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Sherwood

TriStar Universe Divergence Notice

This article documents the TriStar Interstellar campaign universe. Sherwood's canon history — the eco-constitution, the Titanium Blade century, the Tyler dynasty — predates the root divergence and is inherited whole. The divergence begins with the First Succession War: canon Sherwood is a remote world "little merchant traffic passed through." This Sherwood is a capital of the Periphery March, and the traffic never stops.

Sherwood is the green third of the triple system: a world of hundred-meter trees and hidden factories, volunteer soldiers and hereditary republicans, where the constitution protects the forests, the forests protect everything else, and the neighbors on Memphis joke that Sherwoodians alphabetize their wilderness. Sherwoodians reply that at least their wilderness is finished.

The Constitution in the Trees (2415–2676)

Sherwood was settled in 2415 by ecologically minded colonists from Belladonna, New Avalon, and western Terra, who named their world for the great English forest and wrote its character into law: Sherwood Green construction, requiring every large facility to be built among the trees with minimal ecological harm — organic forms, vine-clad walls, living roofs — until settlements and even factory complexes became indistinguishable from forested hills. They added strict population limits outside Marion, species protection, skilled-only immigration, free agricultural universities, and volunteer-only police and militia. New Avalon's political class predicted the eccentric colony would strangle itself. Instead, by the Star League's dawn, Sherwood held over a hundred million prosperous, educated people — and native Chestnut Astoria herds moving along the sides of city buildings, and Digging Glimmershawls raising mating mounds in Marion's parks.

The Blade Century and the Sheriffs (2676–2765)

The same pristine wilderness that made Sherwood idyllic made it a bandit haven. When the AFFS declined to help in 2674 — a snub Sherwood filed away a full century before the famine gave the whole March its grievance — the Court of Elders went over New Avalon's head to the Star League. The SLDF's Third Army spent decades learning that BattleMechs and orbital reconnaissance are worthless under a hundred-meter canopy, while the Taurian-backed Titanium Blade pirates grew from a company to a demi-brigade, capped by the infamous 2759 Montfriar raid that netted them a Leopard full of Wasp LAMs. (An SLDF admiral's 2731 suggestion to solve the problem by orbital bombardment produced planet-wide protests and a permanent Sherwoodian axiom: the people who cannot find you will offer to burn the map.)

The Blade were finally beaten in 2763 by Major General Jonas Tyler and the 132nd Royal Jump Infantry — treetop VTOLs and jump troops fighting the forest's way — earning the media name "Sherwood's Sheriffs" and the planet's lasting love. Tyler married into the baronage, was named earl, and was then shipped with the 132nd into the Periphery Uprising, where Taurian forces singled out the Sheriffs and destroyed them with exceptional brutality. The crippled Tyler came home with the survivors to found Tyler's Terrors; the Court kept the earldom, amended the constitution into a crowned republic (the Tylers ceremonial, with exactly one vote), and Sherwood entered the Succession Wars with two grudges — New Avalon's indifference, and Taurian steel — that the TriStar centuries would braid into its politics forever.

The Famine Alliance and the Green Arsenal (2786–3020s)

The First Succession War rewrote Sherwood's place in the universe. In the canon that might have been, Sherwood stayed remote and lightly trafficked; in this one, Starr Traders' famine runs bound it to Memphis and Lackland, and Sherwood's contribution — timber, cattle, and increasingly the products of the Trolland & Trolland works — made it the triple system's provisioner and armorer. Sherwood Green forestry proved the constitution's economic vindication: selective harvesting of hundred-meter giants under Elder-court quota, milled in canopy-clad complexes, shipped as the March's structural timber and the Inner Sphere's most smugly certified luxury hardwood. The Huntingdon meadowlands carried the cattle; Loxley carried the mills; and under Birkland's canopy, T&T — a firm with a name like a law office and the temperament of one — grew from a rifle shop into the March's small-arms and artillery house, absorbed into the TriStar constellation in the early 3030s without changing its letterhead, its labor practices, or (auditors report, with feeling) its filing system. The T&T Sniper artillery system is the firm's heavyweight signature — most famously as the main armament of the Malice AW-50 E1 — and its tubes stood in the gun lines of the Ledger Barrage, a fact T&T's catalog mentions exactly once, without adjectives, which is T&T for pride.

Sherwood's other industrial anchor is Greene & Harvester, headquartered in Marion: the eco-world's agricultural-machinery house turned powerplant maker, whose GH PowerMaxx fuel-cell series grew directly out of the constitution — Sherwood Green emissions law made clean electric drive a legal requirement long before it was a military virtue, and G&H simply sold the compliance to everyone else. When TriStar's Malice AW-50 wheeled fighting vehicle family entered production at the Sherwood works (developed 3011, fuel-cell A2 from 3020), it did so on GH PowerMaxx plants and T&T guns — a fifty-ton tank that is, in the fullest legal sense, constitutionally compliant, and which the 7th Sherwood describes as "quiet enough to be polite about it."

The military implication of Sherwood Green took the March's planners about one meeting to grasp: a world where factory complexes read as hills, where orbital intelligence fails, and where an SLDF field army once spent ninety years losing to light infantry is, functionally, a fortress that photographs as a nature preserve. Sherwood became the triple system's deep arsenal and its war school. The Jabberwocky School — the TSG's forest-warfare course, run jointly with the militia whose apex-predator name it borrows — is where every Guards officer learns what the Third Army never did.

The Rangers (3023–3070)

The 7th Sherwood Rangers, the TSG's third regiment, recruit from the deepest volunteer-soldier tradition in the March: Jabberwockies, Court Guard, Terrors lineage families. The regiment's character is the planet's — courteous, green-blooded, allergic to collateral damage — and its defining moment came in the Fourth Succession War, when Ranger signal troops used their improvised tri-vid C3 rigs to broadcast evacuation routes to enemy civilians during the Sarmaxa raid, marching a Capellan city's population out of the crossfire on commercial channels while the fighting was still under way. New Avalon's staff colleges teach Sarmaxa as an information-operations case study. Sherwood teaches it as manners.

At home, the Rangers' garrison rotations double as forestry service — the regiment holds Elder-court appointments as fire wardens, a constitutional arrangement absolutely no other BattleMech formation in the Inner Sphere can claim and the 7th will explain at any length if permitted.

Sherwood in 3070

The green capital of 3070 is what the founders wrote down, plus traffic: 175 million people who could be four hundred million and have constitutionally declined; Marion on its river, the Court of Elders still dominated by the five old families plus the militia seat and the settlement delegates; the Tyler earls performing their single vote with practiced ceremony; T&T's order book full; the timber quota argued to the decimal every session; and the Jabberwocky School graduating classes that go on to garrison the Tortuga worlds — where Sherwood's fire wardens teach ex-pirate townships controlled burning, which both sides have agreed to find unremarkable.

Above it all, the canopy — under which, Sherwoodians like to note, there could be anything.

Planetary Locations

• Marion — capital, on the River Kent and the Peaceful Sea; Court of Elders; Taurian liaison office (and its photograph)
• Trolland & Trolland Works — small-arms and artillery manufacture (the Sniper system), under the Birkland canopy
• Greene & Harvester — agricultural machinery and GH PowerMaxx fuel-cell powerplants; headquarters, Marion
• The Sherwood Works — Malice AW-50 wheeled fighting vehicle production (TriStar/MMS)
• The Jabberwocky School — TSG/militia forest-warfare course
• Montfriar — former SLDF forward base, site of the 2759 Blade raid; now a T&T proving ground with a small, pointed museum
• Lake Lionheart — aquaculture facilities, Loxley
• The Sheriffs' Memorial — Marion, honoring the 132nd Royal Jump Infantry

Differences from the Canonical Timeline

Cross-reference: D-002 (Firebeard erasure), D-006/D-007 (triple system), D-008 (this article). The Sarmaxa raid is proposed as the fill for the source history's "raid of XXXXXXX" placeholder — swap the world freely.

Jabberwocky · Chestnut Astoria · Digging Glimmershawl — all Sherwood entries →