Bodies Upon the Gears (Lanthanide Horizon Loreposting)

Where//Who//Why

In the open plains where yellow-bladed grass feeds off actinic blue light, and in the vast cistern-cenotes, and under rains of killing-sigils, the machinery of the world bends men to its will. Firstborn hosts in VR headsets, bearing magnetic halberds and crackling railguns, march from their growth vats directly onto the points of Oasis swords.

Like clockwork, new Firstborn move to the front - the Host Parallel and their spring-cavalry, the fatal basilisk-symbols of the Host Affine, the Host Symplectic whose banners burn with lethal smoke. They do not fear death, they rarely sleep, they send neither scouts nor messengers, and when they need food or water, the ground twists to offer it up.

And this is not the only front - to the south, the greatest cities of the Oases line up their mechanized armigers and their thousands of conscripts to meet armies with painted faces, who re-emerge in vast number every few generations, somehow quintupling in population in a matter of days. Those they capture soon return, newly painted and perfectly willing to kill those who were their brothers barely a week before.

Between the two, the Oases scrabble for mercenaries - but all those they wish to hire have wars of their own. The nomad septs of the Navigators quarrel eternally between their three Assemblies, only taking short tours of Oasis service to rain airgun rounds from their flying vessels - and each tour comes at an exorbitant price.

The other option, the Gardener Clans, are locked in their own seasonal war with the pastoralist Walker-Herds - both reliant on the same hydroponics complex/poisonous fen for food, and both wary of abandoning their territory to fight a strangers' war.

Of course, none of these are monolithic - the painted men who die on the blades of augment-knights are only one faction, some Navigator sept-vessels have elected refugees from the Oases as their advising Select, and far from the warfront Oasis cities find other matters to focus on. Even the Firstborn, despite the voice in their head, are not all sent to war. Some live not in fortresses, but in gardens.

How//When

Standing armies are almost unheard of in the structure. Among Sustainers, Gardeners, or Walkers, you may find the rare wandering hero or mercenary band, but a vast majority of soldiers are temporary levies. You pick up a spear for a season or two to drive off a hideous machine or skirmish with your neighbor, then return for the work of planting and harvest. 

Navigators have a stable base of violent manpower in the form of the koryos - adolescents unprepared for the responsibility of full adult sept membership, and expected to hunt for glory like wolves. Great campaigns attract koryos in vast warbands, but even in times of nominal peace they burn and loot.

All four of these have a tendency for low-intensity "endemic warfare" - ritual escalation, duels between chosen champions, raids and reprisals, and more capture than death.

Aristocrats of the Oases may keep single-digit numbers of armigers in their patronage chains, who trade military service for gifts (including the gift of arms). These aristocrats duel among themselves, raising token forces of conscripts (those who are expected to provide military service only when necessary, and perform some more worthwhile task during peace) to supplement their striding paladins. In true war (and the Oases pursue true war - they respond to a raid not with a raid, but with a massacre, which confuses the hell out of just about everyone else) they form retinues of retinues, city leaders calling on their client-aristocrats who call on their clients, who call on their clients, all the way down. 

The Firstborn follow none of these rules. Their Hosts are meticulously organized, logistically perfect, and permanently assembled. It is this, more than their equipment, that leads them to victory.

The City of Gateway, Two GLOG Classes (sort of) and a Sign I Play Too Much D&D

Essentially all of the dicéd gaming I've done in the last four years has been online, providing great opportunity for all manner of flaking. I've heard the reasonable solution to this problem is to "not have a session that week", but my solution has tended to be taking whatever one or two severely brainwormed players actually made it and forcing them to throw together OSE characters for a one-shot. 

As these impromptu games have repeated, I started thinking about solidifying them - keeping the same setting on the GM's end and the same characters on the players' end, mostly just to see if it would be fun. And so, I did - creating a (rather thin) framework for some picaresque gaming, with an assumed few months between sessions, both for players and PCs.

System and Classes

The rules are minimal, bordering on nonexistent. Stat checks, attack rolls, HP, death, whatever, are all as G20 (by deus ex parabola) (except for the derived stats thing because I can't be bothered). The only changes are in equipment: players choose a Kit during character creation. They start every session with everything listed in their kit, and have two slots for items they want to keep between sessions. During the adventure you can carry more, or accidentally drop all your kit's gear down a bottomless pit, but during the assumed weeks of carousing between sessions, you lose all the former and regain all the latter.

This also applies to money - in between sessions, you spend everything on food, booze, and company, like any sword-and-sorcery protagonist worth the name. Then, when yet another vast hoard is spent (and turned into XP), you return to adventure.

In an attempt to reduce the tax on memory for characters you're probably only playing a few times a year, their rules and progression are part of their character sheets: one for the Rogue, a thief/fighter, and one for the Gestalt, the setting's wizard.

The Setting

Is, because I thought it would be funny, the first setting I ever had. Gateway, the last stop. A city on the edge of an empire that rewrote the earth; an empire that summoned a great and terrible god, who now stretches across the sky with the moon at his feet and the sun as a jewel in his crown. 

But their capitals and their glories are distant - Gateway's imperial governor rages and foams in his new-built palace, but his conscript-legions are thin and his hold on the city frail, even after a roving army was sent to put a troublesome district to the torch a decade ago. 

Gateway heaves with thieves, refugees, four-eyed Gestalt deserters, ogres, bugmen, and so on. A minidungeon waits under every manhole cover, and a heist in every locked room. "Deep worldbuilding", "complex sociology" and other such things are thrown right out.

Six One-Shot Ideas So I Can Remember Them In Like Six Months When I Actually Have Cause To Run This

1. The distant Motherland, a vast fungus slowly crawling onto the stage of geopolitics, has sent a delegation of myconids (tall, chiseled, androgynous, and impeccably "dressed", as all the Motherland's social forms are) to make inroads with Gateway's governor - and like any Motherlandic mission, they come with a convoy of gifts. Valuable gifts...
2. A week ago, the crime lord Iazelmei promised you generous payment in return for a certain gem. You fulfilled your end of the deal, but she won't. Steal it back from her ship, the Sky Flashed Bright - and don't mind the fact she's a dragon.
   
3. An Imperial paladin is spending a week in Gateway to do something or other for the Governor. Make sure he never leaves. Don't worry, he'll be easy to notice with all the bells, and all the spikes.
   
4. Out in the lavender desert past Gateway, where the stars shine through the day, the sand is interspersed with shards of ice, and the light breaks into the secret 8th color (which, it turns out, is Ghosts), sigils are being drawn. One at dusk, one at dawn, each one in a straight line closer to Gateway. Someone should probably see... why.
   
5. A trio of runaway Gestalts are moving through Gateway, pursued by Imperial scouts. Get the wizards out before the Governor gets involved.
   
6. The ol' Bricked Up Noble Mansion (Demons In It).

And if they ever tire of city adventures, I can drag the PCs to the door of any prewritten dungeon I wish. It's Efficient™.

Treasures and Sept-Vessels of the Navigators

Ships hover in vacuum, bathed in smoke and coated in banners and medallions. Their pilots scrutinize the charts painted on the inside of their hollow world in glowing gold and white. Laborers load them with treasures, ancestral relics, and carefully-tuned air rifles.

Navigators are a semi-nomadic society (or, some would say, a subculture of the more numerous local Arcologists, who are in many ways similar) - in the Black Season, where their world of the Volume is airless, they venture out through mile-wide vents, gathering food, trading with their neighbors, and angling for glory. In the Blue Season, where clouds return to the Volume, they conglomerate in their three Assembly clans, each one working on a forever-unfinished ship-city, meant to hold dozens of generations of future Navigators on a trip, millions of miles long, to a dreamed-of heaven.

These assemblies (Elegiast, Cloudspinner, and Sidereal, in order of size and age) are broken up into septs - ~30 person extended families, each with a ship of their own. Player characters are the Select (chosen advisor-arbitrators) of these septs, competing for the treasure and fame that will have them acclaimed as Imperious (a tyrant, in power for only a single Blue Season). 

Sept-vessels are treated as Districts in the domain game (descended, as the rest of these GLOG domain games are, from Phlox's work in Ten Blade Demigod). Each one has a Level (marking size and population; ~30 adults at level 1, doubling each level afterwards) and a set of possessions:

• Weaponry represents the sept's preparedness for external raiding violence - the Select's ability to use force internally is severely limited.
• Trade Goods provide a more peaceful way to interact with strangers.
• Reliquaries reinforce the sept's fame among the Navigators.
• Mysteries are treasures of the megastructure, numinous paraphernalia, and other assorted Weird Garbage.

Vessels also have a moiety - either Left-Handed or Right-Handed. Ships of the same moiety are expected, all else being equal, to treat each other well. Think of it as a reaction roll bonus with people who are otherwise strangers.

Septs of the Elegiast

Impermanence - a sept of exiles, newly returned to the fold. Their ship is scarred and empty; when the Samara captured them, it wasn’t without a fight, nor without looting. The family of Impermanence still nurses a grudge - one they would kill over.

1. Right-Handed, Level 2: Trade Goods 1 (bare necessities, a pity-gift from the Samara)

2. The Select of this vessel is called Misbegotten.

3. The famed ancestor of this sept is Amyas, who was Select when they were exiled - without his words, the sentence was certain to be death. 

Certifier - according to its sept, a blessed machine. Glimpsed, years ago, by some kind of hovering brass sphere that scrutinized the Certifier’s crew with a piercing light. Some among them think it a sign - the sphere the vessel of some ancestral spirit.

1. Left-Handed, Level 1: Trade Goods 1 (induction forge), Reliquaries 1 (engraved marks of the piercing light)

2. The Select of this vessel is called Observed.

3. The famed ancestor of this sept is Ingalsinde, who spent three dozen years decoding Annunciate, the language of the earth.

Samara - a thin, needle-like Vessel, crewed by a thin, needle-like sept. A favorite for the Imperious of Assembly Elegiast to choose as guards, year after year. Killers of men. A year ago they returned the exile-sept of the Impermanence to the community - though the warrior Prothade and his followers think they should have let the ship bleed out, and the exiles suffocate. He has never been Select - but that won’t stop him from arguing with every decision you make.

1. Left-Handed, Level 2: Weaponry 2 (veteran infantry)

2. The Select of this vessel is called Paladin.

3. The famed ancestor of this sept is Quataryna, who guides the dead to rest with her.

Quadrireme - an aged ship, festooned with hanging banners, chains of charms, and shining icons. The hero-ulfeðnar Sicleramna dragged the sept to glory, but now he lies ill - and he says, in his deliriums, that he can hear something, crawling under the ship.

1. Right-Handed, Level 1: Weaponry 1 (Sicleramna’s students), Mysteries 1 (a stowaway?)

2. The Select of this vessel is called Forerunner.

3. The famed ancestor of this sept is Parva, who they say was the first Arcologist to ascend to the sky, some hundreds of years ago.

Septs of the Cloudspinner

Viridescent - an antenna-crusted warship. In years past, its spinal coilgun was the envy of the Navigators and the breaker of cities. But its capacitors were burnt out before you were born, to shatter the spine of a ship-eating nightmare. Now the sept lingers in decline.

1. Right-Handed, Level 2: Reliquaries 1 (fragment of the Ship-Eater), Mysteries 2 (the great cannon)

2. The Select of this vessel is called Trigonometrist.

3. The famed ancestor of this sept is Lantier, who was first to meet the dome-arcology 12 Marbles.

Bewarer - a painted vessel, covered in map-fables; miniature versions of those coating the surface of the Volume. Its last Select, Onesyme, who was killed by the Determinant - starting an open war between the two septs.

1. Left-Handed, Level 2: Weaponry 1 (feud-sharpened), Reliquaries 1 (the atlas)

2. The Select of this vessel is called Teacher.

3. The famed ancestor of this sept is Gaufroi, who drew the first map to the Ghostfields.

Arbitrage - a long, segmented vessel, like a great centipede, trailing tanks and containers to hold what it has pulled from the walls of the earth; but some of its holds have laid empty for years, and become overgrown with hanging vines. Its sept has taken this in stride. 

1. Right-Handed, Level 1: Trade Goods 1 (ship-grown agriculture)

2. The Select of this vessel is called Appraiser.

3. The famed ancestor of this sept is Isambaud, who once led Arbitrage in a series of raids on the cities of the Spire.

Listener - a new-made vessel. Its people are celebratory, and its halls are shining. Crewed by refugees from the empty shell of the arcology 54 North, slowly adapting to the thunder and glory of Navigation. 

1. Left-Handed, Level 1: Trade Goods 1 (Arcology-wrought fabric), Reliquaries 1 (shrine to Sadrabald)

2. The Select of this vessel is called Stargazer - as was the ruler of 54 North.

3. The famed ancestor of this sept is split; both Sadrabald, a saint of the arcologies, and Yzabé, whose descendants form the born-Navigator core of the sept, are revered.

    

   
   
   

Septs of the Sidereal

Determinant - a ship that writhes with life. Many-jointed arms of quicksilver sprout from it and sink into it, and during quiet nights it sings wordlessly to itself. Its antagonistic sept takes pride in its ability to claw at their rival vessels - even after sparking a great feud with Bewarer.

1. Left-Handed, Level 1: Weaponry 1 (feud-sharpened), Mysteries 1 (the Quicksilver Panoply)

2. The Select of this vessel is called Sharp-Toothed.

3. The famed ancestor of this sept is Iolente, who wore a fragment of the Panoply on her wrist.

Aliment - a far-wandering vessel, with a close relationship with some factions of the city of the Spire, to the south. A young faction of transhumanists hope to adopt a set of Spiral ways - in particular, the device or method high-status Spirals use to view and sort the thoughts and emotions of their fellows. 

1. Right-Handed, Level 1, Trade Goods 1 (Spiral exports)

2. The Select of this vessel is called Patron, as are the rulers of the Spire.

3. The famed ancestor of this sept is Eschive, who was mysteriously poisoned.

Palaver - deep in the ship, in an engraved shrine of platinum and green plastic, lay the relics of Typhenet, common ancestor to all of Assembly Sidereal. Others come to it on pilgrimage, bringing gifts to the sept and gifts to the dead.

1. Left-Handed, Level 2: Reliquaries 2 (Typhenet’s grave)

2. The Select of this vessel is called Mummifier.

3. The famed ancestor of this sept is not Typhenet (they say they would never be so prideful), but Kadvael, one of her companions and the retriever of her body.  

Together - the greatest ship of Assembly Sidereal. A pair of apotropaic eyes stare from its prow, and its hold heaves with loot. Its sept is pious, artistically-minded, and very, very, proud. They say that not a single panel of Sidereal doesn’t have the fingerprints of one of their sept on it.

1. Right-Handed, Level 2: Trade Goods 2 (paintings, carvings, and ship parts)

2. The Select of this vessel is called Sculptor. 

3. The famed ancestor of this sept is Typhenet - the sept seethes with entitlement and wrath that the Palaver holds her artifacts.

 

Treasures 

Each player sept starts with one of these strange items, dredged from some depth of history or some distant chamber.

 

1. Songline to Hell - the fable of Melisende, who in ages past ventured to a nightmare; a world of alkaline sands and white-hot tungsten pillars. Her descendants still seek to explore that place - and by listening to her words, you can find it.

2. Bottle of Vitiate - when poured on metal, it reacts viciously. Steel writhes and reaches, then flakes away as dust. Enough of it to open a 100x100 foot hole. It is rumored that there are methods and catalysts to let it turn water into more of itself.

3. Weightless Ants - two handfuls of them, little crawling lights. They follow whistled instructions, and can switch their weight to a total of negative 100 pounds at will.

4. Stranger’s Polearm - a +1 medium ranseur made of a magnetic alloy. It may be used to disarm at range, and can hold the weight of a person. The stranger came from somewhere to the south. She spoke to the walls and they moved. She spoke to the air and it froze. She killed a dozen ulfeðnar and two dozen skirmishers before she was, eventually, laid low.

5. Warleader’s Banner - any words you say while holding the banner are heard by everyone who could see you, as if you were right next to them.

6. Acledulf’s Song - an unnatural, tuneless, clipped sequence of unknown syllables. At its deafening crescendo both you and a target of your choice are struck by lightning.

7. Teal Incense - burn it atop your body in a closed room. Breathe in - it hurts, but do not worry. Breathe out. Breathe in - you don’t feel it any more, see? Breathe out; then open the room to hard vacuum. You will immediately pass out. But you will move anyway. For ten minutes you have an extra attack each turn, move twice as fast, and are not susceptible to pain, suffocation, injury, or fear. At the end of the duration you become immobilized with exhaustion. You have six doses.

8. Divination Vault - captured in a raid, along with a painted foreign augur. Once a year, enough of its signs are collected to answer a question.

9. Alchemic Crucible - once per season, this car-sized machine consumes vast amounts of hydrogen and turns it into strange things - ashes, or soft metals, or poison liquids. Its controls, if they work at all, are incomprehensible. 

10. Whistling Beacon - a 30-sided shape in white plastic. It is solid except to bare skin, which moves through it as if it were water. At its core is a solid piece, the size of an eye. Crush it and the beacon howls through the EM bands. Living machines will swarm to it in their hundreds, blind with rage.

11. Whitefire Engine - a tremendous device that provides electricity and propulsion using a network of strange burning metal rods. With the standard supply of hydrogen fuel, your vessel can move at twice the standard speed. Please don’t do the other thing that you thought of as soon as you recognized what this is. Or do - I’m not your boss.

12. Blessed Carapace - protects, as any spacesuit would, from vacuum, poison, and similar. Acts as medium armor. The blessings upon it declare that you will not die in a shipwreck. Now - after the shipwreck, you're on your own, and it doesn't say anything about getting maimed.

Diminishing Returns (Mothership Module) Review

Diminishing Returns is a 16 page Mothership 0e adventure by Josh Dixon, made as a stretch goal for their ZQ2 project Black Pyramid - and the fact that this was an afterthought attached to a larger project is clear. DR presents an exciting premise for a couple sessions of action-oriented gameplay, but none of the tools needed to bring this premise to the table.

Premise

Namtar (or Nergal, the adventure disagrees) Station was overtaken by pirates 5 years ago - and is now torn apart by the death of the pirates' Captain Blackheart and the ensuing succession crisis. Except the captain isn't dead; in the depths of Namtar Station, a cloning machine has clicked on, and Blackheart returns to life, again and again. 

Structure

DR is around Namtar Station - one central 23-room floor with 4 single-room subfloors. However, the main floor is essentially empty, not keyed with traps, NPCs, or hostile pirates. For example, the five Labs simply say they contain lab equipment, and have a 1d6 table of the drugs being produced with this equipment.

Instead, a d20 table is meant to be rolled on for every room, declaring them "trapped with frag grenade" or containing "5 armed pirates" - pirate locations are also suggested in the Factions page at the end of the zine, but these are vague statements of territory (Billy Blood, one of the contenders for Captain, holds "the central labs, engineering, the armory, and the garden/Hydroponics") which are unmentioned in the map key for said rooms.

Random generation at this fine room-by-room detail, especially when done at the table (as DR recommends) makes the adventure almost incoherent. Why are specific rooms trapped? Where are the pirate forces? Your players can't intuit information (for example, in a generic D&D crawl you may suspect that an immense locked door that shoots deadly needles at you probably hides some pretty cool loot) because there is no connection between rooms and room features. All they can do is walk from room to room and take events as they come. You can't connect room concepts together, spread encounters between them, or really interact with the dungeon as a whole.  

the d20 table, not counting repeats, has 12 entries - one of which is "empty", and two of which are varying numbers of corpses

The subfloors essentially escape notice. One is the empty dock the players land in, and the last three form an epilogue to the adventure - one with an NPC who never leaves, doesn't do anything unless he's forced to at gunpoint, and is neutral in the faction conflict, one big fight with a security system and armed android as a finale, and the cloning chamber itself. They only connect to the body of the adventure through the Captain.

The War

DR may be based on the map of Namtar Station, but it isn't a dungeon crawl, per se - it has no interest in navigation, logistics, time, or other dungeoncrawling components. Instead, the map is used to manage a room-by-room gunfight between its paired factions.

However, the tools needed for this are absent. DR does not say how many pirates there are on the station. It provides stats for three varieties of pirate, identical except for extreme increases in numerical ability, but these statblocks are never mentioned in the random room contents/encounters. 

Running the fight over Namtar Station falls entirely to the GM. In my own sessions I went for an adversary roster to replace the encounter table, with teams of pirates moving through the station as the PCs did, fighting when they ended up running into the same room. In DR's case I chose this because of the adventure's focus on tactical combat - it makes it easier to handle bottlenecks, regrouping of enemy forces, flanking actions, and so on.

Organization

I know why DR is organized the way it is - it starts with the map of the first floor of Namtar Station, keys it, then maps and keys the sub-floors (including their security systems and two pages about cloning) before moving on to its NPCs and factions.

This seems, at first, like a reasonable way to organize the book, but in practice it has no relation to when parts of itself appear in play. Running the main floor of the Station requires, simultaneously, the room contents table on page three and the pirate factions information on page fourteen.

A floor-by-floor system would have been preferable: everything you need for the first floor, then the single-room subfloors. Space in the zine is also poorly prioritized - an entire page is spent on the contents of a vending machine and another page is spent on solely the cosmetic mutations suffered by Captain Blackheart as he continues to be cloned, as opposed to the gameplay-affecting mutations, which are shoved into the bottom-left corner of Blackheart's own page.

Conclusion

Running DR requires you to reorganize the zine, stock Namtar Station yourself, stat the NPCs, and find a way to handle the wider gunfight, at which point you have nothing left except for a map and a concept. Perhaps the concept interests you - but in all honesty you would be best served writing the adventure yourself.