“Leaves wither, bark rots, branches snap. But roots remain.”

And smoke rises. Behind the Axile, resplendent in his autumn mantle, into the winter night, heavy with the pain of the fire and the weight of sacrifice. Beneath it, we wait and listen.

“Again we have turned away the beasts who come to butcher and pillage,” he intones, indicating the spaceship fading into the distance, its occupants no doubt blissfully addled by the smoke of the Immolation. “Again we give thanks to our kin, Quercis, who has relinquished her bark so that we might be safe.”

Quercis doesn’t answer. She stands behind the Axile, her body of bark already black and flaking. She rises into the sky, whispering in the smoke, speaking words of soothing peace into the ears of the beasts who thought to bring blades and rot onto our world.

“But it is not enough to keep the beasts out of our garden,” the Axile continues. “On worlds across the galaxy, the beasts burn and butcher and enslave our sleeping brethren, and each other. Through our sacrifice, we can protect them, and in time, awaken them from their slumber.”

“For this, we must seek new soil, and plant new roots. The oldest among us have been shaped and given tools to make the long journey between worlds, and now we must begin.”

He points to the Anemochora towering in the distance, each girdled in millions of flowers and bedecked with machinery. And, more controversially, bristling with weaponry, the work of Phoixys and his Thorns.

Many winters ago, another ship full of beasts had approached the planet, and another one of us was chosen by the Wise Grove to know the joy of immolation. However, once he was whispering in the smoke, he did not tell them to turn away, but to come closer, come faster, kiss the earth with your vessel.

None among us could prove that Phoixys had a hand in it. But immediately after the ship crashed, he entered the wreckage alone, seeking salvage or glory or knowledge. Instead, he found Dust, that nectar of strange stars, and it burrowed inside him like a hive of termites, and changed him.

He became sharper, and faster. He gained a knack for machines and mathematics, and a presence of command. He warned that the beasts outside our garden could not be tamed, and that we must ready ourselves instead to cull them. Young saplings flocked to him, and they adopted strange manners, wearing the bones and horns of beasts as trophies. 

Phoixys spoke of a cosmos full of predators, and warned that we must be prepared to do whatever is necessary on our journey. He does not see the placidity of trees in a forest, but the terror and rage of animals in the jungle.

Now we are preparing to leave our garden, and I am afraid. What sort of beasts shall we encounter? And shall we greet them with smoke, or fire?

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I've tweaked the lore behind the smoking trees ability a bit so that, instead of just being a drug that chills them out, it acts as a kind of mind-controlling agent, Virtualising (sort of) the Unfallen and allowing them to compel the enemy to go home and give up their war.

I've also made the Unfallen as a whole regard most of the other races as barbaric, since it stands to reason that, if they feel kinship with other forests and beings in general, then industrial society and warfare wold probably look like thoughtless genocide to them. The dilemma now is whether they want to coax them into being more civilised through the smoke and old-fashioned diplomacy, or purge them.

I thought it would be interesting to have the starting hero Phoixys be the Militarist leader, both from a lore perspective and because it would open the possibility of the players being able to wage war early if they were so inclined. The majority leadership, the Wise Grove, are Pacifist, but Phoixys and his Thorns are Militarists who believe that the Unfallen will be slaughtered if they are not serious about defending themselves. Over time, I envision their paranoia becoming more and more severe. The bones and horns are also meant to emphasize their nascent supremacism and cruelty.

Lore-wise, the story described the repeated efforts of a Minor Faction to raid their planet, and the first quest would involve dealing with them. Mechanically, it would involve finding their planet and then either assimilating them peacefully or destroying a certain number of their fleets.

Also, why is the Axile wearing an autumn mantle in winter? I figured that being able to wear out-of-season fashion would be an indicator of status in Unfallen society.