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Player > Setting > Planets > Castrovel
Starfinder Core Rulebook p.438
Diameter: ×1
Mass: ×1
Gravity: ×1
Location: Pact Worlds
Atmosphere: Normal
Day: 1 day; Year: 1/2 year
Hot, humid, and stirred by intense storms and tides,
the jungles and swamps of Castrovel abound with an
unusually robust variety of life, from enormous saurian beasts
to deadly moldstorms capable of devouring whole settlements.
Of the many sentient races to make their home on the fertile
world, the most prominent are lashuntas, followed closely by
elves and formians, all three civilizations highly connected
and cosmopolitan thanks to a network of ancient magical
teleportation portals called aiudara.
Traditionally, Castrovel’s lashuntas have organized into
independent city-states with a variety of governmental styles,
elected matriarchies being the most common. In the modern
era, however, local governance of smaller cities often takes
a back seat to larger corporate concerns, with regional or
interplanetary companies buying out officials or setting up their
own independent, privatized settlements. While these economic
ties mean lashunta nationalism rarely leads to outright warfare
anymore, rampant industrial espionage and corporate influence
over public policy present growing concerns for residents.
Of the city-states still capable of going toe-to-toe with
corporate power, the most significant is Qabarat, the Shining
Jewel of the Western Sea and the planet’s largest spaceport.
From the city’s Threefold House, Lady Morana Kesh and her
chief consort, Grantaeus, pull a delicate web of strings to keep
the planet from becoming a corporate free-for-all. Also notable
for their power and influence are the city’s many universities,
renowned for their vast pre-Gap archives; they train some of
the best explorers, researchers, and starship navigators in the
system. Architecturally, the city is a work of art, its ancient
walls of crushed and glittering shells blending seamlessly with
modern additions. This sense of timelessness—of connection
with the planet’s long history—is a matter of pride to many
of the residents, who exult in the sounds of soldiers training
in the Battle Yards, scholars arguing good-naturedly on
university steps, or the roar and hiss of the landing starships
that have largely replaced water-going vessels in Ship’s End.
While most visitors to the planet enter through Qabarat’s port,
numerous portals throughout the city connect it closely with
other powerful lashunta settlements, such as isolated Laubu
Mesa, Komena in the Floating Shards, Jabask the Unbroken, or
Candares, with its endless waterfalls and dangerous cliffside
corpsicum excavations.
Though the insectile formians battled with lashuntas for
millennia, the coming of the Pact and careful shirren-brokered
peace talks finally ended hostilities a mere 30 years ago. Today,
the formian hives known as the Colonies work together to farm
the land and trade with other races, with each individual hive
queen paying tribute to the Overqueen—a purely philosophical
entity established during the historic Meeting of Queens. Each
of the largest formian hive-burrows can cover miles, sometimes
bulging up in artificial honeycombed hills, making them
confusing to visit (and historically impossible to conquer).
At odds with this new era of peace, the elves of Sovyrian are
predominantly xenophobic traditionalists, trading with outsiders
only when necessary. Members of other races are rarely allowed
to settle permanently on the elven continent and are largely
barred from even entering El, Sovyrian’s canal-choked capital city
led by neighborhood-sized Great Houses. This border control is
regularly violated by the city’s own ruling elite, however, as they
hire foreigners for secretive or specialized tasks.
The abundance of seemingly untouched wilderness on
Castrovel often confuses newcomers used to cutting-edge
lashunta technology, yet to most of the world’s residents, these
vast ecological preserves are proof of their enlightened society.
To them, maintaining wilderness is key to advancing knowledge
and allowing the same evolution that brought them sentience
to continue uplifting others, and the planet’s abundant natural
resources must be harvested sustainably for the good of all.
Toward this end, both the planet’s primary shipyards and its most
destructive heavy industries are relegated to Elindrae, the planet’s
airless, rocky moon. Of course, various species of dangerous
megafauna—from bug-eyed mountain eels to poison-beaked sky
fishers—still regularly attack settlements on Castrovel, which
leads to occasionally “accidental†burning of protected natural
regions in rural areas, but a strong Xenowarden presence usually
keeps such activities from getting out of hand.
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