Bastardverse Revisited

[Rhamnousia]

Let kings and tyrants come and go,
I'll stand adjudged by what I know.
A soldiers life I'll ne'er gainsay.
Over the dawn and far away.

O'er the dawn and past the stars,
We kill and die in others' wars.
But Fortune calls and we obey.
Over the dawn and far away.

- part of a traditional mercenary ballad, based on a pre-Diaspora tune.

Who are the Bastards? Bastard's Bastards is a mercenary commando founded by the eponymous "Colonel" Boudicca Bastard during the period of galactic crisis that followed in the immediate wake of the Great Worm War, the Invertebrate Jihad. If anyone knows anything for certain about Boudicca's early life or military career, they haven't come forward with it, but the most credible of the countless stories surrounding her suggest that she spent much of the conflict as part of the 34th Azure Empress' special auxiliary forces. After the Jihad slowly ground to a halt following the apparent death of the Conqueror Worm and the galaxy settling into an uneasy peace, it seems that Boudicca was ill-prepared to return to whatever life she'd had before – if indeed, she had ever been anything else. She drew to her banner a number of notable personalities who she had come into contact with over the course of the war, many of who were fleeing ogres of their own. There was Harashira, known as "the Old Soldier" now but once reviled as the Hyper-Traitor, who has the dubious distinction of having fought for every side of the Jihad. Mallorie "The Crone" Kron, airborne commando and dread sorceress who spearheaded the assault that killed five of the Seven Sons of Jatto. Heterodox military philosopher Zemje Trass. Rebekah "Raptor" Rapacious, the notorious privateer. Fugitive officer and reginacide Irony Cromwell. Bastard's Bastards' first recognized action was when they appeared seemingly out of thin air, piloting a hijacked Misericord-class commando carrier they'd christened The Crimson King, and singlehandedly ended the dynastic struggle that was tearing apart the Nagaraj. The bloody three-day assault that captured the Liar Prince's stronghold – and the suspicious disappearance of several tons of priceless treasures therefrom – sowed the seeds of the Bastards' reputation as an unscrupulous, untrustworthy, yet undeniably effective outfit that would only grow in the decades that followed. In the eighty or so years since the end of the Invertebrate Jihad, what was once barely more than a single ragtag company has grown into a respectable private army nearly two thousand-strong.

Who is a Bastard? Your archetypal Bastard is a lot of things. Chances are good that she's spintrash born and bred, hailing from some no-name rock at the edge of the galaxy and desperate to escape the monotony of Rimworld life. Or she's spoiled gardenworlder who was eager for adventure, an even more spoiled Sphereworlder who ended up in uncivilized space, a gravity devil, or even an exotic traveler from the Black Beyond. She might come from one of the great mercenary families with a surname like Warmacher or Prang. She might be Bastard-born and raised as a nomadic warrior from birth. She's likely to be one of the countless variances of near-human stock, but she could also be an arthopodal prawn, a hulking hadrath bull-mare, a six-legged cacklebird, a kazan tiger-man, a repurposed droid (combat or otherwise), or one of any other number of flotsam species picked up by the Crimson King. About three times out of eight, she actually goes by "he." No matter her origins, a Bastard is first and foremost a commando. Maybe she was a soldier before she signed on, maybe she was even a good one, or maybe fit-stims and a good mentor were the only reasons she survived learning things the hard way. She can fight on any world with an atmosphere. She is lethal at any distance. She knows how to kill the male-analogues of a hundred different species in a hundred different ways. She has a blast furnace for a heart, her fury disciplined and focused. She has the records of her career inked, burned, or carved into her flesh and stitched into the fabric of her colours. If she's served more than a decade, she's likely got a piece or two of chrome in her. She is fluent in at least three of the Seven Standard Languages and can speak the impenetrable patois known as Bastardchatter. She does not laugh at superstition and never drinks hard liquor from the can, for she knows well the deadly weird of the Rim. She is furious in anger and furious in joy. She is a thief and a liar, but she knows that you always pay for meat, firepower, and sex. She has a favorite whore in every guildhouse, a favorite lover in every spaceport, a war-wife or two in another company, and likely a few children between them – and a gun that's dearer to her than all of them.

What is the galaxy like? There is no accepted common name for the glowing, six-armed wheel of stars and dust upon which we all dwell, though on account of its coloration, many language's names for it translate as something close to "Milky Sea" or "Silvery Road." At the center of the galaxy lies the Pit, a supermassive black hole of such nightmarish gravity that nothing, not light and not souls, can possibly escape from its depths. Immediately surrounding the Pit is the region known as the Furnace: a fiery sea of black holes, exploding stars, and dead, metallic worlds. Travel through this nightless hell is so dangerous as to be essentially suicidal, but somehow, even beneath the sterilizing light of countless radioactive suns, there are inhabited planets – outsiders commonly know the natives of the Furnace as "gravity devils." Moving outward from here, we encounter the scores of Inner Spheres that dot the middle bulge of the galactic disk. Clusters of hypercivilized worlds than can encompass anywhere from a single star system to many dozens of star systems, the Spheres are some of the most technologically-advanced areas in known space. Beyond the Inner Spheres, you enter the Rim, which is divided between the Near Rim, which while dangerous still manages to host some sizeable bastions of civilization, and the truly wild, anarchic Far Rim. The relationship between the Sphereworlds and the Rimworlds is nothing short of hateful. The inhabitants of the Spheres covet the many untapped resources of the Rim that they should be able to seize its stupid, barbarous natives, but not in a thousand campaigns has a Sphere polity ever managed to establish a lasting foothold in the region. Of course, the Rimfolk know why this is, even if their more "advanced" neighbors do not – there is a weirdness in the Rim, a dark and alien magic that the Sphereworlders simply do not have a context for and thus cannot prepare to face when they march into the unknown. At the absolute edge of the galaxy lies the Glory, a halo of stars that marks the boundary between "known space" and the Black Beyond. There are many lesser galaxies beyond the Glory, the Dwarf Brides, which by all accounts appear to be inhabited themselves, but there is precious little communication or traffic with them.

Attempting to create an accurate taxonomy to apply to the tens of billions of planets in the galaxy would be a fool's errand, so the popular nomenclature is extremely loose and intended to communicate a general impression of the world rather than describe it in specific detail. Some of the most commonly-used prefixes are: cold, dune, burn, garden, storm, fen, salt, river, basin, slam, night, still, khan, dungeon, and murder.

[ooc=Currency in the Bastardverse]
Establishing an intelligible galactic currency system is crucial for a setting that revolves around characters who kill for money, but I wanted to avoid something as handwavey as "credits." While what is considered valuable obviously varies from world to world, the standard upon which most interplanetary Rim economies are based is not bullion but salt. Of course, bricks of compressed salt difficult to carry around in one's pockets, so mercenaries like the Bastards are still typically paid in precious metals. These are vague fixed values that you can use to estimate how expensive something would be.

Silver coin, 10 gram: $5
Silver coin, 1 ounce: $15
Gold coin, 1 gram: $35
Gold coin, 10 grams: $350
Gold coin, 1 ounce: $1000
Platinum coin, 1 ounce: $850
[/ooc]

[Ghostman]

Nice to see this again. Are you going to post more stuff?

[Rhamnousia]

Absolutely. Posting in short bursts is what's most conducive to my writing process at the moment, but more will be coming.