The Biomes of the Dancirah

An excerpt from SB_Astromechanics, so created because this table below is an absolute pain to interact with.

planetary equations produce a wide variety of biomes, and many other phenomena interfere with planetary calculus to create biomes that evoke wonder and terror alike in those gifted the ability to traverse the Great Sky and see them. Below is a table of the various biomes in the Switchboard;

Biome Class	# of Entries
Cold	8
Hot	9
Verdant	7
Toxic	8
Grey	8
Dark	4
Wet	6
Esoteric	7
Blessed	8
Total	63

Cold Biomes

Cold biomes, defined by low temperatures, the conditions they inflict, and what these conditions facilitate. Travelers are encouraged to pack for the blizzard, and whatever it may contain.

#	Name	Biome Class	Biome Tier	Description
1	Snowy	Cold	T1	The snowed expanse exists covered in soft powder. It crunches lightly under the travelling boot, and obscures creatures with white pelts, who dart into burrows on approach, or stand briefly on hind legs to study the intruder who dares deserve the impermeability of the expansive white. The chill here is only light, giving shape to breath.
2	Taiga	Cold	T1	Evergreen trees see their spine-like leaves weighed down by heavy snow, spires of green and white above a sea of white. The Astrolabe spins, the Great Sky computes its grand mechanics, and still does the taiga persist, its trees seemingly unaware of the burning stars above. The chill here is accompanied by the smell of earthen wood, woven with the low grow of creatures that choose to wander rather than sleep.
3	Arctic Tundra	Cold	T1	Jagged mountains, grey-skirted and white-topped, cast long shadows on the white expanse of the arctic tundra. Breath is given form. Ice crystallizes on the face, giving the traveler the appearance of some aged apparition of frost. It is this most unfortunate fact that the final traveler in a group long since dead believes his company still marches alongside them. Only when blackened fingers fall out of their gloves do they notice that the tundra’s horizon remains unmarred by upright forms. The chill makes a home out of the bones. Only the hardiest life calls this its abode.
4	Spike Waste	Cold	T2	Blizzarding snow meanders through the solid ice spikes piercing the melding of sky and earth, the abandoned spear-tips of some great war, fought before there were scholars to record that it did. Snow hardens to abrasive furor, crunched wickedly under the boots of only the bravest explorers. Collapsing spikes kill many. The chill here feasts on the lungs, and a bare hand left lazily on the wicked ice will find itself disinclined to leave.
5	Permafrost	Cold	T3	Lands that lie in deathly stillness, interrupted only by the piercing howl of anguished ancestor-kin. Their voices are split to incessant whistling through the impermeable cracked ice. Clouds hang low, masking the horizon. The chill makes corpses out of conquerors. There is no light here.
6	Black Tundra	Cold Special	T3	Black rock lurks just under the snow, granted translucence by the thinness of its dusting. Trees feed on their mineral supports, their leaves growing black in a mockery of scorch and death. The chill here reeks of molten wrath now cooled. The black tundra is stalked by those who grow fat on contradiction.
7	Everwood	Cold Special	T3	At this junction does rich life meet life less so, but life nonetheless. Green joins the white, and it grows tall, proud, wild and free. The chill makes one aware of the heat of one’s vitality. The Everwoods show vitality of their own, ancient and unchanging.
8	Azurfrost	Cold Special	T4	The resultant of planetary calculations has made this section of snowed lands a sea of meandering intensities of blue. Chalk hangs with the chill in the air, and power hums from the ice-chalk crystallite that juts and glows. The chill here bestows power to weave, both to naïve visitor and wary native.

Hot Biomes

Biomes under sweltering heat, from bone-dry deserts to face-melting volcanoes. Every minute, the age-old question is posed; who maintains the dominance between the creator-man, and the created-fire.

#	Name	Biome Class	Biome Tier	Description
9	Savannah	Hot	T1	Sun above, sand below, scorched grass in-between. Sparse wood grows orange and spindly, roots spreading deep below to even sparser sprinklings of water across the landscape. Forms wear shadow and stalk through the tall grass. The air steals water from your skin. The sun bears down heavily in the absence of clouds. The heat prickles.
10	Tar Fields	Hot	T1	Death takes form as liquid, as ancient deposits of slurried life buried deep below spout black and sticky to the surface. Oil mixes with sand, sucking in limbs with enraging nonchalance. The heat sticks and coats.
11	Desert	Hot	T1	Here lies a sea frozen in time, great weaves that dip and surge locked in place. Dry brown, dull yellow, grit that scorches the bare foot, vast emptiness, great open sky. The sun observes blinklessly. The heat drains, stings and cuts. Invisible hands steal both supply and resolve. They manifest only on sun-bleached bone.
12	Red Desert	Hot	T2	Iron drinks deeply of air and begins to bleed, sand bears it up in its wings as it begins to flake. The land rusts. The crimson dust sears flesh that treads upon it. Spilled blood disappears without a trace. Red covers the ground. Red hangs in the air. Red burns in the sky above. Red burns in the eyes and rusted blades of travelers. The heat boils blood. The beasts born from the crimson swirls breathe dry wind like fire.
13	Scorched	Hot	T2	Something fell in love with the expanse of lands here, and found it was unrequited. Endless kisses stirred no fire. Frequency and passion both intensified, and nothing was yielded. All that remains is char and ash, grey flakes that choke the lungs and darken the sky. Pillars of charcoal march in disordered testament. The heat here is dull, settling listlessly over bones in various poises of flight.
14	Volcanic	Hot	T3	Handshakes that crush. Rock that grows too amorous. A calculus that spits wrath. Conical mountains top themselves with rock slurry, glowing orange, bubbling down its mane like a spitting child. Occasionally it gives a cough or a sneeze, flecks of hell uncorked and spewed. The heat here flows, consumes, and cannot be stopped.
15	Chalk Desert	Hot Special	T3	The psychitects observe the chalk desert in puzzlement. Cubes and square-prisms of chalk, tetrahedrons of chalk, pyramids of chalk, perfects spheres of it urged along by woven winds, all atop great, white flats. All conclude varying flavors of the similar; it is an error in planetary calculus, and the heat here is measured with slide rules.
16	Hellscape	Hot Special	T4	The temperament of those who shape planetary equations is an essential factor in grasping the nature of the cradle-nested spheres. The pragmatic agree that a mix of them is essential for shaping a planet that sits in the great sky like sculpted kaleidoscopic glass. But occasionally, the shapers are defined by wrath, and a piece of it is carved into the planetary canvas. Black spires stand and crumble into pyroclastic flow, the heat here burning away all things pure and bright.
17	Shattered	Hot Special	T4	There are shapers and psychitects that knit with knives. They cut, lacerate, carve deep. Flesh and rock is torn. Blood and flame pour. Through the cracks does one see the heat that lies at the core. It dries their eyes to dust as tithe.

Verdant Biomes

Verdant green biomes of lush plant life. Rolling plains, bounteous forests, and the thickest jungles. Life here lives, and lives more abundantly, and occasionally, at the expense of others.

#	Name	Biome Class	Biome Tier	Description
18	Grass Plains	Verdant	T1	Green carpet is draped across an expanse, life of varying shapes calling it home. As though pulled and shoved from various ends, the carpet is warped into rolling hills, so that passing wind may give animation to the sea of bladed green. The wood here is shrubbery.
19	Forest	Verdant	T1	More tales have been told of and in it than perhaps swathes of it that remain, but like those tales it remains resilient, and bedrock for life of all kinds. One who peers through the wood will see only wood. One who dwells within it will see only people. One who guards it will find it guards them as well. The wood stands old and living.
20	Jungle	Verdant	T1	There is an old doctrine that spoke of the power of eating. Consuming, better put. Light, water, all that one could grasp. Consume and grow fat. Grow wild. Revel in a youth that strangles and chokes all around it. Be cut. Be too large to care. Grow lost limbs ten fold. Cover. Encompass. Swarm. Become dense. Become impenetrable. Become wood that remains unchanging en masse, even as life swarms within it in a million forms. Let the only constant be growth. Become wood that consumes all. Become wood that never stops growing.
21	Lushlands	Verdant	T1	The psychitect, having walked one hundred planets and suffered in every one, sat at his table and declared, “No more.” Let the waters renew spirit. Let the fields heal the sick. Let the woods restore life, and give life more abundantly. Let there be solace among suffering.
22	Bog	Verdant Special	T2	Striders who find themselves growing in their strength may also find the things that they consider problems increasing, rather than decreasing. For even as the mighty Strider finds themselves contending with ancient thinking-weaves and diving into flux storms, it makes it all the more annoying when dealing with anodyne occurrences; sucking mud that impedes walking, the smell of stagnant water and dead things, endless swarms of insects assaulting the face. The bog has few lovers. The wood here is thick, rooted in mud below murky water, housing life that has made rot and mire their home.
23	Primeval Forest	Verdant Special	T3	The ancestor-kin of the Switchboard traversed the great sky and spread the vitality of their freshly-spun shapes across as its budding planetary spheres, and as they did it soaked into the earliest blooms and bestowed upon them the power to grow old and yet mighty. The primeval forests contend with the stars of the Switchboard in disputes of age. They grow tyrannical. The songs of the ancestor-kin drone from their wood, wood that has hardened in place as ancient gnarled metal.
24	Verdant	Verdant Special	T3	A gift from the Arcad; lands that grow strong and green by doctrine. They sprawl in quivering waves of life-giving boughs and cascade into neighboring lands, feeding off pure strife and attrition, manifesting as rampant growth. It was solace for the Arcad when they became Fel. The wood here is warm, love spilling from its imperfection.

Toxic Biomes

Chalk here has taken on an ugly, caustic hue, that causes it to manifest as things that suck, squelch, poison and eat away at the flesh. The lattice abhors this place, and it shows little kindness back.

#	Name	Biome Class	Biome Tier	Description
25	Biomorphed	Toxic	T2	From the moment the first man wielded blade against the first beast, there was an understanding. The understanding grew when the first man wielded blade against the first man. There are things that belong on the inside; when they are on the outside, something is amiss. The morphed land is pink. It oozes, quivers. Flesh has been purged from where it belongs, now lain flat to suck at the boots of straggling travelers. Rotten air exudes from still quivering mouths, tainted by miasmic lungs.
26	Ravenous	Toxic	T2	There is weave that has learned the flavor of other weave, and there are worlds where this weave abounds, a swelling mass of predatory feasting. Teeth latch on to flesh, ripping chunks in a frenzy, licking layers off as they slough off, drilling deep to sup on liquid beneath, filling the lungs, rotting the bones, fervent visitation by chemical reaping blades. The strong are felled. The air seeps from the boils on their flesh and finds its next meal.
27	Rust Wilds	Toxic	T2	But for the whistling winds through bloodied-brown spires, crumbling as they sung, the Rust Wilds would be silent. The doctrine here bites at all metal, it crumbles mercilessly into dust, coating the scape reds, ochres, sprinkled with green-blues. All are made pacifists as the methods of the violence-tongue rot. The air here stings as it crashes against skin, turning sour on the wetted tongue.
28	Irradiated	Toxic	T3	Flesh played a tutor, rock played the pupil. As flesh rot, it was fed upon by flesh that still lived, returned to the soil so that it may restore life to more things to come. But when rock rot, it unraveled itself, its weave seeking new homes in new things, things that were disinclined to entertain it. And as the rock rot and left its own bones behind, virulent weave took host in flesh, and what it didn’t kill it changed. What it changed is what learned to live with rot in is flesh. The air finds its way into bone, and the bone mourns.
29	Nuclear Wasteland	Toxic	T3	An ancient altercation between power and power is recorded in lands scorched by the invisible. Basins carved into the landscape are a hazard to cross, the greenery long since turned brown lends no safety from the elements or food for the traveler. Yet the true horror lurks invisibly, a suffocating blanket of violent weave, seeking to pacify itself. Sometimes it succeeds, and bones lie skewed in agony as testament. The air here is a dance of knife and sword, flaying meat from bone.
30	Forgotten	Toxic Special	T3	No psychitect sculpts these brown, bogged, rotting wastes. They emerge instead as a planet forgets. People, places, things, creeds, vows, dreams; all that vanish from the minds of their fabricators come here to die, taking on forms that skulk through lands draped in dilute ink and soaked parchment. Those who tread these lands face either forgetting themselves, or being forgotten. Or torn to pieces by those eager to be remembered. The air here reeks of old books.
31	Viridescent	Toxic Special	T3	The psychitects in their boredom place something green here; a forest, grassland, similar, but from their hands is control wrenched, as premature mindspun emerge from their latent boredom, feasting voraciously on chalk and greenery, smelting them in the information-furnaces of their proto-bodies. From elementary mouths does solid and liquid emerald drip; the volatile viridite, cousin of famylar, that fills the matter of plant and beast alike, verdant-lime crystal overcoming their weave. The air is abuzz with viridite insect life, glinting green lights like flares, flying in geometric formation.
32	Atropus	Toxic Special	T4	Psychitects of planets organize themselves in conclaves of artists. Elders above, versed in the intricacies and aesthetic of the planetary craft. Youth below, starry-eyed, cultivating their own eyes and hands. But some are so inclined to usurp that order; elders that feed on naïve young, young that topple the feeble old. Eyes seeing red, hands stained with red, the first works they sculpt are flesh and madness, and the result are swathes of a planet resembling mangled corpses. The air here maddens, driving knives into backs. The unsuspecting become paint.

Grey Biomes

Ageless stone and its young descendant, metal, define these biomes into being. Each boasts in their age all the same; as with men, their prominence comes with it.

#	Name	Biome Class	Biome Tier	Description
33	Wastes	Grey	T1	In every conclave of psychitects are there the doers, the thinkers, and the thinker-doers. The thinkers vary in how they are perceived, as while many shape the theories that in turn shape planetary sculpting for processions to come, among them are those who - for want of artistic talent - justify what they produce or lack thereof, by stressing the importance of the contemplation induced in spaces of vast emptiness. The horizon is unbroken, as empty sky meets emptier earth.
34	Badlands	Grey	T1	The amateur psychitect erases with hands that redact landscape from existence. But the skilled psychitect knows better. With chisels of wind and water do they carve out gulley and gorges, deep cuts in dirt and rock, variegated layers creating a sandwich of colors on the walls of great pits. Travelers be wary, as the grooved landscape hides those who prey on the unprepared. The horizon hides from view.
35	Steppe	Grey	T1	There is indeed hope for the great thinkers who concoct spiels on the deep nature of the Wastes; when, in their raving madness, do their eyes come to rest on a dislodged brush, brilliance forms in their minds like stars emerging from their cradles. A thin layer of green atop the empty grey prompts a new philosophy; that the deep thinking provoked by grating emptiness is aided by the smell of wet earth. The horizon remains unbroken, but for the light fuzz of young green shoots.
36	Mountainous	Grey	T2	The Strider exists as a mighty thing. Constrained only by their imagination and skill, the Strider weaves thought-stuff into stuff-stuff and traverses the gaps between more that drives them to imagine and the material expended in realizing it in an eyeblink. Few things humble the Strider. But when the planetary calculus looks skywards, and a fist clasps around the fabric of rock, pulling as far as the calcic slide rules allow, topping it with dustings of snow like icing sugar, repeating this across an expanse that stretches deep beyond their sight and far past their periphery, visible even from intra-planetary space, the Strider is reminded that they are a small thing that becomes, and a mountain is a large thing that simply is. The horizon is pierced to pieces by ice-capped stone pyramid.
37	Bio-industrial	Grey Special	T2	Psychitects shape the planetary calculus, their hands painting on the canvas. But their canvas is home to many, and those untouched by the appreciation for the marble spheres that hang in the Cradles have no qualms when they build their chrome towers, vats of toxic brews, spires of crackling power. The calculus is tainted, the landscape likewise, and new life crawls from cracked waste barrels and clouds of metal-vapor, shaped by the carelessness of industry. The horizon here is obscured by smoke stacks, and often, one is knocked to pieces by the claw of a beast born from what remains when man has taken all he cares to learn he can.
38	Tabula Rasa	Grey Special	T2	There are times when the planetary calculus breaks, the result being skewed creations of arcane mathematics. And there are times when the planetary calculus resolves… into nothing, or rather something adjacent to it; a flat, empty, barrenness so grating in its nondescription that many argue there is no use for words where rulers would suffice. The horizon is parallel with the landscape, and explorers steer clear.
39	Chromehaven	Grey Special	T3	The passage of many a traveler and the equipment they abandon leaves latent chalk skewed by the presence of thinking lattices. In response, the elementary Mindspun, proto-minds that once permeated the earliest starscapes of the Dancirah, emerge from thought-sinks and take form in abandoned metal. Their scraping forms learn the shape of their lattice, preserving knowledge of it as elementary thinking-weaves as they amalgamate into stained-chrome mega-construct. It learns swiftly of its own impurity, rectifying this gradually as it calls forth ore from deep in a planet’s core, watching in swelling hunger as metal overtakes the landscape, and its waking kin obtain shapes of their own. The horizon is dominated by bipedal silver-amalgam, yellow floodlights emerging from seams in the chrome plate. Wind carries their creaks and howls.
40	Automat	Grey Special	T4	The land here mourns. Torn, stripped of all resources, acrid air, pyroclastic flow, patrolled by chrome automata, sweeping the landscape with bright ruby cones of information-eating light. A rodent scurries over a rock, the disturbance answered with salvos of vaporizing beams, carving molten troughs in the blackened cobble. The horizon is obscured by dense ash cloud, above it, the faint glint of a distant Vault, housing the Mind that feasts on the works of the psychitects, warping the planetary calculus.

Dark Biomes

For those who are no appreciators of light, shade from cloud cover, tree cover, or something yet darker than that may be their abode. What weave has wrought here, however, may cast shadows the spirit.

#	Name	Biome Class	Biome Tier	Description
41	Hazy	Dark	T1	Spindly trees grow beyond what is allotted to them, and they bend as wives in mourning, vines draping like curtains in mimicry of freed hair. Between them, in this slumbering grove, does a mist permeate throughout, gossamer in make, wholly intangible. The traveler is convinced without reason that they are being followed, and the cruel psychitect completes their terror by giving them one. As in the obscuring haze does occasionally rattling chain resound, squawking and beating wings accompanying deathly chill that shakes the boughs of the weeping forest. Night here is respite for the dead, as only the foolish dare brave the mist in the pitch dark. And there are graves enough for all of them.
42	Penumbra	Dark	T2	From afar, thick cloud cover seems constrained to a space without cause. From afar, deep purple-black woods hedge in a world unknown, the foliage carpet taking on a wine hue. But from within, the world exists in a quasi-night, where no light permeates the clouds but for wrathful light-flashes heralding a storm that never comes, granting terrifying shape to all things tall and spindly. Aqua and lime bioluminescent growth grants the dark world beacons for those treading the overgrown depths. All that lives here sees through the lightless thicket, as relentless bio-calculus has left only those who can. Night here takes only the form of silence, as all that caws and creaks recedes into yet deeper shadow, letting the true masters of the half-light stalk on retractable claw.
43	Midnight	Dark	T2	The young psychitect is tread upon by their peers. Their love goes unrequited. Their ancestor-kin are sympathetic, but do not understand. Their incandescent wrath has long since cooled into something greater; a deep black sea of cold oil. They paint on the planetary canvas with this oil, taking the form of swathes of cascading black velvet, through which pinpricks of light poke through. Whether they be the brightest of stars or the hungriest of eyes, matters not. Night here is a closed hand around the neck; it swallows both air and scream.
44	Nightmist	Dark Special	T3	Through the haze that lurks ever just above the head, the daring adventurer will begin to question themselves. Castle and inn, fence and fortress, the mist solidifies into ruins before him, only to dissolve again into the lightlessness at the slightest touch. Only incomprehensible lights remain ever solid and permanent, spheres floating on soundless winds. They beckon to follow, and to follow is to join their procession. Night here is all there is. The young adventurer finds their elder gone - and another light on their shoulder, joining the growing collection.

Wet Biomes

Spanned by liquid for as far as the eyes can see, wet biomes are simple, proffering only what is in their name.

#	Name	Biome Class	Biome Tier	Description
45	Oceanic	Wet	T1	Existing in perpetual roil, the oceans of the Dancirah stretch to the horizon, bridging island and continent with an ever-tumultuous aquatic walkway. Even as jumpships capable of near light-speed travel soar across the cloud-streaked skies, many a brave traveler still braves the expansive blue with sail or steel vessel. Their unlucky counterparts and contemporaries sleep on the seabed below. The waters stretch vast, and run deep.
46	Thrashed	Wet	T1	The oceans of the Switchboard are rarely calm, existing in turmoil by calculus that seemingly selects for chaos, upturned by titanic megafauna below, existing in catastrophic apathy, or subject to some vast, terrible structural cast that benefits from homogeneity in the contents of its proximity. But there are times when the wrath takes the shape of a bottle poured on the sky and the sea below, and cloud touches wave with torrential rain and glowing lightning. The water here breaks steel. The unprepared are sacrificed to keep the wrath pouring.
47	Evoaquatic	Wet	T2	The life-lit aquamarine waters of the evoaquatic teem with beings large and small, existing in cyclical harmony of birth, life and death. Dotted lines on graphs demarcate boundaries defined by light and pressure, the size and scale of aquatic terrors growing as one descends further into shadowy waters. Waters that tremble as the hum of a leviathan deep below remind all present of the inescapable hierarchy.
48	Neon Sea	Wet Special	T3	Psychitect orders pride themselves on their charge to shape planets. These glass spheres that hang in the Dancirah are the unending work of generations, with each returning to the Current leaving their instructions and philosophy on the sculpting of spheres behind for their successors. But times come when the old doctrines are left to gather dust, starry-eyed descendant-kin choosing instead to test the limits of their hands and eyes. The Neon Sea glows as a jewel in the crown of Shalkarah. Priscillite crystallizes and floats atop its surfaces. Deposits the size of their creator’s dreams dot the sea floor. Their color morphs from piercing yellows to sweet pinks to sickly bright limes according to unknown calculus. The neon water tastes like sugar and fruit.
49	Boiling Ocean	Wet Special	T3	A phenomena studied by the psychitects is that of Emergent Planetary Characteristics; oddities that are native to a planet by virtue of otherwise mundane factors. One such mundane factor is the expanse of ocean that dominates a planet. Another such factor is the glowing rock beneath it, existing in permanent near-melting state from the pyroclastic flow beneath it. The result? An ocean that steams, smells entirely of cooking fish, and a weather system that defies understanding. The water here is excellent for making tea.
50	Strange Sea	Wet Special	T3	To study the planetary calculus is the charge of many, to understand it is the blessing upon few. But to know it, to fully grasp all that it is and capable of, escapes all. The compute is guided by alphanumeric seeds of uncountable length, the sheer depth of variability exhausting lifetimes just to begin to grasp. And so when any psychitect is seen to be becoming too loud, too confident, too sure in their own conclusions, there is always a joker waiting to ask what their findings lead them to conclude is the cause of the chicken soup ocean in the Cannoodle Expanse.

Esoteric Biomes

The planetary calculus has no concept of absurdity, and as such, there are times where it invokes it in its entirety, with none to tell it stop.

#	Name	Biome Class	Biome Tier	Description
51	Amarascar	Esoteric	T3	The Challenger Dark occupies the spatial fourth axis, and the foolhardy traveller is always at risk of slipping below the horizon, finding themselves gulping mouthfuls of sour stardrip. Planets are likewise similarly unlucky, and a great sphere caught in ravenous flux storm may find itself blemished. Stardrip soaks into its soil and foilage, clouds turn scintillating violet, reflected in deep magenta waters where amaranthite sprouts and grows as crystal spire, depthstones sliding in from seemingly behind curtains of sky, crashing to the scarred lands below as lilac meteors. The depthstrider comes here to pay homage to his Void-dwelling kin. Chalk is strangled.
52	Vermeil	Esoteric	T3	The Strider historian leans down to the scarlet grass, masked in the shadow of wine-red rock above him. A column - possibly - wider than his wingspan, that must’ve held up a roof capable of eclipsing the hue-shifted stars above. From the dirt does he pluck something red and sharp, flower cut from red gemstone. The field is filled with them. Light becomes redder through its kaleidoscopic petals. He peers deep and sees silver lines in the cut. He peers through the petal at the column. An ancestor stares back, mechanical, quadrupedal, its hands bear fingers that split and reform, bound to a spiral cylinder body with threads of light and chalk. Six eyes peer from concentric rings, rotating around a morphing gallium foci. It speaks. There was weave that thought and envied its form. It is weave that thinks and envies your form. The chain will not end with the Chalkstriders. The red horizon is pierced by the headstones of an old world. The chalk here is old, and warns you of things to come.
53	Sunderlyles	Esoteric	T3	The endless question posed by all psychitects is that of the limits of the planetary calculus. The answer to the question remains in flux, the boundaries pushed with each genius scholar or new seed fed by the Astrolabe. In proper academic practice, they all concede that they do not know. That does not stop the question from being asked, however, and so when a strider psychitect slingshots around a planet, and sees the long, black shadow casted by an island, archipelago or continent vaulted kilometers in the air, held aloft by only calcic mathematics, they merely shake their head and remind themselves that the answer to that question is already known; none at all, whatsoever. Chalk here lurks just outside comprehension, and it mocks you as you reach for it.
54	Shatterstorm Expanse	Esoteric	T4	Hatred dwells in this place. Clouds stack themselves in stories and between their layers do flavors of storm surge. At their top do jaws lie, the Vitric Shelf peering down, ready to feast on the tornadic chalk. Instead it finds its scintillating teeth dislodged from its mouth, and they join the cacophony of swirling elements below. Chalk lurks below the jaws, this storm a daughter of the Refrain so many processions ago, when the Astrolabe sought to resolve its mathematics and tore sphere and Strider apart in its haste. Similar is taking place here, as a planetary equation bends and buckles under the weight of ten textbooks of possibilities. Chalk and Glass swirl and dance as it does, new things attempting to arise just as old things are marked and culled. Often, the calculus resolves, and the storm gives way to families of craters and a planet able to live another day, but just as often is no resolution reached, and the storm rages until the equation unwinds to mere ribbon, or a skilled-enough psychitect dares touch the angry calculus with a bare hand. Chalk here lashes out, Glass in its wake. All are humbled.
55	Supervoid	Esoteric	T4	A psychitect will tell you that a planetary equation is above all else, strange. It is remarkably resilient, incredibly elastic, and this is tested time and time again by how fickle it is. Influence of any kind, from any source, and it is more than willing to test the limits of imagination in how it resolves itself. Hearing this, you may feel inclined to ask what occurs when a planetary equation breaks. The answer to that is well-known, and will be readily given. You may then feel inclined to ask what is the step just before breaking; what does a planet look when it stabilizes at the cliff? These questions weed out the younger psychitects, leaving only the old, who are less inclined for talking where pictures would suffice. These pictures, in turn, weed out those with very specific phobias; holes, cracks, spikes. A planet at the edge bears all of these, resembling a scar that refuses to heal. Through some, you can peer to a shadowy depth, your view obstructed by constructs like ribs spanning the boundaries. Spikes protrude from some walls. Fissures span others. Something glows from behind hairline fractures. Landscapes stretch to the horizon, their surface seemingly molested by drills. You ask what lies at the bottom, and the elder psychitect only grins. Chalk here takes an unnerving edge, as you get a glimpse of what weave can become when given the opportunity to break.
56	Thoughtgrave	Esoteric	T4	With nothing to protect, the Vault Mind’s doctrine is unfulfilled, and the Mind itself collapses into the Current. With no Mind to keep it intact, the Vault collapses. Cracks and fissures cascade through the seams, mechanisms turn wild, ordnance and weaponry detonate. The last of its anchorage chains to celestial neighbors in the Dancirah come undone, and the Vault shatters, pieces of it pulled towards local planets. Skies remain alight for days as glowing orange kacherock - rich with chalk and lore - streak across the skies, crashing to sizzling stops and rests in blast craters. And this kacherock reaches out to the planetary equation, its age meeting its youth, and mathematics resolves. The traveller comes to see trees and rock thousands of processions older than their neighbors, craters housing beating orange hearts, disoriented Chromelings carving incisions of tessellating hexagons into every surface. The air here is warm, and it comes apparent to those gifted in the calcic that they stand amidst a carcass. Chalk here lives on in new form.
57	Crystalline	Esoteric Special	T5	The Dancirah once had no neighbor upstairs, but that was changed. Great intelligences deceived the Astrolabe, and the ever-oscillating barristeel contraption danced to the tune of their malicious ballad. The calculus synthesized an ontological antithesis, scintillating, kaleidoscopic, ravenously hungry for discord. The intelligences taught it to open its gaping maw, to take wide scything bites, to feed on chalk, lacerate weave, pull the seams from pattern, reduce thinking weave to ordered file cabinets. The Vitric Shelf overlooks the Dancirah, and in its mathematical apathy, it makes meal of unlucky planets. The Glass adopts the shape of whatever was once present, and career catastrophizers index the planet as lost. There is no chalk here. Imagination is dead. Consolidation remains.

Radiant Biomes

From the time of the Old Danseers, the calculus of many planets have been skewed, often just from a touch of their feet as they skate on to another corner of the Switchboard. But this touch alone is often enough to teach the equations to pray.

#	Name	Biome Class	Biome Tier	Description
58	Zakurich	Blessed	T2	Conclaves of Psychitects earn names for themselves, names that spread far and wide as their works hang in their stately posts. And just as there are names, there are names above names. Zakurich of Aur, the Strider Psychitect, lived his days as a beloved of Shalkarah, and his long sojourns along the Dancirah are marked with his touch upon planets; shining gold forests, white-rock temples atop mountaintops, nights filled with curtains of dancing color, rivers of water that renewed the spirit of the Strider, the spirit to look skywards, starwards, onwards. The spirit to ask Shalkarah, King of Roads, to renew their wings and pave paths through the wilderness-sky.
59	Rosenfeld	Blessed	T2	Few have mourned as long or as deeply as the Fel-Arcad. Long since fled their astrolabic home, they exist in perpetual pursuit of former paradise. The First Arcadia at Rosenthal remains an immortal dream carved in the lattice of every one of them, a paradise whose perfection only grows further deified as generation after generation of Fel-Arcad grow more distant and silver-haired. That does not stop the rare prodigy in each generation from making the planetary calculus their dogma, in a bid to reshape lands back into barristeel-shaped perfection. All fall short. Failures compound. But these failures are lands where chalk surges forth, and the chalk ritualist finds the craft saturating the very air.
60	Starbitten	Blessed	T2	The dials click, click, click on the Astrolabe, and the armillary stars surge forth for a final victory lap in the procession. They burn with radiance that leaves the entirety of the Dancirah glowing with woven power. Elementary beings crawl from under rocks, bask in the light, and grow strong. The lone, fool-hardy Strider feels the starblight eat into their legs, watching as the dark of interplanetary space fades away, heating building as they crash towards a planet. The Astrolabe clicks forward again, and again, and the wrath of the stars screams further, until that wrath leaps out and licks a planet. Chalk, wild and free, plays across the surface of the planetary equation, tearing into it and repairing it all at once, the result being… Chalk here flows, elementary beings rise on new feet, see with new eyes, think with sharpened minds. The downed Strider rises to their feet. White surrounds them, glowing hot, nigh molten, pricking their lattice. Yet they feel no pain. They rise above the trees. They sink an inch above the ground. Nefelé smiles upon them. Chalk here mirrors the sky above. Elementary beings gather in their fist. They Stride and leave a stream in their wake. The starbitten lands below sees all who visit become dancers.
61	Hallowed	Blessed	T3	The Skydancer faithful folds their mighty wings, renewed by the touch of Shalkarah. They lay down their sword, its edged kept honed by Zahir. Cicere kept their compass true, the craftmanship of Onuris ensuring that its metal never rusts and its glass never cracks. Ryjik shields them from the lattice-tearing glass. Morrigan wards the First Thinkers and the Mindspun from their camp. They raise their glass to Leilani. Nefelé refreshes their potential. They sit and sup under the light of those whose Stride has never faltered. Mountains obscure the horizon. Mighty woods shade them from benevolent neighboring stars. Wellsprings fill the night sky as pinpricks of white light. Shadri looks over their shoulder, in her hand, all answers. The faithful looks starwards. Their birthright stares back at them. Chalk here flows gently over the doctrine of the Chalkstrider. It renews their protocol. It gives them the strength for conquest.
62	Empyrean	Blessed Special	T4	Neither psychitect nor Astrolabe causes these lands to arise. Only the many cascading wings of a great Danseer have morphed these lands into a state of endless worship. Doctrine saturates the air. Winds blow with the sound of rustling paper, sacraments inscribed within. All that grows, grows titanic and boundless, reaching for the skies above as though reaching for the ones whose Stride had no limits, whose wings spanned all of the Dancirah. Invisible hands tug at the deepest windings of the lattice, and the Chalkstrider has the chords of their ancestry strummed, manifesting as tears down the adoring face. Surely, the divine is in this place. The chalk compels all to kneel.
63	Chromatic	Blessed Special	T4	When the Skydancers lost their lattice shells, and the last of the Danseers rejoined the current, the questions surrounding them in their lives didn’t follow them to their deaths. Who showed Shalkarah the way home? Who sharpened the blades of Zahir? Who stoked the forge of Onuris? Who woke Nefelé from their cloudy slumber? Who followed Cicere on the many paths? Would Morrigan’s wrath ever be sated? Would Shadri’s books ever be full? Would Leilani’s cup ever be empty? One such question pondered was on Ryjik, the Eater; where did all the Glass his jaws consumed go? No answer was forthcoming, but one; the many chromatic, rainbow planets, built of the kaleidoscopic scintillate - Glass with no bite or edge - that dotted various planets, emerging - seemingly - overnight. But only after the reserved Skydancer was seen cleaning his scarred lips with a sleeve. Chalk and Glass exist in a conjunction of contradiction,; at their intersection, unrivalled beauty.