Apostae

Apostae is a rocky planetoid that is much smaller than most worlds in The Pact Worlds system, with an orbit that angles strongly from the ecliptic, almost perpendicular to that of Absalom Station. These telltale clues lead to general acceptance of the theory that the planetoid originated somewhere beyond the system and was caught in the sun’s orbit thousands of years before The Gap. Whether the world was guided to the system intentionally or arrived through some accident remains anyone’s guess.
The few existing records of visits to the planetoid in the centuries prior to the Gap describe a barren, airless surface and a warren of atmosphere-filled caverns and tunnels riddling the rock through to its core. Many of the chambers were empty, but others held ancient machines that still hummed, indestructible doors, permanently comatose and preserved creatures with a range of alien forms, and vaults of advanced technology and weapons. Though a few research teams explored Apostae before the Gap, interacting with a now-extinct race known as the ilee that dwelled inside the tunnels, no group from outside the worldever established a permanent foothold on the planetoid, which most assumed to be some sort of ancient generation ship or otherwise self-contained environment. Strangely, nothing in the records suggest that the ilee themselves had any knowledge of their origin, giving rise to the theory that they may have degenerated over millennia between the stars or else been some sort of captured or servitor race that outlived their masters.
No one knows exactly what happened to completely kill off the ilee, but since the end of the Gap, Apostae has been primarily in the hands of several powerful houses of Drow—purple-skinned elves who reject their kindred on Castrovel and worship powerful demons. How and when the drow first came to the world is also a mystery lost to the Gap, but most believe that they fled there shortly before Golarion's disappearance, guided by their demonic patrons in a twisted parody of the elves’ own escape. Today, despite centuries of effort to expand their holdings and increase their meager population, the drow still maintain only incomplete control of the planet-ship’s interior, and their influence on the barren surface is mostly restricted to a single major city near one of the massive doors leading down into the rock. Even this much, however—when combined with their significant economic power—has been sufficient for them to claim Apostae as their home world and become signatories to the Pact, over the loud objections of Castrovel’s elves.
Much like the bone sages of Eox, the drow houses don’t work together as a cohesive government and assemble only to elect ambassadors as required by the Pact. Each drow house acts independently, with most operating family-run corporations that deal primarily in arms, especially new technologies discovered or retroengineered from the alien items recovered by archaeo-salvage teams within Apostae. The Orcs, Half-Orcs, and other races that live in the drow-controlled settlements are at best second-class citizens, with no say in political matters, mostly used as laborers or subterranean cannon fodder when teams break into previously sealed chambers in search of the fabled Armory or Chamber of Life.
The most powerful house on Apostae is House Zeizerer, which also has the broadest and most successful network for weapon sales. House Zeizerer controls Nightarch, the largest city on the planetoid’s surface and the only known point of entry to Apostae’s interior, as all of the other huge doors set into the planet’s surface are locked and have proven indestructible. As a major spaceport, the city hosts bustling markets dealing in personal and starship weaponry, mercenary squads of orc and half-orc warriors, fleshwarping augmentations, and custom weapons designs.
In addition to searching for alien technology within the planet’s vaults—either on official contract or by slipping past drow defenses—visitors often come to Nightarch to study the eponymous arch at the center of the city. This arch is similar to those that link many of the system’s worlds—and a functioning ring of such portals within the city provides access to most of the other Pact Worlds—yet this particular arch is covered in markings that have so far defied all efforts at analysis. When it activates, spontaneously and at rare and random intervals, it creates a gate to unknown landscapes. So far, no group that’s passed through these short-lived portals has ever returned.

Geography

Apostae is not a true planet, lacking the geological components of such worlds. The planetoid has no tectonic plates, no core of magma, no oceans, and no volcanoes, and its surface changes only when struck by a meteor (an event more common on Apostae than on worlds with atmospheres that usually burn up such objects) or torn apart by war games and weapon tests conducted by various drow houses. However, there is more variation in Apostae’s geography than might otherwise be expected. Craters with expansive glassy bottoms and huge sidewalls pockmark the surface of Apostae, interspersed with towering slabs of rocky crust torn free from the surface to sit at odd angles, often lasting only until another meteor impact (or starship-weapon test) rips the landscape apart again.
The only major features of Apostae other than craters and debris are the mammoth cracks in the world’s rocky outer shell, similar to those formed on a ball of mud when it dries. Hundreds of minor crevices crisscross the cracked planetoid, but the largest chasms run for hundreds or even thousands of miles and generally extend 30 to 40 miles deep. The origin of these fissures is unknown, and pre-Gap accounts do not mention them. The few expeditions that have been allowed to extensively study the crevasses suggest they are only 8 to 12 centuries old based on surface weathering. Most drow assume they are an aftereffect of some massive, forgotten weapon test that occurred during the Gap, though it has also been suggested they are signs that Apostae is much older than it was designed to last and that the world is beginning to literally come apart at the seams.
Caverns and chambers that are known to have existed well before the Gap fill Apostae’s interior, but their true nature remains a mystery. While hundreds of miles of corridors have been explored and stripped of technology by drow houses, much more of the planetoid’s interior has never been explored, accessed, or even found, and some of the rooms mentioned in pre-Gap records—perhaps most importantly the areas known as the Armory, the Chamber of Life, and the Worldheart—remain lost.
RESIDENTS Apostae is home to multiple races that trace their origins back to lost Golarion, most notably drow, half-orcs, orcs, and (to a lesser extent) mongrelmen and troglodytes. None of these races are native to Apostae, and while records suggest that a native race called the ilee once resided within the planetoid’s interior, the ruling drow houses have found no sign that any ilee still exist.
The surface of Apostae is airless and unforgiving; some elemental creatures can be found dwelling on it, but most regions are barren of life. Within the planetoid, intrepid explorers have been known to encounter all types of constructs, but especially wandering berserkers and stoic guardians. Unconfirmed reports also warn of vicious, carnivorous, crab-like creatures inhabiting Apostae’s deepest chambers. If these latter creatures exist, they have successfully avoided all efforts to communicate with them. The sole evidence of the creatures’ existence comes from deep scout teams exploring remote tunnels who call in to describe an attack before their transmissions are abruptly cut off; such teams are never heard from again.

History

Apostae is a planetoid far from the system’s major trade routes and mining operations, with few natural resources and no atmosphere on its surface. Its largely hollow center is filled with thousands of tunnels, caverns, and chambers that are clearly artificial in nature, many of which are filled with advanced technology unlike that of any race known to the Pact Worlds. Even before the time of the Gap, Apostae was a mystery, believed to be an artificial world that came to the solar system from the vast gulf of space beyond. When the Gap ended, numerous drow houses already resided on Apostae in the city of Nightarch and small settlements just under Apostae’s surface, dealing in the technological treasures found in the planetoid’s interior. However, only a small fraction of the inner world has been explored, and even now, centuries later, much of it is inaccessible.
SOCIETY Various drow houses control Apostae, each operating at least one legal business as a cover for more secretive operations. As Apostae lacks any natural resources to speak of, the drow have largely turned to plumbing the depths of its interior chambers to salvage rare technology and use that tech to create advanced weapons and custom systems, which they sell to the highest bidders. The houses maintain a planetwide alliance strong enough to ensure their respective seats on the Pact Council are never threatened, and the authorities of the Pact Worlds have no strong reasons to take a close look at what happens on (or within) Apostae. Despite this alliance, the drow houses and their corporations are in direct competition with each other, any collaboration being limited in scope and generally of short duration. No laws govern the conduct of either the houses or the corporations on Apostae—drow do whatever they believe they can get away with, and only their long life spans temper their emotions and desires enough for them to consider the possible consequences that might occur a year, a decade, or a century later. Most drow houses overlook occasional offenses against their rank-and-file citizens and employees, but they are likely show strength in vengeful response to acts against their higher management. While no hard-and-fast rules control such interactions, non-drow are usually aware their houses won’t protect them against the acts of other houses, and even most common drow know they are unlikely to be considered important enough for their houses to exact revenge in response to acts perpetrated against them by nobles of other houses. Only an attack or political pressure that causes major ripples and makes a house look weak is likely to generate a demand to address wrongs committed by the higher social ranks against lower-class citizens.
The drow of Apostae typically assume that women are both more important and more capable than men. At least part of this is an inherited assumption that comes from the fact that when the Gap ended, nearly all the positions of power among the drow were held by women. The prejudice is backed by the pre-Gap accounts showing that women controlled drow noble houses, and the drow have established laws that enforce this custom. Those “noble drow” who have additional magic powers are also much more likely to be women. This is in part because when a house decides to expend resources to uplift a drow to noble status through genetic manipulation or demonic rituals, it’s considered a safer bet to focus on women, who have already proven themselves within the house.
Since the upper ranks of most houses were already filled with drow women when the Gap ended, and those positions are usually held for centuries, it is very difficult for drow men, as well as members of other races of any gender, to advance within the power structure of any drow house. The most likely path to wealth and power for those such individuals is to find financial success, almost always by making arms deals that bring in long-term clients and fill a house’s coffers with credits, or to gain a reputation as a particularly dangerous assassin, enforcer, or spellcaster. Such paths are also fraught with danger, as those bucking the system are seen as threats by the noble drow above them and as assets worth eliminating by the house’s competitors. This paradox often leads midlevel managers within a drow house to seek house-approved rationales for expanding their operations off Apostae, allowing them to increase their wealth and political power while staying far enough away from Nightarch’s gleaming towers to possibly avoid being marked as targets. While the success rate for this tactic is about 50 percent, those odds are usually sufficient for more ambitious drow.
Other than the few scions and senior managers of drow houses who live in true security and luxury, those on Apostae must prove their value every month in order to justify the air they breathe and water they drink. Anyone able to gain a job as a technology miner earns good income by delving the depths of Apostae’s interior in house-approved ventures, but the nature of those expeditions leads to high casualty rates. Engineers, researchers, and scientists can manage reasonable lifestyles as long as they keep producing advances using the alien technology salvaged from within the world. Clerks, maintenance staff, menial servants, and soldiers lead hard lives, working long hours and seeing most of the economic benefits they reap go to their superiors. The unemployed are tolerated in the worst maintained, least comfortable corners of Apostae as replacement serfs. Even these folks nearly always answer to local gangs and petty block warlords, who in turn answer to minor managers of the major drow houses. On Apostae, everyone serves the needs of the great houses in one way or another.
CONFLICTS AND THREATS The greatest risk to the drow on Apostae is the ambition and greed of other drow. A dozen or so major houses, including Arabani, Brevak, Rycast, and Zeizerer, get along well enough to ensure that the necessary ambassadors to the Pact Council are elected and work to protect the drow’s overall interests, though most houses constantly seek to supplant and even destroy one another. Open warfare between houses is rare, mostly because any such obvious conflict invites other enemies to test a house’s defenses, but covert operations and political maneuvers are everyday occurrences. Though far less common, elven agents of Sovyrian also take extreme steps to damage or destroy the drow holdings. Such acts are actively forbidden by the Pact Council, but many elves see the drow as a growing cancer of demon-worshiping evil that must be eliminated before they destroy or conquer all of the worlds of the solar system. Neither the drow nor their elven enemies tend to think of other races on Apostae as crucial to these conflicts, and they generally regard collateral damage that wounds or kills the servants of various drow houses as inconsequential.
The combination of tyranny and near anarchy that controls most of Apostae, with settlements either wholly controlled by one or two drow houses or else nearly lawless, brings its own level of danger. Even if an outside group receives permission to land on Apostae or explore various areas of it, that permission does not include any guarantee of support, or even safety. Minor agents looking to make a big score, pirate groups, rogue elements, street gangs, and even just mercenaries on leave can cause conflicts that would be seen as riots on most worlds but are considered an acceptable cost of business on Apostae. Less common, but still possible, are attacks by demonic creatures summoned by mystics unable to control them, rogue soldiers maddened by constant use of combat drugs who can’t tell a camp from a battlefield, experiments gone wrong (from genetically altered super soldiers to hunter-killer robots), and strange constructs and technology from the interior chambers of Apostae that sometimes escape containment from research labs.

Tourism

The following are several notable locations across Apostae.
Black Door Black Door is little more than a campsite situated around a massive set of doors set into the rock of the planet’s exterior. It is believed the door leads into Apostae’s interior, as it is similar to the door in Nightarch (though, as the name suggests, it is flat black in color). To the best of anyone’s knowledge, the door has never been opened or breached, and it resists even magical attempts to pass through it (such as teleportation or turning incorporeal). An endless succession of groups flocks to the site, testing new theories on how to control, bypass, or destroy the door, resulting in a semipermanent camp of pressurized tents, mobile labs, and expeditionary vehicles in the area. Because injuries are common in such efforts, House Rycast has stationed a well-staffed mobile hospital at Black Door. Anyone injured at the site can receive the very best treatment her credits can buy, with very reasonable terms of indentured servitude for those with injuries more extensive than their bank accounts. The current head administrator of the Black Door Hospital is Caya Rycast (CE female drow mystic), a minor drow noble of House Rycast who was originally sent to Black Door as punishment for one of her previous assignments. She has remained there for 50 years hoping to capitalize on what she assumes will eventually be a successful attempt to get through the door, while also building a private army of servants who owe her years of service in return for footing the bill for their medical treatment.
Blood Barracks The Blood Barracks are a combination medical facility, demonic temple, and mercenary compound run jointly by multiple drow houses, including Arabani, Brevak, Rycast, and Zeizerer. The barracks are home to the Blood Army, a large military group made up primarily of half-orcs with a few drow officers that serves primarily to protect Nightarch specifically, and Apostae in general. Though small, the Blood Army is considered an elite force, having engaged many times with pirates seeking to steal military technology and with rogue Sovyrian ships striving to destroy the drow as a whole. The Blood Armada, a small navy of starships that constantly patrols space around Apostae and oversees all approaches to the planetoid and Nightarch, is a division of the Blood Army.
To ensure the Blood Army never attempts to take control of Nightarch, its troops are stationed in a mix of small permanent pressurized structures, temporary shelters, and mobile headquarters, positioned far from the city and dependent on weekly shipments of supplies (including air and water). The Blood Army forces are deployed only if a major threat appears, and its soldiers often serve short tours before being shipped off to fight in drow-run mercenary companies.
The Blood Barracks also house a medical facility, where soldiers from any of a dozen drow-approved mercenary companies can be treated and often train with the Blood Army as rehabilitation after treatment. Lying beneath the camp, however, are centuries-old temples to many patron demons the various drow houses worship. While the existence of these shrines is not secret, the drow houses are tight lipped about the details of the demonic rituals performed within them and the exact demons they revere. Rumors circulate that drow perform various blood sacrifices there, perhaps even using kidnapped victims from other worlds, but the few investigations undertaken by Pact Worlds agents have been unable to confirm even a single case of an offworlder being taken below the Blood Barracks, and any local deaths are explained as failed medical treatments.
Breaklands The Breaklands are a section of broken, jagged peaks that are popular as a hiding place for drow-house employees trying to escape their employers, as well as for pirates and smugglers engaged in illicit dealings on Apostae. The Breaklands less resemble a mountain range than they do a concrete lot that has been broken up and the surface pieces left in random piles. Because the planetoid has no tectonic plates, it’s assumed the Breaklands resulted from some spectacular explosion or meteor impact that broke up Apostae’s surface in a vast area and left the once-smooth rock upended and ragged. No foothills or other transitional terrain surround the Breaklands—the landscape goes from plains of pitted rock to mile-high slabs of spiky stone surrounded by packed dirt. While no caves exist in the traditional sense, the slabs that make up the Breaklands often lean against each other at odd angles, creating concealed areas large enough even for starships to hide in. The broken crust is that so thick most sensors can’t penetrate it, creating hundreds of areas safe from detection from anything but a dedicated ground search.
Crater Town Though much smaller and less stable than Nightarch and established only a few years ago, Crater Town is a growing settlement on Apostae, though it remains to be seen if it can last in the harsh airless environment. Crater Town is made primarily of the same kinds of temporary pressurized shelters and mobile domes that make up other minor camps across Apostae, but the settlers have used mining equipment to embed those structures in the sides of one of Apostae’s biggest craters, which gives the shelters considerably more protection and support than those standing in the open. A massive shelf of ice covers the basin of Crater Town, believed to be left over from the meteor that created the crater eons ago. Both air and water can be mined from the ice to provide Crater Town with basic environmental needs—though the quality of both are far below most Pact Worlds’ municipal standards.
Crater Town is the sole settlement on the planetoid not officially owned by a drow house; instead, it is run by a council of retired mercenaries, most of whom are half-orcs. The eldest of the council is Kavor (NE male half-orc technomancer), who was granted permission to attempt to establish a trade camp as a bonus when he retired from a long and profitable career. Kavor set up the first few buildings of Crater Town using his own funds, and he trades ice and other simple goods with passing starships. While the margins are thin, Apostae is far enough from most major trade worlds that a steady trickle of ships lands there looking to replenish water supplies. A small black market has developed in Crater Town as well, as it’s the place most likely for transactions to occur away from the ever-watchful eyes of the drow houses.
Eclipse Academy Very few people outside of Apostae know about this obscure university located at the opposite end of the Hak Rift from Nightarch. The majority of its students are drow looking to learn more about the light-based magic all drow are born with, while the rest are offworlders who have been invited to enroll because of their innate magical talents. Classes generally consist of grueling practical exercises where instructors push their pupils to their physical and mental limits. Only one-fifth of every class graduates, the others dropping out because of the constant pressure or literally dying of exhaustion. Those who see the end of their 3-year course of study are some of the most talented mystics, solarians, and technomancers the universe has seen, though many have contracted serious mental illnesses and neuroses from the stress.
The majority of Eclipse Academy’s campus is underground, with only a pitch-black ceramic tower marking the facility’s entrance. Inside, the lecture halls and dormitories are sparse and functional with no lighting to speak of. Several drow houses secretly finance the university, paying for its food supplies, oxygen, and power while maintaining plausible deniability should the academy’s cruel practices become known to the entire Pact Worlds.
Hak Rift The Hak Rift is the most unstable of Apostae’s crevices. Several times a year, it suffers earthquakes that often result in rockfalls and other dangerous changes in topography. Since Apostae has no molten core and no known natural source of tectonic activity, many geologists are curious about the cause of these quakes. Expeditions into the rift are hazardous, and several exploratory parties have disappeared with no explanation; even so, a new scientific expedition ventures into the Hak Rift every few years.
The Hollows The tunnels directly behind Nightarch’s Great Door have been thoroughly explored, documented, and looted, but very few drow have established permanent colonies within the planetoid. One significant exception to this fact are a series of waypoints collectively called the Hollows. Situated in side chambers and consisting of hastily constructed prefabricated buildings, these stations are used mainly by exploration teams delving deeper into Apostae than a single day’s trip could reach.
There is a code of conduct for using the Hollows that is spread by word of mouth for Apostae explorers. A Hollow should be left in the same state in which it was found, and adventurers must dispose of their own garbage. Incoming parties are expected to defer to outgoing parties, though usually a Hollow contains enough space for both. Finally, spending more than a few nights in a Hollow is forbidden unless there is a medical emergency.
Recently, those who have slept in Hollow-10 have reported terrible nightmares of a dark presence emerging from the planetoid’s interior to stalk them through the tunnels. Descriptions of this being have been remarkably similar: a multiple-limbed aberration with large compound eyes, scales like a lizard, and hot, fetid breath. Some believe these dreams indicate the ilee are not dead and are returning for vengeance.
Iron Door Like Black Door, this area contains a set of massive double doors embedded into the surface of Apostae that is believed to lead deep into the planetoid’s interior and, also like Black Door, has so far resisted all efforts to open it. The doors cover an opening more than a mile long and nearly as wide, and they appear to be made of cold iron (though it is as impermeable and impenetrable as all other surface doors). Unlike other sites, numerous access hatches set within the doors lead into a series of corridors that seem to honeycomb the doors but don’t go all the way through. The corridors beyond the door shift apparently at random, and they often include newly revealed mechanical traps.
For decades after the Gap, the door was seen as a likely access point into the depths of Apostae, but after hundreds of failed attempts—and thousands of lost lives—enthusiasm for the project waned. However, while most houses pulled out of the area, House Brevak remained, and a small permanent campsite grew up around the doors and became known as Iron Door. There have been no new revelations about the door, but it has become a minor center of diplomacy and technomancy. Research into the ever-changing layout of the door’s access corridors is an ongoing project, and cooperation with other houses is a major focus of the settlement’s administration. As a result, the area is now considered neutral ground by most other houses, and any serious conflict between drow houses that does not include House Brevak is often settled at conferences between parties at Iron Door.
Jorund Chasm Jorund Chasm cuts through ancient chambers that are believed to have once been part of the Apostae’s interior complex. Most of these rooms have collapsed, and those that have been excavated (a timely and costly endeavor) inevitably reach dead ends rather than leading to any new passageways beneath the planetoid’s surface. However, the sides of Jorund Chasm collapse periodically and expose new chambers, some of which contain scraps of usable alien technology. Expeditions that plumb deep into the crevasse sometimes find piles of ancient data cards, crushed robots, or even mummified alien corpses among piles of rubble. Such occurrences are rare, and no drow house has managed to make a profit from such efforts, but expeditions with offworld funding are often approved on the condition that the sponsoring house has first right of refusal of any newly discovered technology. The high level of activity also means that raiders are surprisingly common in the area; bands of renegade mercenaries and minor gangs wait for other expeditions to discover valuable treasures, and then they take those finds by force.
Karkaken Testing Grounds Officially, the Karkaken Testing Grounds are simply an area House Arabani has reserved for testing its new defensive systems, military robots, and weapons, from handheld pistols to massive starship-scale tractor beams. However, the massive complex of administrative buildings, factories, labs, showrooms, and warehouses at the center of the testing grounds is self-sufficient and large enough to count as a small city in its own right. House Arabani imports water and air directly to the facility, bypassing Nightarch and the reach of House Zeizerer, except for when Arabani agents want to access the Great Door or to ship goods to prospective clients who land at the Nightarch starport. Normally, no drow house is willing to risk angering House Arabani too greatly, as the Karkaken Testing Grounds boasts the largest military force outside of the Blood Army. As a result, House Arabani is the unquestioned master of the area and uses this secure base as the primary home for many of its businesses.
Mehel Gorge Mehel Gorge is the only major chasm to split into two at one end, though other crevices (such as Hak Rift and Jorund Chasm) do intersect with one another. Mehel Gorge appears to be the most stable of Apostae’s many cracks, as it isn’t wracked by tremors like the others. Its close proximity to the Karkaken Testing Grounds makes it a popular location for military training for mountainous conditions, though it also has a reputation for being unlucky. Most enterprises conducted there suffer at least one major accident, from equipment malfunctions costing hundreds of thousands of credits to the inadvertent switching to live ammunition leading to the deaths of dozens. While there is a rational explanation for each individual misfortune, many suspect supernatural interference causes them all. House Arabani has assigned a minor divination crew to examine the gorge to secure any proof of this theory. They have yet to produce any results—a fact that is making the group’s leader increasingly nervous.
Night Fault The Night Fault is the narrowest of the major crevices that crisscross the surface of Apostae, and it is the only one with a thick dust cloud within it (possibly from the same sources that created the Silted Sea). Running miles deep and generally no more than 50 to 100 feet wide, the narrowness of the aperture and the thick dust choking it means very little of the sun’s dim, distant light reaches far into the Night Fault. Low-level radiation and electromagnetic waves within the rift thwart most technological sensors. The dust generally halves any light source’s range (or reduces it even further deeper within the fault). The poor visibility and jagged rocks combined make going down into the Night Fault perilous even for the best prepared. As a result, it is a popular place to cache materials too valuable to destroy but too dangerous to have on hand. Most such stashes are stored beneath camouflaged fake rock a mile or more below the surface. Efforts to hide materials within the crevice sometimes end with a cliffside impact, a depleted jet pack, or frayed rope that leads to the payload (and its bearer) dropping into the black depths and, presumably, shattering on impact at the bottom.
Nightarch Nightarch is the largest and most powerful city on Apostae. As the Apostae is mostly an airless rock, Nightarch is a sealed city, its hundreds of towers and compounds built with the same environmental systems (and durability) as starships. In the center of the city lies the massive, eponymous Nightarch Gate, while the Great Door, which grants access to the ancient chambers in the planet’s interior, stands in the southernmost quarter of the city. Both sites are heavily guarded, and expeditions into the planet’s interior are normally restricted to groups with the approval of a major drow house.
Nightarch is a major starport and trade hub. Most drow houses have businesses and strongholds here, with shops selling everything from starship weapons to nanite poisons and arranging for nearly any service imaginable. While much of the business done in Nightarch would be considered illegal or immoral elsewhere, as long as customers are accurately informed of the drawbacks and risks of each purchase, procedure, or hireling arranged for, the details are largely considered local matters beyond the Pact Worlds’ purview.
Great halls and pressurized towers that offer breathable air, comfortable temperatures, and often even artificial gravity systems make up the entirety of the surface city. The largest and wealthiest drow houses own enormous towers that contain their own atmosphere plants and power sources, and these buildings can be sealed off from the rest of the city to operate independently for months. Other buildings and domes are dependent on Nightarch Air and Water, a corporation owned and run by House Zeizerer, which charges small fees for the most basic needs of life and can embargo smaller buildings, poorer domes and halls, and nearly any of the cavern-boroughs. While the towers of other major houses are self-sufficient, the tunnels and commercial districts connecting them to the rest of Nightarch are not. House Zeizerer can’t suffocate its major competitors, but it can force them to enter and leave their homes in environment suits.
While the tremendous house towers generally offer opulence and security, such conditions are limited to the powerful scions and managers of each house, along with their handpicked aides. The smaller domes and towers of Nightarch, where rank-and-file drow and a few successful citizens of other races dwell, are significantly less upscale. Lesser spires are generally secure, if uninspired in design and not as spacious, but Nightarch’s domes and block halls are often actively dangerous. These large environmentally sealed chambers house entire slum neighborhoods, and though they’re officially owned by various drow houses, their maintenance is often haphazard at best. Gas leaks, gravity outages, tainted water, and unreliable power makes life in these regions difficult, and security measures are geared toward preventing insurrection against the drow houses rather than protecting the local citizens. Crime in these warrens is largely ignored as long as it doesn’t impact a drow noble, and local gangs or minor mercenary groups are often the closest things to police forces.
Even worse than the slum domes are the cavern-boroughs, stretching out for miles in all directions beneath Nightarch. These enormous, largely artificial caverns were hollowed out during the Gap. They now serve as the cheapest, and most dangerous, long-term housing on Apostae. Most residents are half-orcs, humans, and orcs, though some minor mongrelmen and troglodyte communities also dwell there. Life in the cavern-boroughs is one of constant struggle, as each community must make weekly payments to ensure the flow of air and water from the surface city, and various house-owned companies rule most boroughs as corporate fiefdoms. Blood sports, facilities that perform the horrific genetic mutilation known as fleshwarping, brutal mercenary training camps, and secret labs conducting appalling experiments and weapon tests are the main sources of opportunity within the caverns. Residents who fail to find a way into such endeavors often end up synthesizing, dealing in, or using transdimensional pesh, which can be made from traditional drugs combined with viscous purple fluids that sometimes seep through the walls of the lowest caverns.
The Nightarch Gate is known to have existed before the Gap, long before the drow found their way here. Occasionally, a portal to various alien landscapes appears within the tall structure. No detectable pattern or forewarning precedes the formation of a portal, which remains open for anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours before abruptly vanishing. Portals have formed as often as every few months, but yearlong stretches have also passed without one of them appearing. Explorers and settlers often spend months at a time in Nightarch hoping for a portal to open so they might travel to entirely new worlds, but more expeditions leave the city disappointed than find an opportunity to travel, and no expedition that has passed through a portal has ever been heard from again. All efforts to find ways to control the Nightarch Gate have failed. It is unknown if the structure is related to the aiudara that connect various locations within other Pact Worlds, a part of the original function of Apostae, or an artifact left behind by some ancient spacefaring culture that visited the planetoid.
NIGHTARCH CE metropolis Population 1,238,050 (85% drow, 6% half-orc, 6% orc, 2% Human, 1% other) Government oligarchy (drow houses) Qualities financial center, notorious, technologically advanced Maximum Item Level 20th
Null Tracts No spell, magic item, or arcane effect works within a stretch of a few miles east of one of Apostae’s largest craters. Very few drow are interested in studying the area, which is believed to be the result of strange machinery or other artifacts within the planetoid described in pre-Gap records. Certain groups, however, are convinced this space is somehow key to discovering another way into Apostae, one that will lead to the planetoid’s fabled chambers. These researchers have built small camps across the Null Tracts, but recently a few of them have gone missing, with only a few garbled transmissions to mark their disappearances.
Orobor Abyss The Orobor Abyss is the longest, deepest crevice on Apostae, and it remains the only one to have its own thin atmosphere and, along with it, some kind of ecology. It is believed the atmosphere formed from air leaking into the rift from some place where it intersects with a chamber within the planetoid’s interior, but if this is indeed the case, that breach has never been found.
It’s unclear whether the fault’s inhabitants are native to Apostae’s surface (as no mention of such creatures has ever been found in pre-Gap records), creatures that escaped Apostae’s interior in the ancient past, or transplants of some kind. While numerous different forms of fungi and slimes have been reported, the most common is a climbing predator that seems similar to the ksariks of Castrovel, though lacking even rudimentary intelligence. Xenobiologists groups wishing to explore the Orobor Abyss are often pressured into shady deals with drow houses for “expedition support,” though in truth these are little more than payoffs to ensure the expeditions won’t be harassed.
Platform Brevak House Brevak controls this satellite, which circles Apostae at a near geosynchronous orbit above Nightarch. As the leading drow designer of starship frames, House Brevak maintains a cadre of engineers and mechanics aboard this small space station. House Brevak has lately begun researching a proprietary form of starship power that could revolutionize interstellar travel, which the other drow houses have been attempting to steal.
Silksoil Thick, clogging dust covers the expansive lowland area known as Silksoil. Many believe the dust is the powdered remains of meteors that struck the surface of the planetoid combined with vaporized sections of the crust. Unlike on most of Apostae’s surface, some valuable minerals are found among the particles of Silksoil, and a small number of independent dust miners manage to eke out a living in skimmer units that suck in huge quantities of the dust and sift out the wanted materials.
Silted Sea Surrounding Nightarch in all directions for hundreds of miles is the Silted Sea, a layer of fine silt and dust ranging from 2 to 10 feet deep. The Silted Sea is believed to be the by-product of centuries of drilling out the caverns beneath Nightarch and digging into the alien chambers in the center of Apostae, though since the bed appears to have been created during the Gap, these are only theories. Most digging and drilling operations simply spew waste products up into the gravity well of the planetoid, since the airless world’s settlements must be environmentally sealed anyway, and much of that eventually settles around Nightarch, which is strong evidence for the theory.
The silt is too loose to stand on, and only specialized bubble-wheeled vehicles can drive over it. Anything heavier than a rifle that isn’t spread over a large area generally sinks into the silt and reaches the bottom within a few hours. As a result, the Silted Sea is a common corpse-dumping ground used by crime leagues, drow houses, and mercenary companies, as the bodies sink out of sight without any need to dig graves. Since Apostae is an airless world, some groups even execute unfortunate victims by throwing them into the Silted Sea without environmental protection—a fate that has led to numerous nihilis infesting the area. Some earth elementals have also been encountered in the region, though no one seems to know whether they arrived through some natural link to the Elemental Plane of Earth or by other means.
Stone Door The Stone Door is among the smallest doors built into Apostae’s surface, and visually it appears to be nothing more than two slabs of rock set in a stone frame. However, the Stone Door is every bit as resistant to analysis, damage, and circumvention as the planetoid’s other presumed entrances. Because of its smaller size and lack of anything even vaguely resembling a hinge, handle, or control mechanism, the Stone Door is among the least popular destinations for expeditions hoping to find an alternate way into the caverns below the surface of Apostae. However, some attempt is still made every few years, and the area around the doors is littered with abandoned vehicles and old campsites. Since drow forces rarely patrol the site, criminals and smugglers sometimes use the old camps around the Stone Door as short-term places to lie low while planning their escape or seeking out more stable accommodations.
Wrecker’s Field Wrecker’s Field is an enormous unregulated junkyard of failed experiments, gutted prize ships, military scrap, mothballed vehicles, and a hundred other kinds of remnants of buildings, robots, starships, and weapons. Whenever a drow house ship is so damaged that it makes more economic sense to scrap it than repair it, new advances in technology make a battalion of hovertanks obsolete, or a building is torn down and its ruins need to be disposed of, the discarded materials end up in Wrecker’s Field. Several minor houses control specific sections of the junkyard, but all those houses operate under the vigilant gaze of House Rycast. That house also operates the largest and most successful shipyards in orbit around Apostae, and it is both the primary supplier of new scrap and the corporation most likely to need bulk scrap to fabricate new starship parts. House Rycast doesn’t bother to control any part of Wrecker’s Field directly, but it has contracts with and spies placed within most of the houses that have operations there.
There is no formal city within Wrecker’s Field, as most of the scrap operations carry out their work on large rolling factories that change location every few days, but many of the permanently grounded starships are kept pressurized, with enough power and environmental systems to make them habitable. This makes living within a starship in Wrecker’s Field oddly similar to living aboard one in the depths of space.
Zeizerer Repository House Zeizerer is Apostae’s largest manufacturer and seller of weapons and is arguably the most powerful drow house on the planetoid. The factories of House Zeizerer make much more weaponry than they sell, and any excess is kept within a huge vault, the exact location of which is kept a very closely guarded secret. Only the most senior of House Zeizerer drow and the repository’s security and other personnel know where it is. A few of the other drow houses know that Zeizerer is stockpiling arms, but they keep the information to themselves, for fear that any retaliation against House Zeizerer from the Pact Council and the Stewards would similarly fall on their heads. These other houses are unsure of the reasoning behind Zeizerer’s actions, and a few of them have invested a good deal of time and effort into locating the weapons cache, but they have only dead agents to show for it.

Alternative Name(s)

The Messenger

Type

Planetoid

Inhabiting Species

• Deadfall Stalker