I think we’ve come as far as we can without talking about, perhaps, the most important figure for Charybdis: the leader of the revolt and the effective ruler of the world. We need to give him a name, and since we want to at least give a nod to the Haitian Revolution, we need a TL name for our first leader, so we’ll name him Therim Lathuja (Which, incidentally, translates to “the Calm Butcher”).
So, let’s walk through what we know, and what seems to naturally flow out of the setting we’ve described. In particular, we need to answer a question by Mavrick:
If he does (know Charybdis cannot last), you’ve got wonder what his plan looks like. I’d also accept the plan being raw, unfiltered delusion.
Mavrick
Let’s find out! Of course, it can still be delusion and you can certainly disagree with his political philosophy. After all, what we’re aiming at is not a political manifesto, but a fun and useful NPC and a building block for our “Pirate Planet.” But at least we can get a better sense of the man and his thought process.
So, we have our questions, lets offer some serious answers in the form of writing some history for the setting. We don’t need any particular “hard dates” (they’re rather arbitrary anyway, given how utterly fictional the rest of the setting’s history is), but we can at least align it with other historical events.
Lets do a quick historical summary of what the rest of this post will explore:
Initial Colonization: 2750 BDC (~3550 BD)
The Blood War and decline: 2650 BDC (3450 BD)
Third Tyranny Momentary Return to Relevance: 300-500 DC (700-500 BD)
First Redjack Outposts: 2800 DC (1800 AE)
Vechkian Conquest and Slave Colony 3260 DC (~2160 AE)
The first thing I do when I write up a world is write everything I know. We did that in the first step. Next, we can use systems or sources of inspiration, such as the Desert Moon of Karth or the GURPS Space systems to fill out the rest by extrapolating what we know. But it’s not finished. What’s next? It’s certainly not done. We’ve got lots of little holes, little absences, little problems that need to be solved. The next step is to catalog those questions. We don’t need to answer them! We could, if we wanted or if they’re somewhat obvious, and they often are, but the real idea is to get those questions out on paper. My experience is once you’ve articulated your problems, your mind will start chewing on them automatically (in an especially neat trick, your brain will do this as you sleep, which is why a lot of creatives will say they need to “sleep on it.”). So let’s just focus on articulating some of these questions and we’ll worry about answering them in fine detail later.
Now that we’ve worked out the GURPS Space level of world details for the Blood Moon, we can jump to the population calculations to get a rough picture of what the world might look like. Or have we? I went back to look at those numbers to dutifully write them all down in one place, and I ran into some issues (bad calculations) and some revelations. Plus my readers had some feedback and I’d like to integrate that here. So first things first, some revisions, and then we’ll dive into the population itself.
Orbital Revisions
RED!
So it’s a red moon orbiting a red gas giant orbiting a red star?
Mavrick
The universe likes red as much as I do! But no, I tend to imagine Charybdis, the gas giant, as a deep, coal black with perhaps some occasional red clouds, like the embers on a coal. This was based on a report I read of an exoplant “hot jupiter” with the lowest albedo ever discovered. So it’s a red moon orbiting a black gas giant orbiting a red star.
Rings
I’m surprised you didn’t go with rings; make for an awesome album cover
Mavrick
That might seem like a facile argument, but it’s not! The Umbral Rim should absolutely fee like a bunch of Heavy Metal album covers. “Pretty” Rings are improbable, though, because those tend to be made of ice and we’re too close in for a lot of ice to form. We could have dust or rock rings, though, but they wouldn’t be especially visible. We can lie/cheat though. That said, there may be a better option here.
Revised Orbital Mechanics and Planet Details
There are a couple of problems with Charbdis as I defined it. First, it turns out some of the climate figures were wrong, and Charybdis needs to be a bit further away to be cold enough to be tolerable. I’d also like to add some light pollutants, given how volcanic and heavily resourced the world is. Nothing too bad; you could wander around without a mask at all for days, even weeks, without dying, it’s just not a great idea.
The second problem started with the name: why is it called Charybdis? Well, we can say it has a Lithian name that sort of sounds like it (Kuriburi) but it would make more sense if the world resembled Charybdis, no? I mean, the real reason is it sounded cool when I named it, but it suggests there’s a “Scylla” and they’re both difficult to navigate taken together. This expands on the idea that Charybdis is less of a world than it is a system. So we need to tweak the system a little
So, in place of the tiny world, there’s an even more eccentric gas giant one orbit in. It’s got no habitable moons, and let’s make it red, gold and orange, like it’s on fire. It has an extensive, rocky ring with perhaps some dark dust rings strewn through it. We can give Charybdis a dark dust ring as well. The two gas giants are huge, though Charybdis is by far the largest, and it makes navigating the system difficult unless you know what you’re doing. This might explain why it was colonized “so late,” and may help explain one of the bigger questions of the system: “Why RedJack?” Perhaps they had the knowledge necessary to land ships there, and did so at the behest of the Oligarchy, before the Slaver war.
We can keep the rest of the worlds, and we can make up some names. For Charybdis, we’ll call it “Kuriburi” which is a nonsense word that roughly translates to “Dead Power” but Charybdis has no etymology that I could find, so it might be a mythical name. “Scylla” is Skalafre, which is bad Lithian, but not crazy bad; it means something dragon; nothing really has a “ska” construction in Lithian, except in the midst of compound words, which suggests it was something else (like Saskalafre) and the first syllable was dropped. The ice world will be Izelinnippa, which could be called “Ice Prison,” but gets called Purgatory instead. The star is Rikhalitha, the Forge Star, and I have no names for the Gas Giants or asteroid belts; it might be nice to name at least one of the belts. The new structure is something like this:
Name
AU
Type
Diameter
Gravity
Atmosphere
Climate
0.2
Asteroids
Infernal (944)
0.4
Asteroids
Infernal (667)
Scylla (Skalafre)
1.15
Large Gas Giant
16M mi
Infernal (394)
Charybdis (Kuriburi)
2.25
Large Gas Giant
20M mi
Warm
Blood Moon (Nilia Dehan)
—
Standard Garden
5150
0.9
Thin, Mildy Toxic
Warm (270-330)
Purgatory ( Izelinnipa)
4.6
Standard (Ice)
6750
1
Low Oxygen
Frozen (210)
8.3
Asteroids
Frozen (166)
15
Asteroids
Frozen (117)
27
Small Gas Giant
190k mi
Frozen
48
Small Gas Giant
375k mi
Frozen
Purgatory
This world was rather interesting, but I’ve just given it a sketch so far, so let’s toss on some additional details. It’s a “standard ice world” which means its unbreathable, but I’ve instead made it breathable but with low oxygen. So it’s still mostly nitrogen and carbon dioxide, but there’s just enough oxygen that you can breath it with some struggle, therefore you won’t instantly die if you escape a prison on the world without a rebreather, even though you’ll probably freeze to death.
It’s cold, though not instantly lethal. It averages -80° F, which is -8 to HT rolls. That means the average person with no appropriate clothes will fail every roll, and so will lose consciousness, at best, in about 5 hours. If there’s a wind (and there’s plenty of atmosphere for wind), it’ll be faster, as fast as 2.5 hours, or even just over an hour. A heated suit makes it tolerable, at HT+2, but that’s still a possibility of failure for the average person. Of course, the temperature can get worse at night or in “winter.” But it can get “Better,” in “day” or “Summer.” Fun fact! The temperature is right at the sublimation point of dry ice! That means you can get carbon dioxide “snowing” or “ice” in winter, and those carbon dioxide “ice flows” will evaporate in day or summer, which implies a lot of cold mist and eerie fogs.
What role does Purgatory serve in the system? Well, my guess is early explorers couldn’t handle the nuanced gravitational interactions of Scylla and Charybdis and so a common outcome would be to get slingshot towards the ice world, and so a collection of frozen, dead ships accumulated at some spots. After the colonization of the system, it turned into a prison, and it’s still used as a place of exile. Some rough numbers let us put it as roughly Earthlike in size: 0.85 earth diameters (6750 miles), with a gravity of 1.02. For habitability, we’re looking at a +4 with no resource bonus, so slightly less habitable than the Bloodmoon, but less desirable.
Social Parameters
Finally, we can start looking at the population.
Step 8: Settlement Type
We’ll treat it as a recent Colony. You could make an argument for Outpost, but I think the plan was to have tons of slaves there to mine it.
Step 9: Technology Level
The Blood Moon, by some means, is more advanced than the rest of the Umbral Rim. It’s a solid TL 11.
Step 10: Population
So after some revisions, the Affinity of the Blood Moon is +6, and Purgatory is +4. The maximum carrying capacity of the whole system is 1.5 billion, but I don’t think we’ll come anywhere near that.
How old is the colony? It could be ancient, but let’s say it was colonized in earnest in the build-up to the Slaver war. The great warlord Vechkotai needed more resources for his warmachine and found a way to colonize it. This puts the age at around 100 years, probably a little bit longer, but not older than 150 years. Using the standard rules, we come to between about 130,000 to 4 million on the Blood Moon, and 30,000 to 1 million on Purgatory. We should lean heavily towards the lower numbers, though, for a few reasons. First, these numbers assume maximum colonization time. Second, this probably had a higher death rate than replacement rate. Third, this isn’t Wilwatikta; they had access to FTL, so people could and did just leave when they got the chance. I see it as a major port of call, rather than an isolated world. So let’s say 500,000 max, with about 450,000 on the Bloodmoon, and 50,000 on Purgatory. That seems small, and it is, but it’s about the population of Haiti during the 18th century (we’ll come back to Haiti and why it’s important for Charybdis later), and it’s about the size of a large city, which is frankly what the Blood Moon is going to look like. I doubt you have lots of scattered settlements all over a volcanic, irradiated rock. That said, given the freedom of the world, I could see lots of refugees and immigrants flooding into the system, but they’re under the threat of the Oligarchy, so maybe people would wait and see.
This is a PR of 5.
Step 11: Society Type
We have to pick a world government, and we’re going to go with World Government (Special Condition: Sanctuary). For a specific government, there can be nothing other than Anarchy!
So here’s the justification. They just liberated themselves recently, a decade or less, and we’re going to go with a quite optimistic take on the aftermath of a successful revolution and say they’re all quite united in the idea of what they want to do, which is whatever they want to do. It’s the Psi-Wars Tortuga, so there’s no real laws, just whatever traditions and sentiments they’ve built up. It’s a pirate-state, where everyone can just agree on the same rough ideas without needing a government to enforce it. Where there are hard rules, it tends to resemble a diffuse set of either Athenian democracies and dictatorships, as each “pirate crew” has their own bylaws.
Is this a stable situation? No. At some point, someone will accumulate enough power, or factions will become too divergent, to coexist in some sort of continuous “gentleman’s agreement.” However, I think for now, there’s going to be one larger-than-life personality, a sort of “Pirate king” who keeps this tendency in check. If anyone were to become the ruler of the world, if anyone could be said to be a ruler of the world, it would be him. And he favors anarchy and enforces this idea of the gentleman’s agreement, the pirate’s code, with sufficient force of personality, that the rest of the world accepts it for now.
But we’re catching this world at a highly specific moment, a high point in its history. It’s either going to continue with its wild success and become the seed crystal for an interstellar empire that will need an emperor and a bureaucracy to function or, more likely, it will collapse in on itself and a harder government will arise out of the factional strife. Either way, this will likely be looked upon as a “golden age” compared to whatever comes after.
Step 12: Control Rating
CR 0, obviously. Can you carry military-grade weapons around openly in the street? You’re damn right you can! What’s to stop you from using it? The other guys carrying military-grade weapons! And the code. Though I think there’s an attitude that violence is fun and ordinary, and so brawls escalate quickly into small scale gangwars and it’s all “fun and games” and only when it gets out of hand are there calls for duels and arbitration. Imagine something like a cross between Somalia, gang-land Chicago, the Klingons and Orks from 40k.
Step 13: Economics
Ugh, I hate the economics step. So much of it is bunk. Let’s do economic modifiers from GURPS Spaceships 2 (Page 36) instead! There’s no hard and fast rules, but we can apply some common sense. There’s not a lot of farmland, so it’s obviously not Agricultural. As Extreme worlds go, it’s pretty habitable, though I’d rate it as less habitable than Wilwatikta by a good margin and I think I classified that world as Extreme, and Charybdans definitely wear protective gear when out and about, so it applies. It’s definitly Industrial. The whole point is to mine resources and turn them into ships. They’re the smallest little industrial powerhouse in the Umbral Rim. They’re also fighting a war or, when they’re not doing that, they’re raiding, so they’re Militarized. Their lack of food production is a real threat, so they’re Non-Agricultural. They can’t be industrial and non-industrial,so they’re not non-industrial. Are they rich or poor? You could make a case either way, though they’ve been very successful in raiding and they’ve probably got a lot of treasure. I lean more towards Rich than Poor, but I’m not sure if the wealth is evenly distributed enough to qualify as Rich. It’s definitley on the up-and-up, at least for now.
So, that means we have the Extreme, Industrial, Militarized and Non-Agricultural modifiers.
Step 14: Bases and Installations
Moving on, obviously we have a space port. Now, according to the rules, we should expect no more than Class III facilities. However, I expect this to be capable of manufacture of ships up to at least the Kodiak Class. Obviously, this place was designed to be a major military shipyard for the Vechkian Oligarchy and the revolting slaves inherited it, which is part of the problem. Imagine if a slave revolt in the US had captured Pearl Harbor and also lots of the carriers, fighters and battleships. I’m not sure if a Class IV space port would cover it; if not, it’s Class V. GURPS Spaceships 6 suggests a Class IV port could service up to SM+11 ships, so some major capital class ships, which covers a Kodiak, but if the intention was to build Maulers (SM+12) we’d want Class V, so what the heck, it’s Class V! Scary.
As for Major Installations:
An Alien Enclave is a no-brainer, given the cosmopolitan make-up of the Umbral Rim, paired with the total freedom and financial success of Charybdis. They probably have races of all sorts. So what sort of races would we most likely see? Well, I see Ranathim as the dominant race. Perhaps they were the slaves most heavily imported. Gaunt make a lot of sense too, given the harsh conditions, but I’m not sure they have Gaunt vats on Charybdis or not. Keverlings would also fit, and their inclusion might help explain why the Ranathim were able to fight their way to freedom. And there are almost certainly Slavers on Charybdis, but I expect they are almost certainly, universally, all slaves. Turnabout, after all, is fair play. But the most interesting option might be a human enclave. Someone is handling all of this Redjack tech, and making all of these human names after all!
Black Market: well, it’s CR0, so technically it’s just “a market” but yeah, you can certainly buy whatever you want here, especially if you don’t mind it falling off the back of a truck. Definitely a major weapons market but there’s also likely a slave market despite the history, a concept we’ll return to later.
Colonial Office: No, not anymore. But they probably had one in the past. There’s likely a palace where the Slaver lord controlled the colony at the behest of the Oligarchy. Our heroic Pirate King now rules from there, mostly likely, with the former governor as his caged pet.
Corporate Headquarters: This is a major Redjack base in the Umbral Rim. I’m not sure I’d call it a full headquarters, but you’ve got a major branch here.
Pirate Base: Again, it’s CR0, so it’s just “a base,” but I expect there are several different pirate fleets that have major facilities on this world.
Prison: Purgatory was one a major prison, and it might still be used as such, but I think it’s better to call it a former prison.
Refugee Camp: The Pirates of Charybdis do two things that bring people in: first, they wage war on the Oligarchy and liberate worlds, so surely people fleeing slavery flock to Charybdis, but also, they raid worlds and drag the slaves back to the market on Charybdis. I’m not sure where that leaves the idea of a refugee camp, but I think given the relatively prosperity of the world, and the different character of the slavery there, I think people in the oligarchy might see the risks of being enslaved by a romantic pirate is worth escaping the clutches of disgusting Slavers.
Religious Center: This is a major center of a branch of Domen Sonostrum, so there’s absolutely a temple on the world, and a sacred gladiatorial arena.
Conclusion
And with that, we’ve completed the planetary generation system. From here, we’re onto Mailanka’s patented fractals and general creation approach. But I think we have a pretty good idea of what the world looks like now, at least, enough to serve our purposes further down the line.
One of the reasons I was drawn to working on Charybdis so early is its unusual astronomical features. Instead of being a humdrum planet in a humdrum system, it’s the habitable moon of a “Hot Jupiter” gas giant, or at least that was the original premise. We may have to change some of that, but I still find the premise fascinating.
My fascination was further piqued when I found the Desert Moon of Karth, which is a neat book, though not as useful as I hoped. Still, we can see what we can pillage from it, and what we must make from scratch.
GURPS Space gives us a lot of material to work with, but let’s see if we can answer some basic questions: how plausible is our habitable moon? How habitable is it? How do habitable moons even work, and what does that say about the rest of the system?
While Wilwatikta languishes in complexity hell, I’m aware that people will still use my notes on my blog, so while it’s not ideal, I don’t need to let that slow me from exploring more worlds. In particular, though, I want to trim on some of the detail level and look at some more straightforward worlds, the sort of world that would fit just fine into GURPS Space Atlas, something like 500 to 1,000 words tops. Can Mailanka be that concise? Probably not! But we can try.
I’ve also resolved to run a poll once every three months, but I’m running out of ideas on things to poll for, so I centered on “I dunno, maybe another world?” Since I’m focused on the Umbral Rim right now I thought I’d focus the poll there, though after the Atlas update, there seems a lot of interest in focusing on the Glorian Rim. I might do that instead.
One of the other worlds I’ve seen requests for, and that I’m quite fond of myself, is the Blood Moon of Charybdis, which has a really snazzy name and so demands some additional detail. It’s also a world that, compared to worlds like Wilwatikta, are pretty normal. We expect people to travel there by spaceship, interact with local factions, by some tech, get a quest, and then jet off again. We don’t expect it to be the major center of an entire campaign the way Wilwatikta could be. Of course, we could expand it in that direction, but let’s try to keep it trim enough that a 500-1000 word entry would at least do it justice.
Mailanka's Musing 