Khund

Feb 18

Man, I really need to get used to doing the whole blogging thing. Anyway, here's the first culture I'm working on:

Khund


A picture of a Khundi Roc Cult warrior raiding a smuggler vessel.

Most people, when they think of the Khundi, shudder and imagine slavering savages, drenched in the gore of their victims. They have images of dark ships that seem to come out of nowhere, populated by the restless corpses and corpsemakers.

Most people aren't exactly wrong.

The Khundi hail from a nightworld, a continent so close to the core that its lightside is uninhabitable, but the back is barely capable of supporting life. This is primarily because of the significant volcanic activity on the surface. Water vapor is released with each eruption, which does eventually condense.

Khund's barrens are covered in a perpetual reddish twilight, only broken by its moon, Sethix, and reflected light from other continents. The landscape is mostly arid plateaus with some actual sandy expanses in between. Temperatures shift between freezing cold to boiling hot almost at random, which ultimately is a good thing; it means that there are some small open bodies of water. Dust storms are common, fueled by the crosswinds from the mountainous edges.

What life does eke out a place in the harsh environs of Khund is hardy, vicious, and utterly consumed by survival by any means necessary. From the lichens and molds that produce clouds of toxic spores to provide fertilizer for their new colonies, to the swarms of vicious Piranah Flies, all the way up to the heavily armored Gargantulon and the unsettling visage of the Manticora, Khund has produced some of the most brutal and rugged species to exist on any known continent, not the least of which is the Khundi themselves.


Concept art for a Khundi warrior

The average Khundi stands somewhere between 5 feet and 6 feet tall, and is usually heavily muscled. Biologically they seem to be derived from the same stock as Phaethusan and Daleni Humans, but they've evolved in strange ways. Their eyes are like a cat's; the retinas are mirrored. Their blood has nuclei like a bird. Their jaws are over-muscled and full of razor sharp teeth, giving them the ability to bite all the way through most creatures bones. Somehow, they use 75% less water than any other known species of sentient. Technically, the Khundi (which is both plural and singular, like "sheep") can interbreed with other human sub-species, but the offspring is an infertile hybrid like a mule.


Temple of the Manticora on Khund

Khund has exactly seven cities on it, the largest and most powerful of them is Ossusxar, the city of the Restless Dead. Each necrometropolis is serviced by its nomadic clans that only stop in every couple of years. Generally the ships bring in slave labor in the form of zombified remains, water, some food that stores well, weapons, and luxury goods. A necrometropolis is built around a central temple to one of the Khundi deities, and each temple is run by priesthood. Everyone who isn't a priest or a warrior is a slave to the other two classes' desires. Most of the really hard labor is performed by the zombies, but some of the more complicated tasks must be handled by a live Khundi. Those that aren't doing hard labor, become servants to the upper classes.

Each necrometropolis is ruled by the priesthood, which is headed by a council of necrarchs, undead mummified corpses that are nigh-immortal. To be selected for this form of preservation is the highest honor one can achieve in Khundi society; it means that your continued survival is necessary. Traditionally warriors are picked for cunning, ruthlessness, and victory in battle, while priests are picked for cunning, ruthlessness, and victory in temple politics. The aspirant then goes through a lengthy ritual of self-mummification, which culminates in being entombed alive in a sarcophagus. Only one in five aspirants successfully becomes a necrarch. Warriors then join the Sarcophagants, the protectors of their tomb city, and may be chosen as clan leaders in the raiding clans. Priests go onto the necrarch council. Necrarchs aren't entirely immortal, but they generally last for at least 3000 years baring exceptional circumstances. They can be destroyed, as long as every body part is completely destroyed, which can be tricky. The Necrarchs have a nasty habit of storing excess organs (like their lungs and heart) in hidden burial chambers in temples, and can be resurrected from a sliver of flesh or bone by a simple harmonic manipulation.

Most Khundi no longer live on their home continent; indeed, the phrase "going home" has an entirely different connotation in Khundi. The usual family unit is the clan, which resides on somewhere between one and ten skycraft, made from whatever they have available. Clan size can range from 100 members to 3000. The clan unit is typically led by a necrarch who makes all of the choices in who and what to raid. The Khundi culture is one of institutionalized piracy, since the entire world appears ripe for the taking to their ravenous eyes. Almost all of their thaumaturgy is stolen, although a few of their more memorable tricks are home grown.

The Khundi are well known for their use of necromantic techniques, most notably their method of elasticizing corpses with a rubber-like substance after completely desiccating them. This leads to a unique and bizarre appearance for their zombies, as the rubber around the joints cracks in the extreme temperatures. They also have a tendency to carve runic systems into their flesh, creating a powerful set of defenses scarified directly onto them. Likewise, runic tattoos are common amongst the warrior class.

Feb 14

Happy Valentines day!

On a completely unrelated note, here's the much postponed update:

Physics




Continental sized land masses are free floating in the sky, orbiting around the Core. The only real 'night' would be when the continents orbits would line up. As you get farther away from the core, it would get damper and damper, until fog gave way to the Deeps, the waters beyond the skies.

Gravity is a function of the fifth dimensions (the other four are left/right, up/down, forward/backward, less entropy/more entropy (time)). The various land masses create a fold in the space-time fabric, which gives us gravity. The shape of the gravity well is different than a planet's, and thus a different shaped land mass. This gravity well is strong for about a hundred miles, depending on the size of the layer, and acts to pull objects toward the layer that made it. So if you were traveling fast enough to break out of the gravity well, theoretically you could 'fall' into the deeps, if you missed all of the other continents.

You also could, in theory, walk all the way around a land mass. Practically, it's a good way to commit suicide because of the crosswinds at the edges of each continent that would blow you around and smash you onto the nightside. Also, even if you managed to get yourself onto the other side, you'd probably freeze to death. That said, four expeditions on different continents tried. Only one made it back with anyone alive. They told tales of an endless waste, snow, blocks of mercury, and cold. It took them a year to transverse it.

Orrery Spirits cheat their way around the escape velocity issue. They move by oscillating the fifth dimension around them, basically creating their own gravity well, and thus why skycraft based around Orrery Spirits (read: all of them) have their own gravity. However, their maneuverability and top speed are limited in a gravity well.



Most magic in the setting could be broken down into ritual, alchemy, runic, and harmonic. Harmonic relies on using sound waves to manipulate the space-time continuum by way of making the individual strings alter their vibration (fantastically applied string theory). Runic manipulation uses electromagnetic energy (light, usually in the visible spectrum) that's bent a specific shape (the runic symbol) to alter reality. Alchemy uses chemical energy to bend the strings of a substance to do things that can seriously warp the laws of physics. Ritual Magic uses a mixture of all three other disciplines to attract beings from dimensions far beyond ours to be contracted for services that aren't necessarily covered by the other thaumaturgies.

Here are the four Major cultures I've thought up so far:

The Khund: These pirates hail from a nightworld, a continent that's so close to the Core (the sun) the the lightside is utterly uninhabitable. Their civilization grew in the harshest wasteland populated by the most vicious and monstrous creatures, and now these not quite human creatures have been unleashed into the sky. They take the both the living and the dead, suck the water out of them, and drop them into a vat of alchemical rubber. This rubber makes the joints of the dessicated corpses usable for their foul necromancy to reanimate and control.

Bel Sara: The Bel Sarans are floraphibians- half plant, half ambphibian. They've taken to their verdant rain forest world and built a civilization out of the very trees themselves. The one thing Bel Sara has is a massive biodiversity, and the natives have certainly taken advantage of that. They use their alchemy to modify and create new organisms to fulfill their needs. They live in Giant Acacia trees, grow lampposts, and even modify their own bodies to further specialize in what they do.

Dalengard: Dalengard was once a large number of fairytale kingdoms, stuck in a conflict between the 'goodly' races and 'evil'. Then the Khund came in their burial ships. Millions died to Khundi blades and thaumaturgy. It took all of the races, goodly or not, standing unified to drive of the piratical scourge, and even then at a high cost. Now years later, Dalengard has united under the banner of the Concordat, a senate that runs their fledgling nation, trying to integrate the racial issues and still play on the international scale.

Pax Phaethusa: Pax Phaethusa stands for many things. Most people, when asked, would mention their capital, their moon that they've turned into a floating palace, city, university, and military base all rolled into one. They would also mention the legions of tortoise warriors with their great shields, the clans of eagle warriors who ride on the backs of the multicolored feathered snakes, the wolf clans who hunt through the night as though it were the light of day. They speak of crystal deathrays, and cities grown from jade. They would speak of the centers of learning and culture. But mostly they speak of a civilization at its peak.

A Summary of Orrery

The Core is the center of the world, a bright, white sun around which the continents orbit. There is no ocean, but the free sky around each of the floating lands. We live on the brightside of each continent, facing the Core. Clouds drift around, evaporated from the Deeps, the waters outside the small, fragile bubble of existence. It is a place where night is only when the orbitals pass in front of each other, before continuing on their way

Skyrcraft cut through the open air, guided by Orrery Spirits, allowing the mortals to transverse the clouds, to other orbitals, the flat planes that dance in a delicate, fractally complex ballet around the stationary point of brightness, the Core. There are five superpowers with advanced skycraft technology, and they are in a mad scramble to colonize the hundreds of unclaimed orbitals for resources, for territory, for new markets, for time, and for glory.

Magic is a science, rational Thaumaturgy, Alchemysm, and many other systems dot the orbits, allowing many marvels, and likewise many horrors. There are secrets here, both on the wild shards and within the civilized nations. Old powers are slowly awakening, threatening to pop the illusion of existence the mortals cling to, building cults and creating legions of cultists. Likewise, new evils are made with war, thaumaturgy, and just plain politics.

Despite all this, mortal civilization survives. Though both the light and the dark threaten to consume Orrery, somehow a path in the middle is found, towards survival.