*"There are many worlds that have struck me as corrupt, decadent, crime-riddled amoral deserts. Crassus is all of that, but its inhabitants have ever a veneer of calm pride, a fierce dignity they cultivate as they do their ridiculously complex social hierarchy. It is strange that a society so fixated on personal wealth would have such a grand concept of honour, even going so far as to have honour duels on a regular basis. But in no place are the social frustrations and mortal rivalries better expressed than in the Senate's political intrigues, where murder is but the continuation of diplomacy."* "Oculus", Dominion spy, in an intelligence report to Darth Nadir prior to the Crassian civil war.   Crassus is a moon compatible with human occupation, home to a population of 13.8 million inhabitants, of which 97% are humans descended from settlers from Corellia and Hypori. It orbits the planet X-A-854, nicknamed “Fortuna”, whose abundant gas resources were the driving force behind the original settlement effort. However, discovery of gravitic anomalies in its low atmosphere in 16 BTC drove the birth of hypermatter harvesting, which is now the gilded moon’s primary source of wealth. Clans of powerful entrepreneurs and landlords dominate its social landscape, forming an aristocratic elite that has remained politically and culturally relevant well into the Dominion’s merciless reign. In spite of its modest size and population, and the deep scars left by its recent civil war, Crassus is one of the most valued assets to the Dominion, and houses much of its civilian industries and power generation. As such, it is closely watched by the DIS and the military, as both have a vested interest in keeping the moon stable, whatever the cost in human or alien lives may be. --- # **History** Originally settled by farmers and prospectors, Crassus first grew under the influence of a series of families known as the Old Blood, whose extensive holdings still form the core of the aristocratic class. Through a quasi-monopoly on the moon’s native ore resources, farmland and military, they were instrumental in creating an autonomous state. However, the population hovered around a few hundred thousand prior to the discovery of gas extraction methods by Hyporian engineers, who kickstarted a century-long industrial revolution. A few decades before the Treaty of Coruscant, Crassus was already considered a wealthy nation, with a refined culture influenced by its contacts with Alderaan and Corellia. The aristocracy had matured into a body politic, the Senate, where censors would allow individuals of particular wealth and honor to stand. “Honor” was a difficult notion to properly pin down, but its tenets generally encouraged the fair treatment of subordinates, involvement in politics or military life, and ruthless retaliation against slights. This bred a toxic political environment, where vendettas and feuds over shares of industry or stretches of land were common. This prompted outside observers to often refer to Crassus as a nation of thugs and robber barons, with only the thinnest patina of nobility. At the onset of the reignite Sith-Republic war, Crassian explorers discovered the gravitic anomalies on Fortuna that allowed for the production of hypermatter. This suddenly made the far-away moon crucial to the interests of any superpower and accelerated demographic growth. War refugees, in particular, swelled the ranks of the laborer class, and contributed to an increasingly polarized political landscape. Deeply divided on this topic, the Senate used its considerable wealth to pay for a mercenary army and fleet, and leveraged its resources to appear neutral in the power, though it occasionally swung towards one faction or the other. This precarious equilibrium was shattered when the Empire brutally reasserted control over Anath. Buoyed by fears of a Sith invasion, pro-Republic sentiment on Crassus led to the election of Marcus Licinius to the rank of First Consul. He initiated the process of joining the Republic, which Darth Nadir could not let pass. In a show of ruthless retaliation, Marcus Licinius was killed in public by a sniper, and his most vocal supporters were butchered during the Night of Blood, allegedly by a single female Sith known as Darth Kinsà. In the sheer chaos that followed, the second consul, a moderate Imperialist called Corvus Delsann, was vocally challenged by the Republican faction, and the moon fell into civil war.  *Darth Kinsà, the blade of the Dominion, sole assassin of the dreaded Night of Blood.* After a few initial victories, Delsann and his mercenary army were trapped in the moon’s main hypermatter refinery, and placed under siege for months. To avoid annihilation, Delsann made a devil’s bargain with Darth Nadir, allowing him to bring his forces to bear and occupy Crassus. With one, savage strike, the Sith decapitated what remained of the Republican faction, enacting plans that had long been prepared. The fall of Crassus had been masterminded to appear legitimate, but that legitimacy was fraught, and a vicious cycle of civil war followed this initial takeover. The situation eventually stabilized after several bloody repressions and purges of the Senate, when Darth Venor came to power with promises to protect the senators from further retaliation. His security apparatus, the DIS, implemented strict social controls based on embedded officers, propaganda, enforced thought discipline and revisionist discourse about the invasion. The overt military presence receded, until civilian government was properly built to involve Senate representatives. Now at the eve of a new Dominion, Crassus is considered to be a pacified world, though the memory of freedom and Republican sentiment still runs deep in some sections of its rowdy population. And so, Darth Venor’s gaze can never linger far from the Gilded Moon. --- # **Geography** Crassus is a temperate moon with a hyperdense geothermal core. Its gravity is slightly lower than average, and subject to strange fluctuations that scientists speculate is due to the same gravitic anomalies found on Fortuna’s surface. This translates into unpredictable seismic activity, and a variety of strange flora, from the tall luminescent stalks of the Karakalla Highlands to the dangerous Snap-Roots of the Vespas Wastes. Most fauna is imported from Corellia, Alderaan or Hypori, and has adapted to life in and around the moon’s equator, as the polar regions are not especially inhabited. While some regions do have permafrost, the poles are not entirely iced over, due to the planet overall being hotter than Anath. A number of seas dot its landmass, which itself forms a single moon-spanning continent. The largest sea, Fortuna’s Mirror, is low in salt content and is considered closer to a freshwater lake. Around it were built some of the moon’s main cities, which has resulted in the lake being ridden with pollutants. On its southern shores stands New Castradonia, the capital, which was rebuilt after a tremor destroyed the original settlement. New Castradonia is a metropolis of 780 000 souls, built upon bones of permacrete and durasteel. The ruins of the first city were used to create a network of complex anti-seismic supports, resulting in a tall plateau where the Senate and the mansions of the wealthy are built. Some villas even have antigravitic platforms that allow them to move, and there is no greater show of gratuitous wealth on the Gilded Moon than senator Carrant’s estate, where the gardens and buildings often swap places at a moment’s notice.  *View from the Carrant estate into the Senate district, above the Great Chasm, where the worker-habs are situated.* But beneath New Castradonia also lie dirty little secrets. The plateau houses the feared Krayt Legion, the Dominion’s most terrifying military enforcers, whose reputation is built on terror tactics and brutal civilian reprisals. DIS outposts are hidden behind the walls of manses and hovels alike, and a single, geostationary Blackout-class satellite hovers above the city, ready to knock out its comms instantly should the Dominion decide on a major purge of its population. The entire city is a hostage, an order away from annihilation. Despite its modest size, the moon is sparsely populated, and most of its population lives in industrial estates or small cities, where Fortuna’s bounty is refined into hypermatter, fuel, blaster gas, or just power to fuel industry. The hypermatter business has caused entire industrial sectors to wither, as they could no longer keep up, profit-wise, with Crassus’s main export. As such, many commodities are imported from other worlds. Unprofitable sectors judged vital for strategic autonomy, such as agriculture, have long been automated, so much so that the countryside is mostly comprised of large estates exploited by droids and technicians. Pollution has increasingly become a problem for the Crassians, and air quality has slowly declined with the advent of modern, large-scale industry. As such, the wealthy have tended to flee to the Mordent, a hook-shaped lake near the arctic circle, where the air is cooler and purer. Pockets of utopian countryside have been preserved from mass agriculture by savvy senators, who have used it to establish a culture of tourism enjoyed by the middle class, as a form of added tax on their leisure time. Despite being heavily inspired by cultures with a long history of mineral buildings, many Crassians use complex wooden structures, favoring open spaces and courtyards with small, well-tended gardens. This architecture has proven overall resistant to seismic tremors, and it perpetuates a naturalistic fallacy for the aristocracy and middle class, while the poorer live in tenements of springy permacrete with hydraulically compensated bases. While those seem more secure, luxury homes tend to have a surprising level of hidden technology, discreetly merged with the imported timber. There are in fact very few forests on Crassus, and most of the lumber used there comes from Anath, where forests still grow strong, in part due to the colder climes. The lower quarters are frequently noted to have a strange, even eerie appearance, with almost no natural light reaching into the disenfranchised Striga and Sylla districts, which fill the bed of a dried-up lake. Occasional flash-floods, pollution and holoprojections make for one of the most alienating cities in the sector, where drug use and crime are recurring problems despite the violent Justicar crackdowns on the Indentured residents. --- # **Society** Crassian society is highly structured around wealthy families: the Oligarchs, or *Stellarii*. While only a hundred may sit on the Senate, chosen by censors who are now controlled by DIS, there are about a thousand oligarchical dynasties whose wealth is built on agriculture, natural gas, droid manufacture, hypermatter extraction or show-business, which rake in the most revenue. These families control vast businesses, whose workers exist in a caste system of sorts depending on the nature of their employment contract. Freemen, the closest to the oligarchs, have custom-made contracts, and often head up small businesses of their own, or work independently, as doctors or lawyers for instance. Some Freemen, due to their high level of education and cultural proximity to the oligarchy, work as corporate executives. One rung lower are the Advowed, who form the bulk of the middle-class. Their families usually all work for the same business in white-collar or supervisory positions, which gives their bosses an extraordinary level of control over them, and the oligarchs often provide healthcare and education to the families of the Advowed, furthering their grasp on them. They are caught in long-term employment contracts that are especially hard to get out of, and they are expected to show absolute loyalty to their employers in all aspects of political and personal life. The lowest of the low are the Indentured, often immigrants or unskilled labourers, whose right to stay on Crassus is conditioned on a restrictive employment contract that can be bought and sold. They are a constant source of social unrest, which is why the oligarchy relies on the Advowed to constantly surveil them, sometimes elevating the most loyal or intelligent to join the cast above. Aristocratic culture permeates Crassus and is aped by all castes below it. Owning a home in the traditional Crassian style is seen as a sign of social status, as is enjoyment of cultural events such as concerts or festivals. Crassian society enforces severe dress codes, such as the wearing of shoulder and full capes to differentiate Advowed and Freemen respectively. Most Indentured wear an ocre shawl, the colour of the Crassian dirt, which serves as a constant reminder of their humiliation, while aristocrats wear brightly coloured robes made from shimmersilk, that can change in hue under the influence of subtle electrical impulses. ![trinity_continuum_aeon_10_by_asfodelo_de3mjnz-fullview.jpg<](file-guid:d8743927-bed4-4b9b-9249-fc91e9e4dda0 "trinity_continuum_aeon_10_by_asfodelo_de3mjnz-fullview.jpg" =220x340)The obsession with efficiency and elevation has given rise to a culture of stimm abuse in all classes of society. While caf and a variety of excitants are tolerated, hard stimms are openly banned, but nonetheless in use. The Karakallan stalks produce a goo that can be distilled into the Tess, short for “Tessellation”, a stimm that boosts cognitive function. Highly illegal and destructive for the internal organs, it can be survived with various surgical modifications to the organs, especially the liver and lungs, and its use has given rise to an extensive medical sector specialized in regenerative medicine. Tess addicts who undergo such modifications are known as the “Sutured”, due to the jagged pattern of scars on their torso after repeated operations. *Left: Marine Lotus, a private spa and treatment clinic for stimm addiction. The wealthy can undergo reparative surgery and kolto treatments there.* The mix of air pollution, latent radioactivity from Fortuna’s influence, and the cost of advancing a child’s career explain the overall low birth rate of 1.4 children per woman, well below replacement rate. The recent civil war caused the exodus or death of nearly 2 million Crassians, and the moon has struggled to maintain its population through immigration, especially given the hardships of the Indentured class. As such, societal change is slowly happening, with old class boundaries falling away, and the senator class itself has lost too many of its members, means and prestige to maintain its iron grasp on society. Still, the Senate strives to maintain its relevance, and where its political power has waned, it has spread its cultural influence. Of the old clans, the republican Corelli and the industrial Sarini have been all but wiped out, leaving the imperialist Carrant, the technological Corini and the media-savvy Mortes to vie for power. The Carrant have been politically favoured, but their patriarch Cato was recently killed in the service of the Dominion, and rival families have been stoking a silent war for influence. Part of that fight is sublimated in the televised culture of sparring, a practice imported from the Tapani sector, but fought with a variety of weapons, including the Crassian lightning-sword, and the maul-gauntlet. While the aristocracy partakes and even fights in underground honor duels, most of the fighters are contract champions, lavished with expensive gifts and pricey stimms in exchange for their combat prowess. The true prize of this political game was once the rank of Consul. Two senators would be elected for a four-year term, with the First Consul controlling the functions of State, and the Second Consul controlling Trade. However, the Dominion ended this practice, and now the aristocracy acts either out of boredom, or to prepare themselves for the next political shift, with some influential families looking to carve a place for themselves in the Dominion, as favoured servants to Darth Venor. Even today, Crassian society is impenetrable and complex. The one thing that earns respect in it is called “Honor” but is in fact a minute distillation of personal means, family and clan connections, personal deeds in service to the State, and ruthlessness in the face of external challenge. While this does not mean that Crassus is a meritocracy, it has been noted by several external observers, especially the Warmind, that this societal philosophy was based on ruthless corporate thought, a concept most closely associated with the Empire, and the Sith. As such, while their pride may have held them back from accepting it, the Crassians may have always been destined to become another world to be held in the sway of darkness. --- # **Dominion governance** After years of military governance, Darth Venor personally decreed that Crassus should start converting to long-term civilian administration. A transition government, with the Senate as an advisory body, was established, and after the destruction of the Viroledan fleet, command was given to vice-director of the Ministry of Security, Moran Stern, a former major in the Cthon Legion and experienced Justicar overseer. A swift and pitiless executor of justice, Stern is expected to keep a tight leash on the Senate and has been signaling new laws to slowly undo their grasp on the Indentured class, in favor of a more direct Dominion supervision.