Sociology

Ceph Unguisurfing

Despite the fact Elqua’s surface is 95% covered in water, the pisceans of the Known World reside in an ever more confined space in the Eastern Hemisphere.  With seabed capable of supporting aquaculture solely found near the surface of the water, only so much food can be produced.  But just being close enough to the surface to farm makes those pisceans vulnerable to the aberrations of the Vastness.  Safe farming land is rare, so most centers of population group in the Shoals areas of Elqua’s oceans.  With few races other than the Lumulus and Orcans capable of surviving the crushing depths of the Shelf, that leaves a limited band of living space in the Shoals for populations to form settlements.  As the years go by, the piscean population increases, yet the amount of natural habitat stays limited.  The Fluid Nations have all done their share of deforestation of the world’s kelp farms and coral reefs, despite the protestations of the Locanth and those Xanthellaette Chelon.  Despite this, it is clear that more room is needed, and this has resulted in border disputes and incursions into sovereign territories.

The most affected by this population expansion are the Ceph.  They have no homesea of their own, and instead must survive in the nooks and crannies of the other nations.  The more indignant of these, dissatisfied with eking out an existence at the tail fins of the other races, dwell among the Periphery.  But as the Fluid Nations expand, the Periphery is shrinking.  There is only so much space between the Core and the natural barrier around the planet created by the Spine of the World.  Virgin waterways that once allowed the fallen Kraken the protection needed until they finished their de-evolution into the Ceph of today are rapidly diminishing.  Their race is being squeezed out of the natural ecosystem, and this loss of habitat has forced them into the urban areas.

There they find niches to live that other pisceans would find beneath them.  The Ceph survive by collecting the left over scraps and trash of the other races.  It is a demeaning existence for a species that once dominated the water world, and it is this way of life that justifies some in labeling them “untouchables”.  They have no rights under the Fluid Nations Accord, thus have no recourse when locals push them further and further out to sea.  A life of urban scavenging, keeping themselves hidden from bigoted sight, and being treated as less than animals has turned the ancestral shame the Ceph feel into anger.  That anger has festered, and some of their number have succumbed to its malign influence, and become violent.

So far, there is no concerted organization in the Ceph cells, and no targeted offensive against the other races.  The militants act more as scavengers, attacking the weak and unwary when the need arises.  However, whispers are being heard on the currents of new activity amongst the Ceph militant cells.  There are stories the Ceph rebels are being armed by some unknown source.  Halberds, tridents, and shorts swords of an unknown make are being spotted in the grasp of these indigents.

Halberd of Unknown Origin — Illus. by Gergő Soós

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The How and Why of Ultravision

For those old enough to have played in the early years of 1st Edition Dungeons & Dragons, there was a type of vision called ultravision.  Ultravision was on the opposite end of the spectrum from infravision, which was the ability to see into the infrared, or in other words, heat.  As expected, ultravision allowed seeing into the other extreme, the ultraviolet range.  Very few creatures possessed the ability (and absolutely no player races did either), so it was a rarity to come across in the game.  Many players felt it was poorly explained and amounted to little other than a different kind of infravision, so slowly it fell out of use until 3E, where it was expunged completely.

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The fourth installment condensing what is laid out on the ENDLESS BLUE website so it can more easily accessed by backers:

The Ages of Elqua

The History of Elqua is roughly broken up into “Epochs”, each named after a color.  An epoch does not correspond to an explicit length of time, but is more a general range of circumstances in the world’s history.  The color scale was created by the forefathers of the Synesthete Synod, whose diviners posses a strange cross-linking of their senses, such as seeing color when specific notes are played.  They used these unique ways of sensing to guide their prognostications, nudging society towards outcomes that were more pleasing to the individual’s particular synesthesia.  Garish or jarring sensory input was seen as a sign of ill omen, and soon the general populace began to use the color system to denote events long in the past.

History

Dreadnoughts of the Kraken

The incursion of the united Kraken species was overwhelmingly brutal.  Inhuman in their savagery, the massive squid crashed over the homeseas of the Known World like a tsunami.  Smashing settlements and reefs with indiscriminate ease, they were like an encroaching storm, unstoppable, spewing out from the Maw, effectively blotting out the light from above and eclipsing the oceans of Elqua in a languishing darkness.

Spectroscopy

Senses Despite Darkness

While life may have genesised from the water, it could not have begun there if not for the light bathing the world of Elqua from its sun.  Without that energy, the most basic link in the food chain — namely photosynthesis — could not metabolize, and sans a method of creating food the earliest phytoplankton colonies would have died from starvation.  Sans light, the smallest creatures of the oceans could not survive long enough to evolve into the immense and varied ecosystem of today.