Thursday, April 28, 2011

Omox, The Gold Planet

Omox is a strange planet, its geography dominated by great black and amber metallic plains and mountain ranges, scattered with both vast fields and isolated monoliths of living crystal. Its atmosphere is fine and clear in the highlands, but pools in yellowish, murky mists in the lowlands, and here is mildly toxic to creatures from most other worlds, though its residents have mostly adapted. Its ecology would be bizarre by earth standards, and largely revolves around the magical vibrations emitted by the planet's crystals. The human residents food supply is mainly artificially grown, though they do consume some native life forms as delicacies.

More than anything else the Gold Planet is known for the strange and fantastic powers to be found there. The world is often the best place to aquire strange magical and technological wonders, whether wrested from its ruins or devised in its laboratories, and many wizards and sorcerers journey here to study the strange magical effects of the world's crystal resonances. It is also famous for its colleges of wizardry; the world's particular specialities are divination, enchantment, and transmutation, but only illusionists and necromancers are more commonly trained elsewhere.

The grand city of Spire, Omox's only major settlement and the only Veklo settlement of any kind, is dominated by a caste system, with the Veklo nobility at the top, civilized Akkadi warriors just beneath them, the common mass of Veklo making up the majority of craftsmen and traders on the third rung, and the Satra at the bottom as common laborers. A significant portion of the planet's Akkadi live in settlements of their own, despising the weak city-dwellers who have let themselves become the Veklo's puppets, as do bat folk and ruby golems. Most gnomes live in Spire or another human settlement, but outside the social organization of men.

Very few members of foreign human races call Spire home. They exist entirely outside of the caste system, and are therefore only officially tolerated as ambassadors and traders; a small permanent mixed population of Meo, Mekheni, and Hrungir does the work that the Veklo consider too unclean even for the Satra.

The Akkadi are significantly less xenophobic, and for this reason the vast majority of the planet's non-gnome demihumans make their homes in Akkadi citadels and tent-cities. However, foreigners of any kind are not significantly more common among the Akkadi than with the Veklo; the Akkadi cleave tightly to their interpretation of their gods, so only those individuals who find Akkadi religion appealing last long among them. Curiously, the relatively atheistic elves are among the most successful at living among the Akkadi; those who embrace the Akkadi warrior culture find it easy to attend to the appropriate rituals, even if they have little use for the gods they are nominally devoted to.

The Veklo primarily worship Vortoth, as a deity of medicine, music, and writing, (Healing, Knowledge, Magic, Rune), Koth Anos, as a judge of both the dead and the living (Destruction, Death, Law), Kushrieth, as a mistress of fertility and agriculture (Animal, Plant, Community), Andor, as both a maintainer of machines and a minor trickster figure (Artifice, Charm, Protection), and Rashwidir, as their primary war goddess (Glory, Nobility, War). The Grand Temples of Spire train many clerics of these five deities, as well as some dedicated to their own Omox (Knowledge, Magic, Law, Sun), although the Lord of Narrow Lines plays only a very minor role in their own religion.

Omox is a much more central figure in the worship of the Akkadi, who see him as a god of noble conquest, and hold him up as the ultimate example for the Akkadi warrior to follow (Glory, Law, Nobility, Sun, War). They also hold Vortoth in high esteem as a sort of divine "support staff" for the conquering Omox (Healing, Magic, Travel, Trickery), Silvaria as a goddess of survival in the wastes (Sun, Travel, Water, Weather), and Koth Anos as a patron of assassins (Death, Destruction, Trickery). The wild Akkadi are one of the few places in the worlds of the Star Lords that play host to communities of paladins, devoted to Omox.

The Satra venerate Kushrieth as a goddess of the household, primarily through wild, days-long orgies (Healing, Charm, Madness, Plant). The bat folk worship the night sky and the west wind. If gnomes or ruby golems have any religion of their own, they keep it to themselves, though the gnomes do give offerings to the cults of the Veklo.

The Veklo are habitually suspicious of most cults of Silvaria and Andor, because Spire serves as one of the great centers of the spheres' slave trade. The Veklo tend to purchase slaves for functional reasons: there are occasionally jobs that are beneath noble Veklo, but cannot be trusted to free Satra, or which require more intelligence than the Veklo consider the Satra capable. They also occasionally purchase slaves as subjects for experimentation, and while the Veklo claim to despise the ends to which slaves are used on planets like Vortoth and Merrikerr, the depraved tastes with which they characterize the Red and Violet planets are not unkown among them. Furthermore, the Veklo are reknowned for their skill at training slaves, and many a slaver brings his most valuable prizes to the Gold Planet for a time before eventual sale elsewhere.

The Akkadi own slaves as well, though they are more likely to capture their own. They tend to choose slaves for aesthetic reasons, and most Akkadi captains own at least a small harem. The bat folk occasionally keep slaves, mainly as tools to interact with humans through. Ruby golems, on the other hand, have very little use for other races in any capacity. Gnomes vary greatly in their adoption of the practice: some appear to have trouble understanding the concept, while others own far more than even the most aquisitive Veklo.