Characters / Kardashev

Player Species

Blinkers

The Blinkers are a biotech-based species hailing from the planet Twinkworld. Four-meter tall armless bipeds with a body structure roughly resembling that of a heron (albeit with bare skin, two sets of eyes, and heads ending in four primary and several hundred small tentacles), they communicate via rapidly changing the colors of their skin by way of chromatophores.

The Blinkers are the first among the player species for which virtually all of their technology is biological by design. Selectively-bred or engineered organisms fill roles ranging from tools and worker drones to buildings and weapons, even being used by the Blinkers as spacecraft. The degree to which bioengineering has been mastered among the Blinkers has led to their transformation of Twinkworld's ecology into a model of their own design, with a pan-national organization dedicated to maintaining this "artificial garden" existing in the form of the IEC^note The player-controlled faction of Blinkers in Kardashev is one of the founding members of the IEC, known as Antiboreas; despite this, background information on Antiboreas remains minimal.-; the degree of control over the world's ecology held by the IEC gives a substantial amount of weight to their words, allowing them to (generally) keep the planet's nations in line.

• Bio Punk: Virtually all of the Blinkers' technology is organism-based, contributing strongly to a biopunk aesthetic.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: The Blinkers bear two sets of eyes, one for chromatic vision and another larger pair for night vision - a side effect of Twinkworld's tremendously long day/night cycle, which spans roughly two Earth weeks. Communication between Blinkers is also almost entirely visual^note the Blinkers are deaf, being able to sense vibrations but having no auditory apparatus, being based in "languages" consisting of shifting colors and patterns on bare patches of their skin. One side effect of this is that most Blinker names are impossible to properly translate into textual format, with the names used in-game being conceptual approximations or descriptive labels.
• Camp Straight: Due to an in-joke between the Blinkers' creator and the GM of the game, virtually all of the Blinkers' nations and planets have been assigned names corroborating with various gay slang terms. This has had no real impact on the design of the Blinkers' culture, which has been stated to be not particularly notable with regards to sexuality.

• In Harmony with Nature: Less of a case of deliberate environmentalism, and more one of having mastered genetic engineering to the degree of shaping Twinkworld's biosphere to align closely to the whims of the Blinkers. Whatever the case, the two exist in harmony because of this.
• Living Ship: The Blinkers are so far the only player species to employ biological spacecraft, a trait accessible to species with Tier III genetic engineering technology (or with the Evolving Swarm hive mind trait). In-game, organic ships are produced more slowly (representing the need to grow new craft through complicated techniques), but military doctrine can be more rapidly adjusted (representing the natural selection of ships that are better-adapted to certain scenarios).
• Living Weapon: Blinker warfare revolves around the construction of "combat ecosystems" that ravage enemy territories and populaces, ranging from virulent pests and kaiju-esque megafaunal attack creatures to horrendous engineered plagues. These fight alongside Blinker ground troops, who wield weapons of a similarly biological nature.
• Organic Technology: A hallmark of the Blinkers, comprising everything up to and including their spacecraft.

Corites

The Corites are a group of two closely-related (and increasingly ill-defined) species originating on the planet Mardima. Corites are quadrapeds similar in size to goats, possessing three chest tentacles (two to the sides, one in the center) that act as arms, three eyes, an internal skeleton alongside a hard exoskeleton, and a coat of feather-like fuzz. These features are often ornamented, augmented, or replaced with cybernetic technologies, for a variety of purposes ranging from the decorative to the utilitarian. Mardima is not nearly at a level of national consolidation as is present on the Blinkers' Twinkworld, and remains a world of fragmented nation-states; of these, the Corites represented in-game are the denizens of the nation of Nirn, a hereditary monarchy ruled by a powerful king and a number of queens.

Most of Nirn's population (as well as significant numbers of Corites in other nations across Mardima) adheres to a religion venerating two deities, the brother gods Skay and Lant. Skay is associated with space, the sky, and seasons, while Lant is represented by planets, other celestial bodies, and life. Reverence of the two deities is commonplace within Nirn's culture, with Lant usually being revered during times of war or when relatives are born or die, and Skay during ventures into the sky and space.

• Ancient Astronauts: The Aranoculans, who left a number of crashed spacecraft behind scattered across Mardima. Their purpose for landing on the planet remains unknown at the present time.
• Artificial Limbs: A fairly common Corite cybernetic branch, employed for both fashionable and utilitarian purposes.
• Brain/Computer Interface: One of the myriad subsets of Corite cybernetics. Used for purposes as diverse as recording and livestreaming thoughts, or control of vehicles solely by mental stimuli.
• Bizarre Alien Reproduction: Corites produce large numbers of young in a given breeding instance, which then spend the first five years of their lives in an animalistic non-sapient state before "awakening" and becoming cognizant.
• Cyborg: Most Corites bear some form of cybernetic alterations to their bodies, whether they be ornamental fashionwear (such as decorative shell platings and animated tattoos) or physical enhancements (including proper armor, robotic limbs, and neurological implants).
• Exotic Extended Marriage: The reigning king of Nirn marries a multitude of queens at any given time. Each of these queens is inferior to the king in terms of say in legislation, but if they agree on something, they are unable to be opposed by him.
• Feudal Future: Not really "the future" per exact definition, but the cybernetic-toting, wormhole-capable Corites of Nirn are ruled by a fairly strong monarchy.
• Precursors: A species of long-bodied, many-legged, tusk-bearing aliens with thick coats of fur, dubbed Aranoculans by the Corites of Nirn, have left behind a number of crashed vessels on the surface of Mardima.

Gyk-Zurr-Dahkk

The Gyk-Zurr-Dahkk (often shortened to Gyk) are an alien species originating on the tidally-locked planet Ven'Kuph. In stark contrast to the other biological species in Kardashev, the Gyk-Zurr-Dahkk do not operate under a carbon/water-based system of life - the life of Ven'Kuph instead operates on a base of iron oxide and sulfuric acid. Beyond this utterly alien system of biochemistry, the Gyk-Zurr-Dahkk are otherwise physically strange, with eight sprawling legs (each bearing wings and allowing them to fly), eyes mounted at the tip of a curiously long stalk at the front of their body, and a complex development system from tetralaterally-symmetrical^note four-way symmetry juveniles. The rest of their life cycle is even more complicated.

The Gyk-Zurr-Dahkk are also noteworthy for their psychological and ideological nuances. Lying, betrayal, and other such forms of mistreatment provoke severe instinctual hostility among the Gyk-Zurr-Dahkk; they also form fluidly aggregating and separating social aggregations and hierarchies rather than organized, static groups. This manifests itself in a strange form of logically purist collectivism, which while oftentimes advantageous to the Gyk-Zurr-Dahkk as a species can (and in the past has, on multiple occasions severe enough to warrant recognition as planetwide disasters) lead to rampant flaring of unsound ideologies without the knowledge that harmful actions are being committed. Whatever the case, they start the game as the only faction at the highest possible level of national consolidation, with only a single entity - the Celestial Social Technocrat Hierarchy (CSTH) - existing in their entire home system.

• Alien Sky: Their homeworld of Ven'Kuph is only habitable in a small band at the equator due to the sun on one side and a permanent dark side of the planet on the other. Anyone looking at the sky from this band would see an enormous sun hanging in permanent sunset- in fact, if their planet wasn't absurdly dry, the flow of water would render even this small strip of land uninhabitably hot.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: The most striking example within Kardashev's playable alien base.
  • Most prominent among the alien characteristics of the Gyk-Zurr-Dahkk is the biochemistry of Ven'Kuph's life, which is based on iron oxide rather than carbon, and uses sulfuric acid rather than water as a solvent. While the system works on its own nuances, it is still far more alien from a mechanical standpoint than anything else in Kardashev.
  • The species' body structure also begs mention. All eight of their walking/grabbing limbs feature wings, allowing them limited flight capacity (though due to their weight they can only fly for about twenty minutes at the maximum). Their four elongated sensory appendages^note one long eye stalk at the front of the body, two antennae/halteres, and a long muscular tail are each supported by fluid sacs rather than by their skeleton, and each one features a nearby brain; the strongest brain, located at the front of the body, in fact develops into the primary brain from being the least damaged of the four brains in a young Gyk, with the other three developing into auxilliary brains and their associated sensory organs developing as per their position to the new "front" of the body.
  • The Gyk are also fairly odd in terms of their role in Ven'Kuph's ecology. They are one of several species of symbionts to a large, tree-like "plant" organism known as a gyyrvvk; these "trees" grow a certain form of bulbous branches out of their canopies that produce rich food and comforting hormones necessary to the health of the Gyk-Zurr-Dahkk, in addition to providing them a place to live and a sheltering region for juveniles. In turn, the Gyk guard their trees, heal their broken branches, and cultivate them through various means.
• Bizarre Alien Psychology: The Gyk have a deep, severe instinctual disdain for dishonesty, betrayal, and similar forms of mistreatment; such actions were historically dealt with through angry lynch mobs, but in these civilized modern times is more often punished through sterilization combined with either cybernetic mental alterations or imprisonment within specialized asylums. (The Gyk-Zurr-Dahkk system has been likened by their creator to the Prisoner's Dilemma on steroids.)
  • In addition to this, the Gyk exhibit a fluid social grouping system that removes any need for individuals with disagreeing views or logic systems to compromise or accept "wrong" thoughts. This normally leads to Gyk-Zurr-Dahkk societies experiencing remarkably little internal conflict and ideological gridlock, but can backfire horribly if actions snowball in a way that is seen as acceptable by the collective logos.
• Bizarre Alien Reproduction: There are a whopping 378 individual Gyk-Zurr-Dahkk sexes, each of which can mate with another to produce viable eggs^note more of these sexes appear to have existed in the distant past, but were inadvertently wiped out entirely during one of the profound Gyk Failures. These eggs then give rise either to a "nest" or a non-sapient, dog-like form, with these two mating to produce a single Gyk offspring through live birth.
  • The natal development of the Gyk also deserves mention in this regard. Infants are born with four-way symmetry and four equally-powerful brains; specialization of the body into a bilaterally symmetrical form is prompted by sufficient damage to one or more of the juvenile's brains, with the least damaged becoming the primary anterior brain and the remainer being relegated to lesser roles. Historically, this occurred through (un)timely falls from the lower branches of Gyk-Zurr-Dahkk host "trees" or by attacks from aerial predators or the host tree's pollinators. Nowadays, vaccine injections into what is planned as the rear brain are done to stimulate the change.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: As a side-effect of the differences inherent in the Gyk-Zurr-Dahkk psychological system (as well as their biology, to an extent), they bear commonly a multitude of ideas and institutions that range from foreign to outright Squick for a human (e.g. sterilization and systematic punishment of liars, intentionally damaging the brains of infants). The same operates in reverse, though - a Gyk would find the human tolerance of subterfuge and dishonesty to be abhorrent on an instinctual level, make no sense of the structuring of social groups that are static and often rely on mutual disagreements, and see human reproduction as a bizarrely simplified affair.
• Cool Horse: The cybernetic mounts employed for personal Gyk transportation. Originally restricted to a low-slung species known as the drikk, recent developments in neural cybernetic interfaces have seen domestication efforts extended to other Ven'Kuph megafauna for similar purposes.
• Cyborg: Rather than personal motorized vehicles, most Gyk-Zurr-Dahkk employ cybernetically modified animals as their mounts. These are usually outfitted with mechanical enhancements to increase mobility and movement efficiency, and increasingly with neural interfaces allowing for their Gyk riders to more directly control their steeds.
• Death World: Ven'Kuph, to the average (carbon-based) outside observer. Firstly is the simple fact that it is a cradle for iron oxide-based life, which on Ven'Kuph means that water's role is instead occupied by sulfuric acid. The planet is also far hotter than Earth - temperatures range from 170°C to 290°C at its respective coldest and hottest points. Compounding this further is the fact that Ven'Kuph is tidally locked to its sun, not rotating on its axis as other habitable planets are apt to do. This renders the sunlit half a blazing, barren, lifeless waste, and the shaded side too cold and dark to sustain life; the planet's entire ecosystem, Gyk-Zurr-Dahkk included, is restricted to a thin band of twilit terrain straddling the polar meridian of Ven'Kuph, where the light is dim enough so as not to be heated to uninhabitability.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: One of the clearest examples in Kardashev. See Bizarre Alien Psychology above.
• Made of Iron: A literal example in the iron oxide-based Gyk.
• My Greatest Failure: The Six Mistakes, a collection of six instances recorded by the CSTH as having caused immense damage to the Gyk-Zurr-Dahkk and Ven'Kuph:
  • The Failure of Religion, applied retroactively to the era of immense religious warfare spanning Ven'Kuph prior to the unification of the world behind a single regime. This occurred due to the sheer moral absolutism of conflicting Gyk faiths manifesting itself in crusades to the eradication of one of the religions in question, or the resolution of the moral conflict between the combating faiths and their merging.
  • The Failure of Warming, an era of widespread heating across Ven'Kuph due to environmental mismanagement, though apparently more minor than the one undergone on Earth.
  • The Failure of Control, wherein flagrant overuse of pesticidal compounds led to widespread environmental damage across Ven'Kuph.
  • The Failure of Eugenics, wherein state-sponsored eugenics programs led to mass inbreeding and the eradication of entire sexes by accident.
  • The Failure of Isolation, referring to a period in which Gyk, host-trees, and Gyk domesticates all suffered varying degrees of "mismanagement" due to the lack of knowledge that they required the presence of or exposure to specific aspects of their native ecology in order to remain healthy.
  • The Failure of Medicine, wherein the heavy use of certain antibiotic compounds medically coupled with the Gyk tradition of sky-burials led to the mass poisoning of the host-tree pollinators as they fed upon Gyk corpses, leading to the trees' inability to reproduce and a subsequent lack of new trees for new generations.
• Planetary Nation: The Celestial Social Technocrat Hierarchy holds control over all of Ven'Kuph, as well as several colonies elsewhere in the Zyk'zrrka system.
• Squick: What with their psychological and biological differences to humans, Gyk-Zurr-Dahkk society regularly features customs repugnant to the average human. Targeting certain brains in immature juveniles with vaccination needles^note required for their healthy development is one particularly notable example.
• Starfish Aliens: A striking example, both overall and in the pool of Kardashev's alien species.
• Utopia Justifies the Means: Zigzagged. For a person without their Blue-and-Orange Morality, the CSTH would be a totalitarian nightmare- practicing eugenics, sending people to mental asylums for such small things as lying, the highest levels of election being many levels away from the lowest, and so on. For the Gyk-Zurr-Dahkk, though, it's not only moral but approaching their ideal system, with all Gyk being treated equally and being led by people they consider competent and knowledgeable. On the other hand, though, they have regularly harmed both themselves and their ecosystems through foolhardy application of new sciences and practices, and it's unlikely any non-Gyk would appreciate being governed by them - especially if they tried to 'fix' lying.

Hwao

The Hwao are a species of tiny, hexapodal carnivores native to the planet Ahowhii in the Wohii system. With only ~25% of its surface area consisting of open water, Ahowhii is a desert planet with levels of background radiation significantly higher than most other cradles' due to a weak magnetic field. Thus, the Hwao have been shaped by this harsh background into a hardy species. Measuring only approximately one foot long and mostly encased within a thick, vaguely ocarina-shaped shell, the Hwao are pack-hunting carnivores, hosting acute senses and tremendous information processing capacity to help with finding prey in the vast deserts of their homeworld (and in coordinating lightning-quick swarm attacks on it). Highly advanced biological engineering is present in Hwao cultures, an effect of their attempts to make the most of their planet's scant biosphere.

The Hwao are represented in Kardashev by the player nation of the United Wohaai. Having settled in a region containing one of the rare forested regions of Ahowhii, the democratic state developed rapidly and quickly came to surpass its contemporaries on the planet in terms of population and overall power. With access to a veritable cornucopia of resources, quality of life in the United Wohaai is among the highest anywhere on Ahowhii - and in addition to pioneering long-range communications technologies ^note a vital implement in the Hwao cultural renaissance, which was kickstarted by easy contact between the previously disparate and distant Hwao nations, the United Wohaai is also the owner of Ouhiwohii, a titanic habitat station orbiting the gas giant Souwihii. Mostly self-sufficient and the source of vast quantities of helium extracted from the planet's atmosphere, Ouhiwohii houses a whopping 100 million souls, constituting the vast majority of the population of the United Wohaai. And it is still only the second-largest Hwao habitat station.

• Always a Bigger Fish: In spite of being home to 100 million Hwao, Ouhiwohii is only the second-largest Hwao habitat station. That title goes to Aiviah, the home of the hypercapitalist Hiawhaii nation; located in orbit of Ahowhii itself, the station has a present population of 200 million Hwao.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: With six highly elastic, retractible limbs, a bottle-shaped, shell-covered body with eyes ringing the base of its snout^note  the source of the species' verbalizations, which are a series of whistles, and a tooth-filled eversible mouth used to scrape clean the shells of their prey, the Hwao certainly qualify.
• Bizarre Alien Reproduction: Instead of two-sexed reproduction, the Hwao (as with other members of Ahowhii's dominant clade of land fauna) periodically undergo a reproductive cycle during which they produce a "gamete", a haploid larval organism capable of surviving for several weeks on its own. Upon coming into contract with an unrelated gamete, the two form a cocoon around themselves and fuse, eventually emerging as a young diploid Hwao. Due to their social nature and the lessened need for their larvae to move massive distances across Ahowhii's deserts to find others, Hwao larvae are rather helpless, plate-shaped fleshy organisms; those of Ahowhii's other native fauna are usually far more mobile, and possess sensory faculties to help them locate other gametes.
• Floating Continent: Due to the severe lack of habitable space on Ahowhii, several Hwao nations have taken to building immense colony stations within the orbits of planets or, in some cases, suspended within the atmospheres of gas giant worlds. Despite being entirely artificial in origin, these city-stations are vastly more conducive to Hwao life than the harsh environments of Ahowhii, with populations aboard the stations vastly exceeding even the combined sum of their nation's planetside inhabitants. Ouhiwohii, a United Wohaai gas-mining colony, and Aiviah, the seat of the Hiawhaii state, respectively house 100 million and 200 million Hwao.
• Precursors: In the form of the Ouhiwohii, a mysterious race that has left behind various signs of habitation on Ahowhii, an array of dormant satellites in orbit around the planet, and a depowered station suspended deep in the atmosphere of the planet Souwihii. Curiously, their constructs are all relatively undamaged, with the satellites and station being theoretically possible to power back on...
• Single-Biome Planet: Ahowhii, while obviously not a completely straight case of this (it has seas, highlands, and occasional wet regions that act as oases of the planet's biodiversity), is dominated by vast tracts of desolate desert territory.
• Space Station: While space stations far beyond those presently built by humans are common by nature in Kardashev, the colony stations employed by the Hwao are in a league of their own.
• Starfish Aliens: Yet another in Kardashev's array of strange-looking aliens.

Isaly & Yonala

The Isaly and the Yonala are two alien species native to the planet Ade'sh that together comprise a single nation, the United Demadeh Confederacy (UDC). Both derive from an ancestral bauplan featuring two pairs of eyes, six limbs, and two tails; the Isaly are hulking, slope-backed quadrapeds with their foremost pair of limbs acting as arms, while the Yonala are far smaller and lither, bipedal, and with a pair of wings formed from their middle pair of limbs in addition to grasping arms. The two species evolved in relative symbiosis in the polar regions of Ade'sh; the Isaly were large, hulking predators, whereas the volant Yonala scavenged opportunistically off of kills while keeping eyes out from above for new prey or threats. Over time, the two developed full sapience in synchrony with one another, forming a variety of bi-species societies across Ade'sh and experiencing rapid technological advance from the discovery of alien artifacts before being united under the United Demadeh Confederacy.

While both are seen as equals legally in the eyes of the UDC, there is a significant deal of differentiation in the societal roles played by the two of Ade'sh's species. The Isaly, being hulking and physically robust, tend to take up occupations in the field of physical labor, such as soldiery, farming, construction, and mining. The Yonala, in contrast, usually fulfill roles capitalizing on their high mobility and witty craftiness, such as science, artistry, craftsmanship, and piloting. Their society is based deeply in guardianship (especially towards one's family), something that originated in the two species' ancient history with the Isaly's protectiveness of their Yonala compatriots; this was bolstered further by the discovery of the artifacts left behind on Ade'sh by the mysterious alien precursors, which indicate that they once stood guard over the two fledgeling peoples before they disappeared. They see themselves as the inheritor of that mission, aiming to assist defend the other sapients of the galaxy from whatever threats may exist to them.

• Big Brother Instinct: A cultural example. The Isaly are known to be remarkably protective of their diminutive Yonala cohorts; this was one of the factors that originally brought the ancestors of the two species together when they lived in mutual symbiosis in the tundras of Ade'sh.
• Big Guy, Little Guy: A defining trope of the Isaly/Yonala cultural union.
• Brains and Brawn: The Isaly and the Yonala, respectively. The two species are not grossly different in their actual cognitive capacities, but the dexterous Yonala are still by far better-suited to crafting, spying, and other actions reliant on their wit.
• Fantastic Caste System: Some natural division born of practicality exists regarding the division of labor in Ade'sh society, but not to the extent of proper castes. Played straight with the Independent Colonies of Badeh, one of two breakaway colony states based on the planet Badeh, Demadeh's closest neighbor; Isaly and Yonala are strictly divided in their roles in society, with stepping out of these bounds being seen as a sign of dishonor to the entire family of the responsible party. This has created tensions between they and the egalitarian-inclined UDC, with each seeing the other's approach as being in the wrong.
• Planetary Nation: The United Demadeh Confederacy.
• Precursors: A mysterious alien species that left behind various artifacts scattered about Ade'sh. The artifacts state that the nature of their creators' presence on the planet was to protect and watch over the developing Isaly and Yonala, which has been adopted as the driving ethos of the United Demadeh Confederacy.
• The Symbiote: The Isaly and Yonala, to one another. The species' ancestors made use of one anothers' strengths (the brute strength and toughness of the Isaly, and the guile and mobility of the Yonala) to find success in the harsh environments of polar Ade'sh.

Mlumno-Pwath

The mlumno-pwath^note singular form "mlumno-pwat" are a species of hexapods from the planet Vlaank. Among the assemblage of aliens present in Kardashev, they are quite physically distinct; their body's shape is most reminiscent of a large horseshoe, and their "mouth" takes the form of a small radial beak kept beneath a trash-can like "jaw" and surrounded with tongue-like appendages. To make up for the lack of a functional biting or chewing jaw, they have two specialized pairs of arms, one robust and used for fighting and processing food into manageable portions, the other gracile and designed to deliver food pieces to the mouth and handle tools.

Cooperation and ecological sustainability are two important aspects of the mlumno-pwat cultural psyche, and both products of the species' historic need to maintain environmental and political stability to prevent livestock starvation and population collapse. Larger nations, such as the present player-controlled nation of Orrlough, developed from labyrinthine systems of consolidated and federated groups of states. Continuing this trend towards its logical endpoint, they (alongside certain non-state groups of interest) convene at the assembly of the pan-planetary federation In Permvollot un Eirna un Vlaank (IPEV) to help prevent conflict and promote mutual development.

• Artificial Meat: One of the more recent mlumno-pwat innovations has been the creation of certain forms of plants that have been engineered to have a nutritional profile matching that of animal flesh and, therefore, be digestible to the carnivorous mlumno-pwath. While increasing in popularity, the species' deep-seated livestock traditions coupled with their cultural unfamiliarity with the idea of edible plant matter have kept them from making major progress towards displacing meat proper.
• Binary Suns: Of the Type III variety. The mlumno-pwat homeworld Vlaank's sun, Bmaalu, forms a binary system with the red star Wheishrun. While clearly visible from the planet's surface in the day and long known to the mlumno-pwath as a particularly notable star, Vlaank does not orbit Wheishrun as a second sun.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: With five pairs of limbs (three sets of legs, a pair of robust arms for combat and breaking things, and a pair of longer arms for delicate manipulation and dexterous actions), a mouth consisting of a beak and several tongues underneath a structure best likened to a trash can lid, and a two-lobed bodily torso shaped like a horseshoe, the mlumno-pwath are by far one of the oddest-looking of Kardashev's player alien species. And they still don't hold a candle to the Gyk-Zurr-Dahkk.
• Green Aesop: Being obligate carnivores, mlumno-pwat society has relied on livestock and wild-collected game for food production since its inception^note a trait which led to the very slow establishment of sedentary civilizations on Vlaank - rather than settling down to maintain farmsteads, non-nomadic states originated with the defense of the lushest grazing and trading regions near floodplains and river deltas. This has historically left the species remarkably prone to environment-induced population collapse and famines, with overgrazing of regions, heavy damage to local ecological cycles, or the ravages of war leading to critical damages to livestock production. Early mulmno-pwat societies therefore learned that the best way to avoid agricultural disaster was to keep in balance with their surrounding ecology - a trait which has led to the preservation of most of Vlaank's ecology and their extensive knowledge of biological-focused sciences.
• In Harmony with Nature: A common trait among most mlumno-pwat societies is a focus on keeping the local environment healthy. This originated as a more self-preservational mechanism, but has since branched also into more conventional forms of environmentalism.
• Meat Moss: Another fairly recent mlumno-pwat invention is the culturing of mats of animal tissue for food production purposes. They have not majorly displaced traditional livestock production, but have nonetheless brought a very productive new source of food to Vlaank's population.
• Starfish Aliens: Have no real Earthly equivalent in terms of body structure. See the above Bizarre Alien Biology.

Paladins

The Paladins are a player race hailing from The Arch, an ancient and decrepit ringworld dominating the Alunera system. Unique among player species, they are not "organic" life in the traditional sense; they are synthetic lifeforms, possessing a trilaterally symmetrical bauplan and physical features such as solar arrays and chemical-fueled propulsive thrusters. Their history remains highly convoluted, for even though they are artificial in origin, they and the present ecology of the Arch are comprised of nanobots. Whether they evolved on their own volition from individual "unicellular" nanites, were placed on the Arch alongside their ecology as an experiment in synthetic ecology, or somewhere in between, remains to be seen.

The Arch itself is also by far the most unique homeworld of any player factions in Kardashev, and demands some description of its own. Whatever entities constructed the megastructure in the incredibly distant past seem to have been standard organic lifeforms, as indicated by the terrain of The Arch's inner surface and the array of powerful magnetic field generators integrated within the structure. For whatever case, though, the ringworld's creators abandoned the megastructure, and between their absence and the Paladins' arrival the megastructure's skies and seas evaporated into space through vast breaches opened in the ring's architecture. The Arch is presently in a state of utter disrepair, its surface an endless strip of ocean beds and dry plateaus and bathed alternatingly in heavy magnetic fields or unfiltered cosmic radiation. Oddly enough, the latter parts are the only ones palatable to the Paladins - lacking resistance to magnetic interference, they are able to thrive only under the ring's surface in the endless array of its tunnels, or in surface regions where magnetic field generators have stopped functioning.

The Paladins in Kardashev are represented by the player nation of the Vikar Council. Originally one of several nuclear-capable superpowers locked in tense cold war^note Nuclear weapons are duly dangerous to Paladins; while immune to radiation, they are just as threatened by the sheer destructive power of nuclear explosions, and are utterly devastated by electromagnetic pulses, they eventually set out on a mad spree of conquest of their weaker neighbors while scarcely toeing the line of initiating nuclear attack. While a counter-push by the remaining superpowers eventually did come, the use of mass-constructed nuclear bunkers saved the Vikar Council as their opponents' arsenals were emptied, and they went on to engorge themselves on their lands until no further progress could be made. Presently, three other Paladin nations remain extant on the Arch, but even with the Vikar Council consolidating its gains and focusing increasingly on diplomacy with its neighbors, tension remains palpable.

• Bizarre Alien Biology: In addition to being nanobot-based synthetic lifeforms (and in large part due to it), the Paladins follow a bauplan unlike anything on Earth or the rest of Kardashev. They exhibit trilateral (three-way) symmetry, communicate via radio waves, and feature such "organs" as literal solar panels, chemical-fueled rocket thrusters, and "arms" consisting of bundles of hundreds of thin, two-fingered tendrils. They resemble constructed satellites more than organisms by the conventional sense - and arguably have similar numbers of things in common with either.
• Bizarre Alien Psychology: With a cognition system driven by mechanics fundamentally alien to any sort of chemical-based organic life, the Paladin psyche is not easily comprehensible (or even translatable) to humans.
• Bizarre Alien Reproduction: Paladins reproduce via mitosis - one-third of the organism's biomass, in the form of one of its lobes, will separate from a "parent" and over time grow into a complete new individual.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: By default for the Paladins, whose systems of logic and reason developed from entirely different driving factors and frameworks from any sort of organic life.
• Death World: The Arch was evidently once designed to be perfectly hospitable for (some form of) organic life, as evidenced by its magnetic field generators and landscape of dry seabeds, lakes, and rivers. But due to either an apocalyptic scenario of unimaginable portent, or simple neglect and the impacting of several extrasolar objects, vast holes with diameters comparable to those of gas giant planets were punched into the ringworld's structure. These led to the venting of The Arch's atmosphere into space, and subsequently its seas boiling away into nothing and any organic life present dying out. Now, the ringworld is dead and dry, divided into portions with active magnetic generators (and therefore inhospitable for Paladins), or those without their protection (and subsequently exposed to the ever-present flood of cosmic radiation).
• Great Offscreen War: The great cold war between the nuclear powers of The Arch, and the subsequent span of conquests undertaken by the Vikar Council. The ramifications of the war continue to echo throughout the ringworld to this day, especially in the revanchism felt by two of the three surviving non-Vikar Paladin states.
• Mechanical Lifeforms: The current biosphere of The Arch is nanobot-based, ranging from single-body microorganisms to colonial animal analogues such as the Paladins. While still subject to evolutionary trends and with needs like more traditional lifeforms, they follow a very different set of rules than "organic" organisms. For one, they have no need for atmosphere, and are completely fine with the presence of cosmic radiation; on the other hand, magnetism is extremely dangerous to Paladins and other Arch synth-forms.
• Precursors: Whichever ancient species created The Arch, and the Paladins and their biosphere (if they are even one and the same - no-one is really sure how old The Arch is). All that can be discerned of them is that they seem to have been a carbon/water-based organic species given the geography of the ring's inner surface, and were of immense enough power as a civilization to harvest the materials necessary to build a ringworld around Alunera.
• Ring World Planet: The Arch, homeworld of the Paladins. Named for the structure's appearance as an immense arch over an endless plain, its true identity was revealed to the Paladins only after the advent of space travel.
• The Atoner: A mild example of this, some of the elected Paladin officials that are a part of the Vikar Councils `council` believe that the Great Conquest was unnecessary and could of been avoided through diplomatic action. Indeed, the entire nation sways more on diplomatic action in present day due to this.
• Starfish Aliens: One of Kardashev's most extreme examples.
• Superweapon Surprise: An inversion, oddly enough. During the Great Offscreen War fought between the Vikar Council and the other nuclear powers of its region, the latter formed a coalition against the expanding Vikar Council and emptied their nuclear arsenal on them. Unbeknownst to them, the Council had begun a mass nuclear bunker construction program to protect as much of the country's population as possible from the deadly EMP of the weapons. While 70% of the nation perished in the attack, the remaining residents of the superstate emerged from the rubble to conquer their exhausted opponents and unite their section of The Arch.

Non-Player Species

• Precursors

Aranoculans

TBA

Ancients (Demadeh)

TBA

Ouhiwohii

TBA

• Non-Player Characters

[TBA]