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, but the Imperial House has long been absent from galactic politics, and dozens of Great Houses – each a semi-independent feudal barony in its own right – each vie for power in the federalised, feudal Empire. With the decline of the Empire finally reaching the capital in a series of catastrophes devastating the city-planet, Emperor Clovis IV ascends to the throne and plans to rebuild the Empire - but the Great Houses, used to the power they had, threaten to tear the nation apart to keep hold of it...
The Empire, sometimes referred to as the Argentium Empire, Orion-Cygni Empire, and dozens of of other monikers utilised 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.
For the entire known history of the Empire, once believed to have been transcendent in its power, with technology to rival miracles, has been in a state of decline. Complacency across the Empire has blinded its people to the loss of technology once mundane, to knowledge and science forgotten forever, and to the depletion of whole sectors of space of usable resources. One by one, star systems have ran out of the essentials of survival, blinked out of existence and swiftly forgotten. To those who rule on the capital, the planet Argentium, this was irrelevant — until the decline finally hit their world, with catastrophes born of ignorance and decay rendering chunks of the planet uninhabitable.
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 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 each ruling their own territory, militaries, laws, and commanding the fealty of numerous lesser lords and houses, and billions of serfs and petty labourers.
The nature of what a Great House can and cannot do is contentious. Technically there are numerous limitations upon what a Great House is and what its baron can do. Legally, a Great House does not own its territory, but rather is permitted by the Empire to govern the region on its behalf. Great Houses may not engage in feudal wars between themselves, and must pay tribute to the Imperial House on Argentium. In practice, only the last of these points is enforced, with the current Imperial House, and its predecessors, taking a hands-off approach to governing that has allowed the Great Houses to grow and act without oversight, so long as their taxes were paid.
In recent years, a shift has taken place within the capital of the Empire. Having suffered catastrophic destruction across the capital itself, many of the Argentian elite are no longer content to remain isolated from galactic politics — including the Emperor and the Imperial House itself. The era when it let the Great Houses rule without oversight is over, and the Emperor once again asserts Himself as the master of the Great Houses — a fact for which he has drawn much resentment for. After all the centuries of near complete autonomy, the barons are loathe to once more kneel before the Emperor’s will, even if they were supposed to have done so all along.
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 technically illegal across the entire Empire, is nonetheless abundant across 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 experiences a quality of life lacking the amenities expected of an advanced society.
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.
A Shift On Argentium
Once, the elites and nobility of Argentium, reaping the splendor of a bygone age in their kilometres-tall silver spires, were content to leave the wider Empire to run itself. So long as they received tribute from the Great Houses, they did not care how they ruled — they had all they truly needed in their silver world-city, supported by the steady flow of resources that had remained unbroken for millennia untold. When an issue arose, the Imperial Navy, along with the envoys of the Emperor, could resolve an issue with words and trivial concessions, or else destroy it without so much as a disturbance to the post-scarcity life on the capital.
It was only when this tribute slowed and a famine spread across the city, only when their palaces began to fall apart, and only once a series of devastating reactor failures, caused by a lack of understanding of their inner workings and inability to repair them, ripped deep scars across vast swathes of the surface of the silver planet, did they finally begin to pay attention to the state of the Empire once more. The Imperial House, at long last realising its Empire has fallen from its golden age, decided to once again take an active role in the politics of the Empire again.
Finding the Great Houses to be out of control and disobeying the oaths they swore to the Empire, Emperor Lorenza Valeorin began to assert Her authority, making demands of the barons. The Great Houses, who were functionally independent for so long, were displeased with Her once more reminding them of their servitude to the Imperial House and relinquish them of much of their power. For this, the Emperor was assassinated only five years later, and her son, Clovis IV, ascended to the throne. He continues Her efforts to regain control over the Great Houses and to restore ancient Empire to its former glory — an initiative many Great Houses would prefer to put an end to.