The Sisters of War

The Sisterhood of Morrgna is a humanoid clade living on the border of the Zuran Expanse and the territory of the Alliance. The dark ages after the fall of the Radiant Polity fashioned their society into a machine for war and made its members famous throughout known space.

Appearance & Biology: As the name would imply, the entire Sisterhood is female (though excessive male hormones have led to some being androgenized). They are genetically derived from baseline humanity; all Sisters are cloned from less than a hundred genotypes, but they are further modified for certain caste functions. Most appear as roughly baseline humans, but their are hypertrophic muscled shock-troops, vacuum-adapted space-sisters, and ambigenitaled comfort sisters.

The most heavily modified Sisters are perhaps the queens (or "mothers"): macrocephalic beings, whose vast brains allow them to monitor every aspect of hive function.

Society: Only one Morrgna hive exists currently, a moon-sized artificial habitat with a single queen, but in previous times the Sisterhood was more expansionistic and sent out war wombs to generate hives on numerous worlds. Most of these were destroyed in conflict with other cultures; some fell to inter-clade strife.

Stats: The Morrgna Sisters have the same stats as baseline humans, though based on caste, their actual stats may vary wildly.

[Parsulan] The Lightbearer Republic

The youngest state of Southeastern Parsulan is at once ill-omened and favored with great promise. Morrgna, capital of the Republic, is famed for the strange lights that can frequently be seen in its night skies: the aurora-like ribbons and curtains of pale color, sometimes with faces or forms moving through them and the flickering will-o'wisps that pass through the streets or hang in place for a time before fading. Such lights are often seen in association with the irruption of shadow cysts and they do seem to foreshadow the difficulties the area has with demonic forces.

At the same time, the Republic seems to be on the rise. Less than two decades ago, it was a sparsely populated backwater, ravaged by the demonic Wild Hunt. The tide turned with the so-called Miracle of the Church of Saint Lampada, wherein Leonhart Urzen, now First Citizen of the Republic, led a band of refugees in repulsing an assault by a demonic host. The cost of victory was the death of Leonhart's adventuring companions and their retainers, a group now celebrated as the Fallen Heroes. Those Heroes are entombed with honor in a crypt beneath the great church, guarded by special Keeper-Priests, for reasons that are doctrinally obscure. They are venerated on All Heroes Day, and the night before their spirits and those of the city's other dead are propitiated with offerings and their forgiveness is sought through rituals led by the priests.

Leonhart guided the formation of the Republic by inviting in neighboring cities and towns, and organized a militia, both protect the land against demonic incursion and to collect magical artifacts that emerge from the shadow cysts and bring them to Morrgna's dungeon vaults for safe keeping. While citizens guard the cities and serve in officer roles, Mercenaries and adventurers compromise most of the forces sent into emergent shadow cysts and patrolling beyond the walls of the cities and towns. Those who die in service are considered to be added to the ranks of the Fallen Heroes laid to rest with the original group beneath the church. Though few would refuse such as an honor, agreement to this burial honor is said to be a stipulation of admittance into the militia's ranks.

Audience Participation: The Next Illustration

As I've shown hints of here, artists are diligently at work on material for the Strange Stars book. The only problem is, I can't decide on some of the species and cultures to have them illustrate!. So, I thought I'd see if you guys have any preferences. Here's the list of possibilities with links to refresh you memory:

Atozan - Keepers of the Great Library
Caliban - Vicious sophontophagists
Circean - Psychic witches
Kosmonik - Space-adapted travelers.
Minga - Slave race out to covertly conquer the galaxy
Phantasist - Dream-merchants.
Quicklings - Tiny, fast-living humanoids
Sisterhood of Morrgna - Cloned Amazons.
Virid - Photosynthetic humanoids from a sophont biosphere.
Zhmun - Wealthy invertebrates.

So are any of these guys worthy of illustration? If you have a preference, let me know in the comments.

Artifacts Amid the Strange Stars

Items rare and valuable--if they even exist:

gravid war womb: A central relic of the Sisterhood of Morrgna, these living nano-assembler/bio-computers are able to birth an entire Sisterhood hive, given enough substrate material and time. Though descriptions are likely unreliable, they are said to be spheroids of organic composition with a surface divided in hexagonal and pentagonal areas about 38 cm in diameter. No war womb has been deployed since the time of darkness following the Great Collapse, though barren husks have been found over the centuries.

Mnemosyne leaf: Certainly large leaves of the great choral trees of Dodona in the Coreward Reach are rich in their neurochemical memory, which includes thoughts gleaned from the minds of sophont visitors to Dodona then shared through the trees' songs. Ingesting a properly prepared leaf will allow a psi-sensitive individual to search and experience the tree's memory store. The leaves can also be prepared in a way that allows them to be smoked. The memories can be experienced this way by non-psis, but the visions are more haphazard and uncontrollable.

strangelet bullet: Despite it's name, this legendary planet-killer weapon is actually the payload for a missile warhead. Freed from their containment on impact, the strangelets will convert any ordinary matter it impacts into strange matter.

zurr mask: The appearance of the ancient and engimatic zurr is only known from their iconography, where they are always depicted in nonrepresentational masks. Items purported to be zurr masks or fragments of them show up in auctions or museums from time to time, but these to date are of disputed authenticity or definite forgeries. These archaeological treasures have a lurid reputation in the public imagination due to memes derived from popular horror sims over the last few of centuries. The stories say that each mask is actually the soul of the zurr who wore it.

Strange Stars Outtakes

There were some things that I wanted to include in the Strange Stars setting book, but had to cut because of the structure we ultimately went with or just plan space considerations. Here are a few of them:

Zhmun

While the zhmun get mentioned in the section on the Zuran Expanse, I had initially intended for one of them to be the character in that section, but decided to co with the cantina picture. While I think showing more of Expanse's inhabitants was the way to go, the loss of the zhmun did make all the featured characters strictly humanoid.

The Sisterhood of Morrgna

Similar to the zhmun, the Sisterhood gets mentioned in the Zuran Expanse section, but originally this was one of the characters on my list of those to include, I even already had a description/reference page made for the artist. Ultimately, an Amazon got ditched for the zhmun and then the zhmun got ditched.

Minga

I had originally wanted a Minga male dressed in an outfit like 70s Cosmic Boy above for this section, but ultimately I went with the Phantasist as the character for the Coreward Reach. The Minga slaves and their subtle manipulations had a bit too complicated a backstory for inclusion in the planet sections, so the poor Minga wind up not getting mentioned at all!

Images from the Strange Stars

Art by Michael Golden

Thraxu blades are older than the thrax warrior culture that now wields them. The moiré pattern evident on close inspection of the (presumably inactive) sword's edge represent guides for programmable matter that (when the blade is energized) create a quantum virtual edge capable of cutting spacetime. Power packs for the ancient weapons are hard to come by, and so thrax knights wisely conserve their usage of high power settings.

Art by Gerald Parel

A menace on the Coreward Reach, the Scavengers are opportunistic pirates who follow the Locusts, a giant swarm of von Neumann machines that devour any habitats they encounter. The Scavenger scouts perform hit and run raids before the arrival of the mass of the swarm, and the majority of their fleet sweeps up any surviving ships once the swarm passes. Scavengers commonly have obvious and primitivist cybernetics, the better to frighten victims into submission.

Art by Fernando Fernandez

The Sisterhood of Morrgna zealously protect their habitat in the Zuran Expanse from outsiders. Sometimes, however, warriors like this one are glimpsed in mercenary cadres on other worlds.

What's that Aurogov Talking About?

Well, he may be filling that Wanderer avatar in on the fact that the Strange Stars Index has been updated. So, if you missed the posts about the amazon hive of the Sisterhood of Morrgna, some odd artifacts of the Strange Stars, the Radiant Polity, the ngghrya trackers, or the hwuru, you might want to check it out.

You can also find out about Wanderer remote avatars and Aurogov there, too.

Strange Stars, 5 Operations

Last time I gave a Strange Stars update, I had hoped it was going to be the last tease. Unfortunately, things have not gone quite as fast as I wanted. This is mostly for two good reasons: We're trying to turn out the best product we can and Lester was swamped with work doing a lot of cool stuff for Goodman Games. I am happy to report that the last pages (glossary and intro, essentially) are being laid out. leaving only our last proofing reviews and submission to Drivethru/r\Rpgnow. So it's close.

To tide you over, here's an excerpt from a page called "5 Operations 8 Iterations" which will be lists of 8 items in (hopefully) interesting topics: Valuable Artifacts, People Someone Wants Found, Contents of Spacehauler Container 49, Drugs in an Epic Stash, and Exotic Locales.

Here's one from each:

Gravid War Womb 38 cm diam. spheroid nanoassembler capable of replicating a Sisterhood of Morrgna hive.

Rhona Tam Captain of Moral Hazard, privateer/custom enforcement contractor out of Circus.

Bottles of “Burner” Cyberware [4, 200 count] When ingested, crudely anonymizes noospheric interface for up to 20 ks.

Bouncing Balls of High-Grade Chroma [7] Psychedelic and euphorigenic.

The Pampas of Taprobane Habitat On safari, hunting the sharp-beaked blushing shraik.