Ifrit

The Ifrit were an industrial dog-like race who once ruled over the spheres and blackened the sky with pollution. A theocratic nation plagued by constant internal warfare between orthodoxies and heresies, they carved their borders into the earth through trenches and minefields that still scar the spheres today. The Ifrit never knew peace once they industrialized. Their smog-spewing war machines and armored heavy infantry grew larger and more deadly. However, locked within a constant arms race, the Ifrit never made technological breakthruoughs that would have seen them leave the industrial age.

History

Originating in Sera's leviathan-filled swamps, the Ifrit were forced to devise ways to defend themselves quickly or face a swift extinction. The sphere's hostile climes meant that when the Ifrit adopted neolithic concepts like agriculture and permanent settlements, their military technology had already adopted firearms and gunpowder. With enough firepower to stake out permanent settlements, they quickly laid down infrastructural roots for steel work and factory production within a generation of their first city's founding.
Despite rapid advancement in technology, the Ifrit held on to many superstitions of hunter-gatherer societies. The rapid change in lifestyle from hiding and hunting in the swamps to full-scale urbanization instilled a profound awe in the power of machinery amidst the Ifrit commoners, imbuing within them a sense of divinity.
As their settlements spread across Sera and the other spheres and their connection to The Dream World waned, the Ifrit found themselves listless for lack of purpose. To address their philosophical and spiritual ennui, they turned to the same technological innovations that allowed them to thrive on their homeworld. A powerful ifrit shah built a great temple housing a thinking machine that--through mathematics--would reveal the purpose of life and guide their civilization's development toward it.
For a time, the project marked a resounding success. Seen as a wonder of the spheres, Ifrit from all walks of life flocked to the Shah's Kingdom to worship and serve a great machine. With an entire civilization working toward a single purpose, the kingdom entered a golden age. Mathmetician clerics and robots spread across all the spheres to spread the gospel of the Shah's great machine. So startling were their achievements and so persuasive their evangelizing, that another kingdom soon dedicated its society and resources to build a god machine of their own.
The Ifrit met the construction of their second god with jubilation--which soon turned to horror when the answers it provided to the universe's great questions were different from the first. The Ifrit clerics detected the schism too late to mitigate its effects. The God machines and their devout followers, ideologically opposed and competing for Source's nectar to support their vision of society, soon came into conflict with one another, dragging the entirety of Ifrit society with them. Some engineers attempted to reunify their people by creating more god machines in hopes that a numerical majority could convince one side of their error. However, these efforts led to even further balkanization and conflict when these machines too produced different results from their forebearers.
After centuries of warfare, all of Ifrit society and technological advancements had been redirected toward the religious war. The spheres soon buckled under the conflict, drained of resources and ecologically devastated from the conflict. The Ifrit would have likely continued their slow march to self destruction for many centuries more had another threat not emerged to hasten their downfall. In the end it was not technological gods or mathmatical theorems that united the shcism between the Ifrit factions, but a threat from beyond the Rim.
Comets fell upon the spheres holding monsters the size of islands, beings that residents of the spheres today know as Tyrants. With these titanic foes devastating the cities they fell upon, the Ifrit reunited for a brief noble moment in their history to combat this existential threat. Once again, they focused their technological development on protection rather than warfare, building an army of giant mechs called Sentinels that (collectively) could challenge the Tyrants. The Sentinels and their pilots saved the spheres from outright destruction, but they were not enough to save the Ifrit. When the last Tyrant fell, the spheres had become so ecologically devastated and nectar so scarce that they could not support civilization--especially on the industrial scale to which the Ifrit had grown accustomed. While they never received definitive answers to the existential questions that plagued them, the Ifrit met extinction with unity and bravery.

Technology

Ifrit technology was geared toward the industrial warfare that plagued their society. They stressed what could be accomplished with industrial machining and steelwork, creating bigger and more deadly weapons of war in an endless arm's race. Most Ifrit technology relied on nectar to operate, creating a cycle of secondary military conflicts where nations needed to continuously wage war to scrape enough fuel together to fuel thier war machines. And since most artifacts created by the Ifrit were designed to be deployed in areas that would likely become a crater in a few months time, very little premium was placed on their weapons durability. Unlike the sleek machines of the Erryl or the occult enchantments of the Illithid, most Ifrit weapons fare little better than contemporary black powder firearms when exposed to the elements or a clumsy reload. Any Corsair who wishes to wield an Ifrit weapon best have some nectar on hand and their repair kits ready.
The most common technological remnants of the Ifrit were their firearms and cannons. While only slightly more elegant than the standard fare produced by the spheres today, they often pack a far more powerful punch than the weapons of today. The Ifrit also augmented their firearms with various types of chemical phosphorous, allowing them to burn, blind, and freeze their enemies. In addition to outfitting their rank and file with firearms, the Ifrit crafted prestige weapons in the form of spears, shields, and hammers capable of stunning technological feats. These were often wielded by generals and templars, inspiring their troops and striking fear into their enemies as a showcase of their god and kingdom's technological prowess.
On a larger scale, the Ifrit were known for creating powerful vehicles. Bipedal mechanized infantry were more commonplace than vehicles with wheels or tank treads given that many battles were fought in Sera's swampy and uneven terrain. However, the Ifrit also complemented their armored infantry with submarines and aeroplanes to dominate the seas and skies.
The Ifrit's gifts for robotics and mathematics proved both blessing and bane on their society. The Ifrit crafted wondrous automata that possessed sentience on par or exceeding that of a normal human. However, these beings became central to Ifrit society far before they attained microchips and advanced circuitry. Their mathematical theorems were so elegant that the Ifrit could replicate human like intelligences in a human-sized frames using code imprinted only on mechanical punchcards.
Ifrit technology also saw something of a second life in the spheres thanks in the form of Koan artifices. The crudeness and simplicity of Ifrit machines--at least in comparison to those of other civilizations--made them easy to replicate. Indeed, the Koa's leap in technological advancement over those of other civilizations is largely attributable to their proximity to Ifrit artifacts that they could study and replciate.

Culture

Ifrit culture valued obedience and loyalty against all other virtues. When someone in the Imperial language uses the word dogmatic, they are drawing comparison to the Ifrit. Ifrit society was collectivist and hierarchical by nature, which served them well in their early days of surviving in harsh environments but proved detrimental when trying to form globalistic and interplanetary societies.
The Ifrit placed divinity in machines, believing them to have a greater understanding of the cosmos's underlying principles than humans. Clerics skilled in mathematics guided the rank and file Ifrit in religious worship, distilling complex mathematical truths into parables or sayings that the commonfolk could understand (or at least repeat, in their quest for ideological dominance). Above the clerics were sentient machines called Templars, who walked and fought among the populace as exemplars for the mathematically correct way to live. The Machine Gods sat at the center of Ifrit society, whose brains occupied vast temples and labyrinths of machinery and punchcards. These machines were said to have grasped advanced and divine truths and their direcitves went unquestioned by the faithful. Many scholars have expressed skepticism over these machines' true capabilities, as none have ever been found in tact. Some have even gone so far as to speculate that their directives were not divine procolamaitons of the universe at all--or even the creations of artificial intelligence--but were instead justifications used by the clergy as causes belli for wars over more mundane geopolitical interests such as the control of nectar.
By the time the religious conflict spread across the spheres, four major factions vied for control of Source and Ifrit civilization. The Orthodoxy of the Sun stemmed from the first God Machine and enjoyed a slim hegemony over the spheres owing to their head start in both progress in both technology and theological doctrine. Adherents of the Sun ruled most Ifrit territory, evangelizing the root mathematical principal that "all is derived from one." However, their omnipresent reach across the spheres left them the most vulnerable to subterfuge and heretical fracturing.
The Heresy of the Comet flowed from the second god machine the Ifrit built. Weaker than the sun's counterparts, the comet heretics spread through guerilla warfare and ambush tactics to advocate a root mathematical pricnipal that "many is derived from one."
The Heresy of the Stars formed from a coalition of minor states caught between the battles of the other powerrs. Their doctrine "all is derived from many" sprang from multiple god machines whose contradictory teachings they sought to reconcile. While lacking the military power, the star heretics thrived through their multiplicity--cropping up in mutliple nations. They advocated a message of truth over zealotry, trying to temper and verify the teachings of their machine gods through their own observations of the cosmos.
The Heresy of the Void was a mysterious faction who worshipped no machine and followed the principle "all is derived from nothing." Their enigmatic founder, Prestor John, was said to have terrorized the other factions with occult and mystical powers, causing them to doubt thier religious convictions and slide into nihilism.

Artifacts and Legacy

The Ifrit's presence is still felt on the spheres today, both in the technology they imparted and the scars it left behind on the spheres. Military leaders across the spheres continue to draw wisdom from the strategems of Ifrit generals, while philosophers and advocates for peace point to them as a cautionary tale of what happens when a society places war and ideology above ecological and human interests.
Corsairs often run into Ifrit technology and ruins, particularly if they adventure near Sera or its moons. The Party has found many ifrit artifacts and even a few disciplines derived from the Ifrit on their travels:
Artifacts-- Altus the Drowned, Arc-Bolter, Armada Sprint Pack, Bahamutkrieg, Bright Phosphorous Rifle, Cold Phosphorous Pistol, Disruptor, Ifrit Alley Sweeper, Ifrit Engineer Armor, Maelstrom Rifle, Meteorite, Whizzer.
Vehicles-- Panzer Garuda.
Disciplines-- Mech Commando, Rocketeer, Sun Templar.