A roundabout commentary on 2010s Hungarian politics
I started the blog as an investigation or thought experiment.
I was intrigued by how an increasingly authoritarian regime can stay popular solely, it seemed to me at the time, by channeling EU money coming into the country, skimming just as much off the top for its cronies to leave enough for visible growth.
I really don't know much about politics, so pardon the potential error, but (what I, an Eastern European who's never been in the region) Singapore, with its socially repressive but economically progressive regime looked like an analogy.
I hit upon the idea of the Danube that flows across Budapest bringing magical potential from Germany, had the Soviet-tinged Technocracy-aligned political elites leech off this Prime while somehow also managing to bring about socially progressive measures for the masses in exchange for their political loyalty, and cruelly repress dissenters and marginalized groups — which of course PC mages are in this game.
The central premise of the setting is the tension between doing good for the wrong reasons; are the player characters who are more or less, explicitly or implied resistance fighters and terrorists right, given that the regime they fight against is actually evil, but is actually also improving (most of) its citizens lives?
The blog has been in hiatus because the basic setup has changed, the well-meaning measures and the regime's popularity has waned in real life, and so the whole premise for a make-believe exploration of this started to be wrong. However, I have now decided to pursue this project further again, as a sort of historical capsule. It's an alternative historical fictional setting, so why should it reflect actual contemporary dynamics?
Which brings me to the second motivation for the blog
Building up to publishable material on a neglected region
Budapest is under-served as far as tabletop rpg settings go, and I'd like to make more people around the world aware of how wonderful the city is, how rich the heritage is, how much there is to explore in its architecture, history, and culture.
Starting a blog about this was a way to force myself to actually commit time and energy to the project so that a book good enough to publish on Storyteller's Vault may come of it.
It had worked for a time; perhaps it might drive me to write more content regularly again.