Aoshtai Galaxy

**Aoshtai, the Golden Realm** (also known to extragalactic cartographers as **Aegis-AO51**, or to some as **Rhya**) is a large spiral galaxy located in the Aegis Cluster. Isolated for billions of years by sheer distance and inadequate technology, Aoshtai became home to thriving and dynamic civilizations. Over the course of time, empires rose and fell, until one race calling themselves the Aoshanti, or *Throneborne,* united under a single ruler, conquered the galaxy, and gave it its name.

For a thousand generations, the Aoshanti Emperors ruled in lordship over the galaxy's many races and creeds from their capital of Abzu. The galaxy was prosperous and at peace until the covenant that Priphon the Conqueror had made with Rhya, the Guardian Soul of Aoshtai, expired. The Empire's slow decline into decadence and dysfunction was well advanced by that point, and two enemies from without––the galactic invasion of the machine consciousness Jinohl and the raids of the barbarian Tesar race––precipitated the gradual collapse Golden Throne. After the sacking of Abzu, known forever as start of year 0 of the new galactic calendar, Aoshtai was cast into an age of darkness and violence.

Fourteen millennia have since passed and the galaxy still lives under the shadow of these ancient giants. New civilizations have emerged from the ashes of the old, some attempting to recapture the glories of the past––others seeking to put it behind them so they can meet the future with open arms.

## History

### Prehistory (9 billion AR - 1,000,000 AR)

The Aoshanti of the old empire had greater knowledge of the formative epoch of the galaxy, but much of this was lost in the sacking of Abzu and the fall of the Empire. What is known is that the Aoshanti traditionally believed that the galaxy was formed 9 billion years ago when the great being Rhya and her brothers made the Aegis cloud her home. Under Rhya's steady stewardship and supervision, the galaxy ordered itself around her. From disparate clouds of dust, stars were formed, debris coalesced into planets, life emerged in the unlikeliest of places, and the galaxy was shielded from the forces of chaos and disorder.

Much of what is known about Aoshtai's history is therefore shrouded in myth and legend, with some characters living for hundreds of thousands of years, others speaking to inert stellar objects, and others still engaging in feats that should not have been possible with the technology of the period. What can be inferred for certain however is that life incubated and developed naturally in Aoshtai, giving rise to a diverse and dynamic array of thriving minor societies. Many cities and early wonders were built and destroyed before the records that survive began, laying the foundations for galactic civilization.

### Rival Realms Period (1,000,000 - 60,328 AR)

By the year 1,000,000 before the Fall of Abzu, Aoshtai had entered a new phase in its development. As interstellar societies developed and grew larger, as distances shrank due to the invention of new technologies, as cross-pollination increased as a result of war, competition, and commerce, there emerged the galaxy's first true galactic civilizations. At first, conflicts were infrequent, short, and inconsequential. Societies possessed neither the means nor the interest to wage full-scale galactic war. These contacts, and the shifting alliances and networks that emerged from them, created norms and habits of statecraft and diplomacy which survive to this day.

However, the general amity of galactic politics began to dissipate when Aoshtai's great realms began to develop centralized, efficient states in response to the threat posed by eldritch hordes, which invaded the galaxy from neighboring Tel'ras beginning in the 960,000's AR. The galaxy's first great alliances were forged in order to repel these invaders, but when the danger lessened the great realms turned their newfound military strength on one-another. They found their conflicts more fraught with danger, more costly, and more total, to the horror and detriment of all.

For hundreds of years at a time, peace prevailed, preserved through one system or another. But as powers rose and fell and then rose again, peace inevitably broke down and galactic war once again ensued.

### Age of Heroes (60,328 - 60,000 AR)

It was in the wake of one of these conflagrations that the eldritch horrors of Tel'ras are said to have returned to the galaxy, devastating the exhausted and broken states of the Rival Realms period. In the midst of this chaos, Rhya is said to have spoken to Aldoros the Second, the Duke of young Aoshanti state of Abzu. On the eve of a battle against the Telranites, she instructed that if he devoted himself and his line to her, and answered her call when the time came, she would save his people, and his sons would be kings and emperors.

The Aoshanti King, then a leading light among a young, energetic, and noble race possessing a spark that few nations had before them, accepted her terms. As she promised, Aldoros and a coalition of Aoshanti realms fought off the Telranites from the Concourse. Then, when Aldoros the Second died, his son Prigem broke the back of hegemonic state of Lessos whose interference had prevented the Aoshanti states from unifying under a single crown. On the night before Prigem's crowning as King of the Aoshanti and his wedding to the beautiful Ulysa of Lessos, his father is said to have appeared to him and reminded him of his family's vow to Rhya, and conveyed her summons.

The morning after the coronation, Prigem and his following left the capital and journeyed to the galactic core, where Prigem renewed his vows to the goddess. It is said that she asked him to lead an army of the faithful to purge Tel'ras' rot from the galaxy. In return for his assent, she named him and his descendants Protector of the Golden Realm, and his people *Throneborne*. If they succeeded in defeating the Telranites, she promised, Prigem's descendants would rule the galaxy in her name for a thousand generations.

Led by Prigem and his descendants over two hundred years, the Army of the Light fought many battles, liberated many states, and drove the Telranites back to the very gates of hell: the black hole at the center of Tel'ras itself. However, when the Army of the Light returned to the galaxy, they found it battered, disunited, and preparing once again to descend into another cycle of internecine conflict.

### *Mandatum Galaxium* (60,000 AR - 0 PR)

    The Army of the Light returned from its expedition to Tel'ras in triumph, led by Priphon the Black Prince, arguably the most talented military commander the galaxy had ever known. Priphon was brother to Aldoros V, the weak King of the Aoshanti, and was considered by the royal court to be a danger to the crown. Even as galactic tensions escalated as a result of the petty grievances and inattention of bad rulers, Aldoros V ordered that the Army of the Light be disbanded and its brothers disarmed.

The Aoshtai Galaxy would flourish under the general peace maintained by the Old Aoshanti Empire. Enduring works of culture, immense engineering projects, and advanced technology no longer replicable by modern civilizations were invented and widely proliferated.

Beneath the thousands of years of peace, however, trouble brewed. As the empire grew old, its governing institutions became entrenched and inflexible, its people grew comfortable and complacent, and its common purpose became less and less clear. The frontier secure, the Empire was nonetheless beset by increasing levels of incompetence at the highest levels and sedition at the local level. Ambitious regional governors of the Middle Empire were reigned in through the introduction of the Cubit, a digital currency which could not be minted in arbitrary quantities to fund inter-regional wars and lavish projects.

In the Late Empire, however, an economic crisis occurred which demonstrated the limits of the imperial government to respond to economic crises when lacking the ability to print their own currency. The Emperor of the time built a megastructural computer for the sole purpose of minting cubits. This engine got the Empire through the crisis, but caused the hyperinflation and embezzlement of the Cubit at the highest level over time. Decadence, complacency, and the short-sighted ambition of increasingly vain elites caused the final decline of the Old Empire a step at a time.

The internal decay of the Old Empire rendered it too weak to effectively resist outside threats. Over the course of centuries, invasions of astrobarbarians from the distant reaches of the galaxy and beyond forced their way through the Empire's borders and defeated its field armies in crucial battles. Once within, they settled inside of Imperial space, converted to Rhyanism, and accelerated the decline of the Empire through demographic pressure and barbarisation of its institutions. The final blow came with the onset of the extragalactic Tesar hordes, who briefly united their exodus-fleets in order to strike several terrible blows against the ailing Empire, splitting entire provinces off from it for their own settlement. The most infamous achievement of the Tesari hordes was their sack of the holy capital, Abzu, and this cataclysmic event marked the end of the Old Aoshanti Empire as a unified polity. What followed was an age of darkness, violence, and ignorance.

### Galactic Dark Age (0 PR - 10 500 PR)

The collapse of the Old Aoshanti Empire was dramatic and final. Tesar hordes, in their many millions, scoured the Imperial capital of Abzu and the cultural and religious centre of Lessos. The heart of the Aoshanti Empire was ripped out, and nothing united, strong, and prosperous came to step inside of the vacuum left by the Empire's absence.

What instead emerged in the decades and centuries after the sacking of Abzu was a patchwork of states, independent worlds, and new civilizations. Surviving provinces of the Old Empire reconstituted themselves as autonomous polities, with their power, prestige, and cultural output greatly diminished as they suffered through the tumultuous terminal stages of an ailing civilization.

### Early Modern Period (10 500 PR - 13 000 PR)

(roughly corresponds to the rise of neo-aoshanti civilization at the start to the rise of the major modern non-aoshanti civilizations of modern-day Ecumene, Karstedt, Naer'si, Hasari Sultanate, and the Drodo/Aratacia at this period's end).

### Modern Period (13 000 PR - Today)

(The age of the modern states and politics of Aoshtai. Civilization is firmly established in most of the galaxy and the major movements of history are determined by a balance of great powers. Neo-Aoshanti civilization culminates in the Ascendency and this phase of Aoshanti civilization sees its undoing at the hands of the GCTO. Historiographical debate over a coming "age of man" in which the Galaxy will be dominated by humanoid-lead constitutional states.)

## Government and politics

Aoshtai has not bowed to a single galactic authority since the time of the Abzu Emperors. However, a corpus of symbols, laws, languages, and traditions from that time have survived to the present, and serve as the basis for galactic relations. While the nations of Aoshtai may be unified by this common heritage, they are divided by most everything else. Conflicts over legitimacy, resources, forms of government, ideology, competing claims to the Golden Throne, and survival force the galaxy's great powers into alliances and conflicts in what is commonly referred to as "The Great Game" in the courts and capitals of the galaxy.

**Central Concourse**
 Pomarian Empire
 Aoshanti Republic
 Karstedt
 Amestria
 Naer'si
 Arboros
 Concourse Commonwealth
 Brestovik
 Shak Tuvi
 Rogancia
 Titian
 Kingdom of Neodorum
 Itterbeck
 Day's End
**Southern Concourse**
 Aldaran Confederation
Dreiggan
 Astan
Stallas
Vistallas
 Montaf
 Ibi's Hollow
**The Arrival**
 Krizovia
 Kylnrift Parity
 Seniborcia
 New Tvolai
 Kaikyo
 Clans of Torkac
**Encounter**
 Phero Ecumene
 GladreCorp
**The Reach**
 Trillic Khaganate
 Little Illaria North
 Marric Union
 Farland Company
**Kaos**
 Sibbaldia Republic
**The Demise**
Caduci Republic
**Hytaxia**
 Capitol
 Kapricai
**Axanar**
 Aratacia
 Khimyat
 Stjarnavík
 Dorosani

### International Law

Much of the international law governing relations between Aoshtai states descends from traditions which date back to the Ancient Aoshanti Empire, but many emerged through the mediation of the Order of Lessos and more recently the cooperation of many of the great powers through the Grand Concourse Treaty Organization.

* **Promulgating institution:**  Grand Alliance Assembly
* **International law court:** GCTO International Law Court

#### Principles

* **Sovereignty and Self-Determination:** All recognized states are sovereign, which grants them the right to govern their own internal affairs. All legitimate states have the right to make their own policies within their borders, to defend themselves, to conduct diplomacy, and to join and leave alliances. The borders of sovereign states are inviolable and a state's rights do not diminish with their size or power.
* **Freedom of Navigation:** All states and peoples of the Aoshtai galaxy have the right to transit through nullsec and using galactic etherlanes, even if these run through national space. All traffic must respect the authority of those who own the etherlanes to police and administer them, but the circumstances under which a vessel may be stopped or detained are narrowly enumerated in international law. Countries and other entities can be sued in international law courts for not following these guidelines.
* **Freedom of Trade:** It is generally expected that nations will freely trade with each other with few hinderances, impediments, or restrictions, though protectionist powers and regions exist and buck this trend.
* **International Mediation:** Violence is not seen as a legitimate solution to problems and is only to be used when all other avenues at resolving an issue fail.
* **Colonization:** Colonization in the neighborhood of other powers is thought to require the permission and participation of those powers.
* **Non-Galactic Powers:** Non-Aoshtai native powers are seen as different and their rights to colonize the galaxy or project force within it are limited. Intergalactic empires are looked upon with suspicion. Aoshtai's institutions and laws are perceived to be for native rather than foreign powers.
* **Control of Gates:** The stance of the international community is that Aoshtai's intergalactic gates should be under the control of an international institution which represents the will of the whole galaxy, without exceptions.

#### War

* **Casus Bellis:** Wars need serious justification before they are initiated. Random acts of aggression are considered crimes against the international order.
* **Targeting of Inhabited Planets:** Inhabited planets are to be kept away from in war as much as possible and are not legitimate targets except of the most precise of bombardments against military installations.
* **Civilians:** Civilians are not legitimate military targets.
* **War Crimes:** Aoshtai has a list of acts and behaviors which are considered to be war crimes.
* **Superweapons:** Using "dirty" weapons of mass destruction such as chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons is strongly taboo. Precision weapons, such as tactical tungsten rods, are generally considered acceptable against military targets.
* **Prisoners of War:** It is generally expected that soldiers will be allowed to surrender and prisoners of war will be treated well, receiving adequate food, supplies, medical attention, and shelter.

#### Legitimate Casus Bellis

* **Conquest:** Illegitimate
* **Control of Space:** Illegitimate
* **Demonstrate Superiority:** Illegitimate
* **Reprisal:**
	+ Attacked Courier: Legitimate
	+ Attacked Country: Legitimate
	+ Violated Territory: Legitimate
	+ Publicly Insulted: Illegitimate
	+ Sheltering Adversary: Illegitimate
	+ Sponsoring Adversary: Legitimate
	+ Committed Crime: Depends on the crime
	+ Breach of International Law: Legitimate
* **Arms Limitation:** Illegitimate
* **Reconquest:** Illegitimate against members of the galactic order
* **Trade:** Illegitimate