Three Shades of Black (TSoB)

Three Shades of Black

Patch worn by members of all three gangs.

History

The man known as the Bull was the leader of a group of mercenaries that served the criminal overlord that ran the space station known as Refuge.When the Crime Lord of the Refuge space station died, suddenly and under mysterious circumstances a fight broke out among several different factions on the Refuge.

The Bulls Taurus Mercenaries were the most powerful faction vying for control of Refuge. The Forsaken Tribe and the Thrice Damned Swoop Club were also powerful factions on the space station. So when the three most powerful factions joined together to form the Three Shades of Black, the fight for dominance of Refuge was over.

Recently the Three Shades of Black is thought to have made overtures to the Collective. The Taurus Mercs and the Thrice Damned have both been seen on the Meridian Prime space station before but not after the Dark Jedi Brotherhood takeover of the station, essentially confirming those rumors. What joining the Collective could mean for the long term organization of the Three Shades of Black is currently unknown.

Organization

Three Shades of Black is made up of three separate factions. The leaders of all of the factions make a joint deliberative leadership body referenced to as the Convocation of outlaws. Each of the three member groups of the Three Shades of Black are allotted two seats in the Convocation in addition to the Bull who holds his own permanent seat in the Convocation, is empowered by two votes and breaks ties. All members of the Convocation can be present by hologram or be represented by a designated proxy, including proxying their votes with another member of the Convocation.

Taurus Mercenaries

Tattoo Taurus mercenaries receive upon initiation

History

The group now known as the Taurus Mercenaries comes from many different species and backgrounds. What brought them together was service to the Crime Lord of the Refuge. What held them together was the strength of Baltrog. He took the group of outlaws, outcasts and cut throats and through his powerful personality instilled social order and a sense of belonging among them. When the Crime Lord passed away, there was no question as to whether or not they would stay loyal to the Bull. Every man knew they would. They are his personal army and royal guard.

Culture

The Taurus Mercenaries operate based upon a dominance hierarchy. The strongest leads and if a leader were ever to display weakness they could expect to be challenged by one or more ambitious members. A leader who feels a member may challenge them, might challenge that member first to forestall any assumption of weakness and to enforce obedience. They never challenge one another in the face of the enemy, only afterward when the entire group is safe. The method of joining is by being jumped in by the rest of the pack. If one were to want to leave the pack they would have to be jumped out but that has been known to leave prospective drop outs dead or seriously injured.

Rackets

The Taurus Mercenaries often do mercenary work but they don’t excel in traditional infantry roles. They take close protection security work and escort duty for illicit goods but they find this kind of duty to be boring. Most of the Mercenaries income comes from an extensive protection racket where nearly all of the vendors on the Refuge pay them protection money, to get the Mercs to protect them from others and to keep the mercenaries from busting them up and forcing them out of business.

Organization

The Taurus Mercenaries is a name that wasn’t there at first but what later adopted as a tribute to Baltrog. The structure however references how wolf packs are thought to function. How bulls ended up living like wolves is a mystery to most but no one ever accused the mercs of book smarts.

The entire Mercenary group is considered to be a Den. The Den is made of three Packs. Each Pack is led by an Alpha. One of the three Alphas is a Den Alpha and the other two Alphas are Pack Alphas. Currently, this is Baltrog and his two lieutenants, Saber and Rooster.

Any member of a pack is able to challenge their pack alpha for leadership. This can be to first blood if the champion is willing to show mercy and the loser is smart enough to give in, or they can go all the way to dismemberment, unconsciousness or death. Only a Pack Alpha can challenge the Den Alpha. So it behoves the Den Alpha to cultivate powerful and loyal lieutenants.

Within the Taurus Mercenaries failed challenges at all levels are met with pain, severe injuries and sometimes death by sitting alphas onto their would be usurpers. This is to discourage subsequent challenges. Instilling the fear of bodily injury is how the Alpha maintains control of their Pack.

Within each pack the Pack, the Pack Alpha holds totalitarian power, and within the Den the Den Alpha holds totalitarian power. The Alphas instructions are up to the Alpha to uphold. If a packmate does not follow their commands, that is an effective challenge and the Alphas respond as if their authority has been challenged. Failure to do so could bring a physical challenge.

Leaders

The Bull

Baltrog Quillan better known as the Bull is a well built muscular Iktotchi native to the moon Iktotch. He has a distinctive red hue to his skin color with facial and body markings markings. He bares a nasty burn scar that looks to be from a saber strike on the left side of his face. Standing at six feet tall and weighing 235 pounds, he is very adept at multiple forms of hand to hand and melee combat. He likes to confiscate the weapons of his fallen adversary’s and add them to a personal collection. He is very cunning and manipulative. His narcissism bleeds through his entire personality. Manipulating and destroying others is sheer pleasure for this madman, and he will not stop until he rules the underworld.

Baltrog was born a captive, his mother was a slave and he isn’t aware of who his father is. He was taken from his mother as a boy to work as a cleaner. As the young Baltrog matured, his masters found another use for the Iktotchi: gladiatorial combat. The life of a gladiator on the wasted and broken moon of Iktotch afforded Baltrog the perfect environment to grow into the monster he’d later become. He was forced, as he grew, to learn how to fight for everything he had, earning his place among the slaves.

Baltrog would find himself repeatedly bought and sold until he ended up on the massive space station known informally as “the Refuge.” There the young Iktotchi found himself in the service of a powerful crime lord. On Refuge, when he wasn’t crushing other slaves for the enjoyment of his masters, Baltrog found himself contracted out as a mercenary. As time went on Baltrog or the Bull as he was becoming known, became his masters most useful servant.

The mercenaries that served him became personally loyal to the Bull. The growing personal army and his ongoing usefulness to his Crime lord Master effectively freed the young Gladiator. When his master, the Criminal Overlord of the Refuge suddenly died, fighting between several factions broke out across the station. The power vacuum left by the death of the Crime Lord threatened to destroy the station.

The Taurus Mercenaries were the most feared faction on the Refuge because of their demonstrated brutality. But defeating all of the other factions in open combat would have bled the mercenary group dry. So the Bull showed real leadership by reaching out to the Forsaken Tribe and the Thrice Damned Swoop Club and convincing them to join the Taurus Mercenaries in forming one organization. Once the three groups became aligned, everyone either yielded to their authority or found out very violently why they should.

Saber

The 37 year old Rattataki female was named Kee'ri Otheyga at birth but is known to the Den as Saber. She is a cool, calculating assassin of the highest order, and a lieutenant to the Bull, commanding her own pack of Taurus Mercenaries. Despite her pale skin and obvious tattoos, she is able to drift in and out of a crowd with little effort. Stealth and close quarters killings are her preferred methods. She does, however, have considerable skill with a DC-15 and has been known to make shots that trained soldiers weren’t able to make. She is a ruthless, sadistic killer who lacks the empathy required to feel much more than contempt for those who fall under her blade.

The twins were born to a wealthy family with a claim to a local hereditary title. At a young age, both were accepted into the peerage as a baron and baroness respectively only to have the titles stripped due to some misdealings their father was involved in. In a matter of months, they watched their father fall from one of the highest positions of power on the planet to being assassinated in the street behind an old dive bar. The twin’s mother quickly sent them off-world to boarding school using the last of their family’s reputation and finances to fund the twins’ educations.

After her brothers expulsion from his surgical fellowship, the two sought travel on various vessels and eventually wound up on the Refuge and the twins combined skills were sought out by the Bull. It did not take long for the pair to challenge their way to the apex of the Taurus Mercenaries where they now both lead separate packs and stand to both the left and right of the Bull.

Rooster

The 37 year old Rattataki male was named Gabrael Otheyga at birth but is known to the den as Rooster. He is much his sister’s opposite. Rooster is a savage. He takes pride in killing and considers himself to be “an expert in torment.” Rooster walks with a careless gait that has been described as “unrefined and chaotic” with his motions being “unnatural and exaggerated.”

Profilers suspect he suffers from an extreme case of narcissistic personality disorder mixed with “the kind of psychopathy only found in books.” One of Rooster’s trademarks is his vibroblades. Each has been modified and stained to look like bloodied saw blades. He is known for showing his victims the blades in detail before beginning to cut on them. He enjoys the fear and the emotion it brings to his prey

One would never guess from his brutal demeanor that he’s a trained physician and graduated top of his class in med school before being accepted into an elite surgical fellowship. From there his story turns dark as he was expelled and his licence to practice medicine was suspended because of malpractice concerns. Rooster and his sister traded his skills as a physician for passage on a series of space vessels, eventually winding up on the Refuge.

As Rooster and Saber moved from vessel to vessel acting as an onboard physician, Roosters poor bedside manner and lack of patience and regard for others would inevitably bring him in conflict with the crew and him and his sister would find themselves stranded at the next Starport. Eventually this trail led the twins to the Refuge where the Bull sought his skill set as a physician. It wasn’t long before Rooster challenged the strength of his packs lieutenant and won his place a the Bulls side.

Forsaken Tribe

Small metal badge that Forsaken Hunters wear

History

When Essk left the homeworld after being branded a heretic, many Trandoshan relatives and allies followed Essk, along with other hunters such as the Gand FIndsman Sin that operates as his lieutenant. All found themselves drawn to Essk’s raw charisma and the purposefulness they found in the Scorekeepers harsh light. The new organization was called the Forsaken Tribe, which is a name taken to signify forswearing of what they consider to be false beliefs perpetuated by the Trandoshan establishment.

Eventually the Tribe found their way to Refuge Station where the Bull made use of their services many times. When the Crime Lord of Refuge Station passed away it was only natural for the Forsaken Tribe to side with his chief lieutenant, who was leader of the largest and most powerful faction in the form of the Taurus Mercenaries. Once Three Shades of Black dominated the station, the Tribe stayed busy collecting points and taking special jobs from the Bull.

Culture

The culture of the Trandoshan’s of the Forsaken Tribe has been adopted by many converts, drawn primarily from other species drawn to bounty hunting and fields. They are very similar to aboriginal people, the difference being that the Clans within the Forsaken Tribe are called War Parties and are formed based upon loyalty and conversion rather than ancestry. Leadership among the Forsaken Tribe is formed based on support from a plurality of that Tribes elders. Elders are those whose individual Jagannath score is above a certain threshold.

Rackets

While the Taurus Mercs and the Riders of the Damned are more vulgar and brutal, the Forsaken Tribe is quiet and efficient. They admire lethality but also guile. It’s no surprise that the primary enterprise of the Forsaken Tribe is bounty hunting. But there is a thin line between bounty hunting and other black market services such as kidnapping and assassination. All of which are activities that earn Jagannath points among the Forsaken Tribe.

Organization

The Forsaken Tribe is led by a single person with the most support of the Tribes elders. But the tribe as a whole is made up of an unknown number of Warbands, each which has at least three elders. The total number in each warband is unknown but thought to be small and the total number of warbands is thought to be anything from a few dozen to hundreds. Because the whole tribe is rarely gathered in one spot, the true size of the Forsaken Tribe is unknown and this is likely by design.

Leaders

Essk Tsubra

Trandoshan society is designed around collecting Jagannath points, which would be tallied by the Trandoshan deity Scorekeeper upon a Trandoshan warriors deaths. It’s only known for sure that kills are counted but exo-anthropologists theorize that Trandoshan culture has evolved to count or possibly even favor the capture of enemies. If capturing enemies did not count for their divine scoring the experts believe there would be less Trandoshan bounty hunters. But a Trandoshan named Essk counted these numbers differently.

Essk Tsubra was a respected tribal leader with a large collection of Jagannath points, Perhaps the most of anyone ever. But he believed that one could score points as a leader of warriors and that the tribe earned points collectively for the group. Other Trandoshans refused to accept this new way of thinking and branded Essk Tsubra and those who followed him, heretics to the Scorekeeper and officially re-started his lifetime score.

Essk refused to accept the moral and religious authority of those who would never accumulate a Jagannath score half as high as his and instead declared himself a Prophet of the Scorekeeper. Not only did he find his method of determining Jagannath points to be righteous he declared that he would bring the impartial judgement of the Scorekeeper to non-Trandoshans. This upset the Trandoshan establishment but to date no assassination attempt on Essk has been successful.

The first elder of the Forsaken has cybernetic legs from the waist down, evocative of Darth Maul. Essk uses a kind of blaster minigun as his main weapon. He is also an expert sapper, making him an industrious manufacturer of makeshift weapons and explosives. He possesses heavy skills in blasters, survival and mechanics. He is known to be as greedy and ambitious as he is grandiose.

Sin

The Gand known as Sin was born with the name Xynn. He is an orphan that was raised in a boys home on a space station somewhere near Hutt Space. Young Xynn never knew any other Gand and never received any training, thus he is not a findsman. Running away from the group home stowed away on ships and then traded manual labor for passage, hopping around from what he thought was one side of the galaxy to another. In reality he never got far from Hutt Space before he arrived on the Refuge. Xynn was taught how to read in the boys home and told he was a Gand. He read everything he could about the Findsman. He got swept up in the romance of the notion. But when he ran into other Gand, they recognized him as someone with no culture and treated him as a stranger. So his goal became to learn how to hunt through some other means. If he couldn’t be a legendary Findsman he was going to find his own way to power.

Once Xynn was on the Refuge, he heard about the Forsaken Tribe. He determined that this group would be his family, the first family he had ever had. Gaining admittance through sheer determination, one of the first non-Trandoshans to do so, he learned very quickly from among the best hunters in the Forsaken Tribe. Along the way he earned the name Sin due to excessive use of spice. In the years that followed, Sin racked up enough Jagannath points to be recognized as an elder, then later he was chosen to become the leader of a Warband and eventually found himself lieutenant to Essk himself.

Riders of the Damned

“Colors” that “full patch holders” wear on their back

History

The Riders of the Damned are an outlaw swoop club originally founded by non-human veterans of the Clone Wars. Lacking other options several CIS veterans of various non-human species got together and formed a brotherhood based on the rules of the road, the customs and courtesies of Swoop Culture and a set of bylaws. Since that time humans and Republic veterans have joined the Riders of the Damned and have been allowed to become patch holders

Originally the members of the Riders of the Damned just wore the Confederacy symbol, not so much to symbolize an allegiance to the ideals of the Confederacy as to support the idea of rebellion in general. Most patch holders still wear a CIS patch somewhere on their vest for that same reason but the Club colors, also known as a kutte now display a skull.

Culture

Despite their rugged demeanor outlaw Swoop Clubs like the Riders of the Damned follow very rigid bylaws and expectations for behavior. They also purposefully lack regard for the consequences of their actions while following those codes of behavior. If another Swoop Club tried to establish themselves in Refuge for instance, they would immediately, and without hesitation or regard for who saw, beat the members of the other Swoop Club, take their kuttes, steal their swoops and destroy their club house. Even if doing so were dangerous or would put them in some kind of jeopardy.

Rackets

Because of the hierarchies created by Swoop culture the Riders of the Damned are able to operate in ways that are more complex than other kinds of criminal organizations. On board Refuge, the Riders of the Damned control the Spice Trade. They manufacture, distribute and sell spice while utilizing violence to protect their investment. All spice used anywhere on Refuge comes from the Riders. Spice being used on the station from any other source would be met with violence. But the Riders also have a few other larger quantity contracts with entities outside of the station.

Organization

Anyone wanting to join the Riders of the Damned must first befriend a patch holder so they can be invited to the Riders of the Damned Club House during official functions. This is an unofficial status called Hang Around. It’s determines if the Club even likes them. If a majority of patchholders like them, they can be voted in as prospects. As a prospect they have to prove themselves and pass one more vote to win their own patch, after which they can wear full club colors, be refereed to as a patchholder and they have a vote on all important Club matters.

There is a President and Vice President who are both the leaders, a Sergeant at Arms who enforces codes of conduct and acts as an enforcer, a treasurer who keeps the financial books, and a secretary who writes club records and acts as an office manager. They are voted into office by a majority of patchholders and are empowered to make minor decisions. But most decisions are expected to be voted on directly by the patchholders of the Club by a simple plurality, either at church, which is a weekly club businesses meeting or at any emergency meeting of the Club.

Leaders

Gundark

The Besalisks man born as Maxx Wraxx was the son of a Clone Wars veteran who was one of the very first patchholders of the Riders of the Damned. His father ascended to the status of Club Vice President of the Murkhana Chapter but never climbed as high as his son would. Maxx Wraxx earned the road name Gundark because some of his brothers said he looked similar to one when enraged.

A generation after the Clone Wars, the Riders of the Damned had grown separate full chapters on Raxus, Geonosis, Murkhana and Antar 4; Gundark himself had grown up on Murkhana. But by the time Gundark became President of the Murkhana Chapter each chapter was dangerously undermanned. The pool of Clone Wars veterans had retired, too few of their children followed in the footsteps and the Galactic Civil War was a dangerous time to be a criminal.

So Gundark, as Chapter President of the Murkhana Chapter, went to church at all four chapters separably and convinced them to retire their individual charters and bottom rockers so all four charters of the Club could join together under one patch. Gundark was then elected president of the over chapter and he led them to the Refuge during the upheaval related to the death of the Crime Lord.

Upon arriving on Refuge Gundark led the Riders of the Damned into quickly and violently controlling the drug trade. They as a democratic body decided to stay out of the struggle for the station and instead focus on cornering the drug market on the station. The Bull noticed their strategy and appreciated it. He met with Gundark and Juggernaught first and then all of the patchholders at Church and convinced them to vote to join the Three Shades of Black alliance that the Bull was putting together to end the conflict.

Juggernaut

The Gamorrean born as Zarvor was the grandson of a Clone Wars veteran that had joined the Riders of the Damned following the Clone Wars. He never knew the man as Gamorrean boars tend to die young as a result of their violent lifestyle. But Zarvor decided to honor his ancestors traditions though. He earned the road name Juggernaut because he moved much faster than you would assume a being of his size could and when he ran into people they felt as if they had run headlong into a Juggernaut.

Juggernaut, as his species would imply, is not the smartest tool in the shed. But he impresses his peers by sheer dedication and brutality. He was selected as Vice President not because any great leadership ability but as a compromise candidate. He was chosen essentially because will never be a serious contender for President but he is trusted by both Gundark and those who have designs on the Presidency of the Club for themselves. Since becoming Vice President Juggernaut has proven himself a most able road captain.