Jan 3, 2024 12:46 am
The Karrakin Trade Baronies is a member state of Union that considers itself both the cultural heart of humanity and its modern day capital. Boasting an unbroken, millennia-long history from their foundation to the present day, billions of souls under their banner, and dozens of worlds under their command, the Karrakins are a mirror to Union – if not in size, then certainly in their impact on the course of human history. Karrakis was seeded by the first of the Ten – the Apollo, a titanic generation ship launched pre-Fall.
The millennia that have passed since then have seen a wealth of mythology and legends, rising kingdoms and crumbling empires, civil wars and interstellar conflict. This is a culture that has weathered the weight of history; now, it faces an uncertain future.
The Baronies’ unbroken history is a rarity among galactic states. However, unlike the people of the the Aun Ecumene, who regard Cradle as their long lost homeworld, most Karrakins do not hold Cradle in that same regard. Instead, Karrakis, the Baronies’ first world, occupies that venerated position in their cultural mythology. Cradle is simply recognized as the origin of the species, not a homeland to be reclaimed or longed for. Other than scholars, diplomats, and a few curious travelers, few Karrakins have an interest in Earth – let alone a desire to visit it.
The leaders of the Baronies do not seek to rule Union directly – though they do maintain a representative presence on the Central Committee – instead, they vie for control over Karrakis itself, and seek new worlds to add glory to her name. To sit steward upon the Annorum Dais on Karrakis is to mark yourself as the figurative lord of humanity – a chain unbroken since humans first stepped out from Olduvai.
Though the goal of the barons will always be control of the Annorum Dais, theirs is not an entirely insular culture. The houses of the Baronies pursue interstellar objectives and mount colonial expeditions, raise house companies, and participate in Union politics for varying reasons – some for gold, some for glory, some for adventure, and some who see interstellar ventures as a unique angle back into Karrakin politics.
History, In Brief
The history of the Karrakin people stretches from before the Fall to the present day, developing in parallel to and divergent from Union for thousands of years under the assumption that Karrakis alone had survived the Fall. Recontact occurred under Union’s First Committee, but if it had not been for the Deimos Event and Union’s meteoric technological ascendancy, Karrakis would have been the seat of humanity’s power. Unencumbered by the trauma of the Fall, the colony on Karrakis flourished, and for thousands of years its people enjoyed a linear development. By the time of first contact with Union, the Karrakins had made landfall on nearby worlds. By the time of the Deimos Event, they had developed mass industries and megastructural engineering, and their people had spread out over numerous terrestrial worlds and moons.
There was friction under the Second Committee. Fearing significant resistance to integration from the Karrakins – which, indeed, took place – the Second Committee sent a fleet before its diplomats. The war between the Karrakin peoples and Union was short: bolstered by technological advancements guaranteed via the Deimos event, the Union Navy smashed aside their Karrakin opponents and secured a surrender.
Their fleet eliminated, facing Union’s singular control over paracausal entities and technology, and burdened with a baroque monarchy hamstrung by conventional interstellar communications and transportation, the Karrakins took the unprecedented step of ceding galactic sovereignty to Union.
In exchange, Karrakis became the raw heart of Union’s industrial base, providing the unquestioned galactic hegemon with the vast boon of resources and extraction techniques that ensured Cradle and her colonies – by extension, the rest of the Core worlds in the galaxy – never wanted for any material good. The fractured and internecine nobility, suddenly united by the blink and the omninet, chose not to demand rule over the galaxy, but to fund the people who did. In time, their economic sway became inextricable from Union’s galactic dominion. It is a grim truth of Union – and an uncomfortable source of tension among the center and left-of-center party coalitions that sit the Central Committee – that without Karrakis, Union as we know it today would not exist.
Now, however, all signs point towards the balance of power shifting away from this arrangement. The rich vein that was the Baronic Concern – the core worlds of the Baronies and their rulers, the major houses – is running dry. The worlds of the Concern choke under the demands of populations in the billions and tens of billions, and the resources that the barons were once so readily able to provide to Union’s Core worlds are eaten up first by their own. A crown that thought itself inured to political upheaval – with its millennia of rising and crumbling empires, of states born from and returned to the ashes – is now struck to the core by a rising tide of republicanism. Familiar to the rest of the galaxy, but anathema to the most conservative Baronic factions, the demands of Baronic citoyens to be recognized not as noble or ignoble but equal and deserving of the right to self-rule is spreading among all classes.
Burdened by a hungry and increasingly restless population, the Baronies’ ruling classes have turned towards a fertile clutch of unusually resource-rich worlds: the Dawnline Shore, the Baronic Interest, where they meet not only long-settled indigenous populations seeded under the First Committee, but a swaggering Harrison Armory, hungry to expand its territory.