Akiton

Akiton today has no centralized government, and its cold deserts, dry seabeds, and frigid polar ice caps host never-ending skirmishes and proxy wars between various cities, clans, corporations, tribes, and off-world factions. It’s a world where unscrupulous business interests can engage in unregulated or morally questionable research and exploitation and where criminals, fugitives, and the lost come to escape justice, hide from their enemies, or try to make a fresh start.

Geography

• Diameter: Half of Golarion
• Mass: 0.083% of Golarion
• Gravity: 33% of Golarion
• Atmosphere: Thin
• Day: 24 hours, 40 minutes
• Year: 2 years

Despite its proximity to Absalom Station and its favourable location as the fourth planet from the sun (counting missing Golarion), Akiton is a dying world. Since the system's formation, the so-called 'red planet' has lost much of the atmosphere and liquid water it once held due to the slowing of its liquid-iron core and the resulting weakening of its magnetosphere. Though this slow decline transpires on a geologic scale and Akiton remains hospitable to humanoid life - and indeed, its slowly expanding deserts and rock chasms are all that most of its resident species have ever known - it also offers a sad metaphor for the planet’s dying economy.

Population Centers

The planet’s best-known urban centers are ancient cities such as Arl, Daza, and Maro. In these dusty and flickering metropolises, Akiton’s dreams of civilization and culture still remain - for the rich, at least - propped up by their remaining wealth and control of the planet’s last few viable Thasteron mines, as well as lucrative contracts with off-world corporations and factories specializing in weapons, armor, and ship parts. Most of Akiton’s lesser settlements, by contrast, are company towns, squalid slums, or frontier homesteader outposts where life is cheap, harsh, and short. Though operating largely off the grid, nomadic Ysoki populations can also often be seen driving their ramshackle hovertankers between the Hivemarket and the Winterlands at the poles, hauling ice quarried by the resident cap miners while carefully avoiding the forbidden zones with their eerie alien ruins.

In most of these cities, Ysoki maintain some form of district for their own species. The layouts are often maze-like, with many small passageways that make it difficult for other species to intrude.

Fauna & Flora

Demonym: Akitonian.

Members of nearly all of the Pact Worlds’ common races can be found somewhere on Akiton, yet the best known indigenous residents are the Ysoki. Unlike many of their fellow inhabitants, Akitonian Ysoki thrive under the planet’s current degraded conditions, boisterous and opportunistic in their warren-districts beneath the cities or in motorized travelling caravans.

In addition to Ysoki, Akiton has several other major indigenous races. Once driven nearly to annihilation by corporate interests, the four-armed humanoid giants called Shobhads have seen a dramatic resurgence in recent years as their traditional desert life sidestepped the economic collapse. Moreover, their constant clan battles for honour make them valuable as mercenaries and scouts. Complete opposites of the Shobhads are the Contemplatives of Ashok, telekinetic creatures whose physical bodies have nearly withered away in favour of the great minds contained within their throbbing brain sacs and who excel at the supernatural arts and decipher esoteric truths in their legendary Halls of Reason. Slightly less well known are the red-skinned Ikeshti Lizardfolk, who make model citizens until their reproductive cycle drives them violently insane.

Natural Resources

Thasteron, an ore instrumental in the creation of fuel for sublight interplanetary travel. Since the advent of Drift travel and a reduced need for long realspace flights, however, demand for Thasteron has fallen, and the economic effects of the crash now play out in political squabbles and civil strife across the planet.

History

Prior to the discovery of hyperspace, Akiton was the center of its system's mining, production, and trade of Thasteron, an ore instrumental in the creation of fuel for sublight interplanetary travel. Since the advent of Drift travel and a reduced need for long realspace flights, however, demand for Thasteron has fallen, and the economic effects of the crash now play out in political squabbles and civil strife across the planet. Massive space barges that once shuttled ore between all the Pact Worlds now lie as rusting hulks in the middle of the deserts, empty save for squatters and scavengers, humanoid and otherwise. Residents whose ancestors were magnates and high-society debutantes now hunt trash-eating Khefaks and dodge flying, tusk-winged Norkasa in the shells of abandoned cities, toil as labourers in the few remaining mines or industrial trench-squats, or join the anarchic gangs who battle for territory on the open plains with the planet’s more traditional nomadic peoples.

Alternative Name(s)

The Red Planet

Type

Planet

Location under

Pact Worlds

Included Locations

• Arl
• Daza
• Hivemarket
• Maro

Related Ethnicities

• Akitonian

Inhabiting Species

• Shobhad

Related Materials

• Thasteron