The Exarchs of Dusk Recruitment and OOC

[Shrike]

Exarchs of Dusk
For centuries, the Mastery of Suns was the greatest empire in known space, ruled by the mysterious, unaccountable and above all fickle Rmasters. For all that its distant rulers acted seemingly on whatever their whims took them, the Mastery was a time and a place of stability in the wreckage of a post-Ragnarok galaxy. For some, it was even a golden age when order replaced chaos and centuries of isolation was replaced by connection. Great works of art were commissioned and even greater works of industry were accomplished.

Unfortunately the Mastery was not to be eternal. The Rmasters departed four, perhaps five decades ago, leaving for parts unknown. The Mastery carried on much as before under the Archons and Exarchs, but with no higher power to answer to the bureaucracy was left to fend for itself. Had the Archons been a bit less ambitious, a bit less parochial or simply a bit more complacent the Mastery would likely have coasted under a caretaker government for decades or even centuries until it reformed into something more representative. Instead, cliques turned into conspiracies, particularly after a number of well-placed Archons formed what amounted to a new governing body. The Interim Conclave was unofficial - officially - but this was seen as a step too far for some. The seeds of rebellion had been sown.

One of the tragic ironies of the collapse of the Mastery was that most (though it must be said, not all) of the figures involved both saw themselves as, and in truth were, loyal to the Mastery. This fraticidal dispute was to be over how best to navigate a now-uncertain future.

The Mastery was crafted to be essentially self-running, which suited the Rmasters just fine as they had little interest in the daily grind of managing an empire spanning dozens of significant worlds and many more marginal. It was a self-maintaining machine to cater to whatever whimsy seized the Rmasters. Unfortunately, this machine began to seize up as those directly in charge of it began to scheme against each other. For the average being on the street this was invisible past perhaps a creeping malaise. It was the Verge where the Mastery's dysfunction was most apparent, with many forces withdrawn to fleet bases or to protect the interests of well-placed Archons leaving a power vacuum that soon filled with all manner of riff-raff.

These two decades also saw the creeping replacement of Archonic authority with that of the Exarchs; the Exarchs were originally a military position running parallel albeit subordinate to the Archons. Under the Interim Conclave, the Exarchs were seen as more loyal and consequently they became the favored way for the Interim Conclave to exercise power. By the time the Call to Reform was issued, they, not the Archons, were the executor's of the central government's will. A central government that, it should be remembered, was increasingly seen as not properly legitimate.

Issued by the Interim Conclave after having determined that it was unlikely that the Rmasters were ever to return, the Call to Reform promised a massive permanent renovation to the Mastery. While believing their position was firm, the Call to Reform was very much a step too far both among the now-diminished Archons and, more importantly, the being on the street. Public trust entered a tailspin and increasingly heavy-handed responses led into a downward spiral towards repression. While many worlds carried on as they had before, the Mastery had fallen into civil war. This period of increasing strife lasted roughly half a decade, broken only with the completely unexpected arrival of the EEF.

The EEF - the Enduscaran Expeditionary Force - was a mission of revenge by the distant republic of Endus, a place barely exiting in the Mastery's navigational maps never mind any political awareness. It was to be discovered that the Rmasters had departed for that distant place to retrieve, by force if necessary, an artifact of ancient power. And then, years later, the Enduscarans made a long-distance astral fold into Rubicon space at the heart of the Mastery to put an end to their attackers. Little did they realize that Rubicon had long been little more than a pleasure world and a pro forma capital for the Mastery. Expecting to knock out the heart of their assailants, they instead found themselves ensconced on a supine world of artists, hospitaliers and courtesans surrounded by a rising civil war.

With the members of the Interim Conclave mostly trapped on Rubicon and taken into custody by the EEF, the centralized Mastery rapidly dissolved. A number of loyal Archons and Exarchs attempted to fight off the EEF and protect the Mastery but ultimately it was to be futile; a house divided itself cannot stand. Others proclaimed themselves petty kings and lords, yet others made common cause with the Enduscarans. Conflict raged with the thunder of battle-lines and the knives of assassins.

After three years of sustained fighting the multisided war was over in any meaningful sense; years of military conflict had sapped the carefully hoarded forces of the various Archonates and Exarchates while the EEF struggled to make good its own losses. The Treaty of Vangor brought an official end to the fighting and the wreckage of the Mastery of Suns settled into a number of successor polities, some large, others small, almost all uneasily sharing a hot peace.

You are one of the loyal Exarchs in what's left of the Mastery, five years after the war officially ended.


Basic Concepts
Exarchs of Dusk is "PvEvP" game; it is expected that all players will be Exarchs of the now unfortunately reduced Mastery of Suns and thus nominally on the same side against NPCs, both neutral and antagonistic. However as one does not become an Exarch without a one in a million level of drive and ambition, your fellow Exarchs are also opponents of a more subtle sort.
Note that I am open to discussing players being neutral and antagonists.

Prestige
We stand here amidst *my* achievement. Not yours! - Orson Krennic

This quiet struggle for supremacy in the Exarch pecking order takes the form of 'Prestige', which is essentially how your fellow Exarchs and underlings respect you. Prestige is gained by achieving goals and it can be lost by failing at them. It can also be gained by stealing someone else's triumph and one can undermine their success or reinforce their failures to sap their Prestige. Success has many parents, failure is an orphan.

Prestige is tracking on Permanent Prestige and Prestige Points; the former is essentially how prestigious your achievements are while the later is consumable to perform extra actions (basically convincing the various bodies of the Mastery to support your pet project). Tentatively, 3 Prestige Points can be cashed in for an action of choice, or 2 if it is a favored action.

Actions
Each Exarch gets a base of one Political, one Economic and one Military action per turn. Various traits will give you additional options/actions. This is a list of the different actions. I will be relatively generous as to what each allows so long as a decent case can be made.
• Political - Building political capital, keeping the bureaucracy going, buying 1 Prestige Point, propaganda, reforms, diplomacy, borrowing weapons from the Absolute Defense Fleet, boosting or trash-talking other Exarchs to modify their Prestige, etc.
• Economic - Ordering units of a given type or mixture, economic reforms, civilian trade deals, reinvestment, repairing or refitting military units, etc.
• Military - Pretty much anything that can be construed as deploying military forces into action, this can range from a major fleet battle to sending out a couple platoons of blackbag specialists on an expedition or scouting mission.
• Espionage - Stealing shit, assassinating people, reducing people's Permanent Prestige and/or Prestige Points, etc.
• Research - Developing new and improved equipment or finding weaknesses in others. Depending on the project, it may take multiple consecutive actions.
• Magic - Casting spells. Firing off strategic weapons/magic. This action is special and may only be performed with GM approval, as it requires wizards, nukes or the other specialized items.

Starting Forces
Each Exarch has a variety of forces under their command, with no two Exarchs having the same amount of breakdown. As such as part of Exarch creation you must also determine your initial forces. Details on this is found later on.

The Absolute Defense Fleet
A large force of heavy warships withdrawn to the Bastion Worlds during the civil war, the Absolute Defense Fleet is essentially a "trust" of capital ships to protect the Mastery as a whole. It is collectively maintained and crewed, with Exarchs able to request forces out of it for major operations. Squandering these ships will likely have serious repercussions to your Prestige, but losses in the cause of victory are entirely understandable and can be made well given time.


Your Exarchate

Territory
• Military Outpost - The Mastery constructed many outposts along its borders for early warning and logistics purposes. They were natural strongpoints during the conflicts that tore apart the Mastery, and to this day those that weren't sieged and wrecked are common homes for loyalists, republican and rebel fleets. 200 military points.
• Bastion World - The Rmasters had several worlds deep in the Great Wall terraformed and colonized; these were heavily fortified by the Interim Conclave during the civil war to be unassailable rear areas. They proved to be too much for either rebel or republican forces to take and are the de facto capital of the remnants. Having one of these are your territory grants you greater access to resources but also puts a target on your back - be it by foe or friend. 300 military points of which at least 100 must be army or otherwise defensive nature and at least 100 must be capital ships.
• Periphery Settlement - The Periphery always felt the touch of the Mastery lightly; full of uninhabited or lightly inhabited worlds settlements here were unofficially seen as a place for nonconfirmists to depart to. Unlike the effectively abandoned Verge, the Periphery was to see extensive fighting, though rarely decisive. Controlling a Periphery world often limits available resources but greater powers will often pay less attention to goings-on there. 100 military points of which no more than 50% may be capital ships.
• Resource Outpost - Resourcing operations take many forms; mining operations, ether collectors, perhaps pharmaceutical forests or even more esoteric facilities provide - or provided - valuable and often vital resources to the Mastery. Today, they provide a steady stream of siphoned-off income as well as some personal resources for the forces occupying them. 100 military points of which no more than 50% may be capital ships.
• Raider Base - Unlike the other options, in this case you are a force without a home; home is instead a hidden mobile base from which your forces strike from. While you undoutedly retain the trappings of a loyal Exarch, many will see you as little more than illegitimate and dangerous bandits. 200 military points.


Power Base
• The Fleet - The fleet is the traditional base of hard power among Exarchs, particularly in context of the buildup after the Rmasters departed. While sadly depleted after a decade of conflict and a subsequent decade and a half of collapse and neglect, there is still a strong esprit de corps among the loyalist elements. You get 50% more starting military points when spent on Warships.
• The Army - While warships are invaluable for controlling the deep sky and the ether ways, worlds cannot be taken and held without ground troops. Like the fleet, the army went through a period of growth after the Rmasters' departure, supplementing and eventually supplanting the clone Sanjaks. You get 100% more starting military points when spent on Army.
• Clone Sanjak - The elite, personal troops of the Rmasters themselves, the clone Sanjaks were unquestioningly loyal. Some vanished with the Rmasters and many of the remainder were crippled or destroyed fighting the EEF, but a few still exist in the Remnants. Your units are elite quality.
• Intelligence Service - The Rmasters themselves cared little for detailed intelligence, but those serving them swore by it. In the shadow conflicts that followed, the civilian and military intelligence services grew, split and sometime became power centers in their own right. You have an additional Espionage action.
• Popular Support - In truth, the social compact in the Mastery of Suns was never complicated; the Rmasters would provide protection and stability, in return they would be owed obeisance. In the post civil war era, new social compacts needed to be forged. You have an additional Political action.
• Mercenaries - There are no shortage of sellswords in the galaxy, ranging from Dagonite aerocultists to ex-Mastery bounty hunters to Gael clan-warriors to Clionan PMCs to Cylord borg-troops to name just a few. Mercenaries can bring experience and capabilities that would be rare in the Mastery but they are loyal to a paycheck, not to any greater ideals. You may start with and rent mercenaries en masse. Specifica TBD.
• Corporations - Corporate interests exploded in the Interim Conclave era and a number of megacorps have muscled their way to prominence. While these tend to be more prevalent in the lightly-regulated Verge, the enticement of corporate funding and resources is not to be lightly ignored. You have an extra Economic action.
• The Church - The Rmasters did not condone any official religion in the Mastery though so long as spiritualism did not try to supplant the power of the state they were willing to allow it to exist. This broadly atheistic worldview has become distorted in the past half-century though and a number of quasi-legal Rmaster cults have sprung up which claim the Rmasters themselves were gods. While these are often liable to be suppressed, there is certainly something to be said for instead harnessing this energy. You get an extra Political action and your units are often fanatical, but you run the risk of suffering Prestige penalties.
• Write-in - A secret lab producing wunderwaffe? Critical resources? A delicate political balancing act? Specifics to be worked out with the moderator.


Special Unit
• Elite Guard - In addition to your territorial forces, you have a smaller force of elite troops that are of unquestioned loyalty. They have high-quality equipment and are well-supplied, giving them a battlefield effect disproportionate to their size. Can also represent a small, likely fragmentary clone Sanjak. You get 30 points in Elite units.
• Flagship - The battlefrigate was the largest warship that the Mastery built in series, but larger were constructed every so often. Each was unique and likely has a storied history, though more than one was secreted away in the bastion worlds as part of the Absolute Defense Fleet and never came without a great league of combat for the entire civil war. You get a supercapital warship.
• Superweapons - The Mastery had little need for doomsday arsenals, as any one of the Rmasters was a magi of superlative power. However, a small stockpile of doomsday weapons such as geode bombs was built by the Interim Conclave. Many of these were used in the battles against the EEF, but you have managed to acquire a few. Use them well.
• Citadel of Doom - Your residence and stronghold of power is massively fortified and almost impregnable to any reasonable assault. This provides both the moral benefits of always having a truly safe place to retreat to and the possibility of owning a giant skull fort. You get a giant skull fort.
• Foreign Support - You have cast your lot in with a foreign power - perhaps the UAN, sitting on the far side of the cosmozoan-infested Briar, perhaps former clients and border states like the Clionans, a humiliating role reversal, perhaps even the distant leeches of Moldoveanu. You may get foreign support in-game.
• Advanced Prototype - A dizzying array of weapons were developed during the civil war. Many of these were unsuitable for mass production or simply proved to be failures. You've acquired one or a handful, luckily of the former type. You get a Research action.
• Black Ops - The civil war was not fought solely with fleets and armies. The war in the shadows was even more vicious and all manner of infiltrators, assassins, saboteurs, spies and black-bag specialists plied their trade. A loyal(?) cadre of these blackguards has kept your position secure. You get an Espionage action.
• Sanctioned Magi - Casual magecraft past simple body magic was verboten under the Rmasters, but those occasional individuals demonstrating exceptional raw talent were inducted into a tightly-controlled order of magi. In the aftermath of the collapse of the Mastery, a coven of them has taken up residence in your employ. You get a Magic action.
• Write-in - A cadre of werewolf-soldiers? Summoned and bound extraplanar spirits? A secret force of umbra-ships? Specifics to be worked out with the moderator.


You, the Exarch

Exarch Ascension
• Venerable Leader - For you, the Rmasters are not just a story, but the ones who recognized your generation of loyal service and promoted you to the exalted rank of Exarch. It is an honor increasingly few can claim, though there are undoutedly those who will attempt to turn your age against you if you slip up.
• Electronic Old Man - You were long part of the cabal of the Interim Conclave - not an Archon yourself, but an indispensible associate. For your efforts, you were promoted to Exarch, a position you've held for a generation. You know where all the skeletons are buried, but you are well-known as a walking embodiment of the Shadow State and genuine trust may be difficult to come by.
• Conclave Confirmed - For your loyal service and demonstrated skill, you received the coveted position of Exarch sometime in the years before things went south. The archetypical Exarch.
• Assumed the Purple - You are one of the younger Exarchs, having taken the position of another without 'official' sanction from the now-dissolved Interim Conclave. The former officeholder was likely your superior and possibly even your mentor and are unfortunately passed, almost certainly in some appropriately hagiographical way. You are a bit of an outsider in what's left of Mastery politics but on the flipside, you are also possibly seen as a bit more 'down to earth' and are untainted by prior associations.
• Backroom Manipulator - You have taken the position of another Exarch - spouse, paramour, former enemy or some other relationship - by less than entirely ethical but likely (almost) bloodless means. You have managed to retain it by a knack for cut-throat intrigue and opportunism. You may even have allies who support you instead of whoever preceeded you, but equally there may be those who will never see you as an equal.


Hobby (2 are suggested)
• History - History was never a particularly favored subject in the Mastery, and while there was never any outright repression genuine scholars of history were few, poor and often frowned-upon. While rarely giving any direct value, understanding and contemplating what has gone before could let you avoid pitfalls or delve into the lost history of the Mastery.
• Enigmas - Known space is vast and ancient, with many worlds having roots thousands of years in the past. Mysteries of Man, God and Alien from pre-Ragnarok times are often incomprehensible, critical aspects of understanding lost over the centuries. More recently, the secret actions of states create their own enigmas. Ferreting out meaning from the unknown is your favorite intellectual pursuit.
• Gardening - Time spent in a garden has a salutory effect on the psyche, letting one relax and concentrate the way being in an office or command bridge does not. Well-tended personal grounds are also an impressive tool to show your confidence and security to others.
• Indulgence - For generations, conspicious consumption and hedonism have gone hand-in-hand with success in the Mastery. While outright waste is frowned upon, knowing how to surround yourself in the trappings of wealth and power makes it that much easier to convince others both friend and foe that you are a legitimate force. The pleasure-harem also makes for relaxing evenings.
• Art - It is always difficult to hang the title of jumped-up thug on someone who is the patron of multiple art museums. Until you start dipping your political enemies in acid, anyway.
• Asceticism - Your spartan lifestyle is likely inherited from, or perhaps deliberately styled after that of the clone-Sanjaks. There is a certain impressiveness for a leader to adopt such and your soldiers and citizens may find cause with a leader who gives up pleasures of the flesh for the common good.
• Personal Combat - Most Exarchs eschew personal combat past a modicum of regular training and exercise, but you maintain a warrior's skillset.
• Technology - Technology has always interested you and while it may not always be possible to continually pace the bleeding-edge weapon systems coming out of other worlds, you pay close attention to everything new to avoid ugly surprises and come up with counteragents.
• Gadgets - You are interested not so much in the technology of making war but personal gadgetry of all sort. Guns, swords, toys, artifacts, books . . . if it is unique and you can hold it in your hand, you will likely find it fascinating - and sometimes useful.
• Poison - The intricacies of the poisoner's art are yours; the mundane, the unusual, the exotic, the statement.
• Politics - All those who aspire to Archon or Exarch rank must ultimately learn to play politics. You, however, are a political creature, with well-honed instincts and experience at playing the greatest game.
• People - You have made a careful study of what makes people tick and how to cultivate talent. This may or may not help you select the most loyal, but this has definately given you an eye for talent - and knowing when to discard a failing subordinate.
• Speechifying - You have a talent at both writing and giving speeches for the masses, able to read a room and rouse a crowd.
• Torture - Do not choke on your ambitions.
• Magic - While not powerful enough to be a sanctioned magi, you have spent some time learning the mystic arts, possibly in secret.



Military Forces

Warships
• Battlefrigate (20 points) - Large all-purpose warships that are essentially one-ship task forces, these are favored command ships for High Skies Fleet officers. They can carry ground troops and fighters too. A typical battlefrigate masses 70-100,000 tons.
• Battlecarrier (20 points) - The signature warship of the Frontier Fleet, no new battlecarriers have been commissioned in the past 20 years. Combining respectable gun armament with mid-range fighter complement many of them are also nuclear powered to give them unmatched deployment range. Battlecarriers are rarely below 100,000 tons.
• Dreadnought (15 points or 40 points for Division of 3) - Not as fast as a battlefrigate and without the frills but just as deadly in a line of battle engagement, dreadnoughts were the favored weapon of the Grand Fleet where their complete lack of subtelty was never a problem. Most of the Absolute Defense Fleet is made up of dreadnoughts. Dreadnoughts are typically somewhat smaller than battlefrigates and are normally in the 60-80,000 ton range.
• Armored Frigate (8 points) - A more affordable warship, the armored frigate is the largest warship regularly built in today's Mastery. They do not have all the features of full capital ships but are nonetheless respectable combatants. Armored frigates are normally in the 20-30,000 ton range
• Light Frigates (4 points or 20 points for Squadron of 6) - These were the workhorses of the Mastery's fleet (particularly the High Sies Fleet), capable of landing troops in hot spots or chasing down smugglers. Light frigates generally mass around 10,000 tons. A variation, the Missile Frigate, was built specifically by the Frontier Fleet to provide protection against the high-end aerospace craft entering service in the Verge.
• Warbird Squadron (6 points) - These deep-sky attack ships are small but potent, being mass-produced by all sides during the war. Each squadron is typically about a half-dozen ships, they are not doctrinally meant to operate as individuals.
• Standard Carrier (8 points) - The Mastery's carriers were normally part of the Grand Fleet and as such mostly concerned themselves with scouting and force protection. Of unimpressive size and performance they have become more valuable today.

• Grand Carrier (1 political action + 20 prestige) - For more than a century the Grand Carriers were the main supporting arm of the Grand Fleet, each one housing a full wing of aircraft plus ample supplies all inside a well-protected hull. Unfortunately they were priority targets for the EEF and by the armistice, every single one had been sunk or crippled. Only recently have they been returned to production at a few key sites.
• Scout (5 points) - Scout Cruisers were something of a fad among Verge states a couple decades ago, giving fleets fast and long-range 'ears' to pick up hostiles with plenty of time to form up into battle position. The success of the Iradne Gyga-X system in picking up Neue Ollande attack craft at long range has spurred interest in a more portable version. The result was the dusting off of several old never-built design studies for a fast scout and picket ship, a Mastery equivalent to these scout cruisers. Scouts are lightly-armed, mostly for self-defense, but are fast and can deploy large sensor arrays to perform detection at ranges beyond that of less specialized ships.


Other Government Ships
• Merchant Raider
• Armed Freighter
• Spy Ship

Ground-based units
• Regular Infantry (10 points) - A full legion of mechanized troops, including organic light artillery and assorted support assets.
• Elite Infantry (10 points) - Elite infantry come in significantly smaller formations but come with a broader selection of supporting and mobility assets (such as flight-capable transports) and of course a significantly higher degree of training.
• Special Forces (10 points) - Special forces are the most highly trained soldiers an Exarch generally fields. Many have trained in basic body magic and various skills not normally found among line infantry. Unless they have an appropriate trait, no Exarch may have more than one unit of SOF for every five other conventional army unit.
• Armored Legion (20 points) - Consisting of a mixture of tanks/battlewalkers and mechanized infantry, the armored legions are the hard-hitting offensive fist on the ground.
• Legion Battery (20 points) - A Legion Battery is a powerful support asset, made up of long-range artillery and heavy anti-air weapons. Lighter ships in particular would be ill-advised to try and duel such a formation.
• Interceptor Wing (5 points) - A large wing of land-based aircraft made up of several squadrons, an Interceptor Wing is the primary method of "homeland defense" as well as tactical striking of enemy ground units.
• Bomber Wing (10 points) - The heavy bomber is a weapon that has only a short history in the Mastery, the first of them actually having been inspired by similar aircraft flown by the UAN and then other Verge states.



Your Exarchy

Traits
These are optional

• Mercurial Politics - Perhaps your inner circle is rife with disagreements or perhaps your people are fickle in their demands. You may take an extra Political Action but every time you do so there may be unpredictable demands made afterwards.
• Legacy Mandate - Your state (or your Exarch) has been charged with some long-running and open-ended mission of note, such as ensuring that no-one breaks into the Tomb of Stalsk. So long as the mandate's geas remains intact, the Exarch with it accrues Prestige. The specifics of the geas, its difficulty and the rewards must be determined between player and GM.
• Border World - Your Exarchate is not alone in its solar system and those you share it with are neutrals or broadly uninvolved with the internal affairs of the Mastery. However they are not blind or without strength. You get +50 Military Points. May not be taken by a Bastion World.
• Exarch of Kaliningrad - You pulled the short straw when they were handing out Exarchates and your is indisputably under threat and/or surrounded by those who can rapidly turn into enemies. Good luck, you'll need it. You get +100% Military Points. May not be taken by a Bastion World.
• Lost Cause - Your fellow Exarchs have cut you off from accessing the Absolute Defense Fleet. There's probably some history there, but who cares, you never wanted their dreadnoughts anyway! Not having to tithe support for upkeeping those ships gives you production capacity. You also get +50 Military Points, or +100 for a Raider Fleet. May not be taken by a Bastion World.
• Paranoid - They're out to get you. You may use a political action as an espionage action, but every action bought with Prestige costs +1 Prestige points.
• Write-in - Discuss with the GM.

 

[Shrike]

Spoiler: Existing Exarchs and Archons

Existing Exarchs and Archons
Please note that these may be taken over by a player or have their position replaced by a write-in.

Exarch Lockwood of Narbonilla
Player: OPEN
[https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net...nUC0068.PNG/revision/latest?cb=20150305220437]
Exarch Lockwood's domain is the orbiting city of High Sofia. Lockwood is not considered the most powerful or influential Exarch by his peers but is well-regarded and has a knack for spotting talent and is in many ways the archetypical Exarch. The Lockwood Garden on Spire 3 of High Sofia is his gift to his people and a popular recreation spot for the inhabitants, though the elites and his guests often spend time in the restricted access Conservatory on Spire 7.

Leader Stats
• Bastion World - The Rmasters had several worlds deep in the Great Wall terraformed and colonized; these were heavily fortified by the Interim Conclave during the civil war to be unassailable rear areas. They proved to be too much for either rebel or republican forces to take and are the de facto capital of the remnants. Having one of these are your territory grants you greater access to resources but also puts a target on your back - be it by foe or friend.
• The Fleet - The fleet is the traditional base of hard power among Exarchs, particularly in context of the buildup after the Rmasters departed. While sadly depleted after a decade of conflict and a subsequent decade and a half of collapse and neglect, there is still a strong esprit de corps among the loyalist elements.
• Flagship - The battlefrigate was the largest warship that the Mastery built in series, but larger were constructed every so often. Each one was unique and likely has a storied history, though more than one was secreted away in the bastion worlds as part of the Absolute Defense Fleet and never came without a great league of combat for the entire civil war.
• Conclave Confirmed - For your loyal service and demonstrated skill, you received the coveted position of Exarch sometime in the years before things went south. The archetypical Exarch.
• Gardening - Time spent in a garden has a salutory effect on the psyche, letting one relax and concentrate the way being in an office or command bridge does not. Well-tended personal grounds are also an impressive tool to show your confidence and security to others.
• People - You have made a careful study of what makes people tick and how to cultivate talent. This may or may not help you select the most loyal, but this has definately given you an eye for talent - and knowing when to discard a failing subordinate.


Archon Ranos de la Fontera of Narbonilla
Player: OPEN
[https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net...nUC0068.PNG/revision/latest?cb=20150305215714]
Archon Ranos de la Fontera is an old man who has seen it all. One of the few leaders who can claim to have directly interacted with the Rmasters, Ranos was promoted to Archon before they vanished. Today he still has that title, though the past half-century weighs on him. He is seen as a statesman even among the enemies of the Mastery and takes the role of both mediator and elder to the other Exarchs.

Leader Stats
• Bastion World - The Rmasters had several worlds deep in the Great Wall terraformed and colonized; these were heavily fortified by the Interim Conclave during the civil war to be unassailable rear areas. They proved to be too much for either rebel or republican forces to take and are the de facto capital of the remnants. Having one of these are your territory grants you greater access to resources but also puts a target on your back - be it by foe or friend.
• Popular Support - In truth, the social compact in the Mastery of Suns was never complicated; the Rmasters would provide protection and stability, in return they would be owed obeisance. In the post civil war era, new social compacts needed to be forged.
• Elite Guard - In addition to your territorial forces, you have a smaller force of elite troops that are of unquestioned loyalty. They have high-quality equipment and are well-supplied, giving them a battlefield effect disproportionate to their size. Can also represent a small, likely fragmentary clone Sanjak.
• Venerable Leader - For you, the Rmasters are not just a story, but the ones who recognized your generation of loyal service and promoted you to the exalted rank of Exarch. It is an honor increasingly few can claim, though there are undoutedly those who will attempt to turn your age against you if you slip up.
• Art - It is always difficult to hang the title of jumped-up thug on someone who is the patron of multiple art museums. Until you start dipping your political enemies in acid, anyway.
• Philosophy - Approaching the end of his first century, Ranos has taken an introspective bent lately.


Exarch Tisana Claidmel of Narbonilla
Player: OPEN
[http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3527/3313015411_f136b8f981.jpg?v=0]
Tisana Claidmel is a Lyonessan, her world having been annexed a century and a half ago during the Mastery's expansion into the Verge. Showing some aptitude for magic, she found a place in the employ of Archon Varanus to eventually become his right-hand woman and it is rumored, his paramour. When he died suddenly, she used various secrets to be promoted to Exarch and to fill his place.

Leader Stats
• Bastion World - The Rmasters had several worlds deep in the Great Wall terraformed and colonized; these were heavily fortified by the Interim Conclave during the civil war to be unassailable rear areas. They proved to be too much for either rebel or republican forces to take and are the de facto capital of the remnants. Having one of these are your territory grants you greater access to resources but also puts a target on your back - be it by foe or friend.
• Intelligence Service - The Rmasters themselves cared little for detailed intelligence, but those serving them swore by it. In the shadow conflicts that followed, the civilian and military intelligence services grew, split and sometime became power centers in their own right.
• Sanctioned Magi - Casual magecraft past simple body magic was verboten under the Rmasters, but those occasional individuals demonstrating exceptional raw talent were inducted into a tightly-controlled order of magi. In the aftermath of the collapse of the Mastery, a coven of them has taken up residence in your employ.
• Backroom Manipulator - You have taken the position of another Exarch - spouse, paramour, former enemy or some other relationship - by less than entirely ethical but likely (almost) bloodless means. You have managed to retain it by a knack for cut-throat intrigue and opportunism. You may even have allies who support you instead of whoever preceeded you, but equally there may be those who will never see you as an equal.
• Enigmas - Known space is vast and ancient, with many worlds having roots thousands of years old. Mysteries of Man, God and Alien from pre-Ragnarok times are often incomprehensible, critical aspects of understanding lost over the centuries. More recently, the secret actions of states create their own enigmas. Ferreting out meaning from the unknown is your favorite intellectual pursuit.
• Magic - While not powerful enough to be a sanctioned magi, you have spent some time learning the mystic arts, possibly in secret.


Exarch Manez de la Fontera of Hadrian
Player: OPEN
[https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net...oUC0068.PNG/revision/latest?cb=20150305220047]
The nephew of Archon Ranos de la Fontera, Manez has served as an Exarch on Hadrian for two and a half decades, originally with the charge of the Special Development Division and then with the death of Exarch Janos at the battle of Greenway Straight, the senior Exarch of Hadrian. He is well-known for the lavish parties he throws and for his patronage of various inventors.

Leader Stats
• Bastion World - The Rmasters had several worlds deep in the Great Wall terraformed and colonized; these were heavily fortified by the Interim Conclave during the civil war to be unassailable rear areas. They proved to be too much for either rebel or republican forces to take and are the de facto capital of the remnants. Having one of these are your territory grants you greater access to resources but also puts a target on your back - be it by foe or friend.
• The Fleet - The fleet is the traditional base of hard power among Exarchs, particularly in context of the buildup after the Rmasters departed. While sadly depleted after a decade of conflict and a subsequent decade and a half of collapse and neglect, there is still a strong esprit de corps among the loyalist elements.
• Advanced Prototype - A dizzying array of weapons were developed during the civil war. Many of these were unsuitable for mass production or simply proved to be failures. You've acquired one or a handful, luckily of the former type.
• Conclave Confirmed - For your loyal service and demonstrated skill, you received the coveted position of Exarch sometime in the years before things went south. The archetypical Exarch.
• Technology - Technology has always interested you and while it may not always be possible to continually pace the bleeding-edge weapon systems coming out of other worlds, you pay close attention to everything new to avoid ugly surprises and come up with counteragents.
• Indulgence - For generations, conspicious consumption and hedonism have gone hand-in-hand with success in the Mastery. While outright waste is frowned upon, knowing how to surround yourself in the trappings of wealth and power makes it that much easier to convince others both friend and foe that you are a legitimate force. The pleasure-harem also makes for relaxing evenings.


Pasha Chaid of Sanjak Murane
Player: OPEN

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/g...nmasked.png/revision/latest?cb=20210313173510

The only Pasha - Sanjak leader - to still serve the mastery and the only one other than Bolderiza of Mizum even known to be alive, Pasha Chaid (pronounced 'shade') was the second in command of the mostly ceremonial Murane Sanjak that guarded the throneworld of Rubicon. Much of the Sanjak was destroyed in the immediate arrival of the EEF and he assumed command after the foundering of the flagship Tuminol, his remaining troops forced to retreat to the bastion worlds.

Leader Stats
• Raider Base - Unlike the other options, in this case you are a force without a home; home is instead a hidden mobile base from which your forces strike from. While you undoutedly retain the trappings of a loyal Exarch, many will see you as little more than illegitimate and dangerous bandits.
• Clone Sanjak - The elite, personal troops of the Rmasters themselves, the clone Sanjaks were unquestioningly loyal. Some vanished with the Rmasters and many of the remainder were crippled or destroyed fighting the EEF, but a few still exist in the Remnants.
• Elite Guard - In addition to your territorial forces, you have a smaller force of elite troops that are of unquestioned loyalty. They have high-quality equipment and are well-supplied, giving them a battlefield effect disproportionate to their size. Can also represent a small, likely fragmentary clone Sanjak.
• Assumed the Purple - You are one of the younger Exarchs, having taken the position of another without 'official' sanction from the now-dissolved Interim Conclave. The former officeholder was likely your superior and possibly even your mentor and are unfortunately passed, almost certainly in some appropriately hagiographical way. You are a bit of an outsider in what's left of Mastery politics but on the flipside, you are also possibly seen as a bit more 'down to earth' and are untainted by prior associations.
• Personal Combat - Most Exarchs eschew personal combat past a modicum of regular training and exercise, but you maintain a warrior's skillset.
• Speechifying - You have a talent at both writing and giving speeches for the masses, able to read a room and rouse a crowd.


Additional Exarchs
The Mastery, shrunken as it is, still has a number of worlds, each of which has at least one Exarch. These are open for creation.

Spoiler: Gazeteer

Gazeteer
Note: very incomplete!

The Bastion Worlds
The Bastion Worlds are a number of planets deep in the Shroud - the spinward whorls of the Great Wall - that were discovered during the Tyndall Missions and subsequently settled. During the civil war and subsequent EEF invasion they were the stronghold of the loyalist forces, their last redoubts and ultimate stronghold. In the course of these conflicts the actual defensive strength of the Basion Worlds was never seriously tested, though more than one raid suffered heavy losses in these strongly-secured systems.

Narbonilla
Originally dismissed as a world of slim value thanks to its rugged geography and harsh global winter climate, the gas-shrouded world of Narbonilla spent a couple decades being visited by few more than naturalists, alpine sports enthusiasts of the most serious sort and equally serious game hunters wanting to trek through the trackless taiga in pursuit of the world's furred fauna. This only changed when one of the Rmasters was taken with the world's winter beauty, specifically in the Romi Bay region. This structure is the inundated remains of a volcanic caldera several dozen kilometers across, dating to prehistoric times and thankfully long extinct. The heavily incised oval depression makes for a natural bay while numerous springs and geysers generated as groundwater is heated and returned to the surface dot both Romi bay and the surroundings. Local ocean currents also contribute to the Romi Bay microclimate, making it surprisingly pleasant - albeit often foggy - relative to much of the rest of Narbonilla.

The presence of one or more Masters on Narbonilla on a regular basis meant that the trappings of civilization and government would inevitably follow. In the process of installing the various high-fidelity communication equipment suitably for a Rmaster that it was discovered that the Narbonilla system was, at least by the standards of the Shroud, naturally sited in a zone of excellent astral transmissivity. This made Narbonilla an opportune home-away-from-home for both the Masters and their advisors. Far from the bustle of the court on Rubicon, those on Narbonilla could nonetheless remain conveniently connected to the main communication trunks of the Mastery. Over the years many branches of government set up satellite facilities in the Romi Bay area, often in a disguised attempt to get away from the inecessant politicking and interference at court. By the time the Masters vanished, Romi Bay was itself a bustling city of significant size and a significant satellite bureaucratic center, Rubicon itself having been increasingly relegated to ceremonial purposes. The decade of civil conflict only accelerated the centralization of bureaucracy in the heavily defended Bastion Worlds. Thus, when the EFF did an astral jump into Rubicon they achieved not a devastating decapitation strike on their enigmatic enemies, but the seizure of a world full of artists, courtiers and scholars. The real business of running the Mastery was happening on Narbonilla.

In the debased current erra, Narbonilla has become the de jure capital of the Mastery as well as its de facto one, with much of the Absolute Defense Fleet permanently assigned to the system.

High Sofia
High Sofia is Exarch Lockwood's seat of power, a large orbital city home to more than two and a half million people. Of fairly representative late Mastery construction, High Sofia consists of several dozen hexagonal plates, each one forming the foundation for one or more large pyramids. The ones on the topside are mostly made of polarized glass used for towers and parks while those on the underside are instead monolithic structures.

Originally intended as a modest industrial center to supply goods for Narbonilla's growth, High Sofia has long since expanded vastly beyond these humble origins into a city unto itself.

Hadria
The minor world eventually known as Hadria was discovered within the tenebrous outer drifts of the Great Wall during the course of the Tyndall missions. Combining a relatively fast rotation and significant axial tilt, Hadria is a relatively inhospitable world of strong winds and sharp seasons despite being nominally habitable across much of its surface area. The unfavorability for potential settlement along with its relative inaccessibility made it a favored location for a number of deep security sites, generally of the sort where the Mastery had something they'd prefer buried far, far from anyone who would likely stumble across it.

Considered a hardship posting for much of the fifth century, policy changes saw the relocation of various sensitive installations to the world and growing civilian settlements of dependents, leading to more general economic growth. By the time the Interim Conclave came to power, Hadria had a modest but self-sufficient population living in various fortified - against the wind as much as anything else - towns and cities. Hadria's development accelerated towards the end of the second decade of Conclave governance; always ruled not by an Archon but by an Exarch, Hadria's position deep in the Shroud made it ideal for a stronghold of Conclave power. Like the other Bastion worlds many loyalists were relocated to Hadria as the Conclave consolidated its power and significant industrial strength was brought to bear for purposes both civilian and military. The civil war only accelerated this and Hadria was a fortified world by the time the EEF astrally folded into Rubiconspace, the World of Walls was protected by vast fixed fortifications and elements of the Absolute Defense Fleet.

Hadel
One of the deepest worlds that is not surrounded by vast storms or immense deserts of stagnant ether, Hadel is a brilliant diamond buried in the Great Wall as even by more conventional standards it is a fairly congenial world. This, of course, means that by the standards of the worlds enveloped in the drifting gases and turbulent whorls of the Great Wall that it is a choice slice of paradise and the single most populous of the Bastion worlds as well as being the breadbasket for the remaining Mastery in the Shroud.

Hadel has no oceans per se, its gently rolling topography instead home to innumerable lakes and seas of limited salinity. The world-forest covers all but the polar tundra, though a low equator-to-pole temperature gradient means even the poles are not glaciated. Megalithic ruins dot Hadel, relics of prehistoric, nonhuman but as-yet-unidentified habitation. Hadel is moonless, though the airglow from the thin gas that fills the system gives it no true darkness, only perpetual hazy days and twilight nights. As a consequence of these, Hadel's seasons are all but nonexistent and it has a year round (if mild) growing season.

The forgiving climate of Hadel meant that it drew many settlers willing to make the long trek through the Shroud and a strong frontier ethos developed among its inhabitants over the generations. Even today Hadel is relatively poorly urbanized with only a few truly major cities seperated by fields, forests and lakes. Much of the population instead lives in small and medium towns and a not-insignificant number are believed to have essentially gone 'off the grid' and vanished into the hundred million square kilometers of protected forest.

Resaca
One of the earliest habitable worlds discovered during the Tyndall missions and the eventual gateway to the Bastion Worlds, Resaca is a cloudy, swampy world of somewhat above average size and gravity. Habitation on this soggy globe has mostly stayed in the drier uplands where atmospheric pressure is more in line with that found comfortable by most humans. Much of the population has filled the massive Madras alpine plateau, a country-sized mass of elevated terrain five kilometers above local sea level. Local gravity has been a bit of a disincentive to settlement, though by today the population has expanded to almost twenty million.

Perida
Lying between Narbonilla and Hadria, Perida would be an unremarkable system were it not skirting the edge of the 'Bastion Bubble' and thus irregularly masked by blustery clouds of nebular gas blown in from the Great Wall. Perida has no intrinsically habitable worlds, just a collection of dessicated cinders and dirty iceballs thickly wrapped in ever-increasing amounts of nebular gas with a single lonely gas giant with its own host of moonlets orbiting just inside the star way termini. Perida is also orbited by two asteroid belts, one inside the ice line and thus consisting of dry rocks and rubble, the other scattered into the outer system and made up of uncountable billions of comets and cometoids. It is these two that are the main driver of activity in Perida and immense ore drags each carrying hundreds of thousands of tons of semirefined ores constantly set sail from the semimobile deep-sky ore smelters peppering the debris rings, bound for Corpus, Narbonilla and Hadria to name just a few.

Corpus Hermias
Corpus Hermias (normally simply known as Corpus) is a small, rugged world not far from Hadria and tenuously enveloped in a spiralled drift from the Great Wall. Untold millenia of nebular ether and exotic gases have saturated its atmosphere with all manner of unusual substances. Luckily this has never progressed to the point of no return and while Corpus' atmosphere is indisputably polluted and often downright dangerous in some locales, it remains breathable. Darwinian selection coupled with the mutagenic effects of ether has ensured that the flora and fauna of Corpus, while often not particularly dangerous to humans, is incredibly tenacious. This has also made Corpus a prime location for all manner of polluting industry; it is difficult to complain (or care) about toxic effluent when the environment is already foul with noxious chemicals. The local low gravity also made the landing and launch of mass cargo convenient. During the 600s many new industrial centers sprouted on Corpus, further reinforced by dozens of graving yards constructed during the Conclave era. The small world has become the smelter and workshop of the remaining Mastery.

The cities of Corpus tend to be extremely tightly packed, large rambling hives of pollution-stained mid- and high-rises with a great deal of traffic happening underground. Extensive ventilation and filtration equipment keeps the inside air fresh and for those who can accept the strange vegetation and occasional pink fogs, the world outside the triple-pane windows is undeniably attractive. Over the past half-century or so it has become trendy to study simple body magic to perform respitory cleanses and the like, breeding an entire new generation of citizens who - most of the time - can put aside the nose plugs and the like of their parents.

Rubus
Discovered by chance even before the Tyndall Mission, Rubus lies at the tenuous outer edge of the Shroud and was one of the jumping-off points for the explorations. It has two continents, one massive, the other small; Rubus Major and Rubus Minor respectively. Only Minor is inhabited for with the exception of a few outposts, the entire continent of Rubus Major has been consumed by an enormous continent-spanning mutant rose bush, a Master's attempt at horticulture gone wild. The world is also rumored to be home to Stalisk's Dark Crystal, a mysterious artifact believed to be a fragment of a god.


Periphery Worlds

Sarnath
One of the many tragedies of Ragnarok, Sarnath was the site of fierce and ultimately meaningless attritionary warfare that ultimately escalated to nuclear exchanges which, in the riven age of the fall of the gods, resulted in tears to the Astral realm. Originally known for the continued astral storms that battered the system and especially the world, Sarnath was inhabited by little more than wildcatters using reinforced crawlers and abyss-delvers to harvest exotic resources from the twisted wastes. The one real city on the world, the capital district of Kyber set overtop a particularly stable batholith, never had more than half a million people. Sarnath's strategic value is greater than this however, as it lies astride one of the main routes into the Shroud.

Dark Passage
Gate to the Transwall Reaches
Accurately if sardonically named, Dark Passage was the grimy jewel of the Tyndall Missions. This was due to the discovery that it lay astride the first accurately mapped, stable route through the Great Wall. This discovery of a star way directly to the widdershins side of the vast and opaque nebula reduced travel time by an order of magnitude, from months to weeks or even days. It consequently and directly opened up what soon became known as the Transwall Reach (and later Reaches) to further exploration, colonization and conquest. Despite the fact that this storm-wracked area of space was lightly inhabited, it was rich ground for expansion


Core Worlds

Rubicon
The shattered jewel of the Mastery
Rubicon, the former capital. Believed to be an ancient Atlantean world - albeit a highly peripheral one - Rubicon was isolated for centuries inside the wayward gas drifts at the edge of the Great Wall. Six and a half centuries ago when a clique of powerful mages took over the world and these mages, the Rmasters, used it as the base from which they would build their empire.

Much of the history of Rubicon is lost or otherwise inaccessible, as over the centuries the Rmasters turned the waterworld into a playground for their ideas of an ideal society. By the arrival of the Enmerseian Expeditionary Force, Rubicon was an idyllic pleasure-world of cloned artists and artisans with all heavy industry banished to the far side of Rubicon's sister world Lucania.

The unexpected arrival of the EEF via astral fold threw the system into disarray, particularly given that the world had been essentially running on bureaucratic inertia as the actual ''business'' of running the Mastery had mostly moved to the far more well defended system of Narbonilla. With only a relatively token clone-sanjak defense force to hold the presumably protected center of the empire, Rubicon's bewildered inhabitants were 'liberated' after a few short battles. As the new home base for the EEF, the industry on Lucania was put to work and the locals - most of which were but dimly aware of warfare beyond the abstract - were recruited for additional troops and support staff. Even before the end of the war, soldiers from the EEF were intermarrying with the inhabitants of Rubicon, injecting a dose of vitality into a culture that had grown moribund and cosseted.

While the Rmasters took much of the most sensitive (or sentimental) material with them when they departed and the Interim Conclave put many others in more protected locations, it is believed that there are still many relics of a half-millennia of sorcerous rule hidden away on the world.
System traits
*Planetary Twins (Water and Fire)
*Minor Bodies
Traits of note:
*Ancient World
*Cult of Victory
*Mystic Haven

Malazkand
Malazkand was one of the earliest Rmaster conquests, having been taken almost half a millenia ago when the clone-sanjaks brushed aside the unprepared local defenders in an abbreviated campaign. While initially resentful of the conquest, the inhabitants of Malazkand were treated fairly by the distant Rmasters and over the generations began to accept the loss of autonomy. By the fall of the Mastery of Suns, Malazkand had become the factory floor of the Mastery and produced a disproportionate share of the commercial goods for the Mastery's billions.

Liberated after a fierce siege by the Grand Alliance late in the War of Liberation, the loss of Malazkand's industry set the remaining Rmaster Pashaliks on a death spiral towards defeat. Unfortunately for the Grand Alliance and the EEF in particular, Malazkand was a diffident ally at best and after the conclusion of the war, quickly established in no uncertain terms that they would be charting their own path forward in the post-Mastery era.

Today Malazkand remains the most important economy in the former Mastery worlds, a trade hub of significance with ties to Cliona, Alexandria and even down the winding Appian Way to Mizum. Relations with the EEF on Rubicon remain complicated, with various opinions regarding liberation, usurpation and competition colliding.
System traits:
*Flare Radiant
*Earthlike World
Traits of note:
*Dissatisfied Population

Spoiler: Aerography

Aerography
Overview
The Galaxy is a collection of energetic radiants, worlds of all types etheric gases of varying density; conventionally large-scale maps of the Galaxy present it as a plane for simplicity. This is even fairly accurate as the Galaxy has a flattened disk shape and seen from a hypothetical observer far above the zenith or nadir very few of its major visible structures would actually overlap one another. Seen from afair the Galaxy is distinctly 'lumpy' due to the unseen but not unfelt effects of the invisible dark ether disk as well as the lesser but still important effects of local gravity by the larger shells.

Thus areas around shells and other concentrations have thick, breathable air while large gulfs tend to be much thinner; corridors and streams of comfortable air have shaped the great trade routes and expansions for aeons before humanity. The density of luminous ether likewise varies, though the swings between ether deserts and thick ether (taking the form of nebula) is much more pronounced than that of atmospheric density and less correlated to shells.

Dark Ether
The invisible 'stuff' that makes up the fundaments of the known universe. The actual nature of dark ether remains something of a natural mystery and it is only understood indirectly. Nonetheless its influence can be felt everywhere.

The Void
Not all of space is full of air and ether and these vast bubbles of emptiness are known as voids/the void. While objects such as asteroids and comets can and regularly do wander through the void they are otherwise uninhabited - and uninhabitable.

Aprican Zones
The Aprican (from Apricate, to bask in the sun) is the familiar skies of humanity; white clouds, varigated skies, warm worlds and breatable air all illuminated by radiantlight. The Aprican itself is commonly divided into three broad climate zones of progressively higher temperature and illumination; the Bathics, the Pelasics and the Stratics. All of these exhibit vast varieties of weather and more localized climates. A fourth, the Coronics, is the spaces particularly close to radiants. Here the heat and light becomes oppressive and the light pressure clears the air of anything save the most stubborn, burnt cinder and rendering the Coronics not materially different from air deserts in most ways that matter.

Air Deserts
Many parts of known space is called an air desert; these are reaches where the combination of air pressure and/or etheric concentration is significantly lower than the norm, without actually becoming Void. Other constituents such as water vapor also tend to be reduced and those floating bodies in air deserts are almost inevitably desolate, rocky shells and equally stark globes. What flora and fauna does inhabit them tends to be among the most tenacious of known space. Air deserts are not impassible but the largest of them make impressive natural borders matched only by nebula - particularly since the common clathrate fuels to say nothing of food and water are rare to nonexistent.

The clarity of air deserts also makes them major conduits for radiantlight and heat.

Abyssal Zones
Abyssal zones (or simply the Abyss) are the dark, cold corners of the Galaxy. The most defining factor of the Abyss is that it is lightless or nearly so; some abyssal zones 'merely' have perpetual twilight while others, far past the extinction of light are not so much illuminated as they are decorated with twinkling starlight. Most abysses are far from any radiants, though this is by no means universal; a perpetual or nearly so fogwall or nebula can turn daylight on one side to night on the other. Abysses tend to be mstly clear and thin air, though occasional islands and even axial worlds dot it and an equally small number of sluggish skycurrents wind their way through it, though the dirty snowballs of comets tend to be omnipresent if still scattered. Much of the weather in the abyss is not local but instead the trailing ends of air masses originating in warmer, more energetic skies.

All this said, life does exist here, such as vast and slow migrations of Sundogs from their spawning grounds in cold axial worlds to the tropical oceans of far more pleasant climates. Even civilization of a sort, the lantern-eyed Chaulocs make their lairs in the Abyss, shunned by all.

Many star ways cut through the abyss, canals of twilight cloud spanning the black. By and large they only traverse the upper abyss though, those few that do wind their way through the deep abyss are thin and difficult to navigate and there are no shortage of stories concerning navigators that lost their way, never to return until their corroded ship full of mummified corpses washed up a century later.

Flachmeers
Flachmeers are long zones of low pressure (generally between 0.2 and 0.4 standard pressure) and are recognized as the main loci of cometary accretion. They sometimes lie on the edge of air deserts but the largest all lie zenith or nadirwards of the thick torus where the density of gases starts to drop. The temperature inversion from greatly reduced pressure gives the Flachmeers frigid air temperatures and even in situations with almost perpetual light it will normally range from -30 to -60. Many atmospheric rivers will terminate in the Flachmeers where the moisture and carried material will crystalize out in the low pressure and temperature; this collects into comets which expand over time. Most will tumble out of the Flachmeers by the time they have reached several kilometers in size though a few, such as Murdo Island, have exceeded five hundred kilometers in diameter and are essentially static. Some will fall fairly rapidly into the thick disk and melt while others will slowly migrate for centuries through abyssal zones, often continually accreting thoughout this time. When this is a continuous flow down an aerial current they are commonly known as drifts, with their terminus points being called packs.

The inside edge of the Flachmeers and the slowly meandering drifts and packs are favored habitat of skywhales, the many comets providing both food and habitat to vast ecologies from airkrill to the skywhales themselves. Comets are equally important to the technical needs of humanity and they are extensively mined across the Galaxy for their etheric clathrates.

Bulk composition of comets can vary significantly; at the most extreme young comets from the edge of an air desert may be almost pure water ice with only a dusting of other material - giant fluffy hailstones, in effect - while those that evolved out of nebular flachmeers will be discolored masses of heavy organic compounds, dust and minerals, ices and etheric exotica often of the sort best left frozen. Most comets will be somewhere in between, with any given drift tending to have broadly the same composition.

Nebulas
While luminifous ether is normally not harmful to life (in fact, it is often beneficial), it is understood that at a critical density it thickens greatly in process that is essentially self-sustaining. Known at this point as miasma, the high etheric density leads to the formation of all manner of exotic chemistry and to many living things (including humans) miasma is no more breathable than the effluent of an industrial plant. That said, there are entire orders of life that breathe miasma the way humans breathe air with some going between air and miasma in different stages of life. Misma can sometimes be found collected around shells or in drifting clouds but most grandly it can be found forming immense nebulae, even the smallest sufficient to entirely engulf an axial world.

Some of these nebula contain shells inside their gaseous envelope, while others are bereft of anything larger than random rubble and ponds. The thick miasma of nebula tend to block light very effectively, and while they sometimes glow softly in various shades they can effectively shade entire radiants inside their dark whorls. Their high ether concentration also results in continuous lightning discharges and often unpredictable weather in the neighboring skies while inside the nebula proper the air - the miasma - is commonly stagnant. With all navigation methods save dead reckoning useless inside these opaque masses getting trapped inside one can be a death sentence.

Of course the ether and the miasma is equally valuable; it is a great source of gaseous ether in high concentration and all manner of industrially useful chemicals. An extremely short list would include Promethium R and Promethium S compound families, aerosolized Sakuradite, Merculite precursors, Polydichloric euthimal and Iotimoline particulates, not to mention more common etheric thiolins and hydrocarbons. Thus the edges of nebulae are often sites of extractive industries mining away at emerged comets or their walls of gases.

The largest nebulae often extend for quite significant distances, such as the Great Wall and the nearby Tiamat's Shroud, the Pillars of Creation and the Greater and Lesser Drakenwalds. A few are even haunted by weapons of ages past, with the aptly-named Gunpowder Nebula thick with millennia-old shock mines, their corroded metal shells still protecting a payload of metastable merculite.

A far more benign relative of the nebula are fogwalls. Benign, that is, until your ship smashes into a rock concealed inside the fluffy white mists. Consisting (mostly) of innocuous water clouds, fogwalls are readily distinguishable from nebula by their clean white color as opposed to various rich shades. Generally found at the intersection of multiple air masses, the main difference between a fogwall and a simple large cloudbank is that fogwalls are - within the bounds of seasonal variance - essentially permanent features. Like nebula, the shade side of fogwalls often creates significant mesoclimates with the most famous of this being Quahog Sound bordering the Nanket archipelago.

Skyways
The skyways (or commonly also, etherways) are long lineal features wending across known space from axial world to axial world. Sketched by the hidden influence of dark ether they are some of the richest concentrations of luminifous ether. This ether readily clumps up into clouds of varying size and shape and skyways are commonly a main driver of air masses. Travel along them is rapid, much moreso than free-sky travel and for millennia they have defined the shape of commerce and of empire.

Aerographic Bodies
Radiants
Tiny outlets of pure energy, radiants emit unceasing amounts of heat and light into the cosmos from the Astra. Without them the skies would be cold and black.

Axial Worlds
These are large bodies, often dozens if not hundreds of Gaian masses and typically swaddled in thick layers of gas and ether. They are so-named because other, smaller bodies circle them. Most axial worlds are also host to one or more radiants that illuminate their environs. While axial worlds themselves are almost inevitably uninhabitable (past perhaps cloud cities), their surrounding space is often well-populated.

Rogue Worlds
Some axial worlds have, for whatever reason, no radiants near them. These tend to be of smaller size, though large rogues are not unknown. Drifting in the ether with just the twilight of distant radiants and reflected light to illuminate them they can be strange, exotic places and rarely owned by humans.

Garden Worlds
The in-between axial worlds and small moons, garden worlds are so-called because they host natural - human-friendly - ecospheres. Some garden worlds are giant moons to axial worlds, while others drift alone with a local radiant to keep them pleasant. The term 'garden' is quite broad and even many icelocked or desert worlds are counted as such.

Blasted Worlds
'Blasted' worlds are those that are large enough to be garden worlds but have none of the habitability. Some are baked cinders by too-close radiants while others have fundamentally deadly atmospheres such as chlorine or etheric miasma.

Moons
The smaller cousins to moon worlds, moons are mostly distinguished by size. More broadly and less scientifically, moons are those spheroid bodies that are not intrinsically human-habitable.

Shells
Shells are large rocky masses broadly comparable in size to moons. The difference is that moons are spheroidal while shells are irregular but overall highly flattened, essentially continental plates set into space. Due to their flattened shape, shells normally have a 'light side' and a 'dark side', the former facing the local radiant while the latter commonly covered in ice and snow and in a state of perpetual chilly twilight. Shells also had planar gravity normal to their flat axis, contrasting to the spherical gravity of worlds.

Asteroids
Tumbling, irregular rocks that can range down in size to literal gravel, asteroids are space junk - if sometimes valuable space junk. Mostly without any significant gravitational field they are often found in large drifts and provide home to all manner of deep-sky life from rockhoppers to space slugs to wyverns. Industrialized civilizations also find them convenient places to conduct mining or to place outposts for navigation, scientific or military purposes.

Comets
The close cousins of asteroids, the main difference between the two is that comets are mostly made up of various ices. This in fact makes them an important - and thankfully common - resource, their ices mined to supply etheric clathrates to a busy galaxy. Like asteroids they are commonly home to various types of cosmofauna such as various species of skywhales. Conventionally, a large cluster of comets is called a 'drift' as compared to an asteroid 'field'.

Clouds
The continual ebb and churn of ether and other cosmic gases results in an entire beastiary of deep-sky clouds. Some exist in nigh-perpetual storm belts while others are transient, coalescing and drifting across the cosmos before eventually dissipating.

Spoiler: Setting Notes

Communications
Move the ship out of the asteroid field so that we can send a clear transmission - Darth Vader

Two main methods of long-range communication are used in known space; conventional sidereal radiation and astralcasts. Conventional radio and microwave is cheap and ubiquitous and the babble of radio surrounds most habitable worlds. EMR communicators can range from hand-held systems to complicated cellular grids to sprawling gigachannel comm sats. Unfortunately for all the convenience, over distances measured in multiple Great Leagues they will generally decohere and dissolve into static. As such most long-haul transmissions are reboosted via anchored comms buoys set up in overlapping networks webbing known space. While capable of high bandwidth, this system does not achieve real-time status and there will be unavoidable comm lag. Extremely powerful transmission systems have been sometimes built but the crude use of more power to boost a comms laser across a dozen great leagues is rarely worthwhile compared to astralcasting.

Astralcasting is the alternative used when real-time communication is needed. This method actually punches a transmission through the astral plane, consequently all but ignoring conventional concepts of distance. However, astralcasting has a fairly significant minimum investment and most astralcasting systems are fixed installations; generally speaking outside of greater security against interception they are only superior to conventional EMR over multi-GL distances. Of particular inconvenience is the limited available bandwidth; flickering monochrome holograms is generally the best that can be achieved on even a command ship's astralcaster system. While not strictly line of sight, large masses (such as planets or asteroids) will tend to disrupt astralcasting and most astralcast systems are built to transmit and receive while pointed away from such objects.

Many of the techniques of astralcasting were lost during the Bright Nights as they proved to be a particularly dangerous site of astral incursions even after being deactivated - in some cases for years after being bodily disassembled. It took centuries for their use to be once again accepted, with the stigma having eventually faded. They are (as always) still prone to unusual and localized albeit harmless energetic scatter and they are inevitably surrounded by several hundred meters or more of cleared space.

Spoiler: The Fleet

The Fleet

For generations - centuries, even - the military might of the Mastery was split between multiple and often overlapping organizations. The Clone-Sanjaks were the elite forces of the Rmasters but they were not monolithic formation; each one was its own self-contained military unit with deep sky, aerospace and ground forces. On top of this were the other military units subordinate to the Archons and Exarchs as opposed to the Rmasters; in addition to planetary defenses which answered to local authority at different periods there were between two and seven different fleet organizations under the overarching authority of the Mastery's Summed Fleet. The structure used in the Conclave era is the familiar Grand Fleet and High Skies Fleet division, though the operational division has effectively ceased to exist in the current era. The previous half-century also had the Frontier Fleet but this felt into disuse under the Conclave-era retrenchment with most of its operational hardware reassigned to the High Skies Fleet.

As a final note, it should be remembered that ultimately all of the following design families were not exclusive to any one fleet arm. Individual ships can and often were moved between fleet arms to suit tactical or strategic demands; the Named Fleets were simply components of the Summed Fleet.

GRAND FLEET
The Grand Fleet was the primary battlefleet of the Mastery, particularly during the Conclave era when the Clone-Sanjaks were reduced and a citizen-centric military came to the forefront. The mission of the Grand Fleet was straightforward; it was to be a powerful force of capital ships capable of overpowering any enemy with both numbers and mass. As such, the Grand Fleet had a heavy bias towards slower, powerful capital ships and organizationally was a relatively inflexible structure. The Grand Fleet was not granular; it was normally not structured to operate in more than one to three seperate stellar systems at a given time, nor was it structured to act far from major fleet bases.

During the civil war the Grand Fleet often acted defensively, but its ships fought with distinction against the Enmerseans in a series of great clashes that attrited both forces. Today, the Grand Fleet is split between Narbonilla and Hadrian, though a number of dreadnoughts can be found orbiting other worlds.

Traditionally, ships and fighters of the Grand Fleet were painted in a shade of dark fern green, though Fleet Green tended to be used as a default color across all branches. Most still wear this color, with green being something of a emblem for the Mastery's remnants as a whole.

Dreadnoughts
The weapon of decision for the Mastery's starfleets and the hard core of the Grand Fleet, the classic dreadnought has not changed significantly in conception for several centuries. Modern dreadnoughts are larger, faster and better-equipped, but the fundamentals of a heavily-protected warship bringing large-caliber weapons to bear against the enemy has not changed since the reintroduction of warp drives as opposed to clumsy ether sails. While larger warships were constructed for the Mastery (and unfortunately other states), dreadnoughts were generally among the largest that could be built economically and en masse. The term 'battleship' for these ships is commonly used outside the borders of the Mastery; the UAN and distant Moldoveanu both field strong fleets of such ships.

While a surprising number of dreadnoughts have survived, with a few additional having been constructed in the past few years, they mostly act as extremely heavy guardships today.

Rams/Warbirds
Far smaller than dreadnoughts, rams were the other common hull type in the Grand Fleet. Fast and armed with a mixture of small-caliber, rapid-firing guns and energy torpedoes they were and still are essential escorts and strikers. While fully capable deep-sky warships, they are relatively spartan ships by design and do not have the same unrefuelled radius of action of their rough equivalents in the High Skies Fleet. As such, they were more tied to either fixed bases or tenders - neither of these a problem for the Grand Fleet which by design rarely operated far from substantive logistics. Foreign navies generally label such craft 'destroyers' or sometimes 'frigates'.

As a nomenclature note, the term 'ram' dates back several centuries to a style of fast attack ship built to carry early plasma torpedoes into the thick of enemy defenses and anchorages. Evolution has since seen them become the ships they are today. The term 'warbird' has become more common of late as ever-higher performance craft were built.

Fleet Carriers
Battlecraft - the collective term for fixed or rotary wing aircraft, combat mecha and the like - have long been used by the Mastery and its opponents. Operating as a large force, the Grand Fleet was supported both by fixed-base and naval aviation assets; the fleet carriers were built for just this purpose. With mutual exhaustion having reduced so many combatants to using cheap, easy to replace aviation as opposed to long-range warships the surviving fleet carriers are seen as increasingly valuable as opposed to simply adjuncts.


HIGH SKIES FLEET
While the Grand Fleet was undeniably powerful, it was ill-suited towards operations on the long edges of the Mastery or indeed much of anything that wasn't massed fleet-on-fleet combat. For these purposes the Mastery maintained the High Skies Fleet. This force was organized in small squadrons that could easily be spread around the Mastery's borders as required, moving rapidly to hot spots, to reinforced weakened sectors or to exploit gaps. As such it was commonly seen as the more dashing of the arms.

The High Skies fleet was critical in the civil war, with its ships and crews worked hard during that decade of intercine warfare. Much of the war materiel built during that time that did not end up in the hands of planetary defenses (or squirrelled away to the Absolute Defense Fleet) went towards the High Skies fleet.

Today the High Skies fleet has effectively been dismembered in practice if not officially, with individual squadrons serving under different Exarchs and any semblance of overarching command effectively nonexistent.

Historically the High Skies Fleet used a shade of light royal blue as their main emblem color though a spectrum of medium-saturation blues has been used at various times and places. The role the High Skies Fleet played in the Conclave and civil war era has associated the standard color(s) with internal policing.

Frigates
The mainline ship of the High Skies Fleet is the frigate, a rather vague and all-purpose term for ships ranging in size from 5,000 tons to 100,000. The ''functional'' definition is that frigates are all warships designed for long-endurance deployment in solo or small squadron environments. Additionally, frigates are generally capable of transporting at least some troops and/or aviation assets and are optimized for high cruising speeds. Not surprisingly, frigates tend to be similar if not identical to the ships used by the clone-Sanjaks.

The smallest frigates are the Protected and Unprotected varities, generally massing below 10,000 tons, often substantially less. These fill the roles of scouts, raiders, escorts and light assault, along with secondary roles such as minelaying and picketing. Considered the hardest working ships in the fleet, it is well-earned. In foreign service, these tend to be considered 'light cruisers' though the explosive growth in escort size/capability in the Verge sees even a fairly typical Verge 'destroyer' be comfortably comparable in tonnage to a protected frigate.

For all their advantages, lighter frigates are only so effective in combat and the Armored Frigate is a design style in the 10-20,000 ton range. Not significantly larger than their smaller cousins, armored frigates mostly pack on the tonnage in added armor and other defenses, along with uprated engine rooms to push four or five thousand tons of belted chogokin at a respectable speed. The largest armored frigates are quite respectable combatants, verging on being light capital ships. Comparable ships can be found in many foreign navies as 'heavy cruisers'.

For pretty much any frigate beyond 25,000 tons, the term Battlefrigate is used. These are as large or larger than dreadnoughts, though with no improvements in combat performance. Instead, the tonnage goes towards massive engines and auxiliary space for troops and aviation; the largest battlefrigates are quite explicitly built to be one-ship task forces and captaining one was long seen as perhaps ''the'' most prestigious posting in the entire Summed Fleet. While it is tempting to mirror battlefrigates to foreign battlecruisers, this is a false comparison. Battlecruisers such as the UAN ''Dadube'' are pure combat platforms with none of the expeditionary capabilities built into battlefrigates.


FRONTIER FLEET
The Frontier Fleet is now defunct, having been officially folded back in to the High Skies Fleet in MM0711 after a bit over a century of existence as a separate entity from the High Skies Fleet. While sharing many similarities with its sister/parent service, the Frontier Fleet adopted its own way of doing things in the large and poorly-developed Verge. Ultimately however as the Mastery abandoned the Verge in a bid to retrench, the Frontier Fleet's mandate no longer existed.

The Frontier Fleet's equipment was normally painted a carmine firebrick shade and to this day ships and other items in that color turn up with surprising regularity, almost inevitably as singleton survivors from the civil war. It has seen a resurgence in popularity among individual Exarchs and, ironically enough, survives as a ubiquitous shade on the shipping container used by several significant Verge transport companies.

Battlecarrier
Similar in general concept to High Skies Fleet battlefrigates, battlecarriers were somewhat unique to the Frontier Fleet with a much heavier focus on aviation capabilities. Large and relatively robust capital ships well-suited to independent operations, a number have survived and have been taken in by various Exarchs.


ABSOLUTE DEFENSE FLEET
Never an official Named Fleet, the Absolute Defense Fleet was nonetheless very much a real thing. Formed to defend the Shroud Security Zone and the loyalists therein, the absolute defense fleet swelled during the civil war as many dreadnoughts and command ships were moved there to both act as a powerful reserve and to ensure that they did not fall into the hands of rebels. The fleet-in-being aspect became acutely important with the EEF fold to Rubicon and after getting a couple of bloody noses, the absolute defense fleet and the EEF settled in to mutual stalemates, neither side willing to deploy deep enough and heavier enough to break the other's defenses. While such a military situation is fundamentally unstable, it ultimately ended with an armistice as opposed to an apocalyptical confrontation.

While the absolute defense fleet never had an official color, with most of its ships being the fleet green they arrived in, a number of ships were (re)painted charcoal or bone white.

 

[Shrike]

 

[Cloak&Dagger]

Is this an established setting I haven't heard of or something? Is there a Discord?

 

[Shrike]

Is this an established setting I haven't heard of or something? Is there a Discord?

Click to shrink...

It is an original setting. As for a discord, one does not currently exist.

 

[100thlurker]

Is this an established setting I haven't heard of or something? Is there a Discord?

Click to shrink...

Something of a shared setting, though the details found therein regarding the Mastery and some details of technology are no longer to be considered accurate (Enduscara, for instance, is Emmeria in After Ether): After Ether rules discussion thread

 

[Havocfett]

....

Raider Base, Clone Sanjak, Citadel of Doom, Assumed the Purple, Asceticism, Magic, Lost Cause looks extremely tempting. Possibly drop the Lost Cause.

 

[Shrike]

....

Raider Base, Clone Sanjak, Citadel of Doom, Assumed the Purple, Asceticism, Magic, Lost Cause looks extremely tempting. Possibly drop the Lost Cause.

Click to shrink...

Just pure space pirate eh.

 

[Hyvelic]

I have a concept, need to look over everything to make sure it's what I want to do first tho

 

[Namaroff]

Exarch Gebril Martine of Rubus
​

Territory: Bastion World
Power Base: Intelligence Service
Special Unit: Advanced Prototypes
Exarch Ascension: Electronic Old Man
Hobby: Enigmas, Gardening
Traits: Legacy Mandate - Uncover the mysteries of Stalisk's Dark Crystal

 

[Havocfett]

Just pure space pirate eh.

Click to shrink...

Fear will keep the verge systems in line. Fear of this battlestation.

 

[Secondskink]

Thinking something like this to represent frontline Exarch against the EEF.

Exarch Hartford of Cygnus

Territory Military Outpost
Power Base Clone Sanjak
Special Unit Flagship
Exarch Ascension Assumed the Purple
Hobby People, Personal Combat, Magic
Traits Exarch of Kaliningrad

Cygnus was once one of the jewels of the Mastery, a garden world in the Core of Mastery space that had a booming economy and industrial sector and a teaming loyal citizenry, it also had the misfortune of bordering Rubicon and eventually, the Enduscarans. The Astral Fold caught Mastery forces off guard as this new unseen foe unveiled itself in the heart of Mastery Space. Cygnus was one of the rallying points for the Summed Fleet as it hastily assembled units to fight over the core of Mastery space and it's where they were beaten back to, as the full mettle of this new enemy fell upon them.

Cygnus saw action after action as the elements of the Summed Fleet and Enduscarans Forces maneuvered against each other, each side pouring more formations into the meatgrinder in an attempt to outpace their opponents and secure the valuable world and its Skyways. The ebb and flow of combat saw countless storied actions, from the running fleet engagements of the 9 Battles of Kyknoses Rings, the loss of the supercapital Imperion in the Axil worlds moon system to sustained Geode tipped missile bombardment and the deaths of the entire Barucan Sanjak in the desperate attempts to hold onto Kynoses lunar bodies. Unfortunately for the people of Cygnus the Summed Fleet was incapable of holding back the furious tide of Enduscarans as the fragmented nature of the Mastery played its part, and the fighting continued to the world's orbitals then to its very surface as the Enduscarans mauled formation after disorganized formation sent against them and cloaked Cygnus skies with hulks of green, blue, red and white. It was only on Cygnus surface itself that the Enduscarans were fought to a standstill by hastily raised conscripts and as additional far-reaching formations finally arrived forced into an unsteady stalemate.

The Kemtow Sanjak was part of this wave of reinforcements and arrived in the midst of the chaotic fighting, thrust into fighting amidst the civilian population of Cygnus and skirmishing through broken city's of loyal citizens the Clone warriors were exposed to the population of the Mastery that they had never experienced before, over the next two years the experienced warriors of the Mastery would force the Enduscarans back until they were near the breaking point. The 'Month of Blood' as it would be called started with the mass use of strategic Magic and Geode Bombs to cover the retreat of the Enduscaran forces on the planet, a largely successful endeavor as the Third Exarch in command of Cygnus was killed when the deck containing his quarters on the battlefrigate Invincible he commanded from was destroyed by Enduscaran fighters in the midst of a high-level command meeting forcing the already fractious command structure of the assembled forces into disarray. The fragile command structure that had been painstakingly established and the beginnings of a route and mutiny occurred. The Enduscarans took the opportunity to withdraw cleanly from the fray as Mastery forces turned on each other in what quickly turned into a multi-sided brawl as slights long left to linger escalated to violence. Throwing in with the mostly intact Kemtow Sanjak Captain Hartford was able to coerce the loyalists to follow his lead and destroy those who disagreed as the Enduscarans withdrew from the system.

The peace agreement and ceasefire that ended the war were a relief to the war-weary citizens of Cygnus having to deal with an increasingly temperamental world damaged by the mass use of strategic weapons and magic. Peace and the death of the third Exarch of Cygnus in as many years lead to the eventual raising of Alexander Hartford to Exarchood, primarily due to his command of a large formation of forces and the loyalty of the Kemtow Sanjak. Now five years after the guns were silenced, Cygnus is still on the frontlines, uneasily guarding the approaches to the rest of the Mastery, the world slowly is restoring itself to its once greatness, and Exarch Heartford finds himself commanding the very front with uneasy allies behind him.


Kemtow Sanjak OOB[400/400]
MSS Paragon of Victory [Flagship]
+Elite

Alpha Assault Cluster [60]
- MSS March of Iron [Battlefrigate]
+Elite
- MSS Indomitable Fury [Battlefrigate]
+Elite
- MSS Shadow of Intent [Battlecarrier]
+Elite

Beta Assault Cluster [60]
- MSS Weight of Eons [Battlefrigate]
+Elite
- MSS Reign of Fire [Battlefrigate]
+Elite
- MSS Glorious Purpose [Battlecarrier]
+Elite

Gamma Assault Cluster [40]
- MSS Aegis of Contempt [Battlefrigate]
+Elite
- MSS Mark of Light [Battlefrigate]
+Elite

Delta Assault Cluster [40]
- MSS Rite of Steel [Battlefrigate]
+Elite
- MSS Dignified Response [Battlefrigate]
+Elite

Alpha Strike Cluster [20]
- MSS Medusa
- MSS Minotaur
- MSS Mercury
- MSS Malcontent
- MSS Mirage
- MSS Malady
6 X Light Frigates
+Elite

Beta Strike Cluster [20]
- MSS Resolute
- MSS Rainment
- MSS Rigor
- MSS Righteous
- MSS Resurgent
- MSS Redoubt
6 X Light Frigates
+Elite

Gamma Strike Cluster [20]
- MSS Tanhauser
- MSS Tempest
- MSS Trigger
- MSS Tsunami
- MSS Trident
- MSS Terror
6 X Light Frigates
+Elite

Alpha/Beta/Gamma/Delta/Elipson WABRON
5 X Warbird Squadrons [30]
+Elite

Alpha Dagger Cluster [Special Forces] (10)
+Elite

Alpha Battle Galaxy [Regular Infantry] (10)
+Elite

Beta Battle Galaxy [Regular Infantry] (10)
+Elite

Gamma Battle Galaxy [Regular Infantry] (10)
+Elite

1st Cygni Legion [Regular Infantry]

11th Cygni Skyborne [Elite Infantry]

Alpha Striker Cluster [Elite Infantry] (10)
+Elite

Beta Striker Cluster [Elite Infantry] (10)
+Elite

Gamma Striker Cluster [Elite Infantry] (10)
+Elite

Alpha Assualt Galaxy [Armored Legion] (20)
+Elite

Alpha Bombardment Cluster [Legion Battery] (20)
+Elite

13th Cygni Legionary Battery [Legion Battery]

17th Cygni Legionary Battery [Legion Battery]

 

[averagename]

this is a bit of a weird one but I might be fun.

The Myrmidon Exarchy (space mercs/ space pirates?)

Territory: Raider Base
Power Base: write in: Black Forge (automated shipyards)
Special Unit: Black opps
Exarch Ascension: Electronic Old Man
Hobby: Politics and People (though I'd replace the second with commerce if write ins allowed)
Traits: Write in: (Order of the Diadochi; complete the grand plan)

There is a name whispered among the stars, a spectre which haunts the declining Excharcy worlds; it is the name of the Diadochi. An old and storied order they are to the average citizen little more than a bogeyman; the villain of conspiracy theories and the supposed architects of the fate of the nation.
These rumors are true, though they over estimate the orders power by an order of magnitude. The order is an old body which dates back far into the mists of time. They were a cabal of inteligence operatives of similar views; their founders unkown but their purpose clear. Their role is to safe guard the state and ensure its strength. The diadochi believe that in this, the darkest of nights, the strong will show they're virtues. Thus the daidochi see their role to facilitate the discovery of this leader and ensure their rise to power.
In aid of this the order runs spy rings, pirates and mercnary companies throughout the state; all to help forward their goals deniably. However the jewel in the orders crown is the remote Exarchy held by their secret grandmaster. The exarch Cain is an old hand and largely believed to be a scoundrel and a insular soul not dealing directly with the central fleets preferring to build up his own power.

The Myrmidon Force:

The Black Fleet

3rd Naval Intelligence Group
1x Battle-carrier (The Incognito) (20)
6x Light Frigates (20) (Formerly the 101st Frigate Squadron) (or if at all possible their weight in merchant raiders)

5th Battle Division
3x Dreadnaughts (The Void, The Abyss, The Forsaken) (40)

23rd, 41st and 56th Frigate Squadrons
3x Armoured Frigates (Dusk, Midnight, Shadow) (24)
18x Light Frigates (9 light 9 Missile) (60)

352nd Warbird Squadron (Black Yard close in defense)
1x Warbird (6)

The Myrmidon Legion (30)
1x Special Operations Group
2x Elite Infantry Brigade

The Assorted forces of the Order of the Diadochi
Would these work for the mercs I've assumed a ~1/2 price for the rubbish troops if that works?

Commodore Lord Ptolemy's Protection Squadron: '20' points
6x light frigates (2 missiles, 4 regular)
2x Armoured frigate
(Formerly the 53rd frigate and elements of the 24th pacification reserve squadrons)

The diadochi acquired this group of 'warships' from a mothball yard. The so called warships are little better than antiques; and their value as Museum pieces is at the margins less than their value as warships.
The armaments of the vessels of can be described as 'nominally working' and 'theoretically capable of damaging other ships'; their hulls are 'mostly air tight' and their marines 'largely know which is the right end of the gun'. Fifty percent of their warheads even fit on to their respective missiles!
The self appointed lord mason plays the part of a ruthlessly self interest pirate but is a remarkably competent diadochi agent; remarkably competent as he has managed to keep his ships in one piece. They are considered on the verge of outright pirates taking low tier jobs through master space when their not disappearing lone freighters.

Antipatrid's Bargain value Mercenary Corp. '20'
4x Infantry Legions
1x Interceptor wing

If you need some savages shot or civilians policed you know who to call!
These troops are better trained than reservists but not by much. Recruited from poor illiterate hangers throughout master space these poorly equipped and indifferent troops are capable of low to medium intensity fighting. God forbid if they ever had to combat a Clone legion.
The serve the diadochi's will at the margins; as well as providing an easily available pile from which to draw deniable thugs and hitmen.

Seleucid Solutions 10
1x Spec opps group
The diadochi's most prized possession. Genetically augmented and technologically advanced these are the cream of the crop and among the best mercs on the market. Masters of stealth and subversion they have garnered some small fame for themselves while fulfilling the goals of their shadowy masters.

 

[Silence]

Spoiler

You have my peaked cap @Shrike

 

[Shrike]

Found the missing worlds and added them to the gazeteer. More worlds/flying continent shells/etc can be added as requested. No need to stay limited to those I've already listed. I'll be adding more anyway once I start building the map.

 

[Cloak&Dagger]

Exarch Decimus Lusius
The Rouge Exarchate​

The survival of the Mastery after years of war has been a near thing. For the planet Rouge, a wealthy industrial center finding itself behind enemy lines in once friendly territory, it wasn't a thing at all. Being almost immediately being lost to invasion, hastily assembled liberation forces surged in to bring the strategic system back into the fold, its potential as a supply hub too great to ignore, or, for that matter, to allow the enemy. Rouge was retaken, though at great cost to the planet and its inhabitants. Then the counter-attack came, and the cycle repeated, each iteration grinding Rouge to dust. It wasn't long before the planet was ruined and strategic interest moved elsewhere. Front lines shifted, leaving the devastated and barely inhabitable planet abandoned. The Exarchate was all but defunct.

Of course, Exarch Decimus Lusius has no interest in abandoning his new prestigious position. The posthumous promotion provided by his predecessor wasn't going to go to waste, so the Exarch got to work securing the title. In the worntorn remains of the Mastery, the merchant fleets of Rouge became an invaluable supply line for the myriad worlds facing piracy and encirclement, while Rouge battlefleets ground themselves down against rebel forces. At least for the time, none would question the validity of his title.

The new peace has eaten at The Rouge Exarchate's legitimacy. Careful husbanding of ships during the war has left a large number of ships to maintain with few local governments willing to foot the bill, putting the future of the fleet in question. Governors on both sides of the border, and even ship crews themselves wonder where the Exarchate will go from here, and if it will turn to piracy or raiding to continue.

Despite all this, the Exarch seems unconcerned. Those who keep track of such things can feel the tides of opportunity approaching again.

Territory: Military Outpost
Power Base: The Fleet
Special Unit: Advanced Prototype (Large Light Cruiser)
Exarch Ascension: Assumed the Purple
Hobby: Enigmas, Technology
Traits: Exarch of Kaliningrad

Spoiler: Forces

Ideal
The Heart Fleet is the centerpiece of the Exarchate's military operations. The Grand Fleet-style formation centered around dreadnoughts acts as the core for friendly ships to support and enemy forces to break against.
The Twin Furies are the maneuvering fleets of the Rouge Navy. The High Skies Fleet-style formations centered around Battlefrigates use their mobility to encircle and distract the enemy long enough to feed them into the waiting maw of the Heart Fleet.
The Rouge Army Aether Corp is an auxillary siege fleet. The smaller, lighter formation is intended to take quick action against lightly defended worlds and open a path for the Rouge Army to quickly land and secure their objectives.
The Rouge Army is a scalpel. The well equipped troops are intended to open up a path for further Mastery invasion by targeting critical locations and hit them with surgical strikes, utilizing stealth and armor support to survive the encounter.

Reality
The Heart Fleet is like other conventional Mastery fleets: a boondoggle. Combining a high cost with a low movement speed, the Heart Fleet is unsuited to peace, and serve as a constant upkeep expense for the destitute Exarchate. Unless funding can be found, they will do little more than continue their current mission of sitting quietly at minimum operational levels in ports more interested in the illusion of security than paying for fully functional defenses.
The Twin Furies are more like an entire extended family than twins. The fast and multipurpose ships are ideal for patrols and pirate hunting, and commonly find themselves splitting up from their main fleets to fulfill contracts or collect bounties.
The Rouge Army Aether Corp is the pride of the Exarchate and by far the most productive force. Despite being formed simply to protect and assist army operations, lower upkeep has left it the best supported in the plentiful pirate and dissident operations it has seen.
The Rouge Army is a hammer. Being too low in numbers for extended operations, the power armored and cloaked troops instead use surprise and sheer unrelenting force, alongside plentiful orbital bombardment, to crack apart any defense minor forces can setup against them.

Spoiler: Starting Composition

Heart Fleet
3x Carriers
9x Dreadnoughts
4x Warbird Squadrons

First Fury Fleet
4x Battlefrigates
2x Armored Frigates
6x Missile Frigates
Warbird Squadron

Second Fury Fleet
4x Battlefrigates
2x Armored Frigates
6x Missile Frigates
Warbird Squadron

Rouge Army Aether Corp
Battlecarrier
Battlefrigate
Large Light Cruiser
4x Armored Frigates
6x Light Frigates
Warbird Squadron

Rouge Army
Rouge First Militia
Rouge First Armor Corp
Rouge First Marine Corp
Rouge-Eye Infiltrators
2x Interceptor Wings

Spoiler: Points

Navy: 510 Points (340 x Power Base 1.5)
Heart Fleet(168)
3x Carriers - 24
9x Dreadnoughts - 120
4x Warbird Squadrons - 24

First Fury Fleet (122)
4x Battlefrigates - 80
2x Armored Frigates - 16
6x Missile Frigates - 20
Warbird Squadron - 6

Second Fury Fleet (122)
4x Battlefrigates - 80
2x Armored Frigates - 16
6x Missile Frigates - 20
Warbird Squadron - 6

Rouge Army Aether Corp (98)
Battlecarrier - 20
Battlefrigate - 20
Large Light Cruiser - Special
4x Armored Frigates - 32
6x Light Frigates - 20
Warbird Squadron - 6

Army: 60 Points
Rouge Army (60)
Regular Infantry (Rouge Militia) - 10
Armored Legion (Rouge Armor Corp) - 20
Elite Infantry (Rouge Marine Corp) - 10
Special Forces (Rouge-Eye Infiltrators) - 10
2x Interceptor Wings - 10

Spoiler: Ship Names

Heart Fleet
Carriers
-MSS
-MSS
-MSS
Dreadnoughts
-MSS
-MSS
-MSS
-MSS
-MSS
-MSS
-MSS
-MSS
-MSS
Warbirds
- Squadron
- Squadron
- Squadron
- Squadron

First Fury Fleet
Battlefrigates
-MSS Rampage
-MSS Unbridled Rage
-MSS Senseless Violence
-MSS Wanton Destruction
Armored Frigates
-MSS Assassination
-MSS Cold-blooded Murder
Missile Frigates
-MSS Seething Hatred
-MSS Miserable Existence
-MSS Bad Day
-MSS Constant Annoyance
-MSS Crippling Pain
-MSS Major Distraction
Warbirds
-Vulture Squadron

Second Fury Fleet
Battlefrigates
-MSS Vengeance
-MSS Righteous Fury
-MSS Death Penalty
-MSS Executioner
Armored Frigates
-MSS Self-Defense
-MSS Justifiable Homicide
Missile Frigates
-MSS
-MSS
-MSS Greater Good
-MSS
-MSS
-MSS
Warbirds
- Squadron

Rouge Army Aether Corp
Battlecarrier
-MSS
Battlefrigate
-MSS
Large Light Cruiser
-MSS
Armored Frigates
-MSS
-MSS
-MSS
-MSS
Light Frigates
-MSS
-MSS
-MSS
-MSS
-MSS
-MSS
Warbirds
- Squadron

 

[SirLagginton]

Exarch Rafael vei Kohlail

"There are pilots like you in every generation. And I felled every last one of them."

Old Man of the Sky. The Radiant King. The Phoenix of Aurelia. Exarch Rafael is a remnant of an era long gone, when the Rmasters had cemented their rule over the heavens and the Mastery held the very Radiants within its grasp. Even before his ascension he was legend, one of the foremost aces of the Mastery's vaunted Garuda Corps as it warred continuously to tame a recalcitrant frontier. A legend that only grew after he was raised by the Rmasters, the radiant form of the automagod Azura as living proof of his exalted status.

It is whispered among those old enough to remember the age of the Sorcerer-Kings of the trial he was set by those fickle titans for his ascension, to either brave his destruction by what he trusted most or have it taken away from him. Upon hearing of the task, he stepped off the edge of the cloud city without hesitation. After falling for an hour, he was taken to the foot of the throne of an Rmaster. Was he truly so tired of life he would throw it away? He was asked.

No, he replied. But better to die in the sky than live bound and crippled to the earth.

The Rmaster laughed, long and hard, before declaring that his reward would be to be bound to the heavens instead. So long as he served faithfully, the Rmasters would grant him the skies.

As Exarch, he would lead the charge in the bloody Sunset Wars against the UAN, personally inflicting such carnage among the UAN Navy that even mercenary squadrons eventually refused to attempt to claim the bounty that eventually accrued on his head. At his hands lay the corpses of the heroes of Gryphon Squadron, who gave everything to halt the Mastery's inexorable advance. In the graveyard of Cyrene, where the tails of passing comets set to rest shattered warships, lay the remains of the once-flagship UAN Sekhmet, carved apart by the Sky King's blades. However despite the Mastery's fearsome axis of advance, their conquest was progressively crippled by the declining interest of the Rmasters themselves of their empire. Their distant masters became ever more sporadic, and then eventually Rafael found himself the servant to an unhelmed Mastery.

For all the fury of the Sunset Wars his most infamous feats would blaze over the skies of the bastion islands of Aurelia, in the bloodiest throes of the civil war that erupted in the absence of the Rmasters. Brother turned against sister, mother against son. The heart of the once-invulnerable bastion world became witness of a scene of unmatched carnage as warriors from all across known space threw themselves for the battle of that world, whether it be traitors who had turned their back on the Mastery or the newcomer Enduscarans.

Phoenix some called him, for despite every report of his death he returned to the skies with a vengeance. Demon others whispered fearfully, for he made golden skies rain with the blood of his once-comrades. Inch by inch, second by second, Aurelia slowly stripped away all that was held dear to those that participated in its bloodshed. At war's end, there was no victor, merely those who were left standing. He was left standing.

• Venerable Leader
• Ace Pilot
• Magic
• Asceticism

Advanced Prototype - Azura, Unconquered Empyrea

One of the fabled Automagods. As Arthur wielded Excalibur, so is Rafael honoured with Azura by the Rmasters. A sentient weapon soulbound to Rafael via the esoteric sorceries of the Sorcerer-Kings, to this day Rafael's signature mount remains one of the most fearsome battlecraft ever wrought by minds mortal and immortal. So intertwined is Azura with Rafael that the Unconquered Empyrea is closer to his being than his own sword-arm.

Azura wields that most terrible weapon of the Rmasters. That which crackles and mars reality as the skies themselves are set alight in the halo of its awesome wake. The sword that divides heaven and earth as it sunders the battlefield.

Soulflame.

Power Base - Garuda Corps

The Last Cosmoknights. During the heyday of the now-defunct Frontier Fleet they represented the most elite pilots in the Mastery, aces who had earned the right to the vaunted title of cosmoknight. Comprising the flagship squadrons onboard the Frontier Fleet's mighty battlecarriers, there were few things that stirred pride as the right to bear the Sunfeather, symbol of the Garuda Corps.

The Spear of the Frontier have fallen a long way since the dissolution of the Frontier Fleet, with many of these embittered cosmoknights choosing to follow their hero Rafael as he established his own Exarchate where their traditions would live on. To a man the Garuda Corps remain some of the most celebrated aces in known space, and to a man they have sworn their oaths to the greatest of them all.

[Access to Dominance Squadrons. Get 25% more starting military points in Battlecarriers.]

Aurelia Archipelago - Bastion Archipelago

A realm of lush rainforests, vast cloudbanks, and grand waterfalls, the verdant Aurelia archipelago is an archetypical throwback to the golden age of exploration that followed the post-Ragnarok dark ages centuries ago. First occupied by the Frontier Fleet in the latter half of the 5th century as a major fleet and logistics base, it was subsequently abandoned after the better part of a century later when the Frontier Fleet was folded back into the High Skies Fleet as part of the Mastery's overall consolidation away from the Verge. It was only during the establishment of the Wall of Worlds that the Mastery would return to Aurelia, as numerous Exarchs and Archons staked out their positions in anticipation of the coming civil war.

Control over the Aurelia archipelago would exchange hands no less than three times during the Mastery's devastating civil war, with the last siege ending when loyalist forces led by Exarch Rafael cut apart the defenders after a prolonged battle amidst the winding ether currents between islands. It would remain in his hands until the signing of the Treaty of Vangor between the much reduced Mastery and the Enduscarans.

Today even with its extensive military infrastructure Aurelia remains largely untamed, a scene of picturesque natural beauty with a number of Pre-Ragnarok ruins interspersed throughout its forest. Built atop of an ancient fortress, Port Orel remains the sole exception to that rule, an imposing monolith enthroned on top of a rapidly growing civilian settlement that serves as the formidable gatekeeper to the Bastion World of Hadria. One of the most substantial naval complexes seen outside of High Sofia, Port Orel's industry has taken eager advantage of the growth of its neighbour Hadria to establish its own military-industrial niche. The years after the Treaty of Vangor has also seen a rapid influx of civilian enterprises, with many settlers attracted by the natural beauty and resources of the archipelago.


Military Forces of the Aurelian Exarchate
300 pts + 75 pts Battlecarriers

Spoiler: Forces

Naval Forces:

MSS Arbiter [Battlecarrier]
- Phoenix Squadron [Dominance Fighter Squadron]

MSS Astarte [Battlecarrier]
- Radiant Squadron [Dominance Fighter Squadron]

MSS Vanguard [Battlecarrier]
- Invictus Squadron [Dominance Fighter Squadron]

MSS Furious [Battlecarrier]
- Incarnadine Squadron [Dominance Fighter Squadron]

MSS Audacious [Battlecarrier]
- Raven Squadron [Dominance Fighter Squadron]

MSS Sovereign [Battlecarrier]
- Reaper Squadron [Dominance Fighter Squadron]

MSS Warspite [Battlecarrier]
- Avatar Squadron [Dominance Fighter Squadron]

MSS Conquerer [Battlecarrier]
- Marut Squadron [Dominance Fighter Squadron]

MSS Vengeance [Battlecarrier]
- Errant Squadron [Dominance Fighter Squadron]

MSS Questor [Battlecarrier]
- Fenrir Squadron [Dominance Fighter Squadron]

MSS Ordinator [Battlecarrier]
- Striga Squadron [Dominance Fighter Squadron]

Army Forces:

95th Fusilier Legion [Regular Infantry]

202nd Fusilier Legion [Regular Infantry]

14th AeroDragoon Cohort [Elite Infantry]

11th Janissary Century [Special Forces]

7th Dragoon 'Blue Wolves' Legion [Armoured]

89th Legionary Battery [Legion Battery]

37th Legionary Battery [Legion Battery]

 

[SteelWriter77]

Exarch Alastair of Perida​

Territory: Resource Outpost
Power Base: Corporations
Special Unit: Sanctioned Magi
Exarch Ascension: Backroom Manipulator
Hobby: Politics and Gardening
Traits: n/a

This seems cool

 

[Carol]

Despoina

No one is certain who rules the periphery settlement of Despoina. The Exarch's unknown even to their closest lieutenants, almost as if they had been erased from living memory. Even the bureaucracy cannot remember them. To foreign nations, the Exarch is described as Despoina itself.

a messenger comes!
they carry what they do not know to those who know them not.
such is Despoina!​

A seemingly outrageous claim. People cannot follow a nonexistent ruler, let alone be defined by them! But orders are still sent, subordinates rewarded and dissidents punished. A phantom Exarch whose only wish is that you listen always.

Spoiler

Territory: Periphery Settlement.
Power Base: Intelligence Service.
Special Unit: Black Ops.
Exarch Ascension: Backroom Manipulator.
Hobby: Enigmas, People.
Traits: Border World.

 

[Crilltic]

Can we take multiple of the optional traits?

 

[Shrike]

Can we take multiple of the optional traits?

Click to shrink...

I'm going to say no, to keep things simple.

 

[Crilltic]

I'm going to say no, to keep things simple.

Click to shrink...

Sad but fair

 

[Hyvelic]

Exarch Uri'zer'an​

Territory: Bastion World
Power Base: The Church
Special Unit: Citadel of Doom
Hobbies: People and Speechifying

Spoiler: Potential Military forces

Military:
x3 Battlecarrier (60 points)
x2 Battlefrigate (40 points)
x5 Armored Frigate (40)
x24 Light Frigates (80)
x5 Standard Carrier (40 points)
x3 Dreadnought (40)

Traits:
Legacy Mandate


@Shrike Out of Curiosity, if I took Citadel of Doom and Bastion, would they stack or not?

 

[Shrike]

@Shrike Out of Curiosity, if I took Citadel of Doom and Bastion, would they stack or not?

Click to shrink...

Yes, Bastion worlds are just the baseline defended world whereas Citadel of Doom is a specific giant evil overlord fortress

 

[100thlurker]

Shrike also does some art of the setting, which you guys should check out. Youu probably won't be beholden to follow Mastery designs he's put up but they'll give you an idea of their distinct aesthetic, which is the double-hull.