Academy of Saldan

The **Academy of Saldan** is a well known institution of higher learning, the only truly successful product of the Encyclopedia Foundation to survive its fall to the Naga. It is the greatest source of learned sentients in Imperial space, a repository for artifacts of ancient eras, most prominently the Mage Imperium, but also those of the Pantheon War and the dark times before the coming of Adalna.

The Academy is the location of the most advanced Aetheric and Occult research programs in the cosmos. It also contains strong programs in biology, medicine, mathematics, chemistry, and social engineering. All students are taught Vedlys in an intensive course prior to entering the academy, as practically all scholarly papers are written in it. Saldan maintains a force for the protection of academics on their expeditions and for the defense of the planet, should the need arise, called the Janissaries.

## Founding

The world of Saldan was not particularly strategic during the era of the Imperium, having neither a particularly large population, nor any especially large supply of mineral resources. This made it the perfect spot to place an academy, out of the way of galactic politics. Those who were too late to escape the slow destruction of the Imperium with the main Foundation fleet made their way to the Hybern Sector and joined the administration of the daughter of the Foundation's leader, Maeve Keith-Levin, who decided that all of these academics should be placed into a single establishment for the purpose of consolidating research and training a new generation of Mage Princes - since the traditional academies on Aeldrum were no longer safe or accessible.

Though the rest of the Imperium was crumbling, the Hybern Sector was largely protected thanks to the strategic deployment of Planet Buster weapons by Admirals Clara Keith and Hiram Klausman. Klausman's use of the weapon against the Kirvans and Keith's (posthumous) use in her last stand on Dolorn against the Fialta sealed Hybern off from the greatest external threats to the Imperium. This allowed for a renaissance in the sector, as Maeve and her administration used the power of the Keith family and her grandmother and aunt's connections with the Imperial Fleet to carve a small and stable Imperium out of the greater collapse brought on by the Scouring of Aeldrum.

Maeve had inherited her mother Petra's love of learning and commitment to the improvement of the Imperium; she created the Academy according to the models for learning written out in the many appendices of the Encyclopedia Imperia. Out of a mix of paranoia about spies and a desire to remind the researchers that they must also be educators dedicated to the greater good of the Imperium, all who taught at the academy were forced to swear on the "Profession of Academic Integrity" (a mildly occult document binding its signatories to the ideals of the Foundation) in order to be inducted into its ranks. Thus, the first "Professors" took their posts, with a class of the children of Mage Princes from the region all crowded into the first (now central) academic building, "Keith Hall." The early years were difficult, as the Professors had little experience teaching and at times were literally "teaching from the book" using elements of the Encyclopedia as textbooks.

As time went on, the Academy hit its stride and reproduced many of the wonders of the Imperium. However, the research suffered from the general quality of the professorial staff - the Foundation had taken away the best and brightest of the Imperium. Though a few truly brilliant researchers had joined, mostly from those who filtered in from the rest of the Imperium as it fell, most of the Academy's products were inferior - unable to reach their true potential. Even technology well understood by regional researchers, like the teleportation work done by Selene H. Veer and the transmutation manufacturing tech pioneered by Astrid Keith, were extraordinarily difficult to reproduce. Teleportation was given up on entirely, and transmutation was limited by difficulties achieving adequate energy efficiency. A single Aetheric factory, built off of the data from Dolorn, supplied the sector fleet with Adamantium plating - which gave the sector the best ships in the cosmos for some time, as Adamintium manufacturing and the secrets of its creation were widely lost.

## Survival

Inevitably, the forces which destroyed the Imperium at last reached the Hybern sector. Saldan was spared the worst of the fighting, as it had been developing (at the behest of the Keith family) a device which could temporarily destabilize a gate, starting from theoretical papers published within the Encyclopedia. These devices had only been deployed to Telrion and Saldan itself when the sector collapsed; Saldan activated theirs shortly before the arrival of a Fialta warfleet and did not turn it off for more than a century.

As supplies of quicksilver and other important materials had to be rationed, much of Saldan's manufacturing capacity was disassembled and cannibalized to keep the gate closing machinery functioning and other projects supplied. Little research was done in this period and much learning was lost as academics died with few students capable of understanding, much less continuing their research. Worse, the copies of the Encyclopedia were becoming worn, and the mechanical computer which they had built to house the "digital" edition broke down. The decision was made to preserve the original copies and work only off of copied textbooks derived from its contents.

This dark period ended only once the gate was reopened and supplies from outside began to flow. The Saldanese tentatively sent scouts out to discover the geopolitical state of the cosmos - what they found was the scattered ruins of the Imperium, squatted on by the battered remains of a short lived Fialta Empire. With no single planet powerful enough to resist the Saldanese, they created a small tributary system which fueled the expansion of the Academy and the re-invigoration of scientific endeavor.

## Evolution

The fall of Hybern and the resulting dearth of Mage Prince-level intellects on the planet caused the Saldanese academics to attempt reforms proposed by Editor Lucia Lianor in an annex of the Encyclopedia for raising local populations to produce intellects that could work alongside the current professors. Thus, Saldan created the first truly public education system to raise children from their birth to become academics. Initially, the process was quite rigorous and intensely competitive, with only a small portion of each class gaining access to the halls of the Academy. Fewer still graduated from the program to become "graduate" students who worked directly with the Saldanese Professors and would one day become Professors themselves. Those who failed out of this program still became prodigious within their own communities. The upper-level bureaucrats of the planet were practically entirely drawn from the ranks of those who graduated with a "bachelor's" degree but were not accepted into a "graduate" program.

Even those who did not make it through the bachelors program or were weeded out of the "High" schools of the capital went home and used their acumen to become successful business owners, merchants, apothecaries, and other tradespeople. Prior to the blooming of interplanetary trade that resulted from The Unification of Aeldrum (and the resulting opening of stable trade across its ley-lines), Saldan's economy was one of the most prosperous in the cosmos.

Saldan never really lost the insular habits of the Mage Imperium, and despite the fact that the spirit of the Foundation had created a far greater internal integration between the academic disciplines, experts in different fields quickly created "departments" which attempted to hoard the best students and guide them into their discipline. Naturally, the practitioners of the greatest fields of study in the Imperium created the two most powerful departments — the Occult Studies department and the Aetherics department.

Secrecy also defined the Academy's attitude towards other planets. Though it was happy to spread its technological gains on Saldan itself (insofar as they would expand the size and resources of the academy), the Saldanese jealously guarded their secrets from outsiders. Even after the Unification of Aeldrum and the reestablishment of trade, the Saldanese still would not share their knowledge, though they would pay handsomely for artifacts to study and squirrel away in the increasingly large Library of Saldan.

As contact with the outside grew, the Saldanese knew that to keep their independence would require a greater interaction and negotiation with the powers of Imperial space. As is customary, they responded to this change in environment by opening a slate of new offices. The greatest of these was the "Office of Foreign Affairs," which essentially created a Saldanese diplomatic service. Others were "project" offices, such as the "Office of Cosmic Outreach" and the innocuously named "Counseling and Psychological Services Office," a program by the Psionics school to recruit more practitioners as both academics and as subjects. The first reports from these offices indicated that the knowledge and pedagogical power of the Academy were in great demand all over the cosmos. They decided it would be wise to cement the Academy's independence by selling these commodities to the plutocrats and nobles of the cosmos.

Some resisted allowing outsiders into its degree programs for quite some time. The Aetherics department in particular felt (rightly so) that the outside world had little knowledge to offer their discipline. The Occult department, always their rival, advocated strongly for it, declaring the lack of outside religious and daemonic experts to be an unreasonable impediment to their research. Cleverly, the Occultists lured over a few key leaders among the Aethericists by dangling a newly recovered passage from the Encyclopedia which indicated that Demons might be able to be harnessed as an Aetheric power source (though it did not indicate how). Grandiose dreams of one day rediscovering the technology required to build Aetheric factories had been fueling mad speculation about where the power for these operations could come from. Thus, with a joint Occult-Aetherics sub-department created, the Aethericists (and everyone else) agreed to begin letting the most intelligent and qualified students from all over the cosmos into their high schools and bachelors programs.

The final reform which brought the Academy to its modern state was the establishment of graduate schools which would train high-level agents of the Academy. They produce classes of leaders for intelligence operations, expeditionary roles, public management, and foreign affairs. The graduates of these schools were not educators or researchers (and thus not Professors), so in honor of the overseer role they were preparing students for, the graduates of these schools became known as "Masters." With the establishment of these schools, the Academy became the full-service university that we know of today.

## Organization of the Modern Academy

In the hierarchy of organizations, Departments are always higher than schools, and schools higher than labs, institutes, and similar. Note that for political reasons, the Masters programs are all classified as "schools" although the largest of them (the Schools of Persuasion and Combat Arts) are far bigger than the smaller departments.

1. Office of the Chancellor of the Academy of Saldan
	1. Office of Foreign Affairs
	2. Office of Acquisitions and Commerce
	3. Office of Exploration
	4. Office of Student Wellness
2. Board of the Academic Departments
	1. Aetherics Department
		1. School of Mechanical Engineering
			1. Schulz Weapons Development Laboratory
		2. Energy Propulsion Lab
	2. Occult Studies Department
		1. School of Daemonology
			1. Office of Cosmic Outreach
		2. Psionics School
			1. Office of Counseling and Psychological Services
		3. School of Religion and Philosophy
			1. Ove Lungren Expeditionary Sciences Course
	3. Computer Science Department
		1. Montral Institute for Ensouled Computing
	4. Biology Department
	5. Chemistry Department
	6. Medical Procedures Department
		1. Sera School of Cybernetics
		2. Greater Saldan Medical System
	7. Theoretical Mathematics Department
		1. School of Statistics
3. Office of Masters Education
	1. School of Persuasion
		1. Institute for Compulsory Inducement
		2. Theater Arts Conservatory
	2. School of Combat Arts
		1. Operational Leadership Academy
		2. Undetected Warfare course
		3. Combat Engineering symposium (with the Department of Aetherics)
	3. School of Public Management
		1. Tepper School of Business
		2. Institute for Decision Sciences
	4. School of Cosmic Languages
		1. Elder Scripts symposium (with the Occult Studies Department)

## Notes:

1. ↑ "Bachelor's program" was a somewhat sardonic nickname given by the locals because of the monastic lifestyle of students of the college. The nickname stuck around and was so endearing that later generations of Professors who rose through these "bachelor's" programs made the title official.
2. ↑ Established by the occult department for funding offworld attempts to summon demons and contact gods.
3. ↑ Masters students were sometimes recruited from highly skilled mercenaries and other mid-career offworlders, but more often than not they were the "second best" among the bachelors - those who would have gone on to be administrators anyway - thus justifying the further training.

Masters from the School of Combat Arts, in particular those within the "Masters of Undetected Warfare" program were often (only half-jokingly) called "Terminal Masters" - not only because of the non-zero mortality rate within the school, but also the deadly effectiveness of its graduates.