System: Graus

Graus was settled by a mixture of French, German and Spanish colonists who found the planet's striking beauty and modest natural resources a perfect fit, and before long a series of agrarian communities and light industries dotted the landscape on the planet's thickly forested primary continent of Albion.

Over time, a booming economy developed based in part on agriculture and in part on commercial products such as holovids, recreational vehicles and other civilian extravagances. Beginning in the late 2980s, however, a fundamentalist back-to-nature movement, sparked by widespread development and the predations of the Succession Wars, began to take root on this planet.

By 3007, this pacifistic, pro-agrarian movement had gained effective control over the planetary government and banished all heavy military forces, leaving a reformed planet-wide police department as the only deterrent against criminals and raiders. Though derided as foolish, this policy spared Graus any serious damage when the Jade Falcons arrived during the Clan invasion, and the planet was absorbed without a struggle.

The Clan civilian society meshed well with the neo-communal aspects of the new Grausian order, and despite several raids and assaults while under Clan rule, the planet has returned to the Lyran fold in surprisingly good shape. However, as with the recently liberated world of Blackjack, much of the local population clings tenaciously to the cultural mores imposed by the strict Jade Falcons, though the famed Grausian tendency toward pacifism has made reintegration into the Alliance somewhat easier here.

The capital of Graus is New Paris, and is located on the northern steppes of the Albion continent. The other major landmasses, Bromme and Gaulia, support a host of minor industries and agricultural communities that cluster near the shorelines, leaving the interiors of these equatorial continents to desert creatures, such as the Grausian bloodsucker and the scruffer.