Treasure from the Desert

Deshret is a desert world, terraformed in a previous age, but now slowly sliding back into uninhabitability. Its forbidding red sands would have long ago been abandoned to its hostile indigenes and desert monsters, if it weren't for the treasure buried beneath its shifting dunes.

During the Archaic Oecumene, the desert world was the location of a floating metropolis. The city did a thriving business in the preparation and storage of uploaded mind copies in their secure databanks (referred to as “tombs”) buried beneath the planet’s surface. The Great Collapse lead to the city literally disintegrating to dust under assault by rogue disassembler swarms. The stored data facilities were left unguarded and ripe for tomb-robbers.

Shortly after the incorporation of the Radiant Polity, haphazard thievery on Deshret coalesced into a business supporting a new society. The tall, jade-skinned, ectomorphic Ogüptans controlled the exploitation of the past from their capital, the spaceport Moph. Some are sandminers, sifting the red dust for fragments of code and the rare whole artifact left from the Great Collapse. Others are tomb-robbers, wresting the minds of the long dead to sell into slavery, to toil in the infospheres of today. 

Tomb-robbing isn’t without risk. The data is secure, and getting at it often requires overcoming deadly physical and digital intrusion countermeasures. Perhaps even worse, strife around the Great Collapse or soon after, left the desert full of spirits and devils. Wild nanites haunt the wastes: malicious djinn and  body-thief dybbuks. Then there are the masked desert tribes, murderously resentful of intruders into their sacred places.

Despite these risks, there is no shortage of people willing to brave them for a chance at quick money.

Swords & Celebrity

The red-skinned humanoids of Zyanthion are known throughout the galaxy for their pursuit of pleasure and their peculiar, anarchic society. Popular media depicts them as passionate to a fault; as likely to be heedlessly pursuing a new romantic conquest as to be fighting a duel with archaic (but deadly) graphene-edged rapiers--and they do either in a very public way.

To visitors from other cultures, Zyann seem obsessed with status and celebrity. Virtually all their activities are public recorded in their noosphere [planet-wide internet and grid]. They live or die socially by the praise or disapproval they receive for their actions. Zyanthion operates on a reputation economy. There is no money; goods and services are given to others in hopes of enhancing one’s own prestige. This “currency” (awarded and tracked in the noosphere) is known as éclat. Zyann who have accumulated high éclat (whether from artistry, craftsmanship, bravery, or skill as a lover) can become a powerful in their society, able to occupy manors and estates, and assume self-chosen titles of nobility--as long as their éclat remains sufficiently high.

Current fashion is important to Zyann in all facets of their society. Religions and belief systems appear, flourish, and fall from favor almost as quickly as clothing fads. Only a few Zyann have cultivated the “right” sort of name to avoid having to chase styles to maintain their position.

Because of the supremacy of reputation, Zyann honor is easily offended. Off-world visitors can easily find themselves challenged to a duel. Consultation of a lawyer of at least moderate éclat is advised in such situations, as there are face-saving ways of avoiding the deadly art of Zyann swordsmanship in many cases.  Of course, visitors have to be mindful of their own graciously gifted éclat in such situations.

Inner City Blues

Weird Adventures presents the City and it’s world in the year 5888, an era of automobiles, machine guns, and jazz.  Of course, that’s not the only age when there’s adventure to be had:

About thirty-five years in the future, the City is again seeing hard times. A  grinding war continues with Red Lemuria. Political scandal and public corruption has eroded trust in institutions. The aging subway trains are covered with graffiti. Solace is full of abandoned buildings, crime, drugs, and poverty. The Circus, once the brightly lit crossroads of the world, is now the home of sleazy grindhouses and a haven for pimps, hookers, and drug pushers.

The reputation of thaumaturgy has suffered just like other traditional institutions. Murderous gurus, scandals involving sex rituals, and scam artists have led to the thaumaturgic arts being viewed unsavory and dangerous by the masses, and old-fashion and hokey by the counter-culture.

There are still adventurers, though--and more than ever they're quasi-outlaws sticking it to the Fat Cats and the Establishment. Most of the dungeons have been cleaned out, but there are plenty of treasures in the hands of the wealthy. And there are always monsters--just now some of them sit in positions of power.

Foes: thrill-kill cult gurus, street gangs, the decadent wealthy with secrets to hide, corrupt cops and politicians, the Hell Syndicate.

Media Inspirations: Film/TV: Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Enter the Dragon, Kolchak: the Night-Stalker, Shaft, Sugar Hill (1974), To The Devil...A Daughter, The Warriors, Vanishing Point; Books: the works of Dennis Wheatley and Stephen King, the Doctor Orient novels, the Destroyer novels, exploitive seventies nonfiction about witches and the occult; Comic Books: Night Force, Swamp Thing, Vampire Tales and any of Marvel’s other black and white magazines; Music: Jimmy Page’s unused soundtrack for the film Lucifer Rising. The Shaft and Truck Turner soundtracks by Isaac Hayes, Superfly soundtrack by Curtis Mayfield;  any of Goblin’s music from Argento’s films.

Warlord Wednesday: The Times (and Costumes) Are A-Changin'

Let's take a break this week from the adventures of Morgan and the gang, and consider the changes that have come in the visual depictions of The Warlord's cast. Our canary in the fashion coal mine will be Mariah Romanova, Russian fencing champion and archaelogist. Mariah isn't in Skartaris long before she acquires a standard Skartarian outfit:

As impractical as it is improbable, Mariah's outfit nevertheless marks her as a hero: bit players in the saga tend to have more standard Conan comic attire. Note the Farrah Fawcett feathered hair and the colored eye patches that were sported by several comic characters in the era.

As the years go by, Mariah's hair changes a little bit--and when Ron Randall takes over, her costume gets a bit skimpier. Then after the "Morgan's Quest" saga, Randall gets into a bit of costume experimentation:

Here we see what must be Mariah's "lounging about the castle" outfit. (This is an idea with precedent: Tara and Morgan got them in previous issues.) It's a pretty 70s design despite the era; it recalls the duds of DC's first Starfire. Not that she's got kind of 80s hair, though, and the eye makeup has expanded beyond the old raccoon eyes look.

When next Randall has her back in her standard outfit, it's been subtly (or maybe not so subtly) altered. It's just as revealing, but more a more complicated design. She's now sporting hair and a headband borrowed from some aerobics instructor. Her eye makeup is asymmetric has gotten all Jem and the Holograms (which started around this same time--this stuff was just the zeitgeist).

What's next for Mariah?  Come back next Wednesday and find out.

Galactic History with Pictures

It's commonly accepted that most of the galaxy's sophonts are either descendants or creations of humanity who came into being on the fabled world of Earth. The location of this ur-world of the humanoid phyle is lost. 

The original civilization of humanity collapsed (perhaps multiple times) or perhaps it ascended. Whether the end was glorious or tragic, the true history of these times is only fragmented legend.

The Archaics rose with the aide of knowledge salvaged ruins of the past. They built crystalline cities that floated in the air, and connected the noospheres of their worlds with superluminal relays via wormwholes.  

Something happened. There was a Great Collapse and galactic civilization fractured into individual worlds, and some of them slid back into savagery.

The Radiant Polity, one of the successor states to the Archaic Oikumene, was torn asunder by conflict between toxic memes. The Instrumentality of the current age was born out of this struggle.

The planet Phobetor is home to monsters: Bandersnatches, kalidahs, cateblopases, and crocotta are among the deadly bio-art horrors released onto the world's surface by the artists living in the dilapiated floating city above it. This artists' colony became the Phantasists of today.

The Zao Corsairs

The Zao are an infamous group of space pirates. Their brazen crimes and theatrical flair have made them a favorite as villains and anti-heroes in sims and other popular entertainments. The truth is far from glamorous: the Zao are killers who capture ships, loot them, and hold their passengers for ransom or sell them into slavery--sometimes selling their bodies separately from their uploaded minds.

The Zao are a multi-bioform (perhaps even multi-species) association, but the original founding group was composed of perhaps a few hundred former prisoners of the Radiant Polity. As the polity was torn apart by meme wars, the prison asteroid Naraka was left understaffed.The prison was taken by a group of inmates (legend has it, after one of their rehabilitation programs was replaced by hackers with a sim mixing elements of various ancient adventure and crime narratives), and the asteroid has served as the pirates base of operations since. The asteroid is cloaked in a defensive dust that only allows authorized craft to pass unscathed.

Anyone may call themselves a Zao pirate, and some vessels operating under that title may have no connection to Naraka, but the actual Zao pirates react harshly to those “flying their flag” who don't obey their established codes governing the division of plunder, interactions between affiliate vessels, and the secrecy of their defense system keycodes.

No. Appearing:1-10

AC: 7

Saving Throw: 15+

Attack Bonus: +1

Damage: by weapon (1d8+1 monoblade, 2d6 void carbine)

Movement: 30'

Skill Bonus: +2

Morale: 9

The Zao have fondness for old-fashion appearing bladed weapons for close-quarters boarding, but are certainly not adverse to the use of ranged weaponry.

Science Fiction Inspirations

My appreciation for pulp science fiction is well known, but I haven’t recommended any non-pulp stuff in a while, so maybe it’s about time. These are not only good reads, but good gaming inspirations:

The Risen Empire and The Killing of Worlds by Scott Westerfield form a space opera duology about a struggle between two powers: an empire ruled by the immortal-after-death Risen and the Rix, cybernetic humans who worship planetary-size AIs. The opening battle is much more “hard science fiction” than anything in Star Wars or Star Trek--and all the more  fresh and inventive for it. The Rix, there abilities and goals, are much interesting than the Borg ever were, while filling a similar niche.

Diaspora by Greg Egan is less of an action narrative and not as immediately gameable, but has plenty of interesting elements. In the far future, when the solar system is inhabited by post-humans, a cosmic catastrophe endangers all life. The digital citizens of one polis hatch a plan to escape--to higher order dimensions! Probably the most gameable bits here are the different clades of post-humanity and their societies: the digital polis citizens, the robotic gleisners, the devolved dream-apes.

The Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi sits between these two. It’s got a bit of Diaspora’s heavy science flights of fancy and post-human setting, but more of the Succession duology’s action and conflict. Jean le Flambleur, the greatest thief in the solar system, is busted out of prison by an Oortian warrior and her intelligent ship. The Oortian’s master has a job for le Flambleur, but first the thief has to retreive his own memories from a moving city on Mars--and match wits with a young consulting detective to do so. The various societies of Rajaniemi’s future are exotic and the technologies presented are really evocative.