Kamahep

The Kamahep has two supreme authorities:

• The Wheel, a group of representatives of major criminal groups that meet and affirm mutual respect for each other. The Wheel is the original authority of the Kamahep.
• The Successor, the chief Boss of the Dynasty and the rising singular authority within the Kamahep.

Each representative of the Wheel is sent by a Boss, or recognized authority/crew leader. Each Boss runs their crew differently. The Successor runs the Dynasty, a big-tent mafia that runs operations through a wide number of street gangs and allies. The Successor has a Commandante, or Underboss, for each of the five districts of Halamahi - and possibly additional Commandantes for outlying towns.   Each of the five or more Commandantes has a handful of Captains, who handle major operations and organize lower-level crime. Beneath Captains are Foremasters, who operate gangs or specific operations like smuggling dens. Each Foremaster has a number of Sabres - or enforcers - that they are supposed to train and retain. Often, it is 10 sabres per Foremaster.

The Kamahep began as a peace treaty. Over the 1700s and into the 1800s ME, political factionalism and corruption led to escalating competition between increasingly powerful criminal groups. A few peripheral clans, ambitious and willing to risk becoming Peltless, rose to become the primary criminal intermediaries - first as agents of the great clans, and then in pursuit of their own goals. These peripheral clans put pressure on the petty pirates, smugglers, and fences to work for them; they established territory on the sacred isles and preferred markets. By the early 1800s, the sacred isles had a robust and specialized criminal underworld with powerful mafia families running competing operations. But this competition came with chaos. The crime families formed mercenary and pirate crews, which they called Sabres, to poach each other's territories and undermine each other's operations. These 'Sabre Wars' escalated steadily until the 'bloody summer' of 1839.   The 'bloody summer' was a period of sustained warfare between the Sabres over Halamahi's main port market - which was the Four Winds Market complex at the time. The Four Winds Market complex was a disorganized mess of markets linked together by a half-finished canal project, which was a political battleground between the great clans of that time. In 1839, political tensions sparked a series of messy deals and betrayals that led to all sorts of shady loans getting called in. Violence came to the marketplace, and the merchants fought back. The Sabres responded with relentless warfare against each other, against the Selkie Sacred Guard, and against the merchant militias. While the Sabres aimed to avoid direct clashes with the guard, a line was crossed somewhere. It was an apocalyptic cataclysm of criminal drama: brothers betrayed brothers, gangs ambushed guard captains, once-untouchable gangsters were hanged while their families became Peltless. It is unknown whether the fighting started the great market fire of 1839, or if the violence just impeded a fire response. Either way, the old market complex burned away completely. The politicians, despite relying on the Sabres for their own goals, simply couldn't tolerate the chaos anymore and began a series of terrible purges.   It is in this doomsday scenario that the criminal clans and their rogue Sabres all came together to make peace. They promised to be a Kamahep - like one big family - and to follow a series of rules. They would hold a Congress, like the Motosui Assembly, known as the Wheel to iron out the rules and rule enforcement system in a way that didn't trample any toes. All would be well.   There was one young girl at the Kamahep Conference in 1841 who would walk away with a much bigger plan for the Kamahep than a simple peace treaty: a young gangster known only as Mari. Mari, or Boss Mari as she was soon known, organized a group of scrappy young mercenaries into one of the cut-throat, efficient, and brutal fighting forces in the Halamahi underworld. The other crime bosses shrank from open violence after 1839, but Boss Mari used great displays of very particular violence to great effect. She is a folk hero to some, as she was known to execute those who stirred chaos - particularly in the market square. It is difficult to tell what is true and what was fiction with Boss Mari. Some say she negotiated with the Hanahai directly, building a secret base under the World's Delight Market and brokering a deal with the Guard to help them police the new market as a show of peace. Some say that she hand-delivered the heads of slavers to the shrine of Theia the Liberator, to earn the favor of the Lunar God of freedom. Some say she held court for the downtrodden, trying and sentencing scoundrels that the city guard would never touch. They say her justice was iron-hard but fair. They are probably being too kind to the old mafiosa, but who can say? At the very least, the woman knew how to market herself.    Boss Mari used her authority as Kamahep enforcers to subjugate any criminal group that deviated even slightly from the general interests. She conquered the city like any warlord, but knew that the key to holding her gains was equal parts fear and love. Boss Mari made herself and her gang, which became she confusingly called 'the Kamahep', the enforcers of the Kamahep peace. And, by calling themselves the Kamahep and playing the part, they became it in the eyes of gangster and civilian alike. By her death in the 1880s, her gang had turned a federation into a true unified force. But her death in 1882 changed things. The gang lost something with her passing and the following succession crisis. Violence broke out once again, and the Wheel - that old council of crooks - had to step in to negotiate peace between her successors.    The Kamahep returned to being a coalition of gangsters in a timid peace from 1882 to 1918. Mari had changed the relationship between the Kamahep and the city, made it more stable and professional and regulated, but the structure and identity she had built began to collapse. By 1918, everyone had assumed that Mari's Sabres would never come back and that history had moved on. But one of the splinter groups, under Boss "Young Father" Nev (often called Boss Young), seized on a collapsing relationship between the city guard and the Wheel to suddenly revive her vision. Nev undermined the peace by provoking a war between his enemies - a war that he positioned himself to sweep in during as a "peacemaker". Boss Young was then able to pressure the Exarch of Motosui of the time into renewing the market peace and the uneasy partial truce between law and the Kamahep - and in doing so, suddenly accumulated immense prestige within the Wheel. Boss Young then slaughtered or assimilated his old rivals, not as an aggressor but as a legitimate authority.   Boss Young worked hard to absorb another fragment of Mari's old criminal empire and in the 1930s they rebranded into The Dynasty. Boss Young began wearing sharkskin and sharktooth accessories in imitation of Boss Mari's style, and took residence in her old headquarters. He became known as Successor Young - the first of many Successors since. Successor Young made some very bold claims in doing so, but he did so cautiously and carefully. He avoided antagonizing the other major Bosses and built his power carefully. And Young managed to keep the Dynasty together after his death through very careful expansion and planning. By the 1970s, the Dynasty had become the main power within the Wheel. And now a generation has passed since the Dynasty has held most of the power while the rest of the Wheel fades from relevance. The new Successor Huku has kept a steady hand, continuing Successor Young's work and expanding the Dynasty's influence into the rest of Motosui. The old Wheel remains as a legitimizing force for the Dynasty, but unless there is a major shakeup it seems that Boss Mari's dream has come true.