User:Kepteyn
Kepteyn : Artea Head of Lore
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WIP : The Empire
The Empire is a vast, ancient nation where resources are scarce, history is forgotten and technology breaks down more often than it is repaired. The Emperor rules with divine authority, however dozens of great houses – each a semi-independent feudal barony in its own right – each vie for power in the federalised empire. With the death of the previous Emperor and the suspicious death of His heir, the grandson – the ten year old Clovis IV – has ascended to the throne amidst rising political tensions threatening to tear the Empire apart.
The Empire, sometimes referred to as the Argentium Empire, Orion-Cygni Empire, the Grand Empire, Eliir-Tugezh Shikak, and dozens of of other monikers utilized across its hundreds of star systems, but most commonly and simply referred to as the Empire due to its singular and unquestionable claim to the word, is a vast and unspeakably ancient nation. Its history spans so far back that only its most recent history is truly known, with what, if anything, predated it now lost to time.
The Empire dominates hundreds of star systems in federalised feudal states. Star systems, instead of being controlled by a central government, are ruled by a barony - a semi-independent fief ruled by a baron belonging to a great house, who in turn rules over dozens to hundreds of minor houses. While each barony is bound to the will of the Empire and the Imperial house, House Valeorin, they each maintain a significant degree of independence to rule as they see fit and to maintain military forces.
In recent times, the hegemony of House Valeorin has been challenged by dissatisfied great houses, who support the traitor Lady Lorenza Lucien’s false claim to throne, though have yet to turn upon House Valeorin itself.
Politics of the Empire
The Empire is ruled by the Emperor and His great house, referred to as the Imperial house, who for the past two years has been the fourteen year old Emperor Clovis IV Valeorin. Despite this, the empire is too large of a state for a single person, even one as great as the Emperor, to run by Themself. Due to this, the empire is split up into baronies - semi-autonomous states ruled by a baron and their household, called a great house. Each baron, while beneath the Emperor, is effectively a monarch in their own right, with the lords of minor houses owing fealty to their baron.
While great houses control and own territory within the empire, all territory is also the property of the empire, and a tax must be paid to the imperial treasury. This imperial tax funds the empire, while barony taxes are determined by the great house itself and is imposed upon any peoples, property, or activities they see fit.
All the great houses must follow and enforce the Imperial laws and permit Imperial agencies and guilds - organisations set up to both regulate and act as unions for various occupations ranging from farming guilds to warpgate guilds. However, the empire permits a great level of self-governance amongst the great houses, allowing each one to determine and enforce their own laws in addition to — and occasionally in spite of — Imperial laws. Each great house also maintains its own military forces, albeit with a maximal limit to the size of the forces, with which they can wage feudal wars against other houses and be called upon by the Imperial house in times of conflict in the form of a levy.
Economy and Class
Within the Empire, people are divided between three categories that determine the rights and lives one may live: the nobility, those who bare titles either inherited or given; the plebeians, the lower classes and the majority of the population, who lack such titles and thus lack the full rights granted to those who have; and the indentured, who for any variety of reasons lack freedom and possess minimal, if any, rights. Political and social power is the domain of the nobility and the wealthy - the elites of society most likely born into their status. For the plebeians and indentured, despite making up the majority of the population, power, wealth, and the benefits of the Empire will be scarce.
Across the empire, feudalism is common practice, with serfs who are bound to the land they live on via gene-oath and who live and work according to the decisions of their lords. While considered to be plebeians, the strict decrees of their gene-oath gives them little freedom beyond that of an true indentured, with the cost of breaking such an oath extreme so as to be virtually impossible. Most common in rural regions, feudalism is also seen within cities, especially as part of a self-contained district or arcology. Slavery, while less common and oftentimes illegal, is nonetheless abundant in certain regions of the empire, and indentured service is often used as part of a contract, loan, or as a judicial punishment.
The Empire, reliant as it is on ancient technology and vast resource depletion, a consequence from the ancient past, being widespread, rarely manufactures anything of technological sophistication from raw materials. While the few Atfabs still functioning can produce intricate technology with reasonable reliability, the scarcity of these machines paired with their crippling energy usage ensures they are insufficient to sustain the Empire. Instead, entire sectors of industry are dedicated to the salvaging, recycling, and repairing of pre-existing ancient machines to keep the technology fundamental to modern society working or to provide parts to fix or replace the technology. Even so, the value of these devices mean that the average plebeian only experiences a quality of life significantly worse than the elites.
Religion
The Empire’s state religion is simply referred to as ‘the Faith.’ According to the Faith, the universe was created by the All-Spirit, a divine, all-powerful and all-benevolent being beyond the comprehension of mortals. Despite its omniscience, however, it was not all-knowing, as it had never experienced mortality or life. It shattered itself into a quintillion fragments and fell across the universe, each fragment a tainted part of its spirit – a soul. This is believed by scholars to be the beginning of true life, as all living beings possess a soul.
Despite the divine goodness of the All-Spirit, living beings are inherently flawed. Throughout the mortal life of a living, soul-possessed being, one does actions and deeds good and bad. At the end of a life, these deeds weigh upon the soul. A light, pure soul will rise, reincarnating into a better existence in its next life, while a heavy soul sinks, becoming a social dredge or lesser creature in the next life. When a soul becomes pure, it ascends to rejoin the All-Spirit, bringing its experience of mortality with it.
The purest soul lives within the Emperor, guided by the All-Spirit directly. The Emperor is thus infallible and divine, and to question them is to question the All-Spirit. To this end, to believe anything but the divine good of the Faith is itself an act of dissent. Despite this, some other religions are sanctioned to be believed, however all sanctioned sects and cults must acknowledge the truth of the Emperor’s divinity.
Rising Tensions
At the young age of 122, Emperor Clovis III of the house Valorin died. Despite of life-extension that should have let Him live a further sixty years, it was determined He died of natural causes. Four days before His death, His daughter, the heir Princess Elis Valorin died under suspicious circumstances when, while returning from a hunting trip, her shuttle experienced a catastrophic system failure and crashed into the orbital city-station Silverspire, causing significant damage to the station and obliterating the shuttle entirely.
The ten year old Prince Clovis IV, son of the Princess Elis, ascended to the throne as the final Valorin the same day.
The Young Emperor, as He quickly became known as, is too young to rule directly, even despite of His divinity. To aid His rule, the regent takes the majority of the responsibility for the running of the Empire and decision making, with guidance by the All-Spirit and its cardinals. The regent’s desire for power has long been rumoured, and increasingly there is dissatisfaction amongst the great houses. Already an assassination attempt has been made upon the Emperor, and although it failed, precautions for His safety were strengthened, and the Emperor has not been seen by anyone for a year.
With tensions palpable in the artificially-purified atmosphere of Argentium, quiet murmurs screeching within the Great Counsil, and a weakened House Valorin, the potential for a war, nearly a century since the last devastating war for succession that cemented Emperor Clovis III’s rule, seems an increasing possibility.
Great Houses
House Artea
Homeworld: Ecitor, a desert planet.
House Head: Baron Johnathon Artea
Iconography: A brown rose with a white centre.
House Artea was recently formed when the Artean Nomads, a roaming fleet of nomadic people who lived aboard generation ships and travelled the border of the Empire variously trading, threatening, and stealing from worlds and ships in its path to survive, was forcefully civilised into the Empire by an Imperial armada. During their annexation, all of their generation ships — originally colony ships — were forced to ground on the planet of Ecitor and set up colony there, thus ending their nomadic lifestyle and introducing them to the Imperial way of life. One ship, the Artea, was converted into a space station in orbit and acts as the capital of the Baron, overseeing the assimilation of the Arteans into the Empire.
Despite the resistance to civilisation displayed by many Arteans, the house has found prosperity in utilising their ancestral knowledge of voidfaring and voidships to become one of the Empire’s most reliable couriers of cargo across especially risky space. Despite initial concerns by many, incidents of theft and loss of cargo due to the Artean crews have been minimal. The same cannot be said on Ecitor, however, where the majority of the population have chosen to reject Imperial aid and methodology and live in squalid, impoverished conditions. It is hoped that education will improve the quality of living in time.
House Valeorin
Homeworld: Argentium, an ecumnopolis.
House Head: Emperor Clovis IV Valeorin
Iconography: A golden sphere, with a hole to a smaller, purple circle in the middle.
House Valeorin is the current imperial house, ruling over the entire Empire from the ancient capital - the planetwide metropolis - of Argentium. Believing itself to be both the most cultured and civilised of all the Houses, it considers it a divine mandate to reunify the galaxy under the Empire. To this end, it has some of the best preserved technology of antiquity at its disposal, from fleets to population centres. Foremost of all of these is the Aurum, a dyson sphere located a little more than a parsec away from Argentium. The megalithic machine was only ever half-completed in the ancient past, and much of it was damaged or destroyed since then, but even in its reduced state the Aurum is the single greatest source of power within the Empire, responsible for keeping the Atfabs, fleets, and planetary environmental controls functioning.
Having been in power for two and a half centuries, the unexpected death of the Emperor’s son, followed death of Emperor Clovis III himself led to the child Clovis Valeorin to take to the throne. With his young age, he has been assisted by a regent in ruling the Empire, though rumours of the regent truly controlling the Empire has driven tensions within the Imperial Council. The risk of being cut off from the Aurum is too great for the houses to risk, however, and so dissatisfaction is expressed in more nuanced ways.
House Ryoshi
Homeworld: Chrysos, a tidally locked world with a dense metropolis covering the entire habitable twilight ring.
House Head: Duke Amin Ryoshi
Iconography: A cyan diamond, one half etched with geometric shapes and the other organic curves.
House Ryoshi was integrated into the empire early on, however all warpgates leading to Chrysos and its territory abruptly failed soon after, completely severing House Ryoshi from the empire. During the centuries of isolation from the empire it was presumed that civilisation must have collapsed, inevitably taking all life with it. Despite all expectations, it managed to not only survive, but thrive, colonising several local systems. Within the past century, the house managed to restore contact with the Empire, and was welcomed back to civilisation.
The Chrysos that reintegrated into the empire was a technologically advanced world with an abundance of technology that is rare in the wider empire, a position it exploited to the fullest, becoming the empire’s leading producer of long forgotten advanced technology. Its exports include quantum relays and, controversially, Syntheteks - advanced machines of near lifelike canniness to real, sapient beings. Despite its apparent openness to the rest of the Empire, much of the internal workings of the house remain shrouded in mystery, a fact that has many outside of the house uneasy. The exception to this is House Artea, whose primitive peoples appear to have made contact with the lost house prior to its reintegration to the Empire.
House Sveldr
Homeworld: Hvitheimr, a frozen, barren planet.
House Head: High Jarl Lozbrok
Iconography: A red serpent reaching upwards, surrounded by flames.
Hvitheimr is the historical homeworld of the Jornskyr species. Although once a warm world, an erratic orbit caused an ice age to befall it, scattering the Jornskyr people to survive in darkspace by raiding other worlds, colonies, and voidships for resources using their raiding voidships called Drakkar.
These clans raided the Empire, leading to a long conflict along the border until an agreement was made with Clan Sveldr and several other clans - the clans’ allegiance to the empire in return for territory, resources, and peace between them. The clans agreed, becoming House Sveldr and controlling the worlds they once raided and destroying many rival clans in wars to both expand their borders and to protect the Empire
House Sveldr is divided into numerous, largely independent clans who bowed before the house to avoid destruction. Each clan is ruled by its own jarl. The jarls engage in an annual moot, in which a high jarl is voted on and policy determined. Beyond the clans are Drakkars, voidships and their crews who are themselves almost entirely independent of oversight and merely pay a tribute and pledge defence to their chosen clan in return for their jarl’s blessing. Many Drakkars offer their services as mercenaries to the great houses.
WIP : Technology
The technology of the Empire, though advanced in places, is built upon ancient, often forgotten knowledge, confounded by the lack of resources to consistently build and repair it. Voidships are often centuries old, held together by luck, ingenuity and a cavalier approach to the risks that has created superstitions and myths akin to those of the sailors of old. Warpgates function by long-forgotten means and hold countless oddities that the Empire cannot begin to guess at the causes of. Vital infrastructure decays under the weight of age in an Empire without the means to properly maintain them. Despite efforts to reclaim the knowledge of the forebears, for each small innovation made, a dozen more are lost.
Voidships
Voidships are space-faring vessels capable of transporting a crew through space. Within the Empire, voidships tend to be old, if not ancient, with ships at least a hundred years old being the norm, with many more pushing into several centuries old. These venerable ships inevitably develop many problems, be that noisy, creaking piping, the odd thruster failing from wear and tear, or even whole sections of the ship depressurising from microfractures.
The lack of resources within the Empire and the subsequent scarcity of advanced technological components means that the issues in ships frequently take months or years to be repaired, or even never. When they are repaired, the fixes tend to be haphazard or salvaged from less fortunate vessels. Despite this, one thing that is rarely in short supply are the wrecked, abandoned husks of ancient, forgotten voidships to salvage from.
Voidships are stressful, isolated environments, but also long-term ones. Travel on a voidship may take weeks or months, and crew may live on a ship for years or decades with very little shore leave or even true ‘offtime,’ always being on call. All the while the ship slowly degrades with age, and external factors threaten even the safest voyages.
Due to the difficulties, spacers, as they are often called, tend to be a highly superstitious people, believing in anything from lucky wrenches and vengeful power manifolds, to unknown monsters within the depths of space to even deities who watch over voidships and their crews, but often demand offerings or else risk their wrath. Commonly believed deities include the Lost Navigator, who guides lost ships home, Edyth Mechann, a multi-armed engineer who keeps ships from suffering mechanical failures, and the Voidlure, a malevolent being who tricks voidships into their doom to turn the souls of the damned into its spectral slaves.
Warpgates and Jumpgates
Travel between star systems is achieved through the use of warpgates and jumpgates—massive spatial constructs that utilise wormholes to allow for voidships to travel through a tunnel outside of regular spacetime to the other side. Warpgates and jumpgates are fundamentally the same, except that the former uses a wormhole that links it to another warpgate on the other side, creating a more stable connection.
A jumpgate, by contrast, creates a wormhole that does not have a connecting gate, but instead is temporarily kept open at an approximate location long enough for a ship to pass through. These wormholes are highly unstable, risking damage to a ship using one, but nonetheless is essential for establishing new warpgates. Due to the instability and uncertainty of where the wormhole will actually lead to, there are two methods of warpgate travel – opening in deep space approximately near the destination, or attempting to open one around a large mass.
The former is the safest, however the wormhole, without a mass anchoring it, is liable to open potentially lightyears off from its intended location, leading to the voidship likely needing to take an arduously long, sublight voyage to its final destination, possibly taking years, by which time the crew may well have ran out of supplies and died. The latter is quicker, but more risky, as the gravity of a large mass anchors a wormhole to it, ensuring it opens nearer to the intended location. However, a voidship may emerge too close to the mass. While less of a danger with gas giants, it is rare to find one massive enough to be reliably used for this method, and so the star itself is typically used, risking the voidship emerging into a solar flare or into the star’s corona itself, destroying it.
Wormholes are a scarcely understood phenomenon. While the creation of and use of them is known for the most part, the inner workings of one is pure speculation. They tunnel outside of regular spacetime, enabling the distances inside to be shorter than outside, but this means that they are going outside of reality as it is understood. Ships undulate and disform alongside the wormhole in impossible ways, and while upon exiting these ships return to their original shape, invariably there is some damage caused, with the destruction of entire ships, while rare, not being unheard of.
More concerning are the effects on the minds of humans and other lifeforms. The experience of going through a wormhole is, for whatever reason, anathema to consciousness, leading to those who go through becoming catatonic, unintelligibly traumatised, or – perhaps thankfully – outright dying from shock. To avoid this, hypersleep chambers are used to put a crew into a dreamless, deathly sleep to be rethawed on the other side. This averts the majority of the effects, however many report feeling disconcerted or strangely empty upon reawakening.
Even with these precautions, prolonged, repeated warpjumps have a significant correlation to the eventual development of dementia or schizophrenia, while the offspring of those who have undergone dozens of warpjumps have an unusually high rate of birth defects, especially among those who were in gestation in the time. This includes anomalous genetic information belonging to neither parent, nor able to be regarded as just mutations. This phenomenon is commonly called WBS – Wormhole Birth Syndrome.
Atomic Fabricators (Atfabs)
Atomic fabricators, near universally called atfabs within the empire, are machines that are capable of rearranging subatomic particles in order to convert any matter inputted into a desired result – provided there is sufficient quantities of particles to perform this feat. The ancient, advanced technology that predates the modern Empire can, by and at large, be manufactured only within Atfabs, making these industrial, oftentimes city block-sized machines a fundamental necessity to the survival of the Empire.
While atfabs are highly efficient materially, wasting less than 2% of the inputted material, they are also highly energy intensive. For many worlds possessing one, it may take many months to generate enough power to run a single atfab for several hours. While this was evidently not an issue in the forgotten past, the modern Empire simply lacks the energy infrastructure required to maintain constant atfab usage, and must settle for building only the essentials in the limited time they can operate.
Curiously, House Ryoshi’s atfabs appear to have an unusually high uptime that is in contrast to the amount of energy they should have access to. Despite this irregularity, or perhaps because of, House Ryoshi is dismissive of any inquiries or attempts to ascertain the reasoning behind this.
Quantum Relays
Where jumpgates and wormholes permit faster than light travel for voidships, the process for enabling FTL communication is comparatively simpler. Utilising arrays of quantum-entangled crystalline structures, information can be transmitted between two distant locations instantaneously. Despite the reliability and safety of this system, quantum relays are limited by a number of factors. One crystal can only ever be linked to a single other crystal, both of which must be produced simultaneously. The process by which a pair is produced is painstakingly slow and complex, with only House Ryoshi maintaining all the facilities to produce them. Finally, the infrastructure to support the system - including the means to relay a message across a chain of relays and the ability to read the encrypted messages, is prohibitively intricate and expensive to maintain.
These limitations, confounded by a relatively slow rate of transmission and processing of data, necessitates that the majority of communication through them be of tactical, political, or economic significance, with only the nobility being able to afford the luxury of sending personal messages through them, and even then at significant financial cost.