One of three planets that occupy the Oshora system’s habitable zone, Oshora is a medium-small planet with a diameter of just under nine thousand four hundred kilometres. Orbiting the system’s sun at a distance of one hundred forty five million kilometres, the closest of the 3 planets in the habitable zone, Oshora is generally warmer than its sister planets, with average temperatures at the equator of around thirty eight standard degrees. The planets is also drier than its 2 sisters, having little to no flowing surface water. Over ninety seven percent of the planet’s fresh water is locked in Oshora’s polar glaciers, a resource which has been tapped for millennia to assuage the thirst of the planet’s bustling cities. Most of the rest of the world’s surface was covered in vast sandy dunes or great rock fields of jagged igneous boulders, a legacy of the planet’s seismically active past. There remain large areas of volcanic mudflats as well as areas where molten lava bubbles to the surface of the planet.

Most of Oshora’s surface has now been covered by urban sprawl, the system’s government having established a policy of easy immigration acceptance as well as expedited land purchase and development. This has led to rapid, if sometime haphazard urbanization and development, which can often impact the planet’s environment. The exception to this is those industrial cities established to extract water from the polar glaciers, which operate under a much tighter environmental control regime. This is only prudent considering at an environmental incident at any one of these water extraction points can impact tens of millions of people. Recent excavations in the planet’s eastern equatorial region have unearthed a previously undiscovered cave systems that stretches for thousands of kilometres and promises to open up new residential and industrial opportunities for individuals and corporations that can get there quickly enough.