Sutesh

Another sketch... I think I'm getting better. 



Sutesh (also known as Set, Seth, Sutekh, Setekh, Suty, and a myriad of other names) appears from orbit to be an arid planet, but on the surface it is quite fertile in places. That being said large portions of it are similar to the Atacama desert of South America and because of this around 68% of the surface is uninhabitable. Native lifeforms never evolved beyond microbes, but waves of human settlers gradually introduced various organisms from across the galaxy (though oddly enough very few are native to Earth) and created a diverse, patchwork biosphere across the habitable zones. While Sutesh lacks the significant surface water required for plate tectonics it does have large, highly active volcanic zones which have produced mountain ranges that dwarf the Himalayas or Andes on Earth. This volcanism is what attracted human settlers to this wasteland world in the first place, and the population became wealthy from the mining of aluminum, nickel, gold, gems, and obsidian. The Suteshi people built magnificent, gleaming cities and provided nearly a third of the raw resources for the industrial might of the First Martian Empire. The fertile volcanic soil provided more than enough food to feed the exponentially growing population as well as many population centers in the local stellar cluster, and Suteshi vineyards produced award-winning wines that would continue to be coveted throughout the known galaxy long after the fall of both the First and Second Martian Empires. Ultimately this decadence would come to a violent end as the chaos following the Andromedan Invasion which caused the fall of the Second Martian Empire resulted in Sutesh becoming isolated from the civilized centers of the known galaxy, cutting it off from the trade that once provided them with the means to support their modern lifestyle. The inability to defend itself from outside influence led to Sutesh being conquered and sacked various times in the centuries that followed, ultimately leading the Suteshi to their current state of either pastoral nomads or isolated pre-industrial agricultural city-states. Recently a dynasty that has rule the most prosperous of these city-states has embarked on a march of conquest with the goal of reunited the scattered Suteshi people and restoring the planet to its former glory.