Culture Profile: Sovereign Thalassocracies

Astrography

The ships of the Sovereign Thalassocracies are scattered across the entirety of the Crazed Core, with only a few ambitious captains possessing holdings outside the Core in the form of appropriated orbitals and starports. The Thalassocracies are completely spacebound, with no permanent terrestrial possessions or colonies.

Natural Physical Appearance

The main denizens of the Sovereign Thalassocracies are technically baseline humans of the Galactic ethnicity, but millennia of inbreeding among genetically homogeneous vessel populations, a cultural tendency to use intoxicants and combat stimulants, and a lack of advanced medical technology has led to grotesque birth defects and mutations to become commonplace. Baldness, jagged teeth, pallid skin, webbed toes, bulging unblinking eyes, and malformed limbs are the most common of these defects.

Appearance Traditions

Given the anarchic and decentralized nature of the Thalassocracies, there is little in the way of uniformity when it comes to common appearance traditions. Each individual ship and crew can have its own longstanding clothing practices and gimmicks, with some styling themselves in stolen Avelovan uniforms, while others resemble the inhabitants of barbarian worlds. That said, one universal custom across the Thalassocracies is bearing the symbol of the Sovereign Thalassocracies somewhere on their ship and individual person - the infamous Red X, the interstellar symbol for piracy. Getting a piercing, tattoo, and elaborate body modification after accomplishing some noteworthy task, be it for capturing an enemy ship, putting down a thrall rebellion or reaching the age of twenty, is a common rite in Thalassocrat culture.

Language

The language of the Thalassocracies is as diverse as the pirate alliance itself, with many ships and fleets speaking a bastard form of Middle Standard Imperial that is laced with the individual slang, curses, call-signs, and accents of their vessel’s unique micro-culture. These differences can be so prominent that ship-to-ship communications between Thalassocrat crews can be difficult, if not impossible.

Government, Law, and Politics

The raiders and pirates of the Sovereign Thalassocracies proudly proclaim that they have no government of any kind, and exist as sovereign entities that have simply banded together for mutually defense against their enemies. This is mostly true; the individual Thalassocracies, which can be anything from a single frigate with a crew of about a dozen to an entire armada of tens thousands, are technically bound together by nothing more than self-interest, a common ancestry dating back to the fall of the Second Empire, and a fear of stellar empires like the Federation or the Empire eradicating them piecemeal.

Nonetheless, one authority exists in the form of the Ataxia Court, which enforces the loose set of rules that were created in Sovereign Thalassocracies’ inception. The Court is based in Port Ataxia, a massive Second Empire starport located deep within the Crazed Core, and the largest non-aligned starport in Thalassocrat space. It is composed of the captains of the four strongest Thalassocrat crews and syndicates, with a single arbiter and tie-breaker in the form of Port Ataxia's weak AI, which is more or less a glorified coin tosser. Little actually gets done by the Court, as all four captains see each other as competition and thus are disinclined to sincerely ally with one another unless the entire Sovereign Thalassocracies was in endanger of destruction, in which case they are charged with rallying all Thalassocrat crews to its defense.

The Thalassocracies is theoretically governed by the Code of Sovereign Thalassocrats, a list of "rules" mandating or prohibiting behavior among the Sovereign Thalassocracies. When the Ataxia Court does bother to enforce one of the rules of the Code, it is almost always the one that prohibits any Thalassocrat crew from allying with a foreign power against the collective interests of the Thalassocracies. Those who break this rule rarely last long, as all the other Thalassocracies will be called to hunt down the violators. When they are inevitability captured, they are brought to Port Ataxia for a public execution, which doubles as a ceremonial feast. Other rules of the Code, such as “No Thalassocrat captain may harm another when docked at Port Ataxia,” and “No Thalassocrat captain shall invite human subspecies, AI, or xenos to their crews,” is nowhere as strictly enforced and are more or less ignored by all. A famous saying among the pirates is that the Code is more a series of guidelines than rules.

Beyond those rules and a few others, the Sovereign Thalassocracies is completely lawless, and it falls to the individual captains or crews of a Thalassocracy ship to make their own rules. Theft, murder, rape, necrophilia, pedophilia, and xenophilia are rarely punished, with the only constraint to these actions being that what goes around, usually comes around.

Economy

The Sovereign Thalassocracies has what can be described as a “raider economy,” in that as pirates that regularly steal from the vulnerable and the weak across the galaxy, they are essentially criminal syndicates that use violence to secure products that they then sell to other Thalassocrats or stellar empires outside the Crazed Core. Unsurprisingly, given their anarchist attitudes and hatred of any form of statist or moral intervention to impede their actions and desires, this raider economy is completely unregulated even by the Ataxia Court and the rules of the Code of Sovereign Thalassocrats. Sell what you will is the whole of the law.

Trade

Trade and commerce had been historically seen in Thalassocrat culture as a sign of the inferiority of statists unable to pay the “blood price” for what they desire. However, aside from a few fanatics, most modern Thalassocrat crews are willing to trade their ill-gotten wares with anyone willing to trust them. Beyond stolen materials and thralls, many Thalassocrats also sell their highly addictive combat stimulants, a concoction dating back to the Second Empire that can grant its user almost superhuman strength, endurance, and regeneration abilities at the expense of their sanity if used too often. The biggest trade partners for their drugs, thralls and other stolen goods is the Consortium of Sovereign Systems and the Duzhonev Imperium. Clandestinely the revolutionaries of the Gresi Alliance, the Secessionist Union and Settlement Independent Movement are also some of their most reliable customers.

Currency

The Sovereign Thalassocracies almost entirely relies on a primitive barter economy when negotiating for the exchange of thralls, stims, chems, fuel, ammunition and ships. Many Thalassocrats also stockpile stolen Imperial credits and Consortium currencies, given their near-universal acceptance. Thalassocrat crews often maintain large servers filled with financial data that can be used with Consortium banks, hiding them away on asteroids and comets that only they can reliably track down.

Sex, Romance and Family Structure

Men and women are treated as equals, with only lack of merit and might being seen as disqualifying traits for senior positions in ship crews. Of course, Thalassocrat culture can be seen as highly “masculine,” with there being an explicit expectation that true Thalassocrats, be they male or female, must be competitive, rugged individuals who constantly prove their worth through feats of strength, cunning, and bravado. The Thalassocrats take their notion of sexual equality seriously, in that anybody who is unable to prove their worth deserves their lot, regardless of their sex.

When it comes to sex and romance, the Thalassocrats commonly perform whole crew orgies in celebration of a successful heist or raid. These celebrations usually involve heavy use of stims and chems to enhance the sensory experience. Smaller pairings do happen, but generally speaking monogamy is a foreign concept for Thalassocrats. Long-term relationships, let alone marriage, are seen as a mutual slavery contract. Rape is seen as the failure of the victim to defend themselves, though there is an expectation that such acts can have fatal consequences for the perpetrator before long. Some crews prohibit rape and any kind of sexual assault against fellow crewmates; thralls never have such protections.

There is no concept of direct family structure or even an obligation to raise one’s progeny in the Thalassocracies. Most ship children are either raised communally by the entire crew or the crew’s thralls.

Religious Beliefs and Traditions

While Thalassocrats are a superstitious lot by nature, most are non-religious or atheists. This is a result of Thalassocratic pirate society being staunchly materialist and nihilist as a matter of course, with the idea of there being an all-powerful yet distant invisible entity that doesn’t directly enforce its will on others considered a laughable and worthless concept. After all, any being unwilling to do its own dirty work is not worth following or respecting. Quasi-religious cults of personality do tend to form around particularly powerful and infamous Thalassocrat captain, with some ships practicing ritualized cannibalism and necrophilia whenever a well-loved captain dies as a symbol of respect and grieving.

Philosophy and Disposition

Philosophically, the Sovereign Thalassocracies believe that existence is objectively meaningless and all morals are fundamentally manufactured, bankrupt and self-serving. With that being the case, the pirates also hold that all sapient lifeforms should strive to achieve their own individual meanings and desires by imposing their will upon an uncaring and unfeeling universe. Restricting oneself, or worse, allowing an external authority to restrain one, is seen as tantamount to be being a thrall, the lowest form of existence to a Thalassocrat.

In practice, this ideology values individualistic personal freedom above all else, and expresses that freedom through an utter disregard for thoughts, feelings, and desires that don’t align with an individual Thalassocrat’s own personal interest. Furthermore, since morals are self-serving lies created by the weak, the strong should never involuntarily submit themselves to any kind of moral or legal authority that doesn’t use force, the only true authority in the universe, to back it up. This is why the Thalassocracies despise idealistic statist powers like the United Galactic Federation, United Dominions of Avelov and Solarian Community. To a Thalassocrat, they are liars who disguise their violent hegemony through flimsy ideals, unlike the brutal honesty of the Thalassocracies, the Consortium, the Duzhonevians or Imperial Remnant, all which make no bones about the fact that they do what they do because they are strong, and those they prey upon are weak or cannot fight back. This has led to a culture of begrudging respect for the leadership of the "pragmatic" powers of the galaxy, although this does nothing to slow the Thalassocracies' brutal attacks.

Military

Views on War

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Sovereign Thalassocracies see war as an almost spiritual or sexual event that serves as one of the highest forms of sensory experience. Much of this reverence for violence can be chalked up to the Thalassocracies' universal use of psychopathy and megalomania-inducing combat stimulants.

Culturally, the Thalassocrat understanding of war is more akin to an extended raid, where multiple crews work together against a single target, unlike the full-scale galactic conflicts like the Great Chessboard or Solarian-Duzhonevian War. War is an ancient and integral part of the Thalassocracies' heritage and identity, that can be traced back to their origins as penal legionnaires who performed high risk boarding actions for the amusement of the nobles of the Second Empire.

Economically raiding, warring and mercenary work are the only means, besides stim dealing, that a Thalassocrat worthy of the name can earn their fortune and survive in the resource-starved Crazed Core.

Command Structure

The phrase “every captain is a king on aboard their ship” is taken seriously in the Thalassocracies, with each captain having complete authority on their vessel. As a result, even when the entire Sovereign Thalassocracies is forced to band together to confront an existential threat, it is usually a disorganized and actively infighting mob. It is only through the personal charisma and intimidation of the Ataxia Court that the thousands of Thalassocrat crews that make up the Sovereign Thalassocracies can be swayed to temporarily suspend their pretty grievances to unite and follow their orders.

When it comes to individual Thalassocrat crews, command structures can be quite varied from ship to ship. Some crews are direct democracies with all major decisions being determined collectively, some are degenerate parodies of the hierarchical command structures of powers like the Empire or Avelov, while others are completely solipsistic with the captain being the only “freeman” in a crew of subservient mind-shackled thralls.

Soldier Types and Equipment

While no official standing army or navy exists for the Sovereign Thalassocracies, and thus no official soldier types, there are examples of common specializations amongst its disparate crews. For instance, when engaging an enemy craft or orbital on an extended raiding campaign, Thalassocrats typically use berserkers as a basic military unit. Given colorful terms like madboy, slaughtergirl, and rushkid, these usually young frontline berserkers are given a cocktail of combat stims that temporarily boost their pain resistance and regenerative abilities. They are then thrown into a durasteel-puncturing “dart,” and launched into the hull of the enemy ship so that they can act as a first wave boarding action, meant to harass enemy crews within their own ships and capture the vessel entirely if possible. Lobotomized kerdin, feral cybernetic organisms, and domesticated monstrosities from the days of the First Empire are also commonly used in such boarding actions, as are thralls equipped with nothing more than remote-controlled explosives and vortex inducers if the capture of an enemy ship is seen as a lost cause.

Since they are thieves that steal from almost every major faction in the galaxy, a Thalassocrat crew can find themselves equipped with anything from Federal phasers to Protectorate disintegrators. However, since most crews don’t have the knowledge or resources to repair these weapons, they usually rely on primitive coilguns and even pipe bolt-action rifles of their own design. Particularly wealthy Thalassocrat crews purchase phage and sonic weapons from the Consortium, with the possession of the latter being seen as a symbol of prestige and an excellent way of expressing crew identity by modifying them to “sing” the unique battle theme of a crew during a boarding action or raid. While highly ineffective outside the tight corridors of an enemy ship, Thalassocrats love to use melee weapons such as plasma blades, grav hammers, and buzz hatchets.

Formations and Tactics

Lacking much in the way of disposable resources, Thalassocrats pick their reaving targets well, as a single costly raid can spell the end of a crew. Thus, they prefer to perform lightning raids and hit-and-run attacks on relatively defenseless colonies, orbitals, and merchant caravans so that they may pillage them for thralls and goods, and flee before reinforcements can arrive.

When cornered by a stronger or more numerous foe, a Thalassocrat raiding party will usually use their ship’s impulse drives, or if truly desperate, their void engines to quickly flee the battlefield. If forced to fight a well-prepared and well-equipped opponent, or simply looking for a challenge and a chance for glory, a standard Thalassocrat tactic is their using crude and unreliable Void-derived cloaking technology to creep up beside an enemy, and then unleash the explosive rounds of their ship’s broadside railguns to ravage the enemy before they can effectively react. Thalassocrats almost never resort to engaging an enemy planetside as they have neither the inclination, nor the numbers, to hold any planetside territory.

Navy and Spacecraft

The Sovereign Thalassocracies has no standard navy, and it is only through self-interest, the Ataxia Court’s influence, and the occasional bribe that can get the crews of the Thalassocracies to work together as a cohesive military force. Even if every Thalassocrat vessel was to unite together to form an armada, an event which hasn’t been seen since the days of the the Third Federation-Imperial War it would still be tiny compared to the massive navies of the Federal Star Fleet and Imperial Navy.

The largest and most powerful ships in the Thalassocracies are almost all shanghaied vessels taken from either the Avelovan Royal Navy or the fleets of the United Vessel-States, both of which are favorite reaving targets for the Thalassocracies. Ships actually built in the Crazed Core in the shipyards of Port Ataxia are small, garish things that are patchwork creations of scrap and salvageable ship debris, and are little more than sealed capsules with engines and railguns.

There exists three commonalities when it comes to Thalassocrat ship design: heavily-modified impulse drives that grant their ships speeds that outrace most other non-Thalassocrat vessels, large cargo holds for their thralls and stolen wares, and primitive void engines reversed engineered from abandoned prototypes created during the Second Empire. These void engines not only allow for instantaneous travel across the galaxy, but also the ability to temporarily “submerge” ships in the Void as form of cloaking technology.