On 8/10/2014 11:27 PM, William Ewing (via tml list) wrote: > This email was sent from yahoo.com which does not allow forwarding of emails via > email lists. Therefore the sender's email address (xxxxxx@yahoo.com) has been > replaced with a dummy one. > > > >The only canon reference to the Cassilldan is the picture in Solomani & Aslan > >(p. 24), but there is no text associated. My notes show them as a throw away > >reference. If you have any more than that, I'd love to see it. > > >I'm sure the reason the for the information you have is gleamed from the > >picture, which shows them as taller than the Zhodani (low-g make you taller?), > >and carrying a sword. > Yup, pretty much, low-g means taller and skinnier, typically, and the sword > means I can figure they're probably either barbarians or aristocrats with an > archaic weapons fetish. The clothes look too sophisticated for barbarians, so I > extrapolated a dueling culture. Not enough for a real hook, but that pic makes > me *want* to turn them into something more than a throwaway race. Even if it's > somebody's homebrew kitbash, that might give me the hook I need to either flesh > out their vision to suit me, or to finally figure out a writeup as an > alternative to that homebrew. > My first thought on looking at the picture was similar. But that's a well worn path. So what happens if the item hanging from his belt isn't a sword, but a multi-purpose tool of some sort. So now you have a peaceful (probably), technologically advanced, society. So wild speculation time: The star for Cassilldan world, normally a quiet main sequence start, is in the early stages of becoming a red giant. Normally this is a process which takes millions of years, but does have environmental effects during the whole process. So the Cassilldan population has been, for the past two thousand years, slowly building and moving onto a massive orbital structure. It is a collection of spin gravity toruses, O'Neil cylinders, and other large structures, tied together in a massive spiderweb and connected to a huge solar sail. It is one of the largest constructed structures in charted space. The plan is as the sun expands, the whole structure moves slowly outwards to maintain the environmental balance. In addition to their massive project, the Cassilldans alternate between being isolationist to the point of paranoia and being incredibly open and welcoming. -- Thomas Jones-Low Work: xxxxxx@softstart.com Home: xxxxxx@gmail.com