World Statistics

Main > Rules > World Statistics

Atmosphere

Airless worlds are common as asteroids, rocky or icy planetoids, or barren worlds that have had their atmospheres burnt off by weapons or cosmic caprice. While there may be a very thin atmosphere, like Mars, whatever atmosphere exists is usually too thin to support anything other than microbial life.

Breathable mix atmospheres can support human life without additional equipment or gengineered modification. Any world that has a human population in the millions or more almost certainly has a breathable mix atmosphere.

While the air is breathable, almost every world has its own subtle cocktail of inert gases, atmospheric contaminants, and other odoriferous ingredients. For spacers accustomed to the filtered air supply of a starship, the “new world stink” of a fresh planetfall can be maddening, as few linger long enough to get used to the smell of the local air. Attempting to explain the source of this discomfort to the locals rarely results in positive results. Some spaceport bars make a point of their air filtration and composition mixers.

Corrosive atmospheres are dangerously hostile to conventional vacc suits and other protective gear. They steadily strip away at a suit’s vent ports, wiring connections, and other weak spots until they eventually break through and flood the suit with a toxic cocktail that usually kills a victim in seconds.

Native vacc suits are usually covered with an ablative layer or spray that can be regularly renewed, and their buildings often rely on a steadily-extruded slurry of neutralizing materials that can be constantly renewed by pores in the building surface itself. This often gives the building a drippy, half-melted look that may be more than cosmetic in the case of those structures that have failing slurry pumps. Advanced tech level 5 equipment may be able to overcome the effects, but even pretech is often taxed by the relentless rigors of this world. Vehicles and shuttles are kept in pressurized garages when not in use, and starships never land for long.

Inert gas atmospheres aren’t hostile or poisonous, but they’re unbreathable by humans. If the planet’s climate is otherwise tolerable, the natives might be able to live and work outdoors without anything more than an air tank and face mask. Some degree of technical sophistication is going to be necessary for humanity to survive, and large supplies of oxygen are going to have to be extracted from some local source. “Air mines” might exist to replace the oxygen lost during human use, or local power plants might need to be kept running full blast in order to crack water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen.

Invasive toxic atmospheres are composed of a substantial proportion of molecules small enough to infiltrate past the seals of most vacc suits. This infiltration doesn’t harm the suit, but the molecules have to be steadily flushed by the system’s purification sensors before they build up to a debilitating level. This causes a much faster bleed of air as breathable oxygen is jettisoned along with the infiltrating molecules. Most invasive atmospheres cut oxygen supply durations by half, at best.

Invasive atmospheres make oxygen an even more important resource than it is on inert gas worlds. Outdoor work is avoided whenever possible, as any failure of a suit’s toxin sensors or flush system can lead to death before the wearer even realizes something is wrong. Steady exposure to low levels of the toxins can also result in unfortunate effects even with a fully-functional suit. Hallucinations, chronic sickness, or worse can follow.

Thick atmospheres can usually be breathed with the aid of a filter mask, though the mix of contaminants renders it slowly or quickly toxic to humans who attempt to breathe it straight. Separate air supplies are not necessary to supplement the blend, but any society that means to survive on such a world must have sufficient technological expertise to manufacture and maintain large numbers of filter masks.

Thick atmospheres are often at least semi-opaque, and some worlds have thick atmospheres that are completely impenetrable to ordinary light. Deep banks of permanent fog might shroud the planet, or natives might have to go about with sophisticated ultraviolet or infrared viewing equipment if they don’t wish to be blind. Some banks of gases might be impenetrable to even these viewing tools, leaving a party vulnerable to moments of complete blindness while out on the surface of the world.

Thin atmospheres can usually be breathed with the use of a filter/compressor mask. Separate air supplies may be necessary to supplement the blend, but any society that means to survive on such a world must have sufficient technological expertise to maintain large numbers of filter/compressor masks and be able to manufacture and store compressed gas (TL2). Thin atmospheres may be more breathable in rift valleys or other deep depressions in the planet’s surface, if they exist. Temperatures tend to vary wildly on worlds with thin atmospheres, plunging to very low temperatures at night.

Temperature

Burning worlds are too hot for a human to survive without equipment similar to a vacc suit in effectiveness. Rivulets of molten lead or copper might bleed from open veins on the hillsides, and many of the same perils that face an explorer on a frozen world have hotter equivalents on a burning one. Ash drifts, pools of molten metal, and superheated liquid vents can bring quick death to an unwary explorer, and the miners who inhabit such worlds must be forever vigilant against the perils of their burning home.

Cold worlds are uncomfortable, but a human can survive on them in nothing more than heavy clothing. The worst of the cold worlds are similar in condition to Earth’s Antarctic regions, barren wastes of ice and wind. The more clement ones have brief warmer seasons or equatorial bands that get enough solar radiation to support substantial agriculture.

On cold worlds, agricultural land is at a premium. The population is unlikely to be willing to limit its numbers to what hydroponic farms can provide, and they may lack the technology for wide-scale artificial production methods. Savage wars may have broken out over control of fertile growing regions, and populations have perhaps been driven away from the arable land into the cold zones and a lingering death.

Some worlds retain installations from before the Silence deep within the frozen wastes, ancient bases and laboratories that were planted in an age when good launch sites and orbital windows meant more than trifles of temperature. These lost sites might be remembered in legend and story, and some native leaders might still be in possession of the automatic defense bypass codes handed down by their ancestors.

Frozen worlds are those with so weak a stellar primary or so great a distance that the average temperature is close to absolute zero. Any atmosphere that once existed has long since frozen into drifts of solidified oxygen or lakes of liquid helium. Exposure to these drifts is very dangerous. Vacc suits maintain a tolerable temperature easily because the stellar void is very empty, and there is little conduction of heat between the suit and empty space. Dunking a suit into a lake of thermally-conductive superchilled liquid can force the heating elements into sudden and drastic overload, draining a power cell in minutes or even seconds.

Temperate worlds were the most popular colony sites, and most of the truly populous worlds of the frontier have a temperate climate. Many temperate worlds have temperature ranges not unlike that of Earth, though most are canted a little further toward cold or heat depending on their angle and proximity to the local star.

Temperate worlds are the most likely to teem with native life as well, and to have alien ruins or remains located somewhere on their surface. Most frontier worlds never accumulated enough population to put a serious strain on a temperate world’s arable land, but this same capaciousness often allows for more complicated social divisions to develop. Natives of other worlds are often forced to cooperate or die, while those of a clement temperate world have the luxury of deep and lasting divisions.

Variable temperature worlds tend to show a greater distribution of climates than other worlds, either ranging from cold to temperate levels or temperate to hot levels. This may be a climate that changes world-wide when a long, slow orbit brings the planet into proximity with a stellar primary, or it might be a world that has substantially different climatic zones spread across its surface. The north pole of one world might be a sun-blasted desert that moderates to a cool, wet equator, or an icy world might be warmed here and there by complex channels of geothermally-heated subsurface rivers. Variable temperature worlds tend to have savage weather. The mixing of hot and cold air can send ferocious cyclones and raging hurricanes across the surface of the world, some large enough to consume most of a hemisphere.

Warm worlds come in two main flavors, depending on the prevalence of water. “Desert worlds” are hot enough or arid enough to be deprived of most surface water. Any life on such a planet has to be capable of extracting water from living prey, air currents or moisture supplies deep underground. Humans can survive on warm worlds without more than appropriate clothing, but desert-world humans must learn sophisticated techniques of water prospecting and well-drilling in order to maintain their agricultural systems. Warfare often revolves around these water systems.

The other common variety of warm world is one blessed with an abundance of surface water. These worlds tend to be covered with plant and animal life, teeming with thick jungles and vast mats of sargasso on seas that boil with piscids and other alien life analogs. These worlds can be quite prosperous for humans if the native life is edible, but inhabitants are often forced to deal with large predators and a vigorously ingenious native ecology of disease.

Biosphere

Biosphere remnants are the wreckage of a ruined ecology. Petrified trees, drifts of preserved bones, forests of dead plant life; something killed all the life on this planet in the relatively recent past. It may have been the exercise of a maltech planet-buster weapon, or a mutant microbe introduced by human colonists, or some volcanic eruption or asteroid impact that plunged the world into decades of frozen night.

Any local civilization not sophisticated enough to escape the planet likely died when it did. Their ruins and remains might be found throughout the desolate wastes, along with more clues as to the cause of the devastation.

Engineered biospheres are among the rarest, as they require enormous time and effort on the part of a highly advanced civilization. Whatever life exists on this planet has been extensively altered by an alien race or by advanced pretech gengineering methods. Some such worlds are paradise planets, carefully sculpted by some fabulously wealthy predecessor to suit their own tastes. Others are living forges, where foodstuffs and refined minerals are produced as byproducts from the basic organic processes of the world’s biosphere.

Such worlds tend to be fragile. Many engineered worlds are dependent upon regular stabilizing work to prevent genetic drift and adaptations that do not serve the creator’s purpose. Without regular pruning and adjustment, engineered biospheres can go badly awry. Some end up leaving nothing but genetic wreckage in their wake, while others go wrong in more subtle ways. Where once the biosphere existed to serve the inhabitants, a creaking engineered biosphere can leave the planet’s population chained to constant repair and maintenance efforts just to prevent a planetary collapse.

Human-miscible biospheres are those in which some substantial portion of the native life is biologically compatible with human nutritional needs. The local plants and animals may not be tasty or terribly nourishing, but they can support life without the serious importation of Terran crop seeds and livestock.

Even the friendlier human-miscible biospheres often lack the wide variety of edibles that evolved on Earth, and the natives often supplement their stocks of local foods with limited Terran agriculture. Exotic foods, spices, and liquors can be worth interstellar importation to feed the hunger for novelty possessed by the elites on these worlds.

Unfortunately, the fact that humans can eat some native life means that it is very likely that some native life can eat humans as well. Large predators and diseases capable of human infection are by no means uncommon on these worlds, and small colonies can be hard-pressed to survive them.

Hybrid biospheres are a stable intermixing of Terran flora and fauna with local life forms. Most such worlds have been colonized for centuries before the Silence, giving the local ecology time to shake out into a relatively stable configuration of Earth-born organisms and native life. The native biology may or may not be miscible with human life, but it is unlikely to be particularly hostile in any case, or else the interloping life forms would not have been able to get a foothold on the planet.

Hybrid biospheres often show strange examples of symbiosis and adaptation, with plants and animals forming new alliances. Large predators from one world may find themselves subsisting on herds of herbivorous alien life, while Terran vegetation provides sustenance for large populations of small, furred, insect-like grazers. Familiar animals may show seemingly bizarre behavior patterns that have formed in response to local conditions, perhaps becoming larger or more aggressive, or having been gengineered for compatibility.

Immiscible biospheres are not friendly to humans. None of the local plants or animals are edible, and anything the colony needs to eat will have to be grown from Terran stock. Worse, it is common for the pollen and other microbial life of these worlds to be highly allergenic to humans, requiring the regular use of tailored antiallergenics to prevent eventual respiratory failure or exotic immune-system reactions.

These worlds are exceptionally susceptible to the temptation of human gengineering. Despite the persistent drawbacks, genetic flaws, and handicaps that human gengineering usually introduces in a subject, the desperate need to eat can drive worlds to wholesale experimentation on their progeny. The resultant altered humans are often able to digest the local food, but commonly pay for it in shortened life spans, physical disabilities, or an inability to consume Terran foodstuffs. Sometimes the consequences are worse still.

Immiscible biospheres produce some of the most exotic plants and animals in human space. Unfettered by the limits of familiar evolutionary patterns, creatures of bizarre beauty and strange configurations are found on many of these worlds. Many lack the intelligence to realize that humans are as poisonous to them as they are to humans.

Microbial life is often the only thing that exists on the more inhospitable planets, yet the wide variety of environments that can accommodate life means that these little beasts show up in some of the most unlikely places. Some varieties of slime mold have even managed to evolve on corrosive-atmosphere planets, forming a mucous-like outer shell against the atmosphere and then feeding and growing off the chemical byproducts of its erosion.

Microbial life can also be dangerous. While most alien microbes are unable to infect or harm the radically different biology of humans, some show enough ingenuity to accomplish even that difficult feat. Rumors of terrible “space plagues” that leave behind only drifting ships and garbled warnings remain a steady staple at spacer bars throughout the known universe.

No native biosphere is occasionally found on even the most temperate and otherwise habitable worlds. For one reason or another, life simply never evolved on these worlds, leaving them a blank slate for the agricultural and ecological efforts of humans. If the world is otherwise amenable to Terran life, such planets can be enormously fertile and agriculturally rich.

They can also be disasters waiting to happen. Pretech xenobiologists compiled standardized colonization packages of plants, animals, and insect life designed to expand smoothly and evenly to fill the niches of an uninhabited world. Not all colonists implemented these packages correctly, and some worlds had disasters or special circumstances that destabilized their efforts. Some empty worlds are now in a state of constant biological flux as the local ecology strives vainly to find some sort of equilibrium between the myriad imported species and their violent struggle.

More subtly, these worlds can be suddenly and drastically destabilized by the import of some offworld plant or animal. With no strong native ecology to fight off interlopers, the wrong beast or bug can lay waste to whole continents. These planets tend to be extremely paranoid about importation of foreign life forms.

Population

Failed colonies are occasionally found dotting the worlds of human space. Some date back to the First Wave of human colonization more than a thousand years ago, while others are more recent efforts that guttered out under the strains of a colony’s birth.

Pirate attacks might have wiped out a young colony, as might a hostile biosphere, alien attack, internal dissension, disease outbreaks, failure of vital colonial equipment, or any one of a hundred other disasters. The ruins of the colony might still have valuable pretech artifacts, however, or colonization deeds authorized by neighboring worlds. A few survivors might even have clung to life in the intervening centuries, maintaining some sort of society in the wreckage of their ancestors’ work.

Outposts are rarely composed of more than a few hundred or few thousand colonists at the most. Outposts are either very new colonies that have not have the requisite time to grow or they are uncolonized worlds that just happen to have a naval or corporate base on the surface.

Corporate or military outposts aren’t intended to be completely self-sufficient. While large outposts are often forced to raise their own food supplies, replacement personnel, spare parts, and advanced tech must all be brought in from elsewhere. Such temporary outposts are known to find themselves in sudden distress when a vital supply ship fails to make its drop or when some local threat proves more than the staff can handle. Colonial outposts tend to be better equipped but with less outside backing. Such natives expect to live and die on the world, and are more inclined to build permanent structures and local improvements. Many are exiles, malcontents, or others incapable of tolerating the world that sent them forth, and it can make for a somewhat explosive mix in a young colony. These pioneers tend to be very friendly towards visiting starships, as they are often dependent upon free traders and tramp merchants to bring them vital supplies or news of the sector.

Some “outposts” are really just the stubborn, persistent survivors of a long-failed colonization attempt. These cultures can survive for centuries, perpetually culled by the dangers of the world until the survivors are little more than one more ragged element of the local ecology.

Thousands of inhabitants are often found on newly-colonized worlds, or those with limited arable land. This class has the widest range of results, from societies barely large enough to avoid inbreeding to minor worlds of several hundred thousand locals struggling against hostile local conditions.

For worlds with a very small population, settlements tend to be clustered close to one another for mutual support and efficient exploitation of land. The atmosphere might be something like that of a village-dotted countryside, with too few people to support large, specialized cities. The major settlement of the planet is usually built around the spaceport.

Politics on planets with so few people tend to be very personal in nature. Individual leaders can sometimes address the entire population of a world at a single meeting, and networks of family, friends, and employees can dominate the local social life. This small population combined with limited outside contact can result in somewhat… unusual societies more strongly influenced by a leader’s personal quirks than a more populous planet might be. Some such worlds can grow decidedly unhealthy in their customs and traditions.

Hundreds of thousands of inhabitants make up the population of many frontier worlds, usually ones with adequate supplies of arable land and surface conditions amenable to a human without a vacc suit or filter mask. This level of population is also usually the most that a world at TL4 can support using only artificial hydroponic complexes and sealed agricultural systems, so less hospitable planets rarely have more than this many inhabitants.

At a hundred thousand citizens or more, city-states and hub settlements start to form, and some major political divisions might exist beneath the overall planetary government. Regional variations start to become present as towns and smaller settlements start to assert their own cultural traits. Young colonies rarely have much of a framework for resolving these new tensions, and it’s not uncommon for outsiders to end up as catspaws for varying factions.

A hundred thousand inhabitants is normally the smallest population that can create spike driveequipped starships. Less populous worlds rarely have the broad range of specialists and workers necessary to build such ships, even if they possess the necessary technical information. Even at this threshold, maintaining any kind of astronautic industry would require the determined focus of the entire society. Only at populations of a million-plus inhabitants is there enough of an industrial margin to allow for less determined construction of spike drive starships.

Millions of inhabitants are found on some of the more populous frontier worlds, those planets with an excellent climate and soil for agriculture. These worlds teem with human life compared to most of their neighbors, and if they have sufficient technological expertise to build spike drives, they probably are among the significant powers of the sector. The sheer amount of labor and expertise they can put into their projects dwarfs the capabilities of less populated worlds.

Some worlds of this type fail to coalesce under a unified planetary government, however, and turn most of their attention to intra-planetary quarrels between different nations or city-states. Full-scale planetary wars have been known to break out on such worlds, with some being reduced to burnt-out cinders by some maltech weapon or by nuclear attacks against regions stripped of their nuke snuffers.

Billions of inhabitants on a world is a freak occurrence in most sectors, a circumstance dependent on almost perfect planetary conditions, a First Wave date of colonization, a very large initial colonial expedition, and a strong cultural imperative for reproduction. These worlds have been colonized for almost a thousand years, and have likely gone through substantial cultural development and change since their founding.

Planets with this many inhabitants tend to come in two main varieties. The more common is that of regional hegemon, leveraging its enormous reserves of labor and scientific personnel to build hundreds or thousands of starships. Some hegemons might even have the transport weight and personnel available to colonize or conquer their less powerful neighbors outright, though most hegemons prefer the safer route of docile client states rather than outright conquest.

Not all such worlds have the necessary resources to build starships, even when the labor is cheap and abundant. These worlds tend to take a different route, becoming balkanized, conflict-torn planets not unlike a mid-20th-century Earth. Resource wars are common and local politics revolve around byzantine feuds and ancient slights. Technology on such planets tends to be very uneven; it is limited or nonexistent in fields that depend on unavailable resources, but the natives often show remarkable sophistication in making the most of what they have available.

Alien civilizations are even rarer than massively human-populated planets, but they can be found in some sectors. On these worlds, any human presence is either nonexistent or simply a token contingent of traders and diplomats. The actual number of aliens may range from a few tens of thousands to teeming worlds of billions.

Alien civilizations appear to be no more immune to conflict, disaster, and decadence than that of humans, and most alien worlds are isolated planets. Some sectors were known to be dominated by alien empires before the Scream, but most inhabited worlds found by colonial surveyors consisted of indigenous, low-tech sapients who evolved on the world, or else were the decaying remnants of a former empire that had fallen apart into isolated colonial worlds.

This fate of growth, expansion, colonization, and collapse appears to be a very common event in the galaxy. Countless alien ruins and lost deep-space artifacts indicate that cycles of growth and decay have been going on for millennia, and there is little way to tell how many alien empires have swept over what is now human space before dwindling to rotting worlds and then empty ruins.

Tech Level

Tech level 0 represents a world with technologies similar to neolithic-era humanity. Very few worlds collapse this far without dying out completely, and so a world this primitive is very rare in human space. The world is so profoundly devoid of useful resources that the natives may simply not have anything better to work with than rocks and native vegetation.

Natives of a world at this tech level might retain elaborate cultural artifacts and a very sophisticated society. Existing resources tend to be exploited to the hilt, with large populations producing massive stone cities, human-powered engines for irrigation, and vast displays of foodstuffs and craft work for the ruling class. Despite this, the lack of metal, domesticated beasts of burden, and petrochemicals puts a hard stop on the technological development of most of these worlds.

Responses to far traders and other interstellar travelers will vary with the local culture. The lack of quick communications methods tends to result in large populations breaking up into numerous smaller regional cultures, and the friendly prince of one domain might neighbor an implacably hostile sage-king. Most “lostworlders” have a keen appreciation for the benefits these strangers from the sky can bring them, and will bargain accordingly.

Some worlds might retain crisply rational records of their colonization and downfall. Others might preserve tales of a starry origin in legends and story. A few might have forgotten their origins entirely, and view sky-born humans as gods or messengers of the divine. Such awe rarely lasts very long once the merchants or pirates who landed make their purposes clear.

Tech level 1 worlds have managed to find and exploit metal deposits and likely have imported or domesticated beasts of burden. Those worlds with easy access to fossil fuels or a similarly energy-dense substance can advance to greater things, but a culture trapped at TL1 is unlikely to have access to such helpful resources. A few worlds have enough usable plant matter or other combustibles to make steam engines feasible, but those with very much of such a resource usually make the leap to the next tech level eventually.

As a consequence, tech level 1 worlds tend to be caught at much the same general level of development as their tech level 0 cousins. They may have elaborate social structures and cultural development, but they are unable to mechanize without some energy-dense resource to serve as fuel. The scavenged hulks of their ancestors’ fusion plants may stand as mute temples to the achievements of their forebears, but without the tech necessary to repair and rebuild such edifices the world is dependent on purely local fuel sources.

Tech level 1 worlds tend to respond to visitors in much the same way as tech level 0 planets. The ruling class of these worlds is liable to be able to muster larger cities, bigger armies, and all the other perquisites that come from being able to work the available agricultural land with fewer hands.

Tech level 2 worlds are blessed with the presence of fossil fuels or a feasibly abundant biofuel source. Internal combustion engines are crude things compared to the power of a fusion plant, but they can be built with primitive tools and a basic degree of education. The mechanization that results from this resource vastly increases the efficiency of local farming, the speed of travel, and the productivity of factory workers.

Most tech level 2 worlds are “knockdowns”; planets that once had a much higher degree of sophistication but were recently crippled by disease, disaster, or invasion. The natives tend to be keenly aware of the glories of former generations, and work fiercely to redevelop lost techniques and reclaim old knowledge.

Few tech level 2 worlds produce much that’s worth interstellar trade. Most foodstuffs are too bulky and cheap to make it worth a captain’s time. Some worlds have rare ore deposits, but the natives have no reason to dig them until a merchant makes it worth their while to set up a whole new industry for export. Some such worlds barter the relics of their ancestors in exchange for educational materials or rare resources necessary for advancing local industry. Others feel forced to trade native work contracts for dangerous, dirty labor in a bargain that’s little different from slave trading.

Tech level 3 worlds are those that have developed to a level much like that of the more advanced nations of late twentieth-century Earth. The main difference between tech level 3 worlds and level 4 worlds is the lack of fusion power or spike drive manufacture.

These worlds come in two major varieties. The first is a “knockdown” world that formerly had tech level 4 technologies before some catastrophe or pirate attack destroyed their knowledge and industrial base. Some of the wrecked infrastructure might have been irreplaceable, and the world must struggle to regain its former level of technological production. Worlds in this condition tend to have rather small populations that are susceptible to the loss of a few concentrated groups of experts.

The second major variety is a world that suffered a severe disaster shortly after colonization and has been forced to painstakingly build up their technological base ever since. Some of these worlds date back to the First Wave of colonization a thousand years ago, driven into near-neolithic conditions by some outside pressure before slowly and painfully rebuilding their technological base through purely indigenous efforts. These worlds tend to have very large populations if the world’s climate permits, as they have been colonized for quite some time.

Simply providing a world with the necessary technical data for advancement doesn’t mean that advancement will be quick or even. Even if a tech level 3 world has the necessary resources to build tech level 4 devices, it may take as much as a generation for a world to build the necessary infrastructure and resource extraction enterprises. The time may be longer still if the dominant cultures are uneasy with the new technology.

Tech level 3+ worlds are a not uncommon version of a Tech Level 3 society that experiences occasional interstellar contact. While the majority of the world’s technology is solidly Tech Level 3, in some areas, typically space travel and weapons technology, the world is able to produce versions of Tech Level 4 items. Spike drives are limited to Drive-1.

Tech level 4- worlds are a slightly different phenomenon than 3+. In this case, the world is highly advanced in a variety of ways, but does not have much in the way of interstellar technology. At best, a TL4- world can manufacture a spike drive at Drive-1 rating, but often does not even have the facilities or human expertise to do so. These worlds often have an otherwise high-tech feel, but are limited in their interstellar travel capabilities.

Tech level 4 worlds are the most common in human space, and their technical expertise is the baseline for modern post-Silence “postech”. These worlds can create spike drives rated up to drive-3, fusion power plants, grav vehicles, simple energy weapons, and medicines that extend human life to a hundred years of vigorous good health. They can manage sophisticated gengineering on simple life forms, and some tech level 4 worlds have even attempted to improve the genetic structures of human life itself. These attempts have yet to produce results without severe drawbacks, but some such worlds remain populated by altered humanity designed to cope with local conditions more perfectly than baseline humans.

Most worlds with regular interstellar contact and the necessary raw resources eventually gravitate towards this level of technological expertise. It may take decades, or even centuries in the case of more retrograde worlds, but this tech level is the highest that can readily be achieved by most planets.

Tech level 4+ is an unusual case of a normal tech level 4 world that has retained some pretech industries or has developed their own local technical expertise beyond baseline postech in certain specific fields.

Most such specialties are relatively narrow in scope; grav tech, medicine, hydroponics, force field generation, or some field of roughly similar breadth. These specialties are usually either the product of a few irreplaceable pretech manufactories or the result of some unique local resource that serves amazingly well for the purpose at hand. In both cases, the world will jealously guard the tech, and much local conflict may relate to control over these resources.

These worlds tend to have substantial amounts of interstellar trade from neighboring worlds interested in their tech. The ruling elite of the world can be ostentatious about display of this wealth.

Tech level 5 is the highest tech level that might merit random placement. A world with this level of technological expertise has somehow managed to hold on to the majority of the pre-Scream technology base, and can produce a wide range of goods that are unknown on less sophisticated worlds. Miniaturized fusion plants, drive-6 rated spike drives, exotic grav weaponry, and even the development of psionics-based “psitech” is possible on such a world.

Pretech manufacturing was largely dependent on specially-trained industrial psychics. With the loss of their unique disciplines in the Scream, most worlds that retain this level of tech classification were forced to substitute slower, less precise methods that sharply curtailed their production efficiency. Barring the profoundly unlikely happenstance of this world’s redevelopment of the lost disciplines, their maximum industrial output is sharply limited. Even on worlds such as this, most technology is likely mass-produced postech, with only important goods produced to pretech levels of quality.

A world with this level of technology is almost certainly a regional hegemon, one of the most powerful and influential worlds in the sector. Even those worlds that have no imperial ambitions have enormous influence simply through the vast superiority of their starships and military technology.

Ancestry

African
- Abbyssinian: From Horn of Africa; Ethiopia, Eritrea
- Bantu: From Central Africa; Angola, Congo, Mozambique, Rwanda, Zambia, Zimbabwe
- Central African: From Central Africa, just south of Sahara; Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad
- Egyptian: From Northern Africa; Egypt
- Mahgreb: Northern Africa; Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya
- Somali: From Horn of Africa; Kenya, Somalia
- South African: From South Africa, Combined European and African ancestry
- Tuareg: From Saharan Africa; Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso
- West African: From African West Coast; Gambia. Ghana, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sudan
- Zulu: From Southern Africa; South Africa

American
- Amerindian: Indigenous people of the Americas; Bolivia, Canada, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru, US
- Latin American: Identifying with a European Ancestry, mostly Spanish; Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico, Uruguay
- Mestizo: Identifying fully neither with any indigenous culture nor with a Spanish cultural heritage; Belize, Columbia, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Venezuela
- North American: A people with a mix of European and African ancestry; Canada, US

Asia
- Afghan: Afghanistan, Pakistan
- Arab: From the Middle East; Bedouins, Emiratis, Iraq, Palestine, Saudi Arabia
- Austronesian: From Island Southeast Asia; Indonesia, Malaysia, New Guinea, Philippines, Thailand
- Chinese: China
- Indian: India
- Japanese: Japan
- Korean: Korea
- Mongol: Mongolia
- Persian: Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan
- Turkic: From the Turkish region; Azerbaijan, Syria, Turkey
- Vietic: Cambodia, Vietnam

European
- Baltic: From Baltic Coast; Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania
- British
- Celtic: Ireland, Scotland
- Germanic: From northern Central Europe: Austria, Germany, Luxembourg
- Greek
- Iberian: From Iberian Peninsula; Portugal, Spain
- Romance: French or Italian
- Slavic: From Eastern Europe; Polish, Serbian, Ukranian
- Russian
- Scandinavian: From Scandinavian Region; Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Sweden
- South Slavic: From southern East Europe

Phenotypes

On its own page Phenotype

Government

Assembly of Clans(Democratic): This government is a militaristic form of democracy, where all free clan warriors can make their voices heard.

Bandit Commune(Democratic): This government is organised like a massive crime syndicate, where the strong prey on the weak and any neighboring states are seen as little more than raiding targets.

Bandit Kingdom(Imperial): This government is organised like a massive crime syndicate, where the strong prey on the weak and any neighboring states are seen as little more than raiding targets.

Bandit Syndicate(Dictatorial): This government is organised like a massive crime syndicate, where the strong prey on the weak and any neighboring states are seen as little more than raiding targets.

Celestial Empire(Imperial): This government is a hereditary monarchy, where the ruler is seen as a child of heaven in a largely pacifist and isolationist society.

Citizen Republic(Democratic): This government is a militaristic form of democracy, where full citizenship can only be gained through military service. The voting franchise is limited to full citizens, and they are the only ones allowed to hold public offices.

Citizen Stratocracy(Oligarchic): This government is an advanced form of militaristic oligarchy, where the military has subsumed all aspects of civilian administration. All government offices are held by military officers.

Communal Parity(Democratic): This government promotes total equality for all its citizens, regardless of their jobs or assigned tasks. One life is worth the same as any other.

Constitutional Dictatorship(Dictatorial): This government is a dictatorship where a single individual has been granted perpetual emergency powers to preserve the state from any threats, real or imagined.

Criminal Syndicate(Dictatorial): This government is an enormous and ruthless business syndicate, which shares many of its operating practises with organized crime.

Despotic Empire(Imperial): This government is a relatively pure form of autocracy, with an absolute ruler that governs the state with an iron gripping appendage.

Despotic Hegemony(Imperial): This government is a materialistic form of hereditary autocracy, where citizens are viewed as little more than cogs in the state machinery. Efficiency and technological progress are valued above all things.

Direct Democracy(Democratic): This government is a materialistic form of democracy, where citizens use computer networks to vote directly on most matters regarding the state.

Divine Empire(Imperial): This government is a form of spiritualistic autocracy. Everything is shaped by the official state religion, and the ruler is worshiped as an infallible living god.

Elective Monarchy(Dictatorial): This government is a form of enlightened autocracy, where a strong emphasis is put on the knowledge and qualifications of the elected monarch.

Executive Committee(Oligarchic): This government is a materialistic form of oligarchy, where a powerful bureaucracy governs the state and guides the citizenry towards productive and meaningful goals.

Feudal Empire(Imperial): This government is a feudal autocracy where the monarch rules indirectly, granting offices and territories to vassals in exchange for obligations in the form of taxes and military service.

Gang Land(Oligarchic): This government is organised like a massive crime syndicate, where the strong prey on the weak and any neighboring states are seen as little more than raiding targets.

Holy Tribunal(Oligarchic): This government is a spiritualistic form of oligarchy, where a divinely guided council made up of clergy controls the state. No division exists between the state and the dominant organized religion.

Illuminated Autocracy(Imperial): This government is a materialistic form of hereditary autocracy, based on technocratic principles that the sovereign is sworn to uphold. Nothing is valued more highly than scientific knowledge and the advancement of technology.

Irenic Bureaucracy(Oligarchic): This government is a pacifistic form of oligarchy, where a complicated system of bureaucracy governs all aspects of society to ensure the safety of the citizenry.

Irenic Dictatorship(Dictatorial): This government is a pacifist form of autocracy, where the state is charged with protecting the citizenry from their own violent tendencies as well as any external threats.

Irenic Monarchy(Imperial): This government is a pacifist form of hereditary autocracy, where the ruler is regarded as a benevolent guardian that is striving to protect the citizens from a violent galaxy.

Martial Empire(Imperial): This government is a militaristic form of hereditary autocracy, where the state exists largely to support the military. Martial ability is highly valued, and all citizens are regularly drilled in matters of war.

Megacorporation(Dictatorial): This government is a form of plutocratic oligarchy, where the entire state has been organized as a massive commercial enterprise overseen by a board of directors.

Military Commissariat(Democratic): This government is nominally democratic, with the dividing line between the civil administration and the military having blurred to the point where they have largely become one and the same.

Military Dictatorship(Dictatorial): This government is a militaristic form of autocracy, with the ruler serving as the undisputed head of the military which is firmly in control of the state apparatus.

Military Junta(Oligarchic): This government is a militaristic form of oligarchy, where power rests with a council of high-ranking military officers who oversee all matters of state.

Moral Democracy(Democratic): This government is a pacifistic form of democracy, firmly guided by moralist principles and non-violence.

Plutocratic Oligarchy(Oligarchic): This government is a plutocratic form of oligarchy, ruled by a wealthy and influential elite.

Rational Consensus(Democratic): The government is a materialistic form of democracy, governed according to principles based on rationality and scientific theory.

Representative Democracy(Democratic): This government is a representative democracy, where citizens vote on officials who are elected to represent them.

Science Directorate(Oligarchic): This government is a materialistic form of oligarchy, where a committee of scientists supervises the government apparatus for maximum efficiency.

Star Empire(Imperial): This government is a hereditary and militaristic form of autocracy, with a single sovereign controlling both the government and the military.

Subversive Cult(Dictatorial): This government is structured like a religious cult that relies on a variety of criminal and corporate enterprises to sustain itself.

Technocratic Dictatorship(Dictatorial): This government is a materialistic form of autocracy, where the scientific elite has assumed control over the state in the name of efficiency and technological progress.

Theocratic Dictatorship(Dictatorial): This government is a spiritualistic dictatorship, ruled by a single individual in a hierarchical power structure supported by the official state religion.

Theocratic Oligarchy(Oligarchic): This government is a spiritualistic form of oligarchy, where the political leadership lies in the hands of the leaders of the nation's most powerful religious factions.

Theocratic Republic(Democratic): This government is a spiritualistic form of democracy, where a religious council supervises the democratic process and serves in an advisory role.

Totalitarian Regime(Dictatorial): This government is a materialistic form of autocracy, where the state aspires towards full control over the lives of its citizens in the name of efficiency.

Trade League(Oligarchic): This government is a form of plutocratic oligarchy, where the state is made up of a myriad of free merchants, corporations and guilds that have banded together in common commercial interests.

War Council(Oligarchic): This government is a militaristic form of oligarchy, where all decisions concerning the state are taken by a council of the nation's strongest warlords.