Bloodhound Brotherhood

Rules without ideals¶

The Brotherhood is a loose confederation of raiders, smugglers and killers bound by shared rules rather than shared beliefs. They take what they cannot earn and enforce their own order in the places where law has failed or fled, which in the colonial era is most places.

Loyalty to the Brotherhood outranks mercy. Betrayal is answered at once and without discussion. To a Bloodhound, theft and murder are not crimes but tools, and survival belongs to whoever is willing to pick them up.

Take what you can hold. Hold what you take. Answer for neither.

The only Brotherhood oath anyone has managed to record

Why the rules exist at all¶

Every power that has tried to stamp them out has misread this. The rules are not a code of honour and they are not a pretension. They are the reason the Brotherhood outlives every other band on the coast.

A crew that cannot be trusted by other crews cannot fence its take, cannot buy shelter in Gallowsreach, cannot be warned about a patrol and cannot warn anyone else. So the rules cover exactly the things that keep that network working: what is owed on a shared take, what happens to a man who informs, and what is absolutely never done to another crew's people. Everything outside that list is permitted, because everything outside that list costs the Brotherhood nothing.

Gallowsreach is not a capital. It is the harbour where the rules are enforced hardest, which amounts to the same thing in practice and cannot be conquered in the same way.

Under the Silver Tongue¶

Their faith is the Shadow Covenant, where deceit is sacred and truth a toy, and the fit is so exact that outsiders assume the Brotherhood invented it.

The Whisperers keep secret ledgers, and the Brotherhood's are among the most complete records of colonial commerce in existence: cargoes, prices, sailings, who paid whom and when it cleared. They are kept accurately because an accurate ledger is the raw material of every useful deception, and they are sold, quietly, at a good price, to several chanceries that have outlawed the faith and would rather not discuss the matter.

The economics of a raid¶

The Brotherhood stands forty points below neutral with every power on the map and has never once tried to hold territory.

They come for stores, not ground. A colony with a deep warehouse, a shallow watch and a thin retinue is not a target of opportunity to them; it is an appointment, entered in a ledger, with a date. What deters them is not walls or treaties but arithmetic: a raid that costs three crews to bring off is a raid that nobody in Gallowsreach will crew next season.

Meeting them¶

Do not expect a demand, an ultimatum or a war. Expect an inventory.

The useful defence is to become expensive rather than to become frightening, and the governors who survive the Brotherhood best are the ones who worked out early that they were being appraised rather than threatened.

What the rolls record¶

Standing with other powers¶

Denied to its settlers¶

This people never builds: Wood Gatherer, Grove Shifter, Deep Mine.