Federation of Sol

It is said that there is a Human on every settled planet in known space. Uncounted billions of them dot the Core Systems, in some cases even outnumbering the native population. Whole uninhabited worlds have been settled by Humans in ages past, and their societies have grown to the point where nobody would suspect that those planets weren’t their places of origin. But across the galaxy, few groups of Humans display the depths of determination and ambition as those hailing from the world of their birth.

Jord, third planet of the Sol system and birthplace of humanity, is controlled by the Sol Federation of Nations, more commonly known as the Federation of Sol. The roots of the Federation stem from the earliest days of the Human diaspora, when the discovery of the mass-drive first allowed humanity to venture beyond Sol in numbers. Spreading throughout the stars, humanity eventually encountered other intelligent life. As Humans had so often done in the past, the fractious nation-states of Jord united against this potential threat, forming the Federation of Nations for mutual defense and governance.

Luckily, humanity’s fears proved unfounded, and Jord’s skies remained free from fleets of alien invaders. But the unity remained, and the nascent Federation eagerly continued to expand to Quann, Centauri, Atlas, and scores of other planets. Many Humans dreamed of building a galactic empire with Jord at its heart, only to have those dreams crushed when they finally ran into the Lazax Empire, which already ran the galaxy.

The Lazax offered the Federation a place on their Galactic Council. However, it was clear that humanity would only be subjects in a galactic empire, never free to pursue its own path. The young Federation chafed under the web of laws and restrictions created by dozens of millennia of precedent and tradition. It sparred with other factions that were feeling just as suffocated. And eventually, when the Lazax attempted to bring Sol to heel, the Federation chose to fight instead, firing the first shots at a Letnev blockade of the Quann Wormhole and beginning a war in defiance of their galactic masters.

For the Federation, the next steps were merely a matter of self-defense. They had defied the Lazax Empire, and eventually the Lazax would deploy their ponderous war machine to crush Jord for its insolence. The only chance was to strike first and strike hard. With secret technological help from the Hylar, the Federation drove its fleets deep into Lazax territory, a brutal decapitation strike aimed at Mecatol Rex. The result was more catastrophic than even Sol expected. With the Emperor dead and the Imperial government destroyed, many member factions saw this as their chance to seize power for themselves. The Twilight Wars began, and they would shatter galactic society for thousands of years.

The Federation of Sol Today

The Sol Federation has changed significantly in the years since the Twilight Wars, though its name has stayed the same. The disparate nations of Jord have long since lost any vestiges of their old autonomy, and the many cultures of the homeworld have largely blended into a pan-Jordian culture, though thousands of local variants remain.

Today the Federation is ruled by a democratically elected High Minister, who has executive control of the Federation’s economy, budget, and military. The ancient Council of Security and General Assembly have long since morphed into three distinct governing houses that hold the High Minster’s powers in check. These are the House of Law, the House of the People, and the House of Industry.

Of the three, only the House of the People consists of elected representatives: individuals from across Jord, the wider Sol system, and extrasolar territories directly controlled by the Federation, who are elected to five-year terms. The House of Law consists of a mix of hereditary magistrates and judges appointed by the House of the People, and the House of Industry accepts new members from Sol’s plutocracy using its own arcane qualifications for candidacy.

The actual level of democratic representation has waxed and waned over the centuries, and currently, the Federation is somewhere in between a true republic and an oligarchy of the wealthy. The House of Industry has expanded its power tremendously as galactic commerce has been reestablished, and the House of the People struggles to keep it in check. In this the House of the People has an uncertain ally in the current High Minister, Juan Salvador Tao.

Tao has served for ten two-year terms, and his popularity shows no signs of waning. On the one hand, he has supported the rights of Federation citizens and aggressively curbed the more destructive or short-sighted tendencies of Jord’s corporations and hereditary businesses. But on the other, Tao is a militant expansionist who wants to see the Federation finally become the empire he believes it has always been destined to be.

Even now, the Federation’s territories stretch beyond the bounds of Jord. The entire Sol system, from the ice mines of the outer reaches to the sprawling canyon cities and domed craters of Ma’adim and the floating stations in the upper atmosphere of Venera, exists under the Federal flag. All inhabitants of Sol hold full Federal citizenship, as do the inhabitants of nearly a score of worlds such as Centauri and Gral (the former having remained a part of the Federation even through the worst of the Twilight Wars, and the latter having rejoined several decades ago).

But the rights of the Federation’s inhabitants shrink on the margins of its territories. Sol has claimed (or in some cases, “reclaimed”) a number of smaller settlements, stations, and backwater worlds in recent years. They are officially known as provinces, but a number of the inhabitants refer to them bitterly as “occupied territories,” and speak Tao’s name with a derisive groan.

Goals of the Federation of Sol

Tao’s goals, which are admittedly shared by many of the people he represents, are expansionist and militaristic. Under his leadership, the Federation looks to continue to reintegrate the old Sol colonies, including Atlas and Quann. Eventually, the Federation seeks to dominate an arc of the galaxy stretching from the Quann to the Elysian Wormhole. In doing so, it fully expects to spark war with the equally expansionist Barony of Letnev, and unlike the inconclusive conflicts of ages past, this is a war the Federation fully intends to win. Even now, fleets depart the vast naval base of Churchill Prima over Ma’adim, and troops muster in facilities from Rio Amazonia to Trelic Station on Gral.

However, the Federation also seeks to expand its soft influence throughout the galaxy, relying on the appeal of many aspects of Jordian culture and even cuisine (Human food has the rare distinction of containing proteins that can be consumed by nearly all sentient species). Although Jordian culture is not as renowned as that of the Hacan or Xxcha, the broad popularity of Jordian art, fashion, and food continues to spread thanks to humanity’s ubiquity across the galaxy and Sol’s strategic location between several major wormholes.

In recent years, the Federation’s imperial ambitions have been somewhat sidelined by the emergence of the L1Z1X , Nekro, Vuil’raith, and Mahact. The L1Z1X are a particular danger to Sol, since they have not forgotten the atrocities the Federation committed against the Lazax all those years ago. In light of this, the Federation has been a cautious supporter of the Keleres in the Galactic Council. The Federation provides material and personnel to the Keleres, but at the same time seeks to limit its authority over member civilizations in the Council and to keep it pointed squarely at the L1Z1X menace.