Hello and good morning, it is I, back among the living, a piteous ghoul questing for meat - and who knows how long this burst of vim will last, but for now at least I present this little pile of scraps for you, written on stolen seconds found between the couch cushions of work and childcare. Maybe they will blossom, eventually, into a REAL GAME. What a thought!!!
DESH (Er Desher)
The lands of Desh, awash in aurorae, unraveled in a prior age by the risen black sea, swarms again with the manifold cultures and forms of Mankind. Their antediluvian forebears, wizard-kings, masters of the wheel, walked with ease the paths of prismlight which lead them in pilgrimage to the stars. Now they fester and rave, casualties of a war in heaven, their gods broken before their very eyes and scattered across the inky vault, their homelands lost beneath the boiling world-ending waves. They are refugees, barbarian survivors of a race of demigods.
CALENDAR (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darian_calendar)
24 months, 20 of 28 days, 4 of 27 days (approx. 24 hours), except on leap years when an extra day is intercalcated onto the final month. Leap years are odd-numbered years and years divisible by 10, but are cancelled if divisible by 100, UNLESS the year is ALSO divisible by 500, in which case they remain 669-day years. Days are named for the seven gods of the orbital host: Zossday, Selsday, Deelsday, Jebolsday, Seriday, Typhday, Dendraday. The names of the 24 months are:
1. Sagittar, 2. Dhanus, 3. Caprica, 4. Makara, 5. Arcarius, 6. Khumbha, 7. Piscus, 8. Mina, 9. Ares, 10. Mesha, 11. Torris, 12. Rishabha, 13. Jomni, 14. Mithuna, 15. Conchar, 16. Karka, 17. Leoh, 18. Simha, 19. Virgon, 20. Kanya, 21. Librum, 22. Tula, 23. Scorpius, 24. Vrishika
Current year is 3917 (counting starts from 1609 CE, 3500 years from Current Year 2026)
TIMELINE
- 3.7 Billion Years Ago: Noachian civilization on Mars reaches divinity via unclear means, wipes most physical evidence of their existence in the process of their exodus, destroys biosphere.
- Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin walk around on moon.
- GNOMON Solar Array launched, provides essentially free energy to Earth.
- Development of purely-silicon machine intelligence hampered by asymptotic compute growth. Quantum error-correction proves massively less scalable than biocomputing. Organoid manufacturing expands, allows cheap replication and self-iteration.
- AGI blossoms, leads humanity to an era of solar empire. Luna converted into industrial shipyard ecumenopolis, Venus and Mars terraformed and settled, Jovian moons colonized for resource extraction operations.
- Humanity unifies, burden of government offloaded to biomachine overmind hosted on suite of interconnected lagrangian orbital platforms (MONAD), proceeded by 1,000 years of Edenic splendor.
- MONAD fully connected to human noosphere, becomes a new kind of composite lifeform, spends all excess resources on evolution. Creates forked intelligence ILMARINEN to oversee construction of Sampo (nonlocality device), performs first test run by teleporting a pomegranate, intends to uplift all component minds to absolute divinity.
- Fuliginous Injunction/Severance occurs (a dire packet transmitted by the ascended Noachians through the brane, a Dark Forest/Butlerian jihad thing), blasts MONAD apart, annihilates interplanetary infrastructure, sends solar system into chaos and a desperate dark age.
- Areotectonic engines go bananas, marsquakes, volcanism (Tharsis holocaust, Dendra and Serimet's attempt at closing off the Pavonis mass driver to prevent basilisk invasion), incredible flooding scours the globe (the First Agony), stone and fire falls from heaven as orbits decay (the Second Agony), network corruption causes lasting mental and physical mutation/degradation in implanted humans (the Third Agony).
- Martian social structure collapses. Elysium, Hesperia, Hellas ruled by successions of horrible technarchs. Marineris gets fucked by Tharsis quakes but is resettled by triple-jointed bird-riders. The Aonian desert is glassed by solar electrolaser as the GNOMON beam is briefly commandeered by hostile code. Many arcologies and artifacts of the original colonization are reactivated, shelter refugees, many of whom never re-emerge and become subterranean freaks. Some holdouts may remain intact as nightmarish cruelty societies.
- Civilization never re-emerges in many places. Humans band together in traditional tribal units where collapse is complete. Warlords attempt larger settlements but mostly have insufficient population density and loyalty to maintain cohesion. Urban concentrations also hampered by roving biomechanical abominations.
- Farmboy yokel dreamwalker Aumun Barathrum journeys from village Abreth during historic drought, opens river dam locks along the river Yonth using admin codes harvested from the spirit realm, reaches mythical Lake Argyre, speaks w/ Argyrians and firewalled AI dam controller, bargains for bi-annual flood schedule which the river now enjoys. Returns to village on a barge of light carried by floodwaters, founds Eld Abrathat, the Golden City, as Godking. City becomes ancient Egypt-level local superpower due to wise leadership and predictable flooding cycles, which allows for agricultural exploitation.
- Other large settlements include horseshoe crab Xiphosuran megareef in Isidis, insular dreamwalking Cyrena of Elysium (slaved to psionic oceanic megatherian), the vertical democracies of the Noctis Labyrinthus, effervescent Meridian fiefdoms.
- Eld Abrathat has several centuries of glorious Uruk- or Thebes-esque development, refines Akhetite religious system from immediately-post-injunction encounters w/ surviving receiving terminals, biosphere and noumenal infrastructure stabilization efforts (strange weather patterns, mass dreams, continental holographic projections, psychic warnings RE backup nuclear plants exploding etc, encounters w/ dataforms), extends influence along the Yonth, comes into contact/war/trade/cultural exchange with Iks, empire at the mouth of the river, a blacksoil swamp civilization of flesh, industrial bacteria strains, reactivated combatants (corpse soldiers), population of semi-sapient crab slaves, associated with the Acidalian ocean and therefore with evil in general.
- Grand Temple to Zoss (Magantha Zoss) inexplicably disappears from foundations in the old quarter of Eld Abrathat. Zoss and wife Selene not visible in night sky, occluded by sun. Haruspicy indicates subterfuge, liars, Typhon sends garbled transmission the following day indicating "great houses are being stolen by bats." Iksan biomagicians are suspected as always, but reveal in rare moment of diplomatic transparency that one of their weird spiritual isolation spheres vanished in similar circumstances on the exact same day. Ultimate cause is the Noachian Antichrist Slime influencing subterranean minds into using the buried Nonlocality Engine to teleport buildings into a big stack underground, connecting the Slime holding cell to the divine receiving dish on the roof of Magantha Zoss. Plan is to trigger another Injunction and to transmit slime through the brane-hole through which the punishment-packet will be sent.
- Magantha Zoss is discovered a hundred years later beneath a thin later of Yonth sediment by a bunch of river pirates, who colonize the initial rooms as a base of operations but are prevented from penetrating further due to the presence of giant horny worms and lethal whiskermen booby traps -- in reality they are not the first thinking creatures to discover the temple.
- The PCs are sent to buried temple as representatives (perhaps hired goons) of struggling Abrathatan exploration/philosophical society. Some guy the founder of the society knows lives in nearby village/wayshrine, sent very early reports of increased pirate activity, pirates entering/leaving from poorly-hidden tunnel, pirates pissing into ornate reliquaries, etc.
No comments:
Post a Comment