Republic of Texas

Population: 42 Million (Search +3)

Environment

Terrain: Arid Plains, Hills.
Appearance: Normal
Hygiene: +1

Culture And Economy

Language: English, Spanish
Literacy: Native
TL: 9
Wealth: Average
Status: -2 to 7

Political Environment

Government: Representative Democracy (Oligarchy)
CR: 3 (Corruption -1)
Military Resources: $25.2 Billion
Defense Bonus: +4

History

---

Texas was one of the first states to seceed from the crumpling Union, finally carrying out a threat it had often made in the summer of 2018. The folowing year it faced its first crisis as the category four storm Hurricane Charlie flooded low-lying areas of Houston, areas which remain flooded to this day, and wiped out the city of Galveston. In the political recriminations which followed a tardy government response, a group of wealthy and well-connected Texan businessmen used proxy candidates from the secession movement’s wilder fringes and parlayed their own considerable wealth into a lock on political power. In 2022, the same proxies passed an Emergency Powers Act in response to the GenNu Disaster which remains in effect until today. The powers it gave them enabled them to declare individual politicians and activists from opposition groups “state enemies”, and many were quietly executed.

Despite Texas being hit as hard by the plagues and the Collapse as any other part of the continent, the ruling Freedom Party only entrenched its political and military power in the next decades. When the Militia wars between the midwestern Free Cities and the rump US broke out, Texas was already too strong to challenge – and a nuclear power to boot, having long-since obtained its first few weapons from the seized Lackland AFB and a ready supply of plutonium and know-how from the Pantex Plant, located 17 miles northeast of Amarillo, to make more.

Despite being a dictatorship in all but name, Texas was actually recovering better than most areas of North America when it made what many consider to be a mistake that could prove fatal to the ruling regime in time. Acting upon a request for assistance from the ruling right-wing government in Mexico, which had become an almost failed state, Texas sent 30,000 “advisors” south in 2041. Soon after, the Mexican government crumbled completely – possibly at Texan hands working covertly – and a puppet government was installed. The entire nation, which had been embroilled in a multi-sided war between gangs and warlords with armies for local power, also turned on the Texan occupiers.

Today

---

Nowadays, most of Texas is a blasted wasteland of desert scrubs and ghost towns, not counted as part of the Badlands only because the Republic was never seriously threatened by the rump US during the Militia Wars. A full 35 million of the Free State’s inhabitants huddle in the massive Tri-City metroplex, a megacity to rival the world’s largest. The remainder eke out hard-scrabble farms in the Hill Country, work salvage and smuggling along the inundated coastline or are involved in the shale-oil industry – still Texas largest source of revenue even if nowadays almost the entire production goes to make essential plastics for the world’s economy.

Politically, texas is an oligarchy masquerading as a representative democracy. El;ections are held every four years and every four years it is announced that the Freedom party has won in a landslide with a record voter turnout. No-one believes it, but those who question the official vote counts are hounded, scapegoated or simply disappeared.

Still, opposition groups, now militant and turned to acts of terrorism aagainst the state, still exist in the arid hinterland, sharing the arid land with nomads, survivalist militias and cultish fundamentalists. Chief among these groups are the Liberación Del Pueblo, a left-wing revolutionary militia with strong ties to the Mexican insurgency.

For a decade now, Texas has stubbornly refused to admit it cannot salvage a win from the situation in Mexico and has kept feeding more and more troops into a counter-insurgency effort which noadays resembles most the Russian occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. At present, there are 66,000 Texan troops in Mexico and losses continue to rise.

Locations

---

None as yet.