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.  

Strange Stars A-To-Z: Woon Academies

"For Children The Gates Of Paradise" by William Blake

Woon, the homeworld of the caterpillaroid Bomoth. It has a reputation of being a closed world, but nothing could be further from the truth. It's true that few not-of-Woon have visited the vast fungal preserves below the planet's surface. Still fewer have witnessed and reported the legendary "butterfly women" said to covort among those dim caverns.

But the surface of Woon sees many visitors from elsewere among the Strange Stars. A few thousand attend the Woon Academies: various small institutions that share what the Bomoth know with off-worlders - often for a great price. All of these institutions have extrance examinations; the application fees are considerable, and examinations occur only on Woon.

Here are a few of the Woon Academies:

• Attarus Academy is the most famous of the Bomoth schools. Here flock travelers from all regions of the Strange Stars to learn vocal and instrumental musical arts from Woon's Spiraculous Masters. A vast mountaintop castle with numerous dead-end tunnels, galleries, auditoria, and air shafts, the Attarus itself is an eerie musical instrument that resonates, whispers, and pipes strange songs into the mountain's winding passes and surrounding ravines and valleys. 
• Dchided Towers spears the miasma clouds above a spore-covered dead sea. Its students are the most daring of Phantasists: experimental oneirochemists who use their own bodies to discover and test new cocktails of dream drugs harvested from the dead sea. It's said that the dead sea's spores are the sediment from vast subterranean fungal farms whose caverns collapsed thousands of years ago.
• Cromlech is a series of ancient rock-domed complexes. Some are pressurized, others are open to the elements. The Cromlech admits only the very young among the Strange Stars' multitude of clades. That's because this academy teaches humanoid biologics how to listen to the alien languages of non-hominds, and to the spoken tongues of the wild moravecs, robots, and androids. Only juvenile biologics have neural networks sufficiently plastic to listen to and learn these languages.  
• The Mujib Academy is the most secretive and exclusive of the major Woon Academies. The Mujib also exclusively admits biologics, although it only enrolls adults. Its exact purpose is unclear, but its entrance exam is a series of vocal auditions called "The Ordeal."    

http://www.rpgnow.com/product/165972/Strange-Stars-Fate-Rule-Book?src=slider_view

Strange Stars A-To-Z: "H" Is For High House

Illustration by John Howe

The High House 

Wing there with me

The high place, the infinite space

The only structure built into hyperspace 

What node does it thread? What race built it? Who lives there now - 

Among its many rooms?

We know it's real 

(we think) 

Because the feathered Hyehoon 

Of quick-clawed Omu 

Say they've been there 

They call it Marao's House 

Wing with me there

We've loved the title of James Stoddard's The High House for a long time, so hopefully he's OK with another even higher (hyper?) house.

"What Is 'Library'?"

The second location that players visited in Friday night's Fate Strange Stars scenario at JonCon was the Library of Atoz-Theln, a library-world in the Zuran Expanse. As +trey causey's Strange Stars Game Setting Book relates, the Library was built before the Great Collapse. It has virtual records dating back to the era Archaic Oikumene - and even before that time. Not only does the Library contain virtual records; it also possesses physical records and artifacts from countless worlds. The Library therefore contains a vast store of otherwise lost knowledge.

The players in my "Rescue on Tenebrae" scenario had two reasons for going to the Library of Atoz-Theln.  Their ostensible purpose was to gain more information about their ultimate target, the world of Tenebrae.  However our ne'er-do-well Captain-and-Star-Lord's most important motivation for going there was to find a cache of ancient eight track tapes. Where else in the Strange Stars would one look for such antique and priceless cultural artifacts?

So they landed, under guidance from Library flight control. In my version of the Library, information is organized topographically, and one of the players declared the narrative detail that since the players did not pay special inducements, they had been assigned landing rights over the limnology section of the Library. I went with that.

The Library of Atoz-Theln has very strong Metascape virtualities, and almost as soon as their ship, the Kill-Wagon landed, the players found that they were on a lakeside beach. They felt lake breezes, even inside their ship as the Library's Metascape systems began to overwrite shipboard systems. The players exited the ship and heard the calls of shorebirds. They also spied an immense pterosaur soaring overhead. The Collections are eclectic. What can I say?

The players descended far below the surface of the world using high speed elevators accessible from the beach.  The found themselves in a corridor that was in fact a tube within a gigantic aquarium stocked with all sorts of aquatic life. If you have been to Biosphere 2 you've been in a miniature version of this.

Soon they encountered one of the numerous humanoid librarians dwelling within the Library. The player of the Star-Hawk-ey PC, who belonged to the bird-like Hyehoon clade, decided it would be fun to spend 1 FP and make a narrative declaration that the librarian recognized Gamorine, the party's Gamora-like character, as a wanted-on-all-worlds assassin. (I don't normally see PVP play in Fate games, but I went with it since it was an interesting complication. Really, I should have given a FP to Gamorine...).

The assassin teleported the librarian into one of the aquaria and let him drown.

Nasty stuff.

Next the players took a subterranean tubecar to one of the workshops where restorative work was being done on ancient artifacts. Eight tracks were stolen! The players were somewhat surprised that they were completely ignored by the librarian-restorationists in the workshops. Everyone was very focused on their own work. Kind of like the special neurological state of focus in Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky.

Finally, the players located a deep library section dedicated to the world of Tenebrae. This was a virtual reality as well. Things got creepy when the labyrinth's masked Skulkers appeared, and one took on the mien of Gamorine's father, Lord Death. Virtualities can be tricky that way, and sometimes a daughter can carry along a bit of her father without even realizing it...

Needless to say, the players soon high-tailed it out of that labyrinth and got back to their ship.

Next stop, the dead world of Tenebrae.

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.

The Golden Sphere

Art by Tom J. Manning

Think of it as a Wrecking Ball: the Golden Sphere is said to be able to fulfill your innermost desire. Conscious or unconscious, but it often turns out to be the latter. It's at the very heart of the labyrinth, the heart's desire of the heart's desire.

In some (maybe most) Zones, it's not there at all. There might just be a Room at the heart of the labyrinth which does the same thing. And the antechamber to the Room, oh that liquid floor. Watch your step.

It's a danger. For whose intentions are fully conscious, or entirely pure? Sometimes people don't know themselves at all until they're face-to-face with this thing.

A mirror.

It's no wonder that governments and militaries take a dim view of stalkers, and often just want them dead.

The Guardians

Cover art by Richard M. Powers

There is a touch of a one-eared Anubis about these fluid sculptures. And, of course, The Serpent. Big blocky striations like teeth pop up everywhere on these structures, and then slowly dissolve as new mucoid layers flow over and shift their architecture.

The sculptures appear on desolate, abandoned worlds. They are usually found near ruins that are at least 10,000 years old. Sometimes they sit on top of ancient built environments, or immediately in front of cliff tombs. Whether they mark ancient sites or are intended to obscure them is a matter of passionate conjecture.

When such structures are encountered, it is best not to touch them. Sometimes contact results in contamination with a viscous penetrative slime. Quarantine measures are recommended after contact with this material. At other times, the structure appears to be quite solid. Unfortunately, it is at precisely these moments when the sculptures are the most dangerous. In this glassine state, the sculptures are highly friable, and prone to sudden, catastrophic collapses. The shards can be long and deadly, like the spears of some long forgotten elf army.

Those who have visited these guardian structures have often reported hearing voices. Oddly, such voices do not appear in audio recordings of structure surveys, nor have they been successfully recorded using simsense devices. Nexialists and other psi-sensitive researchers attest that these structures are psychically active, and hypothesize that they constitute a form of weaponized psychic architecture.

Approaching Kunlun Station

Art by Juan Ochoa

Time to get back to Strangers and Friends. You can see the original posts in the series here. Our goal with this project is to do a series of posts - one per Monday - profiling each of the people pictured in Juan Ochoa's illustration. We're using Mindjammer for this project, since I want to get familiar with that implementation of Fate Core.

Kunlun Station is the informal capital of Shining Lake Sector, a Rimward region of space just beyond the Empire (the default space opera setting here at FATE SF). Kunlun Station was built by the R.U.R. over one million years ago, as part of an effort to resettle refugees fleeing the Core. The Kunlun system has one known slipknot connection, which leads to the R.U.R. industrial system of Fountain, deep within the Coreward region of R.U.R. space.

Arriving at Kunlun Station.  Pass the lonely gas giant with its entourage of moons, and go inward toward the sun. The only other object in the system is Kunlun Station. The station was built around a disk-shaped plate approximately 10 km wide on its rim side, and 1,000 km in diameter across the Plate. Most space vessels enter the station through one of the numerous ports on the rim, and then make their way to one of the numerous docking facilities deep within the station.

But the Station is far more than a plateworld. Indeed, from space that is the feature that is the station's least noticeable feature! The Mountain Zones, two huge mountain ranges, "rise" from either surface of the Plate. Each soars as much as 100 km above the Plates, with the highest mountains clustering toward the Plate's hub. The mountains are shielded by dome-like pressure curtains, which retain atmosphere within the two snow-capped mountainous hemispheres. A stable 1G is maintained throughout the upper and lower Mountain Zones, although gravity can be quite variable in strength and polarity once one is inside the Station itself. The casual observer notices rivers and streams and green mountain valleys. The careful observer sees the birds, mastodons and other megafauna, and the various small habitations, shrines, and monasteries.

Deep radar scans demonstrate that Kunlun Station has a central vacuity that is least 50 km deep and 50 km across - a cube, where the ancient "coin" had a missing square. The original structure must have been very similar to a number of ancient and long abandoned "Chinese coin" plateworlds scattered throughout the Near Rim. R.U.R. authorities state that this area is "sacred", and that they have never granted visitors access to the vacuity. But everyone who has been on the station for a while has a story to tell of an acquaintance, patron, or rival who has been there. Their reports vary considerably.

What else is inside the Station? Let's come in for a landing! Come back next time and we'll get oriented.

Strangers & Friends: Shining Lake Sector

http://www.suppressedhistories.net/goddess/xiwangmu.html

Shining Lake Sector is a vast region of space located just beyond the Empire. Shining Lake Sector is a prosperous autonomous zone - one with many local conflicts due to the prosperity of the sector. In this politically turbulent zone, factional alliances are often quite fleeting, and the plethora of micro-polities that may rule one or several systems rise and fall quickly.

The sector has both human and alien species, with humans belonging to one of two gene lines:

• East Asians who arrived in the sector on the free trader and colony vessels of the Early Diasporic Era.
• Comet Barbarians whose clan movements crisscross sector boundaries between the Empire and the Shining Lake Sector. The most prominent clans include: 
• Green Comet Barbarian clans that have migrated outward as the Empire's borders expanded; these tribes form the core of the Legio I Green Banner Army; 
• The Black Comet Barbarian clans, who form the core of Legio V and Legio X; and 
• The Gold clans who maintain several "independent" pirate fleets that invariably target any interests or powers that get in the Empire's way.     

Three prominent alien species also have a presence sector-wide, but none have their origins here. The sector's de facto capital, Kunlun Station, started its existence one million years ago as a vast refugee relocation facility. Built by the R.U.R., Kunlun Station was established using a slipknot connection from Fountain, an industrial system in a coreward region of R.U.R. space. Through the Fountain slipknot, three endangered species fleeing the Anti-Consciousness at the galactic core were evacuated from the Embattled Wavefront and helped by the R.U.R. to resettle in Shining Lake Sector:

• Parturitionists, a species of giant arachnids that have established friendly relations with humans. The Parturitionists helped the first pioneers from Earth establish new human populations in this sector. Parturitionists and humans have co-colonized many worlds in the sector, and on some worlds have even established households together. 
• Dragonbeams, a long-bodied, double-winged avian insectoid species. Dragonbeams avoid FTL travel, claiming it disrupts their consciousness. Instead, they visit other worlds by beamcasting their consciousnesses through hyperwaves. Their 'casts are then downloaded into prefabricated bioroids on destination worlds.
• Broughtlow, an extremely warlike species of insectoid 'hoppers. Shortly after their relocation to Shining Lake Sector, it became clear that the Broughtlow were not only a warrior race, but also xenophobes bent on exterminating other species. The R.U.R. acted quickly, using genegeneered viruses and other methods  to diminish this species. The resulting alterations in the Broughtlow genome caused a rapid crash in their intellectual capacity. The Broughtlow are no longer capable of piloting or navigating spacecraft, or of building technology above a  T3* level. They are still apt mercenaries, however, and are capable of using modern arms and armor with the assistance of a maintenance crew.

Numerous other minor species exist in the sector as well, such as the Ruhai (the kneeling winged figure depicted in the image at the top of this post). 

As noted above, most inter-system conflicts in Shining Lake Sector are economic in nature. They are due to competition over the particularly lucrative trade with R.U.R. space. The sector is largely friendly to the Empire because the dominant economic force in the sector - the R.U.R. - are the Empire's closest allies. The Empire in turn protects its R.U.R. allies and trade in the sector.  The Empire garrisons Legio XIV Lanterns of the Star Silk Road.on Kunlun Station, and as well as at several other critical trade outposts and worlds in the sector. Finally, the pirate fleets of the Gold Comet Barbarians also look after the Empire's interests, reducing the need for the Empire to maintain large battle fleets in the sector.

Next time we'll look at Kunlun Station itself. It's the heart of Shining Lake Sector.

*Using the Mindjammer scale.

Protection Of The Body In Transmigration

Taweret amulet of protection

It is imperative to protect of the body of a caster who is using a Transmigration spell. While the mind travels to another star, it leaves a defenseless body behind it. More than one caster of Transmigration has suffered the misfortune of having their body riddled with arrows or consumed by hyena, marooning their spirit on another world or - still worse - lost forever wandering the enumerations of hyperspace.

Several different means have been devised to protect the body from physical and psychic harm. Some measures provide only partial and/or short-term protection, such as the physical protection of a body by a sentry device. Others provide long-term protection, extending life and preserving the body through either medical or mystical means.

Techniques of protection include:

• Spindles granted as signs of office to important commanders or emissaries are self-aware and very capable of keeping a protective watch over their masters for at least several days.
• A variety of mystical amulets such as the one depicted above can provide physical and spiritual protection to the body of the travelling soul. The best of such amulets were devised by the Anapa in ancient times. Many have been recovered from the long-abandoned sanctuaries of that dreaded race. These objects are often heirlooms passed from one sorcerer to another. Some are genuinely sorcerous in character; others are based on the advanced nanotechnology of the Anapa.
• An autodoc or portable surgical suite can be used to sustain the body of a traveler indefinitely.
• A variety of sarcophagi and mausolea have been devised by the Anapa to magically encapsulate and preserve the life force of a Sleeper. The trick with these device-locations is to ensure that the specific wards set on them allow the return of a travelling soul. A secondary risk is that the Anapa will return and harvest the body prematurely, while the mind of the traveler is still away. Such bodysnatching occurs from time to time because the bodies of travelers are excellent raw material for the creation of new golems and autonoma. 

Deck Of Fridays 20: Top Of The World

Welcome to the 20th episode of DECK OF FRIDAYS, our weekly feature here at FATE SF! Each week since the release of the print edition of the Deck of Fate*, we have made 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: Top of the World, a card with a +3 value. This seems appropriate for celebrating our 20th post in the series!

Top of the World makes me think of space elevators which are often colloquially referred to in SF as beanstalks. So today we have a table on Beanstalks that you can use to flesh out one or more details of a setting which includes one.

***
Jack's Table

Roll 4DF and consult the corresponding result below.

• -4: Monsters (Horta, Dholes, deviant Morlocks, rogue 'bots, etc.) are gnawing at the beanstalk's roots

• -3: The beanstalk is ruined and abandoned, and has fallen into a tangle planetside

• -2: A literal Tower of Babel, the beanstalk's populations are culturally and linguistically balkanized and frequently in conflict with each other 

• -1: Jim Crow to the stars - the beanstalk's amenities (transport tubes, hotel and dining spaces, etc.) are segregated according to some discriminatory scheme (humans vs. uplifts and robots, for example)

•  0: The beanstalk is ruined and abandoned, but still upright - and ready for exploration and plunder

• +1: A typical beanstalk: a spaceport at the apex, a commercial-industrial city at the base

• +2: The beanstalk is the hub of a thriving interplanetary or interstellar civilization 

• +3: The beanstalk has numerous zones/rings of habitation, baroquely stratified with ascending tech levels (low at the base, astonishingly high at the apex)**

• +4: Gods (Vorlonic aliens, transhumans, etc.) live at the apex, and lord over all below

*With some exceptions.

**As in Alastair Reynolds' Terminal City.

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. 

Visitation Of The House Of Knives

"Trials of the Hero Twins" by Diego Rivera

The House of Knives (center top in the illustration above) is one of the places of torture in the Mayan Underworld of Xibalba.   In this place of testing, intelligent obsidian knives fly in every direction, thirsting for the flesh of all who enter this place where heroes are tested.

Those sorcerers who have earned the favor of the Lords of Xibalba or Lord Tezcatlipoca may learn the spell for summoning one or more of these demonic blades into our world.  But only the most favored and corrupt sorcerers learn the spell Visitation of the House of Knives. This spell brings the deadly House into our realm for a time; it has caused the slaughter of many.

Visitation of the House of Knives (Planar, Cost, Per Scenario, Persistent, Requires Call Knife Point and at least one gate spell, Corrupting): The caster rolls Flashy/CHA +2 to summon the House of Knives. Such castings can only be attempted on a planet during nighttime or an eclipse. If the summoning is successful, part or all of the current Scene is enclosed by stone walls on all sides.

The size of the chamber is determined by the results of the roll. A result of one shift produces quite a small chamber; anything in the same zone as the caster is enclosed. Two shifts produces an enclosed space of 2 zones. Three shifts produces an enclosed space of three zones, the maximum size of the House of Knives.

The chamber is plunged into darkness unless a preexisting light source is present. It is filled with an intelligent swarm of flying obsidian knives, which Attack all present (with the exception of the sorcerer and those under their protection) with a roll of 4DF +2 each turn.

The House of Knives has the following aspects:

• Flying obsidian knives!
• A stone chamber with no source of light
• No apparent exit

Such magic is a major infraction, doing 2 points of Corruption stress to the caster.

Because the knives are intelligent, a clever hero may attempt to bargain with them. The knives thirst for the flesh of both the living and the dead. If approached with an offer, the GM should draw a card from the Deck of Fate. If the card drawn reveals a favorable aspect, the knives will pause after their first attack to negotiate.

If normal ants, Napoleon ants, or other ant-like intelligent species are present, their collectivity may be bargained with for help against the knives. Such species of diggers and tunnelers frequently have their own conflicts with the meddlesome and diseased subterranean Lords of Xibalba, and the smallest of their kind are usually immune to the knives' attacks.

Jadepunk Playmat, Pt. I - Cityside

Last week, we ordered the Jadepunk RPG playmat from the Reroll Store. It cost $10 plus $6 for shipping. It arrived in three days, remarkably fast when you consider how long some gaming vendors make you wait before they even take your parcel to the post office!

The playmat has two sides. One side is a map of Kausao City, the default setting of the Jadepunk RPG. That's what I am looking at today.

The playmat is laminated so that you can use dry erase markers with it. The city map has a few key locations that are labelled, but most of the map is designed for on-the-fly specification of locations used in the scenario. So we have a city resource that is closer to Vornheim than to Ptolus. This works well with Fate's collaborative and on-the-fly approach to setting creation, although there is nothing to prevent a GM from specifying setting details by fiat, as I have done in the photo above.

On the top left side of the map we filled-in two Scenario Aspects:

• Find the Meteor Hammer
• Pursued by the Red Jade Swallowers

Boom! We have a scenario!

Now we link the scenario to the map! You can click on the photo above to enlarge the map. For the scenario, I have marked three locations on the Kausao City map:

• The primary location is the Nighthammer District (circled in blue), a borrowing from the city of Nexus in Exalted. This district is where the city's iron and steel are made. On the left side of the playmat, Nighthammer's aspects are listed:
• Many forges
• Smoke
• The sound of hammers
• A discoverable clue location, "Ling last seen here" is circled in rust colored ink on the lower end of the map. The location is known as The Red Garden. It's aspects are:
• Smugglers trade here
• Rough trade (it's close to the docks and people so inclined come here to pick up stevedores)
• Pickpockets
• A discoverable clue location, RJS haven? noted at the top of the map in red. The Red Jade Swallowers are a secret society which is trying to steal a Red Jade artifact, the Red Blood Cloud Meteor Hammer.

Now we link back to some important Faces (NPCs) of Kausao City that will be featured in the scenario.

Apprentice Ling

• Portrayal: Apprentice Smith
• Need: Sell the Hammer
• Secret: On the Run

Master Chen

• Portrayal: Master Smith
• Need: Recover the Hammer
• Secret: Promised the Hammer to two different customers

Mao Yang

• Portrayal: Ling's Lover
• Need: Find Ling
• Secret: I have the money to start a new life with Ling

Debt Collector Yao

• Portrayal: Collect what is owed
• Need: Wants Yang for Himself
• Secret: The Red Jade Society have my daughter

So, a macguffin, a love triangle, and a man who made too many promises.

Then we have our mysterious villain:

Mystery Vang

• Portrayal: Boss of the Red Jade Swallowers
• Need: The Meteor Hammer
• Secret: ?

***

Conclusions: If you are playing Jadepunk, the city-side alone is worth $10. It is easy to use it to create adventures on the fly. The map is color-coded to show the major nations' turf in Kausao city, but there is plenty of neutral territory that the GM can use as they see fit. In fact most of the map works that way.  

My only critical feedback is that I would have been willing to pay even more to get the map without folds, rolled-up in a tube. I just prefer maps that lay perfectly flat. I might not have bought the product if I had known it was folded, but in practice that turned out not to bother me too much when I used it.

We are doing the second half of our Pilgrims of the Flying Temple playtest tonight, so we'll see if the GM wants to use the other side of the map, which offers a Zone Map.   

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

The Savannah Zone

The face on the door says it all. Even the pretty places got hit during The Visitation. No one should have considered themselves immune.

Not even Savannah, Georgia, the first planned-on-a-grid city in North America. The city's historic riverfront has gone a bit off-the-grid now, with the irruption of a Zone across a quarter mile of this former tourist attraction.

Now it's just another zone of exclusion.

One that extends halfway across the river, causing all sorts of interesting problems and hazards to navigation.

"From the Zones" logo is courtesy of Hereticwerks.

The "Where You From?" Aspect And Weird Adventures

"Where you from?" People get asked that all the time in The City. After all, it's the Biggest City In the World, and At the Center of Everything.  Where else would you rather be, than in The City That Never Sleeps?

There are 5 Baronies and 42 neigborhoods in The City. Many Weird Adventures players will want their characters to be from the Ur-Manhattan of Empire Island itself (and who can blame them?). But some may want to be from one of the other Baronies, or even a place beyond the Baronies. Some players will want to leave it up to chance, so here's how to do that!

First, roll 4DF and consult the corresponding result below:

• -4: The Dustlands ("The Dust Bowl" states)
• -3: Freedonia ("Texas" and the Southwest)
• -2: The Steel League ("IL, OH, PN") or The Combine ("MN, WI")
• -1: Ealderde ("Europe"), or outside The Union
•  0: The Five Baronies
• +1: New Ludd ("New England")
• +2: The South
• +3: The West (the Mountain States)
• +4: Hesperia ("California")

If you roll the Five Baronies, pick one, or roll a d10, and consult the corresponding result below:

• 1-3: Empire Island ("Manhattan")
• 4-5: Rookend (Motherless "Brooklyn")
• 6-7: Marqessa ("Queens") 
• 8-9: Shanks ("Bronx")
• 10: Lichmond (New Jersey, at least that's what I think - could be wrong)*

Tomorrow we'll break down mechanics for generating your "Where You From?" neighborhood aspect if you live on Empire Island itself.

But for now, let's make a roll on the table and see what happens: We rolled 4DF on the first table, and got a -3. That means we're from Fredonia. So for our "Where You From?" aspect for this character, I am thinking they're not a lawman, but perhaps a roughneck oil rig worker who had a run-in with the Rangers and had to go North. For our "Where You From?" aspect, we could go with: A Roughneck Gone North.  Could be fun. I can see someone like this getting a job in the construction trades, or as a longshoreman, or maybe even with the mob. 

*Because no one wants to be from there. Or admit they were.

Deck Of Fridays 14: Just Plain Cursed

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: Just Plain Cursed. So, another random draw from the deck with a pretty negative (-3) result!

***

Bottled trouble, so to speak. It's hiding right there in plain sight. The sign by the door says simply "Botanica." They say it used to be an apothecary's shop. But now it sells mundane magical supplies: herbs, folk medicines, candles, incense, holy cards, figurines of saints, a few self-help books on the power of prayer - and bottled waters.

There are several little displays of water-filled bottles around the store. The displays catch they eye; they're colorful. Each bottle has a label with the name of the natural source of water from which its contents were collected. Most of the labels are still legible, although several are quite old and rather indecipherable. Some are smeared, blurred. A few are written in a script that seems alive with quick motion, like a centipede's legs.

None of the bottles has a price tag. The owner says: "They're all special. Make me an offer."

Expect to haggle. It's a high stakes game.

Because these water bottles aren't the kind you drink.

Oh, no. You use this water to make a space sacred. Put a bottle in a window and let the sun will shine through the water. Sprinkle it on friends as a blessing.

The waters come from different sources. Local rivers, streams, ponds, lakes. Some come from farther afield: the Finger Lakes. The Amazon. The Nile. The Ganges. Lake Nyos. Places you've never heard of.

Most are completely innocuous. But mixed in with the safe ones are bottled waters that are just pain cursed.

Frackwater. Medusa's tears. Devil's bongwater. Snake well water. Roaches' spit. Ice water from cannibal glaciers. Plasma squeezed from pus-filled wounds. Water from a baptismal font where someone took a bloody leak. Farm creek runoff. One of the colored theosophical bottles of General Maximiliano Hernandez Martinez.

You'll pay dearly for one of these bottles. Their owner went to a lot of effort to collect them. She promises they'll put a hurt on someone. You'll see.

OGL MECHANICS

Each water bottle is a one-use potion. The potion's target is affected by drinking some or all of the water in the bottle. Even a drop or two is sufficient to produce an effect. 

The potion causes a Moderate or Severe Consequence depending on the nature of the potion. Consequences may be either Physical or Mental, and can only be removed through magical healing. A Heal or Purify spell may remove any of these Consequences. 

(N.B., some of the lesser Healing spells (Cure Light Wounds, Cure Moderate Wounds, Cure Serious Wounds), only remove a Physical Consequence, or reduce its severity.)  

Weird Adventures: The Board Room

We're getting ready to run Trey Causey's Weird Adventures setting using Fate at Con of the North in a couple of weeks. Today's post is about getting into the mood of the City. 

Places of light, places of shadow: it's in a dozen of the City's well-appointed board rooms that decisions are made affecting millions. The Bottom Line is attended to here, affecting hiring and firing at hundreds of firms, the trimming or expansion of industries, decisions to deepen or pull investments in Fate Exchange, allocations for charities to pacify and in some cases improve the conditions of the working masses of the Baronies, and much, much more.

Entire branches of wizardry are dedicated to influencing, amplifying, or mitigating what happens in these well-guarded rooms. Special care is taken with how board rooms are arranged, equipped, and decorated. Firms select only the most propitious table woods to fashion their board room's Great Table. At least one Captain of Industry in the City meets with his board of directors around a table fashioned from snapwood prised from Yggdrasil itself in far away Ealderde. It's said he paid a dear price for that table.

All of the major firms also keep defensive practitioners on retainer to ensure their board rooms are well-warded. The sanctum sanctorum of a magical corporate security specialist is never more than a room or two away from the board room. Its occupant will always be monitoring the board room and its immediate surrounds when an important meeting is underway. Such specialists often keep their own, esoteric ciphered Minutes of board meetings.

Such Books of Minutes fetch high prices for those who are able to filch them. These ledger books record much, much more than what people are saying. They often reveal the subtle influences on board members, the occulted Conflicts of Interest that each brings to the table.

Rotwang's Unheimlich Haven

Rotwang's house in Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" (1927)

Rotwang's Unheimlich Haven (Evocation, Cost, Per Scenario, Permanent): Almost invisible, this house might huddle at the base of any great city, hardly noticeable among the giant girders and foundation blocks that surround it. A nondescript and not-quite-symmetrical structure - perhaps partially melted by radiation or other-planar energies - its roof and walls have no doubt settled a bit over the years. When someone passes by this house, they usually think it is abandoned, having been no doubt seized by the city under eminent domain, then slated for demolition, and then promptly forgotten. That's one of the conveniences provided by Rotwang's Unheimlich Haven: it's hard to notice, the eyes can't settle on it for long, and the house doesn't persevere in the memory of those who do see it.

It's the perfect place to hide. And work.

Rotwang's Unheimlich Haven is a summonable sanctuary for alchemists, steampunks, sorcerer-scientists, and etherites. Once summoned, the Haven provides a laboratory, library, kitchen, bath, and sleeping quarters suitable for up to five people. The kitchen and icebox are not stocked; those who would live in the Haven must venture out to find food.

What it is well-stocked with are scientific and magical supplies necessary for complex investigations and rituals.  It is a failsafe place to bring a robot to full consciousness or sentience, or to stitch together the parts of dead men to create a new body suitable for reanimation. The technology level of the laboratory is positively futuristic when compared to the best laboratories in the London or Berlin of the 1930s, but is quaint by modern standards.

The spell Greater Pass Turing Test can be performed within the Haven at No Cost.

Once summoned, the Haven connects immediately to the city's plumbing, sewer, gas, and electrical systems. These connections are impossible to trace to the Haven, providing an additional level of anonymity for the Haven's summoner, and adding to the impression that the Haven is abandoned.

The Haven also connects physically with the hidden areas beneath cities. There is a hatch in the basement floor of the Haven which connects to the labyrinth of cellars, tunnels, bunkers, vaults, sewers, and passageways under the city where it is summoned. When a city lacks extensive underground systems, a new network begins to spontaneously develop once the Haven is summoned. These spread out like a spiderweb fracture radiating from the Haven's location; the tunnels and substructures will remain in the city even after the Haven departs. They are entirely random in character, an expression of the inner chaos propelling any cutting edge scientific endeavor.

There's a walled-in yard attached to the house. The wall itself is too high for someone standing outside to peer over. What might be back there? Trash, broken or abandoned furniture, an old pig pen? Chickens? Feral cats? Iron Pigs? Buried things? Probably all of the above, and more. For with each new summoning, the Haven "upgrades" to reflect changes made to its environment by its previous occupants. If the police ever start nosing around, they will find incriminating evidence of many varieties...

Finally, the Haven can be readily barred against physical intrusion, and cannot be penetrated by Mind or Divination spells. The roof is wooden, however, and can be burned.