Ilse’s Game and a Brief Illustrated History of Seuthes

In the decades following the end of the First Nomad War, humanity dispatched thousands of long-range exploration vessels in search of other galactic civilizations that had also survived the Nomad onslaught. The crews of those vessels searched the entire Terran Quadrant of the Milky Way and found only ruined worlds, left barren and desolate by the Nomad fleet. The next century was one of great expansion for the human race and massive colonial armadas were constructed and launched. The expeditions were as varied as they were numerous with most being well-funded and well-organized while others were… less so. The Seuthen Colonial Armada  was one of the largest and best funded of these expeditions, and the starships of the armada were equipped with special, long-range Jump drives that were so advanced, they were almost still experimental.

A surge of energy, either due to so many Jump drives being activated at once or to a naturally occurring phenomena in Jump Space, the Armada’s engineers were never able to determine, sent the Seuthen Armada to the opposite side of the galaxy from the intended destination. The people of the Armada found themselves in an uncharted region of space with half of their fleet missing and no way of recreating the circumstances of their fateful Jump so they could return to Terran space even if they did manage to repair their burned out long range Jump drives. Their only hope was to find a sufficiently Earth-like world and establish their colony on it before their supplies ran out. The Armada’s scoutships were dispatched to survey stars likely to have habitable planets and the would be colonists waited.

After months of desperate searching and with supplies beginning to run low, one of the Seuthen Armada’s scout ships, commanded by Flight Lieutenant Eleni Saeger, found a world that was uncannily Earth-like in nature, but possessed an unusual ambient energy field. During their orbital survey of the planet, the scouts detected a faint distress beacon of Terran origin which they quickly determined originated from an island continent in the planet’s southern hemisphere. Closer examination revealed the source was the wreckage of a Terran exploration ship that had gone missing just prior to the beginning of the Nomad War.

The ship’s databanks, though centuries old, proved to be remarkably intact and Seager and her crew learned that most of the ship’s crew had survived the crash and, thanks to the Earth-like nature of the world, had flourished after a fashion. The logs of the vessel’s chief engineer, one Francis Sarbo, contained detailed notes on his study of the planet’s energy field. Sarbo’s notes also contained descriptions of his experiments with a special form of circuitry that he’d invented that drew power from the planet’s ambient energy field as well as his plans to boost that energy field in order to create a global broadcast power network.

The crew of the scoutship was given the honor of naming colonists new home, and on the suggestion of an avid historian among their number, they chose the name Seuthes, after an ancient Thracian king. The continent where the armada landed was, perhaps unsurprisingly, named Landing. The colonist’s first city was built on a plateau in the mountains and came to be called Seven Bridges. The planet’s first starport was named Port Saeger in honor of the scoutship’s commander. The city built at the location of the strongest nexus of energy and the heart of the global broadcast power network was named Sarbotel.

Not long after the colony was established, the colonists discovered the planetary energy field allowed them to perform simple feats of magic while children born on the planet grew up to be able to do more powerful magical feats. The Founders eventually discovered a way to infuse an individual with magical energy and not only greatly elevate the individual’s magical abilities, but to also confer a type of functional immortality. Individuals elevated in this manner are called Guardians.

The Seuthens learned of existence of magic-using aliens they called the Dii. These aliens had two factions: what might be termed “normal” Dii and the Corrupted Dii. The Corrupted Dii launched a series of attacks on Seuthes which the Guardians were eventually able to repel. A small group of Founders and Guardians discovered that other Dii had infiltrated Seuthes’ population by taking on a human appearance or by replacing an individual’s mind with their own. The Founders were alarmed to discover that the elevation process that creates Guardians leaves most Guardians particularly susceptible to being taken over and replaced by one of the Dii.

The Founders and the few Guardians with psionic abilities secretly established Project: DELRAAK (Direct Elevation Radiant Aura and Knowledge) with the goal of producing individuals who will naturally become Guardian-type humans as when they reach adulthood. These new Guardians would not only be immune to being replaced by one of the Dii, but they would also be capable of detecting those who had been replaced.

Roughly 1,000 years after the colonists arrived on Seuthes the catastrophic failure of the broadcast power network brought on the event known as the Collapse. The resulting surge of magic killed most of the Guardians assigned to the detachment on the surface and destroyed or rendered non-functional nearly all advanced technology on the planet Deadly energies lingering in the planet’s ambient magic field made it impossible for any other Guardians to return to Seuthes, leaving the task of recovery to the only three Guardians on-world. Eventually, due to losses incurred by the relentless attacks by the Corrupted Dii, these three Guardians were forced to leave Seuthes in order to help defend it out among the stars. This marked the end of the Guardian Era.

While the Guardians battled the Corrupted Dii out among the stars, the Seuthen people gradually rebuilt their civilization and after about 1,000 years (or 2,000 years after the founding of the colony) reached the equivalent of a Medieval level of magic-augmented technology. Their civilization prospered and flourished, though it was not without it’s conflicts.

The continent of Landing is now divided into three nations: the Plarian Empire, the Kingdom of Sarbotel, and Delraak. Though all three nations trade extensively, tensions exist between the Plarian Empire, which has aligned itself with the Dii, and an alliance of Delraak and the Kingdom of Sarbotel.

Conflicts were limited to border skirmishes and raids, until the appearance of Plarian mage, known only as the Tyrant, who led a mercenary army into the heart of Sarbotel and captured its capitol. The people of Sarbotel fought valiantly on, but they remained trapped within Tyrant’s oppressive grasp.