Ranweth
Ranweth is a jungle planet, with a single supercontinent called Panefialtes that, with the exception of a few square miles of clearings, is covered by a dense rainforest known as the Khashokh. It’s a planet almost absurdly rich in material resources, both traditional precious elements and minerals as well as various exotic materials with unique properties found nowhere else. The problem is that pretty much everything on Ranweth–animal, vegetable, or mineral–is trying to kill you from the moment you set foot under the canopy. But the reward is that the silverback trying to rip you in half has a back that’s really made of silver, a stomach lining made of diamond, and a spleen full of a rare chemical in high demand halfway across the system on Arlayas.
What’s worse is that everyone on Ranweth, sooner or later, experiences the shared nightmares. These nightmares most commonly involve one of four monsters: First, there’s the Fell Vigilant, a shambling, man-shaped mass of eyeballs. Second are the Brain Gilders, golden fungal parasites that grow protrusions out of a person’s eyes, mouth, and the top of the cranium, controlling people like zombies. Third is the Ichor King, who wears spiked crown upside-down: The wounds from the crown spikes bleed ichor, as do his eyes. Fourth is the Slitherer, a dismembered man who drags himself across the ground like a snake, his severed limbs attached to his stumps by chains that trail several feet behind him. It’s not known why people usually report seeing the same horrors, but some speculate that they’re dark reflections of Ranweth visitors’ deepest desires: Knowledge, greed, power, and escape respectively.
Shakhrazin
Shakhrazin is a colony of Anastasi Isan built in the largest clearing on the southwest side of Panefialtes, Ranweth’s jungle supercontinent. It’s best known for Lotoph Basin Temple, built over an inverted golden dome, with four streams of water representing the waters of fate spiraling on parallel channels to a hole at the bottom leading to the sanctum, where the Anastasi perform their version of the Isan-Kanri ritual. The sanctum is a shallow pool of water where Nephelium-infused white and black lotuses. As the seeker eats the fruit and flowers of the lotus, she perceives a pattern in the white and black like a Rorschach inkblot: This revelation guides the seeker into the Isan-Kanri dream-state. While most of the lotuses are kept in the sanctum for ritual purposes, the qasats of Lotoph Basin Temple also distill small batches of a Nephelium-based spirit called Milk-of-Paradise, the rarest and most expensive form of consumable Nephelium. Milk-of-Paradise isn’t sold to the general public: It’s only for sale to those who’ve completed a labor assigned by the qasats who oversee the temple.
While only practicing Anastasi Isan are admitted into the sanctum, the Lotoph Basin Temple is a popular attraction for tourists, mostly Perenni Isan but also some from the other cultures. It’s built next to a large whorlwood tree known as the Mute Witness—not a colossal one compared to the giants that grow deep in the Khashokh but much bigger than the usual small, sickly whorlwoods that grow in habitable areas. In the shade of the Mute Witness, the Temple is topped by a marble dome of simple design but inlaid with gold, in imitation of the patterns in whorlwood. Beginning from the center of the underside of the dome, this inlaid gold tells an epic legend called the Gyriad in a linear ancient Isan religious script, written by a sage known as Shanaqba Imuru, The One Who Sees the Unknowable. The Gyriad is written in a spiral patterns that trace above and below the dome, but the story forks at many points—a battle is won in one version but lost in another, lovers commit suicide in one but marry in another—so that the epic plays out differently depending on the path one follows. Lotoph Basin Temple is surrounded by tiers of hanging gardens, manicured in strange patterns said also to be the design of Shanaqba Imuru.
Shakhrazin is administered by a council of Anastasi qasats from Mute City, a neighborhood that grew up on and around the hillside below Lotoph Basin Temple and the Mute Watcher. It’s named for the tree, but also for the effect the temple seems to have on those nearby: Even the birds are quiet in the Mute Watcher’s shadow.
Shakhrazin’s other main attraction is the Night Market. Running from dusk to dawn, the Night Market is the only place in the Conflux to purchase many of the exotic materials brought back from the Khashokh, the great rainforest that covers almost all of Panefialtes. Along with the Tempest, the Khashokh is home to the greatest diversity of Curiosities and seemingly physics-defying materials, both biological and mineral. The Market is held at night because many of these finds, from deep below the rainforest canopy, lose their exotic properties or disintegrate entirely under direct sunlight. Despite being held at nighttime, shops in the Night Market rarely worry about thieves because the Market is under the protection of the Flock, part mafia and part religious cult, run by a mysterious Anastasi qasat known to his followers simply as the Prophet. The Prophet is rumored to be the direct descendant, or perhaps even a reincarnation, of Shanaqba Imuru.
In addition to treasures from the jungle, the Night Market is also the best place to find gear for venturing into the Khashokh, for would-be spelunkers with deep pockets. The Tahari Andrews Clothiers (TAC), founded by a master tailor who was the daughter of an exiled Malleon banker and an Isan craftswoman mother, specializes in bespoke exploring and hunting gear made from materials brought back from the Khashokh, partly because they’re generally stronger and lighter than equivalent materials elsewhere, partly because some have exotic Nephelium-based properties, and partly because they often are naturally resistant to some of the many hazards of the Khashokh. For those who want to experience a jungle full of deadly planets and nightmare beasts on a more reasonable budget, many other Market craftsmen specialize in upgrading existing gear with custom mods made from Khashokh materials.
Anchinost
The Anchinost colony was founded as an offshoot of Almweth’s Huntmaster Lodge, the nightmare beasts of Ranweth presenting a different sort of challenge than the gargantuans back on Almweth. In principle, Anchinost is subordinate to the main Huntmaster Lodge, but because Almweth and Ranweth are so distant—they’re in the farthest orbit from the Engine Star directly opposite from one another, so that traveling between them is always the longest transplanetary trip in the Conflux—Anchinost is de facto independent. Not to mention that hunters, not known for their etiquette, occasionally find it helpful to let tempers die down while on the other end of the star system.
The lodge in Anchinost is known as the Waterfall, and it’s home to a unique smithy. The waterfall it’s named after is fed by a reservoir of mirror-silver water called Whetwater, which, while beautiful to look at, is highly toxic in liquid form. This liquid is highly useful in finishing steel weapons and armor: steel treated with this liquid becomes enfysite, a much stronger and sharper alloy than traditional steel. Enfysite also takes on a translucent appearance, looking more like coruscating iridescent crystal than metal, each piece having a unique pattern of light and color. But Enfysite’s most useful property is regeneration: A dull Enfysite blade will sharpen in a matter of hours until it cuts like it just came from the forge, and even a bent or fractured Enfysite piece will repair itself to its original finished form in days, provided it’s immersed in a Whetwater solution.
Anchinost’s taverns are notorious across the Conflux because hunters drink copious amounts of jekt, a liqueur made at the Huntmaster Lodge on Almweth, to protect themselves from the nightmares. While everyone sleeping on Ranweth experiences the shared nightmares from time to time, the deeper a person has traveled into the Khashokh, and the more horrifying the creatures they’ve encountered, the more frequent, vivid, and violent the nightmares become. It’s common for Anchinost hunters to get “upside down,” meaning that the amount of jekt they need to drink to keep the nightmares at bay leaves them too drunk to work. These burnouts live in a shantytown just far enough out that the bouncers don’t shoo them away, but sooner or later, each of them wanders into the Khashokh as if in a trance, never to emerge.
Anchinost attracts hunters not only because the Waterfall gives them access to wondrous Enfysite gear, but also because it’s home to beasts much larger and older than those that roam near Shakhrazin. These beasts, while far more dangerous, are also laden with precious metals and exotic compounds in high demand throughout the Conflux. Taking down even one is lucrative enough to keep a hunting party living in style for as much as a year. For a certain kind of hunter, Anchinost represents the ultimate challenge because it tests not only one’s prowess but one’s very sanity.
Konran
Far to the north of Shakrazin, in a smaller clear area at another entrance to the Khashokh, sits the Malleon colony of Konran. Smaller and less well equipped than Shakhrazin or Anchinost, Konran is primarily a destination for Malleon biologists because its entrance to the Khashokh is close to a cavern system called Deepfathom full of many kinds of exotic funguses with uses ranging from food to medicine to useful compounds to recreational drugs. Because Konran has so little ground to work with, the Malleon built it the way they know best: Up. Many Malleon came from the Great Coralwood Forest’s deep-sea treetop towns and villages to Konran, using their expertise to build on and around the giant redwood-sized mushrooms throughout Konrad, including inventing a new kind of foundation frame that allowed them to build improbably large structures on the giant mushroom caps, including a palatial mansion for Konran’s governor on the tallest.
The colony is run by Konran Limited, a joint venture between the bankhouses Lyon Niccolo and Marian Verge. Lyon Niccolo founded and endowed the Royal Mycological Institute (RMI) at Konran, a sprawling facility whose lavish payroll has tempted some of the best geneticists in the Conflux, including some top Feron scientists poached from Genstut on Cadfall. While most would-be spelunkers use Shakhrazin as their point of entry to the Khashokh, collecting fungus samples from RMI contracts, while generally less lucrative, is also relatively safer. That being said, Deepfathom also has the biggest concentration of the puppeteer mushroom, a fungus whose spores grow in living animals, eventually colonizing their brains and turning them suicidally aggressive. These are the fungus samples most sought-after by RMI, but collecting them from crazed versions of the Khashokh’s already-deadly beasts is no task for amateurs.
Marian Verge’s interest in Konran is through its company Selvadeusa Outfitters, which produces budget-priced outdoor gear and attire. It’s partly a PR front: Marian Verge is trying to fix its reputation for cheap goods made from unethically sourced, sometimes-toxic material. Selvadeusa practices sustainable harvesting, or at least that’s how the board decided to spin it when the engineering teams they sent in to scout sites for clearcutting never came back. Selvadeusa keeps a small processing facility and factory at Konran so that it can market its goods as from Ranweth, and they’re quite successful among the crunchy set. Its outlet store is less lucrative: Selvadeusa secured an endorsement deal for the celebrity explorer Ferdinand Undamor to use only Selvadeusa clothes and gear on his next expedition. After it was lost, the only evidence found by the expedition to find the original expedition was a broken rope. From then on, seasoned Ranweth explorers have used a “vertical rope tug” hand motion as an inside joke whenever they see poseurs wearing the brand.
Kaff Center
The Kaff Center is the Catallax’s main satellite campus on Ranweth. It was originally a sole project of Braunstein College (then known as the “Kaff Center for Materials Science”), but, to better study Ranweth’s shared nightmares, Dauffendorf College brought its best psychologists to assist, along with a substantial addition to the endowment.
The Kaff Center is a large complex covering an island off the coast of the Anchinost colony. It was founded to study the properties of the many strange and exotic finds in the Khashokh, hoping to reverse-engineer them for scientific and industrial use. It’s the main buyer of the materials the Anchinost hunters recover. In particular, most of the materials the Catallax use to make their advanced metamorphic prosthetics and their mind-machine interfaces were originally discovered by Kaff Center scientists.
Because the Kaff Center has been so lucrative, the ambitions of the Dauffendorf-led Hunnlefau Project (HLFP) have expanded along with its budget. HLFP scientists hypothesized that the shared nightmares come from some kind of interaction between electromagnetic resonance and native Nephelium-based alloys. After the War provided a particularly valuable contract supplying exotic matter to the Ismal Allies, HLFP had the budget to build two large resonators and submarines to house them. For the past several years, these “Twins” have been secretly amplifying EM signals from various positions in the bay outside Anchinost, using field researchers who’ve infiltrated the hunters to triangulate the signals and study the effects on their state of mind and drinking habits. HLFP staged a soft coup against the prior academic leadership—while to outsiders it seems the same Kaff Center as always, its new primary goal is to unlock the secrets of nightmare creation for use as a nonlethal weapon to deter war and control crowds.
To the outside world, Kaff is famous for the Geodeon, a huge geodesic dome built above the main quad from fused-together minerals from the Khashokh. It was envisioned as an art installation across time, and so sculptors are continuously carving out chunks and fusing in new finds. The extracted pieces are then sold as souvenirs, with some of the more superstitious Conflux inhabitants believing they have healing or spiritual powers, which the Catallax have not discouraged. They’re particularly valued among Catallax students, who give them as romantic presents.
Lodge of Tides
The Lodge of Tides sits at what the Conclave believe to be the nexus of the Wyrmtree, a transdimensional organism that seems to exist outside of space and time, with “roots” that seem to reach invisibly throughout the Conflux. While the Conclave have established two other lodges where they’ve found other entrances to the Wyrmtree on Almweth and Gethen, the Lodge of Tides can tap the energies of the Wyrmtree more directly. Most importantly, the Lodge of Tides contains the only known source of Wayserum, the compound that, when injected into the bloodstream, allows living beings to survive passage from normal spacetime into the Wyrmtree. If the founders of the Conclave hadn’t discovered Wayserum spilling out at the first-discovered portal into the Wyrmtree, it’s unlikely the entrances that developed into the other two lodges would ever have been found.
Unlike the time-warping Lodge of Fates and the space-warping Lodge of Lies, the Lodge of Tides doesn’t seem to contain any spacetime anomalies. (One of the reasons it’s the largest lodge is that initiates are less prone to wandering out of the spacetime continuum.) It’s also special in containing the Lazareum, a library of books from before the Catastrophe that turned Alma into Karsa, as well as contemporaneous writings from Almakarsa’s followers, many of which are considered heretical by mainstream Isan qasats. Unless initiates are handpicked for one of the other lodges, they’re brought to the Lodge of Fates first.
The most important part of the Lodge of Tides is the Great Orrery, a massive chamber with a Curiosity at its center that seems to be an exact scale replica of the Conflux, moving in real time. It contains all the planets, their moons, and, as far as anyone can tell, all the asteroids, comets, and other smaller celestial objects. A light also appears whenever there’s a surge in Nephelium-based power. There’s a spot called the Crux, directly below the center of the room and underneath the “model” of the Engine Star, where the Speaker of Tides can briefly commune with all the celestial objects in the Conflux much as a kubern becomes one with a ship. The Speaker of Fates can only use the Crux for a few seconds at a time—with the assistance of a congregation, a little longer. Others who’ve tried to use the Crux have gone mad immediately, dying of brain diseases within hours.
