Blissful Colony on the Edge of OblivionSource Starfinder #28: The Hollow Cabal pg. 62
Location The Vast
Settlements —
Diameter ×1; Mass ×1; Gravity ×1
Atmosphere Normal
Day 28 hours; Year 16 months
Tudine is a remarkable world only in its general lack of unusual traits. A temperate, terrestrial world of diverse biomes orbiting a binary star, it hosts four continents, several chains of islands, and poles of ice-covered tundra, which help moderate ocean currents and weather patterns. The first native life consisted mainly of large herbivores, small pack predators, and scavengers, and by the time sentient life evolved—remarkably similar to humans in everything save their pale skin and white hair—the natural world boasted a rich diversity that supported agricultural development.
Tudinian civilization had just developed intrasystem space travel when trouble began. Whether Tudinian explorers brought the infection home or it arrived independently on space debris, a hostile alien fungus species known as dycepskians arrived and spread silently across much of the world before anyone realized their friends and families were being taken over by an extraterrestrial menace. Through segregation and wars, governments futilely tried to isolate “susceptible populations” or eliminate nations they believed had fallen to the invaders, but the dycepskians are as much a pandemic as a conqueror. Within two generations, only a handful of unaffected Tudinians remained in isolated fortresses.
The survivors knew their world was doomed and watched in horror as the dycepskians began to rekindle their waning spaceflight program to spread to the stars. In a desperate feat of engineering, the native citizens unleashed a doomsday weapon into the sky, collapsing one of their suns into a small black hole. They hoped the singularity would crush their world and stop the dycepskians’ spread, but the resulting black hole was too small to swallow Tudine. However, the intense gravity still made it impossible for the dycepskians to escape the system using existing technology.
For over a century now, the dycepskians have remained trapped on the edge of a black hole’s event horizon, watching as it slowly devours their second sun. In the meantime, they have rebuilt Tudinian society into a utopia. They know the end approaches, and they broadcast invitations into the void, cheerfully advertising their unusual planet as a welcoming waystation, a scientific wonderland, a resource-rich trading hub, or anything else they believe will attract travelers with more advanced space-flight technology. Until then, they go through the motions of productive industrial lives, an uncanny facsimile of the capitalistic family ideal.
Tudine’s system once held eleven planets, but three have since been devoured by the black hole, throwing their moons into the void to become rogue asteroids. A large gas giant on the system’s edge emits powerful radiation after several moon impacts, acting as a natural lighthouse to mark the system’s location.
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