Map! - Spinward March 'Callia'

Callia is the home of the Thillian, a race brought to the stars in 643 when Imperial frontier scouts began translating their language.

This has widely been considered a mistake as the Thillian are little more than miscreants and criminals when outside the inscrutable gaze of the law. The Thillian were on the brink of extinction despite maintaining a modest TL3 civilization when the Imperial scouts arrived. The local predators were so well adapted to Callia's environment that the diminutive Thillian were forced to eek out an meager living in the shadows of near omni present and imminent death. Shortly after contact and rudimentary trade began, the tables turned for the Thillian as they immediately armed themselves and, bent on genocidal revenge, systematically devastated the local fauna.

And when the local predators were no longer a challenge they turned on each other. Brutalizing a long held culturally accepted value of "might makes right" that had previously been mostly bloodless. As value within Thillian society was often determined inversely by it's legitimacy, with theft being a common trade practice. The more difficult to secure and prized the item, the more it was valued and the more heroic and virile the Thillian was thought to be.

The Thillian have made grand paintings and epic songs of 'Heroes' that managed to steal the contents of cribs, family heirlooms, and more recently, cars and weapons - often from unwary travellers. The most songed hero is that of "Tuelin". He stole the livestock from his neighbor and adultered his wife. Many years later, poor and destitute, when the farmer realized that his son is not his own, he attempted suicide only to find that the family knives were taken as well- taking from him the ability to end his own life.

With the typical life of a Thillian often being incredibly brutal and short anyway, the occasional automatic weapon and laser carbine did nothing to satiate this cultural standard.

Contact became sporadic for many decades after state warfare became the norm and wasn't reestablished properly till a frontier ship from Omni Consumer Products arrived and formally established a work program with the, then balkanized, Thillian governments. This would be the beginning of many such agreements as the Thillian proved to be willing and able to do a great deal of dangerous and menial labor other sophonts refused to do.

The Thillian are rarely welcome off world as their unfortunate reputation precedes them.