Traktionstadtsgesellschaft

The Traktionstadtsgesellschaft (Anglish: Traction City Society) is an organization of German cities that were introduced in A Darkling Plain. They speak New German.

Goals

Originally, it was a group of twelve German-speaking traction cities who joined together to resist the advance of the Green Storm in destroying all traction cities. The Green Storm were seeming to win until many more cities joined the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft. This led to a stalemate with neither side willing to give. Cities who did not join the Traktionstadtsgellschaft often sent money or supplies to help in the war, and also profited from selling the alliance weapons. The cities agreed not to prey on each other until the war was over; instead eating Mossie ships and forts as food, though some less-ethical towns such as Harrowbarrow continued hunting for prey as they thought the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft would turn them soft.

The Traktionstadtsgesellschaft was shattered when the Stalker Fang attacked and destroyed most of it's bigger cities with ODIN. With the end of the war and the deaths of the Stalker Fang and General Jiang Xiang Naga, the remnants of the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft settled down and became static, as per the treaty struck between the leader of the newly reformed Anti-Traction League Oenone Zero and Kriegsmarshal Von Kobold to cease fighting forever.

History

Pre-Series

Fourteen years earlier, while Wren was busy learning to crawl and alarming her parents by eating stones, beetles, and small ornaments, the Green Storm had swept down from their strongholds in the mountains of Shan Guo to spread war and destruction across the Great Hunting Ground. Their air-fleets and Stalker armies had surged westward, herding terrified Traction Cities ahead of them and destroying any that did not flee fast enough. Then Arminius Krause, the burgermeister of Traktionstadt Weimar, had sent envoys to eleven other German-speaking cities and proposed that they join together and turn to face the Storm before every mobile town and city was driven off the western edge of the Hunting Ground into the sea.

And so the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft was born. The twelve great cities, swiftly joined by others, swore that they would eat no mobile town until the Green Storm was destroyed. They would survive instead by devouring Mossie ships and forts and static settlements until they had made the world safe again for Municipal Darwinism, which every civilized person knew was the most natural, sensible, and fair way of life ever devised. They turned, they fought, and they forced the startled Green Storm to a stalemate. Now, a broad ribbon of no-man’s-land wriggled across the Hunting Ground from the southern fringes of the Rustwater Marshes to the edges of the Ice Wastes, marking the boundary between two worlds. To the east of it the Green Storm was struggling to plant new static settlements and reclaim for their farmers land that had been plowed up and polluted by centuries of Municipal Darwinism. To the west, life went on almost as before, with cities hunting towns and towns hunting villages; the only difference was that most mayors sent a portion of their catch to feed the Traktionstadts. Over the years there had been all manner of battles as each side tried to break the line. Stretches of churned mud and empty marsh changed hands again and again, at the cost of thousands of lives, but always, when the months-long thunder of thrust and counterthrust had faded, the line remained much as it had been before, a river of dead ground winding across a continent.

- Narrator, A Darkling Plain, Chapter 8: "On the Line"

Known Members of the Traktionstadtsgesellschaft

• Murnau
• Bremen
• Panzerstadt Koblenz
• Wagenhafn
• Panzerstadt Winterthur
• Traktionbad Braunschweig
• Traktionstadt-Weimar (founder)
• Manchester (later member)
• Dortmund
• Darmstadt
• Panzerstadt-Breslau
• Moloch-Maschinenstadt
• Panzerstadt-Linz
• Harrowbarrow (later member)
• Panzerkampfstadt

Gallery

Fan art of some Traktionstadts moving in formation.