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.

Player 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.

Also consider what, if any, epic level elements to your character; a cyborg reconstruction, a network of contacts, a mecha or space fighter, paratroop elite goons, magical training, etc etc.

History

Ancient History

Ragnarok, etc.

Early Mastery Period (0000-0250 MM)

The earliest years of the Mastery are opaque even today, with few reliable sources available. Ironically (or not) this era is actually less well understood than the preceeding High Imperial period; much of the Early Mastery Period is more myth than history. With that said, it is considered settled fact that the Mastery's initial expansions were in this period, including both wars of conquest and peaceful annexation expanding the Mastery's borders and population. The War of the Alliance is generally seen as capping this period.

War of the Alliance
Five centuries ago, the Mastery fought what may have been the most significant war of the entire pre-Conclave history. While the truth of the matter has been obscured by generations of hagiographical rewrites, some basics can be understood. The Mastery engaged in a war with a group of states that possessed their own pre-Ragnarok weaponry and potent magics, though ultimately insufficient to emerge victorious against the Mastery's clone-Sanjaks. Furthermore, the war occurred at least in part via the planetary godspaths that connect a number of core Mastery worlds. The conquest of Malazkand may have been the proximate cause of this war, as surviving records do paint a picture of conflict on that world where Mastery troops were the defenders.

High Mastery Period (0250-0500 MM)

The High Mastery era is generally considered the Mastery's 'golden age', an age of peace, prosperity and unquestioned hegemony and perhaps not surprisingly, many more historical sources. While not without its share of conflicts, with the exception of the two-year Ironhold war they were also either minor or so peripheral that they barely impinged on the Mastery as a whole. This is not to say that the Mastery did not expand its borders but as known space as a whole tumbled to its post-Ragnarok nadir those new additions might as well have been using bows and cavalry (and in many cases were) for all they could accomplish against hyperalloy-clad man-machines and impact-armored clone mamluks of the Mastery.

Ironhold War
The Ironhold War is the only war outside of living memory that has a significant corpus of both primary sources and scholarship, quite possibly because having opted to not assimilate the Ironholds in the wake of the Mastery's victory they could not conduct their usual historical whitewash.

The Ironholds proper were and still are a collection of dwarven holds bored into a drift of asteroids, these follow a regular two and a half year orbit through a gas cloud and then back into clear space. This gives them three seasons of unequal length; Summer, Gas and Winter. Having once served the Gods, Ragnarok left them both spiritually adrift and lacking in some of their former knowledge. Having been on the Mastery's borders for over a century, they had more than sufficient time to salvage and relearn what they could and use that to construct a defensive force built upon crude but effective technowizardry. While the dwarves of the Ironholds were hardly ones for political boasting, they were confident that despite the inefficiency of their production methods they would be able to hold off the forces the Mastery would send at them.

The war that ultimately came, an unfortunate confluence of overconfidence, stubbornness and face-saving, proved this to be false. Expecting that they'd be able to blunt and overcome any initial forays and sue for peace, the Ironholds were unprepared for the determination of the Clone-sanjaks and their supply depth. The outcome was never in doubt, though the dwarves held on for a full 29-month year with all their wits, grit and arsenal of defenses and dirty tricks. In the end the Mastery extended an olive branch, offering the Ironholds peace in a return to the status antebellum. Even then some of them wished to fight on but cooler heads saw there was no victory to come otherwise. In the centuries since the Ironholds have implicitly existed at the sufferance of the Mastery; that said the Masters had no particular designs upon their space and were content to let them exist on the eastern border. For their part the Ironholds stubbornly resisted any move towards assimilation though centuries on what became a peaceful border saw hostilies moderate towards wary acceptance and while the two have never been friends, they tolerate one another and economic ties have long since bound them.

Ramases Uprising
Another case of Rmaster tendency to rewrite or simply bury inconvenient history, for centuries the Ramases Uprising was treated a historical footnote where a group of local defense forces rose up in a misguided uprising against the Mastery. Only recently has the truth been uncovered; the Ramases Uprising was in fact an entire clone-Sanjak that went rogue. As surprising as this may be, the Mamluks are not mindless servitors as amply demonstrated by the Barzam Sanjak's actions.

Tyndall Missions
Two and a half 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.

Late Mastery Period (0500-0685 MM)

The Late Mastery period is considered to effectively start with the discovery of the path through the Great Wall in 0492 MM, but the opening of the Tyndall-discovered Shroud worlds to settlement in the centennial year of 0500 MM is generally taken as the dividing line between the High and Late period. While the Mastery as a whole carried on much as before, the critical difference is that the Late period saw increasing peer competition as the Mastery expanded into the Verge, a situation that the Mastery had henceforth not dealt with.

Shroud Settlement
Three decades of work had generated some fairly impressive maps of the accessible Shroud, with recently-commissioned skyships able to brave the storms and rough ether. Rugged navigational buoys anchored at key locations provided nagivational fixes that were otherwise difficult to take in the murk and stagnant flows. With these, it was possible for civilian craft and crews to make regular trips through this otherwise perilous area of space. As such, the Rmasters decided to allow vetted pioneering and settlement into the Shroud. Even from the start, the Shroud's inhabitants were those with deep loyalty to the Mastery.

By far the most important of the worlds opened up were to eventually become known as the Bastion Worlds; Narbonilla, Hadrian and Hadel. The first two were in an elongated bubble of relatively calm skies while Hadel was even deeper into the Great Wall beyond a small, stormy drift. As such, so long as ships could make the crossing through the Shroud's massive outer banks (increasingly manageable with a new generation of large warpships) travel between most of the important places therein posed no real issues. All three of these worlds were at least reasonably habitable and with the resources of the Mastery behind them, the early modest settlement efforts soon grew into model provinces.

Verge Pioneering
The Verge that the Mastery discovered circa 0550 MM was a poorly-inhabited morass of storms, populated by various groups of sedentary and nomadic technotribals and host to enigmatic self-replicating machines criss-crossed by free traders on multi-year perambulations. The search for "El Dorado", the mystical origin of these machines of clearly High Imperial origin, soon became something of an obsession among the various explorers of the Mastery. Even Archon Tyndall himself, well into his second lifespan by that time, became involved for the search and it was on one such expedition in 0561 MM that he and his ship vanished. By contrast, the Masters themselves were increasingly concerned with the ramifications of the 'El Dorado Machines' and assigned several clone-Sanjaks to ensure no-one opened up a Pandora's Box of uncontrollable technology in this almost entirely unpoliced frontier. The mamluks were poorly suited to this policing role and in 0577 MM the Regulatory Force (later to be the Verge and Outer Frontier Regulatory Fleet) was created to take over this task, split away from the Citizen Fleet.

This creation happened congruently with the Cylord Wars where several clone-Sanjacks (not coincidentally including the two originally assigned to perform enforcement) were tasked to deal with the worst of the technotribals plaguing the Verge. The Cylords were a militant raider cyber-cult that was a clear threat to any designs the Mastery had upon the Verge and one that was unlikely to simply accept the change in circumstances; they would have to be made to accept it. To that end the clone-Sanjaks were sent deep into the Verge to shatter the Cylords wherever they may have came from. The sheer deployment of forces so distant from the Mastery's homeland opened a military vacuum, one that was initially if badly filled by elements of the Citizen Fleet and luckily for the Mastery, one not capitalized on by the various fringing states that otherwise poses no threat to the Mastery.

Hegemon
Alien to the Mastery for so long, with the clearing of long-term storms across the Verge around the end of the 6th century came the rise of peer competition. The Alexandrian Empire, Moldoveanu, the High Kingdom. None of these could match the Mastery but neither could they be overwhelemed short of total deployment of forces, particularly given the logistical difficulties of prosecuting a war so far from the homeland. Even before the astropolitical outlook was clear the Masters and their Archons were planning transformation; the limits of both the long-standing clone-Sanjak primacy and the Citizen Fleet were already manifest and the evolving situation essentially turned what were pre-existing ruminations into immediate action. This was delivered in 0595 MM as a sweeping reorganization to create the three-Fleet system which has lasted to the present day. In the course of this change the Citizen Fleet was dissolved and replaced by the Grand Fleet and the High Skies fleet, two complementary forces broadly intended to supplement the clone-Sanjaks on the homefront. The Regulatory Force was likewise reconstructed as the Frontier Fleet and progressively assumed most of the Verge mission. Wags cynically declared that the Mastery's military-bureaucratic complex was expanding to meet the expanding needs of the military-bureaucratic complex.

This suggests that the Mastery's response to the dissipation of the westen waystorms was primarily militant, but in truth it was the opposite. The Mastery's frontiers had expanded massively and the conflicts against the Cylords had sapped the clone-Sanjaks. While the Mastery had taken (and would continue to take) several worlds outside of the Transwall Reach, by and large there was little apetite among the Masters for military adventurism in the Verge. In addition to engaging their new major neighbors politically as equals, the Mastery also treated with smaller single-system polities of high development such as Danu and Zorya. Most such were induced - or threatened - into what were termed 'association agreements' which amounted to strict limits on local military forces and the granting of basing rights alongside a committment by the Mastery to provide military protection and various other sweeteners. These were commonly and not erroneously seen as essentially a nation-scale protection racket and an informal empire. Others disagreed on pragmatic terms; the Mastery - or more specifically the Masters - had little interest in the morality or internal politics of the various associated states and a minor loss in national sovereignty was an acceptable price for both protection and access to the Mastery's market. It has long been suspected that much of this relative trepidation on the part of the Masters was out of something approaching paranoia; several parts of the Verge were thick with the "El Dorado Machines". The Masters only feared things they did not understand and they did not understand the El Dorado MAchines.

Thus the 7th century was seen as the Master's period of hegemony. The firebrick-painted warships of the Frontier Fleet were a ubiquitous presence across the Verge with their home anchorage at Kanaria and a number of subsidiary bases ranging from Instigator Reef on the Alexandrian border to Half Moon Sound in the far west to Desolation Reach in the outer Danu system. Blue hulls of the High Skies Fleet were an unremarkable sight as well, though with the exception of ones making semi-regular trips to the immediate transwall Verge on shakedown or training cruises these were mostly ships that had been reassigned to another component of the Summed Fleet and not yet repainted. The ones that truly drew attention were the green ships of the Grand Fleet; while again it was not uncommon for individual ships (particularly smaller ones) to be moved between arms of the Summed Fleet seemingly almost at random, large-scale deployments of Grand Fleet ships in squadron and division strength occurred only a half-dozen times in the entire 7th century and to battle only once.

Steppe War

The Barzam Sanjak

Conclave Period

Withdrawal from the Verge
There is no hard date upon which the Mastery can have said to have withdrawn from the Verge, though it is generally accepted that by MM0700 the Mastery was politically disengaged from the Verge; a revolt on Samara in MM0688 snowballed to an overthrow of the existing government. Attempts by the Frontier Fleet to intervene were stymied by a lack of support for an expensive intervention so far from home and the Barzum Sanjak - busily pacifying even more distant Mizum - studiously refused to commit its own troops to restore order on Samara. Frontier fleet patrols steadily if imperceptibly dwindled across the next decade, until suddenly Frontier fleet ships were seemingly no longer stationed at places such as Danu but merely paying port visits.

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 five 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
• 0125: Aproximate age of oldest verified Mastery records
• 024x: War of the Alliance
• 044x: Ironhold War
• 045x: Ramases Uprising
• 0471: Tyndall Missions Launched
• 0483: Narbonilla discovered
• 0500: Shroud opened for settlement
• 595: Citizen Fleet reorganization
• 0684-0686: Steppe War
• 0685: Interim Conclave
• 0688: Samaran Revolution
• 0693: Cordoba War
• 0702: Call to Reform
• 0707: Start of civil war
• 0719: Arrival of EEF in Rubiconspace
• 0719-0723: Rubicon War
• 0723: Grand Armistice brings the Rubicon War to an end
• 0728: Current Day

Politics

The Mastery

The Mastery (or as it is often referred to today, the Legacy Mastery or Rump Mastery) is much-reduced from the glories of the High Mastery era, laying claim to a half-dozen inhabited system and twice that in shoals, drifts and otherwise outpost systems. The preceeding two decades of conflict has also hardened it; for all its faults the Mastery was generally a comfortable place to be that placed greater emphasis on artistic achievements than military ones. That is no longer the case and many public displays are a thin veneer over a populace scarred by war.

The Legacy Mastery still maintains nominal claim to the former territories

Gazetteer

The Bastion Worlds

The Bastion Worlds are a number of worlds deep in the Shroud - the spinward curls 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 major 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.

System traits

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 linked 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 full of industry, warehouses and environmental equipment.

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. Some but by no means all of this has been driven by the vast expansion of Narbonilla's orbital shipyards with High Sofia being the main center for component manufacturing.

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 fairly inhospitable world of strong winds and sharp seasons despite being nominally habitable across much of its surface area. Hadria's geography shows a pronounced banding, with an unbroken equatorial continent and oceans covering both poleward hemispheres. 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 sixth century, policy changes saw the progressive relocation of various sensitive installations to the world and relaxation of civilian settlements of dependents leading to more general economic growth during the seventh century. 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 protected by vast fixed fortifications and elements of the Absolute Defense Fleet. Many of the Mastery's R&D organizations were relocated to Hadria and it continues to be a source of all manner of exotic prototypes.

System traits

Hadel
One of the deepest worlds that is not floating in 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 those 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. These benign conditions can be attributed to Hadel's fortuitous position lying between two large arms of nebular gas. It is generally accepted today that Hadel is moving deeper into the Great Wall and lies in a relic bubble of low-density ether, having been pinched off between seven and nine thousand years ago and will be fully engulfed within the next several thousand years.

Hadel has no oceans per se, its gently rolling topography instead home to innumerable lakes and seas of limited salinity. The rest of the surface is a world-forest that 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 as well as a minimal axial tilt, Hadel's seasons are all but nonexistent and it has a year round (if mild) growing season with barely perceptible seasonal changes. Other than the various furred predators (none of noteworthy ferocity) that inhabit Hadel's forests, the only significant hazard are meteors. Being in a somewhat dirty system and with neither a moon nor a particularly large planet to redirect cosmic bodies away, Hadel sees regular meteoric fireballs and bolides striking the atmosphere with enough energy to knock down trees are a decadal phenomenon.

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.

System traits

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.

System traits

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.

System traits

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.

System traits

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.

System traits

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.

System traits

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 and by extension, the greater Verge. Despite the fact that this storm-wracked area of space was lightly inhabited, it was rich ground for expansion.

Dark Passage proper is a tired, dusty world that has by some quirk of events became a popular destination for shipbreaking, hundreds of freighters making their final tired trip to the system and dropping through the atmosphere to land on the gravel flats. Once there, teams of hundreds set to work using crude hand tools and torches, slicing the ships into pieces to be smelted locally in preparation of sailing the semirefined slag back to manufacturing worlds. Paint chips, insulation and other trash is merely abandoned in the wastes.

System traits

Core Worlds

Rubicon
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 Thetis, 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:

• Perfectly Normal system
• Flare Star
• Earthlike World

Traits of note:

• Dissatisfied Population

Chaldea

Jardin

Carcosa

Semura

Viteliu

• -0090: Fall of Ocani Republic
• 0250-280: border raids
• 0280: sack of Lucania
• 0300-550: Effective foreign dominance Viteliu
• 0512: War of 0512
• 0550-0615: 1st through 3rd Wars of Vitelian Independence
• 0615: Kingdom of Viteliu established
• 0723: Treaty of Talerno
• 0724: Falco Declaration; much of the remaining Vitelian fleet goes rogue under the command of Admiral Falco

Viteliu has a long history, once having cultural and political influence over many of the worlds later controlled by the Mastery. However, the old Republic was already on its last legs and fell in the chaos of the War in Heaven. Many of the most distal worlds were lost, short-lived kingdoms and empires absorbed into the growing Mastery over the next three centuries. The Viteliu heartworlds themselves collapsed into a patchwork of competing states, soon politically dominated by the Commonwealth of Shenandah. Other free states became centers of commerce and between 0300 and 0500 Viteliu became a proxy battleground between Shenandah, Gran Bretwalda and the Mastery of Suns. The War of 0512 rekindled the first embers of Vitelian independence and unity and much of the subsequent century was a period of unrest, public action and civil battles. It was only in 0615 that a Vitelian state was properly unified, the newly created Kingdom of Viteliu; while a number of prominent leaders supported instead a full republic political realities meant that a constitutional monarchy was the more feasible option.

In the decades after unification, the Kingdom maintained warm relations with the Mastery out of respect for the help provided during the Vitelan wars of independence. While these were more strained during the Conclave era with several personal disputes marring broader diplomatic relations, the treaty of amity remained strong enough that Viteliu provided aid during the civil war and, more significantly, was a co-belligerent in the war against the EEF. It was the latter that was to be the downfall of the Kingdom; as the most important secondary theatre of the war a fierce invasion pushed the Vitelans a third of the way down their arm followed by of two years of dogged retreat before the Treaty of Talerno brought the war to an end. Barely a century after unification Viteliu was once again sundered.

Astrogeography
The Vitelan homeland is a large gaseous pillar extending out of a basal cloud. This pillar of stagnant nebular gas is surrounded by the starways that connect the various stars, drifts and knots of Viteliu proper. Despite the nominally much greater distance taken to travel via these star ways, the brackish clouds of the Vitelan Pillar would becalm all but the absolute smallest of smallboats. This has influenced Vitelian warship designs significantly, with Vitelan designers opting almost universally for fast but short-legged designs.

Falco Fleet
Admiral Falco was the Vitelian hero of the war against the EEF, but his fall from grace was precipitous. Unwilling to accept the loss of full half of Vitelian territory he was critical of just how humiliating the treaty forced upon Viteliu was. Unwilling to acquiesce to this, the president publically castigated Falco and stripped him of both rank and commission. If this was not enough, he was them remanded to custody, a step that finally went too far. Sprung from confinement by a group of motivated young officers, he was flown to his former flagship where he promptly reclaimed his rank and gave a fleetwide broadcast denouncing the civilian government's actions. While some of his officers called for a coup, he realized that the fleet was under the guns of the harbour defenses, many other ships were scattered around and the force as a whole was both unprepared for any battle and was short of crew. Instead he called for as many ships as possible to withdraw from the capital and main fleet base. With the loyalist ships in equally rough shape and rife with disorganization, what became known as the Falco Fleet managed to withdraw to the ragged edges of Vitelian space with almost no ship-on-ship combat.

Worlds of Viteliu

Toujeo

'Oenotria

'Lucania

Russospace

(approximate, years before present) Union of Progressive Peoples formed in the late Imperial Period.

~1000-750 - Union of Progressive Peoples ~750-550 - Centralized Union (periphery splinters off due to conflicts, waystorms, etc) ~550 - The Overturn ~550-440 - New Men ~440-430 - War of Repudiation ~432 - Flight of New Men to Zorya ~430-150 - Cylord dominance ~410 - Sack of Mir ~400 - Landing on Iskandar ~380 - The Burning of the Books (Iskandar) ~150 - Mastery sweeps Cylords out of the Verge ~140-125 - Mastery takes several treaty ports on Polyarny ~125 - Mastery takeover of Polyarny ~50 - unrest against Mastery occupation increases substantially ~40-33 - Ground war of occupation 33 - Mastery 'localizes' the conflict and pulls troops out 33-32 - Collapse of Mastery-backed government 32-Now - Polyarny People's Republic

-272--22 - Union of Progressive Peoples -22-178 Centralized Union (periphery splinters off due to conflicts, waystorms, etc) 178 - The Overturn 178-288 - New Men 288-298 - War of Repudiation 296 - Flight of New Men to Zorya 298-578 - Cylord dominance 318 - Sack of Mir 328 - Landing on Iskandar 348 - The Burning of the Books (Iskandar) 578 - Mastery sweeps Cylords out of the Verge 588-603 - Mastery takes several treaty ports on Polyarny 603 - Mastery takeover of Polyarny 678 - unrest against Mastery occupation increases substantially 688-695 - Ground war of occupation 695 - Mastery 'localizes' the conflict and pulls troops out 695-696 - Collapse of Mastery 696-728 - Polyarny People's Republic

Iskandar

The Tsardom of Iskandar Constitutional monarchy with strong monarch Founded by a rogue (if such a term can be used) Cylord disgusted with the infighting between the other Cylords; takes followers and whatever civilians they can grab or recruit and sails south for Iskandar where the latter are dumped and told 'congrats you're all peasants now' while the Cylord proclaims themself the new Tsar of Iskandar. A generation later once everyone is settled, the Tsar orders all history burned and many other books transcribed, falsifying a new history of Iskandar and wiping the record of any connection with the (former) UPP and the Cylords. The true history remained a closely guarded secret by the royal house. Iskandar today is a fairly conventional constitutional monarchy, with a powerful crown and an upper house of nobility.

Mir

The bureaucratic center of UPP and the capital after the Overturn, Mir saw widespread fighting at the end of the War of Repudiation. Two decades later it was sacked by several Cylords, as a result the fragile truce between these warlords broke and the collapse of the former UPP worlds into a techo-barbarian dark age became irreversible. Mir was fought over repeatedly during the three centuries of Cylord dominance and it was a rare decade that it was controlled by a single one of the cyber-warlords. Today Mir is a world of survivors, of scavengers and the shreds of the broken Cylords. Struck briefly by clone-Sanjaks at the end of the Mastery's campaign against the Cylords, even then Mir was all but de-industrialized. Today little exists beyond blacksmiths and the forlorn remnants of the Cylords scrabbling through the tree-encrusted glories of ancient centuries.

Polyarny

Polyarny was a somewhat peripheral world to the old UPP, though it was never cut off from the core worlds such as Mir. Unfortunately, like so many others it fell prey to the nomadic Cylords, with its resources and people plundered over the centuries. Devolved into the techno-barbarism and pastoral sedentarism that characterized the former UPP 'Cylord Steppe' and many other worlds, Polyarny was ripe for capture by the victorious Mastery; something of a high-water mark for the Mastery, the distant empire exerted control over the locals for most of a century. The colonial government could only last so long however, and as the Mastery's grip weakened the flames of revolution were kindled. The resulting war eventually drove the Mastery out, the distant Conclave too uninterested in further expanding a colonial conflict particularly once it further expanded to worlds such as Danu. While governed by the Popular Front of Polyarny since the end of the revolutionary war three decades ago, Polyarny's government is indisputably controlled by the All-Regions Party. Already the recipient of significant military aid smuggled in during the revolutionary war, Polyarny has since undergone a military-industrial revolution with technology transferred from Zorya.

Zorya

Zorya was settled four centuries ago by elements of the New Men fleeing the Cylord's War of Repudiation,

Databank

Military Theory

The Air Battle

For centuries the Mastery could be effortlessly confident in possessing dominance in the air; gun-dories, armskiffs and wyvern riders were incomparably outclassed next to the archeotech-built man-machines of the Mastery's clone-sanjaks. Those few opponents that could measure up in some manner of quality were unable to match the quantity that the Mastery could put to the field. This overwhelming capability meant that in many cases the Mastery's battlewagons never needed to fire their guns in anger past the occasional ground support mission, the man-machines sweeping enemy warbages aside like so many canoes.

This situation only changed once the Tyndall Mission charted routes through the Great Wall. Unlike the weak, small or backwards states the Mastery had absorbed or vassalized, the Verge had - or at least bordered - states capable of developing counters for the Mastery's weapons. Some, such as Moldoveanu, began their own crash programs to copy the Mastery's aerofighters and man-machines as much as possible. Others, such as the Alexandrian Empire, instead opted to invest in massive anti-air defenses while long-horizon programs matured. Even so, the archeotech of the clone-sanjacks could still not be matched.

It is in the past century that the Mastery can truly be said to have lost its air dominance; the inevitable fruits of dedicated research and espionage by opposing states, a stagnant tech base that made only minor improvements, the proliferation of archeotechnology from other sources and the general, slow closure of just what was considered 'archeotech' and what was broadly-understood and widely-available all conspired to erode the Mastery's advantage. By MM0600 the technology of the clone-sanjaks was seen as ahead of the curve but no longer impossibly so. By MM0650 it was matched by various other states and moreoever, the Mastery's loss of all the clone-sanjaks in fact meant that in some fields it was behind. In MM0728 the Mastery is greatly reduced, coasting on the broken remnants of its old military-industrial complex and what it has managed to patch together in the previous five years of peace and stuck in the unenviable position of being behind those it was once supreme over.

The Mastery long relied on the archeotech-equipped clone-sanjaks as its main military force, with the citizen-filled force mostly filling constabulatory and defense roles. This changed with the opening of the Verge as the Mastery's frontiers expanded very rapidly, increasing by a fairly significant amount in just a decade or three. The citizen force was expanded to fill this gap, particularly in the last century of the Mastery as the clone-sanjaks were diverted elsewhere. The Verge also saw the growth of great power competition, something that Mastery had not previously been subject to; while the Mastery was still the most powerful state (albeit constrained by Verge logistics), it was now facing states with both the will and ability to play catch-up.

The fields where this truly came to a head were combat electronics and aerospace (fighter planes); while the Mastery held early dominance here thanks to the technology of the clone-sanjaks, the edge enjoyed by the citizen-force was much smaller. By the early 600s this had essentially disppeared; as low-hanging fruit was exhausted development in many fields began instead to pace over generations as opposed to over years and intervals between complete replacements got longer and longer - the Aspid As-251 was still considered a frontline fighter in as of the Cordoba War despite having been in service for over five decades and its replacement/stablemate the As-312 was still considered new at fifteen years. Of course the As-251 of the Cordoban War was significantly improved over the original production model, but a fifty-year production run spoke volumes to the bureaucratic speed that the Mastery operated on.

Some of this can also be attributed to deliberate policy to hold down the size of fightercraft. While the Mastery was no stranger to large craft - the ground-based Spada S-98 was a twenty meter long twin-engine pursuit fighter - most fighters were built to a smaller scale fit for a carrier's hangar. This was because the Mastery's war planners expected that in any way the Mastery would be on the offense, meaning that all their battlecraft would need to be flown off carriers.

Other states were not so plodding; the Alexandrian Empire's Serafin Se-22 was a broad match for the As-251 but entered service more than a decade later. Its successor, the Maltzahn-Husayin MaH-107, was accepted only twenty years following and directly led to the Mastery's development of the As-312. The Danan Federal Union was not far behind, with the Pixie-II graduating to a peer competitor once it recieved its definative engines midway through the Cordoba War. By this point it was clear that a multisided aerospace arms race was in progress and within a decade the once-feared As-312 was outclassed by the Alexandrian MaH-171, Avonlean Sprite and Zoryan Zal-9. At the same time the Mastery was sliding into the worst of the civil war, with counter-insurgency and policing sapping resources and more critically *mindshare* that could otherwise have been put towards maintaining an edge or at least parity. In the eyes of many Archons and Exarchs, the Frontier Fleet's requests for equipment as a hedge against a potential conflict was far less important than the demands of an existing conflict. This is not to say the Mastery has completely lost any aerospace competition; to this day it produces a number of highly competitive light fighters and man-machines and can build heavy fighters equal to any other. Unfortunately, particularly in the case of the latter, it cannot do so in the volumes that other states can and consequently the Mastery retains a much wider spread of both airframes and capabilities.

The Mastery's long assumption of air dominance also has an effect on their approach to air defense; for centuries it was expected that the clone-sanjaks would be able to destroy or, at absolute worst, hold off all but the most suicidally determined attackers. Citizen-squadrons flying pursuit or fighter craft lacked the multirole ability of man-machines but were just as effective at controlling the air. As such generations of officers saw shipboard air defense as a combination of long-range detection/warning, intercepting battlecraft and self-defensive weapons on the warships proper to deal with whatever 'leakers' managed to penetrate the air cordon - and those that somehow got through all this were unlikely to carry enough ordnance to seriously impede a battlewagon anyway. In fact, given the (of-correct) assumption that local airspace was going to be full of friendly aerospace craft it was considered perfectly reasonable to leave air defense to them instead of trying to fill space with long range weapons fire that had a good chance of hitting a friendly.

To this end, the electronics fit on Mastery warships tended to be both straightforward and conservative. Most ships maintained a bow-mounted dynaphone for passive detection, a long-range radar set for detecting both ships and battlecraft, and a seperate fire control system for gunnery purposes. Pickets and command ships had more elaborate facilities for tracking and battle management but 'private' ships (non-command) managed with these fairly austere fits. Doctrinally the Mastery also relied heavily on radio silence and passive detection and even today they are still known for quality dynaphones. The Mastery's reliance on Blavatsky particle shedding to seriously degrade the effectiveness of hostile sensors also certainly played a part; there was little value in an expensive long range sensor system if it was blinded by a ship's own particle emissions.

The exception to this was to be the Frontier Fleet. While originally using essentially using the same playbook, the seventh century saw the introduction of various pieces of hardware and doctrines among the various opposing states that were clearly intended as direct counters to the Mastery's fleets. Other factors worked against the conventional Grand Fleet organizational scheme; while the Frontier Fleet never entirely moved away from a fighter-first doctrine the distances and relative lack of available resources for the Verge meant that a greater emphasis on local air defense was necessary. The introduction of ground-based bombers carrying standoff missiles posed a novel problem. While simply increasing the output of the long-ubiquitous lightning fields was a short-term solution it was clearly only an interim measure. More substantial programs were already under way when the Cordoban War (Danu Incident in Mastery records) demonstrated the effectiveness of these weapons. Unfortunately for the Frontier Fleet, only the first wave of post-Incident designs and retrofits had entered service before the spiralling civil war forced new priorities upon the Mastery as a whole. The irony was that the nature of the Civil War meant that many Frontier Fleet units and particularly those already modified with the latest air defense suites were pulled from the Verge to serve instead in the heart of the Mastery, leaving only those least capable of fighting the growing Verge threats in theatre.

For centuries the most common way of dealing with small combatants - battlecraft, harassing gun-dories, griffin-riders and overly amorous skysharks - was the lightning field. This, as the name implies, essentially creates lightning arcs to nearby objects. As weapons, lightning fields generate large electrical fluxes, enough to inflict physical damage, ignite flammables, disrupt or disable active systems both electrical and magical and even electrocute the living. Inefficient but simple and not requiring turrets covering all angles, few ships were not so fitted and large ships with commensurately larger powerplants could pump stronger lightning fields. The crudity of lightning fields as weapons meant they had some very significant limitations though; the first of these was their lack of range. While determined more by powerdraw than by physical size, lightning fields were rarely effective more than a few ship lengths (<1 km) from the generating ship; sufficient to keep away boarders and pose a serious threat to dive bombers or strafing fighters but none whatsoever to craft firing standoff ordnance. The other serious flaw that was that lightning fields were entirely indiscriminate. Ships maneuvering too closely to one another ran the risk of grounding their fields against one another, likely causing damage to both and shorting out their defenses. Friendly fighters had a strict policy to simply stay away from warships with active lightning fields for obvious reasons.

Warships of the Mastery also used more conventional cannons in the anti-air role, only the very oldest and long-retired warships lacked any such defenses Doctrinally these tended to be more used for disrupting inbound attackers to drive them in to lightning fields or drive them away than actually get kills.

Military of the Mastery

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 several different fleet organizations under the overarching authority of the Mastery's Summed Fleet. The structure used in the Conclave era featured three main forces; the Grand Fleet, the High Skies Fleet and the Frontier Fleet, though the operational divisions between the first two have effectively ceased to exist in the current era. The Frontier Fleet still exists but is a shell of its former self, having suffered under the civil war-era retrenchment with much 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.

Citizen Fleet

Long dissolved, the Citizen Fleet has the distinction of being the first major citizen (as opposed to Clone-Sanjak) deep sky force of the Mastery. Created in the late 5th century some years after the conclusion of the Ramases Uprising, the Citizen Fleet was originally an adjunct to the Clone-Sanjaks to bolster their numbers as the Mastery continued to expand beyond comfortable coverage by the Master's elite forces; in particular they were stood up to cover much of the constabulatory tasks that were ill-suited to the Clone-Sanjaks. Initially equipped with older stocks of Clone-Sanjak equipment, within three decades this had mostly been replaced by hardware built 'domestically' in the greater Mastery. While the overall Mastery techno-industrial baseline was still significantly behind the archeotech of the Clone-Sanjaks, this gave the Citizen Fleet a distinct character of their own that better suited to an organization drawn from the citizens.

The Citizen Fleet's heyday was the latter half of the 6th century as the Clone-Sanjaks were stretched to conduct various border conflicts. This led to a sustained growth in the Citizen Fleet as it assumed much of the border defense role that the clones had previously performed, freeing those elite fighters to act independently. The Citizen Fleet was also tasked with constabulatory tasks in the Verge; however this was soon was subdivided away into the semi-independent Regulatory Force which was mandated to operate specifically in the Verge.

Ultimately the Citizen Fleet was reorganized out of existence in the MM0595 restructuring with its assets split between the new Grand Fleet and High Skies Fleet, though the Citizen Fleet's administrative bodies lasted into the early 7th century as various continuity-of-process tasks such as recruitment and facilities maintenance were progressively transferred over a number of years.

Grand Fleet

Created out of the Citizen Fleet, the Master's Grand Fleet was to eventually evolve to be one of the most powerful and feared forces of known space. The mission of the Grand Fleet was straightforward; it was to be capable of overpowering any enemy with both numbers and mass in a direct force-on-force confrontation. As such, from conception onwards the Grand Fleet had a heavy bias towards slower, powerful capital ships and organizationally had a relatively straightforward structure. The Grand Fleet was not granular nor flexible; by design it was structured to operate in no more than one to three seperate stellar systems at a given time, nor was it structured to act far from major fleet bases or other logistics centers. What it did have was a tactically coherent fleet of battlewagons that could dominate any opponent in a gun battle. Strategically the Grand Fleet was not forward deployed and only moved from its secure anchorages in times of high tension. Simply the act of moving half a hundred dreadnoughts to a border system was often enough to tamp any prelude to war and ships of the Grand Fleet were rarely called to fire their guns in anger. The strength of the Grand Fleet grew in the latter half of the 7th century as the Clone-Sanjaks progressively dwindled.

During the civil war the Grand Fleet played a disproportionately minor role as its organization and materiel proved ill-suited towards an amorphous conflict of raiders and corsairs that could simply evade the cumbersome dreadnought divisions. This was particularly acute after the strike on the Laguna Clara anchorage by seperatists; the loss of multiple dreadnoughts to imported dive missiles was a blow to morale and directly led to the redeployment of much of the Grand Fleet into the more protected Shroud. By contrast, its ships fought with distinction against the Enduscareans in a series of great clashes that attrited both forces. Today, the surviving 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 Fleet Green being something of an 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 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 remains the same 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 several additional having been constructed in the past few years, they mostly act as extremely heavy guardships today.

Generally speaking dreadnoughts are designed to be straightforward combatants built to 'balanced' specifications; balanced in this context meaning that under typical combat ranges their defenses can adequately repel their weapons.

Rams
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', the latter having no relation to what the Mastery called a frigate.

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, destroying hostile ships before they could sally forth. The Mastery adopted the term from foreign sources long after the old torpedo rams had lost much of their armor (not to mention their ram) and evolved into something resembling today's escort ships.

Grand 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; their so-called grand 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 grand carriers are seen as increasingly valuable as opposed to simply adjuncts. One flaw that grand carriers had that has only become relevant in the current period is that as built they were relatively underpowered; as fleet units alongside dreadnoughts they had no need for high speed but today this has hampered their use in more independent operations. While construction of new capital ships has been spotty over the past decade, the scattering of new carrier hulls laid down have been more akin to foreign-built attack carriers; larger and faster to pace escorts as opposed to dreadnoughts.

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, commonly known simply as the HSF, a force that was more directly inspired by the clone-Sanjaks. This force was organized in small commands 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 and most certainly the one that saw the most action over the decades. While the HSF mostly concentrated on the Mastery's borders, it had a significant minority that operated in the Verge alongside the Frontier Fleet and squadrons were regularly rotated in and out.

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. The fall of Rubicon was a rupture point for the HSF though; the reputation for gallantry of the previous decade and their host of new frigates was nothing when suddenly faced with an enemy that could rely on massive local superiority to reliably defeat them in pitched battle.

Today though the High Skies fleet, long parcelled out into squadron formations, has effectively been dismembered with individual squadrons and any semblance of overarching command is quite nonexistent. Many of the former ships and formations of the HSF have been absorbed into the local fleets of successor states and even in the legacy Mastery they mostly serve individual Exarchs. A few squadrons have even gone private - or rogue - under charismatic commanding officers.

Historically the High Skies Fleet used a shade of cadet 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 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. A significant number of these small frigates were permanently assigned to the Grand Fleet to perform fleet recon.

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 tend to be 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.

Warbirds
A relatively recent development, the warbird is essentially a long-range attack ship. While similar in many ways to rams (most foreign militaries do not actually distinguish them) the main difference is that warbirds put an exceptional emphasis on flight performance.

Frontier Fleet

Officially saddled with the lengthy title Verge and Outer Frontier Supervision Fleet but universally known simply as the Fronter Fleet, for a century this force was one of the most visible signs of Mastery power outside its borders. Inaugurated at the same time as the High Skies Fleet, the Frontier Fleet had a very different commission. It was explicitly to fulfil all the myriad tasks of being the Mastery's force in the Verge, ranging from the

The Frontier Fleet is now almost defunct, having been steadily attrited by conflict, platform age and reassignment to the HSF. 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 and it mostly persists out of a combination of inertia and stubborn resistance by several Verge Archons; in practical terms the Frontier Fleet is now solely supported by (and exists for) the Mastery-settled worlds in the Verge.

More forward thinkers criticized the reduction of the Frontier Fleet as long experience in the Verge had given them a particular can-do attitude, one well suited to the challenges of great power competition. Most notably, the Verge was in the middle of a rapid technological evolution and many of the most advanced concepts in the late Mastery originated with the Frontier Fleet or, more often than not, in Frontier Fleet contractors. Many of these contractors were also playing both sides and more than one embarassing scandal saw Mastery-commissioned equipment leak to one or more Verge states - or vice versa. Having this pipeline of innovation necked down to a straw as the Frontier Fleet was mostly folded back into the High Skies fleet was a loss to the Mastery.

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.

A fairly significant amount of Frontier Fleet hardware was never pulled out of the Verge. Some of it was gifted to the locals, others sold (a strongbox of currency being far more portable than a hundred aerofighters), while yet others went rogue, were stolen or simply got lost or abandoned in situ. The same could be said of many Frontier Fleet officers, the most famous being Jorgan's Raiders. That which remains in the hands of the remaining Frontier Fleet units is jealously hoarded.

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 were recalled to the Bastion Worlds and taken in by various Exarchs. Many battlecarriers were constructed with nuclear powerplants, a feature generally not seen as worth the added cost, complexity and tonnage in the more tightly-packed Mastery core worlds. While all existing battlecarriers are upwards of twenty years old (with the median more like fourty), the flexibility of these ships has seen several proposals tabled to lay down new hulls.

Frigates
Many of the same class of frigates used by the High Skies Fleet - particularly the smaller classes - are used by the Frontier Fleet.

Guided Missile Frigate
A design that actually originated in the Verge, guided missile frigates (or normally just missile frigates) appeared somewhat over half a century ago to help bolster the Frontier Fleet's defenses against aerospace craft. Various treaties and agreements had kept Verge naval developments in an embryonic state, but the same could not be said for air forces - in many cases something not even seriously considered when the treaties were drawn up. A number of small frigates were refitted with heavy anti-air batteries to provide a defensive 'bubble', but it soon became clear that more extensive modifications were required.

The first missile frigates were just heavily modified protected smaller frigates with large portions of their arsenals razed and replaced with both missile-handling gear and extensive radar suites, but purpose-designed ones were soon commissioned.

The Absolute Defense Fleet

Never an official Named Fleet, the Absolute Defense Fleet was and is 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 retaining the fleet green they arrived in, a number of ships were (re)painted charcoal or bone white.

Miscellaneous and Unclassified

The Mastery also possessed vast numbers of lesser craft for the multitudes of secondary and support tasks an interstellar empire needed. Some of these were organized and used by planetary guard formations, others were universally used across

Brigs
Modified frigates, mostly built by removing half of the engine rooms (still giving them acceptable fleet speeds) and replacing them with bunk space for dragoons, assorted landing craft and often light armored vehicles. Some were converted from existing hulls while others were built from the keel-up as planetary assault ships.

Flyboats
Small armed craft, sometimes used as armed couriers and other times for 'gunboats' when larger ships are overkill or busy elsewhere. Commonly operated from planetary bases.

Gun-Dories and Armskiffs
Armed smallcraft, often carried on board larger ships. Not as capable as aerospace craft, but cheap, reliable and can carry quite a useful tonnage for their size. They also need vastly less maintenance and few ships travel without several slung here and there.

Irregular Forces

Cordoba Army
As the power and number of the Mastery's clone-sanjaks waned they were slowly but steadily replaced by citizen-centric forces. In the Verge they were already supported by the Frontier Fleet but as even before the Rmasters had vanished from the public eye the Mastery was supporting an irregular border force - the Cordoba Army. This was under the nominal control of the Foreign Legion and like the parent force the Cordoba Army was made up mostly of those not native to the Mastery. A typical cross section included exiled Gaels, Avonlean revolutionaries, Canarian thrill-seekers, Zoryan dissidents, freed thralls, prisoners offered clemency in exchange for service, would-be pirates and many others. Equipped with a variety of equipment but typically a combination of captured/ceded Gael hardware and older Mastery weapons plus whatever else the Cordobans could scrounge, the Cordoba Army was relatively lightly equipped but generally well-versed in its usage. As the name implies, the Cordoba Army was primarily a ground force and mostly travelled on hardened freighters or loaned warships, though by the Danu War it had a modern air corps and even a small, respectable warship wing.

The Cordoba Army always had a difficult relationship with the Frontier Fleet, with the Cordobans seen as bullyboys for hire and the Frontier Fleet prissy busybodies. While they would work together when ordered to do so, in any other circumstance they would ignore the other as much as possible. This became particularly acute under the Interim Conclave where several Archons with demesnes in the Verge further backed the Cordoba Army, and for perhaps a decade the Mastery effectively had two parallel military commands in the Verge, albeit one substantially smaller than the other. This was the Cordoba Army on the eve of the Danu War, the war that would see it suffer its gravest defeat.

With the Gaels collapsing into conflict and the crown fleet deadlocked above Gael Crucis, the militant commanders of the Cordo Army saw the Impireachd's outer territories and client states as ripe for retaliation if not outright conquest. The richest of these was Danu, a system that itself could rival any other for wealth but who's states collectively only had a palty military thanks to most of a century of protection by the Gaels. The Avonleans of Fand were not caught unaware though and along with their allies in the Onogoro Islands managed to turn what might have been a victory lap smash and grab into a war of aerial attrition in Macha's moon system, a war that ultimately could only end one way.\

Interceptors (assault)
Having its roots in the old orbital inspection craft which were themselves evolutions of sky guard customs-dories used by local planetary policing forces under the Mastery of Stars, the modern interceptor is a powerful, high-performance military aerospace craft that shares features of fighters, gunships and transports. One of the smallest craft with sufficient range to conduct interstellar travel, interceptors have found favor in many organizations that prize the mobility and organic combat capability they offer, with many special operations groups using them to move commando platoons quickly and discretely between worlds and provide weapon support upon arrival. Others used them in more traditional roles, perfoming long-range interception (hence the name) of civilian or combat ships far from sensitive airspace. A measure of how popular the Interceptor concept is examplified in the Espada Countach series, with over 2,000 built for Mastery-era users the Countach has become the definative interceptor across the post-Mastery sphere.

The competing demands of cargo capacity, combat ability and performance

Note that the Mastery's interceptor design has no relation to the interceptor fighters found in the Verge; the latter are designed solely for air-to-air combat and would be considered Pursuit fighters under Mastery classification schemes. Scholarship attempting to be unbiased in its terminology thus generally uses the term 'assault interceptors' for the heavy attack-transport hybrids and 'fast interceptors' for the high-speed fighter.

Even before the war, Avonlea had cultivated a wide-ranging surveillance program under the auspices of the Central Reconnaisance Agency (CRA). This was to serve both their own ends and to provide a valuable strategic asset to their protectors, one that could and regularly was used as political currency. It was the CRA's spyships that picked up Cordoba Army movements and CRA analysts that put the pieces together, providing enough warning for what defenses did exist in Danu to be brought to readiness while Cordoban Army forces seized several Impireachd border posts. This meant the difference between attacking a weak target and attacking one that was weak and unprepared.

Fierce aerial combat held the Cordoba Army off any strategic position on Fand itself and they were rebuffed from the free-floating habitats of the Onogoro Islands, but the much less populous and essentially undefended world of Neit in the outer reaches of Macha's air ring fell in just a few weeks. It was then from Neit that the Cordoba Army made its headquarters and over the next several months proceeded to seize a number of the tumbling worldlets in Macha's air ring and began to establish air bases on them. From these they could attack Fand and the Onogoro Islands even when they were on the opposite side of Macha from Neit. Unfortunately for all these successes they were stalemated in making any further advances and in a wag-the-dog coup (in what was already a wag-the-dog undeclared war), the Cordoba Army managed to get a Frontier Fleet element deployed to Danu.

The arrival of reinforcements from the Mastery's Frontier Fleet ushered in a new phase of the war, what became infamously known as the "Aspid Summer" after the Aspid As-312 fighters that dominated the skies for four months. An uncompromising air superiority craft, the As-312 was known for its powerful engine and with drop tanks could range across much of Macha's air ring. Moreoever, they were flown by Frontier Fleet veterans well-versed in their handling. The various air forces of Danu suffered heavily at the hands of these pilots and their As-312, so heavily so that the delayed invasion of the Onogoro Islands could proceed. A lucky breakout by the small Onogoran fleet resulted in the Ring Dash where their trio of old capital ships managed to escape to Fand orbit and the protection of the much larger Avonlean air force. All were damaged in the course of the escape, though none fatally. They were progressively, hastily fitted with as many air defense systems as possible, their original sleek hulls and bladelike towers soon sporting all manner of ugly gun and missile mounts.

While Macha's moon system and air ring was a seemingly near-continuous swirl of aerial combat, the outer system and nearby star lanes were instead the realm of naval raiders and hunters. The Cordoba Army had a fleet, but it was mostly older or smaller ships; likewise Avonlea had the approximation of a fleet made up of converted mechants and spyships loaded with external missile pods. The problem that both sides faced was that the naval war was a side theatre; Avonlea was a populous, advanced planet and could subsist without imports and the Cordoba Army's supply demands were small enough that their convoy escorts could be 'everywhere'. Neither was remotely enough to properly interdict the system. The arrival of a squadron of Frontier Fleet ships tilted this towards the Cordoba Army for several months, with battlecarrier-launched As-312s being just as deadly to the bombers of Avonlean long-range aviation as they were to the tactical fighters flying in the Macha air ring. The Avonlean's small force of umbraships, mostly test vehicles and targets hastily modified for battle, did prove to be a continual thorn in the side of the Frontier Fleet though, and a number of freighters and even one corvette was lost to these stealthy attackers.

Despite the mounting losses and the Onogoro Islands falling under siege, the Avonleans of Fand were unwilling to surrender. As their economy began to properly convert to a war footing, newer and more effective weapons began to reach the front first as a trickle and then as a flood. Avonlean raider ships began to range even further in search of soft prey while long range aviation used faster, longer-range missiles and started to put Frontier Fleet ships into drydock. Flying from ground bases on Fand, the Pixie-II fighter - a sound aircraft, but underpowered - finally received its definative engines and graduated to being a match for the As-312. Notwithstanding these obvious military achievements, the true triumph was getting through to the Liminals and reactivating some of the centuries-old Compiler hardware. Mostly abandoned as the Compiler (and thus the operating 'software') was deactivated during the Awakening, new control systems were used to bring some of the sites back into operation. While taking temporary control of old Compiler hardware to return it to a shambling semblance of life was something of a cottage industry across the Verge, the Avonleans did so on an industrial level. Over a million Avonleans volunteered to temporary entangle themselves with the dream-controllers to enable this massive effort.

This was an incomparable improvement to Avonlean warmaking potential and over the subsequent months a seemingly endless chain of components, ordnance and finished products were constructed in a number of key sites. This was more than sufficient to overwhelm not just the available materiel of the Cordoba army but the Avonlean's own military training system. This final phase was mostly characterized by several pitched battles as the Avonleans brought their force advantage to bear. While often still incapable of matching the Cordobans in tactical skill, the Avonleans now had an insurmountable logistical advantage and they used it decisively. The last major battle was the Battle of Two Moons, which saw a force centered around the three Onogoran battleships and four new Avonlean capital ships route a larger but overall lighter mixed force of Cordoban and Frontier Fleet ships. Within weeks the Frontier Fleet ships abandoned anything too difficult to move, scuttled what they could and withdrew out of Danu. Several aerial attack runs hastened them on their way, but once the Frontier Fleet ships were outbound to the star ways the Avonleans and their allies considered it sufficient to merely shadow them at a distance with naval bombers.

With the main Frontier Fleet task force withdrawing, the Cordoban Army's strategic situation began to disintigrate. Their abandonment by their erstwhile allies could not be disguised and like a sandcastle in the waves, the outlying positions began to surrender to advancing Danan forces. On Neit at the Cordoba Army's field headquarters, anger at this abandonment gave way almost immediately to despair; it was only too obvious that without the support of the greater Mastery, defeat was certain. Perimeter posts that could not retreat in time were given orders to hold until overwhelmed and then surrender, while those that could were to return to the main camp for departure. All of this was conducted under the long 500-hour Neit night and by the morning, those elements of the Cordoba Army that could reach the departure points began their own retreat from the Danu system. Attacks by Danan aerospace ensured it wasn't a bloodless withdrawal but the last shreds of Cordoban aircraft in the Danan system covered the retreating warships and transports to the best of their abilities. Cordoban-contracted mercenary troops likewise evacuated or surrendered. The Cordoban War was over.

One of the most consequential results to come directly out of the war was the rapid and total adoption of networked warfare by the Avonleans as their newly created military matured. The CRA had preexisting intelligence networks tying together various sources; it was only a small step to start applying these more tactically. While hardly an ideal solution to the problem of tracking and intercepting inbound air attacks with the most gaping flaw being that of timeliness, as a concept these were progressively (if not frantically) improved during the course of the war. For their part, the Cordobans and Frontier Fleet detachment were unaware of the full extent of the Avonlean developments or growing sophisticated; the latter especially were fastidious about EF communications and emissions more generally and at least at the time considered the Avonlean's propensity towards extensive comms traffic to be that of an inexperienced force. On the far side of the fog of war, the Frontier Fleet saw the Avonlean defense as simply particularly spirited; any tactical lessons learned were promptly forgotten as the surviving elements were reorganized and reassigned with the entire grubby affair filed away as the Exarchate high command was increasingly distracted by the situation in the home cluster.

While the Avonleans considered the war won due to their actions, it would be more correct to say that the Mastery abandoned the war once it became clear that it would require a significant investment of military power. Avonlean warmaking potential was increasing at such a pace that in the month before the recall order was issued Frontier Fleet command believed that it would require the mobilization of the entire fleet to the theatre to assure victory with the commensurate requirement to redeploy elements of the Grand or High Skies fleet to the Verge. While not unthinkable, this also promised the likely intervention by other significant powers. This would run the risk of sparking a general war in the Verge

Among the spoils of war was the Frontier Fleet battlecarrier Neumerol. Having taken a heavy strike that shattered her portside drive ring she was stranded in the occupied port of Soretama while hasty repairs were conducted. As the Frontier fleet did its retreat out of Danu, her crew attempted to sail her out with a skeleton escort. Unfortunately within two hours the hastily-repaired drive ring cracked and she was towed back to Soretama by her escorts where she stayed for the last few weeks of the conflict. As the

Quick notes on Compiller hardware: It's rather inefficient compared to contemporary factories which are derived from and improved on. It also needs a lot of people to dream-entangle to work properly in large volumes. The structures have mostly been left derelict but can be reconditioned due to being solid-state.

Danu

Danu (Star) Fand (Primary World) Neit (secondary world) Macha (gas giant)

Flidas (mother of Fand) Aine (goddess of sun) Cliona Murias, Falias, Gorias and Findias/Finias

Federal Union of Cliona Colloquially: Cliona, The Union Ship Prefix: CS (Clionan Ship)

Avonlean Communes (-800) Tellast Principalities (-500) Kazusa Kuni (-340) Guberniya Krasiniya (-320) Sabije (-200)

Avonlea: Made up of those who were unable or unwilling to go into the Futuresleep, the Avonleans deliberately reverted to a simpler and less energetic culture, relying on handed-down access codes for fabbing the occasional critical, high-advancement item. They were a combination of several sky-cities in the Macha air ring, slowly migrating townfleets and various homesteaders who went even more back to nature. Over the centuries the loss of sundry advanced technologies and the exigencies of riding out astra incursions saw their histories become distorted and their culture rapidly evolved.

Tellast Principalities: Around -500, a relatively stable period led to the waystorms around Danu (and much of the Verge) quieting somewhat. Anticipated as the inevitable downswing in both waystorm and astral activity and consequently the planned end of the Futuresleep, astral activity dipped but did not reduce itself to nearly the expected degree of stability. However, waystorm activity did drop greatly, for a period. As such Danu and surroundings remained almost fallow with just the scattered Avonlean communities in their sky-cities mostly avoiding the planets that had proven to often be lighting rods for various astral incursions. When explorers from Moldoveanu discovered a passable route to Danu and found it effectively uninhabited, a significant number of settlers moved far in advance of any central government authority and landed on Fand (which they called Tellast). A decade later the waystorms rolled back in and the settlers found themselves cut off. Their nine main cities soon declared themselves independent principalities and they settled into a generally benign coexistence with the Avonleans. This period of stability was also when the spread of the Spires began - the inadvertent and uncontrolled expansion of Compiler hardware into the Verge, self-replicating machine probes moving outwards even as the Tellastans moved inwards.

Kazusa Kuni: Exiled from their homeland by the mechanical legions of the Kuroshogun, the shamans and followers of what would become the Kazusa Kuni fled into the tempestuous waystorms and used their powerful magics to breach into Danu, the long-rumored 'Land of the Aos Si', the 'Spire-Builders'. They instead discovered a system inhabited by two different cultures, neither particularly hostile to a group of refugees. Like the Tellastans, they settled on Fand; with ill-omens from the Spires (not to mention various local warnings) they gave any such a wide berth. Two decades later the faced down the Cylegions of Krasiniya and in the unease immediately following, struck an agreement with the Tellastans to exchange 'hostages' - which soon became the tradition of sending spouses to the other.

Guberniya Krasiniya: The Cylegion of Krasiniya crashed into Danu almost by accident, the nomad-fleet caught in a serious waystorm and pulled into Danu via the lingering remnants of the Kazusan storm magics. Damaged but well-armed and dangerous, the Cylegion immediately landed on the secondary world of Neit to conduct repairs and as was their way, prepare to conquer the rest of the system. The ensuing conflict was drawn out over more than a decade of mostly meaningless skirmishes between the unprepared Tellast-Kazusans and the destitute Cylegion. An eventual all-out war was averted not by diplomacy but by the collapse of the Cylegion leadership in a violent palace coup. The ensuing century saw continued tensions between the slowly coalescing joint Tellastan-Kazusan alliance and the Guberniya Krasiniya. While the latter had a much smaller population, they had few of the conpunctures about heavy industry and maintain an unnecessarily large military. For their part, the Kazuni had access to magics like no others in Danu and the Tellastans were well-established over centuries.

The Awakening War: After a century of intermittent tensions and occasional skimishes punctuated by one minor war, Principality and Guberniya relations deepened into crisis levels. Both sides had begun tapping ever more extensively into the spire hardware to construct weapons in a reactionary spiral.

The Guardian Constellation

• Antares
• Bellatrix
• Deneb
• Polaris
• Regulus

Constructed with the best technology out of the Compiler archives and six centuries of evolutionary algoriths, the five ships of the Guardian Constellatoin were the Clionan 'fleet in being' for over a hundred years. Built and first sortied to dissuade the emerging threat of Cylord raiders, most of their existence was instead as a hedge against potential Mastery aggression. Having acquired a reputation of power during their first few active years and the occasional individual action against outlaw privateers, they provided an implicit deterrent far outside their actual tonnage. Each one was unique; at the most they shared various components and modules to a greater or lesser extent.

To ensure the continued credibility of the deterrent they offered, the ships of the Guardian Constellation were widely dispersed at clandestine locations. In fact such was the secrecy that by the time of the Cordoba War their continued existence was considered more propaganda than reality. Certainly the greater Mastery thought as much; not unreasonable when they had not made an appearance for two generations. The connection between well-known ongoing Clionan intelligence gathering efforts and the Guardian Constellation was certainly not done by the Cordoban Army; such analysis was either not done, not properly forwarded or, most likely, simply ignored as dated and irrelevant.

The Polaris was the first ship of the Guardian Constellation to enter battle, shattering the comforting assumptions that the Clionans had no long-range aeronaval units beyond a handful of hastily-armed spy ships and converted merchant raiders. Striking against scattered Mastery merchant ships the Polaris soon accrued a tally of ships captured and scuttled. These actions did much to raise the spirits of the Clionans caught in the middle of the 'Aspid Summer'. By contrast the initial Frontier Fleet reactions were relatively lackluster with merely a half-dozen third-class frigates sent down to reinforce 'anti-raider' efforts. It was only after one of these 6,000 ton vessels was wrecked by the Polaris - ten times its tonnage - in a decisively one-sided battle that the Frontier Fleet command realized that they had no simple auxilary cruiser problem.

The problem the Frontier Fleet now found facing was multifaceted. The first of these was the straightforward military situation; the Clionans now had a capital-weight raider ship loose in the Verge that was striking at Mastery-flagged targets. Secondly, there was the intelligence situation which was itself multifacted. The Polaris was not believed to have launched from anywhere in Danu, meaning either she had been dispersed before the war or was operating from a hidden base. Moreoever, there was no reliable intelligence on her full capabilities with everything relevant dating to the mid-7th century if not before and of questionable accuracy as well. Finally and of greatest concern, there were four additional ships of the Guardian Constellation. One battle-raider was a problem, five - particularly if they managed to link up - was a threat. All this was cast against a political backdrop of multiple flashpoint wars that were steadily sapping the Mastery's strength and flexibility in the Verge. The latter, while far from central in the minds of the Almirantes that soon became focussed on sinking the Polaris, explains much of the eventual settlement of the Cordoba and related wars that flowed not from military victories and defeats but politicial realities internal to the Mastery.

The Frontier Fleet's immediate actions were twofold. The first was the redeployment of heavy forces to the Downverge theatre, the battlecarrier Glorioso and fast battlewagon Brillante along with more than a dozen second- and third-rate frigates as escorts and patrollers were the first units to arrive. Formed into Flota B they immediately began a hunt for the Polaris after escorting a trio of fleet supply craft to Desolation Reach. The second was a Notice to Aeronauts regarding the heavy raider Polaris and the threat it posed to Mastery traffic. The latter was particularly relevant; the Polaris was attacking targets in systems and starzones that heretofore had been entirely ignorant of any war. While still adhering to 'cruiser rules', the Polaris was certainly getting vengeance for the all the Clionan merchant ships foundered, impounded or simply grounded pierside as a result of the Cordoban War.

The Battle of Acuna Slough
By the time the Frontier Fleet managed run down the Polaris in the Acuna Slough, the heavy raider had captured and scuttled more than six hundred thousand tons of shipping, half of which were a pair of T-300 tankers intercepted within a day of each other along with the sky liner Prince of Tennis that had been crippled and left to drift with a well-placed shot to the drive coils. Excluding the military crews on the escorting warships that had faced the Polaris, casualties - both deaths and wounded - were been incidental and minimal as unlike the Clionan recon-strikers operating near Danu, the Polaris regularly boarded ships before scuttling them with cannonfire. Diligent efforts to reroute traffic away from the Polaris had proved mostly unsuccessful but ironically the swath of destruction meant the raider had been fairly accurately plotted to near Acuna Slough. The Glorioso and Brillante made best speed to the starzone where the protected frigate Cario had been shadowing the raider at sensor range, her signature unmistakable.

Loaded with attack craft, the Glorioso made the first attack. Launching a squadron of proton rocket-armed strikers, the intent was very much in line with conventional Mastery doctrine; the battlecraft strike was not intended to sink the raider but to slow her down so the Brillante would be able to overhaul her and then take her under fire, ultimately ending by demolishing the raider with the full weight of the two battlewagons and their flotilla. Unfortunately for the Mastery forces, this plan starts to unravel almost immediately. The first wave failed to achieve surprise and ran into stiff anti-air defenses, their proton rockets detonating in an erratic chain of explosions that only managed to overload the shield bubble of thePolaris. Undeterred, the second wave struck, this time with shock bombs. Several of these struck home and the raider's B turret was crippled. It was about then that the Glorioso picked up a second ship inbound at flank speed and before the Brillante could reach gunnery range of the Polaris, a third was picked up moving to rendezvous with the Clionan raider. They had fallen into a trap.

Or so the Mastery forces believed. What they took to be a masterful trap was in fact blind luck, with the Deneb and Regulus having emerged from their concealed moorings to join the Clionan deep sky war. The Regulus being behind the ships of Flota B was an inadvertent pincer attack. Escorted by only two small third-rate frigates, the Glorioso was caught in the middle of spotting a third wave of strikers. The ship later identified as the Regulus managed to bring the battlecarrier Glorioso under long-range fire, railguns punching through the Frontier Fleet battlecarrier's deflectors.

Air Combat

This section is written to provide a brief overview of air combat and how it works in After Ether. While warships are, to a certain degree, multirole and can be expected to perform under most circumstances, aircraft are often significantly more specialized in what they can do meaning they are strategically constrained. On the flipside, aircraft can be readily configured for different missions (ie loading air-to-air missiles or bombs or targeting pods etc) giving them a great deal of tactical flexibility.

Fundamentals
Aircraft perform a number of important taks for a battlefleet and to that end they have both advantages and limitations. This section will briefly cover these. While none of this should be novel, having these various elements laid out clearly and directly should help with both gameplay and writing.
Firstly, aircraft perform three main roles in battle:

• Scouting is a key mission and arguably the single most fundamental; a fleet that detects the other can prepare for battle - or withdraw - before having actually committed to battle and a fleet that can't is often flailing in the dark. Aircraft can effectively extend a fleet's vision radius, though obviously the further this is extended the patchier or more aircraft-intensive it becomes. In recognition of this value most mid to large warships intrinsically come with facilities for a few scouts.
• Striking is another role that aircraft are ideal for. Attack aircraft can deliver - once - the firepower of a main battery shot and because of their speed, can penetrate defensive cordons and choose their targets precisely. As a note, effective striking does not necessarily mean the target is sunk; slowing the enemy force down so the friendly force can close to gun range and force an engagement can be just as valuable. One does not need a carrier-centric navy to make good use of attack aircraft.
• Air Cover is the third role of aircraft and the sexiest as well. This involves driving off, disrupting and shooting down hostile aircraft; getting rid of enemy scouts blinds their fleet and doing the same to attack craft or fighters obviously protects friendly units and allows them to perform their tasks unmolested.

The strengths that aircraft bring are broken down as follows:

• Speed is a key advantage aircraft have. While having only a fraction of the flight range of a warship, they can cover this distance in a matter of hours at the most, as opposed to days or weeks.
• Precision is another. As mentioned above, aircraft can easily select targets, avoid obstacles and deliver ordnance where it is most critical.
• Payload is a third advantage aicraft have. As they are rarely much more than engines, fuel, various electronics and a pilot, they can deliver a staggering amount of ordnance relative to their dry weight.
• Price is the final main advantage of aircraft over individual naval units. While some high-spec craft can certainly come with price tags that bust banks instead of tanks, most aircraft tend to be affordable for the advantages they bring.

Of course nothing is free, and aircraft have important limitations to go with their strengths.

• Loiter Time is a critical limitation on aircraft. While some ("amphibians") are capable of throttling down or entirely shutting down their engines for extended periods and drift through the ether, the vast majority of aircraft can only keep operating for so long. Fuel concerns are not the only issue, crew fatigue is another. Generally speaking aircraft are assigned a mission, they do it and they return. If you need something to sit somewhere indefinately, don't use an aircraft.
• Flight Range is another limitation, but one that can be adjusted at the expense of ordnance. All aircraft have a maximum number of range bands they can perform missions to, with some missions having a positive or negative modifier - a plane heavily loaded with bombs will simply not fly as far as one lightly loaded with a quartet of dogfight missiles. Trading bombs for drop tanks can reduce hitting power but increase flight range. As this is a fairly important part of missions, see that section for more detail.
• Combat Endurance is related to both of the above and is the flipside of the disproportionate firepower an aircraft can deliver. It can deliver that once before needing to return to rearm. This is a critical aspect of the phase/counterphase system; aircraft can deliver punishing pulses of damage but they cannot sustain.

Please note that this is written with the understanding that deep-diving into the specifics of your air campaign is not necessary. "I have fighters, have them protect my fleet" is quite sufficient. Your officers are assumed to try their best.

To perform their missions, aircraft are armed with three types of weapons:

• Guns are the standard close-combat weapon of aircraft. Not a great deal needs to be said about these, they are short ranged but have the advantage of 'sufficient' ammunition to be effectively unlimited for rules purposes. Guns however generally lack the firepower to threaten large objects. Note that stereotypical Macross-style dogfight mini-missiles that come in quanties of thousands per aircraft also count as guns for game purposes.
• Bombs cover both guided and unguided weapons as well as aerial rockets and the like. They are highly effective at blowing things up but obviously have short effective range. As they are essentially nothing more than warheads with some guidance hardware bolted on, warheads give the best returns on inflicting damage relative to payload.
• Missiles are the third of the three; they are similiar to bombs in that they only have so many uses per mission but they also operate best when properly supported by onboard electronics. In return for these limits, missiles are standoff weapons, allowing aircraft to attack from range - be it to shoot down an enemy before they get to a dangerous range or to strike outside of a defender's flak envelope.

units: Great League (GL): Unit of deep sky distance. Metric Great Leagues are used today, which are slightly shorter than Imperial Great Leagues. Wegstunde (wg): Unit of time-distance for deep sky travel. 1,000 Wegstunde equals one Metric Great League. Cosknot (ct): Unit of travel speed for deep sky travel. 1 Cosknot equals 1 Wegstunde/hour. Zeiss-Mach Shock Number (ZM, or commonly just Z): Unit of travel speed for high speed craft. Nonlinear relation to Cosknots and depends on local condition.

[b]A Crisis in Fleet Defense[/b]

For centuries the Mastery relied on three pillars to protect their ships; technological superiority, air superiority and lightning fields. Such was the Mastery's advantages that even the most determined and suicidal attacker had no chance of penetrating their fleets and inflicting damage. Even when facing the Alexandrines and Molveanans this held true, but not forever. By the latter half of the 7th century MM the Alexandrian Empire had introduced several models of heavy bombers - something the Mastery had never bothered with - and their own war mecha. While objectively inferior in performance to anything the Mastery had, they were clearly catching up fast. Of mounting concern was the appearance of the Yusof Yu-145 heavy bomber and slung under its fuselage, the massive YSR-3 cruise missile. This bulky weapon was large enough to carry a nuclear weapon 50-80wg and while originally intended for the strategic strike role it was soon clear that the onboard remote control system would also allow it to be used to attack ships under way. Even though continued development of this weapon system (and many others) stagnated under the Tretyakov administration the Frontier Fleet began a serious reappraisal of its air defense doctrines, but worse problems were to come.

A decade later the Frontier Fleet was deeply embroiled in the Polyarny War which by MM0693 expanded to the Danu system when the semiautonomous Cordoba Army attacked the Clionan Federal Union. This reckless enlargement of the ongoing Verge disorder into a previously neutral state unshackled Clionan industry; instead of a quick victorious war the Cordoban Army found itself almost immediately caught in a quagmire against a state that was steadily converting to a total war footing. Clionan aircraft fought doggedly against those of the Cordoban Army and within two months the first cruise missile carriers began to appear. While hardly immune to aerofighter interception were they picked up early enough, their missiles demonstrated 200wg range which was quite enough to seriously hamper defensive actions. Similar missiles appeared on Clionan recon-strikers and combined they began to take a toll on ground sites, supply ships and even several warbirds. By the ignomious retreat of the battered Frontier Fleet just before cease-fire the latest iteration of Clionan missiles were reaching free-sky speeds of Z3.5 and causing serious problems for Mastery fire-control systems; the battlecarrier [i]Adamastor[/i] was hit by three missiles and staggered out of the system, almost foundering before reaching a friendly harbour.

[b]Star Dial[/b] The "Star Dial" is a classic deep-sky motive system, in use in various forms for three millenia and the first truly effective and fast way to get between the stars. It operates by effectively 'locking on' to a distant star and then sliding towards it while significantly reducing the gravitational pull of the origin state, essentially falling away from the latter and towards the destination. While quite elegant as a stellar engine, Star Dials are really only good at going in straight lines and thus cannot avoid things like bad weather. A second engine system - typically aetheric spheres or force motors - is also required for actually puttering around a star system. Even though they need one or more properly trained wizards to perform the initial navigational grav-lock as well as regular en-route calibrations, the required skills are not terribly difficult to learn and all but the most inept magi can operate a Star Dial. Star Dials are still in use among those without the benefit of modern shipbuilding advances, but they have long been superseded by other methods.

[b]Aetheric Spheres[/b] One of the earliest methods of controlling ether mechanically (as opposed to with magic), the Aetheric Sphere is fundamentally quite simple; they are thick glass spheres filled with compressed and electrically charged ether and then securely strapped to the vehicle inside which it is mounted. Currents induced in the ether inside the orbs results in surprisingly sophisticated control over force and direction and thus the aetheric sphere was the motive system of choice for quite literally millenia; refinements and additions eventually saw them become a familiar warp drive of today; the long warp nacelle of charged ether hearkens back to these distant ancestors. The most significant improvement to the Aetheric Sphere was the innovation of enriched (and eventually highly enriched) ether for the spheres. While this came with various overhead costs - and the issue of what to do with the highly toxic en-ether afterwards - using purified and enriched ether was a significant generational leap in performance. While dated today aetheric spheres are a cheap and very accessible technology that need no complicated hardware to construct, though a solid understanding of electrodynamics goes a very long way in properly constructing their control mechanisms.

[b]Starbow Breaker[/b] The so-called "Starbow Breaker" is an extreme application of highly purified sildron combined with magic sufficiently strong to heavily twist the laws of physics in deep sky. It is highly power intensive and requires the personal attendance of an archmage to function, but is extremely fast. This ensured that the Starbow Breaker would always be limited in numbers and fitted to only the most important of ships.

[b]Starburst[/b] A downscaled and much-simplified version of the Starbow Breaker, a Starburst is a pre-charged force induction coil that can be ignited to propel the fitted ship at high velocity down a star way. While relatively straightforward to use - essentially point your ship in the direction you want to go and activate - a Starburst has important limitations as well. The most central of these is the fact that a Starburst is effectively single-use and while their mechanical components are robustly built they need to be refilled and recharged by a mage after each use. While this was offered at any spaceport worth the name in the Canon Period, it still meant that going somewhere without services at the far end meant you were crawling back home on whatever you had for a secondary motor. Starbursts are only marginally steerable once in motion and have no throttle; they can be cut to dissipate their remaining charge but that is about it. A Starburst motor is generally charged with a precalculated amount of ether for the ship's tonnage and distance to be travelled plus a small extra so in practice a Starburst is normally just ridden until it naturally dissipates. It was uncommon but not unusual for ships to have two Starbursts, allowing them to make a trip and a return without needing servicing. The second was generally charged with extra ether to make up for the inevitable losses over time, but more than two Starbursts was generally a recipe for excessive complexity, unreliability and an engine room full of poisonous ether condensate when the glassware shatters after a month of stress. The Starburst had broadly fell out of use by the High Imperial Period as contemporary spacedrives could get comparable speeds without the sundry hassles and then returned to use in the post-Ragnarok technical nadir. Today they are once again eclipsed by modern propulsion systems though downscaled derivatives are commonly still found on deep sky attack craft.

[b]Starsender[/b] More of a concept than a specific technology, Starsenders (also known as spatial catapults and similar terms) have webbed known space for more than two millenia. Another outgrowth of the Starbow Breaker magitechnology,

[b]Gap Demon[/b] Affects summoning and other time/space magic. Operates by binding a superdimensional entity or "Gap Demon" to a vessel. Such a form of propulsion is not the most impressive in terms of physical performance but allows a vessel to break the boundaries between dimensions or even other more esoteric borders with some refinement.