Hello,
Welcome to this year's AoC Primer Convocation and Convention. Today we'll discuss the AoC Primer, and its impact on the Inner Sphere.
First, the rules.
This is important.
Super important.
Rule #1: I need feedback. That means posts and answering polls. No feedback, no more AoC primer posts.
Rule #2: The same as Rule #1. I can not stress the need for feedback enough. We're doing a little experiment here, and your help is appreciated.
Thank you for your assistance. As a community, it is appreciated.
Primer to the Age of Chaos
Game Introduction
Age of Chaos is a BattleTech alternate universe setting where the Great Houses of the Inner Sphere no longer exist. After two devastating Succession Wars and a century-long HPG Interdiction, the large Successor States of old have sundered beneath the weight of war and poverty. In their stead they have given birth to dozens of new nations and interstellar factions. Bereft of their historical cohesion, the splintered shadows of these former great empires are a mockery of their once-proud parents. No longer vying for control of the defunct Star League, these desperate successors are fixed in a cycle of perpetual violence to survive. Together they are locked in a dark age that is finally coming to an end.
Creating the Age of Chaos alternate universe required taking certain liberties with some of BattleTech’s core historical material and setting. Changes were made to timelines, characters and even some of the more pivotal events in the BattleTech story. While some of these changes were unavoidable, great care was taken to maintain the integrity of the traditional BattleTech universe and to provide the most compelling and realistic account of a universe eerily familiar to any fan of BattleTech, but decidedly different from the official story.
This integrity was maintained with an eye toward thoughtful and purposeful analysis of every modification made to the original material. Questions were posed and then answered to draw storyline conclusions in developing the Age of Chaos game setting. Lke ripples in a pond, these changes were plotted to their inevitable conclusion. If a proposed modification did not fit logically, it was discarded from the story no matter how attractive the idea may have been. Some of the questions were: What if Jerome Blake had used all eight of his ex-SLDF divisions during Operation Silver Shield, secured more from Kerensky’s departing SLDF or gained the loyalty of the two mechanized infantry divisions garrisoning South America? Would Blake have directed ComStar to secure more of the crumbling Terran Hegemony? What about secretly supplying occupied or ex-Hegemony worlds like New Dallas with extra weapons? Would the bloodshed be enough to slow, or even stop the invading Successor States? These were just a few of the many questions asked that would ultimately help shape the Age of Chaos universe.
Plot and character development were also addressed to help form budding storylines and settings. What if Jerome Blake didn’t die in his sleep or fall to a sinister plot to seize control of ComStar? What would ComStar look like as an organization after three or four more decades of Blake’s leadership, and what sort of impact would his survival have had on the Inner Sphere? On a far larger scale, what if the Succession Wars were longer in length and far more devastating? Would the control of the Great Houses suffer accordingly? How much time would elapse before internal and external pressures reached a boiling point and the Successor States faced domestic problems far in excess to the damage wrought by their bloody wars of conquest?
What about Conrad Toyama and the future Word of Blake? What would have happened if Toyama had not inherited leadership of ComStar in 2819, or saw his advances rebuffed by a strong Jerome Blake? Would Conrad have reacted violently? What if the Holy Shroud attacks targeted ComStar as well as the Great Houses, and the HPG virus used to quiet the Inner Sphere in the 32nd century was instead unleashed in the early 29th?
What would happen? How would the nations of the Inner Sphere and Periphery recover or maintain control? The Age of Chaos Primer charts the disintegration of the Inner Sphere from the tumultuous years after the fall of the Star League until the end of the HPG Blackout through the eyes of ComStar – the Inner Sphere’s largest corporation.
Basic History of the Inner Sphere
“Life is cheap, but technology is not.†– Graffiti found among the remains of an Omniss enclave suspected of bombing a ComStar water treatment plant.
Students of history interested in the fall of the Star League or the First Succession War are often fond of quoting these singular events as the root causes for the current state of the Inner Sphere. While these devastating conflicts were indeed terrible, the same could also be said for ComStar’s arming of Terran rebels, or the corporate Schism. In truth, these events only helped open the door for the discord, which was ready to blossom into complete anarchy. The true root cause for the degradation of the Inner Sphere is simply a full accounting of all the pieces of a very bloody, very messy puzzle, with players and events spanning the length and breadth of known space. The same pieces that began to situate themselves into a position to exert a terrible price not long into the 29th century.
Rather than regale the tale of the Star League’s final years or the tragedies responsible for its sundering, it will simply be said that the end result was an Inner Sphere ripe for conflict and ready to rip into the dying carcass of the Terran Hegemony. With Minoru Kurita’s simple declaration as the new First Lord of the Star League, a gauntlet was thrown. His claim was a simple challenge to his peers – one that would be bought in blood, and so the first of two Succession Wars started in earnest. It was a horrible conflict, engulfing all of the occupied space and surpassing all prior wars. It was in the midst of this conflagration that by 2821 the damage and economic breakdown began to degrade relations within the borders of a number of Successor States. Not only was the First Succession War devastating, its ferocity did not lessen with time – and in some regions never ended – before the outbreak of the Second Succession War.
In 2818, the Free Worlds League found itself fragmenting along the Andurien border when a relatively unscathed Capellan Confederation, in an attempt to seize the remains of these historically important worlds, launched a full-scale invasion of the Andurien Province. The Lyran Commonwealth used the Capellan invasion of the Free Worlds League as an opportunity to assault its border around Bolan, forcing the Captain-General to split his forces from the subjugation of former Hegemony worlds. With the new invasion putting the FWL in jeopardy, the Chancellor committed additional forces to the growing Andurien melee, during which the Capellan Confederation lost a number of former Hegemony worlds when they proved incapable of consolidating their hold in the region. Aligning themselves with Tikonov in 2820, these worlds began to build a new state centered on Tikonov under the auspice of heirs to the old Republic and Hegemony bureaucracy. Although this region lacked a major domestic military presence, the insurgent forces of these worlds made them competitive opponents to their distracted invaders.
The reason for their sudden martial competitiveness came from ComStar’s successful capture of Terra with Operation Silver Shield in 2788. Prior to their successful rebellions in the Tikonov and Skye regions and the stalled absorption of former Hegemony worlds, Jerome Blake believed the only way to protect Terra and the core of the Hegemony was to seize it himself. Deciding to take a massive gamble on the situation, but lacking the personnel to do it solely with ComStar alone, Jerome Blake authorized the First Circuit to supply these nascent rebellions with military gear secreted away on Terra after the fall of the Star League. Within months of the first shipments of arms, many worlds in these regions were consumed in the flames of rebellion.
The Skye Rebellion began as the First Succession War came to a close and as many former Terran worlds, unhappy beneath the Steiner yoke or fearful of being captured by the Draconis Combine, revolted, joining with the already fractious Isle of Skye. These rebels were soon aided by Tikonov forces bloated with secret ComStar-supplied weapons. Meanwhile, the Federated Suns – a nation badly mauled by the Draconis Combine – found itself vulnerable to its own upswing in domestic dissent as March Rulers attempted to consolidate and prepare for another looming invasion of their ruined territory. Not too soon, the Capellan and Draconis March Dukes began looking toward their own worlds to rule, rather than New Avalon. To make matters worse, cross-border raiding between the rebuilding Capellan March and the Capellan Confederation kept tension in the region at an all-time high between the end of the First and the beginning of the Second Succession War. In reality, the short break between wars was a myth along the Capellan border, where heavy fighting did not cease until late in the 29th century.
There were also domestic issues brewing in the Draconis Combine. Failure to consolidate the momentum of the early part of the First Succession War and the Kentares Massacre loosened the tight-knit solidarity of the Combine’s various warlords. Many worked to take advantage of a weakened Federated Suns, while others clamored for a renewed invasion of the distracted Lyran Commonwealth. The death of the Star League also breathed new life into the Free Rasalhague movement, which the terrified Lyran Commonwealth (among others) helped to foster in an effort to weaken and distract hungry Combine eyes from Lyran worlds. While Tamar Province rulers were unhappy with antagonizing the Dragon having suffered enough already, they had little choice but to sit back and watch for the time being, simply hoping for the best.
The smoldering conflicts in Andurien, Tikonov, Terran and Capellan space flared into the Second Succession War in 2823, only a few years after the end of the first. The second war followed the same destructive pattern as the first, but quickly degenerated into a quagmire of epic proportions when many of the Successor States began to fully fracture from within. First, the continued attacks into the Confederation’s soft underbelly by the Federated Suns’ Capellan March prompted resource-rich worlds around St. Ives to declare their independence from the Celestial Throne in 2826. Ignoring the demands issued by New Avalon and determined to capture these worlds for the Suns, the Capellan March continued its invasion of Confederation and breakaway St. Ives worlds. When forces loyal to Prince Davion arrived in the March to halt Duke Hasek’s drive into Liao space, open fighting erupted between the two sides. As a result, the Capellan March declared its independence from the Davion crown in 2829. AFFS units from loyal Marches began to pour into the area, and while Prince Davion believed a massive show of force would quickly squash resistance, the move fatally weakened significant portions of the Federated Suns’ borders.
Meanwhile, the Free Worlds League was unable to tip the Andurien stalemate in their favor and continued to funnel troops into the Confederation meat-grinder, all the while stripping other provinces of their federal defenses to help stall the Commonwealth’s invasion. Between periphery, Lyran, Capellan and even the odd Combine raider, many of these provinces had begun to question the leadership of the Marik family and the Captain-General. When a devastating raid in 2828 cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of League citizens on the world Helm, members of Parliament called for a vote of no confidence against the Captain-General. With tensions already at an all-time high in Parliament, the vote quickly turned volatile. A fistfight broke out between members of the Andurien delegation and those from the Duchy of Oriente that quickly spread throughout the Atrean Parliament.
As the civil war in the Federated Suns began to spiral out of control, the political situation in the Draconis Combine also started to fall apart. Ignoring the order of the Coordinator to press the Combine’s advantage along the Lyran Commonwealth’s troubled Skye and weakened Tamar borders, warlords along the Federated Suns’ Draconis March instead began a full-scale assault on the beleaguered Federated Suns in late 2830. Desperate to crush the Capellan March rebellion so he could meet the Kurita threat head on, the Prince was unable to provide the Draconis March with little more than half-empty promises of assistance. Left with little support or recourse, the soldiers of the Draconis March fought with ferocity that the Kurita attackers were unprepared for or expecting. For the Kurita Warlords, their unauthorized invasion of the Federated Suns was a gambit. They expected easy success and the full support of the Coordinator, but as the assault slowed they were soon out of options. Failure would be their execution at the Coordinator’s hand, while a continued drive into the Federated Suns would inevitably result in the complete destruction of their forces.
While the situation along the Federated Suns’ Draconis border was descending into chaos, Tikonov forces, bolstered by success in the Skye March, continued to “liberate†worlds taken from the old Terran Hegemony in the Federated Suns and Capellan Confederation. Other ex-Terran worlds also used the spreading Sphere-wide chaos to create minor rebellions of their own or among other like-minded planets. While many of the core Terran worlds were wary of Tikonov or Skye, they warmed to ComStar’s offers of assistance and voluntary absorption into the Protectorate. A bold move, the operation also brought ComStar into conflict with some of the partisans it had previously supported.
By 2825 the Lyran Commonwealth was finally forced to contend with the Coordinator’s expected drive into the Tamar Province, while the continued troubles in the Skye March pushed the nation’s economy and industry to the limit. Fighting a three-front war along all of its major borders, trouble soon began to crop up among ex-Rim Worlds Republic worlds the Commonwealth “inherited†after the fall of the Star League. This new threat could not have come at a worse time for the Archon or the Lyran economy. With the opposition seemingly supplied with arms from an unknown source, the LCAF was incapable of meeting the new threat as its material strength was already stretched to the breaking point.
The cracks in the Lyran Commonwealth finally split wide open when the Archon ordered the withdrawal of troops from the Skye March in 2830 to fight insurgents threatening the nation’s periphery border. Against the protests of worlds belonging to the Tamar and Coventry Provinces, the Archon argued (incorrectly) that the Commonwealth should continue to press its claims along the fractured Free Worlds League border and simply re-conquer the (now) free Skye March after the LCAF had defeated its ancient enemy. For the desperate people of the Tamar March, who were barely holding the line against the Combine juggernaut, enough was enough. Claiming the Archon unfit, the leaders of the Tamar Province, along with a host of other Lyran worlds, made themselves virtually free of the Commonwealth. Reclaiming their old titles from the time of the Archonettes, these independent provinces dug in and waited for the inevitable from their former Archon and the Combine.
In the Draconis Combine, the stalled assault in the Federated Suns was only the start. The continued trouble in the Rasalhague worlds, as well as the occupied Tamar worlds, was beginning to irritate the Coordinator. When the invasion of the Federated Suns cost the Combine two of its irreplaceable WarShips in August 2832, the Coordinator had enough. He declared the rogue Warlords Ronin for their unauthorized actions against the will of the Dragon. While the declaration was not entirely unexpected, the Warlords’ response was. They declared themselves free of the Coordinator and the Combine, citing a long list of grievances, which included the claim that the Coordinator did not invade the Federated Suns when the opportunity to smite their ancient foe presented itself. Almost immediately, the invasion of the Federated Suns grounded to a halt, as ex-DCMS regiments turned to face the Coordinator’s inevitable wrath. This unexpected pause gave the Draconis March a small measure of breathing space, and they intensified guerilla campaigns on occupied planets.
As to the Warlods’ declaration of independence, the Coordinator’s response was swift and powerful. Pulling most of the regiments assigned to the invasion of the Lyran Commonwealth, the Coordinator drove straight for the heart of the Ronin camp. In the ensuing civil war a surprising number of worlds switched their allegiance from Luthien to the Warlords’ new capital of Galedon, apparently fed up or enticed by promises of prosperity and freedom. As more worlds declared for the Ronin leaders, rumors of foreign help began to surface. Fingers were pointed at everyone from Federated Suns nobility to Terran guerilla cells, but none was ever proven. In the end, the fighting would see the birth of a free Rasalhague state and the dissolution of much of the Combine’s Galedon and Dieron Districts. The fighting would also completely gut the Combine’s offensive foray into the Tamar worlds of the Lyran Commonwealth. As a result, the people of Tamar easily repulsed the Archon’s halfhearted attempt to reclaim the province in 2834.
At the height of the so-called Second Succession War, every state in the Inner Sphere suffered from internal fragmentation to levels unseen since their formation. Perhaps the advance of the Periphery states at this time was like adding insult to injury, but considering the situation – understandable. The fighting represented a free-for-all and was approached as such. Beginning with the Taurian Concordat’s invasion of the Federated Suns’ Pleiades Cluster in 2832, all of the major Periphery powers with the exception of the Outworlds Alliance – attempted to secure vulnerable or historically-owned worlds from the Great Houses. Even some quiet ex-Rim Worlds Republic planets began to agitate for independence, seeing an opportunity to reestablish a new nation. In many cases these reclamation excursions were very successful, netting the fringe powers valuable worlds and resources while sapping the local strength and resolve of the targeted House. Even the Outworlds Alliance, who made no overt attempts to conquer its neighbors, benefitted from the bloody Sphere-wide conflict as piracy along the fringes of both the Federated Suns and the Draconis Combine pushed suffering and ignored worlds into the Alliance’s accepting bosom.
By early 2834 the situation began to worsen in places like the Federated Suns’ Draconis March, where Duke Sandoval was left to make increasingly important decisions without Prince Davion or the Crucis March’s support. When the Duke began to hire mercenary units to help dislodge the remaining pockets of Combine resistance and to help hunt down pirate raiders, the Prince objected. Stating that the resources could be better served subduing the rebel Duke Hasek, he ordered the release of the new hires to his control. For Duke Sandoval, this was the final straw. Faced with a belligerent Prince, an occupied homeland and the specter of a renewed invasion of Robinson, it was all that the Duke needed to declare the March’s independence from the Federated Suns “…for the duration of the conflict.â€
History will never know whether or not the Duke Sandoval’s declaration of independence from New Avalon would have jogged Prince Davion from his singular pursuit of Duke Hasek and turned him onto the other domestic problems he had been ignoring for so long. A day after Duke Sandoval’s withdrawal from the Federated Suns, Prince Davion was killed in a DropShip accident en-route to his private WarShip. The Prince’s death was the demise of the Federated Suns’ invasion of the Capellan March, and with it the possibility of reconciliation, as claimants throughout the Marches jockeyed for control. Over the next year, the various powers of the Inner Sphere would continue their seesaw invasions of one another with unabated ferocity. Perhaps the specter of civil war, now long since a reality, was replaced with unabated hate and became the fuel that kept the bloodshed going. Regardless, whole planets were consumed, burned out of existence in the fighting. Other worlds just disappeared. Some were lost when key pieces of technology failed, while still more were abandoned for their better-off neighbors.
The final disintegration of the Inner Sphere started with the alarming silence of a ComStar imposed interdiction in December of 2835. It was a bold move, but not entirely unexpected. The recent round of fighting that gripped the Inner Sphere also brought with it the unabashed damage and destruction of ComStar’s HPGs. The attacks were new to the Succession Wars and hurt the organization’s ability to provide adequate communications, as well as its ego. Even after massive triumph in the former Terran Hegemony, which the company successfully spun as peacekeeping, the attacks continued to occur. In response, the First Circuit issued stern warnings to all of the participating states for the assaults to cease or face the consequences. Unsurprisingly, the accused professed their innocence, but ComStar refused to back down. While most historians now believe it was Conrad Toyama’s secretive Order who directed or created the breakdown in communications to suit the group’s needs, the end result was a ComStar irate with the Inner Sphere’s innumerable powers.
While Blake proposed the Interdiction to help safe guard ComStar’s neutrality and perhaps even help slow the rising tide of violence, in reality the interdiction was devastating to everyone; even ComStar would suffer when local elements attempted to forcibly restore communication on a number of beleaguered worlds early in the Interdiction. Many additional HPGs and corporate facilities were damaged or rendered non-functional across the Inner Sphere and the Periphery due to these attacks. The Interdiction also gutted ComStar’s power base in a number of important regions, including the Isle of Skye, where Jerome Blake had previously enjoyed widespread respect for his help. Among the worlds of the former Terran Hegemony the Interdiction could not have come at a worse time – famine and disease ran rampant thanks to the constant fighting.
In the Lyran Commonwealth the Interdiction proved to be the final nail in the coffin for the nation’s economy. Loss of interstellar communications collapsed the seemingly inexhaustible Lyran industries, and the country descended into chaos as the Archon desperately tried to hold the nation together. In the Estates General, many of its members would look at the empty seats once occupied by the Tamar and Skye delegations and wonder if they had the right idea all along. To help stave the economic downspin, the Archon enacted and imposed draconian measures to maintain the war effort. These directives were extremely unpopular to a population already unhappy with the Archon. As a result, the Lyran Commonwealth would lose parts of whole provinces to the budding Isle of Skye and Tamar Province, while a crop of worlds along the old Rim Worlds Republic and Free Worlds League border would claim independence, tired of their old master.
For the Draconis Combine, the Interdiction was a mixed blessing. While it did cause the nation’s economy to collapse, it also slowed the military’s ability to coordinate multiple fronts. In turn, the areas in revolt were allocated extra breathing room to strengthen their position and defenses. While the rebels’ own military efforts were also affected by the Interdiction, their smaller size and defensive stance made these breakaway nations’ militaries far more effective than the larger, but strung out DCMS. After a number of stinging defeats at the hands of Rasalhague rebels and Ronin soldiers, and the continued loss of worlds to the Outworlds Alliance, the Coordinator recalled his remaining forces. Surprisingly, the order to withdrawal spurned another wave of defections in the DCMS, who either joined with the Warlords of Galedon or struck out on their own.
The final component to the Inner Sphere’s descent into chaos occurred in late 2836 when attacks perpetrated by an unknown agent or agents disabled the interdicted HPG grid. Roughly 93 percent of the Inner Sphere's hyperpulse generators were nearly simultaneously destroyed, crippled, or in some other way damaged beyond use. Approximately 90 percent of the A Circuit and a large portion of the B Circuit were rendered instantly inoperable by a computer virus that used a message cascade to burn out the HPG's transmission core and other key components. Even worse, before burning out, the infected HPG would automatically send an infected message to any other HPG within range. Any HPG that escaped the initial infection could contract the virus with this contact. Initially, only a few B Circuit stations survived the attack, but were left unused for fear of contracting the deadly virus.
It is unknown who officially orchestrated the attack, but fingers tend to point towards Toyama’s Order, whose other actions crippled other important industries. Early attempts engineered by a frantic ComStar to remove the virus from the HPG network saw the loss of valuable replacement transmission cores when technicians found that the active virus also stored dormant copies of itself in seemingly random locations within the host HPG’s various interconnected processors. If the virus was not fully and totally purged from the system – which required manual replacement of the infected components – any attempt to use a replacement core would result in the dormant virus springing to life once again. Even more disheartening, ComStar learned there were subtle variations among the collected virus copies. No two were exactly alike, and projects to cleanse infected software would prove impossible. The only solution available would be the complete replacement of the Inner Sphere’s entire communications grid before a single HPG could be used – a process that was projected to take over a century, maybe longer, to complete. While the HPG blackout shocked the people of the Inner Sphere who slowly learned of the event, it still took almost two more years for the fighting to slowly burn itself out by the end of 2842.
For the next 187 years ComStar worked to restore communications to the Inner Sphere. When they were finished in 3027, the Great Houses no longer existed. In their place, the Inner Sphere turned into a motley collection of squabbling mini-states closer to the original proto-nations of the 23rd and 24th centuries than the cohesive empires they once represented at the height of the Star League. Widespread use of nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, and the liberal destruction of the scientific-industrial bases of targeted worlds created a decline in technology on some of the most advanced planets in the Inner Sphere. Along with the deliberate destruction of thousands of JumpShips, life in the Inner Sphere was at a standstill – literally frozen in place.
