Editing Nobledark Imperium Notable Planets (section)

=== Maza ===

Of all the Tarellian worlds that survived the Age of Strife, none were more surprising so than Maza. According to the few Tarellian records that pre-date the Age of Strife, Maza was a world that had just been discovered by the expanding Tarellian species. Maza was a wetter, cooler world than the Tarellians preferred, with trees as tall as Titans lining deep rift valleys at the center of a supercontinent. A few years after the first settlers to Maza arrived, the first warp storms of the Age of Strife hit and all communication was lost. At the time, the Tarellian population on Maza numbered no more than a few hundred individuals, and the colony was still dependent on imports of technology and manufactured goods from the Tarellian core worlds to survive, and so the planet was deemed lost.

When the Tarellians expanded outwards once again after the Age of Strife, Maza was a planet high on their list. Though they didn’t expect to find any living survivors, the planet was still a habitable one with plenty of areas for growing crops and building cities. To the Tarellian explorers’ surprise, when they landed on Maza they found the planet already inhabited. A society of Stone Age hunter-gatherer Tarellians were already present on the surface and were unhappy with the idea of these new Tarellians from the stars claiming their planet for themselves. Even more unusual was the fact that these Stone Age Tarellians were all females.

The survival of the native population of Maza was nothing short of a miracle. When the colony was first isolated during the Age of Strife, medical supplies quickly ran low and the population began dwindling. To make matters worse, soon after their isolation a plague swept through the small population of Mazon survivors, killing off all of their males. The surviving Mazons lamented and resigned themselves to extinction. However, a chance event ended up saving the population. A mutation occurred in the population that allowed a few individuals to reproduce parthenogenetically, and within a few years the entire population of Maza was parthenogenetic.

The Mazon are relatively tall for Tarellians, but also much more lightly built. In contrast to the stereotypical browns, reds, and yellows of most arid-dwelling Tarellians, their scales tend to come in colors of blues and greens, all the better to hide in the dense foliage of their homeworld. And, of course, the most notable feature of the native Mazons is that they are all female. The exact methods of the Mazons’ parthenogenesis are unknown, and the Mazons are highly secretive about their breeding practices, seeing how they were nearly wiped out once. Even when breeding with non-Mazon Tarellians, the offspring of such unions tend to be heavily female and the females strongly resemble the mother. Mazons are also known for favoring guerilla warfare and hit-and-run tactics in battle, in contrast to the more organized battalions or hunter-killer teams of other Tarellian worlds.

Maza was on the coreward side of the Tarellian confederacy, so when the tyranids invaded it was on the right side of the Confederacy to avoid getting eaten. This was all the better for the native Mazons, for if the tyranids had come from the other direction, Maza would not have survived. Fiercely isolationist even by Tarellian standards, the Mazons had traded with neighboring worlds for technology and resources but had remained thinly populated and poorly industrialized. They would have stood no chance against the tyranids. Nevertheless, the Mazons have suffered the aftereffects of the tyranids invasion just as much as any other Tarellian world. The sheer number of refugees from elsewhere in the empire has forced the Mazons to open their doors, and Maza is currently in the midst of a cultural conflict between the mostly pastoral natives and the refugees used to a more industrialized, arid world.