Talk:Transcendence

Exhack's Ideas

Megacorporations Run by Gods

Self-explanatory. Surely, Apollo, Hermes and Hephaestus would make the perfect biotech/information technology/arms manufacturing megacorp.

Artificial Human Splat

Gods love making life to fuck shit up. Talos, Pandora, Spartii. Artificial humans are great.

Lots of Ruined Megastructures

Also self-explanatory.

Amazon Worlds

The Amazon civilisation at its height occupied about a dozen worlds, however those days are past. Now, following a series of wars with the Dorian these worlds are under occupation by large Hellenic armies. Resistance has not ceased however and despite their high technology and warrior ethic the Greeks suffer a steady stream of causalities.

Thermodon

Once the capital world of the Amazons, Thermodon is home to Themescria the former capital. Subsequent to Theseus's abduction of Hippolyta and the battle with Hercules much of the city was ruined, both by the results of the battle and then by greek aerospace strikes in the war that followed. The city is now used as an administrative capital for the occupation army, and is slowly being restored by the greeks and local populations who have either submitted or been enslaved.

All is not well even in the capital however, and Greek patrols even in the city suffer frequent ambushes and bomb attacks.

Other areas of Thermodon are also under occupation, but there has been a degree of squabbling among the various Greek contingents and continued resistance by guerrilla bands makes this occupation a tentative thing, especially in the hinterlands.

Scythae

One of the most populous Amazon worlds, large areas of Scythae remain outside the control of Hellenic forces due to lack of troops and difficulty matching the amazons' mobility. The Dorian have so far been content to control major population centres and extract goods from the local population, though at times political imperatives and the need to prevent missile strikes or attack guerrilla bases drives them out into the wilds. Amazon forces have also been known to raid city garrisons. This has led to occasional fierce clashes.

It is believed that the amazons still have some quantity of old military equipment stashed out in the wilds, and there are repeated, though unsubstantiated reports of gunships supporting the guerrillas

Vistula

Vistula is a vast area of space, inhabited by many tribes and small nations, but few empires of meaningful size; there is no central authority that would command the scattered Veneti people, and the gods have accepted this state of affairs, being content to remain mostly distant from the daily affairs of their worshippers.

The Veneti inhabiting it are commonly viewed as raiders, and there is a lot of truth in it; the most common system of government is war democracy, rule by the warriors and their chosen chieftain, who would much rather try to take the many riches of Hellas, Marduk or Tian than work to create their own. Well-equipped and battle-hardened Veneti warbands are widely considered a blight in the other regions of space – when they aren’t warring against each other, at least.

Nevertheless, for all their inner conflicts and disunity, the many people of Vistula do self-identify as the Veneti and share a common culture; two warriors fighting against each other will usually worship the same gods, observe the same customs and wage war the same way. Occasionally, a particularly powerful chieftain can carve out an larger nation for himself and his descendants, though it’s rare for them to consist of more than a couple planets at most, and yet rarer for them to survive the death of their ruler. Out of those, two used to be the most powerful – the nations of Polans and Rus. By now, however, the two have fragmented and descended into civil war, turning into over a dozen separate states each, closer to being power and tribal blocks than genuine star-nations nowadays.

The Polans

While they cover a fairly small territory, especially compared to the gigantic Rus, their planets are usually very well-developed by Veneti standards, with many grads, strong garrisons and developed infrastructure. Even now that the country has fallen apart, its leftover states are powerful in their own right, and managed to prove to many a punitive expedition sent by the victims of their raids that they should not be underestimated.

They are also those who have deployed the now-infamous Hussar orbital cavalry armor for the first time before the rest of the Veneti followed suit with their own versions, and to this day Polan chieftains maintain significant forces of them in their druzhinas.

The Rus

The Rus tribes and successor nations cover a very large area of space; the result of an exceptionally skilled and capable ruler, who managed to create a unified Rus nation. However, it, too, eventually shattered, succession issues having tore it apart.

While it would be incorrect to say that the Rus successor states are truly weaker than those of the Polans, they are usually more thinly spread, with less developed individual worlds and smaller, though more numerous, garrisons, forced to cover larger territories. Because of this, the Rus tend to use large numbers of fast and light ships and troops, capable of rapid deployment and launching lighting-fast attacks, unlike the more heavy unit-focused combat doctrine of the Polans, making them some of the most fearsome and capable raiders in all of Vistula.

Interesingly enough, they are on surprisingly good terms with Midgard, one of the old and most successful Rus kings being a former Midgard hero that fell in love with a Rus princess and settled down. While not all Rus successor states honor this, it is still the safest area for Gotarling traders in all of Vistula, a fact that they frequently make good use of.

Glossary of common Vistulan terms

Grad – a highly fortified city; some indeed resemble fortresses more than urban centres. They are the centres of life and industry in Vistula, protecting their citizens with numerous anti-orbital and anti-air weapons and sheltering whole garrisons. Virtually every tribe or nation has at least one, even if a small one.

Druzhina – a detachment of specially selected, veteran troops, serving as personal bodyguards of the ruler and the core of his army; the elite of Veneti military forces. The strenght of a druzhina is usually a good indication of the status, power and wealth of its chieftain.

Corab – a local name for a starship; it refers to both civilian and military ships.

Chernobog, the Black God

One of the many mysteries of the cosmos, nobody is really quite certain what Chernobog is, beyond its nature as a dark matter entity, or where it came from – it appeared in Vistula one day, and from then on, continued to occupy the attention of the entire local pantheon.

Because it is a creature of dark matter, it can only interact with the material world in a limited manner; for all its immense power, it would be of little significance. However, that was not to be; in its apparent quest for the destruction of all life, Chernobog somehow managed to find a way to fight its war.

Chernobog can somehow manipulate the machinery of the Underworld, looking for certain patterns within human souls and then twisting them into its servants. Those of the Veneti who died violent deaths, who suffered terribly in life, commited suicide, the damned – those are the ones that Chernobog recruits from, forming an army of warped monsters, formerly human, yet no more, pushed on by their artificially-induced grief and resentment to bring misery to the living, worshipping their new creator as a new, terrible god.

While the Vistula gods do attempt to stop Chernobog from doing this, it is only partially successful, and by now, there are already many hidden factories producing robotic bodies for Chernobog’s armies of corrupted souls, freeing them from having to rely on hijacked divine equipment.

While the situation is still contained, the gods do not know how long it will stay that way – for now, however, the Veneti encounter Chernobog’s monsters only occasionally; they’re not counted amongst the military juggernauts that oppose the gods in other regions, such as the Giants or the TITANs. Whether this will prove a fatal mistake or not, none can say.

Chernobog’s Armies

The beings that form the backbone of Chernobog’s forces used to be humans – however, they all died miserable deaths, and their despair was turned into hatred by their master, mass-produced armoured combat drones becoming their new bodies. They are the flying, multi-formed Strigas, the shapeshifting, ethereal Zmoras, the sadistic Lady Middays, the bizarre Vodyanoy, the twisted Klobuks called the Stillborn, the vampires – some of them resembling humans, some of them with forms so twisted that merely looking at them is sickening. Many of them crave human blood, even if there is no reason why a machine would do so; most consider it simply yet another act of mindless malevolence of the kind that Chernobog’s servants so delight in.

The worst of them, however, are the Chorts, the horned devils – Chernobog’s own children, partially robots, partially dark matter entities, more suited to this world and capable of interacting with the it where their father can’t; the generals of its armies. Their power is considerable, both in terms of powerful weapons and shields of their machine bodies and their ability to manipulate gravity.