Race Name: The Fa-Va [ |.| <)> in baton style low-talk, Coalition Syntax]
Ruling Faction Name: The Rimtreader Coalition of Poleis
Start position: One of the larger and hotter stars
Physical description: The canonical Fa-Va citizen without any esoteric App-limbs resembles a bromeliad (the green parts of a pineapple, or
here) combined with the low slung frame and size of a bowing tiger. Two humps form a fore and aft body with a drooping abdomen between them. The aft hump is held half again as high as the forward, and a spine of whitish calcite plates each roughly the size of a playing card run from the peak of the forward body to the rear of the aft body. From this spine spill thousands of barbed tentacles, mostly coloured olive ranging to black, but with the occasional bright yellow or vivid red depending on the individual. The tentacles increase in size the further away from the spine and the largest ones wrap under the main body mass and serve as locomotor limbs. The calcite plates of the spine are also derived from the tentacle growths and serve as the Fa-Va's eyes, similar to the stony eyes of the extinct earth Trilobite phyla, multiple sweeps of the environment providing a full and crisp hemispheric view, if of low resolution compared to human eyes. From the apex of the rear hump burst a number of more specialised eyes and other organs; long calcite rods acting as telescopes of various sorts, and a set of extremely long, whiplike, and brightly coloured tentacles acting as both ears and communication systems. Forward of the fore-hump lies a rosette of tentacles adapted for object manipulation, studded with smaller calcite lenses providing short range and microscopic vision. Underneath all the tentacles a sticky black main body mass run through with yellow and brown fibres can be occasionally observed, though the Fa-Va prefer to keep this covered, and some have flattened leaf like tentacles to ensure privacy. Average individuals weigh some 200 kg, though this can range from specialists at a quarter that to huge Kings as large as elephants. Movement is a very smooth but slow glide using hundreds of limbs, but they can raise and extend their forward hump and its grabbing limbs like a biting cobra. The Fa-Va evolved in an extremely hot environment with average water temperatures of some 115C (high atmospheric pressure meant this was below the local boiling point), and thus although they originated from the same panspermia as Earth-life they took a very different evolutionary path. With things being too hot for lipid cell membranes to develop the black core of a Fa-Va is actually a single vast RNA-protein and tar based meta-system; genetic storage, metabolism, information processing, and thought all going on within the same substrate. The tentacles and eyes that emerge from this gloop aren't organs in the earth-life sense but rather salt-protein 'supra-molecular machines', and the modern Fa-Va can grow and select new limbs, senses and processors as easily as one might download Apps for an iPhone. The price paid for this tremendous flexibility is that their conciousness is running in a solely chemical substrate rather than the vastly faster electro-chemical nervous system of earth metazoans. Thus whilst a human has their internal mental picture of the world updated every 3 milliseconds and has a thought every few seconds or so, a Fa-Va's sensorium updates every few seconds and thought occurs in bursts every dozen seconds or so.
This isn't a great picture as the tentacles are meant to be pointed and barbed, and I didn't draw all the little ones, but whatevers.
Character description: The post Mindwar Fa-Va as exemplified by the Coalition are introspective and a little bit paranoid. They are very accepting of differing points of view, but are extremely adverse to proselyting, seeing destruction of mindstate as something worse than physical destruction. Surprisingly romantic for a race without hormones (probably due to recreational unmarked fiction being a common pastime passed down from parent to child) the like great displays of emotion and preservation of original biospheres and cultures. The primary civilisation focus is spreading across the galaxy but at a low density, and adapting to local conditions rather than planetforming, attempting to increase the diversity of subcultures and stop the overcrowding that lead to the Mindwar.
Home system description: The bright star Si-Si-Si [ .|. .|. .|. ] has a huge number of comets and small ice bodies, three large gas giants (two with spectacular ring systems), and one large rocky world Ha-Fa-Ho [ \.. |.| ../ ] with roughly 150% of earths radius and 90% of Earths density. A very dense and oxygen rich atmosphere is heated immensely by the star to produce tremendous storm systems and vast flooded jungle analogs. One tremendous continent stretches from the south pole to the equator, taking up a whole quarter of the globe, whilst five Australia sized continents and tens of thousands of islands speckle the rest of the equatorial zone and northern hemisphere.
Brief history: The Fa-Va are perhaps exceptional in developing agriculture, cities, and sailing before becoming sapient. The first appreciable structures were constructed some 17 million years ago by what modern Fa-Va call 'Golems' – physically similar to a modern Fa-Va and able to perform and learn complex tasks but lacking self awareness and symbolic language. The Fa-Va lineage's ability to directly exchange experience in mind-to-mind communication (temporarily linking the body cores and having thought processes flow from one to the other) allowed these beasts to coordinate and progress from littoral and riverine scavengers to packs who managed groves of edible plants and built walls and storage centres to keep foes out. Gradually the evolution of better food plants lead to greater population densities, which kicked off the development of plagues/viral ideas (for a Fa-Va they are the same thing) that began parasitising the Golem farmers. After tens of thousands of years of booms and busts a new mental processing structure arose, one that could check the rest of the minds thoughts, and those thoughts and social relationships coming from outside, in effect an overseeing mental eye...that in time became an 'I'. The newly concious Fa-Va spread across the world destroying and converting the Golems, their symbolic language and higher levels of coordination and self interest making them vastly superior to the unconscious. The appearance of intelligent civilisation all over the equatorial in just a few generations (rather than the thousands seen where humans strolled out of Africa) created a tremendous amount of social stress with every village being its own kingdom with its own low talk language (and these languages weren't like differing human languages as they varied even in the mechanism of communication; some waving batons about, others flashing lights or using motile carriers, still others using aural communication with organs built like drums or violins). The next few thousand years are generally referred to as the Coalescent era, culminating in an orgy of violence with the Language Wars. Subsistence farmers in the main couldn't afford more than one or two language brains, so river based trading settlements warred over which communication method the peripheral harvesters should use, for using a particular cities method would bind them to that trade network.
Eventually however increasing agricultural and aquacultural surpluses allowed the development of mercantile and diplomatic castes and the trade networks stopped their monoglot of conflict and communications equilibrated across geographic zones. The distinction now became militaristic-agricultural jungle polities and trading cities on the coast and rivers, and the difference between two philosophies of mental efficiency – Assimilatory and Specialists. Due to the difficulties of bandwidth with low talk, the fear of mindrape during brain-brain communication, and the general slow reaction speed of the Fa-Va those groups that could react more quickly would have a decisive advantage in battle and trade; Assimilatory groups attempted to make every individual in a polity think as similarly as possible to prevent misunderstanding and easy communication (as if you thought pretty much the same as the other guy you could guess what they meant or were going to do more easily), whilst the Specialists encouraged individuals to develop different mental architectures focused on particular tasks. Generally the Jungle states were Assimilatory and the trading cities Specialists, but there were many exceptions. It is at this time that the great tradition of Rhetorical Warriors developed in the coastal cities, disputes between clans and interests settled by two duellists battling over a direct mind link.
This interstitial era ended with the development of metal working and winged communication subunits, both giving massive advantage to the Assimilatory Jungle states who soon conquered and converted the riverine trading cities and Specialist Jungle states. The Specialists survived as coastal and island polities where Assimilatory tendencies were at a disadvantage and as lineages providing particular services to the Metal Mind-Empires main body of individuals. Over time the Metal Mind-Empires expanded and fought till there was only one per biome unit whilst the Specialists developed advanced sailing techniques and a trading system that wrapped around the equator. The Captains to these ships became a special executive class, the forerunners of the modern Kings, and their quick decision making and fierce loyalties allowed the Specialist polities to regain some ground.
The development of industry lead to a time of fragmentation and chaos. The Metal Mind-Empires, having imported systems of logical inquiry from the coastal polises, began to exploit local energy resources in the terms of coal beds and hydropower, not realising this would be the doom of their current social structure. The rapid increase in population and the strain of having a single Assimilatory mental structure for both industry and agricultural military caused their ancient mental modes to break apart into new states as a patchwork of agricultural lands, mercenary companies and industrial conurbations resembling renaissance Italy writ large. Steam boilers and tapping geothermal energy allowed the Specialists to colonise the islands of the Northern hemisphere that were preciously too cold for habitation (ironically a Fa-Va would arrive in orbit well before one got to the highlands of the massive southern polar continent). The office of Captain having evolved into the institution of City-Kings as central executives. In an attempt to remake their states into the old glories the philosophers of the new land empires experimented with numerous new mind-states, like implanted social concious units and group minds. Their rapid sharing of mentalities in violation of the old taboos unfortunately setting the stage for the Mindwar. The mixing produced new types of mental virus, essentially personalities that could infect another individual, and these plagues spread across the equatorial continents turning hundreds millions into zombies at best and the slaves of a sociopathic group mind at worst. The century of the Mindwar saw 90% of Fa-Va population die as the plagues fought and raped each other, and it was only brought to a close when the relatively unaffected cities of the Northern islands began the mass release of assassination viruses (based on their old political traditions) that targeted the patterns of plagues. In the aftermath the Coalition imposed a common mental syntax on the equatorial survivors and began to explore local space in an attempt to restore their damaged society and create backups against such a tragedy happening again.
Faction description: The Coalition of Poleis of the Rimtreader Archipelago are the dominant scientific and cultural unit of Ha-Fa-Ho, imposing a language and political hegemony over the rest of the planet thanks to surviving the Mindwar mostly intact and having control of the primary satellite communication network. Ruled by the council of Kings (specialised executive caste) and their advisors the other states of the homeworld are clients of the Rimtreaders.
Age: Normal Start
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Ship Template
Ship Name: Za-Ro [ /// .// ]
Normal FTL (2x3)
Scanner x 1
Life support x 1
Engineering Bay x 1
Computer x 1
An unarmed but capable scout ship. Fa-Va ships generally have computers to compensate for their crews slow reaction speeds.
Note on Language; as you can guess the Coalition syntax language is based on the three bations that can each have six positions \ . | ( < / that combine to create 729 symbols, though due to symbol degeneracy there are only about 600 meanings. Human xenolinguists assigned a short sound to each of the six hundred pretty much a random, but for ease of use we'll use their transliterations of the words. ( and ) and < and > have the same literal meaning but apply emotional qualifiers to what's being said – for example |.| <)>, |.| >)>, and |.| <(< all mean the race name Fa-Va, but the first is neutral, the second prideful and the last full of shame.
I can't say for MathNerd but I heard/found the NES subforum through some guys at the Forum Games, and scrolling through the CFC forums to find this subforum.
I haven't been on the forum for 24 hours and then this appears, a whole lot of people join, and they talk about leaving me out in the cold. That is not happening!! 
