This is the first of our Antarean Universe content releases, and first up are the Panhumans, also known as Pans.
Humans spread throughout Antarean space during a past time so ancient that almost nothing of that story is now known. Galactic civilisation has risen and fallen many time in the interim, torn apart by destructive wars, near-obliterated by natural catastrophes, and submerged beneath waves of alien invasion. The current era is the Seventh Age – the Age of the species we know as NuHu – NuHumans. But the NuHu are just one of many millions of different human species that have evolved since the time of pre-spacefaring humans. All of these human species are collectively panhumans. Whilst this means that NuHu and the primitive Revers are also panhumans, the name Panhumans – or just Pans - is most commonly used to describe all those other human descended species. Of course, individual species wouldn't necessarily identify themselves as Pans; they would think of themselves as belonging to a particular world or a particular species of Panhuman, for example the squamous Boramites originally from the Boram Asteroid mines of Gar’Xu, who have now spread throughout many of the mining colonies of the Spill.
Most kinds of Pans are the inhabitants of a specific home world – the world where they originated or a world that they subsequently settled and occupied. Often a species will be adapted to live on that world, able to bear high or low gravity, different atmospheres, extreme temperatures, and dangerous levels of radiation. These adaptations are only partly a result of natural selection. They were mostly initiated by means of transgenic engineering in the distant past, as is evident from the genetic structure of Panhumans today. Pans display a far wider variety of form and adaptations than would be possible with the basic human genome. Some species are undoubtedly the remnants of military experiments to create super-soldiers, though the wars that they were designed to fight are long forgotten. Others may have been engineered to resist radiation or survive in hostile environments far different from those they now inhabit. Many have evolved unexpected traits thanks to instability in their underlying transgenic mutations, creating creatures that are hardly recognisably human at all. Some of these species are mere misshapen brutes, degraded creatures of limited intelligence, the victims of ancient bioengineering projects that ultimately failed.
There are so many different Panhuman species in the Spill that spacecraft, fighting companies, freebooters and most space faring groups typically contain a fair mix. The appearance of space faring humans varies so much that people are accepted for what they are regardless of their appearance. As Antarean space includes a fair number of genuinely alien species, people are used to seeing all kinds of body forms, colours of skin and fur, and varieties of limbs and sensory organs. Some isolate worlds of the ExCon are less tolerant of other Panhuman or alien species. A few, such as the warlike Gwar, are openly antagonistic to all other species, regarding Gwar, the Gwar home world, and Gwar culture as sacred expressions of a cosmic divinity. Such religious or socially driven isolationism is not uncommon in the worlds of the broader Spill, but this kind of extreme parochialism is practically impossible within the Concord or Isorian Shard.
Below you can see some early concepts we've done as we start to explore the various forms Pans can take.
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