Pirates of the North Quadrant

***Pirates of the North Quadrant*** is a historical tome found in the Library of the Spheres on Bral. It contains information about piracy throughout history.

* 1. Ancient pirates
	+ Archeologists have found evidence of piracy leading back to the pre-Vessic era. Scholars have found ancient clay inscription tablets with Old Parthenian heiroglyphic writing in ruins on Caravanserai that tell of the theft of a sacred sword there by a band of pirates. It's said they took the sword south toward the Core. It claims the taking of the sword caused an ecological catastrophe on Caravanserai.
	+ The Vessic Empire is believed to have effectively shut down piracy during most of its long reign. Or, at least, if pirates were active during the early Vessic eras, no records of them survive. The Vessics infamously destroyed nearly all their historical documents and libraries before the liberation of the galaxy, so we may never know for sure.
* 2. Golden Age of Space Piracy
	+ During the Late Dynasties era, Vessic power was fragmenting. Swaths of the Rim began to break away, and the overstretched Empire was increasingly strained by having to constantly put down coups and rebellions. In the chaos, piracy flourished, and four great pirate fleets emerged:
		- **Drake's Claw**, who struck from a hidden base carved into an osseous asteroid in the boneshard field around The Rib.
		- **Rogues of the Red Kindori**, who were said to have anchored their fleet on the dorsal side of a rare red megakindori.
		- **Crystal Tides**, who hailed from orbiting geodes in the crystal rings that circle the planet Magmatic, in the Mid Rim.
		- **Dead Rascals**, who are believed to have come from another plane.
	+ Most were ultimately believed to have been destroyed by the Empire, captured or killed, by the time the Galactic Rebellion rose to retake the galaxy. If any of the great fleets survived, it's not known where. Perhaps on other planes, or deep in the Blood Stars, or somewhere in the unknown quadrants.
* 3. Bralian Age of Space Piracy
	+ After the fall of the Empire, chaos reigned once more as the galaxy fell into a series of civil wars, and piracy resurged in the margins of the conflicts. The Bralian Age of Space Piracy began towards the end of the Age of Chaos, when Cozar united the scattered North Rim pirate fleets and claimed lordship over a swath of space, centered on his seat of power at the Rock of Bral. Only a few pirate bands resisted joining with Cozar.
		- One was the vampirates, a collection of vampire raiding crews known for terrorizing the Outer Rim, who remained a constant presence for centuries. The Parthenian Empire nearly fell in a devastating vampirate raid on Parthenon in 321 AV.
		- Another was the strange crew of the Black Hole, a legendary vessel said to be flying black sails wreathed in smoke and crewed by the damned. It would appear and then not be seen again for months, years, or decades, before striking unexpectedly in some other distant corner of the galaxy.
		- In the early 400s AV, the crew of Greenbeard's Greatfleet amassed an enormous pirate armada that captured dozens of systems, becoming a great power that grew to threaten the other kingdoms of the Core and Mid Rim. A federation of worlds called the Core Defense League struck down the fleet at the climactic Battle of Ca'jantak in 467 AV, a victory that would lay the groundwork for the founding of the Fourth Coalition a year later.
* 4. Modern space pirates
	+ In the modern era, piracy is somewhat controlled inside the primary trade routes.
	+ The tradelanes are guarded by loose agreements between the space empires, who send out warships to patrol each route near their territory.
	+ Bral itself has reformed into a mercantile republic. While it does issue letters of marque to privateers to enforce law in the North Quadrant, it no longer engages in the state-backed raiding of merchant or diplomatic vessels.
	+ In the Deep Astral, however, pirates still prosper, preying on ships that stray from the major routes to save time by cutting across the wild, open Astral Sea - including the vampirates and, some whisper, the legendary Black Hole itself.