Sepres VI
Abandoned but Fertile Plague Planet
The sixth planet from the binary star system Sepres is a lush, thriving world with an ancient history, and it is the only planet in the 16-planet system to sustain life. Yet, its proud and superstitious sentient inhabitants, the seprevois, lost both their home world and their culture during or prior to the Gap. As a result, the entire species has lived in orbit of their planet for as long as anyone can remember, estranged from an inviting but forbidden home in view but forever out of reach. The true reason for the seprevois’ exile has been lost to time, but the people’s legends tell that they were punished for poisoning the world and could not safely return even if they wanted to.
Millennia have elapsed since the seprevois last held dominion over Sepres VI, and the world has since succumbed to natural forces. The planet’s surface is 60 percent land, most of which is tropical rainforests, temperate plains, and expansive subtropical woodlands. Even the planet’s scarce deserts and mountains teem with life, with only the desolate poles devoid of complex ecosystems. The planet’s seas support a stunning variety of life of all sizes, from incredibly fast-growing colonies of psychic bacteria to highly social, mercury-blooded cetaceans. The planet’s atmosphere is free of contaminants and contagions save for one, a deadly virus engineered thousands of years ago to target only seprevois. It was this biological weapon, called derendenol, that precipitated the seprevois’ exodus into space and proved their most deep-seated superstitions about returning to the planet correct.
At its height, seprevoi society covered the entire planet, and the ancient remnants of this civilization remain even after the passage of countless centuries. Nature has worn away the massive works of engineering that supported the thriving population in its heyday, and it is a testament to seprevoi ingenuity that so many of them have withstood the ravages of time as well as they have. Entire cities remain frozen in time, their inhabitants hurriedly rushed to ark ships or long dead and gone, with statuaries, streets, and structures still intact. Other settlements or manufactured works, however, have not fared so well. What may at first appear to be an oddly shaped mountain range is in fact the crumbling ruins of oncesprawling towers, long ago collapsed in upon themselves and overrun by wildlife and unhampered flora; a swamp or river may have been a harbor or canal; a verdant wood may have been a well-tended botanical garden or isolated nature preserve. In rare instances, destruction is caused by creations of the seprevois that have run amok over the ages; military and scientific facilities have given way to strange corruptions of the natural order, including foul aberrations, mutant flora and fauna, and magical research gone awry.
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