About

"Teetering on the edge of poverty and brainwashed by nationalistic propaganda Dulphi chases her late mother's dead dream of exploring the stars by enlisting in the Space Explorer Core only to find herself in a losing battle for her humanity."

One part bio-horror and one part manifest destiny, Teegarden is an unflinching exploration of a future where space exploration is driven entirely by eugenics and corporate greed. Where corporations have supplanted governments and what bloodline you were born into - be it modified or unpatented - determines how your life will play out - what purpose you will serve - and more importantly, how profitable of an investment you (and your genes) are for Yebra.

• Prologue
• Issue 1
• Issue 2
• Issue 3
• Lore Dumpster

• Homo azulensis

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Gallery

Mods

The first modline to be developed, originally owned by Mars-Co, acquired by Yebra during a merger. Azulians contain the following modifications:

TTRPG Game Mechanics (prospective)

Skill - determines your starting point distributionGenerational Wealth - increases the starting skill stats but does not increase your genetic potentialGenetic Potential - the maximum to which any skill point can be increased by experienceAugments - losing limbs will result in stronger robotic replacements after a debug injury periodCull - Designing an explorer with sufficiently off-standard physical traits will mark your character for culling. You can still serve but will not be sent home or contribute to the gene pool.Perma-death, perma-injury - You only have one body and no means of returning health points in the field. If you are injured you will gain a debuff or cripple depending on where you were hit. Limb injuries often result in amputation upon successful extraction. Any injury that causes sterility or high risk of mutation will mark you as a cull. Less effort and expense will be spent keeping you alive and your suicide mission risk increases dramatically. Retiring an explorer rather than playing as them until they die will contribute generational wealth and genetic potential in accordance to how long that explorer served and what risk factors they were exposed to. Longer service lowers genetic potential and increases generational wealth on average.Comrade or Nemesis - your actions on ship and in mission determine how various characters treat you and may spawn various events during your downtime, both positive and negative. Cultivate a particularly poor reputation and you may get thrown out the airlock or murdered in your sleep.Disposition - every character has randomized personality traits that alter their behavior positively and negatively. Being paranoid, for instance, increases stress, lowers sleep quality and may irritate npcs with conflicting traits but it also massively decreases your chance of being assassinated successfully.(Personality traits can be inherited and increase or decrease in severity depending on player behavior and environmental factors.)Bad egg - you may randomly end up with a serial killer, sadist or degenerate on your team. You can attempt to assassinate, court martial, cull or assault them with varying degrees of success based on your respective stat blocks. Generally it is best to weed them out early before something happens to you. You may also gain this stat either as a disposition during character creation or after rolling a coping mechanism die to reduce a stress debuff. Characters with this trait have lower fecundity and must roll an annihilation die each time they draw an event card. They must roll with disadvantage when returning home. Failing an annihilation roll means you must draw a massacre card. Failing when returning home will either end that bloodline or cause the surviving progeny to roll an additional disposition die, along with a coping mechanism die at the start of character creation.Feud - your genetic line may feud with other genetic lines. The longer you play as one linage, the more feuds you’ll accumulate. Feuds may be created with other players or NPCs due to repeated negative interactions resulting in the creation of multiple nemesis in one bloodline or by player consent if you both agree to the feud as part of your backstory during character creation.

Strain Planet Topography and it's Impacts

Azulu is a small planet composed of slag from mining operations by a long dead civilization. It has a large moon with an eccentric orbit that is slowly decaying. Eventually it will crash into the planets surface, though not for a million years at least.The moon being so close causes extreme tides (hundreds of feet) as the water follows the moon across the planets surface, creating dry and flood seasons. The biosphere is comprised of native tidepool adapted species capable of surviving underwater and on dry rocky cliff faces, using moisture in the air as hydration.High up surfaces of the planet - above the reach of the ocean (usually) have accumulated soil after being colonized by invasive species from YEBRA's biosphere (earth plants, mostly, though some aggressive weeds from other planets too.)Azulu obits two suns, one a brown dwarf, the other a young star borne of the old star's nebula. The brightness of this new star is one reason all Azulians are some shade of reddish brown. Their sun is brighter than ours so nowhere on their planet would pale skin not be a cancer risk.Because their eumelanin is derived from the elephant's foot fungus, if exposed to excess solar radiation Homo azulensis will tan reddish-purple, not darker brown like Homo sapiens.If exposed to gamma radiation, their chromatophores will burst and they will turn violently purple and begin metabolizing gamma radiation into ATP. This is also why they have different eye colors than Homo sapiens do.Red/Purple/Brown are all a matter of eumelanin concentration. Yellow is a piggyback gene from their tapetum lucidum mod. It's recessive and carried on the X chromosome so only females express it. Those with yellow eyes thus also tend to have better night vision. Thus, yellow eyes on a male is a surefire indication of chimerism or a DSD. Both of which are more prevalent in the Homo azulensis population due to lack of genetic diversity and the fact that one of their main mods is basically just congenital adrenal hyperplasia with extra steps.The city of Azulu (on the planet Azulu, populated entirely by Azulians - Yebra is very creative at naming things if you couldn't tell) is circular, with the innermost sections reserved for Space Explorers followed by apartments for dependia men and their kids, working class housing interspersed with manufacturing plants and government run shops, a security wall, poor houses and redlight districts, a security moat, agricultural land interspersed with outlander settlements and pirate/smuggling gangs/homeless.Beyond the agricultural district is the giant unscalable retaining wall surrounding the city state and beyond that is a mystery to most as only pirates and outlanders venture outside it at low tide.

Economy

The economic system of Azulu is crafted such that the only way to make enough money to provide for ones children is to enlist for at least one tour of duty.Children born after their mother passes Quality Control receive a care stipend whereas those born before or from a mother who will never complete a tour of duty receive nothing.Men may work in factories for roughly half as much as it takes to meet subsistence needs. Currency is metallurgic so its value is intrinsic and supply limited.All businesses allowed to operate on Azulu are owned by Yebra and adjust their prices to ensure they extract the same amount each year as they pay out in wages ensuring that the currencies value never changes.All non-subsistence goods manufactured on Azulu are exported at no net cost to Yebra due to Azulu’s closed economy.The female population on Azulu is static as well, and new infrastructure is never built, only old infrastructure maintained to prevent growth and thus, an increase in power/freedom.This is due to the sheer volume of space explorers exported and killed each year as well as the intense level of poverty the average male lives in leading to early deaths from malnutrition/violence.(Outland Azulians may build their own infrastructure but they're doing it with no knowledge base and if caught, may be executed and the structures destroyed.)Like the money in/money out rate remains static, so does the birth/death rate. It's the civilizational equivalent of old stagnant water.

Politics

Popular or infamous military women are frequently given a variety of policing and mayoral roles on Azulu. They never have any real power and don't make any meaningful decisions that affect Yebra, instead their purpose is to manufacture consent from the population and keep them in line, something a non-Azulian would be incapable of due to the fact that Azulians broadly see all other hominid strains as weak "Homo retardensis."If you were to grill them on what their job actually entails, they would say signing papers they didn't read or write, giving speeches they’d been coached on and killing whoever they were told had just questioned their authority or undermined the "natural order of the universe."

Propaganda and Information Control

Children are never taught hard skills such as construction, fabrication, plumbing, sewing, cooking, advanced mathematics, physics, chemistry, writing or art. If they are taught these things it is solely by their parents and peers.Instead they are tested and scored on innate baseline characteristics that are biological rather than learned and assigned Quality Control scores accordingly.At the same time, they're spoon fed propaganda from Yebra intended to instill national pride, chauvinism, obedience and squash critical thought/creativity in favor of conformity.Boys and girls are taught together to keep both away from their parents for most of the day, and boys are often excluded from “feminine” (space explorer related) activities so as to further exacerbate the skill gap between the sexes and encourage discrimination.Boys are often given items to assemble on mock factory lines while girls are given foam weapons and taught to beat the crap out of each other.School attendance is a requirement by law and having unregistered kids is likewise a crime and kids in school are encouraged to report their peers who don't attend.If a parent doesn't put their kid in school, the child will be taken from them and raised as a ward of the state. If a parent does this repeatedly they'll be executed and treated as a terrorist.

PTSD, Psychopathy and Neglectful Parenting among Space Explorers

Veterans always either start as genetic psychopaths due to selective breeding or return from deployment with massive trauma and PTSD from being made to commit war crimes or die.Many are self-hating, but many more are resentful of the male portion of the population for never having had to be deployed or experience what the average vet has experienced while still having the audacity to complain and be unable to provide for themselves without "whoring themselves out."(They never leave their economic bubble so this is all they see)As a result some vets will take it upon themselves to kill men they view as privileged/entitled or unappealing to them personally as a way of culling their population as the female population has been culled by Yebra. Some latch onto a romantic partner as a form of escapism and then turn into resentful serial offenders if that partner cheats on them (or is taken advantage of) while they'e on deployment.Most have the maternal instincts of a lizard and see the check the father gets as him getting paid to ensure they don't have to bother actually raising anything they shit out.When their kids get old enough to seek out interaction with their mother, they're often ignored and made to compete with their siblings for attaboys.Often the mother will have a favorite she thinks is the most likely to complete a tour of duty and carry on the family name (last names are monikers earned during service and cannot be inherited by a child who has not served) and will compare all the other (disposable) siblings to her golden child.Often, Space Explorers will have kids with multiple men specifically so they don't have to deal with having all their children around their government house (“palace”) all at once.The dads tend to live with their kids in mid to shitty apartments just outside of the Explorer district.

Misandry

Azulian women almost ubiquitously view Azulian men as expendable and weak. Having only half the value of a woman due to the fact that the average male isn't going to beat the average female in a fight, has less muscle mass (would still be more than a human of equal size on average) and are “unable to reproduce.”They don't have health education so many women genuinely believe their kids are created parthenogenically. Sex and reproduction broadly aren't seen as intersecting concepts for women. Childbirth isn't particularly difficult due to their size (babies are small relative to their mothers body mass) pregnancy is shorter (5-6 months vs 9) and very few women actually raise their kids, so there's little incentive to find ways of evading pregnancy, let alone develop pattern recognition regarding it. It's a bodily function, no different than pissing or shitting.As a result, a lot of mothers have a disposable attitude towards their children - if the current ones are fucked up in some way, they can just make more and replace them.On the flip side, a lot of men will do ridiculous and debasing things to try and woo space explorers because if they manage to father a child with one, that child, when genetically matched with him by the Quality Control Center, will be given to him to raise along with a stipend which is the most amount of money a man can make without committing crime for profit.Children of non explorer's receive no such benefit. As a result, most of the normal, non-perversely incentivized relationships happen between non-explorers and non-gold diggers. (But, like Dulphi's parents, if the woman never enlists their kids will be born into a life of poverty which in turn incentivizes the mother to enlist to escape it. A vicious cycle.)A lot of young women and girls are fed chauvinistic propaganda about how aliens and the “other” (those that don't meet their gender ideals/quality control standards) are destroying civilization and humanity broadly and that they have a moral responsibility to protect, not the weak or innocent, but their culture, national identity and way of life.Sometimes, young boys will get caught up in that too, but most are quickly disillusioned when their female peers learn to treat them like dirt and they're given no outlet for their nationalistic zeal.

Xenophobia

Azulians are raised in a walled city with no parks, no wildlife and no farm animals. The native flora that does grow there is limited to small barely noticeable species and invasives from earth like grass or clover.Thus they have no knowledge of evolution, ecology, biology, bush craft, hunting, gathering or domestication and cannot survive on their own as a population.All Azulians are deployed to a horrifying planet known for its dangerous megafauna, volcanic inhospitable surface, reverse trophic cone of parasitic organisms and biological cave systems as mission one in their training.This mission has the highest mortality and life threatening injury/infection rate of all deployments.It's intended to traumatize the strong and kill the weak. Those that survive and primed to believe all xenos are like those they encountered on their first deployment and given drugs meant to trigger their fight response/ptsd on subsequent deployments so that they don't question it when some xenos seem peaceful or run away.They're all evil and must be purged. Their complete lack of connection to nature means that if they were deployed anywhere, even Earth, they’d kill any non-hominid animal they saw on sight. Robin? Shot. Rabbit? Stomped. Domesticated animal? What are you? A Xeno-lover? Take your “dog” and face the wall while the firing squad reloads.The behaviors they're groomed into are cartoonishly evil. Though for some like Avola, the grooming isn't necessary. Whereas the former are akin to highly trained hunting dogs, the latter is one with such an extremely overdeveloped prey drive, it’ll maul anything that moves and thus can't be trained, instead operating on pure instinct.An ubermensch whose biological drives align completely with Yebra's bioengineered purpose for them.

Eugenics, Profit and Greed

Everything Yebra does ultimately is about eugenics, power and profit. Specialist lines must be atomized and isolated, made dependent on Yebra for survival and thus stripped of any power they might otherwise cultivate for themselves.Those unpatented individuals with "rights" must be shackled to infinite generational debt such that they be made indiscernible from property in every manner but on paper.They must compete with each other for resources and face an increasingly harsh environment with each generation such that their work performance and efficiency increases exponentially, thus increasing Yebra's profits, power and efficiency exponentially as well, giving them a stronger and stronger stranglehold on the galactic economy and biosphere with every passing year.There are no individuals, no people, no humanity, only fuel, flame and a bottomless pit of greed.

Factions

Citizens - People who did not serve, usually because they are men, sometimes because they are cowards.Veterans - Women who completed at least one tour of duty and lived to tell the tale.Culls - “People” with inheritable genetic defects taken from their parents at birth and raised under ground in work camps built to covertly maintain Azulian infrastructure. Each has a kill switch surgically implanted around their spine at the base of their skull that, if tampered with or activated remotely, will internally decapitate the wearer.Intellectual Property Management Class - Unmodified humans, usually from a rich oligarch family. Charged with making on the ground decisions for Yebra involving their property, intellectual or otherwise. Poor decisions will get them disinherited by their families for hurting their bottom line.Pirates - Companies in competition with Yebra. Usually composed of escaped Intellectual Property, Debt Dodgers and Startups looking to develop a competing product and get bought out. Core membership is composed of rebels, money usually comes from Startup companies and “Angel Investors” looking for an illegal edge. Pirates smuggle anything you could possibly want, anywhere you could possibly want it - for a price. The Azulian faction within the pirate faction will also eliminate any target you want - provided it aligns with The Flesh Broker’s ideological aims or fills her pocket with enough crypto. The Gizmo faction will build anything you want too, provided Big Michael finds the concept you’re going for ambitious enough, and The Flesh Broker allows it.Off-gridders - Azulians who eke out an existence without any permanent infrastructure by scavenging and venturing outside the wall. Persecuted by pretty much everyone but themselves.Wicker Gangs - Groups of youth, mostly girls and a few feminine boys who idolize vets and compete in street wicker tournaments where they destroy “aliens” (kids dressed up as aliens) and beat each other with sticks and rocks. Some more inventive kids have been known to make home-made explosives leading to occasional accidental injury and death. Older teens often place bets on bouts between younger grades and there’s usually a niece of a Space Pirate present willing to sell you enhancers or real weapons to skew the odds in their bookies favor. Kindergarten fight club, basically.Police - Azulien women hired by Yebra for a local paramilitary group that cleans up high profile crimes to prevent civil unrest and to beat down civil unrest when it does occur. They exist purely for intimidation and have no power beyond that of a prison guard.MRA Union - Men’s Rights Activist Union. A labor bloc organized by the male membership of the Space Pirates and Varset. Negotiates work relations between Pirates and the illegal male factory workforce. Also advocates for increased policing and protection of men from Rat Hunters/Deranged Vets.Augmenters - People who install cybernetics (legal or otherwise) to restore or enhance function to various parts of their body. Mostly used by amputee Vets, though some men who have money or influence will get similar augments, though not from licensed doctors as they’re not allowed to install anything militarized on anyone not in the military. Some augments are purely aesthetic (same as any body mod) but most tend to be functional.Neo-Posadists - Terrorist Azulian faction that seeks to destroy Yebra and humanity broadly through any means necessary. Has a tentative alliance with the Space Pirates broadly after the events of Teegarden, though this ends when Phiede starts using the Harvester God to kill non Azulians indiscriminately.Robotic Cleaner Crew - Cleaner bots and maintenance robots that do mundane tasks most don’t want to be bothered with like picking up trash and changing lightbulbs. They also scan for illegal activity and will report to the police if they identify anything that could harm Yebra. Will also do stuff like light homeless people on fire and destroy illegal structures. Indestructible without thermite or anti-material rifles.

Cultural Quirks

Everything within the city walls, including the nastiest most crime and drug infested corredors, is antiseptically clean. This is for several reasons. Reason one, most Azulians don't wear shoes and stepping on glass or trash with your bare foot isn't fun. Littering in front of someone is considered an extreme form of disrespect and is a great way to start a fight. Reason two is trash attracts robots, robots attract cops and then nobody is having a good time.The entire city is one giant 3D print, and buildings are often not constructed with human locomotion in mind. Often one is expected to scale vertically up and down walls and parkour their way around. Most infrastructure is overtly hostile to homeless and disabled people.Cars don't exist outside of the Space Explorer district and while there are some roads wheeled vehicles can traverse, they only exist for use by police or government officials. Private “cars” are superconductors that float over water canals between houses and subdivisions in affluent areas. The Space Explorer district was made deliberately to be non-traversable by foot. This is to keep poor people from trying to sell goods and services there - allowing Yebra to siphon back most of the Explorer's paychecks before they even leave the zipcode.Stores are all identical and sell the same Yebra brand food.Cooking consists almost entirely of combining premade mass produced artificial elements together and is very rarely done using fresh ingredients, let alone by scratch. You know the protein jello from Snow Piercer? That's basically their food, except they make sure it tastes good/addictive so that when someone tries something fresh, their immediate response is disgust. Like giving a kid who eats nothing but fake chicken nuggets brussel sprouts.Agricultural districts do have robotic farm equipment, but it's all remote controlled by Yebra AI, not the farmers themselves.Fashion is very Greek looking. Women tend to dress more simply whereas men use clothes to communicate social status. Rich conservative men will wear layered embroidered clothes that cover everything except their hands, feet and head to communicate that they are monogamous and already have kids. (Monogamy being something expected of fathers, but not women.) The more layers, the more kids he has (the more kids they have, the richer and more unavailable they are.) Single rich men however will wear a single layer outfit with bright colors and little to no embroidery to communicate that they're looking for a spouse. These outfits often aren't very revealing so as to make them look more pure/appealing to women who want a monogamous spouse. Men who wear revealing clothes at social functions in the Space Explorer district are seen as easy and while they definitely get more attention, it's usually only from idiots just returned from duty who think a dependia stripper will be their true love and older women just looking for entertainment.Men who work in the factories for a living are often derided as broke classless prudes both by dependia men and women broadly. Women that work in factories, even moreso. As a result people tend not to wear work uniforms in public. Outlander gear (the kind of clothes Varset wears) is associated with ungovernable lawlessness and criminality. Outlanders lean into that reputation as a means of intimidation and really only get trouble from police and Yebra as a result.Azulu has a big sports and betting culture, beyond just Wicker. The rich part of town has a full fledged gladiatorial arena where anyone (mostly space explorers on enough gear to kill God) can make a name for themselves in mortal combat or die trying. Men too are allowed to compete, though they're relagated to insultingly low weight classes and have to wear uniforms that are barely a step above something a stripper would wear. There's a popular trend among asshole Space Explorers of making their Dependias fight eachother in the arena to see whose is the best while trying to fix/sabotage said fights behind the scenes. Often these fights are coerced on threat of withdrawn financial support and exist purely to give the women something to oggle between the “real fights.”Platinum and gold plated augments and prosthetics are a popular fashion trend pretty much everywhere though only the rich can afford the real deal. Some have taken to melting down currency to make faux platinum Cybernetics for men. Some going so far as to amputate appendages for the aesthetic.In women, hair length is sometimes used to denote military seniority. Soldiers all have theirs shaved at the start of deployment and are allowed to grow it back out throughout their tenure, so if you see someone with long hair while on deployment, it indicates they've been active duty for awhile and survived. After a certain point though that perception can shift from one of respect to distrust as the only people who stay deployed consecutively are people who commit crimes on Azulu and are sentenced to deployment as an alternative to execution or weirdos like Avola who get more enjoyment out of being deployed than they can get planetside without falling into the prior category.Beyond that, hair length and style are not gender specific. If you have a shaved head you will get made fun of a because of the association with cadets/greenhorns.Makeup and cosmetics aren't really a thing for either gender because Yebra doesn't sell them and the only people seen wearing them are humans who are broadly maligned as being gay and retarded.

Popular Slurs