Friday Facts #398 - Fulgora

Posted by Earendel on 2024-02-16

Hello there,
Where shall we go today?


Welcome to Fulgora

You land on an unfamiliar planet, a lifeless and desolate place. The thin air is freezing cold but bone dry. A distant sun twinkles in the dull purple of the sky. Wispy clouds race by as a gale whips up sand that grates against your armour.

Fulgora planet icon

As you look around, you find yourself in a desert with endlessly snaking dunes of dust-like sand. The dust almost seems to hover as though gravity were overwhelmed by static electricity. As you press forward, you pass peculiar pillars of fused sand and metal. The sand gives way to rock as you find yourself on the edge of a wind-swept plateau.

Standing on the cliff-edge, you see similar landforms in the distance: Flat tables of rock standing tall from the shifting dark terrain below. The sky dims, and in a flash, the thunder that was on the horizon only moments ago is upon you. Lightning pierces the sky and strikes your energy shield. It can't take many strikes like this.

Flashing lights warning.

In the stormy night you run to evade the lightning while looking for shelter. Suddenly, multiple bolts of lightning strike the same location nearby. Some unknown silhouette looms over you. Could it be some rock formation, or perhaps another pillar of fused sand? No, this is nothing natural. This is alien.

What is this alien structure? It is clearly ancient and beaten by the elements, but it does at least seem immune to the lightning. Deconstructing it gives some useful materials but no more answers. Perhaps it would have been more useful intact.

As day breaks, the sun glistens off the dark substance below the plateaus's cliffs. The surface seems to be a dark churning layer of oil mixed with sand. This is not a pristine new world after all, this is an already polluted one.

You descend the plateau into the dark shifting terrain. The disgusting tar-like mixture sticks to your feet. The oil is not so deep that you cannot walk through it, but the soft sand below forces you to keep moving.

As you climb the next plateau you find an ancient paved road that leads through another desert. The rubble of ancient walls protrudes from the sand in places revealing a convoluted pattern of corridors and passages. As you travel further, some of the ruins show signs of ancient machinery poking through the sand.

In the distance you see some much larger structures in clusters. The strange rounded shapes of the ruined architecture makes them look like robed figures huddled together. The one road becomes a network of many roads that each lead to towering alien buildings.

Few of the buildings retain their roofs, many of them must have been much taller, skyscrapers maybe. Using one as a vantage point, countless more sites like this can be seen on the horizon. This was not just a mining town or an outpost city, this was a whole civilization.

Yet all that moves over this grave landscape now, is the sun, the sky, and the sand.


Conclusion

Some of the sounds, decoratives and structures are either placeholders or still need more work. The combination of all the assets so far, despite being unfinished, gives this new planet a really distinct mood and atmosphere.

Of course, it's not just the aesthetics that makes Fulgora unique. We'll be back with more details about the mechanics and what you can do on Fulgora soon.


As always, shock us with your thoughts at the usual places.