World of Grass

MONOGRAPH ON THE INHABITED WORLD GAMMA LEONIS 3
COMMONLY CALLED "THE WORLD OF GRASS"
PREPARED FOR THE VICEROYAL BY THE IMPERIAL ORDER OF SURVEYORS

Gamma Leonis 3 is an inhabited planet made habitable through terraforming. For reasons that will likely remain a mystery to us, as the relevant records have been lost, your ancestors, who terraformed it, introduced only grasses, and no other type of plant lives there. For this reason, it is called the World of Grass.

The biomes of the world are defined almost entirely by rain. The driest areas are like harsh deserts everywhere: sand and rock and no plants or animals.  Slightly more favorable deserts support poverty grasses. Rainier areas are grasslands, prairies, or steppes; the more rain, the higher the grass. Areas that receive the most rain become bamboo groves, with species as large as any tree. The planet is both colder and rainier than it should be, owing to the massive wildfires that regularly sweep the lands. Winters are unduly harsh.

The lack of any available wood forces its peoples into several limited ways of life, depending on biome. The people of the hills and mountains build homes and terraces of stone, reinforced with bamboo. The people of the river valleys irrigate large fields and build cities of clay. The people of the lakes and marshes weaves boats our of reeds and train birds to fish for them. The people of the seas and islands create ships of bamboo. The people of the steppes live by herding and hunting.

All of these peoples have but three domesticated animals. A species of elk, which was likely tampered with during the terraforming process, as it has many genes from horses and can be ridden like them, a species of bighorn sheep, and a species of guineafowl like great blue-black chickens. They have five domesticated plants, all grasses. They grow rice, wheat, barley, sugarcane, and a semi-domesticated strain of bamboo.

The people of the world of grass are almost certainly the descendants of an ancient colony. Like with most foundling colonies, the peoples of the world of grass are unusually culturally similar, even when great distance separates them. All of their religions are variants of ancestor worship and the worship of national heroes. All of their languages are derived from Anglish, presumably the language of the original colonists. Governments almost all contain technocratic or bureaucratic elements. All of their economies operate with an unusual degree of division of labor and specialization, with craftsmen expected to perfect one single part of their craft, and perform it as part of an assembly line.

You may find their morality puzzling at first, but its basis is simple. To them, all good is the same. They do not distinguish between being good at something and being a good person. They have one word for self-improvement, and one for the improvement of others. It's not charity, but something we don't have an exact word for it. It is tied up with concepts like stewardship and parenthood, a sort of earned superiority. Keep that in mind when you take the reigns of the planet.

The world of grass offers several prospects for exploitation. Its peoples are skilled sculptors and weavers, and their best works would be worth exporting. There are a few national epics and popular stories that would be worth translating and copywriting. Perhaps most valuable is biological information. The genetic templates of domesticated plants and animals always sell well, and the planet's unique ecology is of great interest to biologists, who would buy the templates of strange organisms like bloodgrass, saltgrass, and bamboo birds.

No derelicts have been detected in orbit, which raises the possibility that their colony ship landed on the planet's surface and never took off. Needless to say, its drive core would be the greatest possible treasure this planet could possibly hold. One clue as to its location may be the valley of faces, a narrow gorge the sides of which have been carved into massive statues, all dressed in garments that resemble spacesuits.

275. Carnifruit

Sunrise is home to the planimals, a form of life similar to both the plants and animals of Earth. Planimals are mobile, although slow, and some species (carniflora) have evolved to take on the role of herbivore-predators. A few species, instead of hunting, catch their prey with traps, much like the carnivorous plants of Earth. They also grow fruit, not for seed dispersal, but as bait. They have evolved fruit so tempting it can entice planimals even if they are aware of the trap. "Carnifruit", with a little engineering for human tastebuds and biochemistry, are a fantastic addition to the transhuman pantry.

249. The Solemn Initiative

Solemn represents a great opportunity in the form of a great problem. The exoplanet's unique ecology devours metals and plastics, and with them the foundations of most transhuman technology. Solemn is therefore of interest not only to scientists, but bioconservatives and neo-primitives, who see it as a new Earth, and the best chance for a natural life.

Protection in the form of repair swarms and anti-microbe swarms is sufficient for the short-term, and with improvement, might allow for indefinitely functional tech. Firewall, however, has decided that it would be better for transhumanity to solve the problem the hard way. Firewall, with the help of Argonaut agents and sympathetic bioconservatives, has been pushing a plan for Solemn based on new forms of biotech, recreating the functions of synthetic technology in organic forms.

In the far-future, Firewall envisions a biotech-based transhuman society, distinct from the more synthetic mainstream, with different strengths and weaknesses and therefore subject to different modes of failure and existential threats. Anything that could wipe out one would not likely be as effective against the other.

Plot Hook: Firewall's plan is much more appealing to bioconservatives and neo-conservatives than to most scientists and explorers. The player characters discover that Firewall supported the recent neo-primitive attack on the Solemn science station, as part of an earlier version of the plan to establish a new outpost of transhumanity. It is up to them to decide how to handle this sensitive information.

217. Geode

Geode is the sole planet in orbit around a brown dwarf. The brown dwarf is significantly above the ecliptic of the galaxy and appears to be heading even higher. Its velocity and position are unlikely to occur naturally, so it is presumed, given that and soem other discoveries, that it was sent on its course deliberately and artificially.

The first unusual feature of the planet is the signs of alien presence. Ruins belonging to no less than four species have been discovered, including the Iktomi. Translation of the Iktomi hieroglyph records and investigations into the other alien facilities were prioritized, and slowly gave a wealth of information. What has been pieced together follows.

The focus of the alien studies have all been on the interior of the planet. The visible surface is an accretion layer tens of kilometers thick, enfolding a layer of dense diamonoid material, presumed to be the original structure. The inside of the diamondoid sphere is hollow, and contains an exotic form of matter, never before encountered or even theorized, arranged in complex, slowly shifting patterns. The shifting of the material is complex, but not random. As it shifts it works through a massive set of potential patterns that contain an unimaginable store of information, or, some have hypothesized, describe the minds of an entire society.It is the cortical stack of an entire civilization.

Plot Hook: Geode is a potential source of information billions of years old as well as one of the largest collections of alien artifacts yet discovered. Firewall and Ozma have both cooperated in covering up the discovery, but a secret war seems likely to break out over control of the information.

174. God's Acre

There is life between the stars. Massive beings, devouring comets for water, skimming gas giants for food, and absorbing starlight for energy. Whatever they are, we have never seen a live one. We know they exist only because of the icy dwarf planet called God's Acre, where they crash themselves to die. We call them leviathans.

Their bodies are like bundles of long, winged snakes. Their biochemistry is carbon-based, but based around radiation-proof building blocks. They curl up and tighten themselves into dense spheres in deep space, when nearing stars they unfurl their wings, which photosynthesize and possibly act as solar sails, and when they need to skim from a gas giant they can arrange themselves into an aerodynamic form. From what form of life the leviathans could have evolved from is totally unknown.

Of at least as much interest as their bodies is their brains and minds. The speed of nerve impulses has always been a limit to the practical size of morphs: the larger you are, the longer it takes nerve impulses to travel to and from your brain, and the slower you inevitably become. The current leading hypothesis is that they overcome the latency problem by being able to predict the actions of the other parts of their body as well as the movements of everything they can see, negating most of the need for reflexes. The leviathans have no central brains, but cores of neural tissue similar to spinal columns run through the centers of each of their long limbs, which supports the idea that they can be thought of as a cooperative gestalt as much or more than a unified ego: they are like an ant colony that happens to occupy one body. Most of their brainpower must be occupied with communication and prediction, and the degree of their intelligence is unknown.

Plot Hook: Argonaut, exhuman and hypercorp research teams have all requested the player's help in retrieving samples from the freshest carcass. Only one of the groups will be able to obtain the key samples, and the teams they don't support will hire NPCs to get them first.

97. Chimera

Chimera is an Earth-like world, with 90% Earth's gravity, freshwater seas covering 60% of the surface, and a slightly higher intensity of light from its closer orbit to a Sun-like yellow star. Chimera is incredibly rich with life, where even the coldest, hottest and driest climate zones support complex ecosystems. Chimera supports forms of life based upon multiple types of chemistry, and their interactions and evolution is an immense laboratory of biological warfare.

The two largest ecosystems are are based on the same organic matter and DNA as Earth life. One, however, has left-handed chirality, the other right-handed. The two ecosystems are at times locked in biological warfare, evolving powerful allergens and prions as defenses against those organisms evolved to consume both right and left handed proteins. At other times, they ignore each other, their biochemistry so incompatible conflict is pointless. Both of their remains are decomposed by tough, RNA based pseudo-fungi.

Right-handed life is the most Earth-like, with quadrupedal vertebrates and green plants. Left-handed life is the minority among plants and large animals, but has a virtual monopoly on niches associated with small, insect-like invertebrates. Few of these animals have evolved to metabolize right-handed plant proteins themselves, but many contain symbiotic bacteria that do the job for them.

Towards the poles, where temperatures regularly reaches -90 °C, a sparse ecosystem of silicon based life is spread across the ice. The plant-like organisms resemble crystalline mosses and lichens, interspersed with fractal silicate corals built by left-handed organic polyps. The silicon plants are energy-poor, and grow slowly, and the polyps small and well defended. The only other animal life to be found are migratory flyers and semi-aquatic organisms living along the shores.

Orbiting this unique world is a find that overshadows all others: an array of alien satellites. Observations from ground-based telescopes and orbital drones shows equipment suited to observing the planet and transmitting information out of the system. Interference or physical contact has so far been avoided for fear of unseen-defenses. the satellites are estimated to be thousands of years old, but orbital wreckage of older ones has been found, suggesting they are periodically replaced. The owners might show up for routine maintenance at any time.

The leading hypothesis is that Chimera's unique biosphere is a large and ancient science experiment, and that only one form of life arose there naturally, and the others were introduced. Preliminary fossil surveys show new types of life appearing during large-scale extinctions, which were presumably caused by the introduction of the new life. Perhaps the beings responsible for the satellites periodically introduce new forms of life, using the satellites to monitor their evolution and record anything of interest or potential use.

46. Tartarus

Tartarus is the first rogue planet to have been discovered via the gate network, accessed through discord gate on Eris. The planet's nearest stellar neighbor is a binary system 5.3 light years away, and the only significant orbiting body is a large captured asteroid. Its gate lies in the middle of large plain of black ice, lit only by distant stars.

Scientists have determined that Tartarus is most likely similar to Europa, having an ocean of highly pressurized water under its thick surface of ice. The existence of liquid water raised the possibility of life in Tartarus' past, and an operation to bore through the ice was undertaken. Scientists were thrilled to discover that not only had Tartarus hosted life in the past, but there were complex microbial ecosystems living off of the energy of deposits of radioactive material on the ocean bottom. Stromatolites and diatomaceous earth indicate that life was once widespread, and the isolated clusters of radiotrophs are the last gasp of a family of life at least 2 billion years old.

Tartarus is livelier than one might expect from a frozen ball of rock and ice between stars. In addition to the biological research stations created to study the life of Tartarus, the planet contains several research and development workshops and laboratories designing technologies for extreme cold. The lack of nearby stars minimizes interfering stellar radiation and also makes the rogue planet an excellent location for astronomical observation; a large array of radio-telescopes is under construction.

Plot Hook: The deposits of radioactive material on which the life of Tartarus depends are anamolous. They cannot be accounted for by any models of planet formation, they are too numerous, and they are of the wrong isotopes. Some believe that this indicates intelligent activity, and that the deposits are the left over from ancient alien technologies. Firewall gives these theories some credence, and needs the PCs to investigate a possible find before word spreads to Tartarus' primary sponsor, the Go-Nin Group.