Chapter 2.3: The Four Great Rites and Imperial Citizenship

You earned your place at this table the hard way: you passed the Four Great Rites and became a Prince or Princess of the Stars. Every member of your crew did the same, or holds the title by the rare sovereign grant at the end of this chapter. The Rites are the one piece of backstory you all share, and they are worth a few minutes when you build a character, because what a Rite found in you is some of the best material you have.

What the Rites Are

A Rite is built to change you, and it works: you come out knowing something about yourself that nobody could have just told you. Each one is custom-made for the candidate and aimed straight at the edge of who they are, so your Bhaegor and your crewmate's Bhaegor might look nothing alike. The general shape of each Rite is public. The exact design of yours stays between you and the people who ran it, and whether you ever talk about it is your call.

A candidate must be bonded to a cysuit before facing the Rites. The trials rely on its sensory, cognitive, and medical interface, and completion of the Rites is the sole ordinary path into the Starborn.

Some Rites use a cysuit-generated scenario experienced as fully real. Others place the candidate in a real environment with proctors retaining life-support monitoring and the ability to intervene. The design manages physical danger and keeps the body from becoming the test. What every Rite places under direct pressure is the candidate's understanding of who they are.

The four run in a traditional order that bends when it needs to. Bhaegor and Sceolwyn often share one scenario; Clyddr runs the longest; Ildan is the one most people call the hardest.

• Bhaegor (Valor) asks whether you can act while you are afraid, and whether fear freezes you or moves you. Succeeding at the task is not the measure.
• Sceolwyn (Wisdom) drops you into a problem where your sharpest tool is the wrong one, and watches what you do when your best thinking fails you.
• Clyddr (Devotion) puts you to needed, unglamorous work that matters to the people next to you and to nobody else, for weeks or months, and asks you to keep showing up.
• Ildan (Empathy) sets you beside suffering you cannot fix, and asks whether you can stay with it, steady and present, keeping the person in front of you at the center.

Reference Manual Chapter 12 gives the Rites their full institutional treatment. For play, add one thing to the shape above: what your Rite left behind in your character.

What Passing Gets You

Clear the four Rites and you receive imperial citizenship, titled Prince or Princess of the Stars. A candidate from a member world rises from planetary citizenship into imperial citizenship. A foreign candidate enters the Empire as an imperial citizen through the same achievement. The title brings membership in the Starborn Assembly and its vote from the day it is conferred, and the standing to take the jobs that need proven character as much as skill: governor, ship's captain, diplomat, and the like. Crewing is one of those jobs. The Rites are the reason the Empire hands a crew a mandate at all. They are proof, already on the record, that the people holding it can carry the cost.

A Starborn may later separate from their cysuit. Dependency grows over years, so an early separation may leave little trace while a mature separation demands long medical care and can never restore the earlier mind exactly. A current Unbonded player character therefore faced the Rites while bonded and separated afterward. Someone who has never bonded cannot have passed the Rites and cannot be a standard Morlencir Adventures player character.

Failure, and the Way Back

Not finishing a Rite is no disgrace. You get support and another road in. The Rites are built to find the edge of where you have grown so far, so failing one only shows you where to grow next. Some of the most respected figures in the Empire failed a Rite, sat with what it showed them, and went back. If your character reached the title through a failure first, that is a strong place to start playing them.

The Rites are open to anyone, any origin, any species. People from outside the Empire have earned the title. The Empire actively recruits foreigners whose ability and character mark them as exceptional, then asks them to meet the same standard as every other candidate. Foreign origin creates no shortened path through the Rites.

The Sovereign Grant

The Rites are the ordinary door. The Crown keeps one more. When someone's nature shuts the ordinary path, so that no fair Rite can be built for them, the Rioghan can grant the title directly. The grant is narrow: it answers that one problem, and every use of it is an act of state done in the Assembly's full view. The two recovered Eirenes hold their titles this way. If your character is something the cysuit and the Rites cannot reach, this is how they got here, and the story of that grant is worth working out with your gamemaster.