Verces

As a tidally locked world, Verces has no day or night, only a light side and a dark side, with an atmosphere only partially capable of redistributing the sun’s energy. On the light side, known as Fullbright, scorched deserts host iron-hard plants and animals with photosynthesizing skin, while the partly frozen seas of Darkside offer a home to predators such as hoarbats and the infamous bloodbrothers, who trap prey within their own bodies in order to co-opt their circulatory systems. Between these two extremes runs the Ring of Nations, a temperate zone along the twilit terminator filled with gleaming skyscrapers, bustling spaceports, gorgeously manicured (and dizzyingly vertical) parkfarms, and high-speed bullet trains.
Similar to Human but taller, with color-changing skin and mouselike black eyes, the native Verthani have long been at the forefront of cybernetics, due in part to their traditional caste system. Under this ancient system, young adults chose membership in one of three groups: the Augmented, warriors and adventurers who modified their bodies with technology; the Pure Ones, who rejected all personal augmentation but dedicated themselves to food production, governance, and other domestic responsibilities; and the scarred God-Vessels, who served as living avatars of their deities, burning holy symbols called devotionals into their chests. To ensure that no group grew too powerful, Augmented and God-Vessels were only allowed to marry Pure Ones. Though this caste system is now seen as archaic, with most verthani augmenting themselves to one degree or another and paying only lip service (at best) to the old ways, many still credit the caste system with the head start that placed Verces at the cutting edge of implant technology.
In addition to pioneering cybernetics, verthani were also one of the first races to adopt space exploration, voyaging between worlds in their dirigible-like aetherships. While the coming of Drift technology and increased interplanetary trade under the Pact have allowed other worlds to catch up, verthani pilots and interstellar explorers remain legendary, and their massive shipyards at Skydock—an ancient geosynchronous satellite reached via space elevator—are second to none. Long since replaced by more modern designs, retrofitted aethership pleasure yachts still serve as marks of style and status among Pact World elites, as do their high-end Terminator-brand racing skiffs.
Since even before The Gap, the Ring of Nations has governed Verces’s temperate zone. While all of the component countries maintain theoretical independence, in practice the coalition forms a single worldwide government, with representatives from each country participating in the planetary Grand Assembly. The success of this model led to The Pact Worlds adopting both its structure and the peacekeeping Stewards, and to this day Verces remains a firm supporter of the agreement, as well as Absalom Station's closest ally. Citizens of the Ring of Nations freely pass between countries, and in places the Ring becomes a single vast city, skyscrapers glinting in the sun while its hive of shadowed lower levels blaze with neon and magic.
Of course, not all Vercites recognize the Grand Assembly’s authority. Beyond the terminator zone live scattered groups of rebels, from nomadic tribes and survivalist cults to criminal organizations and political exiles. Collectively termed the Outlaw Kingdoms, these fringe societies are generally ignored except when they raid Ring citizens or Ring-owned outposts, such as the vast Sun Farm solar plantations in Fullbright or Darkside’s shelynium ice mines. Some groups, such as the ice-obsessed Ascetics of Nar in the frozen monastery called the Fastness of the Ordered Mind, trade regularly with Ring citizens, but most respectable Vercites steer clear of both darksiders and lightsiders—at least officially.
For a planet so urban and densely settled along the terminator, Verces has a surprising amount of unexplored wilderness. Even those in the Outlaw Kingdoms, dwelling in their sun-baked huts or tunneling deep into the ice to reach the fertile seas beneath, inhabit only a tiny portion of their territory, leaving vast stretches of untouched wilds and strange ruins from unremembered eras. One of the strangest of these is Qidel, Aerie of the Sun, a strange tube-spire rising high out of the center of Fullbright and descending deep into the planet’s mantle. So far, all expeditions into the structure have failed to return, transmitting only strange ravings about winged creatures in the depths.

Geography

Over half of Verces is dry land, as the sun-scorched Fullbright hemisphere lacks any water. While local legends often speak of ancient seas that used to occupy regions such as the Firesalt Basin and the Keppenvos Badlands, the truth is that the several enormous dust basins in this area never held water in their current location but were rather seas from the Ring that tectonic movement carried into Fullbright, their water boiling away as they left the temperate region. Darkside, by contrast, contains most of the planet’s water and is full of half-frozen seas such as the Godswater and glaciers whose boundaries are obscured by snow and ice. Between the two, the Ring of Nations is primarily dry land punctuated by a few bodies of water.
The fact that Verces is tidally locked means that Fullbright constantly bakes under the blazing sun while Darkside is in an eternal winter. In the terminator zone, temperatures slowly shift from near freezing on the edge of Darkside to over 100º F on the edge of Fullbright. Beyond the terminator zone, temperatures become much less hospitable, requiring the use of environment suits and special precautions for most machinery. There are no seasons on Verces; instead, the permanent imbalance in temperature is the main driving force behind its weather patterns. Superheated air over Fullbright rises and expands, while the frigid air over Darkside sinks and condenses. This effect pulls heated air toward Darkside at high altitudes, where it cools, sinks, gathers moisture, and flows back out at low altitudes toward the low-pressure Fullbright, where the cycle begins again. The wind thus constantly blows across the Ring of Nations from Darkside toward Fullbright. Storms arise erratically as a result of fluctuations in this pattern, and the terrain over which the wind passes also plays a role—the plains see windstorms that can reach tremendous strength, mountainous areas have gustier winds and greater temperature variation, and regions downwind of seas experience more rain.
Being tidally locked also means that the planet lacks a day-night cycle. Light conditions never significantly change in any particular area, other than temporarily dimming during storms. Fullbright is always blindingly bright, while Darkside is lit only by the scattered lights of civilization. The colder, dimmer edge of the terminator zone is twilit, and bright stars can be seen in the few regions away from city lights; the slow movement of these heavenly bodies is the only cue the planet gives its residents as to the passage of time. In warmer, brighter regions, the stars are invisible, blotted out by a perpetual, static sunrise. While the unchanging light is often confusing and eventually exhausting for visitors from planets with a day-night cycle, native Vercites find themselves at home with the constant artificial lighting of starships and space stations but unnerved by the changing daylight and seasons of other planets, as they associate changes in lighting and temperature with geographical movement rather than the passage of time.

History

Orbiting the sun between Akiton and the Idari, Verces is a highly civilized world, a cultural hub forever at the forefront of social and technological progress. Tidally locked, with the same side always facing the sun, it lacks the day-night cycle of most other Pact Worlds; instead, the side known as Fullbright is constantly scorched by a never-setting sun, while Darkside is trapped in eternal frozen night. Fortunately, a narrow ring of temperate climate along the terminator line where the two sides meet has proven surprisingly welcoming to intelligent life, and today nearly the entire population of this cosmopolitan world packs itself into the sprawling megacities filling this ring, while the rest of the planet is left to fringe groups and monsters.
While already heavily cultivated and industrialized by the native humanoid verthani before the advent of interplanetary travel, Verces proves hospitable to most of the major Pact Worlds races, having gravity and atmosphere similar to that of Absalom Station, Castrovel, and Triaxus. Most of its citizens, both native born and immigrants, live in the Ring of Nations that circles the planet along the terminator where night and day meet, relaxing in sky-gardens atop their massive urban towers or laboring in the gritty, workaday slums below where the slanted sunlight never reaches. Generally curious, egalitarian, and peaceful, the urban citizens of Verces are deeply proud of their patchwork planetary culture, which not only produced the Stewards but inspired the governing structure of the Pact Worlds. The lands outside the Ring are generally left to automated solar and water farming, sparsely populated by denigrated groups collectively known as the Outlaw Kingdoms: notorious bands of criminals, cultists, political exiles, survivalists, and—though most may be loath to admit it—a few unjustly maligned cultures indigenous to these harsh regions.
RESIDENTS By far the most populous inhabitants of Verces are the native verthani: 8-foot-tall humanoids with protruding, mouse-like black eyes and skin colors that can be shifted at will to display complex patterns. In practice, verthani forms vary significantly between individuals due not to biology but technology—augmentation is common among them and ranges in scope from minor sensory upgrades to whole-body modifications that permanently embed the subjects into starships or other control centers. Other races are frequently encountered on Verces, though, due to the planet’s long history of interplanetary travel and urbane multiculturalism.
Ubiquitous throughout the Pact Worlds, humans are common on Verces, finding its dense cities comfortably reminiscent of bustling Absalom Station, or perhaps homesteading on its barely hospitable frontiers. Many are permanently employed by universities or corporations such as Ringworks or the Spellsight Cooperative, yet as Absalom Station’s closest political ally, Verces sees a huge number of transient human traders and visitors as well. While the Stewards may have relocated to Absalom Station with the signing of the Pact, the organization maintains strong roots here, and many officer candidates pursue advanced training at the Steward fortress called Peacewatch.
In addition to enjoying the similarities between the planet’s hotter regions and their own desert home world of Kasath, many Kasatha appreciate the stability and tradition of Vercite society, particularly their governmental structures. Some even valorize the verthani’s ancient caste system, to the verthani’s amusement or irritation. An unusually large number of Ryphorian live on the edges of the Ring, as they are well adapted to extreme climates and see a strong echo of their own home world’s century-long seasons there.
When the Shirren first entered the Pact World system, fleeing their former kindred in The Swarm, their first contact was with Captain Korma Anwero and her crew aboard the Vercite aethership Third Chance. An agreement was quickly reached to let the refugees land and establish a permanent colony in the Fullbright region, and today shirrens have integrated thoroughly into all levels of Vercite society, though some of their original settlements remain almost entirely shirren in population. Many Ysoki come to Verces for the technology and personal augmentation, while others simply find ample financial opportunities in the squalid warrens beneath the planet’s gleaming metropolises. They are also encountered with some frequency in the Outlaw Kingdoms, whether engaging in illicit trade between the Ring and other settlements or simply exploring life on the edge. The precise size of their population remains unclear, but there have been permanent ysoki communities on Verces since even before the Gap.
The winged humanoids known as Strix occupy Qidel, Aerie of The Sun, a tall, mysterious spire in Fullbright. Though the strix mostly keep to themselves, large delegations of them have left Qidel to integrate with mainstream Vercite society. Very few non-strix are allowed to enter the tower, and the winged humanoids speak little of their life within the structure, a structure widely believed to be reinforced by magic. While not part of Vercite society at any level, bloodbrothers are intelligent enough—and popular enough as bogeymen in Vercite media—to warrant mention. These huge monstrosities lair in the glaciers of Darkside, with vaguely humanoid torsos atop long, millipede-like bodies. They hunt any trespassers in their frigid world but, rather than eating those they catch, place victims inside large cavities within their chests and incorporate them into their circulatory systems, gradually draining all nutrients via their still-living victims’ blood over the course of months. Rumors that they were born of a spectacularly flawed attempt to adapt verthani to life on Darkside have largely been discredited, as the race is known to date back to antiquity, but such hearsay is nevertheless cited regularly in arguments against biotech of all sorts.
SOCIETY The temperate portion of Verces is composed of 27 different countries, many of them roughly rectangular as increasingly inhospitable environs define their eastern and western borders. For millennia, these have been largely unified as the Ring of Nations, a coalition governed by a representative Grand Assembly and defended by the original cadre of Stewards—the organization of warrior-diplomats that, once dedicated to keeping the peace between Verces’s nations, now serves the same function for Pact Worlds as a whole. Theoretically independent, Verces’s nations nevertheless have deeply intertwined cultures, economies, and legal systems, with citizens passing unhindered between nations and outright warfare unknown for millennia.
While each nation is proud of its particular customs and sensibilities, Vercite culture has long been more homogenous than those of many other planets. Originally, this was due to the fact that the relatively narrow band of easily habitable land led to significant population density, facilitating trade and making true isolation hard to find in even the most difficult terrain. Even in preindustrial times, merchant caravans and traveling universities circled the globe in decades-long routes, transmitting goods, knowledge, and traditions as they went. The rise of modern media has continued the trend toward a uniform culture, and bullet trains now transport commuters in hours across distances that once took days, with megacities sometimes blending into one another in vast urban sprawls.
Verthani society (and Vercite society generally) is welcoming toward outsiders, though otherwise gracious locals are sometimes patronizing about the valuable institutions and knowledge their world has generously bestowed upon the Pact Worlds. As a result, the world is truly as cosmopolitan as it claims, with travelers of all races coming here to study, conduct business, or seek out Vercite expertise, generally with regard to political theory, starship mechanics, or technomancy. Such visitors frequently marvel at the endless bustle of Verces’s cities—with no day or night to divide up the time, businesses, government offices, schools, and other institutions tend to run continuously, with employees arranging their sleeping and waking hours for the convenience of their families. Verthani culture was once defined by a rigid caste system, in which individuals chose at puberty to permanently align themselves with one of three castes: the Augmented, who embraced technological and magical modification of their bodies; the God-Vessels, who channeled the gods’ power and permanently branded themselves with holy symbols; and the Pure Ones, who eschewed augmentation and divine magic alike, instead focusing on agriculture and governance. Traditionally, Augmented and God-Vessels were allowed to marry only Pure Ones in order to maintain the balance of power and build empathy between the castes. Today, the caste system has fallen by the wayside in most of the Ring, with the majority of verthani embracing augmentation to some extent, changing paths as inspiration strikes them, and marrying whomever they please. However, the Augmented caste has recently seen a rebirth as a powerful faction in wider Pact Worlds society, and its membership now transcends the verthani race to include members of any races interested in improving themselves and society through technological or magical upgrades.
Another thriving practice born of the caste system is plural marriage. In the earliest known times, plural marriage was most common in regions where the caste system’s restrictions on marriage made it difficult for people to find appropriate partners. Records suggest, however, that it was also practiced as a way for people to work around the strict laws regarding marriage. These marriages varied widely in nature—in some, all members shared strong emotional and sexual bonds, while others served only to facilitate one or more otherwise illegal relationships, and many were somewhere in between. Rather than fading away with the gradual loosening of the caste system, plural marriage has become increasingly common; several of Verces’s most prominent corporations, including Haruspex Interplanetary, have their roots in plural marriages between business or research collaborators who leveraged their complementary skills and mutual affections, interests, and trust to create tight-knit economic powerhouses.
Many of the most popular sports on Verces are astonishing to behold but require significant augmentation or magical ability to compete, from hyped-up metabolisms and superhuman strength to magical flight or direct neural interfaces. In vithrar drone racing, for instance, riders jack into rigs that directly link their minds to supersonic jets, navigating dangerous obstacle courses at the speed of thought, while the popular Thaumatic Addicts game show turns spellcasters into celebrities as they unveil never-before-seen spells in response to elaborate challenges. While the Pure Sport League represents athletes without special powers or augmentations, it finds its largest audience in the hinterlands, where clans still practice the traditional sport of eshara, in which athletes ride serpentine mounts in elaborate zone-capturing games that can last days.
Outside of sports, many pastimes also take advantage of advanced technology, with multimedia artists directly activating sensory augmentations to create abstract sense-poems or allow audience members to experience virtual-reality programs. Those who prefer more mundane fun can find limitless variety in the dance clubs, nature parks, restaurants, and theaters of the cities, or in the River of Returning Joys.
While the Ring of Nations holds all the choicest territory on Verces, not all residents of the planet recognize its authority. Often derisively called the Outlaw Kingdoms, these diverse dissidents exist on the very fringes of the planet’s habitable terminator or turn to technological and magical adaptation to live in the planet’s inhospitable wastes. Organized into clans, cults, and tiny unrecognized nations, these scattered stalwarts range from traditional ice fishers and desert nomads herding rock-beasts to barbaric gangs and militias who survive by raiding outlying settlements and caravans. Some actively take in exiles, fugitives, refugees, and anyone else seeking to escape life in the Ring, while others have learned to shoot trespassers on sight. The fact that many of these so-called kingdoms have their own caste systems or other wildly divergent social norms only further distances them from residents of the Ring, whom they see as soft and decadent. Most ordinary Vercites, in turn, see the Outlaw Kingdoms’ residents as embarrassingly backward and inbred—though this doesn’t stop them from consuming endless media about them, or from employing them for difficult or illegal activities. It’s common knowledge that many of the raids and kidnappings conducted by Outlaw Kingdoms are paid for by corporations looking to hinder their rivals—especially in the solar farm and ice mine industries—but proving it can be notoriously difficult.
CONFLICTS AND THREATS While Verces is more politically stable and harmonious than most Pact Worlds, the planet still retains its share of dangerous and ungoverned regions, and the monolithic unification of the Ring of Nations can actually exacerbate violent dissent—all of which can provide lucrative business opportunities for freelance adventurers.
This strategic importance of Skydock has its drawbacks, and in recent years there have been several terrorist attacks aimed at snapping the elevator cable—with one very nearly successful. Strangely, the group claiming responsibility for the attacks has issued no demands, only identified themselves as the Ring Saints, and stated that their attacks are for the good of all Verces.
In addition to hackers with a wide variety of criminal aims, groups like the Remakers and NextStep prominently claim that “evolution doesn’t need consent” and commit transformative crimes against “stock” individuals, resulting in waves of violent backlash from both the general public and the public relations assassins of the procybernetics group known as the Cypremacy Collective.
Officially condemned throughout the Ring of Nations, the ultraconservative Banner of Purity movement styles itself as a response to techno-terrorist groups such as the Remakers and NextStep, instead promoting a strict adherence to the antiquated caste system and preaching violence against the “improperly” augmented. Their tactics range from kidnapping citizens and brutally removing their augmentations to tailoring viruses that cause verthani bodies to reject augmentation altogether. While several cults of personality in Fullbright and Darkside claim to speak for the movement, operatives seem to spring up everywhere, enjoying particular support in conservative nations like Thapukar and Ulkothra.
Verces is a hotbed of espionage and outright corporate assassination, and even the most urban corporate headquarters may find itself under attack from elite mercenary teams making smash-and-grab infiltrations to steal top-secret research or prototypes. Ironically, these same teams can often be hired to reacquire stolen data or kidnapped personnel, or even enlisted by the lawful authorities to protect whistle-blowers or gain evidence of malfeasance when regulations tie official hands, making it possible for such specialists to do their business with an unusual level of openness.
Those who live on the edge of the Ring of Nations have always had to deal with bandits from the hardscrabble lands beyond, whether that’s drone submersibles capturing barges on the Great Trade Sea or eshar-riding barbarians from the traditionalist Ysbo Clans charging in from the Slicksand Heights to carry away livestock. While all Ring nations maintain a certain degree of border defense, cheap land and other opportunities often incentivize citizens and corporations to settle beyond the safe zones.
A relatively recent threat—simultaneously attributed to Eox, the Banner of Purity, and a dozen other sources—is a series of outbreaks of cybernetic undeath. These appear to be the result of some unknown virus that causes augmentations to kill their hosts and reanimate the corpses, driving the new zombies to kill and infect others.

Tourism

The following are just a few key nations and sites of interest on Verces.
Athalo Athalo started as a nation of sailors plying the myriad fjords that gave the Riversea its name and often joining with bands of Darkside pirates to raid traders from softer nations. With the advent of spaceflight, many Athalo turned these same skills to crewing starships, yet they continue to retain a strange sense of pride when it comes to taking money from the unwary, even if this is now more often via predatory business deals rather than outright robbery. This penchant for theft is strangely balanced by a legendary generosity, and the oft-spoken Athalo adage that “those who take must also give.” Its capital city, Threq, is a mobile morass of thousands of ships and autobarges that slowly traverse the Riversea, still following the migrations of the deadly but valuable mirakos who boil the seas with their inherent magic.
Camshaft The raiders known as the Rustrunners prowl through the Dustlands on their antique combustion vehicles attacking any unfortunate travelers (and sometimes each other) for precious commodities such as water, food, and fuel. While the Rustrunners are an organization in only the loosest sense of the term, they do recognize a form of authority in the Wrecking Court, a council of five of the toughest raiders who live and accept tribute in a shared camp called Camshaft. Rustrunners with grievances they can't settle on their own take them in front of the Wrecking Court. These issues are usually determined by challenges (such as races or gladiatorial combat) set by the council, and many leave one of the participants dead or severely wounded, but no one has complained too much about the Court's influence.
Camshaft is divided into five sections, each run with an iron fist by a member of the Wrecking Court and inhabited by that judge's most-trusted crew. Tensions between the camps always run high, but there has never been a recorded all-out war between the factions.
Cruori Caves The highest concentration of bloodbrothers on Verces can be found just northwest of the Great Trade Sea in a series of caves at the base of the Worldbelt Mountains. The area has been quarantined by the Vercite government for over a hundred years after an explorer named Hin Cruori stumbled upon a large migration of the blood-drinking beasts to these caves and barely escaped with her life. Scientists are unsure how many bloodbrothers exist within the caves or how they survive with no obvious source of the vital fluids they drink. Some posit there is a massive creature slumbering within the mountains and that the bloodbrothers are feasting upon it like leeches, though this theory is generally dismissed as ludicrous.
Fastness of the Ordered Mind A cluster of linked fortress-temples, the Fastness houses the Ascetics of Nar, one of the oldest monastic societies in the Pact Worlds. Within its walls, the ice-obsessed scholars undergo bizarre rituals in order to further their mystical study of the cosmos, seeing in the crystalline structure of ice a blueprint for the inherent order of the multiverse. For some, this means using melting shards of ice to carve magical sigils into their flesh—thus supposedly taking the ice’s order into themselves—while others meditate unprotected on exposed glaciers, letting the cold ravage their bodies. The most aggressive of these allow frostbite to take all of their limbs, and these honored individuals, called the Clarified, are either wired permanently into starships or joined psychically into neural networks with their cenobites in the Fastness’s most secure heart, helping take the order’s research of the universe to new heights.
While most Vercites find the legendary Ascetics disturbing, most are forced to admit that their suffering is voluntary, and that the scientific and occult breakthroughs that come from their prayer labs (not to mention their astonishingly proficient limbless starship pilots) present a disproportionate boon to the planet’s economy. Star shamans, void mystics, and technomancers vie for educational audiences with the monks, as do warriors and assassins seeking to master the monks’ seeming transcendence of pain. Many people—including the church itself—believe the monks to be a cult of Zon-Kuthon, due to both their self-mortification and the similarity of the Clarified to the Kuthite Joyful Things—voluntary amputees in service of the Midnight Lord—yet for whatever reason the Ascetics have steadfastly denied the association.
Fullbright Mountain Ranges The Amokishu Mountains, the Outcast Peaks, and the Sunteeth make up the largest lines of mountains in Fullbright, and while their peaks see some of the highest temperatures on the planet thanks to the thin atmosphere and lack of clouds, life can almost flourish in the scant shade they provide. Many Outlaw Kingdoms have fought bloody wars over these small respites from the sun, despite the otherwise scorching climes.
Industrial Plantations Corporate-run “charter cities” are scattered across the cold expanse of Darkside, housing hundreds or thousands of workers responsible for maintaining the massive mining rigs and other industrial facilities whose floodlit platforms rise into the icy night. Near the Ring, many of these facilities are hyperfortified server farms taking advantage of the naturally low temperatures, or water-harvesting stations that feed the Aqueducts, massive pipelines pumping desalinated seawater across the Ring to irrigate the edge of the desert. Farther into Darkside, deep-bore mining operations employ workers in specialized mechanical suits attempting to harvest shelynium, a rare variation of water ice found only in this region. Held by theologians to be the frozen tears of the goddess Shelyn, spilled over her brother Zon-Kuthon’s fall into darkness and depravity, the material exhibits a variety of bizarre magical traits, from superconduction to the power to heal a broken heart, which are still only beginning to be understood by researchers. Some of the largest of these plantations are GlaceTek’s Site 37 on the edge of the Whalehook Sea and Vorceaux Inc.’s Southfield north of the Klebani Range.
Kashak Verces has long been seen as a bastion of technological modification, and nowhere is this truer than the Ring Nation of Kashak. From the Woven Towers in the nation’s capital city of Nabokon, the Cypremacy Collective speaks not only as the national government, but also as the de facto voice of the powerful Augmented faction. Permanently wired into their buildings and effectively immortal, the members of the Collective influence policy across the Pact Worlds via insectile drones, living agents, and a powerful media arm backed by the best machine learning money can buy. As a result, Kashak is home to a variety of cutting-edge cybernetics and technomancy labs and research institutions, such as the Everlife Adaptation Corporation, Haruspex Interplanetary, and the Spellsight Cooperative. Yet being the public home of the Augmented carries risks as well, such as threats from traditionalist extremist groups like the Banner of Purity and techno-terrorists like the Remakers and NextStep, along with less ideological hackers and spies drawn by the immense amounts of wealth flowing through the nation’s corporate coffers.
Lempro Not a true Outlaw Kingdom, Lempro is instead a tiny nation separated from the Ring only by geography and a staunch refusal to join. Its inhabitants are exclusively intis—many-eyed creatures with almost skeletal frames who evolved to survive the extreme cold by forgoing blood entirely. Obsessed with spirals, fond of riddles, and prone to dispassionate violence over strange infractions, the nomadic intis survive via hunting and ice-fishing while patrolling the vast sealed fortresses they call the Cairns. Within these sacred tombs, they claim, are the last members of an extinct race that raised them to sentience long ago, held between life and death until someone can answer the Last Question. Unfortunately for researchers, attempting to study the tombs or learn the Last Question are transgressions warranting immediate execution.
Mafentra The dangerous Slicksand Heights are inhabited by the Ysbo Clans, nomadic barbarians who ride serpentine beasts called eshars across the sands and into battle. To avoid baking in the constant sun, the Ysbo Clans stick to the shadows of the Amokishu Mountains most of the time, except when they make the occasional attack on one of the nearby Ring nations. The only permanent Ysbo settlement is the vast graveyard of Mafentra, where the nomads take their dead to be buried. The sands quickly swallow the corpses thrown within, but mystical wards mark the “tombs” of the most important Ysbo and are maintained by a group of elderly shamans who live just outside the softest areas of sand. Outsiders are strictly forbidden from approaching Mafentra, and clan riders are always a few moments away to drive off intruders.
Oasis Temples Throughout Fullbright, explorers occasionally come across forgotten temples in tiny patches of inexplicably lush vegetation. These “Oasis Temples” are almost always in some degree of ruin, having been abandoned or actively torn apart for unknown reasons, and they are often treated as taboo by even the local Outlaw Kingdoms who forage on the oases’ outskirts. In each case, the incongruous foliage and humidity is the result of a tiny planar breach to the First World, the verdant realm of the fey. Sigils carved into the walls suggest the temples were built to honor the fey deities called the Eldest, or perhaps to offer a gateway between the realms, depicting interactions between verthani and a variety of fey creatures. Each tribe has its own story for why the temples were abandoned, yet strangely, almost all speak cryptically of “the Petal War” and include the phrase “a price too high.” Nevertheless, religious scholar Pemano Teth (NG male verthani mystic) from Kleriark University has recently put out a call for self-styled adventurers interested in helping him study these temples, in the hope of expanding the gateways to a useful size once more, and potentially even tapping their energy to terraform Fullbright.
Obarshi Surrounding the foot of Skydock’s space elevator, high in the northern peaks of the Twilight Mountains, this nation is effectively a giant port—one desperately fighting the slow slide into obsolescence. While the space elevator still provides cheap transportation to orbit for goods that arrive via train from all over the planet, the increasing ubiquity of spaceflight has slashed the amount of shipping crossing the nation’s borders, and today many of the outlying train yards and warehouse districts are abandoned, controlled by heavily augmented street gangs who run protection rackets or simply steal incoming freight outright. In order to make up for its lost income, Obarshi has doubled down on its role as a cosmopolitan port of entry, building specialized hotels and entertainment districts catering to the tastes of nearly every known race, as well as actively courting the church of Triune to position itself as a leader in Drift tech and communications.
Qidel Rising from the center of Fullbright, this narrow stone spire is one of Verces’s oldest mysteries. In ancient times, the spire—also known as the Aerie of the Sun—was avoided by verthani due to strange metal-winged humanoids who attacked the surrounding lands from a temple-fortress at the spire’s tip. No one has seen these presumably augmented raiders since the end of the Gap, and many believe they have fled or gone extinct. They have been replaced by strix, other winged humanoids who trace their lineage back to Lost Golarion. They are far different from their isolationist predecessors, and many of these modern strix have peacefully integrated into the Ring of Nations. While generally happy to share their unusual customs and skills, so far the strix universally refuse—or are unable—to reveal much about life within Qidel, and very few outsiders are allowed to see what lies within the tower’s interior.
River of Returning Joys Part of every nation and yet belonging to none, the River of Returning Joys is actually a massive caravan, a rolling festival that has circled the Ring of Nations since time immemorial. While its traditional role in the facilitation of communication, trade, and understanding between far-flung nations has long since been rendered obsolete, the River is still a vital cultural touchstone, and the arrival of its snaking train of groundcars and antique carbosa-drawn wagons is one of the few recognized holidays in a world without seasons. Inside the River, attendees are dazzled by magically augmented circus performances and mind-bending illusions, while also encouraged to leave restrictive social customs and status at the gate and express themselves in a riot of well-intentioned artistic frivolity. Commerce is forbidden within the River, the festival instead supported directly by the municipalities it passes through. Most Vercites take great pride in the tradition, yet there are also those who resent its deliberate disruption of societal mores (and power structures), question the motives of its leaders, or note the ease with which its costumed anonymity has sometimes concealed fugitives, terrorists, and other undesirables.
Shirren Colonies When shirrens originally arrived in the Pact Worlds system, Verces was the first planet to offer them asylum. In what may have been either miscommunication or simple shirren literalism, the shirrens named this initial colony Sanctuary, spreading out from there through the Temora Desert to a series of satellite colonies, including Gekken, Hasetaru, Sisk, and Takoris. While many shirrens quickly immigrated to the Ring of Nations to take advantage of the greater opportunities found here, these original shirren cities still remain densely populated bastions of shirren culture. Sanctuary houses the prestigious Kleriark University, a free-form institution catering to scholars too independent or controversial to be tolerated at more mainstream universities, while Gekken is a hub for primarily shirren mercenary organizations that specialize in extreme synchronization and coordination between members, making them terrifyingly effective on the battlefield.
Shubu This idyllic realm of rolling hills and perfumed kurkurrek forests is widely believed to be the place where civilization first arose on Verces. Today, the nation is essentially a planetary park, its pastoral landscapes home to tastefully concealed artists’ retreats, elegant towns tucked away in sleepy valleys, state-sponsored archaeological digs, and colorful river temples. Undoubtedly the most recognizable of Shubu's landmarks, however, are the Enigma Keeps, nine enormous stone fortresses preserved by magic and dating back to the planet’s ancient eras. It’s from these troves of knowledge and history that scholars learn much about the verthani’s earliest civilizations—and indeed this time capsule functionality appears to be part of their purpose, as huge sections of the rambling structures remain locked away behind powerful magical seals, opening and revealing their secrets only upon the correct solution to seemingly nonsensical puzzles. Yet solving the puzzles is just the beginning, as each new subterranean warren to be unlocked reveals a gauntlet of deadly traps and stasis-preserved monsters. Those university-sponsored teams who manage to make it through inevitably broadcast their exploits, with each new discovery cause for planetwide interest.
Singing Rifts Here the furious winds come howling down off the Osho Glacier in the Worldbelt Mountains, tearing through these fingerlike ice canyons. The crevasses earn their name via the strange tunnels bored into the rifts’ icy walls that channel the wind into bizarre, fluting melodies and eerie chords that can be heard miles away. Who crafted these twisting corridors remains a mystery, but many of them interconnect or turn deep into the stone beneath the ice, inhabited by bloodbrothers and other predators, scribed with strange designs from no living culture. Legends among the local tribes claim that one of the tunnels eventually leads to a chamber with ancient machinery capable of setting the planet spinning on its axis once more, but so far only shards of alien technology have ever been recovered, and even these are of dubious provenance.
Skydock This ancient space platform dates back to long before the Gap and stays in a fixed position above the planet, tethered to the equator by the immense cable of a space elevator. Though its terrestrial anchor lands in the nation of Obarshi, the station is managed by the Grand Assembly for the good the entire Ring—an arrangement that’s admittedly unpopular among both the Obarshi and residents of the station vying for self-rule.
Once, Skydock was Verces’s most valuable resource, as transporting goods up the stalk of the space elevator and out of much of the planet’s gravity well made spaceflight economically viable for Vercites long before other worlds achieved it. Today, conventional thrusters and antigrav technology make surface launches easy, yet Skydock still hosts Verces’s most prominent shipyards—producing both legendary racing ships from brands like Terminator and Redshift Revolution and a variety of more commonplace designs for companies like Ringworks Industries—as well as the bulk of the planetary navy. The space station also remains a popular hub for ship crews on leave, and the party never stops in its entertainment districts, despite regular tensions between these tourists and resident workers.
SKYDOCK N space station Population 786,000 (55% verthani, 15% shirren, 10% human, 5% kasatha, 5% ysoki, 1% ryphorian, 9% other) Government council (coalition appointed by Grand Assembly) Qualities academic, financial center Maximum Item Level 16th
Solar Farms The constant scorching daylight in Fullbright means that solar power on Verces is plentiful and steady—presuming it can be transported. Numerous megacorporations like Sunnyside Inc. and Convectus Solar maintain huge banks of solar panels tended by robots and techs wearing protective suits (most of whom would rather be anywhere else). Other companies maintain automated factories just at the edge of Fullbright to take advantage of the free power pouring from the sky. Of course, the general lawlessness of Fullbright means that such corporations necessarily operate at their own risk. Conduits carrying power back to the Ring are constantly under threat from sabotage, clever siphoning by Outlaw Kingdoms tribes, and the electrovores that chew through lines in order to guzzle power, heedless of the crackling death all around them. Similarly, the installations are heavily guarded by corporate mercenaries, as capturing and ransoming the facilities is popular revenue stream for raiders, such as the spikes-and-leather-clad Rustrunners who hunt the wastes of the Dustlands on antique combustion vehicles.
Thapukar and Ulkothra Sometimes called the Twin Nations, these neighboring countries are deeply tied together by a shared conservative culture, in which the traditional caste system is still practiced and heavily enforced socially if not legally. Thapukar is traditionally agrarian, its plains long viewed as an easy target by outlaws, while Ulkothra is a mountainous region whose mines produce most of the planet’s rare starmetals. Thanks to their codes against widespread augmentation, the Twin Nations turn their attention outward and excel at producing robots, powered armor, and massive mechs for both defense and industry.
Vimal One of the larger nations on Verces, Vimal is the physical home of the Grand Assembly in the capital city of Cuvacara, as well as Peacewatch, the original stronghold of the Stewards high in the mountains of the Klebani Range. While it’s unclear today exactly what wars or social upheaval led to the unification of the Ring of Nations or the creation of the Stewards, several ancient massive black obelisks in seemingly random locations around the country—as well as in both the Grand Assembly and Peacewatch—hint at the answer, bearing the inscription “From strength unity/from unity strength/thus do we stand against chaos/thus do we honor their sacrifice.” A different engraved rune of no known meaning, inert but still exuding magical auras, follows each inscription.
Whitewave The fishing village of Whitewave has resolutely refused to join the Ring nation of Athalo since the end of the Gap, though pre-Gap records show that it was once protected by that nation's soldiers. A series of laser batteries—now maintained by skilled mechanics from the village—keep the bolder creatures and raiders at bay. Whitewave maintains its independence by processing and selling the bladders of a species of flatfish found only in this area into a powerful sedative.

Alternative Name(s)

The Line

Type

Planet

Included Locations

• Zamkan Commune

Inhabiting Species

• Bloodbrothers
• Glacial Borer
• Ihonva