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The Empire of Man

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     Also known as "The Empire" or "The Galactic Empire" (though that's a definite exaggeration in a galaxy with a couple of hundred billion stars) the Empire was formed by Admiral Adam Mason out of the ruins of Earth’s nations at the end of the Four-Day war. With most of Earth’s governments either destroyed or severely gutted and almost all the surviving groups and factions trying to undercut each other and jockey for short-term gain and position at the expense of each other, Admiral Mason believed that he had no other option than to unify humanity using his prestige and his solid grip on the fleet to prevent a final blaze of self-immolation from Earth’s ambitious powers.

 

     Like most “temporary measures”, it lasted longer than expected. A thousand years later it’s more powerful than ever before.

 

 

Planetary Classifications

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     There’s a general system of classifications given to Imperial planets/star systems. It changes as worlds develop, and no world is all of one type. Even the most extreme Ag World will usually have some sort of spare parts industry for its agricultural machinery, or Industrial World will have at least some artificial foodstuff synthesis in case of interrupted shipments. It’s not a solid rule by any means, and there are other rarer classifications too.

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Industrial – A world mostly given over to manufacturing.

 

Agricultural (Ag) – usually less settled, an Ag world has a heavy farming, harvesting or fishing industry, and often helps supply several nearby stations or systems.

 

Cosmopolitan (Cosmop) – 21st century Earth is a Cosmop World, with a solid mix of other elements. Often a high population world.

 

Undeveloped (Undep) – worlds or systems without significant human development. They are still occasionally in use, for example as prisons or military staging areas or training camps.

 

Barbarian (Barb) worlds – places with undeveloped social structures, usually low tech (though there are a few high-tech aggressive clan-based systems around). They’re usually under Imperial interdiction.

 

Fortress (Fort) – Fort systems are located on dangerous frontiers, and there aren’t as many as there used to be as the number of frontiers has dropped a lot over the years. They exist to be heavily defended systems with permanently associated fleets that can’t be safely bypassed.

 

Imperial Reserve (IR) – A system set aside for Imperial private use.

 

Naval Reserve (NR) – Similar to a Fort system but with significantly higher fleet repair and manufacturing facilities.  

 

 

Sector One (Capitol Sector, Home Sector)

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Bucolis (Ag)

     An Ag world that produces a truly staggering amount of produce for the massive Industrial might and High population worlds of the Imperial sector. It’s no con-incidence that Bucolis also produces a very high number of recruits for the Imperial armed services, especially the Imperial Marines.
Yarl Marris was born on Bucolis.

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Thandis (Undep)

     A training camp and Imperial prison are the main features here. Thandis is where Yarl’s career came crashing to a halt in a self-inflicted disaster.

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Capitol (also “The Capitol” or “Capitol World”)

     Capitol is the centre of Imperial governance, the capital world of the Empire. It is the first planet discovered after the first wormhole transit, and is in immediate proximity to the wormhole junction. Colonised and militarised immediately after the Four Day War, in the thousand years since Capitol has gone through massive industrial expansion, then rescaling to make it a beautiful vista of craftwork and greenery with most of the industry now space-based or in nearby dedicated Industrial Core Worlds. The Emperor and the Imperial Senate are based here.

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Sector Seventeen

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     At the end of the sixteenth wormhole lies Sector Seventeen. It’s the edge of space – lots of diversity, lots of potential, but lacking in development. An analogy would be Roman Britain.

Sector Seventeen is colloquially named The Albion Fringe after the sector capital, Albion, and the fact that politically and spacially it is on the edge of the Empire. With two smaller rival human states and two known alien species nearby, Sector Seventeen was the closest thing the Empire had to a wild frontier, except for the extremely spatially chaotic and lawless Sector Sixteen. However, a new status quo had settled on the Empire. The Emperor and the Nobles were looking less towards new frontiers and more towards themselves. Sector Seventeen, generally regarded as a rough borderland and the Edge of the Empire, had little political weight compared to the mighty Core Worlds of larger, richer sectors.

     Sector Sixteen is somewhat of a “Bermuda Triangle”. Subspace currents make it dangerous to travel, and much of it remains unexplored. The number of inhabitable worlds is apparently low, and it has never attracted much economic interest. Seventeen is not rich, but it does have potential and most of it is fairly safe for travel.

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Albion (Cosmop)

     The capital of the Albion sector and chief administrative location, Albion is a pleasant temperate Earth-like world.

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Depot (NR)

     Depot is in interdicted world which acts as the Sector 17 Naval Reserve and main shipyard. The majority of the Sector 17 Imperial Navy plus the local militia is split between here and Albion. After recent events a larger force will be stationed at the wormhole terminus.

Depot is one of the more heavily militarised Imperial Depot worlds (ignoring Capitol and the core sectors), due to the presence of so many non-Imperial societies. The existing fleet, however, has not been built up to a great level, as it is assumed that the current force levels would hold long enough for major reinforcements to arrive via the Capitol wormhole.

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There are three other human-populated worlds that have not yet been brought into the Empire, technically “Barbarian Worlds”:

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Lomond – Actually fairly high tech due to the population being a group of rival feuding clans who keep their education levels relatively high (Imperial teaching machines and materials are an extremely profitable item for smugglers, as are weapons). They don’t have proper starship technology and unlike Troy, are exposed enough that they can easily be monitored from orbit. The Imperial Navy maintains a destroyer in orbit along with a number of patrol craft to interdict the surface.

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Fajjik – Extremely low tech, stone age world. Imperial charity programs regularly provide vaccination programs for the low population base, which is mostly concentrated on one high plateau. Lower elevations tend to be too high pressured and have too high a level of toxic spores and sulphuric gases for comfortable life. Fajjik is often raised in the Albion Governor’s council as a potentially important candidate for Imperial incorporation, but the high expense compared to little reward has prevented this so far.

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Hiyye – Two major communities make Hiyye their home. The first is a neo-Bedouin group that occupies the deserts. They are fiercely territorial. The second occupies the plains and forests, and is the descendent of a group of low-tech neo-hippies seeking a return to “natural life”, which can unfortunately result is some pretty heavy use of recreational pharmaceuticals at unregulated and non-standardised dosages . Imperial authorities do not currently disturb either group, except for the occasional medical sweep. Hiyye is also interdicted by naval authorities.

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     Most planets are so-called “Cosmop”, or “Cosmopolitan” worlds, with a mixture of industrial, commercial and agricultural activity.  World with Earth-like environments tend to be mostly Cosmop. They often were Agricultural earlier in their history, but industry grew along with the population.

 

Westwind (Cosmop) - A mixed usage world of decent size in Sector Seventeen.

 

York (Cosmop) - Site of one of Sector Seventeen’s best universities.

 

Aurora

 

Troy

 

     Troy is a pirate asteroid base, hidden in an accretion disk full of gas, dusk, stones and rocks that orbits around a failed star on the edge of the great and powerful galactic Empire of Man (an accretion disk is the disk of material that builds up as the gases and material that make up a new star slowly collapse into the new star). Criminals on the run from the civilised Core and Industrial Worlds, youngsters who had left their Agricultural Worlds in search of adventure or a better life but who had taken a wrong turn somewhere, even a few Barbarian World émigrés who had somehow managed to get off-planet but who had few skills and little aptitude for fitting into civilisation; these were the lost souls who had slowly found their way to Troy, usually brought in by the few who actually knew how to get there.

 

     Ironically, the space around Troy is resource-rich, in theory at least. If it was not for the ever-present danger of collision and dust abrasion, resource mining could be a lucrative way of life. Unfortunately, the conditions make mining almost impossible on any significant scale – and while asteroid mining could potentially be lucrative, transport costs mean that scale is the only way to make money. Small prospectors could no doubt find valuable minerals (at great risk), but the big bulk carriers need to carry quantities big enough to be valuable would never be able to manoeuvre in and out without unacceptable risks.

With no better livelihood, the inhabitants of Troy turned to preying on others. It suited their temperaments better than hard work would have done, anyway. Piracy wasn’t really all that much safer than mining, but it required less persistent effort and a lot less self-discipline, and it gave a lot more opportunity to surrender to one’s baser desires. So pirates they became.

 

     Troy itself contains a couple of dozen mid-sized spacedocks and a couple of large ones capable of more extensive repair work – at least, if you can find the parts. It’s not a military grade – or even a proper commercial grade – dock by any means. Pirate ships are mostly converted freighters – until recently there were no warships in the mix – often heavily disguised. Their maintenance ranges from excellent, from captains who, regardless of their morals, are rigorous and dedicated, to extremely sloppy.

 

     Much of Troy consists of living accommodation, bars, brothels, warehouses, shops, more bars, more whorehouses (male and female), and the occasional slave trader. A few decades back a raider captured an automated mining machine on a construction freighter, and the new owners decided they were going into the real estate business. They tunnelled out much of the asteroid – it’s liberally full of caverns and tunnels now – but the population never grew to the point of needing so much space, so much of it is wasted or unused. Some sections are still in vacuum, some are full of outdated rubbish from previous raids, and some hold hidden secrets.

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     Troy’s location is a secret, known only to a few select captains and navigators. There’s an unwritten code that you’ll purge your computers if captured to make sure that the data doesn’t fall into Imperial hands.

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     Troy is run (as far as it goes) by a council of captains headed by (self-proclaimed) Colonel Matthew Hansen of the TSA.

The most powerful group here calls itself “Troy Station Administration”, a mostly accurate term as it has control of the main control rooms, the power systems and Troy’s weapons and defences. They handle such station justice as exists; in other words, they employ teams of bruisers to deal with anyone who gets enthusiastic enough in their grievances to pose a risk to station systems or atmospheric integrity. They also collect and distribute the cut they take from raids to the other station-bound groups. They are led by a man called Matthew Hansen, who claims the title of Colonel, but who Bowdak suspected had never served in a genuine military in his life. Hansen was the closest thing to an overall leader that Troy had. The Troy Technicians Union is a sub-group of engineers and maintenance personnel which reports to the TSA.

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     Troy was named by one of the original inhabitants who had a particularly poor sense of humour. It’s short for “asteroid”.

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The United Free Zan Commonality of Purpose

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     The United Free Zan Commonality of Purpose is a long-standing human non-Imperial domain sited in Sector Seventeen on the Edge of Imperial Space. Zan himself took his followers as far from the Empire as he could to set up a "perfect" society, one free from secrets and dishonesty, where all would be equal and deal with each other in trust. To that end, small, short-range tranceivers were implanted in the brains of all his followers, making it possible to read each others minds. It required a fair amount of societal adjustment - people had to get used to things that everyone did (for example, eyes would wander even if hearts didn't) - but as things were starting to settle, Zan himself died, and his followers made adjustments "for the good of all". Obviously enough, military secrets neded to be closed off. Governmental debates should take place behind closed doors, until decisions were announced, and so on. Firewalls were put into place. Heirachies started to appear. Top goverrnent levels were walled off from those below, then civil service heirachies appeared, secret police started checking for "subversive"thoughts  and regular police were given "thought patrol" duties. Over twenty years the most open society in human history became the most closed and restricted.

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     Curently the Zanni are at peace with the Empire, but extremely concerned at the Empire's long-standing history of steady expansion, and since the Empire has expanded over the last few hundred years right up to their border they are now looking for ways to undermine their neighbour.

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