Cutthroat Association

"My favorite contracts are always for Cutthroat Associates. Not just because it feels like scraping the mud off my boots, but because every one of them I put down feels like I’m absolving myself of the sins I’ve committed with this license. We’re all a half-step from becoming them—don’t let anyone tell you different."

— Captain Janna Vocht, Blue Privateer Fleet

Origins of the Disgraced

The Cutthroat Association is not so much a founded guild as it is a collection of outcasts. Each member is a Bountineer who once carried a Letter of Marque—a license that grants wide leeway in hunting criminals but imposes equally harsh penalties for misconduct. Whether from recklessness, deliberate overreach, or simply crossing the wrong employer, these individuals have had their Licenses stripped. Many carry active bounties on their own heads, issued by the very authorities or corporations they once served. Too notorious or too skilled to disappear quietly, they have pooled together into a clandestine brotherhood of killers-for-hire: the Cutthroat Association.

Profession Without Honor

Associates still ply their trade in bounties, but their employers are not governments, corporations, or guild authorities—they are the criminals those institutions fight against. Mafia bosses, smugglers, pirate captains, and warlords all pay the Association for their services. Ironically, their contracts often resemble legitimate Bountineering in form: a Cutthroat may be hired to assassinate a rival cartel leader or break a pirate gang. These jobs occasionally serve the broader public good, though never by intent. What separates Associates from their licensed kin is not necessarily what they do, but who pays them and why. Their line of work cultivates the most ruthless, unscrupulous opportunists, who trade whatever sliver of legitimacy they once had for higher pay and fewer rules.

Ships, Crews, and Operations

Associates are typically captains of their own small warships—light corvettes or armed freighters. Their crews may be fellow ex-Bountineers, mercenaries, or simple opportunists who don’t ask questions. The Association operates more like a labor union than a guild: members share information, swap targets, and sometimes band together for difficult hunts. Yet their internal code is loose at best, built more on fear of betrayal than mutual trust. Every Associate knows that the wrong contract could see them hunted not just by police or corporations, but by other Associates eager to curry favor.

Blood over Bonds

Living captures are rare among the Association. Their clientele have no use for mercy, and so most contracts end in corpses. To the average Associate, killing is the only guaranteed form of job security. This reality makes them prime targets for still-licensed Bountineers. Many legal professionals relish the chance to take on a Cutthroat contract, considering it the ultimate proof of their own moral rectitude: bringing down a colleague who crossed the line. The rivalry between the licensed and the fallen has become almost ritualistic—a grim dance of hunter and hunted, with the balance shifting from one side to the other depending on the contract.

Perception and Paradox

Despite their name, the Cutthroat Association occupies a strange place in Human Space. Among the underworld, they are regarded with both fear and respect: a necessary evil for those too weak to kill their own rivals. Among civilians, their existence is largely unknown; any stability their killings provide is overshadowed by the horror of sanctioned murder-for-hire. And among Bountineers, they serve as both cautionary tale and guilty pleasure—living reminders of what happens when the boundaries of the profession are crossed, and enticing prey that allows licensed hunters to polish their own reputations. Finally, to unaffiliated hit men, they are ironically more terrifying than police or any legitimate bounty hunter.