Spires

Spires

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As intelligent, methodical and resourceful as they are calculative, taciturn and manipulative, the Exiles fill their Spires with schemes that span centuries, and Biomantic creations that range from measly drones to perfect clones and terrifying abominations.

“One must know the range of one’s reach.  Only the fools, the lucky and the very skillful grasp beyond that. In time, we all find out which we are, for in the Spire, if you don’t exceed your reach, you are within someone else’s.”

– The Fractured Concord

Scattered throughout the land as if by the hand of a mad god, the Spires dominate the landscape they stand upon. Rising thousands of feet into the air, they are the source of countless suppositions, tales, and myths. The learned know that the Spires house entire populations, the last remnants of a civilization that once dared to span the stars.

The Exiles arrived on Eä countless millennia ago as explorers. Their craft and skill allowed them to breach the vast distances between suns, and their vibrant civilization looked for new worlds to colonize. The first Spires were germinated to house a small community of scientists, explorers, and surveyors, who spent centuries in isolation, studying the planet and preparing the way for a wave of settlers, who would tame the primordial land they had discovered.

They never arrived. Instead, a growing stream of refugees began to arrive, fleeing a calamity the Spires will not speak of to this day.

Last among the refugees were the nobles of the Sovereign House, who sealed the Ways behind them. This ruthless act, calculated to eliminate all nobility but his House and its Lineages, doomed the countless millions they abandoned to die. The magnitude of this betrayal shattered Exile society to its core. As political opposition raged and entire castes turned against their leadership, three factions were born from the ashes of that once great civilization: the Spires, the Weavers, and the Quiet. Only among the Spires are the flames of the old civilization kept alive, and, even that, only through great sacrifice.

Following the loss of their population, the Sovereign House was forced to turn to the darkest of arts to recreate a pale shadow of the society they had shattered. Without the strictures of religious supervision or the ethical oversight of their own population, the scientists pooled their resources and genius into a single Directorate and turned the holy gift of Life-Binding into the soulless art of Biomancy. True clones were only the first of the dark miracles they produced to replace the shattered population of the Spires and re-establish their economy.

In a matter of decades, the Spire society was rebuilt from the ground up, but as the clone population grew and the reliance of the economy shifted to the products of the growth vats and spawning pools, the Sovereign House began to fear the growing influence of an increasingly assertive Directorate. Cloned troops, primed from the very flesh of the nobility and bred specifically for loyalty, were deployed to place the Directorate under custody and end the threat before it ever manifested. Cold, calculating, and methodical, the Directorate had learnt their lesson in betrayal long ago, along with the Quiet and the Weavers, and had spent almost a century preparing for their coup. They surrendered peacefully… and watched the economy collapse.

Without their expertise, the proper balance in the delicate internal ecosystems of the Spire could not be sustained and quickly collapsed. When the Sovereign House was forced to approach them, the Directorate agreed to a division of power along the lines of the millennia-old agreements between the scientific pioneers, who had first set foot upon this world, and the nobles who had funded them: the wealth of the land belongs to the nobles, but operational control rests with the Directorate. Furthermore, the Directorate must devote its biomantic products to the Reclamation of the homelands. Once reclaimed, the Sovereign House will cede all local holdings and claims on Eä to the Directorate, in recognition of their invaluable assistance.

As a result, what would normally have been an antagonistic relationship has become a fraught partnership: the Lineages in the Sovereign House seek to influence the Directorate with funding for pet projects and pure research, in return for policies and regulations that benefit them at the expense of their peers.

These delicate balances have been disrupted of late by the rise of the Merchant Princes. Members of the younger dynasties, these mavericks have taken to securing resources by trading directly with the outside world, bypassing the main tool of control and influence of the Sovereign House. The Directorate was originally keen on creating competition but is regretting their decision to endorse these newcomers, as the fragile power balances that bound the Spires for millennia unravel. Trade and contact with the outside have introduced a new and volatile element into the machinations of the Spires, which have started spilling over into the lands around them. With uncertainty and greed reigning unchecked, it is only a matter of time before an errant deed sparks the conflagration of war with the younger races.

In times of war, the Spires today remain one of the most potent powers on the planet. While the territory they control is very limited, the power they can project is vast. Their armies are spawned directly from accumulated biomass and mineral resources that their root networks have secured throughout their millennia of rule. The bitter lessons learnt in the loss of their home world have taught them to concentrate on efficiency rather than raw power when assembling their forces. This philosophy of efficiency pervades even their military thinking. With no ethical concerns to constrain their decisions (their troops are, after all, merely clones), Spire commanders routinely make decisions of breathtaking cruelty, perfectly willing to sacrifice entire armies to trap and destroy the opponent.

Departments of Interest

From the sunless, ignored bowels of the Underspire and the pits of the arenas, to the terraces and high halls reserved for those of import, each Spire is a battlefield for the oldest and most ruthless wars of resources and influence on Eӓ.

Sovereign Lineages
Directorate
Underspire

The Sovereign Lineages

It would be easy to dismiss the Sovereign House as the fossilized remnant of a dead civilization. Their pointless posturing, their ostentatious displays of wealth and power, their mindless and cruel political games, they all point to a state of degeneracy and waste that would cripple any other governing body. All these observations, however, fail to take into account their single greatest achievement: Survival. The Sovereign House has survived the loss of their homeland, the Exodus, the rage of Dragons and the disintegration of their civilization. Somehow, they have managed to adapt, evolve and overcome all obstacles before them, and still emerge on top.

Though few would acknowledge it, the current arrangement with the Directorate suits the Sovereign House perfectly. Blinded by the transient promise of power, the ambitious youth of each Lineage devotes its energies to joining the Directorate, freeing the eldest among the Sovereign House to focus on their true objective. For countless millennia the Lineages have amassed resources and honed their forces with but one objective: the reclamation of their long lost ancestral lands.

Spurred by their Sovereign, that elusive yet terrifying figure that rules over them with an iron fist, the bitter memory of defeat and humiliation has helped the Lineages to keep their focus on recovering their lost lands. In preparation for this momentous event, they have hoarded the vast majority of the resources, that the Spires have harvested across millennia.

To further their efforts in the Reclamation, the Linages of the Sovereign House vie for prestige and influence by funding the creation of ever deadlier and more efficient warriors. Month long tournaments are sponsored by the Sovereign, where each Lineage can display its prized war beasts in brutal challenges that serve to entertain and distract the nobility in times of peace.

Over the course of countless years of debauched blood sports, they have honed their personal forces into formidable fighting machines geared towards this single, explosive release, intended to sweep their ancient Enemy from the promised lands. This most recent fracas with the Merchant Princes is but a small diversion, a long-awaited chance to pit their honed forces against the hapless inhabitants of this realm.

The Directorate

The Directorate exhibits the same brutal ruthlessness of the Sovereign House, but weighs it with the cold pragmatism of their hallowed scientific method. The remarkably transparent and open selection process to a Directorate seat can make the politics within a Lineage change very quickly. Shunned members or obscure family lines can rise to prominence with a single appointment, while established family lines can wither if they fail to secure seats within the Directorate. The fluid nature of intra Lineage politics also deeply affects inter Lineage politics, with frequent betrayals, reverses and assassinations keeping the nobles focused on their game, just like the Directorate originally envisioned.

In contrast, the Directorate seems to play the role the Sovereign House expects them to, without too much friction. Honed by the principles of their Biomancy, they display tremendous patience, observing the shifts and trends in the balance of power with a clinical detachment, adapting to the prevailing political environment with as little disruption as possible. Some Directors, particularly amongst the youngest generation, see this as a sign of subservience and perhaps they are right. Their elders, however, have been playing this game for millennia. They have already won this round, wresting control of the Spires from the Sovereign House, and are focusing on the next. With limited resources at their disposal, every move today is aimed at a result not a few years from now, but decades in the future, when they finally inherit Eä, free of control from the Sovereign.

Particularly unimpressed with the Lineages’ fixation on the lost lands, the Directorate pursue instead entirely different goals that will ensure their freedom. On Eä, the Directorate broke from millennia of tradition and started charting their own path, evolving the stifling practice of Life-Binding into the wonder of Biomancy. And it is on this world that they intend to claim their destiny, free of the manipulations and governorship of the Sovereign House and its Lineages, and soon thereafter free of any who might remain on this world to challenge their claim.

While, unlike the Sovereign House, the Directorate does not have endless resources to marshal in the furtherance of their schemes, many of their greatest creations are at the behest of the Lineages. As a result, when a Biomancer is seen on the battlefield, he is often leading the strangest, and deadliest, creations his twisted genius and the endless resources of the Sovereign House can create.

The Underspire

Nestled underground beneath tons of hard packed dirt and the tough fibrous ganglia of the Spire itself, the Underspire protected the most essential processes of the Spires from the depredations of the Dragons and shielded its inhabitants. As the Dragon War ended, the thin atmosphere and sharp sunlight of the upper reaches of the Spire called to the members of the Sovereign House with their memories of their homeland. Within a few short years of their defeat, the Lineages had relocated to the highest portions of the Spires.

Loath to leave the central biotic systems of the spire and the vast spawning pools that were the source of their newfound power, the Directorate soon realized that mingling with the Lineages brought influence, prestige and resources.

In time, its senior members moved to the Upper Spires to engage with the Sovereign House directly. Slowly but steadily, the Underspire was left for the lowest of the Directorate’s menials, the Pheromancers.

Incapable of, or often barred from, practicing the more advanced levels of Biomancy, Pheromancers resort to the crude manipulation of ingested biomass to create scents and pheromones. These allow them to command and guide the basic systems of the Spires, as well as the simplest and most animalistic of drones. Coded into powerful scents, the Pheromantic compulsions can bypass the rudimentary cognitive functions of these drones, stifling all thoughts of self-preservation or natural instinct and turning even the unruliest of drones into a nightmare on the battlefield.

With growing reports of missing drones and dire warnings of a proto-religion growing within their ranks falling upon the deaf ears of the Pheromancers’ distant superiors, it is quickly becoming clear that the Upper Spire may have forgotten just how critical the Underspire is for the safety and prosperity of the Spire as a whole. Despite their growing concerns, fear of upsetting their superiors and being punished or, worse, denied a vital promotion, keeps most Pheromancers from voicing their concerns openly. As a result, shadows in the Underspire are becoming a little darker every day, and the Pheromancers grow more desperate to prove themselves and escape.

Forces

Characters

Biomancer
High Clone Executor
Lineage Highborne
Lineage Prideborne
Mimetic Assassin
Pheromancer

Infantry

Bound Clones
Desolation Drones
Force-Grown Drones
Marksman Clones
Onslaught Drones
Stryx
Vanguard Clone Infiltrators
Vanguard Clones

Brutes

Avatara
Brute Drones
Incarnate Sentinel

Cavalry

Centaur Avatara
Leonite Avatara

Monsters

Abomination
Siegebreaker Behemoth

Historical Events

Abomination
The Battle of Nepenthe

Persons of Interest

The Alchemist
The Fractured Concord
Faded Magenta

Other

Sovereign of Interference
The Arena