Ugan Zal

    In the golden age of the first crop, the phantasmagorics grew a floral superorganism the size of a planet. This world must have been a paradise. Then it died. It was hit by an unimaginable event that sterilized the planet, leaving only dead wood behind. Now the planet is a thriving Ceclaimer world, as they work tirelessly to bring life to the waste land.

    Ugan Zal is perhaps the oldest continuously inhabited planet in Chunk Space. Ornish spores found the planet millennium ago, before even the signing of the reclaimer accords. For thousands of years Orn deep steaders have been bringing life to the depths. In the last thousand years the other races of the alliance have settled here as well. The scolpendrites have introduced new bugs to the fungal gardens, and humans have started surface homesteads farming and ranching.

    Collectively, the surface of the planet is known as the lichen wastes. It is a dry and desolate place, full of huge expanses of bare wood punctuated by small clumps of lichen. Small human villages are found by the moss oases. They raise herds of flat bugs, large insectile rumminats that eat the wood itself. 

Stump Town

    The largest city on Ugan Zal is built into a huge mesa. On the surface, Stump Town just seems like another quaint herding village. Inside the stump is a different story. Carved into the wood is a dense metropolis. The winding, multi level streets are lined with shops with signs made out of glowing fungus. The star port connects the trade routes coming in from the Lichen Wastes and the Deep Stead with the wider galaxy. The municipal government operates out of the Temple of the Ego of Orn. The Orn gestalt itself appoaints a Burgomaster to oversee affairs. The current Burgomaster is Kildith who is Orn, a meticulous and obsessive planner. They have been reforming Stump Town’s road system for 80 years, much to the consternation of the residents.

    Also underneath Stump Town is a vermin cathedral built by the Church of the Holy Vermin. This heavily fortified complex hosts one of the Church’s precious vermin engines, an ancient bio reactor that produces a constant stream of new life forms. Recent unrest has the church on high alert. Their vermin engine is literally irreplaceable.

    The lowest levels of the city are the Gong Tunnels, a complicated sewer system. A small army of laborers works to turn waste into fertilizer. Here, the brown market runs into the black. Everyone knows that the gong merchants don’t always sell soil. Accessing this market requires frankly baroque subservience to the rituals and superstitious of the Reclaimer underworld. Everyone thinks that those that are not Orn are at the top of the hierarchy, but it’s impossible to know for sure.

Bandits

    Decades ago, the Neo Floozy Empire tried to annex this world, one of the many Reclaimer planets they targeted during the so-called “Grasping War”. Guerilla resistance across the entire front rendered the entire enterprise unsustainable and the Neo Floozies were forced to withdraw. On remote Ugan Zal they couldn’t arrange for enough transports, so they simply abandoned the auxiliary forces assigned to the planet. Left to their own devices, some surrendered, while most fled to the outlands of the planet’s surface where they took up banditry. Now they prey on the isolated homesteads of the Reclaimers, living off the land and hiding from the authorities. While time and the wilds have taken their toll on their numbers, they have new blood in the form of discontent youths and native outlaws. They live in dozens of disparate bands ruled by the most charismatic warlords. The most powerful bandit is Dust Lord Koodoth, the last remaining Ever Snake on the planet. Supposedly a mid level riddle smith before the withdrawal, Koodoth is ruthless and stylish. Rumor has it that he was sent to this planet to search for some hidden treasure and that he is still looking 

Village of the Aphoriods

    At first, it seemed as though the remote village of Selca was developing a strong regional dialect. After a spate of grizzly killings in nearby villages it became clear that it was actually a memetic infection known as Aberrant Aphorism. By that point the village was 100% infected and was launching raiding parties, targeting humans for capture and consumption. The memeplex was transmitted verbally, complicating containment efforts. By the time all the local towns had either evacuated or fallen, the memeplex advanced to the next stage. The infected individuals stopped their sorties and started constructing some sort of hive structure. The risk of infection lead to the Reclaimers taking a passive containment approach. Sniper towers and fencing were erected in the wilderness. As the years passed Selca faded from the public’s view and the guards grew lax. Recently the memeplex has mutated again. The raiding parties have started back up, except now the raiders are mutated and carrying homemade slug rifles with unusual curved bayonetts. In desperation, the locals have turned to outside help. There is a bounty on infected “Aphoriods” as well as on intel about the hive. There is a persistent rumor that the infection was initially caused by some sort of artifact covertly retrieved from the Petrified Forest. This rumor sends many treasure hunters to their death or conversion.

Aberrant Aphorism 

Stage 1 - The infected person begins using nonsensical figures of speech e.g “he’s slipper than an orgothan sandhog”, “That makes me madder than a tristan globox on blursday” “well I’ll be a wexian in slippers''. The infected person will not realize their speech has become disordered, instead believing that their outbursts are common sayings and phrases, despite evidence to the contrary.

Stage 2 - The infected person begins to have perceptual distortions, namely they view uninfected sapaints as game animals. Their metabolism increases along with their appetite. At this point their vocabulary is mostly gibberish, intelligible only to other infected.

Stage 3 - This stage is only reached in large populations of infected individuals. It is marked by physical mutations. The skin thickens and becomes warty. The eyes grow reflective membranes and nails become short claws for climbing.

    The condition is spread through hearing the disordered speech of the infected, particularly by trying to understand or repeat it. The condition progresses each time an aberrant aphorism is used. If the host remains silent, the infection atrophies and disappears. The locals treat aberrant aphorism with a drug that induces verbal aphasia.

The Deep Steads 

    Below the surface there are the verdant fungal gardens of the Orns. Mostly what the Orns grow are Orns but they have a whole constellation of symbiote and satellite species. Currently, they are working with the church of the holy vermin in order to enrich the ecosystem with new species of bugs. This is a chaotic time for the Deep Steads, as species come and go. The local government employs a vast army of rangers and researchers to manage the turmoil but things slip through the cracks and weird things happen in the edges of this underground world. 

Those who are not Orn

    Not every fungal sapient is part of the Orn gestalt. Those that refuse live on the margins of Ornish society, hiding and plotting against the overmind they scorned. Like the Orn they have access to a wide range of metabolic abilities, including many parasitic techniques forbidden by Orn. If there really is a Not Orn presence on Ugan Zal is an open question, but the locals are convinced there is. In the Deep Steads particularly every mishap, every die-off, every unpleasant surprise is blamed on the Not Orn. This can cause entire sections of fungal forests to be abandoned. Forgien mercenaries are often used to resolve these issues, as the locals will simply refuse to risk it.  

The petrified woods

At the center of Ugan Zal is a silent city made of petrified wood. The creators of the planet lived here while Ugan Zal was still green. While the city is a treasure trove of ancient Phantasmagoric technology, it remains mostly unplundered due to the wood geists. These pale formless masses of roots and leaves are believed by the locals to be the spirit of the dead superorganism, come to take out its anger on the living. 

Hell Bloom

    Some time in the past Hell Bloom was the victim of a runaway greenhouse effect, leaving the surface a scorched and uninhabitable wasteland. It was colonized by the Noetic Alchemists, who created a specialized high temperature machine ecology to maintain their worldframe installations. These worldframes originally hosted a network of hell realms, specialized digital/astral simulations where the Alchemists conducted their grisly work of processing sapiants into products. When the Alchemists vanished, one of their orphaned creations reclaimed the hell realms and made a strange watery paradise.

Accessing Hell Bloom

    Surface temperatures can exceed 900 degrees, necessitating the use of extreme protective measures. The biosphere is composed of communities of extremophiles that have a tendency to catch fire, meaning the landscape is dotted with flaming pits. The machine ecology will defend itself with cool sprayers, track mounted robots that shoot a freezing spray out of a nozzle. This causes a thermal shock that can shatter many heat resistant alloys. After all that, once a worldframe is reached it is fairly simple to upload yourself or a payload inside.  

    Hell Bloom is both the name of the planet and the name of the realm running on the worldframes. Like most simulated worlds created by the Noetic Alchemists, a high degree of astral radiation makes it more like a dreamscape than a traditional digital realm. Hell Bloom is a verdant morass of swamps and flower choked lakes. Together, the turquoise waters, the green flora and the pink haze in the air form a hyperlight spectrum of impossible colors. The barest traces of the old worlds can be glimpsed, a solitary stone tower, a torture rack covered with strange flowers and vivid veridrgrass. In the sky there is more Hell Bloom; space here is folded into a complicated manifold so the swamp hangs above itself in an impossible vista. It is estimated that Hell Bloom covers around a billion square miles, making a truly vast world, Most of it is wilderness, apart from the cleansing cities and wilderness outposts of the Florid.

The Digital Abyss

    The lakes and rivers of Hell Bloom don’t have bottoms. Rather, if you dive deep enough you find yourself in the Digital Abyss, a particularly nasty astral current. Apart from physical access to the worldframes, this is the one way to enter or leave Hell Bloom. Maskform caravans keep the cleansing cities connected to the wider Chunky Space Maskform society.

The devil of compassion

    The mythic creator of Hell Bloom is known only by euphemism. The native Florid Maskforms call her “the seed of hope” and “the kindest knife”. Digital devils only ever call her “eldest sister” and only in whispers; something about her scares them witless. The only source for information about her are the Florid myths about her. She is said to emerge from the lake every 1028 years. She picks one city to service her; if they displease her they are never seen again. If they do a good job they are granted a boon, which often leads to an ironic doom. Not always though; the founding myth of the Florids is that one such boon paved the way from their society to be established on Hell Bloom.

Florid cleansing cities 

    The major industry of the Florids is hospitality. The cities function as massive bathhouses, offering esoteric cleaning services. The clientele are almost exclusively digital devils; powerful and demented beings that emerged from the astral dross of the Noetic Alchemist’s experiments. Due to their horrible origins, Digital Devils are inherently unstable; they experience continuous mental/spiritual corrosion that manifests on their bodies as black grime. Past a certain point this corruption becomes life threatening and the devil will begin to unravel into component entities. The purpose of the baths is to halt and reverse this process through various cleansing and relaxation techniques. They pay in vials of Devil’s Gold, a valuable metallic astral fluid.

    The cleansing cities are more than mere bathhouses. They contain almost all of the industry required to maintain the baths and to service the needs of the population. They have vast warrens of laboratories, workshops and kitchens working around the clock to meet the needs of Hell Bloom civilization. The flora and fauna of Hell Bloom resist domiscation, so much of the food has to be imported. Each city has a it’s own small army of “wood wise”, specialist hunter gathers who brave the wilds in search of reagents.

The Worker’s War

    Roughly 300 years ago, there were six cleansing cities and they were all ruled by different branches of the same noble family. Each city had a queen and together they formed the spa queen’s council. They hoarded the profits and abused the workers, who they saw as serfs. This status quo was shattered by an event called either the bequeathing, or the usurpation. Workers in three of the houses revolted, and somehow either killed their queens or convinced them to step down (The Florid historical record is mostly just partisan propaganda). Worker’s unions took ownership and a new war came to Hell Bloom. The two camps, Royalists and Unionists soon realized they had to consider a third party, the devils. After an overt offensive by Royalists ruined the vacation of a trio of digital devils, they destroyed the one of the royalist bathhouses and turned it’s queen into a sheet of living skin large enough to cover the ruins. From that point forth the war became a cold economic conflict. Over the last couple of centuries the unionist faction has waxed and the royalists have waned. That order is threatened with a new upset, as the Royalists have allied with Father Corp. In turn, the Unionists have joined the maskform federation. The worker’s war is now a new front in a much larger conflict.

Unionist cities

Glycon - A massive windmill towers above fields of yellow and indigo flowers. The windmill is for pressing the oil from their seeds, in order to fuel the cleansing hot oil baths. The workers here wear heavy protective suits while in the baths.

Loamon - A city built into the boughs of a massive tree. The baths are nested deep into the roots. They use special dirt meticulously cultivated in garden boxes in the tree tops

Thermka - A cluster of towering smoke stacks. The workers wear breathing units to protect them from the fumes of the smoke baths.

Royalist cities

Nibblos - A wide sprawling city built along a network of dams. The pools they create hold swarms of fish that eat impurities off the devils.

Anatomergal - An elegant and imposing castle of stark white towers. They offer full body surgical purges, where the devil is opened up and cleaned from the inside out.

Desalos - Its original name now taboo, this city stands as mute witness to the dangers of war on Hell Bloom. The wind whistles through broken windows and the corridors are haunted by darting shadows. Rumors of a secret stash of Devil’s Gold abound, but few return from this cursed place.

Organisms

Weeping poppy - A flower that resembles a human face. Hazing pollen continuously leaks out of the “eyes”. Mild exposure has a euphoric, narcotic effect. Heavy exposure causes distressing hallucinations of the old hell realms. It is said that each such vision contains a syllable of the true name of the Devil of Compassion.

Gaunt Gargoyle - Tall and thin, this creature sucks water up through its legs, filters it in its body then vomits it out in a constant stream. They scream watery screams, as though this causes them pain. It is said each one contains a small fragment of a noetic alchemist that lives in eternal torment.

Sea of Mazes

     The Sea of Mazes is an old Phantasmagoric world. The entire planet is some kind of megastructure, a tangled knot of the metamaterial known as shadestone. The planetary ocean is laced through with huge spiraling columns of the glassy black stone. Whatever purpose this mechanism once served, it is now broken and the planet is haunted by a strange ecosystem of imaginary organisms.

    Imaginary organisms (also known as creeps) are beings whose biochemistry is psychically mediated. Though they have a physical presence, they come from the minds of living beings, hence the term “imaginary”. While they are initially dependent on their host during development, once they are in their “adult” stage they can mediate their own metabolism.  The creeps on the Sea of Mazes are an older lineage, distinct from the more widespread creeps of the Undersphere . It is thought that they are generated from the ancestral neuroses of the planet’s shades.

  

    Sea of Mazes is the Republic of Sea Serpent’s name for the planet. In spacer’s cant it was called Churtwei. That name has fallen out of favor since colonization. The process began roughly a thousand years ago when scouts from the Republic’s corporate clans began using it as an outpost. It was considered a poor candidate for colonization due to the dangerous ecosystem. Long term settlement was only made possible by the discovery of the Deep Rynth platform. This fractal patch of shadestone works as a control surface for a subsection of the planetary mechanism. For the last 500 years, Senator Orthon has projected her psychic powers through the platform in order to create a relatively safe bubble. It is thought that there must be more such platforms elsewhere on the planet, but they remain undiscovered. 

    Rynth Top is the primary Republic settlement on the planet. Because it is built on a series of atolls it is a sparse, wide open city. The largest sections are the spaceport and the headquarters of the corporate clan Yob. The primary industry of the city is aquaculture and related processing. Dry land is at premium so most residents live on houseboats. The population is majority atheist with a kaijuist minority. Their small church is shingled with shed scales from senator Orthon. The safe zone the senator creates is delineated with carved shell totems.

    Mid Rynth is the network of caves and lagoons below Rynthtop. About 30% of it has been parcelled off for aquaculture, the rest being left wild. While the protective aura from the senator keeps out creeps, the region is still dangerous due to mundane wild animals. Underwater maintenance of the farms is done by Clowners, who can always regrow their bodies if they get damaged.

    Deep Rynth is where the Senator and her coterie of adopted spawn live. Even though the Deep Rynth platform is here, the area is outside the creep exclusion bubble. The senator shaped it so deliberately, to expose her spawn to creeps. She has six daughters, gifted her by wealthy serpents wishing to have a stake in the new colony. Together they call themselves the Council of Dark Thoughts, and they are the foremost authority on creeps in Chunky Space.

    Senator Orthon is in a precarious position. While Sea of Mazes is a recognized Republic colony, she does not have complete control of it. Other powers like the Shadow Marquis and the Wonder Hydra contest her rule. Her patrols suffer frequent caustlies and she cannot protect them from the creeps. To compensate she is offering substantial bounties on any one that can discover new power platforms. With control of all the platforms, she could theoretically extend her powers across the planet.

    Far to the west there is an area where the shadestone spars twist together into spires. The flooded interior of these structures is laced through with tunnels and cavities. The locals call this the Dread Academy. Something about the astral resonance of the structure has created a permanent conflux with the astral current known as the Squeeze. 

    Somewhere in the academy complex there is a secret outpost belonging to Shadow Marquis Plovro*, a powerful reborn corsair operating in Chunky Space. The goal of the operation is to harvest creeps to sell to other reborn nobles. They mostly leave Rynthtop alone, though several of their shapeshifting Deep Flesh operatives have been caught trying to infiltrate. Senator Orthon has posted huge bounties on any Reborn and on the location of the base.

To the east of Rynth Top are the wonder pools. Here the atolls are wider and covered in thick jungles. The lagons here are perfectly smooth bowls covered in sparkling green algae. The algae has psycho-projective properties, meaning it manifests the thoughts and feelings of the beings that swim in the pools as shimmering phantasms.

The region is ruled by a creature called the wonder hydra. In the real world it has many bodies that look like tiny worms with pearls for heads. They attach themselves to beings swimming in the pools, forcing them into a breathtaking dreamscape called the Hydra’s Dream. The dream is made of thousands of bubble realms, each beautiful and unique. Once a victim is pacificed in the real world, the hydra’s shade minions take them to one of the hydra’s underground layers. More hydra worms attach themselves, making the victim look as though they were bound in a string of pearls. The individual's desires and memories are eaten and used to form a new bubble realm within the dream. The Wonder Hydra is sapient but deeply alien and generally hostile. It wants new hosts, but barring that it wants new sensorium to construct its bubble realms. It exists partially in the astral current Siren’s call and it has treaty with the Illuminated Maskform tribe. 

Creeps 

Horror Coral - One of the most common creeps, it is found growing in vast colonies along the shadestone spurs. Each individual in a colony is in the shape of some humanoid anatomy, like a finger or an eye. Harmless on it’s own but broadcasts it’s sensorium to nearby creeps, giving them a tactical advantage.

Skinner - A skinless humanoid with a crude knife for one of its hands. At a distance it appears human (aside from the lack of skin) but up close it becomes apparent it only seems human. The teeth are large and square and the pupils are figure 8s. It desires two things; to hide it’s naked body and to remove skin from living beings.

Dread Proctor - Found in the dread academy. Appears as a humanoid wearing thick robes with its face obscured by matted black hair. It has four long, multi jointed hairy arms it uses to grab beings. It takes its victims deep into trapped sections of the academy and watches as they try to escape.

* While drama and theatrics is a big part of Reborn culture, this title isn't just for show. It means the holder rules a "shadow march" or a secret border territory.

Slug Temple

     A hot and humid world, Slug Temple is mostly white from orbit, with small patches of blue and green peeking out from the swirling clouds. There is a pattern in the chaos, a rhythm to the scudding whorls. If you unfocus your eyes, you can see the fractal lattice wrapping around the world. Five “knots” in the lacework mark the locations of the megaliths.

    The Megaliths are five gargantuan stone monuments. Though they differ in configuration they each consist of five slabs. It’s clear that they serve as some sort of nexus or control point for the biological systems the Soft Bodies built into this world. They play a critical role in the rebirth cycle for the planetary guardian kaiju.

    Slug Temple has a thriving population of kaiju who live under the five guardian Kaiju, the largest kaiju on the planet. They are effectively immortal.  If they are killed they reform out of planetary biomass at their respective monolith. They live for a hundred years before dying and being reborn. Their rebirth schedules are staggered so that one kaiju is dying every 20 years. 

    There is a large land mass on the planet’s north pole. It is flat, cold and boggy. During the planetary winters it can drop to below freezing, a rarity on a planet as hot as Slug Temple. It is a land of rain and fog. What little dry land there is is covered in lush beds of moss. The Megalith is called the hut. Three slabs form walls while the other two form the floor and ceiling.

    The guardian kaiju of the North Pole is Fog Swimmer Quzork, a massive storm ribbon that shrouds itself with a thick fog bank. Despite being the closest guardian to Mount Snarb, relatively little is known about it. There is a tradition on Mount Snarb to credit it for any unresolved disappearances.

    Mount Snarb is a weathered, bald dome sticking out of the morass. It is home to the only permanent settlement on the planet. It was  founded by orthodox Kaijuists as a home base for their pilgrimages by Horace “Grubo” Snarb, who was the sole survivor of an earlier Kaijuist colony. With less than five hundred full-time residents, Mount Snarb is truly the outskirts of galactic civilization. The only major industry is ecotourism and trophy hunting. 

    The Spire Sea is a shallow tropical sea noted for the coral pillars that grow out of the water. The sea here reaches above the surface, with many lifeforms crossing back and forth over the boundary.The piscenoids have fins like wings and the jellies have hydrogen bladders. The megalith is the Table. Four slabs form the legs and one is the top.

    The Spire Sea is the domain of Spire Tyrant Klarklaka, a shelled leviathan that uses it’s muscular tentacle arms to swing it’s bulk over the Spire Sea. It hunts with an array of organic harpons.

    Like many Soft Body worlds, there is a massive subterranean ecosystem underpinning the surface biomes. The secret heart of Slug Temple crawls through every cave and aquifer, a throng of life in a lightness world. The center of that world is the megalith called the Fins. The five slabs are arranged parallel to each other in a huge lake chamber. 

    Normally the underground is full of strange calls and bioluminescent displays but everything goes silent and dark when Luminous Majesty Intragoner approaches. It is a massive slug with dozens of luminous eyes. It hunts with its stupefying psychic gaze, paralyzing anything the eyes focus on, then it simply swallows prey whole. 

    Deep Fire Ridge is a volcanic hotspot on the ocean floor, host to an ecosystem based on titanic chemosynthetic snails. The Ring Megalith has its five slabs arranged in a circle. The Guardian is Deep Fire Dweller Sek’Ron’Teth. It is a slug covered in overlapping bio-alloy scale plates. It attacks with a fierce ambient heat aura that can melt steel.

    The Cloud Biters are a rough and broken mountain range. High altitude cloud jungles cling to the peaks and ridges, a strange high world of green and white. The Star Megalith here is a central slab surrounded by four slabs serving as rays. This is the territory of Verdant Drifter Meklurga. Kept aloft by some unknown force emanating from its shell, the Verdant Drifter looks like a floating mountain, all covered in jungle. Long feeding tentacles caress the canopy, searching for food.

Organisms

Omen Shells - kaiju sized snails with intricate fractal whorl patterns on their shells. They spend most of their time hidden under water, feeding on slime and algae. When they gather it is the first sign that a guardian kaiju is about to die. If threatened, they defend themselves with a sticky bolus of thick mucus. They also have the ability to psionically catalyse lightning strikes when there is a strong enough atmospheric charge, which is most of the time in Slug Temple’s thick atmosphere.

Threnody Singers - Winged flying slug the size of an adult human. They congregate around coming deaths to sing their eerie song before feeding on the new carrion. The size of the flock depends on the size of the death: a couple for something human sized, dozens for a kaiju and thousands for a greater kaiju.

Storm Ribbon - A flying kaiju unique to Slug Temple. Creates its own personal electrical storm wherever it flies.  

Trade goods

Megalith Biofilm - A special microbial community that only grows on the megaliths. It is thought to have some connection to the rebirth of the guardian kaiju but its hard to study, as it decays immediately after being removed. It can be kept alive on a fragment of the megalith, but damaging the megalith releases a viral attack pheromone marker that incites all life, even the guardian kaiju to attack.

Guardian Kaiju Remains - The bio alloys and high performance chemistry of the guardian kaijus make them valuable to genetic engineers. Pieces of the guardians also have religious significance to the kaiju church. Harvesting pieces of dead guardians isn’t easy, because the death of such a creature triggers a massive feeding frenzy. 

Chunky Space compact

    The Chunky Space Compact was created in response to border skirmishes inside Chunky Space between the six major signatories. The problem was that with the elevated levels of priracy within Chunky Space, unnecessary conflicts were occurring between the various security forces, sometimes catalyzed by the pirates they were obstebily hunting. After a particularly nasty incident in which Seeder Navy personnel were captured and eaten by Republic pirate hunters, a peace conference was called, and the compact was signed shortly thereafter. The terms are fairly simple.

1 - Non-aggression - The big one, arguably the reason for the treaty. Each polity keeps a register of all ships active in Chunky Space. Ships so named are to be free of all harassment and molestation outside of publicly declared interdiction zones. A vessel violating this sanction can expect to lose its official designation and be branded a pirate.

2 - Letters of Marque and reprisal - This section covers the (fairly simple) requirements a ship needs to met in order to serve as a privateer, as well as a list of polities and outlaw groups that are considered to be pirates.

3 - Colony licensensing - This is the sole provision added by the Republic of Sea Serpents. It outlines the necessary procedures to quantify environmental impact of new colonies and ways that impact can be negated. All unlicensed colonies are considered to be “wild cat” settlements and are fair targets for privateers

4 - Chunky net - This provision mandated the creation of a pan chunky space communication network in order to share information between polities 

5 - Extradition - Signatory parties have the right to call for extradition hearings for criminals in other signatory’s territories. Such hearings are to be overseen by a local magistrate (or the closest equivalent). Only acts that are crimes in both polities are extraditable.

6 - Right of Docking - Lastly, signatory ships are allowed at signatory ports and must be allowed to purchase fuel at local market prices, except during officially declared emergencies.

Rapacious Child

  

Rapacious Child is the factory/foundry complex that serves as the base of Father’s Corp’s operations in Chunky Space. It is an astral entity that budded off from Father Corp itself. It is possessed by the same greed as its sire but it is much less intelligent. It is a simple, grasping thing that only wants to melt down astral matter in its blazing gullet.

Seen from space, Rapacious Child looks like a monstrous face. A huge mouth splits the station in half vertically. Massive plates the size of cities overhang the opening like snaggly teeth. The mouth is lit by a warm glow. Both hemispheres have a single large glowing eye.


Rapacious Child is Father Corp’s most valuable asset in Chunky Space so it needs protection. In every system it visits it is escorted by 10 micro missile swarms, each hundreds of units strong. The swarms are kept hidden in ready mode in key locations across the system. Fire control for the swarms is provided by observers in stealthed watch posts. In addition, there are 2d20 astral trawlers docked or in system at any given time. Astral trawlers are armed with twin medium mazer banks and a squad of astral marines in battle panoplies. Between the ships there will also be 1d8 psychic weapon officers, split between telekinetic and offensive telepaths. Lastly, in dire situations the meld minister can focus the attention of the Child itself on intruders. The Child attacks with telekinetically controlled webs of molten metal.


Close orbit around the Child is known as the Feed Yard. This is a holding zone for astral matter that is destined to be fed to the Child. There are chunks of impossible edifices, surreal trees, and bloody corpses of astral creatures. Cyborg Prime Strain void laborers pick through the remains, scanning for items of value and potential threats to the Child. In emergency situations they mobilize into an ad-hoc militia.




Baby Blues are creeps that manifest in the Feed Yard. They are thought to have come from Prime Strain misconceptions about human reproduction. They look not unlike fat human infants, but much larger and solid blue. They float around the yard, motionless until they're looked at. They feed off of disgust and revulsion, so they begin to twitch when observed. They converge on people having panic attacks, mobbing up against them in a tide of soft blue flesh. The void workers try not to look at anything blue or baby like if they can help it.



The Jaw Dex is the slightly nicer of the two jaw cities. The hab complexes are cleaner, the rations are fresher and the security forces are less trigger happy. The permanent residents are entirely Prime Strain. The office of the Meld Minister is here. The current Meld Minister is JXTRL, once a cunning and ambitious middle manager. Their mind is already deteriorating from exposure to the Child. When they’re not directing the Child, they are locked in their office playing with blocks and eating candy. The bureaucracy of Father Corp has rerouted management of the child around them, to a council of upper middle managers.


Jaw Dex is home to the Eye of What You Want, a large temple complex where astral radiation shines from the depths of the child. The whole temple acts as psychic focus for clairvoyance, with the catch that it only shows material goods the psychic would wish to acquire.


The Jaw Sin is the shabbier of the two cities. The foreigner ghetto that houses non Prime Strain Father Corp employees is here. These workers are often debt slaves who were pressed into service by rescue fees when Father Corp found them in dire circumstances. They are given the most dangerous jobs in the child, like bowel maintenance worker. Also here is the visitor’s dock and the outlet store, where outsiders can purchase Father Corp goods.


The Eye of What Others Have is here. It is similar to the Eye of What you Want, except it shows material possessions belonging to people the seer knows personally. The two eyes are in constant use by “Clerical Associates” who use them to conduct “market research”. This results in an endless stream of intelligence products that swirl through the bureaucracy until they congeal into action items. Both eyes together give Father Corp strategic vision of almost anywhere in Chunky Space


The Bowels of the Child is a cramped and sprawling mass of brass pipes and tanks. Astral matter is melted down in the mouth and processed in the bowels. High levels of astral radiation means the machinery here does not operate on rational material rules but rather by dream logic. Constant maintenance is required, simply because it seems like constant maintenance should be required. Teams of workers plumb the sweltery depths, looking for dials to adjust and bolts to tighten. Accidents are frequent and deadly, like leaks of molten dream stuff and flash fires. There are also factory dwelling creeps that can be hostile. Somewhere in the tangle is the Umbilicus, the cords and pipes that connect the Child to Father Corp. The Umbilicus runs through the astral current called the Squeeze, which can act as a backdoor into the Child.


Jerkies are a type of creep found in the bowels. They are crude humanoid simulrums made of burned and desiccated meat. They are shy, hiding between pipes, peeking out of shadows with skeletal faces. Bowel workers say they are the corpses of those who were killed by accidents. They say they congregate around future accident sites. They are ambiguous figures, sometimes saving workers from their fate, sometimes trying to make more of their kind.


Rarely a Jerky will have a damaged mask on its face. This is actually a dangerous creature called a Maskform revenant. These beings are the damaged and distorted egos of dead maskforms, still clinging to existence. They are driven by revenge, but they can’t remember the source of their grudges. They grow wicked blades out their bodies and attack at short range. They will not attack the friends and family they had in life.

The Maskform Federation

 

    The Maskform Federation is a new military alliance formed by the various clans and settlements of the astral currents in Chunky Space. The Astral Currents have been settled for millennia but they have always been isolated and independent. Only Father Corp raids have pushed them together. They have created a unified force that opposes Father Corp not only in the Astral, but in the material world as well.

    The Maskform Federation has joined the Chunky Space Compact because they need allies and material support. For generations the Maskforms of Chunky Space have ignored the material world. This position is no longer tenable, as Father Corp uses the material world as a base to launch their raids into the astral currents. The Federation is boot-strapping up a real space navy and they need outside help to do so. 

    Before the Federation, Maskform societies were connected by the Caravan Houses, mechant consortiums that would travel between Astral currents. It was the caravan guards that formed the core of the Federation military. The Federation has since evolved beyond those roots, becoming estranged from the Caravan Houses’ economic interests. There is a growing pan-Maskform nationalism that some see as a threat to the traditional order. For now the common enemy of Father Corp keeps the alliance together.

    The Federation military is split into an auxiliary branch and a professional branch. The Auxiliaries are the fighting forces of the various tribes united together. They use their traditional tactics and command structures to fight in astral realms. The professional branch is a completely modern institution that focuses on real space.

    The strength of the Federation Navy lies in the psychic traditions of the Maskforms. All together, the tribes have knowledge of dozens of different psychic disciplines. There are schools for telekinesis, mind intrusion, wild empathy, techno gnosis and some applications that are so obscure they don’t have common names. What is also notable is how the Federation navy deploys these powers as part of a combined arms doctrine. Psychics are assigned to multidisciplinary fire teams with infantry support. Federation forces are powerful, flexible and unconventional.

    The Amorphous live in the cave-like current called The Squeeze. Their name comes from their custom of assuming flexible slime forms, allowing them to squeeze through any gap their mask can fit through. They live in sealed fortresses built around fixed points in the everchanging caves. Each fortress is ruled by a military leader called a Wallmaster who serves at the consent of a council of civil leaders. The Amorphous have been forced to militarize even before the emergence of Father Corp. The Squeeze is also home to the Dig Safe Empire, a militant cult of meme victims that desire only to dig and to spread their compulsion. The various settlements are all united together by ancient pacts, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t infighting. Disputes are settled through ritual one on one combat between warriors wearing tech gnostic battle panoplies 

    The Illuminated live in Siren’s Call, a layered oceanic realm. The layer you experience is dependent on your vibrational frequency, with the catch that the realm itself is always sapping energy. To avoid the dangerous low vibe layers, they carry lightstones, which they use as a  meditative focus to increase their vibes. They live in nomadic, free swimming pods. The only permanent settlement is the crawling city, made out of motile astral coral. The city is home to creches, libraries and workshops; all of the infrastructure they can’t carry with them. The city is ruled by a Headmaster, who is appointed by a council of department heads.  Their power extends only to the city; the pods have no formal leadership structure.

    The Threaded live in the everchanging wilds of the Trail. Navigation in the Trail works by sympathy and connection; by setting your intention towards a person, the Trail will take you to them (though not necessarily without incident or a detour). The Threaded sew special ceremonial fibers into their astral bodies that strengthen their connection to whoever has the other half of their fiber. They build settlements on meta-stable locations, areas where the warping effect of the trail is somewhat muted. Even these islands of apparent stability aren’t permanent, sometimes melting back into the flux of the trail. As a result the Threaded are always exploring the Trail, looking for new building sites. Settlements are typically small and are ruled by two democratically elected leaders; a “Master Sojourner” who handles external matters like diplomacy and trade and a “ Master cultivator” who handles internal matters.

    The Florid are associated with the astral current known as the digital abyss but in truth the abyss is antithetical to long term habitation. Instead, the Florid live in an “astral delta” realm where the abyss flows into the more hospitable dreamscape known as HellBloom. HellBloom is a massive virtual lake overgrown with digital lotuses. The Florid live on island settlements. Each island is dominated by a single hotel. The hotels service the Digital Devils, powerful and demented digital/astral entities who just need a place to unwind and destress sometimes. The hotels are split between worker-owned and private hereditary owners. An economic war has been going on for centuries that has seen the fortunes of the private owners, the so-called “Spa Queens”, wane considerably. They have now embraced Father Corp and rely on it for cheap resupply. The tides of war are turning once again and the unionists are turning to the Federation for help.

    Life on the Ruin Way is in constant motion. Slow moving objects get shunted to a barren oubliette dimension called the neon wastes. The Peregrine maskforms live on convoys of mobile temple complexes. The convoys travel between sacred fix points in the Ruin Way. Each of the four major convoys uses a different primary fuel source, in order to lessen competition. When there are disputes about routes, food sources or secondary fuels they engage in ceremonial conflicts known as “dust ups”, in which mounted warriors attempt to force each other down into the neon wastes. The convoys are theocracies lead by the most accomplished pilgrims.

    The nexus of Maskform civilization in Chunky Space has always been Dream Washed Ortellion. All five major currents have confluxes here, making it a major trading post. The planet’s capitol, Graz Throne, is the largest city in the Federation. All other settlements are much smaller. The nominal ruler of the planet is the Monarch of Graz, but their role is more militant than political. Trained from birth in the Questing Arts, their task is to contain and control astral influence. Graz Throne is administered by the Fool’s Parade, a body of citizens under the sway of the Jubilant Moon. The outlying settlements are ruled by democratically elected mayors. The Maskforms of Dream Washed Ortellion don’t have a collective name like the other groups. They are sometimes called the Mudbound but that is considered derogatory.