Setting:MercWorld-Seratartes

MercWorld: Seratartes

Introduction

MercWorld is an action-oriented, Sci-Fantasy roleplaying game set in the fictional world of Seratartes, where four Mercenary Companies are the world's most elite soldiers. Players take control of a Mercenary affiliated with one of these Companies and fight man and beast in a perilous, untamed world. MercWorld sets aside the notion of Mercenaries being accomplished veterans from national armies, and instead has them raised and trained by others like them, taking to the battlefield at young ages. As an action game, MercWorld largely disregards actual notions of tactics and strategy and adopts a more cinematic, narrative approach to warfare. While it is still bloody and deadly, in MercWorld, battles are won by heroism and valor.

Mercenary Companies

In MercWorld, players take control of a Mercenary trained by one of the elite Mercenary Companies. These Companies each have their own special talents, methods, themes, and motifs. A brief summary of the four Mercenary Companies available are as follows.

Hound Company

Formed by the legendary and enigmatic mercenary known only as the Old Wolf, Hound Company is by far the largest Mercenary Company. Hound Company soldiers use old but proven equipment and tactics, and the teachings of the Old Wolf stress the values of camaraderie, tenacity, and perseverance. Every Hound mercenary is an orphan or unwanted child born from conflict and they are taught to revel in the chaos of war, making the battlefields of the world the home they never had.

Tsarkovsky Royal Academy

When the old empire of Varan underwent a revolution, the exiled nobility formed their own Mercenary Company, selling the talents that had once protected their homeland to the highest bidders. The noble houses of the Tsarkovsky Royal Academy (TRA) undergo extensive gene therapy and utilize strict eugenics program to create their super-soldiers, believed to surpass the limits of the human body without desecrating its form. The TRA values honorable combat above all else, saving left-handed methods for their own internal affairs.

Meridian Arms Technology

This relatively new Mercenary Company was born from the Meridian Technological Institute. Declaring themselves independent contractors, the Meridian Arms Technology (MAT) soldiers modify themselves extensively with the latest in cyborg technology and arm themselves with impressive directed energy weapons. MAT acts upon the whims of the Technological Institute, and thus approach every battle with a litany of orderly combat protocols, equipment for field testing, and an eye for quick profit.

Sidika's Foundation for the Gifted

The smallest of the Mercenary Companies, Sidika's Foundation was formed by the famous mystic Sidika, who used her powers of prophecy to advise military and political leaders around the world. Sidika's Foundation recruits solely from other gifted individuals; those with great psychic potential and a talent for combat. Due to its size and the unsettling nature of its students and their training regimens, Sidika's Foundation is often seen working in conjunction with another Mercenary Company, serving as specialists and advisers just as Sidika did long ago.

Rules

MercWorld uses FATE Core as its primary ruleset. At the time of this writing, character creation, basic rules for sidearms, and preliminary vehicle rules have been finished.

World

Seratartes is a dangerous world full of squabbling nations, corporations, and city-states with only a tenuous peace and memories of the destruction from the previous wars keeping them from outright war. Outside these places that mankind has wrested from the grasp of nature there lies the untamed wilderness, while home to wondrous sights and valuable materials it is also home to all sorts of fantastical, strange, and incredibly dangerous beasts and monsters.

To fulfill the ever present need for soldiers children are raised within mercenary schools to provide elite troops and specialized services, and there is no lack of tasks to take care of. Jobs range from the hunting of monsters, the protection of trade routes and expeditions into untamed lands, retrieving goods, defending towns from bandits, and acting as bodyguards, to assassination, sabotage of nations and corporations, border skirmishes, and supporting coups, just to name a few of the things a mercenary may be called upon for.

There are gleaming cities that shine like the gems they mine from within the earth, great fortresses that blot out the sun as they travel through the sky, industrial towns pumping out thick smoke and reliable weaponry, oases in barren lands calling for travelers, villages built within massive trees far above the ground. Frozen tundras where the reflection of the sun off of the pristine white snow blinds any who gaze upon it, deserts of shimmering glass of all colors, wild jungles where the survival of the fittest is the only rule, great black craggy mountains separating two nations, beautiful paradises infested by creatures anathema to human life, lands where the flow of lava has wiped out all life, and some few ocean depths hold great beasts that ought never be awoken. It is a world of death, war, and for those brave, talented, or just plain lucky enough it is a world of heroism and great deeds.