What is Project Samsara?
The endeavor of a lifetime.
The World…
Project Samsara is an ambitious science-fantasy worldbuilding project, seeking to exhaustively define the Switchboard Universe into being. Native to this universe are the humanlike ‘Third Kin’ - intelligent beings born from chalk taking the form of gossamer ribbon, then quickened into complex woven shapes. These Third Kin traverse the cosmos as nomads atop a sedimentary rock layer-cake of history, occasionally stirring it from slumber in their pursuits of power, fame and fortune among the stars.
Being born of woven chalk, the Third Kin are thus able to interface with the material of the Switchboard in a manner unlike any of the beings that came before them. With the power of the Strider Protocol, they could fly through space to distant planets and stars in an instant, and with the Weave Protocol, they could contort the matter of their universe into any shape they desired. With these powers they expanded beyond their birth-planets, innovated otherworldly technologies, colonized multitudes of planets, and became a mighty civilization. And along the way they developed all manners of tools, weapons, abilities and techniques, with which they combatted the various precursors that sought to displace them from their post in the Switchboard - from wisp-like mindspun, to the terrifyingly bestial horizon chimeras, to the intelligent Vault Minds, the colossal, hostile domains they oversaw, and their swarms of automated living-machine defenders.
Ancient rules, rituals and regals past hold sway over even the modern Switchboard, and the Kin must contend with subtle intricacies and raging storms alike with regards to the manner of their world. In the domain of chalk, even ideas manifest as material, resulting in a layer atop all conflicts where - just as fighter is levied against fighter - thinkers are levied against thinkers, and the sharper-clawed superior is often the one who has traversed the farthest reaches of the Switchboard - from the lofty, idyllic, replichrome arcologies of the Fel-Arcad, to the deepest ritual conclaves of the Vahnkin, dwellers in the Challenger Dark.\
Their quest, many believe, is to leave the deepest chisel-blow in the marble-slate annals of the Switchboard, persisting beyond death and the grave in the form of memory made material, in that all that comes from chalk, returns to it, and rises from it anew. Old powers and ideas sleep with dying generations and incarnate into new ones, and the Astrolabe - overseer of all - fulfils its prime directive of perpetuation.
…its Peoples…
Four great peoples rose from the planet Spyndl, when the Astrolabe’s calculus resolved in a grand, sweeping move. The third generation of chalk weft woven in the patterns that yielded intelligent life, they rose from the barren chalk deserts in bipedal lattices and possessed with gifted hands and wings; the powers of the Weave Protocol - the power to interface with the stuff of all things - and the Strider Protocol - the power of hallowed velocity, that allowed crossing the distance between stars in an eyeblink. It was not long before the Third Kin came to be tested by terrors from bygone eras, but they asserted their place in the Switchboard - and the dawn of their own era - by right of slaughter.
In time, the earliest Third Kin would take flight from their chalk desert birthplace and land on other planets, like-minded thinkers coming together to form what would come to be known as the Four Great Families of the Switchboard.
The Fel-Arcad The oldest of them all, the once Arcad - now Fel-Arcad - are a studious people that launched deep inquiry into the nature of chalk and thus, the nature of the universe they dwelt within. Uniquely capable with the Weave Protocol, they learned to interface with matter at a plane below the macroscopic, and applied the gleaned insight into the reshaping of their very bodies into any form they so desired, becoming a horned, dagger-eared, and tailed people. In time, the Fel had such a robust grasp of the plasticity of their forms and their ability to manipulate them that they launched wholly into transhumanistic ideals, seeking to make up for flaws in theirs’ and others’ forms and enhancing their own capabilities with advanced bodily modifications, fusing metal with their flesh and often going well beyond even that.
Emerging senior among their thinkers was the Arcad Rosen, who foresaw a decline of the Third Kin stemming from inequality and prejudice, and sought to model the Arcad to adequately forestall this future - or defeat it should it come to pass. The Arcad would colonize their home planet of Rosenthal into a garden world, and build the First Arcology upon it, where all Arcad dwelt in harmony, pursuing the arts and sciences for the betterment of all Third Kin.
The arcology remains a hallmark of the Fel’s identity. Built of a near-magical metamaterial, the Fel grew their silver homes from the surfaces of lush garden worlds - terraformed into such by their own hands - and expanding outwards like great trees, permeating deep into even the farthest reaches of the Dancirah. Their planned economies and extensive technologies allowed for ensuring an unrivalled standard of living from all Fel, insulating them from the multifaceted horrors and inconveniences of the wider Dancirah. Hundreds of thousands - often up to millions - of Fel could dwell in a single arcology, and they came to represent civilization itself, becoming hubs for trade, learning and far more.
The Arcad would lose nearly all they were, unfortunately, in the catastrophe of the Refrain, emerging from the other side as the Fel-Arcad - they that fell. Nonetheless, they were builders once and could be builders again, and the Fel took on a mandate to expand and dot the stars with their living-metal homes, the arcologies. Priding themselves on stringent egalitarianism and fervent study and inquiry, the Fel built a multi-stellar society that almost guarantees a long, fulfilling life insulated from the harshest dangers of the Switchboard.
Some wonder, however, whether what the Fel pay to maintain their peace isn’t too great, and if their arcology homes are truly that, rather than inescapable prisons. Fel social theorists are terribly inclined towards endless debate over the shape of their civilization, while more than most remain unaware of just what has hidden itself under the sun, justifying its tendril-like grasp around the Fel as a whole - and what it has done with the control that comes as a result - with claims of service to the highest ideal.
The Sil’khan Proud, arrogant, powerful but svelte, graceful and deific in carriage; all these words have come to define the Sil’khan, the Dancirah’s foremost Striders. Most fascinating about this Great Family is that they did not rise with their brethren from the chalk deserts, but instead are artificial descendants of perhaps the loftiest of all peoples to ever walk the Switchboard, the Old Danseers. A proud, powerful and warlike people, the Old Danseers were seemingly conferred with a unique grace from the Astrolabe, one that granted them both strength and the skill to wield it. With their emblematic glaives - hallowed weapons of conquest - the Old Danseers were the foremost power that beat back the nightmares of the old era returned to torment the Third Kin, and their actions working alongside the other Third Kin is what brough on the dawn of the Third Kin’s era.
Unfortunately, the Danseers would fall, scrubbed from the Switchboard in all but record by the cataclysm known as the Refrain. Seeking to prevent their extinction, the Fel-Arcad would take the lattices of the Danseers - their knowledge, power and grace - and meld them with the other kin to form new beings that escaped the curse brought by the Refrain. Reborn in shapes more akin to what first emerged from the chalk deserts, yet refined by the inheritance of ordered pattern from discordant chaos, the silken forms that emerged from the slurry took their names for themselves, and came to dwell in the Switchboard as god-children.
Their affinity for the Strider Protocol and warrior parentage has made the Sil’khan a perpetually nomadic people, being known by the Switchboard through the paths they carve through it. Be it on their own wings, in jumpships, in nomadic bands or fleets of starfaring craft, the Silk’s highest ideal is a pursuit of the richness of being, brought about maximally by voyages across the stars in pursuit of anything that satisfies the heart’s fickle eyes. Practicing an elaborate ancestor-worship, they revere the Danseers with which they share flesh, and worship the pantheon of the Skydancers, old war heroes who won the Switchboard for the kin, chief amongst their roster the figure of Shalkarah, the King of Roads, and the one who watches over all travels.
The mythos that has come to surround them is equal parts awestruck and terrified, with many revering the Sil’khan as old gods returned to dwell amongst men, with others seeing the halos - like crowns atop their heads - a product of their unique manner of evolution through tests and feats, to be a bad omen, and a signifier of the true shape of the Sil’khan; ravenously hungry, hewn-from-catastrophe, causeless destroyers.
The Vahnkin Many of the kin were inclined to look upwards. Beneath them was the featureless white void of the chalk desert - rife with potential, proven by their existence, but still a trying media from which to shape all that they could become. Upwards and starwards seemed logical; a vast expanse ripe for the taking. It was with this logic that the Danseers and the Arcad took to the sky and expanded outwards throughout the Switchboard.
But the Vahnkin took a different path.
Inexplicably drawn to it, the Vahnkin chose instead to plunge into the Void, a graveyard realm birthed by one of the Astrolabe’s many resolutions, occupying the fourth spatial dimension; far, but never wholly out of reach. Also called the Challenger Dark, the Vahnkin braved the Challenger Horizon that separated the Void from the Sky above and sought to make a place for themselves in the final resting place of the very stars themselves.
The Challenger Dark would soon prove to be an immeasurably hostile realm, noteworthy among its various flavors of terror including the mutated amaranth chimeras, the ambulatory forms of legendary deceased kin, treacherous geography that proved forbidding to travel, constant flux storms that scoured the terrain, gravitational anomalies that resulted in floating landmasses, powerful chalk volcanoes that blanketed the realm with white, a massive sea of the caustic stardrip; violet slurry formed from the melting of information matter, and dragons. But the Kin were possessed of the intellect necessary to take all such terrors in charge, and the figure of Brother Vahn led his kin to build a civilization in the Void where none else dare even visit, and became the First Amaranth Sultan atop a new dynasty.
Here, the Vahnkin became a monarchical civilization defined by warring city-states and great naval campaigns atop the Amaranth Sea. They dredged the sea of violet and the surface of the Void for treasures fallen from the Sky above - from unlucky travelers to entire planets caught in voracious flux storms like the tentacles of a kraken, dragged into the mire leaving only debris in their wake. When the Refrain hit, the Vahnkin prospered as the graveyard of the Switchboard was filled to the brim with all the good things from above, and they are the only Great Family that saw no decline after this Cataclysm.
Their prosperity and undisturbed living wouldn’t persist eternally, however, as the Vahnkin would come to war with the Fel-Arcad over matters of preserving the entire Switchboard by stopping a second Refrain, something the Fel believed was achievable only by sealing up the Void, and dooming the Vahnkin to whatever fate that might bring. The Vahnkin took something of a victory after many protracted and still ongoing conflicts, but it bred a resentment between those who dwelled in the Void Deep, and the ‘Children of the Sky’, one that persists to this day, with Vahnkin mythos portraying the Fel as moral tyrants, and the Sil’khan who allied with them as star-birthed demons.
Seeking power for his kin to guarantee their survival in the Switchboard, Brother Vahn took on an imposition from the Astrolabe; surrendering his right as Third Kin and inheritor of the Switchboard to see those very stars he and others had fought to dwell under, he became the calculus of all things in the Challenger Dark, an entity that - when called upon by his kin and faithful - would answer from the boundless riches that the Void has come to hold.
The Vahnkin’s place remains one of contention, however, as they war amongst themselves in endless dynastic feuds, while bearing withering hatred towards the Children of the Sky that sees them excluded at best, and hated in turn at worst. Many worry that their division will lead to their annihilation as a family, and Vahnkin apostolics have concluded the only means to prevent this is to unite all kin of Vahn against a common source of ire. And that much is already present; they need only look up.
The Lancasters Once called the Fishers, the Lancasters suffer from an abject lack of grace. With a lattice disposed towards lacking the Strider and Weave Protocols, they are least capable amongst the kin in matters of interacting with the wider Switchboard, and that has caused them to be relegated to the lowest rung in the hierarchy of the Great Families.
Left with little choice, the Fishers were compelled to tackle the harshness of the Switchboard with uncommon grit, eking out a place for themselves through diligence, cooperation, and hard work. Lacking the loftier powers did come with some benefits; to whom much is given, much is expected, and the little the Fishers were given means that various phenomena in the Switchboard - the destructive calcic radiance of stars, the adversarial ramifications of errant weft, the negentropic power of perfecting glass - are all things that have little regard for them, making them immune to what would otherwise have posed considerable threat to them.
This relegation to tackling situations unfavorable for others is seen as demeaning to some, but for others, they used this position to become irreparably intertwined with the affairs of the more highly-placed families, serving as the liaison between them and a variety of their wants and needs, all the while profiting in litany of ways. Business, economics - these became their weapons - and the Fishers became a formidable force through hardiness, resourcefulness, worthwhile loyalty and a fierceness to their sense of identity. Few Fishers would willingly betray one of their kind, and sticking together in this manner has leant them their strength.
Many still resent that mere circumstance of birth has placed them where they are, and many more feel that all that the Switchboard is should be burned to ash in righteous fire. But far more worry little about these things, inclined towards silent living bothering as few as they can, or living on the edge where there is profit and a name to be made so long as one’s nerves are steel, eyes bloodshot, and resolve unwavering. How they obtained their name of ‘Lancaster’, is unknown, some believing it to be the name of some old thinker in their house, while others believe it to be a corruption of ‘line caster’. Fisher records were lost in the Refrain, and the Lancasters that emerged from the storms were among the worst hit.
But in the fashion of the Lancasters, as some have come to put it, they survived, coming out hardier and more capable than before. And it has led some to wonder if, perhaps, the Lancasters were given nothing so that they might one day be poised to take from those given everything. Or perhaps, for a cause yet higher than that.
…their Tales.
The Fel-Arcad scholar who learned only now that their peaceful arcology living is predicated upon endless kin cost. The Sil’khan born from silk cocoon in shaded rainforest, peering through leafy canopy at the white-flecked night sky above. The Vahnkin solider who’s shoulder remains ever heavy from where his Daughter of the Void had touched him and exalted him to post. The Lancaster pirate running contraband scintillate under the eyes of those who watch the Overseen Sectors.
The denizens of the Switchboard exist at the mercy of both the world they live in and each other, and how they have chosen to shape and reshape themselves accordingly is what dictates the mark they leave on the marble-slate annals of the Switchboard; errant cracks and chips made by a careless hand, or a frontal smashing of the slab to dust, leaving only the vacuum where history should be as testament to their becoming.