Manavi

Manavi is surprisingly a great deal smaller than Earth–only about a fifth of the mass and three-fifths the radius. The day length is mercifully around 24 hours long, but their year is only 133 days–the Zhovgonese use a calendar that marks time through the movements of Manavi, the Moon (orbiting around the planet only twice a year), the red planet Vashni (which takes two Earth years to complete an orbit around the sun, or six local years) and the gas giant Kosvar (six Earth years/thirty-six local years).

The planet got hit with a comet quite early on in its development, taking away a sizeable chunk that became the moon but leaving about as much water on the surface as Earth has on its own–volume for volume, not percentage coverage, which frankly makes the whole thing a sauna at the best of times and a snowball at the worst. Its tectonics are nearly as static as those of Mars, but the important distinction here is the word almost–volcanoes still erupt across the planet, leading simultaneously to thicker clouds and a warmer climate than our own Earth. The atmosphere gets down to one-and-a-half times thicker than Earth's at sea level; at a single atmosphere, the average temperature is 18º, warmer and more humid than anything on Earth. And yet this is the world during a warm period; the ever-present icecaps at the poles are at a temporal minimum, where at times during the planet's history they've almost reached the equator.

Think of Manavi, then, as a condensed world. There's lots of water and volcanoes and ice and land, but they've got far less space than even Mars has. Volcanoes erupt, and because of the high gravity some have reached heights over 15 kilometres high.The moon's still around, but tides can reach up to two metres high or less than half a metre depending on the position of the sun. There are as many classes of animals as on Earth, but fewer orders and species because, frankly, there just isn't room.

Once, the dominant species on the planet was an albatross-like reptile which took to the winds and developed a global culture surprisingly quickly. These were the Eremites, and although long-extinct their cultures are retained through two groups of fey folk, the goblins and banshees, which tend to be less receptive to the newcomers than they were to their initial creatures.

These newcomers, the current dominant species, form a strange symbiosis. The Pastors (minos pastor) are large, iguanodon-like herbivores with a migratory bent and a mind bent to cycles and prophecy. All Pastors, curiously enough, start out as female, but make a change to hermaphrodity at some time in their lives. It took some time, but they domesticated a second species, the Faithful (daedalus pius), who more closely resemble large carnivorous tiger-striped wallabies. Strictly male and female, they are highly isolationist by nature, but have slowly grown more tolerant of others of their kind even without the steadying presence of the Pastors nearby. Pastors tend to the land and handle international trade and communication, while the Faithful build great hive-cities and try to puzzle out the chaos inherent in the universe. Pastors, in other words, provide stability—and the Faithful never cease to surprise them.

At the moment, the descendants of the empire of Zhovgo (at its largest about the size of Australia, which is fairly substantial considering it took up the entire area around an extinct super-volcano) are the most developed, reaching something that could be called the Industrial Revolution. And a good thing, too, because it looks like the planet's beginning to cool down again...