The Grief-smiths

A ghost is merely un-archived data. We are the librarians.

Core Concept

The Thanatechs are the modernist, industrialist faction of the Thanati people. They are the descendants of the researcher who first quantified Eidos, and they have embraced his discovery as a new, enlightened gospel of materialism. They see the universe not as a collection of souls, but as a system of quantifiable energy fields. Their craft is Necro-engineering, and their Faith is in the cold, hard data of their instruments. They do not mourn the dead; they measure their output.

Species

• Primary: Thanati
• Adherent: They would find ideological kinship with the most pragmatic and materialistic factions, such as the Mechanists or certain scientific corps within the Hegemony. They value function over all else.

Ideology (Faith / Fiction)

• Core Faith: “Memory is a Resource.” They believe that the “coherent resonance patterns” left by a deceased consciousness are a potent, high-yield energy source. To let this energy dissipate naturally is, to them, a tragic and unforgivable waste. Their sacred duty is to harvest these “Eidic Potential Wells” and refine the energy into stable, useful forms.
• Core Fiction: “The Parable of the Fading Light.” Their central cautionary tale is not of a forgotten hero, but of catastrophic data loss. They tell of a brilliant, ancient civilization whose entire planetary memory-archive was corrupted by ambient psychic radiation, its history lost forever. This story justifies their aggressive, “preservationist” harvesting. They are not desecrating; they are archiving.

Goals & Motivations

• To find, survey, and exploit sites of high Eidic concentration.
• To perfect their necro-engineering, creating ever more efficient methods for “decoherence mining” and waveform stabilization.
• To prove the superiority of their materialistic worldview by creating the most powerful and reliable technologies in the galaxy.

Relations with Other Factions

• Loam-Kindred: They view them with a mixture of pity and contempt. They see their spiritual beliefs not as a valid faith, but as a “primitive, inefficient cultivation protocol.” They are not enemies to be fought, but a valuable resource to be managed and, if necessary, displaced for the greater good of technological progress.
• The Unbroken: Professional respect. They see the Unbroken as fellow rationalists who have correctly identified the flaws in a biological system.
• Arborians: Bafflement. They cannot comprehend why a culture would choose the slow, chaotic, and inefficient path of natural growth when the clean, predictable path of engineering exists.

Player Interaction

• Joining the Thanatechs is to choose a path of technological power and moral ambiguity. Your gameplay will revolve around industrial logistics, resource extraction, and high-tech crafting. Your quests will be to survey new fields, sabotage the “purification rituals” of the Loam-Kindred (which they see as destroying the resource), and build ever-larger Resonance Engines.
• As an Enemy, they are calculating, technologically advanced, and utterly unmoved by appeals to tradition or morality.