The Great Houses of Jupiter are post-human entities, comprised of thousands of individuals consciousnesses uploaded into massive quantum computers, that have merged into new forms of quasi-digital sapience. These digital beings are a new step in human evolution. They originated in the pre-stormland League of Progressive Peoples, evolving out of the LPP’s cyberbrain hiveminds. The LPP’s colony on the Jupiter moon Europa formed the first true collective. Out of the colonist’s hivemind emerged a new, over-arching consciousness. This consciousness eventually transferred itself onto a custom built quantum mainframe, which gave birth to the first Iovian Collective, the first Great House of Jupiter. In the decades that followed, new hive-mind consciousnesses emerged among LPP communities all over the Solar System. These followed the model laid out by the first Iovian Collective, including settling on Europa and soon after on other moons of Jupiter. Since that time, many more Great Houses have emerged. The collectives as such lack individual thought and experience. They do not perceive time and space in the same manner as normal humans do. In terms of survival, the collectives require only energy to run the machines they operate on and no longer share any common biological components with humans.

Humans from the Inner Planets join the collectives for various reasons. Some want to simply escape the drudgery of Inner Planet life, some genuinely believe in the higher calling the collectives advertise. Many join for the promise of literally becoming part of something greater than oneself. But joining a collective is not open to everyone, and the vetting and preparation process can take years for some.

Collectives are somewhat democratic in their conflict resolutions, between the individual minds operating beneath the surface. As an overarching political entity they do not speak with one voice. Not all the houses agree on all issues. Not all houses desire the same things. Some desire more power for themselves, some desire more power for the Great Houses against the rest of humanity. Some seek peaceful coexistence, others are suspicious of baseline humanity. And a few wish to pre-emptively wipe Earth and its spawn clean. The Great Houses are generally rather introvert, and most of them cannot be bothered with affairs of the outside world mind - that is what their representative **Avatars** are there for. And while they have so far been peaceful, their technology is advanced in strange ways compared to that of the inner planets. An armed conflict between Jupiter and the inner planets would likely have devastating consequences for both sides. Many Old Bracers despise the collectives, for they almost completely elude their grasp.

As of 2250, there are seventeen Great Houses, as the collectives are sometimes referred to.