1. The Uncomprehending World
An earthlike planet with two great continents, each a great distance from the other, both tectonically locked, with deep oceans and strong currents between them. Each continent has been seeded with a fundamentally, biochemically different, form of life. Examination has been challenging but its believed something like the principal of opposing chirality is at work; the life of each continent is biochemically incoherent, sometimes even toxic, to the other. The oceans have been described as a 'soup of chaos'. Each continent has evolved a form of intelligent life, each cognitively incoherent to the other.
2. The Moon of Eyes
The single moon of the Uncomprehending World plays host to yet another form of life, itself believed to have been seeded at about the same time. The biosphere of the moon is a single sentient mind with a staggering range of visual and electromagnetic sensors. The 'mind' of the Moon is believed to be half-sleeping, able to observe and perhaps, understand what it observes. (All of its sensors are open only when facing the Uncomprehending World.) However if the Moon of Eyes attempts to awaken, to act, to advise or communicate in any way, buried genetic architecture collapses the stability of the entire biosphere, reducing it to primitive ruin, from which it only slowly re-develops.
The trifector of the two species of the Uncomprehending World and the Moon of Eyes which can observe, but not alter, their fate, is believed to be an act of religious observance by its creators.
3. The Drinkers of Wind
Sub-earth desert-like world. Life emerges largely around the oceanic coast but has evolved an intelligent crustacean species adapted to the deep desert. The species is born addicted to a pheromone, or complex wind-borne chemical, produced very rarely by complex biogenesis in the deep ocean. When this chemical sweeps across the deserts, any Crustacean that experiences it is instantly and permanently addicted, experiencing philosophical and religious rapture and losing interest in anything other than pursuing the wind in the hopes of experiencing the scent again. This acts as a 'destroying wind' on any development of complex civilisation on this world and the power of the 'God Wind' plays a major role in the sentients mythology.
4. The Abyssal Builders
An ocean world with deep-dwelling trench-creatures which have been given a level of complex intelligence far too high for their lightless, high-pressure and limited environment. Wits return like a cancer to this species, generation upon generation, regardless of circumstance. Hosts to great monuments of knowledge and experience they can never use, the builders sculpt the sea-floors of that world into great empty palaces which span its dark oceans, sculpted with agonising care, over centuries, with whale-falls of ivory and bone.
5. The Wombs of Chaos
Earthlike moon of a Gas Giant. Some combination of genetic tampering, nanotech and still-unknown science causes the apex creatures of this moon to reach periods of stability, agriculture, civilisation and population growth. if this period of abundance and high populations reaches a certain unknown threshold, chaoitc wombs are triggered universally across the entire species. All children born are 'sports', mutants, chimera or monsters, each as different from each other as they are from their parents and usually either incapable of or unwilling to, absorb or retain any of their parents culture. Then comes an age of chaos, ruin and warfare as the civilisation collapses. What follows is a long fallow period until the few stable breeding pairs gradually normalise and stabilise the population, which then slowly grows towards a state of civilisation.
6. The Homonculi
An intelligent designed-parasite species, the Homonculi have maggot mouths and dendric hands. They share their world with a robust semi-intelligent Pseudo-Hominid. The Homonculi's main means of surviving its environment is to burrow into the Hominids skull, taking control of its spinal base with their dendritic hands, forcing out its eyes and peeking through the resulting holes while taking their sustenance from its blood. The Prey-Mens brain matter remains intact. The Homonculi are more tangibly intelligent, social, verbal, abstract and driven than the Pseudo-Hominids and what civilisation exists on this world is entirely their creation. However, the Pseudo-Hominids are intelligent enough to despise the Homonculi and are more robust, fertile and more capable of surviving the planets complex environment. The civilisation of the Homonculi is semi-regularly destroyed by the Pseudo-Hominids and the species hunted to near-extinction.
7. The Living Reefs
An ocean world holding sparse continents and bounteous moving archipelagos of islands with sea-adapted fungal bases. The isle-fungi were designed with a powerful latent intellectual capacity. When inhabited by the worlds "sea apes", complex interactions through the islands bio-sheath environment 'awakens' the entities into comprehensible sentience. They invariably aggressively investigate the Sea-Apes using this sheath-environment, so much that the apes are torn apart, survivors, (if there are any), fleeing to the spares continent if they can. The Isles then sink back into sub-awareness.
8. The Hegelian Fog
A highly desertified world. The dust, sand and weather of
this sphere are made up of complex but non-active nanite swarms. When breathed
in by a complex life-form, (always visitors for the planet has no natural
remaining species of this type), the nano-structures accumulate in the cortex
like a plaque and form a fresh sentience which combines the nature of the
infected sophont with memories and advanced processing power of an unknown
nature. The resulting organism is highly intelligent and capable of advanced
reasoning and communication, but as the plaque accumulates they become
uncommunicative and insist on retreating to the karstic plains of the
continental interior where they seem to be engaged in the construction of vast
Nazca-style megastructures. Though resistant to the local environment the
'victim' or transformed entity, is thought to function for a century or so
before desiccating and blowing away into a new flurry of nanites.
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