Seydon of Arda
Raquor'daan
H O L L OW E N D
OUT OF CHARACTER INFORMATIONIntent: Trying at a Codex event.
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Canon: N/A
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GENERAL INFORMATION
Planet Name: Hollowend [Formerly: D’is]
Demonym: ‘Hollower’ / D’yssian
Region: Outer Rim/Wild Space, Corellian Trail-End
System Name: The Blood Channel [Formerly: The Cradle Reefs]
System Features:
Noeo: A low-mass mid-sequence star, primary celestial body. Eerily swollen and distended, caked with strange rinds and shivering patinas of solar grime. Resembling a savaged eye, its body like a stew of broken sclera and pupil blackness. Noeo’s light is fitful, cold and pale.
The Sickle Moon: Hollowend’s sole natural satellite. The Sickle Moon holds a special place in local tradition and folklore, simultaneously a harbinger and gateway. At certain times of the lunar year, the Sickle Moon hangs close and deathly white, casting Hollowend in a light that some say drives anyone caught in it’s radiance mad.
Ring of Ys: Times past, when affluence and station afforded it, the Dyssians built crags in orbit around their home. Once indomitable structures, hanging castles of vaulted, pressurized stone and alloy. Some housed secret paradises of hanging gardens, others hidden schools of thought, others still just lonely bastions keeping their affluent and privileged obscured from the common blood far below.
Clotted Cagastri: A carmine-hued comet known to travail the Blood Channel every fifty local years. Like the Sickle Moon, the Cagastri wears many identities. Some believe it briefly opens a channel to the deeper cosmos for anyone with enough preturnatural insight to see, others that it heats animal instincts and renders ordinary people into bestial mirrors of their former selves. It makes for uncanny sight, regardless of its providence.
Coordinates: 11, 26
Major Imports: N/A [Formerly: Raw construction materials, wholesale foodstuffs, exotic material purchases]
Major Exports: N/A/ [Formerly: Skilled/unskilled labour, industrial parts, ores/slag/ash, heavy machinery.]
GEOGRAPHIC INFORMATION
Gravity: Standard/Earth-Like
Climate: Temperate Cool/Autumnal
Primary Terrain: Boreal Forest/Temperate Mixed Forestry/Arctic & Sub-Arctic Tundra/Xeric Shrubland
Major Locations:
Arn-Prague: Once Hollowend’s most esteemed capital. Built with a fixation towards classical aesthetics dating before the marked Hyperspace Wars and progressively twisted as its elders became further fixated on mastering and inculcating arcane knowledge. A sprawling city once home to D’is brightest and dullest, smelting an alloy of classes and castes. It stands as a windless labyrinth, housing silence and the cloy odour of old, old death.
Steel Heartlands: The industrial sector. One of Hollowend’s beating hearts of almost ceaseless industry, or was. Home to sprawling factory complexes ranging across an array of machining and raw material processing applications, a gargoyle nest of dark brick, black steel, and sooty glass. A film of waste coats nearly every surface outside the massive working halls, though the smoke stacks have long gone silent, broken up by fire and sabotage. Some bare resources might be salvaged from the leaning wreckage, and perhaps even some items of secret interest, squirrelled away by a few cunning workers.
The Murky House: Name given to a collection of interconnected estates built in the city centre, resembling a rising multitude of buttresses and spires linking to a crown of towers. Traditionally D’is’ secular branch of governance that merged with the upper class, becoming a bastion of old blood, nepotism, and rarefied authority. Rumours spread of secret wars between families and federal branches, entire bloodlines supplanted in a matter of weeks as armies of assassins fought bloody wars through the halls of power. It stands abandoned.
Halls of Myriander: Where law was meted out upon the punishable. It later became an extension of several sects positioned within Habroneme Ward and the Murky House, less aimed towards concepts of justice and fairness, and more utilized to wrestle materiel, property, and exact legal vengeance. Situated within its own ward, the Halls stand silent and unoccupied, suffused with frigid shadows. Some of the vaults used to store confiscated riches still tingle with unclaimed wealth. Perhaps not unguarded.
Habroneme Ward: A religious borough occupying a significant tract of Arn-Prague’s layout. As influence of the old Sith arts found greater and greater purchase in Hollowend’s learned spheres, Habroneme Ward became progressively isolated and eccentric. Atrocities occurred with daily frequency toward the end. The Ward is an esoteric place, hostile to the unlearned and uninitiated. There may yet be remains of the Indigo Church’s excesses roaming about...
The Lords Basilica: Habroneme Ward’s seat of ecclesiastical might. Here, the minds and resources of the Ward’s most learned and influential alchemists and worshippers met in council. A nerve centre of frightening influence, that oversaw innumerable operations into uncovering more of the old Sith’s lost arcanum. All the while portraying an air of fatherly wisdom, knowledge, and healing toward Hollowend’s general populace. Like much of Arn-Prague, something warps and turns at the basilica’s decoration and architecture. Pain and revulsion haunt the long vaulted corridors, the stench of many years of hubris and blind, evolutionary ambition. Esoteric relics and knowledge lay scattered about, where fire failed to find them.
Roblet’s Catacombs: Interlinking Arn-Prague’s various districts and neighbourhoods are the sewers and tunnel infrastructure dug out in the city’s nascent times. Its entirety was never fully mapped, save for a handful of essential floors dealing with septic and water treatment. Simultaneously a mass graveyard, a hidden city of the poor, the dumping grounds of the city powers, and nesting holes for runoff dregs and runt mutants left to die after being discarded. The Catacombs took the longest to harrow and there is still no telling if some things yet survive at its deepest pits. Supposedly, a complete map of the depths exists.
Sepulchral Village: On the outskirts of Arn-Prague lies a repugnant hamlet. Traditionally, a lowly township responsible for animal slaughter and other abattoir duties, supplying a few select customers with a taste for fresh meat outside of vat-frozen vegi-meat imported from the Inner Rim. In time, as the city became mired in its own brand of chaos and bloodletting, the village fell victim to its extreme appetites. Meat became strange, all manner of blood and viscera flowing from slaughterhouse to creek, staining the grounds crimson for generations to come. A singular brand of occultism blossomed there, as some neonate Force Sensitives began to read the dead sent to their tables to be ground into dust. A few unwholesome, grave artefacts rest under piles of fire-scorned and age-bleached bone.
The Eternitarian College: Hollowend’s birthing grounds for the rise of its noeticism. When archaeological programs unearthed the buried tomb ships of long exiled dark lords, traditional versions of planetary history were reversed on their heads. To this day, the College still emits its air of paradigmatic scholarship. But any closer examination reveals a distorted, corrupted character, charged with darkness, where faculty and students alike delved too deeply to uncover the secrets of a foreign empire. Corruption that seeped into D’is at large and ultimately doomed the world.
Iron Forest: So named for its peculiar flora, a brand of oak with notoriously knotty and unyielding bark. Caustic industrial run off and other arcane influences slowly turned the wood into an overgrown and dismal place. Dead foliage and the skeletal remains of the iron trees mark as black shapes rearing high in the constant, draping mist. Lost in its drear is the Eternitarian College, guarded by dark wards turning back minds too weak to fend off attacks of mortal fear, killing panic, and insidious anxiety. A few scattered and unmarked resting places belonging to fallen students and teachers hold empowered keepsakes, wrested from the tomb ships or created through forbidden workshops.
Frozen Culex Stronghold: House Culex preferred their own devices to that of the Murky House or the obsessive Indigo Church. They made their own fastness beyond the tundra line, holing up in a forgotten fort once devised for planetary defence. The fortress now stands as a burned ruin slowly becoming devoured by glacial ice and snow. Bones of half-buried monstrosities dot the sloping grounds and the high roof staples, overseen by hanging caskets housing House Culex’s glorious dead. Making your way to the fortress grounds is a tribulation in of itself, but word remains of special repositories of rare materials locked up in mountain dungeons below the castle structure.
Mine of Echopraxia: Exotic minerals and abnormal ores were once pulled from the mine with regularity. Then, in a fitful accident some attribute to an undocumented encounter with an eldritch power guarding an undiscovered Sith tomb ship, deaths scared up through the long tunnels. The mine was abandoned, each successive attempt at reopening its processing machines foiled by misery and demise. A few Eterinatarian scholars took to seclusion in its abyss’, ruminating over the troubling revelations gleaned from their studies of the Antediluvians. Maybe yet their secrets are scrawled in the stone, awaiting to have their broken glyphs deciphered.
Branding Wastes: Following the Harrowing, what remained of the dead were gathered up. Innumerable cadavers were raised as effigies of warning, hung bare under the broken sun Noeo, mounted on crucifixes of specially carved metal. The desert, nameless, now houses their whistling bones and whispers without origin. When the comet Cagastri flies high and the Sickle Moon is tainted red by a fell source, phantasms of the slain can be seen wandering from post to post. A million swaying skeletons left for time and wind to slowly batter down to nothingness. Maybe something can still be gleaned from their remains.
POPULATION
Native Species: N/A
Immigrated Species: N/A/ [Formerly: Human/Near Human]
Population: N/A/ [Formerly: Moderately Populated]
Demographics: N/A/ [Formerly: D’is controversially prided itself on maintaining on a mostly human population, stemming from remnants of the Pius Dea movement some many thousand years prior. Near-humans made up a visible minority, tolerated for their resemblance to baseline humanoids though forced to suffer a local concoction of xenophobia. Wholly alien members of society were a hard rarity. Most were underground, figuratively and truly. It was argued that the tomb ship’s contingents of slave technicians and warriors were first settlers in their way, but their involvement in D’is history, to a point, was deemed negligible.]
Primary Languages: N/A/ [Formerly: Primarily Galactic Standard Basic. Later, a guttural mash of Basic and Sith, eloquence ranging between those more learned from the College, the Church, and the Murky House to common citizenry with corrupted memory.]
Culture: N/A [Formerly: Hollowend showcased a mixture of industrial fixation and a marked devotion to state and theocracy. Older accounts describe a suspicious people, hidebound by old attitudes and customs. As much as the tombs discovered beneath the Eternitarian, D’yssians were relics, subscribed to elder rituals and theocratic observances from when their ancestors raised hell from on high at Coruscant. The introduction of arcane and alchemic knowledge into the general populace through the Indigo Church converted much of the population over to increasing isolationism. Outsiders were omens, curses, spies. Celebration became markedly less common. When the Harrowing came, ‘culture’ was just a veneer; what was left were a people suffused with blood frenzy and murderous paranoia. Overwhelmed by a cosmic need for an unknowable ‘more’.]
GOVERNMENT & ECONOMY
Government: N/A [Formerly: Aristocracy/Parliamentary Republic Elements]
Affiliation: N/A [Formerly: Economic ties between Wild Space unions, Unknown Region groups, and Republic trade.]
Wealth: N/A [Formerly: Records surviving the harrowing indicate a host of salary income and an emphasis on industrial fabrication and general labour. Wealth seemed to ballast in the upper echelons, retained by noble houses and the nouveau riche, sieving into lower classes by way of public and private projects. The Indigo Church siphoned a great deal of coin for its own schemes, bled out of its faithful through promises and weak, piddling ‘truths’ to ‘insight’. A great deal of assets and fortune appear to be currently unaccounted for or outright destroyed.]
Stability: Low : Travel at own risk and preparation. Smuggler crews returning from Arn-Prague relate stories of taken casualties involving crazed dregs hunting fire-devoured ruins or stalking in dark, unhallowed places; the remnants of Hollowend’s population. Worse yet are unconfirmed encounters with alchemical monsters in seedier locales. [Formerly: Medium : D’is attracted it’s own brand of controlled chaos. Between the noble houses, monied businesses, militia powers, and criminal elements, power fluctuations were yearly if not daily. What held the populace together was a practised ‘stiff upper lip’ and a refusal to let day to day occurrences disrupt the general societal flow. Outliers working to change working conditions or bring accountability to the aristocracy were oft imperilled. With the advent of arcane understanding in the upper echelons of influence, worldly stableness began shifting. Sunset marked periods of unpredictable bloodletting. As the influence of the dead Sith Lords seeped up from the Eternitarian College, planetary function waned as a focus, as vying powers looked inward to shore up their power and understanding of the Forces’ cosmological and altering aspects.]
Freedom & Oppression: N/A [Formerly: Oppressive : Even die-hard patriots admitted D’is wasn’t wholly kind to her children. Between the grind and dangers of industrial work, expectations of the higher stratospheres and their own machinations, rife urban crime, and a callous zeitgeist, D’is bread a hardy population well inured against examples of casual violence. Poverty could strike with only momentary warning. If one ran afoul of the well-blooded, a house assassin could come in the dark of night. Operators looking to lessen the influence and power of the Murky House were enemies of the state in all but name. Reward was often granted to those with the right mixture of cunning, blood lust, and an eye for opportunity. Such factors only worsened in time, when the College made its buried discoveries.]
MILITARY & TECHNOLOGY
Military: N/A [Formerly: Martial power was divided between militia and mercenary outfits, extending to ground and spacial forces. In times of crisis, an expectation was held that solidarity would unify disparate units into a hopefully cohesive defence force. A theory that never saw practical exercise. Refusals between noble houses sunk repeated efforts to build D’is her own standing PDF, ensuring a world wide focus on internecine conflicts versus real possibilities of outside imperialist incursions. Combat potency was likewise in fluctuation, differing between militias and the resources their patrons could muster for development. As the influence of the arcane spread and became more and more prevalent, conventional firepower became supplanted by desires to wield esoteric might. Eventually, orbital and earth-bound organization fell into disrepair.]
Technology: N/A : A few straggling devices and some strictly mechanical contraptions may be repairable. [Formerly: Hollowend never showcased much aptitude for higher end haptic UI’s or the latest in Core World technology trends. D’yssians held a preference for olde worlde mechanisms, despite their industrial sector providing parts and machines for export to the Outer Rim. There was an almost universal dependency on traditional fuels where spaceflight was not concerned. Relying on mixtures of gasoline, diesel and diesel-electric systems, kerosene, and some potent homebrew distilleries manufacturing what could best be described as ‘hobo rocket fuel’. Only a few militia units and select individuals possessed blaster-tech firearms or even vibro-blade implements. Firearms seemed particularly developed for blackpowder cartridges, with an emphasis on close melee exchanges with hand-to-hand edged weaponry. A predilection that made the later decades hellish as fighting in the streets devolved to bestial scenes of combatants hacking one another to shreds with enlarged cleavers and improvised armaments.]
HISTORICAL INFORMATION
Days of Exodus
Throughout the days of Pius Dea, the Faithful were carried by a cemented and well insulated belief that theirs was the righteous method of governance. With their regime fragmented and Contispex XIX imprisoned to face crimes against sentience, Faithful interpreted their suffering as holy tribulation, an exodus of trial designed by the spirits to weed out the weak and unworthy.
Crowded habitat vessels and cryo-stasis mass haulers fled down the Corellian Run, harried by grievous reprisal fleets seeking vengeance after a thousand years of ceaseless crusading. The migrant Pius diaspora eventually reached the end of the Run and happened upon the little known Cradle Reefs. Sheltered by a quiet and warm sun, the Faithful made landing on D’is. A colony was soon established, aiming to become a shelter for their now outlawed political theocracy. Ground was broken over what would one day become Arn-Prague.
Echoes of the Dead
In time, D’is’ people recovered from their fugue of exile. Industry was encouraged, schooling committed to ensuring successive generations never went without learning proper history, a burgeoning middle-class that soon came to define the planetary demographic. The outside galaxy became the ‘Other’: hostile, ignorant of their ways, dangerous for their kind. An ironic reversal of trends, when Pius Dea and the Contispex dynasties harangued alien species for traits now shared by D’yssians in general. It wasn’t long before divisional lines were drawn between surviving noble families, the houses now vying again for power. Normalcy soon became the new comfort. The great smokestacks of the industrial parks became a common sight alongside mansion and city-castle spires. D’is became less of a transient destination and more and more recognizable as home.
Before the rise of the Murky House or the advent of the Indigo Church, first came the Eternitarian College. Their curriculum orbited topics dealing with all manner of cosmology and theoretical physics, trying to ascertain unseen lode threads connecting between universal reality and the powers of the mind. It was quick to attract a dedicated student body, focusing on possibilities of human evolution and the advancement/enhancement of their mental capabilities. Those with confirmed Force sensitivity were especially singled out for higher studies.
Fatefully, routine maintenance of the basement boiler rooms unearthed an unremarked tunnel system. Faculty and learners alike braved the dark to delve into the unknown labyrinth running the deeps down below their beloved college. What they encountered, discovered, and gleaned from long years in the dark grew in import. In time, one group of adventurers delved as low as they dared... and uncovered evidence of a prior civilization upon D’is. The funereal mausoleum ships of a once vaunted, feared race.
Attempts at keeping this discovery hushed failed over time. The Murky House became aware even as schisms began showing within the College. Disagreements rose over the application of their usurped knowledge. They had dipped their hands into lost arts, methods of physical empowerment and routes to open their minds even further to cosmic truth. Some were eager to pursue the noetic aspects, others obsessive over the potential afforded through this explosive alchemy. Few journals were willing to own up to who they had stolen their newfound prowess. From a handful of glyphs, a word was derived: Sith.
Soon, the secrets of the College escaped them, finding their way into the Murky House and the Indigo Church. The first mere taste of alchemic potential sent echelons of power into a frenzy. Students and faculty alike were tempted with recruitment, many accepting, others forced into service. The College eventually closed for reasons unknown or simply forgotten. Some surviving accounts mention terrible happenings, as their pursuits into the arcane dragged the Eternitarians down into horror and imprisonment.
Cruor Vult
The alchemical arms race had a leeching effect over the general populace. The influence of ‘Dark’ soon instilled heightened anxieties and gloom, casting a widening pall of gloom. The Indigo Church took advantage of widespread uncertainty and instability, attracting converts over to their brand of strange worship. A measure of power was entrusted with lower classes: a few lesser secrets of the blood magic distilled from the recovered Sith manuals beneath the Eternitarian. In turn, basic alchemy became widespread, commonly practised. The higher arts and secreted truths were of course reserved for the powerful and wealthy. But their proximity to the Dark Side, their arrogance and hubris, made them violently susceptible to physical corruption.
Meanwhile, the Murky House boiled with shadow wars. Empowered assassin arms duelled between rival families, reins of authority sometimes exchanging daily. For the rest of D’is, the compiled spires seemed little different. Noble elite imbibed further and deeper into the arcane abilities introduced to them through the College, some even managing total physical transformation and ascension. Such monstrosities were condemned to death, though some survived to haunt their brethren in the shadows of Roblet’s Catacombs. In that way, the Murky House and the Indigo Church shared the same brand of suffering. Their greatest and brightest scions and champions falling to the very power that invested them so much might. In time, the suffusion of alchemy into virtually every layer of power and commonality showed its toll.
Arn-Prague and cities like it were changing. Mutual phobia, infatuation, obsession, fear and envy, poisoned mind and soul. The Indigo Church waned in influence, flocks turning instead to imbibing in fleshly excesses, emboldened by their taste of the forbidden. Transforming, D’yssians began falling prey to one another, to hunting authorities from the Church, and sanctioned executioners employed the by the Murky House. Even the far away Ring of Ys fell prey to the corruption travelling up the gravity well. And every so oft, a fantastic house of sealed glass and nuclear powered engines fell from the sky, burning hotter than the sun.
There’s no telling for how long pandemonium reigned. Public records disappear or were failed to be kept entirely. Surviving first-hand accounts are contradictory and inconclusive, painting images of chaos lasting from weeks to centuries. As the fell hand of the Gulag Plague loomed and D’is drowned under scorched blood, a furtive signal rose out of the Murky House. A culling was summoned. Payment to any souls willing to brave the nightmare of street to street horror and delve through the darkening halls of D’is.
The Harrowing
A scarce source places a handful of shuttle craft arriving within the Cradle Reefs days prior to the coreward rims going dark under the spreading Plague. One account, the witness of a hermit living at the edge of a harsh, nameless desert, described foreboding outlines descending out of the sky, breaking clouds that had long since turned to the colour of char and gore. Hunters, bound in strange gear and wielding bright armaments, advanced across the realm that had, by then, long since been called ‘Hollowend.’
The Harrowing began in Arn-Prague, spreading from city to town to village. Surviving graffiti denounced them as savage swordsmen and blade-wielding murderers. Anything exhibiting deviancy, monster and kine, were put to death upon discovery and left to be devoured by fire. It’s supposed the only reason Arn-Prague wasn’t absolutely torched to the ground was they’d finally run out of fuel for their ritual bonfires. Over the veil of the long Gulag Plague, Hollowend met its end at the point and edge of silver swords and cat-eyed hellfighters. Four centuries of endless night, filled with their own lost stories and dramas. That none of these killers were reported to have ever returned from Hollowend is telling of the lethality they faced in the monsters roaming the streets. And the far worse things waiting beyond the Indigo Chuch’s cloisters, and the secret throne rooms caging bestial monarchs high in the Murky House.
At the conclusion of the plague, Hollowend was discovered barren. Orbital scans painted it as virtually bereft of habitation, allowing for only scrappy pests and a robust population of rats. Arn-Prague smoked. Noeo, the sun, ready to burst and heaving with swollen energies, cataracts of dark clastic detritus milking out its light. The Sickle Moon a bright eye of omen over the planetary astronomical dusk. Far off, hovering at the edge of the Blood Channel system haze, comet Cagastri blinked like a ruby clot.
Now, Hollowend is left for time to consume. And the few brave and curious to set foot in its scoured, empty cities. Where the stench of blood is still rife and alleyway mouths harken whispered adages and haunting limericks. A world caked over with death by a long night of slaughter...
