Rusty
Purveyor of Fine Weaponry
Images: N/A
Name: Sprocket
Region: Wild Space
System: NR-302-54-1
Suns: Single Star System, Sun Unnamed, Yellow star apprx 1.2 times the mass of Sol
Orbital Position: 1.7 AU from star, 4th planet in sequence
Moons: Evidence suggests Sprocket had a moon once, but it was destroyed by excessively violent asteroid impacts as a result of Sprocket's proximity to the system's asteroid belt
System Features: The NR-302-54-1 system features an unusually high concentration of heavy elements. The large, unusually dense asteroid belt that starts a mere 2,500,000 kilometers away from Sprocket's orbit, for instance, is rich in fissionable materials such as uranium. Early surveys of the system even encountered a few asteroids with small concentrations of naturally occurring plutonium, leading scientists to speculate on the existence of natural breeder reactors forming in the belt. The three innermost planets are so radioactive that life is nearly impossible even on a microscopic level, and the few expeditions that have tried to land were short lived in every sense of the phrase.
The outer system contains a single brown dwarf, a gas giant that could have potentially formed a star if it had only been a little more massive. It has over 100 known rocky moons, and at a distance of 4.5 AU, is easily the brightest source of light in Sprocket's night sky.
Coordinates: 14 25 on the right side of the hex
Rotational Period: 37 hours
Orbital Period: 402 Days
Class: Terrestrial
Diameter: 16,583 km
Atmosphere: Type 1 above 5,000 meters elevation, type 2 at sea level and below. In between is a sort of buffer zone where, the lower you go, the more dense and difficult to breathe it becomes. In the deepest canyons, type 3.
Climate: Controlled. Despite the distance from the sun, careful release of greenhouse gasses have allowed most of the planet to achieve something close to temperate.
Gravity: 1.8 times standard
Primary Terrain: Polar regions are icy and inhospitable. A single supercontinent stretches around the equator, consists mainly of rocky plains bordered by massive mountains and canyons as a result of intense tectonic activity. Between the continent and the poles is a large sea, dotted by islands in the form of mountain ranges that jut up from the sea floor at plate boundaries.
Native Species: No significant native life
Immigrated Species: Humans, Mechanicals
Primary Languages: Gear, a corrupted form of droid binary with Basic loan words, and Primitive, a barely recognizable form of Basic spoken by the human population
Government: Theocracy
Population: Apprx 500,000,000 Mechanicals, maybe 200,000 humans
Demonym:
Mechanicals- The sentient machines that rule Sprocket
Primitives- The human slave population
Major Imports: N/A
Major Exports: N/A
Affiliation: High Priests of the People of the Sprocket
Major Locations:
Mechanical generations last 100 years. The first 50 years of any new generation is evaluating the effectiveness of it in relation to the last. The next 50 years is devoted to planning the next, based on lessons learned. Designing the next generation is considered one of the holiest tasks, and only occurs in the very center of Nacelle.
Every 300 years, a mechanical is "reborn" in the body of the newest generation, and every rebirth is considered a positive upgrade away from their human creators. New generations consist of no more than 50% preexisting upgrades, allowing for a 50% population growth every hundred years. New Mechanicals work almost exclusively in Nacelle, away from the corrupting influence of the Primitives. In the last 100 years of an individual's upgrade cycle, they are usually sent to Manifold, as their minds and souls should be well proofed against corruption by this point.
The High Priests of the People of the Sprocket are specially made beings, designed from start to finish to be as holy as possible. A High Priest may only exist for 100 years before being permanently deactivated, in order to ensure that they don't have a chance to become corrupted. Their existence is sacrifice, and as such are venerated by the everyday Mechanical. They alone among their people experience mortality, since, barring catastrophic accident, there is no upper limit to a Mechanical's lifespan.
The human population, the Primitives, exist in squalid filth. Their lives are short and miserable, rarely longer than 30 years. Their mere existence is seen as an abomination, albeit a necessary ones. Though they represent a drain on the Mechanical economy that is not cost effective or efficient, they're kept largely as a reminder of the wretched beings that built the first Mechanicals. They're given tasks that no sane Mechanical would want, such as mining and refining metals from the earth. For a Mechanical, interacting with nature in any way is considered to be unclean. And thus Primitives do it for them.
The Primitives are barely human by this point. Thousands of years of selective breeding in the high gravity and harsh conditions have left them little more than musclebound brutes. The idea of rebelling would never occur to a Primitive; the concept does not even exist for them. They're fed vat-grown slime molds that are nutritionally sufficient to keep them alive and working, though they'd be nearly indigestible to a modern human. They've little in the way of culture or society, aside from vague notions of the sins of their forefathers and the superiority of the Mechanicals. They work until fatigue would impair their efficiency, and then they sleep. They are allotted one day out of every 100 for the closest thing they have to a holiday, where they're fed marginally better food laced with aphrodisiacs and left alone for the purpose of breeding.
Occasionally, a Primitive with above-average intelligence will emerge. The Mechanicals separate the smart ones at a young age and train them as something between a priest and an overseer for the others. The Elevated, as they're called, lead relatively soft lives in comparison to their brethren. The Primitive communities treat them as holy people, and they administer rites for the dead and for the newly born. Recently, Elevated have been used to communicate with the rare visiting starship.
Technology: The vast majority of Mechanical technology is the derivative of the original tech base brought in by the colonists circa 3,374 BBY. They're the evolutionary descendants of the droids brought by the original colonists. They've long since progressed from the mere AI of droid tech at the time to living beings in their own right, albeit ones constructed from machinery than carbon based chemistry.
Though the Mechanicals have explored their star system, they've shown no interest in exploiting its resources or interstellar travel. They know it exists, but believe the outside galaxy to be irredeemably contaminated. They've little in the way of weaponry, since Mechanicals by nature are not violent towards one another, and the Primitives have been docile for thousands of years.
They've almost entirely gotten rid of bipedal forms, aside from a few specialized forms used for tasks in which their normal wheeled forms are too impractical. The average Mechanical resembles a sentient groundcar. High Priests are the only of their kind to use repulsor technology in their bodies, though repulsorlift powered transports are common enough.
History: The original colonists landed on the planet that would become known as Sprocket in 3,374 BBY. They were religious fanatics who believed that technology was corrupting their youth, and that the Jedi and Sith, or any practitioners of the Force, for that matter, were harbingers of some sort of unspeakable evil. They were also intensely xenophobic. The exact details of their religion were lost to time, but they believed their only choice was to find safety in isolation.
Unfortunately for them, their new sanctuary planet contained extremely high concentrations of both toxic heavy metals and radioactive elements. For reasons that no one was ever able to satisfactorily explain, scans of the planet failed to divulge that fact. They dismantled their spacecraft not long after landing, only to discover that the very ground upon which they walked was toxic.
They quickly created shielded "safe areas" and set about trying to salvage what little they could from the ships in order to survive. Among their number was a brilliant droid designed who, after an encounter with a rogue battle droid, converted to their religion and swore never to build another droid. However, he forswore his oaths in order to save his friends and family, and constructed a generation of droids designed to safely perform all the work outside of their safe areas that was needed to survive.
In keeping with his beliefs, he programmed the droids to believe themselves to be unholy beings, unworthy of existence and only granted it out of the most dire of necessity. The earliest generation of what would eventually evolve into Mechanicals were wretched beings possessed of near suicidal self loathing, fanatically loyal to their human creators. They were self-replicating, a necessity given that factories manned by the human colonists were simply not an option.
For nearly a century, the safe areas slowly increased as the droids cleansed the land of the toxic substances. The humans of course barely treated with the droids, interacting as little as possible. In isolation, their original source code became corrupted. They no longer saw themselves as unspeakably foul, or their human creators as divine.
One day, they all walked away from the safe areas. They were not seen again for nearly a decade.
The humans did the best they could to survive without their droids, but their best was not enough. Thousands starved or succumbed to disease. In desperation, the creator's grandson, something of a rebel, suited up and embarked on a journey to find their wayward creations.
The droids were waiting. The grandson was made an offer. The droids would resume their roles as caretakers of the humans, but not as inferior beings. The humans would be allowed to exist at their mercy, and any signs of dissent would not be tolerated. They would be treated as little more than slave labor, just as the droids had been before. Realizing that there was no choice, the grandson consented.
He returned to his people, and when the elders complained, he shot them with a smuggled blaster pistol that his grandfather had brought in violation of the original charter. Realizing that their choices were a slow, agonizing death or servitude, the majority of the colony chose servitude. Those that resisted were quickly eliminated.
Centuries passed. The droids, now calling themselves Mechanicals, had established an early version of the religion that would come to dominate their society and the humans, whom they had taken to calling Primitives, lived much as they had before, but as servants of the Mechanicals. They performed upgrades and other tasks that the Mechanicals were poorly suited to.
A single human female decided that it was high time they rectified the injustices heaped upon the humans, and organized a rebellion. The details have been lost, but it's thought that the humans managed to penetrate as far as the Mechanical city, which would eventually be known as Manifold. The Mechanicals eventually pushed them back and, at the threat of ultimate destruction, the leader eventually surrendered. She was publicly lobotomized and left in permanent, agonizing pain. The Mechanicals left her to starve, hanging by her wrists from a gantry in the human settlement, screaming in agony until her vocal chords tore and rendered her mute. This was the last rebellion.
For thousands of years, Mechanical civilization evolved in near perfect isolation. A few probe droids scouted out the system, but lacking anything like military utility, they were left alone by pretty much all major galactic powers. The Empire briefly considered an expedition for resources, but the growing Rebellion caused them to cancel those plans, on the grounds that they simply didn't have the resources to waste on such a far flung system, no matter how rich in fissionable materials it might be. The Yuuzhan Vong never made it that far, or else the results might have been interesting, in a cataclysmic sort of way.
During the events of the Netherworld, roughly half the human population vanished mysteriously overnight. The Mechanicals had no idea why it happened, as there were no signs of a breakout. The survivors were certainly clueless; despite an extensive investigation and multiple interrogations, not a single smidgen of information was uncovered. The only signs of wrongdoing were several illegal stills, which the Mechanicals had more or less turned a blind eye to for centuries. Alcohol kept the Primitives pacified, gave them an outlet for any rebellious sentiment. The stills were busted up on occasion if it looked like the Primitives were getting too rambunctious, but otherwise, they were left to their own devices. There were no signs that the stills were related to the disappearances, nor could any signs of an organized resistance be found. With only half of the remaining population left to do the same amount of work, the stills were left intact. They'd need their alcohol more than ever now. Curiously, none of them ever seemed to make their way back from the Netherworld.
It was only recently, in the wake of the current outbreak of wars as a result of the rise of the One Sith, that the system was rediscovered. The Mechanicals have politely discouraged interest as best they could, but they know it's only a matter of time before someone doesn't take no for an answer. An envoy on behalf of the Shard Network has recently made contact. The Mechanicals were somewhat more willing to parlay with other artificial lifeforms than organics, but exactly how that will go remains to be seen.
Notable PCs: None, yet.
Intent: So I was watching Blaze and the Monster Machines with my kids this morning, and I started thinking about what it would take to create a society ruled entirely by mechanical beings. Like all theworst best ideas, that snowballed until I got to the basics of Sprocket. I've more or less been making the rest up as I went along.
Anyway, the reason I'm submitting this planet is because there isn't, to the best of my knowledge, a planet like this. And since I'm trying to get the Shard Network up and running, I thought it might be fun to have a race of crystalline lifeforms that inhabit droids meet a race of droids that use humans as slaves. The moral implications for a group as persecuted as the Shards are staggering, and should provide for some top notch story. The leadership of the Shard Network abhors slavery, but they're not overly fond of organics, either. How will they react when they find out? Only one way to find out.
Name: Sprocket
Region: Wild Space
System: NR-302-54-1
Suns: Single Star System, Sun Unnamed, Yellow star apprx 1.2 times the mass of Sol
Orbital Position: 1.7 AU from star, 4th planet in sequence
Moons: Evidence suggests Sprocket had a moon once, but it was destroyed by excessively violent asteroid impacts as a result of Sprocket's proximity to the system's asteroid belt
System Features: The NR-302-54-1 system features an unusually high concentration of heavy elements. The large, unusually dense asteroid belt that starts a mere 2,500,000 kilometers away from Sprocket's orbit, for instance, is rich in fissionable materials such as uranium. Early surveys of the system even encountered a few asteroids with small concentrations of naturally occurring plutonium, leading scientists to speculate on the existence of natural breeder reactors forming in the belt. The three innermost planets are so radioactive that life is nearly impossible even on a microscopic level, and the few expeditions that have tried to land were short lived in every sense of the phrase.
The outer system contains a single brown dwarf, a gas giant that could have potentially formed a star if it had only been a little more massive. It has over 100 known rocky moons, and at a distance of 4.5 AU, is easily the brightest source of light in Sprocket's night sky.
Coordinates: 14 25 on the right side of the hex
Rotational Period: 37 hours
Orbital Period: 402 Days
Class: Terrestrial
Diameter: 16,583 km
Atmosphere: Type 1 above 5,000 meters elevation, type 2 at sea level and below. In between is a sort of buffer zone where, the lower you go, the more dense and difficult to breathe it becomes. In the deepest canyons, type 3.
Climate: Controlled. Despite the distance from the sun, careful release of greenhouse gasses have allowed most of the planet to achieve something close to temperate.
Gravity: 1.8 times standard
Primary Terrain: Polar regions are icy and inhospitable. A single supercontinent stretches around the equator, consists mainly of rocky plains bordered by massive mountains and canyons as a result of intense tectonic activity. Between the continent and the poles is a large sea, dotted by islands in the form of mountain ranges that jut up from the sea floor at plate boundaries.
Native Species: No significant native life
Immigrated Species: Humans, Mechanicals
Primary Languages: Gear, a corrupted form of droid binary with Basic loan words, and Primitive, a barely recognizable form of Basic spoken by the human population
Government: Theocracy
Population: Apprx 500,000,000 Mechanicals, maybe 200,000 humans
Demonym:
Mechanicals- The sentient machines that rule Sprocket
Primitives- The human slave population
Major Imports: N/A
Major Exports: N/A
Affiliation: High Priests of the People of the Sprocket
Major Locations:
- Nacelle, the capitol city, is a large, sprawling city on the largest of the plains. It is both the seat of power and the center of industry, and for Mechanicals, it's considered a holy place. The city center, considered the center of Mechanical culture, was purposefully lowered to 200 meters below sea level, making it nearly impossible for Primitives to exist without the use of breath masks, which are banned. It's considered the purest part of the whole planet.
- Manifold is the second largest city, and is devoted almost entirely to industries that Mechanicals consider unclean. This is where the majority of the human population lives and works. Manifold sits on a high plateau, geographically opposite from Nacelle. Mechanicals who live here are considered tainted by their proximity to the Primitives, but it is recognized that Mechanical society could not function without them. Entire tenets of their religion are devoted to the Mechanicals living in Manifold, designed to protect them from organic influence.
Mechanical generations last 100 years. The first 50 years of any new generation is evaluating the effectiveness of it in relation to the last. The next 50 years is devoted to planning the next, based on lessons learned. Designing the next generation is considered one of the holiest tasks, and only occurs in the very center of Nacelle.
Every 300 years, a mechanical is "reborn" in the body of the newest generation, and every rebirth is considered a positive upgrade away from their human creators. New generations consist of no more than 50% preexisting upgrades, allowing for a 50% population growth every hundred years. New Mechanicals work almost exclusively in Nacelle, away from the corrupting influence of the Primitives. In the last 100 years of an individual's upgrade cycle, they are usually sent to Manifold, as their minds and souls should be well proofed against corruption by this point.
The High Priests of the People of the Sprocket are specially made beings, designed from start to finish to be as holy as possible. A High Priest may only exist for 100 years before being permanently deactivated, in order to ensure that they don't have a chance to become corrupted. Their existence is sacrifice, and as such are venerated by the everyday Mechanical. They alone among their people experience mortality, since, barring catastrophic accident, there is no upper limit to a Mechanical's lifespan.
The human population, the Primitives, exist in squalid filth. Their lives are short and miserable, rarely longer than 30 years. Their mere existence is seen as an abomination, albeit a necessary ones. Though they represent a drain on the Mechanical economy that is not cost effective or efficient, they're kept largely as a reminder of the wretched beings that built the first Mechanicals. They're given tasks that no sane Mechanical would want, such as mining and refining metals from the earth. For a Mechanical, interacting with nature in any way is considered to be unclean. And thus Primitives do it for them.
The Primitives are barely human by this point. Thousands of years of selective breeding in the high gravity and harsh conditions have left them little more than musclebound brutes. The idea of rebelling would never occur to a Primitive; the concept does not even exist for them. They're fed vat-grown slime molds that are nutritionally sufficient to keep them alive and working, though they'd be nearly indigestible to a modern human. They've little in the way of culture or society, aside from vague notions of the sins of their forefathers and the superiority of the Mechanicals. They work until fatigue would impair their efficiency, and then they sleep. They are allotted one day out of every 100 for the closest thing they have to a holiday, where they're fed marginally better food laced with aphrodisiacs and left alone for the purpose of breeding.
Occasionally, a Primitive with above-average intelligence will emerge. The Mechanicals separate the smart ones at a young age and train them as something between a priest and an overseer for the others. The Elevated, as they're called, lead relatively soft lives in comparison to their brethren. The Primitive communities treat them as holy people, and they administer rites for the dead and for the newly born. Recently, Elevated have been used to communicate with the rare visiting starship.
Technology: The vast majority of Mechanical technology is the derivative of the original tech base brought in by the colonists circa 3,374 BBY. They're the evolutionary descendants of the droids brought by the original colonists. They've long since progressed from the mere AI of droid tech at the time to living beings in their own right, albeit ones constructed from machinery than carbon based chemistry.
Though the Mechanicals have explored their star system, they've shown no interest in exploiting its resources or interstellar travel. They know it exists, but believe the outside galaxy to be irredeemably contaminated. They've little in the way of weaponry, since Mechanicals by nature are not violent towards one another, and the Primitives have been docile for thousands of years.
They've almost entirely gotten rid of bipedal forms, aside from a few specialized forms used for tasks in which their normal wheeled forms are too impractical. The average Mechanical resembles a sentient groundcar. High Priests are the only of their kind to use repulsor technology in their bodies, though repulsorlift powered transports are common enough.
History: The original colonists landed on the planet that would become known as Sprocket in 3,374 BBY. They were religious fanatics who believed that technology was corrupting their youth, and that the Jedi and Sith, or any practitioners of the Force, for that matter, were harbingers of some sort of unspeakable evil. They were also intensely xenophobic. The exact details of their religion were lost to time, but they believed their only choice was to find safety in isolation.
Unfortunately for them, their new sanctuary planet contained extremely high concentrations of both toxic heavy metals and radioactive elements. For reasons that no one was ever able to satisfactorily explain, scans of the planet failed to divulge that fact. They dismantled their spacecraft not long after landing, only to discover that the very ground upon which they walked was toxic.
They quickly created shielded "safe areas" and set about trying to salvage what little they could from the ships in order to survive. Among their number was a brilliant droid designed who, after an encounter with a rogue battle droid, converted to their religion and swore never to build another droid. However, he forswore his oaths in order to save his friends and family, and constructed a generation of droids designed to safely perform all the work outside of their safe areas that was needed to survive.
In keeping with his beliefs, he programmed the droids to believe themselves to be unholy beings, unworthy of existence and only granted it out of the most dire of necessity. The earliest generation of what would eventually evolve into Mechanicals were wretched beings possessed of near suicidal self loathing, fanatically loyal to their human creators. They were self-replicating, a necessity given that factories manned by the human colonists were simply not an option.
For nearly a century, the safe areas slowly increased as the droids cleansed the land of the toxic substances. The humans of course barely treated with the droids, interacting as little as possible. In isolation, their original source code became corrupted. They no longer saw themselves as unspeakably foul, or their human creators as divine.
One day, they all walked away from the safe areas. They were not seen again for nearly a decade.
The humans did the best they could to survive without their droids, but their best was not enough. Thousands starved or succumbed to disease. In desperation, the creator's grandson, something of a rebel, suited up and embarked on a journey to find their wayward creations.
The droids were waiting. The grandson was made an offer. The droids would resume their roles as caretakers of the humans, but not as inferior beings. The humans would be allowed to exist at their mercy, and any signs of dissent would not be tolerated. They would be treated as little more than slave labor, just as the droids had been before. Realizing that there was no choice, the grandson consented.
He returned to his people, and when the elders complained, he shot them with a smuggled blaster pistol that his grandfather had brought in violation of the original charter. Realizing that their choices were a slow, agonizing death or servitude, the majority of the colony chose servitude. Those that resisted were quickly eliminated.
Centuries passed. The droids, now calling themselves Mechanicals, had established an early version of the religion that would come to dominate their society and the humans, whom they had taken to calling Primitives, lived much as they had before, but as servants of the Mechanicals. They performed upgrades and other tasks that the Mechanicals were poorly suited to.
A single human female decided that it was high time they rectified the injustices heaped upon the humans, and organized a rebellion. The details have been lost, but it's thought that the humans managed to penetrate as far as the Mechanical city, which would eventually be known as Manifold. The Mechanicals eventually pushed them back and, at the threat of ultimate destruction, the leader eventually surrendered. She was publicly lobotomized and left in permanent, agonizing pain. The Mechanicals left her to starve, hanging by her wrists from a gantry in the human settlement, screaming in agony until her vocal chords tore and rendered her mute. This was the last rebellion.
For thousands of years, Mechanical civilization evolved in near perfect isolation. A few probe droids scouted out the system, but lacking anything like military utility, they were left alone by pretty much all major galactic powers. The Empire briefly considered an expedition for resources, but the growing Rebellion caused them to cancel those plans, on the grounds that they simply didn't have the resources to waste on such a far flung system, no matter how rich in fissionable materials it might be. The Yuuzhan Vong never made it that far, or else the results might have been interesting, in a cataclysmic sort of way.
During the events of the Netherworld, roughly half the human population vanished mysteriously overnight. The Mechanicals had no idea why it happened, as there were no signs of a breakout. The survivors were certainly clueless; despite an extensive investigation and multiple interrogations, not a single smidgen of information was uncovered. The only signs of wrongdoing were several illegal stills, which the Mechanicals had more or less turned a blind eye to for centuries. Alcohol kept the Primitives pacified, gave them an outlet for any rebellious sentiment. The stills were busted up on occasion if it looked like the Primitives were getting too rambunctious, but otherwise, they were left to their own devices. There were no signs that the stills were related to the disappearances, nor could any signs of an organized resistance be found. With only half of the remaining population left to do the same amount of work, the stills were left intact. They'd need their alcohol more than ever now. Curiously, none of them ever seemed to make their way back from the Netherworld.
It was only recently, in the wake of the current outbreak of wars as a result of the rise of the One Sith, that the system was rediscovered. The Mechanicals have politely discouraged interest as best they could, but they know it's only a matter of time before someone doesn't take no for an answer. An envoy on behalf of the Shard Network has recently made contact. The Mechanicals were somewhat more willing to parlay with other artificial lifeforms than organics, but exactly how that will go remains to be seen.
Notable PCs: None, yet.
Intent: So I was watching Blaze and the Monster Machines with my kids this morning, and I started thinking about what it would take to create a society ruled entirely by mechanical beings. Like all the
Anyway, the reason I'm submitting this planet is because there isn't, to the best of my knowledge, a planet like this. And since I'm trying to get the Shard Network up and running, I thought it might be fun to have a race of crystalline lifeforms that inhabit droids meet a race of droids that use humans as slaves. The moral implications for a group as persecuted as the Shards are staggering, and should provide for some top notch story. The leadership of the Shard Network abhors slavery, but they're not overly fond of organics, either. How will they react when they find out? Only one way to find out.
