Blood Poppies

In a state of ego death, one's whole body oscillates in an impossible rhythm, communing through a cross dimensional collective unconscious with planet Phaeton and all the other worlds. As the Blood Poppies course through bodies, the iridescent ichor that leaks out from orifices and skin lesions breaks down the barriers between self and other. While a powerful resource and technology, prolonged use comes with many severe side effects, including complete integration into the Noosphere; the experience is often described as being dragged into an infinite abyss by Eldritch beings or falling into a black hole by those who manage to escape it's gravity, ending in a kind of undeath.

 

As Ego alive and undead accumulates in the Noosphere, it's density pulls on the fabric of consensus reality. The Noosphere is something like a dreamscape, a collective unconscious, the internet, a rave, or a psychedelic trip; it is both a Magic and Technology, a phenomenal experience that imposes itself on physical reality. Over time this Magic has been colonized, commidified, and converted by the Empire and other special interests, and it all begins with the Blood Poppies.

 

The Blood Poppies have made Phaeton wealthy and powerful. They serves as a drug and medicine, a medium of art and communication, a tool and weapon, a religion and a postmodern science; new applications and new ideas and new experiences, all the time.

 

When the Empire arrived on Phaeton the planet was caught in a Dark Age reminiscent of the 21st-22nd Centuries (Earth Calendar). Some of the artifacts and technologies remained, particularly those most critical to sustaining life on a hostile world, but otherwise lacked the organization or institutional knowledge to leverage what they had, making them easy targets for colonization.

 

The humans who long ago settled on Phaeton have cultivated certain unique knowledge and skills nonetheless. Whereas the rest of the galaxy even up to the present have only been able to create Embodied Machines, the Phaetonians in their deep past created true Phenomenal Machines, thinking machines both embodied and imbued with phenomenology. While the Phenomenal Machines still wander Phaeton in limited numbers today, the Phaetonians are the only ones who know how to work with them, like communing with spirits and magical beasts.

 

Limited physical records and engrams in the Noosphere suggest that the Dark Age was triggered by either a war between some factions of Phaetonians, Phenomenal Machines, and Egos both human and alien in the Noosphere, or alternatively that an alien Ego ravaged the world like a plague. What remains of the Phenomenal Machines are data center dungeons buried deep underground in the old train networks, sometimes marked by pyramids or ziggurats or other such structures above, and these dungeons remotely power the remaining feasible robots or cybernetic artifacts. Too far removed from human consciousness to be truly understood, most robots and cyborgs wander silently like monks or fey creatures, although some have gone mad, like monsters, or evil wizards controlling their data center dungeons towards seemingly no end.

 

The Prismatic Bees that pollinate the Blood Poppies were assumed to be indigenous to Phaeton, however recently discovered engrams suggest that either they came from the Noosphere, or else an alien Ego from the Noosphere exerts its will in the material world through them as a superorganism. The Temple of the Blood Prism, both a physical structure and an organization, built their faith around this alien Ego. The Temple are the beekeepers, the merchants of Blood Poppies, and those who make the pilgrimage to pray at the Temple generate Ego, empowering their node in the Noosphere.

 

The Prismatic Bees look like a cross between a bee, locust, and mantis shrimp. They glow with broad-spectrum light more like a star than any other bioluminescence, and range in sizes from a typical bee, a wolf, or a dragon. When agitated they can level structures, turn night to bright day, and irradiate like atomics. 

 

 

Inspirations: I was going for something like Dune, not in terms of like sandworms and spice, but in terms of blending scifi and fantasy, an ecology and economy built around a unique resource, "geo"politics, and spirituality. Also takes some inspiration from cyberpunk. I originally had larger ambitions for this micro-setting but once again I let it languish so I think this just needs to go up as-is. The data center dungeons were meant to make it more explicitly gamable, and I had other ideas for more factions and fleshing out the mechanics of the Blood Poppies and the Prismatic Bees, so maybe I'll come back to this some day.