The most fantastic thing about ratkin society is that it managed to hit most of the same pitfalls that human society did, with two main differences being the use of lunisolar calendar (their year consisted of 12 lunar months with seven leap months being divided between 19 years in a cycle) and the use of magic. Rats are much closer to nature than us, so they didn't pass on the opportunity to gather different powers we don't even see or feel flowing around.
Religion, or more precisely faith, was used as another source of magic for those who could deal with the strict hierarchical structure and rules of most beliefs. One notable exception was the Church of Chaos, which had neither a solid structure nor regulations. Still, it was so chaotic that not even the highest-ranking priests knew anything about its actual composure.
To be fair, their beliefs and rituals mainly consisted of consuming various types of alcohol, drugs, and hosting orgies. With that sort of faith, unhappy accidents were bound to happen, so the Church of Chaos was quick to ostracize the occasional killer or rapist who's gotten too far by the law's standards, which was ironic, to say the least.
But back to the society. When the ratkin civilization consisted of small tribes, the strongest and the most ferocious usually led the tribe. The tribes grew, towns and cities started appearing, and suddenly, rats realized that their leaders only wanted to wage wars of conquest, which wasn't in the interest of a regular peasant rat, so slowly, the old leaders were replaced with new ones.
Monarchies were established, thus moving from the most physically adept leaders to the most inbred ones. It wasn't a bad thing per se - inbred monarchs resembled a sack of rotten potatoes in their political prowess. Still, thankfully, they had a nice set of advisers who helped those royal sons and daughters of God to lead (mostly themselves and their close circle) to prosperity, which by the rules of trickle-down economics also benefitted regular folk on a much smaller scale.
While being an overall positive change, it still wasn't perfect, so after a few uprisings leading to beheadings of those poor inbred monarchs whose only concern was round-year access to fresh elderberries, a new system was starting to get instated in many countries. The idea behind it was great: let the vox populi get heard so that every rat gets to vote for one of the candidates to elect the most noble and virtuous candidates to form a ruling state body.
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While it was great on paper, the reality was that it just removed the monarch and let those previously grey cardinals finally hold all the power. Don't get me wrong: sometimes this vile cesspool that was ratkin politics managed to birth a decent rat, but usually, other than the love of the people, they had zero to no political influence and were laughed at and shunned by their peers in the parliament.
Basically, if you've had a saucepan of fresh compost and added your largest, sweetest blueberry in it, mixed it really well until the berry was evenly distributed in this volume, you wouldn't like that dish no matter how good the blueberry was.
Sometimes, better forms of government emerged here and there, focusing more on the needs of many instead of the greed of the few. Still, thankfully, neighboring democracies always sent peacekeeping armies to stomp them down to prevent them from spreading and gaining too much power.
All in all, by the year of 1397 s.m.d.l. ratkin society was not too different from what we have today, minus all most of the technologies that followed gunpowder, since magic was a great substitute.
The last thing worth noticing beforehand is the age count. There used to be different systems, but on what became the first day of the first year s.m.d.l., a giant meteorite crashed into the planet. It could've brought about the destruction of most life on the planet, but instead, there was a small dust explosion (small in terms of a "giant meteorite hitting the planet") as it left behind a clear 5-mile circle of completely even fertile ground that was warm to the touch.
The place of impact started getting overgrown quickly, and every crop planted in this soil ring gave triple the harvest in half the time. This miracle could have made the country rich if not for King Edrond II of Grobodia, who ordered his castle and royal elderberry orchards to be established in the middle of this phenomenon. "Who needs so much food anyways when I can have warmth, hot water, and elderberries all year round?" was his reasoning, and none dared to argue. One minister wanted to ask the king to reconsider, but as luck would have it, his assassin was on a sabbatical celebrating the birth of his first grandchild, and he couldn't reach him for several months, after which it was too late.
As you can imagine, the meteorite's arrival was noticed by scholars worldwide, and most of them forbade it from being the end of all things. On the day of this event, when the dust settled and everything returned to normal, King V?scher of a southern kingdom that is no more gathered all the local scholars in his throne room and kept laughing in their faces until he suddenly grasped his chest and died 15 minutes later.
News and jokes of this event spread so quickly that this day became the 1st day of the 1st year since the meteorite descended lightly (alternatively known as since the monarch died laughing).
