#manarian

the Manarian is a whole galaxy inhabited by lost of technologically advanced alien species. there are no humans in the setting, but most of the aliens we created were roughly humanoid.

the thematic core of the setting, in my mind, has always been the Triwars, which is a galactic war fought between three major powers: norph, havok and canog.  the norph were the species i was always most attached to. they’re these guys:

this is the “new” design for the norph species. it updates my older one by removing the “pillar foot” look that a lot of old manarian species have b/c i designed them at a time when i thought feet (and specifically toes) were foolish extremities and gives them explicit gills. i don’t have access to my old sketchbooks right now, but the general look is very similar to the old norph.

so too with the havok. i didn’t really change their design at all, they’re still artificially animated, vaguely malevolent, gelatinous humanoids:

the havok and the norph are traditional enemies. usually the Triwars are considered the “present” or immediate past of the setting. when i’ve written a conclusion for them, the norph win.

both species are artificial; the norph were created by the za’agar and the norph by the zelktar. in the original lore, these were two different species, but in the new lore these are two political factions of the same species, the zær. in the new lore, the canog are also creations of the zær. the canog were based on the zær’s own genes, the norph on the wildlife native to the rhinox system and the havok are completely artificial. the three species represent increasingly radical attempts by the mainstream zær, za’agar and zelktar factions, respectively, to create the “perfect being.”

however, long before the civilizations of these species could really develop, the conflict between the za’agar and zelktar became a galactic war that rapidly spread and wiped out not only the entire zær species but most of their neighbors as well.

after this disaster, the galaxy enjoys an era of relative peace and prosperity as these younger civilizations grow. during this time, the dominant galactic civilizations are the Rox Protectorate (which was mostly untouched by the “biogenesis war”) and the Kotonn Empire (a successor state to the C!ansh Empire, which fell during it). however, they are soon upstaged by the zær’s creations. the havok are the most aggressive of the three and are cast as the antagonists of the Triwars.

here’s the blurb that i wrote as a hook for the post-Triwars setting i’m working on:

The Triwars are over but the wreckage remains.

Half an age of war has left the major powers scarred and bankrupt, and their spaceways choked with damaged, half-operative weapons of war.

Now, from the fringes come the refugee and the migrant, the pirate and the plunderer, the scavenger and the scrounger alike to strip and salvage what they can or die trying. This is the time of the tekleric.

New players have emerged: the mysterio, for generations itinerant riddlers and wanderers, are now the (precarious) princes of those who pick over the bones of the hulks of war. Eiqen raiders, formerly restricted to the galactic rim have crept out to trouble major spaceways.

which brings me nicely to the mysterio, the species i’d point out as critical to the identity of the manarian. in the old lore, they did not have a homeworld but formed in the vacuum of space and live on spaceships. they always wore armored suits and helmets, and no outsider had ever seen them without.

in the new lore, i tried to keep somewhat close to that? now, they are relatives of the orox, who were exiled for a crime in a bygone age and have refused to settle anywhere permanently. as constant spacefarers, they always wear their spacesuits, although i’ve changed their designs to be more lithe and flexible:

tekleric is a profession among the mysterio that involves entering space-wrecks for scrap and salvage. it has grown in importance since the end of the Triwars, and its associated industries are now among the most prominent in the galactic economy.

when i was still in elementary school, i want to say in second or third grade, my brother a friend and i created what i think was the first anything associated with this universe (we came to call it the Manarian): a couple spaceships and their alien pilots, made from polymer clay and baked hard in my toaster oven. we made them in stages, baking the pilot, then pressing the pilot into the spaceship and baking it separately, then molding a detachable add-on onto the back of the spaceship and baking that separately. the result was a fairly good, multi-part toy that we created ourselves. i’ve since lost the toy, but we named the alien species and that formed the nexus of our universe’s lore.

i definitely can’t trace the origins of most of the elements of the Manarian, because the thing that it served us best for was as a place to wholeheartedly and blatantly copy things we liked about other SFF media we were consuming at the time. but it also was a long-term collaborative creative project, carried out in sessions with weeks of downtime in between mostly in the media of drawings and play-acting. 

how much of the play-acting you did as a kid do you remember? i don’t remember most of it, but i do still have a lot of the bits and pieces. i do have a bunch of the in-character emails that i received (although not the ones i sent, those are locked up in an email account i'd need to recover) from a friend of mine between play sessions. as far as drawings go, thankfully, i’ve saved most of the sketchbooks i’ve ever kept; only the loose paper (and that’s what my friends and i usually drew on together) has been lost to time. and i have my other major source: a dozen or so incomplete and unfinished encyclopedias or other reference works that i started at various times from middle school on till high. many hard drives later, i have somehow managed to keep track of most of them.

they usually follow the following format, with varying degrees of follow-through

1. weirdly long and detailed mythology 2. galactic history, building up to the “Triwars” that were either ongoing or had recently ended 3. descriptions of the intelligent species of the Manarian (a variable list with 12-20 mostly stable members) 4. a “science” section that mostly talked about guns, psionic powers, FTL travel or computers.

i’ll level with you, most of my actual material is pretty bad. (let me put it more positively: gosh, i’ve improved a lot as a writer since i was in middle school!) however, i discovered that parts of one of the encyclopedias i had delegated out to be written by different friends. and it may just be that i can’t see the virtues of my own writing because, well, i wrote it, but my friends are so good and creative! my own Manarian writing is frequently afflicted by what i’ll call the “encyclopedic mode” where i have some finite set of categories and i need to fill all of those out for each thing and occasionally i’ll stick on a little flourish or greeble but mostly it’s relatively dry. or maybe it’s just that i approached it like a collating and cross-referencing project and they approached it as creative writing. regardless, i’m continually shook by their ability to produce just brilliant-ass nonsense.

anyway, now i’m in the thick of this project, which is a lot of going back and collating and rewriting the more boring/hackeneyed parts and fitting things into the rough shape that the Manarian has in my head.