Counsellor

There are ten original families who signed the Gollanhad's Pact, promising their support and their militias to the Eirish governor in exchange for wide authonomy. These families traditionally hold one seat each, reserved for the appointed member of the family to hold. This seat comes free of charge - I mean voluntary contributions to the people - as token of respect for their role in establishing the council.   Things are quite different for the remaining ninety counsellors. At the start of every year, an auction is held. Anyone is free to announce their bid, how much money they are willing to commit to the island's treasury. The ninety highest bidders pay the price and get to hold the seat for until the end of the year.

The council consists of ten different committees, each presiding over a specific area of island's daily life. Each counsellor must be a member of one and only committee, and their rosters are fixed by lottery when the seats are decided. Representatives of the ten founding families get to choose their committee without drawing a lot, usually choosing the more high-profile committees and resulting in uneven sizes of such committees, going from a minimum of nine to a record seventeen.   Most things require an authority of just one counsellor from a corresponding committee to happen, many require a majority. Some things, usually impacting the entire island or really high-profile cases, require the attention of the entire council. Those always tend to be the topic of the hottest debate, and often involve two counsellors within the same committee sabotaging each other's instructions. It does not help the case that it is considered normal for counsellors to be sent gifts by grateful citizens.

Overall, the counsellor seat is treated as just another asset on Sol Meridia. With one notable exception - right of transfer. The winner of an auction must serve as the counsellor for the entire year, and cannot choose to transfer that position to someone else. Only if they die then does the seat transfer to the deceased counsellor's heir. This is why sponsoring a counsellor seat for a young scion is such a show of power and wealth, as well as a massive career boost for them. It is basically saying that your family can afford to spend all that money on someone who might not be able to make it all back.   There is one notable exception however. Should a consellor fall seriously sick, their duties must still be carried out. It is the heir's responsibility to see to it. Therefore, some dishonest families would falsify a sickness in order to change the de-facto counsellor to a different family member. Several cases were heard recently on using such trick in order to pad the records of a family's younger member, only for them to "fall sick" and transfer the real power to someone more experienced.