Interlude in a Galaxy Far, Far, Away

Stopping the traditional fantasy train to stretch my legs at the science fantasy station...

I've been working my way through The Clone Wars: Season One on blu-ray.  While notably a kid's show in some ways (every episode starts with a moral, for instance) it is, in some ways, more complex and thoughtful than the prequel films.

Anyway, some half-formed observations about Star Wars' ubiquitous droids have been nagging at me for sometime.  Watching an episode the other day, and seeing those bird-headed (and brained) battle droids not only make poor tactical decisions, but do so due to over-confidence, it finally crystallized for me.

The humanoid species of the galaxy programmed these droids?  I think not.

Follow me here: I can buy that people might program artificial intelligences that make bad decisions--maybe that's just an unavoidable sequelae of having that level of AI.  But AI that are arrogant, boneheaded, dishonest, or overconfident?  That seems unlikely.  Yes, AIs like this do show up in science fiction, but they're typically unique entites, not armies of fretting domestics and slow-on-the-uptake battlebots.  I mean, if that was just the inevitable downside to sapient droids, then I think people would just choose to do without them.  Seems like they're more trouble than they're worth a lot of the time. 

So how does one explain the evidence before us in the canon--the fact that pain-in-the-ass droids are found all over the galaxy?

My theory is that the humanoid races don't actual make droids.  Those droid-foundries on Genosis are apocryphal.  I think droids are machine-life enslaved by the biologic sapients of the galaxy. 

I don't really envision Walrus Man or Snaggletooth out on slaving runs (though Jabba's treatment of Oola the Dancing Girl, and Watto's ownership of the Skywalkers might suggest that I'm being naive).  I think maybe certain fringe biologic races or perhaps other droids, sell the droids to galactic society.  These droids aren't manufactured in the sense of being designed by teams of engineers and rolled out of factories, but instead droids are self-replicating.  They "reproduce" in some way (not likely sexual, despite what your thinking), and the resultant neonate intelligences go through some sort of growth/maturation process.  This allows for their (many) personality quirks. 

I don't know if droids "evolved" naturally--I doubt it.  Probably they were initially created by a long-vanished precursor race, or by the transcendent AIs that succeeded a precursor race.  Since that time droids have been undergoing evolution, changing in ways that have made them as complicated and flawed as any biologic sapients.

So the slavery thing...Well, apparently galactic society is just hugely bio-chauvinist.  The bio-sapients are just culturally incapable of viewing droids as anything but machines.

I know this won't fit well with everyone's version of the "Star Wars Universe."  There are also probably some details from the films I haven't addressed.  But I find the nuance this adds to the universe compelling. 

All this speculation is making me consider an unconventional Star Wars campaign sometime in the future...

Ascension

“I feel myself becoming a god."

- Titus Flavius Vespasianus ,79 CE

One the fundamental features of D&D is that character’s become tougher and more powerful—often extraordinarily so—as they become more experienced, i.e. “level up” as the kids say. This has never really been addressed “in game-world” that I’m aware of except, in a way, in Mentzer’s so-called BECMI edition of D&D. Here the “endgame” became achieving godhood. I think this is an idea with a lot of potential—and a lot of potential to give “in world” context to other rules elements.  I’ve utilized to that end in the world of Arn. I don’t envision it as something to form the primary focus of the game (it won’t be the endgame of every campaign—or any, necessarily), but more as something to fill out the background. The major inspirations are the BECMI metagame plus some transhuman/posthuman space opera (particularly David Zindell’s A Requiem for Homo Sapiens trilogy with its “vastened” gods). Since first starting to play with this idea, I’ve discovered Erikson’s Malazan series contains the similar idea of heroes “bootstrapping” themselves into deities, so you might want to check them out as well.


The following is from a treatise by Mnaurmon Lloigor, a renowned scholar and historian, late of Thystara:

It is one of the fundamental features of the universe that mortals may by great deeds come to be invested with capabilities and perceptions superhuman, making them as gods. Such beings are known as “ascended.” Theologians argue this point with thaumaturgic and natural philosophers but have yet to articulate a compelling argument that the supernal objects of human worship are in anyway demonstrably different from ascended beings. In fact, some deities have emerged in historic times by this very process—noble Ahzuran, the patron of the Empire, among them!

How mankind acquired the knowledge of ascension is lost to prehistory. We certainly can trace it to the ancient Empire of the Godmakers, for whom ascension apparently formed a central cultural rite. Perhaps the Godmakers stole this knowledge, or were given it under apprenticeship to some nonhuman elder race. Some have suggested that it was the older, true gods, from whom it was stolen. Or perhaps it was they who carelessly bequeathed it to man.

From where ever it came, we know something of what that knowledge wrought. The Godmakers’ civilization soared to heights mankind has never achieved since, and numerous god-like beings—Immortals—arose.  These godlings made war with superhuman armies and reality-searing weapons against the last redoubts of the elder races, and fell abstractions from the noumenal planes, and finally, against each other.

Then they succumbed to strange fall, and their civilization was gone.

The Godmakers left us no written record (beyond perhaps some indecipherable monumental text), but fragments of their knowledge has been delivered to us through the hands of earlier ages, and the sometimes suspect memories of long-lived, extraplanar entities. Secrets were preserved in hidden places, in some cases by oral tradition, in others by arcane means.

And then there are the subterranean labyrinths constructed, or invoked, apparently to be the crucible of apotheosis—and persisting to tempt the brave or foolish to this day. The purpose of these structures, however, was not immediately recognizable. Other sources were less cryptic and less dangerous.

It was the young conqueror Azuranthus, known to us now as Ahzuran, who became the first man in millennia to claim these secrets from an ancient order of mystics, and ascend, becoming both emperor and patron deity. The knowledge of ascension became part of the teaching of the imperial cult, spread to all parts of the empire.

God-Emperor Ahzuran eventually chose to move beyond this plane. With strife between old faiths and new, political tensions in far-flung provinces, and the machinations of the nascent ascended which had followed in Ahzuran’s wake, the empire could not hold without its patron.

In the period of turmoil that followed, the class of professional adventurers emerged. Foremost, they were interested in finding wealth amid the ancient ruins, or even just looting the treasure troves of  Ahzuran's empire. Over time, however, skillful (and lucky) adventurers began to discover that the dungeons provided a path to ascension. This knowledge became widespread as the empire's successor states began to coalesce.

To this day, adventurers continue pursue the legacy of the Godmakers and of Ahzuran. They dream of temporal power and riches, but also of the chance of godhood. Perhaps some even think on Ahzuran’s last, cryptic pronouncements, wherein he hinted of levels of attainment beyond the ranks of the ascended, and suggested there was even greater power to be won in realms beyond human perception, for those audacious enough to seize it.

They Remember Lemuria: Troglodytes Revisited

It seems to me that the reptilian folk of D&D don't have a lot to differentiate them. Consider the poorly named troglodyte: It's only distinguishing factor from a variety of reptile-men is that it lives underground, and--well, stinks.

Alright, maybe that's a little unfair. Still, at the end of the day, the troglodyte isn't on anybody's "best monster list."

But what if the troglodyte looked less like a chubby lizard-man and more like this:

Now that look opens up a whole new set of associations...

"Sinuous bodies that moved with effortless ease, seeming to flow rather than step. Hands with supple jointless fingers and feet that made no sound and lipless mouths that seemed to always open on silent laughter, infinitely cruel. And all through that vast place whispered a dry harsh rustling, the light friction of skin that had lost its primary scales but not its serpentine roughness."

- Leigh Brackett, The Sword of Rhiannon (1949)

For one thing, the Sleestak image reminds me of paleontologist Dale Russell's hypothetical Troodon-descended, dinosauroid sapient, to whom the Sleestaks bear an uncanny resemblance. For another, anyone steeped in Land of the Lost lore knows that the Sleestaks are the degenerate descendants of a once advanced reptoid civilization.

Maybe troglodytes are a similarly fallen race, and maybe, like the dinosauroid, they share an ancient lineage. Maybe they were once the rulers of the world, before the rise of mammals. Whether this civilization was more like that of Robert E. Howard's Serpent-Folk or Harry Harrison's Yilané, is a matter of taste. Maybe it was a bit of both. Note that the world they were the rulers of need not be the campaign world--planar travel exists. In any case, they ruled from a lost continent, an ancient Mu or Lemuria, what have you, until some cataclysm (the arrival of the moon, perhaps? Hey, it go Doctor Who's Silurians out of the way) drove them underground.

Or maybe, it drove them all the way to the Hollow Earth. If so, maybe an advanced reptoid civilization still thrives there, waiting for the chance to try to regain the surface world. Or maybe they changed with the eons, too. A review of Burroughs' Mahars of Pellucidar might be instructive. Even in this rosier (maybe) scenario, some of their race wound up in-between the inner and outer worlds, in caves, slowly devolving and losing their ancient grandeur--becoming primitive and brutish, and possibly anthrophagous. In short, they became troglodytes.

So, its pretty easy to see where one might go with this. Like with the Sleestaks, there maybe be atavistic troglodytes who have intelligence (or even psionic powers!) not possessed by their peers, for adventurers to encounter. And of course, there could be an army of magical biotechnology armed reptoids waiting for the chance to bust out of the inner earth and lay low upstart mammalian civilization.

Maybe that disgusting stench is smell of troglodyte victory.