Moons of Megillot

[beejazz]

I'm taking another shot at putting this on the boards. This time all in one place, with somewhat better names, and with niftier streamlined mechanics. I should add that I am experiencing hella writer's block for the past couple of weeks so... be warned about the sparsity.

Millennia ago, humanity left a dying earth in many enormous seed ships. We didn't have FTL. We didn't have warp drives. We didn't have wormholes. What we had was cryogenics. So, for billions and billions of years, humanity was put on ice, while the seed ships' nav systems sought a new home for us.

Eventually, three of the seed ships found a small system of moons floating around a gas giant. One landed, intact, on the third moon. Another fragmented, and sent pieces to the first and second moon. The third was lost. Civilization began again from these ships, and some thousands of years later surpasses our own.

[spoiler=Hadassah]Hadassah (the first moon) is a dry/desert/badlands style moon. There is groundwater, but the absence of large bodies of water on the surface leave the temperature unregulated. Days will be hot, and nights will be cold. There are enormous rock formations of petrified fungus all over the place. Native anthropomorphic bats get by herding giant arthropods (like roaches or trilobites) across the plains or mining hallucinogens. Native fauna includes giant carnivorous moths that'll carry you off and drink you given half a chance.[/spoiler]

[spoiler=Rus]Rus (the second moon) is lush and wet, but uninhabited. Native goblins made the surface of the planet uninhabitable by biochemical warfare. Their cities are sinking into the mud. The AE currents are strong here (AE being ambient energy... something that can be used for a propulsion system like light sails or M2P2) and ships can stay aloft almost indefinitely, making this a convenient way point between Hadassah and Qohelet. Those that continue to hang out here include travelers from moon to moon, goblin pirate ships that prey on such ships, and treasure hunters looking to loot the sinking cities.[/spoiler]

[spoiler=Qohelet]Qohelet is closest to a near-future Earth. Humans are native to this moon, as are anthropomorphic frogs, who live underground. I'm thinking that there would be three major governments recently come to the forefront. One would be a dysfunctional union of smaller nations. Very bureaucratic overall. Another would be a sort of imperial monarchy. The third would be a sort of cyberpunk region, like America in Snow Crash.
The imperial monarchy would be encroaching on the frogs' underground territory, displacing them.
The bureaucracy would include massive refugee communities, who would in turn want to split off or at least gain more of a legal say in the existing system. Mutants are becoming commonplace, and require (often expensive) medications in order to live.[/spoiler]

[spoiler=Eikha]Eikha has a poisonous atmosphere and erratic gravity, but there are research stations and there have been several botched attempts at terraforming.[/spoiler]

[spoiler=Shir ha-Shirim]Shir ha-Shirim is small and has weak gravity and little or no atmosphere. In addition, it is outside the range of the AE fields.[/spoiler]

Psionics exist in this setting. Characters able to manipulate the fundamental forces of the universe are rare, but not unheard of. A few who try to obtain too much power may end up being burned and going insane.

Mutants exist. Powers from this are fairly mundane (spraying neurotoxins from glands on the wrists is okay... "I control metal" is laughable), and many are prone to diseases unique to their kind, or are dependent on medication to survive.

Mecha exists. The robots aren't usually that much bigger than a tank, and are a little more vulnerable than those you'll find in anime (in that concentrated fire from rocket propelled grenades would make short work of most of them).

Cybernetics exist. Mostly it's only the full-body cyborgs that get major benefits out of it. A few full-body cyborgs have completely different bodies from humans (such as the centipede pilots of certain kinds of full-manual interface mechs).

There are fields of ambient energy on which space faring craft can sail. This is what I'm talking about when I refer to AE or ambient energy.

The Babelim were enormous aliens that lived on this lunar system prior to the arrival of humanity and other earth life. They were thirty-foot tall aliens that looked like a cross between a man, a bird, and a whale with three bulbous eyes over three mouths full of needle-sharp teeth. They were powerful psychics in their time, and in fact may be responsible for the existence of psionics in the universe.

[spoiler=more]
Babelim consciousness and perception of the universe varied from our own. They could form intangible machines that would alter the stuff of reality. They could use these machines for teleportation, telekinesis, communication, storage, war, cooking, etc. Anything they wanted, they could have on a whim.

But the constructs needed power. In an attempt at securing an unlimited power source, the babelim partly opened the way for a dead universe to start seeping into our own. Many of the constructs were infected by the stuff of the dead universe, driving some of the babelim mad that used them. Any babelim that survived did so using temporal stasis in a pocket universe. It is rumored that the survivors return to this universe to pursue their unknowable goals when the stars are right, and the dead universe is farthest away.
[/spoiler]

Updates and clarifications later. For now, breakfast.

[beejazz]

Reserved for system