Picking up an interesting challenge from Jim at d66 Classless Kobolds which goes:
1. Pick a genre, setting, or time period
2. Write one or two paragraphs on context
3. Produce one page of random tables
4. Give advice on tropes and how to use them
So here is a thought I had kicking about for a while - portal-fantasy in spaaaaace.
The aliens do not care. There was a brief flash of attention when the war front passed near Earth before that all got quelled. Unfortunately humans escaped their world but they have nothing worth trading and their planet is a mess so ... *six shouldered shrug*
The time is the medium-distance future and our setting is an update on the planetary romance; you can go almost anywhere, walk under the distant suns, and so on as long as you spike your nano-treatments. All the different aliens are out there living their own paradigms and you can walk through the portal networks between them. In places it looks like Mos Eisley or Kill Six Billion Demons, other places it looks like Coruscant or Illium.
Something happened long ago and galactic civilization, such as it is, is jumpy as hell about backups and redundancy. They have portals you can walk through, portals with trains, they fly light-sails, they use habitats, they use generation ships, they use jump drives. They thread the crusts of worlds with bio-engines that can manufacture anything, then leave them mostly dormant.
d8 niches the humans have found on this world
1. Independent fixers among the big local hive minds
2. Salvage experts
3. Dangerous bio-machine wranglers
4. Squatters amongst the mothballed metropoli
5. Caretakers and game-wardens on a fallow world
6. Species-in-charge of a battle-damaged reclamation world no-one else wanted to deal with
7. Occupying an empty biosphere niche - e.g. islands on an ocean world
8. Diaspora services; converting the cornucopia of alien kit for use of other humans out here
d10 local aliens and the fantasy archetype they are living
1. Chittering swarm - hive-mind controlled gestalt organism, lives in the bio-engines. They are living a swarming, chitinous 'faeries of the forest' story.
2. The flock - starling-murmuration type of highly attuned individuals. They are living the capricious 'fae beneath the hill' story.
3. World-walkers - physically massive products of aeon-long bio-cyborg program; each a tiny starship by now. They act like mighty wizards, raising towers and indulging in esoteric hobbies like interfering.
4. Cultists - same physical frames as the flock, much more fractious, mean. More likely to interact with outsiders but can get violent. These are living a 'heroes against the wilderness' set of sagas.
5. The small ones - diminuitive, actually 3 species who get along, a marsupial type, an avian and an arthopod. Backbone of galactic civilization, will talk to you. They are living a complex tale of political intrigue and alliances, ridiculous outfits and lavish balls.
6. Maintenance - obsessive militarists, constantly turning up and fixing things, always carrying lots of hardware, great for rescues, a nuisance otherwise. They are living knightly quests - hunting dangerous beasts, rescuing folk in danger and questing for lost lore.
7. The old ones - compound organisms, city builders, speak in riddles, watched by the flock, small ones and maintenance for guidance. These are living old dream-like tales of the origins of worlds and frequently lose track of what time they are in.
8. The splinter - slightly bigger, tougher version of the maintenance, often turn up, take charge and start imposing wierd rules until the maintenance chases them off. They are living stories of glory and battle, of heroes standing against armies - great to have around if something is going very badly wrong.
9. Howlers - a mixed baunch living on wild worlds - usually turn up, trade a bit and vanish. Your best chance of rescue after a crash, if they don't kill and loot you. They are attempting to live in perfect harmony with their worlds. They have an affinity for worlds with deadly mega-fauna unfortunately.
10. Slow-movers - pockets of creatures that don't travel well, probably local to here and maybe one or two other places. Tend to be either very parochial or fanatical mixers and consumers of news and fashion. Their stories tend to be absorbed from whichever of their neighbours are about. Roll again on this table to see who.
d10 out of the myriad alien forms
1. molluscoid / prehensile blog (d6 - 1-4 no shell, 5 multipart shell that opens, 6 solid shell with opening)
2. serpent-form/tentacular
3. bipedal + 2 arms
4. bipedal + 2 wings/fins
4. hexapod + 2 legs / 4 arms
5. hexapod + 4 legs / 2 arms
6. radial body form (starfish) (d12 limbs)
7. segmented body form 2 limbs each (d20 segments)
8. flyer/floater with d8 dangling manipulators
10. crab-like
d8 points of friction
1. Some bureaucratic fuss about seals and stamps from a sector court that no longer exists. Someone has to back track this mess to an answer.
2. The splinter and the maintenance are having a dispute with live ammunition and it is about to wash over the human community.
3. Some humans have been hunting a delicious native creature and the locals are very upset.
4. New aliens turned up and tossed the humans out of what they said was their old home.
5. The humans salvaged a defunct orbital harvester array and repairs went well until a supply vessel malfunction has knocked it out of orbit. A means to get to orbit needs to be scrounged up from the locals.
6. Humans strayed into the bio-engines and never came back. Are they lost or have they been recycled? Someone needs to go find out. And come back this time.
7. A bunch of panicked local aliens have turned up and are insisting that since you are occupying the local fortress, you are the protector and by the way, the kaiju-based planetary defenses have woken up.
8. Some human has managed to seduce the local next-in-line to the throne and vanished. The furious relations are insisting they return and are making threats that 'a human, any human' will do.
The tropes to play with here is that the humans are living in their sci-fi future with bizarre technology and all sorts of strange things to discover while the rest of the galaxy is living a Dying Earth style post-technology portal-fantasy.
- As per the 'sufficiently advanced technology is magic trope' the aliens live in a world of high ambient background magic and do not even think about it. You could try spraying them with bullets but they may well have an amulet/personal shield device. They may well have a ressurection pod somewhere or a supernova rifle or this one might be on a hike and all they have is their lunch.
- Pick any classic fantasy trope - slay the dragon, rescue the heir, etc - populate it with aliens acting strange and set your high-tech humans on the problem.
- The fun to be had is that the players get to flex the best of their technical know-how without breaking the game immersion.
- Nothing is easy to use or understand, noone bothers to explain anything and many of the aliens don't know or care how anything works in any case.
- Most of the time the aliens are fully engaged in bizarre hobbies, observing aeons of accreted festivals and ritual or arguing amongst themselves about 1-in-100,000 year edge cases.
For other versions of this challenge - see Animorphs by Tír na nÓg Games or Barrowmere by Shuttered Room.
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