Ouranomachy
Operatic Tactical Warfare in the
Spinward Rift
I've always liked tactical wargaming, although I never have time for it these days. Either way, I usually enjoy the list-building aspect just as much as the actual game (especially as I'm never the best tactician). Probably the wargame equivalent of OSR-style rules is Fast and Dirty, which has been a basically open-source, extremely flexible skirmish ruleset for years. (More resources available here. However, there hasn't really been a complete "generic" setting for the game, so here's a bit of a go at it. I use the term "operatic tactical warfare" because I'm integrating more "heroic" aspects than the speculative fiction mould FAD defaults to.
The Spinward Rift
Centuries ago, Earth was drowned by rising tides of water
and blood. The survivors clambered aboard scores of generation ships, forging
thousands of new identities and creeds during the decades spent en route to
their new home.
The ships’ designers had sent them to the Spinward Rift, a
stretch of the galaxy with an exponentially higher density of habitable planets
than any other ever detected. Even if their flight paths diverged, it was
reasoned, crews would be able to redirect to a convenient second, third, or
fourth choice, rather than being carried by their momentum infinitely through
the void.
Each ship expected that, due to the realities of
interstellar travel, they would barely ever have contact with one another once
they arrived in the Rift. They were wrong.
Dreamgates
Cyclopean gateways, fashioned out of an unknown, iridescent
black metal, were spread across most of the Rift’s worlds. There was no rhyme
nor reason to their placement – most had twelve or fifteen, some thirty or
fifty, and they were scattered across verdant forest worlds, fertile
archipelagoes, blasted acid deserts, hellish primordial worlds, and airless
rogue planets alike. Nor did they provide instantaneous travel, as their first
explorers expected – though certainly superluminal, travel between worlds still
took weeks, sometimes even months. Furthermore, they only connected a few of
the closest planets, and their energy weakened when transmitting large amounts
of matter. And no other sign of their builders was ever found.
Nevertheless, they were exponentially more efficient than
the generation ships that brought humanity to the Rift, and soon only
rudimentary, system-bound craft roamed through space. The Dreamgates became the
exclusive means of interplanetary transportation, and colonists raced between
them to discover new resources for plunder, the crashed remains of failed
ships, and to make links with the burgeoning cities of the successful ones. But
this travel was not without cost. Dreamgate users, in their liminal days
within, experienced strange, waking dreams, of fantastical landscapes, strange
beasts, non-Euclidean flora, and of the spaces between stars. The initial
studies revealed no behavioral or psychological effects, and the dreams did
demonstrate continuity of consciousness, which put to rest early fears that the
dreamgates killed those who entered them, and simply reconstituted a copy on
the other side. So the colonists continued their use, not knowing the seed a
select few of them were left with…
The Empire
One in one million Dreamgate travelers, it soon became
clear, manifested odd powers. Repeated use made this more likely, and one
family of eager explorers – the Porphyrii – began to benefit more than most.
The Porphyrii, guided in part by the uncanny intuitions and parapsychological
abilities they were developing, devised a genetic test that did what no
previous researchers had done, and isolated a stretch of DNA associated with
the Dreamgates’ effects. They immediately began locating other psionics and
bringing them into the family, or killing them. While other groups soon
followed their lead, the Porphyrii had an insurmountable first-mover advantage,
and within a generation had unified nearly every colonized world under their
banner. They declared an Empire, with no qualifier – there was, after all, no
other.
The Collapse
But heredity, even coupled with psionic power, is no guarantor
of good rule. The Porphyrii were no exception. For centuries, their abilities
and the rifles of their Phalanx kept order in the Rift, even as successive
Emperors lost themselves to hedonistic dissolution, grandiose bouts of
self-deification, or quixotic attempts to map the ends of the dreamgate
network. Worlds chafed under misrule, rose in revolt, or had to be granted
forms of autonomy.
Then, Emperor Ouranov, the Empire’s twenty-fourth of their
line, found a new object of worship. Wracked by weeks of visions, akin to those
felt within the passage of the dreamgates, they felt something calling.
Something akin to angels, or aliens, both entities that humanity thought had
passed long ago. There was another step, they felt, beyond the rift, beyond
even the fabric of spacetime, even beyond the strange beings that built the
dreamgates. It was humanity’s time to take that step, even if the masses could
never see.
Ouranov first converted the remnants of their family to this
insight, and bade them scatter among the worlds, to prepare for their
unveiling. Second, they contacted the Phalanx, asking the Empire’s famed army
to lock down public plazas and buildings to stave off the possibility of
unrest. Unfortunately, they did not react as had been foreseen.
It took time for the coup to emerge, so byzantine were the Phalanx’s
ranks. Most were long dissatisfied with the errands given them, by their lack
of success pacifying the peripheral worlds and the constant harrying strikes of
the few independent holdouts. In the end, though, a cabal of Phalanx commanders
sent emergency orders countermanding the lockdown and assassinated Ouranov as
they were in the middle of giving a public speech explaining their insights.
Civil War
It has been decades since that day. The Remnant Empire, now
ruled by some of the original cabal in conjunction with whichever local despots
they bribed into remaining, controls a bit more than half its original
territory. Most of the rest is led by the Secessionists, a fractious confederation
of rebellious, victimized, and previously autonomous planets seeking to place
itself at the head of a new order. The Companions, bereft of an emperor to
protect but still dependent on the arcane techno-spiritual fusion that
undergirds their engineered psychology, roam the Rift in search of their own
inscrutable mission. The Phalanx fights itself seemingly as much as the Remnant
Empire’s real threats, as local despots use its exhausted soldiers in their own
petty turf wars.
Meanwhile, stranger threats circle the Remnant Empire like
flies with a corpse. The Ascended, disciples of the Ouranov’s vision, gather
turncoat Companions and distant Porphyrii cousins to nests hidden within its
most peaceful core words. Abandoned rimworld factories pump out legions of Processors,
deadly battle drones from a secret project whose creators were killed in the
war. Dozens of independent worlds have banded together under the banner of the
Dualists, a psionicist movement which claims to have corrected the last
Emperor’s errors, and which has found a novel means of navigating the
dreamgates. Other independent worlds have sent out teams of Scavengers to pick
the choicest bones from between the feet of these squabbling giants.
