Turk Reign
One of two Regency sociological theories regarding the Viral Wilds. Where Plague Reign tends to minimize the impact of Virus to that of a passing epidemic, Turk Reign incorporates the increasing adaptability of Virus to human technology, and its growing ability to manipulate its environment. The Wilds are more akin to the European portion of the old Ottoman Turk empire on old Terra in the period of 1453-1918 CE.
The Turkish Empire was a ramshackle tyranny, dominated by a military elite that became glutted and lazy upon its massive conquests of nearly a third of Europe, and major portions of the Near East and North Africa. When it was challenged by European powers, its rule became frightfully corrupt and brutal. It taxed its subjects to the quick. Its courts and officials were graft prone. Its soldiers and police were brutal, and were given to punitive plundering and rape. It shackled its subjects under a backwards and primitive medievalism that was hostile to the intellect and speculative thought, or any kind of dissent. And its high officials ruled the lands with a heavy and clumsy hand at all times. Under this constant harassment, the lands and peoples under their rule fell behind the west, and in many cases regressed into brutality and corruption of their own. When they were finally liberated, they were left to fight among themselves over the scraps left to them by their departed overlords, with little or no chance of obtaining the fruits of modernity for themselves.
The Wilds, according to this comparitive view, are under the sovereignty of the crazed and erratic Virus and its Vampire Fleets. As with the Plague's Reign Theory, the population dieback that occured has greatly increased the value of skilled labor, but the heavyhanded nature of the worst of Vampires and Virus has returned the former Imperium back to a premodern time of fear and introspection. Travellers are subject to attack at all times; bandits flourish alongside predatory Vampire ships, and every surviving settlement is subject to attack, reprisal and the "tax" of enforced servitude to a Vampire fleet or human slaver. The chances that the Wilds can recover in a positive form without outside assistance are practically nil.