A Thousand Worlds - Community Project

[Tangential]

[ic]Void Beacons
Outside the walls of the galaxy lay Great Voids as vast and they are empty. Yet scattered through these voids are a few hundred slowly drifting monolthic and impenetrable structures. Invariably across their surfaces a shimmering string of numbers expressed in the notation of the watcher constantly flow. They hail from an era forgotten even to the enigmatic Vri, themselves ancient grandfathers of the Ecdysis.
Might they be gifts, or prisons, tombs, or traps, or even watch-stations for a race that has transcended the End of Greatness that so plagues most primogenitors? Regardless; the so-called "god-boxes" have captured the imagination of every race to encounter them - invariably appearing throughout the dreams and artwork of an encountered culture. Some who look upon them go mad, though this happens far more commonly among biological sentiences.  
That is all we know. After 400,000 years of study that is all we know.

--An ancient inscription found by Humans in the ancient mausoleum-library of the extinct Shaxi
[/ic]

[Steerpike]

Ooh, mysterious!

[Mason]

[ic=Planetary Threat Assessment]
    The Planetary Threat Assessment (a division of the Excelsior/Drake Conglomerate)

Now offering Species Annihilation Insurance!
   The Planetary Threat Assessment Board offers a variety of interspecies sustaining techniques, carefully  packaged and carried out by our top scientists.
   
    Don't Fret! We'll come to you!
  Global Warming? Local Star About to Die? OR just a nasty invasion problem? The PTA has a solution for your species continuation problem and a variety of techniques including:

    Genetic Reconstruction , Always popular with the Carbon Based life forms!
   
    Fabricated Climate Development! We start with a tiny speck of dust and rebuild your home planet-The way it might have happened millions-even billions of years ago! Enjoy a full spectrum of species evolution! RAPID EVOLUTION THERAPY NOW AVAILABLE!

  CALL FOR PRICING AND HOLIDAY DEALS!

 [/ic]

  [ic=PTA Database]

    Recent PTA projects/Alerts:
       Nemesis This little life-form sure is a fright! Our scientists are hard at work figuring out how this simple-celled creature can survive in the vacuum of space. Nemesis can infect a whole planet in a mere single local star cycle! NOW THATS FAST!
 Using photosynthesis or some derivative of it, this little bugger will eradicate every living thing-and non-living thing in a quick burst of simple-cell fury. Eventually the planet will be transformed into a floating ball of Nemesis.
[note=] [/note]

     But this little guys not done there folks!
 
In a matter of months after complete assimilation, the planetoid begins sending out pockets of Nemesis to start the whole process over! WOW
     
     But don't worry! An atmospheric coating process is in the works to protect your planet from any Nemesis incursions! CALL FOR PRICING! Act fast-this is sure to go...well quick as a Nemesis Assimilation Process!

   Brought to you by the Planetary Threat Assessment Division of Excelsior/Drake Conglomerate

[/ic]

 I think this fits in here as well:
Octillionares Hunting Club

[ooc]
   We need a blinking text tag...you know...like on cheesy commercials.
[/ooc]

[SA]

I can't help thinking that Fabricated Climate Development and Nemesis are somehow related...

[Gamer Printshop]

Dang, that means I have to come with names for all the races shown in this map... this being one of the few sci-fi flavored maps I've ever made. Plus there's technologies and factions for these as well. (I don't plan to use them for anything campaign wise myself, so I'll donate this to the cause...)

 

[Tangential]

[ic]Adamastos
Those who have encountered this entity quarrel about whether it is a ship or a being. In appearance I am told Adamastos is indigo and amorphous tempest, surpassing the size of many small planetoids

 Luckily - I say luckily because I have good reason to believe that Adamastos is a threat to all galactic sentience - it seems confined by STL travel. But don't get excited by that apparent weakness; I have access to a classified report that a Nemati Brain once sought to take advantage of that and upon launching an infestation-attack, vanished.

Adamastos has been confirmed to be responsible for attacks on Ernhardt Drake's Spectacular Space Crypt, as well as on Mwanwi, BLZ, and Ysäj vessels, and rumored to have 'eaten' a moon (Phantion V) on the outskirts Gnaraerl system, rightfully putting the esteemed elueth Ertocrats on edge.  

The character of these engagements is uniform. Adamastos floats forth and surrounds it's target, thereafter becoming opaque for hours or days. Next Adamastos engage in sudden, abrupt departure from the region. Designer plagues have failed to phase it, as have visceral interaction with various deep-space drives, and at least one usage of a Class VII mononet. Did I mention it probably ate a moon?

I have given these arguments and more and been ignored! What will it take to Dynasties that this is a threat worthy of my considerably violent attention and quthorize action?

~Arthur "Acateon" Bellwether[/ic]

I've left some nouns vague enough that they can fit under several headings. I leave such designation to Steerpike.

I also worry that I'm trying too hard to connect-the-dots. Should I focus on not tying entries to 1000 Worlds lore?

[Steerpike]

I'll have to ponder where things go!

I wouldn't worry about including too many references to other 1000 Worlds entries.  Once a certain critical mass gets reached it gets easier and easier to trow in references here and there, but trying to pack in lots of references can be difficult.  Adamastos is creepy and cool, though!

[Mason]

[ic=The Thinking Planet]

  From PTA Database:

   ...one of the more unusual planets yet discovered...I'm not really sure how to classify this Mr. Drake. Instead I have enclosed the portions of Dr. Iphegenia's Logs that pertain directly to the situation:

  Transcript:

  Dr. Iphegenia (Speaking to Specimen) Good day.
  Specimen (A tree) Hi!
  Dr. Iphegenia You can understand me?
  Tree I think so.
  Dr. Iphegenia I see.
 
 Dr. Iphegenia had been suffering from temporary visual impairment since landing on Somniferous VI, the planet in question
 
  Dr. Iphegenia Frank, my eyesight is fine now, can you turn off the visual enhancer? Thanks.
  Specimen What were you saying Dr. ?
  Dr. IphegeniaI don't remember. (gutteral vocals from the Dr.)
  Specimen Are you ok?
  Dr. Iphegenia I...ughhh....yes. That was weird. I couldn't think straight. Did you do that (tree)?
  Specimen I don't think so. (it did not)
  Dr. IphegeniaYour just a tree.
  Specimen I am.
  (Specimen is no longer conscious)
   
  Dr. Iphegenia What the hell Frank?
  Frank I don't know sir.

   We have concluded that Somniferous VI has the unique quality of conscious-reality relationship. Remember the old Earth adage "I think therefore I am?" That seems to apply in all cases of organic life forms on this planet. Even foreign subjects. Further research should be conducted with utmost care.

[/ic]

 
  [ooc]
    Working on this one a bit more later...Essentially any living thing on the planet can simply 'will' something into existence. Not sure how to present this idea though.
  [/ooc]

[SA]

Purth of the Universe

The trend of domestic uplift was short lived on the world of September. In the four months between the passing and the repeal of the bill over three-hundred thousand dogs, cats and parakeets, and at least ten thousand forest frogs underwent genetic neural realignment and began filling the endless suburban ecumenopolis with their throaty and uncoordinated mutt-speech. It was very upsetting to children. Old timers had heart attacks. Ecclesiasts called it the devil's speech and incited pogroms against the pusses and puppydogs. There were frenzied mass stampings of terrified frogs who fled into the sewers and formed a great undercity in the interstices of the reconstitution silos, which they called Libertalia. The ferrets had a strange sort of cunning and disappeared in droves long before the killings began. Lord knows where.

By the time the Global Peace Police reigned in the violence most of the unfortunate animals were dead or had been horrifically trepanned by their guilt-ridden owners. The thousand or so who remained were gathered up by the Space Government and relocated to several orbital stations where they would be safe from their erstwhile masters. But one cat was not discovered. Her keeper, a middle-aged billionaire widow called Bettany Mueller, spent all her life's savings in the purchase of a tiny refitted rocketship and sent the little cat, whose name is Purth, out into the wide wild universe.

Purth is now a very very old cat. She has been on hundreds of worlds and has been genetically perfected by alien sciences so that maybe she will never die. She has been a gunslinger on the mud moons of Prukah and matched the gambits of the cutthroat cardsharps on Vontis Solar. She has seen the galaxy moths gobble up great swathes of space on the verges of Taleante, studied under the perverted tutelage of the Gronnock Mimesis Bug, and padded through the lonely lemniscate corridors that the Aftertime Lords built (or are yet to build) in the cold eternity of the heatless future, when stillness is supreme and causality's arrow is thus ragged and coiled. She has the look of a creature who has seen, and who comprehends, more than you will ever know. Which is to say that she looks very much like an ordinary cat.

[SA]

WORLD FIVE

The way we understand it, the Brugians (whose world is called Bruges but you may call it whatever else you like if it better conveys some sort of verisimilitude) had such awesome science that they achieved perfect harmony with their planet, almost to the point of becoming a single organism. They could do all sorts of cool stuff like reshape mountains and control the atmosphere and ride starbeams to the moon and back (wank wank). This freaked some of them out. Maybe they hadn't wholly forsaken their egos and were terrified by the prospect of subsumption within the geologic whole. Maybe they were simply ne'er-do-wells by nature. Whatever. They hijacked the worldmind, turned its power against itself, blew up the planet and started over. Nobody remembered what the world was like the first time which is probably why the second time around was exactly the same.

Third time around a voyeur species that looks like fat dried up slugs with crackly skin (they don't have speech so the hell knows what they're called) discovered Bruges and watched the long process of its social perfection and defection and reversion. They've now watched the Brugians destroy and recreate the planet two further times. The sluggers are starting to think the Brugians are maybe just a little bit cracked in the head and they're seriously considering doing something about it. If they do it will get messy very fast because there's actually a very practical reason why World Five is just like World One, and it has nothing to do with existential inadequacy.

[SA]

THE BUG IS REFLECTED IN NUMBERLESS MIRRORS

there's a point when the rising potential of a species begins to outpace their comprehension of that very same strength. when they're smart enough to recognise the imbalance and humble enough to take the necessary pause and consideration the danger can be averted, but this is a rare fate. the universe is filled with a hundred million prisons built of runaway science.

mimesis
there are three active in registered space and perhaps one dormant in the long-malfunctioning utility fields of PHEGREAH (the repair savants, whose meticulous ministrations are scarcely swift enough to keep those fields from sweeping further across the low plain into grand-terrier, haven't provided reliable accounts of the entity, but it has been confirmed to exhibit i-order wave patterns). the remains of the fifth bug have been scrutinised in every possible fashion by intellects of the highest class and clade. we suspect that they are nothing more than the organism's hypospatial residuum, a sort of spacetime exoskeleton. the creature itself remains unanalysed.

(bug four)
it's called the gronnock mimesis bug, formerly of GRONNOCK, currently active in the principality of GRAVITY 1. we'll speak more on it later.

(bug two)
the seed ship that brought the cardammou people to the planet ATAXIA suffered damage to its terraformation engine en route from the slip rift. unable to settle upon ataxia, the cardammou instead remained in low orbit, dwelling in their latticework satellite cities and farming the steady hail of mineral-rich meteorites with continent-wide kinetic nets while their cultivator class toiled upon the planet surface, completing the work which their ruined machine could not. the cardammou cities beyond the sky are called the VERTIGINE.

according to certain accounts the ataxia mimesis bug had been in stasis near the planet core. descriptions of the structure containing it suggest it was intended as a sort of solid potentiality device (if speculation concerning the misesis bugs' nature is correct, such a large-scale quantum artifice could serve as a prison, binding the organism to a single iteration of spacetime). when the cultivators encountered the bug (either releasing it or merely rousing it, depending on the true circumstances of its internment) it replicated the cardammou civilisation pattern and populated ataxia with imitations of the newcomer species. the cultivators, already pariahs among their own kind, accepted an exalted status among these simulacra.

the vertigines rightly feared the imposter race. they quarantined the planet and charged the cultivators with treason. for many centuries (the ataxia calendar is very short but time passes quick for the cardammou) the true and false people have endured a paranoid standoff but because the vertigines don't understand the nature of the mimesis bug they've nevertheless permitted emissaries from ataxia into their satellite cities. it's possible that the bug itself has infiltrated vertigines and is refocusing its creative power on a mimicry of cardammou spaceflight.

(bug three)
its league-long needleship follows the rumoured course charted by the undiscovered people. when the entire universe has dissolved into silent uniformity they will build the labyrinth that threads into the interstices of former time and the lemniscate mimesis bug will follow them into that corridor where the likes of lorridian and nyx and vri and purth have trod before. there it will learn of the formless aftertime and in that knowing its body will become all of our bodies. if it is going to happen then it has already happened.

[SA]

BYZANNICA was hatched in the uttermost pit of the Symphony catacomb upon the ecoformed asteroid Sinister Six. It was one of many genderless mutants, whose numbers were growing ever larger as the dis-ease of the Cosm-Father Dutiful spread and infected the stellar territories of Squamous Telema and disturbed the gene-fabrications of the eggweavers. At the moment of Byzannica's birth, so the telling goes, the klaxon fields of Sinister Six resounded with a sudden and extemporaneous song, and that melody, with intricacies baffling even to the great ponderers of Mellifluous Tower, upset the delicate harmonic of the catacomb's pillars and arches so that the city's soaring ceiling smashed down into the nurture fields and killed a thousand broods of juveniles. This was the first of Byzannica's many monstrous miracles. If the child harvesters had sensed the significance of that correlation perhaps they would have killed it were it lay, tangled in cords of rubescent amnion upon the natal floor.

[ooc]Uh oh. Looks like my posts are getting a little crowded. Someone tap in, quick![/ooc]

[Llum]

Hess

The planet Hess is covered in water, having few land masses and those mostly small island chains formed by mantle hot spots. Having a dense atmosphere, small polar regions and no major land masses the planet would be ignored by anyone who managed to find it except for the life cycle of Hessian coral.

The coral grows in large reefs in the waters near the equator. Spindly masses of tubular growths they spread across vast areas of the sea floor. At some point in their life cycle the coral begins to grow gas filled sacks, protected away in the core of its mass. After time and age take their toll the lowermost coral begins to break, allowing sections of coral to drift upwards with new found buoyancy. These newly independent sections can be seen breaching the waterline all over Hess. With the new influx of sunlight the production of sacks increases in dramatically eventually giving the masses of coral lift, enough to leave behind the waters that spawned them.

The skies of Hess are full of these floating islands of coral. They vary in size and shape from small spheres a few meters across to kilometer long needle-like shapes. This makes landing spacecraft a dangerous endeavor for all but the most agile spacecraft.

[Superfluous Crow]

Two promised and much delayed entries; I hope they aren't too lacking in quality. I'm a little sick, so it might show...

The Canter Belt
The Canter Belt is a lawless region,a belt of asteroids circling Marken's Star, a dying star named after an explorer who supposedly found the system by mistake. Most of the planets in the system are worthless chunks of of rock and ice, but when the prospectors checked the Canter Belt they couldn't believe their eyes. The Canter Belt asteroids contain some of the largest deposits of valuable metals and minerals in the universe. Or at least, Some of them do. Tragically, setting up mining operations on a tumbling piece of space rock is both an expensive and difficult business and only a handful of the megacorporations have invested in the venture as of yet. Smaller, independent operations attempt to uncover some of the riches, but this is a dangerous effort at best. Yet the steady influx of people has ensured that a couple of spaceports thrive in the Belt, selling cheap whores and cheaper liquor to underpaid miners. Floating Rock and Last Man's Hole are the most famous (or notorious, depending on a man's sensibilities).
What the Canter Belt is really famous for, though, is the space pirates. Few regions in space see more of their kind, and the Belt is both profitable and sheltered from any intergalactic authorities. The mining companies take all kinds of measures to keep them at bay, but to little avail. Infamous freebooters such as Ironeye and the Black Lady still plague the Belt.      

The Ir
Odd creatures even by the standards of the Thousand Worlds, these are one of the few organisms who live and gather in the black void of space. They appear vaguely like Old World squids, with 7 fleshy pseudopods dangling from a bulbous sac covered in fins and strange orifices, possessing skin like nacre. The Ir are wise and gentle creatures, living for as long as a millenia. They can communicate telepathically with each other and any other living creature and often do so. They spend their lives slowly assimilating stray matter and discussing philosophy with their peers. Their main interest remains alchemy, though. There might be centuries between encounters with the rarer of elements in the darkness of space and the Ir thus desire to remake all of creation with the elements they have at hand. Their sac-like bodies hold all of the atoms they have gathered over the years, and the Ir continually tinker, break down and remake their possession within the confines of their body. Occassionally, a group of Ir might find their way to a planet, slowly drifting to the surface as their sac is dilated into a balloon. On the ground, the Ir gather the knowledge of natives, share their own lore, and feed on the choicest of natural elements the world has to offer.  

[SDragon]

[ic=Ylva]The planet Ylva is a lush, heavily forested world with many natural resources. Of these, the most valuable is the mineral myrrode. Myrrode is exceptionally strong, lighter than most known alloys, and easily bonds with cheaper minerals and metals. On top of all of this, myrrode has the unique quality of regenerating itself, replacing the mined quantities. Once off of Ylva, this growth ceases entirely, thus preventing disastrous effects on myrrodan equipment.

The biggest drawback, however, is that myrrode is sacred to the planet's most prominent species, the ylvs, from which the world gets it's name. Ylvs can be a significant threat to mining colonies. While some Ylvan clans have allowed strictly regulated mining within their territory, conflicts between neighboring clans make it difficult to know just how long any site is safe.

Interestingly enough, while the Ylvan people themselves are technologically primitive, they seem to show an advanced understanding of the technology of other worlds. This has lead to the popular belief that they are capable of such advancements, but actively choose against them. This, of course, only adds to their danger, as ylvs have been known to systematically deconstruct weapons in ambushes and raids, leaving scouts and miners completely defenseless against Ylvan spears and arrows.[/ic]