Steenkin’ Badges

One of the better known traditions in the Legions is the collection of fort badges. When you successfully pass training at one of the Legions’ many specialized facilities, you are awarded a small ceramic badge to display with that fort’s crest. Officially, this is so that legionaries with particular skill-sets under their belts are readily identifiable; unofficially, it lets veterans of particular courses make those who haven’t attended them pay for the next round of drinks.

The one everyone’s familiar with, of course, is the falcon-over-anvil badge of Fort Petrae, where every new legionary-apprentice goes for basic training.

Stay in and get assigned to interesting jobs, and there are plenty more to collect. Fort Snowbound, for ice moon, high-radiation and dark-ocean training. Fort Cascade, for survival and deep-field operations. Fort Inferno, for high-pressure, toxic-environment, and volcanic-world training. Fort Labyrinth, a blacked-out maze in a barren rock where you learn stealth, sniping, breaking stealth, and not being sniped. Fort Efreet, for those chosen few who might need to fight inside a sun.

And perhaps most memorable, there’s Fort Surreal, where the challenge is a simple combined obstacle, live-fire, and social-combat course, just like you were run through back at Fort Petrae.

It’s just that at Fort Petrae, they don’t shoot you up with the most gods-cursed witch’s brew of narcotics, stimulants, and hallucinogens they can devise first.

– The Emperor’s Little Finger: A Double Dodectave of Special Ops

Notable Replies

  1. Avatar for ahd ahd says:

    The legions, of course, also have innumerable slightly-specialized variants on these basic themes, along with outright specialist legions: guards/peacekeepers, communications specialists, combat engineers, super-heavies, military police, siege specialists, logistics specialists, undersea legions, first-strike specialists, reconnaissance specialists, saboteurs, experimental technology legions, battle theater prep specialists, automaton legions, hunter legions, special weapons legions, medical specialists, underground specialists, even terror legions.

    Which training facilities for each of these?

    I’m especially fascinated by the terror legion skillset, but almost as much by the prospect of the eldrae equivalent of Jack Reacher.

  2. Avatar for dziban dziban says:

    Not to mention sanitation specialists, culinary specialists (not including dietetical specialists, nor nutritional specialists), commissary specialists (and closely related retail specialists), software delivery specialists, postal specialists, laundry specialists, …

  3. Now, this is all fascinating and I can even understand the need for Fort Petare and operating in an environment where nothing is reliable except maybe the few things in their skulls. But, I can also see the existence of Fort Marathon, where Legion solders are dropped into the nastiest, most random training missions that are possible with AIs, bio-shells, and bots. Like the near-psychotic homicidal humanoid soldiers in heavy powered armor that only seem tactically inept…at first. Or the ever classic “Precursor alien bioweapons” that are even more dangerous because what is leading them can read minds and has no problem with using stupid-seeming tactics initially to sound out a foe. And, we can’t forget one of the favorites-dealing with a local insurgency that has hired very competent mercenaries to press their case to the fullest.

    There’s probably game designers that have cut their teeth building interesting campaigns for Fort Marathon, and there are some that are (in)famous for being absolute terrors.

  4. Oh my, a sun is a really hot, gravity-y and sensor-hostile environment, why would you wanna fight or station yourself there?

  5. Avatar for NHO NHO says:

    You, as a fact, don’t. But if you aren’t prepared to fight on the Sun, what would you do when opposition decided that using sun’s surface is sufficiently out-of-the-box location for a base or a fight or something?

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