The Brass Orchids

I'm taking a brief break from my Bard series to write about one of the factions in my world.  It's the least 'traditional' of all the factions, and it's been tricky to wrap my head around them.

First, some background information.  Before the Tarluskani invaded and founded the Tarluskani Empire, the Confederacy was home to 30 feuding city-states.  The region was resource-abundance and the wars were petty affairs, so life in the cities was very stable.  Because of the stability and prosperity of the area, urban folks had the time and resources to support the arts - architecture, ceramics, cooking, drawing, literature, music, performing arts, sculpture, and swordplay, and artists would often compete to bring pride to their home city-state.

When the Tarluskani invaded, they banned representational art and enslaved the entire population.  However, the artistic class still existed, just driven underground.  Using their art to embolden the spirit of the enslaved Confederates and strike back against their Tarluskani oppressors, the Brass Orchids (name stolen from Delaney's Dhalgren) were founded as an artistic resistance movement, creating massive murals overnight and sneaking instruments and figurines into slave pens all over the Confederacy.  Just creating art would not be enough, they knew, and so the duelists became assassins, striking down Tarluskani who abused their slaves and high-ranking military targets.

The faction is essentially a decentralized terrorist organization that sees itself as the defenders of an indigenous way of life uprooted by the Tarluskani some 80 years ago.  The bulk of the enslaved populace have acclimated to their slavery and while some see the Brass Orchids as young firebrands who mean well but only bring trouble down upon the very people they claim to protect, most see them as a threat more dangerous than their predictable Tarluskani masters.  More than anything else, the Brass Orchids are an ideology to which any can claim adherence.

They have vibes of the student's rebellion as expressed in Les Miserables with tinges of Modernist art - in other words, they are an organization entirely at odds with the early-Renaissance aesthetic of the rest of my world (along with the other terrorist organization, the Avondown Associates).  However, despite the anachronism, it is important to keep them.

The Avondown Associates are a group of Southerners, mostly former thieves, who are attempting to oust the Tarluskani from their city, now renamed Reyjadin.  When I first introduced my players to the world of Prodigy, I gave my party good reason to join them.  The slow realization that the party had aided and abetted racially-motivated terrorism (since the Southerners and Tarluskani are different ethnicities) made them incredibly uncomfortable, and it is important that my world be able to put players into that kind of position and force them to grapple with this issue, especially today, when terrorism has become a part of the Western consciousness.

Alexis recently wrote about the Senegalese slave trade and addressed placing the cruel realities often found in the real world within the game one.  I agree with him.  One of the central themes of the world of Prodigy is cultural intersection, which happens both positively and negatively.  It presents (and creates) gross injustices that a civic-minded party has to grapple with, and I've tried to give every culture, every faction, both a positive and a negative aspect.  The Brass Orchids are freedom fighters seeking a better world for the Confederates and are the only 'organization' in the world of Prodigy that sees art as more than mere entertainment (and would be able to take advantage of the work on bards I'm doing right now).  They can also be cruel and callous killers, willing to let the repercussions of their actions fall upon their people for the 'greater good'.  The party gets to decide whether the one balances the other, or not.