Satrap of Saturn

  After X thousand years, the ancient engineers, who operate on a rather slower rate with respect to time, find their way into the meditations, ritual psychodelia, dreams, olfactory halucinations, and other unconventional cognitions of some set of the the Sorqite Quick: mammalian humans and beaked reptiloid shén, hexapodal ssû and decapodal hlÿs, wingèd hlaaka... The communications are not in the form of language or intelligible visions; the engineers did not make the effort to learn Quick semantic patterns; they did not want relations, or to be regarded as superior beings, or infernal ones, far less to be understood as yet another intelligent species sharing one small world. Concepts such as telepathy, revelation, mental domination, and demonic possession were now widespread among surface cultures, but few contactees interpreted their experiences as contact with other minds, as many of the new religions and wonder workers claimed.   [i guess i don’t need to explain what it wa...

Sorq was originally a metal rich, dense moon. Planetary engineering transformed it into a world-vehicle for the evacuation of a civilization from a doomed star. That star is now a white dwarf; Sorq moved to its primary’s companion, a star now in itself evolving, red and swollen. The world can move about, create vast force fields, manipulate spacetime and other fundamental forces in its vicinity. The original inhabitants and world-shapers changed out of their old forms over the course of more than a billion years. Interstellar species have come and gone, some taking an interest in the curious world, between the size of Mercury and Mars but with surface gravity close to old Earth. At some point new arrivals crafted a lithosphere around the old surface, fitting planetoids and cometary mass together in imitation of a planetary surface with water and atmosphere. So it was when humans and allied sophonts came across Sorq, studied it, settled it, brought along many pets and treasures. [I do k...

Sorq's wizards, priests, temples, and the Underworld A wizard is an arcane magic user not connected to either an established temple or to any of the rivals, although many wizards spent some time in the outer circles of a priesthood before going it alone. Many wizards are aligned with some grandee, or are themselves aristocrats, and others live in remote areas where no temple can apply political pressure or get away with murder, when secular rulers so often avert their gaze from temple affairs. In cities and populous country, temple magicians jealously watch for wizards operating in any public way, and have both the number of their own magicians as well as status with the state to prevent wizards from combining into circles, schools, orders, or upstart temples... so it is off to the far places that wizards hie themselves, NOT to combine and return in magical vengeance against their oppressors (not very often, anyway; the Revanchistas and the foundation of the Athamic Misericorde dyn...