Ancient History
The North Road, past the Sheaffer and Carrigan plantations
Trelawni has seen humanity ebb and flow over her dusty savannahs for nearly three thousand years. Situated on a border during the ancient imperial period, she served as a stronghold world until the Terminal Wars. As humanity fell back to the core worlds and the colonies were cut off, Trelawni avoided nuclear doomsday but suffered isolation for countless generations. With no greater empire to sustain her, she fell into a dark age until humanity ventured out again over a millennium later. In that time, her industrial culture slid back to the bronze age, and scientific reasoning hardened into religious doctrine. Modern explorers found tribes on Trelawni who bore little resemblance to the ancestors whom the tribes and the explorers had in common.
Recent History
Humanity’s emergence from the post-nuclear dark age and re-expansion into the outer worlds marked the beginning of the modern age. Trelawni was annexed by that portion of humanity which referred to itself as the Commonwealth, during an expansionary rush which preceded the New War by a century and a half. The rush of new capital saw agriculture and industry bloom once again on Trelawni’s dusty red surface, though the native population was pushed to the lower rungs of society, their culture increasingly consumed. Too hot and dry to support most crops, Trelawni was able to raise kliktik trees. Kliktik, sipped each afternoon in the Commonwealth’s best households, became the iconic beverage of the rising nation, one symbol of refinement among many drawn from a new empire’s distant possessions.
Main Gate, Government House, Powasheik.
Kliktik was already slipping by the time of the New War, now a drink only for the older set. After the war, the idea of a new empire seemed a very bad joke, the idea of colonial dominion no longer a universal point of pride. The Colonial Police, charged with administering His Majesty’s foreign possessions, found their role on Trelawni slipping from one of development to merely chasing stability among a maltreated native population who suffered under their masters’ growing poverty.
Commonwealth settlers had started families on Trelawni for two centuries. Their descendants, born for generations on that soil, considered themselves every bit as native as those born on the tribe lands, yet the two groups could not be farther apart. Separated by race, by social caste, and by what money remained, it is the conflict between them over which the Colonial Police maintains an uneasy peace. A ‘peace’ often delivered at the point of a District Superintendent’s bayonets. The system has long since passed an impossible point; in the aftermath of the risings it is exhaustion, more than planning, which keeps the peace now.
A Blikt woman of the Mwklani tribe.
The Blikt
Cut off from humanity when the old empires folded back upon themselves, Trelawni’s native population developed a culture utterly alien to the core-world explorers who re-discovered them. What had been science and industry shifted to religion and mysticism after the material means of civilization were withdrawn. However, buried in a seemingly simple agrarian culture lie the secrets of ancient empires, merely covered over by a thousand years of superstition.
A Blikt man with protest tattoo.
Distinctive for their universally copper-colored hair, the Blikt tend toward dusky-pale skin. ‘Blikt’ is a general term which means only ‘people,’ the individual tribes of Trelawni have their own identities and see little commonality between each other. The steamrolling of their culture has led to resistance movements since Trelawni’s annexation, but a disturbing recent trend involves the application of ritual poison facial tattoos as a sign of open protest among those young men on the tribe lands who no longer fear to openly rebel.
Mt. Oberschall, a geologic anomaly in Septura District.
The Future
Failing cash crops, an oppressed native population, and a tiny but privileged settler community in fear for their lives have dropped Trelawni into the problems which have plagued conquerors since the beginning of time. But no new answers present themselves, as the harried Superintendents on the ground struggle to hold together factions determined to tear apart from each other, driven by their rage or their terror. The Tigran Republic, defeated in the New War, has begun to rattle sabers again from not so far away. Considering the cost and trouble, is His Majesty willing to retain his colonial possessions in these dangerous times? Considering the sins of empire, shamed by humanitarians everywhere, will the Senate let him?
Ruin Site, Stargazer’s Prospect, Taktili District.
And the fact remains that while Trelawni has been conquered, settled and exploited, neither the will nor the money have ever been present to undertake real exploration and research of her past. For all anyone knows, the secrets of the ancient empires, Earth, Centauri, all the rest, may still lay in wait, buried by centuries of red dust. All that is known is that they left in a hurry, and under very bad terms . . .