Archpendix N

The wagon of bands for September 8th - inspirational media (in this case, for Lanthanide Horizon). Like weirdwriter I will be writing this in 15 minutes, though in my case that's because if I think about it for too long I will cringe right out the back of my own head. 

Debt: the First 5000 Years / The Dawn of Everything

David Graeber's Debt is not the origin of my fixation with the gift economy (nor is Marcel Mauss's The Gift), but since I don't recall the source it gets the spot.

Graeber and Wengrow's TDoE is the direct source for Navigator subsistence and seasonal government (based on their description of the Nambikwara) and the institution of the Imperious (based on their description of the Great Sun of the Natchez).

Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants

A good bedrock for the "evil chemistry" pillar of the game - a multi-decade comedy of errors. People burn through concrete with aluminum-fluorine cutting torches, try to shame rocket motors into working correctly by playing the sounds of a launch, blow up extremely valuable scientific equipment, cover acres of woodland in powdered metal, make a fuel so unrelentingly foul and fly-attracting that they seal the container and throw it into the San Francisco bay, and get attacked by "nine thousand demented bats".

Atomic Rockets fulfills a similar role for my obsession with deeply impractical radiator designs.

Firelock 198X is a recent fixation that filled in the vat-grown Firstborn and (in combination with Ignition) has given some 1960s-military-engineer-fever-dream tinges to megastructural technology. 

Also there are a lot of things I haven't read - The City as Text: The Politics of Landscape Interpretation in the Kandyan Kingdom, which I know only through these blogposts, or the fact that when I really give up I just poke around in front of the Wikipedia pages for political and economic anthropology. Eclipse Phase should clearly have some influence on the transhuman elements of the setting, but I've never read it either, only the yearblogs Farcast and Seedware.

 

Navigator "Gunsmith's Societies" (Lanthanide Horizon)

The "gunsmith's society" is an occult ritual organization within the clan-ship society of the Navigators, specializing in military leadership, mutual aid, and mediation across the lines of the three Navigator "assemblies".

Behavior
Gunsmiths have an inverse set of virtues when compared to mainline Navigators - where they are invasive, obsessed with equal treatment and insult, expected to react with high emotion, and aim for decisiveness in action and thought, gunsmiths are instead expected to keep the secrets of their order, accept the hierarchy of masters and journeymen, remain calm, and forsake immediate action to instead consider all angles.

This makes them, in the eyes of their neighbors, frightening - difficult to predict, difficult to understand. Additionally, members of the society are the only Navigators with the permission to ignore demands of their Imperious tyrants.

Social Function
Members of the society have a monopoly on the authorized production of Navigator airguns. Manufacture of these weapons is not hidden, nor even particularly difficult - any Navigator ship-tender has the necessary understanding of pressurized systems - but it is socially prevented. Navigators behave in a saga-like way (i.e. they go flying off the handle for basically no reason all the time) - do you trust them with guns? Really?

The society, with its more restrained social expectation, keeps these weapons to themselves, and to those Select and Imperious they can trust to keep them turned away from each other for use in war and against machines.

As a group they theoretically have no political desires beyond mediation - in practice, individual gunsmiths tend to stand in opposition to the twin cultural shifts of Legalism (who seek the development of writing, sedentary agriculture, and other ideas taken from the local Oases) and the Golden Sphere Revelation (which believes in an alternate eschatology than mainline Navigators). 

Mythological Basis
One of the secrets revealed during initiation into the gunsmith's society is the secret of heredity. Members of the society are not, in fact, descended of Parva Weightless (the mythohistorical first Navigator) - but instead children of Saveriu, a hunter and minor character in conventional tellings that the gunsmiths expand into the warrior-philosopher-king of Parva's home pre-Navigator culture. As members of the society are not children of Parva, they are thus not Navigators, permitting them to act as the society demands.

This was written for G L Å U G U S T 2 0 2 5 - prompt 1:2 "He Wields A Gun", maximum word count 500

More Treasures and Sept-Vessels of the Navigators

The third in the set (one, two) - I'm making another attempt at a play-by-post Navigator domain game and realized I put half of the obligatory PC starting treasures on the map somewhere, so. I need. more of those.

New Sept-Vessels

Falsifier - centerpiece of the secretive ritual “gunsmith’s society”. Members of this group appear in many septs, providing mediation, calming advice, and firearms expertise to the Select and Imperious - but they consider Falsifier their home.

• Left-Handed, Assembly Elegiast, Level 1: Reliquaries 1 (society lodge), Gunsmith’s Workshop (asset)
• The Select of this vessel is called Breathless - and the head of the gunsmith’s society is titled Occluder.
• This sept’s fabled ancestor is Ansgar, thief-inventor of the air rifle.

Indemnifier - a vessel with great potential. As well as the standard solid radiators found on any sept-vessel, Indemnifier holds an emergency high-flow loop using 1400 °F vaporized potassium. In the future, this could let it run all sorts of extreme technologies - for now, it acts as a convenient anti-boarding measure.

• Right-Handed, Assembly Cloudspinner, Level 2: Trade Goods 1 (potassium gathering), Mysteries 1 (Ti/K Vapor Tube Radiator)
• The Select of this vessel is called Optimist.
• The famed ancestor of this sept is Dydier, who was thought lost in distant lands but crawled back to his sept on foot.

Decalcifier - a baleful ship clad in carbon fiber. They hope to arm themselves, and then follow Sidereal into the Next World as a sentry, rather than join the assembly-ship’s crew; or, if the few of its members who fell into the Golden Sphere Revelation have their way, become self-sufficient and then vanish into that bleak place.

• Left-Handed, Assembly Sidereal, Level 1: Weaponry 1 (trained wanderers)
• The Select of this vessel is called Absent.
• The famed ancestor of this sept is Per, a poisoner reviled by all others.

additionally, sept Listener has been remade, now that Arcologists are no longer part of the setting:

Listener - a new-made vessel. Its people are celebratory, and its halls are shining. Crewed, in part, by glass-masked Firstborn… refugees? orphans?, slowly adapting to the thunder and glory of Navigation.

• Left-Handed, Level 1: Trade Goods 1 (3D-printed fabric), Reliquaries 1 (shrine to the voice ringing in your head)
• The Select of this vessel is called Stargazer.
• The famed ancestor of this sept is split; both Yzabé, whose descendants form the born-Navigator core of the sept, and the bodiless voice are revered.

New Treasures

10. Metamaterial Cloak - a misshapen parallelogram of tarp-like plastic. Refracts light, making its wearer invisible.

11. Ninety-Seventh Casket - a boron monolith the size of a shipping container, taken from the Hanging Gardens. Diagnostics sweep across its surface - the thing inside is not yet ready.

12. Eye Closer - a blue stone box with a mouthpiece on one end and a barrel on the other, filled with 5 doses of baleful powder. Those afflicted with it are first paralyzed by spasms, then driven to hallucination and paranoia.

13. Grain of Sand - contained in a magnetic apparatus. Glows with a blinding white heat. If it was released, it would fall, burning, forever. 

14. Bladeless Hilt - a +1 light “weapon”. Deals no damage to living things. If a machine is “killed” with it, it follows the commands of the hilt’s holder until another machine is “killed”.

15. The Volume’s Most Eligible Bachelorette - [sept] Balsinde Hierosme. Superlatively intelligent, kind, well-spoken, virtuous, et cetera, et cetera. Puts you in the best possible position for marriage arrangements.

16. Scalpel - an uparmored monopropellant-driven ultralight with an octet of laser-guided missiles. Carries one pilot and six desanting passengers.

17. Speaking Fire - carried rarely by Firstborn officers. A point of oilslick light, hovering by your shoulder. Lights your path, magnifies your voice, flashbangs people, and projects a burning shield of the same light (+2 AC, lights fires).

18. Siege Fusil - masterpiece of the gunsmith’s society. Fires 5 millimeter pellets at 6 kilometers per second, powered by a two-stage hydrogen gas-piston. 2d12 damage, +2 to-hit increasing by one for each turn spent aiming. Disadvantage on attack rolls if firing from an unsupported position.

Small Rules for Lanthanide Horizon (Dissection, Climbing/Caving)

Usually, I shift between genre with each campaign - but I'm now two failed Navigator sept campaigns deep and still haven't stopped thinking about them, probably because of the. failing...

As a break from three hundred years in the mines making Lanthanide Horizon hexcrawls I can't post because all my theoretical players read this, here are some leetle rules-modules I stapled to the latter campaign and barely used. 🙂

(later - I want to alter the Navigator backgrounds (i don't like Skald or Ropemaker), rewrite the Navigator septs so they can be used as NPC factions, and write some kind of generator for their Imperious management-kings) 

Machine Dissection

Ripped off from this system by Benign Brown Beast, but inverted - assigning dice, then rolling them, instead of rolling them before being assigned. 

When you move to salvage, pool 2+[INT bonus] d10s - with a relevant skill, add 2 more. Before rolling, divide them as you wish between three categories:

• Receive answers to [dice] questions about this machine and others like it (HD, AC, attacks, purpose, etc).
• Obtain minor components - roll all dice in this category and sum them together. Addone to the first digit of the sum to determine how many slots are collected, and the last digit keys what component is obtained. Any results that say "either X or Y", the player chooses. (For example, “26” is 2+1 = 3 slots of component #6)
• Take [best] on a secret table of attempts to recover a major component - a machine-specific tool that could be repaired, with work. (OK I realized that this is kind of a pain in the neck, "the table" is honestly probably just. 1-5 you really do it wrong and the dying machine catches your hand in some gears and crushes it, 6-8 you get Nothing, 9-10 you get "broken component that could do Thing The Machine Does In Its Statblock if you fix it) 

Minor Component Table

1. Wire (either stout copper or beautiful fiber-optic).

2. Either intact batteries, or manganese dioxide (flammable, used as a dark green pigment).

3. Propylene glycol, used as a coolant and lubricant - startlingly, somehow, safe for human consumption.

4. Jumbles of small springs and synthetic tendon, or fragments of soft solder.

5. Elbow-sized servomotors, or shin-long electric pistons.

6. Contact adhesive, or screws and bolts.

7. Multicolored plastic insulating sheaths, or dice-sized blocks of graphite.

8. Strings of status LEDs, or single lightbulbs.

9. Lengths of metal skeleton, or external plates.

0. A clicking mechanical eye, or the tangled-bismuth brain - a piece you can’t understand, but the men of the Vault will buy. ("the men of the Vault" are a local group of Foreign Types - more generally you could just say "[...] understand, but have value as decoration and trophies.")

Climbing/Caving

Also ripped off, this time from Sam Sorensen's Lowlife, and this blog post by Xenophon, and the classic Veins of the Earth system. I've been alternating between this and a stat-damage-mapped-segment thing with every campaign and I'm not happy with either of them, but this one is faster which makes it better.

When climbing/caving, roll 1d6 - looking for a 4-in-6 normally, or a 2-in-6 under poor conditions (evil overhang wall, evil your-head-is-touching-the-wall-and-ceiling-simultaneously tunnel). 

Add 1 to your chances if:

• you have an already-set rope line
• you have 15 or more STR (for climbing) or DEX (for caving)
• you have a theoretically relevant skill (if you literally have Climbing or Going Through Tunnels, add 2) 
• you've had at least ten minutes to study the route

and subtract one if:

• you have at least 5 filled inventory slots
• you have something in one of your hands
• you are in darkness
• the ascent is, in some way, out to get you (a general situational penalty for icy climbs, rubble-filled tunnels, or other such things)

If you pass, you're good! Probably. Reroll every 10 minutes or if your situation ever suddenly changes.

If you fail, roll 1d4 - this is how many quarters (25/50/75/99.9) of the obstacle you made it through before either falling on a climb, or becoming trapped in a tunnel. If you have and are using sufficient rope and pitons, you fall only 1 quarter and take that much fall damage before becoming caught. 

If you ever have to crawl vertically, do the math for your chances at both and then roll a single d6. Experience the wonders of falling 30 feet down a pipe and getting stuck still 80 feet up.

(this system removes the large tables of possible failures in Lowlife and Veins. Instead, I get to build on this basic system by keying climbs and tunnels - electrified walls, pipes flooding with boiling water, or places with added or changed failure penalties - "fall one segment before being caught in the moving gears", "fall, and also wake up the robots that live in the walls", etc) 

Oasis-Cities of the Megastructure (Lanthanide Horizon)

You walk the path to Vyeku Proxy Tekha, member of the nomenklatura, the contending-class. You walk it first in trepidation, then in terror, then in resolve - your tin fingertip-covers click against the handle of your knife. He deserves it.

First, into the city, over the red-and-violet mosaic that marks its border (for the city has a border, and the men of the city say they need no wall to protect it), then into the favored-district, where the houses are tiled and plastered instead of painted metal, and the street glows with a calming light, then through Vyeku's gate, past the brass statues of his father, his grandmother, his brother (taken far too early), still clothed and fed as well as he.

When you see him - running a hand across the cheek of the statue of his wife - and he sees you, you feel that telltale click in your hindbrain and watch that telltale symbol (who could say what it means, except for the presence of your patron) flash before your eyes as your heart leaps with joy.

You pull out your knife - and then hand it to him by the hilt. You could never do anything else.

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At the peak, the hedrarchs, fountains of food and water, who take all goods into the bureaucracy of the palace economy to be distributed to those below. 

Below them, the nomenklatura, those who have passed their civil service examinations and become eligible for election to the hedrarchy. Subjects of the system of names - their ration set individually by the hedrarchs, to reward and punish. (Among the nomenklatura, the Proxies, legally identical to those they represent.)

At the base (apart from foreigners), the citizenry, who give fealty to their favored nomen in votes, in corvee labor, and in military service in exchange for patronage in goods - for the tribute to the citizen class is thin - and favors. (Among the citizens, the Sworn, prosthetic armigers given new limbs and strange weapons stolen from the machines of the world in exchange for lifelong service.)

These chains of patronage radiate downwards - hedrarchs summon individual supporters in the nomenklatura to rouse their subordinate nomen, and them to raise their citizen-levies. 

Source

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To foreigners, it is your modifications that make you recognizable. Augmentation - lacquered steel limbs and glittering golden eyes - is not ubiquitous, but is common enough to mark you. One alteration, however, is universal, or near enough - a click in the hindbrain. Complete conscious control of emotion.

Firstly, control of your own - it takes a second too long for your face to contort in rage as you seek the dial and tune it to what you desire.

Secondly, for the nomenklatura, control of your clients'. A scale to weigh their hearts.

Among the Navigators (who the northern Oases, like the vast city Lightning-in-Amber, see on their yearly pilgrimages, or when they come to collect their salt-and-electrical-component payment for mercenary service) this power is called "telepathy" - and their modernizing factions dream of it. 

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Sworn (generic): 5 HD, AC 18, 2 DR, two attacks with bare hands at +4 2d8 + superhuman combat maneuver. Their arms and legs are too long, cast in gold and aluminum, engraved and lacquered.

Sworn armor/prosthetic complexes are unique (coming with not only the generic statblock, but with heart-seeking javelins, irradiating curselights, and so forth), named, and inherited - their nerve hasps have felt the touch of innumerable forebears. Recovery of Sworn bodies is paramount, and often features as the inciting incident of their wars and war-stories.

Swarms of prosthetists surround them, pulling off limbs to tune and retune, replace motors, solder wires, apply unguents and oils. Without constant maintenance, nerves delaminate and contacts rot.

Vibechete! Play Report & (small) Review

Vibechete! is a Mothership adventure written by Joel Hines as part of Hull Breach. 

It's the 50th anniversary the accident that closed the orbital Hodder Forest Reserve - a favorite rave spot for plutocrat failscions and trust-fund drifters; and what better way to celebrate than to break in? All the CONDEMNED tape over the airlock doors is just for show, I'm certain.

Our PCs are:

Wavey Deshong, successful plum brandy mogul, with his retinue (tennis coach and tennis coach-bot B.B. Fingers and CS 38-874 [Casper], and clone-daughter/organ donor/erstwhile final girl Caitlin)

and the Dass Malangar twins, Mary the accelerationist and Andy the joyrider, with their pair of butlers, Sammy and Old Cynic. 

The eight of them (I may have gotten a bit overenthusiastic with Ian Yusem's funnel rules) have spent weeks on the yacht Scorpio Rising, bombarded with hideous dino synth in one ear and the endless chatter of NPCs (who I more or less immediately forget about, due to the... eight PCs) in the other.

Unsurprisingly, when the ship docks, they're more than happy to get away from the noise and spread out through the Reserve's habitat dome, engaging in a mixed itinerary of mild vandalism and corporate politics - B.B. wanders off to an abandoned cabin, arm-in-arm with a third son of some chemical company, while Wavey does his best to set his clone-daughter into a marriage with Yvette, soon to be inheritor of a printed-architecture firm... at least, until the lights go out, and Yvette disappears.

There are long minutes before the emergency lights switch on - and when they do, B.B. hears footsteps outside his cabin...

Oh, nevermind, it's just Casper.

Fortunately, androids have no fear of "blood loss", "shock", or other such biological foibles - as the vibechete slithers out of his chest, Casper turns and jabs the handle of his tennis racket into his attacker's face...plate. It bounces off the glass of an antique spacesuit's helmet just a second before B.B.'s own tennis racket cracks it, sending the killer fleeing.

On the other side of the habitat, Mary and Caitlin have a stuttering, blushing conversation about current events

 

 

until B.B., Jasper, and Whoever the NPC crash through the underbrush to complain about "being stabbed". 

Wavey declares that, clearly, a team should be sent out after the killer, and, clearly, he shouldn't be a part of it. After some spirited complaining, 5 of the PCs follow Casper's integrated bioscanner into the ominous woods, where a bloodied piece of Yvette's shirt dangles from an equally ominous branch, ominously.

The bioscanner pings movement - B.B. throws a rock into the canopy, and mildly annoys the killer before they fall out of a tree like a pile of bricks, burying the machete into B.B's shoulder. The PCs spend a turn ineffectually kicking at the slasher's armored suit as they drag their weapon through B.B.'s chest - and then the PCs decide, "welp, nothing we can do for him now" and flee. 

After picking up the other PCs, they swarm back into the docking bay; only to find it closed by the emergency lockdown. Jittering holographic signs demand CONTROL ROOM OVERRIDE and SIMULTANEOUSLY REACTIVATE BACKUP GENERATORS - and, somehow, Casper's scanner picks up two people already in the hangar bay with them; one hidden beneath the Scorpio Rising, the other inside.

The ping under the ship vanishes as the killer descends Scorpio Rising's ramp... and is immediately mobbed by seven PCs and beaten into surrender. Their shattered helmet is pulled off to reveal... woah, it's Yvette, the only NPC that the GM remembered to introduce into the game at all! Who could've guessed!

Yvette is made fun of, her machete is stolen, and while she is explicitly kept alive she immediately falls into the Memory Hole where every non-immediately-murderous NPC lives in perfect harmony.

(This marked the end of our first session - surprising, since text games tend to move rather slowly)

Dragging Yvette behind them, the crew descends into the Reserve's service tunnels, seeking backup generators. 

They are, in fact, literally right next to each other - the first generator's room is empty, apart from an envelope of "worker's demands", and the second is empty, apart from a machete-armed killer in a spacesuit. 

Hey, wait a minute.

The second slasher grabs poor Old Cynic and impales him on the generator's crank as thrown brandy bottles and lunchboxes rattle off their helmet - and then, once more, the PCs abandon one of their own... except for Wavey, who cowers in a corner under his fashionable, color-changing suit until the killer gets bored of watching Old Cynic die. 

Soon reunited and re-generatored, the crew shrugs and decides that fighting the first axe murderer went fine, so we can probably(?) just beat up this one too(?) - so they send Casper, bioscanner'd, to hunt for them. 

Casper is immediately caught by the killer, thrown into a cryopod, and ejected into space. Welp.

While Wavey starts an argument over nothing with most of the surviving PCs, Caitlin and Mary kick in the door to another room - one with an enormous hole into space barely covered up with plastic wrap and caution tape, a hundred hands hanging from the ceiling, and a big ol' "integrated jaunt pad" humming in the center.

They decide this is a perfect place for a cute romantic bit, and then Mary hops onto the jaunt pad and explodes, telefragged by the slasher. Such is life.

Caitlin throws Yvette's stolen machete through the plastic wrap, venting the room just in time for Andy to gormlessly open the door back to. the hallway. with all the PCs in it.

Everyone except for Wavey is dragged into the void by decompression - but a second from unconsciousness, Wavey manages to slam the door shut, then flee to air. Behind him, the killer teleports back to their jaunt pad and dusts themselves off. 

Wavey's panicked flight eventually leads to the control room - split between a hulking computer terminal and the twin ignition bolts for the Reserve's self-destruct system. The computer gladly overrides the lockdown, then alternates between depositing cookies, apologizing for the slasher's behavior, and demanding Wavey leave - something Wavey has no interest in arguing with. 

Or, well. A bit of interest in arguing with - when their conversation concludes, Wavey takes his cane to the monitor and sets the self-destruct, then crawls through the vents back to the hangar bay - just as the killer emerges from a side door.

Wavey throws everything in his inventory under the slasher's feet, slowing them down just long enough to close the Scorpio Rising's ramp - then the yacht drags itself out of the Reserve, leaving the habitat to die...

Review Bit(?)

Vibechete! was a lot of fun - I wouldn't've written this otherwise. There are places where the care of the designer is evident - each room comes with a couple "ambush tactics" for the killer(s) to jumpscare your PCs with, answering "how do I vary a single monster" and "how do I make sure the GM knows how aggressively to pilot the monster" simultaneously. 

Its bespoke backgrounds are wonderful little jokes (plum brandy mogul, tennis coach, and favorite child's backup clone are all directly from the book) with an (I think optimal) disregard for balance - only three of the 8 PCs were even truly "armed".

I do think it makes some questionable choices for its ending - the facility AI is written in the same section and the same style as the hostile NPCs, but it doesn't do anything until the PCs enter its room near the end of the module, and then it essentially wants the same thing the PCs do - the crew off the station and away from the slasher.

Using both slashers in sequence is the adventure's recommendation, but I think doing that makes the adventure more than a bit repetitive ("after you kill the slasher villain with a machete in a spacesuit, you're attacked by... a slasher villain! With a machete! In a spacesuit!"). The two of them are different - Yvette focuses on mystery, with Yvette appearing without her suit and a set of other NPCs around to spread the blame, while the nameless slasher creates the shameless meatgrinder I ran - but I think the GM should choose which of these they're aiming for, rather than stacking them.

It's an extremely runnable adventure, with a couple interesting twists and a nice fast pace.