Took a foray into logo design and decided to surprise my roommate with a logo for the website she's making for her ttrpg Prima-Materia. it's been a long time coming and I'm happy to have been part of the creation process for the past 3 years, every day she gets closer to releasing the game and her world building and ideas have been so fun and interesting to listen to, I have several years worth of memes i'll be able to make once she releases it!
this is for @girlcodedcreature creator and developer of @prima-materia-ttrpg
It is Lore time. Sit down and hearken to my tale of the planet who was once a god.
This particular story is about the planet Patek, and the little creatures which live on their current body. They are the first setting of Prima Materia, a character all their own, and a good case study of the core concepts that make Prima Materia tick. Those things in the background of a setting which are generally beyond mortal ken, invoked by the GM to make low level players marvel at the far-off absurdity and high level players cow in the terror of the unimaginable in front of them.
Patek, as a discreet consciousness, has existed for a very long time. Like most gods, their story begins before the end of the stelliferous period but not so far in the mires of history as to be as old as the universe itself. There are of course other gods like Patek, though they rarely cross each other's paths. One such god, which we will get to in a later post, is Ternak.
Many planets in Prima Materia also happen to be gods. This wasn't the case before the end of the stelliferous period; gods would flit around the universe as they pleased, mucking about in the affairs of other species. They were the cause of great acts of malice and benevolence alike, sometimes depending on how they felt on a particular day. And before the gods were the gods, they were a space faring species. Before that, they evolved somewhere on a planet in the early days of the universe, but that was lost track of long ago.
Eventually, though, the dream ends. Once again, Patek and those like them were at the precipice of change, having watched the last stars in the universe begin to die. Collectively, they decided to mature, and created a last bastion against entropy in their home universe. They created new stars, and new bodies for themselves so they could always be nearby; acting as a lens to funnel Prima Materia into the stars as fuel to keep them burning. Perhaps most critically, turning themselves into planets also allowed for new life to evolve on their surfaces.
When Patek, or any god, sends Prima Materia to a star in this manner, they end up bathing the planet's surface in free-floating Prima Materia. This allows what most cultures would call magic, or Alchemy, to happen.
Many gods like to take on projects
Patek is no exception to this. They delight in the observation of new kinds of life, and have on occasion directly meddled with the genetics of some natural species on their surface just to see what would happen if, say, a large crustacean were smart enough to become sapient. Other times, they've looked into the annals of history and brought an old biological design out of retirement; such as when they decided to re-create a certain successful ape-like species that existed long ago.
Life has existed on Patek for quite some time now, facing many of the same hardships any other life would have earlier in the history of the universe. Life fills ecological niches, extinction events happen, and life re-fills those niches. With each epoch, Patek watches and tweaks things. We are all but humble stentors, and Patek is introducing carmine to our environment to measure our reaction.
Occasionally, Patek sends a piece of themself to incarnate on the surface. When this happens, the incarnation tends to have powers not seen in others, usually the ability to perform miracles or being blessed with long life. These incarnations almost always become large movers and shakers on the planet, completing conquests or becoming great philosophers as they become blessed with sacred knowledge from Patek themself. Their reason for creating incarnations of course is to gather experiences of what it's like to be born into the world, then review the memories once the incarnation dies and the bit of consciousness can be recalled. Sometimes when an incarnation needs help, Patek will send one of these bits of consciousness to talk with them, offering their experience and views on things.
Patek also creates Prophets, which are similar to incarnations in that Patek interacts with them; though they do not carry a piece of Patek within themselves. They can also perform miracles, but usually they're called on to meddle in things where Patek feels their direct influence would not help or not be nuanced enough to succeed.
Getting the lay of the land
Patek, as a planet, is a few degrees hotter than Earth is and slightly larger, with a wide range of flora and fauna across the entire surface. Some of those species of Fauna are sapient, and have their own myriad cultures, traditions, and civilizations.
All-in-all, most of Patek is fairly similar to Earth with jungles, forests, deserts, grasslands, tundras, and mountains. It's also mostly water, though storms tend to be a fair bit more powerful than on Earth thanks to the shape of continents and average temperatures.
Here is the current official map of Patek, with climates mapped out and continents named. I tried to make the continents more or less match up with what they would look like with as little distortion as possible if you were to look at the continent from orbit. Unfortunately, because it's not a Mercator projection that means it's kinda inaccurate; the most egregious example being Meridionalis actually sits over the south pole.
I so desperately want to explain everything about all the continents, what cultures are where, how species interact with each other and other things; but all in due time. They will get their own posts where I can talk about them in the detail they deserve later.
Thank you very much for reading this far. I'm working on combat mechanics at the moment, so if I get those done and tested by next week I'll write about that (unlikely, but possible). Otherwise, I'll write about some other crunch; Attributes and Skills and perhaps character creation.
Thanks to @donutboxers for the render of Patek. It is very cool and I'm using it as my computer background.
I just realized I never posted this but I guess I was waiting for my friends ttrpg to be officially public (it's still in the works but she is posting about the development)
this is one of my OCs for the ttrpg, a melekah (or rather half of a melekah), AT-AD 2338 (he/it)
I don't have a full story for him yet, but I do know that it's missing his legs and has been found in a dump and he'll soon have an exosuit it can use to walk once he learns how to be an artificer
Currently my friend @girlcodedcreature is working on the main book for @prima-materia-ttrpg which doesn't include the melekah since they're a moon species so I'm waiting for some more lore to be written about them before I finish his background :>
