Since posting about them I managed to start, turn to despise, and then end a play-by-post campaign among the sept-vessels of the Navigators. This is a bit of a slushpost - ships, items, lore, and procedures dredged from the ruins. It is long, rambling, and poorly organized, and that's exactly what you deserve. Suffer.
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| Navigator dress sense seems to have turned into a Nazca / Paracas vibe - such as this turban. |
1. New Ships
Sympathist - an empty hull of a ship, made of a single piece of flawless metal. It was just found one day. Your sept had recently split from Quadrireme, hoping to get out from under its shadow, so you took it as a gift of good fortune. Now it can fly, but that’s about all.
- Sept Elegiast, Right-Handed, Level 3: No Holdings
- The Select of this vessel is called Aspirant.
- This sept has no famed ancestor, yet. You may have been the first person in the Sympathist’s halls.
- Sept Cloudspinner, Left-Handed, Level 1: Weaponry 1, Trade Goods 1, Reliquaries 1 (gifts of the Imperious).
- The Select of this vessel is called Tremulous.
- The famed ancestor of this sept is Hierosme, who was executed by a prior Imperious Cloudspinner.
Executant - a sept soon to split. A devastating blood feud killed nearly a dozen of them, and it’s only quiet, not over. The start was a (according to one side, intentional) fatal explosion. Then there was the ax murder. Then the shooting. The survivors seek new sept members to reinforce their chosen faction - by adoption, marriage, glory, and so on.
- Right-Handed, Level 2: Weaponry 1 (feud-sharpened) Trade Goods 2 (hydrogen harvesting infrastructure)
- The Select of this vessel is called Generous.
- The famed ancestor of this sept is Aodrenel - saying his name in front of one side of the feud is liable to get you killed.
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2. New Treasures
Ghost Projector - a suit of wires and electrodes, wrapped awkwardly around you. Once per day, it can project a faceless, vague figure of reddish light. Items pass through it (though it heats them to ~400 degrees F), and after five minutes, or if it ever leaves your line of sight, it snaps out of existence.
Sulnitse [PC's Name] Spire - fleeing that greatest of all cities. 12 feet tall (mostly in the disproportionate limbs), supposedly bulletproof, with a halo of floating spears. Owes you greatly, for some reason.
Costume of Parva - fashioned after the mythohistorical first Navigator, a child of the Arcologies who took to the sky. While wearing it, you are unaffected by gravity.
3. Navigator Lore
Property & Law
Navigators have a limited idea of personal property. Your clothes and a few items required for your work (determined by your “starting equipment” via background) or of sentimental value are yours - everything else is a sept possession.
As such, fines are not used as an internal legal punishment; nor is imprisonment. The Select (who are arbiters of legal dispute, and investigators of accusations) have a different arsenal of legal options; obviously, players may do as they please, but these are some starting points. Expect the victim of a crime to demand a sentence - you should not expect these demands to be reasonable, and I do not expect you to accede to them.
Sentences for Injury or Death
One who is found to have injured another member of the sept unrighteously is to have their victim placed in their care until their recovery. This is, effectively, a fine on the attacker’s time. If the victim dies in their care, they can be accused of murder.
In cases of murder, the victim’s close relatives may claim the right to kill the accused, or demand the killer be placed into their care as a replacement for the deceased.
Sentences for Whatever The Hell Else
In situations of insult (and good god, can Navigators find a lot of insults), the victim may request repayment via violence - often with bare hands or painted knives, and generally without loss of life. They may also do this anyway, without your knowledge or agreement - this is assault, as above.
A common recourse for the Select is to simply get the defendant Out Of Here. Explicit banishment from a sept is possible, though it may seem extreme - arranged marriages or “volunteering” them for service in the court of the Imperious are more subtle options.
Sentences from the Imperious
While the Select are bound by public opinion and cooperation, the Imperious are absolute in their decrees - but, only in their own presence. The Imperious may command executions, exiles, mutilations, and other tortures, but they cannot delegate. Representatives of the Imperious are just people, and will be ignored. Their radius of power extends only as far as they, personally, can be seen and heard.
Sentences Between Septs
In theory, disputes between septs could be resolved by the Imperious - but given their ability to command the aforementioned executions, exiles, mutilations, and other tortures, this is often avoided.
Instead, fines are often levied. These are not against the specific person involved in a crime, but their entire sept (as an incentive to keep your own members under control). These are represented via expenditure of "glory", a kind of dubious attempt to wrap material wealth and public perception into a single number used in the failed domain game.
Common fines include:
Destroyed or stolen goods - repayment in twice the value of the goods.
Unrighteous killing of a sept member - 100 glory (roughly "a lot of money, but bearable").
Unrighteous killing of a Select - 300 glory (roughly "you can take that from my cold dead hands").
Again - these are common legal precedents. A way for players to know what is “normal”, so they can deviate from normalcy if they wish. Perhaps you hated that guy and aren’t really bothered that he’s dead, so you ask for 50 (and hope his close relatives don’t take too much offense). Maybe you really hate your opponent, and threaten to drag them in front of the Imperious unless they pay you 500. Raid someone and then demand weregild for your own lost raiders because it would be funny. Do as you please.
Navigators have a limited idea of personal property. Your clothes and a few items required for your work (determined by your “starting equipment” via background) or of sentimental value are yours - everything else is a sept possession.
As such, fines are not used as an internal legal punishment; nor is imprisonment. The Select (who are arbiters of legal dispute, and investigators of accusations) have a different arsenal of legal options; obviously, players may do as they please, but these are some starting points. Expect the victim of a crime to demand a sentence - you should not expect these demands to be reasonable, and I do not expect you to accede to them.
Sentences for Injury or Death
One who is found to have injured another member of the sept unrighteously is to have their victim placed in their care until their recovery. This is, effectively, a fine on the attacker’s time. If the victim dies in their care, they can be accused of murder.
In cases of murder, the victim’s close relatives may claim the right to kill the accused, or demand the killer be placed into their care as a replacement for the deceased.
Sentences for Whatever The Hell Else
In situations of insult (and good god, can Navigators find a lot of insults), the victim may request repayment via violence - often with bare hands or painted knives, and generally without loss of life. They may also do this anyway, without your knowledge or agreement - this is assault, as above.
A common recourse for the Select is to simply get the defendant Out Of Here. Explicit banishment from a sept is possible, though it may seem extreme - arranged marriages or “volunteering” them for service in the court of the Imperious are more subtle options.
Sentences from the Imperious
While the Select are bound by public opinion and cooperation, the Imperious are absolute in their decrees - but, only in their own presence. The Imperious may command executions, exiles, mutilations, and other tortures, but they cannot delegate. Representatives of the Imperious are just people, and will be ignored. Their radius of power extends only as far as they, personally, can be seen and heard.
Sentences Between Septs
In theory, disputes between septs could be resolved by the Imperious - but given their ability to command the aforementioned executions, exiles, mutilations, and other tortures, this is often avoided.
Instead, fines are often levied. These are not against the specific person involved in a crime, but their entire sept (as an incentive to keep your own members under control). These are represented via expenditure of "glory", a kind of dubious attempt to wrap material wealth and public perception into a single number used in the failed domain game.
Common fines include:
Destroyed or stolen goods - repayment in twice the value of the goods.
Unrighteous killing of a sept member - 100 glory (roughly "a lot of money, but bearable").
Unrighteous killing of a Select - 300 glory (roughly "you can take that from my cold dead hands").
Again - these are common legal precedents. A way for players to know what is “normal”, so they can deviate from normalcy if they wish. Perhaps you hated that guy and aren’t really bothered that he’s dead, so you ask for 50 (and hope his close relatives don’t take too much offense). Maybe you really hate your opponent, and threaten to drag them in front of the Imperious unless they pay you 500. Raid someone and then demand weregild for your own lost raiders because it would be funny. Do as you please.
from Arcology: City in the Image of Man
Marriage (So That You Can Arrange One To Get That Insufferable Person Out Of Your Sept, Please)
Navigator marriages are exogamous (out of the sept of birth), and between people of different sept moiety (one partner from a Left-Handed sept, the other from a Right-Handed). Individual gender is irrelevant.
Before the wedding itself (which goes largely without mention) there is a meeting between the couple’s septs to determine details of married life:
- Firstly, you decide where the couple will live, usually attempting to persuade all involved that the other sept-vessel is far greater than yours, and surely they should live there, instead of here.
- Then, when the first round concludes, you flip around - since the other sept is taking these delightful, capable individuals, and they are maiming your sept with your loss, they obviously must pay some extravagant price to make up taking away your two (because even though you just argued that you shouldn’t have them, you now talk as if you already did) fellows.
- Everyone gets drunk, everyone makes fun of their own sept and the other in equal measure, everyone has fun, and only once in a while does somebody get stabbed.
Death, Ghosts, and the Eternal Procession
(unlike the lore above, which has some bearing on the behavior of the Select, this only exists because it’s fun)
Navigator cosmology sees the world as having many "sides". When someone is born, they are brought from a prior side to this one. When someone dies, they move to the next. Opinions differ on whether this is a circular progression (and you find yourself born into the same side again, after innumerable generations) or an infinite line.
Spirits of the dead, especially the great dead, are able to reach backwards to the present world in order to have positive effects. The living in the present world are expected to provide sacrifices (food, water, mortal company, light, et cetera) to those in the next. This also extends backwards - the gifts of food, water, mortal company, light, et cetera from the previous world radiate into the present in the form of forests and rivers and glowlines and so on, and some Navigator rituals are explicitly pointed backwards, in order to provide support from "dead ancestors" to those yet to come.
Failed sacrifices in the world behind lead to famines, cold snaps, droughts, darknesses, and so on in the world ahead. Those who die in these events don't progress forwards - instead, they are dragged backwards, to scourge those who killed them as intangible spirits. When the problem is resolved and the shirkers are sufficiently terrorized, they get to progress again.
These ghosts are said to cause disease, unexplained loss of propellant, electrical fires, sometimes they just sit there flashing lights in your eyes over and over, et cetera. every once in a while, in Tales of Myth and so on, they grab some unfortunate and challenge them to a duel. in a myth meant to go "pay attention to the rituals, you loser" they win the duel (obviously, they're an intangible spirit), but sometimes in sagas of great heroes the ghost is found to be unfair/unjust, defeated, and dispelled.
The assembly-ships will carry this set of Navigators from this side of the world to the next - this will reunite those who finally reach it with the dead, but it will notably do it while they are still alive. Living people in a world ahead where they are supposed to be are thought to have all sorts of divine capacities (because what is minor in one world is great in the next - thus allowing you to feed your ancestors with a great forest with the sacrifice of a single fruit, and so on) which they will use to reshape all worlds, simultaneously into endless heavens.
4. Sept-Vessel Procedures
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If a sept-vessel were to be completely destroyed, such as by slamming it into another ship, slamming it into a wall, slamming it into the floor, et cetera, it is sundered. Everyone inside loses all their HP and rolls on your favored wounds table (if you're playing a system where PCs die at 0 HP, just make them take like 5d8 or some other huge number - it is presumably fatal, but not certainly fatal). It will take a season of work for it to fly again.
The maximum value of a raid was set to [raiders]d10 Glory - a raiding unit can spend their action while in any room to destroy it and gain 1/4th of that maximum value (taking the same amount from the raid's target). The target vessel's Shrine gives an extra 25% (for a maximum total of 125%), but damaging it in a raid provides your sept-vessel 1 Unrest (a measure of. what it sounds like) for your iconoclasm.
The cargo pods, radiators, and engine can be destroyed without entering the ship, just keep an eye out for how the latter two are... rather warm.
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