Thank you, as always, to my patrons Darius, Ferny, Jaina Bee, Dave, Casey, and Keeper. They saw this post a week before anyone else did, and if that or the mere prospect of helping support my RPG streaming and writing efforts excites you, please become a patron on my Patreon.
(I use Wikipedia's Random Article link to name the many things I have to name when making an entire planet; I have provided links to the Wikipedia articles where useful, in case they might provide inspiration for the locations and people they named)
C000271-E
System Nature: Solo (Scimeca, K7 V/orange dwarf star)Stellar Mass: 1.069x10³⁰ kg (0.5376 sol; 179,020.8 Earths)
Stellar Luminosity: 1.096x10²⁶ W, 1.8675x10²⁸ lm (0.498 Lₛₒₗ)
System Population: 355,791 Scimecan sophonts
Planets:
- Scimeca I, 0.2 AU (habitable zone): Hatfield (D435544-7)
- Hatfield Α, 21,120 km: Wrecking Ball (X00024L-6, 1280 km, population 936, Nexus, Liberal)
- Scimeca II, 0.4 AU (outer zone): Nomia (described in this post)
- Scimeca III 0.7 AU (outer zone): The Planetary Barony of Hausu (E64523L-3, population 381, Sexist, Barbaric)
- Scimeca IV, 1 AU (outer zone): Vidara, (X677000-0, population 0)
- Vidara Α: Arthur's Missing Moon, (X000000-0, population 0)
- Scimeca V, 1.6 AU (outer zone): Sprinters' Commonwealth, (D45021L-6, population 617, Deceptive)
- Scimeca VI, 2.8 AU (outer zone): Julian Priestley, (X331000-0, population 0)
- Scimeca VII, 5.2 AU (outer zone): The Planetary Barony of Morgan-Beavis, (D56044L-5, population 83,208, Fashion)
- Morgan-Beavis Α: Weatherby Belt (XR00000-0, population 0)
- Morgan-Beavis Β: Cover (X000000-0, population 0)
- Morgan-Beavis Γ: Stadium (X000000-0, population 0)
- Scimeca VIII, 10 AU (outer zone): The Baronet World of Goat's Rue (E63627L-6, population 171, Unusual Custom: Media, Unusual Custom: Technology)
- Scimeca IX, 19.6 AU (outer zone): Robenhymer (the marquesal seat, B76733L-B, population 7459, Unusual Customs: Eating)
- Scimeca X, 38.8 AU (outer zone): Beyond Counting (X54223L-0, population 703, Honourable, Barbaric)
- Beyond Counting Α: Ghost Moon (X000000-0, population 0)
- Beyond Counting Β: John Griffith (X000000-0, population 0)
- Beyond Counting Γ: Solariella (X100000-0, population 0)
Approximate Surface Area: 3.22x10⁵ square kilometers (0.0006313 Earth)
Planet Density: 3.7495 g/cm³ (0.68 standard; rocky body)
World Mass: 1.7135x10²¹ kg (0.0002869 standard)
World Gravity: 0.5001 m/s² (0.051 g)
Orbital Period: 125 days 22 hours 29 minutes 13.7397 seconds
Rotational Period: 54 days 20 hours 50 minutes 41.1959 seconds
Axial Tilt: 28 degrees
Orbital Eccentricity: 0.000
Seismic Stress Factor: 1.344
Atmospheric Composition: None
Surface Atmospheric Pressure: 0 kPa (0 atm)
Mean Surface Temperature: -13.8314 degrees Celsius (7.1034 degrees Faherenheit; 259.1686 Kelvins)
Hydrographic Percentage: 0% (0 km²)
Hydrographic Composition: None
Tectonic Plates: 1
Oceans: 0
Volcanoes: Mount Lauren, GC376, WKCI-101.3, Pajanimal Pile, the Anthill, Media Agua Peak
Terraforming: Greenhouse (+10% greenhouse effect), terrain
Weather Control? No
Native Life? No
Satellites: None
Weather Control? No
Native Life? No
Satellites: None
Population: 710 Nomian sophonts
Approximate Population Density: 0.0022 sophonts per km²; 453.5211 km² per sophont
Exports: Artforms, manufactured durables, processed metals
Cities
Approximate Population Density: 0.0022 sophonts per km²; 453.5211 km² per sophont
Exports: Artforms, manufactured durables, processed metals
Cities
- Melanderi Station, population 710, C-class starport
Social Outlook:
- Progressiveness: Conservative attitude, stagnant action
- Aggressiveness: Competitive attitude, militant action
- Extensiveness: Fragmented globally, friendly interstellarly
Cultural Differences: Unusual Customs: Conspiracy
Local Customs: Men have minimal quarters
Government: Balkanization into 5 nations
- The Armășescul Collective, a participating democracy
- Population: 212
- Representative Authority: Ad-hoc volunteers among the populace agree by means of widespread networking to take charge of interpreting and executing the directives and laws outlined by the current and former Frater Superior(s). The population as a whole elects and advises the Frater Superior. The same software also randomly compiles anonymized juries of citizens chosen at random to preside whenever there is a question of legality or civil harm. As an error-proofing measure, every such case must be tried repeatedly, until five juries come to similar judgments.
- Law Level:
- Overall: 2 (low)
- Weapons: 0 (none)
- Trade: 6 (moderate)
- Criminal Law: 0 (none)
- Civil Law: 2 (low)
- Personal Freedom: 2 (low)
- Uniformity of Law: Personal
- Le Magasin des Suicides, a medical manufacturing company/corporation
- Population: 166
- Representative Authority: The marquesal knight des Suicides, shop steward and corporate representative on Nomia, holds all authority when it comes to the Nomian factory.
- Law Level:
- Overall: 1.4 (low)
- Weapons: 1 (low)
- Trade: 4 (moderate)
- Criminal Law: 1 (low)
- Civil Law: 0 (none)
- Personal Freedom: 1 (low)
- Uniformity of Law: Personal
- Where the Air is Still, an anarchic platform
- Population: 108
- Representative Authority: none
- Law Level:
- Overall: 1 (low)
- Weapons: 0 (none)
- Trade: 2 (low)
- Criminal Law: 0 (none)
- Civil Law: 0 (none)
- Personal Freedom: 3 (low)
- Uniformity of Law: Territorial
- Willie's Pad, an anarchic platform
- Population: 82
- Representative Authority: none
- Law Level:
- Overall: 1.8 (low)
- Weapons: 4 (moderate)
- Trade: 3 (low)
- Criminal Law: 0 (none)
- Civil Law: 2 (low)
- Personal Freedom: 0 (none)
- Uniformity of Law: Undivided
- Shrimpton-in-Space, a metal-refining company/corporation
- Population: 142
- Representative Authority: The Council of Elder Workers determines the path of the refinery, which a handful of supervisory workshops then enact. The mayor-owner's job is mostly to ensure that everything runs smoothly and correct it when necessary.
- Law Level:
- Overall: 3 (low)
- Weapons: 2 (low)
- Trade: 4 (moderate)
- Criminal Law: 5 (moderate)
- Civil Law: 0 (none)
- Personal Freedom: 4 (moderate)
- Uniformity of Law: Territorial
Known Factions or Revolutionary Groups:
- Hitit, a well-known anarchic faction of anti-marquesal conspiratorial hackers with significant support
- The Neo-Hungarians, a well-known anarchic go-gang with significant support
Technology Level:
- High Common: E (high stellar; Geneering Age)
- Low Common: E
- Energy: E (fusion plants)
- Computer/Robotics: E (computer/brain implants, model/8 robots)
- Communications: E (early meson communicators)
- Medical: E (genetic engineering, memory erasure)
- Environment: G (high stellar; Hopdrive/Artificial Persons Age; global terraforming, hostile worlds)
- Land Transport: D (average stellar; Wafer Age; grav vehicles merge with orbital spacecraft, jump-4)
- Water Transport: D
- Air Transport: D
- Space Transport: F (imperial maximum; Maker Age; jump-6)
- Personal Military: F (man-portable fusion gun-15, battle dress)
- Heavy Military: E (x-ray lasers, bonded superdense armor)
Trade Codes: Asteroid, High Technology, Low Gravity, Low Population, Vacuum
It might surprise many that the Scimecan system's primary manufacturing center is both near-post-scarcity and originally an artist's colony. Founded by the Marquis Robenhymer as an ostensible haven for the surging counterculture of a century and a half ago, Nomia's explosion of arisanal-technology exports and rapid pace of advancement soon attracted corporate interest. The rush this precipitated was halted by quick political maneuvering and organization on the part of the artists, but two of the corporations were nonetheless able to get a foothold among them.
Le Magasin des Suicides adapted by adopting the avant-garde and cavalier attitude of the planet, while Shrimpton-in-Space has merely retreated into a relatively isolationist provincialism. All the while, the Armășescul Collective works to protect Nomia's fierce independence and pioneering culture. The various hackers of Hitit, each of whom uses the name of an ancient Hittite deity in their hacks, pranks, and communiques, insist that all of these, corporate lapdogs and artist protectionists alike, are nothing more than the contract nobility's conspiracy to repress the Nomian people. Meanwhile, a go-gang called the neo-Hungarians unites a fractious criminal underground to meet the less savory demands of the artisanal engineers of Willie's Pad and the freewheeling hard partiers of Where the Air is Still, or just rob anyone they can.
They're not wrong, of course. The marquis of Scimeca did, in fact, subsidize Nomia's establishment as a way of sidelining and undermining a popular movement wherein secret societies and revolutionary sentiment was just as trendy as technological advancement and artistic sensibilities. By appearing to accept the artists and support them, the marquis hoped to situate them far from the courts of Robenhymer, Morgan-Beavis, and Goat's Rue and the outposts of Hatfield, Wrecking Ball, and the Sprinters' Commonwealth. From such a distance, any effect they had on the larger system could be minimized.
This has led to an even more Wild-West feel to the world (thankfully, minus the genocide of natives) than the Most Prized Republic of Hatfield, which is a much more peaceful homesteader vibe. Embedded within a context of near-singularity levels of tech, rollicking adventures on Nomia can get pretty wild.
The basic unit of social organization in all five pads is the workshop, a co-working space around which a handful of artisans working in related fields or on intertwined projects live. The wealthier Nomians maintain sleeping quarters budding off of and generally surrounding the main workspace, or even a supplementary room like a kitchen; poorer Nomians just meet all of their life needs within the one workroom. Nomian custom heavily prefers men using as little space as possible for their life needs. If a workshop with a three-bedroom living space consists of a woman, a nullo, a genderqueer, and a male, the male will almost always be the only one sleeping in the workspace. This perspective extends to food storage use and every other aspect of life. Every once in a while, projects or relationships band multiple workshops into a single neighborhood collective, which replicates the workshop dynamic across multiple workshops.
Nonetheless, an overdose of future shock spiced with shock of a more cultural kind has led to a populace that tends to resist change. Paradigms have shuffled past the people of Nomia so fast that it has numbed out their sense of wonder, leaving only a calcifyingly practical recognition of the bother and work of overhauling one's system to accommodate the work of some hotshot inventor. Pride plays some part in this wooden resistance, as well; every Nomian is convinced to their core that their inventions and their ideas represent the truest and most important breakthrough in their field, if only they could figure out how to make them work. Fistfights (or fights with more dangerous weaponry) frequently bloom throughout Melanderi Station, fertilized by this perspective and most often with an obscure piece of theory at their core.
Over the course of the last human generation or so, a technocratic sentiment has begun to swell among the Nomians. A counterculture to the founding counterculture of the colony has begun to wonder why the assembled artistic, engineering, and scientific geniuses of the planet haven't applied their individual and collective brainpower to finally solving the problem of governance. A volunteer and ragtag military force has begun to form around this core meme, and the rest of the system has quite definitively noticed its rise.
The most restrictive of the pads is Shrimpton-in-Space, a cliquish, almost eremitic metal refinery composed of a pad in the north of Melanderi Station. Only reluctantly engaged in trade negotiations with other Nomians and offworlders alike, they enforce a series of communal rules determined by their corporate charter with a dourness otherwise unseen on Nomia. In fact, their legal code entirely lacks any provisions to seek redress for wrongs done by one worker to another, in favor of a more extensive criminal code than found elsewhere on the planet. Despite the propensity for these restrictions to intrude upon the freedom of those walking around the pad's streets, they do work to ensure that commerce proceeds with a fairness and a restraint exceeded only by the Armășescul Collective's trade law.
Said Collective operates the spaceport around which Melanderi is built, and their trade law is the strictest law around. Almost as if they felt the need to apologetically compensate for this, the Collective is far more relaxed about most other matters. They make no attempt to speak of to prevent the ownership and trade in weapons, for example, and have not a scrap of criminal code anywhere in their annals. Willie's Pad follows suit when it comes to a refusal to name any behaviors as wrong or to be repressed. However, as the pad most likely to produce ever-more-efficient tools for mass death, they have recognized the danger such things being widely available and carried could cause to productivity. The other two pads have only scraps of legal code between them.
Nobility is scattered sparsely throughout Melanderi Station, as marquesal or baronial knighthood contracts are offered to individual artisans or the higher-ups in either company with a presence on the planet. Rule of the planet itself has not been subcontracted to any baron by the marquis, who thus governs (as much as they are able) directly.
Amidst all of this chaos, the small Company base in the county no longer rely on isolation and secrecy to hide them, but nestle their operations invisibly among the population here. The base is too small to train agents, but there is the requisite Continuity Directorate operational hub, as well as a Science Directorate lab and a Technology Directorate workshop.
