Cherie Heiberg (CH): Hi everyone. I’m Cherie Heiberg, the Archivist here at CIG. I’m one of the hosts of the Loremakers Guide to the Galaxy. If you’ve never seen Loremakers Guide to the Galaxy before, it is a show where one of the members of the lore team takes the time to talk about the science and the fun facts and the lore behind each of the systems in the game. With that, let’s get started.
So today we’re going to go over Hades, which to me is a very archaeologically interesting system. I’ve seen some chatter recently about ghost stories or scary parts of the game that we would like to include and Hades is a good example of that. It is a system of the dead. It’s totally unclaimed. It was accidentally discovered in… mmm when was it discovered, 2515, by the crew of the Mary Crow which were, you know not exactly an official vessel. They usually just did their thing. Well I’m not going to say they’re smugglers, but they were certainly independant business people. They kept their discovery of Hades secret for quite a few years until the last surviving member of the crew, navigated by the name of Jake Taps, sold the information off to the Dynamo Corporation.
When the Dynamo Corporation came to this galaxy, they discovered a wasteland, an ancient civilization completely laid to waste, no inhabitants, ruins throughout the entire system. With that discovery, their hands were legally tied. They weren’t able to terraform the system as they may have liked and the system became unclaimed, but archaeologically protected.
Now travellers through the system often swear that it is haunted. Nothing has been definitively proven of course. Let’s go right back here again. There is one particular ghost that people say that they see. People, Banu, Xi’an, Teverin, perhaps even Vanduul see this thing that is… it’s a creature, it’s kind of undetermined, no one’s ever gotten too good look of it. Doesn’t have skin. Blue veins and blue musculature are visible on the surface of the being and whenever someone tries to get a good look of it, it vanishes.
It has obtained cryptid status by this point. It’s known by quite a few names as many cryptids are such as: Hades Satan, Tobias, Thanatos, that’s a good one. So here we have Hades, the star of the system right here. It was a mistakenly classified as a B-Type star by the crew of the Mary Crow and when the Dynamo Corporation came with their surveyors, they correctly reclassified it as a Type-F star.
The habitable zone is a little wider than that of our own sun because it’s kind of like one step up on the stellar sequence and consequently three of the planets in the system Hades I, II, and III are all inhabitable. Although they are no longer habitable for reasons I am just about to go into. This is Hades I. Because it’s so close to the sun, it is quite possible that this was a lush tropical planet with oceans and ice caps and savanna and jungle, kind of like a balanced climb. Warm, very nice to live in, maybe not very temperate, but definitely a good place you would like to go to grow food.
But currently it is a hellscape, it’s crater blasted. There’s evidence of great weapons being discharged, there’s…the ruins that used to exist here don’t even really exist anymore except for impressions in the earth of the planet where the ruins may have once stood. Now we’re not exactly sure what happened to Hades I, we’re not actually sure what happened to any of the planets in the system but evidence points to a big war that happened between the three planets and it’s possible that they were all settled by three different species. It’s possible that the one species in the system inhabited all the planets and they broke into various factions and went to war with each other. I will say there is evidence of only one sentient species found so far but there’s still quite a lot to discover.
This is Hades II, it is a very geologically active planet, there are volcanoes all over it that are erupting quite often, spewing ash all over the planet and consequently much of the ruins that are on this planet are sealed underneath the big, barrier of ash sort of like Pompeii. There have been many different surveys on this planet to try to both get into the ruins and to survey them without damaging the integrity of the ruins, just for posterity sake…but because of the incredibly harsh environment, it’s swirling storms all over the planet. Constantly blowing winds, lightning strikes, tornadoes, you know what have you. It’s very, very difficult to conduct a stately and slow and correct archeological survey and mining is also prohibited, just in case anyone was interested.
Now unlike Hades II, Hades III is a very still planet. There is no weather, there is no wind, at least none on the surface, there’s jetstreams in the high atmosphere. There’s very little atmosphere left though, it’s completely toxic to humans because of that there is nothing living on the surface. There is evidence there may have been organic life at some point but it is absolutely no longer there so it’s pretty rough there. Most of what we know about the Hadesians originates from this planet because of the mostly intact nature of the ruins, probably preserved because the weather on the planet is next to nothing. What we know about this species is that they were roundish, they were a little bit bigger than humans, they had very long arms and kinda weird tentacle appendages that varied from statue to statue so it’s not known if they were actual appendages or if they had a decorative purpose whether it was ceremonial, it’s hard to say. Very few records of this civilization have ever been found, because the atmosphere is so toxic it’s difficult for all but the most well funded teams to gain access here and a well funded team would be very interested in figuring out what’s going on here because Hades IV which is known as the Broken Planet is cracked in half.
It was cracked in half by some kind of force because of the state of the system it is speculated that this is a planet killing weapon that was most likely partially responsible for the horrific war that may have taken place in this system and so various weapons corporations are very interested in hiring well funded outfits to try and get in and see what the tech is and whether they can replicate it and sell it themselves. It is illegal to do this but that doesn’t necessarily stop some corporations from trying and that is the Hades system. One of the spookiest systems in the entire known universe, not a UEE system, unclaimed. Shipping routes come through here sometimes but no one really likes to stay here very long. Thank you for tuning in this week and I hope you enjoyed this tour of Hades, wooo.