Hiemal Vellum
Hiemal Vellum is a Rim colony that survived by being cold.
Rules Reference
| Field | Value |
|---|---|
| Aesthetic | outpost |
| Anchor System | HIEMAL-VELLUM |
| Fold Bleed | medium |
| Habitat | arctic, ocean, volcanic |
| Population | 90000 |
| Role | anchor |
| Zone | Rim |
Notes
Controlling Faction: Independent
Dangers: Cold kills unprepared visitors in minutes; pressure suits and shelter discipline are the colony's only law., The Fold veil behaves differently in sustained sub-zero; bleed-through presents as frost-madness and shared hallucinations between insulated survivors., The colony council rations heat; political undesirables get cold quarters and quietly stop being a problem.
Hooks: Smuggle a gene-therapist past the colony council to treat a cold-adapted strain of Helix plague spreading through the lower ice towns., The colony's chartered Kadiss beacon is overdue for a Fold-opening sync; the council is paying Rek for any unlicensed fold that can sneak a fresh sync through., Recover the original colony's founding charter from the ice archives before the council rewrites the boundary that decides who counts as a citizen.
Lore: Hiemal Vellum is a Rim colony that survived by being cold. When the founding arks landed, the colonists built pressure domes on the equatorial arc and went underground for ore; three centuries later, they are still there, still mining, still rationed. The cold is the cause of the colony's medium Fold veil: sub-zero temperatures slow bleed-through the way they slow chemical reactions, so horrors that would coalesce into entities in a warmer system stay frozen in place here. The colony relies on that property. A thaw would change the calculus entirely, which is why the council monitors the Frost Maw mine for any sign of heat leak. The colony has no licensed LaGrange Core; its Kadiss beacon syncs only when a passing ship folds in, which means the colony is administratively dark for months at a time, and the council uses that gap. Cold colonists are pragmatic colonists, and pragmatic colonists do not ask what the council does in the long winter.
Notable: A frozen world of high-pressure snow and methane seas, with a single habitable equatorial arc where the original colony's pressure-dome settlements cling to the windward basalt. Sub-glacial mines run beneath the colony; thaw-days are rare and treated as civic holidays.