A noob's guide to the Outcasts

[Petitioner]

So, you've opened up this thread, probably wondering "what is there to know about the Outcasts?" The goal of this post is to try and explain the basics of Hispanian roleplay, and the concepts that have traditionally driven the Outcasts. We'll briefly touch on the history and RP of the Corsairs as well, since it's important to understand them due to their very unique connection to the Outcasts.

We'll begin with a recap of ancient history. During the Alliance's exodus from Sol, there were five sleeper ships constructed; the Hispania was one of them, containing the various peoples of the Mediterranean and Latin America, as well as a small number of Coalition saboteurs. (For more on the Alliance-Coalition conflict, play Starlancer or watch the intro cutscene to Freelancer, if by some miracle you haven't already seen it.) The stowaways sabotaged the engines of the Hispania, and it exited hyperspeed in Omicron Gamma.

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Crete, the only habitable planet in Omicron Gamma, is very barely so, but without any guarantees of finding another habitable planet, around half the population of the Hispania made planetfall, and became the Corsairs. The rest of the colonists kept the Hispania barely running until coming into Omicron Alpha and settling on Malta. These would go on to become the Outcasts. To this day, both the Outcasts and the Corsairs outwardly blame the other faction for sabotaging the Hispania, and use it as a moral justification for their continuing war; internally, however, it's known that this is just propaganda, and among the Corsairs, knowledge that it was actually the Coalition who sabotaged the Hispania is something of an open secret. Most unlawful groups in Sirius have picked one side or the other based on geopolitical concerns, and they can be roughly organized into blocs based on these sides.

Malta is more hospitable than Crete, but not by much; notably, unlike Crete, the soil is more fertile, and mass-scale agriculture is actually feasible. An orange grass called cardamine grows on Malta, and trace amounts of the stuff are in pretty much everything on Malta; there's cardamine in the air, the water, the soil, the flesh of the fruit and of the animals. When humans are exposed to cardamine, it acts as a powerful stimulant, inducing euphoria and quickening reflexes. It also prolongs your lifespan (Outcasts commonly live to be over 120 years old) and increases general intelligence, but drastically lowers fertility. It is extremely addictive and withdrawal always results in a painful death. As a result, the Outcasts strongly cherish every single Maltese life. This is an extremely important part of Maltese culture, and you cannot understand the mindset of the Outcasts without understanding this first. Due to their heightened reflexes and intelligence thanks to cardamine enhancement, the Outcasts are, in-roleplay, some of the best pilots in Sirius, hence their success despite their limited numbers.

It is important to note that to the Outcasts, cardamine is not a drug. It is rather an essential component of life, like air and water. To talk of Outcasts "getting high" off of cardamine (unless it's extremely concentrated, anyway) is as silly as talking about a normal human getting high off of pure H2O. When an Outcast leaves Malta, they wear breathers or utilize other devices to maintain a constant supply of cardamine; the distance a Maltese can travel from home is strictly limited by how much cardamine they can bring. This is another reason they maintain such an extensive network of allies; doing their own dirty work is extremely costly, and there's always a time limit, so getting regular pirates to cooperate is in their interests.

The Outcasts are also very paranoid, and see anyone within "their space" as an urgent threat. This is why they've been hostile to the IMG and GMG since their first encounters. They see the rest of humanity as having abandoned them (hence the name, which they chose themselves), and seek to profit off of extracting revenge by selling cardamine to the other Houses, making millions of people dependent on them.

Maltese society is basically structured around aristocratic and plutocratic families who either won recognition as "nobility" somehow, own cardamine plantations, or both, and, while it isn't written in the game, player-created lore has generally held that there's rarely (if ever) been a unified central government on Malta; instead, power is constantly shifting from one family or cartel to another. The cardamine plantations are generally operated entirely by slaves, or "mandatory workers". How the Outcasts morally justify slavery isn't really specified in the game, so players and factions have taken a lot of interesting stances with this. In the National Council, it's mostly just shrugged off and accepted as a fact of life, but there's a lot of room for individual interpretation here.

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This post is a work-in-progress. More sections will be added as I'm able to. Currently on the to-do list: talk about ingame potential (piracy, civilian interactions with Bretonia), relations with Liberty, Bretonia, Kusari, Rheinland unlawfuls (in that order), brief rundown of the history of Outcast factions.