The Trojan Reach Sector
If the Spinward Marches are an isolated outpost to the rest of the Imperium, then the Trojan Reach is where the wilderness begins. The sector is an expanse of uncharted worlds and petty, backward barbarian kingdoms, a chaotic, treacherous zone of space teetering on the maw of the Great Rift.
And somewhere, out there beyond the little one-world kingdoms and failed Second Imperium colonies, are the ferocious and fearsome Aslan, unrestrained by the Peace of Fthair.
At least, that is the Imperial perspective. To the Aslan, the Trojan Reach is a feast they have only begun to savour. As far as the eye can see and scout ship can jump is a vista of worlds begging to be conquered. These are not lifeless, rocky wastelands – they are vibrant, rich worlds, living worlds. The Aslan know that expansion in this direction must, inevitably, lead to conflict with the Imperium, but they welcome this challenge. The Reach is there to be conquered!
History
If a historian were to sum up the whole sorry history of the Reach in one phrase, it might be ‘treacherous opportunity’. At first glance, the Trojan Reach looks inviting – a whole sector of settled worlds, ready to welcome the explorer, trader, colonist or conqueror, but almost every venture in the Reach founders and fails, often violently. The Second Imperium never managed to tame the Reach, and its own native kingdoms are beset by barbarism and their own internal squabbles. The Aslan invaders, too, have been affected by this strange curse of thwarted ambition ever since they set foot in the Reach.
The Ancients
The mysterious Ancients were active across the Trojan Reach, but there is less evidence of their activities here than in the neighbouring Spinward Marches. This is largely due to the lack of scientific investigation in the Reach – the little warring pocket empires and barbarian kingdoms have little interest in the relics of the past. The one obvious exception is the Ancient ruins on Floria, the homeworld of the Floriani, a minor human species transplanted from Terra thousands of years ago. There are other potential traces of the Ancients, such as the patently artificial singularity in 627-301 or the Canals of Fomalhaut, but a full inventory of Ancient sites in the Trojan Reach is a task for future generations.
Old Empires
The Ziru Sirku never counted the Trojan Reach as part of its holdings, but Vilani scouts and colonists did settle a few of the worlds of the sector. These colonies were left to fend for themselves as the First Imperium began to decay and turn inwards, and were ravaged by Vargr raiders and their own disputes. There was little in the way of organised trade in the Trojan Reach until the Terrans began an aggressive colonisation project here thousands of years later.
What most natives of the Reach refer to as the old empire, though, is the Empire of Sindal, which ruled much of the sector from -2000 to -1400. See page 121 for the Sindalian Empire.
Vargr & Zhodani
Despite the distance between the Trojan Reach and coreward space, both the Zhodani and alien Vargr have a long history in the Reach. Zhodani traders passing through the Spinward Marches in times of peace have done more to cultivate relations with the barbarian states than the Imperium, while long-range Zhodani military patrols have been encountered ‘snooping’ around this region. Imperial analysts believe the Zhodani Consulate is capable of launching a pincer attack on the Spinward Marches, simultaneously attacking from both coreward and rimward using vessels hidden in Egyrn or Sindal subsectors. The probability of such a pincer attack is low, but nonetheless the Imperium has always watched closely for signs of Zhodani in the Reach.
Vargr are much more common and much more dangerous in this region. Almost all the Trojan Reach Vargr are descendants of corsairs and raiders who migrated here millennia ago, during the fading years of the First Imperium. These corsairs were drawn to the rich shipping along Corridor sector, then skirted round the still vital Domain of Deneb and along the edge of the Great Rift until they ended up in the Reach. Some historians blame these Vargr corsairs for starting the tradition of raiding that blighted development in the Long Night; while barely one in ten raiders is nonhuman, the Vargr corsairs could have been the seed around which raider culture formed.
Terran Explorers
While the Trojan Reach was neglected by the Vilani, the Terrans embarked on an ambitious colonisation project, settling more than two dozen worlds in the sector. They also explored and charted the whole region, stopping only at the abyss of the Great Rift. As there was comparatively little Vilani presence in this sector, the Trojan Reach attracted settlers who wanted virgin, untamed worlds instead of trying to integrate into Vilani society. To this day, several worlds in the Reach (such as Strend) are heavily influenced by ‘pure’ Terran cultures.
In many ways, this eager expansion into the Reach was responsible for the chaos that followed. The Terrans set up colonies that were overly specialised and dependent on support from offworld. When the Second Imperium abruptly collapsed, the Trojan Reach colonies fell hard. Elsewhere in the galaxy, worlds cut off from the Imperium became insular, refusing to deal with outsiders, but in the Reach, colonies turned to raiding their neighbours. Agricultural worlds attacked industrial planets for spare parts and machinery; mining colonies were raided for raw materials, starports were cannibalised and torn apart to find jump-capable ships, no matter how small. With a little push towards diplomacy, perhaps interstellar society in the Reach could have been preserved, but every colony acted in its own interest and chaos engulfed the sector.
Raider culture took hold in this era. Small bands of thieves would jump into a system, land and loot what they could before fleeing. As these raider bands grew more successful, they acquired larger flotillas of repurposed civilian ships. At the height of raider culture, a single band could number a hundred ships (though displacing no more than fifty thousand tons in total), which would descend on an undefended world like a swarm of locusts and steal everything they could pack into their cargo holds. Raiders were beholden to no planet or government save their own captains, and were a twisted reflection of the modern free trader.
The prevalence of raiding not only ruined any chance for the Reach to pull itself out of the Long Night by its own efforts, but also blocked any chance of external aid. The Trojan Reach quickly gained a reputation as a hive of scum and villainy, a barbaric, chaotic region. This was largely accurate, but the image of the sector as the ‘Outrim Void’, an irredeemable and downright wicked region of space, meant that when the Third Imperium expanded spinward, they ignored the ‘dangerous’ Reach in favour of developing the Spinward Marches.
The Sindalian Empire
The threat of raiders caused a few worlds to band together and fight the fall of night. The former subsector capital of Noricum was one of the most advanced and stable worlds in the whole Reach, and joined with the neighbouring planets of Thebus and Salif in a mutualdefence pact. This pact quickly strengthened until Noricum found itself at the head of a growing Empire.
The Sindalian Empire was formed by a coalition of Terran worlds, and had its seat at Noricum in the Sindal Sector. At its height, the Empire covered nine of the sixteen subsectors of the Trojan Reach and drove the raiders towards the fringes of the sector. The empire succeeded in building trade links and staving off collapse for a few centuries, but its focus was always on defence and expansion instead of consolidation or scientific development. When the Empire ran out of worlds to conquer, the central government became autocratic and unnecessarily brutal towards the end of its existence. In the last two centuries of its existence, the sole purpose of the Sindalian Empire was the preservation of Sindalian authority over its member worlds. Planets were bombed from orbit if they refused to render exorbitant taxes and fees. Ironically, an Empire founded to defend against raiders became the biggest raider of them all.
In the end, rebel worlds deployed a plague against the Imperial forces, and the Old Empire collapsed heavily in on itself. The Empire’s centralising influence meant its member worlds were unable to maintain their technological base without interstellar trade, and interstellar trade was dangerous because of the lethal artificial plagues let loose in the final wars. Virtually all the member planets of the Empire slipped into barbarism, and the Sindalian Empire was remembered not as a tyrannical police state, but a golden age.
The Florian League
The Florian League is the oldest extant human civilisation in the sector. Florian history is quite similar to the Vilani – both groups of humans were transplanted by the Ancients, and lived side-by-side with their alien masters for some time. The Floriani were the subject of a multigenerational experiment by the Ancients to produce specialised forms of Humaniti. The Floriani come in two forms – Feskals and Barnai. The Feskals were designed for strength and endurance; they are hulking brutes, standing more than two metres tall when fully grown and capable of incredible physical labour. The Barnai were made to be supervisors and lab assistants. They are physically weak and underdeveloped, but have huge heads and are highly intelligent. Despite the apparent inequity of this system, where the Feskals are seen as little better than slaves to the Barnai, both subspecies are content and respectful of each other’s rights.
When the Ancients vanished, the Floriani way of life continued almost unchanged. The Feskals deferred to the orders of the Barnai, and the Barnai organised and catalogued and oversaw the production of food and industrial machinery, but innovation and development were virtually forbidden. The Florians had to develop agriculture from scratch when the Ancient foodproduction machines broke down, and their progress remained stalled for millennia after that. They changed their ways only when another Ancient machine failed and could not be repaired.
The Floriani developed the jump drive from a crashed Aslan ship, and their empire has expanded steadily but conservatively since then. They incorporated a number of Terran worlds into their nascent League, and the influx of Terran innovation (the Floriani are perhaps the only subrace of Humanity to whom the ultra-conservative Vilani seem dangerously radical) has helped push the Floriani a little towards independent development and trade.
By 500, the Floriani had settled enough worlds to require an overarching government structure, so they formed the Florian League in 506, adding an extra tier of lotteries to their existing planetary governments. The Florian League is one of the most stable and secure governments in the Trojan Reach, and has also expanded strongly into the neighbouring Beyond sector.
The Ya’soisthea
The Aslan successfully crossed the Great Rift more than two thousand years ago, but other than a few tentative trade missions and minor colonies, the Hierate never bothered to expand across the difficult jump-5 route until the era of the aisekhokhe entse, the Kinstrife or Aslan Cultural Purge. When the ‘deviant’ tsekho clans were defeated, many fled across the Great Rift to the Iiyaihuakh (Reftspan) or Hlaoiroahaurl (Trojan Reach) sectors. The existing Aslan colonies refused to accept the refugees, and so they moved onwards. A wave of territory-hungry Aslan flooded into the Trojan Reach and Beyond sectors.
Soon afterwards, a second wave followed – this second wave was triggered by the Peace of Fthair, which restricted Aslan expansion along the Solomani border Without anywhere else to go, clans crossed the Rift and began settling and fighting for territory in the Reach. Other clans soon followed, hoping to take advantage of trade with the Third Imperium and newly-contacted pocket empires. Between these two waves of colonisation, the Aslan went from having a dozen colonies coreward of the Rift to holding hundreds of worlds. Some of these worlds were unoccupied, but others were human colonies incorporated into the Hierate.
For the human colonies, this period was a grim reminder of the military power of the Aslan race. The Third Imperium managed to blunt the Aslan’s claws in the Peace of Fthair, but in some ways all they accomplished was moving the war from the Dark Nebula/Reaver’s Deep to the Trojan Reach. The Aslan dared not invade the Imperium directly, but all unaligned human colonies in the Reach were fair game. Once again, the fearsome warships and giant savage warriors of the Aslan conquered human worlds; once again, dewclaws ran red with human blood.
During this expansionist period, the Aslan of the Trojan Reach/Riftspan/Vanguard Reach and Beyond Sectors also formed their own local government. In fact, this government had existed for more than a thousand years, in the form of an organisation called the Ya’soisthea. The Ya’soisthea was initially established by the Wahoi and Aroaye’i clans and their vassals in -802, to cope with the communications delay back to Kusyu. It was patently infeasible for clans on the far side of the Great Rift to send regular messages to their representatives back on the homeworld, so they established their own local form of the Tlaukhu. Just like the original council, this new council – the Ya’soisthea – had no formal authority, but existed as a discussion forum and method of structured political hierarchy. The old Ya’soisthea had fallen into disuse by the modern era, due to increasing availability of jump-5 couriers, but was revived to serve the needs of the new Aslan colonies.
The Ya’soisthea is a far more fractious and divided body than the current Tlaukhu (of course, a large portion of the Ya’soisthea comes from clans exiled from the Tlaukhu in the first place). Unlike the Tlaukhu, which meets only on the Aslan homeworld, the Ya’soisthea moves from world to world, meeting on the home planet (or a nominated substitute) of a different member clan each year.
The Glorious Empire
The Tokouea’we clan was one of the first to migrate across the Great Rift during the Cultural Purge. Unable to settle in the existing Aslan colonies, they travelled onwards until they reached Goertal subsector. There, they embarked on an ambitious period of conquest. Goertal subsector was full of easy prey – lightly populated, lightly defended and comparatively primitive human colonies. While the Tlaukhu had just outlawed slavery under the terms of the Grand Conclave, the Tokouea’we embraced it. Human slaves drove the expansion of the Tokouea’we clan, until it was the single greatest Aslan military power in the sector.
As more Aslan moved into the Trojan Reach and established their own clan holdings, the Tokouea’we were the loudest voice calling for the formation of a new, local version of the Tlaukhu – as the largest, most powerful clan, the Tokouea’we would be assured a prime place in this new council, and have the respect of other clans they had long been denied. They proposed using the old Ya’soisthea as a model for the new government, and used their considerable influence to bring other clans on board.
However, they were, if anything, too successful. The Ya’soithea was supported not only by clans already present in the region, but also by Tlaukhu clans. When the Tokouea’we saw old rivals and persecutors claiming places in the new government, they cut off all relations with the rest of the Hierate and declared themselves to be an independent Empire, the Glorious Empire.
The Glorious Empire has survived, albeit somewhat diminished, to the present day, and still enslaves humans for brute labour and cannon fodder.
The Imperium
The Third Imperium began tentative expansion into the Trojan Reach within a century of the crowning of Emperor Cleon I, but this expansion soon stalled as the threat posed by the Zhodani Consulate became obvious. Reconquering and pacifying the whole of the Trojan Reach would require money, effort and ships better spent fortifying the coreward border of the Spinward Marches. The Imperium established two great fleet bases at Pax Rulin and Tobia, then effectively declared they would go no further.
Following the end of the Aslan Border Wars, word was sent to Deneb warning them that the Aslan might expand into the Trojan Reach now they could no longer push into Terran space. The Archduke doubled the border guard and established a chain of listening posts to watch for Aslan forces, but as yet neither the Imperium nor the Aslan have gone to open war in the Trojan Reach. As the Aslan press every closer to the border, though, conflict may be inevitable.
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