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Player > Setting > Planets > Triaxus
Starfinder Core Rulebook p.452
Diameter: ×1
Mass: ×1
Gravity: ×1
Location: Pact Worlds
Atmosphere: Normal
Day: 1 day; Year: 317 years
Triaxus’s eccentric, mysteriously slow orbit takes it even
closer to the sun than Castrovel during its summer,
resulting in a tropical climate that turns harsh and frozen as the
world sails back out past the gas giants in its winter. This cycle
takes 317 Pact Standard years, with whole generations living
and dying in a single season and plant and animal life forming
two nearly separate ecologies, each going dormant during its off
season. Of the creatures that adapt to both, the most prominent
are the humanoid ryphorians, who manifest thick white fur and
narrowed eyes to protect against snow blindness in the winter
and develop smooth, dark skin in the summer. While the advent
of spaceflight has made such adaptations less important for
survival, ryphorian biology continues to be inexplicably tied to
the planet, which is currently locked in winter. Those ryphorians
born offworld generally maintain their current winterborn form,
though even without knowing the exact mechanism, some have
begun using magic and genetic engineering to transition early.
Much of traditional Triaxian culture revolves around the
fraught relationship between humanoids and dragons. For
millennia, the fractious humanoid nations of the Allied Territories
battled against the dragon-ruled nations of the Drakelands. The
tactically crucial isthmus between the two warring continents
was the Skyfire Mandate, defended on the allied side by a legion
of ryphorians bonded with intelligent dragonkin mounts. With
the coming of the Pact, however, the primarily evil dragons of
the Drakelands saw the advantages of membership and trade
with the other Pact Worlds, and active hostilities ceased. Today,
while humanoids remain second-class citizens in the Drakelands,
their masters have opted for more subtle power plays, with many
dragons acting as shadowy investors in major corporations. The
Allied Nations, meanwhile, largely lost their reason for cohesion,
and today nations such as militant Kamora, where every citizen
goes armed, vie for relevance with countries such as Zo, where
spaceflight and its support are practically a state religion, or
Preita, the Scholar’s Paradise, where technomancers duel on
campuses for high-paying corporate contracts. While most
of the nations have prospered under the new interplanetary
arrangement, a few have refused to modernize fully and still
cling to the old ways. Of these, the best known is the pugnacious
walled city of Aylok, which shoots down any starship that dares
enter its airspace and requires that anyone seeking to trade or
meet with its ruling Imperators come in by land instead, through
trap-lined plains of jagged ice and hordes of furred insectile
horrors bred for defense. Such policies have deeply undercut
the city’s health and economy, but so far the ruling elite claims
it’s the only way to avoid complete cultural annihilation by the
encroaching Pact Worlds.
Even with minor outliers like Aylok, nowhere did the advent of
the Pact have a greater effect than in the Skyfire Mandate. With
peace—if a tense one—between dragons and humanoids, and
with spaceflight replacing planetary combat in importance, the
territory’s famed Dragon Legion found itself without a purpose.
In response, its leaders took to the stars, and today the rebranded
Skyfire Legion forms an elite and highly principled mercenary
organization, selling its protection to well-meaning colonists
and corporations operating beyond the solar system (and thus
outside the Stewards’ protection). Now the dragonkin themselves
are only occasionally ridden in atmosphere. Many starfaring
dragonkin families have resorted to genetic engineering to reduce
their size to better fit in the narrow corridors of space stations
and starships, and thanks to their near-telepathic bond with their
partners, no humanoid of the legion would dream of flying a
starfighter without her dragonkin copilot.
Outside of the Allied Territories, a notable exception to prevailing
Triaxian culture is the continent of Ning, long cut off from the other
nations by the vast Sephorian Sea. Like backward-looking Aylok,
Ning has refused to acknowledge the Pact’s authority, but it has
embraced modernization, making it a haven for corporations,
criminals, and all others that seek to avoid Pact control. Far from
being a lawless society, however, Ning is obsessed with honor
and status—traits that attract a fair number of kasatha and vesk
immigrants—and its upper class, led by the Immortal Suzerain,
keeps its citizens safe from dangers both domestic and foreign.
Culturally, Ning is best known for the ukara, or “battleflowersâ€:
lithe, genderless warriors—often solarians—who compete in
broadcasted ritual combat in exchange for system-wide celebrity
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