Operating in secrecy, the Tanukian Templar adopted a meditative monk-like lifestyle, dedicating themselves to both martial prowess and spiritual enlightenment. Their primary objective is to ensure the safety and prosperity ofAmber Krowe's inhabitants while subtly steering their society towards becoming a peaceful technological power within the galaxy.
Overview
The Tanukian Templar are a secretive ancient order founded by 
Tanuki after his release from 
Jethro’s influence. Their original mandate was simple in wording and vast in scope: protect the fledgling world of Amber Krowe, guide its early people away from extinction, and help shape the planet into a peaceful technological power without allowing the hidden hand of 
Varuna’s deeper cosmic machinery to become obvious.
To most citizens, the Tanukian Templar never existed as an institution. At most, they survived as rumors: silent guardians, red-robed monks, old watchers beneath the city, figures glimpsed at the edge of disaster and then erased from public record. In reality, they functioned as a hidden scaffolding for Amber Krowe’s development—protectors, advisors, martial specialists, and keepers of knowledge too dangerous to become public.
Quick facts
- Type: Secretive guardian order / meditative martial tradition
- Founder: Tanuki
- Primary world: Amber Krowe
- Historic mandate: Protect Amber Krowe during its early development
- Modern status: Hidden, diminished, and known only to a select few
- Membership: Fewer than one hundred in the modern era
- Headquarters: Hidden beneath Kwinana on Amber Krowe
- Restricted mandate: Safeguarding knowledge of Red Matter
Role in Tanuki’s legacy
The Templar are best understood as the organizational extension of Tanuki’s post-host vow. After the Jethro catastrophe, Tanuki’s guilt becomes doctrine: Amber Krowe must not be left exposed, and certain hazards must be contained before they can become history-breaking events. The Tanukian Templar inherit that logic in human-scale form.
They are not an empire, army, or public religion. They operate as a quiet continuity mechanism—preserving Tanuki’s will across generations, protecting sites and bloodlines, steering early 
Amber Krowen society through fragile developmental thresholds, and ensuring that the planet’s rise does not immediately reveal the deeper secrets buried beneath it.
Foundation
The Tanukian Templar were established over a millennium ago, during Amber Krowe’s early developmental era—long before the world became the sprawling mega-city and headquarters associated with the 
Systems Alliance. At that stage, Amber Krowe was still a vulnerable world in need of guardianship, guidance, and protection from forces its inhabitants could not yet understand.
The order drew members from many walks of life. Selection was not purely hereditary, political, or martial; candidates were chosen for unusual ability, discipline, secrecy, and devotion to the order’s long mandate. Their training emphasized both combat and meditation, with the belief that true strength came from inner balance, restraint, and harmony with Varuna’s cosmic energy.
Over time, the Templar became myth. Their influence blended into ordinary life so completely that most of Amber Krowe’s people never recognized the order as real. When they intervened, the result entered public memory as coincidence, local legend, or superstition. Among those who knew the truth, however, the Tanukian Templar remained one of the quiet forces holding the planet together.
Doctrine and methods
The Templar’s core doctrine is built around guarded intervention. They do not rule openly, seize institutions, or present themselves as saviors. Instead, they preserve stability by acting before disasters become visible.
Their traditional methods include:
- Hidden guardianship: protecting key settlements, routes, people, and artifacts without public recognition
- Spiritual discipline: using meditation and ritual practice to control fear, aggression, and exposure to dangerous knowledge
- Martial readiness: training members to serve as protectors when secrecy is no longer enough
- Social integration: living as ordinary citizens so the order can observe and respond from within society
- Hazard containment: restricting access to knowledge, locations, and materials that could destabilize Amber Krowe or the wider galaxy
This makes the order less a knightly brotherhood and more a long-duration survival protocol—one disguised as folklore.
Modern Tanukian Templar
In the current era, the Tanukian Templar have largely abandoned any recognizable traditional uniform. Their robes, symbols, and ceremonial presentation survive mostly in private rites, internal memory, and distorted legend. Publicly, modern members blend into everyday Amber Krowen society.
Their meetings are rare, hidden, and focused on whether intervention is necessary. Tanuki himself was known to attend with a smile, treating the order less as an institution beneath him and more as a family-bound extension of his oldest promise. These gatherings concern global affairs, concealed threats, and the question that defines the Templar’s restraint: when does inaction preserve secrecy, and when does secrecy become cowardice?
Despite their diminished numbers, the order remains intact. Fewer than one hundred members are believed to exist in the modern era, but their size is misleading. The Templar’s strength has never come from numbers. It comes from longevity, placement, trust, and the fact that most people looking for power never think to search for monks hidden in plain sight.
Headquarters
Deep beneath the city of Kwinana, part of the massive metropolis on Amber Krowe, lies the covert headquarters of the Tanukian Templar. Its exact location is known only to a handful of individuals. The site functions as a meeting ground, archive, refuge, and spiritual center—a buried continuation of the order’s oldest role.
The headquarters is less a command bunker than a sanctuary for hidden continuity. It preserves records, restricted doctrine, and whatever ceremonial remnants survived the order’s transition into modern anonymity.
Restricted mandate: Red Matter
The most devout members of the order are entrusted with a deeper knowledge and responsibility: safeguarding knowledge of the 
Red Matter. This is not treated as ordinary lore inside the Templar tradition. It is a restricted hazard—something whose study, preservation, and concealment all carry consequences. The existence of the Red Matter, or “The Red” is known only to a few outside of Amber Krowe. It is confirmed that at least Bezekira knows.
Public-facing records preserve this mandate only in damaged or redacted form. The remaining fragments suggest that the inner circle understood Red Matter as a catastrophic mystery tied to Jethro, hidden history, and events too dangerous to expose without protocol.
In practice, this makes the Tanukian Templar the primary containment order of the Red Matter. They do not merely defend people from threats. They defend history from information that can become a threat by being known.
Historical reputation
Because the Tanukian Templar avoided public power, their legacy survives in contradiction. Some traditions describe them as monks. Others remember them as warriors, spies, guardians, ghosts, or bedtime stories. All are partly correct.
To ordinary citizens, they are myth. To a select few, they are a quiet fact of Amber Krowe’s survival. To Tanuki’s broader legacy, they are proof that his answer to catastrophe was not only to build weapons like Rainru, but to build people and institutions capable of remaining when weapons were not enough.
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