The Outback || Shoutback! #14 (September 2026)

ISSUE #14

SEPTEMBER 2026

|The Official Newsletter of The Outback|

Puzzle of the Month

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Click on the image above to start the puzzle!

Talonia and Carcassonne reach a detente
Greg’s Chair Care Score:
There is a lot of value in formally recognizing reality. Talonia and Carcassonne were once at odds, both flinging insults and mud, in the sense that Talonia threw them at Carcassonne and they splashed off of Carcassonne and made a mess while Carcassone grumbled at the ground and shook a fist now and then. You may even observe that this hasn’t really changed, since Talonia still, albeit less frequently, trades plenty of barbs with their old foes, except that now Talonia adds a little laugh and a pat on the back that looks a little like a shove. But we are happy to report that everyone is friends again, and they don’t even have to incestually fill out RBR team rosters this time! The frontier space and our diplomatic sphere are practically the same circle, but the overlap isn’t official, so we’re glad to see this relationship heal and form one of the most important bridges between regions that exists. We’re especially pleased when the mutual understanding and burying of past grudges involves further burying Lone Wolves United (LWU), who somehow still had an embassy with a region people can point on a map, but no longer following the detente.

The Outback and Talonia update their treaty
Greg’s Chair Care Score:
While we have been allies for over a year, the relationship between our regions has shifted and evolved. One area where that has been most evident is our cooperation in the World Assembly, something that our treaty did not reflect the way our treaties with other allies does. We have rectified this, putting in a WA cooperation clause as strong as the ones in our other treaties. With that comes a new name, one that makes more relevant references than the former name. And we like to think, as trendsetters and thought leaders in this game, that this kind of treaty refresh will become more common than it has historically been and hopefully keep alliances as healthy and strong as ours.

The West Pacific (TWP) and The Leftist Assembly (TLA) establish a treaty (Poppy Accords)
Greg’s Chair Care Score:
Speaking of alliances, and recognizing reality after it’s already changed, TWP and TLA have finally re-established their old treaty. One of the great partnerships of yesterday is fully back in place, and we are happy to see it. There is nothing shocking about old allies, especially allies as close as these regions were, coming back together after the circumstances that forced them apart have ended. The MGC deal about Solidarity saw to that, but there is much more to come. TLA continues to be the tip of the spear of leftist endeavors in NS, and we hope they continue their effective balancing of those concerns with the needs of gameplay. Nature abhors a vacuum, and seeing as there is simply no other significant or authentic leftist voice of this size that can represent the ideology in this game, it is only natural that TLA will fill that role.

Vara retires
Greg’s Chair Care Score:
The bigger they are, the harder they fall. In the end no Pacifican interference, no Wolfist plot, and no amount of hoping and praying could dislodge his immensity. Vara had to roll away on his own, the same way a celestial body eclipsing another eventually moves on, the same way all forces of nature eventually pass. Of course this day would come, but it is a shame to see nonetheless. After setting a new record of service in TWP, and firmly placing TWP among the top tier regions of gameplay, not to mention stirring the pot so effectively that gameplay swirled around his not-so-little finger, Vara at last takes a well-earned and probably much-needed break. His region and this game will never be the same, and the modern order is in large (perhaps the largest) part a result of his scheming and the unprecedented and diverse social web he has weaved. We will miss working with him, but we know that he has chosen well by naming Witchcraft and Sorcery, or perhaps as he is now better known in our circle, Logical Stimulus, as his successor. The partnership that transcends ideology will be well-served by a former significant defender-turned-unrepentant-Independent. Enjoy your retirement and enjoy the extra large armchair that is waiting for you, Vara. Rest assured, there is no one who can backseat quarterback and agendapost like you!

The New Pacific Order (NPO) crowns a new emperor
Greg’s Chair Care Score:
Shortly after Vara’s announcement, and days before his own successor’s transition, the NPO quietly signaled their own changing of the guard by appointing a successor and initiating a mustering of pilers to initiate a transition, which just finished less than a week ago. If I didn’t know better, given their preference for lurking in the shadows and desperately muttering under their breath to be ignored, I’d have said the NPO was trying to steal his thunder!

The NPO used to have emperors who held court for years, symbolically maintaining control and stability when their friends and especially rivals would come and go. The NPO never changed, never needed to adjust or adapt, it would wait and spin its web and carry on. Now, it replaces emperors more often than stable, stalwart regions like TWP, and with as little fanfare as possible. Maybe this time they will get it right, and Krzyzewskiville, better known as Seasons of Love, will be exactly what the empire needs. So far he has written an unprecedented third apology for the same series of events in less than two years, shaking up the NPO’s pattern of keeping their apologies to once a decade affairs. But the recovery from this scandal has not gone as well as it did after the revelations of 2018. The social expert they employed at the time is not here to bail them out, and they burned their bridges with the region that worked hardest to rehabilitate their image. To say they have their work cut out for them is not so much an insult to them as it is insulting to have to state out loud.

But we have spilled much ink on this topic already (and I suppose will do so here as well). To revisit or discover their recent misdeeds and mistakes, consult their embassy thread announcing the ascension of the new emperor, past FA digests and regional newspapers, or one of the many exposé threads. There’s plenty of places to look. What concerns me to this day is how needless and pointless this all was. There is a lesson to be learned, a lesson that clearly was not learned by the latest players to run afoul of it, the former Consuls in The League & Concord. Echo chambers are death traps. It is imperative in a game like this that you know who to trust, but at some point, you need to be able to trust other people from outside your region. Forging relationships is not just smart play, it is essential to good gameplay. It is essential to survival. And breaking those relationships comes with a cost, especially if you do not end the relationship in the right way. No region that has ever been a major gameplay state was able to accomplish this alone, just as no individual player was ever able to go completely solo to achieve fame or infamy. The NPO can be said to have friends, though they seem to prefer the type of friend who knowingly serves as cheerleader and enabler and avoids talking back or challenging assumptions. In recent years every region which has clung to its strongest believers and shunned everyone else has become stagnant, isolated, and irrelevant.

Hindsight is 20/20, but even in the moment there was no shortage of voices warning these players away from their short-sighted and restrictive impulses. And yet Osiris and The Communist Bloc (TCB) chose to side with the ever-shrinking circle of raider disruptors until the raider faction fizzled away into nothing and TCB lost its role as the vanguard of NSLeft. The Augustin Alliance (AA) spent a year expanding its diplomatic network and becoming one of the most significant organizations in the game, culminating in its admittance into the Pax Polaris Occidens (PPO), a military bloc that consisted entirely of feeders (!), and the Sovereign Seven (S7), which is of course still one of the most relevant blocs in existence and actively shaping gameplay to this day. But they chose to back up the ill-advised course championed by NPO and their friends in LWU, losing not only all the progress they made that year but locking themselves out of further advancement and relevance in the rapidly changing gamestate. The PPO collapsed soon after they joined, and they were unceremoniously booted from the S7. In every one of these cases, personal relationships were prioritized at the expense of diplomatic or regional ones. Personal bonds are powerful and can enhance these relationships, but they cannot replace them.

The regions and players dominating together have obvious strong personal bonds and trust in each other. But they have always balanced that with careful attention and respect for their constituent institutions and regional communities, and most crucially, respected and helped advance those regional concerns even when they belonged to a region outside their own. Our regions have all had a chance to lead military operations and take credit on WA initiatives, but most significantly, pick battles in these arenas that mattered to no one else but our own region. Everyone had a turn to pick a priority and have assistance in succeeding in whatever the endeavor was. Every one of our regions accepted input and initiative from our players and provided room for them to grow as players or leaders, to try even if they failed sometimes. We took on burdens we did not want to, assisted in causes we may not have believed in ourselves, or held our noses and helped lift up outside voices or projects we may have found distasteful in order to forge stronger partnerships and be better neighbors. This is, of course, because every region seeks to provide prestige, protection, and purpose for its people, or at least it should, and being a proud island looking down on everyone else and choosing to remain as insular as possible cuts off paths and opportunities to do that. If you build the tallest, most detailed sandcastle in the sandbox, and don’t let anyone else but the most slavish and compliant sidekicks help you build it, while refusing to give any material or help to anyone else working in the sandcastle alongside you, why would anyone else in the playground even care to see your castle when it is completed? Is it still impressive when people look away, focus solely on the smaller, “lesser” castles made by others, or even spend their time hoping your castle falls rather than admire the work you did? Most would probably consider this to be an empty achievement, and that’s if the castle even gets finished, or manages to be finished as designed. These things often go wrong and fall short of the high expectations we set for ourselves, maybe there’s a falling out with some of the builders, or anyone too critical gets kicked out of the sandbox. What is it all for then, when the act of building the castle becomes a chore for the sake of completing it and no one truly enjoys the experience?

Politics is people, and people can make life nasty, brutish, and short. That is why communities form, why governments exist, why an effort is made for rules of the road and a set of societal norms. This is a game where the finer details of these things are negotiated and re-examined on a continual basis. The road to success for the Modern Gameplay Compact and the S7 is one built not on undisputed triumphs and one-sided victories, but on compromises and incremental progress that makes numerous undisputed triumphs and one-sided victories possible. And it is always the most uncompromising and absolute thinkers, the most stubborn and blind-faith operators inebriated with superiority and the false notion that they are the only ones who understand what is going on and what everyone else “truly” thinks, who crumble before the might of the diverse, ever-negotiating operators that run gameplay today. These people decry some unfair or nefarious change in the game, some unprecedented shift, some illegitimate trick that suckered a majority of people into accepting it as reality and forcing them out for no good reason. The shifting ground beneath their feet went unheeded, the cracks they created with their own poor decisions and short-sighted aims ignored. The people whose trust they took advantage of, or betrayed, the people watching who they disappointed, none of that was supposed to count against them. They were true to themselves, they never changed, they looked out for themselves and everyone who eagerly followed them asking no questions, the people they could “really” trust. It’s a big world out there but their world is small and the only world that counts, and yet they still believe they should have maintained a place of power and prominence in the game which, ideally, would consist only of them or anyone who agreed to follow them and their vision for gameplay. That is not how this works, and it never has been. It’s not good politics, and worst of all, it’s not even fun. But it is the single most reliable way that all empires eventually fall.

This piece draws on the Emerald Papers, an upcoming series exploring the World Assembly from ideological, philosophical, and historical angles. It also incorporates elements from the WA Blueprints, an upcoming series of technical guides for authors building on the Pillars, and serves as something of a preview for both.

Nations are the building blocks of the World Assembly and of NationStates as a whole. This basic reality is reflected in the regions we build, the communities we develop, the discussions we have, the literature we write, and the very mechanics of the game we play. Accordingly, every General Assembly proposal interacts with member nations, directly or indirectly. Our project is not built on a denial of this reality, but on a rejection of the excesses and mismanagement that corrupted it in the old GA. Our efforts are premised on an inclusive vision of sovereignty, one that recognizes that the WA is a body by and for its members.

Whether protecting the rights of members, asking something of them, or even just developing administrative infrastructure for the WA, the fact that GA resolutions interact with members is inescapable. Thus, it is paramount that we provide guidance for authors on how to handle such interactions in a positive-sum manner that doesn't merely respect sovereignty but embraces and expands it.

For new authors especially, it can be difficult to figure out what topics to write about and how to write about them. In particular, it can be difficult to figure out what kinds of interactions with members are acceptable and how to rhetorically approach them, especially in preambles. Is banning this alright? How about this obligation? Should I require this? While the Pillars provide an excellent set of principles for evaluating proposals and approaching GA writing, they would be bolstered by a complementary model that authors can directly apply when writing their drafts, particularly where it concerns asking things of members. I call this framework CREDO: Coordination, Response, Equity, Development, and Operability.

1. Coordination: The WA is well-positioned to coordinate members in addressing collective action problems for the benefit of all. There's value in the WA stepping in to coordinate action on matters such as health, research, and diplomacy, and authors can approach such topics with or without establishing a WA agency. Some examples of Coordination in action might be a resolution establishing a WA agency to facilitate international oceanic monitoring or a resolution setting basic standards for diplomatic protection in order to protect members' sovereignty in conducting their foreign affairs.

2. Response: Members threatened by disasters or other acute situations are in an inherently vulnerable position, and the WA providing support and regulating response is a great way to assist those members and uphold their sovereignty. Examples might include infrastructure and policies pertaining to disease outbreaks, resolutions establishing humanitarian aid frameworks, and provisions on wartime conduct.

3. Equity: Inequality and repression poison the WA's body politic, and justice denied to one is justice denied to all. Notably, this applies to members as much as it does to people; a member experiencing coercion, undue aggression, theft of its resources, or the slaughter of its people has its sovereignty threatened. The WA has the means and the jurisdiction to step in for the benefit of such members. On the flip side, while zeal for protecting the rights of individual people is a well-intentioned inheritance from the old GA, such topics must still be handled with care and in alignment with the Pillars. At a more fundamental level, the way the GA handles popular rights (as in "rights of people") must be worthwhile from the standpoint of international relevance, and credibly to members' benefit. Care must also be taken to not impose unsupported mandates on members, overburdening potentially insufficient administrative capacity to the point that it could compromise an author's good objectives.

4. Development: Perhaps the most straightforward way a General Assembly resolution can implement positive-sum policy to members' benefit is by creating robust regulatory and developmental infrastructure that helps them grow. This ranges from funding support, to thoughtful exceptions and considerations of national circumstances, to technical and policymaking assistance, to a WA agency providing expert-driven recommendations, to a resolution simply establishing a coherent and well-thought-out regulatory environment through the strength of its vision and the quality of its writing. By taking an active albeit unintrusive interest in the development of its members, the WA can implement more well-rounded policy and act as a true guarantor of sovereignty.

5. Operability: Sometimes, you can't just trust things to work out on their own. Authors should consider the practical implications of their writing, not just as it pertains to direct burdens imposed on members (which should use the least restrictive means practicable), but to the overall efficacy and knock-on effects of their proposals. Between operative clauses and rhetoric, a proposal is more than the sum of its parts and how things fit together is as important as how those things work independently. Operability is already a through line of our Pillars, most strongly implied in our contemplation of Clarity, Sovereignty, and Relevance, but still visible in every principle. In practice, Operability can mean different things. It can mean tightening up the wording of a clause, fixing a mismatch between a definition and a provision, adding a carve-out, or even writing an entire resolution on the WA's administration or limiting the extent to which the WA can interfere in members' affairs. It could even mean recognizing that a particular idea just isn't workable.

Our Pillars served as a vision for the new GA and a hope for the future. We've expanded on that essential document with more specific examinations of each Pillar. The next step is to begin complementing them with directly actionable guidance for authors, both of the ideological and technical sort. Given the fundamental role of the national unit in the WA and in NS, it makes sense to begin with a model authors can apply to how they handle members in their proposals. Hopefully, the CREDO can serve as a solid take on such a model, a robust progenitor for future work in this space, and a valuable resource for the laboratories of sovereignty that are authors, regions, and the WA itself. We in the Outback look forward to continuing to build a true consensus and community in the beautiful wilderness of the renewed General Assembly.

Ingredients (one serving, serves one, scale as needed):

• 150g lean beef mince

• 1 tsp olive oil, optional

• 100g cooked rice

• 60g onion, finely chopped

• 60g cherry tomatoes, halved

• 40g lettuce, shredded

• 30g pickles, sliced

• 30g low-fat cheese, grated

• 1 tbsp tomato ketchup

• 1 tsp mustard

• 1 tbsp low-fat Greek yogurt or light mayo (optional)

• Pinch of salt

• Pinch of black pepper

• Pinch of garlic powder or paprika, optional

Instructions:

1. Cook the base - you should really know how to prepare rice. If not, look it up.

2. Cook the beef - Add the lean beef mince and chopped onion to the skillet. Season with salt, black pepper, and garlic powder or paprika if using (you should). Cook until the beef is browned and the onion has softened, breaking the beef up with a spoon as it cooks.

3. Add the skillet bowl base - Stir in the rice and cook for another 2-3 minutes so everything is hot and well combined.

4. Add the cheeseburger flavour - Stir in the ketchup and mustard, then sprinkle the low-fat cheese over the top. Let it melt slightly into the warm beef mixture.

5. Prepare the fresh toppings - Add the shredded lettuce, cherry tomatoes, and sliced pickles to your serving bowl or keep them ready to top the skillet mixture.

6. Assemble and serve - Spoon the hot cheeseburger beef mixture into your bowl and add the fresh toppings. Finish with a spoon of Greek yogurt or light mayo on top (I usually skip this step), then enjoy straight away.

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This issue of Shoutback! was edited and formatted by Okona and Walkabout, and features articles and elements by Ghost, Walkabout, Araklus, and The Osnari Federation.

Layout by Walkabout

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