House Richese

[Kannon]

Homeworld: Richese (Epsilon Eridani)
Status: House Major
Crest & Colours: Lamp of Knowledge, Green and Gold
Head: Count Ilban Richese (prime minister Ein Calimar)
Heirs: 11 Children with Edwina Corrino (Most Still Alive)
Main exports: Tech products e.g. suspensor devices, Richesian mirrors (chips), biotech
Current Allies: Thorvald
Current Frenemies: Atreides, Harkonnen, Corrino, Bene Tleilax
Current Enemies: Vernius (Ix)

Position:
Once a truly magnificent house, recognised by the marriage of Count Ilban to Corrino princess Edwina, the fortunes of House Richese have dwindled throughout the Count's reign. Even in decline, however, the pedigree, Landsraad position and ubiquitous need for some of their tried and tested fare as well as some novelty products from recent inventions keeps it afloat. Their demeaning inflection point was the loss of the siridar governorship of Arrakis eight decades ago.

Count Ilban, a melange-buoyed supercentenarian patriarch of the house, has never been a man with much verve for the incessantly underhanded aspect of politics of the Imperium. His attention to family life, bringing up his eleven children and numerous grandchildren, has however led to costly negligence in securing political and economic interests of the House. His political flare has usually been limited to securing good marriages. While his descendants want for nothing, some of them blame him for the overall decline and are anxious to take over and undertake more outwardly ambitious agendas. They managed to convince the senior to relinquish some of the governance to the appointed prime minister. Since then, most of the day-to-day governing is done by a pragmatic technocrat, Ein Calimar, who has somehow arrested the fall of the family fortunes.

Part of the complacency had resulted from the life being too easy for House Richese for much of the prior century. They had amassed very comfortable spice stockpiles during their siridar governorship of Arrakis and their wealth had allowed them to pursue various pet projects in science and engineering, leading to the construction of the artificial moon Korona, a glorified space lab hub.

It was on Ilban's watch that House Richese let the lucrative desert quasi-fief slip from their hands. It was despite their Corrino connections, because they had genuinely failed to provide the spice quota required by the Imperium, having allowed a Fremen insurgency to compromise the spice production. It made Elrood IX pass it over to the heavy-handed Harkonnen who had pledged to beat Arrakis into submission.

That shocker led to other poor decisions. To recoup the losses, Count Ilban waged an ill-advised economic war on ascendant, Vernius-ruled Ix. This changed into a true hegemonic conflict between technological powerhouses. It was decidedly lost by the Richese, with Ix taking over the grand prize of Spacing Guild contracts for the heighliner construction and the respective CHOAM shares, forcing House Richese to forfeit is directorship for the upstart House Verdun of Dross. This has led Calimar to seek closer ties with the Harkonnen, and Ilban had to pocket his pride and accept the Baron's peculiar social calls to Giedi Prime.

Before that, Ilban had attempted to forge deeper ties with the Atreides, whose leader Duke Paulus seemed then ascendant due to being a faithful executor of Elrood's will in military escapades like the Ecazi rebellion or the pacification of House Colona. He had married his eldest daughter Helena to the Old Duke, which had created a period of allied relations. But Paulus seemed to be prioritising his friendship with Earl Dominic Vernius of Ix and taking the Ixian side in the economic war. Him and Helena had got estranged over that and other issues, and it was speculated she had somehow been involved in her husband's death in the bullfighting incident. Her own son Leto forced her injunction into an isolated convent on Caladan. Cooler time in the mutual relationship settled and allowed for rapprochement with Harkonnen, sworn enemies of the Atreides, though Count Ilban has never found it in himself to see his grandson Leto as a foe, who has also given him few direct reasons to change his mind, and he does support Leto's voice in the Landsraad on occasion.

Though never on matters related to Ix. In the Great Hall on Kaitain, Ilban had ever been one of the main accusers of House Vernius of breaking Butlerian precepts by building forbidden thinking machines in secret. The consequent fall of Ix to a Tleilaxu occupation over three decades ago and the demise of House Vernius gave Ilban a sense of schadenfreude and House Richese a long-awaited opening. Policies of the Calimar government focused on spurring and then commercialising some technological breakthroughs of the House's glory days, like in biotech and cybernetics, once spearheaded with assistance of the Suk School on Parmentier. This allowed it to hold some economic ground against the resurgence of production on Ix, renamed Xuttah by its new masters, especially because of sharp drop in quality and cutting edge of those products, but in the end the House failed in fully pressing its advantage during this window of opportunity.

The window abruptly closed when a punitive Sardaukar action mandated by Shaddam IV for illegal spice hoarding by House Richese led to the destruction of their crown jewel - the artificial moon Korona, an insensibly concentrated treasure trove of valuables, sophisticated research, and manufacturing. As the moon detonated in an atomic explosion, a quarter of population of Richese was affected, including Calimar and several of Ilban's children - their eyes were burned out. Humanitarian aid arrived from... Bene Tleilax, and the Tleilaxu provided eye replacements for the Richesians. Later Atreides contribution was a more conventional humanitarian aid, though appreciated and remembered. Before Richese could recover from the blow, Rhombur Vernius restored his renegade father's earldom over Ix and geared the planet back toward manufacturing Richese has found hard to compete with. It is speculated though not proven that those events have led to deeper clandestine collaboration of convenience between House Richese and Bene Tleilax.

Right now, the only steadfast and uncontroversial alliance of House Richese is with House Thorvald. While the Thorvalds have their own set of problems with the Golden Lion Throne and don't make it any easier to endear Richese to the Padishah Emperor, the industrial synergies are strong and Thorvalder raw materials give the Richesian side a modicum of competitive edge in CHOAM. There's also the issue of sunken investment with all the support Memnon Thorvald has received from Richese to build up the Heighforge. With the unexpected foothold House Thorvald has just secured on Arrakis, House Richese may start to call in favours. After all, they are the only House other than the Harkonnen who has any deeper understanding what it means to govern that desert planet, and their industrial base could possibly return to the production of all the spice mining hardware.

Culture:
Richesians cherish work-life balance and family life, and they could usually afford it because of the accumulated wealth, albeit now forfeited by the loss of Korona. Scientific focus espoused by high-end STEM education, which is a worthy pursuit even for members of the ruling house, co-exists with strong religious and humanitarian convictions, but is also mired by excessive bureaucracy, inefficient political system that struggles between autocratic and democratic models, and IPR litigation culture that secures proprietary rights to the extent of stifling more widespread innovation, retaining it in the realm of secret projects funded by the government.

As a society, Richesians value social rites and decorum. They are mostly dark-skinned, including the royal house. They are not beneath manifesting opulence, though they have much less taste for showmanship of the new money like the Verdun, who they deeply despised and were glad to see removed from equation, though with unease related to their own trauma of liberal use of the Sardaukar against the Great Houses. They inhabit a terrestrial world that doesn't put exceeding environmental strain on their livelihood, though maintaining a balance between industrial base and climate preservation puts a high price tag on weather control systems.

The economic woes of the last decades have led to declining fortunes and stagnation, and the debris from the destroyed moon is now a source of small but frequent asteroid-like events that cause both physical damage and constant anxiety. Many are very uneasy because of being beholden to Tleilaxu inventions for their sight. Post-Korona stagnation on the technological front, exacerbated by religious strictures and financial liquidity problems, are offering bleak perspectives for a rebound. Ambitious inventors, who had been leaving Richese even before the loss of the primary research facility, have recently acquired much more reason to defect.