General[]
History[]
Origin[]
The Vanara originated from a timeline in another dimension that was more chronologically advanced than this one. In their home universe, the Enlightenment Alliance of that universe led a crusade that resulted in the domination of light and the destruction of darkness. This irreparable damage to the balance of that universe led to the void manifesting directly and consuming everything. A single Vanara colony fled the universe through the void eventually emerging into this universe after an extensive odyssey that lasted ten thousand years.
Society[]
Organization[]
The Vanara are not a unified people but instead are a disparate nomadic group that organizes themselves into various crime syndicates known as Houses. Vanara Houses are composed of multiple clans with each house having anywhere up to sixteen clans. Houses act as a unified fleet with each clan having command of a capitalship. Each clan is run by a head matriarch and the head priest of the clan ship's homunculus AI. Houses themselves tend to be commanded by a head family who runs a super capital ship acting as a place of reset, repair, and resupplies for the clans under their command. These houses and clans tend to operate on democratic principles electing their head matriarchs and making decisions based on consensus between all adult members of the family or house in democratic meetings called Things. Interesting despite being matriarchal it is Vanara females that leave their clan and house of birth, venturing to another house and clan and battling another young female to evict them from their clan of birth and take their place.
Culture[]
The Vanara are highly social and communal valuing group cohesion and survival first and for most. At the same time, they value ambition and encourage it though they believe that ambition should be tempered and focused on benefiting one's clan and/or house rather than one's own advancement. To this end, they despise treachery and betrayal seeing oathbreakers and kinslayers as being condemned to worst fates in the afterlife. Because of their encouragement of collective ambition, the vast majority of Vanara make their living through jobs requiring a high degree of skill and there are little to no Vanara that make their living doing blue-collar work. To this end, they often employ either automation or slave labor to perform low skill jobs.
This mindset has been only reinforced by the Vanara's traditional lifestyle of making a living off piracy. So ingrained is their cultural history of piracy that Vanara tend to measure an enemies' worth in how difficult they are to steal from.
The Vanara houses have universally maintained a nomadic lifestyle largely out of a sense of fear. They know that the force that destroyed their timeline is still out there and may still be searching for them. To this end, many Houses refuse to stay in one place for long and stick to a traditional practice of raiding a target for a while before fleeing to the next target.
Religion[]
The Vanara are for the most part practitioners of Mechanist Drakenism, a denomination of Drakenism devoted to the World Eater Avura goddess of war, hunting, destruction, invention, and strategy. Mechanist Drakenism is particular to many for its veneration of machinery and technology, and its worship of AI, specifically the Homonculus AIs that run Vanara ships seen as idols through which Avura's will can be used to speak to her children. Because of this operations such as general maintenance and diagnostics tests have become ritualized and Vanara see receiving cybernetic implants and prosthetics to replace lost limbs and organs with sacred reverence.
As with all Drakenist sects, sacrifice is a major aspect of worship since the Persacron were thought to have sacrificed themselves to create their child races it is only natural that the child races should sacrifice in return. For the Vanara this takes the form of ensuring that their ships stay supplied, well maintained, and in good repair believing their relationship with their ships to be mutualistic symbiosis. They keep their ships running and in good condition and their ships in return give them a place to live and a means to travel the stars.
Avura is part of a trinity of gods including her siblings Kiradonai the World Coiler and Izactyls the World's Terminus. These three are seen are the children of the oldest Persacron Armordoros the Deceiver, a powerful trickster god who is himself the servant of far greater power. There are various other lesser Persacron that the Vanara venerate along with the main trinity and Armordoros himself, but Avura is their patron and mother goddess.
Biology[]
Physiology[]
The Vanara are a species of small reptilians of the saurian variety. The average Vanara is around four to five feet long from nose to tail and weighs around 15 pounds on average. They stand bipedally and have three-clawed feet and hands. Their limbs are six with four arms and two legs. Vanara backs, tails, and heads are covered in scutes and their heads are further dominated by dagger toothed jaws, large slit pupiled eyes, and large pointed ears. Vanara appear to have originally been adapted to live on a volcanic planet. They have a higher heat tolerance than normal as well as a powerful biological filtration system in their lungs and powerful livers and kidneys to filter out poison gasses and excess heavy metals. Vanara also appear to have the ability to metabolize sulfur and can do so to help manage hypersickness brought on by FTL travel.
Nowadays as the Vanara have spent so long as space nomads they have become so adapted for life in space with lighter and slimmer frames thanks to living in microgravity and cannot inhabit planets without extensive enhancements or boosted or powered armor.
Vanara have the ability to breathe fire by using electrolysis to split water into hydrogen and oxygen. They then recombine the gasses and release them as a stream which they ignite using electrical currents run between their teeth creating a jet of bluish-green to bluish-purple flame.
Psychology[]
As mentioned above Vanara are highly communal and social, naturally inclined to value group prosperity and to work to benefit their group. This pack mentality combined with a high degree of curiosity and innate kleptomania tends to mean that Vanara are prone to collective trouble making. If one Vanara starts planning some sort of scheme or heist pretty every other vanara in their immediate social group will want in on it. This innate pack tendency and kleptomania appears to have been motivated by the Vanara evolving as scavengers living in the shadow of much larger predators, where they would often have to work together to figure out how to steal a carcass from a larger predator or eggs from a nest. This unfortunately has had the side effect of making the naturally suspicious of any other being bigger than them which is most sapient races.
Interestingly the Vanara have an innate understanding of machines meaning many to believe that they were uplifted for some purpose by a future version of the Multus Esse. Vanara are capable of understanding how any form of machinery works with even a simple look over of its internal working and schematics and can even figure out how to repair, sabotage, or even build a machine in a similar fashion.
Metaphysiology[]
Vanara bare a strong primary connection to the liminal elements of fire, plasma, and nuclear. They have an easier time learning spells related to elements and are more likely to birth koatria that wield these elements. Vanara are also naturally skilled technomancers able to both utilize elemental spells related to the manipulation of technology and machinery, as well as understanding naturally how to imbue machinery with elemental energies.
Technology[]
Fundementals[]
The basis for the vast majority of Vanara technology is Azoth, named after the mythical universal solvent by ancient alchemists, a theoretical substance that could dissolve any other substance. Modern Azoth actually a form of nanite that has the ability to analyze, deconstruct, and then reconstruct any material that they are exposed to, giving them diverse applications in many fields across Varslan from medical, to industrial, to culinary, and so on.
Azoth is highly flexible in what it can interact with, most being able to analyze, deconstruct, and reconstruct most any material organic or inorganic. It can even mere living creatures together to create chimera's, as well as merge these chimera's with machinery to create cyborgs. However, Azoth has its limits as it cannot transmute materials into other materials. It can, for example, break down alloys into their component elements and change ice to water but it cannot change lead into gold or living tissue into none living tissue. It also cannot create other living things, only merge other living things together to create chimeras.
Military[]
Vanara prefers to use energy weapons such as pulse lasers and particle projection cannons as their main weapons. More uniquely they make use are ECMs for point defense and dimensional phasing missile that exist out of phase with reality until they pass through something with significant mass and which point they phase back in causing mass matter displacement, allowing them to bypass shields and some armor. Vanara military vehicles are all mechs with Land Air Mechs acting in place of more conventional airpower. All Vanara mechs are chimeras encased in mechanical power armor and wield a combination of mechanical and biological weapons, they tend to be powered by small scale nuclear fusion reactors. Vanara are well known for their employment of extensive air power in combat and are rather famous for it.
Civilian[]
Automation play a major role in Vanara civilian life acting as drones with limited sentience to take care of menial and low-skilled work and for personal use as pets, personal assistants, and/or transports. Beyond this specially programmed Azoth colonies play a major role in both medicine and industry. Most individual Vanara have medical azoth colonies living inside them that are used to heal wounds, fight disease, increase trauma resistance, and extend lifespan. Industrial uses of azoth come primarily in the form of nanoprinters and nanoforges, large scale eitr colonies that can be used to create almost any product so long as the right raw materials are fed into it. This has revolutionized the Vanara economy by allowing a single individual to produce many high-quality goods by themselves so long as they have the right raw materials. This leads to an emphasis on cottage industries and craftsmen over large corporations and the increased socialization of Vanara economies.
Beyond what azoth can provide the Vanara are masters of cybernetics and genetic modification. Eitr cells can heal almost anything that doesn't result in central nerve damage. Injuries that do so cannot be properly healed (such as severed limbs) by eitr and require cybernetics to correct. Many Vanara chose to get cybernetic augments regards if they have been injured or not to enhance their basic capabilities or to allow them to live on planets if they choose to do so. Gene moding is often used in Vanara reproduction, with most Vanara not being born in their mother's womb but in a test tube. These test tube babies are raised by their parents normally but have had their development directed up until birth with the most desirable traits selected for and defects edited out to ensure healthy offspring. Despite this more than a few Vanara are born in the traditional manner.
Artifical Intellegence[]
Vanara know artificial intelligence as Homonculus or in ancient Vanara alchemical knowledge a living being created from raw material with no prior progenitor. AI's most match this description and are thus known as homunculus by the Vanara. While sapient the homunculus are not so in the same way as the Vanara and other beings, they exist in mutualistic symbiosis with the Vanara who provide them with resources in exchange for the homunculus running and maintaining all automated system aboard their ships.
Factions[]
Integrationist Houses[]
Integrationist Houses are Vanara who have chosen to ally themselves with the UAE, having come to recognize that the UAE of this timeline is not the one's whose crusade destroyed their home dimension. They believe that the time has come to stop running from the threat that destroyed their timeline and make a stand with the UAE to fight against it or otherwise take the other UAE members with them if they must flee again. These Vanara have given up slavery and instead moved fully automation for production. Integrationist Houses often attach themselves to a particular UAE member and make their living acting as privateers.
Relationships[]
Allies[]
Trade[]
Neutral[]
Enemy[]
Quotes From Others[]
- add your own!
Seperatist Houses[]
Separatist Houses are those that still see the UAE as enemies who could still threaten to destroy this universe by tipping the balance to the light and destroying the darkness. They have thrown their lot in with the Brotherhood of Darklings and have come to worship the Darklings as gods causing them to be seen as heretics by the other Vanara. They rely extensively on slavery and make their living exclusively as pirates. They know the enemy of the Vanara that destroyed their timeline is coming and plan to exploit the surrounding space for as many resources as they can before fleeing again.
- Notable Separatist Houses
- House Cocytus - Serves the Dark Empire
- House Cerberus - Serves the Macabre Empire
- House Medusa - Serves the Realm of Dusk
- House Geryon - Serves the Silver Magocracy
- House Minotaur - Serves the Blood-Oath
- House Limbo - Serves the Revenant Domain
Relationships[]
Allies[]
Trade[]
Neutral[]
Enemy[]
Quotes From Others[]
- add your own!
Trivia[]
In-Universe[]
Out-Universe[]
Themes[]
Inspirations[]
- The Vanara Houses are based off the historic Norse, the Vasari from Sins of a Solar Empire, the Thalans from Galactic Civilizations, the Fallen from Destiny, and the Rak'Gol from Warhammer 40k.