Tag: Worldbuilding

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The Military Brotherhoods – The Confraternity of the Starship and Sword

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Origin

The Confraternity is a relatively new Military Brotherhood, but it is also one of the fastest growing.  Relatively poor as far as such organizations go, the brothers of the Confraternity are eager to make their mark.  Given the Confraternity’s somewhat dubious origin, this has made a number of planets extremely wary of them, but they have acquitted themselves well, putting their past successfully behind them.

Unlike the Caractacan Brotherhood, the Confraternity has no one founder.  The First Brothers were in fact a mercenary company working the Sobretan Circuit.  The Circuit is perhaps misnamed; there is no formal agreement as to what systems comprise it, and many trouble spots that are considered parts of it are actually outside the Sobretan Sector.  Many of the worlds on the Circuit are perpetual flashpoints, many of them jointly colonized by outsystem factions that then had a falling out.  They are not necessarily always made up of different races, either.  Some of the nastiest wars have been human on human, or forvak on forvak.

Some of the older members of Rheloman’s Company, a mix of humans, forvaks, gordoks, and sefkhit, were talking one day, and hatched on the plan to start their own Military Brotherhood.  No one can be sure of their exact motivation.  The Confraternity’s founding documents are full of high ideals and a story about the First Brothers’ weariness at the constant wars and corruption they had seen.  Some of it is doubtless true.  There are other tales told, however, that the Confraternity was an attempt by the First Brothers to win some greater legitimacy among higher-paying clientele.  It could even have been conceived as a front to allow for quick smash-and-grab robberies of rich clients who let the Confraternity in out of trust.  A Military Brotherhood is far more respectable than a Private Military Company, in many eyes. Continue reading

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Alien Anthropology – The Triamic

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A Strange And Tragic People

The Triamic are not the first sapient race in the galaxy to go extinct.  They are, however, one of the most recent, at least as far as is known to students of alien anthropology.  Even more tragically, they were well on their way to becoming the first true galactic superpower, just before the collapse.

History

Having independently developed their own version of the Bergenholm field before they attempted their own diaspora, the Triamic exploded out of their home system almost overnight.  As a pack-based society, they had already established the Hegemony in their home system, with a complex system of dominance and patronage that kept the myriad packs from each other’s throats.  They had a highly sophisticated civilization, and when they made first contact with an alien race, the ekuz, they were actually the more technologically advanced of the two. Continue reading

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Alien Anthropology – The Yeheri

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In this latest installment of the Alien Anthropology series, we meet the yeheri.  These beings appear in the opening chapters of The Fall of Valdek.  As before, this post will be linked to the Alien Races page under History and Background.

Yeheri History

A cruiser from Enekosh made first contact with the yeheri.  Enekosh is a prosperous sefkhit world, known at the time for its idealism.  In large part due to this idealism, the cruiser’s captain was completely unprepared for what they encountered.

The Yaahaag system was split up between three major empires.  All three had been intermittently at war for over a century in Yaahaag reckoning.  (Yaahaag orbits its sun in roughly 7,400 hours.)  They had also expanded throughout their system, colonizing outer worlds and asteroids.  The wars between empires often flared up on and between those outer worlds and asteroids, even when uneasy peace reigned on the homeworld.

Without understanding the yeheri languages, or the dynamics of the three empires, the sefkhit made contact, seeking to make new friends and welcome a younger race into the loose galactic community.

Exactly what happened has never been adequately explained; the ship never returned to Enekosh, and the yeheri have never been forthcoming with the details.  But certain details have been determined by context and study.  The sefkhit cruiser made contact with the Kahapar Concordiat, the most militant and totalitarian of the three empires. Continue reading

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Alien Anthropology: The Ekuz

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This is the first of a series of posts that will dig deeper into the lore and background, to be later linked to the History and Background pages.  The Alien Anthropology posts will be linked directly to the Alien Races page.

Ekuz History

The ekuz diaspora began about three centuries after the human (by ekuz reckoning; their homeworld’s year is approximately 9,992 hours, as opposed to the 8,766 hours of the Terran standard used by most human historians).   The extent of ekuz worlds is still considerably smaller than the human worlds.  They are thickest through the Norma, Crux, and Carina arms of the galaxy.

According to some ekuz sources (though the veracity and details are in doubt in some circles), the diaspora started due to a looming interplanetary war in the ekuz home system.   (There are hundreds of different names and nearly as many guesses as to the homeworld’s location).  One or more of the factions, rather than risk a cataclysmic war that would have involved both nuclear and asteroid weapons, instead built sublight arks from hollowed-out asteroids and fled the system.  Some ekuz historians suggest that the tensions leading up to the war might even have been due to one or more factions observing the construction of the arks and believing them to be first-strike asteroid weapons.  No one really knows. Continue reading

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On Aliens

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You Can Hardly Have A Space Opera Without Aliens

Okay, it is possible.  Isaac Asimov’s Foundation features humans only.  But a mainstay of the genre has long been the appearance of strange alien races, some far more advanced than humans.  They were in E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensman series, in Buck Rogers, and of course in Star Wars and most of the major space operas on TV, such as Star Trek, Babylon 5, and Farscape.

Part of any adventure story has long been visiting the strange, the foreign, and the exotic.  From Allan Quatermain to Tarzan to John Carter to Luke Skywalker, the adventurer has found himself surrounded by those unlike himself.  Aliens provide that exoticism and sense of a far bigger universe. Continue reading