KazarimCorps, Part 3 (Life and Culture)
Travel
Travel between planets and stations in the Glow works due to local relatively, but once a ship leaves the influence of the God-World (by passing beyond the Brilliance), they are stranded in the Dark, lost to who-knows-where in interstellar space. The distance between the various wheelworlds, stations, asteroid mines, and moons takes days or weeks by spacecraft under normal drives. Since the God-World itself moves through hyperspace, dragging the rest of the Glow along with it, most ships are not built with faster-than-light capability. A few select ships in the Fleet still maintain FTL drives, but as part of their approach to war readiness, not because they use them.
While magical teleportation is theoretically possible between planets, there are currently no known spellcasters capable of using 9th level spells in the Glow.
Time
Without a star, and traveling within a bubble of space time while the God-World speeds through hyperspace, the people of the Glow have to tell time by non-standard means. They utilize a 24-hour clock, derived from the atomic clocks of the Fleet’s oldest ships. A week is seven of these 24-hour days, a month is 30 days, and a year is 360 days, or 12 months. Each month is numbered, rather than named.
The followers of the Lost Father attempt to cling to the old Amher-based calendar used prior to the Awakening, but without a star and orbiting moons (and with chaotic record-keeping during the war with the Stone Spider and the early days of the Glow), all they can do is guess.
Magic
Magic in the Glow behaves differently than elsewhere, making the most challenging and powerful spells nearly impossible to cast and causing unusual fluctuations and surges in weaker magic. Spellcasters had to adapt, or risk insanity or death as their spells backfired. For this reason, technomancers and mystics are the only magical classes known in the Glow today, as these two traditions have found ways to work within the Glow’s unusual magical environment.
Religion
Unjunkel, the God-World dominates the metaphysical landscape of the Glow, unintentionally creating the very reality that mortal creatures reside within. However, few rational folks worship the God-World directly, and those who do often succumb to madness and radiation sickness before long. Most of the God-World’s worshippers are noktor and zmey.
Several other religions exist within the Glow. The largest faith is Bodda Am, a belief in the inherent connectivity and divinity of all creatures. Followers of Bodda Am believe that each person consists of a shadow nature and a radiant nature, and these two halves of self constantly vie for power within the soul of an individual creature. If the shadow nature wins out over the course of a mortal’s life, they reincarnate as some lesser form of life: an animal or plant. Particularly vile people may become demons. If radiant nature ends up being dominant, then the person ascends into a better starting point in their next life, striving to become like the Bodda themselves: the perfect being of pure empathy and reason, who leaves the cycle of reincarnation forever. The kaevolians brought this religion to Jeruntam before the Awakening, and now most sentients in the Glow follow its teachings to some degree. Only the calakhon and the Preserved are more likely to follow a different religion than Bodda Am.
Veenan is primary deity of Bru-Asar, a river god worshiped by the calakhon, as well as some of the kaevolian, noktoran, and kosha settlers who have come to the moon. Generally respectful of nature and supporting of agriculture, the river god is also known for rare spikes of anger that flood settlements and drown the faithless.
The Preserved sometimes follow whichever religion they belonged to in life, but most come to worship the enigmatic deity known as the Eater of Words. Few among the living follow the Eater, who has a dogma that emphasizes suffering as a form of worship, and knowledge as the truest form of suffering.
The Cult of the Stone Spider worships the vermin deity of earth and stone, and was the chief villain of an ancient pre-Awakening war. These cultists operate in secret on the various colonies and space habitats, seeking to introduce mutagenic toxins into life support systems and ecosystems.
All that remains of the Amher, the original noktoran religion, is a small, loosely connected faith known as the Lost Father. Mostly confined to noktor in the Soman city of Qeru-Sor, this religion teaches that not all of the Amher died in the war against the Stone Spider, but that one became stuck in a sort of limbo. This “Lost Father” will return one day and destroy the Stone Spider, then restore the God-World to its pre-Awakening glory.