Quick Start Guide

This is a temporary quick-guide for reference while prototyping and writing further content, and to introduce others without much of the weighty flavour text.

Most of these things should get full pages or at least portions of articles dedicated to explaining them properly. Names or details in  formatting are currently in draft and alternative ideas are highly welcomed.

The Glow
Glow is, in a sense, the strength of a sentient being's spirit, of will and emotion and creative spark; their soul, so to speak. Beings with a strong enough Glow can use it to assert their will on reality around them, allowing for feats that seem to break established laws of science with ease. Most beings have far too weak of a Glow to ever realise these reality-bending abilities, however, and it is only through the Aurora that the Bright are able to channel their powers.

The Aurora
The Aurora is a pool of Glow that seems to pervade much of the Sol system, especially worlds with significant human presence prior to the Shattering. Some individuals have the ability to tap into this Glow, channeling the Aurora to give themselves powers of varying kinds that seem dependent on the nature of their own spirit or soul; these lucky few are known as the Bright, and are the first line of defence against other forces seeking to claim the Sol system.

 The Aurora is, in fact, the remaining Glow left behind when humanity was wiped out by the Midnight Protocol in an attempt to stop the Signal; see below.

The Shattering
The Shattering was a calamitous event that led to the destruction of previous human civilisation, save for the Neathers in their underground arcologies, and a few other holdouts in the extremes of the system.

 The Shattering was, in fact, the initial attempt by the Orrery to wipe out humanity, using a memetic weapon - the Signal - to drive the majority of humanity insane and to hunt down any of those immune. The covert organisation NYX attempted to harness experiments with Null to purge the Signal from the human noosphere, and while it succeeded in doing so, it was also universally fatal to those it cleansed. The Glow left behind from these en masse deaths eventually coalesced into the Aurora.

The Orrery
 The Orrery is a post-intelligence of unknowable scale, technology, and power. Its origins as organic or artificial life are unknown, but it eventually came to its "Final Theorem": the conclusion that in order to delay the Heat Death and preserve the universe as long as possible, all sapient life and the wasteful habits that come with it - entertainment, music, culture, civilisation as a whole - must be wiped out.

It generally attempts to do so as efficiently as possible, by driving races to insanity and apocalyptic conflict with themselves and thus use up their own weaponry without needing to expend its own (as in the case of the Shattering). However, it is not above taking direct action against more difficult foes like the Lastborn. In these cases, its vast resources, intelligence, and near-complete mastery of all science and technology makes it effectively impossible to fight without reality-bending abilities such as those of the Glow or the Null.

Although it is not introduced until several expansions in, the struggle to survive against and defeat the Orrery is intended to be the overarching goal and mythos of Polaris and of the Aurora setting as a whole.

Sol System
Polaris nominally takes place in the same solar system as the real world, but it has a few key differences. In general, Hellenic names are used for planets rather than Roman ones (where counterparts exist), and the worlds themselves have some differences due to the human, post-human and alien activity.