Oedrask Prime

The world of Oedrask Prime was once the asteroid belt of the Oedrask system. When the Second Empire of Man found this system, it was deemed unfit for proper settlement. The dim, dying sun could not sustain human life well, and the system had no true planets apart from dwarf planets that orbited in the system's comet cloud. However, this was an old system, meaning that the rocks here were rich in heavy minerals. At the time, the Empire was waging several wars of extermination against its xeno rivals, and so Terra designated the Oedrask system as one massive arms factory. Robotic drones collated the asteroids of the system into one artificial planetoid, a massive arms factory to be used in the Empire's crusades.

There were few humans on Oedrask Prime, just the bare minimum needed to ensure that the machine intelligences running the factory world were working according to the Imperial military's wishes. When the Second Empire fell, the Oedrask system was quickly forgotten. Being an important military asset, the Imperial bureaucracy had taken steps to ensure that the very existence of the Oedrask system was on a need to know basis. The chaos that engulfed the Second Empire during the War of the Cog Lords erased any information that existed on the system. The humans there acted quickly, disabling the machine intelligences before they could turn the guns they made on the humans, but they were isolated. They could not call for help, lest hostile forces find them.

Deactivating the machine intelligences had their side effects. The vast majority of the planet's systems went offline. Pollution containment broke down, rendering hundreds of square miles of surface practically uninhabitable with toxins, radiation and more esoteric dangers. Some simpler machines, typically combat drones, gained a form of intelligence on their own, cannibalizing weapons and waging wars against themselves and the humans. They developed their own barbaric cultures, typically in the heavily polluted portions of Oedrask Prime.

The planet's antigravity was also disabled. Being composed of hyperdense material, Oedrask Prime collapsed in on itself after its systems failed. This not only destroyed much of the inner honeycomb of the planet, but it also made the surface gravity much higher. This affected the humans on the surface by selecting for strong, stocky types. By the modern age, the average human on Oedrask Prime was an average of four feet tall, but had a much denser bone structure and a higher muscle mass than a baseline human.

These humans developed in isolation from the rest of the galaxy. Like their Imperial ancestors, they rejected religious ideas, but the world around them slowly changed this. Oedrask Prime did not just manufacture the quantum tunnelers and dark energy guns needed by the footsoldiers of the Empire. More esoteric weapons were manufactured on this cursed world, utilizing forbidden knowledge of realms beyond the material. When the planet's systems failed, machines armed with these weapons broke free from containment, and these forces began to subtly transform the nature of physics around the planet. Machines would work without any source of power, what could only be described as spirits appeared in plain sight, and the writing of certain symbols would have strange effects. But the people of Oedrask Prime knew that this was not a phony god’s doing. Seeking to be enlightened by their own intelligence, the humans of Oedrask Prime applied what scraps of scientific knowledge that survived the fall of the Empire to studying the strange phenomenon around them. Brave adventurers would venture into the polluted wastes and the unexplored tunnels of the planet to find out why their world was changing.

By the modern era, there are three major human civilizations on Oedrask Prime. The first, the Wegantu, is a large, feudal state descended from one of the Empire’s major arms corporations. Ruling over Oedrask’s meager agricultural sector and ten million people, Oedrask Prime’s largest population, the basis of Wegantu society is the manager-employee relationship. Employees belong to the Wegantu Corporation, while managers are tasked with ensuring that they do their jobs. Managers in turn report to higher officers, and so on and so forth until finally reaching the Board of Directors, who are supreme over the entire state. The second most powerful state is the Uzsmerth Republic, a democratic state founded by a group of survivors in Oedrask Prime’s light manufacturing sector. Having a virtual monopoly on civilian goods, the Uzsmerth have become rich through trade with other civilizations, though their free market and democratic government strikes the other two states as strange. The third most powerful state is the militant Ashar Empire. The Ashar have little, but they have managed to make a good portion of the arms factories in their territory functional, including some combat drones. This has given the Ashar’s feudal lords a lot of firepower, which they use to wage war against external threats and one another. The current Imperial government is an ostensibly temporary council of powerful lords, after their emperor was assassinated. With each of the three major states occupying different weapons manufacturing sectors, there is considerable trade between them, and in spite of these rivalries, cooperation against machine and other threats does occur.