The Babluse are big‑headed, Rift‑touched humanoids whose homeworld died screaming; most of their kin embraced self‑willed undeath, leaving the living Babluse as rare survivors, exiles, and prestige curios across the Starfall Galaxy.
They feel magic and planar flux as pressure in their skulls, speak the high tongue Nedxen, and live with the constant knowledge that their “second life” as carefully curated undead is both a promise and a threat.
For most people, undeath is a horror, a punishment, or a perversion of the soul; for the Babluse, it’s editing rights on your own existence.
First life is the rough cut—awkward, fragile, full of bad takes; second life, as curated corpsefolk, is the archival edition they expect to inhabit for centuries under the gaze of the Noāxol’s necro‑bureaucracy.
That doesn’t mean they’re naive about the risks; they know who owns the studios, who runs the bone‑vaults, and how easily a “second life” can become a controlled asset instead of a fulfilled self.
But culturally, they don’t recoil from the idea of their own corpse walking—they recoil from losing authorship of that corpse to the Corpse Empire’s producers and genealogists.
In the Wraith‑scarred corridors of their shattered system, the Babluse learned to live under glass while the rest of their species learned to live without breath. When the Cataclysm boiled their seas and stripped their skies, necro‑engineers offered a terrible mercy: transition into curated undeath, a rite that birthed the first Taq “corpse‑emperor” and their bone‑ruled fiefs.
Today, living Babluse are outnumbered by their undead cousins a thousand to one, penned in arcology‐vaults and ecumenopoleis where atmosphere is rationed and every gesture can be watched, recorded, and sold as spectacle.
Those who escape into the wider galaxy are equal parts refugee, cultural ambassador, and uncomfortable reminder that the Corpse Caliphate’s sins were committed first against their own.
Their language, Nedxen, is all hard consonant clusters and front‑loaded stress, a high speech once reserved for philosophers and ritual architects that now carries bunker slang, contract law, and whispered prayers in equal measure.Other peoples joke that Babluse think in spell diagrams and broadcast schedules—but when a Babluse squints into the middle distance, they aren’t daydreaming; they’re feeling the Rift hum in their bones.
Children of a Corpse Empire:
The Vaelen chronicles remember a “Corpse Empire” called Noāxol in the Inner Sphere—an undead empire shattered only by a grand coalition at the height of the Principality’s power. Babluse oral history insists that the first victims of that regime were living Babluse pressed into undeath to survive a man‑made cataclysm, long before the Caliphate turned its attention outward.
Living Among the Dead:
On their homeworld’s husk, intelligent undead outnumber the living and dominate industry, governance, and ritual; self‑determined corpsefolk created via tightly guarded rites form the majority population. Living Babluse exist in sealed “Halls of the Living” and bunker‑cities, valued for reproduction, novelty, and the morbid entertainment of audiences who no longer sleep or age.
In the Inner Sphere, Babluse priests and necro‑engineers are unsettling but invaluable consultants: they bring a normalized, even optimistic, perspective on undeath into otherwise horror‑coded situations.
In the Outer Sphere and Frontier, Babluse “death‑diplomats” can be the only ones at a table willing to negotiate with liches, corpse‑fleets, or Rift‑tainted revenants as people rather than monsters.
Rift‑Tuned Brains:
Specialized neural structures behind their enlarged foreheads give Babluse a literal sixth sense for magic—they read mana, planar bleed, and active spellwork as pressure, color, or static in their minds.reddit+1
This sense made them prized as arcane theorists and Navigators in the age before the Rift‑Storm Cataclysm, and many still hire on as sensor officers, diviner‑artificers, or temporal analysts for the Chronologist Guild and major factions.
Babluse Mechanics
Hit Points: 6
Size: Medium
Speed: 25 feet
Attribute Boosts: Constitution, Intelligence, Free
Attribute Flaw: Wisdom.
Languages: Galactic Standard, Nedxen (Babluse High Speech); additional languages equal to your Intelligence modifier (minimum 1), chosen from Eoxian, Necril, Vaelen, Trade Cant, and others common to your region.
Special Abilities
Magical Sense
Your brain has a specialized organ that can sense magical energies..
Babluse Heritages
Entertainer: You love being in the spotlight, and you've spent a good deal of your life on camera. You were born and raised in the Halls of the Living, where you learned how to entertain an audience from childhood.
Exiled: You're a rarity: a Babluse who wasn't born on Paxima. Perhaps your parents left the Halls of the Living before you were born to give you a better life.
Sageborne: You have a natural talent for magic. This might be due to the presentation of ancient Babluse genes, or maybe you were exposed to a burst of arcane energy that awakened and turbocharged your magical senses.
Stagehand: You love being on the other side of the camera. You've spent your formative years rigging scenes, hauling props, and making media magic as a stagehand in the Halls of the Living.
Babluse Ancestry Feats
1st Level Feats
Aspiring Necrovite-You don't plan to die—instead, you're going to exist forever as a necrovite.
Bablusian Cantrip- You enhance your performances with delightful magical tricks, going far beyond normal sleight of hand.
Bablusian Lore- Your people's dwindling numbers hasn't stopped you from learning everything there is to know about your ancestral past.
Dramatic Reading - You recite a memorable catchphrase or monologue delivered by a famous media character.
Flip the Script- All the world is a stage and you know the script.
Just Like in Rehersal - Life often imitates art, and you've learned to deploy your dramatic training in dangerous situations.
Method Actor- You like to live as the character you're playing, which makes your performances incredibly convincing.
Prop Closet - You've practiced enough with prop replica weapons that you can draw on these experiences in a real fight.
Role Repertoire - You've played many roles and picked up a surprising amount of eclectic knowledge while preparing to play them.
Stunt Work - You've performed countless risky stunts and flashy tricks for an audience.
Use the Scenery- Performing for an audience has made you aware of your surroundings.
5th Level Feats
Bablusian Magic-Your arcane aptitude grows as you learn how to better entrance an audience with magic.
Improv Workshop - Your stage experience has taught you how to improvise in just about any situation.
Novice Necrovite- Your studies as a necrovite have progressed, and you've learned how to influence mindless undead.
Repeating Role- Just like giving an encore performance of one of your most iconic roles, you learn how to better use your training off the set.
9th Level Feats
Arcane Recall- Your training has enhanced your memory for magic, and spells linger in your mind.
Improved Bablusian Magic- Choose one 3rd-rank or lower arcane spell.
Prototype Electroencephalon- When Paxima's atmosphere burned, necrovites crafted devices called electroencephalons.
Shy- Whether through magical training, a technomagical body rig, or superior escape and evasion training, you've managed to learn how to fade from plain sight.
Stunt Double- You've trained hard to tackle physical challenges of all types as part of your entertainment career.
Universal Translator- By activating your arcane sensory organ and analyzing ancestral memories and arcane lore, you can communicate with all kinds of people, animals, and even plants.
13th Level Feats
Arcane Adept- Your intense magical studies have taught you how to watch out for signs of magic even when looking for other things.
Dramatic Blocking- Thanks to years of practice, you know how to use every inch of the stage and give a fantastic performance even in tight quarters.
Leading Role- You played a leading role in a long-running, popular production, and you frequently like to fall back on this character to get through difficult situations.
17th Level Feats
Ascending Necrovite- You've reached the pinnacle of necrovite training available to living creatures.
Encore- You consistently rehearse your best bits so that you're always ready for an encore.
Example Quirks / Beliefs
“First life is rehearsal; second life is the archive. Don’t waste your footage.” (Common paraphrase of Babluse philosophies similar to the Song of Silence.)
Keeps a personal “cut log” of days they intend to buy back as an undead corpsefolk, tracking moments worth preserving and those they’d prefer to edit out.
Flinches subtly whenever a new spell is cast nearby, describing it later as “someone shouting in the Rift” even if no one else felt anything.
Refuses to appear on live broadcasts, insisting on strict post‑production edits, even for simple interviews or debriefs.
Treats undeath not as blasphemy but as an inevitability to be negotiated—shopping around for “better” rites the way others compare starship warranties.
Uses Nedxen honorifics rigorously, especially around undead elders, believing that sloppy language risks drawing their attention long after death.
GD-14.0.12 | Hollow 15 – The Paxima Quietus
In the throes of localized cataclysms, Paxima’s protective domes and orbital shields failed within a single Standard Cycle, boiling seas and stripping atmosphere from vast swathes of the planet.
Babluse necro‑engineers, unable to evacuate their population, unveiled the first large‑scale self‑willed undeath protocols—a desperate program that would later be mythologized as the Paxima Quietus, “the night the living chose to keep walking.”
GD-16.7.84 | Maelstrom 16 – Proclamation of the Noāxol
As more of Paxima’s elite and technical classes converted into corpsefolk, they consolidated control over surviving infrastructure, defense fleets, and Rift‑gates.
From a throne‑crypt buried under Paxima’s most intact ecumenopolis, the first Taq Noāxol formally declared the Noāxol (“Corpse Empire”), recasting undeath from emergency measure to imperial identity and codifying second life as a legal estate.
GD-28.4.34 | Beacon 3 – The Pact of the Two Lights
Early in the Vaelen Ascendancy, a coalition of Vaelen void‑princes and Babluse necrovites negotiated the Pact of the Two Lights—the promise that the Corpse Empire would confine its corpse‑fleets and soul‑harvesting to the Wraith‑touched margins of the Inner Sphere in exchange for limited access to Rift‑gates and trade.
This uneasy treaty briefly normalized Babluse corpsefolk diplomats and Navigators in Inner Sphere courts, and it’s still cited by modern Babluse activists who argue that undeath can be regulated rather than purged.
GD-29.5.64 | Terminal 49 – The Shattering of the Corpse Empire
Centuries later, as the Vaelen coalition reached its zenith, the Noāxol overreached—launching synchronized corpse‑incursions into multiple habitable systems under the pretext of “preemptive preservation.”
The resulting war—remembered in Inner Sphere annals simply as the Shattering of the Corpse Empire—ended with the Vaelen‑led coalition wrecking most Noāxol fleets and driving the Corpse Empire back into a handful of Wraith‑scarred sectors, but not before millions were forcibly converted into imperial corpsefolk.
The Halls of the Living Decree
In the aftermath of the Shattering, unsurviving Babluse necro-elites issued the Halls of the Living Decree, centralizing all remaining breathable habitats on Paxima and allied worlds into tightly controlled arcology‑vaults.
Living Babluse were henceforth cataloged as “pre‑assets” within the imperial system, but the Decree also locked in unprecedented guarantees: access to education, representation, and the legal right to refuse conversion—on paper, if not always in practice.
GD-31.8.05 | Acsent 33 – The Vaelen Wraith Accords
After the Rift‑Storm Cataclysm and the Vaelen decline, scattered Vaelen and Babluse remnants hammered out the Vaelen Wraith Accords, defining who controlled corpse fleets, reliquary worlds, and Wraith‑sector salvage.
These shadow treaties are why Babluse necromantic expertise still quietly shapes salvage law, battlefield memorial practices, and how the Commission regulates undead labor in the Inner Sphere.
GD-44.9.22 | Parallax 11 – Phoenix Archive Controversy
An Azure Archivist survey team uncovered a sealed Babluse “Phoenix Archive” in a derelict Vaelen command ship—an intact data‑vault containing thousands of Noāxol cut logs and undeath contracts for Babluse who never converted.
The ensuing dispute between Babluse diaspora communities, Archivists, and Corpse Empire agents over whether to honor, suppress, or weaponize these archives has reignited debate across the galaxy about undeath as a right, a tool, or a war crime.
Adventure Hooks
The Director’s Cut
A famed Babluse actress from the Halls of the Living dies off‑world—but her contract promised a curated undead “director’s cut” of her life.
Her family hires the PCs to recover her body and memory backups before Ebon Syndicate media barons or Noāxol agents can seize them and produce a propagandistic corpse‑idol.
Halls of the Living, Halls of the Dead
A Paxima Rift‑gate has begun glitching; living Babluse are arriving in Commission space marked as “pre‑asset inventory” by Corpse Empire archivists.
The PCs must decide whether to help these refugees vanish into the Inner Sphere, return them to their promised undeath, or cut a deal with the Noāxol’s representatives for safe resettlement… at a price.
The Lost Cut Log
A dying Babluse scholar’s “cut log” surfaces in a frontier data‑market: a lifetime of annotated plans for how she wants her corpsefolk self edited, from loyalties to memories.
Multiple factions (Chronologists, Azure Archivists, Corpse Empire agents) want the log—either to honor her wishes, weaponize her expertise, or test how far identity can be re‑cut across life and undeath.
Noāxol’s Envoy
A polite but terrifying corpse‑envoy of the Taq Noāxol arrives on a neutral station, accompanied by a single living Babluse liaison who insists, “This is just a routine rights‑audit.”
The PCs are hired as security and cultural interpreters when it becomes clear the Empire is quietly “recalling” Babluse expatriates whose contracts were never meant to lapse.
Second Life, First Refusal
A Babluse PC or ally is mortally wounded; local necro‑engineers offer an emergency rite that will fast‑track them into a corpsefolk body—using Noāxol protocols and binding clauses.
The party must race to find an alternative (Chronologist temporal intervention, Viridian biogenesis, Rift‑weird solution) or accept that their friend’s second life will come with strings to the Corpse Empire.
To play a Babluse is to embody the tension between living body and undead destiny: a brilliant, Rift‑tuned mind walking through neon‑lit decay, knowing that somewhere a bone‑sage producer is already drafting the script for your second life.
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