Aballon

Aballon

(Cosmos)

Titles

The Horse

Type

Planet

Adjective

Aballonian

Diameter

x 1/3

Mass

x 1/20

Gravity

x 1/3

Atmosphere

Trace amounts

Orbit

90 days

Inhabitants

Aballonians, diggers, ice vines, sharpwings

Satellites

None

Images of Aballon

This article might have further canon details available on StarfinderWiki.

The planet Aballon (also known as the Horse because of its speed around the sun) is the closest of the planets to Golarion's star. Close inspection via divination magic and telescopes shows that it is dotted with ruins that look almost mechanical in nature.

Description

Aballon is a relatively small world, only one-third the diameter of Golarion, and made of dense iron and other heavy metals. It also has a wealth of mineral deposits, including ores and skymetals rare on Golarion. It is pockmarked by thousands of impact craters, the edges of some of which are as high as mountains.

Aballon's proximity to the sun, and its lack of any meaningful atmosphere, means the planet undergoes extreme fluctuations in surface temperature that can melt lead during the day and reach superfreezing depths of cold at night. It could easily be assumed that for this reason alone, Aballon would be a charred, featureless world devoid of life. Studies have shown, however, that ruins of ancient cities poke through its shifting sands. Whether these structures were built by elementals or a mechanical race is unknown to most scholars of Golarion, but it is speculated that they were designed to harvest as much of the sun's energy as possible. The planet only has a trace amount of atmosphere that is cooked off from time to time and later replenished by the solar wind.

History

Thousands of years ago, a race of travelers arrived on Aballon in enormous spaceships to harvest its ore and take advantage of its proximity to the sun. Now known only as the First Ones, these aliens moved about on servo-driven limbs to transform the surface of the small planet, creating giant cities, and building armies of servitor machines that ranged from dull earth-movers to organizational intelligences smarter than the cleverest humans.

After centuries of harvesting Aballon's riches, the First Ones vanished, leaving their machine servitors behind without further guidance. Some of the left behind machines simply shut down, others went insane, while others fought the remaining members of their kind in a chaotic war. When the conflict finally ended, the surviving machines were left to discover what it meant to be free, bereft of their semi-divine leadership; they are now simply referred to as Aballonians.

Gazetteer

Aballon has a few interesting locations:

• The Automatrix
• The Cities of the First Ones
• The city of Epoch, also known as 'the Striving'
• The Fields of Judgment
• The Ice Wells, including
  • Horsethroat, founded by Abasi Nasf and supported by Casson Menias
• The Midnight Trenches
• The Sea of Glass
• Sun Basin

Inhabitants

• The mechanical Aballonians, who live in two factions known as Those Who Wait and Those Who Become.
• Diggers
• Ice vines
• Sharpwings

Figurative representation

In scholarly works, Aballon is sometimes represented by a complex rune in which a 'U'-shape is attached by a small vertical bar to a circle hanging below.

Travel on Aballon

Due to its intense fluctuations in temperature, almost complete lack of atmosphere, and unfiltered exposure to the sun's radiation, most races of Golarion have a very hard time surviving on Aballon. The only exception is in the half-frozen jungles of the Ice Wells, that contain both water and vegetation in small supply.

Because of Aballon's fast rotation, days and nights are roughly half the length as those on Golarion, and due to the thin atmosphere, most of its inhabitants speak via a sign language, or a kind of mechanical, wave-based telepathy.