New ExfordStar Type (Recharge Time): F8V (179 hours)
Position in System: 2
Time to Jump Point: 4.89 days
Number of Satellites: 1 (Lyncombe)
Surface Gravity: 1.03
Atm. Pressure: Standard (Breathable)
Equatorial Temperature: 35° C
Surface Water: 85 percent
Recharging Station: Zenith
HPG Class: B (Exile enclave: A)
Highest Native Life: Reptile
Population: 388,100,000
Socio-Industrial Levels: B-B-B-C-A
Technological Sophistication: Advanced
Industrial Development: Moderately industrialized
Raw Material Dependence: Mostly self-sufficient
Industrial Output: Limited output
Agricultural Dependence: Breadbasket
Defending Forces: Second Wolf Legion
Landmasses (Capital City): Dulverton, Exmoor (Woodborough), Johor, Jurong, Lynmouth, Sentosa, Ujong
Importance: Industrial, Strategic
Tracing a barely-eccentric orbit around a star a bit younger than that of humanity's birthworld, New Exford was catalogued early in the 22nd century by Terran Alliance surveyors in one of the very first stellagraphic tours of what would soon be known as the Inner Sphere. They found a waterlogged world whose archipelagic landmasses banded the world's wide intertropical zone like a girdle, their formation implying a high degree of glacial retreat in recent geological time, likely due to widespread vulcanism early in the planet's history. Hotter and with slightly higher gravity than Terra, the world was not initially flagged for colonization efforts. A second, more thorough survey in 2277 discovered that beneath the seas was another ocean: an ocean of oil. Multiple KT-extinction-level volcanic events had reset the world's biosphere a number of times, and now a practically bottomless supply of precious petrochemicals lay in wait for those with the means to exploit it. A conglomerate of seven British and Singaporean families known for their power and influence within the Alliance petroleum industry were the first to organize a serious colonization effort, and by the early 2300s New Exford boasted a booming economy and a population rapidly approaching eight figures. Spread across the planet's seven continental archipelagos, each of the families was given virtual sovereignty of their respective domains. The three most prominent families were House Stilson of Exmoor, House Linghui of Johor, and House Singh of Sentosa, with the lesser Houses Ward of Dulverton, Kuek of Jurong, Ishak of Ujong and D'Arcy of Lynmouth rounding out their ranks. It was not until the late 2370s that they were enticed to join the burgeoning Lyran Commonwealth, responding to the self-styled 'Archon Basileus' Robert Marsden's offer of incorporation by signing the Articles of Acceptance he was circulating throughout the region; the benefits of tighter economic ties with their now-fellow-Lyran neighboring worlds, along with protection from the marauding armies of House Kurita, outweighed any potential loss of political autonomy. In order to be more practically represented within the Estates General, the Commonwealth's new deliberative body, the Seven Families formed the Petrogarchy, a confederal oligarchy that formalized their grip on New Exford. Over the course of the next two centuries, as the Age of War raged across the Inner Sphere, the Petrogarchs became phenomenally wealthy; with a bevy of Periphery worlds and other backwaters lacking sufficient access to fusion power to maintain their economies, there was rarely any shortage of customers for Exfordite petromerchants.
For many worlds the Star League is remembered as a golden age, and New Exford is no exception. In the late 26th and early 27th centuries, numerous discoveries involving the pharmaceutical properties of various Exfordite fungi-esque life forms gave rise to a thriving biopharmaceutical industry, thanks to the introduction of advanced gene-splicing technology imported from the Terran Hegemony. The so-called “Mold Rush” that followed caused a second population explosion and a real economic rival to the Petrogarchy; moreover, unlike the wealth inequalities produced by the more starkly bimodal class spread of the petroleum industries, the ascent of the biopharms contributed in turn to the creation of a sizable middle class. At the same time, thanks to the increase in living standards across the Inner Sphere, demand for petrochemicals slackened, constricting the Seven Families' economic leverage. Over time this populace began to demand more substantive political rights, and in the face of increasing pressure the Petrogarchy caved to reality and instituted a planetary parliament, with their own influence confined to an executive 'Council of Seven' that nevertheless left them with considerable clout in the new government. This proved to be an altogether more effective arrangement of power on New Exford given the recent demographic and economic shifts that had led to this juncture, with infrastructure-improvement grants from the Commonwealth's Bureau of Economic Development fueling growth for the next century and and half. Over a dozen sprawling underwater cities were built in this era, possible thanks once again to Hegemony technologies. These gleaming aquatic metropolises were seen by Exfordites as a symbol of the golden age of progress and prosperity...and their slow decline in the wake of the Star League's fall was likewise a memorial to everything they had lost.
Ultimately, New Exford was as much a victim of the systemic effects of Star League's collapse as it was the direct ones. As the number of JumpShips plummeted and interstellar trade networks foundered, the biopharms could no longer sustain themselves, and for a time the petromerchants found themselves with massive surpluses they no longer had the physical ability to export, with the subsequent inflationary spirals only compounded by lackluster government response; by the end of the Second Succession War the economy was a shell of a its former self. Over the following decades, as the demand for petrochemicals once again began to rise, the Petrogarchy slowly reasserted itself, and by the late 30th century the parliament was effectively a rubber-stamp committee for the resurgent oligarchs. Feeling unfettered by either local or national oversight, several of the Seven Families (particularly Houses Stilson, Ishak and D'arcy) grew phenomenally corrupt, venal even by the standards of Lyran nobility. This led to a scion of House Stilson becoming a literal textbook example of Lyran governmental corruption in 3017: the so-called 'Stilson Incident' began after Duke George Stilson VIII bought his son, George Stilson IX, a position in the prestigious Nagelring by way of an ample infusion of kroners into the local chapter of Veterans of the Succession Wars. Agreeing to sponsor the young man in turn, Stilson only barely graduated, and soon became a notable disgrace in the 4th Lyran Regulars, practically infamous within the unit for his pratfalls in the
BattleMaster the Duke had also bought for him. But instead of being dismissed, his father simply used his wealth and connections to have his son promoted to hauptmann instead. A few months later he was promoted to leutnant-colonel, and then again to leutnant-general: all less than a year after graduation. It was only ended thanks to Kommandant Hana Fuchs of the LCAF's Administration Section, who caught wind of the goings-on and brought it to the attention to the Section Chief herself, Hauptmann-General Janet Page-Ripley. Somewhat ironically, the Stilson Incident drove Katrina Steiner to spend a great deal of her focus on cleansing the military of such graft and corruption, ridding the High Command of deadwood, strengthening the JAG Corps, and adding Military Ethics courses at Lyran academies.
As with much of the rest of the Inner Sphere, New Exford's gradual descent from the heights of the Star League was finally arrested with the discovery and dissemination of the famed Helm Memory Core. Now able to produce for themselves critical components in the failing machinery behind the ailing biopharms, the 3030s and 3040s saw a steady recovery, compounded by coming on the heels of the transfer of Nashan Foods' headquarters to the planetary capital of Woodborough in 3008. The move injected considerable capital into both the biopharms and New Exford's inland ranching industry, and established lucrative trade ties with nearby Bountiful Harvest, Hamilton, Graceland and Summit (the four breadbasket worlds that with New Exford were known as the 'Fertile Saltire'); by 3040 Lyran economists were predicting that New Exford was on track to return to or even exceed its Star League-era prosperity by the century's end. Of course, no Lyran could predict the way the '40s ended: the return of the descendants of the self-exiled Star League Defense Force, now reborn as the Clans and tearing their way through coreward space with frightening speed. As the invasion progressed and more and more worlds fell to the marauding Clans, Exfordites began to seriously worry that their world would be next, and in the early 3050s a not-insignificant portion of the populace emigrated to worlds perceived to be safer, such as Donegal or Coventry. In fairness, of course, these émigrés were greatly outnumbered by the waves of refugees fleeing worlds that had fallen to the invaders, and many never left. While the borders finally stabilized before the Clans reached New Exford, the populace increased by nearly a third by the decade's end. Since most of these refugees had been those with enough means to escape from their former homeworlds to begin with, their arrival ultimately accelerated the ongoing trends in the economy. Real refurbishment of the two aquatic cities that had survived the centuries, Bagong Sarawak and Shoreham-by-Coral, was spearheaded in large part by these newcomers, with tentative plans underway to recover and repopulate at least three others. Of course, this relatively good luck did not come without a price: their industrial and agricultural wealth combined with their proximity to the Clan Occupation Zones made them the target of regular raids by both the Jade Falcon and Steel Viper Clans. In 3054, New Exford's militia was the first to debut the Warrior H-8 VTOL against one of these raids: a Nova from the Eleventh Viper Regulars landed outside Woodborough, swiftly outflanking the defending militia's BattleMechs and leaving only their tanks and infantry between the Vipers and the Nashan granaries they were clearly intent on ransacking. The half-dozen Warriors made repeated attack runs against the Clan forces, losing most of the VTOLs in the process but slowing the Viper advance long enough for the militia to regroup its BattleMechs and counterattack. When the Clans finally found purchase on New Exford, it was neither through war nor conquest, but through cooperation.
Exiled from their brethren at the conclusion of the tumultuous Refusal War that gripped the newly-conquered worlds of the Wolves and Jade Falcons in 3057, the Warden Wolves decamped to Arc-Royal, the domain of the Kell Hounds. Welcomed by their freeborn Khan's father, Grand Duke Morgan Kell, they initially spread across Grunwald, at the time a largely unsettled continent. Just a few months before their arrival, Grand Duke Kell had declared the formation of the Arc-Royal Defense Cordon, a sixteen-world semi-autonomous military district within the Lyran Alliance (which itself was barely weeks older, having just seceded from the Federated Commonwealth). New Exford was one of those sixteen, as the Petrogarchy had long-standing ties with Arc-Royal and trusted the famously elite Kell Hounds with their defense far more than the nascent LAAF or the clearly self-interested Katherine Steiner-Davion. After the Exiled Wolf touman returned from its participation in Operation Bulldog in 3061, they began to spread enclaves across several ARDC worlds. Landgrave von Dulverton Reginald Ward XII practically rolled out the red carpet for the Exiles, and he was a strident force for their integration into New Exford, believing strongly as he did that partnership with the Wolves could reap enormous benefits for the populace in general and the biopharms in particular; as one of the few Petogarch Houses that had diversified its corporate portfolio over the years to include significant biopharm assets, House Ward was not above such lobbying efforts to improve both their standing and their bottom line. The landgrave voluntarily gave up a huge tract of his family's lands in order to facilitate the building of Enclave W137, known to the locals (and, eventually, the enclave's lower castes) as Wolfcastle. For the rest of the decade, even as various conflicts engulfed the Inner Sphere, New Exford was peaceful and quietly thriving, as the Wolves began to make major inroads into Exfordite society thanks to selective tech-sharing. The biopharms in particular underwent a renaissance as Clan gene-tech gave them the ability to produce some of the most cutting-edge medicines ever devised. The sole attempt to raid the world, a probe by the Third Falcon Talon during the Jade Falcon Incursion of 3064, was fended off by a Kell Hounds-subcontracted mercenary 'Mech company rotating through, in a Trial of Possession on the Cocuala island chain of the Ujong archipelago.
It was this burgeoning high-tech infrastructure that made the world a natural fallback point for both the First Kell Hounds regiment and Snord's Irregulars after brutal defeats by the Jade Falcons in the early 3070s. When the Hounds returned to recuperate in the wake of grueling fights against the Word of Blake on Tharkad and Arc-Royal in 3072, they unknowingly made the world a target. On 28 August 3073, Blakist JumpShips arrived at a pirate point just hours from the planet, and their DropShips blew past the hasty aerospace defense thrown up by the Hounds. Tentatively identified by BattleROMs as the Fiftieth Shadow Division, the attackers seemed to anticipate every move by the Kell Hounds: an attempt by the Hounds' Second Battalion to hit the Division's flank ran into vast minefields and then was hit by massed mechanized battlesuit infantry. The slaughter was total. Simultaneous to this massacre, the Fiftieth's 'Mechs struck the remaining two battalions, while headhunting squads targeted Christian Kell, the regiment's commander and Morgan Kell's nephew. Going down fighting, Kell ordered the few remaining Hounds to retreat, and the devastated mercenaries fled offworld, having lost nearly three-quarters of the regiment in a single day. The Manei Domini, surprising the Exfordites, ransacked the Kell Hounds' base for supplies and salvage but otherwise left the civilian populace and local industry entirely untouched. After this incident, it was rare for the Exiles not to have a full cluster stationed at Wolfcastle.
Further Wolf investment came in the late 3070s, when the Exiles built a genetic repository at the enclave, desiring a backup site for their most precious Bloodheritages (especially since many of those had been made highly exclusive thanks to the damage done by the Blakist nuclear attacks on Tamar in 3070). Bloodname House Ward, with their ancestral ties to the world, was especially eager to set up their genechapel on the grounds of Wolfcastle, though their relationship to their freeborn 'brethren' would wax and wane over the years, as Clan reverence for those lineages was often at odds with the reality of House Ward's behavior. Finally, in 3086, Khan Phelan Kell decided to share their limb/organ replacement technology with the Exfordites, on the condition that it could not be exported offworld and had to be used with the supervision of a member of the Wolf scientist caste. Limb regrowth clinics began to sprout up all over New Exford, and soon the planet was one of the premier destinations for medical tourism; one such clinic attached to the famous Helspring Resort, nestled in the Lynmouth capital of Crescent Harbor, became the destination
du jour for numerous nobles, artists, Mechwarriors and other
éminence grises. Whether or not this move was a clever ploy designed to ingratiate the Exiles to the Lyran aristocracy and military by catering so directly to nobles and soldiers is anyone's guess, but with a Lyran noble for a Khan, one perhaps might be wise to attribute them more political savvy than would otherwise be expected from the Clans. At any rate, ingratiate them it certainly did, and with them New Exford. With such a reliable source of patronage in both the Estates General and the High Command, the Seven Families now found themselves competing for these patrons' favor, and this competition has been a vital part of the world's political ebb and flow ever since. Likewise, the ties between the Exiles and the Exfordites were pulled even tighter on Gray Monday; ComStar's B-class HPG went down like most of the rest of the network, but the HPG the Exiles had constructed for themselves at Wolfcastle inexplicably still functioned. This has given the people of New Exford a badly-needed lifeline to the rest of humanity in a time of great darkness...but it has also painted a target on their backs.
Modern New Exford is one of the most advanced and developed worlds in the Lyran Commonwealth. Their cities are a masterwork of urban planning, making the absolute most out of limits imposed by the planet's archipelagic and primarily thick tropical jungle terrain. They sprawl not outwards but upwards, tight bundles of enormous gleaming towers allowing for some of the highest population density of any city in the Commonwealth, with over 52,000 people per square kilometer in some places. Woodborough in particular, home to nearly forty million people, has some towers that house more people than some entire Periphery planets. To relieve this density, from time to time these towers are built in the shallows between islands, serviced by canals rather than roads. Civilian hovervehicles have become the norm over the centuries as a result, able to traverse both land and sea with equal facility. The thick jungles also make traveling overland extremely difficult, and while roads and bridges between and across the islands on each archipelago do exist, the last century has seen the rising popularity of mass-transit VTOLs. Blackstone BattleMechs of Inarcs debuted their first foray into the civilian VTOL market, the Pegasus, in Woodborough and Bedok, the planet's two largest cities. By the turn of the century, the yellow taxi VTOLs were a ubiquitous sight in the skies of New Exford. Not unrelatedly, this has led the planetary militia to rely heavily on VTOLs themselves, backed by a hovercraft-based navy; models not usually seen outside of frontline LCAF regiments are sometimes found here as well. The militia largely draws from the Military Institute of Woolwich on Jurong, a tri-service academy that trains cavalrymen, infantry and chopper pilots with a degree of quality exceeded only by the Commonwealth's premier war colleges. This quality is in part due to the opportunity to train against Exiled Wolf warriors in their biannual war games. Between this and the seasoning garnered from the occasional Falcon raid, the militia is one of the toughest in the region, with only its small size disqualifying it from attaining Regional Militia status within the LCAF. Ironically, probably the weakest element of the militia is its BattleMech contingent: composed entirely of the sixteen 'Mechs owned by the various Petrogarch families, their pilots are traditionally the wastrel sons and daughters of their Houses, those unsuited for either the family business or the Nagelring. The militia's current commanding officer, Colonel Kuanyu Lee, is the exception: a former Kell Hound who had the good fortune to retire to his homeworld just a few years before the Hounds' scourging on Timkovichi, he has brought his drive and experience to the position and has made an effort to whip the militia's Mechwarriors into shape, albeit with limited results thus far.
Very few people, other than rich oligarchs who can afford to have land cleared and estates built, live outside of the urbanized areas of the planet. Most of the remaining land is used for two things: the vast tracts deep in the interiors of the largest islands, owned mostly by Nashan Foods, where pig and gnu-oxen ranches are cut out of the jungle (Exford truffles are a famed delicacy across the Inner Sphere), and the World Heritage Preserve System, a series of government-protected nature sanctuaries that also double as pristine research fodder for the biopharmaceuticals. The environmental damage the former has gradually done to the latter has been an ongoing source of political and social strife between the ranchers and the biopharms.
The culture of New Exford's first settlers was a mix of British and Singaporean; it featured a heavy emphasis on meritocracy and a semi-rigid class system. While this has waxed and waned with passage of centuries and the influx of refugees in the mid-31st century, it still holds considerable influence. English and Malay-tinged Mandarin are the primary languages, although as with many multilingual worlds the influence of the Star League made English the language of the monied and educated classes from the late 26th century onward. Another relic of the Star League is the planet's dominant religion. The Voyager Christian Church, whose members sometimes refer to themselves as Mahayana Anglicans, is a syncretic faith founded by Karishma Singh, disowned eldest daughter of Sentosa's Petrogarch House and first captain of the
SLS Pioneer, the
Avatar-class WarShip permanently attached to the Star League Expeditionary Brigade. After imbibing a highly potent entheogen in the company of an isolated religious community on a distant Periphery world, Captain Singh was overwhelmed with visions and became convinced she saw a way to bridge the two major religions of her homeworld and bind them into a single creed. When she returned to New Exford, she published her writings on the matter,
Voyage into the Light, and her fiery charisma (not to mention her famous name) quickly gained her many converts in her home city of Bedok. A collection of her sayings gathered by a pair of her closest disciples,
The Singh Sutras, became immensely popular following its publication in 2699. By the time of her death in 2749, at the ripe old age of 138, nearly eighty percent of the Exfordite populace had converted to the Voyager faith, and it had spread to sizable portions of nearby Bountiful Harvest, Kandersteg and Hamilton. The disappearance of the
Pioneer in the wake of the Star League's fall, captained by Karishma Singh's grandson Joshua Singh, led to a belief that one day the lost captain would return as the messiah and grant humanity enlightenment. Among other things, the Voyager Church is extremely pro-Star League and romanticizes the era greatly: not exactly a difficult sell given New Exford's history, to be sure, but this also made the Exfordites much more welcoming to the Wolves-in-Exile than your average Lyran populace might otherwise have been.
Of course, nothing highlights the impact of the Star League quite like the great thalassopolises, truly one of the wonders of that age: numbering fifteen at their zenith, just two remained by the end of the Succession Wars, the rest gradually abandoned as the machinery required to sustain them went out of production. This trend was reversed thanks to the Helm Core in the 3030s, and with the inundation of refugees two decades later several of the lost cities were brought back to working order. At present there are seven thalassopolises, each putatively under the suzerainty of one of the Seven Families. The two most venerable, Bagong Sarawak and Shoreham-by-Coral, each host nearly a million residents, while the remaining five (Lazarus, Yishun, Queenstown, Sengkang and Pioneer) each hold somewhere in the range of a half a million apiece. Each is situated near one of the Petrogarchy's major drilling operations, and most residents are employed by the petrochemicals industry in some capacity, many of them commuting by way of ever-present Baleena passenger submarines. There is currently no inclination to recover more of the sunken cities: seven is considered a very lucky number in Exfordite culture, and buildings with a second “seventh” or “seventy-seventh” floor are quite common.
With an island-centric culture, seafood and fruit are the staples of the Exfordite diet. Here the culture's Malay roots show strongly: most start their day with a breakfast of kaya toast and coffee, and street vendors hock Sambal stingray and hot pisang goreng. Sport hunting of New Exford's largest native life form, a rough analog to prehistoric Terran thyreophorans, was popular in the days before the World Heritage Preserves, but since then acquiring a license to hunt one has become prohibitively expensive in order to keep such hunts from endangering the species; outside of bored Petrogarchs, only the wealthier inland ranchers take up the hobby. Surfing, swimming, sailing and scuba-diving are also quite popular, and among the middle and upper class cricket is yet another affectation inherited from the earliest colonists. Perhaps the most popular sport, though, is jetski racing: it's rare these days to look off a coast and not see a group of Exfordites bounding across the waves on their StarCorps Sundivers, somewhere in the distance.
