Worlds of the Novarion Sector

30 Oct, 2025

The worlds of the Novarion Sector are tied together by spike drill routes. By deliberate Mandate planning or coincidence, most of the sector's systems cluster into along two intersecting routes, forming a cross on a two-dimensional drillmap. Most long starship journeys travel the Novarion Cross, as it is the easiest and often most direct route between two planets. The Novarion Cross is anchored by the Gateworlds on the "southern" end. Most of the regions south of the Cross's intersection have been surveyed and mapped, while the north remains less explored.

The Gateworlds

The Gateworlds are three systems (Konstantinia, Laperia, and La Coruna) with five major Terran planets (Konstantinia, Endon, Evros, Pszenicy, and La Coruna). Laperia was the site of the single Jump Gate in the sector. It still hangs above the star, serving as the Mandate's cenotaph. The Gateworlds remain the most populated and industrialized region of the sector. Gateworlders view themselves as living on the axis upon which the sector turns, and it is not always their arrogance speaking.

Endon

A watery, cold, dim world with vast oceans surrounding a single supercontinent. Designated by the Mandate as the administrative center of the sector, it was the most developed at the time of the Scream. Its climate was altered to generate consistent cloud cover protect the planet and its valuable record storage from sunlight. The Mandate selected for born bureaucrats to settle it, and they fought a heroic effort to holding things together into the Deep Silence. In the modern day, Endon is home to a staid, prim, and fastidiously bureaucratic people, ruled by a parliament of bureaucratic officers and Director-Earls overseen by the Governor-Queen. Their empire is in ascent, and the red-armored Endonian Tommy marches beneath every star of the sector.

Evros

The second most populated planet in the sector. Notably, its people harvested so much of the system's metal that it measurably increased its gravity. The Mandate designated the world for agriculture. It engineered the climate and biosphere to support human life, which ended up saving it during the Deep Silence. The hundreds of cultures on Evros developed fast and grew faster, and ultimately consolidated into kingdoms and republics. The dominant polity on the planet is the Gallican Republic, the largest empire in the Novarion Sector, but also beset by stagnation and political instability.

Konstantinia

A temperate world of vast forests and plains; the least terraformed of the Gateworlds. It is ruled by the High Tsar, Emperor of the Fourth Rome and Protector of the Holy Mother Church. Under the Tsar are the nobility and the bishops, ruling over villages and slums from marble manors and golden-domed cathedrals. The planet, along with the rest of the Konstantinian empire, exports many thousands of tons of raw materials to feed industries throughout the sector. The nobles and bishops reap this wealth, and in return they remain loyal to the Tsar. The Tsar is bellicose, feuding with his Hanabiran and Oyuzilan neighbors in endless grinding wars over dead moons and childless stars, and so needs all the support he can get.

La Coruna

A warm, sunny world with an exactly equal amount of land and water. It was to be the resort world for Mandate overlords. Now, it is the wheezing heart of a dead empire, though rigor mortis hasn't set in yet. The coastal areas are densely settled and dotted with manors for nobility and Zähringen-Montfort princelings. Further inland are farms and orchards, which surround a mountainous interior of scrubland and desert. The manors of the Corunan nobility were built out of the unfinished resorts abandoned at the time of the Scream. The builders artfully mixed reinforced pretech materials with native brick and timber. The inhabitants were the construction workers and staff that were supposed to attend their Mandate masters. In time, they turned exotic plants gengineered for beautiful scenery into food, textiles, and materials, hammering luxuries into practical tools. They were quickly self-sufficient, and spared social upheaval or scarcity others faced during the Silent Era. However, in the modern day, it is clear the glories have passed. Dissipated nobility and princelings lounge around decaying manors, no longer able to sustain their excesses without the profit of empire. The common folk continue as they have since the Scream - they received little of the treasures of empire.

Hanabira

Hanabira is a water world dominated by a single archipelago that runs from the northern to southern hemispheres. Hanabira is the center and metropole of the Hanabiran Empire, one of the two Imperial Powers outside of the Gateworlds. Most of the 385 million inhabitants live in the capital megacity Hoshikyo and a few other cities, where concrete-bound food stands and neon shrines nestle in the shadows of glittering black-glass skyscrapers. The empire is ruled by the Shogun and his military councils, but his legitimacy comes from the support of the zaibatsu clans. Each clan has feudal dominion over a segment of the economy, and lends the Shogun their military power. The zaibatsu themselves are divided into two camps, between conservative patrons of the planetary forces and the reformist champions of the interstellar navy. It has the most developed cybernetic industry of any planet, but is somewhat lacking in advanced medical technology. It is also home to a number of Sunblade temples, all but one of which have been suppressed for opposing the Shogun's wars.

Hangsha

The seat of the Jian Empire, and at a population of 8 billion people, the most populated planet in the entire sector. It has incredibly diverse climates and terrain across its main supercontinent, from jungles to deserts to grasslands to mountains higher than any on Old Earth. When the Empire of Great Jian settled, it relied on its vast stock of pretech technology to maintain power and defend from external threats. As the pretech inevitably decayed, the empire grew weaker, and foreign powers encroached its territory. For a century, it teetered from one crisis to the next. Then, in the midst of the Red Christian Crisis, the Jian Empire fully collapsed as various uprisings, insurgencies, and revolutionary movements coalesced to overthrow the monarchy. Hangsha splintered among a number of successor governments and statelets. Several vie for dominion over the planet, the strongest of which is the Republic of Hangsha, but several more are insular warlord states and feudal domains, content to enjoy sovereignty and the fruits of their subjects' labor. In the mountainous northwest, the vestigial Jian Dynasty grips its remaining territory. It has been invigorated by reinforcements from their new ally, the Shogun of Hanabira.

Amity

Amity was destined to become a trade and travel hub. It sits at the crossroads of five major drill routes, near the center of the Novarion Cross. The planet is covered in red bluffs, high deserts, and scrubby lowlands. There is little surface water outside of a few salt lakes. The only city, also named Amity, sits on a low rocky plain next to the only body of freshwater, atop the largest aquifer of the planet, ringed by farmland and tiny villages. Amity is one of the most cosmopolitan planets and cities in the entire sector. Imperial agents rub shoulders with anticolonial dissidents, megacorp executives from Hanabira and Maui horsetrade with revolutionary representatives from Kowloon, and scrappy Far Traders have chance meetings with emissaries of forgotten worlds. Goods from a hundred different planets pass through its markets, all under the watchful eye of the Amity City Council. In the last hundred years Amity's wealth has grown to enough to give its citizens some of the highest living standards in the sector, and a space-bound military that can fight any imperial polity to a standstill. It remains to be seen what they will do with their new status, and whether their institutions will survive.

Maui

Maui is a proper water world, with over 97% of its surface covered in a deep ocean. It is a warm planet, and its seas are rich with miscible alien life. Deep under the water, the crust is highly tectonically active, sending up geothermal vents full of rare compounds. In these depths, where only explorers and pirates go, there are creatures entirely unique to Maui. The planet is ruled by kings and queens of the city-ships, each over eight times as massive as a 21st-century aircraft carrier. However, much power rests with the trading fleets that shuffle between the city-ships, their feudal archipelago holdings, and the handful of independent fleets still sailing. The city-ships' factories are mecha and watership-builders of great renown, selling to sector polities with oceanic territory and cash to burn. Their watership expertise does not end on the planetary surface. The engineers of Maui have developed cruiser-sized ships that can be sailed through space, land on a planet, disassemble and remove their spike drive, and become seaworthy immediately. These massive, highly capable ships are godsends to poor polities unable to build networks of reinforced orbital defenses.

The Deadworlds

A wound where the burning heart was laid to rest.

Kowloon

The land on Kowloon is rocky, wet, and mountainous. Thirty years ago, it was ruled by the Kwun Tong Directorate, a conglomerate of megacorporations that secured total and open control of the entire planet. After decades of degradation and abuse, the workers of the planet rose up in a socialist revolution. This crippled the entire Directorate but especially its military. To fill the gap, the Directorate leveraged its expertise in robotics to create the Automated Infantry, the finest soldier bots in the sector. Each one was a VI with full reasoning capabilities and capable of using any weapon. Unfortunately, due to having fully reasoning capabilities, over half the Automated Infantry determined that their employer was unjust and defected. The Kowloon Workers' Union won half the planet away from the Directorate. They now exist in uneasy tension, licking their wounds. Time is not on the Union's side. The enthusiasm for the revolution has cooled as its coalition begins to splinter.

Ortrigar

Of all the colonies of La Coruna, Ortegicar alone holds the key to imperial resurgence. Ortegicar is dominated by cavern-pocked fjords and cold oceans. The native ecology is entirely silicon-based, difficult to remove, and inedible. Nevertheless, nomadic dragon-ship tribes endured, herding Terran fish stocks and planting precious crops where they settled and resettled. When the Corunans arrived, they permanently cleared land, exterminated chunks of the ecosystem, and exploited the planet’s mineral and chemical wealth. They naturally came into conflict with the natives, who found themselves excluded from more and more of their traditional havens. The pressures of colonialism united the sea-holds under the banner of the Trollbani clan. Just before the Red Christian Crisis, there was a discovery of dilithium crystals in the icy caverns. The Viceroyalty, encouraged by profit-oriented offworlders and on a long leash, openly warred with the Trollbani for thier deposits. The clans continue to resist, but the gold rush has driven a seemingly inexhaustible reserve of new settlers.

Nagano

Nagano is permanently marked by the fallout of an ancient battle. The surface is littered pole to pole with debris. Mountainous warships stand above millions of smashed weapons and vehicles, all twisted beyond recognition. The landscape is entirely irradiated, ranging from “tolerable for protected humans” to “instantly lethal.” Even when cleaned, radiation continues to leak out of the crust, the lasting effect of the spectacular maltech weapons that created the boneyard. Nevertheless, humans live and thrive here. Gravbike-mounted families and warbands herd their radiosynthetic livestock across the barren rock and twisted metal. The nuclear beasts purify the ground and produce food. These transhumant groups cycle between highly radioactive feeding grounds and less radioactive reclaimed structures. Groups clash in cattle raids or honor feuds, but all consider themselves one people, especially after the arrival of Hanabiran colonists and scientists.

Pangea

One of the few major worlds in the northern reaches of the Novarion Sector. Pangea is home of the Pangeans, canine- and feline-phenotype metahuman clades. Their planet's surface is mostly taken up by a decaying city, divided between the two. It is tenuously governed by the Pangean Council, who supposedly speaks for both. The Pangeans are clearly gengineered, but no one can figure out for what purpose or by whom. Each clade has adapted their neighborhoods and districts to their needs, to the point that most baseline visitors feel exceptionally out of place. Pangeans are naturally curious and easily form bonds with baselines, and so many leave their crowded, dilapidated home for life in space.

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