House Vefna

House Overview

A House formed after House Raix's failed colonization attempt of the planet Vefna, sponsored in large part by House Aramin, in hopes that having it colonized by someone would prevent Gwynne from taking over. This hope proved ill-founded, but in the end, the Vefnans mananged to throw off occupying Gwynne soldiers, and re-take the planet. An enthusiastic ally of the Wormhole Colonies, they are populated mostly by Jarou (smallish shape-shifters without a home planet) and rugged colonists.

Players

• Lucian (Kyil)

House Skills

• Trade/Diplomacy: Good
• Engineering: Good (Jarou tinkerers and small hands)
• Industry: Average
• Research: Average
• Exploration: Average
• Military: Bad

House Aspects

(Two things of note about the House that can be used to benefit/penalize character actions wrt that house -- this could be unusual talents possessed by the members, a particular House ethos, some standard-issue piece of equipment, etc)

Fool me once, shame on you - Gwynne's trickery has left them a little gun-shy about anything similar happening again.

Can't beat Jarou Ingenuity! - The Jarou have been homeless for so long, they have learned to make due with whatever they find on hand. If anything, they're more likely to want to try a hacked solution, especially if it's cheaper than the tried-and-true method.

House Background

Vefnans have been basically too busy to form an official local government. It obviously doesn't help that for much of the House's brief history, the majority of its occupants were in jail.

Most disputes thus far have been settled by a community process developed organically by Jarou living in small communities throughout the galaxy where they were not represented in the local governments at all, and needed a way to resolve things internally. Grievances are brought before mutally-agreed-on volunteer arbitrators, who accept a small fee from both parties to listen to the dispute and make a non-binding ruling. A complicated system of secondary arbitration and enforcement is in place in the community if the dispute continues, with banishment and shunning by the entire community possible at the end. The (minority) humans on Vefna find the process odd and confusing, but after most of them were exonerated for collaborating with the Gwynne occupation force by a Jarou arbiter, they find it workable enough, and haven't complained. It has yet to be seen if this system will survive without an external governmental system in place behind it to enforce punishment of truly egregious acts of violence or larceny, but the Jarou seem content to adapt the system as needed if those issues come up in the future.

On a personal note, several people have asked Kyil to arbitrate for them in a few situations, apparently in light of his role in the freeing of Vefna; a development he finds exceedingly odd, and more than a little uncomfortable. (His story was key in the exoneration of the accused collaborators, as well.)

Characters of Interest

(list characters in the house, players or non-players. players should have a more complete skillset listed, but you don't have to decide now who is who. it would be useful to know the names of important/significant people in the house even if they aren't present on the colony -- eg, the head of the house)

Kyil

(PC, lpsmith)

Being dragged along with his parents to the far side of the wormhole to colonize some dump of a planet was bad enough, but then they didn't even end up on that dump, but on some *other* dump of a planet, which was, if possible, even worse than the first one sounded. His parent were all 'This is a great opportunity for Jarou everywhere blah blah' and 'Aren't we lucky we're the ones who can finally blah' when all Kyil wanted to do was hang out with the other kids after school in the Holy Names School for Wayward Aliens and see how long they could set fire to things before one of the nuns found them.

Then they got captured by Gwynne soldiers, which at least was exciting, but in the intervening weeks, he's discovered that if there's one thing he hates even worse than nuns, it's Gwynne soldiers. They've even picked on his baby brother, which is just too much. It's time to find a way out of here.

Skills:
Great: Criminal, Weapons(Primitive)
Good: Vehicles, Survival, Stealth, Weapons (other)
Average: Athletics, Engineering, Investigation
Bad: Academics, Socialization (everyone)

Kyil is 8 years old, which is the Jarou equivalent of a late teen. He has several tatoos and piercings which seem to intentionally interfere with his shapeshifting ability, which horrifies his parents.

Aspects:

• "Don't treat my baby brother that way." Kyil has a fierce loyalty to his baby brother Puul, which he tries to keep hidden, but which is fairly obvious to anyone who observes the two of them together for any amount of time.
• Tatoos and piercings. Kyil's tatoos and piercings make it hard for him to shapeshift into certain shapes, but it does mean he always has his lockpicks and other criminal paraphernalia with him.
• Tolerance for Extremes. The shapeshifting ability Kyil does find useful is survival in extreme circumstances--he figured out how to get tatooed and pierced with hardly any pain at all, for example, and he's practiced a lot to survive in other unpleasant and dangerous circumstances--'who can last longer' was a game he almost always won among his friends after school.
• Subversive Thinking. Kyil usually doesn't get along with people, but if they're subversive like him, they get along famously (can use Criminal instead of Socialization when talking with sufficiently lowlife scum).

The Colony

Vefna is a mysterious and ice-locked planet. The natives show no particular evidence of advanced civilization, being primarily nomadic hunters who live off scattered vegetation and hunting the wild mammoth-analogs (they have three trunks), but nevertheless the planet is home to no less than three enormous, elaborate and completely abandoned palaces, their origin and purpose unknown (even the identification as 'palace' may be false). To more practical eyes, the main value of the planet is mining the frozen gases which have accumulated over the centuries.

• Resources: Industrial Gases (+4), Mammoth Byproducts (+2), Palace Salvage (+0)

Frozen Gases

The low temperature of the planet gets even colder rather than warmer as one penetrates the surface of the planet, though Empire scientists claim that the planet has a molten core just like any other. This unnatural and rare phenomenon means that several valuable compounds, normally gaseous at typical planet-surface temperatures and pressures, can be found in crystalline form in mines under the planet's surface.

Mammoths

It is somewhat rare for megafauna of any sort to still exist on settled planets in the Empire, having typically been hunted or crowded to extinction years ago. The survival of the mammoths of Vefna can be attributed to the extreme hostility of the planet itself, combined with the mammoths' adaptation to the cold, and ability to survive on the peculiar 'snow' that falls on the surface of the planet: actually a complex chemical whose simpler forms are gaseous, and combine and condense in the upper atmosphere in response to sunlight, and aided by a peculiar airborne bacteria that also uses the complex form of the chemical for energy.