Into that Vast and Unrelenting Darkness (40K Xeno Civilization Quest)

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[X] TEKKET
[X] The Destroyers
[X] Beast Spirits

Unite flesh and steel!
Unite spirit and mind!
Unite emergent and intent!
Unite and strike down this fallen galaxy that seeks only ruin!
Unite until ALL ARE ONE!
 
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[X] Syhghkk
[X] The Destroyers
[X] Power Gems
Another very cohesive story. The destroyers (which I don't think were Necrons) came to the planet, expecting an easy victory against an evidently weak race that needed technology to even walk around.

Except they weren't weaker and were actually in a somewhat advantegeous position due to their particular powers. It still probably would have not been enough, but then the discovery of the powers gems, likely due to unprecedent use of psychic powers in a vast scale (the culture strenght may indicate a mostly pacific species), allowed the Syhghkk to defeats their enemies. And now they will work hard to avoid their deaths.
 
Adhoc vote count started by The Bird on Feb 24, 2023 at 11:01 AM, finished with 63 posts and 61 votes.
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Tiny ferret people with technopathic skills and the mysterious, vast machines that adopted them seems like a fun enough basis for a civilization.
And they almost certainly based the foundations of their faith on recovered Mechanicum scriptures, so when the two meet things are bound to get interesting.

The best case scenario is that the Tekket stumble upon a Xenarite expedition, or another like-minded group: at least those tech-priests recognize there is something worthwhile about alien societies.
 
CivGen Two: The Aesthetics of Technology and Civilization
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    • "Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception."

    "We had been naive then. We looked to the skies in wonder and hope, thinking the stars full of wonder and hope. The Destroyers taught us better: under their deathly march, we learned what actually lie in the void. Death. Annihilation at the hands of enemies far beyond us. As their titanic, darkly carapaced forms swept across the world like a black tide of death, we struggled, fighting our oncoming extinction at the hands of the invaders.

    We are no longer naive. We know that vast powers exist in the void, and that some of them mean us harm. I pray that next time, we will be prepared.

    The God Machines saved us once from the Destroyers. May they not have to do so again."

    V U L K A N

    A name that would haunt the nightmares of your race. The ship that had bore the invaders had emerged from the edge of your solar system, emerging as if out of nowhere from the direction of the Sky-Storm your people knew as the Malket Configuration. One moment, nothing on the deep space monitors employed by your people, then suddenly a giant mass is screaming through space.

    Your communications technology had been as crude as your space exploration technology, which had made trying to communicate with the vessel difficult. You honestly might not have bothered, however, for all it accomplished: your understanding of the destroyers language had been meager then, but all attempts at communication after had ended the same way. Rebuffed silence. Perhaps an exhortation of death or a litany about how eager they were to exterminate you.

    Whatever transmissions they might have sent at that time would have likely been more of the same.

    When their ship eventually crash landed, it impacted one of your larger metropoles, reducing it to cinders. As horrific as this was, historians believe that this is the only reason you weren't completely annihilated: the crash had likely been accidental, the result of some systems malfunction or pre-existing damage ensuring they couldn't land properly or assume control over the planetary orbit.

    To those few survivors of the initial event, this is little solace, as their home was reduced to burning wreckage. Those who remember the event clearly say it was the smell of cooking flesh they recall most vividly, the scent of their crushed peers being swallowed by the wave of fire that had begun to swallow the city.

    Then emerged the Destroyers from the ruins of their damaged ship. Several hundred in number, several hundred hulking giants in black and green armor, the sigil of a a hammer and flame on their pauldrons, wielding flame and death. Soldiers. Emergency workers attempting to rescue people. Fleeing civilians. Even kits weren't spared, the young of your species brutally murdered by the invaders.

    Within a short scant few hours, the city was considered seized. And so began the Destroyer War. Your governments had been disunited at the time, unable to muster a coordinated response. By the time the government that had controlled that particular metropole had realized what was going on, there were reports of strike teams across the nation hitting major military installations.

    Your weapons, simple ballistics at the time, had done nothing to the armor of the invaders. Your tanks could barely stagger them, and your firearms were like mere childrens toys: meanwhile, the Destroyers could rend metal with their bare hands, could outrun even the fastest Tekketi, and had weapons that were capable of reducing your mightiest fortifications to melted slag. And even as the Destroyers did their bloody work, their subordinates, the Servile Ones and the Red Priests, surged out.

    The Servile Ones acted as the Destroyers hands, a surging, genocidal wall, lesser in stature and strength but far, far greater in number. Armed with durable armor composed of materials centuries more advanced than what you could produce and weapons of burning, focused light, they crushed the armies of the nation they had landed on, taking and holding territory and establishing it as their base of operations. Any Tekket in occupied zones would find themselves subjected to, if they were lucky, immediate mass execution. The unlucky would be forced to labour in the camps, or worse, given to the Red Priests.

    Even to this day, you don't know how many Tekket the Red Priests ripped apart in their cruel attempts to learn your races weaknesses, how many they poisoned or blighted testing novel toxins and bioweapons to exterminate you more efficiently, how many they tortured to pry your secrets from: military installations, troop movements, technical specifications, nuclear codes. When the laboratories of the Red Priests were stormed, the scientifically inclined servants of the Destroyers opted to destroy as many records as they could.

    The nation they had landed in had only lasted a short while before it finally collapsed: stolen nuclear devices being launched. Millions were vaporized across the globe. In the ashes, the Destroyers butchery accelerated, taking advantage of the chaos and dissarray. By the time what was left of your species governments finally organized itself against them it was too late.

    Your laboratories churned away at weapons technology. Your workshops built tanks and guns, as many as possible. Your engineers designed new and novel tools. All for the faint and fleeting hope that it would save your species even a single day longer.

    In what ways did your technology develop? This will determine technological aesthetic.

    [ ] BlokTek:     Originally, Blok had been a brand of childrens toys. Miniature plastic bricks and figurines that you could snap together to make diaoramas. However, even at their height they had produced a number of highly modular robotics products, mostly educational play-sets for more scientifically inclined kits. When the Destroyer War started, their research assets had immediately been seized and used to develop BlokTek. Highly miniaturized, modular technology that could easily be repurposed as needed: the same Bloks used to make a blok-gun could also make a microwave, could be used to repair a tank, upgrade an AA turret, give your Bond-Drone a better weapon...While this still left you at a disadvantage in terms of firepower initially, it meant your forces were extremely adaptable, being able to adjust tactics on the fly simply by figuring out potential alternate uses for your gear and equipment.
    Aesthetic: Lego and MegaBlock technology: the vast majority of your devices consist of (typically brightly colored for civilians) magnetized ferroplastic regenerating bricks and blocks of assorted size and shape containing various plug and play circuitry and machinery. Larger machines might be comprised mostly of blocks several feet in diameter, while smaller machines and devices might use regular lego-style bricks. Bond-Drones generally resemble various lego animals: a good example of a poorer civilian Bond-Drone would be ToyAgumon, while a more advanced one might resemble Unikitty.

    [ ] SaucerTek: Study of Destroyer Technology had led to a variety of advances in gravitics manipulation and energy generation, allowing for the development of Beam Guns, Jetpacks, Saucerships, tractorbeams. During the war, this technology had only been able to be fielded in limited amounts: deployed with extreme care because of its cost. Now, however, a number of these advancements were finally becoming available for common use: the sight of flying saucers in the sky a regular occurance all throughout your planets various metropoles.
    Aesthetics: Rayguns, flying saucers, jetpacks, and tractor beams to abduct cattle. Think classic pop culture aliens of the 50's and their homages, from Mars Attacks to Destroy All Humans. Smooth, windowless metal, minimal detail. Disc shaped craft with no obvious windows. Thick, rubbery enviro-suits, typically with fishbowl helmets. And everywhere and anywhere, unnecessary fins. Analog consoles and computers covered in diodes and switches.

    [ ] BoomTek: The only consistent way to take down a Destroyer was overwhelming firepower, and that was what you went with, developing larger and larger machines and heavier and heavier power generators and building bigger and bigger guns. That technological trend hadn't stopped when the Destroyer War did: nowadays a great deal of your infantry technology required light augmentation or gravity manipulation technology just to lift, let alone deal with the recoil. Still, it meant that a great deal of your technology was either very rugged, or very volatile.
    Aesthetics: This is the Rocket Raccoon option: big guns, big vehicles, big machines, heavy, bulky, and powerfully industrial. What you lack in finesse you make up for by having a nuclear fusion reactor core installed in a number of things that probably don't need a fusion core installed, like your shotguns, your hover-truck, your microwave, your toaster...

    It hadn't been enough. Even with your rapidly advancing technology, you lost engagement after engagement after engagement, with nation after nation falling as all you could do was slow down the approaching onslought. Then had come the discovery. A desert excavation project had breached a vault, deep below the scrap and sand, a relic from some ancient precursors.

    Inside they found a tomb of black, living metal and unearthly green light. Inside the tomb they had found Gods.

    Nobody knows why they decided to intervene once awoken, those titans of shifting, living steel and metal, but their wrath was devastating and immediate. A war that had lasted decades, and it ended in exactly 71 Hours as the Destroyers found their strongholds annihilated by blazing green plasma and the silent, skeletal guardians of the God Machines, equally inscrutable as their masters.

    As quickly as they had arisen, the God Machines and their armies returned to their tombs, leaving only three of their number awake: MOTHER, a shifting serpent of liquid mercury, SPHERE 001, a featureless, hovering orb the size of a city, and YALDABOATH, resembling a titanic, crowned version of his lesser servants. Each of them toiling to very thoroughly erase the invaders from the face of your world, or else serving to protect your kin from the depredations of what few remnants of the Invaders still lurked.

    It would have been easy for them to assume control over your people, and yet they didn't: instead, they separated, undertaking strange toils throughout the land. Of the three, MOTHER was the easiest to communicate with, having a strange maternal affection for your species, frequently taking young, driven Tekketi as favorites. Sphere 001 and YALDABOATH would prove far more enigmatic, the former descending below the waves and only communicating rarely to express specific requests, such as technological samples, raw materials, or biological specimens of note. YALDABOATH meanwhile would create a lonely workshop, high in the mountains, where the God Machine toils to create forbidden and hidden works.

    In the wake of the invasion, your people were rudderless: having spent so much time fighting alien invaders had united them in desperation, yes, but the decades and decades of war and death had served to annihilate most extant superpowers on your globe, and now the survivors, many of whom had grown from kits knowing little but terror and onslought, had to adapt to a new, changed world.

    From this adaptation came new political systems, new ideas.

    What social body would form from the embers of fallen nations? This vote decides your social aesthetic.

    [ ] The Directorate:     Initially starting as a shaky resource sharing agreement between the broken remnant of nations, over the decades the Directorate evolved into a true alliance of peoples. One governed by consensus, not monopoly of force, one dedicated to the virtues of egalitarianism, justice, peace, and progress, where all needs are met thanks to the advanced technologies granted by the God-Machines and concepts such as currency were mostly eliminated, policy decided by direct democracy, in a system where every citizens vote counted equally. Recognizing the potential that the Destroyers might return, the Directorate would pool its resources to create the Directorate Expeditionary Force, which would utilize the various technologies developed during the Destroyer War and after to create the first Tekketi space vessel: the Starship TKK Endeavor.
    Social Aesthetic: Star Trek-ian utopianism. Your people don't use currency, technology is used for the benefit of all, and democracy and equality are your guiding civics. Pick this option if you want to have Ferret James T Kirk cruising around the galaxy solving problems and fighting space pirates.

    [ ] The Sevenfold Ministry: The Ministry began life as a God-Machine cult, viewing them as holy guardians. Over time, it expanded and evolved into becoming the central governing body of the world, becoming a strange mix of bureaucracy and religion guided both by faith and statistics. Compulsory education, data based policy, and veneration of the machine spirits would become the backbone of this body politic, divided into seven individual ministries, each with their own particular theology and purpose, from the Ministry of Bread which handles the growth of food and feeding of the flock to the Ministry of Steel which trains warrior-monks tasked with protecting the innocent or the Ministry of Scrolls from which teachers and educators graduate.
    Social Aesthetic: A lean into the religious aspects, but instead of taking from Space Catholicism and Dune-esque Mystery Cults, you take more from ancient Persia or China, blending theological doctrine with bureaucratic statistics and scholarly pursuit, faith backed not by blind zealotry but through rigorous study of the world and its systems.

    [ ] The Freespace Accordiate: The Freespace Accordiate is closer to a limit on what governments are allowed to do than a government in an of itself. Anarchistic and chaotic, while resources and research are shared between Tekketi, governing bodies aren't. The only consistent rules, however, are the ones nobody is willing to break. No slavery. No casual use of WMD's. No martial actions taken against signatories of the Accord. Those who think the Freespacers are easy prey because of this are sorely mistaken, however, as seen what happens when the Accords are violated.
    Social Aesthetic: Freespace Society trades central organization for a remarkable degree of freedom. Pick this if you want your society to be a rough and tumble alliance of a dozen different political groups and factions guided by common interest and a very loose legal framework that's more important for what it represents than any actual powers enumerated in it.

    Lastly, select a bonus technology developed during the Destroyer War, either through study of Destroyer Technology or as a countermeasure to the Destroyers.

    [ ] Crude Bionics:     Autopsies of the Red Priests and Destroyers (and even a few Servile Ones) revealed that they had mutiliated a great deal of their body to install various cybernetic modifications. You had managed to develop slightly less invasive models that could replace basic functionality, such as lost eyes, limbs, organs, etc.

    [ ] ShieldTek: A countermeasure developed to reduce the effectiveness of Destroyer Laser Weapons, ShieldTek generators could power energy barriers around fortifications, hardening positions against lasfire.

    [ ] TekKnight: During the war, the Destroyers had deployed a handful of automata, none so dreaded as the Annihilator Engines, gigantic war-machines piloted by crippled Destroyers, capable of smashing through even the heaviest fortifications with ease. Your own TekKnights were deeply experimental, but they should serve as a decent countermeasure.
     
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