The Succession Wars
A Dark Age has engulfed humanity, the result of more than two centuries of bitter and endless war. Where once a united Star League ruled, five splintered Successor States now struggle for dominion. Each House seeks mastery over the others, but none can conquer unaided, and none can be trusted as an ally.
The devastation of direct conflict between these vast realms is such that it can no longer be tolerated and thus wars have become a deadly pavane of shadow conflicts, border worlds contested between rival governments ‘advised and supported’ by distant lords, as spies and saboteurs work to undermine these efforts and keep them from spreading to the handful of factories and shipyards that allow interstellar civilisation to endure.
The Periphery Uprising, the Amaris Civil War and the First Succession War burned hundreds of worlds and reduced thousands more to chaos, savagery and barbarism. These ancient battlefields are laced with forgotten weapons and unexploded munitions that spell death for men, warmachines and even spacecraft that venture into them.
But as the Second Succession Wars reduced proud universities to smoking rubble and industrial complexes to nuclear craters, the wastelands wrought by war became a vital source of replacement equipment to continue the wars. Today the Successor States, shielded from the direct ravages of war by countless proxies, can supply themselves with a comparative trickle of new jumpships, dropships, BattleMechs and combat vehicles, none of them equal to the advanced technologies at the height of the Star League.
Worlds in the tumultuous border regions cannot boast even this much. Warlords must strip wrecked machines of the parts needed to restore others to service. Like carrion birds, the discovery of a forgotten supply base or battlefield brings scavengers to strip it of what was once discarded… and warriors to fight over these treasures.
While infantry, artillery and armoured vehicles make up the bulk of any army, the heart of battles are the BattleMechs. First developed over five centuries ago, in the age of war that eventually gave rise to the Star League, these huge walking vehicles are faster, more mobile, better armoured and more heavily armed than anything before or since. Equipped with charged particle beams, lasers, rapid-firing autocannon and missiles they pack enough firepower to flatten anything but another BattleMech. A small fusion reactor provides virtually unlimited power and BattleMechs can be fight in environments ranging from sun-baked deserts to subzero arctic icefields. Only above the surface of a planet or the ocean depths can more specialised vehicles – aerospace fighters and stealthy submarines – dominate but make no mistake: even there a BattleMech remains a dangerous foe.
The Mechwarrior Nobility
The soldiers of the Third Succession War are professionals, members of a hereditary warrior caste that has emerged from the longest and most bloody conflict in human history. Few worlds can still build new BattleMechs and most of those that remain are patchwork machines handed down from one generation to the next. These military families form a small, powerful elite within the former Star League, even on secure worlds theoretically far from the fires of war.
Children of these dynasties are raised from birth to be Mechwarriors. From they time they are old enough to talk, the skills they need are hammered into them: electronics, mechanical engineering, tactics and strategy. The high manual dexterity and hand-eye coordination required are developed by drill, and by constant practise in simulators. Those who don’t measure up are shunted aside, to serve the family as ‘Mech technicians, estate managers or household guards who look on enviously as their family’s legacy is passed on to more worthy heirs.
The best can hope to be sent to the great military academies of the Successor States, instructed by the finest soldiers, most illustrious scientists and brilliant leaders that the great lords can win to their cause… and indoctrinated into fanatical loyalty towards their lords and masters. Places at these academies are fiercely sought after and can be won through deeds of valour, displays of great potential and through the corrupt political bargains that seem an inescapable part of the human condition.
Over the centuries, the Mechwarrior families have gathered more and more power. Many own large estates, supported by such industry and agriculture as remains on them. Those who command retinues of other mechwarriors may rule over vast swathes of territory, granted noble titles by warlords eager for their services. In return for these privileges and wealth, the Mechwarrior families guarantee protection to their tenants, allegiance to their officers and fealty to a government, large or small. That fealty can be threadbare though, as the fortunes of war remain turbulent.
Despite their wealth and power, a Mechwarrior family’s position is always precarious. It rests solely on their BattleMechs, and these war machines must be risked time and again in combat. Disaster on a distant battlefield can strip away a family’s lands and prestige in an instant. If a Mechwarrior cannot quickly replace their lost BattleMech with salvage from a victorious campaign or purchased at an enormous price from one of the few factories that still constructs the war machines then they will fall into the ranks of the Dispossessed.
The Dispossessed may count themselves as members of the warrior class but they are scorned and avoided by their former peers, who fear that they may draw the same ill-fortune upon themselves, and hated by the ordinary folk who they one lorded over. Many struggle to find a place in society now that they have lost their former niche.
Naturally then, the Dispossessed and their families, are often driven by one over-riding ambition – to regain the status of Mechwarrior by capturing a BattleMech. Many of them offer their services as technicians and foot soldiers to more fortunate families, hoping that years of hard labour or dangerous battles will be rewarded with a captured ‘Mech. Others take desperate chances in the shadowy underworld, turning to crime and espionage to earn the wealth and favours to bid for possession of a new-built ‘Mech. Some turn to the lost and forgotten corners of the Succession Wars, wandering the graveyard worlds in search of hidden caches of Star League weaponry and other high-tech equipment.
The warlords of this era often recruit their spies and scouts from among the Dispossessed, for they are perfectly suited to these roles: desperate, ambitious and willing to do almost anything to regain their place among the elite.
The Successor States
Many hundreds of governments exist in the torus of inhabited worlds between the tortured remains of the old Star League core worlds and the blasted remains of the territorial states that once marked the frontier of human advancement. Others may exist in the shadowy reaches beyond this. Certainly expeditions set out even before the Star League existed and many refugees sought the same escape before the Succession Wars left too few jumpships for large colony fleets to be mustered.
Few governments can boast control over more than one world – indeed, most cannot be said to rule even this much as many worlds are divided between warring factions pledged to rival patrons or philosophies. The five largest and most powerful realms are the Successor States, so named because each is headed by a royal dynasty of mechwarriors laying claim to the long vacant throne of the First Lord of the Star League.
While the splintering of their territory since the Second Succession War means that these Successor States rarely directly border each other’s worlds, the circular nature of humanity’s expansion means that each has two closer neighbours while the other States can be reached only with more difficulty. In theory, the five have held to armistices for over a hundred years, but in reality rarely a day goes by that the soldiers of their proxies are not at war somewhere.
Draconis Combine
The Dragon Throne combines the western dragon of Rasalhague with the eastern dragon of New Samarkand. From this seat upon the Luthien, the polluted industrial world they call their ‘black pearl’, House Kurita rules directly over a swathe of worlds connecting their two ancestral homeworlds but also five powerful warlords – the rulers of Dieron, Benjamin, Alshain, Pesht and Galedon.
The Mechwarriors of the Draconis Combine style themselves as heirs to the samurai of old, combining a ruthless dedication to the code of bushido with the avarice that drove Vikings across oceans in their longships. Given a ruler who can harness these restless and ambitious men and women, there is little the Combine cannot aspire to… and Takashi Kurita, Unifier of Worlds, may be such a ruler.
Federated Suns
At times the Federated Suns has been led by Presidents and by a Council of Princes. House Davion emerged as the first and then only princes, retaining with pride their title of First Prince. In practise, much of the military power of the Federated Suns is held by the Grand Duke of Robinson, commanding regiments facing the Draconis Combine, and the Grand Duke of New Syrtis, who does likewise with regard to the Capellan Confederation.
Besides maintaining this dominance in this balance of power, Hanse Davion must secure farflung industrial worlds that are the key to his realm’s fledgling recovery from the ravages of the wars. His personal recovery of the Halstead Station Collection, a long buried university library from the Star League, and the establishment of the first new university in centuries upon New Avalon, has allowed him to win back many of the impoverished worlds facing the periphery, whose faith in the Federated Suns had begun to gutter.
Capellan Confederation
Celestial Wisdom. So the Capellans name their leader, governing now from Sian after the former capital of Capella suffered occupation and then orbital bombardment. Short internal trade routes and communications allow the Capellans to protect their most vital industrial worlds, while tight efficiency allowed the smallest of the Successor States to weather the wars with no more damage than their rivals… if no less.
Lacking the military power to force his enemies to submit, Maximilian Liao has earned the title ‘Diablo’ for his cunning when it comes to fomenting trouble and disloyalty within vassals of both the Federated Suns and the Free Worlds League. It is said that both the recent Marik Civil War and the ongoing corruption within the court of New Syrtis bear his fingerprints as he smiles serenely.
Free Worlds League
A fractious alliance between Regulus, Oriente and Marik, the League’s divided leadership made it the first of the Successor States to fracture as border worlds looked first to themselves and less to a distant Parliament on Atreus. While the rise of House Marik as hereditary Captain-Generals has restored the League’s military might, they are all too often at odds with Parliament bitter at their diminished authority.
Even worse have been the conflicts within House Marik. The recent civil war turned brother against brother, father against son, and while the sitting Captain-General emerged victorious, Janos Marik can hardly be said to be triumphant about a war where he was forced to execute one of his own sons. Worse, the war has damaged some of the League’s few remaining BattleMech factories, leaving them dangerously dependant upon the ambitious duchy of Andurien until and unless repairs can be made.
Lyran Commonwealth
The wealthy trading federations of Donegal, Skye and Tamar brought together unmatched economic power when they formed the Commonwealth, but also unrivalled corruption and a preference for financial advancement over military glory. The soldiers of the Commonwealth are said to be among the best equipped in the Torus but often the worst led.
Since ousting her incompetent uncle, Archon Basilieus Katrina Steiner has waged an unrelenting war to reform her realm’s internal enemies, relying on hired mercenaries to protect her interests on border worlds. While Katrina is respected in the core provinces of Alarion, Bolan, Coventry and Donegal, the lords of both Skye and Tamar rejoice in the independence of the last century, leaving them wary of efforts to bind them back to the rule of frozen Tharkad and House Steiner.
Interstellar Travel
The key to humanity’s expansion across the galaxy is the jumpship, each a complex construct of intricate and expensive machinery almost a kilometre in length. More than nine-tenths of a jump-ship’s volume is committed to the Kearney-Fuchida hyperdrive that can carry the ship and a few tens of thousands of tons of external payload across up to thirty lightyears in an instant. Charging the drive for use usually takes several days as massive capacitors build up the necessary energy reserve. Faster charging can be damaging so most crews expect to wait a full week between jumps, not wishing to hazard their irreplaceable livelihood.
Besides the drive, a jumpship contains habitation for a crew who may remain aboard for years, fuel and fusion reactors to charge the drive, and the systems to extend the jump field around craft docked along the hull. There is no room for a sublight drive except for minor station-keeping thrusters (though some jumpships use a solar sail for limited mobility) and thus jumpships are used solely and exclusively to travel between star systems.
Hyperdrives can transit only between points of neutral gravity and the gravity well of star is considerable – in the solar system, the sun’s gravity interferes with hyperdrives operating within ten astronomical units: slightly more than the orbit of Saturn. Since this is inconveniently distant from most habitable worlds, jumpships primarily utilise proximity points to jump deep inside a star systems. These points, where the sun’s gravity is countered by that of a planet or moon, are in constant motion relative to the star system and may be temporarily occluded by other astronomical bodies. Accurate records of orbits within a system are critical for plotting a safe arrival point and some captains prefer to jump into the outer reaches of an unfamiliar system to confirm their data before attempting entry to the inner system.
Travel between jumpships and the surface of a planet is the task of dropships. Vastly smaller than a jumpship, sized to fit into the razor-edged margin between the jumpship and its jump field, most dropships are little more than ovoids with fusion thrusters at one end, controls at the other and a sheathe of hull material around the cargo space between the two. More complex and comfortable aerodyne dropships were made under the Star League but these are beyond the reach of modern construction.
Given that the bulk of their fuel is needed to land and take off from planets, dropships can usually only afford enough for a slow coasting flight from a proximity point to low orbit. Whereas jumpships cover light years in an instant, the last few tens or hundreds of thousands of miles can take days or weeks unless a dropship is available to serve as a dedicated fuel tanker. At more developed systems, fuelling stations existed for exactly this purpose but given their military value, they have often been destroyed over the centuries.
Jumpships are similarly a declining breed. None of the Successor States can build more than one or two a year, something short of the rate of losses as limited access to repair facilities erodes the remaining fleets. Even those ships still being built are less capable than those before, simplified designs with less range and greater vulnerability to damage from trying to fast-charge the capacitors.
ComStar
At the height of the Star League, every known world was knit together by a web of interstellar communication. Daily transmissions were sent to and from every world via HyperPulse Generator stations, uniting humanity. While a single HPG could reach only fifty light years at best, messages could be relayed from one to the other. Suitably aligned, a rare double-chain of constantly transmitting HPGs could enable real-time conversations across the Inner Sphere (although at a ruinous cost, even for the Star League).
The military value of such communications was apparent and as the Star League fell, the HPG stations were frequent targets, fought over and destroyed as eagerly as any other objective. The HPGs around Terra, long the central hub of all communications, were almost entirely lost as the Successor Lords fought over the rich worlds of the First Lord’s personal domain.
In the closing years of the First Succession War, ComStar emerged as the custodian of the remaining HPG stations. Led by Jerome Blake, the last Star League Minister of Communications, the organisation had hidden away the last factories able to build certain key components of HPGs – a jealously hoarded perquisite of the First Lords and a much-desired prize. Had the Successor States been less exhausted by a war that had already been waged for more than thirty years, it is likely they would have hunted ComStar down until one of them possessed the factory (or more likely, until it had been destroyed). However, Jerome Blake had picked his moment well and was able to offer the five House Lords what they needed most: a neutral channel of communications through which they could negotiate the ceasefires that they desperately needed in order to refit and resupply their forces.
In the brief interval between the First and Second Succession Wars, ComStar – now under the leadership of Blake’s successor Conrad Toyama – took over and fortified a thin web of HPG stations linking the five capitals and certain other major worlds. The House Lords retained for themselves many of the lesser stations and schemed to reverse-engineer the technology but the ravages of the Second Succession War put paid to these ambitions: so many HPG stations were lost and so many research stations blasted that scientific research came to a near total end and the Successor States lost control of much of their domains.
Such was their alarm that the Successor Lords signed binding armistices that have kept them from directly clashing for more than a century. And each dynasty in turn contracted with ComStar to construct additional HPGs not only for their own shrunken realms but also so that they can influence and control the contested worlds between them.
In more than two hundred years since Jerome Blake’s death, ComStar has become increasingly insular. No one outside what is now a quasi-religious order knows where they are headquartered. Initiates are welcomed from any realm, but are taken to hidden retreats and subjected to intensive and traumatising re-education in their loyalties before any training in how to operate – much less repair or construct – HPGs begins. Despite fervent efforts, no successful infiltration of the Order has ever been reported by the House Lords… although it hardly would be.
Those initiates who lack the technical aptitudes serve ComStar in other ways. They are historians, seeking to compile an honest and unbiased account of the Succession Wars. They are bankers, overseeing interstellar trade, taxation and even such tourism as remains in the way that only they can. They provide diplomats to mediate between warring governments and emergency workers in the face of natural disasters. And some even provide for the security of HPG compounds against lesser threats.
It is no secret that every ComStar HPG’s ultimate resort against attack is a nuclear weapon buried beneath the main HPG facility, to be detonated if the Order’s secrets are endangered. And any realm to risk that would then face a less immediate but more dreadful consequence: an immediate Interdiction of HPG communication until they make full and abject amends. Only twice has this sanction been placed against a Successor State, lessons that House Marik and House Kurita will never forget, for the economic and military damage took years to recover from.
A/N: the first couple of sections were heavily cribbed from the original Battledroids sourcebook. After that I let my imagination wander...
