Bionoids are an artificial species created by the Astral Elves in ancient times. They were constructed as a separate sentient species, purpose-built for war, and have never been anything else. No Bionoid has a prior life as another species; the transformation narratives sometimes attached to them in secondhand accounts are false. They are what they are: a created people, distinct and entire.
Standing roughly ten feet tall, with chitinous natural armor and scythe-like bone protrusions, Bionoids are formidable in combat. They are also culturally complex, self-governed, and, in the centuries since their exile, thoroughly independent of the civilization that made them.
Civilization and Culture
Despite their genesis as weapons of war, Bionoids have developed a rich tapestry of customs and traditions that affirm their identity and independence from their creators. These practices are a reflection of their resilience and a declaration of their autonomy.
Communal Kinship: Bionoids scattered across the cosmos have formed tight-knit colonies that serve as beacons of their culture. Each colony, regardless of its location, is a microcosm of Bionoid society, reflecting a collective ethos of unity and mutual protection.
The Rite of the Weird Egg: Bionoid reproduction is inseparable from their cultural identity. A Bionoid cannot mature past egg form without bonding to a sentient host. The bond is formed by touch alone; when a sentient being makes contact with a Weird Egg, the connection establishes immediately. The host carries the developing Bionoid through a cycle measured in months, typically in the context of active duty or travel. When Bionoid colonies are present to witness a hatching and bonding, they mark the occasion with solemn ceremony. The crystalline structure at the egg’s center, which clarifies as the Bionoid matures, is treated as a symbol of the soul’s emergence. The knowledge of how Weird Eggs are originally produced has been lost; existing eggs are irreplaceable.
Warrior Meditations: Bionoids maintain a disciplined regimen of combat training, oriented not toward conquest but toward personal and communal harmony. These sessions are meditative in character, designed to achieve mastery over their formidable bodies and to find equilibrium in their engineered nature.
The Festival of Remembrance: An annual tradition in which Bionoids honor their origins and the Astral Elves who created them. Though they were discarded, they hold no stated malice; the festival is a time for storytelling, passing down the history of their creation and exile to new generations. Some scholars of Bionoid culture read the Festival as a complex act of collective processing rather than simple gratitude, though Bionoids themselves tend not to explain it further than the tradition requires.
The Assembly of Elders: A council of the eldest and most experienced Bionoids that convenes regularly to deliberate on matters of importance. The assembly safeguards tradition, mediates internal disputes, and represents the Bionoid people in interactions with other civilizations.
The Pact of Non-Interference: Bionoids observe a strict code of non-aggression toward conflicts that do not directly threaten their existence or that of their allies. This pact is a cornerstone of their diplomatic relationships with other species and has served them well in maintaining neutrality without invisibility.
The Path of the Nomad: Some Bionoids choose to travel the stars, seeking knowledge and experience beyond their colonies. These nomads return with discoveries that enrich the collective understanding of the universe. Rarer still, and outside the tradition entirely, is the Bionoid hatched beyond reach of any colony, bonded to a host who is not Bionoid and with no elder community to shape its early development. Such cases are documented individually rather than as a category.
Physical Description and the Change
Bionoids are Large creatures. In their true form they stand as tall, insectoid humanoids: hard iridescent exoskeleton plates over fibrous, gas-filled muscle tissue that expands and contracts rapidly. The muscle fibers, visible at the joints in a pebbly metallic weave, heal quickly from damage. Hard claw-blades extend from both forearms and the crown of the head. A pair of compound eyes handles primary vision; four secondary eyes, mounted around the compound pair, move independently of one another and of each other, covering peripheral angles continuously. Beyond these natural weapons, some Bionoids, though not all, bear crystal longswords, translucent blades forged from crystal dragon fang or claw that are otherwise the armament of Solanari Dominion War Princes. The overlap with Astral Elf weaponry is slight but real, and is read by some as a quiet clue to the Bionoids’ origins.
Bionoids maintain a second form while bonded to a host: a close, sleek configuration that wraps the host in living armor, compressing the Bionoid’s mass to fit. In this bonded form the host’s face and other features can be revealed or concealed as circumstances require. The transition between forms is near-instantaneous and is called the Change. It is announced by the rapid shift of plates and a sharp hiss of pressurizing gas. There is no intermediate state.
The Bond
The psychic bond between a Bionoid and its host is resonant rather than parasitic. The host is not overwritten, diminished, or transformed. The observable effects over months of bonding are a gradual alignment drift in the host toward Lawful and Good, and a progressive hard-coding of the host’s predilections into the developing Bionoid. The Bionoid learns the host’s humor, their biases, their characteristic ways of engaging with the world. These become permanent features of the Bionoid’s character, present after the bond releases.
A Bionoid reaches social maturity at a point determined by the individual and their colony, after which they are capable of operating independently of the host. The bond releases without loss to either party; what the Bionoid absorbed remains with them, and the host’s alignment drift does not reverse.
Common Taboos
The Astral Elves’ decision to banish the Bionoids, and their subsequent treatment of Bionoids as taboo, reflects multiple overlapping anxieties within Astral Elf culture.
The Shadow of War: Bionoids were the living embodiments of the Astral Elves’ most bellicose period. Once peace was achieved, their presence was a persistent reminder of an epoch the Astral Elves preferred to leave behind. Their existence contradicted the self-image of a civilization now oriented toward serenity and cultural refinement.
Cultural Dissonance: Bionoids bear no physical resemblance to Astral Elves and never did. This divergence created an aesthetic discomfort that functioned as cultural rift. The sight of a Bionoid challenged ideals the Astral Elves held about form and harmony.
The Ethical Weight of Creation: The creation of the Bionoids raised ethical concerns within Astral Elf society that have never been fully resolved. Constructing a sentient species for the express purpose of warfare, then discarding them when the war concluded, is the act the Astral Elves most consistently refuse to examine directly. The decision to banish rather than destroy them resolved nothing; it merely made the question geographically remote.
Fear of Reprisal: The possibility that a species created specifically for war, then exiled without apology, might eventually seek redress was a risk the Astral Elves calculated and chose not to face.
The Loss of Control: Bionoids were designed to be directed, but as they developed their own consciousness and governance, they began acting independently. The Assembly of Elders was not a structure the Astral Elves sanctioned. This autonomy was experienced by Astral Elf leadership as an institutional threat.
The Taboo of Playing Gods: The Astral Elves ultimately acknowledged that in creating the Bionoids, they had crossed a line their own ethics identified as significant. Creating a sentient species as a weapon, however effective the strategy, became a cultural taboo: a practice shunned, officially denied, and quietly preserved in restricted historical records.
As a result, Bionoids became anathema in official Astral Elf discourse. The banishment was as much a symbolic act to bury the ethical cost as a practical measure. The Bionoids, for their part, have outlasted the discomfort.
History
The Astral Elves created Bionoids as a distinct artificial species during their most militarized period, deploying them as frontline combatants in conflicts against Orcish and Goblinoid kingdoms. Astral Elf soldiers served as hosts during the development cycle, bonding with Weird Eggs and carrying them through active campaigns. When the wars ended and the political calculus shifted, Bionoid creation was officially prohibited and the Bionoids themselves were exiled from Astral Elf space.
Over two millennia have passed since the exile. The official Dominion position is that Bionoid creation has ceased entirely. Persistent rumors suggest that a dissident cabal, resisting the final order, secreted away a cache of Weird Eggs at the close of the last war. These eggs, if they exist, represent both the continuation of the species and an irreplaceable historical artifact: the knowledge of how to create new eggs is no longer held by anyone currently living.
Table of Contents
Scientific Name
Humanoid
Geographic Distribution
- Astral Plane