The Deadworlds
The Deadworlds
In the dawning years of the thirty-second century, in an area of space far, far, far away from Old Earth, there lay five star systems, tied through metadimensional space and haunted by the memory of the most terrible war in the sector. They were forever scarred, their people inheriting the wounds unto the third generation. They are a festering red stain in middle of the Novarion Sector. They are the Deadworlds.
Before the Deadworlds were the Deadworlds, they were a vital connection between the western arm of the Novarion Sector, and the central column of the Novarion Cross, allowing for small ships to bypass the wide gap of the Lesser Vault. Some of the worlds were populated before the Scream. Others were settled by the waves of stellar powers: the war-fleets of the High Jian; the star galleons of La Coruna; the colonists of Endon and Gallica and all the other empires of the latter days. They grew, they developed, they hosted the many comedies and tragedies of human existence. The detailed history of this five hundred year period was erased by the the Red Christian Crisis. All that remain are ruins, scattered and disjointed testaments of a better time.
The Red Christian Crisis
Fifty years ago, something happened, an event veiled by time and redaction. On each of the Deadworlds, groups who would later be called Red Christians rose up, making war on anyone who refused to submit. Within days, they had fleets, and within months, they were spreading far beyond the Deadworlds, putting planets as far afield as Maui and Hanabira under threat.
Onto the stage strode the Perimeter, who shed its cloak and revealed its nature. It was an order founded in time immemorial to protect mankind from interplanetary threats; it had failed to contain the Red Christians, and so requested the help of all the sector's great powers. The crisis was so dire and their appeal so effective that none who could contribute refused; even the haughty Gateworlds were roused to action. Under their banner, they formed the Coalition, the greatest military the sector ever saw. Ten thousand ships from dozens of planets, tens of millions of troops, and the greatest military minds of the era set out towards the Deadworlds, intent on ending the threat.
The war was vast and furious, fought on three different fronts and on every system in the Deadworlds. No world was spared, and nothing, no airless moon or asteroid outpost, remained untouched. The early years were filled with defeats and setbacks, but in the later years the Coalition won brutal, costly victories, grinding down the Red Christians inch by bloody inch. A half decade of desperate fighting brought the Coalition to Necropolis, the swollen heart of the menace. There, amid a ceaseless rain of dropships and bombardments, the war ended. The enemy ceased to be a threat, and the Coalition's infighting ran over. It dissolved acrimoniously, even as its vanguard was still clearing Necropolis block by block.
The Coalition left, nearly abandoning their own armies, and providing little relief for the inhabitants. The war was over and it was time for triumphs and parades, not the painful task of rebuilding. Thus the Deadworlds were created, as the shattered societies of each world tried to piece something back together from the ashes.
Red Christians
*squeezes head so i cant hear god tell me his plan* by Omega Black Art
On the foe themselves, the official histories are brief. The Red Christians were a violent sect descended from a mĂŠlange of traditions in Saturnine Christianity. They seized power in what are now the Deadworlds, and mustered an army and a fleet in an attempt to take over the sector. They lost the war and the last Red Christians were destroyed by the Coalition on Necropolis. There are no extant Red Christians.
This narrative was curated by the Perimeter. It is a palimpsest, and its gaps are apparent to anyone who reads it closely. The Perimeter was very thorough in expunging the records of the conflict, but they were not perfect. Renegade scholars, defying professional scorn and shadowy threats, piece together clues. They sift through remote archives, navigate abandoned shipwrecks, trek across hostile territory, and brave bandits and worse to gather scraps of the truth.
Their consensus is in flux, but their studies paint an eerie picture. The Red Christians had a theology of agony, an obsession with evangelism and sacrifice, and if wilder tales are to be believed, a talent for gengineering. The Red Christians saw flesh as a tool for divinity, and enhanced or created a variety of creatures for their war effort. Footsoldiers that laughed as their mangled limbs regrew in seconds. Cruiciform, squat humanoids that launched gobs of poison. Flying, angelic arachnid carnivores that chewed through power armor. A lupine mass of muscles that could survive hard vacuum and unerringly track crew through bulkheads. Oversized columbiformes that shed prions. There are many more known in far less detail, only referenced in a single fragmented after-action report or a panicked terminal communication. The scholars disagree on which are genuine and which are typical combat misidentifications.
The Red Christians' social works are less understood. Their forces appeared to move impossibly fast, almost at the speed of communication. When they arrived on a world they always drew hundreds of people to their cause instantly. Records of the Red Christian's infiltration and conversion efforts were far more thoroughly scrubbed by the Perimeter, but there are just enough clues to speculate wildly. Some have proposed heretofore-unknown psychic disciplines; some have proposed a mind-controlling virus; a few have even claimed that the infiltration was performed via genetic stay-behind forces dormant for centuries. There is not enough evidence to disregard any of these theories.
However, one thing these iconoclast scholars agree on is that there are no extant Red Christians.
Worlds of the Deadworlds
Arcadia - Shattered World
The Red Christians were brought to a dead halt on the verdant, forested world of Arcadia. The Arcadians fought valiantly against their horrors. It was all for naught. In what the Arcadians called Le Grand Coup, the enemy activated an unknown device, cracking the planet down to its core. Tens of millions were killed instantly, the planet's biosphere snuffed out soon after. Only the Arcadian military aboard Coalition ships survived.
The few hundred thousand left, the last Arcadians, carried all that was left of their people, their culture, and their world in their rucksacks. They were promised a new, habitable homeworld in return for fighting the war to the bitter end. The promise was broken. So they carried their heavy loads elsewhere - into little colonies on uninhabitable worlds, and aboard the gas giant orbitals in which they headquartered - and stuffed their rucksacks with bitterness. Time and bitterness warped the culture buried in their rucksacks. Pieces fell away until only their martial tradition remained. They taught their children and their children's children about their homeworld, an edenic land that was lost forever. They taught them that the highest aspiration is to be a good soldier, and those unfit for war disgrace the memory of their destroyed planet.
The Arcadian Division maintains a watch over the shattered remains of their homeworld, but their primary occupation is as mercenaries. Units of Arcadians serve throughout the Deadworlds and the Sector, where they are regarded as superlative soldiers. Their treasures are remitted to Arcadian high command, embedded in their orbital stations. There are no other suitable worlds in their system, but they refuse to leave it before they are ready. Their Marshal watches the corpse of their homeworld trail around the star, as the wages of war pile in their vaults. One day, she says, they will use it to barter for a new home. The young captains look at their companies and ask, why not take one?
Namur - War World
Namur was thoroughly infiltrated by the Red Christians prior to the Crisis, and when it erupted, it fell into chaos. Monsters stalked the streets, emergency response was crippled, and thousands of innocents unknowingly spread plagues. The response, when it came, was decided upon by a group of masked men in a dark room. The threat was a cancer, they reckoned; and lacking a scalpel, the only cure was a fevered, manic hacking at their own flesh. The world was divided into those that were guaranteed to be "clean" and those that were not; those falling on the wrong side of this hasty division were abandoned or exterminated. In time, this group would escalate their actions; they called for the use of every horrific weapon available on their own world.
The scars of the conflict never healed. Namur is now a wasteland, a world that boils at the equator, a world where the winds can bring the killing air, a world were weapons denied their day bide their time to finally detonate. Those that were called clean now have the privilege of living under the authoritarian rule of the Victory Alliance, where individual identity is doled out as a reward for devoted service to the death cult. It fights a miserable, unwinnable war against those who had the temerity to be marked for death and not die. These Survivors roam the wastes, avoiding patrols and salvaging what they can. The arid, broken landscape permits only the hardiest to persist.
Its sister planet Ohey survived the war in a far better state, retaining its pre-war society, its industry, and its habitability. The Victory Alliance gazes at it from their devastated wasteland with a hungry envy. It bides its time, building strength for the coming day of Final Victory.
Caliban - Tempest World
Caliban is one of the many ocean worlds of the Novarion Sector, with 94% of its surface covered in water. It is warm but not life-threateningly so, as the water and the churning atmosphere provide a degree of stabilization that rockier planets lack. The air is perfectly breatheable for humans, and while the native life is not fit for Terran consumption, marine life of Terran stock has thrived, mingled, and adapted since it was introduced. It even hosts a population of sentient delphinidae in its waves. It would be a twin gem to the water-paradise of Maui, if not for the storms.
Vast storms brew and rage across the surface of Caliban, and with only a handful of small, rocky landmasses, there is nothing to break them. Only the high peaks that hide the planetary lowport in San Juan can break the storms, and even then, only just. The storms were not always as intense as they are now, but the Crisis brought about a change in climate. Outside of San Juan, whose privileged location has turned it into a pirate port of vice and villainy, the people of the Salem Commonwealth and the United Pods have adapted to the storms. They attach underwater buildings to epipelagic ridges. Their boats are designed to submerge without sinking. Submarines are the preferred mode of transport for valuable things and people. They venture onto the surface, but only a fool remains long enough for a storm to arrive.
These adaptations have taken their toll. The human population lives in isolated, cramped settlements, where social tensions have no room to diffuse. The elders of Salem carry war paranoia still, and encourage their people to monitor the behavior of friends and neighbors. They are incredibly suspicious of outsiders, quick to accuse them of being fish poachers or pirates. This atmosphere is not helped when the great storms churn the depths and wash up something from the war that is not quite dead.
Zelotupia III - Atavist World
Zelotupia's third planet was never a gentle world, but when the elders speak of the old days, they will say (with a distant gaze and misty eyes) that is was not like it is now. Before the coming of the Red Christians, and before the Coalition took their people into camps, a man could live in the jungle. The air was not so thick, and those born on the world did not need the filters of the foreign people. Healers were not overwhelmed by constant disease. The animals remained the same from season to season, generation to generation. There were no giant craters where the soil and water are poison, and where strangling fruit comes forth from the seeds of the dead.
Now, Zelotupia is every urban and orbital inhabitant's nightmare of a jungle - a hostile, hateful, rotting morass of untamed nature, red in tooth and claw and vine and pincer and a thousand other ways to kill painfully. Above all, Zelotupia III is hot and wet. The temperature is murderously hot at the equator, and just below temperate at the poles. Almost all of the water is in subtropical seas that keep the atmosphere humid. The atmosphere of the planet is also thick with oxygen, enough to slowly poison a baseline human in hours. The combination of the heat, the water, and the oxygen creates a trophic bounty, where flora and fauna can grow to monstrous sizes and staggering numbers. The entire surface is covered in extremely diverse tropical and temperate rainforests, except for a handful of mountain peaks. Zelotupia is home to the most unique species in the sector, in every clade and kingdom, and new ones are being discovered every day. Most of these species are inimical in some way to humanity, and many of these exhibit strange symbiosis. It is easy enough to dodge the northern branch vipers and the lesser brown monitor beetle, but it is harder to avoid the fungi, the bacteria, and the parasites they spread.
Nevertheless, there is human settlement on the planet. The pre-war inhabitants were returned to their overgrown polar villages, and left to rebuild their lives on their own. Twenty years ago, a city-sized patch of jungle was cleared and paved by the Calcevermis Industrial Combine. The arms dealer established a station in orbit and a base camp on the world, and began harvesting biomatter. No one knows what brings them to Zelotupia III. Their conventional weapon manufacturing facility is on Leipzig, moon of Zelotupia VII; and their biological and pharmaceutical insights are a trickle. All that is known about their interest is a project name, one word - Eisenstock.
Necropolis - Ruin World
Miseration - Tragedy Has Spoken Album Cover Art by Pär Olofsson
The Coalition's war wounded all the worlds, but none more so than Necropolis. Not only was its surface crushed and people slaughtered, its history was washed away in blood. The records of what the planet was, even its name before it received the title of Necropolis, have been erased. Perhaps the remaining inhabitants carry some shred of memory, but if they do, it is not widely known off its surface. What is known is that before the Crisis, Necropolis was densely populated, as testified by the ruined skylines that dot the planet. Even before the war, its air was fouled by industry and its waters plagued by waste. The humane biosphere was choking to death. Popular reckoning holds that it was the genesis of the Red Christians; why or how is unclear.
The situation is a classic post-apocalypse, the fevered nightmare of the ancient nuclear age. Craters mar the surface. Outside the craters the land was torn by brutal hand-to-hand fighting of the last months of the war. The Coalition leveled anything larger than a shed as a matter of course. Only tiny scraps of infrastructure remain, and it is around these sanctuaries that what is left of civilization clusters. Without these last functional pieces of modern technology, the survivors would have perished.
Despite these dire circumstances, Necropolis actually retains the largest population of any of the Deadworlds, though it is still a fraction of a fraction of its estimated pre-war population. In metro tunnels wrapped around fusion reactors, hand-powered aquifer pumps in the basement of sewage plants, and intact underground hydroponic chambers, the people of Necropolis live their lives as best they can, as they have for fifty years. Outside their sealed entrances and guarded walls, warped fauna hunt the ruins. Beyond the ruins, raiders rove across the hills and plains, sacking those too weak to resist. A few have evolved into proper despotates, where the archon or nobility live in feral luxury atop a pyramid of human suffering, imitating the people that destroyed their planet.
Between all of them are small family bands, those expelled from the meagre sanctuaries when the crops withered or the water ran thin. They eke out a marginal existence, coaxing crops and game from the poisoned earth. A few get the bright ideas to scavenge the ruins of their world. They seek artifacts they can trade to a bandit lord for protection or to a sanctuary for food and water, or best of all, to a trader from the stars with technology of their own. Their elders quiver in fear and warn them (in vain) that their world was once home to a monsterous sin, and the things in the ruins are best left buried.
Why Come to the Deadworlds?
Unknown Title, David R. Deitrick, for The Traveller Book by Game Designer's Workshop
All of the information above may give the impression that the Deadworlds are a generally unpleasant place to live and work; star systems best avoided or fled. That is because they are. Yet tens of thousands of people from every corner of the sector enter the Deadworlds every year.
The most common are the merchant ships. The route through the Deadworlds is still the fastest way from the Gateworlds and the east into the west of the subsector, and the only route available to jump-1 spike drives. There are plenty of small-time tramp freighters, penny-wise pound-foolish naval captains, and merchant princes on rush jobs to provide a steady traffic of starships through the systems. Naturally, these starships need fuel, repairs, and other travel services, and so must often interact with the polities of the Deadworlds or their dependencies, and so must interact with its inhabitants. It is not uncommon for a hapless or novice merchant crew to get caught up in the intrigues and dangers of the Deadworlds, and more than one crew can tell a tale of shore leave gone very, very wrong.
Not all merchants are just passing by. There are still people in the Deadworlds, and where there are people, there will be peddlers profiting from their lack. Many smaller merchant ships make tidy sums trading even basic goods to the polities and inhabitants of the Deadworlds. Of course, the shriveled and occassionally chaotic nature of these economies can present more challenges than opportunities. Despite how simple a scheme might appear, hauling grain or machine tools to a Deadworld is not for the faint of heart or averse of risk.
The second most common are the outlaws and refugees. In the Novarion Sector, getting out of a system will shed the heat. However, for those that want the comfort of a little extra distance (or those who are heinous and infamous enough to merit a chase across the stars), the Deadworlds are the place to go. No foreign navies patrol the Deadworlds, to say nothing of civilian law enforcement. It is a good place to go for those looking to fall off the map. However, this glut of wanted faces has created a robust bounty ecosystem. For every criminal that slips into the Deadworlds, three fresh-faced bounty hunters show up in the market lot of Plymouth or the beerhalls of Verlaine looking to make their fortune, and two are dead within the month. Nevertheless, plenty more are undeterred and come to hunt the most dangerous game.
Where there are merchants and criminals, there are pirates. Pirates strike any who dare enter the Deadworlds, demanding their pound of flesh as the price of passage. They come from many backgrounds: fallen noblemen mix with romantic revolutionaries; nationless fraternities stalk alongside charismatic cults; vile slavers skirmish with merchant-privateers. They fly in frigates, shuttles, fightercraft, and even lumbering upgunned bulk haulers. They nest in airless moons, remote outposts, and abandoned space stations. Some have spike drives to chase their quarry from system to system. Pirate hunters are a sight rarer than bounty hunters, but every few years pirates cause enough economic disruption to attract the attention of sector navies. In between these sweeping purges, merchants and inhabitants alike must fend for themselves. The easiest way to deal with pirates is to cut a deal, receiving occasionally reliable protection at a high (but not life-threatening cost.) Other voyagers swap cargo space for engines to run or guns to fight. A few enterprising individuals refit their civilian craft as an armed sloop, and offer their services as escorts. These sorts often turn buccaneer when they realize the money is better.
The least numerous but by no means rare group is the motley assortment of mercenaries, prospectors, treasure-hunters, field scientists, corporate marketeers, pĂcaros, big-game hunters, filibusters, and bored youths that are collectively and dismissively referred to as adventurers. Bands of these scoundrels cause no end of trouble for the local inhabitants and the other groups. They are drawn by rumors of treasure great and small, and of every kind. Some trawl celestial bodies for a Jian treasure-moon or miraculous pretech cache, some become fixers and hired guns, and some content themselves to see sights and secrets found nowhere else.
