worldbuilding

Planets of the Foross Sector: Palan and Meruna

Palan

Palan is a mostly barren planet, but has sufficient microbial life in its numerous small seas to maintain an atmosphere dense enough and sufficiently high in oxygen to be fully breathable for most species. However, the radiation from its sun is dangerously high across most of the planet, and all settlements are located near the south pole, where due to the planet’s low axial tilt, the sun always stays low above the horizon all year. Creating the impression that each day consists of only a very long morning and equally long evening. The most striking feature of Palan’s sky are the planet’s large rings that are visible over the northern horizon during the day and most of the night. What plant life exist on the mostly barren rocks that make up most of the land surface consists mostly of lichens and a few simple shrubs. No animals are raised on Palan, and there are no native land animals larger than 1 cm in size.

Palan is home to two main settlements. Sarantal was founded in 497 by a the Askal Directorate from the neighboring Askal sector to serve as workers’ housing for the construction of a large fuel and repair station in orbit around Palan’s moon. As commerce in the Foross sector greatly increased in the mid-500s, both the station and the settlement were greatly expanded, and gained a large new population of genya workers. At 9 million people, Sarantal is now the single largest city in the entire sector.

A consortium of mahir corporations established the Usomi colony in 579, some 200 km from Sarantal. Over the following century, it gained a population of 4 million mahir and genya.

Meruna

Meruna was the last planet in the Foross Sector to be settled. Even though it is one of the most habitable planet in the entire sector, second only to Kion, its lack of valuable mineral resources had made it completely irrelevant to any of the mining companies that originally drove the development of the sector. The Keritika colony was founded by firax in 631, after most of the large colonial companies had already ceased operations in the sector and sold off most of their remaining assets. The purpose of Keritika had never been to become economically profitable, but to primarily to serve as a self-sustaining embassy of the firax states closer to the regions of space inhabited by the vhen, mahir, and tubaki. The only direct neighbors of firax space are the enkai and chosa, and they considered it in their collective best interest to have direct contact and establish relationships with other peoples as well.

Meruna is a largely oceanic planet, but home to several groups of large islands that cover about 8% of its surface. Most land is relatively flat and covered in a wide variety of grasses, though there are many types of native shrubs and scattered clusters of small trees as well. This makes the planet very suitable for raising introduced farm animals. While animal life in the sea is extremely abundant and diverse, land animals consists mostly of small birds and burrowing animals, with no large predators that could pose a threat even to firax children.

Though the planet’s 5 million population consists mostly of equal numbers of firax and genya, various enkai and vhen oligarchs from other planets in the sector have been trying to take control over the major private businesses on Meruna for years, and have recently been pressuring the government in Keritika to privatize several state-owned companies to take over.

OUTA TIME

As surely is evident from going through over 10 years of posts on this site, I have always had a challenging relationship with Sword & Sorcery campaigns and worldbuilding. I think the roots for what became the Ancient Lands and later Kaendor were already there when I first got seriously interested in making my own fantasy campaign setting all the way back in 2009. I had a very strong vision for the kind of world I wanted to make, inspired by the aesthetics of Conan the Barbarian and Return of the Jedi. But with all the (often short) campaigns I ran over 15 years, it never actually played out as adventures that evoke that style. What I managed to run always ended up being fairly generic D&D. In 2014 or so, I was dabbling with trying story writing again, set in a world of that style, but that never took off due to lack of any plot ideas. And more recently, over the last year, when I took up videogame design as a new hobby, it always was a big indecision and endless back and forth whether I wanted to make something in that fantasy style, or in my more recent concept for a Space Opera setting.

The one dominating problem has always been that I couldn’t come up with stories, because I couldn’t imagine what kind of actionable goals and motivations heroes could pursue that would make for a great adventure but also feel believable and make them sympathetic characters. One thing that I realized last winter was that my ideas for Kaendor and Sword & Sorcery have always been an idea for a strong aesthetic, but never a concept for themes or stories.

I really love the idea of Iron Age style societies living in a prehistoric wilderness. But what do I actually have to say about Iron age people and cultures? What ideas and concepts do I want to express through the conditions and actions of people living in Iron Age societies? I don’t really have, and never had, anything interesting interesting about Iron Age cultures that I find interesting to explore through fiction. I always just really liked the aesthetics of it.

There is, of course, always the option taken by lots of fantasy writers, to simply have the people of a fantasy world think like and have the concerns of contemporary audiences. The Witcher games are a prime example of a world that has medieval technology and magic, but is inhabited by people who intellectually and culturally think and behave like 21st century Europeans. D&D has persistently progressing into that direction for the last 40 years now. But to me, that idea has always been completely unappealing. What’s the point of having fantastic cultures that are based on ancient societies and use ancient technologies if they think and act, and deal with the same concerns as we do today? That would just be modern society dresses up in costumes, and missing everything that makes Iron Age cultures interesting to me in the first place.

Things are very different for me with Space Opera, though. While technology in Space Opera is often significantly advanced to ours, their motivations and concerns are generally seen as the same as ours. In the mid-20th century, modernist thought was that great advances in technology would drastically transform society, and that new technologies could solve the many issues society had been struggling with for generations since the start of industrializations. But we now know that this is not the case, and this has been the whole reasons of being for the entire cyberpunk genre since the early 80s. New technologies do not solve societal problems. Modern technologies have massively improved food production, energy generation, and medicine. But most of the newly generated wealth only ends up making the already rich even richer, without lifting the poor out of poverty. Throughout Europe and North America, the message by the ruling classes has been for decades now that the common people have to get used to becoming poorer, being able to afford less, and are going to have to work more. At the same time as the countries as a whole are getting ever more richer. It is of course foolish to assume that people will still live the same way and have the same culture as we have today. But we also really have no reason to assume that anything is going to change in meaningful ways either, or that the social problem of 2525 will be different from those in 2025. Or those in 1825. There are no trends that clearly point to significant social changes in the future. (Except significantly lower population numbers everywhere.) There’s still going to be rich elites that tell everyone else they will have to tighten their belts while they get ever richer, and distract from their own blame by agitating for hostility against some minority or another. Cool tech gadgets won’t change anything about that.

Which is why I always find it infinitely easier to come up with goals and motivations for characters, ideas for possible adventures and stories, factions, and large scale conflicts in Space Opera environments. In a Space Opera, I have no problems coning up with themes, or meaningful things that I want to express through worldbuilding. In contrast, Sword & Sorcery has always been only a very dear and appealing aesthetic to me. An aesthetic that ironically was inspired mostly by Return of the Jedi, the Dune game from 1994, Albion from 1995, and Knights of the Old Republic. Which are all Space Opera! So realizing that aesthetic that always dominates my imagination through a Space Opera setting rather than a Sword & Sorcery world is absolutely doable. (And the six planets of my new iteration of Iridium Moons satisfy that artistic urge very well so far.)

Every couple of weeks, I have a moment where that old familiar call to take another shot at making that vision for an Iron Age society in a prehistoric world work comes back very strongly. But each time, I still can’t think of any new ideas for themes or conflicts that speak to me. Having been at it for 16 years now, I often feel that my motivation to do so is probably mostly habit and familiarity at this point. It is an old dream, that is very dear to me. But I also feel that from the perspective of narrative creative expression, it probably is just a dead end to me. There just isn’t anything I want to express or explore through characters native to pre-modern societies. And for once, this isn’t a sudden burst of half thought through thoughts that I want to shout out to whoever might want to listen. This has been a fairly consistent experience I have had for probably at least 5 years now. And it’s not necessarily a bad thing. I absolutely feel that with Iridium Moons, I really do have something that has a lot of potential for true greatness and making an impact, and is just as exciting to me. When the excitement of wanting to work on Sword & Sorcery runs out and I get stuck, and I think about maybe making something new for Iridium Moons instead, the excitement always comes rushing back immediately.

I think perhaps this just will take more time to get used to.

Grant Us Eyes!

One of my favorite game mechanics in videogames in Insight from Bloodborne. You increase your character’s Insight by encountering weird alien shit for the first time, or by consuming the Madman’s Knowledge item. As your Insight increases, you gain the ability to see more supernatural stuff happening around you that would otherwise be invisible. But as you are pulled into the world of eldritch beings, you also become more vulnerable to their strange powers.

For a campaign in which the player character’s are on a journey to visit sacred shrines of supernatural power to gain greater wisdom and enlightenment from personal encounters with cosmic forces, an Insight mechanic would be just perfect.

In Dragonbane, this is a perfect case for introducing a secondary skill. That is, simply a skill that isn’t in the main rulebook for the game. Assuming the campaign begins with the PCs already having done a circuit of the regular pilgrim’s path but still craving for greater understanding from more out of the way and controversial sites of power, all PCs would start with Insight as a trained skill in addition to the starting skills of a new character. Which means it starts at a rank of 1 to 7, based on the character’s Willpower attribute, corresponding to a 5 to 35% chance at making a successful skill check.

Insight checks are rolled when touching a supernatural object, entering a supernatural area, or first interacting with a supernatural creature to gain a first impression of what’s going on. It might also be rolled in secret by the GM to become aware of a hidden presence. And in turn, an Insight roll might need to be failed or otherwise supernatural beings take notice of the PCs entering their vicinity and come to investigate. (That part is admittedly still very vague at this point.)

As with all skills, a roll of a 1 or a 20 marks the Insight skill for advancement at the end of the game. Once the game ends, players make a skill check, and if the check fails, the skill advances by one rank. The sacred shrines that the characters are seeking and visiting count as a teacher for for the Insight skill. Spending a full shift in a sacred shrine and contemplating the experience lets players make a skill advancement roll with a boon (roll twice, take the better result).

The Pilgrimage

The main challenge for me in imagining fantasy adventure stories has always been the motivation of the adventuring heroes. Oldschool D&D was before anything else a tactical dungeon crawling game. It wasn’t even called a roleplaying game for some time. Just a fantasy adventure game, that had evolved out of wargaming. Characters were play pieces for the players. Both disposable and replaceable. The game is being played to have fun interacting with the challenges. It was not a game about experiencing the heroic journey of memorable characters. In that context, people just picking up a rusty sword to walk straight into monster-infested hellholes and to their pretty certain death was not an issue of narrative dissonance.

But very few roleplaying games that succeeded early D&D since the mid-80s are anything like that. They are not dungeon crawling tactical games. They are roleplaying games about characters with personalities, motivations, and ambitions. But in the typical fantasy adventure game, they are still walking straight into situations that should be certain and immediate death on a regular basis. Real people do significantly dangerous things as a job, even if the pay is poor, because they want to help people in danger and believe that this is worth the risks they are taking. But these people usually go to incredible length to mitigate all the possible risk to themselves and rely on extensive support structures to fund and equip them. And even then, there is regularly a point where they concede that there is nothing they can do because the risk of becoming additional victims that need saving is just too high.

Fantasy is fiction of the impossible and magical. But when it comes to the risk that characters take in fantasy adventure scenarios, and the possible gains they expect from that, my brain just can not believe that a person with a mind that works in similar ways to real humans, would make decisions like that. (Let’s not even touch on the whole genre of JRPGs and Shonen anime.)

We do have many fantasy protagonists who go on adventures outside of games, and many of them were the direct inspiration for dungeon crawling games in the first place. But old king Conan does not go on adventures. He rides out into battle to defend his country from invading armies. Ending up in dungeons and fighting demons was never his plan. Young man Conan does go dungeon crawling many times. But his motivation is that he thinks killing, stealing, and intimidating people are the most fun passtimes one can engage him. Not exactly a model for the typical fantasy game player to emulate.

Elric and Kane frequently find themselves in adventure situations, but adventuring is not what they set out to do. Most commonly they are on a journey to get a thing that is important to them or will be a valuable tool for their goals. And along the way, an adventure happens to happen by accident, and is something they would rather have avoided.

I don’t think any of these characters and stories make for good models for player characters in roleplaying games. And that is probably at the heart of why all my campaigns in the last 10 years have felt to me like a compromise to just have something to play, rather than nothing. But the adventures as a whole never felt meaningful to me.

But thinking about the topic again over this weak did lead to an idea that could be interesting to pursue further and build a campaign around for the Iron Lands.

Characters on Pilgrimage

Why would people go on adventures? That does depend on what even is an adventure in the first place? In the context of Sword & Sorcery tales, it’s pretty much a given that it is about characters on a journey during which they enter at least one exceptional, and often supernatural, location and face off against a significant, and usually supernatural, threat. But why do they go to the place, and why do they risk facing the threat? And for a campaign, why do they keep doing that over and over?

Self-preservation and defense only works so many times. By the third time the heroes’ home gets attacked by demons, the believability breaks down. Seeking an opportunity to get rich quick or die trying does work structurally, but that just goes completely counter to any themes I find worthwhile to engage with. And traveling heroes for hire who ask around in every village they come through if they have any monsters they want to be freed from just doesn’t pass my personal checks for a plausible world.

But here is one new idea! What if adventuring is basically a religion?

The idea is that there are many kinds of mystic cults and societies that seek to gain understanding or enlightenment about the reality of existence and their own being through personal experiences of the supernatural or divine. Living a rural life in the natural world only lets you experience a small fragment of what reality in its entirety really is. Studying tomes and listening to the words of mystic teachers in great metropolitan cities will only get you so far. To truly gain enlightenment and real understanding of the world and being, people have to experience the supernatural as well. And to that purpose, followers of these religions go on pilgrimages to visit many holy sites, and experience the presence of supernatural phenomenons and beings for themselves.

For most people, these pilgrimages are just that. A year, or maybe two, visiting several revered shrines and sanctuaries, and returning to their former lives as a grown person with a greater appreciation for the world and life. But some pilgrims feel that there is still more for them to learn. Greater truths and more revelations that are just out of reach and prevent them from returning home just yet. Many great and most revered mystics continue their pilgrimages to more distant and remote sites for decades or their entire lives.

And off the regular pilgrimage routes, on rarely travelled paths deep into the wilderness, pilgrims can often find themselves in the presence of forces far from the serenity of the more famous sanctuaries. And on these journeys, some people discover that they have it in themselves to face the supernatural even when it is frightening and hostile, and to keep going forward into the unknown when most others would turn back. Warriors and mages who have stepped on the pilgrims’ path are often found among those who have both the courage and the compulsion of curiosity to push on on these darker paths. But they can also be found in the most unlikely people who have never considered themselves as being particularly brave or thirsting for knowledge. And it is these people that many remote settlements, that have no experienced priest or shaman of their own, put their hopes on when they are struggling with the dark forces from below and beyond. And in many cases, pleas to take a look into these strange and rare manifestations of the supernatural are too tempting to resist investigating.

In Dragonbane, professions for new player characters cover the typical fighter, hunter, mage, and thief. But they also include scholars, merchants, artisans, and mariners. People without any special martial skills or magical powers, who really would have no qualifications to leave their homes and clear out bandit lairs, goblin warrens, and haunted tombs. But going on a pilgrimage to visit holy shrines? Sure, why not. Lots of ordinary people do that. And as their journeys go on, asking other pilgrims if they can tag along to visit some of the more dodgier and out of place sites is not much of a stretch. The professions are also only a template to speed up character creation. Once play begins, character advancement is entirely by using skills and receiving skill training from instructors. Who your characters will become depends entirely on their experiences during the campaign. This seems a really nice mechanical fit for a world in which characters become adventurers during their journey, instead of chosing it before they set out.

This setup also provides a nice default action for sandbox campaigns, for when an adventure is wrapped up with nothing else for the characters to do. Just take out the map again and look if there’s any other pilgrimage sites in the area. And if that turns out uneventful, continue on to the next one until something extraordinary disrupts the quiet journey again.

This is a new idea I just started thinking about. But I think this could be something really interesting to use as the centerpiece to build a fantasy world around.

Planets of the Foross Sector: Sarhat and Kion

The Foross Sector is located near the edge of Known Space, at the outermost point where the regions of vhen and enkai colonial influence meet, and give way to unexplored space, and only a bit more than a week from the genya homeworld Upara by cargo freighter. It saw some very extensive mining in the 5th and 6th century, but was abandoned by government-owned mining corporation in the early 600s.

Since then, the sector’s population has dropped from more than 100 million people to less than 60 million due to emigration. The local economies were fully privatized, and economic output declined down to 20% of its peak levels in the late 6th century. The greatly scaled down mining operations are used to fund the import of advanced electronics and medical supplies, but almost all the local infrastructure and industry relies on 200 year old heavy machinery parts salvaged from abandoned mines, and almost half the sector’s population is working in food production, often for mostly personal consumption.

Sarhat

Sarhat is an arid planet dominated by rocky deserts and a number of enclosed salty seas that are home to oxygen-producing bacteria, and whose continuous evaporation provides the scarce rain that fills the planets rivers. While the salt seas are highly alkaline and covered in thick layers of pink bacterial sludge, the seasonal rivers are regularly replenishing underground caverns in porous rocks, which create numerous oases that have become the main sites for settlements on the planet. Though vegetation on Sarhat is sparse, the planet is home to many species of native animals. Most are fairly small and of little threat to people, but some are large enough to be worthwhile to hunt for food. Agriculture of hardy crops in the soil of Sarhat is possible, but the import of fruit and vegetables from Kion is the main source of cargo traffic within the sector.

Sarhat was first settled in 523 by enkai from the Parakarit colony, who established a small survey station as an outpost of their settlement on Kion. Discoveries of numerous small, but still highly concentrated sources of Iridium and Palladium on Sarhat in 547, and decreasing outputs from the mines of the Turik colony on Halon, led to nearly all the Turik mining operations being moved to the much less hostile and inhospitable planet. The Turikan cities and settlements of the Tauros colony are now home to 15 million people ruled by eight oligarch families. The older Parakarian colony of Partenas is home to 5 million people, and are ruled by 4 oligarch families. Another estimated 2 million people live scattered throughout the hills or the ruins of settlements abandoned after the Turik and Parakarit governments cut all infrastructure funding on the planet.

Counted together, Turikan and Parakarian enkai make up the largest population on Sarhat, and all the oligarch families on the planet are enkai. But they are outnumbered by the large populations descended from alien migrant workers, mostly chosa and tubaki who deal well with the hot and dry climate of the planet. The Turikan and Parakarian oligarchs often prefer to have dealings among themselves, but at the end of the day, business interests go above cultural animosities.

Kion

Kion is one of the two most hospitable planets in the Foross Sector. Its surface is covered in several large continents, separated by a global network of winding narrow seas. Except for the polar regions and the higher mountain ranges, much of the planet’s land is covered in dense vegetation. As expected from a planet like this, Kion is home to millions of species of native animals, only a tiny fraction of which has ever been scientifically described or named over the past two centuries.

While the first settlers from Turik immediately went to full scale mining on Halon, the Parakarit government decided to first focus on setting up sustainable food production in the sector to greatly reduce the costs of supplying later mining operations. The Solanika was established in Kion in 503 and some mining was begun in Lerinas in 514, but it never reached the scale of the Turikan mining operations on Halon and later Sarhat.

The mines on Halon ended up buying large quantities of food from Kion, as even with the enormous prices paid to the rival Parakarians, this was still cheaper than relying entirely on shipping food in from Turik. Correspondingly, the vhen colony on Palan established the Arkon outpost on Kion in 558 to compete with Solanika, though this was exclusively a food production facility with no plans to do any mining on Kion.

Today, the Solanika colony numbers 12 million people ruled by five enkai oligarchs. Arkon is home to 5 million people, ruled over by three oligarchs. Two vhen, and one Turikan enkai.

A Brief History of Space

When I came up with the idea for Iridium Moons four years ago, the concept was to create a world that is a blend of Cyberpunk and Dune, with the only fantastical elements being hyperspace travel and artificial gravity. Other than that, everything was meant to remain plausible under conventionally understood physics, biology, demographics, and economics. But this year, I’ve really gotten invested in a much more space fantasy style, more similar to A Princess of Mars and early Star Wars. In that context, many of the planets and factions I had created for the Esekar Sector no longer really make much sense. And since I picked up 3D modelling and rendering in Blender as a new hobby, and very much entertaining the possibility of expanding from that into videogame development with Blender at a later point, focusing on a smaller number of planets with fewer different kind of aliens would be a significant reduction on the asset creation workload. So I created a new sector for Iridium Moons, that’s more in line with the new vision. Reusing many of the aliens and other concepts, but also replacing or throwing out others.

Starting with the history of the Foross Sector doesn’t feel like a particularly good way to introduce the new setting, but it still seems to make more sense to cover this background before going deeper into the description of the individual planets and factions.

The Start of the Interstellar Age

700 years ago, the first working hyperspace drive engine was constructed by the vhen. This marked the beginning of the Interstellar Age, and is conventionally treated as the start of interstellar history. Though for the first century, this history is the story of vhen space exploration alone. Traveling out into space, they explored hundreds of star system and established a number of small outposts on habitable planets, though most of these were constructed to primarily serve as supply stations for expeditions deeper into space.

After having previously encountered only a few very small populations of intelligent species with early stone age cultures, vhen explorers discovered the homeworld of the enkai in 104. The enkai were already a technologically very advanced species, but their planet was highly divided and at that time in the grip of several major conflicts. With no side having a technological or military edge over the others to risk a full out global war, the conflicts had been largely frozen for many decades. While the arrival of aliens in their star system did have a great cultural impact on all of enkai society, the possibility of interstellar expansion through hyperspace travel was primarily seen by many of the warring governments as an unprecedented opportunity to gain major economical and military advantages over their rivals. Several of the most powerful enkai states did have the technological and economical capacities to build shipyards for the production of hyperspace capable ships and begin construction within 20 years of gaining knowledge of the physics behind hyperspace drives from the vhen.

The Enkai Space Race

While the vhen had undertaken space exploration as a primarily as a scientific effort, for the larges enkai states, falling behind in the race to gain and secure access to valuable resource in other star systems was seen as an existential threat to their survival. Throwing their entire industrial might behind the effort to beat their military rivals, the enkai space race accelerated the exploration of new systems and the establishment of major colonies to a pace far beyond anything seen before.

Of the four largest enkai colonies, one would eventually be largely abandoned after 60 years, failing to become self-sustainable after being a huge drain on the state’s economy. The other three turned out to be extremely successful, and by the year 300 each had grown to population sizes over 100 million people, due to massive state-sponsored migration and very effective social policies to encourage high birth rates. However, the great war on the enkai homeworld never actually materialized. And with communication between the colonies and the homeworld being delayed by weeks, and the colonies having become economically fully self-sufficient, two of them gained full independence as sovereign states during the 4th century. While the last colony had become very successful, its establishment and very high support costs during the early decades had played a major part in ruining the government on the home world. With several regions breaking off to become independent minor nations, the colony eventually outpaced the state that had founded it both economically and in population, ultimately leading to the capital being moved to the colony. This effectively makes it sovereign state that has a colony on one of the homeworlds. A unique case in all of interstellar history.

Further Expansions

During the enkai space race of the 2nd and 3rd century, several other large civilizations were discovered in the exploration of habitable planets and became part of interstellar society. The enkai discovered the chosa in 197, who also had already developed limited space travel within their own system.

In 274, vhen explorers discovered the homeworld of the tubaki, who did have quite advanced steam power technology but no electrical infrastructure.

In 312, the vhen also discovered the mahir, who turned out to be the descendants of enkai who had been settled on a far away planet and genetically altered by an unknown lost civilization tens of thousands of years ago. Mahir technology was already quite similar to that of the vhen, except having never discovered the means to produce hyperspace drives.

In 381, enkai discovered the firax, who had just begun to develop electronics 50 years earlier.

In the early 5th century, the major enkai colonies had become significant powers in their own right and began to establish new permanent mining outposts on more resource rich planets that had been discovered after their own founding. During this time they discovered the genya in 442. The genya had discovered electricity, but due to their planet’s scarcity of coal and almost complete lack of oil had never been able to make use of it industrially. The introduction of fusion power by the enkai led to an incredibly fast industrialization that happened in all parts of the planet simultaneously, leading to an enormous population explosion.

Settlement of the Foross Sector

One of the regions of space that was of great interest to enkai colonies on Turik and Parakarat was the Foross Sector. The first Turikan outpost to be established in 478 was on Halon, an inhospitable and barren planet covered in near permanent haze and dust storms, but with breathable air and being home to several rich deposits of Iridium and Paladium from asteroid impacts, which made it very attractive for mining.

Parakarians founded a settlement on Kion in 503, which became the main food producer for the mining operations in the sector. By this time, the genya homeworld was reeling from a six times increase in global population numbers, and severe economic hardship for working class clans, leading to several hundred million people taking up offers for work in alien colonies, with large numbers of them ending up in the Foross Sector.

In 547, new rare metal sources were discovered on Sarhat. With the most abundant deposits on Halon having been mined decades ago, and the environment being much more hospitable, the main mining operations in the sector were almost entirely moved from Halon to Sarhat, leaving the first settled planet in the sector mostly abandoned.

At the same time, the vhen fuel refinery in orbit around the moon of Palan was greatly expanded, with extensive support structures and housing facilities being build on the surface of the habitable planet. In time, Palan became home to the main spaceport of the Feross Sector, with the Sarantal colony growing into a city of 9 million people. A majority of them being genya.

The Decline

By 7th century, mining on Sarhat declined significantly and had already mostly ended on Kion. The enkai colonies that had been funding the new settlements greatly reduced their budget for maintenance and upkeep and completely pulled out of the sector in 617 and 623. Palan followed in 635. Over a third of the sector’s population left in a span of 25 years, most of them taking up contracts in the new mining operations in neighboring sectors.

Whatever, by that point largely worn out and outdated, industrial equipment and infrastructure remained on the planet was quickly auctioned off to the highest bidders. As the vast majority of people in the Foross Sector had been government employees who received most of their wage in the form of housing, food, and social services, the only people rich in cash tended to be criminals. Who now in control of the remaining industry and infrastructure, became the new oligarch class.

Without the regular supply of subsidized advanced technological components, and largely limited to what could be manufactured locally with existing industrial capacity, the technological level of the Foross Sector declined significantly. Large parts of the population on Sarhat and Kion turned to farming, possessing only a few small electronic devices, and often relying extensively on work animals. The oligarchs still maintain access to many advanced technologies by trading the resources from the greatly decreased mining operations to interstellar trade companies from the homeworlds.

Despite the massive industrial decline of the Foross Sector, a new settlement was set up by the firax on Meruna in 631. While the planet is highly habitable with a fairly mild climate, its lack of valuable resources had left it unclaimed by the industrial operations of the enkai and vhen. The firax, whose homeworld lies in one of the most remote frontiers of known space, wanted to establish a presence closer to the vhen and mahir, that would allow them opportunities to open relationships with other peoples than only the enkai. Attracting a large number of genya settlers and workers from Kion and Palan, the new colony managed to become economically self-sufficient, but remains the smallest of the populations in the sector by a great margin.