Support United Paizo Workers! Click here for more details!
Player > Setting > Planets > Akiton
Starfinder Core Rulebook p.442
Diameter: ×1/2
Mass: ×1/12
Gravity: ×1/3
Location: Pact Worlds
Atmosphere: Thin
Day: 24 hours, 40 minutes; Year: 2 years
Despite its proximity to Absalom Station and its favorable
location as the fourth planet from the sun (counting missing
Golarion), Akiton is a dying world. Since the system’s formation,
the so-called Red Planet has lost much of the atmosphere and
liquid water it once held due to the slowing of its liquid-iron core
and the resulting weakening of its magnetosphere. Though this
slow decline transpires on a geologic scale and Akiton remains
hospitable to humanoid life—and indeed, its slowly expanding
deserts and rock chasms are all that most of its resident species
have ever known—it also offers a sad metaphor for the planet’s
dying economy.
Prior to the discovery of hyperspace, Akiton was the center of
its solar system’s mining, production, and trade of thasteron, an
ore instrumental in the creation of fuel for sublight interplanetary
travel. Since the advent of Drift travel and a reduced need for
long realspace flights, however, demand for thasteron has fallen,
and the economic effects of the crash now play out in political
squabbles and civil strife across the planet. Massive space
barges that once shuttled ore between all the Pact Worlds now
lie as rusting hulks in the middle of the deserts, empty save for
squatters and scavengers, humanoid and otherwise. Residents
whose ancestors were magnates and high-society debutantes
now hunt trash-eating khefaks and dodge flying, tusk-winged
norkasa in the shells of abandoned cities, toil as laborers in the
few remaining mines or industrial trench-squats, or join the
anarchic gangs who battle for territory on the open plains with
the planet’s more traditional nomadic peoples.
Akiton today has no centralized government, and its cold
deserts, dry seabeds, and frigid polar ice caps host never-ending
skirmishes and proxy wars between various cities, clans,
corporations, tribes, and offworld factions. It’s a world where
unscrupulous business interests can engage in unregulated
or morally questionable research and exploitation and where
criminals, fugitives, and the lost come to escape justice, hide from
their enemies, or try to make a fresh start.
The planet’s best-known urban centers are ancient cities such
as Arl, with its passion for blood sports; Daza, the half-irradiated
City of Fusion; and Maro with its fabled Thousand Lights, a vast
trench city climbing its way up the walls of the Edaio Rift. In these
dusty and flickering metropolises, Akiton’s dreams of civilization
and culture still remain—for the rich, at least—propped up by
their remaining wealth and control of the planet’s last few viable
thasteron mines, as well as lucrative contracts with offworld
corporations and factories specializing in weapons, armor, and
ship parts. Most of Akiton’s lesser settlements, by contrast, are
company towns, squalid slums, or frontier homesteader outposts
where life is cheap, harsh, and short.
Members of nearly all of the Pact Worlds’ common races can
be found somewhere on Akiton—including a seemingly native
crimson-skinned human ethnicity—yet the best known indigenous
residents are the ysoki. Unlike many of their fellow inhabitants,
Akitonian ysoki thrive under the planet’s current degraded
conditions, boisterous and opportunistic in their warren-districts
beneath the cities or in motorized traveling caravans. Though
operating largely off the grid, these latter nomadic populations
inevitably return to the Hivemarket, the vast bazaar-city at the
foot of Ka, Pillar of the Sky, where everything can be found for
the right price and ghostly creatures called khulan keep the
peace. The ysoki can also often be seen driving their ramshackle
hovertankers back and forth from the Winterlands at the poles,
hauling ice quarried by the resident cap miners while carefully
avoiding the forbidden zones with their eerie alien ruins.
In addition to ysoki, Akiton has several other major indigenous
races. Once driven nearly to annihilation by corporate interests,
the four-armed humanoid giants called shobhads have seen a
dramatic resurgence in recent years as their traditional desert life
sidestepped the economic collapse. Moreover, their constant clan
battles for honor make them valuable as mercenaries and scouts.
Complete opposites of the shobhads are the Contemplatives of
Ashok, telekinetic creatures whose physical bodies have nearly
withered away in favor of the great minds contained within their
throbbing brain sacs and who excel at the supernatural arts and
decipher esoteric truths in their legendary Halls of Reason.
Slightly less well known are the red-skinned ikeshti lizardfolk,
who make model citizens until their reproductive cycle drives
them violently insane.
Website owned by Mark von Drake. All content on this website owned by Paizo Inc. Privacy policy can be found here.
Contact: markvondrake@thehiddentruth.info