Codex: Major Groups on Dandriss
The title of 'Great Power' is something of a misnomer for the collection of post apocalyptic survivors even in comparison to more primitive industrial nation states, but the title is still somewhat apt in that there are five major groups that can be said to hold sufficient military and economic power that only another Great Power can successfully challenge them, although for all the groups logistics and numbers greatly limit their capacity to actually project power very far. These five groups are: Green Owl, Indigo Hammer, the Blackthorn Regulars, the Authority, and the Belters. Of the 'Colour Powers' they have the largest populations and strongest economies, while the Authority and Belters both have the most advanced technology, powerful militaries, and can claim continuity with the prior government, giving them considerable cultural sway over many of the unaffiliated groups.
Green Owl
Full name "The Duchy of Green Owl and the Protector of the Glass Canopy Quarantine Zone"
Liberal Corporate Neo-Aristocracy
An impromptu duchy with a solid core around the Counties of Shattersaw and Owl's Nest, it was formed through a series of military conquests and political weldings by Baroness, later Countess, Dia Stone, a warrant officer pre-Starfall assigned to the academic community of Greengraft. Through a combination of luck and ensuring that the academics were well supplied with funds to maintain and recover their technology, she managed to maintain a high standard of living for her people. With security assured via military force, she was able to quickly establish trade and commerce among the survivors. Through political marriages she welded together her people with the Barony of Dragonfly's Landing, a former tourist destination full of nobles who had kept order in the immediate aftermath of Starfall. The successes of Dia Stone were expanded upon by her daughter, Anna, who took control of the Dragonflies at an early age due to the death of her father in a reaver attack and continued policies of sponsorship of technology and business while also aggressively expanding military capacity. After approximately ten years as baroness, she ascended to become a countess with the abdication due to illness of her mother. Shortly thereafter she declared that she controlled enough resources and territory to be named a Duchess and challenged any who thought otherwise to prove her wrong.
The South Woods Conflicts, Aerospace Crisis and the Secession War demonstrated that the forces at her command, both military and economic, meant that no other single Great Power could prove her wrong, and she was more likely to find allies in Indigo Hammer and the Blackthorn Regulars than either of her two primary competitors were. While somewhat distant and often finding each other weird, the people of Green Owl and Indigo Hammer were both far more socially and politically liberal than the Belters or Authority, and the Regulars were willing to swallow their distaste for them in order to go after the people they truly hated when necessary. While the Authority sees them as upstarts, they also see them as being the least divergent from prior social norms, so they are willing to talk and trade more frequently than anyone else. Similarly, whatever distaste the Belters have for the ground based Dandriss, it seems the least around the people of Green Owl. As such, Green Owl often plays the middle man for the various other Great Powers, aided by their strong mercantile interests.
Indigo Hammer
Full name "The Commonwealth of Indigo Hammer"
Liberal Military-Academic Civic Bureaucracy
Another hodgepodge weld of multiple communities that formed immediately after Starfall, the scientists of Indigo Leaf managed to make numerous breakthroughs in the management of Dandriss life. Developing radical new technologies and techniques, they produced radical biological modifications to their people, allowing them to work outside of the settlements with much more limited protection, and to grow their people physically stronger, hardier, and better able to handle the toxic biologies of the planet. Freed of significant infrastructural constraints, they made major strides in plant sculpting that allowed for further expansion. In exchange for military protection they traded much of the products, if not the knowledge itself, to the now semi-legendary figure of Colonel Hammer. While his origins have been deliberately shrouded, the military man took over the local county capital in spite of the bomb damage and made a benevolent military dictatorship to help people survive. Deliberately larger than life for propaganda purposes, he actually had the foresight to rapidly devolve power to his own people in 'monitoring committees'. Over the first three decades post-Starfall he came to weld together numerous communities, especially with the exotic technologies Indigo Leaf was developing. Eventually he stepped down and retired in obscurity in a process that directly welded together the government structure he had produced with the academic hierarchy of Indigo Leaf.
While possessing numerous military advantages, among the biggest reasons that Indigo Hammer is considered a Great Power is that they possess a method for universal assembly that works via "programming" genetically engineered Dandriss plants to produce technological analogs. Combined with their other advantages and they have among the strongest industrial base of the Great Powers, and their industry is also well protected since they can leave with it into the woods. They have also produced numerous nomadic splinter groups that spread their influence, philosophy, and trade across the planet. Their closest allies are Green Owl, although the two have come to butt heads over trade issues as both of them have trade companies that compete with each other. Because of the radical biological changes they induce through Dandriss derived drug regimens, they are also tolerant of some of the more extreme body types present among the Blackthorn Regulars. They get along poorly with the Authority and there is no dialogue between them and the Belters without an intermediary present.
Blackthorn Regulars
Full name "The Blackthorn Regular Militia and Defence Companies"
Radical Communitarian Corporate Military Dictatorship
Composed of a number of mercenary bands that worked variously for the Authority and the Belters, in 42 SF they banded together and declared open revolt against their former employers, seizing the facilities the Belters had built in the former capital and 'liberating' the large population of indentured servants located there. While technologically and industrially the weakest of the Great Powers, the Blackthorn Regulars are by far the most populous and have what many consider supernaturally good luck. Composed of numerous small mercenary bands that originated as competing gangs of scavengers from Blackthorn - and later other communities transplanted there for the chance at food and shelter - they eventually coordinated into a loose hierarchy bound by contracts and family ties. Currently run by the man only known as "Little Rock" (it is a source of mutual irritation with the Stone dynasty of Green Owl that there is a similarity of names there), the Blackthorn Regulars are known for three things: their seething hatred of aristocratic and corporate structures that they blame for Starfall; their tolerance of any sort of the gross mutation that has popped up since Starfall that many other communities reject; and their willingess to throw bodies at problems whenever they are lacking in technology.
For obvious reasons they get along with almost none of the other Great Powers, but they have been aided by the mutual animosity between the Authority and the Belters, and the fact that both of those groups tend to take an overbearing tone against Green Owl and Indigo Hammer. During the Secession War they received considerable aid from those two in retaliation over the Aerospace Crisis that had been simmering for the past decade. Both Green Owl and Indigo Hammer will also support the Blackthorn Regulars unconditionally on anything having to do with the containment Dragon Woods that are less than a thousand kilometres from Blackthorn due to the religious beliefs of those groups. While they don't exactly like the new corporations and nobility they contain, the Regulars are also more willing to let ideological differences slide in comparison to the representatives of the old order and the groups that personally oppressed them prior to independence. It was only through third party negotiations that they actually declared an official peace with the Belters and Authority, and they have had numerous brushfire conflicts in the years since, especially when they march troops into tributary communities of the Authority.
Authority
Full Name "The Authority of the Restoration Movement"
Reactionary Neofeudal Military Dictatorship
Composed of a combination of vacationing nobles and the remnants of the officer corp they managed to scrape together from across the planet, the Authority was once the premier force on Dandriss due to their possession of the North Polar Military Base and numerous technologies they recovered from within. However, a combination of technological stagnation and decline and some unspoken of disaster that killed their original leadership, the Authority went into steep decline. Their dozens of client communities were treated mostly as sources of tribute and were not developed the way that Green Owl or Indigo Hammer did, and over time much of their military might was reliant on mercenary forces. When the Belters came along and challenged their ability to control the skies and offered better deals to their mercenary forces, they almost collapsed completely. While still primarily coasting on old glories, their current leader, Marshall Julian Danzig, has made efforts at slowing the decline and has even demonstrated the capacity to expand capabilities thought static or in decline previously. However, there are many whispers that dark things occur in the Polar Fortress and that the Authority as a whole is cursed, with their current improvements in fortune coming at nightmarish cost. What exactly this cost is varies from rumour to rumour, but the expansion of their elite corp of cybernetic shock troops almost certainly came at high human cost.
While the exact details differ depending on who is telling the story, both the Authority and the Belters claim that there was a conflict between the people who would found each faction in the immediate aftermath of Starfall. The Authority lost and was kicked out of the orbiting station to take over the Polar Fortress, while the Belters took their damaged station into the local asteroid belt and Jovian planets. The bad blood between the two, as well as the fact that they consider the other their primary military threat, puts them constantly at each other's throats. They view the other Great Powers with unearned paternalism and are constantly getting into conflicts as other powers pull their underdeveloped vassal communities away from them through economics or force, although they tend to only be directly violent with the Blackthorn Regulars as a polity.
Belters
Full name "Stellar Trading and Reclamation Corporation"
Deep Conservative Corporate Bureaucracy
The last remnants of the StarCorp branch that set up Dandriss as a colony world, their administrative station in orbit suffered a damaging revolt by the predecessors of the Authority in the days immediately after Starfall. Damaged to the point where they could not supply the trips down to the planet's surface for supplies, they instead broke orbit to go to the more gravitationally favourable mining opportunities in the asteroid belt (hence their common name of "Belters"). Approximately thirty years after Starfall they began to send expeditions back to Dandriss. While the group as a whole numbers less than ten thousand individuals, they retain full access to pre-Starfall technology, allowing for a highly automated economy and technologies that were never even released on Dandriss. This makes them simultaneously the most powerful and most fragile of the Great Powers, especially since the majority of their economy is weeks of spaceflight away and there are often only a few hundred personnel in orbit, and often less than a dozen on the ground for any reason. For some reason they also view the people of Dandriss in an extremely negative light and their interactions tend to be highly paternalistic and controlling. Their attempts to ban any sort of flight outside their control resulted in the Aerospace Crisis, which then later resulted in the disaster of the Secession War. They still claim the ultimate high ground and will aggressively defend the orbitals against attempted insertions by ground based powers, but have given up on restricting sub-orbital flights due to a lack of manpower.
While they don't get along with any of the other Great Powers, they have been forced to concede that they cannot dictate terms to them outside of their control of the orbits due to extremely limited capacity to maintain force projection on the ground. While they can fight and win any conflict with only a few dozen heavily armed and armoured soldiers, they cannot hold ground without local assistance, and after the rebellion of their mercenaries and theft of much of their ground infrastructure, they have generally given up on such schemes. Most of their ground activities are business related in nature, usually attempts to manipulate economics and bring the other Great Powers to blows with each other.
Lesser Communities
The majority of the population of Dandriss is either not a member of the Great Powers or only loosely affiliated with one. These communities, ravaged by Starfall and never able to recover to the extent the Great Powers did, are important in that they represent population and resources to be absorbed and leveraged, and the possibility of rare salvage. They vary from a few families in the ruins of smaller communities, to the more typical five hundred to two thousand populations of most settlements, to a few "Middle Powers" that have recovered enough that they can resist the Great Powers economically and militarily due to supply line lengths and logistical challenges. While many that have only been distantly contacted by the aerospace heavy groups like the Authority or Belters and view the Great Powers as distant saviours, many of the more aware ones view the Great Powers warily. The Colour Powers are often wildly divergent culturally, while the remnants of the old order are often paternalistic and overbearing. Many feel that they are caught in a crossfire of squabbling nations and corporations, pawns and prizes for those lucky enough to bounce back quickly.
Warlords and Raiders
While the heyday of barbarism in the first three decades after Starfall has faded with increasing interconnection between communities and the recovery stable trade lines and national armies bring, there are still significant chunks of the map where the Great Powers do not have enough presence to stamp down on raiders who stick to the rail lines and striking at small communities. As the number of nomadic splinter groups breaking off from the growing population and growing philosophical divergences of Indigo Hammer increase, a few have also taken up attacking their more sedentary neighbours. While not considered a threat to the Great Powers, such groups can occasionally become a problem for distant outposts, and protection from particularly bad examples tends to be a major recruiting tool for the Great Powers.
