A house of diminishing strength and limited reach, House Atreides never extended much influence beyond Byzantium Secundus.
A house of diminishing strength and limited reach, House Atreides never extended much influence beyond Byzantium Secundus, and now even its position in its home territory is flagging as its nobles war with one another and are slowly forced out by Imperial pressure. Never the most martial house, House Atreides has nonetheless held unquestioned claim to much of northern Tamerlain for centuries, and even played a significant role in the first Emperor Wars. Atreides nobles are a curious blend of warriors and scholars, sometimes living almost entirely in a realm of esoteric ideas. Many Atreides lords attempt to enact their odd philosophies in their fiefdoms, producing some interesting and often-favorable results. However, as any Atreides will attest, there has been a curse on the house of Atreus since its very founding, and its dreams often turn to bloodshed as brother turns on brother in bitter struggle.
House Atreides dates to the late Fall of the Second Republic, when the eccentric billionaire Atreus Ludlum sold all of his shares in his various holdings to buy out a private security firm and vast estates of untamed mountainous land on the northern coast of Tamerlain. Claiming to follow prophetic visions, he used his security firm as a private army, a bastion against the growing maelstrom of chaos. He handpicked a number of these soldiers, along with various eccentric intellectuals who moved in his upper-class circles and taught them of his vision: a new society led by philosopher-kings, a society broken down into kallipoli- perfect cities, self-sufficient and self-sustaining, guarded by a warrior elite working hand in hand with the warrior-philosophers. His new disciples adhered to these precepts, and within a decade, the Second Republic was in ruins and the city-states of House Atreides stood as bastions of order and reason in a chaotic world.
Unfortunately, his Utopian vision was rather short-lived. His oldest son, Thyestes, became king and sired three children, who he taught the Atreidean precepts. However, they became sullen and disobedient, and at the same time, the aging Atreus became more strict with Thyestes, imposing upon him with ever-harsher demands dreamed up in his deathbed philosophizing. Somewhere between the two generations, Thyestes snapped. On his winter solstice feast, he had his three children killed, chopped up, and fed to Atreus and all of the rest of his guests. When this deed was revealed, his sister Electra took it into her hands to kill him and carry on as queen, but the damage had been done. At the feast there had been a mendicant monk, Tiresias, who, upon smelling the food, placed a cataclysmic curse on the House and wandered away, never to be seen again.
Though normalcy returned to the house with the coronation of Electra's children, Tiresias' curse seems to carry weight- every few generations the entire house consumes itself in an orgy of bloodletting and dark deeds. In between these periods, however, House Atreides thrived and prospered, conquering more of Tamerlain and dividing it into such kallipoli. During the First Emperor Wars, House Atreides had united all of its provinces, extended its reach as far as Criticorum, and proved staunch allies of Vladimir against the barbarian threats. The bloodshed following Vladimir's demise, however, coincided with another dark time within the house, and while it had thought to insert itself among the royalty, such dreams ended forever after those years. Since that period, House Atreides has remained split into its tiny city-states, and never again has fully united.
The closest the house came to unity after that was in opposition to the reign of Halvor the theocrat. Never a very orthodox house, House Atreides was outraged at his seizure of power, and were almost united when the Philosopher-King of Phobos declared Halvor a holy savior, and rallied all of his allies against those of the other house members. All hopes of alliance were then shattered by the ensuing war. The House was badly divided against itself during the recent Emperor Wars, and this division and strife has not ended as it usually does, prompting doomsaying philosophies among many members. Indeed, the House is rather beset. The Inquisition is investigating their unorthodox beliefs, Empire-backed Reeves, Hawkwoods, and al-Malik are collecting on war debts by buying out large holdings, and the city-states are still wracked by plague and internal warfare.
The Atreides embody an interesting dichotomy. They encompass thinkers as arcane as any al-Malik, and warriors as stern (well, almost) as any Hazat. They philosophize about harmony yet slaughter each other in droves. They believe devoutly in the will of the Pancreator, but each have their own oracles to interpret that will. Indeed, almost all Atreides pray in Eskatonic cathedrals, and most powerful ones have a gifted theurge, or, better yet, Penitent, to read omens.
Landed lords among the Atreides are considered philosopher-kings and are extremely well-educated, taught by Eskatonic tutors in theology and Reeves in debate and disputation. They also undergo weapons training like any noble, but the emphasis is on wisdom and insight. There is a downside to this education, however. The philosophers often become too enamored of their philosophies. They stray to heresy, or they begin to forget their own personal responsibility, living like robots according to the strictures of their beliefs or abandoning them entirely. Non-landed Atreides (baronets or knights- second children of landed lords are considered philosphers as well), however, are considered merely protectors, and receive almost nothing in the way of education, learning instead the ways of the battlefield with such single-minded intensity that it almost destroys any other desires or thoughts in them. Indeed, most non-landed Atreides are considered rather uncouth among nobles, and very few of them survive with much intellect intact.
It is a pity, then, that warfare or conspiracy so often puts these rabid warriors into the reins of power where the philosophers should be. When this happens, as is so often the case, the city-state becomes entirely oriented to war, fearsome and noble but cruel and inevitably self-destructive. Still, enough viable kallipoli survive to make the house a marvel. In a kallipolis, commoners are very strictly policed by the non-landed knights, while the landed lords spend much of their revenue building monuments to study and to the Pancreator, beautifying the city with statues and public spaces intended to inspire worship and temperance to the lower classes. All behave with honor and all live in harmony. Sadly, this rarely happens at all, and when it does, it only manifests in small communities, and even then, only when they are experiencing a surplus.
The Atreides symbol is a trident with three crossbars spaced at odd intervals, a strange and arcane symbol whose true meaning is buried in the mists of Urth's prehistory. House Atreides' colors are dark green and dark gray. Atreides nobles tend to be dark-complexioned, with wavy hair and rounded noses. They usually wear studded leather or light scale-mail jerkins, for few have shields. Strangely, the Atreides' weapon of choice is the spear or trident. Atreides nobles often carry short tridents and spears with heads specially designed to lodge in the victim. Once their spear has broken or been stuck, Atreides lords employ a paired disarming dagger and shortsword to finish their victim. Being members of a rather poor house, Atreides do not make extensive use of firearms. Well-off knights employ rifles or shotguns on the battlefield, and landed lords sometimes carry revolvers, but with rather less frequency than nobles of other houses.
Philosopher-King Aristaeus Thebanide Atreides (head of the house, aging and growing senile), Lord Jason Athenide Atreides (son of Baron Menele of Athenidium, questing to expand house's holdings on foreign shores), Baron Diomedes Creonide Atreides (bloody-minded warrior who has seized the crown of Spartindium), Baroness Hecata Argo Atreides (renowned philosopher, occultist, and psychic)