The Azure Nebula Campaign II

Tonight was the fifth and final session of our Azure Nebula mini-campaign, so I can share the map I made for the adventure. The core of the nebula consists of a double layer of spacetime folds. It's quite mitochondrial really. Outside that double structure, the "dots" are a series of rather rude Klingon buoys warning ships away from this region of space.

You'll find the Azure Nebula in the Star Trek Adventures gamebook. It is right on the border of the Federation and the Klingon Empire, and also rather proximate to the Romulan Empire. If you're looking for a place for a Triangle Campaign, the space just "Northeast" of the Azure Nebula should work just fine!

The Azure Nebula is also a rather storied region of space. Enter at your peril; there's no telling what you'll find!

Strange Stars A-To-Z: A Yantran Holiday

http://memory-alpha.wikia.com/wiki/Vaal

A Yantran Holiday: it has become a euphemism in the Vokun Empire for unforseen, improbable disaster. All too many Vokun lords have brought their entourages to Yantra for a holiday to dally with its beautiful and accomodating natives. More than a few of these pleasure trips have meet with sudden, inexplicable calamity.

Invariably, these disasters take the form of catastrophic technology failures. Anti-gravity or drive systems fail; Vokun rocket chairs suddenly plunge to earth; Metascape-based guidance systems become improbably unrealiable; life support systems spit out toxic goo.

More than one Ibglibdishpan mentat has calculated the odds. They have concluded that primitive and pleasantly lush Yantra is improbably dangerous - and especially so for parties accompanied by a Vokun lord.

So an experiment has begun.

The Vokun Empire has temporarily opened Yantra for holidays by sophonts from outside the Empire. A temporary Smaragdine art colony here. A space hauler shore leave there. A Hyehoon or Djagga-led eco-safari in the equatorial regions. Dilettantes from the Circus ringworld tour the natives' quaint stone shrines.

The Ibglibdishpan are watching and running the numbers.  

The Sword Of The Dawn

Cover art by Michael Whelan

That cover. Did anyone but me buy this edition? This is Vintage Science Fiction Month, so we're back with a third roleplaying-minded review of a pre-1979 SF classic - in this case, Michael Moorcock's third Hawkmoon novel, The Sword of the Dawn.  (Our first review, featuring Moorcock's second and third Kane of Old Mars novels is here; my second review focuses on Moorcock's second Hawkmoon novel, The Mad God's Amulet, and is here.)

This is the fifth Moorcock novel I have read in the last two months.

The Sword of the Dawn (1968) continues Hawkmoon's quest for the weapons necessary to defeat the Dark Empire of Granbretan. The adventure is driven by Hawkmoon's sense of unease and restlessness. Hawkmoon's beloved Yisselda and her father, Count Brass, are safe for the moment, hidden in a planar adjacency. But like Goethe's Faust, Hawkmoon has an urge to keep things moving.

He wants to stay ahead of the enemy, and prevent that enemy from threatening his loved ones. So Hawkmoon goes to the very heart of the Dark Empire, Londra, as his first stop. The traitor to Granbretan, the deadly dandy Huillam D'Averc, is Hawkmoon's companion on this journey.

Like The Mad God's Amulet, the second Hawkmoon novel, The Sword of the Dawn is all about collecting what John Clute in the Encyclopedia of Fantasy calls "plot coupons." In this case, Hawkmoon and D'Averc move across the fantastic landscape in search of a sword whose destiny is linked to yet another plot coupon: the Runestaff (which - perhaps it's no accident - is the title of the fourth novel in the series).

Our heroes arrive in Amarehk, the legendary continent to the west of Granbretan and the rest of Tragic Millennium Europa. They head south along a great river, toward the pirate city of Narleen on the continent's southern gulf coast.

This should sound familiar,

There are a few traces of New Orleans in some of the details. In particular, many dwellings in the city still have the classic cast iron decorative gates that one sees in the French Quarter. We don't get much sense of race in the city, although oddly enough the warriors summoned by the Sword of the Dawn are described as brown skinned. It would have been interesting to have seen the city developed in greater depth. I'd like to see whether some form of Voudoun persisted in the Tragic Millennium.

Narleen might make a good home base for a roleplaying campaign. There is conflict between the pirates, who have a walled enclave within the city, and the merchants that the pirates prey upon and extort. So we have the potential for river piracy outside the city, and political intrigue within it. There's the mystery of the blood drinking tentacular monsters that lurk within the Temple of Batach Gerandiun, where the Sword of the Dawn is enshrined. How did they get there? Why haven't they torn down the entire city, like their larger kindred on the plains? Then there are all the adventures that might occur among the other cities of the coast, which can be reached by sail from Narleen.

There has to be a lot more to explore in this setting. We haven't even gotten a good look at the technological marvels that must be scattered here and there among the ruins from the times before the Tragic Millennium.

One thing is for sure though: we don't get much sense of the natural climactic destruction that we now know is very sure to happen along the gulf coast in the time just before the Tragic Millennium. Our time. These aspects of climate change hadn't been figured out in 1968.

Rough Map of Amarehk from Chaosium's Hawkmoon

We know that Amarehk bore the brunt of the radiation from whatever brought on the Tragic Millennium. The gulf coastline has changed a bit - particularly in what is left of Texas. So for game's sake, I might play up the climate change even a bit more. Things don't have to get quite as bleak as in Paolo Bacigalupi's Shipbreaker, but a hint that there are drowned cities off the coast raises all sorts of possibilities.

Fate Of The Tragic Millennium

Frank Brunner's stunning cover

Maybe we're in it now. I've been reading a bit of Michael Moorcock recently. Really, it's the most I've read of Moorcock since my high school days, when I read just about everything I could get my hands on by him. Not the Cornelius stuff or the "straight" SF, mind you; what I read back in those days and am enjoying again are his swords and sorcery/planetary romance stories.

Currently, I am re-reading The Mad God's Amulet, which was the second Hawkmoon novel. I bought the first three of the Tor reprints of the series, read the first novel, the Jewel in the Skull maybe a year ago, and then let the series sit for a while. After polishing off the last of the Kane of Old Mars novels a week ago, I decided to dive-in and read this one. It's a fun romp through Western Asia and up into the former (waaay former) Soviet Union, and induces a bit of a frisson while browsing through my recently arrived copy of Chris Kutalik's Slavic pointcrawl, Slumbering Ursine Dunes. (And yes, it's no accident that they feel connected.)

Cover art by David Lewis Johnson

So what is Hawkmoon, or to put it more accurately, "The History of the Runestaff"? It's a sequence of Eternal Champion novels featuring Dorian Hawkmoon, a knight from the German statelet of Koln. Hawkmoon is one of the few warriors willing to stand up to the might and insanity of the Dark Empire of Granbretan.

Just as Melinbone's Bright Empire is a reflection of the British Empire, so too is the Dark Empire. But Granbretan is far more homicidal than Melinbone at its most warlike and decadent. The Melniboneans may have looked upon humans as being their inferiors, but at least they weren't exterminationist about it. Granbretan is more like Pan Tang: a twisted image of Melnibone, as dreamed up by its inferiors.

(At this point, it is probably worth pointing out that the History of the Runestaff was published around 1968 - at least the volume I'm reading now was. It was published at the height of a mad empire's overreach in Southeast Asia - a drama that same empire was to reproduce as farce in West and South Asia just a couple of decades later. Like that other empire, Granbretan embodies the march of Chaos. A chaos barely constrained within a framework of ostensible order. One wonders whether Moorcock had read Franz Neumann's seminal study of the Third Reich, Behemoth: The Structure and Practice of National Socialism: 1933-1944?)

The Dark Empire marches East. The nations of Tragic Millennium Europa (our far future, post-collapse) are falling one after another to the beast masked legions of Granbretan. Only Hawkmoon and a handful of others stand in their way. The world is a familiar one, but damaged, rendered weird. There are mutants, there is weird science, and there's magic. Many castles and palaces probably have laboratories beneath them - as well as dungeons. Tragic Millennium Europe is littered with ruins that have caches of inexplicable artifacts based on strange technologies.

(Monty Cook didn't invent this idea with Numenera; neither did Gene Wolfe with The Urth of the New Sun, nor Michael Moorcock. These are science fictional ideas that go way back, and they are recurrent.)

This setting is gameable. It has the makings of a points-of-light-getting-successively-extinguished kind of campaign. There are pockets of resistance to the Dark Empire. More than just Kamarg. These might be small states, or they might be resistance forces within the occupied cities of the Dark Empire.

There are probably other campaign models that I haven't even considered yet. But one thing I am convinced of is that this setting would work exceptionally well using Fate. Eternal Champions and their Companions are typically not 1st level types. They are most often experienced. The PCs need not be Hawkmoon or his Companions, but to truly have a Moorcockian feel, a campaign should really feature the PCs facing off against entire armed companies. With arcane swords, relic tech artifacts, and no doubt summoned allies.

Post 500 - Adventures of the Ancient Star-Queens

The Star Queen Nebula

Today is the 500th post at FATE SF. So perhaps it's not inopportune that this morning, as I was awakening from a good night's sleep - the third night in a row - I had a great idea for a new Fate setting: Adventures of the Ancient Star-Queens.

Long before our storied Empire, ages before the rise and welcome fall of Earth's wanton Star League, the Star-Queens explored the galaxy. From jeweled worlds scattered among the stars, the ancient Star-Queens sent out their Emissaries to visit other worlds. Some Emissaries established settlements, while others simply explored or traded. Many helped worlds end age-old strife, establish a lasting peace, or solve seemingly intractable problems. 

Today, the Star-Queens and their Emissaries are best remembered in their epics and songs, still sung by their descendants on many worlds. Their traces can also be found in the gate-relics that once tied world-to-world, and by the rediscovery of their ancient star-vaults:  the time lost treasuries still found in these latter times. They were great when we were naught but the distant potentialities of their own far flung Outreach.  
-Saga of the Star Queens

The Setting: The game is set during humanity's ancient, first Diaspora. By unknown means, humans had been scattered among the stars long before the first generation ships set forth from Earth in the early days of the Star League. Many of these early societies were matriarchal, with communistic, socialist, or anarchistic leanings. A few -the Wolf-Queens - were authoritarian, mercenary, aggressive, or militaristic. In time, many of these worlds discovered how to visit other planets using gates, sorcery, or starships. The ancient Star-Queens sent out Emissaries to make contact with other peoples.

The Emissaries: Each group of Emissaries represents the Star-Queen of a particular world. Such teams are always led by a female, but typically include a mix of genders. Skill sets include diplomacy, trade, science, exploration/survival, and (an unfortunate reality) warriors. Many of the latter are warrior-scholars or poet-warriors (yes, the "bard" is a highly regarded archetype in this setting). Most Emissary groups also include a psion or sorcerer to open gateways between the worlds. As Emissaries have contacted other worlds, their teams grow to include beings of other species. (In fact, there is every reason to believe that some of the ancient Star-Queens were actually members of insect and reptilian species.)

Adventures: The emphasis is on exploration, discovery, diplomacy, and other forms of problem-solving, Empire-building isn't the norm among the Star-Queens, although there is some degree of competition among the Queens for fame and glory. Groups of Emissaries will be largely on their own. Back-up from the homeworld is infrequent, as operating gates requires significant expenditures of magical energy. Emissaries must act on their own, and are expected to uphold the largely altruistic values of their homeworld.

Inspirations: The biggest one for me is Catherine Asaro's Skolian Empire series. We know that the original Ruby Dynasty was a star empire led by matriarchal warrior queens. Unlike the Star-Queens described above, the queens of the ancient Ruby Dynasty were imperialistic and given to a great deal of internecine rivalry. They also kept male harems. Some of the males in the harems were masters of a glass bead game (although remarkably the author told me she wasn't familiar with Herman Hesse's novel). The game helps the queens anticipate the moves of their rivals, as well as simulate and extrapolate a range of cultural and political contingencies.

Second Noon?

Give this wikipedia article on Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's Noon Universe a gander. We have an interstellar science fiction setting with no interplanetary or interstellar governments. No space empires, no imperialism and war among the stars.

Most humans just life on Earth. Most of humanity's problems have been solved - by humanity. It's a post-scarcity society, and one that is communistic. The stage of communism that has been achieved is the highest one, where the state has withered away. Socialism circles back into anarchism. Society is guided by other kinds of collectivities such as councils.

Interstellar travel is nearly instantaneous. It is mainly scientists and observers who get around the stars. Other worlds in other systems also have human or near-human populations (Arkanar is a good example of this), but how they got there is a bit of a mystery. We'd probably have to turn the clock back thousands and thousands of years to figure that one out.

Other systems have aliens. Some of the aliens are so alien that it takes a while to figure out they are intelligent.

Earth sends out observers to other worlds. When societies are less developed than Earth (and here it is important to point out that the development of most human and near-human societies follows predictable "stages" outlined in "basis theory"), there is a policy of non-intervention to prevent the development of things like a "20th Century Rome".

But people from Earth are no longer used to everyday violence and misery. Being around it sickens one. Some observers feel obligated to act. Small actions, like saving someone's life: probably no big deal. Big actions, like ending the life of a tyrant, fomenting a peasant rebellion, or introducing advanced technology: those are no-no's. Some observers will do it anyway. There's a story there to tell there.

Other humans go out to explore. Lots of stories to tell there as well.

I'd imagine Sector General style stories could work in this universe too.

Here at FATE SF, I am going to explore developing a Second Noon campaign frame. I'll take my time with this project, lots of irons in the fire right now, and I want to read more of the Strugatskys' novels set in the Noon Universe.

Dawning Star Playtest

Eric Gilbertson's Wolf -species character "Spot"

Last week our Thursday Night Group did a playtest of the chargen rules for the Fate Core reboot of Dawning Star RPG. We participated in the Kickstarter campaign for this game back in the fall, based on having liked the d20 edition of the game. While I never had an opportunity to play or run the d20 version, the game had great art and a very interesting multi-species space opera setting with all the action happening in one solar system.

For the reboot of the game, there are even more species in-system as recent arrivals onboard the evacuation ship Uyti. The playtest chargen package includes a number of those species, which range from the fairly humanoid to the really weird. (Remember the Horta from Star Trek? Here we have a rock eating species that defecates precious minerals.)

It's no accident that many species have been drawn to the Helios system, where Dawning Star is set. An ancient star gate network brings ships here from many different systems. In fact, the system is riddled with alien artifacts, and there is a lively trade in the relics of the Ancients.

Our players decided to tie the Ancients' relics - and in particular, the competitive archaeological and relic hunting ventures resulting from the widespread knowledge that such relics exist - into their two Campaign Issues. The current and impending campaign issues they selected were:

• We must destroy the secrets of the Ancients for everyone's good.
• Ancient artifacts coming to life.

The players decided to create a group of radical demilitarizers/armed disarmers or anarcho-luddites who seek out and destroy the Ancients' relics before the PCs contemporaries can use them as weapons. So they hunt for relics in order to destroy them, as well as ambushing others' relic hunting and smuggling operations.

This is a group bound for trouble. A party of space asshole archaeologists including:

• A Wolf, a Vargyr-like alien species. Eric's character, as depicted above, is also the cook for the group. In one hand, Spot holds a chainsaw; in his other hand, a chocolate chip cookie tray. Eric is a dog guy, what can I say?
• An Elgie, a lemur-like race that are better with tech than most of the other races. Rachel made a really cute sketch of her character. If she gives me permission, I'll include it in a subsequent post.
• A Velin named "Fabian", the most pretentious name possible for a member of the humanoid indigenous race on Eos. Bob created Fabian as the "Velin Indiana Jones". He uses his psychic Red Truth affinity to find artifacts and destroy them.
• Speaker to Anarchists, a Kzinti. Speaker is the muscle of the group, but he also has a great Edge: a working stasis box. I created him to test the new species creation rules in Dawning Star. Since first edition D&D people have been creating Kzinti for their own RPGs. Why stop now?

All-in-all, we had fun creating our characters, who would be very fun to play in a campaign. We would get into a lot of trouble.

Deck of Fridays 19: Clear Path

Welcome back to DECK OF FRIDAYS, our weekly feature here at FATE SF. We make a draw from the Deck of Fate, RPG Inspiration Cards, or another Aspect-generative randomizer. Then we do something interesting with it, using the Aspect as inspiration for a campaign or scenario seed, a situation, scene, location, NPC, thingie, etc.

This week's draw from the Deck of Fate is a card with the Aspect: Clear Path, a card with a 0 value. A scenario seed comes to mind.

***

It was a tough punching through the orbital sentries around Piranesi VII. There were thousands of them orbiting this dead world, waiting for intruders. We used dropships loaded with green troops to get their attention, while the carrier and its three escorts picked off the satellites. 

Clear path. 

We were happy that the three dropships with veteran troops made it down there. Of course, each dropship was sent to different points planetside. The mission was simple: find out if this planet had any inhabitants - really, anything of worth.

The atmosphere appeared to be breathable, but we kept our helmets on. We're not Omega House for sure, but we're not just stupid grunts either. Well-armed, we disembarked, and started our surveys and sweeps.

The entire planetary surface was a built environment. Ruins everywhere. Below that surface were galleries, stairways, more layers of structure. Lots of open space. Clear paths in all directions. 

Too many of them, in fact. The pings on deep radar show that this is a shellworld. Some of the deeper layers are still pressurized. They have exotic atmospheres, and things down there are moving.

We're going to be here for a while. 

The Fist-of-God Campaign

Our Ringworld Reloaded scenario at Con of the North ended with the PCs entering the Ringworld though the enormous "hole" in the structure's outer wall. The hole was created (presumably) by a collision with a rogue planet at some time in the distant past. The hole opens onto the interior surface of the Ringworld, where it takes the form of a 200 KM tall conical mountain, the Fist-of-God.

The PCs took their ship right through the hole, but lost control in the vortex of storms above the mountain's apex. The ship bounce-crashed its way down the Fist-of-God, destroying several mountainside monasteries along the path of their descent. Fortunately, the ship had a General Products hull, which is for all intents and purposes indestructible. Shipboard emergency stasis fields activated, and the next thing the crew knew their ship had landed in the middle of a city at the base of the Fist-of-God. There was a ring of fire around the ship; the city was burning.

Our heroes put the fire out, and were invited by local dignitaries to visit the fallen sky castle that was in the center of the city. This structure was the only area of the city to have an energy signature consistent with high technology. The rest of the city was at a 19th century level of industrialization.

A multi-species ecumenical delegation of priests welcomed the visiting Sky Gods (our PCs) to the sky castle. But the priests were surprisingly unsubmissive, insisting that the PCs stay put in the castle and learn a variety of Ringworld languages, both humanoid and Kzin. Then a discovery: one of the PCs sneaked off to discover the source of the energy emissions within the sky castle. The priests were soon forced to reveal their holy-of-holies: a three-dimensional holographic projection room with a real-time display of the Ringworld.

The scenario ended there. But I plan to use this setting as a home base for an episodic campaign, taking place at successive conventions where I run games. Here are the starting campaign issues:

• Current Issue: A map of the Ringworld that must be explored
• Impending Issue: We're not the only Sky Gods on the Ringworld

Campaign Aspects For Paolo Bacigalupi's "The Alchemist"

Art by J.K. Drummond

I read Paolo Bacigalupi's "The Alchemist" this weekend, a novella set in a shared fantasy world that Bacigalupi co-created with Tobias Bucknell. The world is one in which every use of magic provokes the growth of an invasive, thorned and bushy weed called "bramble".

Imagine a world overtaken by hedges. Magic in this world doesn't go away, but arable land, clear urban space, and roads do disappear as bramble grows. Magic-using civilizations fall, choked by bramble. Refugees fill the cities that have not yet fallen to bramble. It's a world living on borrowed time, just like ours. Magic can't get rid of bramble - quite the opposite, in fact. When magic is used to clear bramble, the weed quickly comes back with a vengeance.

The novella begins when our protagonist, an alchemist, discovers a non-magical alchemical technique to eradicate bramble, seeds an all. All sorts of chaos ensues.  The setting and story can easily be framed using Fate Core's Game Creation Rules:

1. Current Issue: "Magic brings bramble" (p. 79 of the novella)
2. Impending Issue: An alchemist's discovery turns everything on its head.

Bacigalupi and Bucknell have created a very interesting and dangerous shared world.

Deck of Fridays 12: Betrayed

Welcome back to DECK OF FRIDAYS, our weekly feature here at FATE SF. We make a draw from the Deck of Fate,RPG Inspiration Cards, or another Aspect-generative randomizer. Then we do something interesting with it, using the Aspect as inspiration for a campaign or scenario seed, a situation, scene, location, NPC, thingie, etc.

This week's draw from the Deck of Fate is a card with the Aspect: Betrayed. This is a pretty good fit thematically with one of the novels I am reading right now, Cherie Priest's Boneshaker. It's the book that kicked off the second wave of steampunk back in 2009. It's a very gritty novel, not particularly "light" or giddy steampunk - not the good clean fun divorced from the hierarchy and mayhem of 19th Century capitalism that so many steampunk aficionados are content with today.

The world of Boneshaker is filled with the consequences of betrayal: the lingering war with the traitorous South, racism and nativism in the supposedly free North and Northwest, women's oppression, and environmental destruction wrought by careless and callous inventors and industrialists.

So, a scenario seed on the theme of betrayal, inspired by Boneshaker.

***

Your husband the genius inventor was responsible for thousands of deaths; thank God he's dead. He left you to raise a kid on your own: a good kid, but one who's looking for answers. Too bad the answers he wants are all about his father. 

You had to change your last name to get away from your husband's horrible reputation. Not everyone gets to destroy a city with one of their inventions. Not everyone turns thousands of people into zombies in an industrial accident. 

The kid's taken off looking for answers. He headed right for the ruins of the city. Right on the other side of that Wall. You know, the Wall that keeps the zombies and the poison gas inside the ruins and away from the living city.

So you followed him in. You want to find him and save him before the gas or the zombies get him. Or cannibals. Or slavers. There are lots of possibilities in the ruins. There are people still living there, and a lot of them are worse than the zombies.

Although now that your over the Wall you've found some people who aren't too bad. They're helping you try to find your son. But the rumors! Everyone thinks the mysterious ever-masked Doctor who lives in the ruins is one and the same person as your deceased husband.

Supposedly deceased. Because if he were still alive, and had just abandoned you and the kid - well, that would be a betrayal.  Better that the zombies get their hands on him than you do.   

Dollar Store Dungeons: Other Doctors

Two planes for $1.00

These two aircraft came in a $1.00 pack from the local dollar store. One is obviously a SR-71 Blackbird (but not black), while the other is a modern stealth aircraft (we're not too sure whether it's supposed to be a stealth fighter or a stealth bomber). Both aircraft have emblems on the wings which resembles the shirt emblems you see on crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise, which has me thinking about a specific way to use these.

Other Doctors, or-

Who is Gary Seven?

First of all, Trey Causey clued me into this. Others have blogged about this, as well. It's the question at the center of the 1968 Star Trek episode Assignment: Earth. 

Who is Gary Seven? Is it true that he's a Timelord?* After all, he uses one of these:

And he has some kind of console (with an interstellar transporter, no less) inside of his TARDIS "office":

And who or what is Gary Seven's cat?

We're told she's actually a shapeshifting alien:

And as if that's not enough, Gary Seven has another companion - I mean, "secretary."

Timelord or not, the Federation is going to keep an eye on any alien who is running around on 20th Century Earth tampering with space-based nuclear weapons. However, due to World War Three, the Federation's own records about what technologies were deployed exactly when are probably a little bit fizzy, at best. An SR-71? Not anachronistic. But a stealth fighter/bomber? Only the Federation, with its hazy historical records, would deploy one on Earth in 1968.

Chances are, both these planes are actually small time travel/warp-capable vessels disguised as  U.S. military aircraft of the late 20th/early 21st Century. The Federation deployed two of them to keep an eye on backtime threats from Gary Seven, other Timelords, aliens, etc. What happened to these planes and their crews? Who were their crews, anyway? Did the Federation also deploy ground-based agents? Were there Federation safe houses in major U.S. cities? There are some stories here worth exploring...


*There have been some nasty online discussions - particularly in forums - about whether Gene Roddenberry cribbed this episode of Star Trek while watching an episode of Doctor Who in London. That's not our concern in this post. We're mining the similarities for gameable ideas; that's all. 

Dollar Store Dungeons: Lamprey Centipede

The centipede pictured above was one of a number of bugs in a $1 package of Creatures purchased at the dollar store. Full details on the contents of the package are available on our sister blog, The Everwayan. 

The Lamprey Centipede 

One of the post-apocalyptic horrors found in The Alwyn Campaign, the Lamprey Centipede is a subterranean threat on the post-apocalyptic future Earth of Babylon 5. It is one of a number of horrific monsters that can be found while exploring ruins from the age before the Great Burn. Whether it is one of the atomic children of the Great Burn, or is simply something that escaped from a laboratory or zoo during that disaster is one of the many mysteries lost in time. Perhaps one of the learned souls in the great monasteries of the South knows the truth...

Lamprey Centipedes range in length from 2-3 meters. They live in underground caves and tunnels, emerging at night to hunt game. Favorite prey include deer and wild pigs, but humans are all too often on their menu. The centipedes often stalk along tunnels, sewers, and wells, infiltrating the cellars of human dwellings in search of an easy meal.

The most horrifying feature of the Lamprey Centipede is how it eats. It has a circular maw flanked by two huge pincers. When the centipede senses its prey, the pincers become coated with a white frothy a paralytic poison. The Lamprey Centipede will first try to paralyze its prey with the pincers. Then its circular mouth will project outward for up to two decimeters, and begin chewing its way into the body of its victim. Our PCs killed a Lamprey Centipede in the second episode of The Alwyn Campaign. They found an interesting signet ring in its guts, along with some human finger bones.

When attacking humans, the Lamprey Centipede goes in the hard way.  It prefers to bite through the sternum and then consume the victim's heart and lungs first. Once it has cleaned out the victim's chest cavity, it begins eating downward and consumes the soft and calorie-rich organs in the abdomen. Miraculously, the victim often remains in a semi-conscious state during part or all of this two course meal. It's a horrible last meal.

Chirurgeons and torturers will pay delvers top dollar when they return with samples of the Lamprey Centipede's venom. Its armored segments are also valuable; they can also be used to fashion lamellar armor. Its teeth are exceptionally strong and sharp, and can be mounted for use as the blades on a macuahuitl.

http://www.michtoy.com/item-MRN-AZT042-
Aztec_Eagle_Warrior_Defending_with_Macuahuitl.html

OGL MECHANICS

Lamprey Centipede
Giant centipedes (neutral)

ASPECTS:

• High Concept: Mutant centipedes with a taste for human flesh
• Trouble:  Fears light and fire  
• Aspect: "Did you just see something?"
• Aspect: Frothy poison fangs
• Aspect: There's never just one

APPROACHES

• Careful: +1
• Clever: +1
• Flashy: 0
• Forceful: +2
• Quick: +3
• Sneaky: +2

STUNTS:

• Bone Saw: The creature takes a +2 to its Forceful Attack when biting through leather/cloth armor or a victim's ribcage to get to the tasty soft meat.
• Paralytic Fangs: When the creature Succeeds with Style on a Forceful Attack, it injects its victim with a paralytic venom. The victim gains the Aspect Paralyzed for the remainder of the Scene. The venom also does +2 stress per turn until an anti-venom or some other healing measure occurs. 

REFRESH: 3

Obscure Simulations Roundup: Metamorphosis Alpha

Today's FATE SF post is our contribution to the Obscure Simulations Roundup, a community blog hop dedicated to forgotten or under-appreciated RPGs. As regular readers of FATE SF know, I have a forthcoming generation ship RPG of my own called Project Generations. So it shouldn't be a big surprise that my OSR post is an appreciation for Jim Ward's original generation ship SF RPG, Metamorphosis Alpha (TSR, 1976).

Metamorphosis Alpha isn't the most obscure or forgotten RPG. After all, it was the first SF RPG published. It's not even out-of-print. You can buy Metamorphosis Alpha in PDF here, or pick up a hard copy from Lulu here.

I'm writing about Metamorphosis Alpha today because it has a special place in my heart. It was one of the first RPGs I purchased, shortly after the first edition of Traveller and around the same time that I picked up Whitebox D&D.

Cover of the Dell edition of Heinlein's "Universe"

One of the first SF novels I read as a kid was Robert A. Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky. It was an SF novel about a population of humans and mutants (you can see the mutant Joe-Jim standing in the picture above) living on a slower-than-light interstellar generation ship many generations after the ship's launch. Over that time, successive generations had 1) forgotten that they were on a star ship, and 2) had lost the skills to pilot and maintain their vessel. They were essentially lost in space, facing eventual doom unless a group of heroes rediscovered that they were on a ship that had a destination in mind. A small band of humans and mutants - two communities usually at each others' throats - made this discovery and set about to bring things to right.

Generation ship stories often involve an epistemological break from ignorance, to (re)discovery, to setting things right. Such a discovery is common in SF stories but particularly important in traditional generation ship narratives. For example, you see it in the very title of the classic Star Trek episode about the generation ship Yonada, "For the World is Hollow and I Have Touched The Sky".

While scientific and cosmological discoveries made by characters in the Cthulhu Mythos stories are ultimately disempowering, underscoring the futility of human effort and of irrelevance of the human scale, discoveries made in generation ship stories are ultimately liberating and empowering. People learn that the world is not what it seems, that it needs to be fixed or improved in some way, and that the means to fix the generation ship and set its course right are within the characters' reach - if they know where to look, and what to make of things! The characters may have to struggle or sacrifice, but their efforts aren't ultimately in vain. That's hopeful, and a call to responsibility.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Starlost_-_intro.jpg

Of course, my encounter with the generation ship in Orphans of the Sky was quickly followed by watching the early '70s SF generation ship TV series, The Starlost. Ed Bryant and Harlan Ellison wrote the screenplay (and a novel, "Phoenix Without Ashes") for this Canadian TV series, and Ellison quickly turned against his series very vocally, deriding laughable plots, implausible SF terms, and rotten dialogue.  In 2011, "Phoenix Without Ashes" was also published by IDW as a graphic novel.

Oh well.  I loved the show as a kid. The ship model was wonderful and there was some interesting tech on the ship, such as the the habitat hemispheres, the iris doors, the small cassettes and devices used to control access to different parts of the ship through the iris doors, the bounce tubes that helped people get around the non-habitat parts of the ship quickly, and of course the librarian AI.

Silent Running also comes to mind as a generation ship eco-narrative of the '70s - even if those ships weren't really going anywhere.

Silent Running (1972)

They also had cute maintenance and gardening droids. Every generation ship needs maintenance drones of some kind. Somebody needs to continue working and repairing things while the humans busy themselves with killing each other.

Silent Running

So anyway, back to Metamorphosis Alpha. It's an extremely simple system by contemporary standards, but it does the job. There are six Abilities, rolled randomly using 3d6: Radiation Resistance (pretty important, as the generation ship Warden in the default setting was damaged by a cloud of interstellar radiation and is still contaminated with radiation), Mental Resistance (defense against psionic mental attacks, as well as the intelligence skill that helps characters understand the ship's now ancient, mysterious, and often deadly tech), Dexterity, Strength, Leadership Potential (only pure humans can attract followers; human and animal mutants don't even get this Ability), and Constitution (determines how many d6 of hit dice you get, as well as your ability to survive poisoning). If after reading the Constitution bit you're saying "Hello, Carcossa" you should be, although in Metamorphosis Alpha you only roll the dice for hit points when you create your character - not every encounter.

If you are a pure human, you are pretty much done at this point. Take clothes and weapons typical of your community. If you are going to play a mutant human or mutant animal, you roll 1d4 to determine the number of physical mutations you get, and 1d4 for the number of mental mutations. You pick your mutations from the lists for each type. Then the GM gets to roll to determine randomly what physical and mental mutational defects you get; the GM rolls either once (if the player has 4 or less mutations) or twice (i.e., once on each list, if the PC has 5 or more mutations). Mutants get no equipment.

Then you are ready to play. The core mechanic is d20 based and there won't be huge surprises to people who have played other OSR d20 games.

The GM needs to have at least part of one level of the Warden detailed before play begins. This is good as it enables sandbox play, but there's nothing to stop the GM from detailing as much of the ship upfront as they'd like to do. Like building a dungeon, this is a game in itself.

The book tells you what the general details of each deck of the ship should be, as well as the kinds of technologies found on the ship, and their relative complexity; PCs roll their Mental Resistance vs. an item's complexity in order to figure out if their character knows what to do with it and can handle it without risk of injury. There's guidance to help the GM build mutated animals, plants, and humans, as well as guidance for robots and androids (i.e., chemical life - essentially, replicants).

There's no experience system, so (all things being equal) characters will keep the abilities that they have until death or the end of the campaign. I think that's good, as it keeps play focused on exploration and problem-solving, and not on monster hunting and treasure seeking as ends in themselves. All the treasure in the world won't do you a bit of good if your ship burns up in an alien sun, crashes into an uninhabitable planet, or runs out of gas between the stars.

Here's a few campaign ideas for Metamorphosis Alpha:

Metamorphosis Moonbase Alpha: The sudden departure of Earth's rogue moon caused a disaster at home, and a very long, strange trip for the inhabitants of Moonbase Alpha. The Alphans are used to sudden transitions. One moment, their moon is travelling along in the depths of interstellar space; a few days or weeks or months later, it is careening into another solar system entirely.

So imagine the Alphans' surprise when they receive an automated distress signal from a ship they are approaching. A signal in English. It's a vast ship. It's an Earth ship: the hull says: "Warden." Moonbase Alpha's computer (there is only one!) has no record of any such launch. Was the vessel launched after the moon ripped itself out of Earth orbit?

A ship this big could have many things of value on board: replacement technology, hydroponic supplies and seeds, medicines, astrogational records, news from Earth - many things. The ship is crawling with radiation. It's too risky to send more than one Eagle to investigate. The Commander calls for volunteers.

[The GM should secretly roll 1d6. That is how many days the Eagle crew will have to explore the Warden before the moon begins to accelerate away from the Warden forever.]

An Eagle from Space:1999

Return to Yonada: The  U.S.S. Enterprise is called back to the asteroid generation ship of Yonada. A civil war has broken out on the vessel, even as it has settled into a stable orbit around a habitable world. A restorationist cult called The Most Devoted to the Oracle have declared that it is heresy to leave Yonada. They have tapped into the central computer of the ancient space ark, and have appropriated the medical secrets of the Fabrini (the Yonadan's distant ancestors who built the ship), unleashing a mutogenic viral plague which has wreaked havoc on the People of Yonada. Worse still, the High Priestess of the People, Natira, has gone missing. She must be rescued, as Natira is the Yonadan leader with the greatest interest in helping the People of Yonada complete their ancestors' long journey to colonize a new world.

Play a native Yonadan loyal to Natira, or a Federation officer! Find Yonada's rightful ruler! Defeat the cult and its mutant menace!

Yonada

Ark of the Shunned Ones: A reconnaissance starship far beyond the borders of the Humanspace Empire discovers an ancient generation ship: a vessel of the hideous and inimical Shunned Ones. The Ship's Telepath reports the presence of human minds on-board the generation ship, as well as the minds of a great many other alien races. The Shunned Ones' ship is in a terrible state of disrepair, leaking radiation and strange other-planar energies; it may not survive much longer. It would be desirable to rescue the humans on-board, and to explore this great vessel before its imminent demise. The Captain orders a team of scientists and marines to board the ship.

Hideous Inimical Alien From "This Island Earth"

Beneath the Pyramid of the Sun: The great hexagonal Sun crosses the sky every day. Every day, your temple feeds it a live human heart, ensuring that it will return from the Underworld at the end of the night to bring the next day. Yet today, just before the sacrifice, a strange creature appeared from the Underworld beneath the temple, and stole the mid-day sacrifice. A group of brave warriors and priests must descend into the Underworld and find this monster.

"Chariots of the Gods?", anyone? Aztecs, mutants, and more on a generation ship with many different habitat compartments, each containing a different ancient human culture.  (Check out Harry Harrison's Captive Universe for even more inspiration!)

"Captive Universe" cover art by Alan Guttierez

Also, be sure to check out Brett Slocum's idea for a Paranoia-Metamorphosis Alpha mash-up over at The Eye of Joyful Sitting Amongst Friends blog.

Finally, we leave you with a rather evocative piece from near the end of the Metamorphosis Alpha book. The artist is David Sutherland, who was not only responsible for the art in Metamorphosis Alpha, but also did many of the illustrations for Empire of the Petal Throne.

Art by David Sutherland! 

Deck of Fridays 4, Part II: Grounded: Jailbreak! Scenario Seed

Earlier today, we drew a card from the Deck of Fate (a card with the Aspect Grounded). Then we created the Grounded! Table, a 1d6-1d6 FATE table in with 11 reasons why a starship might be grounded.

One of the items is the discovery that a bunch of kids on a grounded starship were themselves grounded - and that they went somewhere. Here's a scenario or campaign seed based on that outcome! My thinking for this scenario is very much influenced by my recent purchase of +Robert Bohl's fantastic indie RPG Misspent Youth, an SF RPG of youthful rebellion. You can get the free Eyebleed Edition PDF here, but I'd encourage you to get the print version too!

Part of the game's set up is that the players work together to create an enemy, The Authority, before they create their own rebellious youthful characters. The Authority has three attributes, a Vice, Victim, and Visage, as well as a need.

Grounded: Jailbreak! Scenario Seed 

The Authority on the ship is the adult crew. The Captaincy is a clonal gerontocracy. The oldest capable adult is the Captain. The next most elder make up his Council, and take the most senior positions on the ship.

All the crew - adults, youth, and kids - are clones of The Man: the original owner of the huge merchant vessel, Galleon. He thought the best way to run a ship was to do it all himself.

The Man bought the cloning technology and the autodocs required to make more of himself. These are kept in a secure area far below decks. Only a few adults have access. The crew have carried on this way for 300 years now.

The adults act as interchangeable parents for the youthful members of the crew. As adults age, the cloning machine spits out baby-clones as replacements. Some adult crew members take hormones so that they can breastfeed the babies.

Teens mind the little kids. Adults mind the teens. Deprivation, isolation, boredom and lack of stimulation are the adults' primary tools of control. Nobody wants to be grounded.

There are a lot of dietary practices that make no sense to outsiders. There's no marriage. No relationships between the adults and outsiders, except for brief business transactions. No passengers, no guests.

Strictly business with outsiders. Just one big happy clone family.
.
That's the official line. But who wants to live in a straightjacket? Kids will steal a shuttle and run away when they can. Even kids who are grounded dream of a jailbreak. That's who the PCs play. They'll have to decide whether it's better to run away, or stay and fight The Man's secret plan (see The Need, below).

***

Authority details: In this section, we describe The Authority's key attributes: its Vice, Victim, Visage, and Need. We also represent each of these attributes with an Aspect; the Aspects are in italics.

• Vice (i.e., The Authority's underlying motivation) is Fear - Their biggest vice isn't greed. Being a merchant ship is just a vocation. Being One Big Happy Clone Family; now that is an avocation. But if the youth run away, no more Big Happy Family. The crew will its lose coherence and functionality.Everything The Authority does, it's whole weird familial corporate culture, is based on the Fear that the family will fall apart (Trouble). 

• Victim (i.e., who or what The Authority beats down, chews up, feeds on) is Humanity - On this ship, The Authority grinds down the next generation, the youth. Conformity is everything. 

• Visage (i.e., what form The Authority takes) is Corporate - The Authority on the ship takes the form of a family-owned business.  A merchant ship with an all-clone crew (High Concept).

• The Need is what The Authority wants, and what it would do without the PCs to stop it - The Authority's need is to put an end to runaways and youthful rebellion. They think the solution is to modify their clone line by creating a collective telepathic consciousness for the crew. They have started making experiments toward this end with A special batch of clones, which are hidden away in a sealed deck in the depths of the ship.

Deck of Fridays 4: Grounded!

Welcome back to DECK OF FRIDAYS, our weekly feature here at FATE SF. We make a draw from the Deck of Fate, RPG Inspiration Cards, or another Aspect-generative randomizer. Then we do something interesting with it, using the Aspect as inspiration for a campaign or scenario seed, a situation, scene, location, NPC, thingie, etc.

This week's draw from the Deck of Fate is a card with the Aspect: Grounded. We're using that Aspect for today's post, which includes the Grounded! Table, below.

There will be a related scenario seed later in the day!

Grounded! Table

There's got to be a reason why your ship is grounded. Here's 11 of them, Starblazer Adventures, stylee!

Roll 1d6-1d6.

RESULTS:

• -5: "What a revolting development!" A tractor beam has pulled you down planetside. This was supposed to be an uninhabited world - what gives?

• -4: It was a crash; you're all just lucky to be alive! 

• -3: There were "Imperial Entanglements" after all. Surprise, surprise!

• -2: One of the crew got hurt or killed on shore leave. Too bad it's the pilot, or you'd be out of here already!

• -1: You're not going anywhere until you find that replacement part. Oh, and find a way to pay for it.

•  0: They said this port was "duty-free" but they lied. You're ship won't be leaving until you pay up.

• +1: Smuggling can be lucrative. This deal seemed that way too. But where's the buyer?

• +2: One or or more of the crew aren't back yet from shore leave. Time to hire on somebody to replace them, or go find them?

• +3: We told those kids they were grounded! Where the hell did they go?

• +4: A passenger of high value was kidnapped on shore leave. You know because you just got the ransom note. They're the high net worth person - not the crew - so paying up isn't an option. A rescue mission maybe?

• +5: You have discovered something of great value planetside. Captain says no one's going anywhere until we figure out how to take it with us! 

Albion Trigger: The Gloriana Project

We're thinking about combining the Camelot Trigger setting from Fate Worlds 2 (interplanetary SF mecha with Arthurian themes) with this:

Maybe we're losing it. But we think Early Modern Europe has a great deal to offer. It's much more intelligible to us moderns than medieval Europe is, as Silvia Federici has shown us with Caliban and the Witch.

In Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene we have Tudor state ideology, Arthurian mythos, a touch of the Italian renaissance epics, and so much more coming together in a heady mix. Add in Camelot Trigger's mecha and modify its SFnal storyline, and I believe we'd have a very interesting alternative Camelot Trigger setting indeed.

All we have is a name so far, so please feel free to drop setting and story ideas in the Comments.

Fate System Toolkit And Worlds

The Fate System Toolkit and the two volumes of Fate Worlds have arrived in the Land of 10,000 Monsters. Here in the heart of South Minneapolis, in fact.

With the arrival of these three volumes, we now have African American or at least potentially characters of African descent as cover stars on the five essential Fate books: a young martial artist on the cover of FAE, a working class hero fireman on the cover of Fate Worlds Vol. I, and SF-flavored heroes (female and male) on the cover of FST and FW2.

I remember Dante on the cover of Mage back in the day. He was a revelation for the hobby: a truly non-stereotypical African American representation on the cover of an RPG. It's nice to see the range of roles continuing to expand.

Things Found In The Zone - List A

Art by +j garrison of Hereticwerks

Stalkers go into the Zone looking for things to bring back out with them. They may have shopping lists from scientists at the Institute or from various brokers and  black marketeers. It's not unusual for Stalkers to bring back items that blur the lines between living things, chemicals, and/or other kinds of environmental hazards. Others things they bring back are more obviously manufactured items, even if their purpose and use is often inexplicable. Anything that Stalkers bring back has the potential to fuel new scientific investigation, black marketeering, and even violent attempts by others to acquire the item.

Areas of town near the Zone frequently have hidden caches of items that Stalkers have brought back. Weirdness potentially lurks inside every loading dock, warehouse, or apparently abandoned building in town. And sometimes it leaks out and spreads.

Almost all the items on the List A Table below are named items mentioned by the Strugatsky Brothers in Roadside Picnic. In a couple of cases (#8, 20, and 21) I had to come up with a name for something the authors had described without naming. As in life, not all experiences have names.

We'll be writing item descriptions in individuals posts (we already have a couple), and may be adding a bit more to the list as we finish the novel in the next few days.

1. Hell Slime
2. Burning Fuzz
3. Silver Cobwebs
4. Wispy Hairs
5. Graviconcentrates aka Bug Traps
6. Magnetic Traps 
7. Living Corpses
8. Autonomous Viabilities (parts severed from Living Corpses that have a life of their own)
9. Happy Ghosts
10. Spacells
11. Black Sparks
12. Empties
13. Full Empties
14. Bracelets
15. White Whirligigs
16. Lobster Eyes
17. Dick the Tramp (a wind-up mechanical doll)
18. Bitches' Rattles
19. Rattling Napkins
20. Short-shocks
21. Coal Pit
22. Green Slime
23. The Death Lamp
24. Grinder (sometimes localized as a tunnel called The Meat Grinder)
25. The Golden Sphere (sometimes localized as The Room)