The Sand Barons / SANDBARON

Named after Hurston’s least valuable commodity, the Sand Barons are a pseudo official term used by Hurston’s royal elite (often as an insult) to describe influential figures of various factions of Hurston and its moons. If an individual or group from one of these factions becomes powerful or influential enough, they can expect to be given the title of Sand Baron and be considered one of Hurston’s somewhat reviled “under nobility.”

These individuals or groups could be from well fashioned nobility exiled for their excesses, wild magma sailing tribes of the mountain kings, siege lords of the junk wastes flying their blue banners, gem eyed greed cartels of the cave guilds, drug running grav-gang nomads, mercenary bullet princes, toll lords of the asteroid paths, brutal commissars and their rogue union armies, mutated corsairs who roam the rad seas, the charnel butcher Dukes who ply their bloody trade, man-machine cults of the scrap jungles, squatter mining gangs who spoil every claim or even the cannibalistic troglodyte clans. All of these and more could be called a Sand Baron, if successful enough.

While the Sand Barons are Hurston’s dark secret, they never organise long enough to endanger Hurston as they are all in competition with each other and wage their petty wars between each other. It would be expensive and difficult to eradicate the Sand Barons. The sad fact is that the Sand Barons have local influence, knowledge, brute force and are a interwoven part of their petty fiefdoms. This of course makes them useful to Hurston nobility elite. If Hurston wants a dirty job deniable? The Barons did it. Need a path finder through the scrap jungles? Contact the local Baron. Need a rival’s mining claim spoiled? Send in a Barons mining fleet.

The Sand Barons influence is not limited to just Hurston space. As the old Hurston saying goes, “When the sand goes to storm, who knows where it may settle.”