Mundayne Hegemony

Gramski's Prison Notebooks

First proposed by the great political philosopher Gramski of the Round Open Patch near a Stand of Birches, a hunchbacked gnome taken prisoner by the Imperial Army for his revolutionary behavior. Gramski first attracted the ire of the authorities while openly trying to recruit both the magickal and mundayne beings of a small frontier town to join the rebel cause. Gramski was detained and charged with being a general nuisance and not wearing wooden shoes¹ within imperial bounds.

Because of his belligerent behavior before the military tribunal that considered his case, Gramski was given the sentence of 30 years in prison, to be served in a workshop making weapons for the very troops that he had worked so hard against. Of course, Gramski was deeply demoralized by the ruling and, in particular, the sentence that he was given. However, with his intimate knowledge of woodcrafting the rebellious gnome found subtle artifices to undermine the efficacy of the weapons he was forced to make with what he hoped would be deadly results for their imperial wielders.

During his time in prison, Gramski, who had always been a prodigious talker, set down to record his thoughts on and justifications for opposing the Elothninian Empire's seemingly insatiable appetite for expansion. This labor yielded several important concepts, including the landmark notion of Mundayne Hegemony. According to interpreters of Gramski², Mundayne Hegemony describes Elothninian society as systematically devaluing and destroying magickal beings' culture, rights, and even their lives on the belief that the use of magick corrupts the morals and internal ethics of beings. Magickal creatures, in the view of some anti-magick demagogues, are lazy, morally deficient, and dishonest because magick allows its practitioners to skirt the kind of labor that keeps humans honest. This, in turn, is used to justify the systematic disenfranchisement and devaluation of all magickal beings.

In his strange, often cryptic writings Gramski argued that if mundayne and magickal beings were ever to have peace with one another, mundayne beings would have to be compelled to abandon their anti-magickal beliefs -- only then could a just society be created.
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¹Following an edict by King Gimmelthorpe all gnomes dwelling within the confines of the Elothninian Empire were required by law to wear wooden shoes at all times, "for the sake of public decency and order." This law has been viewed by many in the gnomish community as being both discriminatory and naive.
²Because of the strict constraints on his activities and the danger of being found with anti-imperial rantings by prison guards, Gramski elected to write in a form of code, which only the most astute and initiated readers are able to decipher.