Contemplative

• Overcomplicate challenges, often just to test your abilities and hypotheses.
• Dislike pointless noise and mayhem that distracts you from deeper thought.
• Dedicate yourself to mastering some great mystery, magical tradition, or field of study.
• Refer to yourself as “we,” not “I.”

• Assume you know almost everything about anything.
• Are reticent to voice their thoughts around you, believing you'll relentlessly lecture them or question their epistemological foundation.
• Treat you as a fragile oddity, assuming you're unable to perform simple tasks with your vestigial anatomy.

Through untold generations of selective and psychically guided evolution, contemplatives have transformed from some longforgotten species with humanlike proportions into immense brains with mere vestiges of their abdomens and limbs dangling underneath like the gondola of some cerebral blimp.

The immense brain is roughly 70 pounds of a typical contemplative's 100-pound weight. Hardened layers of skin and cartilage cover the exterior, giving the brain a tough yet extremely pliable texture. The huge brain isn't just for show; a contemplative can store and process vast amounts of information by running independent conscious and subconscious processes subdivided across its four quadrants. Two quadrants handle tasks like motor function, language, and reasoning, akin to a human brain's two hemispheres.

Though capable of conscious thought too, the other two quadrants primarily generate a contemplative's psychic fields. Buoyed by this telekinetic force, a contemplative learns to fly with precision, if not always with speed. Even more importantly, a contemplative's telekinetic field helps support the brain; the organ lacks the structure needed to maintain its shape in standard gravity without psychic support. If rendered truly unconscious, a contemplative risks suffocation, internal bleeding, and weeklong migraines if they survive. Fortunately, they instinctively rest portions of their brain at different times, much like aquatic mammals, in a process called “logging.”

By comparison, a contemplative's lower body seems puny. Tight skin covers its gaunt frame, with spiky bones showing where powerful muscles might have attached themselves millennia ago. A contemplative has two sets of forelimbs, akin to a shirren, with only the upper set capable of manipulating objects in any meaningful way. The lower set act more like antennae, parsing olfactory and tactile information. A contemplative often hovers over a curiosity to analyze it with an array of senses, including the eyes that jut out a short distance from beneath the brain.

Their legs have slightly more strength than their arms. If necessary, a contemplative can waddle short distances before tiring. More often, though, their legs act as stabilizers for pushing off surfaces and reorienting the body in midair.

Some contemplatives find the concept of having a vestigial body at all so distasteful or unnecessary that they wear garments designed to veil it completely, giving them the appearance of a ghostly brain trailing a billowing shroud beneath them.

Contemplative society carefully straddles the competing objectives of isolation and connection. A contemplative thrives in quiet spaces where they're shielded from distractions so they can dive deep into thought. On Akiton, they carved out vast caverns and subterranean cities that didn't just block conventional noise; these places deflected cosmic rays, radiation, and other minute signals that could distract a contemplative's acute senses. Their brains are like great telescopes, working best when far away from the pollution of others' thoughts while they strain to hear the universe's psychic signatures. In practice, this preference for isolation gives many contemplatives an aloof, standoffish quality that discourages some would-be companions.

At the same time, contemplatives have evolved to crave community. The same psychic fields that buoy a contemplative's mass also radiate telepathic signals that act like mental pheromones. Contemplatives subconsciously network and compare notes when living together, borrowing each other's perspectives and mental processing power. This chatter reflexively communicates their biases and moods, which has trained most contemplatives to be straightforward, analytical, and (by most creatures' standards) brash when they openly psychoanalyze and second-guess others. For a contemplative, sugar-coating feedback risks muddling the message.

Though unflinching honesty and dispassionate feedback are deeply valued among contemplative communities, contemplatives who leave the forums of Akiton quickly catch onto and master societal norms, learning to tiptoe around, appreciate, or even exploit others' taboos. After all, chasing away potential colleagues would deny a contemplative the comforting hum of others' thoughts. Adventuring contemplatives enjoy company for another reason: personal drive. Each companion is a potential rival or measuring stick against which a contemplative can judge their own worth, fueling their drive to learn more and (inevitably) outclass those around them. Half the time, a companion isn't even aware that their contemplative friend is engaged in this personal quest for dominance and validation.

After millennia of sharing brainwaves, contemplatives have blurred the line between self and society. Contemplatives rarely use first-person singular pronouns, instead referring to themselves as “we” or “us.” This seems to acknowledge how the community collectively overcomes problems, with no individual able to take sole credit. Yet it's still hypothesized that this linguistic quirk references some powerful entity beyond conventional detection that contemplatives can somehow sense and contact. When asked, contemplatives are infuriatingly coy about providing a definitive answer.

On Akiton, contemplative societies never developed central authorities; the notion of an autocrat or even a ruling council seems laughably self-limiting. Instead, a settlement is more like a constellation of minds that resolve conflicts through debate and psychic consensus. A proposal that can't withstand scrutiny isn't worth implementing, and contemplatives are infamously relentless when analyzing (and often disparaging) other societies' laws and values. This mindset turns some contemplatives into accidental freedom fighters when they challenge a tyrant's shortsighted edicts. Being targeted by secret police or silenced by spies just motivates that contemplative to overthrow an evil regime to prove a point—not out of any sense of moral principle.

Technological Division

Contemplatives are no strangers to technology. Yet the rapid expansion of infospheres, cybernetic augmentation, and other tech has challenged contemplatives' traditional approach to self-perfection. In response, an array of loose societal factions have developed since the Gap.

The Pristine Muse champions traditionalism. To them, a contemplative's mind is already honed to near perfection, and pursuing enlightenment without relying on technology poses the final step in the species' evolution. Incorporating too much technology endorses laziness. By comparison, the Transcendent Cortex embraces technology and augmentations, which they celebrate as just more tools in contemplatives' evolving toolkit as they unravel galactic mysteries. Computing technology surpassed contemplatives' own brain power centuries ago—much as many of them hate to admit it. If they don't master these inventions, contemplatives are doomed to be overshadowed by other species who do.

These opposing viewpoints rarely come to blows. Instead, they're a source of lively debate as contemplatives reexamine and reform their societies. It's possible the two approaches might ultimately reach irreconcilable differences, driving in an evolutionary wedge that could lead to further speciation ages from now.

To a contemplative, understanding is a matter of experimentation, philosophizing, discovery, and hard work. By contrast, divine revelation is a grotesque exercise that needs stronger citations. As a result, contemplatives rarely acknowledge deities through worship. Instead, gods are treated like famous colleagues and living libraries in the greater cosmos—important (and often biased) sources of information that can help a contemplative unravel even greater truths. Any god who demands obedience, commands pointless rituals, or makes unsubstantiated claims about reality earns few contemplative followers.

Contemplatives respect and might obliquely worship deities who encourage their followers to research cosmic answers for themselves. The likes of Eloritu and Yaraesa are natural fits. Their edicts encourage what most contemplatives were already doing, but some commune with these deities as a student might with their academic advisor, seeking guidance and occasional collaboration. Ibra, Oras, and the Newborn are more like divine puzzles whom some contemplatives simultaneously worship and endeavor to decipher; if those deities hold more unsolved mysteries, they're worthy of further praise and attention. Those contemplatives dedicated to specific fields such as sociology and technology gravitate toward gods like Talavet and Triune. Finally, gods of community like Hylax and Lambatuin sometimes earn contemplative priests; however, some of these followers try to establish a permanent telepathic rapport with their patron as if they were another contemplative, often resulting in a flood of oracular (and cursed) insight.

The esoteric concept of Ashok lies at the center of contemplative belief. Exactly what Ashok is varies by the individual and the historian—anything from a philosophical system to a legendary seer in the past to a mystical state of enlightenment yet to be achieved. Whatever definition a contemplative adopts, the concept of Ashok is one of aspiration and reverence. It goads a contemplative out of complacency, urging them to keep learning, exploring, and striving. Truly mastering Ashok would be a presumptuous claim; it's an indefinite process, perhaps on par with becoming a god or transforming into a being of pure thought. It's almost as presumptuous for a non-contemplative to engage with Ashok, much less claim to understand it. Few outsiders earn the honor of being initiated in the Ashok mysteries.

Popular Edicts collaborate with peers to overcome problems, embrace moments of solitude and silence, engage in deep self-reflection, excel in a specialized field, seek Ashok
Popular Anathema be content with simple explanations to complex problems, corrupt groundbreaking research, make assertions without evidence, suffer ignorance, value feelings over facts

Eskari's Third Concerto, Bones Land in a Spiral 16:3, Pokolv's Last Koan, Drift's Gravitational Constant, Toshoo Verse 4, Sonnet on Desna's Wing, Castrovelian Symmetry Paradox, Battle of Purple Valkyries

6

Medium

Fly 20 feet

Charisma, Intelligence, Free

Strength

Additional languages equal to your Intelligence modifier (if positive). Choose from the list of common languages and any other languages to which you have access (such as the languages prevalent on your home world).

Your limbs are atrophied. Decrease your maximum and encumbered Bulk limits by 1. While using your hands to wield any weapon or device whose Bulk is 2 or higher, you are clumsy 1.

You can see in dim light as though it were bright light, and you ignore the concealed condition due to dim light.

You gain thoughtsense as a vague sense with a range of 20 feet. This enables you to determine when a creature is within range, though this sense detects only thinking creatures; a creature that's unthinking or otherwise immune to mental effects can't be perceived using your thoughtsense. This doesn't give you the ability to read or understand their thoughts.

You can communicate mentally with creatures within 30 feet. You can communicate only with creatures that share a language with you. This doesn't give you any access to their thoughts, and communicates no more information than normal speech would.