Houses and Factions
The bodies that hold power: houses and clans bound by blood, factions by choice, governments by a seat, and cultures by being a people.
What holds a body together is not the same question as what it does, and it is the first thing worth knowing about any of them.
Houses and clans are blood. Membership comes by birth or by marriage, and the trade travels with it, which is why so many houses are known by a craft: Gemsmith cuts the gems of Loshev, the Veren horse barons breed the horses. A clan is the same binding under another word, and the range is wide: a lesser kin group of Haudh-Gwenn is one, and so are the nine great clans that held the Mól empire between them.
Factions are chosen. A faction is entered rather than inherited, it can be left, and what binds it is a purpose rather than a line of descent. The Order of the Broken Chain hunts slave traders outside the law; the Ten Lashes ran the slaving in the region until the ring came apart. Both are factions, and neither took a man for his blood.
Governments hold a seat. Not the strongest body in a place and not always the most feared, only the one entitled to decide: the Council of Loshev, the eight Great Houses of Amulta, the Tarumbar who are the three rulers of Peredhel.
Cultures are peoples, and not organizations at all. The Free Folk are a culture; the Council of Many Voices and the Elders and Crones are the governments they keep, and a Free Folk man belongs to the first whether or not he has ever stood before the second.