Warcaster Faction Overview Iron Star Alliance Part I: Illimitable Dominion

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by Jason Soles

To understand the Iron Star Alliance, you must first understand the underlying principle upon which it is predicated: Those who stand united are strong, and those divided are weak. And there is no place for weakness in the fierce competition for survival that plays out across the stars. For the Alliance, dedication to this principle has meant a millennium of ruthless expansion through annexation, coercion, and conquest.

Despite having spread rapidly across the vastness of space, human civilization had taken only the most tenuous hold on the Hyperuranion before the Alliance. Preyed upon from all sides by threats both internal and external, isolated, exposed, and unfamiliar with the natural phenomena and geography of the thousand worlds they now occupied, not to speak of the strange galactic tides and the raw fury of the stars themselves, the fortunes and very survival of humans were slaved to ancient and unpredictable void gates created by an unknown and hostile godlike power. Factionalized and afraid, humanity had long sought even the semblance of peace and security in the face of a cold and uncaring universe.

From out of this howling vacuum, the Alliance was forged.

What began as a pact of support and mutual protection among a handful of desperate settlements, outposts, and city-states grew into a galaxy-spanning empire of unparalleled strength and influence. Building upon its early successes, the Iron Star Alliance grew rapidly as it traded on the promise of security, prosperity, and stability. Not all who were extended the offer of membership, however, were willing to sacrifice their freedoms and autonomy for peace. Many refused to join the Alliance and came to oppose it.

When rebuffed, the bloc has always responded with political and economic pressure underscored by the promise of violence, setting the stage for distrust and tensions that could easily escalate into protracted conflicts and bloody border wars. Those who refuse membership face blockades, piracy, and the threat of direct invasion. Opposition that shows any weakness will be crushed, and those who stand strong will be isolated and choked off from the great shipping lanes that have become the life’s blood of the flourishing empire.

The Iron Star Alliance sees itself as the guardian of humanity. Its members are the torchbearers of order and civilization, the flame in the darkness of a hostile universe. The actions they take and the terms they offer may be harsh, but such actions are weighed against the risks of failure and annihilation. Those who join the Alliance are seen as adding to the peace and wellbeing of the collective, while those who refuse are viewed as an existential threat, further fueling the chaos and disorder that jeopardize survival itself.

When a territory or principality joins the Alliance—whether willingly or through force of arms—it is appointed a governor and is formally admitted into the Supreme Assembly as a province. Every province and chartered corporation in the Alliance is represented in the Supreme Assembly, the great parliamentary council that oversees the empire. If a territory entered the Alliance peacefully, its governor will likely be chosen from amongst its local ruling class. If the province was conquered, however, it will be appointed a military governor, a position rightfully considered a spoil of war. More rarely, if a local faction aided the Alliance in the conquest of a given territory, its governor may be chosen from amongst the bloc’s allies in the territory, thus rewarding their agents for their aid in pacifying their neighbors. Such governors might be officially rewarded as “heroes of the empire” but will locally be remembered as traitors.

Governors generally serve for life but can abdicate their positions or are removed outright by a vote of the Supreme Assembly. New provinces admitted into the Alliance are expected to assimilate and adjust to its rules and laws quickly, but they will also be allowed to retain elements of their unique cultures and traditions. While all provincial leaders are officially recognized as “governors” within the Supreme Assembly, their methods of address in their home territories may vary. At home, a governor may be recognized by a noble or military rank or by another traditional title native to the region the governor commands.

In addition to its home provinces, the Alliance also maintains a number of client states on its borders that have not been formally admitted into the bloc. While technically independent (at least for a time), these territories look to the Supreme Assembly for direction and support. Such arrangements benefit the Alliance in a number of ways. A client state can appear to act independently, shielding the Alliance from actions that might be unpopular or that it may wish to deny. Client states also offer the Alliance a buffer between its home provinces and the other hostile powers of the Hyperuranion. While an incursion into Alliance territory may require a formal military response, the same is not true of incursions into client territories, which can be ignored or brushed aside in the politics of the Supreme Assembly.

The citizens of the client states are not afforded the same rights, protections, and privileges as true citizens of the Alliance. They can be more easily exploited because they lack any representation in the Supreme Assembly. The Alliance also reserves the right to annex its client states at any time, which is presented as both carrot and stick to the territory’s local rulers. On one hand, the promise of full membership can entice would-be governors to further squeeze their populations on behalf of the Alliance. On the other hand, the threat of forced annexation can be used to keep a potential warlord in line.

The borders of the Alliance are not fixed. They shift continually as new territories are annexed and old territories are lost and reclaimed through endless cycles of rebellion, warfare, and happenstance. Gaps in the human understanding of the void gates, coupled with a nearly complete reliance on them for interplanetary travel and commerce, can lead to long-term isolation of even major production and population centers. Such circumstances, while mercifully rare, are highly unpredictable and can last for years or decades, sometimes even centuries. These disruptions not only close off whole territories but potentially access to void gates and territories beyond them as well. Whole networks of void gates can be temporarily lost, severing vital supply lines and jeopardizing the survival of any outposts and settlements relying upon them.

The reliance on void gates has also warped the very concept of what even constitutes borders across the Thousand Worlds. Networks of void gates can divide worlds, sometimes making destinations light years apart seem like neighbors while cities on different sides of the same planet may seem impossibly far apart. What is far more important than control of terrestrial territories is control of the void gate networks that connect them.

The Alliance has long understood this principle and has taken great care to study the nature of the void gates and their operation. In fact, next to the acquisition of Arcanessence itself, the resource most valued by the Iron Star Alliance is access and control of void gates, which the bloc seeks to monopolize whenever possible. Virtually all Alliance territories are centered around and connected to networks of void gates. Furthermore, the Alliance also has amassed the greatest knowledge of void gates amongst the human powers. They have extensively mapped these networks, which are amongst their most carefully guarded state secrets. For the Alliance, control of the void gates represents not only control of commerce and movement but also control of the future. Each gate network discovered expands the potential for human colonization exponentially.

Through this networks of void gates, the Alliance maintains both its great trade ways and its secret military shipping lanes. It is even believed that some well-established corporations maintain their own secret trade lanes by din of tradition, ancient charters, and force of arms. These trade lanes represent both the strength of the Alliance and its hidden weakness. When trade and materials flow most freely, the Alliance is at its most stable. Disrupt the flow of trade and supplies, and the whole system careens into disorder.

The Alliance is truly vast and commands virtually limitless resources. Its staggering scale in terms of raw population, industry, and controlled territory, however, requires both an expansive bureaucracy and septarchy of consuls to maintain.

Seven in number, the Consuls of the Alliance serve as heads of state with command authority over all aspects of the bloc’s military and government. Appointed by the Supreme Assembly as the first among equals, the septarchs are charged with important decision making in times of need. The Assembly itself is a large and unwieldy legislative body built around the idea of endless debate and compromise rather than the rapid and decisive decision making required to address the short-term disasters and threats faced by the sprawling Alliance. While the septarchs hold overlapping authorities, they are expected to act in concert in the interests of the Alliance. Disagreements between them are resolved by majority vote.

The Ministries of the Alliance—the great bureaucratic apparatus of the state tangentially overseen by the Supreme Assembly—are charged with collecting taxes, regulating shipping, overseeing supply concerns, managing disaster relief, and generally overseeing all aspects of life and commerce within the Alliance. The Ministries employ well over four percent of the entire population of the bloc and carry out virtually all aspects of government throughout Alliance space. The Supreme Assembly may write the laws, but the Ministries are charged with enacting them.

The Ministries are also charged with maintaining uniformity and standardization throughout the territories of the Alliance. While the most mundane expression of this responsibility is the calibration of weights and measures, standardization has become something of a guiding philosophy within the bloc. Military readiness, interplanetary commerce, and cultural identity all depend on it.

The true backbone of the Alliance, however, is its military might. While the promise of peace and prosperity may unite the Alliance in common purpose, without the military power to defend its territories and project its influence, there can be no lasting stability or prosperity. As with the sheer bureaucratic scale of the Ministries, the Alliance also requires a vast military to defend its borders and shipping lanes, hold its territories, prosecute its wars, and conquer new lands to further its appetite for expansion.

The military forces of the Alliance are dominated by the Paladins, elite soldiers trained and equipped to act in concert with the bloc’s Warcasters. In addition to these forces, there are also countless private armies in the service of powerful nobles and corporate interests, provisional militias and security forces commanded by local governors, and a latticework of law enforcement bodies, each with distinct yet overlapping jurisdictions.  And that is not even to speak of the justicars, the roving marshals and their retinues, who are granted vast authority to enforce the laws of the Alliance and pass judgment on those dwelling within its borders.

The justicars are appointed by the Supreme Assembly and hold a singular authority to pass judgment and carry out sentencing upon the citizens of the Alliance. When the rule of law breaks down and the dictates of the Alliance go unenforced over its territories, the justicars are dispatched. There is nowhere they will not go and virtually no one they are unwilling to pass their judgment upon. In the service of their office, they have been invested with powers of life and death. They can sit in judgment at trial, order summary executions, and commute sentences at will. The justicars are backed by the full weight of the military and the Alliance’s myriad law enforcement bodies in the execution of their duties. In the Alliance’s convoluted system of ranks and title, only the septarchs personally bear more authority than the justicars.

The Paladins, however, are broadly considered to be the true face of the Alliance’s military might. Such soldiers are drawn from across the empire. Each province owes the bloc its due in taxes, raw materials, finished goods, and personnel.  Most fresh recruits will end up in the service of the Ministries, while about a third will be trained as soldiers.

Those citizens who are to serve as soldiers are transported far from home for processing and training. As with the standardization of weights and measures, the Alliance expects uniform professionalism from its soldiers. Those who cannot pass the rigorous requirements are drummed out or else are moved into the bureaucratic service. By the time Paladin soldiers complete their training, they will be transformed into living weapons of war, ready to serve their commanders without question or fear of death.

A defining aspect of the Paladin forces is their connection to the Warcasters they serve.  Paladin soldiers learn to fight alongside and against warjacks. They learn how to operate complex mechanika weapons and equipment and to anticipate the powerful effects of Cyphers in battle. They also face the raw fury of destructive Cyphers directed at them in the service of their training for war in the Hyperuranion.

Military Cyphers themselves are carefully managed and regulated. They too must be standardized so that every combatant throughout the Alliance ranks, from the Warcaster to the commanding offers serving under them to the very soldiers in the field, can anticipate their effects and call upon the Warcaster’s aid in times of need and to know the form that aid will take when it comes.

The Alliance’s catalogue of official military Cyphers is regularly scrutinized and reviewed by military arcanists in the employ of the Ministry of War. New Cyphers and improvements on the old ones are rigorously tested and perfected before entering field trials. Eventually, a new Cypher may be approved for active service, a process that could be years in the making.

The sheer size of the Alliance provides its own challenges. Vast shipping lanes, void gate networks, valuable holdings, and major population centers must all be defended. Hostile territories, whether recently annexed or actively rebelling, must be pacified. As a result, huge amounts of resources in the form of soldiers, ships, and support are tied up in simply maintaining the stability of the empire. The requirements of the Alliance’s vast bureaucracy and careful planning make its supply chains particularly vulnerable to disruptions that can leave whole worlds starving or great factories idle for long periods of time. Paladin forces patrol and guard the Alliance’s borders, serve as garrisons on governmental and merchant vessels, act as peace keepers on conquered worlds, and generally serve as the soldiers of the empire in any role that is required of them.

Though trained in great numbers and stationed throughout the empire, the Paladin expeditionary forces that serve alongside Warcasters are typically quite small. They are deployed in numbers limited to what a Warcaster can actively support in the field. A full accompaniment of Paladins is generally less than fifty soldiers, divided among small combat squads, officers, and support staff. The small scale of these forces, however, belies their true strength when supported by a Warcaster.

Paladins are typically equipped with some of the most advanced mechanika weaponry and equipment available to the human powers. As with the Alliance’s military Cyphers, these weapons are painstakingly developed and rigorously tested before being adopted by the Alliance. Such high standards, however, can make iterative improvements slow to implement.

Weaponry and gear must not only be manufactured to a high standard, but it must also be designed in such a way as to be quickly produced and in large numbers. Budgetary and production concerns can take precedence over concerns of performance, a necessary, if unfortunate, complication indicative of the bureaucracy of the Alliance. Sometimes it is not the best weapon or force shield that is adopted; instead, it is the most reliable for the cost and complexity required for its production. One must remember it is not the military that controls the purse strings but the politicians of the Supreme Assembly and the bureaucrats of the Ministry of War.

This rigorous standardization also extends to the fighting forces themselves. The Alliance wants soldiers, not heroes. Such troops are drilled relentlessly until they can perform like clockwork in battle. Those who show exemplary proficiency or leadership capabilities may be placed in specialized roles or trained as officers. Though no small number of candidates for the officer corps comes from aristocratic families, the military of the Alliance is theoretically meritocracy, which favors skill and experience over patronage. Furthermore, the politics and culture of the Alliance force their military officers into rigid molds.

The officers of the Alliance tend to be conservative and traditional with little appetite for experimentation or reckless action. That said, the further from the Alliance’s centers of power and the prying eyes of the government, the less true this seems to be. Success and Warcasters make their own rules.

The Warcasters themselves are the Alliance’s most powerful military asset. They are widely seen as true and dashing national heroes set apart from the rank and file. Both independently powerful and invaluable to the empire, Warcasters are afforded great latitude in their tactics and personal conduct, latitude that is the envy of the officer corps they serve alongside. They are, however, military assets that are part of a vast military war machine. Though relatively high-ranking, Warcasters have their orders to follow like anyone else. They are sometimes tasked with serving under more senior officers or justicars, even on their own ships. In such cases, a Warcaster may even be relegated to serving under the tactical authority of another in battle. This is especially true in the case of major conflicts in which the actions of several Warcasters, their ships, and their cadres of soldiers must be coordinated in concert.

Despite the Alliance’s aspirations toward unity and mutual prosperity, the bloc is also a hotbed of intrigue and imperial machinations. The population of the Alliance is slaved to the ambitions of its rulers, all of whom have a desire to make their place in history and to be set apart as the first among equals. This leads in turn to considerable and constant competition, making rivals of every citizen, regardless of their place in society.

Outside of the military, and too often within it, opportunities to gain honor and prestige are monopolized by powerful interests and noble families. They seek to hoard such opportunities both to add to their own prestige and to deprive their rivals of them. Backed by a long tradition of patronage between the wealthy and powerful and the average citizens of the empire, this leads to intense factionalization within the Alliance, as influential and well-established families seek to elevate those loyal to them and to play kingmaker to future generations.

Success is well rewarded, and failure is seldom forgotten. Keeping one’s reputation clean is as vital as success. Despoiling one’s reputation will lead to reduced opportunities and the possibility of ruin. Professional soldiers and officers who fall from grace may find some measure of redemption serving as part of a private army or by joining the clandestine services.

Externally, the Alliance’s myriad enemies plot to steal its secrets, disrupt its trade and supply lines, run afoul its military operations, and sabotage its industry and research. Internally, politicians and provisional governors conspire against their rivals, nobles feud amongst those of their class, corporations seek to drive each under or to plunder industrial secrets, and the government itself seeks to further subjugate its citizens in the name of continual prosperity.

Knowing all too well the nature of the society they had wrought, the architects of the Alliance established the Secret Defense Services centuries ago to coordinate intelligence gathering and to defend their state secrets. The SDS is divided into Sections, each with its own brief and well-defined arenas of operation. While the true number of Sections and their defined roles are themselves something of a state secret, a number have become quite familiar to the enemies of the Alliance. Other Sections are believed to exist, but they are neither officially recognized by the Alliance nor have they been definitively exposed by their rivals.

Intelligence analysis and coordination is the domain of Section 1.

Section 3 is the Alliance’s primary counter-intelligence service. Headquartered on Laris IV, Section 3’s clandestine agents operate throughout Alliance space. They serve as both a security apparatus, protecting the Alliance’s assets, secrets, and personnel, and as a secret police force, keeping a watchful eye on malfeasance throughout Alliance society, as well as rooting out enemy agents wherever they are active.

Section 4 is the Alliance’s feared covert intelligence gathering service known to operate outside the territories of the bloc. While the location of the agency’s headquarters within Alliance space is a kept secret, Section 4 is known to maintain networks of agents, secret bases, and safe houses throughout the Hyperuranion. It is believed by some intelligence services among their enemies that Section 4 benefits from priority access to secret trade lanes and void gates, some of which may not even be known to the Alliance’s military forces.

The mysterious Section 6 oversees the Alliance’s arcane research and security. It is their agents who are charged with mapping the Alliance’s networks of void gates. As such, Section 6 agents often accompany military forces on expeditions if there is any likelihood of the operation providing access to unknown or previously unmapped networks of void gates. Section 6 also oversees the training of the Alliance’s weavers and Warcasters, along with the development of military mechanika.

Section 7 is charged with xeno research and affairs. Their agents investigate and catalog alien ruins, technologies, and languages with the intent of furthering military preparedness and harnessing technological advancements in the interest of the Alliance. Section 7 agents often accompany military expeditionary forces on the fringes of Alliance space.

The Alliance is the first and greatest of the human powers. It has outlasted and defeated some rivals while providing the impetus for others to rise. Without an imperial Alliance to operate in opposition to, for example, it is hard to imagine the Marcher Worlds would have ever organized under the banner of the Coalition of Free States. And although the great human Factions continue to fight their endless wars as they have done since fleeing their dying world, the return of the Empyreans foreshadows a new age in which the old powers must adapt or else risk being swept aside by the great celestial currents of the Hyperuranion. Despite its draconian policies, internal divisions, and deep-seated paranoia of its neighbors, for its countless millions of citizens and perhaps for the whole of the human race, the Alliance offers not only their best chance for prosperity and stability but also potentially for survival itself.

Insider, Warcaster: Neo-Mechanika
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