moonS or rinGS: onE vEry larGE moon, haladar Gravity: 1.2 G

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planEt namE: riGEl vii, alSo known aS orion, or kolar ClaSS: m

moonS or rinGS: onE vEry larGE moon, haladar Gravity: 1.2 G

ClimatE: Standard (bUt thinninG) atmoSphErE, 0% (bUt dryinG) hydroSphErE, CoolinG tEmpEratUrE

dEmoGraphiCS: 2 billion orionS, 00 million kaylar, 100 million miSCEllanEoUS

Civilization: dECadEnt and barbariC, tl 2- in thE vaJ with importEd tl

- (moStly wEaponS and tranSport) and rEliC tl  tEChnoloGiES, balkanizEd UndEr a tEnUoUS Global monarChy

rESoUrCES: moStly dEplEtEd, hUman rESoUrCES inClUdE mErCEnariES and othEr SpECialiStS

erAs: Captain Pike’s yeoman and two other crew-men of the U.S.S. Enterprise died here fighting Kaylar in 2245. Pike also hallucinated an Orion slave market here while on Talos IV; helping to establish Rigel VII as a wild, primitive world of furious danger and shady opportunity. Like the rest of the Rigel system, Rigel VII has the swashbuckling feel of the 23rd century about it, but is interesting in all eras.

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eography

Two hundred millennia of empire, war, and over-population have worn out Rigel VII. Its plains have become dust bowls and deserts, its oceans and lakes are tainted with toxins leached out of the soil after biological warfare and experimental chemistry take their toll. Even its air, thinning and drying, holds traces of pollutants and the ever-increasing metallic tang of dust. Furthermore, the planet slowly slips into an ice age, dessicating and cooling as it does so.

The shrinking seas thicken and congeal in the poles, as the sand advances steadily toward the coasts to meet them.

The northern continent, Ingarroi, is roughly the size of Africa, and is mostly steppe, outside of some low mountains along the southwest fringe, and the irrigated plains between the Vaklash and Othlivash rivers. Oaniru, the largest continent, is east of Ingarroi; its interior has almost completely desertified into drifting sands and blasted erg. Further east, the forested Kotay archipelago runs south into the large island of Zalaril, and further south lies the Asia-sized continent of Evanaroi, covered with glaciers and eroded badlands.

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ivilizatioN

The main civilization on Rigel VII is the Orion civilization, surrounded and beset (as on most Rigel worlds) by barbarian, nomadic Kaylar on the northern plains of Ingarroi and elsewhere. On the western half of Oaniru, the Kaylar have even erected a primitive

“mameluke state” approaching TL 3, where descen-dants of former Imperial Guard slave soldiers now rule a network of coastal enclaves and deep-irrigated oases.

Independent Orion lords have built near-modern (TL 6) states in some of the Kotay islands; the Republic of Zalaril has a functioning TL 4 mercantile economy bolstered with substantial TL 7 and 8 imports. The old Orion Empire still slumbers on Ingarroi, where 510 million Orions have built “the Vaj,” a sprawling, ram-shackle empire where slave Kaylar soldiers drag laser cannon behind tandu-beasts to besiege rebellious vazaks (provincial governors) in their diburnite for-tresses. The Emperor, the restive vazaks, and offworld powers play a delicate balancing act that keeps the Vaj intact but weak, the vazaks powerful but subject, and the offworlders frustrated but hopeful. The Emperor gladly accepts military aid and arms shipments, and controls the two functioning spaceports on the planet (at Vajripam, the capital, and the fortress of Karkan), but both he and the vazaks reject any interference in Orion’s ancient traditions of slavery, decadence, and greed. Orion merchants from offworld gladly agree;

Federation officials must try other tactics to improve global stability and peace.

A Federation-backed global computer network, built as an attempt to provide useful education and outside perspectives for the citizens of the planet, collapses catastrophically in 2362 when the Kobliad criminal Rao Vantika crashes it with a subspace shunt.

The ensuing economic collapse wipes out almost all of the progressive, pro-Federation businesses on the planet. The Orion Syndicate (or even the Emperor!) may be behind this act of sabotage, which increases suspicion of the Federation and cements the hold of traditional authorities over the world’s population.

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Orion civilization began in the Enala river valley on Evanaroi around 220,000 B.C., but industrial devel-opment began in the Kotay Archipelago, with a short-age of labor and an excess of tidal and water power.

Spacecraft launched from the island of Rohay (accord-ing to tradition) in around 203,000 B.C., when much of Rigel VII was still struggling to master gunpowder rocketry. Although settling the Rigel system was slow (given the immense distances involved), it was sure, and Orion colonies wound up on most of the system’s planets. Orion astronauts studying the Rigel XIII super-string developed the warp drive around a thousand years later, and the Orions poured out into a waiting Galaxy just as the Iconian civilization was falling.

After a lengthy period of piracy, colonization, and interstellar squabbling, Nispavan I unified the Orion colonies (and Rigel VII) as the Thakolarivaj, the “Great Orion Empire,” declaring himself the first Emperor of All Space in 200,993 B.C. During the almost sixty thousand years of the First Empire, Orions perfected technolo-gies that the Federation has only begun to experiment with: sentient androids, planet-remolding generators, stellar power taps, and transwarp drives and subspace engineering of all kinds. Records do not reveal what unknown species destroyed the First Empire, only that

the Thakolarivaj went down under a wave of robotic planet-killing craft from another galaxy.

Although the Fourth Empire extended the Thakolarivaj even further than the First Empire had (well into the Alpha Quadrant), none of the successive empires matched the First in technical skill or longev-ity. Slowly, the Orions saw more and more potential and success in mercantile pursuits; conquest was never as profitable as trade or piracy. As the Emperors became more and more degenerate, the caju or merchant clans became the dominant powers in the Empire. Finally, when the Twelfth Empire fell in 5200 B.C., the caju decided that galactic conquest could be left to lesser species. Unfortunately, with profit as the only social goal, Orion scientific progress (essentially static since the days of the Eighth Empire anyway) dwindled away to nothing. Even the homeworld began to slide backward, as Orions with drive and prospects married into a caj and left for the interstellar market-place. When the Vegan Tyranny invaded Rigel and attacked Rigel VII in 1529, it blasted the last remnants of global technology away and Rigel VII fell into bar-barism. It has barely emerged since, even though the increasingly bankrupt and harassed Vegans retreated two centuries later.

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The center of power for the Vaj, and hence for most of the planet, is Vajripam, a sprawling mud-brick city broken only by diburnite citadels and the smooth walls of a Fourth Empire power plant (now the Imperial Palace). Climate in the vicinity is substantially warmer than most places in Ingarroi, with more regular rainfall; Starfleet suspects ancient weather-control technology at work, and believes that the entire planet could be rescued ecologically if the system could somehow be reactivated globally. Even in the Vaj, however, people think of “the capital” as the Sand City of Kolaripam, legendary seat of the first Twelve Empires in southeastern Oaniru. At its peak, the city (sacked and refounded many times over 2000 centuries) held a billion people and sprawled across a thousand kilometers of roadways, homes, and manu-factories; now it lies beneath the shifting sands of the Oaniru Desert. Some of its kilometers-high towers of crysteel and diburnite still tower above the dunes, and the Twelve Emperors mountain range to the east has not eroded enough to completely erase the features of Orion’s greatest monarchs, carved into the living rock millennia ago. The city is very dangerous; parts have subsided down to six levels of sewer and storehouse, raiders and bandits camp there, wild beasts (often alien creatures escaped from the Imperial Menageries) roam the empty streets, and the Kaylar tribes of the region firmly believe the place to be haunted.

Illustration by Kieran Yanner

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planEt namE: riGEl x, or kolhor (tEChniCally, riGEl xb, bUt ColloqUially rEfErrEd to aS “riGEl x”) ClaSS: h

moonS or rinGS: kolhor iS a larGE moon orbitinG a ClaSS-J SUpErJovian (thE propEr “riGEl x”)

Gravity: 0. G

ClimatE: thin atmoSphErE, frozEn hydroSphErE (%), Cold tEmpEratUrE

dEmoGraphiCS: 100,000 orionS, 2 million mixEd SpECiES

Civilization: CommErCial and CoSmopolitan, tl , CorporatE GovErnmEnt rESoUrCES: tradE loCation, antimattEr and hEliUm-3 proCESSinG

erAs: Captain Archer’s NX-01 Enterprise becomes the first Starfleet vessel to call anywhere in the Rigel system when he traces the Suliban to the Rigel X star-port in 2151. Starfleet involvement on this world, and in the Rigel system in general, increases throughout all eras, but never becomes boring or routine.

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The climate of Kolhor ranges from cold and snowy to simply extremely cold. Only the radiant heat emit-ted by Rigel X (a Class-J gas giant twice the size of Jupiter) keeps the surface livable at all, and that just barely. Almost all activities on the moon take place indoors in one of the many trade entrepots that make up Kolhor Station. Kolhor Station lies on a libration point, where Rigel X is visible for half the time and invisible the other half. The station covers approxi-mately 400 square kilometers of Kolhor’s frozen sur-face, primarily landing docks and repair bays open to Kolhor’s thin oxygen-argon atmosphere. The station’s supply bays, workshops, homes, and nightspots bur-row kilometers beneath the icy crust of the moon, and

even long-time residents can get lost if they venture outside their native pod.

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olhor

S

tatioN

Founded in the time of the Fourth Empire (on the site of an earlier Orion research facility), Kolhor Station has been a primary trade entrepot for visitors to the Rigel system for 30,000 years. By now, civiliza-tions whose navigational records have completely for-gotten any other world in the system contain complete data for Rigel X. Its Fourth Empire defense grid keeps it relatively safe from all but overwhelming attacks.

With security and position (far enough outside Rigel’s gravity well to make even primitive space navigation easier) comes trade. The station provides helium-3 and antimatter (mined and refined from Rigel X orbit), food (replicated or grown hydroponically on site), water (melted from Kolhor’s frozen seas), and a myriad of other supplies and services (including deca-dent R&R facilities only topped by Rigel II) to passing ships; with the reopening of the Rigel XII dilithium mines, Kolhor has only become more prosperous.

Traders, spies, mercenaries, and starship officers from a hundred worlds mix and mingle on Kolhor Station, the gateway between the mysteries of Rigel and the wider universe beyond.

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In document Star Trek Rpg Worlds 1 (Page 148-151)