House Mayfore

One of the noble houses of Varia, and — in the blunt words of the Varian broadsheet House Mayfore and 'Legalised Piracy' — a house that "appears to be nothing more than pirates. Tattooed brigands, toothless corsairs, greedy freebooters." Their ships work the oceans that surround Varia on three sides and flagrantly attack and sink vessels to plunder them. Varia's response to this is a "don't ask, don't tell" policy regarding where Mayfore's imports come from — a stance the document calls "utter disregard for other nations' agreed naval treatises."

This is not an accusation from an enemy state. It is Varian commentary, circulating in Varia, about a Varian house.

State-tolerated piracy

The arrangement is the point. Mayfore takes the ships; the crown takes the goods and asks nothing; the paperwork stops at the quayside. A nation that audits its citizens' wealth quarterly under Zone of Truth and treats destroying tax evidence as a capital offence (Varia) declines to ask a single question about one house's cargo manifests. What Varia buys with that silence is a standing fleet of experienced raiders it does not have to pay for, and a supply of goods it does not have to trade for.

What it costs is exactly what the broadsheet says: every naval treaty Varia's neighbours have signed and Varia has not honoured.

Seen in play

• Session 08 — the corsair bar at Fort Foothold. Lash drank free rum in a Mayfore sailors' bar while the rest of the party stood through the landing speeches. Its patrons — proud corsairs — were passing around an official piracy complaint notice from a foreign trade society for laughs, one of them offering the line "how can you be a greedy freebooter if the booty's free?" She passed her con save and was annoyed about it. The house's name was heard at the table as "Maythor."
• Fort Foothold still keeps a House Mayfore corsair bar among its soldiers' leisure halls — the corsairs are a fixture of the reclamation's first landfall, not a curiosity.
• Varia itself records the house as the nation's "questionable naval activity" — corsairs who are "little more than approved pirates."

The Coalition's pirate-hunters are pirates

Mayfore is a militia training branch of The Coalition. A reclamation recruit may train with the Varian Navy / House Mayfore stream, and that stream's standing objective is to attack Seadog Jon Thomas and break pirate control of the Atollian trade routes (The Coalition, Atollia).

The irony is load-bearing. The Coalition's designated answer to Orathi piracy — to the Seadog, and to allied fleets like Rinder Mardek's Black Fleet — is a house of practising pirates whose own government has agreed not to notice what they do. Mayfore's qualification for the job is the job. Nobody knows these waters, these tactics, or these people better, because Mayfore are these people, with a flag over them.

Open questions

• Do Mayfore and the Orathi pirates have history? Both plunder shipping in the same seas. The Black Fleet and the Seadog's fleets are the enemy Mayfore has been assigned; whether they have ever been the customer, the competitor, or the fence is entirely unexamined.
• Where do the sunk ships' crews go? The broadsheet says Mayfore sinks vessels to plunder them. Sinking a ship is not how you take a prize; it is how you leave no complainant.
• How does the house sit with the others? House Bloodworth runs the spies and the throne, House Clandestin was dissolved and repossessed for betraying the common folk's trust — yet Mayfore's open lawlessness draws only a shrug. Whatever Mayfore provides, Varia values it more than its reputation abroad.