GHOUL WORLD
GHOUL WORLD is a large planet orbiting a black hole and is tied to several planetoids by weavebone. It largely considered the galactic "hub" of necromancers and is inhabited primarily by the undead.
Climate[edit | edit source]
The air on GHOUL WORLD is stale and still, as there is no wind (since there is no sun). A dense purple smog covers the planet in most places (lightly obscures vision) and a pale, wispy mist like that caused by dry ice carpets the land, preventing vision below about a foot off the ground. The temperature of the atmosphere at ground level is most often between -10 and -5 degrees celsius.
The largest body of water, which is called the Eye Sea, has been entirely polluted by necroleachate, and is, like the rest of the planet, infested with undead. Around the ocean, it is around 8 degrees celsius.
Although it is said that GHOUL WORLD was once a beautiful world teeming with life, it was sapped dry by the dominant native species, gargantuan creatures known now as Necrobehemoths, who learned naturally how to tap into negative energy and apply it to everyday tasks. Little by little, they overwhelmed all life on the planet and gradually went extinct with everything else - the only "surviving" individuals being those that had become undead. Traces of native life date back to -18,237 GR, and supposedly between then and -6679 GR (when the first off-worlder arrived) no living creature existed on GHOUL WORLD. Since then it has been inhabited and continuously "terraformed" by necromancers.
When the first necromancers moved to GHOUL WORLD, they found it to be icy cold and entirely without atmosphere, and were forced to continually apply magic to themselves simply to survive. In addition, they were continuously drained of energy, and found themselves rapidly weakening. To counteract this, so that they could use the abundant resources (in the form of a massive amount of dead and undead organisms), many of them independently created pockets of liveable atmospheres. The precise methods by which they achieved this are long forgotten, recorded in literature that was lost following the creation and subsequent destruction of the NecNet. It is clear, however, that the primary method involved extremely powerful magic that stole huge portions of the atmospheres of warm, inhabitable planets, as the ecosystems of several planets were destroyed beyond repair by this process. Notably, the planet formerly known as "Nim Nu Narabo", in the Nim system, was small enough that its atmosphere was stolen completely, and all the creatures on it died and returned as undead, which is why the planet is now known as Nim Nu Necro. Some of this atmosphere-stealing process is thought to have involved the snaring of other planetoids from the galaxy, since at least some of them were previously inhabited.
Other methods that are at least somewhat understood involved the deaths of huge numbers of creatures imported from other worlds. At least some of these deaths related to sacrifices to powerful beings, but some were the result of a bizarre, now-forgotten process that sapped the life force from individuals and used it to somehow produce breathable atmosphere. It is thought that this second process partially involved a type of magic that "undid" the individual's lifetime of breathing, reversing this process and causing them to rapidly expel the entirety of this breath. This particular process, the existence of which is considered dubious at best, is highly sought after by certain contemporary wizards as it would have been both highly destructive and would have produced oxygen from nothing without drawing from the plane of air. Over time, by whatever means the necromancers managed it, the majority of GHOUL WORLD gained a mostly breathable (though ultimately toxic) atmosphere. It is assumed that it is still, even after half a million years, stealing atmosphere and warmth from other worlds.
Terrain[edit | edit source]
A large proportion of the planet is covered in a crust of bone-filled deposits that have accumulated from the polluted air over the past few hundred thousand years, encasing any unmoving corpses of the dead, either picked clean by ghouls or preserved (freezing temperatures and a lack of endemic bacteria means that corpses, if left alone, may retain their flesh indefinitely). Beneath this crust, which is a grey, dusty, ash-like substance, the ground is mostly thick, dried out mud and porous stone. The constant wars between necromancers have also left their toll on the land, with many, many battlegrounds pitting the surface.
Many regions, especially those surrounding large necromancer towers (which are dotted all over the surface of the planet), are covered in huge, diverse structures made primarily of bone, some as large as mountains. It is common for these regions to be formed in deliberately treacherous ways, with vast chasms and spike hazards.
