Akiton

Despite its proximity to Absalom Station and its favorable location as the fourth planet from The Sun (counting missing Golarion), Akiton is a dying world. Since the system’s formation, the so-called Red Planet has lost much of the atmosphere and liquid water it once held due to the slowing of its liquid-iron core and the resulting weakening of its magnetosphere. Though this slow decline transpires on a geologic scale and Akiton remains hospitable to humanoid life—and indeed, its slowly expanding deserts and rock chasms are all that most of its resident species have ever known—it also offers a sad metaphor for the planet’s dying economy.
Prior to the discovery of hyperspace, Akiton was the center of its solar system’s mining, production, and trade of thasteron, an ore instrumental in the creation of fuel for sublight interplanetary travel. Since the advent of Drift travel and a reduced need for long realspace flights, however, demand for thasteron has fallen, and the economic effects of the crash now play out in political squabbles and civil strife across the planet. Massive space barges that once shuttled ore between all The Pact Worlds now lie as rusting hulks in the middle of the deserts, empty save for squatters and scavengers, humanoid and otherwise. Residents whose ancestors were magnates and high-society debutantes now hunt trash-eating khefaks and dodge flying, tusk-winged norkasa in the shells of abandoned cities, toil as laborers in the few remaining mines or industrial trench-squats, or join the anarchic gangs who battle for territory on the open plains with the planet’s more traditional nomadic peoples.
Akiton today has no centralized government, and its cold deserts, dry seabeds, and frigid polar ice caps host neverending skirmishes and proxy wars between various cities, clans, corporations, tribes, and offworld factions. It’s a world where unscrupulous business interests can engage in unregulated or morally questionable research and exploitation and where criminals, fugitives, and the lost come to escape justice, hide from their enemies, or try to make a fresh start.
The planet’s best-known urban centers are ancient cities such as Arl, with its passion for blood sports; Daza, the half-irradiated City of Fusion; and Maro with its fabled Thousand Lights, a vast trench city climbing its way up the walls of the Edaio Rift. In these dusty and flickering metropolises, Akiton’s dreams of civilization and culture still remain—for the rich, at least—propped up by their remaining wealth and control of the planet’s last few viable thasteron mines, as well as lucrative contracts with offworld corporations and factories specializing in weapons, armor, and ship parts. Most of Akiton’s lesser settlements, by contrast, are company towns, squalid slums, or frontier homesteader outposts where life is cheap, harsh, and short.
Members of nearly all of the Pact Worlds’ common races can be found somewhere on Akiton—including a seemingly native crimson-skinned Human ethnicity—yet the best known indigenous residents are the Ysoki. Unlike many of their fellow inhabitants, Akitonian ysoki thrive under the planet’s current degraded conditions, boisterous and opportunistic in their warren-districts beneath the cities or in motorized traveling caravans. Though operating largely off the grid, these latter nomadic populations inevitably return to the Hivemarket, the vast bazaar-city at the foot of Ka, Pillar of the Sky, where everything can be found for the right price and ghostly creatures called khulan keep the peace. The ysoki can also often be seen driving their ramshackle hovertankers back and forth from the Winterlands at the poles, hauling ice quarried by the resident cap miners while carefully avoiding the forbidden zones with their eerie alien ruins.
In addition to ysoki, Akiton has several other major indigenous races. Once driven nearly to annihilation by corporate interests, the four-armed humanoid giants called Shobhads have seen a dramatic resurgence in recent years as their traditional desert life sidestepped the economic collapse. Moreover, their constant clan battles for honor make them valuable as mercenaries and scouts. Complete opposites of the shobhads are the Contemplatives of Ashok, telekinetic creatures whose physical bodies have nearly withered away in favor of the great minds contained within their throbbing brain sacs and who excel at the supernatural arts and decipher esoteric truths in their legendary Halls of Reason. Slightly less well known are the red-skinned Ikeshti lizardfolk, who make model citizens until their reproductive cycle drives them violently insane.

Geography

Akiton’s famous red hue is a result of its rocky, iron-rich surface, which is marred by craters and is virtually absent of visible plants or liquid water. Like many other rocky planets, Akiton has a molten core, though that has cooled considerably over the past tens of millions of years. Not only has this process slowed tectonic activity, but it has also allowed solar winds to gradually erode the atmosphere, leaving it barely suitable for most humanoid respiratory systems. As the planet cooled, its weather systems gradually precipitated the world's liquid water into static ice caps, leaving behind immense trenches, virtually lifeless plains, and swaths of salinized soil where oceans once reigned—at least so the leading theory insists. Ancient myths speak of a time of great floods, though geological studies of the sundry trenches and channels suggest a variety of origins, with some pointing to a distant past of raging rivers and others indicating an ongoing divergence of tectonic plates. The greatest of these canyons is the extraordinary Edaio Rift, which nearly circumnavigates the planet like a jagged belt.
The largest “ocean” is the utterly dry Irkonian Sea, created by the collision of a prehistoric meteor that slammed into Akiton at a shallow angle and left an oblong scar. This impact corresponds to a mass-extinction event that killed off virtually all of the planet’s larger fauna and, as paleontologists believe, paved the way for the evolution of intelligent humanoids such as the ikeshtis and ysoki. Force waves from this explosive event are evident in the surface for thousands of miles, and even the Arlkari Plateau appears to be a geological percussion bulb uplifted by the strike.
Immense ice caps known as the Winterlands cover both of Akiton’s poles in a crystalline shell several miles deep. Descending winds blow with withering speeds across the frozen landscape, sometimes colliding to create extremely powerful twisters that blast the ice and sublimate water directly into short-lived clouds. In the north, beyond the hardy Ice Clans that still eke out a living here, the only signs of life are the abandoned Progenitor Cities that scholars now know the mysterious Witchwyrd built long ago. To the south, different ruins peek up from the glaciers, but all creatures avoid these purportedly haunted sites that tend to scramble electronic devices brought nearby.
The planet’s surface appears barren but sustains a wide variety of hardy cacti, grasses, and shrubs whose roots burrow as deep as 100 feet in search of Akiton’s anemic groundwater. Dust storms maraud across the rocky plains, practically circumnavigating the planet unless interrupted by a mountain chain. During the thasteron boom, engineers began an intensive terraforming operation dubbed the Bounty. Its goal was to stabilize the soil, restore Akiton to its prehistoric levels of flora, and kick-start a new agricultural industry. When funds dried up, many of the experimental sites withered, though the heart of the Bounty north of the Hivemarket has remained a fairly stable, albeit increasingly dangerous region of lush greenery unseen elsewhere on Akiton.

History

At a glance, the rocky surface, grisly impact scars, and forbidding ice caps of Akiton seem uninhabitable. Even so, life has clung to the surface for untold eons, even as the planet slowly dies. In a process that has been occurring for millions of years, Akiton’s core has cooled, its atmosphere has thinned, and its liquid water has frozen, killing off all but the hardiest plant life as much of the arable soil has simply blown away. What might have once been a lush paradise is now a desert world on which truly tenacious creatures have evolved to survive.
The rise of space travel brought new life to Akiton, for within its rocky crust run immense veins of thasteron, a substance key to the production of starship fuel for sublight travel. The centuries-long boom brought in unprecedented businesses, immigrants, and wealth, making the poor rich and the rich even richer. With the advent of Drift travel shortly after the Gap, though, the need for thasteron quickly plateaued and then plummeted. Within decades, most operations’ cost of extracting thasteron outweighed the potential profits, and today only a handful of reserves are pure enough or so easily accessible to be worth excavating. Those who had the means to do so left the planet long ago. Those who inherited Akiton were the desperate poor, the opportunistic raiders, the rugged traditionalists, and the stubborn plutocrats who hoped to keep their crumbling thasteron empires together. After several centuries of economic depression, the situation has largely stabilized, but the vibrant survivor culture is still a long way from prosperity.
It’s said that for every crater on Akiton, there are at least a dozen wrecks. Some of these are the weathered remains of abandoned mining vehicles, but a staggering number of starship hulks lie wrecked across the planet’s surface. Archaeological investigation indicates that most of these wrecks crashed on approximately the same date at some point during the Gap, suggesting some extraordinary battle for dominance of Akiton on both the land and beyond its atmosphere. Scavengers have yet to identify—much less loot—all of these wrecks, which hark back to a time when Akiton was richer and the Pact Worlds less peaceful.
RESIDENTS Despite its relatively inhospitable climate, Akiton has attracted a wide range of species, many of which remained even after the thasteron bust. Even so, five intelligent species are both native and dominant.
Tens of thousands of years ago, humanity settled on Akiton by means now lost to prehistory. Commonly known as the Hylki, these Akitonian humans have deep-red skin and warm-hued irises, but they are otherwise identical to humans originating from Golarion. Although most outsiders use the label “Hylki” to refer to all Akitonian humans, the Hylki subdivide themselves into five distinct ethnicities whose differences are lost on the typical offworlder. The Hylki tend to be skeptical of the bold claims of strangers, and this skepticism translates into agnosticism in religious matters for many Hylki. Despite this wariness, however, the Hylki are a hospitable and passionate people, as ready to offer a stranger shelter against Akiton’s cold nights as they are to demand recompense for a perceived slight.
Of all Akiton’s species, few can match the ysoki for how well they exploited the advent of space travel. Already curious and gregarious, the ratfolk have made themselves invaluable on starships and space stations across the galaxy. On Akiton, they command considerable respect—at least compared to the teasing they sometimes receive on other worlds—and ever since the thasteron bust, ysoki ingenuity has been one of the key components keeping Akitonian cities afloat. Their population is split roughly in half between urban opportunists and wandering nomads whose motorized convoys transport key resources to settlements all across the planet.
Over untold generations of evolution and genetic modification, the creatures known as the contemplatives of Ashok have transformed into psychic geniuses whose atrophied bodies dangle from their immense brains. Consummate scholars, most are content to direct their extraordinary mental faculties to complex mathematics, theoretical physics, and esoteric mysticism from the comfort of the Halls of Reason. With increasingly regularity, contemplatives have settled on other worlds, taking prestigious positions with think tanks, trading companies, universities, and even exploratory expeditions. Many other species find contemplatives unsettling for their appearance, but also for their insistence of referring to themselves with pronouns such as “we” and “us”—and practically never in the singular “I”—whenever found in a group.
When technological advancement exploded throughout the Pact Worlds, most contemplatives took these changes in stride, but two fringe groups (each representing a small fraction of all contemplatives) took opposite stances on the digital age: the Transcendent Cortex embraced technology wholeheartedly, and its advocates dedicated themselves to digitizing their minds to finally exceed the limitations of the flesh. The Pristine Muse, on the other hand, found technology disruptive, believing societies (including contemplatives) that relied on computers would find their thought processes and critical thinking atrophying. The two groups remain at odds but rarely clash directly; instead, they regularly call upon proxies to perform semilegal acts of sabotage against one another.
The red-scaled ikeshti lizardfolk of Akiton have long lived on the fringes of “civilized” society, in part because their ravenous young can inflict lasting harm on unprotected settlements. During their adolescent phase, ikeshtis are at their most social, and they favor opportunities for the mechanically inclined, seeking jobs as technicians, wreckers, or traders of technology. In ages past, Akiton lacked the resources to support especially large populations, but after more than a millennium of imported foods and terraforming, the ikeshti and ysoki populations have grown so large that they have come into conflict with one another. The result is that the two species often clash over territory, and the ysoki have increasingly exploited space travel as a means of avoiding competition.
Thanks to their group-oriented life cycle, most ikeshtis are born on Akiton. Many seek out opportunities elsewhere in the Pact Worlds, though it is very common for ikeshtis to send substantial remittances back to their brood-mates on Akiton. Travel abroad often disrupts an errant ikeshti’s reproductive cycle, though, and more than one starship crew has woken to find a stymied ikeshti crewmate transformed into a hulking, rage-filled rivener.
Even at the height of Akiton’s terraforming initiatives, immense tracts of the planet remained a dusty wasteland. This suited the shobhad-neh just fine, and these four-armed giants stubbornly clung to their nomadic lifestyle of herding, hunting, and raiding. They have integrated into society over time, though most shobhads spend the better part of each year eking out a living in the wilderness. When they accept work, the warlike shobhads are often mercenaries or gladiators who carefully negotiate in their contracts what their codes of honor will allow. Shobhads very rarely accept long contracts of menial labor, believing that such work makes them cogs in the urban machine and erases their individuality and identity.
When the price of thasteron plummeted, many mining settlements emptied but for those too poor to leave. Many Hylki and offworld miners looked to the shobhads’ way of life and adopted it for themselves, beginning an enduring fad of neopastoralism. This cultural appropriation grates on the shobhads, who balk at how casually others don leather harnesses, sport bone jewelry, and attempt to herd the planet’s large and destructive livestock. They have little recourse against others claiming their culture, but flaunting such affectations in the face of a shobhad is a surefire way to get into a fight.
SOCIETY Despite the virtual implosion of the thasteron industry, the people of Akiton have found new ways to survive and even thrive. Competitive cities clash for resources, and only the Pact Worlds’ most fundamental rules have much sway over the largely lawless wilds. As governments slashed their budgets, regulatory commissions were among the first to go, and now Akiton is a hotbed of quasi-legal industry. The porous customs agencies make the world an excellent smuggling hub, and it’s often up to the community to police all but the most egregious ethical violations. For all its upscale businesses, the planet is now famous for its junkyards, mercenaries, recyclers, and masses of people willing to rent themselves out as guinea pigs for tests both cybernetic and pharmaceutical. As far as the records are concerned, Akiton also has some of the fastest growth in the Pact Worlds, though that’s largely thanks to the many power brokers who exploit the cities’ loose business licensing to create untraceable accounts.
Upward mobility is the grand goal of many Akitonians. While plenty turn to crime or other get-rich-quick schemes, the most famous route is gladiatorial combat. Akiton’s arena tradition dates back untold millennia. Although the city of Arl has almost always boasted some form of blood sport, the purists maintain that most ancient bouts focused on ritualized combat and low lethality. Ceremonial clashes hold little interest for the galactic market, though, which eagerly tunes in to watch the major arenas’ increasingly flashy grudge matches. Those who can prove themselves in the arena stand to earn immense wealth and fandoms, and the people of Akiton practically fetishize their favorite gladiators—even starting brawls over the results of a recent match. The Three-Scar League manages the games and is one of the few surviving planet-wide regulatory commissions. Even so, untold numbers of underground fighting circuits defy even the League’s rules, often in order to preserve the “traditional” fighting styles of Akiton’s countless cultures in the face of broadcast sensationalism.
For all the economic desperation and jostling, Akitonians are largely sympathetic to those who’ve fallen on hard times. They share freely with the destitute, though some gangs use charity as a way to recruit new followers in ongoing turf wars for control of cities such as Arl, Daza, and Maro. Others offer handouts as incentives to sign on with the thousands of mechanized caravans that travel between cities, trucking goods around and keeping a keen eye out for newly discovered salvage.
CONFLICTS AND THREATS With scattered city-states, vast swaths of uncontrolled territory, and no centralized government, Akiton is far from the safest destination in the Pact Worlds. Even in the best of times, Akiton’s barren surface discouraged permanent settlements, and the frontiers remain the dominion of dozens of ferocious species such as the octopodal hrugs and the four-pincered silt dancers. Where these beasts dare not roam is often home to roving bands of brigands such as the daring Arroyo Boyz and the merciless Red Razors. Most infamous of all are the Sandstorm Nine, a group of ex-military kasathas who have founded their own bandit kingdom in the Ridgelands northeast of Arl. A number of Akiton’s raiders relish the income from abducting travelers and either ransoming their captives or selling them into slavery. Even though few settlements openly allow slavery, hidden slave rings across Akiton supply gladiators, labor, and test subjects to the planet’s less scrupulous souls. Most local governments have a standing bounty on slavers—at least on paper, as some of those same officials receive handsome bribes to look the other way.
Travelers who don’t have reliable aerial transport usually join motorized convoys that wind their way through the dust, seeking safety in numbers while carrying passengers and cargo. For these heavily armed caravans, there’s no such thing as too many guards, and a capable mercenary can find reliable work just by hopping from one expedition to the next. Ambushes aside, the Akitonian wilderness is a dangerous place, with punishing sandstorms, polar vortices, and deadly bolts of orange lightning that strike without warning from atmospheric dust clouds. To make matters worse, the prevalence of craters and ravines makes traveling in stormy conditions potentially disastrous, and the resultant dunes can slow even the most capable land vehicles.
Cities may seem safer, but they hold their own dangers. With the decline of thasteron, gangs have become the refuge for the economically downtrodden. Rival groups clash for territory, often catching bystanders in the crossfire of their turf wars. Municipalities can rarely dedicate the funds to combating local crime because the plutocrats who hold their cities together are also busy fighting over access to resources, and these magnates regularly hire freelance groups to perform covert operations against each other without leaving a significant paper trail. Even animals can pose a threat in cities, both where blighted neighborhoods have become the realm of dangerous beasts and where scavengers have tunneled up into well-established districts.

Tourism

The following are some of the most famous sites on the red planet of Akiton.
Arl Magnificent Arl is one of the oldest and largest cities on Akiton, having stood atop the Arlkari Plateau for millennia before the Gap. Its equivalent to kings, called thuroks, ruled the plateau for ages before being deposed, and as can best be reconstructed, Arl’s rulers were largely figureheads in a parliamentary thurokracy during the Gap. Since the thasteron crash, Akiton has become increasingly dangerous, and a military coup reinstated the thurok as a supreme ruler. The current thurok, Vahal Ayos (N male human soldier), favors bold shows of force over sustained recovery, often sending warriors to crush nearby raiding parties or posting bounties on dangerous fauna anywhere near Arl. The city rebooted its manufacturing industry, though it struggles to remain financially competitive—a matter Vahal Ayos sometimes sweeps aside by imposing new tariffs to protect the factories.
Arl is most famous for its historic district, one of the best-preserved, continuously occupied neighborhoods of pre-Gap architecture in the system. The star attraction is the Crimson Forum, a crumbling arena that once housed the greatest fighting tournaments on the planet. It has since been upstaged by the VitariTech Coliseum, a state-of-the-art stadium that hosts sporting events of all types and seats up to 150,000 people.
ARL N metropolis Population 18,350,000 (38% human, 36% ysoki, 11% Android, 15% other) Government autocracy (Thurok Vahal Ayos) Qualities cultured, in recession, profiteering Maximum Item Level 14th QUALITIES In Recession The settlement is experiencing an economic downturn, usually resulting in higher unemployment rates. Profiteering The businesses of this settlement engage in unethical practices in order to make profits.
Ashok Akiton’s native contemplatives are often referred to as the contemplatives of Ashok—a term that can refer to both this impact crater and a state of enlightenment that many contemplatives seek to achieve. The exact relation between the crater and this philosophy remains unclear, though some scholars of prehistoric Akiton have postulated that Ashok may originally have been the contemplatives’ ancestral homeland, obliterated when a meteorite struck the planet, forming the crater that now bears its name. Today, the crater of Ashok functions as an immense amplifier that focuses and intensifies psychic energies, much like a particle accelerator for telepathic waves, allowing the contemplatives to broadcast their telepathic communiqués throughout the galaxy and dissect the fundamental energies of magic itself. The researchers at Ashok are very protective of their discoveries and publish only frequently enough to allay the Stewards’ concerns. Even so, few creatures dare inhabit the region for miles around, reporting terrifying dreams and even spontaneous mutations as a result of the psychic radiation that resonates from the crater.
Bounty The grand terraforming operation known as the Bounty was supposed to revitalize the planet and spur industry, but ecologists traced its early failures to a lack of supporting fauna to crop the native plants, disperse seeds, and aerate the soil. In an effort to restore the prehistoric conditions, a multilateral effort began to excavate ancient animals, extract their DNA, and clone them. It worked, but perhaps too well. What scientists believed to be simple, small, burrowing proto-lizards were in fact only the juvenile form of a titanic species of subsurface predator. Upon reaching maturity, these scar gnashers began bursting from the ground to consume farmers, machinery, and even entire houses. Akitonian starships attempted to wipe out the creatures by orbital bombardment, but the scar gnashers merely burrowed to safety and they have since spread a modest distance from their terraformed home. Fortunately, they seem unable or unwilling to travel far beyond this region, but their presence makes the area increasingly dangerous. VitariTech Industries has proposed using an experimental weapon to exterminate the creatures, but so far no one has been brave enough to carry the armaments into the overgrown wilds.
Company Towns Where the best veins of thasteron lay, mining companies were quick to assemble new towns populated almost entirely by employees and their families. With the near collapse of the thasteron industry, laid-off workers hastily fled these settlements, leaving behind eerily empty ghost towns in their wake. Most of these surrounded the basin once known simply as the Deep, where the concentrated thasteron earned it a new name: Golden Bay. Booster City was the largest of these boomtowns. Several years ago, an extensive mining sinkhole caused a chunk of the city to slough down the side of the Deep, revealing an extensive network of previously unknown tunnels both artificial and natural. Etob on the northern rim is a wreck of ice-cracked structures, whereas Great Gwaz to the west has streets choked with dust. Not content to keep building settlements, Angkal Unlimited created a mobile town named Angkal Heights the size of several city blocks and propelled by treads more than 100 feet wide. After the structure became hopelessly mired in Golden Bay, the company abandoned thasteron mining entirely.
Perhaps the most famous settlement is the Utopia of Tivik, the creation of the egomaniacal ysoki Tivik who had her image etched into virtually every surface of the city. Her employees suffered this stream of propaganda largely because Tivik paid the best benefits and wages, and living conditions were otherwise some of the best in the industry. Even after being abandoned, the Utopia of Tivik still hums with energy as its digital billboards flash heroic scenes of its founder, speakers scratchily blare songs that praise her courage, and the occasional parade of robotic entertainers built in her image marches down the street. The city’s become a haven for ne’er-do-wells and raiders. Even these tend not to linger, though, for no matter how many of the flashy signs they demolish, something stealthily repairs the damage within a week.
Dal Dawat Ikeshtis’ nomadic lifestyles leave them with few settlements, but all know of Dal Dawat. Carved into a ridge overlooking the Irkonian Sea, this monumental sculpture of two intertwined reptiles is a sacred site for ikeshtis, who view it not only as a monument of fertility but also as a reminder of the warring instincts that sleep within themselves. Those ikeshtis who cannot find a mate make pilgrimages here to breed and avert transformation into riveners, though many lose their senses before completing the journey. As a result, riveners are common for miles around the site, and ikeshtis regularly organize patrols to hunt down their wayward kin—sometimes even attacking other creatures in a vain attempt to preserve their species’ dignity.
Daza The Pact Worlds may have developed several sources of clean, renewable energy, but tragedy litters the path to innovation. Daza traces its origins to The Gap, and it emerged from that period with a unique and extraordinarily efficient power plant that combined magic and technology in ways modern scientists still struggle to understand, earning it the name City of Fusion. Its post-Gap citizens easily pieced their lives back together, but within a few years, many of them fell ill, poisoned by arcane and chemical radiation that had leaked from the plant’s core for months or more. While many fled the irradiated city, those who stayed had irregular responses to the contamination. Certainly a large percentage became ill or died, yet an impressive fraction grew redundant organs, recovered from terminal illnesses, or even developed beneficial mutations. Within a decade, Daza became a destination for miracle seekers of all stripes, and a cottage industry of mystics promising the means to unlock Daza’s curative energies emerged.
Advances in individual radiation shielding have made it practical for people to once more live safely in Daza, drawing upon its functioning plant for energy at virtually no cost. It’s also an informal holy site for disciples of Oras, who view the city as one glorious, living experiment. Still, Daza is best known as a galactic leper colony that attracts the incurable, who settle in the city to work while awaiting salvation.
Dustwarren The fierce dust storms that erode Akiton’s rocky surface don’t distribute their payloads evenly, and much of the grit eventually settles in an immense rift known as the Dustwarren, forming a vast sea of fine silt. The dust constantly and slowly sloshes about, with powerful winds regularly sweeping up and depositing material. Innumerable tiny invertebrates slither through the grains in search of food particles the storms leave behind, and immense filter-feeding huikarls gorge on these virtually invisible creatures while leaving ephemeral furrows with their sharp-edged fins.
The sea of dust experiences unpredictable tides that can last for several weeks, and the ebbing sands reveal networks of scoured tunnels that riddle the submerged coastline. Among the most enduring tales on Akiton are those of space pirates and bandit kings who hid their loot down various tunnels, and shady traders are always eager to sell a “genuine” map to one of these abandoned troves. Interest might have faded were it not for regular sightings of starships landing near the Dustwarren and drunken tales of pirates on shore leave insisting their captains continue the tradition to this day.
Estuar This small town at the edge of Akiton’s southern Winterlands is deceptively quiet. Not much seems to happen aside from the thriving “icing” industry, where workers collect water from the polar caps and store it in large metal vats to be traded to the rest of the planet. Those familiar with Akiton’s criminal underworld know that Estuar is run by a collection of criminal syndicates that prosper from kickbacks and shady deals within the icing industry. The Szuri Ring is the largest and most ruthless of the settlement’s cartels.
Five Tines Fortress Akiton’s early history is rich in warlords who aspired to create empires, and although records of those would-be emperors from the Gap are now gone, many of their weapons remain. Among these is a flying citadel that patrolled the wastes but whose defenses were no match for post-Gap technology. The first to explore it found no signs of its creator beyond wall art depicting a ysoki warlord wielding a five-tined polearm. With the site considered safe, entrepreneurs moved in and transformed Five Tines Fortress into a touring attraction that boasts a carnival, rides, and luxury gambling. For all its relatively quaint technology, understanding of the aerial fortress’s navigation system has eluded engineers, and the structure meanders the planet at its own unpredictable pace.
Five Tines Fortress is most famous for its annual Redstone Raid, in which the site’s staff populates a different section of the citadel with lethal threats and sends teams of fortune seekers into the gauntlet for a chance to win a huge cash prize. The whole affair is broadcast live throughout the Pact Worlds, which has made the fortress’s current owner, Zukar Nurkop (CN male ysoki), very rich on the proceeds.
Gantim What began as a normal adolescent ikeshti camp several decades ago has become a scientific curiosity. Located near the edge of Akiton’s northern polar cap, Gantim is now home to an almost religious order of ikeshtis who have staved off their rutting instincts long past their normal reproductive cycle. They attribute their “success” to deep meditation and focus on intellectual pursuits, but some scientists have noted increased levels of radiation in the area. The ikeshtis of Gantim refuse to evacuate despite the threat to their health.
Halls of Reason Like powerful computers, the pulsating brains of the contemplatives of Ashok function best when kept cool, and these creatures often congregate in small research hermitages secreted in the darkened channels that crisscross the planet. The greatest of the contemplatives’ bastions, though, are the Halls of Reason, a vast array of windowless cubic towers. Whereas most of these boast cutting edge technology, nearly a dozen are completely devoid of electronic devices—all the better to concentrate on the most esoteric conundrums. The advent of Drift travel has expanded the contemplatives’ figurative horizons, driving them to excavate a vast network of tunnels and sealed laboratories that shield them from the technological chatter of the Pact Worlds so they can listen for the telepathic projections of distant societies calling across the cosmos. The contemplatives openly admit to having made contact with at least five otherwise unknown species in distant, unexplored systems, but they remain cryptic about further details while commissioning crews to dig ever-deeper vaults below the Halls and exterminate the subterranean beasts that keep infesting the tunnels.
Hivemarket On Akiton’s largely lawless surface, any place that sustains honest commerce forms an oasis of relative prosperity. No marketplace is larger than the Hivemarket, a sprawling bazaar that exists in equal parts aboveground as well as within a subterranean network of lava tubes beneath Mount Ka to the northeast. Although its tunnels provide considerable safety from raiders and the weather, the greatest reason for the Hivemarket’s millennia of success is the khulans. These ghostly, glossy-eyed creatures have lower bodies that seem to trail away into nothing. For all their spectral appearance, khulans are utterly vigilant and viciously attack anyone who performs major thefts or attempts to take over the market by force, but any legitimate business, no matter how immoral, goes unpunished. Most patrons have learned to accept the khulans as an eccentricity of the site, but several universities sponsor ongoing studies of the strange creatures to determine where they come from and what they want. A recently developed psychic tracker has allowed one group from the Qabarat University of Xenoarchaeology and Xenoanthropology to ascertain that the khulans retreat to tunnels far below those used by the market, and at intervals the tagged subjects all gravitate toward Ka as if following unheard instructions.
Several governing bodies help maintain the Hivemarket, perform minor policing, and provide directions, though these groups are often at odds with each other as they maneuver for greater shares of the bazaar’s profits and influence. The most influential of these is the Goldvein Census, a network of Abadaran temples that authenticate goods, notarize deals, and encourage economic growth—all while watching the khulans with suspicion. The minimal oversight and considerable safety of the Hivemarket have attracted several large businesses, including Sanjaval Spaceflight Systems, one of the leading producers of interstellar transport.
Ka, Pillar of the Sky Whereas its canyons are gigantic, several of Akiton’s volcanoes are outright titanic. Peaks such as the cinder cone High Shanzu and the composite volcano Eeha (nicknamed “the World Flare”) dwarf most mountains on other planets, but Ka, Pillar of the Sky, reigns supreme as the tallest mountain in all the Pact Worlds. This shield volcano rises to a height of 22 miles, bringing its summit well above the point that most creatures can breathe. Rather than deter visitors, the height has invited them to test their fortitude against the mountain. The old shobhad Test of the Mountain, in which a person seeking validation or exoneration climbs to the summit and back, remains popular to this day. Those who survive are forever changed, though in the past century, many of the mountain-tested have returned having formed a strange mystic spellcasting connection.
Ka is a sacred site for the shobhad-neh. Every year the disparate shobhad tribes send representatives to the Clanmoot here, the only gathering of their kind at which peace is guaranteed while the giants air grievances, trade, and develop alliances. This peace is not guaranteed to outsiders, however, and with the exception of a handful of approved minor outposts and tiny science installations that ring Ka’s lower slopes, the shobhads have mercilessly destroyed every attempt to establish settlements closer to the mountain. Some shobhads sell their services as guides to those seeking the summit, which also allows the giants to keep their clients on established paths and far from areas the shobhads would rather keep secret—including ominous obelisks and steaming caves reported by trespassers.
Khefak Depot Located near the largest concentration of wrecked starships and named after the trash-eating vermin that plague the area, this small settlement has a surprisingly robust economy based on an industry the residents call “junk tourism.” Khefak Depot has styled itself the go-to place for offworlders—mostly amateur archaeologists and Gap historians—who want a glimpse at Akiton’s famed wrecks without braving the dangers of the planet’s wastes. The town is chock full of hotels, restaurants, and tour guides, all eager to charge exorbitant prices to anyone naive or foolish enough to pay them.
Maro Plenty of settlements cling to the sides of Akiton’s trenches, but none are half as spectacular as Maro, which stretches for miles along the Edaio Rift and nearly 3 miles vertically from the surface to the chasm floor. Its ancient epithet of “Thousand Lights” is now a laughable understatement, for the lights of millions of billboards, businesses, and residences compete for attention. In past ages, Maro suffered from considerable wealth disparities, but the city admirably shared the profits of the thasteron boom. This upward mobility—both figurative and literal—shook up the city’s hardwired social identities, triggering an ongoing cycle of creative media that continues to this day. Lately, Maro echoes with the shumka beats style that resounds off the chasm walls, and a rash of pig-growling (short for pigment-growling) has left the upper reaches vandalized with immense graffiti masterpieces sprayed from speeding hoverbikes.
Maro may be famed for its fashion and nightlife, but it’s also infamous for its gang warfare. The city’s relative prosperity attracted many ambitious and desperate souls as thasteron failed, and gangs formed to round up a quick credit from the unsuspecting urbanites. Maro’s citizens have learned how to avoid the worst side effects of the turf wars, few of which creep beyond the bottom mile of the city. Even so, recruiters frequent virtually every neighborhood, always on the lookout for new hotshots willing to join up.
Nurkop Richpick Sometime during the Gap, the Nurkop ysoki clan went from relative poverty to fabulous wealth, and no one—not even their descendants—knows quite how. The mythology quickly arose that among the innumerable wrecks found on Akiton’s surface, the Nurkops found the mother lode of them all and sold off their prize. Ysoki love telling the tale of the Nurkop Richpick, that legendary site said to lie somewhere within the Dry Delta. As rumors insist, the Nurkops left behind enough loot to make AbadarCorp’s executive archdirector choke. Nobody’s ever rediscovered this wreck, but that doesn’t stop treasure hunters from braving the delta’s tusk-winged norkasa and biting sandstorms in the hope of finding a fortune.
Pau, Heart of the Land Whereas Ka, Pillar of the Sky, is the testing ground for great leaders, the massive impact crater the shobhad-neh call Pau, Heart of the Land is where their people prove their worth. Located between the Ngur Lowlands and the Teeth of Jolga, Pau has some of the richest natural grazing on the planet, making it valuable territory to shobhad herders who have traveled this region for untold ages. Its value also makes it the most hotly contested regions among the giants, who regularly raid one another and spill blood for control of the reddest grasses. The resurgence of herding among other species has led to bitter centuries of skirmishes between the shobhads and their insistent neighbors, and the former have buried the hatchet with one another in order to present a more united front against the usurpers who want their territory.
The Shears Akiton’s cities host dozens of registered arenas and gladiatorial companies, but numerous independent operations exist outside these municipalities. The largest of these is the Shears, an ancient fighting school that boasts trophies dating back to the early days of Arl’s Crimson Forum. Operated by the unforgiving priest of Damoritosh Shazzag (LE female shobhad mystic), the Shears offers the most brutal—and, so it claims, the best—training regimen on the planet, promising that students emerge either as hardened champions or as pulverized carrion. Its teachers regularly send groups of students out on “field trips” to reach some nearly inaccessible point or capture an imposing beast. As a result, these muscular disciples are a fairly common sight on the Kaviri Plains or in the unforgiving Sloughscar Hills.
Most of those who graduate the Shears depart to join urban gladiatorial stables, but Shazzag invites the very best to remain as part of her 15-member elite squad that competes only a few times a year. The school never enters the same championship twice in a row—these veterans are very confident that their repeat participation would be unfair to a region’s games.
VitariTech Research Sites The thasteron bust spurred a gradual brain drain of Akiton, especially in industrial sectors. The homegrown VitariTech Industries was among the hardest hit as property values fell and neighborhoods decayed. However, in the past century, the company has found new life thanks to Akiton’s virtually nonexistent research regulations, allowing it to engage in bleeding-edge research that often veers into deeply unethical territory, sometimes with Aspis Consortium funding. The studies at Site 3 are especially disturbing, using hired test subjects to endure torturous procedures in the pursuit of new cybernetic augmentation and gene therapies. Failed test subjects often conveniently disappear, and the privately owned company rarely publishes its findings or methodologies. Those few settlements near the facility sometimes come under attack by rampaging escapees with bounty hunters in hot pursuit.
For all the heinous practices of Site 3, the scientific community is more concerned by the claims out of Site 5, a separate facility studying atmospheric regeneration. The mountainside lab claims to have discovered the means to stabilize and rebuild Akiton’s atmosphere, though peer reviewers insist the procedure could as easily set fire to the whole planet. Some suspect it’s only a matter of time before VitariTech tests the technology anyway.

Alternative Name(s)

The Battlefield

Type

Planet

Included Locations

• Kelldor Memorial Center for Personal Enrichment

Inhabiting Species

• Khefak