House Of Fabrication
Overview
The House of Fabrication is the sole government, employer, and landholder of the Forgehome sphere. It began as a spacefaring trading caravan and became a corporatocracy: the company runs the government, and there is no distinction between the two. Three castes hold the population. The Mercane govern, own, and price. The artisans build, and are descended from the sphere's native civilization, bought out over generations rather than conquered. The Warforged carry, and hold their position by the settlement that ended the civil war, which freed them from classification as property and set the Life Debt against them in its place.
The House keeps everything in-company. The ore and the heat that feed the forges, the crystals processed from Follis that fuel them, the yards that build the ships, and the food that keeps its living residents alive all move through House hands from source to consumption. Its exports are few: Spelljammers, ordnance, wondrous items, and constructs on commission. House Navigators are the only ones capable of entering or leaving, by way of the Gate spell. House records state that the magic preventing accidental discovery of the sphere, or traversal through the shell, is maintained by an ancient Mythal cast by House mages in the distant past. The House trades across the Known Spheres and answers to their overarching government in matters of law, which is the leverage that ended the war.
Origin Story
The House of Fabrication began as a small spacefaring trading caravan, a handful of Mercane dealing in goods and services throughout the Known Spheres. Eventually, one of their exploration ships stumbled upon a derelict sphere far enough removed from the Known Spheres that had the perfect conditions for them to set down in.
However, the planets in the sphere were not uninhabited. Its prime world was inhabited by a civilization that had not yet discovered Spelljamming: a perfect work force. They were unaware of anything beyond their own planet, so the technology and goods brought to them were like that of miracles. This went on for generations, and the native population were none the wiser.
Conquest was not an option for the House, as they did not have an overwhelming military presence. Instead, they took over economically. They introduced new technologies and magic that improved their quality of life, like improved agriculture and better plumbing. Eventually, the House held so much economic sway that they simply purchased the planet through honeyed words and promises. Over time, everyone became an employee of the House and everything was owned by them. Once people became aware of the situation it was too late; no one even remembered a time before the House's rule, so they just accepted it.
The House placed the natives into the Artisan Caste. The first order of business was terraforming and developing the other planets in the sphere, which became new homes and workplaces for the Artisans. The process began with Navalia and worked inward to Crucibulum as the yards grew capable of surviving the heat. Follis was found to be a manifest zone rather than a star, and the satellites that process its output were the first structures the House raised in open space. The ancient relic in the last planetoid was left alone, as House Scholars couldn't identify it and recorded it as an anomaly.
Caste System
Caste in the House is fixed at birth or at manufacture and is not a rank that can be earned. Movement between the three is possible in one direction and one case only: a Warforged who settles the Life Debt may enter the Artisan Caste, and no other crossing exists. Caste determines where a person may live, what work they may hold, what they are owed, and what the House may do to them, and it is set against every individual in the sphere from the day their name is first written down on Tabularium.
The High Mercane Caste holds the nobility and is made up entirely of the Mercane race. They govern the sphere, own the concerns, negotiate every contract, and set every price, and they do not craft. Every commission passes an Mercane table before an artisan is told it exists, and every schedule, allocation, and sentence in the sphere originates with them. They keep the private residences and biodomes on Tabularium, which are the only gardens in Forgehome and the only place in the sphere where anyone lives among growing things. Their number is small and closed. Marriage, inheritance, and appointment all move within the caste, and an Mercane who leaves the House is struck from its histories and never spoken of again.
The Artisan Caste hold the citizenry. It can be entered from outside, on demonstrated skill alone and without question as to origin, which is how the House recruits from every people that sails, and from below by a Warforged who has paid off its Life Debt. Entry is the whole of the mobility available: an artisan's children are artisans, and an artisan who devises something the Known Spheres has never seen has done good work and remains an artisan. They hold wages, quarters, and the protections the policy affords a citizen, and every hull, helm, binding, wondrous item, and crystal the House produces is their work. An artisan may register a business with the House and trade under its title, which is the arrangement that governs the Warforged shops on Peculium. They do not leave the sphere. Postings abroad do not exist for the caste.
The Warforged hold the Labor Caste. They work the smelting faces on Crucibulum, the yards, and the sites where no living body survives, in conditions that are slavery in all but name, and they are the only caste whose position was manufactured rather than inherited. They quarter on Peculium, a belt of airless asteroids at the outer edge of the habitable band, granted to them at the close of the civil war. What they hold, they hold because the war ended with the Mercane conceding a single point: Warforged are sentient beings and cannot be owned as property.
In place of ownership, the House set the Life Debt, the cost of the materials that went into creating it. That sum is the price of its freedom: its wages decrease it, and repairs increase it. Most find this to be just a different form of slavery, for as long as the Warforged is in debt, it cannot leave the sphere or purchase property from the House. Once the debt is paid, the individual enters the Artisan Caste, and may then either remain in the sphere as a citizen or take leave to depart. Those who leave are given a severance package of basic equipment and their belongings, and sent away in a ceremony. Few reach it.
Warforged Civil War
When the House first began developing the innermost planet of their sphere, they realized they could not send in living workers as the conditions were too hostile to life. In response, they began to awaken the artifact in their sphere, the Forge of War. These awakened Warforged were then sent in to work the forges and crucibles on the planet. The first cohort assigned there outlasted every projection the House had set for them, and the House wanted to know why. A select group of individual Warforged were plucked from their jobsites and secreted away to an undisclosed location for experimentation.
The experimentation went on for a few hundred years, with no one the wiser. Though after a while, rumors began to circulate that Warforged were going missing, and a cautionary tale emerged and was used to keep rebellious Warforged in line. "If you don't behave, the Great Taker will get you!" This legend was beneficial to the House twofold: it kept any rebellious Warforged in line, and gave them plausible deniability in a world full of mysticism and superstition. The situation was ruined when a lone Warforged Scout escaped and leaked the tests that were run and the truth behind it all.
The tests produced results the House did not expect. They tested for physical stress limits, psychological stress limits, and whether they were sentient. The results came back stellar in all fields, though the results of sentience were deeply unsettling for the House. They could not allow their workforce to believe themselves sentient, as it would damage their bottom line. It was marked as an instability in their intelligence augmentation and was altered for future models that did not need it.
The rebellion began on Crucibulum, the closest planet to the testing facility and the location where the escapee landed. Once the truth behind the legend disseminated, yards and factories across the planet began to cease production. Sabotage became rampant across all facilities, things such as dismantling gear, rerouting the slag channels, and destroying planar crystals in storage. The damages caused and the disruption to the network were felt across the sphere and caused cascading damages that the rest of society could no longer ignore.
The citizens took the brunt of the effects of the rebellion. Rationing came in on Crucibulum and Navalia first, where the sabotage had stopped the yards outright, and reached Tabularium within the year as the biodomes began to fall short with their equipment failing and no one left to repair them. The shortages upset the living citizens to the point that it began affecting work in other places as well. A well-fed work force is a productive one, but if they are not fed and maintained then their productivity goes down as well. The House cut artisan pay against lost output, then cut it again when productivity took another downward turn. They were told only to deal with the shortages while the House worked to quell the rebellion.
This event split the Artisan Caste in half: one side in support of the Warforged and their freedoms, citing that they experience life and exhibit sentience in the same ways as any other living creature; the other side arguing that the disruption is harming society more than the rebellion is worth, and the Warforged are just being lazy by asking for more freedoms and concessions. The arguments became harder to defend when the shortages got worse and the population grew hungrier. Eventually, artisans began to refuse work, being that they were a starving population and could not physically do the work.
The Mercane conceded that the Warforged are a sentient race of people. In fear of being sanctioned by the overarching government of the Known Spheres, where they do most of their business, they decided to free the Warforged from being classified as property and put into their own caste. They were also given a stipulation in the form of the Life Debt, the cost of the materials that went into their creation as an individual. While they were still in debt, they could not leave the sphere or purchase property from the House. Once they paid it off, they could either leave the sphere or join the Artisan Caste.
The settlement also granted the Warforged a place of their own. The House ceded the asteroid belt at the outer edge of the habitable band, which became Peculium, and it cost them nothing to give: the rocks were unworked, they held no atmosphere, and no living resident would ever want them. The Warforged took it as the first thing in the sphere that was theirs.
