Ruined Cosmos

North-West Sector

BG-281 'Requiem'

Explorer by: Acatalepsy

Described by: FBH

The system has 10 planets (5 rocky and 5 gas giants), in the inner system, and a second system based on a dark Jovian mass in the outer system. Planet 3 appears to be in the midst of a nuclear winter, but has a Terran like environment amid the ice and radiation (or the remains of one) there's remains of a 20th-early 21st century level civilization on it, and the wreckage of various satellites and what appear to be space vehicles (relatively primitive pulse drives and chemical rockets.) The destruction is strangely patterned, and does not show a clear set of targeting priorities. For instance there are numerous intact missile silos and air bases, while other areas of what appear to be normal countryside have been intensively nuked. The number of warheads deployed is huge, with well over 100,000 weapons of yields from 10 to 100,000 kilotons.

Evidence from the planetary surface suggests that there were survivors of the apocalypse in various bunker complexes, but these were violently breached by some form of high technology attackers. There are no bodies within the bunker complexes, and record banks seem to have been systematically destroyed or removed. Your intelligence believes that there may be additional groups of survivors somewhere on the surface or in hidden subsurface shelters.

Various probes are also found on the other rocky planets.

Near the Dark Jovian mass there is some kind of neutrino source, however skip drives inexplicably fail when they approach within around an AU, so any experdition will take a while and possibly require building some kind of forward logistical base.

Byblos

Explorer by: Zeronet

Described by: Bossmuff

The Byblos System is a single, young star, surrounded by no fewer than four dense asteroid belts. Preliminary surveys are difficult due to the sheer quantity of radiation and other static jamming most signals, complicated further by the system's only inhabitants, a series of space-faring miners who primarily frequent the outermost, largest belt. Superstitious and xenophobic, they tend to resist any attempts to explore the belt, though they lack organization or numbers to pull off any coordinated military manoeuvres. They avoid the other belts with religious terror, particularly the system's only planet, which resides second from the sun.

Byblos' second world is overwhelmingly green, even seen from space. The planet has far less ocean than Earth, primarily land-masses that appear bright emerald. Great jungles and vibrant forests cover the entirely of the planet, forming a dense and lush ecosystem teeming with life. A wide assortment of animal, plant, and insect life teem in the planet, thriving on a seeming abundance of resources and energy from the nearby star. The planet seems perfectly balanced to attain long summers and to keep winter weather localized closer to the poles than on more Sol-grade planets.

What's more, obvious structures can be located from orbital viewing, revealing several large structures rising out of parts of the forests and jungles. They are hard to view, however, as many are heavily integrated with their surrounding environments – great terraces rising out of jungle canopy, themselves laden with parks, or carved out of the tree-coated mountains. Dubbed 'Hanging Gardens' by the natives who observed it, these structures carry their own fast parks and small towns of heavy green-space. The culture present seemed to have a heavy love of gardens and horticulture, as evident from photos.

The unsettling element comes from long-term obvervations – no people seem present in these cities, with only some animal life moving among them. Most of the natural predators and larger herbivores ignore the human-made strucutres entirely, shunning them for the wilder expanses. Though deserted, the cities seem timeless, never fading to wear. No radio or other broadcasts can be heard, save for a few automated messages of terrible quality. The only signal achieved from space is a greeting, welcoming newcomers to 'The Five Gardens of Byblos', and giving broken account of several landmarks. The only truly clear one, mentions “The Master Library of-” before cutting off – the outer belt natives tell stories of this Library, legends that it contains all the secrets to life, the heavens, and hell.

There are two moons orbitting Byblos, both awash in greenery, though lacking any oceans. One is largely like the main planet, possessing only a few visible structures largely the same as its parent. The second, however, is a tangled haze of aerial fungus, spewing off into space before fading as it goes dormant and freezes in vacuum. A few broken structures can be seen with proper radio-scanning, crushed by the plant life, but the overgrowth makes such studies difficult.

FURY-10 'Pasargadae'

Explorer by: Hollewanderer

Described by: General G

FURY-10 is a desolate system centered around a lone Red Dwarf that is best known as being the last stop before arriving at the swirling vibrant madness that is the pirate haven at Magellan. It possesses a few debris belts, a single unremarkable Jovian planet, and a few small rocky planetoids. none of which presently have any known settlements. Few ships linger long, mostly because there's simply no reason to but also because local spacers are generally aware of the superstitions that have grown up around the system. A few attempts to set up fueling stations or outposts have suffered various mishaps, and automated satellites left in the system never seem to live up to their expected service lives. Rumors persist that a number of passing starships have simply vanished while passing through and of massive stonework structures sighted on the surface of a planetoid or moon.

Naysayers point out that it's certainly not hard to explain why ships might vanish near a port frequented by rival pirate factions, and that there's no proof of any mysterious ruins. The stories about the ruins never even agree on which minor world possesses them. Nevertheless, most spacers try to avoid lingering in FURY-10 longer than they need to.

Sargon I 'Spyglass'

Explorer by: Deathstroke

Described by: Screwball

Spyglass is a pleasant yellow star with four rocky planets and three gas giants, two of which boast impressive ring systems. The rocky inner worlds and the giant planets are separated by a moderately dense asteroid belt.

The star system is inhabited by a technologically sophisticated civilisation on par with the interstellar average, and until recently was embroiled in a complicated, multi-sided conflict between over a dozen different major national factions and a multitude of smaller groups, often over totally different issues. As far as any outside observers can tell, the 'Great War' was more a case of several dozen entirely unrelated wars occurring at the same time and blending together into a mess so incomprehensible that even the various Spyglass factions had difficulty keeping track of who was actually at war with who. There are multiple recorded instances of 'allies' realising mid-battle that they were actually supposed to be on different sides, and at least two cases where this occurred to both sides at once.

Such a chaotic situation could not last forever, and out of the mess of internecine conflict emerged a pan-system federation, built on the mutual desire of everybody in Spyglass not to have to put up with such a situation again. This is not to say that the various members of the Spyglass Federation particularly like each other, as they do not, just that they have generally decided that cooperation is preferable to skirting the perilous edge of total societal collapse and knocking their civilisation back into pre-industrial subsistence agriculture. The Federation supports a considerable military force that is theoretically politically neutral, and operates a firm legal system that goes out of its way to apply equal treatment to everybody.

Neither the Federal Navy nor any of the other forcibly downsized national militaries in the system operate FTL craft, and neither do any civilian organisations or individuals. The people of Spyglass are firmly of the opinion that the Ancients had good reason for the destruction of all records pertaining to FTL and related technologies, reasons almost certainly related to the collapse of that civilisation, and they have no desire to see such things happen to their system after their flirtation with annihilation. They will engage in peaceful trade and dialogue, but FTL ships arriving from outside the system are required to transship any cargo at platforms near the starway terminus, and any cargo or visitors moving further into the system must travel in Spyglass hulls.

Sargon VI 'Empty Quarter'

Explorer by: Deathstroke

Described by: Screwball

Sargon XII 'Basil'

Explorer by: unreasonable-o-matic

Described by: Screwball

Basil is a binary system with no less than three habitable planets - and a number of moons that are survivable with only minimal technological assistance, being prime candidates for terraforming - several gas giants and four dense asteroid belts. Unfortunately for would-be colonisers, the system is infested with the warped descendants of self-replicating pre-Cataclysam defence systems. The drones are not necessarily hostile; indeed, they will allow ships to pass through the system freely and will even appear to 'play' with ships in transit. Estimates amongst the experts who have studied the unique techno-life of this star system have concluded that individual platforms are roughly as intelligent as the average dog, and individual platforms have demonstrated recognition and memory for ships that are often present - in several cases even, apparently, affection, including aberrant behaviour like waiting at the entry point of the stellar current the target ship departed the system from until the vessel returned several years later on a fresh mission.

The platforms are, however, incredibly territorial, and will respond harshly and with immediate (usually lethal) violence to anybody attempting to approach 'strategically important' areas of the star system, including the habitable worlds, terraformable moons or any of the apparently intact pre-Cataclysm stations distributed about the system and which serve - along with other, more recent construction - as hives or dwellings for the techno-fauna. This makes exploitation of otherwise prime real estate effectively impossible so long as the techno-fauna remains.

As far as the habitable planets themselves go, all are pleasant worlds that have clearly been terraformed, all bear signs of obvious bombardment from orbit, and all bear human civilisations ranging from the bronze age to the early industrial era. Observations using long range methods suggest that most of them are aware they didn't originate on their current planets, but that the specifics have been either lost entirely or integrated into religious dogma. The inhabitants of Basil AII, the most advanced society, divided amongst a number of colonial empires established by early industrial nations, appear to be aware that the other two worlds are inhabited; the state of affairs regarding this subject on the other two are unknown.

Sargon VIII 'Manhoam'

Explorer by: unreasonable-o-matic

Described by: Shrike

Sargon VIII is a medium-sized red dwarf, one of uncountable similar within the borders of the long-lost Overculture. It is a minority of these though, as it is home to a habitable (and inhabited) world.

Sargon VIIIa is the innermost world, orbiting approximately 0.1 AUs from Sargon VIII itself. The inhabitants commonly know it as Manhoam in the primary language, a corrupted and drifted version of Imperial. Manhoam is tidally locked to Sargon VIII, with the light side mostly split between oceans, fetid wetlands and rocky uplands. Atmospheric circulation keeps the dark side from freezing and with the exception of the antipodal ocean, most of the dark side is a mixture of nightland deserts and fungoid xenomats. Squeezed between the two of these is the 'terminator' zone, the broad ring where the inclinant light comes in at a low angle, moderating the unrelenting light. This extends to about 20' N lattitude (local coordinate systems using the hot pole at 'north') and is the primary inhabited zone where most of Manhoam's estimated 350 million live.

Sargon VIIIb is an icy rockball about three times as far from the primary. Smaller than Manhoam, it is known locally as Glint. It is unremarkable save for several major cometary impacts all dating to circa 2,000 years previously.

The third and final major world is Sargon VIIIc, called Weil by the locals (etymology unclear). It is a moderate-sized gas giant and has a large, disrupted ring system and several dozen small to moderate moons. Metallic shards and wreckage of unmistakably artificial source are scattered throughout, including the shattered remains of what may once have been an Overculture warp gate.

The outer system is poorly swept and is rich in KBOs, including a small methane giant on an eliptical, 17,000 year orbit. Orbital backtracking does not support a hypothesis that orbital disruptions by this provisional planet caused the impacts on Glint.

The population of Manhoam was knocked back to the Iron Age by the destruction of the Overculture and has spent the subsequent 2,000+ years recovering. It is currently on the cusp of the industrial revolution, though it has been undergoing anomolously rapid technological development over the past three decades - hydrogen-filled airships, fossil fuel burning and primitive radio broadcasts can be detected from low orbit.

North-East Sector

Elissar

Explorer by: Silence

Described by: Shrike

Elissar was one of the first worlds to be (re)contacted by the Lighthuggers of Nova Carthage. A primitive, poor world who's most notable cultural innovation was a particularly intricate and ornate system of vengeance, it offered little to the sophisticated Phoenicians save furs and a few noxious plants of interesting use. This poverty meant that Elissar was generally passed over even after the recovery of FTL reduced the time and cost of space travel by orders of magnitude. A few token innovations were sold to the local elites, some baubles and conveniences far beyond their ability to replicate, assuming they could even understand their operating principles.

This status quo continued for centuries, the Elissarans sometimes making token efforts to play catch-up with the ever-distant Phoenicians but in general minding their own affairs. It was the actions of a previous Archon that changed this; coming to the conclusion that the Phoenicians could no longer allow the Elissarans to practice slavery now that they had achieved space-faring capability - if only via the acquisition of a few hulks crudely refitted - he gave them an ultimatum: Free their slaves or their system would be blockaded and further sales outlawed.

Perhaps not so unexpectedly, the Elissarans attacked. It was hopeless, in the end, they had badly underestimated the power of the Phoenician fleet but their code would allow no other option. The peace was humilitating, and the second war a generation later was even more lopsided.

Now, the Avatar of Elissar plots his own vengeance on Nova Carthagos.

PRISM-077 'The Shoals'

Explorer by: Arc

Described by: Duncan Idaho

Perhaps no system in known space is as powerful a witness to the great cataclysm (whenever it was) as the Shoals. The system takes its name from the eight huge belts of asteroids and wreckage that ring its dull red sun, all that remains of the several planets that once orbited there. Mixed in among the rock and metal is a staggering amount of destroyed ships and space habs, utterly unexhausted despite centuries (or millennia?) of salvage by adventures from beyond the Shoals - and by the inhabitants of the Shoals themselves.

For the Shoals are inhabited. Indeed, they teem with life. Though no one has really attempted a serious estimate of the native population, it is almost certainly several billion at least. These are the Bullwi.

The Bullwi (singular, Bullwu) are a squat, bipedal, toad-like race quite comfortable living in hard vacuum. They stand between four and five feet tall, and are extremely tough, if not particularly strong, intelligent, or fast. Communicating primarily through workaday telepathy and chromatophores, Bullwi have little sense of history. Epic "oral" tradition claims that their system was destroyed in a war that broke out among the gods at the moment reality came into being. The last dying breath of the divine courier, Amalwi, crystallized among the ashes. In time these crystals moldered into the Bullwi, who have lived among the Shoals ever since (7,000 years, by their reckoning).

There are countless tribes and clans among the Bullwi, engaged in a constantly shifting dance of raiding and dynastic politics. Most groups are ruled by queens, who forge coalitions through strategic marriage of their daughters to the male heads of war/scavenging bands. Free Bullwi males salvage, tinker, and raid, but the great majority of Bullwi are essentially serfs, farming a variety of space algae and lichen with the most primitive tools and working menial jobs in a vast, jury-rigged, salvage-fueled manufacturing economy. The Bullwi are not particularly hostile to visitors from out-system, so long as these visitors do not attempt to undertake salvage missions of their own; the Bullwi are fiercely territorial among themselves and against any who seek to despoil the wreckage that belongs to the (free) Bullwi by right (that is, every scrap of it). Nevertheless the Bullwi are eager to trade.

There are many extremely small populations of humans hiding out in the Shoals' innumerable nooks and crannies. The Bullwi hate these, regarding them as interlopers, and seek to kill or enslave them whenever possible. Their origins are, obviously, mysterious.

PRISM-117 'Ironbar'

Explorer by: 100thlurker

Described by: Shrike

A star in the southern sector of the Aral Cloud, Ironbar is host to an unusual gas arc following the gravitic distortion of the star current through the orange primary's goldilocks zone. The only habitable worlds are a scattered disk of irregularly orbiting planetoids, none larger than 1,000 km and all cycling in and out of the gas arc, losing and regaining atmosphere in the process.

In the aftermath of the ancient cataclysm, civilization in Ironbar has split into two groups; the Electro-Farmers and the Riggers. The former inhabit the various planetoids, living underground in sealed bunker complexes during the airless 'winters' and surfacing to take advantage of the explosive fecundity of the 'summers' as the planetoids traverse the gas arc. Grown tall and distorted by the low gravity, they average three meters tall but barely the weight of a normal human half that. Outside of their bunker-towns they are almost never found without wearing full-body power suits.

The Riggers are the second group, nomads that inhabit the former gas and mineral production platforms ('rigs') that once dotted the system and harvested the immense material wealth blowing in from the Aral Sea and distant Gunpowder Nebula. These have long since become mobile towns, with the largest fixed structures becoming centers of power for the tribalistic and often beligerent Riggers.

Technology has regressed badly in Ironbar, with most common technologies being forgotten and only replaced thanks to ancient and incalculably valuable Overculture fabricators. Even otherwise common technologies such as Electro-Fisher powersuits, Rigger Warmechs (used as immense armed infantry onboard the Rigs), important components on the Rigs themselves and many other items would be irreplaceable without at least some parts from fabers, though both groups have gotten extremely good at minimizing this.

Ironbar has comprehensively lost FTL capability, and passing Nova Carthaginian merchants have so far avoided the temptation of selling them either working copies or full schematics.

Typhon-3 'Steel Yard'

Explorer by: Silence

Described by: Arc

Typhoon 6 is a trinary star system, Typhoon A, B and C. Two Sol mass stars orbiting each other at the two AU distance and a third one a red dwarf orbiting Typhoon B. Typhoon B and C have no planets orbiting them, unlike them Typhoon A has four planets. Three of them are small rocky Earth like planet, while fourth one is a Neptune like gas giant.

Some of the rocky planets have interesting minerals, but thinking much more. The most fascinating feature of the star system is the mega structure left there by some ancient builder. The mega structure is in ruins now and is unclear how it still manages to remain in one piece, further research must be done. The structure is a ring around the entire trinary system. It still rotates in the same direction with the rest of the stars and planets. It's is clearly abandoned long ago. Some areas have holes the size of gas giants, some have things of unknown origin, type, or material sticking out of it. The most frightening thing are the evidence of space battles on a scale unimaginable by races of today.

Tyre

Explorer by: Silence

Described by: Arc

Come here, traveler. Look at these mighty worlds and their coronets of moons, enormous and whirling with furious winds- everything bound to them kept in perfect sychronous harmony, or carried down to be unmade in their unknowable depths. There is beauty there, in those banded clouds, that will persist through the life of the universe. Defined by its very nature as something intagible to grubbling mortal hands, it will be forever unspoiled by things that emerged from eons of bacterial cruft. So too will our works, and they will outlast you and your entire race.

The gleaming white Neptunian world of Amirus is home to the Aerists, whom rule all their lessers of Tyre with an iron fist. Thousands of glittering space orbitals hang above the placidly turning cloud bands, linked together by gilded filaments into a lattice that rings the planet's equator. Cold, distant, stark and beautiful, it mirrors its inhabitants perfectly.

Tyre's other worlds and captive moons are host to a carefully manicured and cowed society of human descent, whom build sleek and shining towers in cities that are designed purposely to be a pale echo of the grand orbitals of Amirus. All traces of their precursors and the calamity that destroyed them have been completely erased over the last thousand years, as the Aerists will tolerate not so much as a hint that something grand existed in Amirus- or anywhere else- prior to their coming. With little power and self-determination, many liken the populations of Isholm, Mooren and Litor as the pets of self-appointed godlings. Though there are no gentle benefactors here; access to Amirus is forbidden and carefully guarded. Every piece of the Aerists' works in their human sprawl speaks of disinterest and quiet contempt.

The Aerists themselves interact with their subjects, and virtually all others, by proxy or not at all. Tyre as a whole is flourishing under Carthaginian trade, though it is clear its masters are immeasurably displeased that not only that contact by explorers from other stars took them by surprise, but also that these visitors have expanded an enormous network of contact and trade.

On the surface the Aerists claim they desire only peaceful cooperation, though they have been known to engage in ruthless subterfuge with their neighboring states and they are implicated in a number of conspiracies despite spurious evidence. Most recently, bioroids have been found on Nova Carthago, convincingly programmed as doppelgangers of certain governmental officials. While each one captured has thoroughly self-destructed, it is quite clear that it is beyond the ability of the Phoenicians to create such things themselves. How long they have been in place and how many still roam Nova Carthago is a subject of intense contention.

South-West Sector

CHIME-22A 'Cantor's Anomaly'

Explorer by: General G

Described by: Arc

CHIME-22A is a genuinely worthless star system, occupied most notably by its namesake red dwarf star, barely massive enough to sustain stellar fusion, and it's co-orbiting brown dwarf sister. Such a thing is rare amongst dim stars, exciting for astronomers and disappointment for everyone else. Three small rocky planetoids orbit the binary pair in sweeping, chaotic elliptical orbits through a large debris field of comets and icy asteroids, though no major planets are present.

Pitiable resources led to the system being rarely visited and poorly charted, until by happenstance, an object was discovered in the gravitational locus point between the red dwarf and its companion. A curious field exists there, somehow canceling the enormous tidal forces exerted on the point in space, forming a bubble few hundred kilometers in diameter where normal material might exist without being torn apart and consumed. Trapped within that space lies the ghostly wreck of the star ship Cantor –the only vessel to ever enter the field- and the Anomaly that bears its name. The Anomaly is a spherical object some twenty five kilometers in diameter of unusual density, orbited and surrounded by layers of gapped concentric rings and shells of intensely artificial construction. These objects spin in a gyroscopic fashion around the Anomaly, rotational axes tumbling, and often orbit in opposing directions at differing altitudes, never losing speed or diverging from their paths in the slightest. The labyrinthine mechanism prevents detailed observation of what lies inside, and emits wild magnetic fields that influence solar weather on the nearby star and drags a trail of massive electrical storms along the facing side of the brown dwarf.

Distant

Explorer by: Bossmuff

Described by: Arc

Warning beacons line the busy navigation routes through this quiet dwarf star's gravity well, drawing passers-by into a cumbersome path that circumnavigates its planetary bodies through its outer reaches. Five in all, three are ordinary gas giants with their halos of moons, and two terrestrial orbiting a comfortable distance from their parent star. Sparsely explored, No Man's Land is legendary for the frequency of ship disappearances. Enterprising souls have marked the safe paths for the public good given its location as a trade lane hub, though they increase transit times by a factor of five.

It makes for a tantalizing incentive to take alternative routes. Those who take the risk of passing close enough to the inner system report a transmission commonly known as the Siren's Call. The innermost world, possibly habitable once, is a gloomy rock surrounded by a network of geosynchronous satellites, broadcasting an as of yet undecipherable repeating signal at high power. Its oceans swell a sickly grey and its lands are stark and barren. Most believe the oceanic cruft is the remains of nanomachines and lingering amounts of atmospheric oxygen suggest at one point the world sustained photosynthetic life. Presently the world is, by all accounts, completely dead and inhospitable. Surface temperatures are decidedly unlivable and steadily increasing as a runaway greenhouse effect is taking hold. It ominously bears the name No Man's Land.

The second terrestrial world, with a wispy atmosphere and ice-choked features, shows no outward signs of contamination, though its surface is marked by a number of wreckage sites from crashed star craft. Although ships are advised not to stray from the shipping lanes under any circumstance, responders to distress in the vicinity of that world have noted that the crash sites seem to disappear over time. Traders have attempted to regulate traffic through the system and improve safety, constructing two space stations at the ends of the shipping lane, however smugglers and pirates frustrate all attempts at enforcement as they follow their own paths. They too, however, have something to fear in No Man's Land and rarely stay long.

Tyrol

Explorer by: General G

Described by: Shrike

Tyrol was once one of the shining centers of the galaxy - a world-city that never slept. Its shining towers reached the sun and its foundations were the very deepest of bedrock. A hundred - a thousand - languages were spoken by its inhabitants both human and not. If its leaders were not always infallible, they were at least accountable - more than could be said for so many others.

All that ended.

Only a tiny fraction of Tyrol's population escaped the siege and subsequent scouring of Tyrol, a rounding error in a population of forgotten trillions. The rest perished directly at the hands of the invaders' biomechanoids or indirectly from the collapse of the planetary weather control network, famine or simple failure of essential services.

Now, a millenia later, Tyrol is a desolate world all but unfit for human habitation. Tendrils of gas from the Gespensterwald have curled into and through the Tyrol system and transformed its climate and atmosphere. This nebula gas has dimmed the light reaching Tyrol but at same time insulated the world, leaving it with a global surface temperature that rarely deviates from the single digits. The surface is an imperceptibly crumbling mass of towers, craters and rubble with the remains of ancient war machines or the skeletons of the invading biomechanoids scattered at sites of major battles. Above all this the pearlesent skies are constantly rippling with aurora but few watch them - on the surface the partial pressure of oxygen is much too low to permit unaided breathing to say nothing of the exotic compounds filtering down from the Gspensterwald above. It is only in the vast underground techno-caverns that lie deep beneath the slowly collapsing rubble of Tyrol where both heat and air is comfortable, with many of the more noxious chemicals having condensed out on the trip downward.

In these vast geofronts the real business of Tyrol goes on. Those selfsame noxious exotic gasses are, once purified, an important source of valuable chemicals. Immense processing plants have recently been erected with gleaming condensation piping heading to the surface via dscovered tunnels, a stark contrast to the greys and browns of ancient ruins. Most of this product is packaged into fusion premix and shipped out regularly on tankers to feed the voracious demands of the PDRG. The remaining and most valuable gasses is pressurised and used in manufacturing, arms and similar exotic roles.

All this does not mean that Tyrol is dead, however. While the original biosphere has long since collapsed, strange nebula life has seeded itself all across the world. This alien ecosystem has taken over the surface, with bizzare plant-analogues sprouting out of towers and spreading across the rubble and even more alien creatures lurking among the ruins. A number of scholars believe that some of these - almost invariably the most dangerous and elusive types - are also the descendants of the biomechanoids that destroyed Tyrol originally, though how exactly they survived a millenia is a mystery so far unsolved. Most of these creatures (and much of the surface in general) are entirely unclassified, though a small number of hardy adventurers has taken it upon themselves to scour both the surface and the subsurface of Tyrol for surviving ancient technology or, less commonly, biological curiosities.

South-East Sector

Luxor 'Lysander'

Explorer by: Silence

Described by: FBH

Lysander is a large but problematic market for your commerce. They are lower tech than you, (~traveler/Gurps TL9) with only one FTL star ship, a larger freighter which mostly flies to your planet, and a very large population (on the order of 15 billion on the 4th planet, a hot, fairly lush Terran world with around 40% Land surface but a large number of marsh lands and huge forests which trap moisture) and on space platforms and oceanic colonies.

Most of the population is baseline human, but there are several tribes and nations of transhumans, who it is claimed descended from visitors (or invaders) in the distant past.

However while they have the makings of an excellent trade partner (high population, abundant primary resources to sell you, unable to compete in those areas that really matter), they are ruled by an unstable and aristocratic system where voting is allowed only after a series of rigorous mental and physical tests. This has lead to frequent instability and revolts by the lower classes, most of whom do not have the resources or time to study for said tests, and extremely unequal distributions of wealth and market distortions, as well as occasional atrocities by both sides.

Currently, the planet is nearing civil war, with several outer districts in open revolt, and security forces shooting up demonstrations (and sometimes, the demonstrations shooting up security forces.)

Things seem to have coalesced round a masked rebel leader known as the Dragon of the Woods, a woman who it is claimed is desended from one of the transhuman clades and thus ineligible for testing. Regular video messages from her (often also featuring some unfortunate Lysandian army captive suffering some imaginative fate after a revolutionary trial) are regularly circulating local information networks. The dragon always goes masked.

Your government is bracing itself for Lysander in revolt round 27, while your military is wondering openly whether you shouldn't send in the fleet to restore order.

HCT-3F 'Ouroborous'

Explorer by: Screwball

Described by: Duncan Idaho

The system of Ouroboros is a relatively desolate one, with a single large habitable world and a couple of mid-sized gas giants in the outer system.

On this habitable world, a harsh desert planet also known simply as Ouroboros, one finds an old and populous human civilization. The Kingdom of Zur was ruled for many centuries by an aristocratic class that carefully controlled access to its signature genetic modification, immortality. The right to receive these treatments was long subject to byzantine rules of heritability and, for the great majority of commoners, extremely long (or often permanent) servile status in the household or clientage network of the sponsoring noble family.

Recently, however, the ancient kingdom has been overthrown by a popular revolution. The nobles long ensconced themselves within impossibly high towers (or deep subsurface palace-caverns), indulging in esoteric arts, pedantic philosophy and mysticism, and decadent pleasures ranging from drug-fueled orgies to gladiatorial fights. The groaning masses, doomed either to die or, at best, live forever in shameful servitude, finally had enough. So far, there has been only an initial, relatively contained burst of violence, which has catapulted a coalition of middling, relatively moderate representatives into incomplete (if significant) positions of power in government, military, and security.

The hold of these moderates is highly tenuous, however. Finally possessed of a relatively strong position vis-a-vis the nobility, the revolution's representatives are only now learning just how little these nobles understand about how the immortality treatments work or even where power in "their" society truly lies. A few of the highest nobles, caught between the demands of the populace and a mysterious fear, have begun to refer vaguely to some other intelligence or organization, largely inaccessible even to the nobles it appears to patronize, perhaps hidden deep in the planet's core or somewhere else in-system.

The situation is extremely precarious all around - the commoners are losing patience with the excuses of their representatives and the nobility, and even the threat of the mobs is doing little to dislodge the nobility from its reticence. What this mysterious other power could possibly be threatening with keeps many of the currently-ruling moderate revolutionaries up at night.