Patreon Special: the Lost Book of Houses

I had originally intended to release this with the release of the Maradonian Noble background lens, but it's the end of the month, and I wanted to give it to my Patrons early, so some of it might be "out of order" and you may have to wait a few days to understand the logic of the included background lenses.

The Lost Book of Houses introduces the details for four new houses, two of which are completely new. This work is available to all $3+ "fellow traveler" patrons.  Thank you, guys, so much for supporting this project.

• House Harrow: The Bastard House rules the Rogue Stars with an iron fist, hated by their people, and seem to represent the worst of the Maradonian Nobility. Nonetheless, their tyranny has given them the wealth necessary to bankroll the Alliance’s efforts, and they have an intriguing bloodline that whispers enough of the possibilities of a restoration of the Alexian bloodline that more prestigious nobles are willing to hold their noses and bed members of this mongrel house.
• House Korenno: The great houses of Maradon rest their power upon the service and loyalty of lesser houses, who provide the bulk of their knights and handmaidens.  House Korenno, “the Grooms of Sabine” or “the Speakers of the Dead,” represents one such minor house in the service of House Sabine.  They fight in the Alliance’s wars, and attend the grand balls of the nobility, but rarely get the recognition of the great powers of the Alliance.  The people, however, love them and their retrocognitive talent for dispensing justice.
• House Tan-Shai: The Merchant House ruled the Arkhaian Spiral, and the Akashic Order attempted to prevent the Alexian Emperors from elevating them to the level of Maradonian aristocracy. They have a strange, alien air to them, and a manufactured quality to their beauty, and they seem to hide a dread secret on their forbidden world of Shaddai. When the Emperor rose, the House split in twain: the Shaddai branch betrayed the Alliance and sided with the Emperor, seating on of their own next to him as Galactic Empress; the Arkhanus branch joined the Alliance, but many regard their motives as suspect, and were it not for their control of the Hyperium Mining Guild, they might not be allowed a seat on the Alliance Senate at all.
• House Alexus: The culmination of the Akashic Dream and the rulers of the Eternal Empire, the Alexian Dynasty, died in the during the death throes of the Mad Emperor Lucian Alexus. Or did they? The Alexian bloodline lives on in the “Duchal” bloodlines of House Sabine, House Grimshaw and the Orphean lineage. And, perhaps, some last heir still lingers out there, secreted away beyond the edges of the Galaxy, or locked away in some Imperial prison.

Why?

What's wrong with 4 houses?  After all, it's much easier to remember, and more houses makes things more complicated.

As I've watched the community, they've begun to do a thing I dreaded, which is to treat the four houses as the Four Houses, as though no other houses existed.  This is not to say that people who discuss Psi-Wars aren't aware that other houses are possible, but I don't see a great deal of discussion of a mess of other home-brew houses, and in retrospect, this makes sense.  The four houses are pretty easy to remember, and thus they stand out in your mind.  You see no need to create more houses.

I do, though.  If people focus entirely on a game set in the Glorian Rim that focuses exclusively on the Maradonian nobility, which seems an extremely popular mode for Psi-Wars, then you can quickly run out of variety for characters and NPCs.  Which noble is the bad guy? To which house does your boon companion knight belong?  From which house comes that interesting new noble girl who made a big splash at last year's social?  In my mind, there are many houses.  Sometimes I think of them as "the hundred houses."  There must be.  But we don't know them, so we go back to the original four.

By adding a few more houses, we begin to clutter up the mind-space.  There are not "four houses" but "many houses," and it becomes more obvious to add your own house.  I don't intend to do this for other forms of aristocracy, because they're either explicitly limited in scope (the Shinjurai royal family) or their region of space has other ways of accessing variety (the Ranathim Mithanna).  These also act as templates for building your own new houses.

House Harrow

I had noticed some time ago that I lacked a "villainous" house.  I originally conceived of House Grimshaw as the "villainous" house, though over time, they seem to have grown into the House that does what needs to be done, regardless of how you feel about it.  I needed a force that really hammered home that, maybe, aristocracy wasn't such a good idea, that the Alliance could be a tyrant as well.

I've also love the idea of the "mongrel house" for a long time: the House that doesn't actually have much in the way of breeding, but has a lot of money and power, so everyone tolerates them.  In Houses of the Blooded, for me, this was the House of the Bear.  This also gave me a chance to discuss how Akashic eugenics work: how do they breed the houses?  It's not all incest is it? No, of course not: there are normal people out there who happen to have the right DNA that, when combined with a noble's DNA, will breed a better noble.  I've created the Akashic Stud perk to represent this, if you want your non-noble character to be especially intriguing to the aristocracy, but I wanted an example of a house that came up with interesting genetics almost by accident.

Thus House Harrow also has a unique genetic profile that let players mix and match their eugenics.  Instead of the "perfect" member of a house having four our of four eugenic packages, this house has a complex mix of 9 eugenic packages that represent intermixed variations of lost bloodlines.

Naturally, our villainous nobles need to be psychic vampires.  To contrast them with the Ranathim, they're more social vampires, the sort of people who show up with a cloying charm and get you to like them and then leave you exhausted and miserable.  Their alternative bloodlines give them access to the new Dream Control power, a niche application to be sure, but fitting with the idea of them as succubi.  Finally, this House gives our famous Leylana Grey a place to call home.

House Korenno

Not every house should be a great house. I've tried to represent this with House Elegans and House Kain, both of whom are clearly inferior to House Grimshaw and House Sabine, but this creates the weird situation where either you have only two major houses and two minor houses, or as seems to be the case for how most people handle it, Elegans and Kain get elevated in importance until they're very close to Sabine and Grimshaw, which is also what I find myself doing.  As with most forms of nobility, there should be a hierarchy: the Duke rules over Counts and Marquis who rule over Barons and Viscounts who rules over knights.  While a lot of hierarchy has fallen away since the days of the Alexian Dynasty, one would still expect such a situation to exist where some houses are just plain subordinate to other houses.

Thus, House Korenno.  They represent a clear example of a minor house, a footnote next to House Sabine that explains where a lot of their genetic stock comes from, and gives you a means of adding in knights and handmaidens without picking from one of the four major houses.  The presence of a minor house helps recontextualize the fear House Elegans has, and the relationship between House Daijin and House Grimshaw.

House Korenno is, like House Sabine, good at ESP.  I wanted to show that you can have more than one house within a psionic niche. I've designed the Houses to have access to specific, limited elements within a broader psionic power.  House Grimshaw and Daijin are electrokinetic, with a strong focus on shutting down technology.  House Elegans is empathic. House Sabine is precognitive.  Thus, House Korenno is retrocognitive.  So, when designing your own Houses, you can see how you might go in and create a new niche or modify an old one to fill a particular role.  In this case, House Korenno acts as top-notch detectives and security agents by investigating the past.

House Tan-Shai

House Tan-Shai isn't actually new.  Patreons voted on this House over a year ago, and I've already released them. All this document really adds is new version of the background lens that cleans up some of their material, and puts them in a single, easy-to-find spot with the rest of the Houses.

House Tan-Shai represents how the Maradonian houses have hybridized themselves over the years as they became the dominant force across the Galaxy (to some extend, House Kain represents this too).  The original Houses descend from Maradonian stock, but later houses like Tan-Shai and Kain, might descend from Westerly or Shinjurai stock.  They might be hopped up space pirates or merchant lords whom the Alexian dynasts elevated for political reasons and now they remain on the Alliance Senate out of tradition, and perhaps have intermarried so much with the aristocracy that they have become indistinguishable from them.

Tan-Shai also underlines that the Galactic conflict is really a civil war between the pro-aristocracy side of the defunct Federation and the anti-aristocracy side, as they have members of the family on both sides.  Tan-Shai players can choose with which part of the conflict they will side, and have family on the other side.

And, of course, Tan-Shai is Anti-Psi and has a deep connection with the Eldoth, making them a fairly unique part of the setting that allow players to explore the Arkhaian spiral.  They're a strange, alien sort of nobility, something that evokes the Guild of Dune.

House Alexus

Since the heady days of Iteration three, my readers has been asking me for more details about House Alexus.  You can't play a Maradonian game without wanting to explore the House, and I think I get asked if they've been released once every couple of months since the poll way back over a year ago.  And now, they're finally here!

One problem I've noticed with House Alexus is that they're a bit of a setting bomb.  If you play one,  you cannot help but be a setting-destroying Mary Sue.  That's fine, as far as it goes, and this section extensively discusses various ways to handle such a character, like what their origins could be and how to integrate them into the plot.  But if you want to explore house Alexus without turning your game into "Grab the last Alexian princess!" I've included a unique option: extremely pure members of "Duchal" lineages can manifest one Alexian eugenic package.  This adds a little extra variety to your Maradonian games, as your Sabine princess or Grimshaw prince can have a little unique power that nobody else has access to.

The Alexian eugenic packages are different from the normal eugenic power-ups: they're more expensive and add changes to how you'll play your game, rather than a minor tweak to a stat.  Alexian characters also have access to Alexian Madness, a form of precognition and ESP that slowly drives them mad and may present falsehoods as truths.

This does not include Throneships or further details on the Immortal Legions or their unique fighters, as I didn't have the time to look into those.