House Advantage

House Overview

House Advantage is an ultra-new house, created when a loose association of bright young things in the Imperial administration pulled off a brilliant political manoeuvre that gained them some substantial and lucrative Imperial possessions (and, in the process, seriously irritated several of the larger Houses). The problem was that their plan didn't extend much further than that; they have no standing military, a skeleton administrative service and a rather unclear idea of who's in charge and what the next objective is. The most probable outcome is that Advantage will collapse through infighting, organisational chaos and the depredations of Gwyne and Reeft; but a good many smaller Houses would like to see them survive at least for a while.

Players

• maga
• katre

House Skills

• Trade: Average
• Industry: Average
• Research: Good
• Exploration: Good
• Diplomacy: 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)

Possibilities

• Disavow: "That position was the personal opinion of a House Advantage stakeholder and does not necessarily represent the policy of House Advantage at this time." Duck out of any commitment, contract, alliance or policy position that has become inconvenient, with relatively little penalty. Downside: everybody expects you to do this.
• Paradigm Shift: Inveterate glory-hunters, House Advantage characters are always more motivated when they're doing something charismatic, new and unexpected. If I'm not defining the zeitgeist, why did I even get out of bed?

Colony Possessions

• The main colony, Tomorrow, located at hex I14
• A rank-1 aquaculture harvesting operation (ie, a mine which produces Food) (located on a rank-3 source) in hex J13
• A rank-1 Savage Corn docudrama/farming operation (ie, a mine which produces Savage Corn) in hex I13
• A rank-1 cargo ship
• A rank-1 explorer unit, located at hex J11
• A rank-2 explorer unit, located at hex I14
• A rank-1 research institution in the main colony: the Tomorrow Institute of Lobbying, Marketing and Propaganda.
• 8 mega-credits in the colony treasury
• Resources:
  • 2 units of food (rank-1)
• Notable sites:
  • A natural (?) corn maze, located at hex I13 (This hex can be turned into a rank-1 mine producing Savage Corn for the cost of 3 mega-credits; it can't be increased in rank further without further exploration or advertising effort, though.)
• Additional abilities:
  • Local Rapport: spend to either calm unrest or negate a bad result involving the native population within ten hexes of I14.
  • A really quite catchy jingle: Suitable to have the words of your choice set to it and guaranteed to be the talk of the Empire for at least five turns.

House Background

(More about the House, history, governance, name of home planet or planets, any special assets, etc)

History and governance: During the decadent Venafi Dynasty, several thousand years ago, the Emperor of the time spent a truly stunning amount of money terraforming the planet Hrobaj into a pleasure-planet on which to settle his several thousand concubines and their offspring. During the ensuing economic collapse and dynastic changeover, the mostly-terraformed world (and the concubines etc) was abandoned, and the location of the wormhole was lost. But folk tales abounded, and "Hrobajan folly" is still used to mean "catastrophic self-indulgence on a vast scale" in many parts of the Empire. Until recently, no one was really worried about the planet, as there was bigger game to fry.

Until, that is, a bored underling in the Imperial Department of Planning found an outdated and heavily mis-filed early report on the terraforming effort on Hrobaj. [He could be an archaeospy: see Agents_Of_Empire/Brainstorming.] Instead of trashing it, he read it, and discovered a) the location of the wormhole, and b) that one of the reasons Hrobaj had been selected was due to its extensive lodes of thorium, in a very isotopically pure state that would require little processing and easy extraction. The Venafi Emperor had intended to keep them secret in case of future need, and only the economic collapse (due to his own terraforming plans) kept him from proceeding.

Armed with this, the clerk and some like-minded friends quickly formed Advantage, Inc, and managed to maneuver the Emperor into giving them title to a lost planet with no known use. Once they had legal title to Hrobaj, they lost no time buying ships, stabilizing the wormhole, and starting up mines, quickly turning themselves into House Advantage.

House Advantage is run along corporate lines, with all of the original bureaucrats as the Board of Directors, and a CEO running the show. So far, they are aligned around the mining operation, but a Long Term Strategy group has promised a forward-looking document on future growth opportunities, due sometime early next fiscal year.

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)

PC

Elaine the Navigator (maga), amphibian explorer and adventuress. Her gene-line of deep-sea migratory humans were forced to settle down by House Gwyne, and she was conscripted into the military, shuffled into deep-space scouting, and climbed the ranks through a combination of raw navigation talent and networking. She acquired her first command, stacked its officer corps with her close friends, made a string of discoveries and promptly defected to Aramin with all the data. In gratitude, Aramin gave her command of its brand-new star-frigate Heart of the Storm, the flagship of its exploration fleet; after a string of successful missions and furious clashes with her superiors, Elaine defected again, taking the ship and a good number of Aramin's best and brightest. Character portrait.

• Great: Investigation, Socialising (Barbarians)
• Good: Vehicles, Athletics, Survival, Socialising (Other)
• Average: Stealth, Engineering, Weapons (Blasters)
• Bad: Criminal, Academics, Weapons (Other)

Personnel Genius: Somehow attracts subordinates who are exceptionally competent and loyal. If she walks into a spaceport and hires the first hobo she lays eyes on, he'll turn out to be a former hotshot pilot who just needed a reason to get sober.
Bestselling Author: Writes witty, popular, questionably accurate accounts of her adventures, lovers and enemies. The money is okay, but mostly it's useful for character assassination and self-aggrandisement. And anyone could be a fan.
Pathogen Hardened: Elaine's immune system is managed by a weak-AI implant with a small biochemical lab at its disposal; any disease or parasite not specifically designed to defeat such systems will fizzle, and she'll get an early warning about chemical toxins.
Amphibious: can swim like a fish, breathe underwater, endure cold.

Jathries Smith (katre), originally an archivist in the Imperial Department of Planning, he found the lost documents describing Hrobaj and helped set Advantage in motion. Due to poor infighting skills he now has a lot of shares but has been mostly sidelined, but he wants to make a play for more power in the House.

• Great (+4): Investigation, Socializing (Imperial Bureaucracy)
• Good (+2): Academics, Socializing (Corporate), Stealth
• Bad (-2): Athletics, Engineering
• Aspects:
  • Hmm, I saw that in the Archives Once - Jathries has read voraciously in the Imperial Archives, and remembers a lot of it which comes in handy sometimes.
  • Great Smile - Jathries has been practicing his smile for /years/ now. It'll stun an Acturan Megashark.
  • Ambitious - Jathries will do almost anything to gain power. Sometimes this helps, sometimes it doesn't...
  • Forward Planning Is The Key To Our Success - Due to his years in the Imperial Department of Planning, Jathries always has a plan ready, even when he didn't need to have one.

NPC Or Undetermined

• Akwe Nerumi Blue-Star-Guidance, a mercenary corporate raider of sorts; brought on during the takeover, now holds enough shares to be a de facto leading light of the House
• Senator Pabula Erythro, a longtime eminence grise and voice of reformist dissent in the Senate, widely-respected but fundamentally ineffective for a very, very long time. (Her constituency, Wyndham Station, is an ancient trade hub so balkanised among the Houses as to be politically inert.) Brought on by Advantage largely for respectability; her motives are uncertain.
• Enatha Starhaus, CEO, the most brilliant MBA of the generation. Stunningly charismatic for twenty-five minutes, after which you realise that nothing makes any coherent sense at all. Body-sculpted for maximum confidence-inspiring appeal to key demographics. Great teeth, great hair, great skin, serious brow, honest eyes, androgynous. Easily swayed by stakeholders. Nominal leader of the House, though everybody knows this is a polite fiction.

The Colony

• • The main planet was designed by the great terraforming artist Hrobaj towards the end of the decadent Venafi Dynasty. The last Venafi Emperor commissioned it as a pleasure-garden on a vast scale, and used it to house thousands of concubines and offspring. Then the dynasty collapsed, the planet was lost, the population fell into barbarism, and so on.

Geography

The climate of Hrobaj is adjusted to the tastes of C16th Imperial recreation, and is thus mostly mild and temperate, with a baby-bear orbit that makes modern terraformers green with envy. Highly complex coastlines, shallow oceans, fertile soils, spectacular forests and attractive-looking, delicious fauna (much of it now much-mutated.)

Population

Since the Venafi harem was culled from every known corner of the Empire, the genetic diversity of Hrobaj is very high (if you don't count the Y chromosome.) High radiation levels have made for rapid selection, mostly for radiation resistance. With abundant food resources and a population still expanding into available land, Hro are mostly taller and better-nourished than you'd expect of rural barbarians. Speculation among galactics makes them out to be unusually good-looking, and if people want to believe that, House Advantage certainly isn't going to correct them.

Otherwise, the complicated landscape has made for lots of small, diverse, competing nations, varying in technology level from hunter-gatherers to a few pockets of early-industrial. Any broad statement about Hro culture is likely to have numerous counterexamples.

The original population had a rather poor opinion of the Empire, and distinctly mixed feelings about their abandonment; the dominant mythology features the Emperor and Hrobaj as a single composite figure, almost always a wicked progenitor who imprisoned a heroic ancestress (a daughter, sister and/or wife) and stole her birthright. Myths of that birthright's future reinstatement are pretty common, and some feature spaceships. (The galactic mining operations are mostly set up near these. House Advantage has yet to work out how to handle the bit where the locals inherit the entire Empire.)

• What sort of planet is the colony on and what is its name, what's the terrain like, what resources are found on the planet
• What does the colony do?
  • At present, mostly thorium-mining, although it's agriculturally rich too. There's an idea that some of the locals might be exported to work in high-radiation environments, although there are many obvious problems with this idea; for one, the Hro hate even slightly inclement weather.
• What nearby planets might be of interest?
  • Paranoid about security and not trusting human guards, the Venafi Emperor commissioned automated defence platforms on the three moons of Hrobaj. It's not clear whether they were ever brought online, and certainly they were never designed to operate for more than a hundred years or so. But there might be something there to salvage.