Serpent in Paradise

The official vokun assessment of Yantra was that it had little to offer the Empire. It's natives were primitive (at best they had mastered iron) and demonstrated a pervasive culture of nonviolence so ingrained that they were insuitable for military conscription. The ibglibdishpan analysts verified that there had once by an advanced civilization on Yantra: the environment had been finely tuned, nanotechnology (though dormant) still permeated the biosphere, and seemingly primitive stone structures (shrines, mostly, for the superstitious Yantrans) actually showed complex femto-level engineering.

Obviously, the primitives had no knowledge of these technologies, and there was no indication they ever did. The vokun are an incurious species. They assumed some great pre-Collapse civilization had left its mark and moved on. Yantra was only usefully as a pleasure world; it's mostly tropical clime and pliant, simpleminded, and exotically attractive populace provided an ideal place of relaxation for vokun nobility.

The ibglibdishpan were vexed by the anomalies. It only took a few in the continuing series of seemingly random network and equipment failures that have plagued the Imperial conquest of Yantra for them to deduce the truth. They were not at all surprised when vokun junior officers began to disappear or have unusal accidents--never frequently enough to arouse suspicion on the part of the vokun, but a detectable statistical signal, nonetheless. For reasons known only to them, the ibglibdishpan have kept their conclusions to themselves.

Noah

Afronosky's Noah resembles the Biblical account of his life and exploits in a roughly analogous manner to how the original Clash of the Titans resemble the story of Perseus--and it's all the more gameable for it.

Like the Biblical narrative, the film takes place in a mythic Antediluvian past, though the film's is decidedly post-apocalyptic with barren landscapes thanks to rapaciousness of the descendants of Cain. All in that roughly made yet unusually modern-looking clothing seen in post-Apocalypse's from the Planet of the Apes TV show to Waterworld. Noah and his fellow descendants of Seth have been hunted and killed by bands of the more technologically advanced tribes of Cain. Noah is the last survivor, trust trying to hideout with his wife and kids, living a low-impact, vegetarian lifestyle.

Then the Creator decides he's had enough. He starts sending Noah prophetic dreams (Noah's gets a bit of help in interpreting these after (possibly) being slipped an entheogenic brew by his grand-dad, Methuselah). There's going be a world-killing flood, and he's got to build a boat.

Noah gets some help from the Watchers, imprisoned in giant, rocky forms, and a the last seed from the Garden of Eden, which grows an instant forest for lumber. Then the odd, not-quite-the-animals-we-know, start showing up in droves.

All does not go smooth though, as hordes of human refugees under the command of the warrior-king, Tubal-cain show up to try and storm the ark, and Noah's wifeless son begins to have second thoughts about this "only family left on earth" thing.

I won't spoil the ending, but I suspect you know how it turns out.

While a lot of this film is devoted to the sort of drama than Afronosky is typically known for, a lot of the elements the film adds to the tale seem like the sort of thing Jack Kirby would have done, even if they're not wrapped in typical Kirby presentation: fiery angels trapped in misshapen rock bodies, a post-Apocalyptic prehistory, zohar stones that provide light and fire.

If it's more your thing, there's also a graphic novel version.

First Strange Stars Art

As I've mentioned in comments, but I don't think I've explicitly said in a post, I'm putting together a book on my Strange Stars setting. This is the first (mostly) completed piece of artwork for it by the talented Waclaw Wysocki: This is Stella Starlight, captain of the Motherless Child, just one of many starship captains operating in the galaxy.

More to come.

Apotheosis Quest

Some adventurers are content to be earthly rulers, basking in the rewards of their past glories. But some yearn for a further challenge and the greatest of all rewards.

Like concentric spheres, the higher planes surround the Prime Material. Beyond them all is the Empyrean, where dwells the Increate Source. This supernal presence is said to bestow godhood on those who reach it.

Getting there is the hard part. The paths are hidden in the lower astral, where there are monsters, godlings, devils, and beings on the same quest to get in the way.

Andrew Ross MacLean

Beyond the astral are the ascending levels of the Outer Planes, iconic realms ruled by (or perhaps manifesting) gods. Each is a challenge, perhaps designed to cause seekers to falter and fail, and possibly even be cast into the Abyss for their audacity.

All of reality is a mega-dungeon that goes up.

Wednesday Comics: Juliet

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

"Juliet (Metamorphosis Odyssey Chapter III)"

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

Synopsis: In Kansas, a family listens to reports of an alien invasion on the radio. Russia and China have fallen. The island of Japan may have been sunk by the onslaught. In the U.S., officials debate the use of nuclear weapons against the threat. Everything else the nations of the Earth have tried has been to no avail.

Juliet walks out into yard. Her mother worries about her, most of all: she's only 15. Juliet's grandfather reminds them all of Pearl Harbor. He's confident the U.S. can win this one, too. Besides, the aliens won't want anything in Kansas.

As if to mock him, an alien vessel flies overhead and blows up the farmhouse. On Juliet survives.

The craft lands and two Zygotean mercenaries emerge. They were scouting for locations to land the fuel fleet. The see Juliet and move to kill her. Suddenly, one of the mercenaries is disintegrated.

The other mercenary is quick and wounds Aknaton, but it doesn't do him much good. He's disintegrated by the Osirosan's next blast.

Aknaton builds a pyramid around them with his power to fly them off Earth. He explains to Juliet who they are. She feels bad about leaving her people. Aknaton explains that they are all going to die anyway. Her death would mean nothing here, but she has gifts that can help him stop the spread of Zygoteism.

He assures her that Earth is dead, but there are different kinds of death: Slow death under Zygotean enslavement--or a quick death that takes foe as well as friend. A death brought about by the simultaneous detonation of all the Earth's nuclear weapons:

Things to Notice:

• "Pulsar-sucking obstructionist!" is a alien insult.

Commentary: 
Starlin's opening with Juliet's grand-father and parents conversing contrasts the pessimism of the seventies with the post-World War II optimism. The story comes down on the side of pessimism. The dialogue doesn't allow Juliet to say much in her own story, though.

Aknaton's confrontation with the Zygotean mercenary serves to show him as vulnerable--and fallible. This is important because the first chapter portrayed him in a very mythic way and in the second he's in the role a god. His mortal fallibility gives us a different lens through which to see his declarations about what needs to be done.

Aknaton's destruction of Earth (and the rationale he gives Juliet) shows just what sort of conditions he's willing to count as victory and foreshadows events to come.

Elemental Planes Addendum

I would say I forgot the quasi- and para-elementals in yesterday's post, but I really didn't. I've never felt those were as conceptually pure as the primary elementals and so not as rich for turning into whole planes. Do we really need a whole Plane of Ooze?

After thinking about it a bit, I do think there is a little bit to be said. I do like the idea of elemental mixing; I mean, that is the source of the Prime Material Plane, after all. I just don't think we need whole plans of them. Maybe they're just the phase boundaries between the elements? I suppose you could still call them "planes" if you wanted, but they would really be the overlap between planes.

In any case, I'm pretty sure this is what the area of  Quasi-Elemental Mineral looks like:

I'm not convinced that currently list of para-elementals is complete either. It would seem to me that the more watery side of a water/earth mixing might be silt or sediment rather than ooze. The airy end of the air/water boundary would be mist (perhaps freezing mist) rather than ice.

Oh, and in case you were wondering about the Positive and Negative Planes that finish out the Inner Planes, check out this post from exactly 3 years ago.

The Finer Elements of Inner Planar Adventuring

It's not an uncommon complaint on the internet that the Elemental Planes are boring because they're featureless expanses of the same thingm, which is sort of like saying dungeons are boring because thy're just empty spaces underground, or wilderness adventures are dullsville because it's just a whole bunch of trees. Most environments are probably not in and of themselves terribly interesting. They're interesting because of (a) what you can put in them and (b) the additional challenges their nature presents to PCs. I would also say that the Elemental Planes can be an interesting cosmological element in a setting even if not viewed as a place to go adventuring, but it's "place for adventuring" I'm going to focus on here.

First off, the Elemental Planes as typically described are for the most part pretty hostile to human life. I don't think that's a bad thing, necessarily. High level adventurers have access to a lot of great technology (i.e. magic) to protect themselves. Guarding against equipment failure and avoiding changing conditions certainly creates a lot of tension in science fiction books and movies; there's no reason it can't be put to similar effect in gaming. It's resource management that's more than just counting.

Here are some brief ideas and inspirations for Elemental Plane adventures:

Air
This one's probably the easiest, with flying creatures, cities on clouds and the like. I would draw some inspiration from sci-fi imaginings of life in the atmosphere of gas giants. The plane of air should only be featureless like space is featureless: there should be pieces of stuff falling/tumbling through it. There should be air-dwelling Portuguese man o' war type things and air-whales like living zeppelins that one can travel or even live on. Reliance on the strongest air streams for travel would ensure that there were certain air caravan routes.
Inspirations: the Cloud City of Bespin in The Empire Strikes Back, the Star Trek episode "The Cloud-Miners," The Mysterious Explorations of Jasper Morello, Castle in the Sky (1986), Last Exile.

Fire
Fire is like a really big star, though it's surface is much cool. There would be islands of rock (and by islands, I mean things bigger that continents) floating across it, or great metal craft drifting through it's smoke-choked corona. It would, of course, be populated (though perhaps not exclusively) by beings (jinn?) composed of Fire who did very similar stuff to Prime Material humans but were fiery while doing it.
Inspirations: Any Adventure Time episode dealing with the Fire Kingdom, the neutron star life of Forward's Dragon's Egg, parts of Sunshine (2007), Secrets of the Fire Sea by Stephen Hunt.

Earth
This plane is a huge sphere (or block or tesseract, or whatever) of rock, riddled with tunnels and chambers. In other words, it's a dungeon in three dimensions. It's sci-fi asteroid mining and molerat sapients, too.
Inspirations: Dig Dug, the Star Trek episode "Devil in the Dark," Derinkuyu.

Water
Like Air, it's fairly easy to see what to put into the Plane of Water, but maybe difficult to see why you wouldn't just do that stuff on a Prime Material ocean. I would say it's like an extraterrestrial ocean planet: You can make it far more exotic than you would the oceans of your main campaign world. Societies would have vertical and horizontal borders. Different depth layers would be like different levels of a dungeon, except (depending on how science fictional you got) adventurers might need increasing pressure protection to descend to the next level.
Inspirations: Neptune's Brood by Charles Stross, The Abyss (1989), Finding Nemo, 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Blue Submarine No. 6, Sub-Mariner, Aquaman, and Abe Sapien comics.