The Ancient Kings of Benu

The Ancient Kings of Benu are oldest know sentience in the galaxy. At a time when the stars were barely a wink, they were the first to divine the secrets of spacetime travel, immortality, and the true nature of the universe.
They would go on to build a body of knowledge that would make them "gods". The 12 original Kings came from the root tribes and included nomads, tradesmen, alchemists, fishermen, farmers, teachers, a soldier, and even a performer.

Long after they'd made Benu a paradise, they expanded their empire over the millennia, planting tribal colonies and leaving their mark on each world--each rendered more splendid than the one before it. They've long passed into myth, but relics of their ancient ways and wondrous technologies remain.

Benu is in twilight now, and the Kings may no longer be seen, but their presence is felt and it's said that the wind still carries their songs, even as it beats down their temples on a million tiny blue worlds.

Geologic Characteristics

Benu has, for most of it's habitable existence, been a temperate world that was once flush with life. Now, it's barren, rocky skin is showing the scars of billions of years. There are no jungles here, but there are a few pockets of shrubland steppes and a few plains, these being the least arid regions.

The rest is desert, stone, salt flats and dried seas, sinkholes, canyons (both natural and man-made), and similar features.

Much of the rock has been mined through and shows the mark of machine and hand pick alike.

Bony, protruding remains whether they be rusted scaffolding or animal fossils are not difficult to find. Potable water sources however, are another story.

Lost Planet of the Ancients

 Daylight, approaching midmorning

Orbiting a dying sun near the galactic eye is a world long forgotten to the earliest settlers of space. The stars glow faintly until midday, chanting the impending doom of the blue deserts and dust blown salt flats below. The inhabitants are obliquely aware of their galactic lineage--they are the root world to all others. They are the forgotten children of the precursors...the ancients.

Millions of years long past, an endless procession of humanoids (some barbaric, some civilized) crawled across the land, scarred it with war, fought to recover, and then finally left it to erode for all time. Now only a single race of humans remains to eke out a living amongst the ruins. They know little about the true nature of the others that have come before them or the cataclysms that winked them into oblivion.

Most of the remaining inhabitants are nomadic tribes scavenging the wastes and digging into the barren soil hoping to find something to eat, something useful, or something "magical" left behind by a precursor they can sell or trade--or if it comes to it--something they can use for protection against the things-that-go-bump in the endless twilight.


This is Benu.