The nation of Zhellomvend began centuries ago as a prison colony for the Vuurstahl Empire, host to many of their most dangerous families of organized crime. Incensed at the treatment they received at the hands of the Empire, and tired of the unpaid labor expected of them, its prisoners banded together to revolt against their captors. The Empire at the time, its resources stretched thin by its current campaigns of conquest, was ill-prepared to handle the situation, and the prisoners of Zhellomvend scored one of the earliest emancipatory victories against the Empire in Tempestian history.
Though the founding families of Zhellomvend had fought together, bound by their mutual disgust with their former home, many of them still held longstanding mistrust for one another. As a result, against what others expected for a nation founded by former criminals, Zhellomvend became a land of draconian laws, designed to prevent the same abuses of power and backstabbing that defined their lives back under Imperial rule. Under the laws of Zhellomvend, innocence is not assumed; it must be earned. This was exacerbated by subsequent generations, who, eager to strip away their nation’s reputation as a haven for criminals, came to prosecute criminality all the more harshly. To prosecute became almost sacred, and to defend the accused, villainous. As a result, public trust in the legal system of Zhellomvend has fallen so low as to dissuade anything that may be even accidentally construed as a breach of law in the common citizen… though this may be what the system’s architects intended from the beginning.
While Zhellomvend’s reputation as a land of manichean worldview and brutal punishment has not endeared it to the other nations of Tempestas, it was these same traits, along with the country’s complex history with the Empire, that led to them proposing and organizing the Tempestian Union. In the days since the war, however, even Zhellomvend’s opinion of the Union has dropped; to the Zhellomvend government, there is no greater shame than a governing body that can’t even properly bring wayward souls to justice.