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Player > Setting > Planets > Aucturn
Starfinder Core Rulebook p.460
Diameter: Varies
Mass: ×2
Gravity: ×2
Location: Pact Worlds
Atmosphere: Toxic
Day: varies; Year: 500 years
The ominous world of Aucturn, the Stranger, remains
mostly an enigma even after centuries of interplanetary
travel. Visual observations of the planet vary significantly from
viewer to viewer, and both its diameter and rotational period
fluctuate wildly and seemingly randomly. However, most of the
Pact Worlds lean toward one particular hypothesis: namely that
Aucturn is not a planet at all, but a living thing—an immense
embryo or egg that will someday mature into a near-deific being
of untold cosmic power: one of the Great Old Ones.
The farthest planet from the sun, Aucturn is not a signatory
to the Pact and is claimed by the Pact Worlds only out of
proximity and necessity. A weird and sickly world cloaked in
thick poisonous clouds, the Stranger warps reality with its very
existence, endangering any living creature that approaches
or visits it. Yet Aucturn is far from uninhabited, and the living
planet is currently a battleground between the cults of the Elder
Mythos, who aspire to nurture a new god, and the forces of the
Dominion of the Black, which seek to subjugate and manipulate
the nascent Great Old One for their own sinister purposes.
The most prominent settlement on Aucturn is the Citadel of
the Black, home to the Pyramid of the Black Pharaoh, the largest
temple to Nyarlathotep in the Pact Worlds. Once, the Citadel was
apparently neutral ground between the Elder Mythos cults and
the Dominion, but at some point during the Gap, this tenuous
detente turned to open conflict, and today the Citadel is the
center of the Elder Mythos’s war effort. The Citadel of the Black is
also home to the mysterious entity known as Carsai the King, the
closest figure the planet has to a head of state, but one whose true
form and nature remain unknown. A powerful leader in the cults
of the Elder Mythos, Carsai has ruled the Citadel of the Black for
millennia, leading some to believe that he might be an avatar or
herald of Nyarlathotep himself. Carsai’s defense of Aucturn—and
thus the Pact Worlds—from the predations of the Dominion of the
Black, combined with the fact that he is a relatively approachable
and reasonable figure on an otherwise incomprehensible planet,
is the primary reason for the Pact Council’s reluctant acceptance
of the world into their agreement as a protectorate. Interestingly,
Carsai’s representation in some popular media as an antihero—a
deviously handsome and rebellious godling protecting the Pact
Worlds from unthinkable horror—has significantly increased the
worship of Nyarlathotep and the Outer Gods in the Pact Worlds.
The space around Aucturn is littered with old ships purportedly
sent by inner system worlds to neutralize the planet during the
Gap. While visiting starships are sometimes allowed to land
unharmed, these corrupted, madness-inducing hulks still drift
as a warning to all those who might seek to cleanse or colonize
Aucturn’s breathing shores. The Pact Worlds, unable to clear
this neighboring area of space of these dangers, are resigned to
maintaining a nominal connection with it instead.
Aucturn’s surface is a sickly, organic place, with fleshlike
ground and mountains resembling tumors through which flow
thick veins of a black ichor that acts as a psychotropic drug
for many of the native creatures, most notably the skittering,
proboscis-tongued orocorans. Whole landscapes can change in a
blink, leaving visitors feeling as if they’re in some sort of dream—
one moment walking among fungal forests or along the edge of
sphincter-like canyons, the next in some ichor-lord’s monastery
or at the foot of glowing towers pulsing with abandoned halfbiological
machinery. Breathing the world’s toxic, yellow-green
atmosphere only makes the situation worse, as it contains a
seemingly endless variety of drugs, mutagens, and poisons.
Settlements on Aucturn are rare, generally isolated
communities of native creatures or Outer God cultists huddled
behind heavy fortifications or in the crumbling ruins of haunted
flesh-block edifices from a forgotten age. Attacks by the Dominion
of the Black are common, their brain-eating and chittering hordes
bombarding the surface in single-use drop pods or burrowing
up out of the planet’s flesh like botfly larvae to make suicidal
guerrilla attacks on any creature they encounter. After the
Citadel of the Black, the most populous settlement is Amniek, the
circular tower city at the base of the polyp-like mountain called
the Gravid Mound. According to the Midwives, the 13 cowled
casters who rule the city, Aucturn is already pregnant despite not
having been born itself, and their egg-shaped mountain will one
day burst, spewing Aucturn’s child into the universe—and when it
does, they will be there to receive its dark gifts.
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