LORE24 ENTRY #24 – Incarcerus IV

Category – Place

Incarcerus IV is a rather notorious, if mostly forgotten, planet held by the dark elves, and was once one of their largest prisons (the fourth such  planetary prison, as its name indicates).  Located in a distant and rarely traveled system, this planet was originally an uninhabitable rock that was terraformed using one of the ancient arca-tech tarraforming devices that radically changed the planet into a perfectly habitable world.  Though the records are inconclusive, it would seem that the planet was originally meant as an isolated colony world, but due to poor resource availability, was converted into a solitary prison planet once the dark elves had fully taken control of the galactic prison system.  The space around the planet itself is covered by a still-functioning security net filled with various devices that will warn ships away from the planet, and attack those that are not authorized for approach, ensuring that most will avoid coming too close, to say nothing of attempting a landing or a jailbreak. 

However, at some point, the planetary terraformer went out of control, causing a global catastrophe that destroyed much of the population and reshaped the surface of the planet, which had been left behind by the dark elf wardens when they escaped the planet.  Though most assumed the world was destroyed and left completely uninhabitable, this was not the case.  Though the world was left greatly changed during the upheaval, quite a large number of the former prison colonies survived, and once the worst of the destruction had ended, these survivors picked up the pieces and formed their own societies and began to rebuild.  Though filled with dangerous areas and sometimes radically shifting weather due to continued malfunctions from the terraformer, the planet is perfectly livable, and there are multiple large countries and peoples across its surface.

Currently, the world has reached a technological state consistent with the real-world late Victorian era, with steam-based technology, continent-spanning rail systems, dangerous frontier towns, prevalent repeating cartridge-based firearms, and smaller pockets of a more “civilized” nature.  Due to the occasional upset from the malfunctioning terraformer, it seems that most technological advances have been halted at this level, preventing the local populations from advancing to a level that would allow them to attempt to escape into space, though most have long since forgotten the original purpose of the planet and its former status as a prison.