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torchship-rpg · 25 days

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Dev Diary 18 - Zinovians

Right, let’s talk another major species! The Zinovians are the other really ‘big’ species in Torchship on the level of the Aquillians, the folks you’ll be dealing with often. They’re not as widespread or numerous as the Aquillians, but they’re a powerful and highly present political force in multiple astrostates, and the shared history they have with humanity have set us on a collision course.

The most important thing to know about the Zinovians is that they got exiled from their own homeworld by the Aquillian Empire about four hundred years prior to the events of the game and scattered across the stars. This has created several very distinct groups of Zinovians to encounter or play as, with sizable cultural, political, and even genetic differences between them. The majority settled in a single state which humanity allied with during their war against the Aquillians; the Zinovians are the reason we caught up to Local Space’s tech level so quickly.

We promptly paid them back by making peace with the Empire instead of helping them take their homeworld back. They’re still not over it.

Oh, also; all the alien species names in Torchship are exonyms. The Zinovians weren’t originally called that by humans; it’s a (derogatory) descriptive name that emerged after the war to describe the structure of their government by unflatteringly comparing it to the guy whose bureaucratic decisions laid the groundwork for Stalin’s rise to power, and it stuck where the competing approximations of their endonyms failed. As is a general theme with the Zinovians, this is a mutual kind of awful; their name for us is, literally, “The Little Traitors”.

Biology

The Zinovians are another of the local humanoid species, though they’re a little more alien looking than the Aquillians, who could pass for human with a hat on. They’re one of the most diverse species in Local Space; like Humans, they have no taboo on genetic engineering and have used it to adapt themselves to a variety of physical and social environments. But there’s still some commonalities across groups.

Zinovians are cat-people, though this is less ‘cute kittycat girl’ and more ‘oh god, there’s a panther on the loose!’. Think the Puma Sisters from Dominion Tank Police. They have tall tufted ears, retractable claws on their hands and feet for both climbing and hunting, and a lot of subgroups have vestigial tails. They’re descended from apex ambush predators with a similar hunting strategy to leopards, complete with hauling kills up trees, which gradually developed complex social structures in response to changing environmental pressures.

As the only major sapient species of obligate carnivores in Local Space, their transition to sapience was largely driven by the complex competitive politics of reproductive suppression to avoid overhunting, which gradually shifted toward tool use for reshaping the environment to increase hunting yields. Their version of the agricultural revolution was the invention of the fishing net and nomadic groups settling along coastlines.

That gives us our first trait, the aptly named Ambush Predator Evolutionary Outlier trait. This gives some pretty meaty bonuses to short bursts of physical activity, but means you take Fatigue more quickly in return.

Zinovians have distinct structures of long hair and short fur; their fur and skin share pigmentation, which can make it hard to tell which is which at a glance. The amount, lengths, and colouration of fur has a dizzying degree of variance (with colours mostly clustered in the red/yellow/green range) thanks to their ancestors having some pretty cool camo fur patterns; those largely became solid colours in the transition to sapience, but you get deliberate or accidental genetic throwbacks.

The claws give you the Built-In Weapons Trait; these are serious business, about as dangerous as walking around with iron daggers on hand at all times. This is connected to the somewhat-muted Zinovian pain response; with sociability being a relatively recent evolutionary development, pain’s signalling function of ‘stop and get help’ is less neurologically developed, meaning that Stiff Upper Lip here represents quite literally feeling less pain.

Finally, Zinovian sexual dimorphism and gender politics are a fascinatingly complex subject. Their crash evolutionary development of sociability has left rather significant holdovers from when their ancestors were highly hierarchical matrilineal fission-fusion societies resembling something between spotted hyena clans and lion prides. The psychological developments are no more present than in humans, of course (though, like in humans, pop science evolutionary psychology does crop up socially), but some of the physiological aspects have stuck around.

So, first off, baseline Zinovian sexual dimorphism is a bit exaggerated compared to humans, with females being larger. This is a bit more than the relatively small differences between human sexes; their evolutionary adaptation trait suggests you can take Efficient Metabolism over Ambush Predator if you want to play the far end of baseliner male dimorphism, more optimised for wandering off to find groups with gaps in the hierarchy than challenging it. This dimorphism has been genetically reduced in some Zinovian groups and exaggerated in others.

The other big thing is that Zinovians have two sets of sex expression, termed ‘major’ and ‘minor’ sexes, which is a holdover from alternative reproductive strategies that developed around the strict hierarchies of their presapient ancestors. Essentially, about 3-5% of Zinovians naturally develop what we might term inverted secondary sexual characteristics, with no way to tell before they hit puberty. Like, naturally occurring transgender hormone balances, sorta kinda. And then you layer socially constructed gender on top of that, and it gets complicated, with different cultures having vastly different answers to the social status of sex expressions, transgender people, etc…

Yeah, it’s an excuse to roll up your sleeves and get on some next-level gender stuff with these cat people. Don’t let it be said we don’t know our audience.

In the Zinovian Sphere

Okay, first off, they don’t call it that. We call it that, because it makes them sound like an evil hegemony. They call themselves the Universal Republic, and call us the Human Star Empire. See? This is a whole thing.

The Zinovian Universal Sphere Republic is the largest political body the Zinovians have and are in many ways the ‘second power’ of Local Space, being the largest unified group after the Star Union in the aftermath of the Aquillian Empire shattering like a pane of glass. Unified is being kind of generous, though; the Zinovian Sphere is more like a loose federation of eight semi-independent ministries which once had specific duties in the unified government, but who have gradually developed into messy mini-states within the larger whole.

The logos of the Ministries. Resources, Loyalty, Labour, Peace, Space, Life, Sanitation, and Security. Once specialized, all now form mini-governments in their own right, complete with their own militaries.

They symbolize a borehole mine, a watchful eye, a churning vat, an interstellar transmission, a rocket launch, cell division, water purification, and a watchtower.

The Universal Republic began with the ragged survivors of their homeworld’s uprising against the Aquillians being directed to a group of marginally-habitable high-gravity worlds in a star cluster near the Aquillian border with one of their distant rivals, to be used as a buffer state and early warning system. Their founding ideology of hopeful liberation was one of the many victims of starvation, decompression, dehydration, and radiation poisoning that characterised this exodus and the crash terraforming projects that followed.

As a direct result, the Universal Republic adheres to an apocalyptic socialism the Union calls Social Triage; resources must be held in common to be distributed to maximise return. In accordance with ability, disregarding need. It’s the cold logic of a mass casualty event, applied to entire societies and lingering long after the emergency is over. It’s a relic of the days when a community leader had to stand up in the shelter and tell a thousand people they will only have calories for eight hundred, when neighbouring communities would exchange rosters of their population so unbiased choices could be made as to who gets to live.

They’re past the days of anyone actually starving, but that, uh, is going to leave a bit of a psychological mark. It’s the reason why their government can be eight Ministries in a trenchcoat and yet survive; for all their squabbling, the Ministries are dedicated with absolute zeal to not rocking the boat too much, in case it means somebody somewhere doesn’t get fed, and are equally dedicated to the dream of one day getting Lost Homeworld back and making the fucking elves pay for it.

Republican Zinovians are divided into three Identities for gameplay purposes. The first two represent the civilian population of the Republic, and share a bunch of interesting Traits. You get Heavyworlder, because the 12 worlds the Zinovians were forced to settle on were largely hovering around 1g. You get Radiation Hardened (Lesser type, with Radiation Absorbing Structures) and/or Built-In Armour, which represents the subdermal steel plates which are affected by most of the population; these plates are largely cultural now, but at one time these were there to keep major bones from absorbing too much radiation on worlds with marginal magnetic fields. You’re encouraged to take Psychrophile/Thermophile, or any other trait which reflects the harsh nature of whichever world you ended up on.

You also lose some traits. In the Republic, genetic engineering efforts have at times been directed to reducing sexual dimorphism as part of various (largely unsuccessful) efforts to combat matriarchal social structures. Republican citizens also get their claws removed as a public health and safety measure at a young age; this is largely seen as a kind of sad-but-necessary reality of modernity, and a lot of defectors to the Star Union go get them regrown or have mechanical replacements installed.

The first of the identities is the Citizens; these are the regular people of the Republic, the politically disenfranchised common folk with no overt loyalties to any one Ministry. As with all the major powers in Local Space, the Republic is dealing with an overabundance of labour; in the Republic this manifests as waiting. You don’t want for anything vital, the local Ministries work together to ensure you have food, shelter, education, and distraction, but what you’re issued is what you get, and what you’re issued is decided by a bureaucrat somewhere. If you want more, you sign up for a waiting list for job openings in the Ministries, and you wait.

Which is why there’s a wild black market among the common citizens, hence a recommendation for the Entrepreneur trait. Polyglot represents how these colonies were haphazard multicultural endeavours which maintain enclaves carrying on the traditions of Lost Homeworld, and War Veteran represents how the only widespread employment available to common citizens was the recruitment drive during the war.

The second group are the Ministry Families. The Ministries operate as densely entangled networks of nepotistic family groups, with entire departments run by extended clans. The definition of ‘family’ is pretty loose; Zinovian norms about adoption are extremely flexible. Ministry families live marginally better lives than the regular Citizens in material terms, but do so under constant scrutiny and the intense expectations of their families, creating an intense political thunderdome of inter- and intra-family competition.

This gets so serious that it's reflected in the main Ministry trait, Augment. If you’re a ministry couple expecting a kid, it’s not uncommon for the clan matriarch to drop by and talk about the job they have lined up for them when they grow up, so wouldn’t it be a good idea to make sure they’re well-suited for the role? This dovetails well with just about any other trait; you’re encouraged to think about what you were destined for and how your family tried to achieve that.

The final recommended trait is Foreign Connections, a Trait which gives you both friends and enemies in another state. Maybe those friends are family who still have your back… or maybe they’re the department you betrayed your family to in order to smuggle yourself out of the Sphere.

A fun detail about the Republic is that they’re intensely maltheistic; organised religion was one of the main tools of the Aquillian occupation, and a lot of them were very devout people. Given the subsequent traumatic Everything, the natural cultural conclusion was that their gods had sold them out to the occupiers, and when Lost Homeworld is taken back they’re going to make a point to lock their deities inside the temples and light a match. In the meantime, they practise with effigies. Their kids make them out of paper mache. It’s great fun for the whole family.

There’s one last Identity within the Republic, and they’re very different from the other two. The Republican Marines are a cultural group inside the state descended from a seafaring culture who had been given a position as warrior nobility under the Aquillian hierarchy; the uprising largely kicked off because they got sick of getting increasingly sidelined for foreign mercenaries and defected to the rebels. The Marines are essentially a separate nation bound by treaty to the Republic to serve as an apolitical military arm; though in theory they’re all soldiers, in practice the majority of them work the logistics that allow a small handful of them to be the scariest power-armoured infantrymen in the history of the galaxy.

Seriously. The main narrative purpose of Zinovian Marines is to act as a thing the GM can put in a scene to say to the players “nope, you need to talk your way out of this one, because you aren’t winning this fight”. They have rotary chainguns with sufficient armour penetration to shoot up your reactor from the top deck of your spacecraft, and their armour has articulating ERA shields that double as deck-clearing fragmentation mines. Your redshirts going up against them is going to look like that sick Astartes animation on youtube. Just don’t.

Marines get to keep their claws, and obviously get recommended the War Veteran trait. It’s also noted that you are extremely visually distinct and it's impossible to hide it; Marines get elaborate facial tattoos and piercings specifically so they cannot shirk their duties to the Republic and try to become a civilian.

In the CNFT

The Zinovian Marines are one offshoot of the seafaring warrior culture, one that ended up in the Republic. But a lot of them ended up elsewhere, either through surrendering to Aquillian forces during the war and being repurposed, or fleeing reprisals. Like most refugees in Local Space before the Star Union became a thing, those people ended up in the CNFT, alongside some other Zinovians who quickly became culturally integrated.

So what do a bunch of soldiers do when they arrive somewhere with combat experience but no money? They offered their services as mercenaries within the cutthroat anarcho-capitalist nightmare of the Territories, and they were good at it.

The modern SEA-WARRIORS OF ZINOVIA! are what happens when an entire culture’s financial security depends on being able to sell themselves as the best mercenaries in the entire galaxy, playing up their foreign heritage and biological quirks as an intergenerational advertising scheme. According to the marketing, the Sea-Warriors are a barely-civilised society of bloodthirsty warrior women whose rigid codes of honour demand they seek out war and conquest, and they can be yours for the low low price of $29.99! They wear the furs of exotic animals and get cool tattoos and carry four-foot long cultasses around in public and pick fights in bars with the hope of getting cool scars. Where the Republicans downplayed their sexual dimorphism with genetic engineering, the Sea-Warriors exaggerated it (mostly in that the ladies got even taller). They even gene-modded their tails back in and made them fuzzier to look more animalistic.

And it worked. Every politician has a Zinovian bodyguard, every criminal kingpin has Zinovian enforcers, and when you turn on the TV you’ll see Zinovian athletes playing full-contact sports, chasing perps in cop shows, and selling gene-therapy treatments at the commercial break. The CNFT’s image of physical prowess is a six-foot-five cat woman with tattooed abs and a massive machete leading a platoon in the conflict zone of the week.

The thing is… it’s not entirely an act. It started as one, sure, and the ones pushing the envelope will wink and nod and admit to exaggerating, but a culture can’t perform a persona this long without becoming true believers. Yes, they put the furs and swords away and fight in power armour under a swarm of autonomous drones like everyone else when it comes down to it, their mercenary corporations have slick PR operations and genetic modification programs and R&D departments, there’s Zinovians in suits negotiating with the government over protection contracts, but at the end of the day this still is a culture growing up with a self-image that the coolest thing they can possibly be is a barbarian warlord with a laser pistol in one hand and a sword in the other.

The first recommended Trait from all this is Augment, because you don’t keep your edge in a market like this without a bit of help. Imposing reflects the brand, obviously, and you still have your Built-In Weapons (getting declawed is seen as a fate worse than death). You have the fun Cultural Tool trait to represent the exaggerated cutlasses that your honour demands you carry in public, and War Veteran is an obvious pick for a culture where the Territorial Army and then subsequent mercenary work is the only real career path for most.

Finally, you’re encouraged to take Redundant Vitals, because a lot of Sea Warriors opt into a series of genetic and surgical procedures to duplicate a few of their vital organs, just in case. It makes getting life insurance so much cheaper that it’s always worth it.

The Greater Diaspora

The final set of identities is a bit of a catch-all for everyone else, and is more a high-level summary than the detailed Trait lists for other identities by its nature. There’s a ton of Zinovians living spread out in Local Space; descendents of refugees, migrant workers, and ancient settler projects. Like with the Aquillians (or the human wildcat colonies), it's an excuse to take the basic archetype and make it your own. One part of this characterisation is the fact that the Universal Republic wants very badly to use this diaspora as an arm of state power, and its various Ministries attempt to do so, with various levels of influence and success. There’s also a fair number integrated into the Star Union, many of them advisors who came over during the war and decided they liked it better.

Finally, there’s a note that the Zinovian Sphere is, well, not just a Universal Republic in name; they actually do have a number of alien species among their ranks as well, who will be culturally integrated at various levels using the above Identities. There’s a fair number of humans who have jumped ship to the Universal Republic in the same way, mostly people who think the Star Union is too pacifist or forgiving for its own good, or advisors horrified by the voters back home leaving their allies in the lurch. Said humans are largely integrating into Ministry families at this point.

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