Song of Audacity

 “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.

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.