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I give worldbuilding a lot of flack for being a masturbatory exercise combining all the pedantry of a fanwiki with the insularity of a game you'll never play. That said, we all do it, and I have a setting I'm never going to get to do anything with so I may as well share and let anybody have at it. This is a pulp sci-fi weird fiction setting built for a variety of session focuses. The idea is to enable space-fantasy characters that stop just short of having regular magic. The theme of the setting is a lost human colony that has developed without contact from any other interstellar involvement -- whether or not that exists at all. Narya (named for Gandalf's ring of fire, but I'm very open to better names) is a tidally locked planet in orbit of a red star. It has no natural satellites of its own. The planet's day side is a lethally hot desert while the night side is a frozen ice cap. There is a band of, technically, habitable territory around the terminator where liquid water can exist. Stout cities have been built here as the air currents moving from the hot side of the planet to displace the cold result in frequent, cataclysmic storms. Being tidally locked means that the planet has no natural night or day and the habitable bands are locked in perpetual dusk and dawn. The two sides of the world are each dominated by one hegemonic nation, the pair of which are in a perpetual cold war. Travel from one side to the other is difficult and usually done by crossing over the ice sheet on the night side near the poles. So, while no one would choose to live here, the world was colonized because humanity needed new worlds and this one had earthlike gravity and earthlike atmosphere. The liquid oceans near the terminator have complex ecosystems, but there's essentially no native life on the land except what humans clones when they colonized. Time has not been kind to the world's inhabitants, and they have lost much. The first thing they lost was their interstellar colonization fleet, how and why are unresolved mysteries. Space launch platforms exist on the world, but sit relegated to historical study. Wrapping the world is a dense, hazardous debris field and further out are derelict space craft and stations. Sometimes these come crashing down to the world (where they form valuable dungeons full of salvage.) This is the source of Dragoons, mech suits that are highly sought by pseudo-knights that fight as mercenaries. Others are content to become Augs, Mad Max style body modification enthusiasts that are happy to weld a nuclear reactor into themselves and then see how much robot stuff it can power. More cataclysms befell the world. An AI once guided mass swarms of nanomachines, until for lost reasons, it went mad, then shut down. The nanomachine swarm retreated into the world, literally. Veins of grey goo are mined in dangerous prospects, if not handled with care, they will assimilate animal life, turning it into a source of biomechanical monsters. But the swarms can be re-purposed to produce magic-adjacent effects as well by nanogineers. A few people, no doubt half mad, even build themselves suits of armor from the nanomachines and connect with the dormant AI, becoming antennaes, something like a paladin and a Sentai Ranger. One influence was Metal Hurlant / Heavy Metal -- creating a setting where as many cataclysms as possible could have happened in the past. An attempt to reclaim the ocean found a man-o-war like colony organism, but turned it into a gestalt sapience somewhere between a god and the internet. Some of the original colonists operate secret bases frozen into the night side of the world. And the cities are polluted by crime and industry, densely packed pockets where people can eke out a livelihood. VVV: As a statement of contrition, I do know what boustrophedon means and have used it in prose before. I hope that I'm no longer such an immature rear end in a top hat as to be branded as that guy though. ZorajitZorajit fucked around with this message at 00:38 on May 21, 2019 |
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May 20, 2019 21:13
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 18:16 |
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