Eliane

System: Eliane
Hex Location: 1928
Star Type: Single K8 Ia
Number of Worlds: 11
Gas Giants: 3
Planetoid Belt: None

Starport Type: E
World Size: Larger than Earth
Atmosphere Type: Dangerous—immediate but not life-threatening.  Without a filter, sickness which imposes -4 on all d20 rolls.
Surface Water: 30%
Population: Medium sized (110 million)
Political Affiliation: Bern Monarchy, Carrick Grand Marches
Notes: There are remarkably few worlds in known space that occupy systems with stars as odd as a red supergiant; in fact, it's generally believed that such is statistically almost impossible to exist; the forces that cause a massive, old star to swell to red supergiant status like Antares of Betelgeuse would also cause it to sweep away with solar winds, or swallow whole any planets in a habitable zone.  And yet, here were have Eliane, and planet bathed in harsh but surprisingly not terribly hot light from a massive red supergiant that fills much of the sky.

However, there are some aspects of Eliane that seem weird.  While it is a large world; much more comfortable for hulks than for regulars, with an atmosphere that won't kill you exactly, but which is slowly poisonous and requires a filter or other breath mask at a minimum.  Because of the blazing sun and its UV radiation, most life lives in deep chasms, both native (non-sentient) and colonial.  Many colonial building have been "gravved" by warlocks to counter the effects of the heavy gravity so that normal people can live here comfortably, but this is also a world where hulks are often more comfortable, and much of the population, curiously, is made up of emancipated robots rather than biological colonists.  Emancipated robots are often unusual in nature and personality, and many of them are recruited by the unscrupulous, who take advantage of their relative social inexperience and artificial autism-like behaviors, to engage in various shady activities.

Water is somewhat scarce on Eliane; mostly concentrated in polar ice caps and glaciers deep in the bottom of craters and canyons that receive little or even no sunlight, but which steam as the temperature rises.  Tidal effects from the massive gravitational pull of Eliane's supergiant sun also warps and distorts the planet, causing an abnormally high level of volcanic activity.  Mostly this is less explosive, and manifests as lava lakes, rivers and other features usually associated with water, but huge shield volcanoes and the occasional pyroclastic blast are a hazard that needs to be accounted for by the colonials.  In spite of this, there are very solid tectonic cratons that seem very stable, and even have fossils millions of years old that appear to resemble the remains—both biological and architectural—of the Greys.  This has led scientists to speculate that possibly Eliane's current position—either it's distance from the sun, or it's presence in this system at all—is artificial, although what could cause an entire planet to migrate is unknown, and no ruins anywhere on the planet can be interpreted to give any clue to answer that riddle.

Eliane is also famous for having a gigantic, ancient crater, as big as a continent, that is a scar from some massive ancient impact that nearly destroyed it altogether.  This leads scientists to also believe that life on the planet is not native, and must have been artificially seeded at some point in the distant past.