Sollum

**Sollum**
Military

The organization of Sollum's sigil

**Sollum** is the name that refers to both Choko's group, as well as the city-state that they primarily live in. It is a "secret society" of sorts, with restricted access from the outside world. The ruling and upper classes are dominated by powerful psionicists, while the most diverse population was those who did not particularly benefit or were disadvantaged from their stay here. The city was known for being a culturally diverse stronghold that readily accepted refugees, although it was not much of a paradise and was in fact quite authoritarian.

The city of Sollum was a castle town in the Underdark. With the primary Citadel, where Choko and important government officials like Nikuiko worked and lived, built into a large flat stone wall at the end of the cavern, the rest of the city surrounded one side of it with a hemispherical wall divided into north, east and west segments. A lot of the crumbling infrastructure it was built upon was of drow origin. The most common choice of materials to build with was stone, ceramics and metals, because wood was a difficult thing to farm for down in the depths, although they had some success with using the stems of oversized subterranean fungi as a form of lumber.

## History

The city of Sollum has roots older than 500 years, but it was a mere village when Choko's community arrived. Choko took her place as regent in the 1560s, and from there she aggressively pushed to teach psionics to everyone. In merely 100 years, through a combination of studying alien technology left behind by the Gems, meteorite impacts that left their surrounding lands a barren and desolate wasteland but rich with potent materials, and trading technology with the lunarians, they had become the most technologically advanced beings in the whole dimension. Choko outlived her political opposition and transformed the city into a militant nation, enticing her citizens with the prospect of reinforcing them against the dangers of the outside world. It was around then that they began to become more closed off and elusive.

It seems that Choko's time on the surface wouldn't last forever though, because in 1656, a particularly large "meteor" would threaten to extinguish all life around its impact site, which included all of the citizens of Sollum. Refusing to accept this death, Choko evacuated her citizens and took everything she and her workers could carry deep into the Underdark, where she had come from. They traveled only a few miles from the surface before settling in the ruins of the former drow city Charrvhel'raugaust, which she had helped to destroy a century earlier. After driving off the squatters and bandits that called these ruins home, she helped the citizens unpack, and it was there that they felt the earth-rumbling quake of the Leviathan landing, devastating the land around it, including much of her former city.

Immediately after that was a dark age. Food was scarce and the surface dwellers knew little about the Underdark ecology. The population began to thin until all that was left was the people who could sustain themselves psionically, with healers overworked to stave off disease and illness. Eventually however, they learned to exploit the resources of the caverns, and they were able to repair and build over the ruins. Things were looking up. They started to return to the surface to scavenge for remaining supplies in the old city, and it was here that they encountered the **Great Poison**. The "meteor" that drove them underground was something otherworldly, and when it impacted, it began to leech an awful substance into the land. On top of being a blight on the already dying biome around Sollum, the substance spreads into the city and causes deadly radiation poisoning, with unprotected contact causing death in moments and prolonged exposure being a serious cancer risk. Choko projects that this substance would eventually grow to consume all of Farauei, so they begin work on the construction of the Seal, in the Land of Black Blood, a vault far beneath even the Ancient City, where Choko lived in her youth. When the seal was complete, in 1701, they used a powerful ritual combining Choko's space-warping gem powers and draconic magic in conjunction with the collective psionic abilities of the remaining psionicists, teleporting the entire **Leviathan** into the seal. The lead-lined seal was only a temporary solution though, one they had to reinforce over the years. Eventually, it became more of a psi-tech seal with a magical reinforcement.

Over the years, Choko's city grew larger. They met drow refugees who defected from Lolth's imposed lifestyle, duergars exiled from their clans, curious svirfneblin and halflings. They met surface orcs, other underground dwelling humans, kobolds, and all sorts of unfamiliar faces. They expanded further down, creating village-like outposts, but they were never able to take any ruins larger than the new city of Sollum, including the infested Ancient City. They also expanded up, reclaiming the ruins of their old land, but they were never able to fully move in due to the earthen cracks filled with Phazon, which caused a potent sickness in anyone who made contact or lingered too long around the stuff, so they maintained only a mere outpost in the city. Although people worked there to extract Phazon, scout out safe and dangerous areas in the city and reclaim lost technologies or resources, they were required to wear protective gear and they lived and slept in the stronghold underground.

In 1980, Choko begins to build the framework for Perseus, and she allocates the rest of her Draconium reserves to fueling the reactor necessary to power it. Installing the powerful psi-core in 1985, Choko invents the *psiodrome*, a powerful field of psionic energy that can act as a medium to transfer power, bestowing efficient wireless energy within the range of the city and significantly easing infrastructural costs. This also grants psionicists the ability to add their energy into the stack, draw out of it to fuel their manifestations, and grant all psionicists the power to manifest a few utility powers, such as *sustenance*.

In the year 2000, Choko works on construction of the mainframe attached to the reactor. By 2003, the mainframe is complete, the brain copy is uploaded, and Perseus is born, solidifying the city's defenses and greatly improving logistical capabilities. Drow, drider, orc and grimlock attacks completely stop in the coming years.

In recent times, the seal is cracking, and having run out of temporary solutions, Choko is looking into ways to permanently seal the Leviathan. She is also looking into the applications of Phazon, the radioactive substance it produces, but research is lacking and progressing slowly. By the year 2013, it has mostly recovered to its former strength, and it possesses a diversity not found in other Underdark communities.

## Government

It is essentially a military dictatorship, or perhaps functions more as a monarchy, with Choko acting as both the head of state and head of government; she's the Crown Princess, her word is what goes. However, she maintains a sort of senate with which to receive opinions and keeps tabs on the public's opinions of her and her actions via surveys and social media and close surveillance.

Choko maintains this fragile hierarchy via her ability to sway populations with her divine influence, which comes from the strength of her bloodline. This power is known as *regency*, and its subtle "energy" is defined mechanically as RP (regency points), which she spends to get people to do things.

Curiously, the state and the military are mostly merged. Due to a lack of territory (they are the size of one city), the state lacks any sort of territorial divisions, so the federal police is the only law enforcement agency; as well, the federal police's training regime is essentially a specialization of the compulsory military training. All *citizens* of the state (as opposed to "permanent resident", applied to refugees and foreigners settling down from abroad, but whom could apply for citizenship) received compulsory military training, and if they were not of schooling age, they were still taught, as a necessity, basic psionic talents such as the ability to gain a psionic focus and the ability to detect psionic effects. They were highly encouraged to pursue psionic training, however.

All citizens of the state were considered to be part of its military's reserve duty, and were expected to take up arms and aid the state in a time of crisis. Comparatively, the number of personnel in active duty was rather small, and relegated essentially to law enforcement and city guard. This was part of why Choko was so authoritarian, and why only a regent like her could act as Crown Princess, as granting citizens military clearance was rather dangerous, and if a prospective ruler couldn't manipulate the regency necessary to inspire their citizens, the chance of revolt, civil war and destabilization of the state was rather high, which would be a death sentence given the hungry and opportunistic nature of its neighbors.

## Economy

Prior to their disappearance from the surface world, Choko's city was completely without currency in its economy; to obtain something, you work for it. It functioned with a system of rations and personal privileges to request things from the state.

After its disappearance and subsequent relocation, the foreign races looking to settle down meant that Choko was unable to sustain this style of economy. After a legislation change, the city began to mint its own legal tender, which came in the form of four types of coins: copper, silver, gold and platinum. These coins were generally only partially made of their named material, and were usually alloyed with metals such as nickel or tin to either reduce the weight and value of the coin itself or to strengthen it in some way. Sollum coins generally had images of Choko on the "heads" side and the face of a dragon on the "tails" side, although these could change depending on the coin type itself and the year of production.

However, merchants were known to trade in things other than coins. Bartering trade goods was universally accepted in the lower circles of the city (the upper class generally didn't rely on trading and were bound to the coin-based internal economy of the city), and food, alcohol, labor and valuable materials were all an acceptable form of currency. The gold coin was used as the standard for measuring wealth, even if neither gold nor coins were involved in a transaction.

Food production and the acquisition of drinkable water was scarce at best, so Choko had several programs in place to teach people the *sustenance* power, which greatly reduces the number of mouths to feed, providing a sort of safety buffer. Through powerful psionics, Choko can breach the barrier separating her world from other worlds like Earth, Toril, Golarion or Eberron. She frequently visits other worlds or sends expeditions to gather resources from those worlds, and she has a small reserve of currency from other countries.

Sollum is Farauei's largest producer of psionic items. On top of enchanted trinkets, weapons and armor, and universal items, dorjes and power stones, Sollum produces psionic technology, or psi-tech for short. This enchanted technology either interfaces with psionics in some way, or uses electrical power as a fuel source to produce psionic effects. Many complex technologies can be shortcut with psionics: powers like *correspond* can be coded to function as a protocol for instant, long-distance, potentially even extraplanar communication technology, and the power source readily connects with a user's mind, enabling for an easy implementation of cybernetics without prohibitively invasive surgery.

Sollum also takes advantage of the *faerzress,* the lingering magical radiation of the Underdark, to empower its equipment. Weaponry and armor are typically forged in a *drowcraft* fashion, with channels to absorb the faerzress to empower the user's usage of the item, at the cost of rapid degradation if left on the sunlit surface unprotected. This is a cheap, cost-effective method to creating efficient gear, although the gear itself takes a while to make, due to the lengthy process involved in soaking the object in radiation. When a workforce expects to be dealing with the surface, it instead gears itself with traditional Sollum-style gear, which doesn't dissolve in sunlight, although the materials to make such items are rarer now; for instance, wood is incredibly hard to sustainably farm underground.

## Technology

Despite the fact that Farauei did not, as a whole, share in the breakthroughs of the modern world (which was why it was stuck in an anachronistic past), it was believed that Sollum did. Choko, who was in charge of leading experiments and technological breakthroughs, could enter or see into the outside world, and did so numerous times to gain an understanding of modern society as it progressed with them from the 1500s to the 2000s. This led to her, at several points in time, one-upping the outside world in terms of their technological progress, and in conjunction with her nation's extensive psionic capability and research, she would remain a powerful player both in Farauei and in the outside world. Perhaps because of these advancements, she lead the nation to become more isolated and closed off from the rest of the world, to ensure that the secrets to her success were kept well.

The main principles that Sollum's technology revolve around, and which separate them from conventional human technology, is the extensive and often experimental application of psionics. By imbuing psionic power into an item during manufacturing, in the same way weapons and armor and the base form of a universal item could be enchanted, the resulting component could channel psionic energy, and thus was compatible with 'psionic coding', the art of calling upon the mental energy stored within via technological impulses and electricity. Each piece needed to be imbued with an amount of energy proportional to its designated task; for instance, many things only required the weakest enhancements to become compatible with the system as a whole and be able to conduct psionic energy. Contrarily, an AI mainframe designed to perform intense calculations and procure information from any source such as Perseus required imbuement from a masterful manifester, such as Choko herself. General pieces didn't have any power requirements, while specialized ones necessitated the crafter to know a particular power, such as *hypercognition* and *metafaculty* for Perseus's compute nodes, or *force screen* in the creation of force barrier emitters ubiquitously in Sollum's defensible choke points and walls. This ability to recycle the powers they had researched for automated functions was what made Sollum tech so flexible and adaptable.

Additionally, the prerequisite of being psionic in order to create some of the pieces fundamental to Sollum's designs was what made reverse-engineering the technology so difficult. Psionics was a rare art even in Farauei as people were more familiar with the various forms of true magic. It was almost unseen outside of Farauei, and even some naturally psionic aliens would have trouble formulating their psychic energies into the powers required to imbue a component. Even understanding the technology was difficult, as it seemingly conjured effects such as powerful lasers and force barriers without any complex physical hardware.

It was known that Choko was experimenting with a fork of Qubes OS. As well, the nation's sole gateway into the internet of the outside world was a Tor bridge that she ran from Perseus. This suggested that Choko was working on directly integrating human protocols into her technology, possibly indicating she wanted to expand into the outside world at some point.

They also possessed their own dominant social networking service, named Ethergate, which combined a human-equivalent instant messaging protocol which supported both direct messages, peer-to-peer user groups, and "servers" with their own channel system (near-identical to Discord in implementation) with a public board where users wrote more permanent and longer posts, in a function more akin to Twitter or Miiverse.

Sollum technology was mostly comparable to Earth tech in what it could produce, particularly in its weak points such as cross-land and air transportation, as well as the infrastructure to move resources around such as water. They had directed energy weapons in the form of firearms and plasma blades, and had a particular fondness for creating different versions of their weapons that had a different elemental energy imbued into them. Where it excelled and put itself above what humanity could do was in its automation and AI abilities, as well as its biological interfacing capacity; Sollum had cracked cybernetics far before the humans of the outside world did. They could use the psionic energy of their components to interface with connected organic systems, with the right firmware. This made installation of prosthetics relatively simple. Concerning automation and AI, skilled crafters and programmers worked together to create quasi-intelligences that could understand natural languages, and make inferences, reason, and automated decision-making by emulating a humanoid mind, which almost entirely negated the first step of training an AI on generations upon generations of abstract data input. Another minor convenience of incorporating psionics into their technological designs is that networking protocols were incredibly simplified, and through the implementation of powers like *correspond*, one could create a messaging system that worked almost laglessly and at any range, even into other dimensions; in fact, advanced portal technology could be created as well, something that required feats of engineering and physics unfathomable to present-day Earth. The creation of portal technology was prohibitively rare and expensive though, because not many psionicists had access to planar travel powers, and even fewer devoted themselves to artifice. Such devices were often experimental prototypes and manufactured only when requested, without aid of a common template to guide their creation.

Before the advent of the draconic fusion reactor in the late 80's, Choko relied on geothermal and magical (*faerzress-*derived) electricity. She had experimented once with using the Phazon of the Leviathan to power a nuclear fission reactor, but the project was abandoned only a few years after completion due to concerns with radioactive waste and potential disasters at the facility itself. The components were recycled for the fusion reactor later.

Aesthetically, Sollum's technology has a very "raw" design. Other than the elvish accents of the drowcraft style that has become so popular, as well as the occasional channels in their devices for psionic energy, most devices had no decorations and were, at best, simply polished metal and polycarbonates. They did not see beauty in pointless decor, but instead, ruthless and brutal efficiency; to the architects and engineers of Sollum, seeing a device working perfectly was better than seeing it look pretty. This was also how their cities looked; the industrial and residential outer city had a very grungy and gritty design, with dull grey metal with only a hint of green and brown, accented by the occasional fluorescent light. It was comparable to the 2003 version of City 17. As one approached the inner city, the maintenance and amount of flourish increased, and the designs became more outlandish and more alien. Curiously, they preferred selective forcefields over doors the closer one got to the center. The design would resemble something like the Sanctuary Fortress from Metroid Prime 2: Echoes. At the very center, in the areas directly surrounding the Citadel, it looked to be something like the modern Combine architecture from the retail version of Half-Life 2, with a distinctly non-human aesthetic.

In time, when Choko leads her people to the space age, her starship technology will have a lot of Reaper and Geth elements, from Mass Effect. She will also likely rely on psionic jump drives that rely on astral travel as her main method of FTL transport. This will lead to an overhaul of her city and any future colonies, making them more refined, but still just as brutally efficient. She may even develop robotic workers and soldiers akin to the geth, and given how much it fits with the mental theme of psionics, possibly invent indoctrination and how it strangely emanates from her alien technology.

## Relationships

Choko is the main representative of her nation, and does the diplomacy work when dealing with other nations. She tries to maintain relationships at a distance, since she doesn't want to have to side with others during their strifes. Sollum has never been part of any wars. It used to trade technology with the lunarians, and still maintains a decent relationship with them by way of Hiou and Choko's friendship. The city has had to deal with drow raiding parties in the past, but Choko has never pressed to try and retaliate against the neighbouring drow cities, because it would take too much work and likely fail. Instead, she advocates to fortify the city.

In The Magnum Opus, Sollum becomes a Combine colony with Choko as its administrator. It was once settled on Phaaze, but moved to the Half-Life+Portal universe's version of Earth. In the contract, it shares its resources with the greater Union, which works out to be a pretty good deal. It also becomes a potent anti-Gem Empire force as Choko plots to dismantle their empire with her special operatives.

Post-Scratch, Sollum instead starts itself on Aether and maintains a friendly relationship with the Luminoth.

## Demographics

About two-thirds of the population were "mostly" human; kalashtars, humans and elans. A few more percentile were human in ancestry but had a significant portion of non-human blood, such as half-drow and half-orcs. Major houses within the city possess divinely imbued bloodlines, frequently of the Basaïa, Brenna or Azrai derivations. As the population of Sollum consists mostly of descendants of Farauei natives, the most common ethnic groups were the Yamato and Ainu people. The state language was Undercommon, but the ethnic groups spoke their racial language amongst themselves, and Qualith was a second language taught to essentially everyone due to how common it was.

Sollum humans had a noticeable draconic ancestry, which seemed to be from Choko's bloodline disseminating into the populace. Despite being the monarch, her children never take her place, and though they live long, they lack her immortality. As well, without careful maintenance, the strength of the bloodline was heavily diluted in her descendants, so those who bore manifestations of their bloodline generally only had it in tainted, minor or rarely major strength. The physical effects of this draconic ancestry were a great boon to the humans, who could see with only the dimmest light, or even in no light at all out to a pitiful range. They also sometimes manifested draconic powers, most commonly the ability to temporarily transform their nails into reptilian claws, but more powerful scions of these powers were resistant to bludgeoning damage, could exhale a concussive force-like breath weapon, and most powerfully, grow black, Japanese fan-like dragon wings. The kalashtars and elans were less lucky, kalashtars because they do not inherit any traits from their non-kalashtar parents, and elans because all of their draconic traits are washed away in the transformation, and had to rely on either their psychic powers or technology to see without light.

Of the non-humans, drow were the most plentiful. These drow were not slavers, nor did they follow the Spider Queen, but instead were rogue drow who had fled from their original cities, or the descendants of such drow. They faced discrimination on the streets because the other races distrusted them for the actions of the evil examples of their kind, but they were welcome to stay at the word of Choko and the government, who imposed no such institutionalized discrimination against them. Psychologically, the descendants who were natives of Sollum were most similar to regular elves, and one merely had to look past such frivolities such as skin and hair to see them as such. The refugees were more grim, but they integrated fairly well with the existing elven community. The drow were the least psionic of Sollum's residents, as they primarily practiced arcane or divine magic, and schools teaching magical disciplines were both dominated by and exclusively run by the drow. There were many psychic wizards among them, however.

Other non-human races included svirfneblin, who generally found a reason to live there when they were pressured by the drow, and were attracted to the city by the promises of being able to work in good conditions, and apply their creative talents. They were highly prized as being to Sollum what surface gnomes were to the world above: innovators and inventors, spearheading the technological development of the nation. Duergars were exceptionally rare, but equally prized for their forging capabilities. They generally arrived when their madness brought them outside of their clan's territory, or if they were shunned and rejected by their kin, and despite having a high status in Sollum's hierarchy for what they could do, they were still mistrustful of everyone and felt out of place.

Kobolds, at one point or another, set up camp around the outer city and began to do what they do best: annoying others. However, being that Choko had lots of ties to dragons (to the point of being able to take the form of one), she was able to convince them to work for her and have them worship her as a dragon. As a people, they offered cheap and easy labor, and were particularly good at mining, which she benefited greatly from. However, their relationships with their co-workers was tenuous at best, and they were merely tolerated.

Like the kobolds, halflings showed up at one point, likely as refugees from the terrors of the Underdark. Unlike the kobolds however, halflings have always been quite good at blending in with a human society, and this rings just as true with Sollum. Particularly in the lower classes where there is lots of diversity with race, culture and species, it is not uncommon, nor is it out of place, to see a halfling every now and then.

There are several other races, including adventuring gloamings and grimlocks who have been washed of their tribal nature and inducted into "civilized" society. As well, Choko has made a handful of Gems using the minerals of the Underdark, although she abandoned the project after seeing its effects on the environment so there are correspondingly few. Because they know true freedom under Choko's guidance, unlike Homeworld gems, they have been growing dissatisfied with their small population, and have been pushing for the re-establishment of a kindergarten. Warforged, particularly the psiforged that Sollum roboticists favor, are however crafted in great quantities using their only remaining creation forge, which they guard jealously.

Clerics of Choko, who acted primarily as some bizarre mixture of ordained priest and government agent, were able to draw from the Psionics, Sun, Artifice and Knowledge domains, as well as the Construct, Industry, Thought and Noetics subdomains; as well, personalized interpretations of Choko's power may grant different domains such as Scalykind or the Day subdomain. These clerics were known as templars, though they had all the same abilities as clerics of other deities. They were quite the rarity, as psionicists rarely derived their powers from their faith, and most agents of Choko were psionicists, however it was possible that she could bestow clerical abilities on existing powerful psychics. Though she was unaligned between the forces of Good and Evil, most of her clerics chose to channel positive energy to heal members of the community; necromancy was a very rare art, even among magicians of any sort. Other, minority religions centered around racial gods, such as the Spider Queen, or more popularly, Eilistraee.

All citizens in the nation were literate and given basic education as a right; "permanent residents" could forgo compulsory education, but often didn't, as it was paid for by the government. The school system has 12 mandatory years of education, split into 6-year elementary, 3-year middle and 3-year high schools. Most schools combine all of these into one and just restrict certain buildings from particular year levels. Psionics was a compulsory subject, as was Japanese and math. It was here that most students chose their path, and refined their abilities into the particular class they wanted to be. Most students learned how to manifest powers by the end of year 6, but did not gain the unique abilities of their class of choice until around year 12.

Among the humans and those races who never tended towards a common alignment, the most common alignments in the city were lawful neutral and true neutral. As a society based around assisting each other and working together, they strayed away from chaos and evil and towards law and goodness, although good was hard to find in a place such as the caverns they dwelt in. The drow had a chaotic streak but favored true neutral, with equal measures of evil and good. Gloamings, being gloamings, would often be chaotic and sometimes evil, but never particularly enough to be noticed. The kobolds, naturally, favored law and evil, but focus on rigid hierarchy and falling into order placed them more neutrally morally.