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August 05, 2007
Mechwarrior: Age of Destruction Factions – Draconis Combine
One of the original “bad guy” factions or Battletech’s Inner Sphere, Kurita was always the toughest opponent of the Steiner-Davion “good guys.” A military dictatorship based on a Japanese cultural foundation, the Draconic Combine was ruthless and ingenious. Kurita also had the most hardcore special ops/intelligence service in the Mechwarrior universe – the ISF. Here’s an excerpt from a Wizkids article which lays out the early history of the Mechwarrior faction many of us love to hate – House Kurita:
”The Draconis Combine was officially “born” in 2319 after a long, brutal military campaign by its founder, Lord Shiro Kurita, First Citizen of New Samarkand and Director of the Galedon Alliance. The founder of the Kurita dynasty, however, did more than single-handedly establish an empire. He also imparted his will and his beliefs onto this new realm, a spirit that lives on even now, eight centuries later. More than any other nation, the Draconis Combine reflects the culture and personality of its Coordinator and ruling family, House Kurita. . .The rise of House Kurita and the creation of the Draconis Combine can actually be traced all the way back to the 2236 Outer Reaches Rebellion against the Terran Alliance, long before Shiro Kurita’s birth in 2270. The two-year Rebellion ended with the collapse of the Alliance government and the near-total isolation of its former colonies. All cohesion between the far-flung worlds of the Inner Sphere shattered, as every world suddenly found itself unsupported and left to its own devices. Filling the void and maintaining a semblance of trade were numerous mercantile alliances. The most powerful of these in the Galedon region was the Ozawa Mercantile Association, a loose – but pervasive – trading coalition united under the Ozawa family of Terra’s Japan. The OMA enjoyed unrivaled dominion in the “northeast” quadrant of human-occupied space, controlling all trade among the struggling colonies.
Motivated purely by profit, though certainly unafraid to use their influence to extract favors from local governments, the Association focused less on consolidating control and more on expanding their influence and stifling competition. The excessive arrogance of the Association’s merchants, however, and the flouting of their wealth in the faces of those who barely managed to eke out an existence, led to widespread bitterness among the peoples and governments of the region. Into this age of simmering resentment came Shiro Kurita. ”
To read the full article, pop over to Wizkids and check it out.
Posted by Discoshaman at August 5, 2007 07:40 AM