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Talitan the Conqueror

"Talitan the Conqueror was a bad, angry man. He convinced a lot of people on his planet to join his army, and then he took his very big spaceships and came back to planet Passe-Rath with them. There was fighting for a long time, but eventually, we defeated him, and his army went back to their planet."
— Excerpt from A Children's History of Passe-Rath

  In the wake of Saint Aulysses's fabled adventures exploring the galaxy, large groups of humans followed their example and set off to other planets to make new lives for themselves. Some of these colonies found ways to stay in contact with their mother planet, some were simply content forging new traditions and history away from interference, but a rare few were met with harsh conditions and failure, and devolved into warring clans all fighting to get back to Passe-Rath. One of these planets was known as Nurrath, and from it came the most infamous villain in all of Passe-Rath's history: a man called Talitan the Conqueror.
 

The Warbands of Nurrath

Old records tell of a colony ship called the Dais Crimson that left ancient Corlisk sometime around 1060 BDL, due for a habitable planet called Co-3 in the nearby star system Co. According to explorers that visited Co a few decades ago, the planet was teeming with nutrient-dense plantlife, exceedingly rich in minerals and ores, and home to a few territories of an alien species who seemed friendly enough to outsiders.
However, when the Dais Crimson arrived at Co-3, they found huge swathes of land charred and lifeless, bombarded by fire and radiation. The alien species whom they had planned to share the planet with were nowhere to be found, the only signs of them being ruined husks of exotic architecture. However, the humans had come too far to turn around and leave, so they found a healthy piece of land and landed their ship. They renamed the planet Nurrath and began building their colony.
For thirty years or so, the colony grew successfully -- ores were mined, farms were started, and even some advanced industrial equipment was built. But eventually, resources started diminishing faster than the Nurrathans could replenish them, and the colony started breaking down because there wasn't enough food, water, or shelter for so many people.
Murmurs of returning to Passe-Rath spread among the Nurrathans, but the population had exploded since they arrived and the Dais Crimson couldn't bring everyone back. By the time it returned to Nurrath -- if it returned to Nurrath at all -- much of the population would have died out already, and it would take even longer to construct a new ship.
Order was tenuous in the colony as leaders debated what to do about the severe incoming famine and overpopulation, but one event threw the colony into complete anarchy. A small band of armed citizens raided an entire silo of emergency food rations, and the rest of the colony quickly scrambled to obtain resources for themselves, splitting into 10-30 person bands and fighting anybody in their way. Some bands were quickly killed off, some managed to steal food and water and then escape into the unpopulated wastelands, and some took over sections of the central colony to scavenge for resources.
Another thirty years later, and the surface of Nurrath had become a battleground for warbands led by warlords to fight each other upon to survive. However, the Dais Crimson, in a state of disrepair, still stood in the center of the old colony -- but it took at least 150 crew members manning the ship to make it back to Passe-Rath, and none of the warbands could work together for long enough to repair the ship and leave without turning on each other or being sabotaged by other warbands. Escape seemed impossible... until one man rose up above the others and united the warbands for a chance at freedom and conquest.
 

Rallying the Bands

Ever since he was young, Talitan possessed a charismatic personality, a penchant for combat and military strategy, and a vicious streak. These three factors enabled him to rise through the ranks of his warband meteorically, leading them to victory against countless others. However, he didn't stop there. He saw the fire and skill that the other warbands had, and he knew that their rage could be harnessed if he played his cards right.
Over a course of 5-10 years, he slowly convinced the warbands that if they worked together, all of them could escape the hellish planet and head back to Passe-Rath. However, his mission was not only one of improvement, but of revenge; Nurrath had never been helped once in the thirty years since their decline by their mother planet, and many Nurrathans felt betrayed and abandoned, left to die and rot. Talitan stoked this hatred, uniting the warbands by giving them a common enemy: the people of Passe-Rath.
After uniting the majority of the clans, Talitan set to work churning out equipment and technology for his army. For the first time in thirty years, the industrial factories of the original colony were started up again. Working conditions were horrible, but the warband members were used to suffering, and now, they had a goal. Some of the most significant pieces of machinery manufactured in this time were the Demon Colossi, gigantic spaceships that could carry entire battalions of soldiers, were fitted with stone-melting laser artillery, and could bombard the surface of a planet from orbit. Many Nurrathans were sacrificed to the cause mining the vast amounts of ore and resources that were used to fuel these factories and create the weapons of war that would soon terrorize Passe-Rath.
 

Conquest of Passe-Rath

The Talitanic Legion boarded their Demon Colossi and set off from the surface of Nurrath in a plume of smoke and soot. With the superior technology that powered the ships, they reached Passe-Rath in a matter of months. Talitan landed on the surface in a small vessel with a cadre of elite warriors and declared, first to Corlisk and then to the rest of the megacities, war on all of Passe-Rath. His statement was first brushed off by the megacities, but then the first Demon Colossus landed on the Kriiaska Plains, across the channel from Rockwater. Battalions of highly traned, bloodthirsty troops poured out, setting the plains ablaze and making their way along the coast towards Atathana. This caught the attention of Atathana, Rockwater, and Corlisk, and they scrambled to ready their soldiers for war.
  UNFINISHED!!!
Species
Year of Death
949 BDL
Birthplace
Nurrath
Children
Gender
Man
Eyes
Dark
Hair
Long, black
Height
5'11"
Aligned Organization

Mysterious Genius

When the Talitanic Legion returned to Passe-Rath, they carried weapons and technology that hadn't been possessed by the colonizers of the Dais Crimson when it left some seventy years earlier. Historians wonder who was behind the leap in technology that was made in Nurrath; the people of the warbands had little to no technological expertise, and almost no scientists or engineers originally onboard the Dais Crimson survived by the time Talitan united the warbands as an army. The leading theory currently is that a technological genius was born in one of the warbands during the wasteland period, and is was this person who made the leading advancements that let the Nurrathans reach Passe-Rath and invade it so effectively. However, no surviving records available to the public detail who this mysterious person might have been, and what happened to them during and after the Talitanic War.

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