Maia is a wastelander planet. It is nothing but desperation, violence, murder, and worse.

The Warworld

Name: Maia (2nd planet in system)

Moons: 0

System: Eta Lyncis, Red Main Sequence star

3 other planets present - Eta Lyncis I is a tidal locked gas giant with an orbital period of 15 days. Eta Lyncis III is a small rocky planet that is contemporary to Ceres. Eta Lyncis IV is a methan gas giant with rings and asteroid sized moons. The system shows signs of being of advanced age compared to Sol.

Length of Maian Day - 35 hours

Length of Maian Year - 443 Maian Days

Planetary Diameter - 16000 km

Planetary Gravity - 1.4x Earth Standard

Atmosphere - thin Oxy-Nitrogen, breathable and comparable to high altitude on Earth

Climate - Arid and dry, with large temperature swings, no discernible seasons but temp can swing from 110F to 30F in the span of 2 hours

Factions

Maia is contested by three major factions, each hailing from a slightly different time period, and representing a different face of humanity. It is hypothesized that the Pegasus Rift is by far more unstable than expected, and that ships passing through the Rift are bounced through time, refracted through dimensional prisms, and otherwise folded, spindled, and mutilated before reforming and popping out on the other side. There is also speculation that the rift itself is a trap, and that it is a multidimensional object, and each of the factions represents the dominant power on their respective home Earths.

Council of Maia

Also known as the Maians, the Council is the most advanced faction on the planet, and has a number of large and imposing cities, ringed with defenses, and bristling with combat vehicles and mecha. They have, conversely, the fewest ships, and have not been able to mount a planetary dominance campaign, as a loose alliance between the other two factions has prevented this.

Maian Phenoclade - Maians are easily recognizeable. Due to years of genetic engineering and longevity treatments, they are all quite old, and despite being in generally good health, have the appearance of age. A typical Maian has papery thin skin, prominent veins, hair loss, and look to be in their late 90s. This longevity has come at the cost of fecundity, and Maian children are incredibly rare, most manpower comes in the form of Maian Cymeks. The cymek has an organic body and a machine brain, giving them what is considered the best of both worlds. Maians typically keep an entourage of cymeks and droids with them. They tend towards decadence, hubris, and carrying grudges for years. The Maians, despite their advanced tech, are very likely a cultural dead end as social and scientific advancement within their culture has nearly come to a halt. They are quite happy to steal from other factions, enslave entire cities, and indiscriminately slaughter those who don't accept their will. This is done with a very calm and calculated presentation, with massacre orders being delivered in poems, and launching nuclear strikes at the culmination of a musical performance.

Hanzo League

Known as as the Hanzo, Hans, or the Hands, the Hanzo League has the largest surviving number of ships, and has the closest thing to space dominance. They are merchants, traders, and scientists, and are the general intermediaries for Maia in general. They have a modest number of cities, but their civic nature has left them with the smallest military, and while not the least advanced, they lack a general ruthlessness required to truly thrive on Maia.

The Hans do not have a specific phenoclade, but do genetically resemble an amalgamation of Mediterranean, Nordic, Korean, and Micronesian bloodlines. Women represent close to 75% of the Hanzo population, with the general explanation that on the Earth they left, women were considered much more expendable than men, so they were sent, with most of the Hanzo men staying behind to keep fighting their wars at home. They still have the general notion of building something on Maia so that they can start sending aid and supplies back through the Pegasus Rift and help their respective factions win the great war at home. To this end, they tend to be much more peacemakers.

The Brutalists

Also known as the Wastelanders, the Doomseekers, the Fallen, and other colorful names, the Brutalists have the largest army on Maia. They could dominate the entire world relatively easily, except for their general lack of ships, relatively low tech, and the fact that the Brutalists are as prone to infighting as they are to fighting others. The Brutalists are survivalists, militia members, xenophobes, and generally the dregs of their own society. They will claim to be exiles, criminals, pioneers, heroes, explorers, or transapocalyptic renegades.

The Brutalists are best represented by an Indo-Chinese phenoclade with a strong military culture. Clothing, equipment, and social norms are all pragmatic and draw on military utility and durability.

Life on Maia

Life on Maia is Hobbsean, brutal and short. There are a number of ways that the now self-identifying Maians have worked around this, with the vast majority of the population having been cloned repeatedly. This technology propagated down from the Council of Maia faction, which used it to keep their clone servants under control, and simply resurrecting servants after their deaths rather than training new servants. Each Maian ends up with a Cortex Implant that if recovered, contains a digital copy of the person's memories. The cortex implant can then be put into a newly grown clone body, and the person brought back to life.

The thing about Maian resurrection is that when you come back, you can come back different, you can be sleeved into a new body, and in an instant can change races, genders, anything. You don't get to pick what they sleeve you back into, you don't even get to pick who brings you back. That's a Brutalist game, headhunting, then cloning their victims from the implants they carve out of still warm brains. Humans on Maia are a commodity. Humans are slave labor, soldiers, entertainment, and in some places, food.

The Cities

The Cityscapes of Maia are fluid. Borders change constantly, and cities are routinely being destroyed. Some are obliterated by ship's firing heavy energy weapons into them, others are overrun by marauders, some are depopulated by disease, biological weapons, chemical weapons, or outright natural disasters. The ruins of the old cities are quickly devoured by the winning factions, and the materials are used to build new cities, which are repopulated from the cloning tanks and birthing creches studded around the planet.

It is a game between the factions. As they kill and destroy, they extract data from the wreckage and the corpses. This allows them to almost innately become stronger. On Maia, the cost of progress is destruction. The citizens of the planet are not generally aware of this, but they do know that at almost any time, any city can be leveled. Alliances for quickly, and cities from different factions can team up to destroy a third city in a matter of days or hours. Because of this, people are paranoid, heavily armed, and the cities are girded with bristling weaponry and large armies.

The typical Maian follows a predictable life pattern. They are born at near physical peak age, fresh from the cloning tanks. They live eventful, harsh, dangerous, short lives, and typically die in violent and unexpected manners. Their cortical stack, or uploaded engrams of their minds are used to create a new clone, who starts the cycle over again. As such, most Maians are biologically seldom more than 5 years old, but many have decades of experience, memories, and skills. Even among the advanced Council of Maia, few of them are actually more than a few decades old, and sometimes there are schisms in the Council that are settled by sending mecha armies and nukes to wipe out the internal opposition. Brutalists celebrate months they way most people celebrate years.

Economics

There are a number of commodities on Maia. Food, technical schematics, raw materials, and bitcoins. The planet is harsh and unforgiving to agriculture, so the Maians have done some impressive things with the basic food dispensary, teaching the machines to manufacture edible food from basic organic materials. Synthetic food, compressed food, engineered food, and dozens of other technologies to turn the smallest material investment into the largest caloric bang for the buck. As such, it is dour and stoic, hardly the thing to inspire the soul and nourish the spirit. As such, the Maians are creative about sauces, seasoning, and indulging in consuming large amounts of alcohol, recreational drugs, and non-discriminatory sex. Everything else is just terrible.

Technical schematics are almost all legacies from the Utopia Initiative and it's various guises across the different realities that sent victims to Maia. They do not match, but their formatting and technical language are the same, thus almost any data reader or skimmer can access a Standard Template data device and the schematics it contains. While many of these vary wildly, they can be either used to pioneer a new tech that was formerly unavailable, or can be used to hone an existing technology. Food production, computer tech, and military tech are by far the most popular. These are stolen, copied, and sometimes an entire city can be destroyed and it's inhabitants killed on the suspicion that the city might have accessed a new technical schematic.

Raw materials are fairly basic, metals and volatiles are needed to make everything from food to ammunition, so there is a constant demand for more. The three basic modes of acquiring raw materials is heavy mining, scavenging the ruins of battlefields and cities, and raiding cities and pillaging them for their supplies and manpower. Such is life on Maia.

Bitcoins represent the basic economy on the planet, and is loosely based on Terran blockchain currency systems. This system is supported by the Hanse, and through their control of basic trade across the planet, has been adopted as a planetary currency. The basic exchange rate is one Bitcoin for a liter of synthetic fuel, and everything goes up from there. Certain raw materials are worth more, like titanium and uranium, and social services range from cheap food to high end sex workers and recreational drugs. The rich cannot be rich if there isn't a medium of measuring economic success or failure.

Outlook

The general outlook on Maia is that life is hard and painful, and it will be endured. Death is no escape, since people are endlessly being resurrected in new bodies, and there are even cortical stack engineers who copy personas, meaning that one person might have a dozen, a hundred, a thousand other bodies with their memories and sentience matrix. Those who fight and innovate and work together live longer, and are more successful. Those who cower or rely on others become victims. Those who cannot adapt are the ones who become slaves and fodder for the ravagers and Maian wildlife.

General Goals

Survive another day - pretty basic, live. Enjoy life as much as possible because you dont know when or where you will die, or how. You can make contingencies about who might resurrect you, but there is no promise that these will work. Tonight we rejoice because tomorrow we may all perish again. And again. And again.

Escape - Most of the Maians want to escape from the hellish planet and it's perpetual warfare, it is just that the factions will absolutely not work together, and anyone who seems close to escaping will become the number one target of the other factions.

Explore - things on Maia are strange, and there are secrets to be found out away from the cities, out in the depths of the wastelands.