Homebrew Spelljammer Faction: The Telleril Conclave
A little expansion, some worldbuilding, for one of the concepts in this post. The spacefaring biodomes of the Telleril Druid Conclave:
Standing on the deck of your vessel, you see a glimmer of light in the distance, a gleam of starshine. As you move closer, a shape begins to resolve itself from amongst the void and stars. A vast, crystalline dome, close to a mile in diameter, the light of stars caressing its surface as it rotates. Inside, for it is translucent, almost transparent in places, you see light, and what looks like a landscape, a carpet of white and grey shadows. Beneath it, a dagger of rock, grey and glistening, pockmarked and scored by aeons among the asteroids and meteors of wildspace. It looks as if, once upon a time, some titanic force seized hold of the dome and all the rock beneath it and ripped it, whole and of a piece, from a planet’s surface. Tore it up, a jewel from its setting, and flung it out into the void to sail among the stars.
This is, of course, almost exactly what happened. Once, aeons ago. For what you see before you is Frostfound, the first and most ancient of the druid domes of the Telleril Conclave. Telleril was a world. Telleril is a world no more. The dome you see before you is one of the last, preserved remnants of that long-lost, shattered realm. A jewel among the stars. A living monument to what was lost.
Frostfound, of the Telleril Conclave.
The Telleril Conclave
The Telleril Conclave is both the collective name for the druid domes of the destroyed world of Telleril, and the name of the great meeting where all the surviving domes gather together in the Astral Sea. The timing of the conclave is complicated by the farflung locations of the domes sailing through wildspace and the Astral Sea, and is calculated based on a series of omens by the Quilak druids of the Frostfound dome and communicated to the other domes by some strange means that they are extremely careful not to reveal to outsiders. It is considered to happen ‘once a century’ by common knowledge, but whose century is anyone’s guess, although likelihood suggests Telleril’s.
The Conclave was created for the purpose of preserving as much of the natural world of Telleril as the druids could, against a looming cataclysm that they sensed coming. Each dome was forged by a titanic druidic working, their full circle working together, and contains a shard of Telleril’s surface, a discrete environment in which to preserve the nature, life and magic of the world.
Some of these domes are better known, more commonly encountered, than others. Frostfound, the icy tundra dome, cared for by the Quilak druids of the Circle of the Stars, whose study of omens first identified the vast terror among the stars that sought to lay waste to their world. Glorollon, a sphere of ocean and a fragment of rocky island encapsulated in a fully spherical dome. Istacan, the most vibrant of the domes, full of the verdant jungle life of Telleril’s humid equator, and prowled by the Circle of the Moon druids of the Txachatchi Circle. Tchimillil, guided by the Circle of Spores, whose black obsidian dome is perfectly opaque, shielding the fungal forests and raw stone of Telleril’s ancient heart.
Others have vanished, even from the Conclave itself, and are feared lost or destroyed. Baralatan, called the Eyrie, a vast oval dome holding the full height of Mount Soruhsaran, what was once the tallest peak on Telleril. This dome, perhaps the single largest of the Conclave, has not been seen in aeons. There are many rumours of what fate befell it, from the tales that it passed through a colour pool in the Astral Sea into the Hells or the Elemental Plane of Air, to the more fearsome stories that the Doom of Telleril itself, that malevolent, ravenous star, has finally begun tracking down the pieces of the world that were stolen from it, and destroying them one by one.
The Doom of Telleril is the most ancient enemy of the Conclave. An entity of the Far Realm, the Doom is a dark star, a monstrous hungering light that traverses the planes in search of ripe, ancient worlds, full of life and magic for it to devour. Most worlds never see it coming, a mote of light in their skies that becomes ever so incrementally larger over aeons as it drifts ever closer, as it reaches out with incomprehensibly vast tendrils of inky star matter to guide their world gently and inexorably into its maw. By the time it is close enough to cause alarm, thousands and thousands of years after it has first marked its prey, it is almost always too late. Though it may take centuries more to finally devour them, no world can escape its vast arms and hungering maw intact. It was only a truly ancient study of the stars, and the aid of a great crystal dragon sage, that allowed the Quilak Circle to see the omens in time to salvage as much of Telleril as they did.
The Conclave has not forgotten this most ancient and cataclysmic of their enemies. Nor, they greatly fear, has the Doom forgotten them. One of the many purposes of the domes, in this new life they have forged for themselves among the stars, is to search for omens and signs of the Doom’s passing, and hints of its future prey. The Conclave seeks to protect other worlds, to keep them from falling as Telleril did. Or, should they come too late, to teach the druids of other worlds the means to raise their own domes to the stars. Not all of the Conclave’s domes are Telleril’s any longer. The remnants of two other worlds find their place among them now.
And then there are Telleril’s Children. The place of these smaller, more artificial domes among the Conclave is debated at best, but they gather along with all the others, and vociferously argue their right to attend, such that they have not yet been forbidden entry to the Conclave.
It was argued, you see, that the domes of the Conclave had become stagnant. Fossilised, frozen in time. Their purpose was to preserve the life and environments of a lost world, but it is not nature’s way to stand still and remain forever unchanged. Over time, some of the druids of the Conclave’s many circles became uneasy with the Conclave’s purpose, viewing it as an unnatural attempt to prevent nature from healing, changing, and moving on. Nature, they said, was not a museum display, but an ever-living, ever-changing process. To keep the environments of long-lost Telleril forever pristine, forever unchanged, was unnatural to them. They argued that the domes should embrace new life, the life of other worlds, and allow it to influence and expand the life of the domes, representing Telleril’s new life among the stars. It would not dishonour the memory of their world, they said, to show how her remnants had adapted, changed and sprouted again among the stars.
The schism that resulted nearly destroyed the Conclave in a way that even the Doom had not. For some, particularly among the domes that had sailed mostly the Astral Sea, outside of time, and thus still remembered Telleril’s loss as freshly as the day they were flung to the stars, the thought of allowing those tiny fragments they had preserved to be changed and warped by other worlds very much was a dishonouring of her memory. To lose that tiny fragment, to allow it to be taken and changed and absorbed into the shadow of other, still-living worlds, as though Telleril herself had never existed, never held her own, was anathema. Nature healed, yes, nature changed, nature moved on, but the domes could do that by themselves. The environs of Old Telleril could change under the magic of starlight and wildspace without ever allowing other worlds to colonise her. Even the suggestion of doing otherwise was violently resisted among them.
For several centuries, the Conclave threatened to fracture between these two ideologies. Anger, grief, hope and outrage boiled beneath the crystalline shields of the domes. Finally, a compromise was offered. The creation of new domes, Telleril’s Children, where her life could mix and mingle freely with the life of the stars, while the original domes, those who still clung to the stone of Telleril’s skin, would keep her memory as pure as possible within their confines, with only their own environs to influence the change and growth of Telleril’s seeds.
The domes of Telleril’s Children are, generally, smaller. More purpose-built. They were created among the stars, having never touched the rock of a world. They are experimental gardens, new and strange environments where the seeds of many worlds mix and mingle under the guidance of the magic of Old Telleril. Their place among the Conclave is, even still, hotly contested, and old hatreds for them run deep in certain circles. But they hold their place, even still. They grow, and spread, and build, in ways that the Old Conclave cannot. And they still hold sacred, in their own way, the memory of lost Telleril.
All of these, old domes and new, gather once a century for the Conclave. They come from wherever they have roamed, from the depths of the Astral Sea, from wildspace, from the orbits of other worlds. They bring each other news, magic, word of the Doom. They shepherd the survivors of newly-lost worlds. They trade magic, seeds, knowledge, hope. People. They send those of their inhabitants better suited to another dome across to each other. They meet old friends, and argue with old enemies. They preserve memory, and encourage growth.
They are the domes of the Telleril Conclave. They are the last remnants of a destroyed world, and the seeds of many new ones. They keep the lives and memories of what was lost alive.
If you encounter one of them, in the voids of wildspace, or sailing the vast silver expanse of the Astral Sea, perhaps you might pay your respects.