Bonfire Revamp - the New Pantheon

Bonfire Stars has gotten a revamp!

The New Pantheon is an overhauled cosmology for the setting. For the most part, the universe and its history, factions, and designs remain the same. What’s changed is the underlying worldbuilding, connecting everything more cohesively and making it easier for me and everyone else to get a complete picture of the world.

For a full treatment, the whole Lore Primer for Bonfire Stars has been reworked and now gives an overview over the setting and how key changes work. You can find it HERE.

Here are some of the Key Changes

• A Greek-mythology-inspired space opera.

The setting always had gods and different pantheons, but now the parallels with Greek myth are more concrete and extend to factions, peoples, and daily life. There’s more to this than just iconic names. The way factions are structured and interact, how people view the world, and – most crucially – the bases for all “magical” aspects of technology and how the universe works (aka FTL and the like) are now rooted in an ancient-Greece-inspired mythos.

• Fire from the Gods

Everything that transcends the realm of science is now based on Divine Flame, or Fire from the Gods, the essential unobtanium of the setting. The idea is: Gods lay out the rules of the universe, and the Divine Flame represents their power to bend or break them. Consequently, any civilization wanting to build high technologies like an FTL engine must access the Divine Flame in some way. How they go about this and which Gods they turn to differentiates cultures and peoples in the setting.

• The Imperium turned Politismos

The setting is dominated by a single, vast and ever-expanding civilization whose arrival in the local sector is what sets in motion the history this project explores. All that remains unchanged. Just, instead of the Imperial Crown, the central civilization is now a league of Polis Worlds, whose machinations are half mortal interstellar politics, half divine squabbles among Gods.

• Peoples and Kin

Up to now, local factions in Bonfire Stars were roughly sorted into the domains of humankind (i.e. Imperial, Colonial, Firstborn, Deeping). This concept is now reworked into there being five distinct Peoples in the universe, defined by how their souls and bodies work, the pantheons they worship and how they wield the Divine Flame for technology. Factions and places will be dominated by one or another, lending distinct flavors and ways of operating to them. This is further differentiated by different kin (i.e. subraces) existing within each people. 

• Universal Domains

All peoples their various kin are spread across the known cosmos, but not evenly so. In Bonfire Stars, there exist four domains: High Civilization, Low Civilization, the Frontiers, and Wilderness. These domains exist at every scale of the setting, and they all share some rules and traits across the board. The point being that this is a basis for imagining what any place in the universe might look like.

For one example: Rustic Gods will always be most active on the Frontier, wether you’re talking about the frontier worlds of the universe at large, or the frontier towns on a local planet’s continent.

For more details, like a list of the Peoples, rules of the Domains, overview of the local setting, visit the Lore Primer HERE.

What about old lore and art?

As mentioned, this is not a blank-slate fresh start, the broad strokes of all old stuff still hold true. The devil is in the details where changes to names and terms, background worldbuilding or inspirations will create some inconsistencies. These aren’t a huge deal.

The New Pantheon is only there to signify: From here on forward, things should be consistent. Everything that comes before, take with a grain of salt and be aware that some description texts and depictions will be somewhat out of date.