Army Lore 107 - Founding

This post continues the advice series on designing the lore for your army focusing upon the origins of your armed contingent.

A note for all of you.  Obviously it must have been at least a few days since I posted, my guess is I won't be able to post at least for another 4 days when I leave where I am currently without internet and will go to a friend's house for a week, so when you are reading this I should have several of these written and you should be able to see them all en masse as they will be posted in groups until I have caught up with the posts to reflect the daily writing.  Until then I hope that you were not too bothered with the wait.  Now onto the article itself.

So you've gone into some serious depth in how the individual pieces of your army operate and their story, how they got to be like they were.  Now is the time to put all of them together and to come up with a coherent and consistent theme for your entire army.  How did they all get to be part of the same force?  What lead this group to all work together and not be under the banner of another commander or ideal?  What drove the founding in the first place?  If all goes as planned these questions should be answered by the end of this post.

So the first question to start with is what is the driving purpose of the founding?  What necessitated its occurrence?  This can be answered following a variety of themes.  Local culture could be one:  for instance the first-born of the Vostroyans I believe it is for the imperial guard regiment are given off because of their previous mistake of choosing not to provide the required troops and instead focusing upon their factory output.  There is now a significance and pride in the fact that the first born of every family, from lowly factory worker to the planetary governor must all serve in the military.  The governmental law could be another, mandating that a certain amount of troops are recruited every set amount of time or in the event of [insert event here].  A third category could follow the lines of necessity, such as a military conflict that required more fighters or a serious issue of planetary defense due to a recent invasion while most of the military was off world or so.

The next piece to clarify would be why the force was organized as it is now.  What made the commander be in his position and not some other individual?  Who took in the resumes of everybody and assigned them to their unit before they even had some of those defining characteristics that you already wrote about.  Or were they already a unit from another army or just independent, and how was the call made to keep them together?  Were there in fact any units that were split apart or thrown together, something that you could add to the story of some units or others that you hadn't thought of before?  How was the call made on who to give the transports to, who to give jump packs to, and who would get to hoof it really, really quickly?  These questions might lead you to defining a little bit more on the military or government organization and create a few individuals that you can refer to in stories or Battle Reports later, an added boon.

The final documentation regarding the founding is any additional ideas that you have floating around your head.  Are there major issues that lead to the founding that have permeated the theme of the army or its attitude or style of action?  For instance the Tanith First and Only try really, really hard to survive since they are the last of their planet (that isn't every part of them, but it is a significant piece).  Was there significant politics involved with the regiment, and does that intrigue follow them wherever they go such that their deployments are often determined more by politicians than by any real strategy?  For this portion of Army lore, just try and think as far as you can in terms of the founding of the army and see where it takes you.