Tavla under Askandarae

Under a pale bright star and its dim red sibling spins the dusty world of Tavla, holding many secrets. An ancient colony of the Karrakin Baronies, a semi-feudal, polytemporal, dynastic state with origins in humanity's pre-Union history, Tavla is an old and remote world deep in the backwater of the galactic community. Old even in an empire defined by its connection to its ancient past, Tavla seems at first glance to be nothing more than an unremarkable rock; its people known to the movers and shakers of the galaxy only in their having endured the many tempests that snuffed out the lights of countless colonies like it.   Tavla, however, is no longer a forgotten glimmer on the star charts. Its people have undertaken a grand project and poured into it the strength of countless generations. This project is The Great Archive, an enormous database, physical archive, and library at the heart of Tavla's shared societal development. Collecting resources from the ruins of the failed colonial endeavors and marooned travelers, the Tavlan Archive contains a kind of resource immensely valuable to both the Karrakin Baronies and Union: raw data from the first Karrakin Annorum and the lost age that followed The Fall of Old Earth.   For centuries this project has been an endeavor to uncover Tavla's own history, which is dotted with strange gaps and seemingly alien insertions of cultural mythmaking. The modern Baronies, long conscious of Tavla as little more than a petty mining colony, gave this project little mind until recently. Now recovering from internal strife they have only just become aware of the complexity and potential of this little world's library, and they have done so almost too late. Union too has become aware of the data-wealth growing in the halls of the Central Archive, and have begun the slow process of integrating Tavla into the broader galactic community.   But with this wealth of potential there is also greed and danger. Uncertain as it is, the planet's future will be complicated, and opportunists jockey for chances to wrest ore, claim, and title from the world before the Great Powers descend upon it. Aristocratic claimants plumb the library for evidence of princely titles bequeathed to their families in centuries past, rubbing shoulders with cosmopolitan pilgrims seeking ancient star charts with the locations of forgotten pre-Fall seed colonies. Corpro-state diplomats engage in cutthroat diplomacy over the rights to ship the mineral wealth of asteroid strip mining out of system before it is claimed by a Union project, and less scrupulous agents use their printing licenses to assemble bands of heavily armed privateers to ruin their competitors prospects.   As of yet, Tavla is still light years away from the nearest Blink Gate, and exploiting its resources is costly. But the Union administrators have begun to lay the plans for the construction of a Blink Gate that will unite Tavla with the throng of the metropolitan galaxy. While this project itself could still be generations away, the prospect of its eventual completion has turned Tavla into a hotbed of activity. Local forces grow restless as they chafe against the authorities vying for control over their world, and as an ever more diverse population of spacefarers frequent the system's star-ports, whispers of danger and mystery fill the cantinas and caravanserai. While the rumors of deniable asset corpro-pirate bands and cascade haunted ghost ships are easy enough for the less superstitious traveler to dismiss, the looming presence of a Union Cruisers and Baronic House Chassis are harder to write off as claustrophobic paranoia.   Into this soil the Archive library still blooms, delicately tended by its monk like custodians. Will the seed of Tavla's peril and potential endure these tumultuous times? Tune in, sit down, and find out.   Resources