Faction:Forsaken

Factions

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Forsaken

Faction data

Forsaken
Species	Humans
Homeworld (Origin)	Earth
Capital	Ajani

Overview

The "Forsaken", as they are collectively known, are the descendents of various victims of one of the more tragic eras of Humanity's expansion into space. Six centuries ago, slowboats were made obsolete by the development of FTL travel. However, this didn't help those colonists already en route, who, upon reaching their destinations, found the worlds slated for their colonization already inhabited by settlers that had leapfrogged them in humanities continued outward expansion. Arriving hopelessly out of synch with the rest of human society and finding themselves deprived of both their worlds and nanite-based technology, these groups found they had more in common with each other than anyone else, and set out to colonize the worlds no one else had wanted to.

A minor faction due both to the initial power gap and the consequent constant state of "playing catch-up", they were not asked to participate in the conferences that begat the Confederation, nor would they have accepted, having no love for the powers that had done nothing to stop the leapfrogging of colony worlds that had been slated them. Likewise, as the dominant strains of thought at the time within Forsaken space considered the Confederations's protection would be at best hollow, and at worst a pretense for tyranny, the Forsaken declined an offer to join the LIHW, and instead focused on settling the Diaspora sector, keeping their distance, to the best of their ability, from the developing Confederation.

On the origin of The Forsaken

The Forsaken are, at top level, sub-light settlers abandoned and displaced due to the FTL expansion of other entities. As a non-coherent group, the Forsaken are much more diverse than any of the meme-groups, with members derived from an assortment of late embarking colonies, far ranging colony missions, and, this being a distinct minority, arriving quite late with respect to other groups, refugees from Sundered worlds. However, this assortment of influences actually makes them even more distinct, because of the already diverse nature of each of the subgroups that make up the Forsaken.

Some of the Forsaken actually set out long before most of the dominant Human meme-groups, but in slower, more primitive vessels, or toward significantly more distant stars. Earth, at the decline of the Nation States and the beginnings of the nanite economic revolution, was a place of significant turmoil. China, grown increasingly insular and denied of information and innovation from outside as it rejected the meme-trends, shielding its population from what it saw as memetic viral infections through draconian information control, was the last of the truly great Nation States. It had hidden for over two centuries behind successively more impermeable "great firewalls," each improved, ironically enough, with increasing willingness by outside expertise with mutual interest in isolating themselves from what they saw as an increasingly dangerous anachronism. China sought to capitalize upon the destablization of the other world powers and eventually plunged the world into war by proxy support of the now shell-like governments of numerous other former great powers. Much of Asia, in particular, was ravaged, but the war ended far more swiftly than any had anticipated – the first real signs of the economic change that the nanite revolution that had been simmering only outside the Chinese borders had wrought. Defeated planetside, the mankind’s first manned interstellar venture (following probes already launched decades prior) was undertaken in haste, rather than jubilation. In a grand twist of irony, the greatly distilled population of Chinese Nationalists and assorted Nationalist allies that were to crew the two craft that left the solar system embodied, more than their particular nations, the meme of nationdom. Their haste, however, was to prove costly in the long run. Their cryoships were efficient and simple, but extremely slow. Neither of the vessels would actually be the first human craft to reach its intended destination, being in fact usurped by later sub-light settlers.

Soon after the war ended, there was one more last gasp of escaping fragmentary Nation States, launching a final four more vessels, which, though less hastily constructed, were all aimed toward more distant stars rimward of Sol. Only one of the four craft would be the first human ship to reach its destination, a destination which would turn out to be a Sundered star system, unconnected to the jump network. With the passing of this last great undertaking, the nation-states were no more, as nanite economics led to profound individual freedom of association for populations throughout the entire solar system. However, even with the nanite economy, the devastation wrought on its own and surrounding territories, combined with the resource allocation that had been necessary to produce interstellar craft in haste, served to cripple the further aspirations of those in former China’s territories both on Earth and in space.

Even as humanity lurched toward a post-sufficiency economy, there were still those far better off than others. In an effort to leverage their superiority in a world of increasingly homogenous meaning to one’s wealth, the precursors to the Highborn set about getting a jump on all other meme-group’s colonial aspirations – and the colonial aspirations of meme-groups were many, seeking, much as those who came to be known in America as the Pilgrims, a place away from everyone else as much as anything glorious. Moreover, at sublight speeds, the nearby pickings were few, and the choice planets were likely to fall to the swift. Thus groups that had resources to spare rapidly saw themselves embroiled in a spacerace. While the nanite economy was allowing post-sufficiency living for Sol’s booming population and the ever advancing communication networks were allowing collaboration on remarkable scales, interstellar undertakings were still monumental undertakings, and groups without initial reserves, or with significant catching up to do with respect to those immediately benefiting from the new economy were in no shape to immediately mount interstellar expeditions. Likewise, many groups were not interested in placing leaving Sol among their goals.

Still, interplanetary developments in Sol were legion, and many impressive interstellar craft began their construction in what were distinctly two phases of expansion. There were the groups, such as the precursors of the HighBorn and the Great Mormon Mission, which expended their existing advantage to immediately begin their interstellar expansion, and then there were groups, such as the then newly formed Andolians, who would catapult themselves, through their efforts in building the craft for the first wave of launches into a position amongst the second wave of launches. (The Andolians, by virtue of their extensive engineering undertakings for other groups, actually made a number of unmanned launches during the first wave, effectively securing themselves their future home system long before they themselves would leave.) By the beginning of the third wave of launches, however, the real-estate suspected of being most prime had already been spoken for, and while some were willing to race the long-already-launched Chinese, the general pace of launches slowed down as immediacy lessened and those groups in position to expend capital in exchange for travel had mostly already done so.

The third and longest phase of sub-light expansion from Sol was therefore a sporadic process. Minor groups often had to, much to their chagrin, band together in order to construct their interstellar steeds, especially knowing that the worlds they would be headed to may well be more marginal, leading to such mixed-meme enterprises as the settling of Bantam. Eventually, the more prosperous or lucky colonies would even begin sending out second-generation colonies, but the number of those was sufficiently small as to not warrant separate discussion.

It is from the later portion of the third phase of sub-light expansion from Sol that the Forsaken would draw the bulk of their ranks. Those who could not, or would not, leave earlier found themselves in flight when FTL was discovered. Those headed to worlds that would turn out to be on the jump network tended to find their planets already occupied and their presence unwelcome at the end of their flight – this if enough of them survived re-animation in the absence of their expected nanites (should they have waited until contact to begin re-animation). Others would arrive at their worlds, jump network or otherwises, to find it not in the state their run-ahead terraformers should have left it in, their terraforming nanites consumed by the nanoplague. Still others in mixed fortune would find their destination not on the jump network at all, and remain wholly isolated, having to survive the unexpected nano-plague (though an admittedly slower onset plague experience, according to all reports) without human aid or intervention (except in rare cases, such as exemplified by the origins of House Blythe, even if they came too late) until the invention of the SPEC drive by Emilio Sofono.

Those that survived to see their erstwhile new worlds generally found themselves turned away or worse. It is widely believed that there were several massacres of late arriving sub-light craft that managed to escape sufficiently detailed reporting to be able to assign responsibility to any extant parties. The increasing frequency of such sub-light craft turning up led to the formation of a dispossessed settler’s union, which, though ostensibly run by the displaced themselves, was funded by the other meme-groups, and thus strong-armed, until the later development of the Union’s own government (Forsaken being a colloquial rather than official term), into adhering to a policy of expedient removal. Those lucky enough to survive seeing their erstwhile destinations from orbit were forced to stay on board their ships while crews outfitted them with jump drives, and re-fuelled them (if possible), or crammed the colonists onto converted freight ships when such was infeasible, sending the dispossessed off toward what had begun, even then, to be called the Rimward Badlands – a zone already looking from early exploration and astrometrics to be an oddly less bountiful region of both space and jump network that the major meme-groups were willing to lose colonization of.

The final members of the Forsaken’s population base would be the smallest portion, those repatriated from Sundered worlds. Sharing only poor luck and temporal dialation from the rest of humanity with the Forsaken, most Sundered populations worth calling such were too large to repatriate en mass and may not have been particularly compatible matches with the Forsaken in the first place, but a number of them supplied either a one time disbursement or a steady drip of persons fleeing their black paralysis off of the jump network for the only group willing to take them in.

See also

• ./history/factions/Forsaken/ in the SVN repository