Blicero wrote:Frank, would you mind posting a bit more of the writeups you presumably have for the Bumin Horde? I know you were planning to save those for AS expansion material, but those books seem to be on indefinite hold.
Good idea.
The Bumin Horde of Ergenekon
"All power is the power of the fist."
The Bumin Horde of Ergenekon was a Syndicate that existed from 728 CE until 1844 CE. It was structured based on extreme ideals of tribal feudalism and had few meaningful titles or laws. Each member was allowed to have up to five supernatural vassals (called a "pack"), and was in turn part of a pack that was required to report to their liege. And so on with each member being both vassal and liege all the way up to the Khan, who was vassal to none. The liege could do pretty much anything they wanted to their vassals and could give any orders they felt like giving, but anyone doing anything to the vassals of another member would presumably have to answer to that member (and any of their vassals they brought in to the conflict). The Horde could sometimes be called upon by having members call upon their vassals to call upon their vassals in turn, but these games of telephone were often quite shaky. Nominally, a member could give orders to their vassals that they give orders to their vassals in return, however this rarely actually worked out. Practically speaking, most members of the Horde only took orders given by their direct liege or by the Khan of the entire Syndicate.
The first member of the Syndicate was also its Khan. She was an Avar camp follower who got infected with Lycanthropy early in the 8th century. Following this, she left the army she had been following and traveled overland to Central Asia towards the mythical homeland of her people. Why she did that, or what her name was before making this pilgrimage is unknown, but for whatever reason she made her way to a shadow gate in what is now Turkmenistan which opened up to an abandoned city in the Gloom. She named the city "Ergenekon" and herself Asena: the Wolf Mother. This tied her to the creation myths of Mongolian and Turkic peoples, and inherently implied large territorial claims in Central Asia. From the secrets she had found in that fallen city, Asena had achieved immortality and grown to tremendous proportions. Many creatures believed she was the legendary mother of wolves who had created the steppe nomads - certainly she had the power to make such a claim plausible.
Word of Asena's "return" spread quickly into Russia, Turkey, and Eastern Europe. Her tactics were simple, brutal, and very effective for the time. A member would gather a handful of vassals and then take on enemies one at a time. To an era where supernatural creatures were expected to duel one another, it was nigh unbeatable. Joining up was not without its benefits, those who came into the pyramid scheme early could be expected to get vassals of their own. But while the Horde took over the supernatural side of things for thousands of kilometers, they were never able to make that big of an impact on human society. The Horde did not puppet empires or even kingdoms very well, for precisely the autonomy of its members that gave it such flexibility and strength for taking over the domains of powerful loan elders made it incapable of creating a favored tax policy or grain shipment administration. Once a pack had declared itself king of the hill and its members subjugated the locals and became lieges over packs of their own - they tended to disintegrate into bickering and revolution.
The Horde had few rules. If you wronged a supernatural creature, they were expected to deal with it themselves, or to convince their own liege or vassals to help them get vengeance. This was called the "Duty of Vengeance", and pretty much excused any action taken against someone who had acted against a member in any way. For this reason, packs tended to avoid each other, with newly formed packs moving into unoccupied territories (or areas where the local supernatural creatures were not already part of the Horde). The Horde also had the "Duty of Fealty" (you're supposed to do what your Liege tells you to do), and the "Duty of Five" (if you end up with more than five vassals, you have to give one or more of your vassals to one of your remaining vassals so you have no more than five). Asena always assured people that there were five total Duties, but if she ever told anyone what the other two were, it's lost to history.
In the early 19th century, the Horde found itself on the receiving end of a more organized foe: the Cauchemar Communes. The Cauchemar had every bit as much zeal and effectiveness in ganging up to take down powerful loners, but they also coordinated with each other to respond to threats as a group. The revolutionary committee of the Cauchemar was continuously several steps ahead of the Horde. A feint into Algiers with enough forces to crush the packs there, and a few years later a daring series of commando raids on key members of the Syndicate and the Communes had everything they needed to go after the Wolf Mother herself. The Horde might have been able to call on aid from other Syndicates, but they'd basically been on a war footing with the Covenant and the Makhzen since their inception. By 1844, Asena and her own pack of vassals found themselves under siege in Ergenekon itself. With its head cut off, the organization fell apart. Asena had never created any rules of succession or political structure to carry on without her, and the Syndicate limped to its death in a few years. Those packs that did not bend knee to the Cauchemar were hunted like dogs, and Central Asia has been in the hands of the Communes ever since.
Ergenekon
"The veins of a city are its streets, its people are its life."
Ergenekon itself is a mountain fortress in the Gloom. Its architecture is in the style of the Mauryan Empire save that most everything is black. The stones are black and fitted together with iron that is also black. There are great Buddhas carved of basalt and onyx, but their expressions are depraved and their jaws full of sharp teeth. At the gates of the city and also in front of the central palace/temple there are great iron pillars on which inscriptions have been laboriously carved. Some Asura claim to be able to read the glyphs, and most say that they are boastings of the (unnamed) creating civilization's power as well as admonishments to very definitely not open "The Vault". The vault itself apparently refers to a set of great marble blocks that only might count as "doors" because there are iron rings set into them. The stones resist attempts to penetrate them with empty body or clairvoyance of any kind, and so far the Cauchemar Communes have been content to leave them alone.
The city has housing space for about a thousand people, which makes it a small town by modern standards. And it certainly has never held that many people since long before it was rediscovered by Asena. The Cauchemar discovered numerous magical objects of surpassing age, and it is very likely that one or more of them were responsible for the Wolf Mother's rise to power all those centuries ago.
The Horde in the Present Day
"Why would I give up rulership just because I gave up being ruled?"
The Cauchemar Communes dealt a decisive blow to the Bumin Horde in 1844. They stormed Ergenekon, they slew the Wolf Mother, and they claimed the empires of the Ottomans and Romanovs as their domains. But while the Syndicate was broken, the very cell structure of it all meant that some packs managed to escape notice and continue their work as "independents". There were no records in Ergenekon, and no member of the organization knew who exactly was in the organization when it fell apart. Many packs chose to flee rather than to join the Cauchemar, and since some of them were immortal creatures there are still some alive tonight who consider themselves to be members of the Bumin Horde of Ergenekon.
Packs tonight tend to be driven by some combination of a lust for power and a lust for revenge. There are as many schemes launched to try to bring back Asena as there are schemes to revive Hitler. But some packs merely try to replicate Asena's rise to power - by getting into groups of five (or six with a liege), and trying to subjugate other supernatural creatures. These activities are generally misinterpreted as the work of small independent criminal gangs of supernatural creatures by modern Syndicates. And to tell the truth, that really isn't far off the mark.
The backstory to the backstory is that the Central Asian Tribes (Huns, Mongols, Turks) have a legend that they are descended from a giant wolf (not unlike the wolf that supposedly raised Romulus and Remus) who raised them in a secret valley of iron called Ergenekon. To this day, there are secret Turkish terrorist organizations who use that nomenclature to justify plots to take over Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
Asena the Wolf Mother is not actually that mythical giant wolf, as she contracted lycanthropy long after the Huns had invaded Europe and subsequently had their empire fall apart. But she is badass enough that a lot of people give her the benefit of the doubt on that issue.
-Username17
