Ocampa (planet)
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Ocampa is a ruined world that once qualified for Class M rating. Once lush and fertile, its atmosphere was accidentally destroyed by Nacene explorers, rendering its surface an inhospitable desert. Its native intelligent race, called the Ocampa, lives in a sophisticated, well-kept subterranean city (called the City) created for them as a gesture of remorse by the aliens who wiped out the planet’s biosphere. Now it is a desert Class H world.
Ocampa serves as home to its native species since long before the formation of Starfleet, but the point is largely moot as Ocampa resides in the Delta Quadrant. As a result, it does not play a large role in Galactic politics.
Ocampa is the fifth planet in the Caerelon system, which is located in the Delta Quadrant.
Climate
Ocampa was once a fairly typical Class M planet, fertile and hospitable to advanced forms of life. After the Nacenes accidentally disrupted their water cycle, its atmosphere dried up and thinned out, so that its climate became more like that of, say, pre-colonization Mars than that of Earth. Ocampa’s atmosphere is still breathable, but as a general rule all parts of the planet experience wide variations in temperature. Subject to seasonable variation, Ocampan days are hot and bone-dry. It is impossible for all but the hardiest creatures to survive without a good supply of water, and finding any fresh water above ground is a miracle. At night, one may experience vacuum-like cold. And at all hours, violent, choking dust storms may blow up out of nowhere.
Geography
After the catastrophe that altered the planet’s climate, the oceans on Ocampa began to recede, as they continued to lose water from evaporation without replenishment from rain. By the time of the Caretaker’s death in 2371, water covered only 30 percent of Ocampa. Vast salt flats marked the former location of the continental shelves, and the planet’s land mass resolved itself into two enormous continents, one stretching around the northern hemisphere, and the other stretching around the southern.
The Ocampa have all but forgotten their ancient place names, the ones that date from before the Nacenes’ arrival. For a thousand years, their underground city prescribed their boundaries and, thanks to the Caretaker, they had no need of any other place. After the Caretaker died and some adventurous Ocampa began to explore the surface, the process of identifying specific places with unique names resumed, although not all of those names gained universal acceptance right away. The Kazon-Ogla colonists have also adopted their own place names for the parts of the planet that they have explored.
Civilization
The Ocampa are humanoids with relatively short and lithe bodies. They have a rapid metabolism that, unfortunately for them, gives them a shorter life expectancy than most humanoid species. A typical Ocampa lives nine years, although after the departure of the Nacene alien known as the Caretaker their life span lengthened to about 20 years. They make up for the brevity of their lives by maturing quickly. Ocampa reach physical maturity at the age of 2. Their emotional and intellectual development follows a similarly rapid pace.
The Ocampa have distinctive and sophisticated traditions of visual art, literature and music. Most of their cultural productions for the millennium under the protection of the Caretaker address, either directly or indirectly, their relationship with him. Very little in the way of cultural productions or social traditions remain from pre-Caretaker Ocampan history, although after his death some Ocampa tried to unearth evidence of what life was like during these earlier times. One of the traditions that did survive is the Ocampan belief in improving one’s comra, or soul, through meditation and performing charitable deeds, although its exact origins are now shrouded in the mists of time.
Another tradition that survived is their manner of dress. Both male and female Ocampa wear dark body-length smocks. After their planet became desert waste, the Caretaker advised them to wear kerchiefs that could be drawn up over the lower half of the face as well. They kept out the dust that he knew would plague them until he could finish building their new subterranean home. To the Ocampa, however, that piece of apparel became sacred, since the Caretaker had told them to adopt it. Even after they moved into the City, they continued to wear them, even though the air they breathed was carefully filtered.
Under the Caretaker, the Ocampa had very little in the way of governmental structure. In essence, he ran an informal theocracy, overseeing their lives as a living god. The Ocampa oversaw the details of operating their city themselves, but took overall direction directly from the Caretaker. When he died, he left them without any idea of how to govern themselves. This was the most important challenge that the Ocampa faced in the post-Caretaker era. Routine maintenance of the City continued as it had before. But without the Guardian, they had no higher authority other than themselves to whom to refer when it came to larger questions. Gradually, different sections of the City formed their own governing councils, and these councils consulted with each other from time to time. But formal governmental structures that united all Ocampa remained elusive.
No formal contact between the Ocampa and the Federation exists. The two know of each other only because the U.S.S. Voyager stumbled upon Ocampa at the beginning of its detour into the Delta Quadrant. An Ocampa female named Kes served briefly aboard the Voyager as a medical assistant, but she joined the crew under highly irregular circumstances. After Voyager’s return to Earth in 2378, however, Starfleet eagerly studied all of the ship’s logs for its wealth of information about the Delta Quadrant. Among many ideas floated in its official report on the Voyager’s odyssey is the suggestion that Ocampa, whose relatively brief life span makes them faster learners than most humanoid species, might be tapped as an emergency pool of Starfleet personnel because they could be trained in a hurry.
History
Ocampa civilization had just begun its ascent when intervention from the heavens changed their fate forever. In the 14th century, they had emerged into the Bronze Age and organized themselves into extended tribal groupings. These primitive political entities coexisted in peace. Natural resources were plentiful on the planet, and population pressures had not yet forced them into competition with each other.
It was then that an exploration party of Nacene, a sporocystian non-corporeal life form from another galaxy, came to Ocampa. The Nacene use extra-dimensional travel to explore the Universe and as such, they are a powerful and highly advanced species — so much so that they don’t always understand the extent of their powers. They accidentally stripped the Ocampan atmosphere of the nucleogenic particles that allow water in the atmosphere to condense into rain. With its water cycle irretrievably broken, all of Ocampa became an inhospitable desert.
The Ocampa themselves had no idea of what was happening, no idea that the Nacenes were even visiting their planet. Panic set in as severe, permanent drought pushed their civilization into total collapse. Wracked with remorse, two of the Nacenes remained with the Ocampa, taking on a corporeal form to make themselves known. They built a vast underground city for most of the surviving Ocampa, where they could live shielded from the elements and increased ultraviolet radiation. They also constructed an orbiting station, called the Array, to power the city’s life support systems.
For their part, the Ocampa revered the Nacenes as gods. Having no idea how their planet had deteriorated so rapidly, they quite naturally saw the Nacenes as powerful beings of unknown origin (but roughly familiar form) who had come to them in their hour of greatest need and taken care of them.
Even after their labors were completed, the Nacenes remained with the Ocampa, moved by a continuing sense of obligation to them. In 2071, the Nacene called Suspiria decided to leave the planet, taking some 2,000 Ocampa with her. Suspiria built an Array-like station of her own in deep space, where she trained her Ocampa to make more efficient use of their latent psionic ability. The other Nacene, who was known to the Ocampa only as the Caretaker, remained behind, maintaining the Array. When necessary, he took on the corporeal form of a ragged old man playing a musical instrument that closely resembled a Terran banjo.
In the mid-24th century, the Kazon-Ogla, a sect of the resource-poor Kazon Collective, came to Ocampa. Seeing that the planet’s surface was all but uninhabited, they believed that they could easily exploit its water resources, as well as its deposits of cormaline and other valuable minerals. Ground water was hard to find, but the Kazon-Ogla found enough cormaline to make their stay worthwhile.
For the most part, the Caretaker was able to prevent the ravenous Kazon-Ogla from causing the Ocampa any real harm. Soon, however, he began to feel his life force ebbing away. Desperate that the Ocampa should have a protector after his passing, the Caretaker scoured the Galaxy for a life form with which he could produce offspring. He captured over 50 starships in his search and tried to procreate with all the species that he found on board, in a process that more resembled medical experiments than mating. Among the vessels caught in the Caretaker’s dragnet was the Voyager, which then became the first Starfleet ship to enter the Delta Quadrant (although quite by accident). The Voyager’s encounter with Ocampa and the Caretaker marked the beginning of its 70,000 light-year journey across the unknown space of the Delta Quadrant, one of the most acclaimed feats of navigation in Starfleet history.
The Caretaker died in 2371 without leaving an heir to his task. He left the Ocampa enough energy to sustain their life support systems for five years, but failed to destroy the Array to keep it out of the Kazon-Ogla’s hands, as he had intended. Instead, the Voyager destroyed the Array, saving the Ocampa from predatory invaders but making a foe of the Kazon Collective just as Voyager started on its long journey back to the Alpha Quadrant.
The Caretaker’s death and the destruction of the Array gave the Ocampa the perilous knowledge of freedom for the first time in a thousand years. Without a Starfleet warship to watch over them, a small, but a hostile band of invaders camped on the surface of their world, and only five years before their energy supply gave out, they were confronted with difficult choices. During those five years, the Ocampa debated their course of action. A millennium of allowing a powerful being take care of them had allowed their ambition (as well as their psionic powers) to atrophy, and their understanding of science and technology had developed slowly. Some delved into long-ignored records of scientific knowledge to develop a new source of energy. Others, mostly younger Ocampa who took inspiration from the moral and physical courage that Captain Kathryn Janeway and the Voyager crew had shown on their planet, wanted to find a way to make the surface of their homeworld habitable again.
Eventually, the Ocampa pursued a split solution. A small number of adventurous souls moved to the surface, researching ways to reinvigorate their planet’s moribund biosphere. They stayed on guard against the Kazon-Ogla, but consider the risks that they ran to be acceptable. The remainder stayed in the old underground city, using new, relatively crude power sources to sustain the life support system.
Places of Interest
The Ocampa refer to the underground metropolis that the Nacene built for them as the City because they have no need to distinguish it from any other similar place on or under their planet. Their entire population is concentrated there. The City has ten tiers, each punctuated by open spaces so that one can look at the levels above and below. Medical, life support, power generation and other support facilities are located on the bottom tier. The Ocampa grow some of their food in large hydroponic gardens (every tier has at least one), and food synthesizing devices supply the rest of their needs.
Contrary to popular belief, the City is not entirely closed off from the planet above. Fissures in the City’s walls that lead all the way up to the surface do exist, although their existence is not universally recognized. During the Caretaker’s lifetime a few adventurous Ocampa would try to explore the surface, although this became even more dangerous after the arrival of the Kazon-Ogla. The Caretaker himself actively discouraged exploration of the surface because of the risks involved and used his powers to close fissures when he discovered them.
The Kazon-Ogla settlement nestles by the side of a dry river bed in the shadow of a range of extinct volcanoes in the planet’s southern continent. Its population numbers no more than ten thousand, most of whom are engaged in the backbreaking labor of mining cormaline with early Industrial Age technology. Of the rest, about 700 have the task of scouting and exploring the rest of the planet, with finding fresh water being one of their most pressing duties (they aren’t very successful at it). They carry weapons as a matter of course and also serve as the colony’s military force. The Kazon-Ogla on Ocampa are led by a settlement commander, who functions as a combination of war leader and small-town mayor.
Reference(s)
- Burns, Eric, Kenneth A. Hite & Doug Sun. Star Trek Roleplaying Game Book 7: Worlds, Decipher, 2005. ISBN: 1582369097.