The Dharma

An ancient civilization that began and ended on Marcadia. They seem to be extinct, with no reason apparent to the new explorers. Skeletons are abundant, but with no apparent cause of death, but all seem absolutely terrified. The buildings are generally intact, with no sign of war in the way it would be fought by modern societies.

Origin
Evolved from predators that fed on the tree-dwelling leaf-eaters that lived in the canopy.

Culture
The Dharma never discovered flight; it probably never occurred to them that it would be possible, and there are no flying creatures on the planet to serve as an example. They were fantastic climbers, which shows in the construction and layout of their buildings. They were artists, and painted murals using bright colors on many of their walls. Predatory by nature, but also dedicated to small tribal units, their murals contained many images of ancient hunting parties skewering or ripping their kills. Others show the teaching of children and great honor for scholars and doctors. (how to portray this?) They had a medium level of technology, including basic computers, planet-wide communication, etc. Inside the Lower Levels the ground the players might find wires from zipline systems that they sued to get around, but these were all below the current height of the forests.

Most of the interiors of the buildings are made up of a beautiful mixture of Merahtite and smooth-sanded (but untreated) wood. This includes the art and furniture, as well as workspaces and equipment.

Buildings
Made of Merahtite, the only thing light enough to rest on the jungle canopy.

The buildings were hundreds of feet tall, but only a few dozen feet remain. If explorers had come a few hundred years later, they might never have found them.

The buildings are laid out in many thousands of small clusters, 3-5 at most. Lower down there are very long ziplines that connected some of them as they built larger and larger nations and tribes, but they still always focused on smaller tribes of a few hundred at most.

Standard building architecture has the entire thing divided into floors, with no stairwells. Natural climbers, the Dharma seemed to have no trouble jumping up to access holes between floors. The floor divisions are only partial, with the interiors more like multi-layered terraces with poles or ropes between platforms and levels (the latter partly rotted away, but a few remain). Most buildings have a central "trunk", which is partly structural but is covered in handles, lines, chains, and loops all the way around. When these exist, the terraces around almost seem like branches of a tree. When greater floorspace is needed (labs for example?) there are ports through the floor scattered about.

The buildings take on a variety of shapes, but are wider at the bottom, ending in distributed foundations that spread the weight out among multiple foundational trees.

Extinction
They went extinct around 3000 galactic standard years ago from an internal war. They had discovered kyber crystals while mining the inside of their planet for Merahtite. They never discovered lightsabers or other uses for the kyber crystals, but they did discover that the crystals, when ground up and then impacted or otherwise disturbed, released a blast of dark force power that caused a fatal spike of terror in those who were nearby. This Kyber Crystal Powder weapon, once discovered, was used with abandon by all sides of the conflict. A few final large blasts in population centers essentially wiped out the civilization.