Storms and tides of strange energies that surge back and forth across the Forge, appearing suddenly, sweeping across systems and worlds, disappearing again, leaving chaos in their wake.Certain pieces of Precursor tech seem to respond to their presence, but little else is known, except for the jeremiad of woes that they bring to the Forge.
Baleshine:
Idiomatic for the unusual abilities that some appear to gain from balefire exposure.
Balespawn:
Lifeforms warped and twisted by too much exposure to balefire. Spawn are vicious, horrifying mutants easily recognizable by their many asymmetries and deformities, easily distinguishable from the indigenous lifeforms they once were. They are normally hostile and aggressive, but can sometimes be intimidated or even frightened away by displays of force and/or “magic”.
The Itani Gate is a Precursor artifact, but no one knows if it was created by one of the Precursor races from the Forge, or an unknown third.It provides instantaneous transit for spaceships from the Itani System in the galactic plane to the Forge some 1700 light years above.
The Gate is ancient – none know how old.It is generally reliable but not without its risks.The Gate has been known to “flicker” when in use, resulting in the destruction of the transiting ship.Others have simply disappeared into the Gate field – passing into one end, but never coming out the other, like a ghost train on Old Earth, vanishing into a tunnel beneath the hills.
When it became evident that the Forge was far from some bright new frontier, and that the most common reward for risking the Gate was a significantly abbreviate lifespan, interest in transiting waned.The Gate structure itself remained something of an enormous tourist attraction.But in the decades preceding the coming of the Otherlords, only the hardiest and most dedicated of scientists, prospectors and would-be tomb-raiders bothered to make the passage.
Early in the war, refugees used the Gate to flee to the Forge when they could.But for many, it was safer and easier to head further along the galactic plane, rather than risking a passage through the thick of the struggle.The bulk of the Exodus occurred in the years immediately following the war.
Itani Gate was always isolated, but since many populated systems near it were eradicated, it is even more so now, a circumstance that further reduces traffic through the Gate
We see a lot of pastiches and homages to the various supporting characters in Dracula and their imagined descendants.1 Except for one: Quincy Morris.
Which is kind of odd, seeing as Quincy delivers one of the killing blows to the Count, the one to the heart, with his Bowie knife.
But wait – aren’t vampires immune to mundane weapons?
Well, yes, of course. But who says Quincy’s knife was mundane?
What if it was, in fact, the fabled knife of James Bowie himself, supposedly lost after the siege of the Alamo?
If it was, in fact, the legendary Iron Mistress, then it was made of literal star-stuff, meteoric iron that came from the fathomless depths of outer space. Or perhaps beyond.
What better to slay an otherworldly monster than an otherworldly weapon?
Sadly, Quincy dies from wounds sustained in the fight against the vampire, and nothing more is said, in the story, about the knife.
But we can speculate that, as was often customary in such circumstances, particularly for a minor hero, Quincy’s possessions were returned to his family in Texas. There, perhaps, the knife occupied an honored place on a wall of similar memories, and waited, down through the generations, before being sold off like so much clutter, in an estate sale.
Until some hapless nebbish buys it at a yard sale and (through events and circumstances yet to be written) finds that it is so much more than a mere priceless antique.
1 As far as we know from the text, Quincy had no children. However, in this context, “descendants” are considered to be anyone in his familial bloodline.
In The Black Castle (1952) Sir Ronald Burton, a British gentleman, investigates the disappearance of two of his friends at the Austrian estate of the sinister Count von Bruno, who is hunting unsuspecting English visitors a la The Most Dangerous Game, for past grievances against the British Empire.
Burton arranges to be one of Bruno’s “guests”, although Bruno knows nothing of his friendship with past victims.This all comes out in the denouement, when Burton reveals the truth to Bruno just before he kills him in revenge for his friends and countrymen.
In my twisted version, Burton is pursuing the two men he claims are “friends” to exact vengeance of his own.He tracks them to Bruno’s castle, and when he realizes Bruno has robbed him of his vengeance after so many years and so many hardships, he kills the nefarious Count.
In Loner, you create story momentum through a repeating loop of prompts:
Where are you?
What do you see?
Who else is there?
What’s going on?
What is your response?
Then you can – if you want to – generate random answers to all but the last which, one would hope, you want to decide for yourself.
Loner uses 2d6 in series, which generates values from 1-1 to 6-6, so 36 possibilities, which may seem low, but prompts usually don’t come in isolation, and you are often rolling on more than one table, to get values like “nervous smuggler” or “disgraced soldier”.IDK the math, but combining tables ups the total possibilities.
And it’s in these tables that you can customize the game to pretty much any milieu you want.A “Random Vehicle” table in sci-fi is going to be a lot diff from sword and sorcery.
This is a snapshot of the tables in Kwaidan.
ADVENTURE SEEDS
HAUNTED ARTIFACTS
MYSTICAL LOCATIONS
RANDOM EVENTS
SUPERNATURAL OMENS
CURSED VILLAGES
WANDERING SPIRITS
MYSTERIOUS VISITORS
RITUALS & CEREMONIES
FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE
SHAPESHIFTERS & ILLUSIONS
SEALED AWAY
SPIRITUAL BARGAINS
ECHOES OF THE PAST
GHOSTLY PROCESSIONS
SACRED RELICS.
YOKAI CONFLICTS
BLOOD TIES & FAMILY CURSES
NATURAL DISASTERS & OMENS
THE WORLD BETWEEN
INSPIRATION TABLES
Spacer doesn’t have an index of tables, but it has, for instance, tables for Stars, Planets, Moons and Asteroids and so on.Very different from Kwiadan’s tables.
(BTW, “Spells” appearing on the Spacer CS/char sheet appears to be a boo-boo, as that is the only hit on Spells I can find in the rules.)
You can also tweak the character structure a little.Kwaidan adds Chi, Honor and Corruption to the basic Loner character design.My (eventual) Norse adaptation will add Wyrd and Ond to the characters, the latter being kind of the Norse “mana”.
I wonder how much of this design concept came out of OOP.If you step back, it’s like the core rules are the interface, and the various genre modules are the implementations thereof.You can extend the class beyond the interface, but you have to conform to certain loose base requirements.
The number and nature of those tables is not a hard requirement – Kwaidan has many more tables than Spacer, but then esoteric Japanese folklore is not as speculative as sci-fi, there are certain real-world precedents.
Dirge is fun, and Kwaidan is just dripping, potentially, with atmosphere, but eventually I’m probably going to do a Norse-themed mod.
Many of the SRPGs I’ve reviewed over the past few weeks use Tarot cards as a random oracle, so I have perforce found myself handling the ol’ pasteboards again.Doing so has unlocked, or at least stirred, some very pleasant and poignant memories. Perhaps the approaching Hallows put me in a receptive frame of mind.
It only took a few moments of reflection to realize that, in focusing on my career and Shadow Work since 2014-15, I have unintentionally drifted away from contact and involvement with the Otherworlds and their denizens.
A so-called career path is a nearly universal distraction from the internal life, and more than enough has been said about that by others. Nonetheless, I found a great deal of satisfaction and validation in finally getting a “big boy” coding job, so it was “positive distraction”, perhaps?
For its part, Shadow Work is a wonderful modality, and I am eternally grateful for what I have learned from and through it.But in the end, it is based in archetypal psychology, and thus is not inherently mystical or spiritual, although the experience of Shadow Work can be both. I believe the majority of Shadow Worker would rejoice if it were suddenly to be declared “hard science”.
Zen also eschews the “woo-woo”, in favor of concentrating on taming the mind, and I’ve been easing deeper into Zen in the last 2 or 3 years.
All unknowing, in pursuit of one set of paths, I came to neglect another, which is at least as rich and valuable.
I’ve kept up my reading on the Norse, but again it’s been tending toward the academic and historical.I wave at the mythologies as they float past in context.
Perhaps, after a number of years immersed in the more phenomenological frameworks, I shifted base paradigms for a time, and just drifted.
But I’m back now, bitches.So hitch up yer drawers and hang onto yer broomsticks…
Phaseways are a trope I toyed with some years ago, inspired partly by the alien transporter tech in Assignment: Earth and partly by The Last Stand of the DNA Cowboys by Mick Farren.
Essentially, they began in my imagination as an immense web of “warp conduits”, but for individuals, not ships. The phaseways are Forerunner tech, so the current inhabitants of the galaxy use them, but don’t really understand them. With the proper tech or psionic ability, a person can “phase” from one destination to another, as easily as stepping through a door. (Which means the concept is also based on The Lion Game by James H. Schmitz.)
I intended it to be extravagant and unlikely, merely a gimmick that briefly infatuated me.
In the Dirge-iverse, I’m recasting the phaseways as the very aforementioned network of warp conduits, used by Affiliation ships to traverse the galaxy. I’m merging this with the concept of “forking” – the phaseways can be seen as an immense highway network, with “on- and off-ramps” forking off of larger, regional arteries.
“I’m forking off to Alpha Cent tomorrow…”
Even for the most advance Affiliation vessels, navigating the phaseways is a bit like riding a flatboat down a frontier river in the 1700s. There are obstacles and dangers that we are barely aware of and have little hope of understanding. Any Forerunner tech that makes forking safer and faster is highly sought by pretty much everyone – governments, cults, corporations, mad scientists and, of course, adventurers at large. (See what I did there?)
I’ve recreated Dirge’s Loner character card, and then expanded on each entry.
Name:
Dirge Darkrune
Concept:
Intergalactic Ne’er-Do-Well
Skills:
Crack Pistol Shot
Martial Arts Master *
Frailties:
Socially Clueless
Skua September
Motive(s):
Fame
Fortune
Goal(s):
Not Getting Caught
Getting Rid of Skua
Nemeses:
The Treemutes
Skua
Gear:
Ring Plaster
Intergalactic Ne’er-Do-Well
Dirge’s homeworld and intermittent base of operations is Bev-Arajh, a shabby, run-down former resort world fallen on hard times. In its heyday, Bev was the Jewel of the Cosmos, but now is more a cosmic roadside attraction with a reputation for tarnished glitz, grimy neon and shady street corner games of “chance’. (Think AC before the brush-up in the 80s.) Bev isn’t some kind of Casablanca, some exotic, neutral port of call. More like it’s just not worth the effort to anyone with the power to matter. Not that there’s a lot of crime and/or villainy that needs policing – cool and successful criminals do not come to Bev, and if they happen to be born there, they leave almost as soon as they become aware of that fact. It may be the generally bland, uninteresting and apathetic nature of the place that makes it an idea hideout for anyone who can withstand the crushing boredom.
Somewhat atypically, Dirge did not make the acquaintance of shady people and questionable places until he’d been off Bev for a few years, chasing the dream of government employment, and then only because he made the unfortunate acquaintance of Skua, as described below.
Crack Pistol Shot
Oddly enough, Dirge is an authentic crack shot, a Trinity-level savant with a handgun. Due mostly to the fact that there just isn’t a lot to do on Bev that doesn’t cost exorbitant amounts. A stolen, solar-powered pin-blaster (or plaster) – the Saturday Night Special of the day – can provide hours of diversion, practice and sometimes income. But the less said about that the better. They can even stun an opponent in a pinch. As non-lethal as you can get and still be mildly unpleasant, the proliferation of plasters on Bev led to a duelist culture among the youth and young adults. If you didn’t want to get plastered, you better be fast on the draw. And Dirge really disliked the post plaster hangover.*
Martial Arts Master
He is not, however, an authentic Master of the Martial Arts. Rather, he is yet another deluded punter who joined the notorious Black Dragon Fighting Society, founded in the distant past by the near-mythic Count Dante himself! Needless to say, Dirge would lose a lot more fistfights if it weren’t for Skua.
Socially Clueless
As a young, aspiring bureaucrat and politician, Dirge wasn’t all that socially awkward, more like trying too hard to be cool, and a little too narcissistic to read subtle social cues. He came to feel that he needed an edge to get ahead in the Skein, the vast tangle of governmental entities that somehow allowed the Affiliated Worlds to live and trade in relative peace. (“Affiliated Worlds”, because “Allied Worlds” was just a step too far.). Unfortunately, the solution that found him only made things worse. Social situations become intolerable when you might become a raging space pirate at any moment.
Skua
In his search for that edge, Dirge ran afoul of rogue tech. A pirate-themed personality analog chip that was supposed to help him be more daring and assertive ended up moving in beside his native consciousness and setting up business. Skua September, as it calls itself, usually manifests in those moments when Dirge’s normal clueless bravado falters, such as when he’s confronted with a beautiful woman or a dire threat. Then Skua emerges, and becomes the very incarnation of Blackbeard himself. But Skua is also highly erratic and unreliable. It can’t be depended on to pull Dirge out of a tight spot on-demand, as it were. Sometimes it just doesn’t give a fuck. It’s a construct, basically an autonomous trope, and doesn’t think like we do.
Fame and Fortune
Do a character’s motivations always have to complex or inscrutable? Financial security and social recognition have motivated humankind since its origins. Dirge grew up in poverty, and managed to turn a potential disaster into a career of sorts. Not the one he initially wanted, but certainly one that is way more exciting and profitable than driving a desk.
Not Getting Caught
As with the Stainless Steel Rat, it’s not just not getting caught, it’s avoiding capture with panache. Skua has a big Robin Hood complex, and Dirge sometimes finds it hard to keep money in the bank. While he lives comfortably, his alter ego’s profligate charity makes it necessary to seek income more often than he’d like.
Getting Rid of Skua
As implied above, living with a space pirate in your head can be a bit of a detriment to an early, comfortable and secure retirement. While Dirge has developed something like affection for the construct, the fact remains that, like early AI, it is not sentient, merely capable of mimicking sentience. Therefore, it cannot truly learn or grow, and so remains immature and virtually feral. It has, sadly, outlived its usefulness, and Dirge knows he needs to be shed of it.
The Treemutes
Treemutes are a species of genetically engineered lifeforms that resemble trees the way Jame Arness resembled a carrot in The Thing From Another World. They are somewhat more willowy than The Thing – see what I did there? – but no less lethal and grumpy. They appear like a somewhat smaller and leafier Groot, with long, highly flexible willow whips sprouting from their upper bodies and backs. While these thorn-studded whips are fast and dangerous, the creatures cover ground with all the speed of a gouty Tree Ent, and so are relatively easy to evade in close encounters. Dirge incurred their racial enmity during a particularly risky raid on Old Folks ruins.
They are the Daleks of Dirge’s story.
Skua
Honestly, there are times when the Captain is a greater threat to Dirge than the Treemutes.
Ring Plaster
One of Dirge’s somewhat unique pieces of gear is his ring plaster, a large, somewhat gaudy-looking ring that is in fact a kind of plaster derringer. Like most plasters, it can stun, and seems to recharge itself from any ambient electromagnetic source – sunlight, radio emissions, heat, etc. However, it is difficult to aim at any distance, and gives no indication of it’s current charge. Dirge has estimated that, at any given time, he has 7-12 shots. It is an artifact of Old Folks tech, and no one really knows how it works.
Notes
The Elder Peoples
The Elder Peoples – or, in the vernacular, the Old Folks or Codgers – are the highly advanced races that have populated the galaxy on and off over billions of years. There were several epochs or waves of Old Folks, and the galaxy is littered with their cast off late-night infomercial appliances. Most are simply more sophisticated versions of “Whippersnapper” or Younger Peoples’ tech, performing relatively mundane functions in weird and amazing ways, like quantum laser pruning shears or personal force-field umbrellas. Occasionally something actually worthwhile surfaces, like a sentient, telepathic universal healing module, or an ultra-miniature power source. Sometimes, people stumble on an Old Folks’ weapon. Whole solar systems have been know to wink out of existence shortly after the announcement of such a discovery. Much more common, but still rare to the average citizen, are body-weapons like ring plasters and thumb lances.
Thumb Lances
Thumb lances are a type of Old Folks device that might be a tool or weapon. In general, it is a featureless metal cylinder approximately 2-3cm in diameter and 10-12cm long. It responds to the thoughts of the holder, and will extend a needle or lance of indestructible metal using molecular nanoextrusion, the length of the lance conforming to the holder’s thoughts, but rarely exceeding two meters. Given enough force, the lance can theoretically pierce any substance known to the Younger Folks, but such requirements limit its use by average humanoids. The negligible weight of the “miracle metal” makes it nearly useless as a club, so the debate continues as to its original purpose. It could be a dueling weapon, a fruit skewer or a tool for spearing trash on the ground.
The term thumb lance refers to the impression of the lance springing from the thumb when held by a standard humanoid.
As I am bringing this site back to life after a long-ish hiatus, I feel it appropriate to quote Firesign Theatre:
Back from the shadows again
Out where an In-jun’s your friend
Where the veg’tables are green
And you can pee into the stream
Yes, we’re back from the Shadows again
We’re goin’ back to the shadows again
Out where an Indian’s your friend
Where the veg’tables are green
And you can pee right into the stream
(And that’s important!)
We’re back from the Shadows again