Friday, January 20, 2012

Black Seas of Infinity (Encounter Table/Terminal Space)

“We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”
H.P. Lovecraft
Mythos-Style Interstellar Encounters
  1. Mi-Go flotilla enroute to a mining colony world with the intent to restore order and productivity. (-4 on reaction roll. The Mi-go are looking for a few good, tractable slaves to add to the about to be depleted population of their soon to be pacified colonies.)
  2. Polyp-Ship tumbling out of control. The central AI-ganglia have been laser-pithed by a Tcho-Tchoid raiding party that have quickly extracted certain undisclosed items before departing the now ruined polyp vessel in almost unseemly haste. (30% chance of a doomsday device counting down on the bridge of the ship.)
  3. Moon Beasts coasting along beneath the surface of a frozen trans-solar moonlet. They are caught-up in their massively multiplayer dreams and won't immediately notice intruders or visitors, so long as they are discrete and non-damaging. Interfering in the games will cause squads of shiny metal constructs to mobilize in defense of the moonlet. They may also have more than one large-scale Oneiric Lens Array located within one or more of the squat gray domes that are just barely covered by the gritty ochre-streaked ice of the outer crust.
  4. Roll once on the Space Ship Sized Monsters Table.
  5. A flock of Primordials on a trajectory for some near-by solar system where they probably have incredibly ancient ruins lying around the place, unless the Shoggoths or other forces have erased them or co-opted the site(s) for their own ends. (20% chance to extrapolate the flocks previous location. That system might be worth taking a look at, especially since the Primordials have left it for now.)
  6. Mega-Shoggoth in force-sphere accelerating to transluminal speed. (base 10% to catch its attention as it passes by.)
  7. (1d4) Yaddithian Light Envelopes. They make no attempt to communicate. Who is inside?
  8. Vegetusian Saucer only recently released from a protracted period of unplanned burial underneath deep ice on some frozen back-water planet. They are lost. Their systems are crashing and they may crash again, if they're lucky enough to survive that long.
  9. Roll twice on the Ship Sized Monsters Table. The two entities are most likely caught-up in mutual hostilities.
  10. (1d4) Fungal Battlecruisers (TS p. 49) float forlorn and mangled, surrounded by a massive cloud of outgassing atmosphere and spores. The core cerebropods are defunct or too severely damaged to control any of the sub-systems. (5D20) Brain Cases are scattered in the immediate vicinity, as are hundreds of the cell-scrambled corpses of Mi-go infantry and marines. (Mi-go will arrive to investigate the situation within 1d4 hours).
  11. Black comet surrounded by a thick haze of green ice, dust and other particulates. Sunk deep into the core of this icy mass is a hidden colony of Yarakian-descended abhuman degenerates who worship the Gray Flame drive-core of a Thyophian Saucer that has been slowly corrupting their bloodlines for over a thousand years of interplanetary isolation.
  12. Nomad Ship (TS p. 48) carrying a poorly secured triad of 'talking monoliths' recovered from an Abbithian Tesseract-ship. (Monoliths take over the Nomad's internal systems within 2d4 hours.)
  13. Serpent People sleeper-ship. Mostly intact.
  14. Drifting wreckage of a Pnakotian vessel with a faulty Zin drive that is still wildly unpredictable and unstable. (30% per hour of either a Ghast 'Black Suit' encounter, or a Dreamstate Overbleed.)
  15. An ancient hollow-asteroid Nug-Torch Drive colonization ship of the Vhoorli-aligned K'n enroute to a far-distant destination with an army of Lomarian, Voormi, and Gyaa Yoth'n troops in criogenic suspension. The decadent faction won out over their rivals more than a thousand years ago only to have the outer hull of the command-section rupture due to sabotage. No one is left to control the ship, nor to awaken the sleepers.
  16. Cthughiim Flameship roaring along through deep space, leaving a caustic, cinder-strewn trail of smoke in its wake. (50% chance they attack upon detecting another ship).
  17. Coral-bound domes just from the lumpy mass of a clumsily-reshaped clump of solar-mirror-welded asteroidal debris blown-out to form a lop-sided bubble-shell and filled with sea water. This is a Deep One ship, and a very old one. (20% chance of a slow leak and potentially disastrous ice formations around the drive systems. They may require assistance or rescue...)
  18. A vast, writhing mass of pseudopods and shimmering bubbles that houses a non-Euclidian mega-arcology made-up of thousands of disparate closed-ecologies, some of which are recognizable. (40% chance per hour of someone aboard this living cloud of a macro-ship attempting to make contact.)
  19. A Broken World driven out of its orbit and cast adrift through interstellar space.
  20. Military Transport (TS, p. 47) from one of the petty empires operating off of one of the few remaining human-dominated worlds along the rim.

6 comments:

  1. @Porky: We see HPL's admonition as a challenge, and it provides a bit of inspiration for some of the Terminal Space stuff that we're building.

    We want to take things beyond the paltry, stale confines of the old attitudes and out-moded approaches that have held this sort of thing back for too long. Fear is not something to hold back the Undefiled Knowledge, and all the forbidden secrets don't mean crap once their cover is blown and people can begin to really, truly think for themselves. The old monsters were lame, so HPL invented new ones. Turn about is fair play.

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  2. I've got some travelling options that you might be interested in! A few spells & psychic abilities for a sunny Monday morning! Terminal Space & Human Space Empires stuff coming in the morning.

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  3. Here's Your ticket Now! http://swordsandstitchery.blogspot.com/2011/04/corridor-of-infinite-doorways-spells.html

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  4. @Needles: Looks like you've been very busy indeed! Interesting stuff. Those spells are serious old school weirdness of the best kind. Very deranged, possibly dangerous, and definitely not for the weak of stomach...

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  5. Great table... Great piece of art... and a fantastically revealing quote from Lovecraft. It's tough to pin down the messages in his works, but that quote encapsulates the resignation of Humanist/Enlightenment failings in the face of the vast, cosmic, and timeless.

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