It’s the end of the month and time for a wrap-up on this month’s RPG Blog Carnival. Regular readers of my blog know that I normally do a “State of the Frontier” post on the last day of the month, that post will be up tomorrow. Today we’re going to look at the various entries in this month’s blog carnival topic, Organizations.
I don’t know if the topic wasn’t very appealing, people were crazy busy, or if the blog carnival is losing steam but we did not have a lot of submissions this month. I know I’m guilty of not doing an article every month as sometimes I’m strapped for time or just don’t have the inspiration to bend the often fantasy themed topics to sci-fi. But I was hoping this month’s topic of organizations would be broad enough to appeal widely, I guess I was wrong. That said the entries we did get were great.
First up was Building a Financial Landscape with Megacorps by Phil Forbes on the Stray RPG Thoughts blog. This entry discusses how to use Keith J. Davies’ Polyhedral Pantheons system to, instead of creating gods for a setting, create a series of mega-corps that are the main influencers in a setting. Phil then goes on to apply the system to the local branches of the mega-corps and the local markets they are operating in. This provides a rich framework of connections and competing interests for the players to interact with. I found this one interesting as my preferred setting, Star Frontiers, already has a pantheon of canonical mega-corps controlling various interests throughout the setting. I’m definitely going to take a look at this system for expanding these interactions.
Next up was an entry by Andrew Girdwood on the Geek Native blog. He gave us a random secret society generator. You can never have enough random names on hand and this generator gives you an infinite supply. You choose a general genre (Contemporary, Horror, Low or High Fantasy, or Sci-Fi) and then generate a name. You can keep clicking to get new ones or until you find one that sparks your imagination. The second one I got on his sci-fi generator was “The Eternal Planet Faction.” I immediately thought of a tie-in with the True Yazira society that I posted as part of the kickoff of this month’s carnival. In this case, it’s not part of the True Yazira Society, but a faction within the Family of One and the GODCo mega-corp that is trying to recreate their homeworld. I might write that up in the future. I’ll definitely use it at some point in my game.
Next was the entry by Gonz from Codex Anathema with their entry on the Silver Arrows, a loose, crime-prevention organization that might be part of the Church of the Silver Flame in their Ebberon campaign. They even provide a variation on the Arcane Archer archetype to play a member of the Silver Arrows.
As host, I offered up two different organizations. The first as part of the kickoff post, was the True Yazira society, primarily a cultural organization striving to preserve the traditions of their homeworld but also opposing the practices of the group that has usurped authority (as the True Yaziria Society sees it) from the rightful rules of their species. The second was the Investors, as shadowy, behind-the-scenes organization that works to influence governments and corporations to increase their own wealth and power.
That’s it for this month’s RPG Blog Carnival. I hope you found a nugget you could use in your game from this month’s posts or were inspired to generate some new organizations for your world even if you don’t blog or didn’t submit an entry. For me this is just a springboard as I plan to present various organizations from my setting in future posts, not just part of the Blog Carnival. I have several ideas lined up, I just need to find the time to write them down and get them posted.
Next month’s entry is still TBD but be sure to check out the RPG Blog Carnival’s home page on the Of Dice and Dragons blog to find links to past and future topics. And come back tomorrow for my regular “State of the Frontier” Post.
I had originally planned to do a post on the HSS History’s Hope this week but I’m not quite ready for that. Instead, I’m giving you the outlines of a small town on Pale, Myha’s Beach. While I developed this as part of my Star Frontiers campaign, you could easily drop this town on to any world in any game.
Location
In my game, Myha’s Beach is located about 300-400km east of Point True on the sea coast. Here’s a map of the region around Point True.
I can’t seem to find where I recorded it, but I believe each of those grid boxes are either 300 or 350 km on a side.
History
Myha’s Beach started as a small fishing village founded shortly after the sathar were driven out of the Frontier. The village was built about five kilometers south of the crater left from the sathar’s destruction of a former costal city.
Not long after the basic city infrastructure was in place, the small town became a favorite beach destination for vacationers wanting to get away from Point True. The waters are warm and clear as the spur of land to the north keeps the cooler arctic waters from flowing into the bay. The city has embraced this role and now tourism employs a major portion of the city’s workforce.
About a decade after the city was founded, Streel decided to get into the shipbuilding industry and brokered a deal with the city to open a shipyard some 10 kilometers to the south of the city proper. This caused the city’s population to grow once again as the shipyard workers moved to Myha’ Beach and more services grew up to support the new citizens.
City Layout
Click for full sized version
Myha’s Beach is a long narrow city that sprawls out along the seacoast. The original village lies toward the northern end of the current town. The original marina is still in use. As the tpwn began to grow, it was originally small, 4-10 room hotels that were built both north and south of the original village, with almost everything built with access to the beach. This region of small hotels and private residences comprises the northern 3-4 kilometers of the town, centered on the now historic original village center and marina.
With the construction of the Streel shipyards to the south of the town, the town’s growth began to shift more in that direction with new residential and commercial districts being built southward with the residences on the beach and the commercial districts more inland. While growth continued to the north, it slowed considerably. At this same time, several large resort-style hotels were built on large swaths of the beach south of the existing city.
Front view of Observatory Manor
The city’s growth northward was effectively halted in FY18 with the construction of Brekstoone Manor. The manor is simply referred to as Observatory Manor by the locals, due to the large observatory dome on the manor’s north tower. The Brekstoone family secured a large tract of land that ran from the sea several kilometers inland on which they built the manor. With no more room northward to grow, the town continued to grow southward.
The 3-4 kilometers around the initial resort hotels was zoned for more of the same while the area between these large hotels and the Streel shipyards was reserved for the smaller hotels and residences. As this area filled in the city began to grow inland from the seashore with more commercial and residential areas to support the growing resident and tourist population.
In FY36 a small spaceport was built about 30 kilometers inland from the town to reduce the noise and air traffic impact on the town. This allows offworld visitors to come straight to Myha’s Beach instead of having to go to Point True first.
Current Population
The current resident population of Myha’s Beach is about 20,000. It is about 55% human, 20% yazirian, 15% vrusk, 9% dralasite and the remaining 1% made up of Rim and other races. In addition to the residents, the city supports between 20 to 40 thousand visitors, depending on the time of year.
About 5% of the resident population work at the Streel shipyards. Another 10% work in the town’s still thriving fishing industry supplying fresh seafood to both the local residents and tourists but also to Point True. A quarter of the resident population works directly in the tourist industry running shops, hotels, equipment rentals, and as guides both to the ocean and the inland areas. The remaining population works all of the support industries including city services, maintenance, restaurants, and stores that keep the city running.
Your thoughts?
That’s the city of Myha’s Beach. What other details would you like to see in a city write-up like this? Do you have any suggestions for other things that should be included or discussed? Let me know in the comments below.
This is another new organization for the June RPG Blog Carnival which I’m hosting here on the Expanding Frontier. I had originally thought I was going to write about my vision of the Galactic Task Force, Incorporated, which I am using in my current game, but decided that I would rather go with something completely new instead of an already established mega-corp in the setting. So I decided to write about “The Investors” a secret society I created as part of my Detailed Frontier Timeline project.
The Investors
The Investors is a secret society composed of a number of the very, very wealthy citizens of the Frontier. They work behind the scenes on nearly all the worlds of the Frontier. Very few people outside the organization even know of its existence. Star Law has a slim file on the organization, and a few of the large mega-corps have some data, and a few planetary governments have some data, but beyond that, they are very obscure.
The society does not have an official name, the members just refer to themselves as “investors.”
Aims and Goals
The aims and goals of the organization can be summarized by two words, money and power. The organization exists to increase the wealth of its members and increase the power they have in influencing the operation of the Frontier economy.
The members of the society, while sometimes at odd with one another, and always in competition with each other, use their already considerable assets to influence businesses and governments in ways that will increase their personal wealth and make it possible for them to exert greater influence in the future.
An example of this recently in my Detailed Frontier Timeline is their acquisition of the Groth Energy Corporation on Groth in the Fromeltar system, the major power supplier on that world. First, they manipulated the finances of the company to force it into near bankruptcy. They then bought out the previous owners, and finally tripled energy prices on the planet. Since GE was the only power supplier to many portions of the planet, people either had to pay the new prices or go without power. At the same time, they started trying to buy up all the smaller energy producers as well. They were a little too rash, however, and many of the smaller energy providers banded together to form the Consolidated Nebula Energy Group to fight back.
As the society has grown, and due to its decentralized nature, sometimes the members find themselves working at cross purposes with other members. When this is discovered, they meet to discuss the best way forward that provides the greatest benefit to all. If there is ever a business conflict that seemed to be at a compete impasse and then suddenly resolved itself, sometimes in a completely unexpected manner, it may very well have been the investors behind the scenes making deals.
History
The society started at a country club on Triad in the Cassidine system, in 37 p.f. There was a gala event and three of the Frontier’s richest beings, including the then CEO of Pan Galactic Corporation, were commiserating with one another about all the laws and restrictions their respective planetary governments were placing on them. One of them joked that they should create an organization to invest in the right people to sway things in the direction they wanted. The idea stuck with them and by the end of the night, the three had formed a rough outline of how they would operate.
Over the years, the original three members felt out others around the Frontier with similar feelings and desires and the number of investors grew. While they are primarily a self-interested lot, not everything they do is necessarily bad. Fed up with the depredations of the pirate Hatzk Naar, the organization worked to facilitate the organization of the First Common Muster. The sathar invasion in the Truane’s Star system a few years later was definitely bad for business and the organization was instrumental in the speed at which the Second Common Muster happened, which allowed the sathar to be quickly defeated. And with the formation of the UPF, most of the new military contracts for the creation of Spacefleet and equipping Star Law went to businesses owned by members of the society.
Today, members of the society control, or at least exert strong influence over, nearly all the mega-corps and large planetary corporations. They have tendrils into almost all the governments of the Frontier with some of the members serving in those governments.
Membership
There are no more that a few dozen members of the society across the entire Frontier. You must have a net worth of over a billion credits to even be considered for membership and there just are not that many billionaires out there.
No single person within the organization knows all the members, or even the true names of all the members as they only interact through holovid communications and use aliases in their interactions. While a single member might know the true identity of a few other members, possibly the person who recruited them and those they may have recruited, the members are careful about not revealing their identities, even to other members of the society.
That said, due to the limited pool of possible recruits, it is sometimes possible to determine the identity of other members by the agendas that they support. And a few members openly share their identity to other members.
The membership contains representatives from nearly every major industry in the Frontier.
Recruitment is done slowly and carefully. As members interact with the other elite, wealthy citizens, they keep an ear out for those that are discontent with restrictions they are facing or which are limiting their opportunities. These contacts are nurtured and if they are deemed to have the right mindset and ethics, they are approached for membership, sometimes openly and sometimes indirectly.
Organization
There is no real hierarchy or formal organization to the society. In theory all members are equal. When conflicts arise or major decisions have to be made, they form committees consisting of the members affected by the activity to discuss and debate the issues and reach a decision.
Occasionally, some endeavors are so large in scope, that it requires a meeting of the entire society. These events are rare and are usually scheduled around major events on one of the core worlds that all the members would reasonably expect to travel for anyway. Even these major meetings are held remotely so as to preserve the anonymity of the members that wish to do so.
Despite there being no formal organizations, there are definitely clicks and power blocks within the organization. Most members are at least somewhat loyal to the member that recruited them and gave them access to the society. Other power groups form along industry lines or other areas of common interest. Some major decisions can take weeks to resolve as each group tries to influence things most favorably for themselves.
What do you think?
The society’s outline is fairly vague and nebulous. That is intentional. It is partially due to the fact that the society is still taking shape in my game and I haven’t decided exactly how and where I want to use it. But it is also partially to allow others to shape and use it in their games as they wish. This description paints broad strokes over the society’s operations and memberships but leaves the details for individual game masters to implement in ways specific to their campaign.
Let me know your thoughts on the society and how you might use such an organization in your game. And don’t forget to check out the other posts linked in the comments of the kickoff post of this month’s blog carnival to see what others are writing about on this month’s topic.
I really struggled this past month in getting the updates out on a daily basis. They came out eventually, but often in bunches instead of one or two a day. As I’m writing this blog post, I’m a week behind on posting. I’ll try to get those caught up soon. As always, you can follow the @StarFrontiers twitter account for the daily updates, this is just a summary from the past month.
This month, the UPF and some of the militias begin to increase their ship rosters, the first Saurian Ark Ship headed toward the Frontier departs, the Gullwind continues its flight from Dramune, and the HSS History’s Hope gets lost once again via a misjump.
Date (FY)
Events
61.081
Construction of the CMS Swallow complete at the Minotaur (Theseus) shipyards. The ship begins its maiden voyage to its home system of White Light.
61.082
– Construction begins on two assault scouts for Strike Force Meteor at the Streel shipyards (Pale, Truane’s Star).
– The HSS History’s Hope successfully jumps back to the YS02 system completing the YS02-YS03 jump route. They begin decelerating and plotting the jump back to YS03 to begin the next leg of their journey.
61.083
The seventh Saurian ark ship is completed and begins its shakedown cruise.
61.084
Garulus Tylappar discovers Chukkas, a protected and beloved species of Inner Reach (Dramune), in shipping crates marked as “Foodstuffs” he was contracted to deliver to Malco Enterprises on Darkworld Station (Outer Reach, Dramune). (SFKH1)
61.085
Worried about being discovered with the new knowledge and unwilling to turn the lovable chukkas over to the Malthar, Garulus takes his ship, the Gullwind, and makes a fast jump to the Cassidine system.
61.086
The UPFS Eleanor Moraes completes its shakedown cruise. With its crew fully assembled, it is tasked with exploring the region beyond Theseus. With over 20 days until the exploration module is complete, the ship will jump to White Light and back to verify that everything is in working order. Calculations begin for a jump to the White Light system.
61.087
The CMS Flitter arrives at Clarion Station (White Light). After a final inspection, it is added to the Clarion Royal Marine roster and enters official service.
61.088
Initial calculations complete, the UPFS Elanor Moraes begins accelerating for the jump to the White Light system.
61.089
After a couple of weeks of discussions the CDC delegates reach an agreement with the new Consolidated Nebula Energy Group to supply resources to the new company’s power plants.
61.090
The Gullwind, having not slowed down upon entering the Cassidine system, completes its astrogation calculations and makes the jump to the Madderly’s Star system. It doesn’t slow down here either.
61.091
The CMS Swallow arrives at Clarion Station (White Light). After a final inspection, it is added to the Clarion Royal Marine roster and enters official service.
61.092
The HSS History’s Hope successfully returns to the YS03. While the engineers work on the drives, the astrogators begin plotting the jump to the next system, a white dwarf-M star binary 11 ly away. This will be the longest uncharted jump yet of the trip.
61.093
A Flight patrol in the outer Kazak system stumble upon the patrolling sathar cutters. One of the cutters is destroyed but the other escapes. One of the Flight assault scouts was also destroyed.
61.094
With reports from agents in the Frontier that Strike Force Nova has recently left Truane’s Star to return to Prenglar, the sathar decided to stand down in OFS019 and start preparing for a major push on the Frontier.
61.095
The newest Saurian ark ship completes its shakedown cruise and begins loading passengers and supplies for its journey into the unknown.
61.096
Having left the remains of Patrol Group Virgo in Truane’s Star, Strike Force Nova arrives back at Morgaine’s World (Prenglar).
61.097
– The UPFS Eleanor Moraes arrives safely at Clarion Station (White Light). After a full checkup of the ship, they begin the jump back to Minotaur (Theseus).
– The surviving sathar cutter in the Kazak system makes the jump back to the OFS019 system.
61.098
After double checking the jump calculations, the HSS History’s Hope begins acceleration to jump speed. Their destination is designated YS05.
61.099
After an extensive debrief of the crews, Strike Force Nova stands down for maintenance. Almost all of the ships enter the PGC SCC at the same time. Several civilian ships are removed from the shipyard to make room, upsetting their owners.
61.100
– After completing overhauls on the ship’s engines, the Gullwind departs the Madderly’s Star system for White Light.
– Repairs at the PGC shipyard (Gran Quivera, Prenglar) restore capacity to 95%.
61.101
Owners of ships ejected from the PGC shipyards lodge a formal complaint with Starfleet and the Council of Worlds. However, the UPF charter grants Spacefleet this power during “times of crisis” which the CoW has invoked after receiving the reports of SF Nova and the sathar buildup in OFS019.
61.102
Encouraged by their reception by CDC, the Consolidated Nebula Energy Group (Groth, Fromeltar) send delegates to Terledrom (Fromeltar) and Inner Reach (Dramune) to meet with energy suppliers there.
61.103
– The HSS History Hope attempts to jump to YS05. Unfortunately, the calculations were off and the ship misjumps to an unknown star system with a small M dwarf instead of the binary system they were aiming for.
– They designate the system YS06 and start working on figuring out where they are at.
61.104
The ship bearing the Consolidated Nebula Energy Group delegates headed to Terledrom (Fromeltar) suffers an in-flight explosion, three of the four delegates are killed. No other passengers are injured but the ship is disabled. Rescue ships from Terledrom dispatched immediately.
61.105
Repairs of the Triad Starship Construction Center (Cassidine) bring it up to 95% capacity.
61.106
Sathar begin what they expect to be a final push on the Sauria system. A massive fleet, dwarfing anything seen since the attack on Truane’s Star 60+ years ago, leaves the SCC at OFS228 and heads to Tischen via OFS177.
61.107
The UPFS Eleanor Moraes arrives back at Minotaur Station (Theseus). All systems working flawlessly. The crew takes three days of leave while waiting for the exploration module to be completed.
61.108
Investigation of the damaged starliner reveals that the damage was deliberate sabotage and not an accident. Star Law takes over the investigation.
61.109
– The Gullwind departs the White Light system for it’s final destination at Minotaur Station (Theseus)
– After six days of around the clock work, the astrogators on the HSS History’s Hope determine their location. They overshot their target by nearly 8 light years. The good news is that this system was to be the next one on their trip. The bad news is that they have two uncharted jumps back to a known system.
61.110
The UPFS Eleanor Moraes’s extended exploration module is complete at the Minotaur starship construction center (Theseus). The ship’s crew docks with the exploration module and pull it into a holding orbit as they begin final preparations for their first jump.
Welcome to June! Regular readers my have noticed that this post is a day early as I usually post on Tuesdays. That’s because this month, I’m hosting the RPG Blog Carnival and we need to get this month’s topic, Organizations, kicked off. This post will replace tomorrow’s regular post as the first post of the month. But don’t worry, the next installment of the Detailed Frontier Timeline will be up next week.
If you’re new to the Expanding Frontier, welcome. After you’ve read today’s post, maybe you’ll stick around and take a stroll through the archive and hopefully find something else of interest as well.
The Topic – Organizations
When I volunteered to host a month of the blog carnival, I had already had in my mind to do some development of new and existing organizations in my game. I had already done a few posts on the topic and thought it would be a great topic to get input from other creator on how they handle different organizations in their settings. Plus it would give me the motivation to flesh out a few more of my own.
I’m using the term “organization” here very loosely. It could be anything from a megacorp, like I detailed in my post about the Streel Corporation, a small private company (e.g. Obar Enterprises), a religion, a governing body of a planet or city, or a band of adventurers. It could be a single business, a sports team, or a knitting club. Guilds, cults, and secret societies are other examples. Anything that has two or more people involved and some sort of order or hierarchy counts. The sky is really the limit.
Maybe like me, you want to flesh out one or more organizations in your setting an share them as part of the carnival. What makes the organization unique? How does it stand out in your world? How do the player characters interact with the organization, if at all?
I remember a business from a fantasy game I played in when I was in high school. It had been created by a retired character in an earlier campaign run by the GM, he wasn’t part of our game. It was a chain of establishments that were a combination of high-end tavern, inn, casino, and other attractions. You could find them in almost every major city. But they only accepted silver coins. You could not pay in gold, copper, nickel, or brass (the various other coins of the world). Only silver. Apparently, the retired PC who set up the original inn, which he created as a safe house, had something happen to him that made him leery of every other coin type. It was a great, safe place to stay, you just had to have a lot of silver on hand to pay your bills.
Or maybe you have a unique set of rules for handling the way various organizations interact with one another. I remember when I read Stars Without Number, the faction rules were so interesting I almost wrote a little mini game based just around that set of rules.
Another topic that comes to mind is how you keep track of all the organizations in your game and what they are up to. Do you have lists of all the projects they are working on? Or maybe you just have short descriptions of their aims and goals and when something happens, you attribute it to the organization most likely to have done it.
Those are just some ideas I’ve had of things to write about as I’ve contemplated this topic the last little while. I’m sure you’ll have others. Share your ideas by linking to this post in yours, and posting a comment here once your post is up. At the end of the month, I’ll gather up all the posts from the comments and consolidate them in to an organized list to provide a handy reference.
And with the kickoff out of the way, it’s time to turn our attention to a semi-secret society in my game universe, the True Yazira Society.
The True Yazira Society
True Yazira Society Logo, a stylized tree shaped like the leaf of the major tree species from Yaziria with the society’s initials forming the branches.
I teased this organization back in my posts for the February Blog Carnival, whose topic was Legends and Lore. As part of that month’s posts, I did two posts on the legends and lore of the yazirian species in my Star Frontiers game universe. The first, Yazirian History, I covered the background of how the yazirian race came to be in the Frontier. Most of this is general knowledge to yazirian characters. In the second, Legends & Lore – Yazirians, I covered more less known information including things the characters may not know. It was in this post that I introduced the True Yaziria society.
Creation
The True Yazira society was formed about ten years before the first sathar attack. It was created by surviving members of the old Warhon’s guard, supporters, and retinue.
When news reached the yazirian colonies that the only ship to be lost in the exodus was the one carrying the royal family, many believed that foul play by the Family of One was involved and that they didn’t want to give up control of yazirian society on the new worlds. This was most strongly vocalized by members of the royal court and the Warhon’s personal guard that were already in the Frontier.
It was at this point that the “accidents” and disappearances started happening. Many of the most vocal dissidents died or simply vanished. Fearing for their lives, many of the royal court and royal guard took the opportunity to emigrate to the Prenglar, Cassidine, and Truane’s Star systems were there were multi-species worlds and where they would be out of the direct influence of the Family of One.
As part of this second exodus, these yazirians formed the True Yazira society. The members initially consisted of those fleeing the yazirian worlds but that would change over time.
Aims and Goals
The initial aims of the society were really just mutual protection and support. Coupled with a desire to preserve as many of the traditions of their homeworld as they could in their new environment. First and foremost in the beginning, the members of the society worked to keep track of each other in order to keep them safe from the Family of One and alert one another if someone went missing. The other major aim was to support one another as they settled in these new worlds among aliens species. Contact with the humans, vrusk, and dralasites had started only a few years before and the society provided a social outlet for yazirians to meet and just be themselves.
As word reached the members of the actions being taken by the Family of one on Hentz, as well as the other yazirian colony worlds, the True Yaziria society’s goals expanding to opposing the actions of the Family of One. Many members returned to the yazirian worlds, either permanently, or as regular business visitors, to both monitor and actively work against what they felt were encroachments by the Family of One on the true yarziran way of life. These early efforts were quite fruitful, and the society was gaining momentum, most rapidly on the worlds other than Hentz where the Family of One was centered.
And then the sathar attacked. While the actual devastation was confined to the Truane’s Star system, the repercussions would be felt all over the Frontier. Most of the membership of the society living on Pale were killed in the sathar attack, as whole cities and towns were obliterated in single strikes from space. In the decade after the attack, when everyone thought a fresh attack could occur at any moment, the focus of the entire Frontier shifted and the concerns of the True Yazira society were far from the concerns of the average yazirian citizen. The Family of One worked efficiently and effectively during the crisis and people just came to accept their leadership.
In the intervening decades the aims of the society have shifted somewhat. They still oppose the Family of One, but their efforts are much more behind the scenes. Openly, they focus on cultural preservation and teaching about traditional yazirian values from their homeworld. But behind the scenes, many members still work to limit the power of the Family of One and to get equal treatment for yazirians everywhere regardless of world or clan. These efforts have been much more effective on the worlds other than Hentz. They have given up on completely ousting the Family of One from its position in yazirian society but rather now focus on neutralizing its influence as much as possible.
Membership and Organization
Initially, members of the True Yazira society were all members of the royal court or royal guard and refugees from the yazirian colony worlds living on the mixed-species worlds or the worlds of other species. With the return of some of these yazirians to the colony worlds, the society began to grow there as well. Anyone who expressed displeasure with the operations and ideals of the Family of One would often find their way to True Yazira. On the non-yazirian worlds, many joined simply for the comradarie of fellow yazirians in their new alien homes.
Today most of the membership of the society is fairly old and consists of first generation colonists who still remember Yazira itself. While there are new recruits of the younger generations, their numbers are relatively few but growing. Some of these younger members are truly interested in preserving and sometimes restoring practices from Yazira, most are there for the opposition of the Family of One and its policies and practices. The old world doesn’t mean as much to this younger generation as they have never seen it.
The society is organized in to chapters and councils. The chapters are the local organizing body and typically cover a single town or small region. Although in the larger metropolitan areas such as Port Loren, or Point True, there might be multiple chapters each covering a part of the city.
Councils are the higher level organizations. Each world has a single council that coordinates activities across all the chapters of the world. Each chapter has a representative that attends council meetings and votes for the interests of the chapter. This representative also has the responsibility to make sure that the chapter members adhere to any decisions of the council. Typically, the council representative is the head of the local chapter.
There is also a Frontier wide council consisting of two representatives from each of the world councils. This is the governing body of the society. All current members of this council are former members of the royal guard or royal court.
Activities
In the early days of the society, the members openly opposed the actions of the Family of One although they did so as individuals or groups and never in the name of the True Yazira society. And in return, the Family of One actively hunted down these members of the society, although that was done clandestinely as much as possible.
Openly, and in the name of the society, the early members organized activities and cultural events for yazirians on all the worlds of the Frontier where chapters were organized. They also welcomed any visitors of the other species in the Frontier to the events as a way of teaching them about yazirian culture.
After the sathar attack, the opposition to the Family of One became much more clandestine and behind the scenes. They supported organizations that opposed the practices of the Family of One with money and manpower but took much more of a supporting role than active involvement. They have worked extensively, especially on the worlds in the Athor, Gruna Garu, and Scree Fron systems, to get equal treatment from GODCo on those worlds and limit the control the Family of One exerts on the govenments of those systems.
At the same time, the society has actively stepped up the cultural and historical activities on worlds all around the Frontier, working hard to preserve the cultural heritage of the species and the histories of their homeworld. In the last decade they have launched a major effort to interview and record all surviving members of the species who actually lived on Yazira and participated in the Great Exodus. All of these stories are available for anyone to listen to.
As the society is slowly recruiting younger members, many dissatisfied with the actions and policies of the Family of One, the opposition is becoming more vocal and open once again.
Once recent activity which the society is indirectly a major supporter of, is the voyage of the HSS History’s Hope, a small exploration craft currently trying to chart a way back to the system that they believe to be Yazria. The Family of One suppressed the location of Yaziria shortly after the yazirans arrived in the Frontier claiming a computer crash wiped all details of the location and routes there. With the recent discovery of a system that might by Yazira in the right direction from the Frontier, many members of the society were quite excited. The support for the mission was quite spontaneous and not an organized event. However, most of the crew of the ship are members of the society and much of the mission’s funding comes from members as well. While unintended, this means that the mission has the ability to call on the society for assistance if needed. You can expect to hear more about this relationship in an upcoming post and in upcoming events in the Detailed Frontier Timeline.
Closing Thoughts
That’s my first organization for this month’s carnival. I intend to do at least one more later in the month and have new organizations be a regular feature on the blog. I created the True Yazira organization as part of the Legends and Lore blog carnival entry and have since tied it in to several events in my setting. It hasn’t come up with any games I’ve ever run but that is sure to change in the future.
I can’t wait to see what other organizations my fellow bloggers come up with and other aspects of using organizations in games they discuss. Be sure to check back regularly to see what new posts have been added to the comments and come back at the end of the month for the wrap up and summary post.
What do you think of the True Yazira society? How would you use an organization like this in your game? What more would you like to know about this society? Feel free to share your ideas in the comment section.
