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What are the harshest cruellest environments people live in, in the SARP?

OsakanOne

Inactive Member
Retired Member
From the harshest deserts, cruelly acidic rains, the most evil cities and towns..

What's the worst place to live in the setting?

And who lives there?

And why?
 
Here's some that came to mind:
  • Outcasts who live outside of the atmosphere dome on Urtullan, because they're poor.
  • Delsaurians who have deal with glass hail and desert conditions on Delsauria, because it's home.
  • Reds who live in the waterless, sand-worm-infested trash heaps of Yicuqibu I, to scavenge.
 
Funky City.
What's so harsh about Funky City? What's the worst about it?

Delsauria is love.
 
Funky City is basically all of those cities in Eastern Asia you hear about where people have to wear facemasks to breathe, and then turned up to 11. Cramped living conditions, environmentally effectively dead, lots of violence and other nasty pieces of society that are a lot closer to the surface than in most areas. For another example, think the megacities from Judge Dredd, except worse.
 
A good example of this which happened IRL is Kowloon Walled City. Its one of the first places I think of when it comes to Funky City. Just imagine the first image below, but taller, and everywhere.





 
Seloca, the chelti homeworld. Pretty much every part of it for different reasons.

The North Pole is locked towards the local sun and has a giant rainforest with black and brown and white leaves growing on it with kilometer tall trees, the fauna is so dangerous and the terrain so difficult that even today no one has claimed to venture to the North Pole and back on foot and no settlements exist there. Slightly further south around the pole, though, are the tree cities of the north, hanging and bustling from the bright upper canopy to the dark interior, but never too close to the predator infested swamps below.

On the outskirts the marshes and swamps met the beginnings of the windswept and turbulent equator, this area is filled with soft, difficult ground and the grasshounds that lurk within, as well as the small seas that sprinkle the surface and the occasional incursion of seamonsters from them and into the rivers between them. The people here live on the few places of high ground available and fortify their dwellings well, but sometimes it's not enough.

The equator is a tornado striken barren land in perpetual twilight, the meeting point between the hot air from the north and the cold air south. The freakish and rapidly changing weather means the place is inhabited by little more than traveling nomads fighting the elements, bandits, each other, and the lack of resources trading north and south.

The south side of the planet has a six-year Summer-Winter cycle, where the barest sunlight reaches the thick mosses and lichen that form the majority of plant-life here. The giant Feeders, giant mouths on comical duck-like feet that run for their entire lives, never stopping, never slowing or they will freeze, scooping up whatever grows here, while at the same time carrying the spores of their food hundreds of kilometers to grow elsewhere. On the darkest week of winter the locals light up the night sky for over a week and is one of the biggest parties on the planet.

The south pole is again too inhospitable for almost anyone to survive, the few residents here tend to be miners ekking a living from sheltered cliffside caves. The predators here are slow and lazy and tend to ambush unsuspecting prey.


Leaving the chelti homeworld, the system itself has a few places of note as well.

Kimoga IV, Seloca's neighbor as the Fifth planet from the sun, is a lava planet with kilometer deep gullies and canyons from ancient lava floes and a massive mining operation on a never-emptying lava lake that could erupt on them at any moment. Cooling the mineral rich lava and breaking it down to its base materials.

Far from the relative happiness of the homeworld, far from the light of the star is the Kazah penal colony (Kimoga VIII). A dark, claustrophobic place of domed cities, dense living, and cruelty. The guards and the indentured criminal workforce fight a constant war inside the domes for control. Even criminals who have served their time are not truly released, forced to labor in the pits and factories and forges until they can earn enough to buy a ticket off of this inhumane world.

Kimoga IX has ice that will explode in oxygen-hydrogen steam explosions if anything remotely warm is dropped on the surface, settlements here have to be closely regulated to prevent hydrogen build-up from melting ice. As you can imagine, even after multiple recruitment drives for volunteer settlers, this planet is still rather sparsely populated.
 

AND WE LOVE IT

---

And aww, people are talking about my Delsaurian glass hail change, I'm giddy.

In addition to these, we did some major overhauls to Rok'Veru for a plot that never got off the ground. The few of us who worked on it attempted to make it a really crap place to live for a Nepleslian. Nepleslians generally hate tree, and it's a jungle world where the trees grow and encroach city limits so fast that deforestation is a constant and lucrative booming business in every city, where they work every day just to keep that green shit out of the city limits. Nepleslia has owned and been colonizing Rok'Veru since the dawn of the setting and we've only just now have maybe 20% covered in lovely smog-filled money-making supercities.

95% of the flora and fauna are lethal in some form. Brown mushroom-like bulbs that grow inches beneath the soil, produce a volatile gas and explode when stepped on. Carnivorous plants of all shapes and sizes. BIO-SLIME AND POISON GAS EVERYWHERE. Trees that can grow mile-wide, concrete-cracking, property-destroying roots in a couple of nights. Birds with feathers with the toughness and consistency of granite that love to breed in natural heat vents, and also love to fly into the heat exhaust-ports of ships and die while causing catastrophic crashes. And for anyone savvy with the old Cirrus Station plot; this is where Quaags comes from.

It's a shame that plot never got off the board, but the ideas are still novel and give Rok'Veru more character than we've previously had.
 
Nesha Prime is a pretty tough place to live. There's a hurricane that never ends covering 25% of the planetary surface. Even if the hurricane isn't around the people have to contend with spiked rain. Literal balls of ice with spikes on them falling out of the sky. Most people can't even handle hail, can you imagine spiky balls of death smacking into your cars and windows?
 
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