Introducing the Ouroboros: hyper-religious and martially-oriented worm colony-minds.

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[b]Faction Name:[/b] Ouroboros, The Congregation of Lords and the Church of Ouroboros

[b]Faction Type:[/b] Pseudo-feudalistic confederation

[b]Species:[/b] Ophisia, gestalt colony-minds comprised of worm-like/eel-like organisms. These organisms group together in large writhing colonies, with each part of the whole acting both as muscle and brain for the greater whole. They are unintelligent individually, but form unique sapient personalities as a group. Worms live, breed, and die without greatly affecting the health of the colony-mind. As such, newly born worms in time replace their elders and are slowly incorporated into the colony. Given time, a colony can recover from the brink of death, though their mental state deteriorates each time the colony suffers one of these "little deaths."

[b]Scale & Territory:[/b] The Ouroboros holds control over a handful of star systems, though these are not totally unified and there are often civil wars and petty landgrabs between the Lords. Each system is in varying degrees of development, but almost all carry some scars of nuclear war on their worlds. 

HEX CLAIM: 0711, 0712, 0811, 0812, 0911

[b]Culture:[/b] The people of the Ouroboros are religiously driven, guided by the will of a dead god whose voice lives in the priests of the Church. For most, following God's will simply means living an honest life, honing a skill to perfection. The commoners aspire to embody some of God's spirit in this way. For the Lords of the Congregation, the means of worship change. Each Lord has at least one priest assigned to serve as their religious advisor, and often the Lords interpret their advisor's interpretation of God's will quite liberally. These interpretations are used to wage wars, guide battles, and make demands. The Lords glorify war and martial prowess, and many commoners are keen to join their levies and die in the name of God. The Church itself is secretive, and few know what they truly think of the cycles of destruction the Lords put their realms through.

[b]History:[/b] Ouroboros history is filled with war. Those few records that survive each cycle of destruction show that this has been the case for at least ten thousand years. Despite the age of the Congregation and the Church, neither makes much technological progress between cycles, as every new engineered material calls for more powerful weapons, and these weapons drive the civilization as a whole back to the middle ages. Little is known by the Congregation as to what has happened in the last ten thousand years, and the Church knows only a little more than the Lords themselves. 

In more recent history, the Heretic-Lord Ua-Menlir led a crusade against his brother-lords, and was nearly successful in conquering them totally. His crusade was brought to an end successfully, and while some worlds are still warm from the nuclear fires unleashed upon them, the Congregation has managed to avoid bringing about the end of their present cycle. Tensions are high, and all eyes begin to look outside Ouroboros space.

[b]Technology:[/b] Ouroboros technology could best be described as being in the nuclear space age. Their ships are driven on immense fission torches, their shipboard armaments are powered by barely contained nuclear fires, and their warheads almost always contain nuclear material, even if they aren't intended as nuclear weapons. The Ouroboros have not unlocked the power of nuclear fusion. Their materials science is somewhat more advanced than the rest of their technology, but their advances stopped short of anything more useful than tungsten alloy armor-plating for ships and personnel. All in all, Ouroboros technology is designed with resilience and endurance in mind, not efficiency or precision.

FTL METHOD: Faerie Rings - The Church of the Ouroboros has constructed a series of interlinked wormholes within Ouroboros space, known as faerie rings. Travel between rings is instantaneous, however, each ring only has a single counterpart to which it connects. Faerie rings require a group of trained members of the Church caste to activate initially, and the resulting wormhole is only active long enough for a transport vessel to ferry the other faerie ring across the threshold, whereupon it can be activated and linked with the first of the faerie rings. This method of construction can take decades to finish, and occasionally the temporary wormhole collapses prematurely. Prior to the discovery of manufacturing these temporary wormholes, paired faerie rings had to be ferried across the void between stars at sub-light speeds. This practice is still employed when time permits.

[b]Military Forces:[/b] [FIGURES PENDING] The Lords of the Ouroboros each maintain a personal retinue of spacecraft and personnel, varying in size and strength. They can also call upon levies in times of war, with those Lords that have more developed worlds tending to have stronger and more numerous levies.
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