Dev Diary 16 - Aquillians
Hello cosmonauts! Iâve been almost non-stop sick for three months which hasnât been great for progress, but this canât be delayed any further. Weâre going to try to do more frequent dev diaries again; next week Iâll do a diary on Meta-Campaign mechanics and the current state of character creation, but for now, itâs time to do some lore.
So, letâs talk the biggest alien species in Torchship, our local Space Elves, the Aquillians!
Aquillians are a diverse species of humanoids who superficially resemble, well, green-blooded elves, and theyâre very much inspired by taking a few of the greatest hits of sci-fi space elves and shuffling it all up. Torchship might be a deconstruction of a lot of common sci-fi tropes, but itâs also a reconstruction embracing fun ones along the way and wearing inspiration on our sleeves.
Though pretty human-looking on the surface, like all humanoids in Torchship, they look like that because of a mysterious process of directed evolution from very different routes. Humanityâs first inkling of just how dominated Local Space is by the mysterious forces of Star Gods and K2 civilizations was discovering an alien that looked just like them, but had totally different biochemistry, internal anatomy, and evolutionary history. The ancestors of Aquillians were gliding arboreal bird-like pack hunters, sent along the path to sapience by their increasingly complex social dynamics and changing climates on their relatively small, low-gravity homeworld. Flight proved less useful in lean times than dexterous hands and the intelligence to shape the massive, tangled trees into built environments.
Evidence of this ancestry is still present in their constant-volume unidirectional respiration system and energy-conserving metabolism (and fluffy protofeather hair). This is reflected through the only universal Aquillian Trait, which is also part of our new category of Evolutionary Origins Traits; everyone gets to pick one representing the evolutionary lag of their ancestral environment. (Most) Humans now get the Persistence Predator Trait, letting humans take more Strain before experiencing Fatigue penalties.
In contrast, the Efficient Metabolism Trait of the Aquillians allows them to avoid taking Strain on dice rolls if they succeed by a large enough margin; this encourages you to double-down on your specialities and lets you perform low-stress work more or less indefinitely. This was very handy for a species whose path to sapience involved becoming the galaxyâs best tree-pruners.
Aquillians are also generally encouraged to take the various Psychic traits. The thing about psychic powers in Torchship is that while theyâre not genetic, they are heritable, in that people raised by or around psychics tend to become psychics themselves. The widespread emergence of psychics is predicated on certain social conditions, but once itâs become widespread in a species itâs unlikely to fade. Thus, nearly all Aquillians possess some level of psychic potential simply because their species has been puttering around all the psychic weirdness of Local Space for so long.
Aquillians are the most widespread and populous species in Local Space by a considerable margin; theyâre either the primary species or a sizeable minority in multiple states and are otherwise generally present everywhere. One could make the serious argument that Local Space is defined by being the part of the galaxy thatâs Aquillian-majority, and when you come across an independent planet with faster-than-light travel and humanoid aliens, theyâre probably Aquillians of some description.
The reason for this is that the Aquillians have been around a very long while, and one way or another have been in a dominant position that entire time. Theyâve had FTL travel for forty thousand years, and for at least half the time an Aquillian political body has been either a great power or the undisputed regional superpower. The nature of this dominance has varied massively over time, but it most recently manifested as the Aquillian Empire.
If you listen to their propaganda, the Aquillian Empire was/is Local Spaceâs rightful heirs, existing for forty thousand years of unbroken and absolute rule. Under the guidance of wise Emperors, they did more to preserve interstellar civilization than anyone else with their ruthless enforcement of the Exploration Taboo, their rigid hierarchy of specialised castes and subordinate species, and the wonders of a massive, high-speed web of FTL beacons. They crushed the dangerous Argent Empire, drove the upstart Zinovians from their homeworld, and brought Pax Aquillia to the stars.
In reality, the Empire only existed for about fifteen hundred years, and they just claimed the entirety of their speciesâ spacefaring history; with total control over the presentation of their own history, it was kind of hard to call them out. 1500 years is still really impressive, as empires go, but it wasnât quite grand enough for the swelling egos of the ruling class. Itâs a bit like saying, âAs you can see, Sumer prevails!â while pointing at New York City.
The Aquillian Empire was well-known for their historic use of genetic engineering on both themselves and their enemies, which creates the settingâs taboo on genetic engineering that humans are in blatant violation of. For this reason, Aquillians in the Empire were changed considerably from the ancestral template, modified for life on heavier worlds; their capital isnât their mineral-poor, low-gravity homeworld, which is instead a bit of a sad backwater now. This gives the Imperial Aquillians and those derived from them the Downweller Gravity Trait, which is in-between the Freefaller Trait used by human spacers and the Heavyworlder Trait of Terrans; itâs the âaverageâ trait with no real strengths or weaknesses.
It also resulted in a degree of artificial phenotypical convergence, as waves of engineering were used to aesthetically modify sections of the species in-line with current fashions. This isnât universal, but the higher in the hierarchy you go, the more Aquillians tend to be tall, gaunt, and have desaturated skin and hair colours to match their self-reinforcing image of nobility.
The biggest consequence, however, is the clades. The Aquillian Empireâs power structure emerged from a caste structure inherited from one of their precursors, now entrenched with genetic engineering. Initially this was in the form of creating a large number of specialised subspecies for different tasks, but as the Empire grew in strength, automated more infrastructure, and acquired more and more vassals, the priority increasingly became engineering for control, outsourcing labour to client states and modifying their own population for compliance instead of productivity.
At the time the Empire fell, the many specialised groups had been condensed into three diverse Clades; the ruling Nobles, the ruthless Enforcers, and the mass of numbed Commoners, all with their own Traits.
The Nobles, or High Aquillians, are the highest Clade, forming a kind of industrialised aristocracy inside the Empire, acting as administrators, military leaders, governors, lawmakers, and scientists. Functionally immortal, fabulously wealthy, and relatively rare, the nobility have an agreement within their own ranks to only produce new Nobles for specific purposes in order to avoid diluting power or creating succession crises. This worked out fairly well historically, but has resulted in every major faction of the currently-simmering civil war in the Divine Empire cloning their own Ideal Monarch(s) for when they overthrow the upstart Empress and seize power (after they win the actively-boiling-over civil wars against the other remnants and crush the humans, of course). Those other remnants are mostly ruled by planetary governors or admirals who have seized power, but a handful are also hard at work in Build-A-Tyrant Workshop.
Each noble is tailored to their role and raised to serve that particular purpose, so as Traits go they are pretty much completely freeform, save encouragement to take Augment and various psychic traits. Thereâs not a lot of them in the Union for obvious reasons, but that makes playing as one and casting aside your birthright to fight for a fairer world all the more meaningful.
(Weâre also playing around with a funny Trait, whose working title is Class Traitor, to represent how even with your defection, thereâs a lot of places who still respect the title⊠and a lot of others who really, really donât. Renouncing your title doesnât necessarily destroy your claim; thereâs probably a lot of servants and functionaries back home wondering when youâll get all this communism out of your system and come back to run the planet again.)
The Enforcer clade constitutes the law enforcement, colonial bureaucracy, and military officer class of the Empire, and are as much defined by their upbringing and social isolation as their genetic modification. The Enforcers are descendants of a specialised clade to create the ideal secret police, which unsurprisingly meant they soon infiltrated, dismantled, or took over every other lever of power they could get their hands on and firmly established themselves as the middle managers of society. The only reason they never successfully couped the Nobility is the fact they are categorically incapable of trusting one another.
Enforcers are biologically distinguished by a change in their neurology which rewires the way they experience empathy. While humans initially believed (to their horror) theyâd encouraged a subspecies of engineered sociopaths, the truth is more complicated; Enforcers have had their mirror neurons modified to basically receive the alien equivalent of a dopamine hit from understanding the emotions and thoughts of others. Genuine empathy is very difficult when your neurochemistry rewards you for treating other people as fun little puzzles to take apart and put together; it makes them very good interrogators, investigators, and spies, but also means the closest thing to emotional attachment most of them feel is having favourite subjects. This means they historically spend the time they could have used seizing power scheming endlessly with one another instead.
To represent this, Enforcers are recommended the Reserved Trait, which modifies how you interact with Relationships and the Unity system, the Turncoat Trait (because playing as one almost inherently implies defection), and Narrow Socialisation, which lets you select two types of Relationships (in this case Rival and Nemesis) to get a target bonus in social interaction with, while hitting you with a target penalty for all others. You also typically are a Psychic Void; the deeply engrained secrecy and distrust of their artificial anti-society makes them largely invisible to psychic powers as well as making them very difficult to access.
Finally, there are the great masses of Commoners, the dispossessed masses of once-workers who increasingly existed to be ruled in the Empire, acting as an enormous reserve army of labour and potential conscripts to give bulk to the Empire and be selectively employed for economic or military violence. In between those times, the Commoners didnât really have much to do, and to keep them manageable, they were gradually engineered to be more and more easily controlled and managed.
This involved, essentially, breaking their motivation system by genetically curtailing the natural production of neurotransmitters and replacing these systems with electromechanical implants. If the Empire didnât need the Commoners for anything, they left them in a state of numb apathy and executive dysfunction; they could get away with just bread without circuses. If they needed labourers, soldiers, or to stop the population declining, they would just start pressing the feel stuff again button as needed to reward useful behaviour. Crude but tragically effective.
Though they believed this made their population a docile and cultureless stockpile of potential labour, the Commoners retain a complex internal culture built around their tactile telepathy, developing a sort of introspective philosophy of dualism, intellectualism, and fatalism. Unable to confront a system that had control over their own neurochemistry, common Aquillians instead developed a parallel culture which existed in their collective shared imaginations, sharing aspects of their thoughts and personalities with one another in a quiet network, with their philosophers living on in transmitted fragments alongside loved ones and comrades.
Commoners also get the Reserved Trait, for different reasons than the Enforcers but with similar effects. Plural System allows you represent transmitted personalities by essentially having Crew NPCs that fortunately donât take up limited bunk space in your spacecraft, Stiff Upper Lip and Fearless reflects how the limits placed on them also mute strong reactions to pain and fear, and Prodigy simulates having cybernetic modifications which reward pursuing certain work.
This system survived a very long time in the Empire, and persists in its Remnants. Once you get outside them, though, it gets interesting.
The Aquillian Breakaway states are the Union-aligned or neutral bodies which broke away from the Empire during the civil conflicts which ended the Aquillian-Human War. Some of these still function more or less like the Remnant before them, but the majority are revolutionary states of some kind which have elevated Commoners to the top of the pack. Youâre probably not playing an Enforcer or Noble; they, uh, arenât too well liked there for obvious reasons.
If you play an Aquillian from one of these states, youâre probably playing a Commoner who still has the above modifications (as these states have very strong taboos against further genetic engineering they are still struggling with), but who now has their hands on the remote control for their emotions.Â
This ties into one of the core principles of Torchship; you can always change your characterâs Identity at any time you like, at no mechanical cost, provided you have a narrative reason. Your characterâs external neurology interface is a special use of the Cultural Tool Trait which acts as that narrative reason to turn on and off many of the common Traits listed above whenever you like, as is advantageous to you. Of course, that also does mean thereâs a remote control with your emotional state on speed-dial which is just lying around, taking up an equipment slot and just begging to be stolen for the sake of drama.
Regrettably, while the chances of experiencing Spockâs Brain are low, they are never zero.
There are quite a few Aquillians in the Star Union, making up the largest alien minority by a significant margin (larger even than the Koath). These are a mixture of refugees taken on during and after the war, immigrants flocking to a place which might be able to undo the genetic modifications done to them, war orphans who wound up in the Union through various dubious humanitarian programs or ad-hoc adoption, and the former prisoners of war of Camp Aldrin on Earthâs moon. In fits and starts, theyâve largely undone or changed the way their various genetic modifications affect them to suit their needs better.
These groups live all over the Sol system now, and many of them have integrated into the various human cultures and, in so doing, have often taken on some of the genetic alterations used by those groups (seeing as they self-select for âcool with some level of genetic modificationâ). So one of the ways you can play an Aquillian, particularly a young one who has largely or entirely grown up in the Union, is by basically making a Terran, Martian, Spacer, etc, just swapping out Persistence Predator for Efficient Metabolism. Itâs increasingly common to meet Aquillians in Star Patrol with the flag of their adoptive home country on their sleeve and no more connection to the Empire than peers of their age, for good or ill.
If youâre playing somebody from Camp Aldrin (first or second generation), then it gets a little more interesting, because these Aquillians arenât being directly assimilated into human cultures, instead creating their own experimental one in their lunar enclave, with an abolition of the clades and an attempt to create a more egalitarian society. Any older Camp Aldrin Aquillian is going to be a Turncoat and War Veteran from the Imperial military, and traits like Augments or Prosthetics are quite appropriate.
This is also where youâd most likely find former members of the Enforcer or Noble clades, taken prisoner during the war. Though Solar Patrol developed a bad habit of pushing Enforcers they captured out of airlocks during the middle period of the war, they still captured an awful lot of them, and the process of many Aquillian Breakaways forming was made a lot smoother by the Union offering asylum to Nobles in exchange for laying down their arms. These groups, who donât usually see their genetic modifications as burdens like the Commoners do, will have an interesting time figuring out where they fit in a more egalitarian world.
Outside the Empireâs successors, the largest concentration of Aquillians are found in the multicultural capitalist empire of the CNFT, where they form a plurality of the population with a historical position of social and economic dominance. This is because the CNFTâs origins; about two and a half thousand years ago they were a colony of one of the Empireâs precursors. They took advantage of changing interstellar geography (astrography?) to declare independence, forming a network of political bodies which eventually solidified into an increasingly multicultural capitalist state.
This means that the Aquillians of the CNFT are, largely, pre-genetic modification Aquillians, predating the clades. Theyâre visually quite distinct, with vibrant multicoloured hair, much more diverse phenotypes, and a preference for low-gravity worlds that give them back their ancestral Freefallers Trait. A lot of them are even totally unmodified Baseliners, because their ancestors were displaced off the increasingly-irrelevant Aquillian homeworld and went looking for places that suited them. Being the dominant group in the Territories, theyâre also recommended Foreign Connections with their former markets, and Driven, because being a workaholic is how you survive under Space Capitalism.
Thereâs also various Imperial Aquillians who ended up in the CNFT as refugees, in the recent war or earlier. Theyâre distinctly an underclass there, with little in the way of resources or help⊠well, except for the Nobles, who usually arrive with shiploads of antimatter and set themselves up nicely as investors.
Being so common, so widespread, and having been around so long, youâll stumble across Aquillians of one sort or another a lot across Local Space. Theyâre more or less the default, the alien you should reach for if you havenât got anything else in mind.
Aquillians form a portion of the population on a lot of former Aquillian client worlds, which arenât really breakaways in the traditional sense but where the Aquillian settlers still form powerful political blocs. Defusing tensions caused by these arrangements is a pretty common job for Star Patrol missions operating inside the Unionâs de facto space.
Thereâs an awful lot of Aquillian pirates out in Local Space now, given they had the largest fleet in the region by a considerable margin and the fall of the Empire saw a lot of them cut off with nothing but a very powerful warship at their disposal. Many of these pirates are privateers who still mostly work for a Remnant power to keep up the wars against the Star Union and Universal Republic, but save their patron power money by also picking off civilian convoys for profit along the way. Others are now without allegiance, just hitting whoever they can and taking shelter around sympathetic planets. Some even side with Breakaways and prey on their former Imperial comrades. Itâs equally likely youâll be fighting them, scaring them off, or helping them.
Finally, the Aquillian presence in space is so old, and their history so distorted by successive waves of authoritarian censorship and purges, that there are many, many colonies that just slipped through the cracks. Youâll very often come across planets at just about any imaginable stage of technological and social development that were settled thousands or even tens of thousands of years prior by Aquillians, and were then cut off by some long-forgotten political cataclysm and left to develop or decay on their own. Sometimes it feels like you canât turn over a rock without finding another weird space elf.