Cauldron of Civilization

Right now, I'm reading James C. Scott's The Art of Not Being Governed -- and one of the things he keeps coming back to is the Chinese metaphor of the barbarians being “raw" and the civilized peoples (i.e., the Han Chinese and those they assimilate) being “cooked". Here's a quotation:

A twelfth-century document from Hainan... “Those who have submitted and are attached to the country and township administration are the cooked Li. Those who live in the mountain caves and are not punished by us or [who do not] supply corvée labor are the raw Li. These sometimes come out and engage in barter with the administrated population." The “cooked" Li occupy a liminal space. They were no longer “raw" and yet were not assimilated Han subjects. Officials suspected them of outward conformity while “sly[ly]" cooperating with the “raw" Li to “invade governmental lands and roam about plundering travelers." Despite the fear of treachery from “cooked barbarians," they are, as a category, associated with political (state) order while the “raw" are associated with disorder. Thus the “raw Wa rob and plunder" whereas the “cooked" Wa “safeguard the road." It would be a mistake, Magnus Fiskesjö emphasizes, to believe that, for a Han administrator, raw was simply another word for primitive or close to nature. While all “primitives" were presumptively raw, not all developed barbarians were cooked. The key was submission to Han administration.

So, me being me, I thought, what if this were literal?

The Cauldron of Civilization 

The Cauldron is a much-feared artifact that an ambitious, expansionist state can use to forcibly convert rebels and “barbarian" tribespeople into loyal subjects of their nation. The Cauldron itself is an exceptionally large (several feet in diameter) three-legged iron cooking pot, much as one might expect, equipped with a heavy lid and covered in engravings. The engravings are deliberately-simplified images that depict such activities as collecting taxes, tending rice fields, jailing dissidents, writing decrees, engaging in trade, overseeing forced labor, doing paperwork, and so forth.

Something along these lines, but larger and fancier.
Photo by BabelStone - https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20898053

The use of the cauldron, once one has done one's research, is quite simple. First, the inside must be lightly coated with a specially-mixed oil -- the recipe for the oil is a closely-guarded secret among those who know these things, and may have been forgotten at some point, but it's technically possible to work it out from first principles with a little trial and error. Second, a living sapient being must be placed inside -- this is where the heavy lid comes into play, though the user might want to weigh it down further and possibly chain it shut. Then you just need to light a fire under the cauldron, stoke it into a proper blaze, and wait.

The being inside the Cauldron -- hence, the “subject" -- is technically killed, but swiftly reanimated by the necromantic energies within the Cauldron. The subject must remain inside the Cauldron for at least one hour for the change to take effect; for each hour they remain inside, they permanently lose two points of Wisdom. In addition, the process is hard on their physical form, and the subject of the Cauldron will look withered, leathery, and somewhat mummified after the process is over; they also permanently lose 1 point of Dexterity for each hour in the Cauldron.

So kind of like this.
(Image is an old photograph of Ramses II's mummy.)

In addition to the ability score loss, the subject undergoes the following changes in game terms:

• Alignment becomes Lawful Neutral.
• Creature Type becomes Undead.

The real benefit of the Cauldron, from the point of view of whichever nation has currently dug it up and decided to use it, is the enchantment that acts upon the subject's mind. A subject of the Cauldron receives the following compulsions based on its remaining Wisdom score. Note first that the effects stack -- so that someone who comes out of the Cauldron with a Wisdom of 7 not only has the effects of “Wisdom below 8", but also all the lines above it. Note second that there is a slight problem with the reduced-wisdom population; while they may be enthusiastically willing to do work for the state, at a certain point they become so dramatically lacking in common sense that they need supervision or the sort of job where improvisation is never needed.

Mental Effects of the Cauldron of Civilization

Wisdom Below:	Mental Effects:
18	Obsession with productivity and order.
16	Compulsion to settle down in a permanent location and pay taxes.
14	Contempt of nomadic lifestyle, ungoverned peoples, and anyone who isn't a “law-abiding citizen".
12	Unshakable loyalty and obedience to the state that used the Cauldron on the subject.
10	Must follow every law, rule, directive, and suggestion of their government to the letter.
8	Complete loss of critical thinking capacity, morbid love of bureaucracy.
6	Evangelizes about the wonderful qualities & divine mandate of their sovereign at the drop of a hat.
4	Will follow any order given by an official of their government without thought or question.

Subjects of the Cauldron are usually assigned to work as apparatchiks, jobsworths, and all varieties of low-level government functionary. They are valued for their loyalty and their respect for the rule of law. No longer subject to the normal restrictions on natural lifespan, they can happily continue their officious existences for centuries; over time, nations that use the Cauldron can find that its products build up in the lower levels of government, creating a strict and virtually-impenetrable bureaucracy around any interaction with the State whatsoever. The higher levels of government generally see this as a good thing.

There is only one Cauldron of Civilization, and the process by which it was created is lost. Periodically, the Cauldron itself will be lost during a regime change or a bloody revolution; the products of the Cauldron tend to stick around, however, as long as they consider the State that currently exists to be officially the same nation as the State that made them.