The "gunsmith's society" is an occult ritual organization within the clan-ship society of the Navigators, specializing in military leadership, mutual aid, and mediation across the lines of the three Navigator "assemblies".
Behavior
Gunsmiths have an inverse set of virtues when compared to mainline Navigators - where they are invasive, obsessed with equal treatment and insult, expected to react with high emotion, and aim for decisiveness in action and thought, gunsmiths are instead expected to keep the secrets of their order, accept the hierarchy of masters and journeymen, remain calm, and forsake immediate action to instead consider all angles.
This makes them, in the eyes of their neighbors, frightening - difficult to predict, difficult to understand. Additionally, members of the society are the only Navigators with the permission to ignore demands of their Imperious tyrants.
Social Function
Members of the society have a monopoly on the authorized production of Navigator airguns. Manufacture of these weapons is not hidden, nor even particularly difficult - any Navigator ship-tender has the necessary understanding of pressurized systems - but it is socially prevented. Navigators behave in a saga-like way (i.e. they go flying off the handle for basically no reason all the time) - do you trust them with guns? Really?
The society, with its more restrained social expectation, keeps these weapons to themselves, and to those Select and Imperious they can trust to keep them turned away from each other for use in war and against machines.
As a group they theoretically have no political desires beyond mediation - in practice, individual gunsmiths tend to stand in opposition to the twin cultural shifts of Legalism (who seek the development of writing, sedentary agriculture, and other ideas taken from the local Oases) and the Golden Sphere Revelation (which believes in an alternate eschatology than mainline Navigators).
Mythological Basis
One of the secrets revealed during initiation into the gunsmith's society is the secret of heredity. Members of the society are not, in fact, descended of Parva Weightless (the mythohistorical first Navigator) - but instead children of Saveriu, a hunter and minor character in conventional tellings that the gunsmiths expand into the warrior-philosopher-king of Parva's home pre-Navigator culture. As members of the society are not children of Parva, they are thus not Navigators, permitting them to act as the society demands.
This was written for G L Å U G U S T 2 0 2 5 - prompt 1:2 "He Wields A Gun", maximum word count 500
Hey Archon! Long time listener, first time caller. (Always wanted to say that.) First, I wanted to thank you for all your years of excellent, evocative writing. Second, I have some questions.
ReplyDeleteThis post prodded me to blow much of my morning going back through your archives and rereading every Lanthanide, nee Sunless, Horizon post I could find, and I was interested to see 1. you repeatedly mention abortive campaigns and 2. the steady evolution of the setting.
On point 2--Most strikingly, the Navigator Houses started out as colonizing nightmare feudalisms, but at some point between 2023 and 2024 it seems like they were fused instead with the groups previously called the Skinborne, becoming the Navigator Septs instead. Did I miss a trick? Are the Houses still around, and this is just a naming convergence? If not, what prompted such a radical shift?
On point 1, do you have anything to share regarding your dissatisfaction with your campaigns? Was it related to inadequacies you perceived in the rules or setting that felt restrictive when in practice, or just the standard scheduling-beast that comes for us all?
Sorry for such a longwinded comment. Feel free to ignore or respond to as much or as little of it as fits your fancy. Thank you again for your stuff, it's great.
On point 1: the recent folded campaigns were for different reasons - one (a play-by-post domain game among the Navigators, Aug-Oct 2024, ish) fell apart because it intersected with some overwhelming life events (though it did also have some worldbuilding problems - the "Arcologists" mentioned in mid-2024 Navigator content have vanished, there was a culture called the "sunblinded" who I never posted anything about, etc). A second with a more standard structure started in January and ended just a couple months ago because of internal stresses (testing a new group that turned out to be a bad fit). Just a week ago I started another play-by-post game - hopefully this one will make it for the long-term!
DeleteMy rules change constantly - all variety of GLOG-ish OSR rulesets have come and gone because I'm never happy with them, but honestly I don't think it matters much.
On point 2: that's exactly what happened! When the setting got... largely restarted, honestly, in 2023, my priorities changed. The Navigator Houses worked fine as the hideous tyrants driving hapless PCs into the horrors of the structure, but were too blatantly evil and pulpy for the anthropological focus it's wound up with (similarly, notice that all characters have become human, and the cloning-failure "ghouls" have vanished).
Now, the Oases have filled in a lot of the space the Houses formerly held - large, active, agricultural/bureaucratic proto-states - with the Firstborn clone-teams (along with the particular subset of Sustainers referenced in "Bodies Upon the Gears") replacing the Houses as a consistent threat to the Oases.
Thank you for asking - I love comments, especially longwinded ones, and I'm always overjoyed to answer questions.
Right now, my goal for this setting is to make some hexcrawl regions - I've finished the Volume, and nearly finished the Hanging Gardens (which border them - a lomas-like fog forest lit by constant aurorae from all the immense magnetic interference and open fusion reactors), but can't quite manage to post either of them because all my players read my blog, ha.
At some point I want to go back and write the hexcrawl for "Endless, Endless, Endless" and its bordering regions, since the campaign in those has already come and gone so I don't need to be precious with them. And, if I'm lucky, someday I'll do a Wolves Upon the Coast style immense sandbox book - though at this rate it looks like that could be a while!