For the past couple of months, I’ve been rather thoroughly absorbed by The Citadel, a game currently in very early alpha. At this stage, much of the experience happens beyond the game itself: a bunch of nerds sitting in Discord, hunting bugs, breaking things in creative ways, sharing feedback, and occasionally discovering that something we thought was a feature was, in fact, another bug.
I’ll eventually write a proper review and share my deeper thoughts about The Citadel. There’s already plenty I want to talk about. But today I wanted to do something rather different for my Insights section—sitting somewhere on the edge between fan fiction and game design.
Those who have been reading me for a while probably know that I occasionally get this itch to return to game design and start creating things myself. Previously, that resulted in ideas like my EVE Online Sisters of EVE supercarrier and a concept for a new ammunition type in EVE Vanguard. Designing an entire faction, however, has always been one of my favorite exercises, because a faction is much more than a logo, a color palette, and a few gameplay bonuses. You get to define a whole framework: culture, politics, religion, technology, values, beliefs, visual language, and eventually the mechanics through which players actually experience all of it.
And this particular idea started with a Discord header.
What If I Could Live in the Breach?
One evening, while we were discussing The Citadel’s three existing factions, I grabbed a picture of the woman in red from the server artwork and jokingly asked:
There was actually a reason behind the joke. During the current playtest, everyone seems determined to murder everyone else (and, quite frequently, to gank poor me!) while I keep wandering off the grid and trying to play a slightly different game.
I’ve had this fantasy for a while, and even explored something similar in a trailer I made earlier: becoming a kind of nomadic scavenger.
Not necessarily conquering territory or constantly returning home with another successful expedition, but living out there. Salvaging, exploring, avoiding trouble when possible, and treating the Breaches less like temporary dungeons and more like the place where my character actually belongs.
And somewhere during that Discord conversation, everything clicked.
The three established factions can enter the Breach, exploit it, explore it, and eventually return to civilization. But what about the people who never came back? What if, over generations, prospectors, fugitives, mercenaries, scavengers, failed colonists, opportunists, and people who simply wanted to disappear had built their own settlements there? What kind of culture would emerge somewhere that distant governments couldn’t protect you, possession only lasted for as long as you could defend it, and surviving another day gradually became not merely a practical necessity, but a philosophy?
What started as “I want to play for the cool lady in red” rather rapidly spiraled into politics, frontier economies, scavenged technology, petty territorial states, religions, legalized ganking, and eventually an actual faction gameplay mechanic.
Before we go any further, this isn’t me telling the developers what The Citadel needs. I have no idea what horrors are hiding in their design documents, what future factions they already have planned, or whether some of these mechanics would even survive first contact with the game’s backend. This is simply what happens when you give a gamer an interesting world, two months to become obsessed with it, and access to a Discord channel.
So grab some tea, wrap yourself in a blanket, and get comfortable. We’re going into the Breach—and this time, we’re not planning to leave.
CODEX: The Breach Riders
Seyra emerged from the permanent settlements established beyond the maintained routes of the Pillar Eucumene. Breachers had entered these regions for centuries in search of relics, machinery, resources, and lost infrastructure, but most expeditions ultimately returned to settled space. Seyra began with those who did not. Prospectors, fugitives, salvagers, failed colonists, mercenaries, and expedition crews occupied abandoned stations and habitable structures deep within the Breach, gradually creating communities where no distant government could reliably exercise authority.
These settlements never formed a unified state. They developed into independent cities, flotillas, clans, companies, and territorial alliances whose borders shift through war, migration, and negotiated access to routes and resources. Some control substantial regions and maintain fleets comparable to those of established powers; others consist of a single station and the ships capable of defending it. Alliances form and collapse frequently, while neutral relations allow trade and passage between rivals without implying friendship or common government.
What binds Seyra is a shared frontier culture rather than political allegiance. Authority is expected to survive challenge, agreements depend heavily on reputation, and possession without the ability to defend it is regarded as an uncertain claim. These ideas developed from practical conditions in regions where law could not be enforced from outside, but over centuries they became moral principles of their own. Many Seyra regard danger as corrective: failure exposes incompetence, survival validates judgment, and excessive protection allows weakness to disguise itself as civilization.
This belief also underlies the raiding for which Seyra are notorious. Convoys, prospectors, and poorly defended settlements may be attacked even without strategic necessity, while prominent captains sometimes describe such violence as instruction rather than predation. Loss is treated as evidence that a victim entered territory they were incapable of surviving. The most radical Seyra movements have transformed this reasoning into quasi-religious doctrine, combining fatalism, personal charisma, ritual, and promises that relentless selection will produce a humanity better suited to the Citadel.
Seyra nevertheless depend heavily on exchange with the civilizations they ridicule. Their settlements export salvage, rare materials, maps, aberration specimens, and machinery recovered from inaccessible regions, while importing manufactured goods and specialists they cannot easily produce themselves. Their vessels combine equipment from Ganden, TZHAL, Clementine workshops, local industry, and recovered systems of uncertain origin. Constant rebuilding has produced a technological culture concerned less with standardization than with making incompatible machinery function under conditions for which none of it was designed.
In war, Seyra forces reflect the societies that field them: irregular, highly individual, and difficult to predict. They favor mobility, ambush, interception, boarding, sabotage, and modifications that conventional fleet engineers consider unsafe. Rival Seyra powers fight each other as readily as outsiders, yet share enough customs to trade, negotiate neutrality, and occasionally unite against intrusion. Clementines, TZHAL, and Ganden enter the Breach and return to civilization. Seyra made the Breach their civilization.
From Lore to Game Design
So, that was the lore part. Now let’s put the codex aside for a moment and get into the more technical details. I didn’t want Seyra to exist only as some fan-fictional civilization that sounds interesting on paper. The fun part for me is imagining that I was actually producing this faction for The Citadel: what rules would define it, what should the artists keep in mind, how should its people behave, and—probably most importantly—what would choosing Seyra actually change for the player?
That means establishing a few design pillars. Some are deliberately restrictive, because knowing what a faction isn’t can be just as important as knowing what it is.
The Vibe
The easiest shorthand comes from EVE Online: imagine null-neutral states and alliances mixed with a healthy (or perhaps extremely unhealthy :D) dose of the “Princess Aiko” school of ganker philosophy.
Seyra aren’t one pirate empire. They’re independent crews, settlements, clans, companies and petty powers, each with their own territories, rivalries and interests. Two Seyra groups might be trading today, shooting each other tomorrow and temporarily joining forces next week because someone else wandered into their part of the Breach.
What loosely connects them is a culture built around self-reliance, danger and the idea that weakness eventually deserves to be exposed. This is where the ganker mentality becomes particularly fun to play with. Raiding your ship, stealing your cargo or taking territory from you doesn’t necessarily have to be framed as simple greed. To some Seyra, it can be a lesson. If you couldn’t protect your ship, perhaps you shouldn’t have flown it there. If you couldn’t defend your cargo, perhaps it never truly belonged to you. If another clan took your settlement, your claim apparently wasn’t as strong as you thought.
Taken far enough, this becomes almost religious. Charismatic leaders can wrap extreme violence in cheerful rhetoric about education, merit and making humanity stronger (ref. James 315 cult). Freedom, brutality, madness and complete conviction that they’re doing everyone a favor can comfortably coexist. The important part is that Seyra generally don’t wake up in the morning thinking, “Excellent, another day of being evil. Mwa-ha-ha-ha“
They think their world makes sense.
The Core Concept
If I had to reduce the entire faction to one sentence, it would be this:
Clementines, TZHAL, and Ganden explore the Breach and return to civilization. Seyra make the Breach their civilization.
Everything else should grow from that distinction. The Breach isn’t a dungeon or expedition destination to them. It contains homes, trade routes, territorial disputes, resources, politics and generations of accumulated local knowledge. Other factions enter an environment that is fundamentally hostile to them. Seyra live there. That difference should affect their lore and aesthetics, but if this were an actual playable faction, I would want it to affect gameplay too.
Faction Design Guidelines
1. Political Structure — A Faction Without a State
Seyra should never become a conveniently unified nation.
They consist of independent settlements, fleets, clans, companies and small alliances. They fight among themselves, form temporary coalitions, negotiate neutral passage and compete over territory, resources and Breach routes. Again, my biggest inspiration here is EVE’s nullsec politics rather than a traditional fictional pirate empire.
That also means there doesn’t need to be one Seyra leader, capital or central government. A powerful alliance might control a huge region and field an impressive fleet, while six breaches (or whatever the eventual geographical equivalent becomes) away, another Seyra community might consist of one station and twenty people who absolutely refuse to acknowledge the first group’s authority. Political power is local, and authority only lasts for as long as someone can maintain it.
2. Shared Identity — Culture, Not Citizenship
So why call all these people Seyra in the first place?
Because their common identity is cultural rather than political. Seyra broadly value self-reliance, personal reputation, strength, risk-taking and the ability to defend one’s claims. Agreements matter because reputation matters. Authority has to be continuously earned and maintained rather than simply granted by some distant institution.
That doesn’t mean every Seyra agrees with every other Seyra (I already explained that part). Quite the opposite. Their shared assumptions simply give otherwise independent societies enough common language to trade, negotiate, feud and cooperate.
3. Moral Philosophy — Getting Ganked Builds Character
Danger should be considered useful.
Failure exposes weakness; survival validates choices. That’s where my Princess Aiko/ganker inspiration really enters the design. Robbery, destruction and even killing can be reframed as a lesson, a correction, or a contribution toward producing stronger people.
Importantly, this shouldn’t make every Seyra a psychopath hunting newcomers for entertainment. It’s a cultural idea with different degrees of interpretation. For one person it might simply mean, “You took the risk, accept the consequences.” For another, it becomes justification for raiding a poorly defended convoy. Take it to its extreme and you get someone who genuinely believes blowing up your ship was an act of public service.
That spectrum is much more interesting to me than simply labeling them the evil faction. There’s a classic cultural phenomenon in EVE Online that captures what I mean perfectly: someone destroys your ship, then sends you enough ISK to replace it and invites you to join their corporation. The attack and the helping hand aren’t necessarily contradictory. You lost because you made a mistake, but you survived the lesson—and now the person who taught it might happily show you how not to make it again.
I’d love Seyra to carry some of that strange logic. A captain might rob you today, explain exactly what you did wrong, and offer you a job tomorrow. In their mind, none of those actions have to conflict.
4. Religion and Ideology — Please Don’t Give Them One Church
I wouldn’t give Seyra one organized religion.
Their beliefs should range from completely secular frontier pragmatism to bizarre quasi-religious interpretations of survival, danger and the Breach itself. A charismatic captain might gather followers around a particular philosophy until a successful fleet gradually turns into something suspiciously close to a cult.
Some beliefs might be sincere. Some could be propaganda used to justify power. Others might be superstition accumulated through generations of living around phenomena nobody properly understands.
Ideally, the line between philosophy, religion, propaganda and plain madness should remain blurry.
5. Technology — Improvised Does Not Mean Primitive
This is one visual cliché I’d particularly want to avoid.
Seyra are scavengers, but that shouldn’t automatically mean rusty scrap welded together (Hello Minmatar!) by people who have forgotten what a computer is. Their technology is heterogeneous because their civilization developed around whatever they could manufacture, trade for, steal, salvage or recover.
A Seyra ship might contain Ganden components, old THALIT machinery, Clementine equipment, locally manufactured replacements and something dragged out of the Breach whose original purpose remains unknown. If those systems weren’t supposed to work together, Seyra engineers have had generations to become very good at making them cooperate anyway. And successful Seyra don’t have to look poor. Some clans and territorial powers could be extraordinarily wealthy.
Improvised ≠ inferior, that’s a key.
6. Civilization — Useful, Not Home
Seyra shouldn’t be completely cut off from everybody else either.
They can visit cities, trade, buy equipment, sell salvage, hire specialists, negotiate contracts and conduct diplomacy. Their relationship with established civilization isn’t necessarily one of permanent hostility.
They simply don’t depend on safe space as their permanent home—or consider living there particularly admirable. A Citadel can be a useful marketplace. It doesn’t have to be where you belong.
7. The Breach — Home Turf
This is probably the most important distinction after their political structure.
For everybody else, entering a Breach is an expedition. For Seyra, it can be Tuesday.
Their homes, routes, economies and conflicts exist there. They know how to navigate dangers that outsiders are still learning to understand. Aberrations, Golems, and Builders aren’t automatically friends, pets or mystical allies; they’re simply parts of an environment Seyra have learned to coexist with.
That local knowledge should eventually become the foundation for their gameplay identity.
8. Combat — Knowledge Instead of Better Stats
I wouldn’t solve Seyra combat identity by simply giving them stronger ships.
Their advantages should come from mobility, ambushes, opportunism, unconventional fittings (like my 60 tons hauler with a single legendary Railgun ‘Mass Divider’), local knowledge and a willingness to accept risks that more conventional forces wouldn’t. They should be dangerous inside the Breach because they understand the environment outsiders are merely visiting.
A Seyra ship doesn’t necessarily have to beat your ship in a fair fight. Why would a Seyra captain give you a fair fight?
9. Visual Identity — Individualism With Money
Visually, I’d want Seyra equipment to feel individualistic, practical, modified and personal.
Components don’t need to match. Repairs and alterations can remain visible (Kintsugi, or “golden repair” is a right example). Ships and clothing can carry trophies, territorial markings, religious symbols, clan insignia or completely personal decoration. Two Seyra vessels performing the same role don’t necessarily need to look like they rolled off the same production line.
But again, I wouldn’t make the entire faction ragged, tribal or post-apocalyptic. A successful Seyra captain could be sitting on an absurd fortune accumulated through salvage, trade and control of valuable Breach routes. Their equipment might be extravagant precisely because nobody is enforcing standardization. As a useful guardrail for the whole concept:
Seyra ARE: frontier states, raiders, traders, salvagers, explorers, territorial alliances, opportunists, survivalists and occasional cultists.
Seyra are NOT: one nation, generic pirates, primitive barbarians, universally insane, universally religious, freedom-fighting rebels, anti-technology anarchists, or automatically hostile to everyone.
And with all of that established, we finally arrive at the part where this stops being primarily worldbuilding and starts becoming an actual game mechanic.
Seyra Faction Perk — Breach Dweller
If Seyra had one faction advantage, I would want it to express the entire concept in a single mechanic:
Seyra can remain where everyone else eventually has to leave.
My first idea would be a significantly extended Breach timer—perhaps around 60 minutes, potentially even unlimited—combined with a stash from refitting terminals from inside the Breach.
Other factions would still operate around the familiar expedition loop: enter, explore, gather whatever you can, survive and eventually extract back to civilization. A Seyra player could instead begin treating the Breach as persistent living space. Refit, unload, resupply and continue deeper rather than automatically returning home.
There are obvious balance problems here, especially because The Citadel is still in such an early state that we don’t even know what the eventual scale and structure of Breaches will look like. If the maps remain relatively small, unlimited residence could be pointless—or ridiculously powerful.
Public refitting terminals create another problem. Giving Seyra longer exposure doesn’t help much if another group can simply camp the terminal while you’re effectively trapped inside. One possible solution could be small Seyra-only safety pockets hidden throughout Breaches: local refuges with stash and refit access, representing the infrastructure they’ve built over generations.
And naturally, living outside civilization should have a price. Rather than making Seyra ships artificially weaker, I’d put their disadvantage where it belongs: civilized space and its economy. Higher crafting or research fees in Citadels could work. Restricted vendor access, poorer direct selling options, or dependence on intermediaries are other possibilities. The exact numbers and systems would obviously depend on mechanics that don’t even exist yet.
The important part isn’t whether the timer should be exactly 60 minutes or whether a Citadel fee should be 20% higher. Those are balance knobs. The design principle is what matters:
Playing Seyra should make civilization less convenient and the Breach more like home.
Fly Safe,
o7
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