Private Militias

 

The Knights Vanquishers

This loosely organized but widely spread order of self-styled knights and adventurers dedicate themselves in particular to confronting and destroying monsters - the larger and more spectacular the creature in question, the better. Very often, when a small village or town finds itself harassed by some sort of monster, their closest city will need to weigh the cost-benefit of attempting to deal with the creature. Committing soldiers to go monster hunting can be a big investment, so the cities will sometimes commission the Knights Vanquishers to undertake the quest. Sometimes - if the village is not deemed to be worth the investment - the city will simply disavow the village. In this case, the villagers will typically attempt to raise a bounty to attract the Knights.

Often, successful Knights Vanquishers end up retiring to a village they have ‘saved', and becoming elected Mayor or Burgomaster. Many small towns, and indeed a fair number of cities that emerged from them, still host the lineages of the heroic Knights that answered the call decades or centuries previously. In some cases, these families even sit on powerful city councils.

It is worth noting that there are several cases of Knight Vanquishers sowing false rumors, stealing and killing livestock, and otherwise perpetuating monster hoaxes in order to trick a village into drumming up a bounty which they can then claim by defeating the imaginary threat.

Order of Alcinette

Another mercenary company that found a profitable niche in the beginning of the Enlightenment was perhaps the least ‘enlightened’ of all the companies in history. The Order of Alcinette began as a group of slavers and pirates during the Imperial Era who largely sought to broker prisoner exchanges between Empires. When the Empires collapsed and the Order was left holding the bag - with hundreds of prisoners in their custody, but no one to pay their ransom, they decide to put them to work. Captured soldiers would labour or fight as indentured servants in order to buy their own freedom over time - making a profit for the Order in the process. With Empires fading and collapsing, however, this was a dark and bloody business with no future. Until the leaders of the Order realized that the emerging City States had little to no capacity to deal with criminals. Instead of imposing a death penalty on criminals - which was wasteful and demoralizing on the population, or exiling them - which was inefficient and difficult to enforce, Cities could pay the Order of Alcinette to make their criminals ‘go away’. The Order of Alcinette would sail into port, pick up a boat load of criminals, and then sail them to some far away location and sell their labour to some other company. Getting paid on both sides of the deal made the Order of Alcinette very profitable, very quickly, and their reach and influence, and their horrific practice, spread around the world.

Order of the Flaming Sword

As their areas of oversight increased, however, many cities found themselves stretched too thin to protect the new mining towns that were popping up, or the new villages or farmlands that would end up providing for them. In 1281, the Order of the Flaming Sword, which had grown wealthy by providing military support to various Empires in the waning of the Imperial Era, offered its services to most of the City States that had signed mineral rights agreements with the Western Metal and Gem Company. It had been a generation since the Order of the Flaming Sword had been a major mercenary force whose involvement could determine the outcome of an epic battle, but in an era where enforcing tolls, protecting travelers from bandits, and securing villages against scattered bands of raiding goblins was the job, the Order of the Flaming Sword could get the job done for a fair price.

The Soot Soldiers

The Soot Soldiers are a paramilitary force that formed in 1200 in Midgate, in the central Iron Ridge Mountains in order to keep the peace during the instability caused by the collpase of the Golanicjan Kingdom. The Soot Soldiers were primarily formed from reserve forces and combat veterans from the Kingdom's many wars who were doing civil protection or protected roads and mining camps in the Iron Ridge Mountains.

The motto of the Soot Soldiers is "You can't eat steel". With the collapse of the Kingdom, unrest began to threaten towns, villages, mining camps and roads, and the Soot Soldiers formed themselves out of the belief that, if trade security in Golanicja collapsed, they and their families - who mostly resided in remote mountain villages, would be the first to starve. Thus, the ability to trade iron and coal for food was an existential need for them. They were certainly right. If not for the efforts of these soldiers, may of whom went years without pay, trade in the Iron Ridge Mountains would have collapsed, they all would have starved, and Golanicja would have degenerated into prolonged civil war.

Since the establishment of Golanicjan city states, the Soot Soldiers have served as a private militia throughout the Iron Ridge Mountains, mostly providing private security to mining operations and policing the roads, particularly those that connect to the major crossings at Jagged Pass, Midgate and Stonewall.

The Steel Key Company

In the later years of the Imperial Era, as the Knights of Sixthos shifted away from ground-based security and transport to focus on the sea, many of their members chose to keep their feet on solid ground. Thus was the Steel Key Company founded to continue providing secure overland transport and protection for hire. Unlike the Sixth Order, the Steel Key Company never evolved into a banking operation, and instead transformed from a few scattered echelon-scale mercenary units operating out of major cities, into dozens or perhaps hundreds of section-scale groups operating autonomously out of smaller cities and towns.

These Steel Key Company ‘franchises’ focused their work much more narrowly than did the Sixth Order, offering expensive but effective personal protection and transport services from town-to-town, from one end of their network to the other. For the first couple of decades, their business was tenuous, but under the leadership of Commissioner Bogdan Janos, a Rodian, they managed to renew ties with the Sixth Order, and ingratiate themselves with many Great Families. This allowed them to recruit and expand their ‘franchise model’ to other continents - first opening offices in Principal Cities where there were plenty of opportunities, and then organically growing a network of connections from there.

Over time, the Steel Key Company evolved to provide not only personal protection and secure transport services, but also investigatory services - particularly related to hijacking, highway robbery, bank robbery, and smuggling. They furthermore evolved to incorporate a division of engineers that design and manufacture safes and strongboxes that are world renown for their security.

By the middle of the Enlightenment, the Steel Key Company had offices in every Principal City on every Continent, and in most major cities as well. While their numbers remain comparatively small overall, they have a notably high sense of pride and loyalty to the company, and maintain good security through strong communications protocols and codes that are updated regularly. Steel Key Company employees are typically able to validate their identity and loyalty at a local franchise office anywhere in the world in only a couple of days - allowing them access to resources they may need to work efficiently. Higher level agents and officers of the company, following proper validation, can effectively commandeer most of the resources of an entire franchise office once properly validated - a unique capability that allows the Company to focus its energies and efforts in times of crisis.

The Tin Hats

The Tin Hats were initially formed as a reserve security force in the Malfincia - Gamania - Sandante Triangle on the main island of Senecia during the Imperial Era as a safeguard against potential invasion. The organization gets its name from the fact that most of their original members were miners. Over time, the Tin Hats became a fully formed private militia in their own right, principally offering security and protection services to mining companies. Over the course of several decades, however, increasing competition for work securing mines in the MGS Triangle led to the Tin Hats losing a lot of their contracts - particularly to the Order of the Flaming Sword.