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.

More Kronos Musings: Geography

Now that we know something of its history, what does it look like today? I generally don't like "island worlds" though on some level it's unavoidable. Most games can't handle one fully detailed world (Earth) and even your most far ranging fantasy games rarely escape a single continent. Still, we can add a few more details than just "one city." Nonetheless, let's start with one city.

More Kronos Musings: History

 So, quite some time ago, I announced a playtest, a heist; we did a poll, and Kronos won out.  I expect it did so because it's an interesting, alien world set in the midst of an otherwise human dominated part of space, and that's pretty much all we knew about it at the time.  I believe I've made some musings on it before, but let's do another iterative cycle on it, where I simply walk through some basic logic, and what I need to make it an interesting heist location.

I was originally going to post the whole thing at once, but it turned out to be way too big for me to handle, so here it is in the first chunk.

What is Kronos? Why is Kronos?

So, let's start with why Kronos even ended up in the Psi-Wars atlas.  One of the things that irritates me about a lot of space history is the timelessness of it.  Star Wars is the worst, of course, with Coruscant being a big, urban capital world for basically all of galactic history, at least as far back as the Old Republic.  This would be like deciding that Rome was the capital of the world for all time, when it wasn't even the capital of Rome for the entire history of the Roman empire! Things move, they change, and they get left behind.  I wanted to express that, and to acknowledge the slow shift in power from the alien empires that made up the early history of the Psi-Wars galaxy.  Once upon a time, the power of the galaxy lay centered more towards the "eastern" half of the galactic core, around Kronos, between the Umbral Rim of the Ranathim, and the Arkhaian Spiral of the Eldoth.  Then came the Alexian Crusades and the conquest of the galaxy by humanity, and the center of power shifted to the "West" of the galactic core, closer to the Glorian Rim of humanity, and Sovereign.  This makes Kronos "the old capital."

So, in a sense, Kronos has always been a historical world.  It's had a few name changes, from Chronos (time) to Cronus (the titan, the king of the bygone age) to Kronos (an aptly confusing blend of the two), all meant to represent this notion of Kronos as a world deeply embedded in the history of the setting.  Thus, it's most distinguishing feature is that it featured strongly in, and retains features of, previous eras, making it something of a time capsule world.

But I don't want to go too far in that direction.  We often freeze locations in history based on a preferred narrative perspective.  I think Egypt suffers the most from it: when we discuss Egypt, most people immediately think of the pyramids, mummies, great monuments to bygone eras, the nile, palm trees, etc.  But this was _but one moment in time_ and from a very long time ago, once that was trumpeted wildly in the early 20th century, a moment in time that has set a lot of the tone of pop culture. But Egypt has been many, many things since, from a seat of Greek power to the breadbasket of the Roman empire, to one of the most important regions for Christianity to a seat of power of the Muslim world, home to Saladin and the Ismaili sect that later spawned the Hashashin, to the home of the Mamluks, and I could go on and on. I wanted Kronos to feel like that: it was not some world frozen in a single era, but one that had accumulated history, like layers of dust, over the eons, and you could see all of them every day, such as being in Egypt, with the pyramids at your back, a coptic church before you, and hearing the Islamic call to prayer.

Brainstorming Cronus

 I have an impending playtest wherein we will play a heist in Psi-Wars.  This is intended to shake out the civilian/criminal/law enforcement elements of the game, and while I'd like to run it in the next couple of months, it might turn out to be more work than that.

As usual, when I decide to run a session, I turn my eye towards the setting.  Grist got more detail with Tinker Titan Rebel Spy, and the Tall Tales of the Orochi Belt gave attention to the Orochi belt.  We have lots of places I could run a heist, so I ran a poll for the playtest group, and they tied between Samsara and Cronus, and it looks like we'll be doing Chronos Cronus.

I thought I'd be a little more public about my thought-processes for what Cronus would look like, rather than hiding all of my work, as the point of this blog is to watch my process.  And the first step when detailing a world is to stop and talk about "everything that you know" and figure out what questions you need to ask about it.

Everything that follows are just my musings as I noodle around as to what this world might look like in detail.  If you want to discuss it, to complain about it, to argue against it, or to advocate for particular elements, feel free!  This is a creative process, after all.

Wiki-Showcase: What the hell have you been doing over the past month?

I had a nice, long vacation, and also announced the up-coming playtest for the action vehicular combat system (which, alas, had to be postponed, as all the actual action vehicular combat characters couldn't make it.  I've added a new one so this is less likely to happen in the future).  In the meantime, I've been doing a lot of work primarily on the wiki, but not a lot here on the blog.  So, I thought I'd take a moment to highlight some of the bigger updates.

The great thing about actually running something is that it totally clarifies what you actually need.  Thus, most of the changes I've made have been to facilitate the coming campaign. Not all of them are "complete" or as thorough as some of my previous work, but we can always go back and change them.

The main changes include:

• The Fighter Ace Template
• The Officer Template
• The Wanderer Background
• Cybernetics
• The Orochi Belt as a setting

Most of these are just a port of the original material over to the blog, though all of them involve some reworking.  The Orochi Belt is wholly new, but treat it as a draft; it will doubtless get a lot of changes over time. I've also made little changes to various other parts, such as:

• The "Don't Drink the Water" sidebar in Broken Communion

I've also written up some additional things as Patreon Previews, such as the Asrathi and the Scavenger template, but these will be ported into the wiki soon.

There are always lots of little edits (I have a few readers who love to send me little bits of errata, so we discuss them. I try to get on them right away, lest I forget them.)

Psi-Wars Atlas VI - The Sylvan Spiral

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The Sylvan Spiral has long hidden its mysteries not behind a veil, as with the Umbral Realm, but with a mysterious web of hyperspatial filaments that prevent travel deep into its heart. Throughout most of galactic history, this meant that march of conquest across the galaxy largely left this arm untouched. Those who have braved its depths find wondrous worlds, flush with life and untouched by time.

(Patrons, don't forget to vote on which world you'd like to see more detail on!)

The Sylvan Constellations

• The Spindel Web: The gateway to the Sylvan Spiral, bio-technological adept Shinjurai clans rule this constellation and have tamed their worlds into beautiful gardens.
  
  
• The Morass: The great bulk of the Sylvan spiral has its hyperspace lines cut apart by alien “thalline-filaments” along which its space-based lifeforms travel. These interconnect the ecologies of its many varied worlds, and make for extraordinarily diverse life found within the thousand worlds of the Morass
  
  
• The Serpentis Constellation: On the farthest edges of the Sylven Spiral, outsider civilizations from beyond the galaxy wage war on one another and make alliances with the Slaver empire.
  

Psi-Wars Atlas V - The Umbral Rim

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Alternate Names: The Dark Arm.

The Umbral Rim invokes both dread and a sense of curious wonder. The veils of its nebulae shroud its worlds from sight, and its alien inhabitants exude an aura of exotic appeal. Its strange philosophies have swept the galaxy, and its inhabitants once ruled the galaxy.

Where the Glorian Rim is home to the least aliens, the Umbral Rim is home to the most, which makes this region of space a melting pot of cultures and genetics. The three most famous alien species to arise from the Umbral Rim are the sacred Keleni, who produced the True Communion philosophy, the vampiric and beautiful Ranathim, who conquered the Galaxy and produced ecstatic cults of Dark Communion, and the hungry and disgusting Slavers, who currently rule the Umbral Rim.

The dead system of Styx and its nebulae dominate the Umbral Rim’s astrography. Once the homeworld of the Ranathim, some secret and dread technology, suspected to be of Eldothic origin, caused their star to go supernova and collapse into a black hole. Its death shattered the hyperspace routes and cast a nebulous veil over the Umbral Rim. Its death also broke the Ranathim’s tyranny, and they fell from being a race who held others in slavery and into a race itself enslaved. Today, those Slavers ply the stars of the Dark Arm, demanding a tribute of flesh, trading in the alien races native to their region of space and coveting the chance to capture more exotic species, like Traders, the Nehudi or even humans!

The nebulae and the broken hyperspace routes make travel through the Umbral Rim difficult, but not impossible if one is familiar with the region. A successful roll of Area Knowledge (Umbral Rim) grants a +2 to Navigation rolls, while a successful roll of Area Knowledge for a specific constellation within the Umbral Rim grants a +4.

The Umbral Constellations

• The Hydrus Constellation: The sacred worlds of the Keleni and the Templar; the origin of True Communion
• The Corvus Constellation: Skirting the edges of the Shroud, these worlds are the most accessible of the deep Umbral Rim
• The Shroud: The heart of the great nebula the covers the Dark Arm, where the dead world of Styx rules.
• The Sanguine Stars: The far end of the Umbral Rim, and heart of the Slaver Empire.

For Companion (or better) Patrons, you can vote on what worlds you'd like to see more of here.

Psi-Wars Atlas IV - The Arkhaian Spiral

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The cold worlds and the blue suns of the Arkhaian spiral have a long history of technological excellence and eldritch disaster. It seems to teeter forever on the edge of collapse, with only the most recent innovations keeping it alive just that little bit longer. The combined calamties of the Cybernetic Union and the Anacridian Scourge may prove to much for it, but the Valorian Empire does all it can to save this progressive part of space from final apocalypse.

The Arkhaian Spiral gave rise to the Eldoth, a callous race with unparalleled technology that, for a time, held the galaxy in their sway. Their defeat and extinction at the hands of the Ranathim cleansed the arm, and left it free to be co free to be colonized by humanity, the Traders and other races; even the younger races wisely gave the ancestral worlds of the Eldoth wide berth. The arm developed into a region of exceptional technological prosperity and wealth, and came to rival the prestige of the Glorian rim.

When the Anacridian Scourge descended from beyond the edge of the galaxy, they tore through the Arkhaian Spiral, consuming its people and laying waste to its worlds. While the Galactic Federation dithered, Leto Daijin acted and reformed the military and purged the Arkhaian arm of the Scourge. The Federation may have seen him as a usurper, but the people o the Arkhaian Spiral see him as a hero.

With so much loss of life, the people of the Arkhaian Spiral turned increasingly to the support of robots, and were thus unprepared for the rise of the machines. The Cybernetic Union, which purports to bridge the gap between man and machine and to offer equal rights for all, began to force cybernetic alterations on humans and purge all who disagreed with its programs (robot or human). The now genocidal military machine of the Cybernetic Union wages war on the Valorian Empire, while the memory of the Anacridian Scourge and the Eldothic race lay forgotten… for now.

The Arkhaian Constellations

• The Kybernian Constellation: The last remnants of human civilization in the war-torn spiral, the Empire offers them their last hope.
• The Borean Stars: The cool, blue stars at the heart of the robotic Cybernetic Union, where humanity has been forced to submit or be exterminated
• The Telas Constellation: The homeworlds of the dread Eldoth, now under the protection of an ancient sect of the Templars.
• The Arkhaian Chasm: The interstellar gap between the Glorian Rim and the Arkhaian spiral, with vast swathes of tranquil emptiness.

Patrons (Companions and better), don't forget to vote on which world you'd like to see more detail on.  If you missed it, there's also a poll for yesterday's post, the Glorian Rim.

Psi-Wars Atlas III - The Glorian Rim

Before I dive into the post proper, a note on the navigational traits of galactic arms:

 

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30,0000 parsecs (100,000 lightyears); curved. It takes about 5 months to go from the point where the galactic arm meets the galactic core, to the very end of it with a rating 1 drive. Crossing the galaxy from the tip of one arm to the tip of another arm typically takes 1 year with a rating 1 drive.

The Glorian Rim

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The Glorain Rim gave birth to the galaxy’s current rulers: humanity. Its worlds nurtured their rise and today, houses the last remnants of the Galactic Federation: the Alliance. Thus, its occupants are primarily human. The Glorian Rim’s ancient traditions date back to the dawn of human space travel, and the most prestigious of aristocratic houses trace their roots to its worlds. It houses one of the few major powers in the Galaxy that can pose a reasonable threats to the Empire in the form of its alliance of psychic aristocracy and free worlds, which means it faces the constant threat of invasion from the Valorian Empire.

The Glorian Constellations include:

• The Maelstrom: the swirling hyperspatial storm churned by a pulsar that guards the entrance of the Arm
• The Ancestral Spur: The homeworlds of humanity
• The Golden Belt: The most fertile worlds of the Glorian Rim
• The Rogue Stars: Scattered stars on the edge of the rim; a hive of scum and villany.

A Note on Labyrinthine Worlds

Some worlds in the Glorian and Sylvan Rim are “labyrinthine,” which means their cores died millennia ago and some ancient race riddled the world with endless tunnels and passageways. Persephone is the most famous of labyrinthine worlds; the symbolic caverns of the Akashic Mysteries imitate the labyrinthine passages beneath Persephone, where the first oracles of the Akashic Mysteries first encountered the Devils of Persephone and mastered the art of peering through deep time. However, other such labyrinthine worlds exist, scattered throughout space and, some say, are fundamentally connected to one another somehow. Those who navigate the labyrinths can, according to this legend, travel from one labyrinthine world to another without ever leaving the labyrinth. Navigating a labyrinth is perilous; beyond the danger of becoming lost in its endless passages, traps protect secret chambers and monstrous creatures (like the devils of Persephone) roam their depths.

Other Labyrnthine worlds include:

• Perspehone (Glorian Rim)
  
• Caliban (Glorian Rim)
  
• Exile (Glorian Rim)
  
• Nehud (Sylvan Spiral)
  
• Jotan (Sylvan Spiral)
  
• Verdant (Sylvan Spiral)
  
• Tho-Tan (Pheonix Super-Cluster)
  

Psi-Wars Atlas II: the Galactic Core

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The Galactic core is an oblong sphere roughly 15,000 parsecs (50,000 light years) across (it takes about a month for a fully cross the galactic core). The constellations of the Galactic Core are exceedingly easy to navigate via hyperspace, meaning it has more than its fair share of colonized worlds. It also has more hyper routes than any other part of the galaxy, making whomever controls it a master of trade across the galaxy and between the arms, and thus it serves as the prime seat of galactic power.

The Galactic Constellations:

• The Galactic Heart: the inhospitable center of the galaxy dominated by a super-massive black hole.
• The Crown: The seat of the Galactic Empire.
• The Trader Band: A winding, interconnected set of stars that reach from one side of the galactic core to the other, allowing for trade and filled with rebellious aliens.
• The Carina Constellation: Human-settled space wracked with the tyranny of the Empire.
• The Crucible: The industrial core of the Empire.
• The High Halo: A set of stars once held sacred by previous civilizations.

 If you are a patron (Companion or higher), you can vote on which world (if any) you'd like more detail on.

The Psi-Wars Atlas I: Introduction and Overview

 For this month, my patreons voted for a setting overview.  The intent of this vote was no more than 2,000 words, but as you can tell from the fact that I've talked about nothing but maps for the past couple of weeks, it has turned out to be a much larger undertaking than I expected, and it'll take awhile to release, as there's quite some material.

I'm often asked what my method for setting creation is, and I wanted to take a moment to highlight my approach to this one.  If you look over my last two posts, you'll get some perspective on how I sorted the galaxy, and there's more that could be done.  I could sit down and make sure that I don't repeat myself with systems that are too similar ("Dantooine. Tatooine."), or ensure that every star system has something interesting in it, something players can deal with.

I didn't do that.  Instead, I did something else, and I'll offer it to you as a tip, especially for your first run: Write what you know.  People too often stare at a blank sheet and freeze up; when I ask them what they want to write, they say they "don't know."  That's a lie, you do know, you're just worried.  Write what you've got in your head!  It won't be good, but you can always go back and revise it later.

That's what I'm doing here.  I'm writing what's been accumulating in my head, based on the core themes I see of each region of the galaxy, the various aliens I've written up, the snippets of history I've stitched together, and mentioned worlds that have made it into character backgrounds or faction write-ups.  In many cases, I had to make up names on the spot to vague concepts I'd been using for quite a long time.

This is, perhaps, a long-winded way of saying that this is a first draft.  We'll almost certainly revisit, renaming worlds, expanding them, adding new ones, removing redundant ones.  Thus, I welcome feedback, and even encourage you to suggest your own worlds.  You can leave a comment, or hit me up on our discord!

This will also be long, so I've broken it up into pieces, and not everything is even done at the moment of this writing (I have the galactic core and half of one of the four arms written). I also want to emphasize that the detail here is sparse, because this is a setting overview, and not a deep dive into specific worlds.