Whence

The Free People's Commonwealth of Whence is one of the more unusual among the 333 planets.

Economy

The local government has passed a series of bylaws which mean currency is virtually unused on the planet's surface.

Within a village, the farmers usually provide their crops to anyone who wants them. Once a villager is seen to have understood this principle, they can expect to get everything they need without paying.

A barter sytem is used between villages who have a surplus of different produce. However, neighbouring villages often adopt an informal system of supplying whatever the other is short of. Once the members of a village generally believe the other village's leaders to be good and honest it is common to not track what goods they have been given, an expansion of the local gift-trade system.

External Trade

Trade with the outside world is usually negotiated by station chiefs. These people live on the Line Stations and trade with offworld visitors in a more conventional manner. As the chiefs receive crops from the villages free (as any other villager can), and provide imported appliances on the same terms, those living on the surface don't even need to understand the concept of money.

Main Imports

• Manufactured goods
• Metals
• Meat and Game

Main Exports

• Herbal extracts
• Rare spices
• Fish and fish oil

Geography

The majority of Whence's surface is covered with freshwater oceans. The sea is only broken by 3 major island groups.

The Spine

This range of undersea mountains follows half a great circle around the planet. It is currently believed that this may have been the planet's equator at the time the mountains were formed. For about 35 degrees around the planet (1900 miles), these mountains each above sea level. They are mostly isolated peaks rather than a true mountain range, with hundreds of yards or even a few miles of sea between neighbouring islands.

The Spine is mostly uninhabited, however there are usually about a dozen geologists from offworld universities studying the area's unusual formation. There is also a permanent research station maintained by Gracini University on one of the larger islands, although this is currently unoccupied.

The Southern Continent

It may seem (at least from an outsider's point of view) that whoever produced the first world maps of Whence must have been less than serious with the naming. The feature marked as "Southern Continent" is not a continent but an island chain, and Whence's geography does not define a direction as 'south'.

The Southern Continent is a series of large flat columns of sedimentary rocks which rise from the sea bed, an early experiment with Geologic Engineering to produce habitable land. Each island has a flat surface, between sea level and 50 feet higher. During the original settlement in 2949, it was apparently believed that these would provide a safe space to build habitations for which fishing and algae farming would be the main primary industry.

The Southern Continent is partially populated, although fishing isn't as lucrative as projected and the main source of revenue is several software development houses in the two larger cities, Taisinki and Capitol.

These settlements have a population of less than a million people, and do not recognise the authority or laws of the Commonwealth. As such, they cannot use the downline except in exceptional circumstances, and are therefore treated politically as a separate (class 1) planet.

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