Arcturus Subsector redux

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pt 3

Some people do venture out, with compressors, spare filters, pressurized government surplus shelters, and whatever other kit they can pull together. Life outside the arcology is harsh and challenging but affords privacy and freedom of movement. Hardly plants and animals suited to hypoxic conditions, introduced during the second phase of terraforming provide food that is semi-palatable if cooked sufficiently.


In the arcology, only processed food of low quality, most of it bland, rubbery slabs of green or teal 'foodstuff' is widely available. Anything better has to be imported.

According to recent TAS updates, the people have not taken to cannibalism, despite rumors about one foodstuff variation that 'it's made of people.'

The arcology contains an excellent, but aging, computer system based on buried mainframes connected to free public access terminals placed on every street corner and in large cyber-centers.

Automats stocked by robots and by Popular Assembly volunteers provide food with the tap of a biometrically encrypted ration card, up to the card's daily limit. The machines also accept Imperial credits with a surcharge added, and the local plastic currency at face value and no added fees.

STARTOWN

The neighborhoods around the starport are in better repair than the rest of the city. Relatively wealthy citizens: successful food smugglers, gang leaders, influential speakers in the Peoples Assembly, and so on, live here with robots and armed men to guard them and their possessions.
Businesses catering to travellers line the streets: hotels, food sellers, pharmaceutical markets, weapons shops, survival kit outfitters, etc.

Imperial forces patrol the fortress like wall of the extrality line, built to keep out desperate citizens, would-be hijackers and stowaways.
Rumors of corruption persist.

HOOK- An ambitious Imperial bureaucrat on Jael hires the PCs as outside investigators to look into corruption at Tunguska Lowport after weapons used by Solomani terrorists are traced back to Tunguska but an official inquiry comes back with little to show.

 

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Tunguskans avoid the bone density loss and weak musculature problems of some low-gravity populations through free prenatal drugs and pharmaceuticals infused in their food.

Outsiders who live too long on Tunguska food-slabs may develop bone spurs and acute join pain and stiffness. Thirty days is no problem.

 

[coliver988]

I can see all sorts of interesting adventures on Tunguska

 

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IKUK
pt 1

A779769-D

Ikuk natives do not wear the filter masks visitors require because they are all given bioengineered symbionts as infants. The symbionts live inside the human body and only a certain blue tinge to mucus membranes provides a clue that anything is different about an Ikukian compared with other humans of Solomani or mixed origins. As this situation is one of symbiosis rather than heritable modification, Ikukians are not considered a Minor Race or Chimera by scholars in either the Third Imperium or the Solomani Confederation, although the more zealous followers of some religious groups might object to the biotech on grounds of 'purity of body.'*
The symbiotes are tailored to Ikuk and do not necessarily provide protection on all worlds with tainted atmospheres.


* see Library Data entry on the Imperial Temple and Reformed Consistorial Temple

 

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IKUK

Ikuk is a world of long, hazy days under the sullen red sun (a dwarf star, but it appears large because Ikuk is fairly near it) and long, dark nights with the stars mostly hidden by smoggy clouds. Greenhouse effect raises the temperature of what might otherwise be eternal winter to an autumn that never ends. Sickly-looking black plants grow over many parts of the main landmass not cleared by human activity.

Many native animals are endotherms that see into the infrared spectrum, and a person going out into the dark woods, swamps, or tall grass prairies by night should beware nocturnal predators drawn to his body heat.

Even in the cities, there are some dangerous creatures. A kind of flying arachnid infests dead trees, nesting in the rotting trunks had adapted to live in culverts, eaves, chimneys, and other human structures. Deforestation has only caused more of the nasty things to enter human inhabited areas. These 20 cm diameter "winged spiders" can metabolize human tissues, which they dissolve with sprays of enzymes and then slurp with probosces. Their venom has a numbing effect on native animals but feels like hot cooking grease to a human sprayed with it.

 

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IKUK part 3

IKUK remains under Imperial military rule, but home rule advocates continue negotiations with the Third Imperium and some commentators expect a transitional government will be announced in the next few years.
Strict laws ban the carry of any weapons outside private residences, and those arms are limited to clubs, swords, and other such hand weapons. No guns.
Censorship is strict and the security services monitor political groups.
Supporters of the Solomani Cause are especially common in Ikuk's arts and humanities circles. Recently, a minor riot broke out at a playhouse when military police shut down a popular show for alleged 'crypto-Confederate' messages.


The latest fashion in the capital/starport area is for women to wear short, brimmed soft hats with hanging lace veils, a sartorial choice that adds mystery but is also useful for keeping flying spiders from alighting on the face or neck.

 

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CYMBELINE PT 2

ADDITIONAL DATA

The democratically elected telecomms/computing board maintains a public posting or ratings and reviews for every legitimate business on the world, updated hourly or even more frequently. Off world companies are listed, too, though with less accurate and up-to-date information.
Anyone can look up the credit rating, customer reviews, market past performance, and other such information on any company he or she wishes to check out.
Given how little formal law exists, nearly anything not illegal under the High Law of the Third Imperium and physically available on the world can be readily obtained online from an aboveboard firm. The transaction will be recorded on the data web, with the buyer's name redacted but discoverable by the government, so some purchasers prefer to do business in person, offline.

The government also maintains a free digital library with millions of books and recordings.

Citizens/residents often carry weapons but seldom fight gun battles in the streets---an armed society is a polite society, at least in this case.

 

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LAMARCK

A763886-C

Vast pits and ringed rock tiers mark wide areas of the surface of Lamarck, evidence of several thousand years of mining. Some of these depressions hold jewel-bright lakes and rivers, fringed by lush green jungles that stand out in sharp contrast to the red, brown, and black stone of the stony deserts.


Once barely habitable as a result of massive industrial pollution, terraforming has made Lamarck a prime spot for immigration from across the subsector, and the population is growing swiftly.
A civil government rules today, but one of the members of the old corporate cartel that sponsored the post Long Night resettlement maintains considerable influence as a major employer and investor--Lamarck Minerals.

 

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TAMARIND

C9A4869-9

Tamarind is no garden spot-- a frigid sphere with orange-tinted ammonia/alkaline lakes and brown rocky landmasses partly covered in black, spiky vegetation. An unprotected man venturing outdoors would freeze and asphyxiate in less than a minute.

All citizens lived packed into a score of mega-city arcologies, domed structures heated by fusion reactors.
A military government, answerable to the governor on Scandia, maintains strict control over the population, and monitors the manufacture, import, and sale of gear needed for venturing outside the cities: vacc suits, heating systems, cold climate gear, and oxygen tanks.
Many dissidents and criminals from Scandia and other worlds end up imprisoned in the hives of Tamarind, working in factories, mines, and vertical 'rack farms.'

Successive governments since the early years of the Second Imperium have used Tamarind as a prison and place of exile.
During the Long Night, the world enjoyed independence and civil freedom; native Tamarinders sometimes see as a golden epoch those centuries which form a 'dark age' in the annals of many other worlds.

 

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STRACKENZ

D423110-9

Fewer than one hundred citizens inhabit this small world, and every one of them is a member of the Strackenz Development Cooperative. Settlers came from Kurland, seeking freedom from all 'oppressive taxation and regulation' with a shared dream of striking it rich mining newly discovered lanthanum deposits, but the mineral wealth proved more difficult to extract than the planners had projected and the colony has slipped into something close to anarchy as capital and colonists bleed away back to Kurland. The few men and women who remain are determined to stick it out and make Strackenz flourish for their children.

Outgassing from volcanic vents replenishes the very thin atmosphere, which is tainted by hydrogen sulfide and ash.
Shallow oases of bubbling mud or bitter, warm lakes dot the barren surface. Native life is mostly small, and all of it restricted to the water.

 

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HATHOR

A78A997-B

Nearly all the surface of this world is covered by a vast sea teeming with bacteria that feed on decaying lifeforms, a horizon-bounded vista of greasy waves rolling ceaselessly beneath cloudy skies.
Only a few specks of basalt rise above the waterline. Rains fall often, in drizzles and downpours that can last for months. The air is soupy and stale-tasting, but cleaner than the water and quite breathable without a mask.



Several billion people of mixed Solomani/Vilani ancestry live on Hathor, the vast majority of them in gargantuan complex of submarine habitats in the West Equatorial Shelf Region, which constitutes one of the densest concentrations of Humaniti in Charted Space.

The government is officially a confederation of democratic city-states, but in practice political power belongs to a trans-metropolitan bureaucracy responsible for maintaining critical infrastructure and feeding the vast population.

Over the last several centuries, pollution and the over-exploitation of natural resources have seriously harmed the environment; many scientists fear Hathor's ocean ecology is dying.

During the Solomani Rim War, in a rare display of new ideas and vigorous action, the bureaucracy approved military action against Anenerkuk(at the time, Hyacinthe) in conjunction with the Third Imperium, and the annexation of that 'rebel world.' A steady stream of soldiers, administrators, and colonists flows from Hathor to its subject, but even if the emigration were increased a hundred-fold it would hardly affect the crowded conditions and resource demands on the home world. Still, Hathor has gained from its conquest, with an ongoing technology transfer from the less populated but more advanced colony.

 

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KURLAND

A6879CA-E

Visitors from worlds with 1g or greater surface gravity and with normal or thin atmospheres may experience a certain giddiness on comparatively low-gravity, oxygen-rich Kurland, until they acclimate.

Kurland, arguably Arcturus subsector's most habitable world, is home to the subsector's greatest population; perspective immigrants apply ever year despite the long queue. A thousand titanic white, pink, or blue ceramet-walled tower-cities rise high over a verdant landscape of farmland and parks on a south temperate zone world-archipelago. Aircars and gigantic grav-assisted dirigibles soar between the high-rise habitats. In some regions, metallic arches and cylinders, traces of the long-derelict elevated tube-transport system may be seen through the trees or gleaming bare in the golden fields.

Robots work in forestry and agriculture, with small numbers of human experts.

Most industry is located in orbitals or on Kurland's moon.

Ongoing computerization and robotization have put millions of citizens out of work, but a dole system prevents serious poverty. Still, few people can aspire to much more than a small apartment or a dorm room, with three meals a day in a cafeteria, and library access. Upward mobility is possible principally through higher education, and the planetary university system, with physical campuses in every city, provides Kurland with its ruling class of 'Scholastics', men and women drawn from the top levels of achievement in economics, sociology, political science, agronomy, urban engineering, and other fields.

Security cameras are ubiquitous in the habitats, though criminals have disabled or reprogrammed monitoring systems in some places. Police patrols are frequent. Cops wear mesh and carry sonic stunners.

 

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That covers all twenty worlds of the subsector.


Now comes an addendum phase.


I'm considering defaulting to Adventure 13's 22 million population for Cymbeline, no matter the UWP.