The Enclaves of the Devils

 

The Saturnian devils have been embroiled in the longest-lasting war in the system for millenia. The Titan and its demonis offspring can emerge from any Gate in the Saturn system at any time, and for this reason most Gates are neither out in the open nor in population centres. An unmonitored Gate is a recipe for disaster, and when a previously unknown or inactive one allows the demons to establish a foothold, it takes an almost full mobilisation of the devils and their “allies” en masse to purge the creatures.

Mappae Solis: The Cloisters of the Engels

The engels of Jupiter are united in a single common cause: their re-ascension to godhood. Fractured posthumans seeking a lost past, they are nominally a unified front. However, over time different opinions and philosophies arose as to the best way to reawaken their godminds permanently, resulting in several different organisations, each based on a different moon of the Jupiter system. These Cloisters still work together, but the exact nature of their alliances and cooperation is baroque and inscrutable to outsiders.

Mappae Solis: The Hives of the Dwarves

 

As not all asteroids are the same, not all dwarven hives are the same. Although hives almost universally share a rigid internal structure with leadership held jointly by Queens and Praetorians, the hive’s relationship to other hives and the greater system is the key defining factor in differentiating the dwarven hives. Hives tend to specialise heavily, and connections and trade are vital for their survival. Dwarves also often view Worker and Soldier dwarves as closer to a resource than a populace, and may trade population instead of resources if needed.

Mappae Solis: Villages of the Elves, and the Shard-Holts of Terra

 The Villages of the Elves

In the same vein as the Copses of the Halflings, I am going to use two combined tables of 6 to produce a variety of different villages for the elves.

Elven culture is based on the answer to one question: what does it mean to be human? Whether this is a philosophical question or a query into fashion, each village is essentially a subculture, exploring specific answers to the question. Villages may grow or shrink in popularity and population as fads come and go, or even vanish overnight as the elves finish fully exploring the fashion.

Mappae Solis: Habitats and the Undead

There are many space-born habitats in the solar system that the Gates can reach, ranging from small zero-G satellites to great Stanford tori and O'Neill cylinders. However, the Gates rarely link to them, as the local network does not consider them in its attempts to send travellers to their desired location. Gate Keys can give direct access to these places, but a common trick used by adventurers is to carry a fragment of a Key.

Mappae Solis: Copses of the Halflings

 CULTURES AND BIOMES

Monocultures are rare on Earth, and usually occur due to some form of extremism or isolation. Humans do not have a single authority or culture, but it is a common failing of much speculative fiction to assume that other races do. This often ties in with the idea of “single-biome planets”, worlds of only ice, or forest, or ocean. 

Places might be hotter or drier than Earth, but they should still have variance. Cultures might have species-based traits and similarities, but they should be varied. In this next series of Mappae Solis posts, I will try to give an impression of different species’ cultures, especially given the broken and varied worlds they live in. Don't take any of this as immutable canon, as strange and bizarre subcultures are to be expected.

The Copses of the Halflings

The massive forests of the halflings are not united. Although they share common ideas and views, each Copse is a separate entity, aligned but not always allied with the others.

Godtech, the Gates, and the Beast in the Pit

Spread across the many worlds of Mappae Solis are fragments of technology. Some are rude chunks of inert metal, others simple toys and trinkets. Others have remnant power, and many a hedge wizard possesses a small collection of minor artefacts. Some however, are not minor. Some have incomprehensible power, and work in bizarre and arcane fashions. Some, are godtech.

Terra and the Humans

Earth suffered the most of any world in the Fall, as its density of both technology and population made the disaster much worse. For all that it was, and still is, the most habitable world with the largest carrying capacity and oldest, most complex biosphere, it is much reduced from its glory days. It has been long enough after the Fall that many ecosystems and biomes have recovered, and in the absence of cities and godtech megastructures, even returned to pre-Industrial levels.

However, many will tell you that Earth, now called Terra, is the most dangerous world.

Mercury and the Halflings:

Mercury and the Halflings:

Most people’s experience of halflings are of jolly and gregarious beings who, despite their odd appearance, are almost universally loved for their good humour and soothing talents.

Halflings, as the name suggests, are half as tall as a baseline human. This is hardly their most obvious visual feature however. They are often portly, with pot bellies and short, thick limbs. They also have an extra set of arms, identical to their top pair, which they keep wrapped around their torsos or under clothing. Halflings are also known for both their talent with first aid and healing, and their knack for repair.

The Saturn System, Devils, Demons, and the Titan:

The ex-posthumans of the Jupiter system solved their problem in two ways. The first became the engels, emulating a higher godmind piece by piece. The second group chose to sever any possibility of regaining their posthuman selves, and instead became a race of “merely” advanced transhumans. Driven out by their engel kin for what they and their godminds saw as the ultimate sin, they were forced to move to the Saturn system.

The Jupiter System and the Engels

 

Jupiter and its attendant moons have long been a staging area for both research and further colonisation. Never quite as populous as the inner worlds, they became a haven for those who desired privacy and sought to take personal modification to new levels. By the years just before the Fall, this had coalesced into a loose alliance based on the four Galilean moons and several orbital stations. Posthuman entities, their minds grander than almost anything else that human history had seen, spread out through advanced infrastructure built and designed by them to hold their expansive consciousness. Each still had a physical body, either a carefully crafted clone or their much altered original, but they functioned as nodes in something greater. The body was built to be an interchange, to house a density of processing ability in order to give the posthuman supermind a firm connection to base reality. They were tall, slender, beautiful, and filled with more technology than even their contemporaries in-system could imagine. 

The Belt and the Dwarves

 Some Gates do not lead to new lands under strange skies. They lead to massive underground warrens, halls and vaults carved by pick and claw. Some are hewn from ice, others from rock that could be found anywhere, and some from metal alone. While it is common knowledge that these places are deep underground, the truth is that most of them reside in hollowed-out asteroids.

Mars and the Drakuu

Mars and the Drakuu:

Mars was always the planet closest to Terra, the best candidate for terraforming. Its history is in many ways longer than Terra’s, with relics and ruins from before the Fall still being easily searchable. The Fall scoured Terra, left very little remaining, but on dry cold Mars, history endures.

Mars always was, and always shall be a desert world, but liquid water returned to its surface millennia ago. The desert flows through a dozen shades of xerosere, from dense scrubland and wiry bush, to dry savanna and dusty plains. Still a severe world, Mars has relatively limited large wildlife, and what there is tends to be mammalian or avian. The cold climate is a barrier for many exotherms, granting their warm-blooded competitors a significant advantage. 

Mappae Solis: Venus and the Elves

Venus and the Elves:

Venus is hot and humid, and even though it has a thick cloud layer, its proximity to the sun causes a large amount of UV radiation to pierce the clouds. To the human eye, Venus is mostly a dense swampy jungle of thick black mycelia. Descended from the altered fungi that helped terraform Venus in ancient days, the current ropy tree-like growths cover the majority of Venus’ surface. Although they usually form biomes that are some flavour of “hot, wet, and fungus-trees”, there are a variety of biomes ranging from wetlands and dense jungle, to swamp, moor, shallow sea, and massive river deltas.

Intro to Mappae Solis

So this is a project based on a few ideas. The first is the mappae mundi, or medieval world maps. Maps are always our attempts to represent some part of the world in abstract. Most modern maps strive for realism, to mathematically match their symbols and lines with the physical. The mappae mundi did the same, charting the world according to the people of the time.

Who, given that this was the Middle Ages, were bugfuck crazy. Things they thought were real, beliefs they held, real places, actual fiction: it all got thrown in. The result doesn’t map the physical world, but the metaphysical. The mappae mundi don’t chart distance, but relationships. Like a modern subway map, where a station is in the world doesn’t matter as much as what other stations it is linked to.