Last episode, we speculated that the Draconites knew what dreadful racists the Zenithian Hegemony would become and set themselves up to defeat it. So I am going though the books looking for evidence of the nazi-punching heroes I hope the Draconites will turn out be.
If we paint the Hegemonists as the dark uniformed Imperial space nazis of Star Wars, then it follows that the Draconites – a secretive “Order” with a system of Apprentices, are the Jedi Knights of the Horizon, though they have no history of guiding a Galactic Old Republic to the light …
On page 183, we read of the Draconites as “traitors” , a third faction in the nascent disagreement between the the Hegemonists and what will become the Consortium. But we don’t get told whether any particular family leads them. Are the Draconites made up of more liberal members of all the Zenithian families? It doesn’t seem that they are “liberal” at all, actually, with their worship of the Executioner aspect of the Lady of Tears, and their motto “Through conflict, the truth.” Do they have sleeper Agents imbedded in both sides of the Zenithian debate?
It seems to me, that they actually left the Zenith before it finished it’s tour of the Third Horizon at Kua. I wonder if they discovered some ancient secret on that tour, and, without revealing it to their crew-mates, abandoned ship to take advantage of what that secret offered…
But there is very little detail in the core book, where again and again it says how little is known about the faction. And even in the Artefacts and Faction Technology supplement it mentions only Meson weaponry and an (admittedly impressive) camouflage sphere. No mention is made of any truly ancient artefacts that they might have discovered.
One thing we do know is that pretty much the first thing they did as an independent faction was not join with the Consortium and the Legion to wipe out the Hegemony, but rather to join with the Order of the Pariah (and the Legion) to wipe out the Nazareems Sacrifice. Why? Were the Sacrifice the greater threat? Or did they think the continued survival of the Hegemony would be useful to them, if only to keep the Consortium occupied?
One last unanswered question. What is a Draconite Dragoon? Sometimes, I feel that when writing the sub-concept suggestions, the authors just chose words that looked kind of cool, without really thinking about what it might mean. And perhaps that’s OK, it’s just a couple of words slammed together to prompt the player’s imagination. But Draconite Dragoon rubbed me up the wrong way. It’s in the operative concept, which is kind of about secret agents. But it’s a word which, to me invokes images of grav-bikes and dashing uniforms.
At this point, regular readers are probably shouting at their speakers that EVERYTHING makes me think of grav-bikes and dashing uniforms. But this time I genuinely have a historical precedent. You see, a Dragoon is a specific type of 18th century soldier, a sort of mounted infantry. They would ride into battle on horses, but dismount to engage the enemy. Unlike traditional cavalry, they carried guns, short barrelled muskets called carbines. The name still exists today, for highly mobile pathfinder troops operating lightly armoured vehicles. All of which seems a far cry from the workings of “the most secretive” faction in the Third Horizon.
But … everything I just said about Dragoons is from my memory. And I have just gone to Wikipedia to fact-check myself. And I learned some interesting things, not least that the British Army converted all its cavalry regiments to Dragoons in the eighteenth century, because Dragoons were paid less than cavalry. But that’s by the by. What’s most interesting is the the French persecuted Protestant Hugenot households by forcing them to accept a Dragoon as a ill behaved “houseguest” until they either converted to the catholic faith or left the country.
Now, I like the idea of this sort of “secret policeman”, even if it doesn’t quite fit with the nazi-punching hero faction I was looking for when I started with research. We don’t know, from the published books about any systems where the Draconites are the governing faction. And indeed the core book suggests that they is no system which the Draconites call “home”. But I can imagine that, somewhere, they might well aggressively repress other ideologies in this way. In such a case, the Dragoon would be a thuggish, lower caste policeman, not privy to the secrets of the Draconites but steeped in their philosophy. And let’s face it, if that philosophy included punching Nazis, we’d possibly forgive other boorish behaviours.
But it doesn’t seem that the Draconites are the Nazi-punchers I was looking for. If anything they hold the Hegemonists in contempt. But only because the Hegemonist’s racist dogma is so far removed from the truth that they seek, and the secrets they keep to themselves …
fictionsuit.org 