Mawite Legend
The Moon Children
Hush now my daughters
Keep quiet my sons
You must not be found when
The Moon Children come
Make not a sound
Or they'll steal you away
To the vaults of Gehinnom
Where madmen hold sway
They'll poke you and prod you
With needles and knives
You'll wish they had killed you
Not snatched you alive
And when the dark vats
All slide open their doors
A thousand Moon Children
Have faces like yours
OUT OF CHARACTER INFORMATION
- Intent: To provide suitably creepy shock troops for the Brotherhood of the Maw, for use in upcoming battles.
- Image Credit: Captured in Mad Max (2015 Video Game) using Nvidia Shadowplay, edited by
The Mongrel
in GIMP - Role: Shock Troops
- Permissions: N/A
- Links: Clone Madness, Gehinnom
- Unit Name: The Moon Children
- Affiliation: The Brotherhood of the Maw
- Classification: Infantry
COMBAT INFORMATION:
- Unit Size: Large
- Unit Availability: Common
- Unit Experience: Rabble
- Equipment: Bladed gauntlets, spiked harnesses
Strengths:
- Without Fear: Moon Children have no sense of self-preservation whatsoever. The pain and rage that drives them knows only one outlet: ripping apart whoever gets in their way. They are heedless of injuries, heedless of combat disadvantage, heedless of superior enemy numbers or tactics, and heedless of their own losses. So long as a single Moon Child remains standing, he will try his utmost to kill whatever enemy is before him.
- Without Number: A new Moon Child can be grown to "maturity" in a mere two weeks, and thousands upon thousands can be grown at a time. Sacrificing a hundred of them to secure a single hallway is no setback for the Brotherhood, since they are so easily replaced. They are the perfect shock troops because their lives can be spent freely, and they are so inexpensive and quick to produce that any gains they make, no matter how minor, are cost-effective.
- Guileless: The brains of Moon Children are given far, far too little time to develop before they are pulled from the cloning vats and sent to the front lines. They have motor control and sensory input, but little else. They cannot follow complex orders, or indeed any orders at all, because they cannot even conceive of anything beyond sating their eternal pain with immediate violence. If not carefully controlled, they can easily end up attacking their own side.
- Underequipped: Moon Children are not capable of operating weapons, and equipping them with armor that would make any difference would significantly reduce their cost-effectiveness. They go out on to the battlefield almost naked, their spiked harnesses intended to hurt their enemies rather than protect the wearer. They are totally ineffective against anything that can't be breached by sharpened durasteel spikes, and go down in droves to concentrated blasterfire.
When it began its campaign of chaos and destruction across the Unknown Regions, the Brotherhood of the Maw relied heavily on slave-soldiers captured from the populations of raided worlds to fill out its ranks of marauders. However, heavy resistance on planets such as Batuu and Jakku proved that this strategy had flaws; if a planet was well-defended, it might cost the Brotherhood more slave-soldiers to take it than they could replenish with captives from the battle. Further, the invasions of Crakull and Mar'Zambul totally disrupted the model; the Croke and the Gundanbard could not be broken as slave soldiers, so no replenishment of their ranks was possible at all after the battle.
The Heathen Priests took on the task of finding a solution to the growing manpower shortage. The dark laboratories of the Holy City of Gehinnom were fully equipped with a variety of arcane devices, including cloning cylinders. Of course, the Brotherhood faced the same difficulty that all cloners do: clones must be grown gradually, with the Kaminoan method requiring some ten years. Even the faster methods were unsuitable to quickly replace losses. Research revealed the most successful of swift cloners: Grand Admiral Thrawn, who had grown each clone in only fifteen to twenty days. He had used Ysalamiri to prevent the debilitating madness normally faced by clones grown so fast.
But the Brotherhood of the Maw was not particularly interested in fully-formed people, or even in disciplined soldiers. It did not matter that they had no access to Ysalamiri because they did not require their soldiers to be sane. Thousands of heavily growth-accelerated clones were immediately bred in the vats below Gehinnom, each given only two weeks to develop. The results were, to any student of cloning science, utterly predictable: the clones were severely mentally underdeveloped, their brains and their souls all but unformed. Further, the background dark energy of Gehinnom - city of suffering - tainted them as they grew, filling them with eternal pain and insatiable rage.
The Heathen Priests could not have been more pleased with the result.
Soon, hordes of the mad clones were unleashed upon worlds that the Brotherhood pillaged. They were used to great effect on the isolated colony worlds surrounding Oriam-Mei, and it was there that they earned their legendary name: the Moon Children. Many of the colonists had myths about the strange influence of moons on the mind, with tales of men and women driven to bizarre passions or acts of madness by the shifting phases of the silvery orbs above. The mad clones struck at night, and they descended from Gehinnom, a worldcraft easily mistaken for another moon that suddenly appeared in the sky. Because of this, the clones became known and feared as the Moon Children.
Adding to the legend, and the fear, was that physically strong and fit colonists taken alive by the Brotherhood were sometimes used as cloning stock. This led to the legend that the Moon Children took people away to steal their faces, then wore them as their own. Of course, the actual Moon Children didn't take anyone; they had no capacity to do anything as sophisticated as capture anyone alive, only to kill, but captures by slave-soldiers kept the story alive. The expanding beliefs surrounding the Moon Children only added to their fearsome battlefield presence; it is difficult to stare down gibbering, slavering madness without feeling a chill of fear, especially if you've heard of them in hushed tones before.
The end result: the Moon Children have become a useful vanguard for Brotherhood attacks, fully expendable but terrifying to fight.
Last edited:
