“The Condottieri Stella
What defined them, more than any single quality was
their ever-burning humanity. Strangers to fanaticism and despair, the
Contottieri, or ‘Sky Corsairs’ were engaged fully in every aspect of human
life.
These were no bare-hulled mercenaries or joyless
Malmukes, nor the more-human, but shaped and regulated, citizen-soldiers of a
democratic polity, who might carry sharp personal hearts, yet beneath serial-numbered
uniform kit. Call them pirates if you will, and some were purely that, or
gangsters, of which; not a few. But they were poets, artists, creatures of business
(all), technicians, explorers, adventurers, lovers, highly aggressive assault
troops, brave as Lions, as neurotic as cats. Cunning mercenaries all and men of
Art.
Let none say they were not principled men! Only that
their principals differed, even within themselves, and were always in direct
contact with an immediate material world of staggering danger and opportunity.
And how else may a principal be measured, questioned, sharpened or lived with,
than through, and by, holding palm-to-palm, the mutable hand of Fate?” –
Francis Malledini, ‘Wars of the Centaurus Arm; the Condottieri Stella.
Models, Painting and Aesthetic
The core idea that began this was; what if Mechwarrior
wasn't fucking ugly?
The Mechs of Mechwarrior have a battered Ford-Factory
boxy midwestern aesthetic which; fine if you like that sort of thing but I have
never once fantasised about getting into one, any more than I have wondered
what it would be like to get into a bus.
Added to that was my recent experience with applying
decals to miniatures, for the first time, using Microset and Microsol.
For those unfamiliar with the irregularly curved pauldrons
of Space Marines - that is where the symbols go. For which; either git real
good at freehand or use decals. And if you do use decals, get ready to suffer,
for the decal is small and wants to lie flat, and the surface it goes on to is
irregular and curved. And small.
Various Mythradic mysteries attend this process - the
secret of making very fine and small cuts around the radial edge of the decal,
avoiding the symbol in its centre, the careful applications of light varnish
beforehand, of clear paint solution afterwards to equalise the surface sheen,
of very careful staining and weathering to help disguise seams and failures,
(without also obscuring the symbol on the decal itself of course). Such labyrinths
of near-alchemical fury.
All, or most, of these were abraded, and in some cases,
vanished, by careful applications of micro-set, (which prepares the surface and
allows the decal to 'melt' onto it). and Micro-sol, (which does more forcible
mutual adhering later). Suddenly my transfers were going on easy, and they
looked good!
This lead me to a thought; what if you designed, or
brought into being, a model line, specifically based around the use of
decals. The models, and the background, would all be designed for transfers
to be applied.
What transfers though?
My mind turned immediately to the High Middle Ages/early
Modern period. To the Italian Wars, and to the glories of
pattern-on-pattern-in-pattern heraldry. Of stripes and stars, heraldic beasts,
coats of arms, cheques, dags, trinary hanging ballsacks and geese-rampant, and
also a little of the Formula-One ultra-capitalised high-speed racer, their car
blazoned with signs and adverts, of that one boxer who took money from a sponsor
to have their branding on the bottom of his shoes, so they would be
photographed if he was knocked out, and somewhat of Games Workshops post-future
heraldry where the iconography of trans-stellar hyper-corps and meta-states
melts into a dream of symbols.
Above all I dreamed of actually-attractive mechs, things
designed by Italians rather than by Midwesterners; absolutely slathered in
bright, confident, blazing heraldry, of bobbaunce and a vision of outgoing
prideful masculinity taken from before the Great Renunciation and the
democratic business jacket.
These machines would be battered and weathered by war,
but their flags and pennants would flutter proudly, even if they have to be made
of electrostatic material to make them fly when there is no wind, or no air.
The patterns, signs and symbols on a mechs chassis would
be the record of its actions, of allegiances so old the current pilot doesn't
know them, of contracts taken, deeds done, of heroism and shame. As in
heraldry, each sign or pattern would have some meaning, either obvious or
hidden.
And all of this to be personal; no uniforms, no
regulation, instead a culture of fantastic mercenaries, perhaps banding
together in 'Companies' long enough to wear similar heraldry, or at least
wearing the sign of their current company, but perhaps moving on from that,
fighting alone or in loose associations of 'free lances'.
Mercenaries, but not without honour. That takes us back
to the Condottieri Stella.
 |
| Tomy Zoids Zeeva Zevle battle vehicle ostrich type NIB 1992 |
The ‘Cultures’
Don't call them 'Empires', they wouldn't like that. Think
of them as tendencies, or smears of interstellar power. Each powerful enough,
in its own way, to provide a sincere threat to the others, and each also
desperately vulnerable.
The Cultures are what might be called transhuman. At
least for any that once were human, they are no longer so. Others may be alien,
though it’s hard to tell for all seem alien now. Cybernetic hive minds,
thinking world-spanning biological substrate, carefully genetically engineered
Brave New World Climax Societies, perhaps mildly extra-causal semi-sublimed
polities, extradimensional half-gods, swarms.
None of the 'Cultures' are 'evil', at least in the
Warhammer sense. At least no more evil than any other Empire. Sure they might
have done a war crime here and there but that is in the past. Nor will they
compulsively eat your brain, or turn you into one of them. Though they may make
some strong arguments that you should join. They can negotiate. They pay well.
They have reason to fear each other for each Culture is
so different that the magisterium of the others makes them a potential strong,
strange and unpredictable threat. Probably the galaxy belongs to one of them
but none are eager to start the world-burning
hyperwar that might complete that praxis. They are old. They are maybe a
bit too comfortable. They are willing to wait.
But the Centaurus Arm remains unclaimed, and it is home
to strange wonders, secret histories and relics of forgotten time, to the
residue of ancient climax-species and the mathematics of unknown philosophies,
and the wild evolved residuum of their existence, not to mention all the
extremely valuable basic resources that any 'Culture' needs; water,
heavy metals, rare materials and so on.
Each Culture would quite like the Centaurus Arm.
They each edge closer, unwilling to commit, fearing the apocalypse. Far from
here, across arms of the galaxy, each faces the other, quietly, across a
hundred thousand minor volumes. No-one wants it to all kick off. Even the big
computers can't predict how it might end.
Hence; proxies. Fractured tribes of tech-denying humans
are moving through the Centaurus Arm at a glacially slow pace, aboard massive
generation ships and hollowed out moons jammed with crude fusion drives. They
are even fighting each other occasionally, and they have a particular
ritualised form of warfare which limits the long-term damage of their
conflicts. They don't use nukes, complex A.I. or bioweapons, let alone ontological
or reality-scarring weaponry. It’s basically monkeys fistfighting each other in
crude machines.
So use them, employ the humans to stake claims,
gain resources, control paths and vectors. They are a deniable, (though
everyone knows everyone else is doing it), cats-paw, and they respond well to
payment in gold, (as well as other resources). You can buy them off with minor
toys. They even set up complex social and economic organisations to arrange
their own exploitation! You don't even need to send in agents to hire this or
that warband or kin group, instead they self-organise into 'Companies' and even
pitch for 'Contracts'! You can just pull them off the shelf.
From the perspective of the 'Cultures' this has only been
going on for half a millennia, so early days yet. As the humans see it, their
whole sprawling culture has adapted to one of mercenary service, and many
Companies and Capitanos, have grown ridiculously wealthy doing it. Some have
even become rulers of moons. This has shaped the whole of human culture into
one where the flaws and virtues of the crafty mercenary philosopher king are
the dominant ethos of the whole race. In a way they are all Condottieri
Stella now, for, though they don't always wield institutional power, these are
the heroes and leaders of Man.
 |
| Moebus I think |
Humanity and Humanism
Neither bigots nor fanatics, but not necessarily 'good'.
Who are they? They spend their money on libraries and art, on music and display;
the culture of the Condottieri Stella is a savage high culture, not a milky
democratic one. Pride anneals all, the pride of men and women ready to risk
their lives, and combined with this; a love of all that is human; of love,
friendship, loyalty and affection, and of human culture and human lives.
I see them like Renaissance Princes, or at least, aiming
to become such; gold gathered from the battlefield spent in the courts of man, owners
of libraries, sponsors of artists, of painters, sculptors, musicians, engineers,
where the sponsorship of technical art and useful science, goes alongside with
that of the fine arts, where corporate power is unsteady, due to the chaos of
war and vast distances involved, where the power of science and technology is
likewise, potent, but shattered and hard to scale.
In part because the culture of the Condottieri Stella
refuses full submission to the machine, in other, the irregular supply of
strange resources. In part because the Cultures, the likely-alien
backers of the Condottieri, for whom they fight their proxy wars, specifically
don't want them to progress past the singularity; that might transform them
into a possible competitor, such a powerful agent would require an equivalent
response from an opposing 'Culture', which would quickly spiral the Centaurus
Arm into the destructive and unpredictable hyperwar the 'Cultures' were trying
to avoid.
So Humanity remains, retained as a useful and limited
tool by the Cultures, and by the deliberate refusal of the Condottieri, and
their specific orientation of their own piratical high culture around the
products of unaltered humanity.
Since the Condottieri Stella are the highest-status
figures in their own societies, and since they are a source of irregular
funding, resources, and of martial interest, they shape the ethos of those
cultures.
That the Condottieri Stella have no single fanatical
goal, or single grand opposition which justifies and unites them, does not mean
they do not have ideals, or dreams of past and future, or questions
about the meaning of their lives.
They have lots of ideas, they throng with them, for a
Condottieri Stella is also, as well as being a mercenary, a bandit, a captain,
a C.E.O., a Patron of arts, a friend and ally to some and foe to others, is
also a philosopher, or at least they read philosophy. They may have written
books, or at least hired others to do so.
While other wargames might dispose the profits of a successful
campaign into materiél, or raw status, the Captain of a Condottieri Stella
Company, leaves behind them, a trail of books, paintings, sculptures,
performances, music, films and poetry, a kind of living library which serves to
represent them, their company, and their ethos or philosophy.
True some Captains might be interested only in propaganda,
in forms and stories sufficient to push up their payments and burnish their
reputations, but as others would point out, this also is an ethos, though it
does not call itself such.
Others; many, have dreams; ideas about what humanity is
or should be, of mans relation to the immensity of time, of the Cultures, of
the Centaurus Arm, of God and sorrow. Some are tragic, some positive, some
empirical, others abstract. Some tell their story in the blazing of pennants,
others speak like funerals, guarding their poems and philosophy like grieving
turtles.
What matters is that their ideas are human and that they
have them, and that they matter. Fighters argue over these things, they might
even come to blows. Friends might be divided by philosophy, or art, while long-time
foes might find themselves united by a common theme, a mutual appreciation of
the meaning of a life, or by love for an aesthetic, though they must battle
none the less.
That these are battles of ideas does not mean they are
battles of extinction, but arguments via arms. Always the Man has the Idea, not
the other way round. Always there is consideration, mulling over of concepts or
ideals, thoughts of process and precedence, of final ends against current
means. Always questions of virtue and expediency, honour and survival. The very
wrestling with these questions is the animating spirit of the game. Two
Capitano's might battle on the field of war, then agree in the opera house, two
co-philosophers could end a battle with a chess game, or a debate. You might be
able to talk them out of it. A man might weep for his enemy and deride his
friend.
What I describe here is an annealing of a culture of deep
humanism with one of controlled and ritualised violence. The personal,
political, religious and ideal interwoven through the core human
experience sharpened and made vivid by the extremity of war, of life and death.
That such figures care about money is no confirmation of hypocrisy,
for money is never, or rarely, all they care about. Always they balance
the needs of the day against those of the morrow, the passions of the ideal
against survival. A miser might fight to bitter ends if well-resourced and
rightly motivated, while an honour-bound hero might retreat, thinking only of
the survival of their company and soldiers, unwilling to expend their lives,
this time, in too straight and narrow a combat.
The intermixing and continual balancing of complex
multi-layered motivations does not corrode the ideal or produce a scene of
gold-gathering hypocrites, but exposes and enlightens humanity by placing
controversies of the ideal in the only place they ever really exist; in the
hands and hearts of living souls, bound by material condition and limited
circumstance.
In the world-view of this game, high ideals in the hands
of those who have only such ideals, who are driven only and entirely
by the ideal, are worthless, and would be seen, (by the characters in
this game at least*), as a moronic bashing together of toys.
To risk a final glorious charge, in order to stand by a
principal, or hold to ones honour, might be very glorious, but if that charge
risks the whole life and future of a company, where then does virtue lie? In
standing by principal, or taking a practical path, for the lives one wagers
with are not one’s own. Sane people may disagree on this, and even souls
disagree within themselves, and that is the kind of choice and turmoil that
Song of Audacity is made to express, for the turning over of virtues and deciding
of fates, not just once, but over time and long campaigns, and the interweaving
of the wisdom of the moment with the wisdom of time, that whole process, is the
humanism I am talking about.
It's not interesting if they are shit people. They might
be 'bad'; manipulative, acquisitive, back-stabbing, but such a character can be
'good', to those they ride with; a provider of futures, a shaper of fates, and
a magnificent patron of arts which may burn through time, (think the Borgias).
Likewise a soul may be craven, calculating, willing to retreat, but should
never be a coward exactly, for in this careful weighing of the moment against
the future, they preserve not only themselves but their Company, their
companies families and futures, as well as the wishes of their patrons.
 |
| ELF 2 500 1984 |
The Game Itself
A 28mm wargame based around mechs, and maybe a handful of
troops. No more than 30 models per side. The high-status leaders are always in
the best mechs. These would be scaled at about the size of the Imperial
Sentinel, with some a little bigger and some a little smaller.
There are only humans in this game and they are
always fighting each other for money. This is explicitly a game of contracts
and resources, and the contracts are dietetically directly *from* the Cultures
which have hired each side in this battle to do particular things.
Mission objectives would be largely asymmetric and blind.
Each side might be there to do a quite different particular thing, and wouldn't
immediately know what the other side was there to do. It might be possible for
both sides to win, or for both to *lose*, monetarily at least.
A Company can 'break contract', going off the books,
perhaps to escape what they see as a losing situation, or even imbued with the
spirit of Ares, swearing vendetta against a rival company, though that may not
have been in the contract.
To avoid a 3rd party playing DM, this would be mediated
through smartphone. You would have all your rules online, and a living list of
your Company, with its current state and resources. Then you and the friend you
want to fight would go to the app, sign in and confirm some rough details of
the battlefield, and the app would act as each of your 'contractors', sending
mission objectives to each players phone separately. At the end of each turn
you would update basic details of what objectives and damage you have taken,
and confirm the other players losses and objectives. There may be 'turnarounds'
where, in the middle of a battle, your 'Contractor' suddenly changes what they
want you to do, and why, perhaps offering increased payment for certain goals.
The record of your Company would be held online and if
people wanted to team up together in larger narrative battles, you could scan
each others phones to join an alliance for the day.
As in Necromunda and Mordheim, the presence of cash
earned from battles, and of damage taken, troops lost, repairs made, alliances
broken or stood by, disasters, successes, friends and enemies, would make the
'Company' a character of its own.
The cash sponge that stops super-successful Companies
from running away with everything is the funding of arts, artists, libraries,
philosophies, music, culture, technology, etc etc. Naturally as a Capitano
becomes more and more respected, they become more like a Prince, and as a
Prince, they lead not just a warband but a collection of aesthetics and ideas,
leaving their print on human culture across the Centaurus Arm. This 'Cultural
Victory' effect is the true status symbol for Captain and Player alike; those
who are most successful and leave the greatest mark are written into the
official history of the game, their aesthetic and ideas becoming a strand of
humanities great over-culture, which others may align with, copy or defy in the
future.
 |
| Andrew Stewart Jamieson |
The Modelling and Roleplaying
You would have to do this yourself, off the books, but as
the game manufacturer, False Machine would sell transfers and symbols for
various Contractors, tendencies, alliances, battlefields, achievements, ideas,
principals etc, and you would be able to apply these to your mechs to show
where they have fought, what for and why.
Or you could just assemble your mechs and decal them with
whatever you think best, and base your Companies philosophy and history on
that.
The subtlety of owning and developing your philosophy is
likely too complex for Wargame mechanics, we would have to rely on gamers to
think about them and roleplay them, (we could include it in the RPG). The game
could provide potential reading lists for people beginning their philosophy.
 |
| Kallamity 135 scale HDM-07 BRIEGEL I master, 2005 |
Mech Design
Anything, just not ugly, and it must have wide
flat surfaces for decals.
I dream of mechs influenced by, designers like
Kallamity. (But not copying; Kallamaty’s designs are precisely arranged
for the scale they are at), and also by early race cars, the more vibrant end
of the Japanese robot market, mixed with the neo-industrial style of 40K,
especially the Ad Mech, Imperial Guard and, Tau and of course, Knights.
No antigrav, and a healthy dose of
anthropomorphism.
Kitbashing would be fine and dandy I think. We could even
start of selling 3d printed kits to alter or amend GW kits and other into
something more ‘Song of Audacity’
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* I am not against this in other fictions but it is
specifically not what this one is about.
