Introducing my Mechwarrior setting. For now I am leaving some elements blank, so as to give player backgrounds a chance to influence the setting. Feel free to embellish, as questions and seek confusion.
The Basics…
The game will be set on a colony world on the periphery of controlled space.
Flavour wise everything will be planet based for this campaign (if it goes longer than a single campaign I may shift it interstellar at a later date).
The colony is owned and controlled by The Marian Hegemony. This is one of the quirkier powers in the Battletech fiction, it is based off Imperial Rome in political, social and military ways.
When?
3064.
Within the battletech timeline this is after the Clan invasion of the Inner Sphere has settled down. It is just before the Word of Blake Jihad, but will not touch on these events as they are to distant to directly effect this world.
Where?
Baccalieu.
This planet is not a recent colony, having been inhabited for just over 100 years (this is still young though by inner sphere standards). But the planet has not made colonisation easy. Combining a rich metal core, slow rotational axis and slight elliptical orbit forms a recipe for the most sever of weather conditions. The planet itself is a terraformed Venus class world, theorised to have been engineered by the star league at least 300 to 400 years in the past. Lack of indigenous life, biomes and introduced species of work beasts all hint to a job unfinished. The severe winds make at least 50% of the planet uninhabitable at various times of the year.
Society
Players will be linked in some way to Marian society. They have been selected by the planets senior senator to form a Special Task Force enacting the will of the senators. This means they will be apart from the core military, and serving directly to the Planets senatorial body.
The Marian Hegemony has three social levels Slaves, Plebeians and Patricians. Plebeian and Patricians are citizens, with the latter being the effective nobility and possessing the write to own land. Players will most likely be Plebians or Patricians, with Mechwarriors being near exclusively Patricians.
Economy
Metal. Doesn’t grow on trees, but is plentiful in all its forms on the planet itself. The colony has sufficient water and agriculture production locally to be self-sufficient. Secondary production industry has started to take hold with basic munitions and vehicle construction being produced locally.
Politics
The Marian Population of Baccalieu is 10 million strong and very spread out. Only 30% of the planets surface is effectively utilised by its owners. Various factions have sprung up over time as the colony has grown.
The first and oldest faction is formed from landed ‘pirates’ who settled down after the hegemony became a ‘legitimate’ society. This faction is dispersed through the economy and regions of the planet. Several possess old estates in some of the choicer and most remote sections of land.
The next set are the ‘industrialists’ having migrated to the colony in the last two or three generations, many of these originated from the capital and are focused on turning the planets natural resources into money through some form of value add. They tend to focus their activities around the planet capital and the various planetary mining operations. The largest formal corporate operations are fielded by Marian Arms Inc. A second and more unique industrial salvage operation originated on the planet itself, Techwizards Ltd is led by its mysterious CEO Robert Scogin. Scogin is known as slightly more quirky than the average, given a particular penchant for dressing in Black robes, but his technical skills and business acumen have seen the rise of his operations as one of the leading salvage and reclamation operations within the region.
The third and most recent have only been on planet for the last generation. These are Inner Sphere refuges that have fled the Clan Invasion looking for a better life in the periphery, instead they found the hegemony. Using their wealth to buy themselves into power (considered a bit old school by Marian standards), the colonist have established an agrarian society that holds itself apart from the other sections of society.
Barbari…
There is a lot of space on the planet and the weather makes surveying difficult at best.
An indigenous population existed before the pirates came; these people live off the land and are the remnants of a disaster that befell the original star league inhabitants. They are a nomadic people now, whatever their origins. Utilising American civil war level of technology (Revolver Rifles) and riding Tariq (think raptors, but vegetarian) they have both managed to stay separate from the Hegemony Colony and raid outer outposts that lack security. Some have hired themselves out as mercenaries to the pirate elements that once raided from Baccalieu, but even then they still choose not to become formal citizens of the hegemony.
A deeper mystery exist behind where the weapons possessed by these Barbari originate from, as metalwork’s are all but unknown to these nomadic people. When ‘pressed’ to reveal their source they talk of moots and trade meets were the weapons are sold to them in trade for their various goods with other more distant tribes.
Additionally other elements have shown up from time to time, the occasional farming outpost falls from time to time, wiped from the surface by bandits possessing modern weapons. These incidents are believed to be from old bandit or pirate operations that have been stranded on the planet after dropship or jumpship failure. Efforts to eradicate these and other transient pirates raiding from off-world remain a primary concern of the hegemony.
