CCSF Blog Carnival 6: Mythology

Today's prompt is about the mythology and backstory of Creatures. I'm the worst person to ask this since I haven't really thought about the backstory in any real detail. It's been over a year since I've read the backstory for C1/C2 and even longer for C3/DS. I remember liking both of them, I just don't remember that much of it. The two bits of lore that have stuck with me over the years are: the Shee left Albia/C1 with only 6 eggs to continue the species and the Shee were master space ship builders and were prone to abandoning spaceships. These two bits of (possibly incorrect) lore have informed my own version of the creatures universe, and the few bits of fan fiction I've written for the Creatures games.

Like many players, I used to occasionally write down what happened in world as a story. Over time this evolved into a fan version of what a Shee society would be like. In my fannon, the Shee had found their fabled 3D world, and were so unimpressed about it that most Shee left for other planets. So there were quite a few Shee, but most were scattered around the galaxy. The Lone Shee's warp was still a thing, but most of the ships weren't compatible with it yet. Communication between them was possible within a certain distance, but they could go quite a few years without bumping into another of their species. Even still written letters and packages of strange new tea were a favorite thing for Shee to send to each other. Who delivered the mail though? It was often a species of immortal norn and, rarely, a grendel. These mailnorns and mailgrendels were smart enough to pilot simple mail ships, and deliver mail.

This has nothing to do with the actual post.

Ships filled with genetic experiments and frozen specimens were common and abandoned ones were also somewhat common. (This was partly inspired by the Seru agent.) So it was fairly common to see a few Shee and their assistants exploring old, abandoned ships to salvage something from them. One of these explorers is Balmora and she was an assistant to a Shee version of myself. From what I remember, my Shee was the owner of the Mobula Ray, and Balmora was her assistant. She could pilot the ship without the Shee and knew quite a bit about ship engineering and maintenance. She was also prone to forgetting things and ruining experiments, so the Shee eventually fired her.

Balmora became a freelance assistant while the Shee went on to do other things. I didn't do much with the Shee character, but Balmora's whole freelance assistant thing has stuck around. I've even thought of starting a more story-based world again, though that idea is quickly killed. I have enough projects on my list of Creatures list already.

A side effect of the many, many abandoned ships is that the Grendels of Minimordor, or GoMs, were able to breed and take over small sections of the galaxy. The GoM queens were smart enough to be able to direct their hoards of males to salvage parts and repair broken down ships. They could also pilot ships, and raid Shee ships for norns to eat and eggs to enslave. They tried to leave the Shee ships intact and didn't hurt the Shee if they didn't fight back. After all, they were dependant on the Shee for food.

Inspired by my own Cattle norns I also eventually added Shee that tried to appease the smarter GoM queens with immortal norns for slaves and fast breeding norns for food. This worked out well for the GoMs, they got a stable supply of food and cheap labor, while the Shee were left alone. Until those smart GoM queens had female children and the GoMs took over more sectors of space. The GoMs weren't invincible though, space could still kill them and most of the queens weren't immortal. So they couldn't take over the galaxy, just make it a miserable place for some Shee.

This is long enough and I don't have many questions about the mythology or backstory. So I'll talk about my favorite bit of C1 lore instead. I've always been facinated with the idea of a limited population, like the Shee only leaving 6 eggs behind. In C1, it made you extremely careful with those precious few eggs... until you realized how to get more anyway. I've tried doing a similar thing in C3/DS where I limited myself to 6-10 SERU eggs. The run ended horribly when all but two females died and I had to import a few gen 1 males. I've considered trying it again or trying it in a different game, but, like the story-based worlds, the idea is killed before it goes to far... Anyway, I'm really curious to read the other post's for todays prompt. This isn't a subject I've thought about in any real detail for years now, and I'm interested in others weird versions of how the Creatures universe could work.