Lore24: The Pale of Sanctuary

From "Terra" by Calder Moore

 

I bounced off Mastodon late last year, and I'm not really following these instructions to the letter, but the important thing is just writing a little something every day, right? That and sharing it with the world, which brings us to this post.

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The Pale of Sanctuary is not a new idea, but developing it as a TTRPG setting is. I've been running a Stars Without Number game for the past few months using the default meta-setting—rolled up a sector, whipped up some factions, had a jolly good time detailing things far in excess of what was necessary—but of course the soul cries out for more. A bigger canvas! A unique science-fiction setting entirely of my old invention! All my favorite stuff and nothing I don't like! (On that note, I started writing about things I don't like in recent SF and a couple of my dislikes metastasized into an entire post of their own. Oops!)

So what do I want from a bespoke SF setting? I want it to be set extraordinarily far in the future, so that I can get as weird and wild as I want with human civilization. But I do want a recognizably human civilization, not a post-singularity hivemind. In fact, I don't really want to deal with advanced computer technology at all. Yet I do want terraforming, interstellar travel, massive orbital habitats, and things of that nature. How do I square that circle? A Dune-style cultural taboo against thinking machines!

What else? I want to try jettisoning some of the fantastical technology that's de rigueur in SF games. No artificial gravity, no faster-than-light travel or communication. I'm imagining zero-gravity combat with nets, darts, blades, and the like, and I'm imagining interplanetary societies that have to cope with years-long lag times when communicating, or trading, with their neighbors. Then I find myself backtracking a little: I still want some FTL travel to be possible, for the sake of being able to offer various different campaign types (and for the sake of mystery), I just want human society not to have mastered it. Massive objects of uncertain origin, with no human crew, course their way through parts of the Pale following constrained but not perfectly predictable courses, like riverboats steaming up and down a watercourse (except that instead of steaming, they're jumping from star to star in the blink of an eye). This River shifts and swells and shrinks and slows according to no pattern a human can ever fully discern. The riverboats resist any attempt to use them to violate causality, as well as any attempt to use them for major military operations.

Now, what sort of interstellar societies might be sustainable in a setting without (reliable, predictable) FTL? The really obvious one is a feudal empire, and (surprise!) I love Dune, so I'm sold already. It's also a great opportunity to subvert the idea of the totalitarian evil empire; in this empire, the left hand has no clue what the right hand is doing. Some nobles are good (some Miyazaki influence bleeds in here), some are bad, some are diligent, some are disinterested. The center cannot hold, etc. This also suggests an exotic counterpart: a society that labors, with great effort and at great cost, not to see its constituent parts diverge even across tens of light-years. A society obsessed with continuity and consensus, where change comes at an almost literally glacial pace. Part bucolic solarpunk degrowth utopia, part totalitarian communist surveillance state, with duty-bound commissars criss-crossing the spaceways fighting to keep everything, and everyone, in line.

Throw in a third, looser confederation, some independent planets, a deep history wherein the empire sprawled out from its heart to encompass nearly all the Pale, back when populations were smaller and laws less defined, only to convulse and contract and spit out offshoots. Accept that some things are placeholders and it's not all polished and perfect yet. Hardly anybody's going to read it anyway! Here's one month's work:

1. The knights of the Empire and the commissars of the Continuum are similar, even mutually sympathetic figures, held up in their respective societies as paragons of honor and self-sacrifice (both groups are, of course, fallible and corruptible, much as each society would like to pretend otherwise), prepared to give up decades of their lives, maybe the entire length of their lives, to travel the stars and enforce the law. The law of the Continuum is of course superficially quite distinct from that of the Empire, but many of the fundamental principles are similar. Both are ultimately derived from the Rule, which is older than the Empire itself.

2. The universal language promulgated by the First Emperor and now widespread throughout the Empire, the Continuum, and all the worlds of the River was derived, based, so the story goes, on the emperor's deep studies of ancient texts, from several prominent Indo-European languages (i.e., it's Anglo-Esperanto), and is written with a script, also carefully selected by the emperor, derived from Hangul.

3. The Dissentient Synod is an anticlerical, antimonarchic faith community that periodically crops up around the fringes of the Empire.

4. Aaru is the green and pleasant world at the heart of the Empire, a watery planet of low-lying continents and island chains, mighty rivers, and, at most latitudes, mild seasons marked by periodic heavy rainfall. It is quite hot in the tropics and temperate nearly all the way to the small polar icecaps; water is an omnipresent feature nearly everywhere, from vast marshlands to mangrove forests to shallow river valleys cutting through lush steppes.

5. In secret, wary of old taboos and prejudices, some scholars attempt to study the evidence of technological civilization in the space beyond the Pale, working to decipher the “language” of the Outsiders, if indeed that is what the strange, sporadic signals are, and to predict their motions and actions.

6. The independent systems that defy the emperor's divine authority are known as the Recusant Worlds. Irredentist extremists apply this epithet to the Continuum as well.

7. The noble dead of the Empire lie in state in the Hall of Tears for a public mourning period commensurate with their rank.

8. Rumors persist of androids, synthetic beings that simulate human life perfectly. It is said that they were created in the distant past, during the Age of Strife or before, and can even reproduce as humans do; they are, some stories say, indistinguishable from humans down to the molecular level.

9. Some things are allowed on the River and some aren’t, but it’s never entirely clear what the restrictions are. Obvious military force is never permitted, but some traders are able to travel with modest quantities of weapons and others are blocked from shipping so much as a brace of rifles.

10. “Backwaters” are systems visited by the River so infrequently, or so inconsistently, that torchship travel is, on average, faster (assuming one can find crews willing to put up with it).

11. The Ministry of Concordance works to prevent political, legal, cultural, or any other kind of social drift among the far-flung worlds of the Continuum; commissars from the Ministries of Concordance, Memory, and Safety (collectively, the Ministries of Coordination) typically travel together on decades-long tours of duty. Such a unit is called a troika.

12. The ancient laws of war put stiff restraints on the sorts of brutal tactics a knightly caste with access to outrageously powerful warships but without the means (or manpower) to invade and occupy densely populated planets might otherwise gravitate toward. Terrible crimes were committed during the Age of Strife, long ago.

13. Any military or police operation outside of one’s home star system means years spent away from home, maybe decades, and all without direct supervision. Unimpeachably loyal, highly effective soldiers are at a tremendous premium. They are generally promised great rewards and instilled with strong beliefs in the righteousness of their work, and their leaders are loath to risk them, or even send them away from their home ports, except when absolutely necessary.

14. The worlds of the Empire, and many beyond, uphold the sacred rights of hospitium, including the obligation of nobles to provide hospitality to interstellar travelers (who are assumed to be, almost by definition, nobles themselves). This is a tremendous, and dangerous, privilege for those commissars and diplomats of the Continuum who have occasion to travel beyond their own borders.

15. The ruling caste of the Empire, or at least the tradition-minded among the high nobility, never trim their fingernails and rarely use their hands for any purpose except eating.

16. Various parahuman and epihuman clades exist in the Pale—populations who can be traced back to some deliberate, engineered split from the main human line, optimized for various environments (like gravity considerably higher or lower than human standard). Such tinkering with the human genome has long been forbidden by the Rule, but long-established clades are not regarded as aberrant.

17. The Inmost Houses of the Empire are descended from the clans that backed the First Emperor during the Great Conjugation; the Utmost Houses are descended from those that opposed him. The Low Houses are descended from those who attempted, dishonorably, to remain neutral.

18. On the periphery of the Continuum is an archipelago planet with beautiful calm seas and abundant life whose people live a mostly premodern life (albeit with access to modern medicine and the other rights afforded by their government).

19. Elsewhere on the Continuum's periphery is a world of endless steppes; shallow, wide river valleys; broad deltas; and long, low lines of hills, where enormous storms boil up over the plains. The people, mostly farmers, live in low, sturdy homes half-buried in sod banks or hillsides.

20. Far out on the edge of the Pale is a wilderness planet honeycombed with sprawling concrete structures, some recognizable from their past purposes, others totally inscrutable, all overgrown.

21. Anchorite redoubts [pinched from Dan] are mysterious structures of widely varying form and size, having in common only that they drift in zero gravity or freefall and that they are, or at least seem to be, impenetrable. Some are found in asteroid belts, others orbiting barren planets, still others in deep space. They are occupied, it is thought, by humans or parahumans who in ancient times chose to remove themselves from the affairs of the greater galaxy for unknown reasons. None responds to communications, although some do show faint signs of activity, like venting waste heat.

22. An underground progressive movement in the Continuum has taken up the slogan "continuity leads to destruction."

23. Near the edge of the Pale, a rarely contacted planet is scattered with mostly abandoned cities still ritually visited by the rural people descended from their onetime inhabitants.

24. On more than one world in the Empire and Continuum alike, rock-hewn cities crowd underground caverns, paraterraformed to be human-habitable below a pitiless surface.

25. Old and persistent tales tell of a certain order of Outsiders, or servitors of the Outsiders, who enter the Pale to judge the righteous and the wicked and to enforce the Rule. Opinion is fiercely divided as to whether these Arbiters are angels, demons, aliens, or something else entirely, if they even exist.

26. The highest principle in the Empire and among most religious groups in the Pale is not "good" but "truth" (which is understood to mean, among other things, "loyalty" and "obedience"). Falseness and disloyalty are the most loathsome sins. "Wide is the gate and swift is the river that leads to Falsehood, and many go by it," however.

27. Imperial nomarchs (ruling nobles with circumplanetary or interplanetary fiefs) are ideally twins; one governs from the family's ancestral seat while the other, with a comitatus (a retinue of sworn companions) goes abroad as a knight.

28. “In the beginning, God created the dark and the light and all the heavens. He set the stars and planets in motion and spread life across the cosmos, and human beings were his greatest creation. And He made seven great angels to govern creation, and bestowed upon them wondrous powers and set many lesser orders of angels beneath them. But when He instructed these lieutenants to serve His favored children, there was dissent. The first and greatest of the seven, who was the right hand of God and is now become the Adversary, would not kneel before human beings, and rebelled against his Creator, and overthrew the throne of heaven.”

29. The emperor is widely believed to have access to the memories of all previous emperors, or to literally share a mind with all previous emperors, or in fact to still be the First Emperor, a deathless soul, millennia old, who simply migrates into a new body when their old one wears out.

30. Government in the Continuum, at every level, is a representative consensus-based democracy with delegates chosen by sortition; being selected to participate in an interplanetary congress is a tremendous honor but also a life-changing burden.

31. In the absence of any kind of immediate responsiveness or alacrity on the part of delegates, a lot of the day-to-day business of maintaining order in the Continuum and responding to people’s concerns falls to the vast bureaucracy.