Imperia
"Hold the line."
Colour: Purple, accents of black and gold
Abilities: Fortify and Assault
Manifesto: "Stay true, hold fast, the line drawn."
Homeworld: Tharosian
Artifact: Korthaan
Sigil: Vertical bar
Families: Highmarch, Aurelian, Castellan
"Hold the line."
Manifesto: "Stay true, hold fast, the line drawn."
The station was still standing where it had stood for two hundred thousand years, scarred and powered down and stripped to bare metal, and Imperia made it a wall. That is the house in one image: the position that holds long after the people who said it could not be held have gone quiet. Other houses chase the fast win, the clever angle, the territory taken before anyone can react. Imperia does something harder and rarer. It refuses to lose. It builds a position no force in the system can break, and then it makes the rest of the board come to that position, on ground it has already made its own. To fly the vertical bar is to be the wall that does not fall, the one who outlasts the noise, the rock the storm wears itself out against. That permanence was never handed to them. They built it, out of a station that should have killed them, on a world that allows nothing to last.
Who they are
Imperia is governed by three families, and every Imperian alive belongs to one of them: Highmarch, Aurelian, and Castellan. Each family holds a single vote, and the house decides by that vote, two to one or three to nothing, on the strength of continuous surveys that run across the roughly ten thousand people who live aboard the station. The current chair is announced openly to the other houses; the path that put them in the chair stays inside Imperia. They do not move quickly to replace a leader whose numbers slip. The families extend a long grace period and wait to see whether the position can be recovered before anyone calls a vote, because to Imperia a transition is a structural matter, and structure is not rushed. Replacements are deliberate. The handover is formal.
The temperament shows in how an Imperian speaks. An officer answers the question asked and not the question beside it. A scholar gives the narrow answer and keeps the rest. An Imperian child learns the difference between what is told and what is held before the child learns to read, because the whole house was forged by people who understood that what you keep can be the thing that keeps you alive. They are plain, exact, and patient. They distrust display. Conspicuous accumulation beyond what a person needs is quietly scrutinized rather than punished, and reputation does the enforcing, because the original colonists were chosen in part for a disposition toward contribution rather than hoarding, and two centuries later the trait still runs through the population.
What they hold
Imperia's colony ship changed course for the gas giant Tharosian when its instruments registered something the records could not account for: a large, regular object in stable orbit, far too symmetrical and far too vast to be a captured moon or a wandering asteroid. They had come to the system for resources, but the cross-section reading alone made the object impossible to pass by. They launched probes ahead of the fleet, and the returns confirmed it was artificial, an enormous structure built in open space on a scale that matched nothing the colonists had ever recorded. When they reached it and explored it in full, they understood what they had found. It was a station built for industry, design, and war, abandoned and powered down but structurally whole, with a ship factory still inside it.
Deep in the command center at the station's core they recovered the artifact they came to call the Monolith: a sealed data vault behind an information-rich etched exterior, holding the last surviving schematics of the people who built the place, designs for armor, ships, and weapons. For the first decade they could not read a single character of the script that covered it. Only as they pieced together the builders' language did the designs open, and with them the names the place had carried all along. The station the ancients had called the Aurokhal. The object at its heart, Korthaan, the standing stone. In those early years Imperia deciphered the schematics and shared them with the other colonists, the way every house shared what its artifact gave up, and the basics of hardened ships and reinforced armor spread across the colony. The refinements Imperia developed afterward, two centuries of them, it kept to itself.
What the Monolith taught was a single hard idea worked through every design it held: the universe is hostile, survival is structure, and what is built must hold or it must die. Knowledge endures only when it is given hard form. Imperia absorbed that not as a slogan but as a method, because understanding the schematics meant absorbing the way of thinking that produced them. That is who they became. A house that meets every threat from ground it has already fortified, and that treats endurance as the highest form of strength.
Where they live
Imperia still holds the Aurokhal. The colonists who arrived did not land, because Tharosian is a gas giant and cannot be lived on; they held in orbit, took the scarred, cold, scrubbed-clean station as their home, and have been repairing and rebuilding it ever since. Many of its systems are foreign in design and behave in ways that have taken generations to understand, so daily life carries an engineering rhythm that touches everyone. Most adults give time to station maintenance regardless of their main occupation, and children are raised with mechanical literacy as a core skill, the way other peoples raise their children to read the land. Quarters are tight by design. The air is recycled. Meals are communal more often than not, and the confined space has shaped the arts toward small-scale crafts, music played at low volume, and table games.
The house supplies the necessities, food and shelter and medical care and education, and everything above that baseline runs on requisition, the internal currency every house uses. It is issued monthly, a baseline minimum for everyone and more earned through effort, assigned work, salaried duty posts, and bounty-style bonuses for the high-risk jobs. It resets roughly every six months, use it or lose it, so it is spent rather than hoarded into private fortunes. What it most visibly buys is the work of the house workshops, the armor and weapon upgrades commissioned and modified to a citizen's own specification. An informal bazaar runs continuously in a designated section of the station, quiet in the mornings, busy through the working hours, settling by dinner. There the population trades crafted objects, technical works, structural art, lessons, custom skill-work, prepared meals from small restaurants, and above all the modification of personal gear, every piece of it held to the house's locked visual identity, purple and black and gold, the structural design language of the station, the vertical bar worked in proportionally. Imperia trades with no other house. Each house was built to stand alone, by founding intent.
When it happened
The story begins long before any human saw it. Roughly two hundred thousand years before the colonists arrived, six civilizations rose on six worlds in the system the ancients called Solace, each understanding one fragment of what the universe is, each building an artifact that embedded its philosophy in how it was made. They met, they read one another's frameworks, and each believed its fragment was the whole truth. The competition for understanding ended in war, and the civilizations destroyed each other. Each one's last act was to preserve its artifact and carve its name into the ruins. The Aurokhal was left powered down in orbit, intact, waiting, for two hundred thousand years.
Humanity reached the system after a journey of roughly one hundred and twenty years, sixty thousand colonists across six survey vessels, ten thousand to a ship in cryosleep, three generations born and dying in transit. The ship that became Imperia had left Earth as the Unbroken Will. The colonists named the system Solace again without yet knowing the name was already its own, and named the gas giant Olympus before they learned what its makers had called it. For the first decades the houses did not exist. There was one mission and shared findings, and as each artifact came online its discoverers published what they learned. Hardened ships, energy reactors, entanglement comms, all of it spread across the colony in those open years. Then the sharing tapered. Each group had lived long enough with its own artifact that the artifact's worldview had begun to shape it, and six worldviews began to suspect one another of holding things back. Politics came, then secrets, then the alleged raids and the alleged hacks. Roughly fifty years after arrival the six houses were formally declared, an acknowledgement of a turning that had already happened. Imperia, by then, had made the Aurokhal a fortress and itself a wall, and in the present Era of Stratagem it is still standing exactly where it chose to stand.
Why they fight the way they do
Imperia believes that the universe takes everything that is not held, and so the only honest answer is to hold. It did not set out to rule. It set out to survive a place that allowed no permanence, and what survived became rule by necessity, which is the closest thing the house has to a creed. Strength, to Imperia, is not the blow you strike. It is the thing that is still there when the blow is spent.
At the table that conviction becomes a way of fighting. Imperia raises walls and stacks shields until the board locks into shapes the opponent cannot break, and then it strikes outward from a position that cannot be hit back. It feels no need to win quickly. It wins by refusing to lose, grinding the other side down until there is nothing left for them to play. The Imperian player cannot be panicked. The walls close in on the other side of the table while Imperia stays calm, certain it will be there at the end, because for Imperia the end is the only part of the game that has ever mattered. Hold the line is not a wish. It is a promise the player gets to keep.
Plays by Fortify and Assault.
Life in the house
Canon: from the universe-details walkthrough.
Governance
Three families hold the votes inside Imperia: Highmarch, Aurelian, Castellan. Each family casts one. Surveys of the roughly 10,000 Imperians run continuously and inform every family's position. Decisions resolve at 2-1 or 3-0. The current chair is publicly announced to the other houses. The path that put them there stays inside the house. Leaders are given an extended grace period when survey numbers slip. The families wait to see whether the leader can recover the position before calling a vote. Replacements are deliberate. Transitions are formal.
Military and fleet structure
Imperia maintains three command ships in active service, the maximum the population can crew. Each command ship supports ten squadrons of three fighters. Squadrons must move with a command ship. The chair leads the combined fleet by default and may delegate command to a Captain or Admiral from any of the three families. Ranks follow the standard ladder: Ensign, Lieutenant, Commander, Captain, Admiral. Promotion is documented and slow. Universal conscription begins at age eighteen and includes basic combat training for all citizens. The standard-issue weapon is a heavy assault rifle, refined with armor-reinforcement systems derived from Monolith research. Conscripts retain their weapon for life. Specialized tracks open after the service year: fighter pilot, marksman, command staff, science, industry, and others.
Justice
All crimes committed by Imperians are tried by Imperia regardless of where the crime occurred or who the victim was. Trials follow formal procedure. Charges are read, evidence is presented, and a panel drawn from the three families issues judgment. Records are kept and held internally. Capital punishment applies only to murder, attempted murder, and treason against the house. The convicted is offered a choice between a method of execution and the Nox-surface option administered by Nox on Velhuneth. Lesser crimes carry sentences ranging from service obligations to confinement. Cross-house disputes are negotiated between the chairs of the involved houses. If negotiation fails, trial by combat is invoked. The chairs agree all parameters: who fights, location, weapon or unarmed style, and the win condition.
Daily life and culture
Imperia lives on inherited previous-civilization station infrastructure in orbit around the gas giant Tharosian. The orbital structure carries its own translated ancient name: The Aurokhal. The colonists cannot live on the planet itself. The stations were partially functional when found and have been the subject of continuous engineering work across two centuries. Many systems are foreign in design and behave in ways that take generations to fully understand. Daily life carries an engineering rhythm. Most adults contribute time to station maintenance regardless of their primary occupation. Quarters are tight by design. Recycled-air culture. Children are raised with mechanical literacy as a core skill. Meals are communal more often than not. Personal dress trends toward practical layered clothing that holds up under work, with house identity showing in subtle metalwork on everyday garments. Institutional dress, military uniforms, armor, science officer kits, engineer gear, and house property follow the system-wide visual identity rule: house colors (purple, black, gold), station-and-structural design language, and the vertical-bar sigil integrated proportionally throughout. Hobbies and arts have evolved in confined-space directions: small-scale crafts, music played at low volume, table games.
Economy and wealth
Imperia operates on a contribution-based model in which currency is earned through contribution: necessities are supplied, and an internal requisition currency covers everything above the baseline (detailed below). Necessities including food, shelter, medical care, and education are supplied by the house. Every adult contributes to station maintenance and house operations as a baseline expectation. The original colonists were selected partly for this contributory disposition and the trait runs through the population. Conspicuous accumulation of resources beyond personal need is socially scrutinized. The cultural norm against greed is enforced informally through reputation and standing rather than through formal sanction. An informal bazaar runs continuously in a designated section of the station. Mornings are quiet. Activity picks up by mid-morning, peaks through the working hours, and dies down by dinner. Crafted objects, technical works, structural art, writings, personal possessions, custom modification of personal weapons and armor, lessons, custom skill-work, and small restaurants serving prepared meals are exchanged through barter or reciprocal service. Modification specialists work alongside other artisans and follow the locked house visual identity regulations on all weapon and armor work. Imperia does not trade with any other house. Each house is economically independent by design and by founding intent.
Requisition. Above the supplied baseline, members draw an internal requisition currency. It is issued monthly: everyone receives a baseline minimum, and more is earned through effort, completed assigned tasks, and standing salaried allotments for full-time duty positions, with bounty-style bonuses for high-risk or optional missions. Requisition is use-it-or-lose-it: balances reset roughly every six months, so it is spent within its cycle rather than hoarded into private wealth. It buys personal gear and, most visibly, the armour and weapon upgrades and modifications commissioned from house workshops. Requisition is the same across all six houses: one monetary system the founding colonists arrived with and never changed, because it always worked. Each house issues its own members' requisitions; the unit itself is common to the whole system (see how Solace runs).
Religion and meaning systems
Religion is treated as a personal and private matter in Imperia. People hold whatever spiritual or philosophical orientation they were raised in or have chosen, and Earth-inherited traditions persist across generations through individual practice. People can discuss their views openly when they choose to. Celebration, ritual, prayer, and contemplation are conducted in the domicile rather than in public, work, or bazaar spaces. Imperia does not institutionalize any religion. The house has no official spiritual orientation, no clergy, no sponsored holidays, and no religious structures within the station infrastructure. The Veil is taken seriously across the population. It is understood as an investigative threshold, a way to seek knowledge of the self, the universe, and the previous civilization. It is not worshipped. The Guides, Witnesses, and Gatekeepers are custodians and investigators, not clergy.
Sub-faction relationship
Imperia treats service in any of the three sub-factions as honorable. Citizens who join are recognized formally and their families are publicly proud. Returning retirees are welcomed back into Imperian civilian life. Imperia contributes personnel to the Guides, Gatekeepers, and Witnesses in equal share with the other five houses. The sub-factions enforce strict balance and will pause recruitment from a house if it falls short of qualified candidates rather than draw unevenly. Imperian Guides are drawn from those with relevant preparatory skill or those who have personally crossed the Veil and returned. Imperian Gatekeepers are drawn from citizens with battle or training experience. Imperian Witnesses are drawn from retired political figures, with rare exceptions for citizens whose temperament fits the role. When the Gatekeepers request ships, materials, or personnel, Imperia supplies its share without delay. The obligation is absolute and not subject to vote.
Families
The three genetically distinct lines of the house, one vote each.
Heroes
The house's three hero cards (one per family). Names are canon; stories open.
- Frederick Highmarch
- Lucia Aurelian
- Bernard Castellan
Related
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the-monolith (artifact)
- tharosian (homeworld)
- the-veil
- the-archive-institution