Cold Eggs

Ksaa are an aggressive and expansionist species native to a system on the Rim in the Strange Stars.

Appearance and Biology: Ksaa are oviparous humanoids with some reptile-like characteristics. They have three sexes with a great deal of phenotypic difference between them. Females are large, aggressive (particularly after egglaying) and territorial; males are smaller, more brightly colored, and less intelligent. The neuter sex has pale white coloration and is more intelligent than the others. It is born from eggs incubated at a cooler temperature, hence the name khii gan, meaning "cold egg" literally, but also "eunuch." It is used figuratively to connote something like "cunning bastard."

Psychology: Ksaa society is formed around family groups of related females. They control territory that is administered by cold eggs born of their clutch or another clutch from the same mother. Cold eggs play games of political intrigue for greater wealth and position. They view themselves as superior to the rest of their species and believe their species to be superior to all others. Ksaa are not an organized threat, except in the occasional period where a cold egg manages to unite a significant number of the great families. These periods are generally short-lived, as treachery takes its toll.

Ksaa still retain the predatory instincts of their evolutionary ancestors. They greatly enjoy hunts and take pleasure in toying with prey (and enemies) before killing them.

Stats: Male ksaa are cannon-fodder soldiers little smarter than animals (AC 7, HD 1, AB +2, bite 1d4 or melee weapon), female ksaa are less likely to be encountered but are more formidable (AC 6, HD 2, AB +2, bite 1d4, tail slap 1d6 or weapon), cold egg ksaa can be built like PCs have have attributes in the same range.

The Weird Adventure of the Anagrammist

I always enjoy hearing about (and sometimes playing in) other peoples Weird Adventures games. John Till has been blogging about a cool game he ran using Fate at Con of the North recently. Like Lester B. Portly, John has his own sort of interpretive spin, which I think is great.

Anyway, check out the set up here, and follow it up with part two and three.

Wednesday Comics: Metamorphosis Odyssey

Here's the first installment of a new Wednesday feature. Leaving Warlord behind, I'm branching out to other comics, starting with Jim Starlin's Metamorphosis Odyssey...

"Metamorphosis Odyssey: Aknaton"

Epic Illustrated #1 (Spring 1980) Story & Art by James Starlin

Synopsis: An alien in pseudo-Egyptian garb flies through space via power of a mystic chance on a disc. This is Aknaton, and his mind is consumed not by the wonders of the cosmos he travels through, but by the past.

He remembers his world of Orsiros, an ancient civilization mixing magic and science, now gone. He thinks of the friends and loved ones he lost including his beloved Nieth. All of them gone now. Only the hated Zygoteans remain.

Even the Orsirosans didn't know the origins of the Zygoteans. They knew well the Zygoteans war of conquest though, as they watched horror befall world after world. The Zygoteans invaded, enslaved the people, then stripped the world of resources, and left their slaves to die on the withered husk.

The Orsirosans watched but didn't act. War was unknown to them, and though centuries were as hours to them, they feared death. Still, they knew that the Zygoteans would one day come for them, and so they watched and learned, and made ready. When the Zygoteans finally attacked, they met stiff Orsirosan resistance. The confrontation lasted 500 years, but Orsiros stood.

The Elders of Orsiros knew their victory wouldn't last. They considered many strategies for overcoming the Zygoteans, but ultimately came to realize that the outcome was inevitable. And so, they fixed their minds on the idea that Orsiros should not die alone.

All their facility for magic and technology went into making the Horn of Infinity; the universe's last resort, the end of the Zygoteans. One of the elders was chosen to be the Horn's guardian: Aknaton. He was granted great powers by his fellows, and these he used to look into the future. He saw the Zygotean triumph, the destruction of his homeworld, the sounding of the Horn and vengeance--and his own death.

Aknaton hid the Horn on a barren world. Then he laid the foundation for what he knew must be. He visited Earth and place a racial memory in emerging humanity. He visited a lush world in the Crab Nebula and released life of his own creation. In Alpha Centauri, he instilled in cannibalistic brutes the capacity for empathy, and on a gelid world in Vega, he hide "a sword of icy fire."

When he was done, he returned to Orsiros to await the end. Though it took 100,000 years, it came. As the Zygoteans attacked, Aknaton said his good-byes. Then he stepped on his helodisc and left his doomed world.

He tried not to watch, but in the end, he couldn't resist. He turned at the precise moment to see Orsiros ripped apart. And then:

Things to Notice:

• Aknaton has a pointy nose (and to a lesser extent, chin) that the other Orsirosans don't share. Maybe it's just Starlin deferentiating them, but I wonder...
• The Zygoteans are never clearly seen, only their "thralls."

Commentary: 
Metamorphosis Odyssey was serialized in Epic Illustrated, Marvel's answer to Heavy Metal, starting in it's first issue. Starlin had been working for DC just prior to this, but his return to Marvel (albeit in a creator owned environment) marked a return to the cosmic vistas and big themes of his work in Strange Tales and Captain Marvel. Starlin has said some things about the origins of this story, but I don't want to touch on them now as they might be a bit spoilery for what's to come.

The Orsiros clearly have an ancient Egypt vibe going on. Orsiros is derived from Osiris, the god of the afterlife. Orsiris was killed by his brother Set and then dismembered. Unlike Orsiros, Osiris gets reassembled and resurrected. The name Aknaton is reminiscent of Akhenaten, pharaoh of the 18th dynasty who forced the abandonment of Egyptian polytheism and the adoption of monotheism, in the form of the worship of Aten.

"Zygotean" is likely derived from zygote, the name for a cell formed by the union of a sperm and egg. The word is derived from a Greek term meaning "joined" or "yoked." Perhaps this choice of names represents the Zygoteans as a growing threat to the galaxy, its gestating doom?  

The Simple Art of Mystery

After this weekends Detectives & Daredevils game, I was talking with the game's creator and our GM, B. Portly, and the man from Kaijuville, Steve, about running mystery-based games. This is something I've put a bit of thought into as most of my Weird Adventures games are mysteries in one way or another. Here are some things I feel like help make a mystery genre game (as opposed to game that just happens to have mystery elements or a mystery setting) successful and enjoyable:

1. Get players' buy in. To create the feel of a specific genre, everybody needs to be on the same page about what you're doing--at least if it's going to be fun for all involved.
2. Plan, but leave some blank space. You need to know the "who," the cast of possible "whos," and at least have a good idea of the "why," if you're going to be able to effectively lay clues for the PCs to uncover. There needs to be some fuzzy areas though, as the player's are going to suggest interesting details either purposefully or through their actions during play. So long as you're not changing the fundamental facts of the mystery the PCs are trying to uncover, this only enhances things.
3. The PCs always find the important clue. This one is borrowed from Robin Laws' GUMSHOE, but it can be employed in any system. If the PCs look, there going to find the critical clues. If they don't look, be on the look out for alternate ways they can discover the information. There can always be some details players' might miss, but if it's really important, don't make it hard to get.
4. Repeated interviews yield new information. As Raymond Chandler pointed out in "The Simple Art of Murder," one of the "unrealistic" things about the murder mystery is that it features a close-knit group of people. Going back to those few NPCs with new questions will get new information, because they will have thought of things since last they were interviewed or new things will have occurred as the malefactor's "plot" precedes.
7. Keep things moving. To again quote Chandler's "The Simple Art of Murder": "When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand." If the PCs have hit a wall or their just not connecting the dots, they shouldn't flounder too long. Their investigative actions are going to make the villains react or (related individuals with something to hide), and the reaction will often be to try to kill the PCs or throw them off the trail. Maybe the villains don't come after the PCs, but after someone else they think might give the PCs information. Their actions shouldn't be random; they should make sense, but their exact timing can be when the game needs it.
8. Everybody has got secrets. Even when someone isn't the killer/primary criminal, they may have something to hide. Hints at these provide good red herrings and discovering them gives the PCs a feeling of accomplishment while they're slowly chipping away at the big case. Be careful not to let these overwhelm the main mystery or make them too hard to discover, lest the PCs spend too much time on a tangent.
9. It's not necessary to be Sherlock Holmes. In The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade does very little investigation. He mostly reacts to people coming after him; he thinks on his feet, keeps the other guy talking so they give up a lot of information for relatively few questions, and uses violence judiciously.

That's what I've got. Anybody else got any pearls of wisdom from their gaming table?

Mapping Hyperspace

Star charts of the Strange Stars exist, but they are not as usual for travelers as diagrams of the area hyperspace network. The travel distances through hyperspace have only a slight association with the distances in regular space and the spatial relationships of two systems matter not at all.

Above is a simple, 2D download of a hyperspace map of the primary member worlds of the Alliance. By convention, worlds are typically named for the primary habitation (either natural or artificial) rather than the star, though there are exceptions--Altair being one here. The connections between nodes are typically color coded, based on the baseline human visible spectrum. (Other colors or other sensory stimuli are employed by beings with differing visual discrimination.Some spacer cultures refer to the two ends of the travel time continuum as "hot" and "cold." ). For a given length, redder connections indicate faster travel times and bluer ones slower. Red connections, for example, typical denote average travel times between 18 and 90 ks, depending on length of the connection and other variables. Violet connections might take 7 Ms or more.

For comparison, the normal space distance between the primary of Smaragdoz (Lurline, a K0V star known in ancient records as Alsaphi) and Altair is approximately 5.54 parsecs, taking 18.09 years or 570,490 ks for light to travel between the two. The sublight trip from a habitation to the terminal station (typically located at the edge of systems) in many cases takes longer than traversing a red connection.

Smaragdoz's hyperspace node is unusual in that it has multiple connections. This does not require a separate gate for each connection; there are only two pairs of gates in this case. Connections are accessed on a rotating timetable. The delay in access is typically in the range of 1-1.5 ks before a new connection can safely begin to be used, however delays 2-3 times that are not unheard of. The connection timetable can be changed on the fly, but this is seldom done as periodicity in connection changes has been found to lead to shorter stabilization delays and fewer "dropouts" (requiring a hard reboot of the gate).

Making A Living in the Far Future

Helluva way to make a living.

The whole "post-scarcity" thing hasn't really panned out in the Strange Stars, and not everyone gets to do something glamorous like being a starship pilot or sim star. At  the same, in the most advanced societies a lot of people just aren't needed in the work force and live off social services, making a bit of money through social media or oddjobs. Here are a few interesting things those in the working world are doing:

Data Prospector: There's a lot of valuable infomation buried in the depths of a planetary or system noosphere. Data prospectors mine the infospace either for clients or as freelancers.

Lawyer: In most places, law is the province of low-sapience infomorphs, but some jurisdictions require a physical presence in court and juries often harbor unconscious biochauvinism, so biosophont attorneys still have a role.

News Contextualizer: Where most events are uploaded to the noosphere by citizens, the job of the news aggregrators is to deliver concise and contextualized news. They rely on contextualizers who are savvy at finding the "angle" or finding the stories to fill out an already established angle. Contextualizers work with stringers or news hunters who sift the raw social media for stories.

Pest Control Specialist: An interstellar society leads to the introduction of invasive alien species. Large-scale infestations call for a governmental response, but smaller ones lead to a call to a local private specialist.

Re-enactor: Re-enactors are a special breed of sim performer. They cater to a market for "historically accurate" simulated experiences. Re-enactors undergo memory (and sometimes bodily) modification based on extensive research of a specific era or individual to provide those experiences.

Scientist: Science is a different sort of endeavor in a civilization following in the footsteps of more advanced civilizations who long ago pushed knowledge as far as it would go with human-level intelligence and perceptions. Most modern scientists are more like archaeologists or historians: they sift the remnant noosphere and data storage of the ancients for lost experiments or not yet fully mined veins of inquiry. The best scientists spend as much time in the field as they do in laboratories.

Super-voter: In cyberdemocractic or demarchist polities, some voters are always going to make better decisions that others, so complicated algorithms will tend to weight their votes fractionally more. Political interest groups and parties track these super-voters and try to court them due to their influence. They're given consultant fees or even gifts, so long as there isn't a direct quid pro quo (buying their votes wouldn't be effective in the long term in any case, as biased "incorrect" decisions would soon make the infosophont vote tabulators decreased their votes' weighting.)

Surgeon: Surgery is actually preformed by bots that look something like giant, artificial Hydra with surgical tools attached to the end of their appendages, but nicer surgical centers employ friendly public faces to consult with patients or their love ones. Surgeons explain the procedure and make any last minute (minor) adjustments to the bots' programming.

Creature Commandos

Long before rpgs got to the idea of making World War II a "weird war" (here and here) comics books had stormed that beach. There were Pacific islands of dinosaurs, G.I. robots, and whole platoons of ghosts and undead. The weirdest of the weird warriors may be relative latecomers to the game: the Creature Commandos, whose adventures are now helpfully available in a collection.

When writing Weird War Tales in the late seventies, J.M. DeMatteis took an idea to editor Len Wein that Wein reportedly though was "so silly" that it would work. That idea was a special forces unit comprised of characters resembling the Universal Monsters.

It's 1942: American scientists are delving into psychological warfare. They devise a program to realize certain cross-cultural archetypes of fear in the flesh. Thus, Project M (for Monster) is born Warren Griffith, a sufferer from clinical lycanthropy, is turned into a werewolf for real. Looking to avoid jail time, Vincent Velcro allows himself to be injected with some vampire bat derived chemicals and becomes a vampire. Marine "Lucky" Taylor just had to step on a landmine to get patched up by military surgeons into sort of a Frankensteinian monster.

I imagine Project M spawned a number of Congressional hearings and lawsuits, by the seventies. In 1942, the brass is utterly disgusted by the Creature Commandos, but sends them against Nazi Germany, anyway--and that's only the beginning. They drop in on Dinosaur Island, fight super-strong children (products of Nazi experiments), tangle with Atlantean survivors, and tussle with Inferna, daughter of Hades and Persephone. Along the way they team up with G.I. Robot J.A.K.E. (two models), and get a female team mate: Dr. Myrra Rhodes, who has snakes for hair thanks to inhaling strange fumes.

So, yeah. A lot of gaming inspiration to be had.