The Strange Stars

With nearly 40 posts in the Strange Stars setting, the sagacious Robert over at Rogues & Reavers suggested it might be time for an overview post to make it easier for people to see how these far-ranging elements sort of fit together. I’m not sure the best way of doing that (one might want to start with the inspirations here), but I’ll sort of summarize what’s been presented so far:

The Strange Stars is the sphere of the human phyle in the far future, a time millennia after the first human expansion and the rise (and fall) of builders of the hyperspace nodes, the Archaic Oikumene. In the current era, the Strange Stars are fragmented into smaller cultures and civilizations.

The former cradle of the Archaic Oikumene is a depopulated area without a central authority known as the Zuran Expanse. The Expanse is home to dangers like the inhuman ssraad (in three colors), and ruined worlds that entice treasure-seekers like Tenebrae and the Library of Atoz-Theln. It’s also home to unusual cultures like the invertebrate zhmun of Aygo and the self-improvement cult of Aurogov.

Art by Peter Elson

Spinward from the Expanse is the Alliance, a union of species allied for protection and trade. Members of the Alliance include the green-skinned psionicists of Smaragdoz, the privacy obsessed neshekk of Kuznuh, the avian-humanoid splice hyehoon of Omu, the human-alien blended cyborg Blesh, the gnomes of Dzrrn, and the angel-like deva of Altair.

Bordering the Alliance is the expansionistic and theocratic Instrumentality of Aom.

On the other side of the Expanse is the Vokun Empire. Besides the decadent vokun, the empire contains several client species. The cybernetic crustacean-like Engineers build much of Vokun technology. The yellow-skinned ibglibdishpan are their biologic computers. The kuath are bioarmored child-soldiers.

There are a number of other interesting cultures and worlds: the oneirochemist Phantasists, the ancient mind excavators of Deshret, and the warrior-poet moravecs of Eridanus, among others. The major galactic powers are at least openingly cordial (whatever may go on behind the scenes) and trade takes place between the two “civilized” portions of the galaxy that must pass through hyperspace nodes in the “wilder” areas (not just the Expanse, but the Rim and Coreward Reach, as well). New cultures, lost since the Great Collapse are discovered from time to time, and their are number of ruined worlds with treasures to loot.

Phaser

We resumed our Google+ Star Trek game last night in Starships & Spacemen 2e. I had done some statting of Trek stuff that I hadn't shared on the blog, so I thought this was a good time to give the wider internet world a view of some of that.

Here are my stas for Phaser Type I from the original series, gleaned from FASA's version and non-RPG sources.  The ranges are low compared to the weapons given in S&S, but shorter ranges are in keeping with what we see in the show.  Weight of a Type I phaser is 0.44 lbs. The "drain" uses FASA's assumptions of 20 shots for the Type I.

Type I Phasers have the following settings:
1- stun: Save vs. stun check at a 2d6 penalty or be knocked unconscious for 1 turn. Range: 100’ (Drain: 1)
2- wide angle stun: Same as Stun above, but generates a cone-like beam extending for 30’. At 30’ it is 6’ ft.wide. (Drain: 4)
3- Heavy stun: Save check vs. stun (2d6 penalty) or be knocked unconscious for 2d4 turns. roll 1d6 for the results: 1-2, no damage; 3-5, 1d6 hp damage; 6, 2d6 hp damage. Range: 100' (Drain: 2)
4- heat: 1d3 damage to living things, but mostly used to warm up objects when applied over longer periods (roughly 1 round). Range: 6’ (Drain: 1)
5- disrupt: 2d6 damage. Range: 70’ (Dain: 2)
6-dematerialize: 4d6 damage on a hit, Save vs. energy attack or be disintegrated. Range: 30‘ (Drain: 4)
Overload: A phaser set to overload makes a progressively higher pitched warning sound for 1 minute until it explodes, doing 1d6 x its remaining charges in damage.

The purpose of the variable penalty on the stun effect was arrived at in playtest. It was a way to ensure stun was usually effective while still proving a bit of chance to it.

Warlord Wednesday: The Vision Quest

Let's re-enter the lost world with another installment of my issue by issue examination of DC Comic's Warlord, the earlier installments of which can be found here...

"The Vision Quest"

Warlord #129 (May 1988)

Written by Michael Fleisher; Art by Jan Duursema

Synopsis: Morgan is awakened from a nightmare about Tara and the Scavenger of Souls by a woman on “bronto-charger” who’s being chased by “blood-crazed marauders.” As he’s wont to do, he leaps to her aid without any real clue as to what’s going on. Morgan and woman (no slouch in combat herself) quickly dispatch the marauders.

She introduces herself as Aoife, Battle Maiden of the Cuchulainn Clan.

Morgan knows those people. Aoife is pretty far from home. She explains she’s chasing a vision she had:

Somehow, those images mean she is to meet her destiny on the Isle of Xur-Chemosh in the Tourmaline Sea. Morgan has never heard of it, but he's just wandering anyway, so...

Meanwhile, in another part of Skartaris, Mariah’s bathing in a pond under the watchful eye of Danny Maddox. That turns out to be luck when a winged serpent attacks her. Danny does it in with his automatic rifle.

Immediately after, they meet a group of veiled tribesmen visiting the watering hole. The tribesmen lead them back to their village in the middle of an unusually parched desert, surrounding a half-buried spaceship.

Not everybody is so welcoming. The high priest thinks no one can kill a sky serpent. He warns the strangers to stay away from the shrine. We also learn the name of this place is Xur-Chemosh. Quite a coincidence, eh?

Despite the priest’s warning, the first thing Maddox and Mariah do is check out the spacecraft. They find a skeleton with a weird flight helmet—which Maddox immediately puts on. The priest arrives and starts calling them defilers. Before the situation can escalate:

Maddox knows how to stop them. He presses a button and energy beams shoot out of the spacecraft, killing the monsters. Maddox is hailed as a savior.

Beginning their quest for Xur-Chemosh, Morgan and Aoife enter a village. Aoife gets a premonition that a stone wall is going collapse, she manages to scatter the villagers, but would have got hit by it herself, if Morgan hadn't intervened.

Back in Shamballah, Jennifer is worried about what’s going on in Khnathaiti’s cave beneath the mountain. Jennifer puts a spell on a bird and sends it out to do some recon. Khnathaiti sees it coming and knows whose it is. She blasts it—blasting Jennifer, as well.

Things to Notice:

• This is the first issue of Maddox's Revenge.
• The letter column reports that Warlord goes to bi-monthly with this issue due to lowsales.

Where It Comes From:
With the introduction of Aoife, Fleisher starts hitting Celtic mythology and languages pretty hard. "Aoife" itself is an Irish female given name meaning "pleasure" or "radiant." Cuchulainn (Irish for "Culann's Hound") is the name of a Irish mythological hero.

Xur-Chemosh, on the other hand, comes from "Chemosh," a god of the Moabites mentioned in the Bible.

IN SPACE II: Modrons and More

When I did a post about using Fiend Folio as a source for aliens and monsters in a science fiction game, the idea met with a lot of enthusiasm, largely because everybody likes the Fiend Folio. I'm going to court a little more controversy today and assert that Monster Manual II may be even better in this regard.

First off the easy stuff. It's got a whole slew of dinosaurs and giant (and minimal) animals and insects. Those are mostly kind of boring though. A bit more interesting are exotic things like the aurumvorax or is it a Barsoomian honey badger? Who knows.

The cool stuff comes with the monsters that are already sort of sci-fi. The aboleth remind me a bit of Larry Niven's thrint (except in appearance) with no modification. The Vagabond's description already tells us it's from another planet. The cloaker and the crysmal likewise work pretty much as is. Memory moss is positively Star Trekian, if we only make it's power psionic instead of magical. The wemic are a lot like Poul Anderson's Ishtarians in appearance.

Art by Wayne Barlowe

Then there are ones that will take a little more thought. Maybe a demilich is some sort of nanoswarm? Is a Tarrasque a fearsome bioweapon of an extinct civilization? And the Modrons? Well, I figure they're probably sentient programs living in an ancient computer network, Tron or Reboot style, waiting on adventurous netrunners to stumble into their mainframe.

Hellhound on My Trail

art by Alan Davis

Of all the dangers in the Zuran Expanse (and there are many), perhaps none provoke as many nightmares the hellhounds or fury hounds. Though there are less than twenty of these monsters in existence, they’re reputed to have decimated small cities and forced the destruction of entire habitats in an effort to keep their threat from spreading.

The hellhounds are synthetic beings, sophont weapons of mass destruction; though if the tales are to be believed, they were originally created for a very different purpose. Allegedly they were once the playmates of  lonely prelapsarian princeling in an isolated habitat. Though their basic minds only mimicked sapience, the canny princeling improved their programming, possibly by using elements of his own neural structure.

The princeling grew to a psychopathic adulthood. He hosted sadistic games for the amusement of his courtiers (mostly mind-copies of himself) in which victims were hunted by his former toys, evolved to a more suitably vicious form. In time, the creatures had outgrown this roll, but by then it was too late for their master to stop what he had thoughtlessly begun.

They still hunt, but are generally undiscriminating: Anyone and everyone are fair game. They aren’t mindless beasts; in fact, they're quite erudite and likely to attempt to engage their prey (or at least taunt them) with allusions to and quotations from pre-Great Collapse works of art before the kill.

The hounds are the size of earthly great cats and appear as vaguely canine in form, but with triangular heads more reminiscent of birds of prey or perhaps serpents.  Their faces are much more expressive than an animal's would be. Their bodies are made of computronium sheathed in a quicksilver smartmatter skin. Their limbs can contort or flow in surprising ways, and they can squeeze themselves into smaller spaces than might be expected. They regenerate damaged; a fist-sized portion of their substance can regrowth the entire creature with time, an energy source, and a material substrate. They can survive for indeterminate periods in hard vacuum.

They hunt in packs.

No. Appearing: 1-4
AC: 4
HD: 7
Saving Throw: 11
Attack Bonus: +8/+8/+6
Damage: 2d4/2d4 claws, 1d8 bite
Movement: 40’
Morale: 10
Special Abilities: Their hides provide a -2 penalty to hit with laser weapons. They regenerate 3 hit points per round, starting after 2 rounds of combat. They have the ability of total cellular regeneration similar to the biopsionic power Nine Lives. 

Terror and Atavism

The Eden Seekers are a group of antignostic sapience-rejectionists among the avian humanoid hyehoon, who sometimes engage in terrorist activities. Contrary to the beliefs of the majority of their species, they view their fabled creator, the genetic engineer Anat Marao as a satanic figure. Their ultimate goal is the purging of the hominid influence in their genome to return their descendants to the “pure” avian genetics of their presumed ancestors.

There is a wide range of expression of Eden Seeker beliefs. Some merely choose to engage in atavistic rituals where their minds are downloaded into bird-like bioroid bodies. Others actually actually have temporary (or permanent) nanosurgically restructuring. Still others are fanatic terrorists seeking to acquire and use weapons of mass gene restructuring.

Though their primary focus is on overthrowing the social structure of the hyehoon homeworld Omu, Eden Seeker extremists sometimes hide in Expanse or smuggle weapons through its hyperspace nodes.

EDEN SEEKER EXTREMISTS

Attributes: Force 3, Cunning 6, Wealth 5

Hit Points: 29

Assets: Boltholes/Cunning 6, Demagogue/Cunning 5, Laboratory/Wealth 3, Zealots/Force 3

Tags: Fanatical

Warlord Wednesday: The Brood

Let's re-enter the lost world with another installment of my issue by issue examination of DC Comic's Warlord, the earlier installments of which can be found here...

"The Last Dragon"

Warlord #128 (April 1988)

Written by Michael Fleisher; Pencils by Jan Duursema, Inks by Tom Mandrake

Synopsis: She’s got him: the “blood-mad fiend” who killed her mate and left her the last of her kind.

She is the dragon and the fiend is Morgan’s new friend Dreadnar. If Morgan gets in the dragon’s way, she’s willing to kill him, too. Dreadnar and Morgan dive under the surface of the lake. Dreadnar slices the dragon’s belly and she flies off. He thinks he’s driven her off, but in reality she’s just postponed the fight.

In Siberia, Danny Maddox picks the lock to the cell holding Mariah. He recruits her to help him in an escape attempt from the gulag—thinking he can use her as a scapegoat if things go bad. The two manage to waylay a guard and get a rifle.

The dragon flies back to her brood, thinking on her conflict with the biped (Dreadnar) as she does. Her kind had protected the humans of the Vale, but they relied upon them too. Only the blood of this particular race could nourish the dragon new borns. It was to this use they put the maidens the shamans sacrificed to them. When feminine struck the humans and they withheld the sacrifices, thinking the dragons were responsible, threatening the dragon’s hatchlings with starvation. The dragons retaliated, but the war has nearly destroyed her kind as well.

The dragon can see Dreadnar and Morgan approach in her mind’s eye. She realizes “the white-haired one” is not consumed by hatred and his blood won’t feed her young, but if he persists in helping the madman, she will slay him too.  She ambushes the would-be ambushers:

Mariah and Maddox haven’t gotten far into the wilderness before the gulag guards catch up with them. They’ll never make it to the rail line Maddox was opening to get to. Luckily, Mariah has another way out.

Morgan and Dreadnar are pended down by the dragon’s breath. Dreadnar knows the dragon will have to stop to take a breath eventually; when she does, he attacks.  Dreadnar’s attack is a distraction so Morgan can use his gun, but he doesn’t get a chance.

Mariah and Maddox are out in the snow. She can’t find the cave entrance. Maddox thinks she’s going crazy because she keeps saying “the pteranodon died here,” and the guards are almost on them. Then Mariah finds the pternanodon’s carcass that points them to the cave entrance. They run in, escaping their pursuers:

Even though Morgan didn’t get a shot off, he distracted the dragon enough that Dreadnar was able to jump on her head. Dreadnar stabs her skull, and she tosses him off. He falls to the ground; she hears every bone in his body break and knows her mate is avenged.

Morgan looks at Dreadnar then at the dragon. Their eyes meet and some understanding passes between them.

But Dreadnar isn’t quit done yet. He hurls his weapon into the dragon’s skull. She topples over, dying—but crushing him in the process. “The monster is dead,” Morgan thinks, and it’s unclear which of the combatants he refers to. He rides away, while Dreadnar’s blood seeps down:

Things to Notice:

• This is the only issue of Warlord narrated by a dragon.
• The cover image doesn't really happen in the issue.

Where It Comes From:
This issue continues the story from the last issue, but recontextualizes things to give it more nuance. This isn't the first time in the Warlord saga that a monster has come off sympathetic, but it has been  while.