In the Strange Stars, The Circean Witches (officially the Sisterhood of Circe) are an order of female-only psychics that rule two worlds in a system in the neutral territory between the Instrumentality of Aom and the Alliance. The larger and more populous world is named Perseis, and it's people largely live in primitive, early industrial conditions (something akin to the 19th Century of Old Earth in the ancient reckoning). The Sisterhood, headquartered on the smaller world of Circe, limits the technology of Perseis through it's "advisory" roll to the world's various governments. The people of both worlds call themselves "Circeans," as they believe their culture originated on the smaller world.

Appearance and Biology: Circeans are basline human in appearance, other than their skin tone, which ranges from a dull, pale gray to a lead color. The brains of Circeans show mildly enhanced prefrontal-parietal interconnectivity. The result is somewhat enhanced intuitive and lateral thought processes. In females (where the connectivity is most pronounced), it can lead to the ability to utilize controlled dreamlike states of consciousness and high psi potential. Females on Perseis are tested in adolescence, and those with the talent are taken away to Circe and becomes novices in the Sisterhood. It's been hypothesized that the Magi split from the witches in the distant past; when queried on this, the Magi deal with the issue with bemused silence and the witches with irritation.

Psychology: Circeans of Perseis are a superstitious and hidebound folk, with a prickly sense of honor. The Circean Sisterhood are less insular, but still mistrustful of outsiders, mysterious, and often haughty. The witches have particular antipathy for missionaries of the Instrumentality of Aom. They're aware that the Church doctrine on other worlds has under-minded the power of witches and sorcerers, and they take every measure possible to ensure that doesn't happen to them. Though they more governed by divination and intuition, the Sisterhood is as concerned with planning for the future as the Instrumentality.

Flavor: Perseis makes a good locale for Gothic, Hammer, or Universal horror sorts of stories, with psionic beings or creatures substituted for the supernatural. The witches can be played as anything from misunderstood and persecuted to mysterious manipulators (like the Bene Gesserit in Dune or the Shabda-Oud from Metabarons) to horror movie witches depending on the context of the encounter.

Stats: Circeans must have at least a 9 in Wisdom. Only female Circeans can be psychics.

The gnomes are a member species of the Alliance. They hail from ancient subterranean habitats on Dzrrn, a large asteroid. They've colonized more asteroids in their own system and in others. 

Physical Characteristics: Gnomes are small (1.-1.3 m) humanoids with loose, wrinkled skin and large ears. Most gnomes encountered will likely be male, but there is little sexual dimorphism. Gnome clans are seldom made up of more than 100 individuals, though they tend to have close ties with nearby clans. Only few individuals in a clan are capable of breeding at a time, though a female may breed with multiple males. Mating produces an organism the gnomes call a”mother”--essentially an external womb. The mother generates gnome embryos from the genetic material donated from its maternal gnome and all the males she mated with. The female coordinates the mother’s care, but all members of clan take part. The gnomes care for the Mother until it gives birth to its stock of embryos and dies.

Gnomes have castes, as well. Most males (and a few females) are “workers” responsible for the care and maintenance of the habitat. The somewhat taller “managers” are disproportionately female, but still numerically mostly male. They have primary responsibility for the rearing of children, the protection of the clan, negotiation with outsiders, and strategic planning.

Psychological Characteristics: Gnomes are eusocial (like naked mole rats) and divide labor between workers, responsible for the care and maintenance of habitats, and managers, who raise the children, defend the habitat, and interface with outsiders. 

Gnomes are gregarious and inquisitive, but deliberate in their thought process. They seldom act rashly. They have less need for personal space than most humanoids and are prone to depression if forced into situations where they have diminished physical contact with others. Many gnomes suffer from a fear of open spaces, and may experience a panic reaction in these situations. 

Names: Gnomes aren’t given lifelong names at birth, but instead their clan members use descriptors to refer to them. 

These descriptors may change over the course of a gnome’s life. 

They are often four or more syllables long and have been likened to low pitched humming or stomach rumblings. Gnomes are often given nicknames by members of other species they associate with.

Example descriptors: Brrdurmmdrur, Obdommrrmrr, Nggrrtumbora, Mmbuhmmngrr (Double consonants indicate a syllabic form of that sound, e.g. “mm” is “uhmm.”)

Backgrounds: Deck Crew, Politician, Worker (Miner), Soldier.

Classes: Gnomes may be Experts or Warriors, though only manager caste gnomes are likely to be the latter. There are no Psychics among them.

Attributes: Minimum Constitution of 9.

The zhmun inhabit a domed city on the small, austere world of Aygo, orbiting a yellow star in the Zuran Expanse. Their famed wealth comes from ancient treasure stores (the contents as much of value as art objects or archaeological finds as anything else) and by their control over the mining rights to three superterrestrial worlds in their home system. Enforcement of these rights and protection from interstellar marauders of the Expanse comes via their alliance with sophont, ship-sized moravecs that have patrolled the system since ancient times.

Zhmun are thought to be bioroids due to their unusual structure. They're invertebrates with ameboid characteristics, despite being multicellular. A zhmu uses the hydrostatic pressure of internal fluids and the ability to quickly alter the rigidity of its tissues to hold itself in a roughly humanoid shape. Zhmun who can’t achieve consistent humanoid appearance are second class citizens—“globs.”  Zhmun are asexual (though sometimes assume gendered titles) and reproduce by pinching off a bit of their substance and tossing it into comunnal vats of doughy proto-zhmu plasm. Zhmun are only allowed to contribute to vats in their living districts, which are rigidly segregated by status. While zhmun don’t need to sleep in the human sense, they do need to relax their hold over their form for a few hours every few standard days. They're also said to re-encode information from ancient brain scans from their sacred stores every week or so, but it is uncertain if this serves a ritual or biologic purpose.

Zhmun perform no manual labor, but insist that their needs be provided for by biologic entities, not robots. Higher status zhmun perform no work at all. They affect an air of nobility and assume lofty, nonsensical titles. They spend their days in artistic pursuits or idle pleasures, as befits their station.  Globs direct zhmu business interests and supervise their myriad of alien employees and servants in the name of a zhmu master. Menial tasks are performed by a slave clade of unknown origin, collectively called yoom. Yoom are low on the sophont-scale and are bred in a variety of function-based forms from brutish, thick-browed laborers and bodyguards to sleek, quadrupedal racers.

The zhmun’s paid employees arrive from the co-orbital planet, Erg. There, a rundown spaceport, mining camps, and shantytowns attract the desperate and down an out of known space. They watch the job listings, hoping to get a lucrative position with the zhmun, either serving them on Aygo, or working in their mining concerns on the neighboring planets. or (dare they hope?) representing zhmu interests on other worlds. While they wait, they pay rent to the zhmun on whatever shabby accommodations they can find, and go in debt buying food and entertainment in zhmu-owned businesses.

The sky city of Eidolon is the home of The Phantasists. Believed to have been a folly constructed by an Archaic Oikumene plutocrat, it was once home to an artists’ colony who created fanciful bio-art monsters that still roam the ecologically damaged surface of the planet Phobetor below.

The Outer Rim is the most sparsely settled region of known space; even in the days of the Archaic Oikumene, it was the frontier. Today, most of the inhabited worlds there are isolated and insular. Some are planet-bound and unaware that a star-faring civilization exists around them. Only the Ksaa control more than one system — and they have little interest in joining galactic society.

A gas dwarf in the Ruggedo System. The independent High Lonesome Confederacy habitat orbits the planet at an extremely close distance, essentially sitting in the upper atmosphere.

A myriad of moons and asteroids also orbit the planet, forming a planetary ring system. Nearly all are mining interests of the Gnome mining enterprise of Dzrrn.

Centuries ago an experimental algae was released in the upper atmosphere of the planet to convert native gases to a human-breathable mix. the progress is extremely slow, and while the upper atmosphere has seen substantial shifts in composition, the oxygen levels are barely above 10%.

The Radiant Polity, one of the successor states to the Archaic Oikumene, was torn asunder by conflict between toxic memes. The Instrumentality of Aom of the current age was born out of this struggle.

The Radiant Polity directly ruled only a few worlds or habitats, but it claimed ultimate guardianship over the future of the entire human-descended tribe. Membership in the polity was ostensibly voluntary, yet each of its lords wielded absolute power, checked only by other lords. Their mantra was: "We civilize; we do not govern. We end war; we do not wage it. We guard; we do not control. Our thoughts look always to the future."

The civil servants of the Polity were it's most common face. Many were volunteers; others were drafted. They administered the noospheric fora (where members could petition the lords) and the Polity controlled hyperspace network, collected tolls, and handed out encryption keys for it's use to members. Through these measures the Polity effectively controlled interstellar trade and exerted soft power to shape planetary governments.

Not all it's power was soft. Polity membership made a sophont or a world subject to the justice of the Radiant Lords--justice meaning anything the lord in question felt would further the needs of the Polity and by extension humanity. They had a strict code and seldom acted rashly, as actions determined to be in error by review of their fellow lords carried harsh penalties, but they wielded great power and acted decisively--even brutally--when necessary. The lords all appeared baseline human, but their nervous systems were linked to their swift sophont ships, their brains modified with psybernetics, and their bodies enhanced. Each acted as a combination law enforcer, spy, advisor, and diplomat. When real war was needed, lords' code required they withdraw, and Hannibal Early was summoned.

In an effort to keep the peace, the Polity prohibited the export of irrational memeplexes such as religion between cultures. It was this prohibition that brought it into the conflict with the emerging Instrumentality of Aom and ultimately led to it's dissolution.

It's believed that the psi-research NGO the Phaidros Group was involved with the Polity inception. If so, they abandoned it before it's final fall to begin their colony on Smaragdoz.

It's commonly accepted that most of the galaxy's sophonts are either descendants or creations of humanity who came into being on the fabled world of Earth. The location of this ur-world of the humanoid phyle is lost. 

The original civilization of humanity collapsed (perhaps multiple times) or perhaps it ascended. Whether the end was glorious or tragic, the true history of these times is only fragmented legend.

The Archaics rose with the aid of knowledge recovered from the ruins of the past. They built floating, crystalline cities, constructed the hyperspace travel network (even connecting the noospheres of their core worlds with superluminal relays), and engaged in planetary-scale engineering. Theirs was an age when a noble might rule an entire world populated by her clones and sophont warships fought grand battles for audiences in telepresence.

Something happened — something called the Great Collapse. Galactic civilization fractured into individual worlds, and some of those worlds slid back into savagery. Much of the available historical record of this time appears to have been deliberately altered to obscure events. The time separating the Great Collapse from the present isn’t entirely clear, but may it be 1,000 standard years or more.

The salvager holy grail would be one of the twelve great battleships of the Archaic Oikumene, vessels the size of cities with sophont minds. 

Some of these great ships (like Terrible Swift Sword and Leviathan Smiles) are known to have been destroyed. Others (like Achilles’ Last Stand, Fearful Symmetry, and Conspiracy of Ravens) have disappeared completely from history, possibly re-structuring themselves into vessels of different types.

PSI PHENOMENA moved fully from the realm of fringe belief to exploitable technology during the Archaic Oikumene. The hyperspace network is the most prominent example, but not the only one; other psionic devices exist.

The Phantasists are renown throughout the galaxy as dream merchants. No purveyors of mere sims or other mass produced neural trickery, the Phantasists use ancient arts to craft neurochemical mixtures that deliver an individualized, specific, and vivid oneiric experience.

The Phantasists inhabit the sky city of Eidolon (believed to be a folly constructed by a prelapsarian plutocrat), floating above an environmentally damaged world populated by nightmare horrors. They generally appear as baseline humanoids with pale complexions and blue eyes, though they are a creative people and sometimes wear other more varied bodies. Phantasist society is a syndicate subdivided by guild and class. At least when dealing with the public, all Phantasists affect an air of ancient nobility. Though their own official history is perhaps purposefully obscure on their origins, historians believe the Phantasists are descended from an artists’ colony that took up residence in the city during the age of decline before the Great Collapse.

Phantasists have made extensive study of dreams. Their technicians (or “oneironauts” in their advertising copy) delve into simulations constructed from centuries of dream log data gathered in their sleep laboratories from a myriad of sophonts. Comparing the subjective experience with real-time neurologic data they have been able to isolate dream elements and experiences. All this knowledge goes into the synthesis of their oneiric neuronanochemical cocktails for high paying clientele.

Phantasists don’t seek to create crude and causality-bound simulations of physical reality; Their aim is the crafting of experiences with the particular sensation of a dream. There are rumored to be rogue oneirochemists who are willing to create jamais vu traps and  unwaking nightmares for special clients, but the Phantasists vigorously deny that any of their number would participate in those practices.