# starlit lore
! spoilers ahoy!
## Thinking Few
the Galaxy teems with life, but only one in a trillion of its creatures is fully sophont, with a soul and mentality of their own.
### Lesser Races
the majority of the Thinking Few are held in thrall to the Starlit, their null psionic potential locking them out of the higher levels of civilizational power and attainment.
#### Humans
The weeds of the galactic flowerbed. Humans are one of the Lesser Races, excluded from the ranks of the Greater Races by souls that lack, in normal circumstances, external psionic channels. Their mastery of the universe cut unexpectedly short, forever locked out of FTL travel, short-lived without augments, and alternately pitied or scorned by the lowest of the low, humans flourish nonetheless due to a capacity for adaptation all but unmatched among the Thinking Few, terrifyingly rapid reproductive cycles -- and a keen facility for bribery. While the lack of human psions remains a sensitive topic, humans (unlike the bitter and emotional Kruthandi) are practical enough to hire the talent they cannot possess, and have even built a small number of symbiotic civilizations with the more indulging of the Powers. In a galaxy where nearly all sophont life is specialized to a fault, humans have found the unique niche of occupying no particular niche.
#### Kruthandi
The Kruthandi are a race of four-armed marsupialoids, with the rough body proportions of meerkats, though much larger.
Geographically, they occupy a small net of systems linked only through their home system. Unable to accept the reality that their lack of psionics doomed them to a subservient, sublight role, the Kruthandi indulged in a brief, petulant, and entirely futile war with a Su'ikuri state[^lizard-war], and then retreated to their home web to sulk. Access to their space is tightly controlled, and psionic races are absolutely barred from their worlds, even the mere Greater Races, tho this is hilariously unenforcible. In practice they are particularly vulnerable to psicrime – when you ban psionics, only criminals will have mind powers. The Kruthandi are generally viewed with pity and amusement as a pathetic basket case of a civilization, and engage in little intercourse with the broader galaxy.
lizard-war: The Su'ikuri sovereign in question was of a decidedly philosophical bent and was commendably gentle dealing with the upstarts, seeming more bemused than angered by the attack. He took a few of their leaders as battle trophies and spanked the remainder out of his system. There were no casualties on either side.
However, the Kruthandi are an ancient and sophisticated civilization, and there is much more to their culture than mere wallowing in victimhood (though this certainly has a special place in the Kruthandi heart). Their hate-crush on the Starlit Races has lead to an utter obsession with metric technology, and the Kruthandi have, by sheer brute force and fanatic tenacity, built a surprisingly sophisticated gravitics industry. While this makes little economic sense, it soothes the Kruthandic psyche.
#### Qir
a race of religious fanatics cleaving to no particular faith, Qir enthusiastically adopt and syncretize new religions as fast as Heaven can churn out prophets. their fanaticism seems to be a cultural evolution to compensate for exceptionally weak mememmune systems; unable to properly critique new ideas, the Qir need to outsource much of their reasoning to systems of sacred commandments, ideally those developed by species who know how to deal with memes. good old-fashioned natural selection does the rest.
### Greater Races
a handful of species have souls that are just barely capable of developing external psionic channels. the respected vassals of the Starlit, they can touch the spirits of others, sending messages and reading thoughtforms -- or attacking with torturous sensations and ruinous emotion. however, their power does not extend to the physical universe; they rely entirely on their Starlit masters for access to faster-than-light travel.
### Starlit Races
the unquestioned lords of space and time, the Starlit Races are those lucky few to have evolved cognitive architectures that allow a soul to reach its full development potential, progressing from merely cogitating about the universe to manipulating it directly with innate power. seemingly as a consequence of the necessary neural architecture, the Starlit are all ferociously intelligent -- IQs below 150 are unheard of. however, they are marred by a proportional tendency toward mental instability and psychosis.
their civilizations are known as the Powers.
#### Su'ikuri
(sg. Su'ikutra, adj. Su'ikuruk)
a reptilian race of artists, aesthetes, hedonists, monks, and philosophers, the Su'ikuri are an idle, contemplative, and aristocratic people whose massive psionic sophistication numbers them among the Powers -- much to the annoyance of the Eluthrai. as any adult has the requisite level of finesse and raw power to tweak individual alleles throughout the whole body of a living organism, the Su'ikuri are a race of peerless organgineers. they eschew "dead" hylotechnology, and insist on using biotech wherever remotely practicable.
their 'spacecraft' are massive tree-like organisms housing whole ecosystems, propelled and protected against radiation by the psionic power of their crew. sometimes they are equipped with technology produced by a vassal race, but only when unavoidable.
Su'ikuri generally use Lesser Races for manual labor, and Greater Races to overseer these laborers. whether these are paid and respected laborers or outright slaves depends entirely on the ethos of the local civilization.
Su'ikuruk society is strictly feudal, with a hierarchy based on psionic skill and wit. virtually all conflict is resolved with either a polite, prolonged philosophical debate (the Su'ikuruk version of a duel) or a brute psionic struggle -- the party overpowered by the greater psion is compelled to submit totally, and may achieve freedom only by strengthening their soul to the point of being able to overpower their former superior. even other members of other Starlit Races can wind up enslaved this way.
Su'ikuri relations with the Eluthrai are, as a rule, extremely strained, and many small but high-energy wars have been fought between the Su'ikuruk Powers and the Corcordance.
a motivated and talented Su'ikutra can reach astropathic levels of psionic power with only a century of practice, something otherwise unheard of among the Starlit.
#### Usukwinya
(sg. Usukwinti, adj. Usuk)
the Usukwinya, known affectionately as the "Tradebirds", are a psionic avian race. their adults range in height from 1 to 1.3m, and 20-30kg in weight. they lack precise manipulatory appendages and are physically weak, forcing them to rely heavily on their psionics for everyday dasks. however, they remain fully capable of flight even without psionic assistance.
culturally, the Usukwinya are a mercantile race. they exert their power not through physical force, but through obscene wealth, garnered by selling their painstakingly [^drm value-engineered] technologies to the highest bidder. some rare few Usukwinya will also rent out their psionics, even to the Lesser Races (if they can afford their prodigious fees).
drm: Usukwinya DRM is some of the most powerful in the Reach.
the enthusiastic capitalism of the Usukwinya is tempered by a hardwired loyalty drive so powerful that before First Contact they had no concept of contract law. they are also noteworthy for having never fought a war among themselves, and seem utterly unwilling to resort to force unless physically provoked. their governments all work diligently to maintain peace among the other races, and the somewhat absurd spectacle of a Starlit diplomat gently negotiating with two hysterical Lesser ambassadors tends to crop up when two factions the Usukwinya have good relationships with threaten war on one another. (the Eluthrai find this patently ridiculous, and prefer to maintain peace with a judicious application of preventive violence. several Usukwinya-organized peace conferences have dissolved when the Eluthrai summarily shattered the offending governments without a note of forewarning.)
their willingness to trade with or work for anyone and everyone mean that the Usukwinya are the main reason the Lesser Races have any ability to travel beyond the Great Web. however, Usuk astropaths are very selective: they will not use their powers to help their employers to commit acts of aggression, no matter how much you offer to pay them. many human captains chafe under the restrictions of their Tradebird astropaths, but short of relativistic travel, they have no other way to escape the confines of the Web.
Usukwinya get along with everyone and make excellent diplomats, so long as they can restrain their urge to make a quick profit at the first available opportunity.
#### Eluthrai
(sg. Eluthra)
the greatest and most aloof of the living Starlit races, the Eluthrai are a race of psionic warrior-poets. they are slim humanoids with subtly iridescent dark grey skin, lustrous white hair, red~violet eyes, and tapered, expressive ears. they are very few in number, with no more than ten thousand Eluthrai in the entire galaxy. it is popularly said, not without some reason, that the only reason the Eluthrai haven't conquered that entire galaxy is because they don't care to.
natural immortals with a very low reproduction rate, the Eluthrai all have an exceptionally long-term worldview that frequently confounds mortal morals. little about them is known for certain, and they interact openly with the non-Starlit very rarely, usually to deliver some form of unforeseen intervention that they typically refuse to explain.
the Eluthrai see themselves as the masters of the Thinking Few, and spare no expense in ensuring they maintain their position. to them, the Great Web is a garden, a place to be tended carefully and protected from the storms outside. their civilization is dedicated to combatting extra-Web threats -- in particular, guarding against the possible return of the Forevanishers. they have cultivated a strong & highly spiritual warrior ethos in consequence
within the Web itself, they mostly by clandestine means, using "Agents" selected from the Greater (and, occasionally, Lesser) Races to act on their behalf. in general they act directly only when overwhelming force is required, such as to exclude the Kuradoqshe, or to excise Suldibrand.
it is known that the Eluthrai are of great intelligence: a 200pt IQ makes you a laughable simpleton in their eyes. it is estimated that the average individual has an IQ of 290, close to the theoretical maximum where organized intelligence dissolves into a sea of blinding psychosis. consequently, they are very conservative and cautious of new ideas; their culture emphasises skepticism and avoiding rash action.
early Eluthran history was extremely warlike, and they could have easily devastated the whole of the Reach in their fanatical pursuit of competing ideologies. however, a philosophical tradition emerged from the rubble of a particularly ruinous exchange that offered the correct tools for neutering the more dangerous aspects of their intelligence -- after the centuries proved its value, the Philosophers exterminated all the remaining Eluthrai who had not adopted their practices. it was a coldblooded but rational act of genocide: an individual Eluthra is intelligent enough to bootstrap an industrial civilization from first principles with a few years of effort. an entire civilization of them, devoid of self-control? that wasn't merely a threat to the Philosophers; it was a threat to the Galaxy entire.
the Eluthrai have a single common language, Eluthric, which they use in interstellar discourse and in the sciences. however, the different far-flung colonies have their own individual tongues as well. Eluthric has the largest vocabulary of any known language, with over twenty million words. an Eluthra who hasn't learned at least a million of them by adolescence is deemed slow.
they have developed very slowly since the Philosophers came to power, but were already so advanced that nobody is expected to exceed them any time soon.
Eluthran civilization is united under the rule of the Philosopher-King, an enlightened despot with unrestricted power, in a complex web of fealty and patronage collectively named the Corcordance of the Eluthrai. while the First Philosopher died tens of thousands of years ago, he had the foresight to prepare a successor to take his place in case of his assassination or ill-fortune. in all those years, power has changed hands only three times. the current Philosopher-King has ruled for eight thousand years.
Eluthrai have two genders, and dramatic dimorphism. their women are much more intelligent than their men, and proportionately more prone to psychosis. traditionally most of their societies were matriarchal -- with the brains and psionic brawn to overpower the males, there was very little that could keep the Clan-Queens from exerting their will. the First Philosopher recognized however that the lesser intelligence of men was useful, due to their stabler psyches, and proposed patriarchy as part of his solution. this was made possible through a previously obscure psionic technique known as quelling -- with enough intimate exposure to the soul of another, it becomes possible to negate their psionics, even if that psion is stronger.
among the modern Concordant Eluthrai, a female's mate is expected to be capable of quelling her psionics. female Eluthrai generally cooperate with the practice; it is difficult to learn to quell someone who actively tries to stymie you. it is widely understood, however, that the female sex will only cooperate so long as their men rule wisely: in a celebrated case on a far-flung world where the men began to take too many liberties, the women carefully organized to overpower one another's mates and instituted a compensatory subjugation of the local males for a proportionate period, which the Philosopher-King himself agreed was the just and proper punishment.
Eluthran technology can be tidily summarized as "uncompromising." the Eluthrai demand excellence from their machines as much as one another, and will happily incur absurd expense to eliminate the smallest flaw. languishing for thousands of years of under such attentions, abetted by the most ferocious living intelligence to be found in the Reach, has created a technological ecosystem that is succeeded in its phenomenal capabilities only by its preposterous expense. an Eluthran computer requires about ten times the time and a hundred times the energy input to fabricate as does a conventional human computer, despite the vast gulf in manufacturing capabilities, but you can be [!damn] sure it'll still be working in ten million years' time.
they enjoy a post-scarcity economy that is the envy of even the other Starlit.
very few of the Greater Races, and vanishingly few of the Lesser Races, have ever had the opportunity to visit an Eluthran world. they admit only their mysterious Agents and the occasional individual subjected to penal servitude for some great crime against the interests of "the Garden".
while even their females are not nearly the psionic match of the Su'ikuri, they are nonetheless vastly powerful. their psionics are not as seamlessly integrated into their nervous system as in Usuk neurology, and deploying their power is consequently more effortful, requiring some concentration and intent, but they can bring far more energy to bear. where the Usukwinya have finesse and the Su'ikuri have brute power, the Eluthrai have technique: they can do things with their psionics that the other races never would have imagined possible.
the Eluthrai put a great deal of effort into foremodeling the universe, seeking to predict future events and trends. their models are far from infallible, but reliable enough that some supersitious Lessers have come to believe that Eluthran psionics can be used to see the future. intelligence-gathering is in the modern era the prime industry of that exalted race, second only to warfare.
### Forevanished Ones
#### Forevanishers
a mysterious race or power thought to be responsible for exterminating a number of Forevanished Ones. no one knows for sure that they have themselves Vanished -- for all we know, they could be one of the contemporary Powers…
#### firstborn
the architects of the Great Web, the Firstborn were the first civilization of which traces remain within the Reach. their psionic and scientific mastery, developed over ten million years of energetic industry, reached heights even the greatest of the modern Starlit Races cannot hope to equal. while their Continuum Bridges form the backbone of the Lesser civilizations, little else of their manufacture seems to have survived into the present era.
practically every trace of their existence that does remain is scored with weaponsfire.
the artifact which tore an external channel into the player's soul in the backstory is of Firstborn design and uncertain purpose. Commune scholars had hitherto ascertained only that it was a machine seemingly able to produce psionic effects -- something that [!should] have been a contradiction in terms.
! possible plot: the Firstborn devised a means to produce psionic effects with carefully cultured neurons embedded in a mechanical matrix. essentially creating slaved psionic AI dedicated to a single purpose. while these rudimentary consciousnesses, barely fit to called souls, did not suffer, some other race or perhaps a faction among the Firstborn seems to have taken exception to the practice of trapping souls in metal, outside the thread of reincarnation, and exterminated the civilization to prevent its heresy.
! if this was a real proper AAA game the player would face some epic choice to release the secret and free the Lesser Races (or a subset of them) from the dominion of the Starlit, turning psionics into a mere commodity; keeping the secret but placing her power at the disposal of the Commune (or Empire, in return for elevation to the ranks of nobility); or joining the Eluthrai as an honorary citizen in recompense for keeping the secret. alas, i don't have a budget.
## psionics
the ability of the soul to extend its will beyond the confines of its substrate. this power is technically defined as the presence of one or more external psionic channels in the structure of the soul. such a channel allows the soul to direct excess numina into other souls or into the numon field of the physical universe.
the delicate interlink between soul and body relies on quantum phenomena, and only carbon-based life seems able to maintain such a link. silicon-based intelligence is at most a simulacrum of true thought.
### farspeakers
the most powerful psions among the Greater Races, the Farspeakers can extend their mentality across light-years of space, providing FTL comms. such long-range comms require a bonded psion on the receiving end, and cannot feasible reach much beyond a parsec; consequently, long-range FTL communication requires complex networks of bonding.
### astropaths
the greatest -- and rarest -- of all Starsouls, astropaths can, with technological assistance, manipulate and direct so much numina that they can perform metric conjunction across light-years of distance. a single astropath usually requires a week or more to recover from a fold and regain enough power to perform another, though the greatest Su'ikuri astropaths require only a few days.
## culture
the Galaxy is an intensely cosmopolitan place. while a few of the Lesser Races keep to themselves, most intermix to varying degrees. this is largely necessary due to the intense specialization of most races. there are some tasks a Qir cannot undertake without the help (however grudging) of a Kruthandi, and vice-versa. before humans burst onto the scene, rescued by the Qir from a state of savagery on a long-lost Webworld, most scientific advances and engineering breakthrough were a result of either Eluthran super-science or scholars of multiple races working together.
### faith
faith is at once fantastically diverse and largely uniform. certain ancient customs are universally acknowledged: even the barbarian humans remembered the Wild Gods (and had fallen so low as to begin worshipping them, in hope of appeasing them and forestalling their wrath). there are two broad "schools" of faith: one, by far the most common, is syncretic and idiosyncratic, with the believer mixing and matching customs, notions, and gods from wherever they might travel, sincerely if awkwardly celebrating alien festivities as their own, and generally Doing In Rome. the other is the religious school: the undertaking of a singular exclusive religio-philosophical system, and reserving one's devotion exclusively to that. the Religious, as opposed to the Faithful, are often scorned for denying the Gods of the Faith, though in truth most are henotheistic in their approach.
an important distinction is that between the Gods of the Faith and the Wild Gods. the former are the subjects of both organized and disorganized religion, worshipped and plied with incense and sacrifices. the Gods of the Faith are the civilized divinities, who first bestowed thought and reason upon the Thinking Few, and it was only by their grace that we rose from the dream of subsophonce. they are tutelary powers, often of a particular place or science, and they are deeply involved in the affairs and fates of Men. they are the Gods of the Harvest, of War and of Peace, of Computation and Cybernetics. they are beloved, oft invoked, and much celebrated.
the Wild Gods, by contrast, are the animin powers, the temperamental personifications of nature in its varied aspects. these are the Gods of the Storm, of the Sun, of Lust and Beauty, of Life Itself, of Gravity & the Weak Electric Force. they are the far greater of the divinities, powers incomprehensible even the Gods of the Faith, and their whim is utterly unpredictable. there is no point to the organized worship of them; indeed, one turns only to the Wild Gods in the lowest of desperation, undertaking great acts of sacrifice in the hope of attracting their attention and mercy for the briefest of moments in which to regroup. rather, they are objects of awe, inspiration, and terror. one builds shrines to the Gods of the Faith in hopes of attracting their blessing; one builds shrines to the Wild Gods to ward away their temper. they are invoked only in moments of rage, terror, passion, or sublime awe. to seek connection with them, as some rare few do -- mostly artists and weary, tortured souls -- is a spiritual endeavor, not a religious one, the undertaking of oblivion and dissolution, to lose oneself in the depths of power and passion, and dance among the storm. there is nothing in the universe so powerful, so dangerous, majestic, or beautiful as the Wild Gods: they are truly beyond all knowing.
it is of note that atheism is a singularly scorned and rare tendency. even the Eluthrai honor the Gods, even if the Lesser Races might be inclined to account them on the same level.