Dolphin Riders

The MFZ Empires were three unrelated political empires that arose at the dawn of the Cosmopolitan Age. The original Empire, Mayuvas, was Dreamland, which acquired the byname after it came to be dominated by the Gold party, as the word for gold in Play was mayu. The other two empires, Fayuvas and Žayuvas, were then named as puns based on Dreamland's model.

There was no common trade union between the three empires, and they did not see themselves as an alliance. Their diplomats only met through a fourth party, Baeba Swamp, which at the time was run primarily by the Iron party, an offshoot of the much older Zenith party. Baeba Swamp was a single city, and not an empire, but it had a strong economy and was the center of world diplomacy. The common bond among the MFZ powers was that they were strong enough to achieve economic independence rather than depending on trade with Baeba; nevertheless, Mayūas and Fayūas traded with Baeba and with each other.

Note that the best transliteration of the names in the original Play language would be with the long vowel ū, giving Mayūas ~ Fayūas ~ Žayūas, but that from the earliest stages of Play exploration, their language was already resyllabifying sequences like these into having sequences like uv (pronounced as IPA [uw]).

Mayuvas (Dreamland)

Dreamland entered the Cosmopolitan Age under the control of the Dolphin Riders, who had declared themselves to be the seventh iteration of the ancient Gold party. As such, they governed Dreamland according to Gold ideals, meaning that in their Parliament, every tribe was given equal representation regardless of their size. In the Gold Empire and Nama, this had led over time to many tribes with very small populations governing their empires much as royalty would, since they had vastly disproportionate power over the larger tribes making up the common population. But in Dreamland, this process had not had ample time to take place, even though some tribes were much larger than others.

Historically, the Gold party had held the sole authority to determine what was and was not a proper tribe; this is why earlier Gold empires such as Nama had not simply disintegrated into thousands of single-family "tribes" each claiming full representation in Parliament. However, once the Gold party recognized a tribe, no future action by the Gold party could take this status away.

Fayuvas (???)

Note that there is no convenient way to represent the Play-language pun in English, as no English word rhymes with dream and yet also relates to the meaning of the empire's name in Play, roughly "thornland" or "sharpland".

Žayuvas (Creamland)

Žayuvas got its name when the rebel Tink army invaded their ally, the Play party, and the Players responded that they would sooner ally with their historical enemy, Dreamland, than to make peace with the Tinkers. The Players' own party name had been a pun when first coined, and they were fond of puns even in wartime, so the name of their new empire came to be used in diplomacy and regarded as a legitimate name of the Play territory; nevertheless, they also called their territory Memnumu.