ParoxysmalBirth
Member
NOTE: All text copy pasted from Discord.
They are very large arthropods inspired by the predatory, scavenging, and often ground or ocean floor dwelling variants. Devil's coach horses, ground/tiger/bombardier beetles, centipedes, pugent sound king crabs, vampire crabs, woodlice eating spiders, and other such rougher, more grotesque looking or or relatively lesser known arthropods. While capable of standing in a bipedal mode when not crawling across the ground, they can have sometimes around 36 limbs of varying sizes and be on average between 6''11 to 10''2 in height, possessing skinless mask-like faces and a variety of limbs resembling more of surgical or torture devices than conventional body parts.
They are well known for their love of augmentation technology to the point some of them are essentially small self-contained environments full of performance enhancing parasites and symbiotes, feeding off of their bodies and even one another. Cybernetics, biomods, even more ethereal components or bizarre combinations of all three can turn them into something that is not quite a wholly natural, biological life form. They may have additional limbs, organs, even weapons and equipment not only grafted or integrated into their bodies but "encoded" in some cases.
Vrexul have some sort of bizarre, ageless biological characteristics and technology that allows them to carry extra "gear" something essentially stored as semi-genetic coding in their bodies after it's essentially broken down and absorbed into themselves. They can morph it out of their own biomass and carapaces, making them appear to be reshaping themselves on the fly. Granted this requires some heavy modifications to actually do and they are limited in how many encoded elements they can carry by biological and technological statuses. It is believed this may be due to relationships with parasites that once fed upon them in their prehistory that ended up becoming beneficial to both on whatever hostile worlds they originated from.
I'll need to get that thing on setting history to help smush them into the setting but the vrexul will generally be split between the younger and older civilizations that had a semi-split a few decades ago over clashes over how they believed they should project their power or not - they were once a fairly unified plethora of species that simply classified themselves under the "Vrexul" title. During this time as part of a large social experiment to solve the nature/nurture question the at was the main source of conflict between two political conglomerates, a number of their eggs were seeded onto previously marked worlds for colonization with a variety of bodyguard automata and an experimental construct (a sort of large biomechanical computer-cloud of decomposing, semi-magical matter) watching over them. This was simultaneously a move to avoid giving the expansionist faction additional manpower as the decentralization one would soon engage in a brutal civil war with them, shattering their civilization and reducing most of it to a variety of nomads living in various roving fleets. Currently the decentralization faction's remnants are meeting with their offspring from the seeding project which have evolved a not-entirely-similar culture and political system. The seed-vrexul are themselves already embroiled in a variety of complex political arrangements with alien species that settled on and around these worlds so the decen-faction being thrown into the mix really just gives everyone more headaches.
Culturally the vrexul can be said to have a generally collectivist culture that is offset by their otherwise cold and seemingly uncaring nature. Regardless of whether they are from the days of empire or not, they typically do not have a concept of family and otherwise seem to be creatures that live primarily to feed and reproduce, even if they lack the sort of culinary or romantic culture we might expect from that among others. In spite of this, they hold a sort of pragmatist sense of unity that sees individuals as primarily fragments that whether consciously or not, create the motions of history, progression, and ideology when enough of them simply act as wholes disconnected or unified.
In spite of having a history a large part defined by bloodshed and conflict among themselves or with others, they are not particularly begrudging either though this is moreso for seed rather than decentralization vrexul (or the expansionists). For the seed-vrexul who control some territory, this is due to the unusual form of governance and general class-lacking nature of their society. The lower levels of power are generally held by various community leaders and directly-elected officials but it becomes stranger the higher one goes. Conventional politicians become replaced by gestalt consciousness-linked groups of people who basically sacrificed their sense of selves to semi-mentally meld into unified living computer-councils. Go up further and the AI-councils originally created to guide them handle an even wider array of data management, dispersal, and counselling.
At the very top now sits the strange biocomputers known as Ezvredigors, created solely for the purpose of decision making as well as protection. They rule out and announce various decisions, determine the parameters of politlcal involvement, and could be seen as the highest power... but all of this vertical power ultimately rests on those at the very bottom. After all, everyone lower down has the freedom to collectively refuse, oppose, and create decisions of their own and force them all the way up to the top. Ezvredigors, AI councils, gestalt collectives - their function is less one of rule and one more of assisting with complex decisions.
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TLDR: they are cold but oddly social people who are generally pragmatic to varying degrees concerning cultural and political narratives. They value the idea of direct participation and structural political being a shared responsibility, keeping the system "clean" by basically "dehumanizing" their power the further up it goes. They could very roughly be said to be alien marxists.(edited)
-
Vrexul society is in this strange spot of being fairly liberating but also difficult in general. In spite of lacking the concept of family, all childcare is more or less taken care of by enormous nurseries replicating their natural environments while their "children" are born with a variety of feral survival instincts. Education subsequently is mostly about taking post-pupal or nymphal offspring who are only just beginning to transition from a feral to a sapient consicousness, often being lethargic and skittery, and gradually doing a mixture of "unlocking" latent language capabilities and roughly getting them up to speed with the specifics of survival as adults.
Most of them live in large group homes usually made of essentially "cyborg artificial bioplants" that everyone plays a part in maintaining whether it's installing specially bred organisms to convert plant-juice into nutrition or burrowing through parts of it to make additional living space. Work is in an odd spot as a lot of the essentials are provided and essentially owned by communities while they partially automate much of the work. At the same time there is a lot of difficult work that the biomachines are not necessarily 100% adept at doing or require a more specific touch so much of it is formed of volunteers and specially trained collectives and interest groups. A few societies have "money" but others basically use credit points for if you want to get extra goodies beyond what you're typically allotted.
Further contrasting the appearance of cold pragmatism, vrexul naturally group together less so in "hives" and moreso in what they treat as the cultural equivalent of small biomes. While they don't really have political parties (the only "party" is more of an apparatus of decision making), a lot of both political and cultural power lays within interest groups that can affect grander level decision making. Collectives for mining, biotech research, archaeology, philosophy and so on sprout, dissolve, absorb one another and so on, often taking care of the needs of their own and reshaping parts of their communities to fit their particular visions.
Quite a few of these are also artistic collectives and while the vrexul are somewhat suspicious of outsiders, they do pump out quite a few cultural products they often export to soften up outsiders to them. A lot of it is visual art, often focusing on bizarre arcane, cryptic, and occult subject matter and a large portion is musical. Unsurprisingly the music is not particluarly accessible either, often sounding like strange mixtures of dark ambient, the more cryptic ends of extreme metal, feverish tribal chanting, electroacoustic microtonal chamber music, some sort of demented folk music/crust punk crossover, and so on, but it's found a niche in a number of societies.
They are very large arthropods inspired by the predatory, scavenging, and often ground or ocean floor dwelling variants. Devil's coach horses, ground/tiger/bombardier beetles, centipedes, pugent sound king crabs, vampire crabs, woodlice eating spiders, and other such rougher, more grotesque looking or or relatively lesser known arthropods. While capable of standing in a bipedal mode when not crawling across the ground, they can have sometimes around 36 limbs of varying sizes and be on average between 6''11 to 10''2 in height, possessing skinless mask-like faces and a variety of limbs resembling more of surgical or torture devices than conventional body parts.
They are well known for their love of augmentation technology to the point some of them are essentially small self-contained environments full of performance enhancing parasites and symbiotes, feeding off of their bodies and even one another. Cybernetics, biomods, even more ethereal components or bizarre combinations of all three can turn them into something that is not quite a wholly natural, biological life form. They may have additional limbs, organs, even weapons and equipment not only grafted or integrated into their bodies but "encoded" in some cases.
Vrexul have some sort of bizarre, ageless biological characteristics and technology that allows them to carry extra "gear" something essentially stored as semi-genetic coding in their bodies after it's essentially broken down and absorbed into themselves. They can morph it out of their own biomass and carapaces, making them appear to be reshaping themselves on the fly. Granted this requires some heavy modifications to actually do and they are limited in how many encoded elements they can carry by biological and technological statuses. It is believed this may be due to relationships with parasites that once fed upon them in their prehistory that ended up becoming beneficial to both on whatever hostile worlds they originated from.
I'll need to get that thing on setting history to help smush them into the setting but the vrexul will generally be split between the younger and older civilizations that had a semi-split a few decades ago over clashes over how they believed they should project their power or not - they were once a fairly unified plethora of species that simply classified themselves under the "Vrexul" title. During this time as part of a large social experiment to solve the nature/nurture question the at was the main source of conflict between two political conglomerates, a number of their eggs were seeded onto previously marked worlds for colonization with a variety of bodyguard automata and an experimental construct (a sort of large biomechanical computer-cloud of decomposing, semi-magical matter) watching over them. This was simultaneously a move to avoid giving the expansionist faction additional manpower as the decentralization one would soon engage in a brutal civil war with them, shattering their civilization and reducing most of it to a variety of nomads living in various roving fleets. Currently the decentralization faction's remnants are meeting with their offspring from the seeding project which have evolved a not-entirely-similar culture and political system. The seed-vrexul are themselves already embroiled in a variety of complex political arrangements with alien species that settled on and around these worlds so the decen-faction being thrown into the mix really just gives everyone more headaches.
Culturally the vrexul can be said to have a generally collectivist culture that is offset by their otherwise cold and seemingly uncaring nature. Regardless of whether they are from the days of empire or not, they typically do not have a concept of family and otherwise seem to be creatures that live primarily to feed and reproduce, even if they lack the sort of culinary or romantic culture we might expect from that among others. In spite of this, they hold a sort of pragmatist sense of unity that sees individuals as primarily fragments that whether consciously or not, create the motions of history, progression, and ideology when enough of them simply act as wholes disconnected or unified.
In spite of having a history a large part defined by bloodshed and conflict among themselves or with others, they are not particularly begrudging either though this is moreso for seed rather than decentralization vrexul (or the expansionists). For the seed-vrexul who control some territory, this is due to the unusual form of governance and general class-lacking nature of their society. The lower levels of power are generally held by various community leaders and directly-elected officials but it becomes stranger the higher one goes. Conventional politicians become replaced by gestalt consciousness-linked groups of people who basically sacrificed their sense of selves to semi-mentally meld into unified living computer-councils. Go up further and the AI-councils originally created to guide them handle an even wider array of data management, dispersal, and counselling.
At the very top now sits the strange biocomputers known as Ezvredigors, created solely for the purpose of decision making as well as protection. They rule out and announce various decisions, determine the parameters of politlcal involvement, and could be seen as the highest power... but all of this vertical power ultimately rests on those at the very bottom. After all, everyone lower down has the freedom to collectively refuse, oppose, and create decisions of their own and force them all the way up to the top. Ezvredigors, AI councils, gestalt collectives - their function is less one of rule and one more of assisting with complex decisions.
-
TLDR: they are cold but oddly social people who are generally pragmatic to varying degrees concerning cultural and political narratives. They value the idea of direct participation and structural political being a shared responsibility, keeping the system "clean" by basically "dehumanizing" their power the further up it goes. They could very roughly be said to be alien marxists.(edited)
-
Vrexul society is in this strange spot of being fairly liberating but also difficult in general. In spite of lacking the concept of family, all childcare is more or less taken care of by enormous nurseries replicating their natural environments while their "children" are born with a variety of feral survival instincts. Education subsequently is mostly about taking post-pupal or nymphal offspring who are only just beginning to transition from a feral to a sapient consicousness, often being lethargic and skittery, and gradually doing a mixture of "unlocking" latent language capabilities and roughly getting them up to speed with the specifics of survival as adults.
Most of them live in large group homes usually made of essentially "cyborg artificial bioplants" that everyone plays a part in maintaining whether it's installing specially bred organisms to convert plant-juice into nutrition or burrowing through parts of it to make additional living space. Work is in an odd spot as a lot of the essentials are provided and essentially owned by communities while they partially automate much of the work. At the same time there is a lot of difficult work that the biomachines are not necessarily 100% adept at doing or require a more specific touch so much of it is formed of volunteers and specially trained collectives and interest groups. A few societies have "money" but others basically use credit points for if you want to get extra goodies beyond what you're typically allotted.
Further contrasting the appearance of cold pragmatism, vrexul naturally group together less so in "hives" and moreso in what they treat as the cultural equivalent of small biomes. While they don't really have political parties (the only "party" is more of an apparatus of decision making), a lot of both political and cultural power lays within interest groups that can affect grander level decision making. Collectives for mining, biotech research, archaeology, philosophy and so on sprout, dissolve, absorb one another and so on, often taking care of the needs of their own and reshaping parts of their communities to fit their particular visions.
Quite a few of these are also artistic collectives and while the vrexul are somewhat suspicious of outsiders, they do pump out quite a few cultural products they often export to soften up outsiders to them. A lot of it is visual art, often focusing on bizarre arcane, cryptic, and occult subject matter and a large portion is musical. Unsurprisingly the music is not particluarly accessible either, often sounding like strange mixtures of dark ambient, the more cryptic ends of extreme metal, feverish tribal chanting, electroacoustic microtonal chamber music, some sort of demented folk music/crust punk crossover, and so on, but it's found a niche in a number of societies.
