Great Haven Lore and Discussion (and Q&A??)

What exactly are Sparsens?

This is actually a really good question, and I suppose the most direct answer is that I don't really know.

They are, first and foremost, something I doodled once on a group art board, and then never really seemed to stop. I just really like the simple, cylindrical, spiky-headed design.



When it came time to decide what my races were going to be, I knew I wanted something unique (as one does when creating an IP) and one of the immediate ideas was, I could toss this design that I really like in there. But then I had to figure out how a body shaped like a cone was going to work in the space that wasn't just a piece of paper. Is it going to be alive? Is it going to be sentient? Celestial in some way? Does it have skin? Does it reproduce? Does it have emotions? I still can't answer any of those questions with complete confidence. Sparsens are highly enigmatic, and that's part of their appeal to me, I think.

So, we can start with one thing that makes a little bit of sense. Sparsens are not organic life forms. A sparsen is something that can stand, think, speak, and employ logic, so in a lot of ways, they're a lot like humans - but the defining thing about them is that they're inorganic. That makes them completely incomparable to humans. When I think about organic life, I think about the chemical reactions that need to happen so that life may sustain itself. That means DNA, respiration, consuming food - having a BRAIN, stomach, lungs, cells, building blocks for all these things. But a life form that isn't considered "organic" throws all these assumptions out the window, and it leaves you in a tough spot. How do you get something that can think without having a brain?

Sparsens, and their existence, are intimately intertwined with the forces of magic in Simoialand. One can trace their origins back to one of the nine fountains of youth that dot the surface of the planet, which are highly concentrated centers of magic that produce two things: magical energy, and sparsenore. Sparsens are a byproduct of an accident. Normally, air that is thick with magic will start to congeal into an oil and pool up, giving the appearance of a fountain bubbling up from under the surface of the earth. Magic doesn't like to stay in one form, so it starts to mess with physics, and try to convert its energies into something else. With enough energy in a closed system, you could create a self sustaining cycle of energy conversions, cycling through light, force, heat, magic, aaallll in just the right order to start over and loop back in on itself. So one day, before any life had ever existed on the planet, all the right forces and all the right energies fell into place at just the right time to create something that could exist indefinitely with enough fuel. And, to top it off, this entity could push things around and make copies of itself. And that was all it did. The chances of this happening in the universe are astronomically low, and yet here we are.

Soon enough, you have enough of these weird, self-contained entities rolling around the fountains, and just as mistakes are made in DNA transcription, errors are made in the design of this self-replicating machine. It evolves, in a sense. And it gets smarter - through trial and error, it "learns" what makes a better machine. It finds a way to not lose so much of its own energy to radiation, how to keep physical objects from obstructing its internal workings, how to use sparsenore to fuel itself as it begins to "live" for longer and longer, just to keep making more of these quirky, energy based automatons. And then, after just three minutes after the birth of magical life, these senseless robots flailing about in the oil of youth learn how to make decisions.

That process goes on and on from there. It's highly unstable, and more than once, it's almost completely wiped out in the relentless march of chaos and entropy. But eventually some automaton leaves the fountain it was born in, and marches off in one direction and manages to survive away from the nurturing aura of its home long enough to find a different fountain. It rejuvenates itself, and builds another copy. And now, the planet is covered with these things.

Organic life didn't show up until late in the Spasren race's evolution cycle, and so it was simple to adjust to the changes in the environment. When the first plants started to show up, A sparsen simply avoided the grass, for it felt uncomfortable to walk across compared to the rocks and sand they were used to. When the first magma-spitting dragon came along, the solution was even more simple - they could build walls around their fountains and their homes - all they really needed was solitude and sparsenore, the crystaline substance that acted as their food. They created special Sparsens to protect themselves, gigantic sages that look over and protect their fountains from outside forces, and Sparsens that could move and survive under the water as they searched for more fountains. And they learned how to communicate with that strange, unfamiliar organic life, and learned to take things that they would normally be useless to them (Food, tools, and even air) and trade them for added protection and insulation from the terrifying organic world.

Organic society came quickly with the influence of magic and sparsen trading, and it became a lot easier to come out into the open and stop being so shy. With infrastructure coming along, it became easier to explore the world again, and to trade, and to integrate themselves as vital parts of the organic world.

tl;dr they're weird robots that eat magic and i don't fuckin have a clue but i still love them