Ancestors - Ancestors: The Ancestors are the multiple, deceased generations of the Kin of the Leagues of Votann who have come before the present day. They are viewed with almost spiritual reverence by the Kin, who believe that the purpose of their lives is to live up to the perceived ideals of their Ancestors, a belief that drives them on to illuminate dark new corners of space, to witness sights no Kin before them has, and to engage in adventure and battle across the vast span of the galaxy. Essentially, the religion of the otherwise overwhelmingly secular Leagues is one of Ancestor worship.This belief is given more credence by the fact that the Votann, the self-aware machine intelligences that guide the Leagues, have long accepted into themselves the accumulated -- and often duplicate -- cerebral data of endless generations of dead Kin and their self-aware robotic constructs known as Ironkin in a custom known as "returning to the Ancestors." As such, the Votann earn their other moniker of "Ancestor Cores", for they truly do contain the accumulated wisdom and experiences of every Kin and Ironkin who has ever lived.It seems likely this custom was once purely practical, part of the same pragmatic routine that saw the bodies of the fallen recycled for nutrients and raw materials. In more recent millennia, however, it has taken on an element of religious ritual that has seen mountainous drifts of accumulated cerebral data drown even the hyper-advanced mind-cores of the Votann.All Kin desire to rejoin the Ancestors upon their deaths, with their bodies and minds offered up to the Votann in the belief that their experiences will enrich the machine minds and aid future generations of their people.Living up to the ideals of their Ancestors by providing the Votann with the accumulated experiences of their lives is a major motivator in Kin Oathbands setting out to fight as soldiers of fortune in the wars of other starfaring races, for doing so allows them to learn much from their temporary employers -- not least the movements of potentially hostile foes and the locations of rich caches of resources. They then return to their people more grizzled and wise than ever before.The tradition of returning to the Ancestors also provides the Leagues' Kindreds with their greatest means of sentencing transgressors in their society. It is viewed as a waste of resources to incarcerate those Kin so aberrant that they would commit cardinal crimes against their own. Murder, extreme wastage and abject failure have but one possible punishment. That they might no longer burden their family, the culprit is sent into exile from which vanishingly few ever return. At the same time, their name is told to the Votann, so that the Ancestors know who has failed them and can forbid the transgressor entrance into another Kindred or league.To the Kin the true horror of this sentence is neither death nor loneliness, but rather that they will never be permitted to join the Ancestors. Their entire life and all of their experiences are thus rendered meaningless. The Kin say of this fate that it would be better never to have drawn breath than suffer it. The thought of exile is one of the very few things that inspires true dread amongst them, and its threat does more to stay the hand of lawbreakers than would any amount of corporal punishment or fire and brimstone religious dogma.