Editing SWN: Prismatic Spray (section)

===A Hanseong Gazetteer===
Hanseong is in the tradition of floating island archipelagos suspended over a "lost continent" cloud sea. Big inspirations are the game/setting Inverse World and an incredible zine called the Doodle Factory in the Skies. Sometime between the Scream and now, someone's technomagical terraforming project got all screwed up, and now stuff floats. It's difficult to just zip around in a standard gravflyer (what with the energy currents), so local forms of flight are more widely used. I think there's an inner orbit of larger islands that've been made more culturally legible to offworlders, maybe even locked into place or surrounding a stable mountain whose peak pierces the clouds, and then increasingly further-flung outer orbits where the worldlets and their cultures get real strange: checkerboard sky castles with warring bishops and their mercenaries, floating junkyards, lost vampire prisons. Brave/stupid treasure hunters and archaeologists can wear a pressure mask and dip below the clouds to dig through ancient ruins, like Weave-era settlements or the Statue of Liberty halfway sticking out of a beach.

Sedentary islands and nomadic groups have their own practices, but there are overarching cultural norms, including that people use cybernetics and Rectifier (or Biopsion) body augmentation to fulfill their social roles, which aren't static throughout life. I don't wanna write a whole anthropology before the players even visit, but I'm picturing The Left Hand of Darkness, and for that matter lots of LeGuin's Hainish and Earthsea books. Harpies are people who travel often between islands as couriers, messengers, and explorers, which is why they have wings, and keen eyes to pierce the clouds and see danger and opportunity at a distance. Not coincidentally, Hanseongin who leave the planet to seek their fortune on further islands are usually Harpies. There are other broad and niche roles: Shepherds with drone control implants, Delvers who breathe toxic air freely, various warriors and sectarians with retractable claws and beam cannons. And of course your caregivers and farmers and doctors and technicians and teachers, who might augment their bodies to more durable, patient, careful, or tender.

Hanseong is officially a protectorate of Amity and the Lieges of the Real - they were close enough for regular travel during the Metastorm. The Lieges take students for prestigious and high-quality magical and administrative training, which has been impacting Hanseong cultures as their ideas filter back, especially on the more sedentary inner islands. They would like to translate Hanseongin cultures (and resources) into a form more legible to their way of understanding and controlling the world - the Real.