Exarchs of Dusk: Titans

Game

You are the proteges of Exarch Lockwood, one of the three Exarchs to call Narbonilla home. As such are you are tasked to do essentially anything he asks. Assassination, theft, tea service, espionage, counterespionage, diplomacy . . .

Exarch Lockwood

He is your boss. He probably doesn't look like Moff Tarkin, but you never know. He has the following traits:

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 battlecruiser 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.

Characters

Please post short concepts (one sentence to one paragraph) and I will generate rules as appropriate. Ideally all characters would have reason/skills to mostly be in the same scene, but we can discuss ones that have sidekicks for battle duties. Assume that if necessary, a transport or combat ship with crew can be provided. As Lockwood does not have magi backing, any etheric abilities are low at best.

History

Ancient History

Ancient empires etc etc

Early History

See timeline

Recent History

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 perhaps five decades ago, leaving for parts then-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 or simply a bit more complacent the Mastery would likely have coasted under a caretaker government for decades or even centuries. Instead, existing cliques turned into conspiracies, particularly after a number of well-placed Archons formed 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, key syststems 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.

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 a decade, broken only with the completely unexpected arrival of the EEF.

The EEF - the Emmerseian Expeditionary Force - was a mission of revenge by the distant republic of Emmersei, 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 Emmerseians 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 Emmerseians. Conflict raged with the thunder of battle-lines and the knives of assassins.

By nine years ago 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 wreckage of the Mastery of Suns settled into a number of successor polities, some large, others small, almost all uneasily sharing a hot peace.

Exarch Lockwood is the governor of Narbonila, one of the sadly-reduced remnants of the Mastery that still exists in the Shroud. While only the most hard-line still seriously believes in the return of the Rmasters, Lockwood is among those that still claims direct descent from the Mastery.

Timeline

All dates in the Millenium Magisterium (MM) calender, the official dating scheme used by the Mastery.

0001: Apocryphal founding date of the Mastery
0150: Aproximate age of oldest verified Mastery records
021x: War of the Alliance
043x: Ramases Uprising
0488: Tyndall Missions Launched
0503: Narbonilla discovered
0500-0550: Shroud Settlement
0630: Interim Conclave
0640-0650: Withdrawal of Verge forces
0653 Call to Reform
0654: Start of civil war
0665: Arrival of EEF in Rubiconspace
0665-0669: Great War
0669: Treaty of
0678: Current Day

Gazetteer

Tyndall Missions

Three centuries ago, the Mastery had already grown to encompass most of what are considered 'core' worlds today and the central Archonate government had stabilized after some of the more unsteady decades prior. It was in this golden era that the Mastery turned its gaze towards the vast bulk of the Great Wall, long aeris incognito since Ragnarok. Occasional explorers had attempted to chart the vast murky depths of the Great Wall but it was far too much for a few scattered individuals to ever make headway. It would take the resources of the Mastery to properly scout the Great Wall and even so, it was only the nearside that was meaningfully visited. These missions were known as the Tyndall Missions after the Archon promoted specifically to direct them.

More than one ship was lost to the hazards and mysteries of the Great Wall, but enough interesting, valuable or simply novel places were found over the decades of exploration to justify the expense and difficulties to not just the notoriously fickle Rmasters but their pennywise advisors as well. In addition to the local wonders, the Tyndall Missions also managed to discover several passes that allowed the Mastery to expand to the widdershins side of the Great Wall, something of such value that Archon Tyndall was granted a second lifespan.

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.

=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.

Rubus

Continent-spanning mutant rose bush Holds Stalisk's Dark Crystal, a mysterious artifact believed to be a fragment of a god.

Periphery Worlds

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