Eudaimonia

Welcome to paradise, traveler.

A game which stubbornly refuses to kowtow to mainstream genre designations like 'post-apocalyptic', 'science fantasy', preferring to call itself a work of lighthearted mundane fantastic transhuman space opera inspired more by slice of life and action adventure series than the heady and cerebral titans which have defined the genre. Run by Exhack, if you couldn't guess based on the excessively hipster intro line.

Premise

Eudaimonia is a world that was terraformed over the course of thousands of years through concerted effort by a now-defunct human society which at one point had the resources to do so. Its continents are lush and impossibly fertile, weather placid at all times of the year and shallow seas crystal blue and dotted with beautiful little islands and indestructible terraforming stations which are now inhabited by human and transhuman inhabitants which no longer remember their genuine purpose. It is a paradise made by human hands and by human technology, which will likely outlive its creators as the machinery which sustains it will turn until the universe is too large and cold to draw power from.

Although tucked away in some unseeming corner of the universe, it became the battleground of a war between some new agency of humanity calling itself (or perhaps only remembered as) the True Human Empire and a nameless and incomprehensible menace called the Mysterious Starfish Aliens some thousand years ago. The remains of their battles, from weapons of incredible power to the laboratories of ships which surpass even the miracles of the builders of Eudaimonia and other things stranger and more alien can be found all over the planet now.

As a scavenger working the tropical oceans, you live an exciting and glamorous life few of your peers dream of, plying the ruins and entering those uncharted sectors of the world for a few untouched scraps of miraculous technology and making some concerted effort at rediscovering the workings behind them. It's dangerous, messy and downright treacherous sometimes when jobs go sour and friends turn on you, but the sights you see and the things you learn along the way make it all worth it.

To say nothing of all the tail.

The Setting

Eudaimonia

Eudaimonia is a oceanic planet dominated by island chains and shallow seas. Its ecology is ostensibly entirely artificial, weather patterns maintained by strange and esoteric machinery left behind by a previous human civilization. The planet is small and possesses a porous core, so gravity is light and more akin to that of Mars than Earth at a low 0.42g, while the air is slightly more oxygenated than normal terrestrial environments and contains eukaryotes which induce a very mild euphoria and calm in a majority of the people on the planet (which may actually be a leftover biological weapon deployed by either side of the last war).

As a consequence of planetary conditions, the plant and most animal life is quite huge and tends to be oceanic. Giant turtles, fish and penguins are common, though many actual megafauna from Earth became tragically extinct and any viable samples lost before the terraforming process on Eudaimonia was finished. Blue whales, tigers, elephants and other large mammals in particular were lost centuries in advance, though they have been re-engineered from extant life and are present on the planet- albeit at reduced sizes and mostly serving as semi-intelligent pets.

Settlements

Temperate island chains play host to a majority of the most of the 'classic' transhuman population and transhuman castes mostly reliant on infrastructure such as uploads and cyborgs. The style of these cities tends to emulate classic 'coastal' and 'canal' cities such as Singapore and Venice, with essentially wear-proof and non-polutant pseudocrete brick buildings (some thousands of years old) made of materials produced by request from ancient fabricators and dotted with bits of rediscovered 'modern' technology as the current wave of modernization settles in. Some enclaves never quite backslid into complacency as others did and have the hard-edged futuristic look expected of the general level of technology remaining on the planet.

Settlement around the tropics and equator tends to be more piecemeal, as a consequence of the nature of their denizens. Part-animal transgenes or 'splices' tended to adapt better to the heat and moisture of the tropics (in no small part thanks to their apparent lack of nudity taboos), and despite sparse population spread out over the myriad archipelagos actually consist of well over 50% of the planet's population (currently nearing 59%). Splice homesteads tend to be diverse in purpose but tend to be transit stops or tourist destinations that feed into the immense off-world traffic, or give waystations to scavengers and explorers attempting to chart and plunder those few unknown regions of the planet which still remain.

Humanity at large on Eudaimonia is dependent (and perhaps reliant) on getting the materials for consumer goods (and often completed consumer goods as well) from the terraforming equipment left over. Only a few very rare items such as weapons and military-grade bioaugmentation are not available in ubiquitous abundance for nothing, and are considered to have value. Food is common in large part because local fauna and flora are seemingly impossible to deplete and almost universally edible.

Certain negative stereotypes against the splice community based on their unwillingness to produce anything of rarity other than salvage is sometimes levied, as much of their population is content to spend all their time frolicking in the sun, foraging for food and engaging in trade with seagoing people from the cities.

Travel

Travel on Eudaimonia is almost entirely done by ship, mostly small seagoing vessels with shallow keeps. Because of low oceanic depths and sealanes crisscrossed with shoals and reefs, large cargoships with deep keeps are unpopular and essentially liabilities. Bulk transportation of goods (where it occurs at all) is done primarily by massive air-cushioned hovercraft, and mostly for the transport of food and luxury goods with limited geographical spread such as coffee, chocolate and tea which are only viable in certain archipelagos. Submarines and submersible boats, mostly military leftovers from when the THE and MSA warred on the planet, are somewhat popular among scavengers and moreso among pirates- who represent a small risk to the planetary trade network.

Air travel is rarer and done primarily via hybrid airships made of ultralight alloys and buoyed by a combination of ultralight float gasses and aerofoil wings- and essentially act as major status symbols to their owners. Travel through the sky is mostly reserved for the wealthy and powerful and the wealthiest among them have stranger craft, elegant yachts and cruise ships decked with rows of ionofoil sails which bear them into the air without the thrum of moving parts.

Though harder and much less regular means of travel, recovering wrecked drones and re-purposing them into vehicles is a popular passtime among scavengers. Electromagnetic hovertanks left behind by the True Human Empire make great courier vehicles in the archpelagos, and the regenerative glass-winged drones left behind by the Mysterious Starfish Aliens can easily be prized into single or two-person flying vehicles that function similarly to motorcycles.