House Degallio - House Homeworld: The world of Alaric Prime is an ancient and hidebound Feudal World of toiling peasants and haughty nobles. It is covered mostly in sulphurous seas, viscous chemical tides and currents devoid of all but the hardiest of lifeforms.Dotted across the burning acidic oceans, the planet is made up of islands strung together in hemisphere-spanning chains or standing along thousands of miles from the nearest foreign shore. There are also a handful of larger land masses, their coasts scoured clean by the sea but their interiors are blessed havens of verdant life, fed by flourishing self-contained eco-systems.On these islands, the black stone keeps of the nobles brood from rocky outcrops and coastal bluffs, thousands of indentured labourers toiling in their shadows. Unlike many Knight Worlds, Alaric Prime boasts numerous knightly houses, each masters of a different region of the planet. But this is a world of bitter rivalries and constant skirmishing between the various noble families.Alaric Prime possesses a regressive society. Technology is limited as the result of ancient law, and most souls live simple lives of hard labour, scratching at the ground with tools of wood and iron.For their part, the nobles pay little attention to the hard lives of their people, consumed as they are with their standing amongst the knightly houses or with gaining glory on the field of battle if they possess a Knight suit. Only the spectre of their ancestors and the foreboding presence of Sacred Mountain with its holy significance keeps the nobles in line.Located on the largest of Alaric Prime's islands, on land owned by none of the knightly houses, the mountain is a shrine to everything a Knight should aspire to, a reminder to the Nobles of their honourable purpose and the lynchpin of their many laws and traditions.When there is a serious dispute between the houses, they will gather in the shadow of the Sacred Mountain to resolve their differences, praying to the spirit of the planet's founding father to guide them.Countless legends are woven into the lore of the mountain, speaking of a divine army that sleeps at its core, or of the souls of slain Nobles dwelling there to watch over their descendants. That it is the resting place of the Freeblade Gerantius the Forgotten Knight only adds to the significance of the mountain, and the place it holds within Alarican culture.Beneath the mountain there is rumoured to be a vault of archeotech and lost lore, over which Gerantius stands guard. Ancient and mysterious, Gerantius has defended the vault, and the world of Alaric Prime, since time immemorial. Whenever the planet is threatened, legend says the Forgotten Knight will rise from his tomb, and march upon the enemies of Alaric.Alaric Prime is a world repressed by law. Over the millennia, countless minor laws have been added to those first set down by the founding families, often when one house attempts to increase its power or diminish control of another. Often, laws end up hurting the peasants more than their masters, and while a house might decline in power it is the common folk that will pay with their lives.Indeed, most Alarican laws do not apply to nobles, though they are honour-bound to enforce them. For this purpose each house employs numerous Justicars, men charged with ensuring the populace follow Alaric's many laws and punishing those that do not with incarceration in one of the world's many prisons.This draconian enforcement of a system that has never seen a law repealed or changed means that more than two-thirds of the planet's population are imprisoned, many for crimes such as sneezing on the vernal equinox, stepping on the shadow of a convict, or drinking ale brewed by a bald man. Relatively few of those incarcerated in the island penitentiaries are there for offences such as theft or murder.Ironically, the truly lawless within the antiquated legal bedlam of Alaric become overlords of its prisons and the de facto taskmasters of their more law-abiding brethren.These criminal overseers rise to power through threats and violence, cowing the other convicts and knocking them into line. When the nobles need hands to farm their lands or craft their goods it is the criminal lords that answer the call.The most notorious of the penal colonies on Alaric is the smoke-shrouded volcanic island of Ignivitch. In the basalt mines the convicts hack stone from blackened walls, filling steam-barges bound for fortresses across the planet.If a convict should survive the years of backbreaking labour on Ignivitch he might rise to become an overseer himself, hardened by the criminal company he keeps. Houses like Degallio care not from where the stone, steel or grain comes, or who applies the lash to see it gathered, only that it fills their storerooms and warehouses.