Gaiaterra: Elysea's Conflict/The Craftworlds. Floating Continents of Navea

"A craftworld is a sentient being, with a hundred thousand minds."

-High Inquisitor Czevak

A Craftworld is a vast, island-sized spacecraft populated by the survivors of Navea. The craftworlds travel through the upper atmosphere of Gaiaterra at sublight speeds, carrying the greater remnant of the Naveans after their Fall.

Each craftworld is a self-sufficient, independent realm with its own distinctive culture. The most important Aeldari craftworlds of Gaiaterra are listed and described here.

Every craftworld is built upon a skeleton of psychoactive, crystalline wraithbone whose structure extends throughout the gigantic voidcraft. A similar skeletal core lies at the heart of most Navean constructions and every one of their aircraft.

In function, this core is similar to the blood vessels and nervous system of a living creature, pumping life-giving energy around the body and also transmitting the psychic impulses that coordinate its many functions.

Wraithbone is psycho-conductive, and the core of a craftworld acts as a self-replenishing reservoir of psychic power. The invasive rib-like structures carry this energy throughout the entire length and breadth of the vessel.

In a very real sense, the craftworld is a living entity, powered by psychic energy and responding in an organic way to the stimuli of psychic forces. The psychic power contained within it can be expended as light and heat, and most ship-board devices and other Asuryani technology could not actually function without the wireless psychic power grid that runs throughout the substructure of the craftworld.

The Asuryani refer to this grid as the Infinity Circuit, a metaphysical neural structure studded with the Spirit Stones of the craftworld's dead, their gestalt psychic collective serving as the source of the great vessel's power -- and its ghostly sentience.

Before the Doom of Old Navea
Prior to the Doom of Old Navea, the craftworlds were vast Navean commercial airships made of their continents psychically "sung" from wraithbone; they were effectively self-contained starfaring communities housing hundreds of Navean families, barring the Dwarfs who don't trust anything not grounded. Trading missions could take the craftworlds thousands of years beyond the borders of the Navean Empire, separating the community from the Navean kingdoms for months.

These colossal airships would travel across Gaiaterra using the Webway, trading with the many races they encountered before returning centuries later to Navea.

This meant the craftworld communities had already developed a strong sense of independence and self-reliance from the heart of their civilization -- an independence that prevented them from being infected by the increasing decadence and sadistic hedonism that ultimately consumed their nation.

Because a craftworld might return to the rest of Navean civilization only three or four times in a thousand years, it was easy for them to perceive the degeneration of Navean society, while to Navea as a whole, the slow decline was too gradual to realize.

As the final weeks leading to the cataclysm that would be called the Doom of Old Navea approached, the various craftworlds' populations returned to the heart of the Navean Empire, finding their worlds already in ruin, torn apart by the orgy of sadism that led to its mysterious doom, with fragments of the Doom saying it had involved the Chaos God Slaanesh.

The craftworlds' inhabitants were horrified by the changes in Navean society. The Eldar Seers who had remained behind and uncorrupted enlisted the aid of the Craftworlds to undertake a titanic effort to save their people. Onto each craftworld, the last uncorrupted people from each of the empire were loaded.

Taking with them any Eldar, Norn, and Humans who still remained what they considered sane, the craftworlds fled the heart of the Navean civilization, along with works of art, plant life and animals, and whatever else of Navea culture that could be saved. The massive psychic shockwave of the Doom caught some of the craftworlds and destroyed them alongside the Navean Empire, while others were pulled into orbit around the newly-formed Eye of Terror Warp rift at the moment of the Dooms birth.

Others survived for thousands of years before their people finally faded and died. The rest drift throughout the galaxy today, their exact number uncertain, as contact with and between them can be difficult and intermittent.

After the Doom
For thousands of years after the Fall unto the current day (Elysea's Conflict), the craftworlds have carried the greater part of the surviving members of the Naveans, those who named themselves the Asuryani, the "Children of Asuryan," in the years after the Doom and were often called "Eldar" by outsiders, particularly Humans.

Craftworlds contain Webway gates that connect tunnels through that labyrinth dimension that lies between the Warp and realspace. The Webway links the craftworlds to each other as well as to thousands of planets scattered across the territory of the lost Navean Empire, allowing the dispersed Navean civilization some measure of cohesion.

Because the Webway is labyrinthine and impossible to accurately map, many craftworlds are effectively lost, unknown, and cut off from the greater part of the remaining Navean civilization. Craftworlds have grown greatly in size since the Doom, when they became the sanctuary worlds of the Navean people. They are now approximately 10 to 100 times bigger in both volume and population size than they were before the Fall.

Craftworlds are well-named, for they are effectively artificial worlds in space, each a self-contained biosystem, with forested and natural areas as well as urbanized ones. These natural areas provide a breathable atmosphere for the craftworld and renewable resources. There are sections of some craftworlds that are uninhabited and awaiting reconstruction. Vast space docks located outside the craftworld house fleets of Asuryani aircraft.

These fleets are capable of traveling through the Warp tunnels of the Webway, allowing the Asuryani of the relatively slow-moving craftworld to bring their forces to areas of Gaiaterra thousands of miles distant.

Every Navean of a craftworld is a highly trained warrior -- in battle these citizen-soldiers are known as Guardians, forming the craftworld's defensive militia. Craftworlds are independent political realms, sometimes acting in cooperation with the other craftworlds, combining their military forces and acting in concert to achieve a common objective and trading or exchanging knowledge.

Exodites often trade with their Navean counterparts who live in the craftworlds, but believe that the Craftworld Naveans are still too close to the old ways of decadence for their own good. However, the militarily stronger Asuryani grant some protection to Exodite Naveans from attacks by the Horde, the Raiders, Chaos and the Coalition.

As mentioned, the populations of the craftworlds of Elysea's Conflict probably now comprise the majority of the surviving Naveans in modern Gaiaterra, although it is impossible to say just how many Naveans this actually is. The craftworlds are certainly the seat of the remaining Navean industry, technology, and culture, as they contain the only vestiges of their original Empire.

Most of the craftworlds contains special biodomes that house plants and wildlife from their original Empire, and these are carefully tended and preserved by the Naveans as the last vestiges of what they have lost.

Although each craftworld is essentially independent in its actions and governance, they will generally offer and accept aid and advice from one another. Although not common, sometimes craftworld disagreements will cause them to clash with each other on the field of battle, though this is always a last resort when every Naveans life, particularly the slow-breeding Eldar, is precious.