Patreon Poll: The Phoenix Cluster -- Part I

 

Are there plans to add parts of the Galactic Fringe to the Atlas, or otherwise add areas of Westerly influence to the setting? I know to some extent it's supposed to be "fill in the blank" But I think the setting struggles somewhat with a lack of properly Westerly settings, outside of the asteroid belts (which is a different type of Westerly)

-- Mavrick

EDIT: Quick aside, but speaking of polls, if you're a backer, we have the monthly Release the Balloon People on Patreon and Subscribestar. Vote on what you'd like to see added to the wiki!

The Westerly are an interesting ethnicity in Psi-Wars, and one that I'd like to revisit in more detail as I explore their culture, but they pose a bit of a problem in exploring.  In a lot of ways, they fit the "Barbarian" niche of the setting, not in the sense that they are primitive, but that much of history was written not by powerful men ensconced in towers with legions of scribes writing their every deed, but often by "hard men of the desert," great waves of resilient, "uncivilized" men who hard learned to survive in the shatterzones beyond imperial reach.  A lot of history fades from view as we move beyond the gates of the cities that civilization so loved, but that doesn't mean the people beyond those gates didn't matter.  They mattered a lot.

The Westerly exist on the low end of the political power spectrum. They are the tribesman of desert worlds, the crochety miners in asteroid belts, and the religious pilgrims of remote worlds on the edges of civilization.  They don't seek to rule, and they don't create heroic conquerors with amazing psychic powers or technological prowess to whom paeans will be sung for centuries to come.  The result, though, is that just as they fade from the view of history, they fade from your view.  If you read this blog, or frequent the wiki or the discord, you can likely name at least one Maradonian Great House, and probably several; you can likely name at least one major Shinjurai world, and perhaps even discuss some of the features of their royal family.  But you probably can't name any Westerly tribe, or a miner clan of Grist, or even a single name of a major Westerly figure.

I had intended to flesh them out more as I got to the specifics of planets, as that's where they tend to "live," not writing their name in the stars, but in the soil of the worlds they inhabit.  But I might never really get to any of these worlds.  I mean, it's been years, and I've barely detailed a few worlds.  So far, I've mostly succeeded at painting broad pictures of the galaxy.  Perhaps I need to paint a broad picture of the Westerly, or give them a place where there culture is so obviously dominant that we can afford to discuss the broader strokes of Westerly culture in a way that makes it easier to discuss the Westerly more broadly.

But such a place already exists!  It's the Phoenix Cluster.  I had always envisioned at least three major regions in the Galactic Fringe, beyond the edges of the galaxy: the Draco Super-Constellation (the home of the draconic Mug), some place from which the Scourge staged their invasion and in which they can still be found, and the Phoenix Cluster.  I originally imagined the Phoenix Cluster as beyond the Glorian Rim, with the world of Exile as a "bridging point" between it and the Rogue Stars. I pictured them as a stand-in for Space America in a WW2 metaphor, where the Alliance was Space Europe and Cybernetic Union as Space Russia. They even showed up as a mention in the Fourth Templar Chapter poll (which was a bit of a disaster).  But if there was ever a part of the galaxy dominated by the Westerly, it would be that one.

Why haven't I gotten to it? Well, I wanted to detail the rest of the galaxy first, but that seems to be taking too long and I'm getting caught up in details as I seem to not heed my own advice against getting bogged down in details when there's broader work that hasn't been done yet. So why not detail it now?

And while I'm detailing it, why not do it together? In a lot of ways, the Fringe is the place for players to stick massive chunks of the setting in if they want.  If you want your own space empire, or an ancient and fractured kingdom that's slowly dying, with little relation to the rest of the galaxy, the Fringe is the place to do it.  So if there was ever a place for audience input, it's out on the edges of the galaxy, where we're more free to play.  I also feel like I've not had many polls lately, and I could probably milk it for a few months, because you can't do a single poll on an entire region.  But that would be great, because we could explore lots of elements of setting building, and have an entire section of the setting that was poll driven and that addressed this lack of the Westerly, and introduced a rather important political playing piece as well.

So, this will be a multi-part set of polls, with the first today. I'll try to do the rest monthly, as we revisit previous poll entries to get more clarity, or expand on parts of the setting.  The most likely result of this will be simple entries on the Galactic Atlas, but we'll see how complicated it gets. The link should appear in your applicable backer site.