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Player > Setting > Planets > Bretheda
Starfinder Core Rulebook p.456
Diameter: ×11
Mass: ×320
Gravity: ×2-1/2 (at the “surfaceâ€)
Location: Pact Worlds
Atmosphere: Special
Day: 6 days; Year: 30 years
The largest gas giant in the system, Bretheda is a constantly
swirling mass of blue and purple storm clouds. Through
these tempests and swarms of lesser life-forms soar the blimplike
barathus, sometimes derogatorily called floaters, or simply
Brethedans, given their status as the planet’s most advanced
native race. Though their transparent bodies resemble elongated
jellyfish or dirigibles and their trilling and diving give the
impression they are strange birds or dolphins, barathus are in fact
highly intelligent, curious creatures, with an unusually communal
approach to survival. When faced with a challenge greater than
it can handle on its own, a barathu merges with other barathus
to create a temporary, unique collective creature far stronger and
smarter than its component beings, only to disband again when
the need has passed.
As befits creatures on a planet with few metals, barathu
technology is entirely biological. In addition to their capability
to reshape themselves and evolve new adaptations in seconds,
hardening their bodies or growing extra limbs, barathus’ gene-altering
abilities also allow them to design and birth living tools
using only their bodies, from tailored viruses to semi-intelligent
servitor races. Some of the best biotechnology in the system comes
from Bretheda, created either in the numerous floating arcology
cities staffed by offworlders or within native Brethedan enterprises
such as the capricious Sopeth Corporation—a company that’s in fact
a single sentient being composed of thousands of merged barathus.
While the peaceful, freewheeling nature of barathu society
makes local governance unnecessary, barathus have learned that
outsiders require more structure to avoid disaster. Toward this
end, Confluence—an entity of immense intelligence formed of any
barathus who feel the near-religious call to public service—sets and
enforces regulations on offworlders. The entity splits off specially
adapted delegates and enforcers as needed, imbuing them with
proprietary biotech allowing communication with Confluence in
real time, no matter the distance. Any number of corporations
would kill to study this technology—and many have done so—but
thus far the self-destruction sequences coded into the so-called
Confluence Agents, plus fear of reprisal from Bretheda’s governing
entity, has kept greedy researchers largely in check.
Bretheda’s nickname, the Cradle, comes from its dozens of
moons, some almost large enough to be planets in their own
right. While many are inhabited, only some of these are well
known, and others have barely been explored.
A water world covered in a shell of ice, Kalo-Mahoi is the most
industrialized of Bretheda’s moons, and its residents, the aquatic
kalo, have their own independent representatives on the Pact
Council. Though air-breathing races often find it disconcerting to
descend deep into the moon’s frigid seas, and though the world’s
icy crust contains numerous spaceports and liaison centers, the
kalo have taken great pains to make their world inviting, and
they dominate the solar system’s art and fashion scenes from
their organic vent-cities.
The arid forests of Marata, by contrast, are the subject of much
anthropological debate, as its seven-gendered maraquoi tribes
have been making the leap from paleolithic to spacefaring in just
a few generations. While some maraquoi traditionalists in their
government, aided by activists of other races, argue that the
furry humanoids are losing their culture and fundamental right
to advance at their own pace, the majority of maraquoi resent
the idea of having their access to the Pact Worlds restricted and
have begun a mass exodus out into the rest of the solar system.
Less social than these other races are the silicon-based life-forms
of crystalline Dykon, most notably the brilliant math-obsessed
urogs. Buffalo-sized creatures of crystal who slide
across the surface on cilia and electromagnetic fields, they
absorb the sun’s light through their skin-shells. Urogs sometimes
take jobs as starship navigators, technomancers, and physicists.
Only the desperate or condemned accept work on Bretheda’s
notorious collection of “death moons.†On radioactive Thyst,
for instance, unshielded flesh melts from bone in cancerous
rivers, yet crews are still needed to harvest minerals, study the
unique animal life, or hunt for the magical armor mysteriously
discarded by the moon’s rarely glimpsed light-absorbing
humanoids. Meanwhile, on the tidally heated hellscape of
Varos, elementalist fireworkers harness raw volcanic power
while digging for the unique gemstones produced only in the
moon’s mantle.
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