Different Dark Suns

Dark Sun is an evocative setting as is, but there's nothing wrong with a little variety. Maybe there are two great tastes that taste great together? Try these:

Art by Kevin O'Neill

Dark Sun, Red Sands
Killraven (and the War of the Worlds tv shows, and perhaps The Tripods series of novels by John Christopher) posits a world where the Martians from Wells's novel return and succeed in their conquest. The Masters would no doubt turn their vast, cool, and unsympathetic intellects toward areoforming Earth in the image of their homeworld. Desertification and cooling, accomplished by casting dust into the sky (making the sun appear darker and redder).  Over time, the Masters became decadent and lost the ability to produce much of their technology. They amused themselves with bloodsports and petty intrigues. The mutants and monsters they had bred for various purposes escaped into the wilds. Earth becomes almost Mars, and almost Mars becomes Athas, or something pretty close.

Art by Frank Frazetta

Dark Red Sun
Two ideologies fought a centuries long war, unleashing weapons they destroyed their world's environment, mutated its creatures, and cast both civilizations back to a more primitive state.Perhaps these competing tribes were called the Kohms and Yangs, but certainly the victors in their struggle flew a red flag (as ERB had it, in the original version of the book that became The Moon Maid). In any case, their former differences don't matter as much anymore in a harsh world where human and inhuman is a bigger distinction. Sometimes, though, the desert tribes still give the ancient war cry: "Wolverines!" though none remember what it might mean.

Art by Ken Kelly

Dark Western Sun
This riff is to BraveStarr what McKinney's Carcosa might be to Masters of the Universe. When galactic civilization tore itself apart in civil war, many frontier worlds, left on their on, backslide into primitivism. The strange, psionic races of Darksun left their reservations and remote hiding places and turned human habitation into settlements isolated by wilderness, where the only law comes from the barrel of a gun.

They Always Get Their Man

The ngghrya are humanoids native to a world on the border of the Coreward Reach and the Vokun Empire. Their population has slowly dwindled under Vokun occupation. Today, ngghrya are confined to the montane forests of their world, but exiles and refugees are not infrequently encountered in the Expanse.

Appearance and Biology: Ngghrya are thin, almost skeletal in appearance with rough, nodule-covered skin that almost resembles carapace. Their thinness belies their strength and durability. Their skin is scaled in places with dermal denticles, but also has ridges and horns of calcium carbonate deposition that begin to form at puberty and elaborate as they age.

Ngghrya exhibit slightly less sexual dimorphism in terms of size than baseline humans, but some male ngghrya grow "tusks" of keratin from both ends of their upper lip.

Psychology and Psi: Ngghrya are a somewhat superstitious people, but do not revere gods or supernatural beings as such. Rather, they seek to avoid notice of spirit entities by the proper ritual behaviors and taboos (some of them idiosyncratic) except at certain times. 

They tend to be a taciturn people by the baseline standards but fairly accepting of other cultures so long as they are respected. The stresses of their current existence on their homeworld have led to increased substance use, violence, and a mistrust of non-ngghrya.

Some ngghrya (a disproportionate number found off-world) are trackers, bounty hunters, or skiptracers, thanks to a psi-like ability. They are able to track any quarry across any distance, even light-years of space. This ability (called yaa'hii by the ngghrya) is thought to be instilled by a ritual involving an hallucinogenic substance native to the caves of the mountains of their homeworld.

Psi-researchers believe this ability creates in their brains circuits the equivalent of time loop logic computer, using telepathic data sent back through time by their future self and the Novikov self-consistency principle for error correction. This theory is lent support by the assertion by ngghrya trackers that they cannot catch any quarry they haven't already caught. 

Stats: Stars Without Number:  Ngghrya have +1 to Constitution. Tracking: On a failed Mental Effects saving throw, the target will be found by the ngghrya. Note that being found doesn't necessarily mean capture or defeat. Escape may mean another saving throw, if the ngghrya is alive and still on the job.

Wednesday Comics: Nightfire

Here's the next installment of  Jim Starlin's Metamorphosis Odyssey. The earlier posts in the series can be found here.

"Nightfire (Metamorphosis Odyssey Chapter XI)"

Epic Illustrated #7 (August 1981) Story & Art by James Starlin

Synopsis: Zygotean cruisers swoop down on our protagonists, so they make for the shelter of Vanth's ship. Aknaton wants to resort to magic, but Vanth suggests it's his magic power that they followed to begin with. Better to use Vanth's ship that's small, fast--and loaded with weapons.

They could easily slip past the slower cruisers, except those ships must have been transported there by a swifter dreadnought.

First, they need to deal with the cruisers. Vanth turns the ship and comes up behind his former pursuers.

Now for the dreadnought. Even the Osirosians were ultimately unable to stand up to their power.

Vanth asserts they didn't study their enemies' ships closely enough. The dreadnought has dispatched all its cruisers to catch them. Its hangars are open and its shields are down. Vanth flies inside the dreadnought, firing.

The dreadnought is destroyed thanks to its unshielded power pods. Vanth's light cutter's shields hold. Cunning did what Osirosian power could not. Aknaton wonders if they had had warriors like Vanth, if they would have had to resort to the plan they embarked on.

They're off. To a planet called Dreamsend.

Things to Notice:

• We get some Star Wars-esque space battles.

Commentary: 
This chapter injects some action after the exposition of the last one. It also serves to highlight just how Vanth will be able to defend the others.

Aknaton's tale last chapter did its job. Vanth now seems to come around to Aknaton's way of thinking about the Zygotean menace.

The Alex Toth Casting Agency

Need a different look for an NPC or a weird monster of some sort? Check out the model sheets and concept art created for Hanna-Barbera by the late, great Alex Toth:

"futuristic city dwellers", maybe. Or maybe some fantasy city:

Demons:

The rulers of the cat people:

A wizard and his pets:

A wizard with a nose piercing and fairy lackeys:

Visiting dignitaries:

Strange Stars Update

Thrax warrior in progress by Waclaw Wysocki

Work on Strange Stars continues. The artists I'm working with have been turning out a lot of cool stuff only some of which I shared here.  I'm also happy to announce that John Till of the blog FATE SF is lending his extensive knowledge to the Fate adaptation of the setting. Given John's blog output, I can't think of anyone better qualified to collaborate with.

My current plan (still subject to change, based on POD restrictions and what not) is for a full color setting book that's systemless bundled with a "just the facts,"  no frills game stat companion for both Stars Without Number and Fate. I've lately thought of patterning the stat after the old Ace double novels in format, but we'll see. The reason for the separation is to keep costs down (pages of game stats don't have to be printed on glossy full color paper), but it also means the setting book could be used as an in game reference.

Anyway, there will be further updates as things develop.

Do the Time Warp (Again)

With X-Men: Days of Future Past about to drop this weekend, I was thinking about alternate futures. They're a staple of comics and have made appearances in movies and TV. Outside of the superhero genre, they probably don't show up much in gaming--and I 'm specifically excluding settings that may technically be alternate futures, but have no interact with a different present. I mean an alternate future of a current campaign world.

It's not a stock fantasy concept, admittedly, but since when has that ever stopped anyone, particularly in the old school crowd? There are so many ways it could be utilized. The old Dark Shadows show had a parlor room that led to a parallel time line; there's no reason a whole dungeon couldn't have links to an alternate future. Like on Star Trek: Enterprise, maybe the Big Bads behind--well, something or another--are from an alternate future, perhaps different alternate futures.

The PCs could interact with alternate future versions of themselves  traveling to the past for some reason (usual to cause/prevent their future occurring). For extra fun, the big bads could actually be one or more of the PCs.

Anybody ever done something like this in a non-supers game?

Meeting one's alternate future self always means getting to see one's snazzy alt-future duds

Wednesday Comics: Requiem

Here's the next installment of  Jim Starlin's Metamorphosis Odyssey. The earlier posts in the series can be found here.

"Requiem (Metamorphosis Odyssey Chapter X)"

Epic Illustrated #7 (August 1981) Story & Art by James Starlin

Synopsis: Aknaton shows the others the history of the Zygoteans. Their world was once a veritable Utopia, but it fell into the hands of venal and incompetent rulers. First, they despoiled the planet.

Unfortunately, few of the people seemed to notice. They were consumed by their distractions and amusements and complicit in the despoiling of their world:

The people eventually realized what had happened. The gap between have and havenot was large, but the cries for social justice went unanswered. Instead, it was determined some would escape their dying world. Thanks to the influence of the military and religion, the many were inspired to toil to launch a few into the stars.

Zygotea died, but the Zygoteans lived on. They repeated the same process on every world they came to. The more monstrous they became, the more they came to resent those that reminded them of their origins. The Osirosans, the progenitors of all humanoid races, were the greatest reminder of how far they had fallen and so had to die. But the Osirosans conceived of the Infinity Horn--and a way to end the Zygotean menace.

The others are silent as Aknaton finishes his tale. Elsewhere, though, their enemies mark them all for termination:

Things to Notice:

• The Zygoteans originally look just like humans.

Commentary: 
We see the Zygoteans at last and...they look just like us, at least at first. Starlin is obviously offering a critique on and perhaps a warning to our own society. Interestingly,the Zygoteans wind up with long noses and bald heads, looking like a slightly more monstrous version of the Osirosans--or at least Aknaton. Maybe this is because they're bookends: the Osirosans started humanoid life and the Zygoteans were going to be the end of it.

Or perhaps, they are two sides of the same coin, given Aknaton's intentions.