1d20 Microworlds

Dan mentioned how artifical gravity would lead to Super Mario Galaxy and I can't stop thinking about it so here's some teeny tiny worlds.

The Messinger-Dawoud KV/4 Gravity Engine 

(A-grav, gravity net, downwell generator, etc.)

 

A honeycomb of metal tubes and a blackbox, attached to your ships jump drive. Expensive but not crushingly so. Scales exponentially the more  you stack together, in area and strength. 

 

Almost certainly reverse-engineered from posthuman tech but Messinger-Dawoud isn't telling.

Microworlds

Why have a station or a ship when you can traverse the void on a tiny personalized planet?

1. Delicate golden filigre, layer upon layer, surrounding a woven coccoon that spins it anew as the outer layers boil away into vaccuum.

2. Intricatly carved wooden puzzle. Each layer increases in difficulty. Desperate debtors crawl across in vaccsuits, feverishly working to unlock chests of air and supplies.

3. Transparent orb, filled with a freshwater ecosystem. Waterproof false sun at the center, shrouded in oxygenating plants. Amphibian servitor-creatures croak in a choir across the comms.

4. Earth and stone and conifers. Thin atmosphere, alpine climate. Single 'mountain', populated by a lone shepardess and her goats.

5. Layer upon layer of books. Tunnels within carved by librarian-hermits.

6. Dirt, graves and bones. Shaped like a skull. Ring of dancing skeletons animated by wires. Coven of goth cyberwitches inside- quite friendly once you get past the cobwebs and corpses.

7. Giant hermit crab. Snips at passing ships.

8. Enormous flowers arranged around a central core of glass. Bee-drones hum in a swarm. Wealthy owner LARPs as a fairy queen, has had psychosurgery to make herself more whimsical.

9. Ball of sand and rock. Some large cacti and some lizards. Lone gunman in a vacsuit plays the banjo mournfully. Half-heartedly raids passing ships.

10. Very large CRT monitor. Cassette-cultists make their home inside. Hum of ozone, dust everywere. Watch out for static shock.

11. Dodecahedron of beds, each containing a slumbering wizard. The dream-world they inhabit is many times larger- passing spacers may find themselves lost in it when they go to sleep.
    

12. Collection of giant bottles, cocktail glasses and paper umbrellas. Zero-g globs of booze float in orbit.
    

13. Box-shaped collection of networked android logic cores, thick atmosphere protects from solar radiation. Narrow passages allow maintanence drones.
    

14. Spherical hedge maze, pavilions at each pole. Tea parties held on the hour every hour. Lots of rabbits and intricatly carved topiary.
    

15. Appears as a giant bread roll. Interior an industrial bakery, the android bakers have pastry-themed chassis.
    

16. Really big dog in a very large dog bed. Has a very large dog ball he wants you to throw for him.
    

17. Hamster cage. Different areas accessed by rolling in a giant hamster ball. You can walk but it'd be gauche.
    

18. Ridiculous brass contraption with no rhyme or reason. Pipes, tubes, valves and pistons go in all directions. Mouthpiece at the center- when blown the sound is indescribable.
    

19. Gigantic top hat. Interior contains a golden-lit ballroom, 24/7 parties and galas. Inhabitants wear long-nosed masks, black and white dress clothes. Speak in impenetrable references and gossip.
    

20. Giant sphere of crocheted yarn. Interior hollow, lined with pillows, blankets and softly glowing lamps.

 

 

25 Alt Histories

 I love alternate history, despite the fact that the majority of the stuff out there kind of sucks (apart from that one short story where the Titanic survivors start a floating pirate city). As usual I have missed the boat entirel but whatever here are my Efforts

1. The Diggers ideology takes root in Leveller groups; occupation of land and non-payment of rents rapidly evolves into a popular uprising
   
2. One of the nuclear bombs accidently dropped on north carolina by the USAF detonates
   
3. Makhno remains in Ukraine, Bolsheviks successfuly repelled by the Black Army
   
4. IRA sniper assassinates Margret Thatcher as she flees the Grand Brighton Hotel
   
5. Opium Wars end in british defeat
   
6. Pokemon anime is censored, Digimon becomes most popular childrens cartoon of its time
   
7. Sun has a binary partner star with orbiting bodies
   
8. Indian forces defeat the East India Company at Gwalior
   
9. WW1 continues until 1920; leads to general mutiny by all armies involved
   
10. Ned Kelly is never caught
    
11. Earths rotation is half as fast
    
12. Roswell confirmed as genuine alien probe crash-landing  
13. Disneys original vision for Epcot is successfuly realised
    
14. Great Apes evolve abilty to hibernate
    
15. Ottoman Empire conquers most of europe in late 1400s
    
16. John C Lily teaches a dolphin english
    
17. Zealandia never sinks
    
18. Sergei Korolev dies in the gulag
19. US fakes the moon landings
20. Oswald the Rabbit remains disneys mascot
21. Constantine the Great never adopts christianity
22. Council of Nicaea fails, no biblical canon established
23. Anastasia escapes russia, goes into exile
24. Spartan victory at the Battle of Thermopylae
25. Definitive evidence of a yuletide gift-giving entity is obtained
    

 

 

 

Monster Menu-All: Mothership Edition

 

Obviously inspired by Skerples posts. Hopefully this will help if you ever find yourself in a situation where your players are demanding you let them eat the alien horror. Or if you want some random flavours for street food on distant worlds.

Normal Alien Meat 

For when you've killed something strange and decided to eat it, and it just so happens to have compatible biochemistry. 

Roll on the table below for how edible your meal is. Proper hygiene, cooking it well, a successful gastronomy roll etc. give +1. 

  

1d10

1-2           Disgusting. Body Save or suffer from food poisoning for 1d10 hours. Gain 1 stress

3-9           Adequate. No special effect.

10            A culinary sensation. Advantage to heal if you are resting, and relieve 1 stress.  

 

Obviously this only applies to compatible biologies. Dont try to eat silicon- or ammonia-based lifeforms.

 

For taste and texture, roll twice, or just once and read across horizontally. You can also use this for any foods you find on frontier colonies, strange street stalls, dubious fast food shops, etc.

1d25            Texture                                                 Flavour                                                    

1                  Crunchy                                                 Salmon     

2                  Squelchy                                                Beef 

3                  Crusty                                                    Pork 

4                  Stringy                                                   Gammon    

5                  Fatty                                                       Escargot 

6                  Buttery                                                   Chicken 

7                  Lean                                                       Clams 

8                 Tough                                                     Jackfruit 

9                 Oily                                                        Grass 

10               Flaky                                                      Pineapple 

11               Spongy                                                   Mutton 

12               Gelatinous                                              Crickets 

13               Gristly                                                    Vinegar 

14               Rubbery                                                  Tofu  

15               Juicy                                                       Soy Sauce 

16               Oozing                                                    Brown Sugar 

17               Coarse                                                     Abestos 

18               Sinewy                                                    Drywall 

19               Supple                                                     Yoghurt 

20               Oddly Familiar                                       Your mothers cooking 

21               Dense                                                      Metallic 

22               Caustic                                                    Vaguely Chemical 

23               Papery                                                     Squid/octopus 

24               Tooth-breakingly hard                            Ashes 

25               Irregular (roll twice)                               Weird (roll twice)

 

Actual Monsters  

If your players try to eat these then idk what to tell you.

 

 

Alpha Gaunt

Taste: Rubber soaked in acid, pure ethanol and petrol. Meat hums unpleasently and writhes in the corner of your vision. And your mouth.

Chefs tip: Exposing the meat to a Jump Drive for a month gives a +1 to the roll.

 

1           Hyperspace Intrusion: Your body warps into a Dead Gate. Crawlers, death worms and worse pour  through. Good luck.

2-4      Wormspawn: Parasitised cells hijack your body. Once a day, 1d10 Death Worms emerge from your mouth. You take 1d10 stress, 2d10 damage and must save or Panic, nearby PCs must make a Fear save or take 1d5 stress.

5-8      Shrivelled: Your skin pulls tight, turns grey and leathery. -10 to speed and body save. Take a sanity save each day or suffer a compulsion to sculpt.

9         Gaunt Hunger: As Shrivelled but gain the need to subsist on raw flesh, industrial chemicals, alcohol and fuel. 

10       Gaunt Apotheosis: Gain the Telekinetic Drain attack. Gaunt creatures will treat you as an ally. +15 to Speed and Combat. Your fingers can elongate to long, molecular-thin claws. Whenever you travel by Jump drive, there is a 40% chance the ship will be becalmed in orbit of the Dead Planet.

 

Ypsilon 14 Specter

Taste: Gristly, oily and stringy, strange tingly feeling. The meat of a predator. After hibernation, it is starving- there won't be enough meat for everyone. Wash thoroughly before the meal, wear protective clothing.

Chefs tip: If cooked, its Normal Alien meat. If consumed raw, roll on the table below. 

 

1        Goo'd: You didn't clean it properly! You die slowly over the next day or so, dissolving into yellow goop.

2-8    Consumption: Parts of your insides are dissolved. You don't die, but you will need serious medical care for the rest of your life. Body Save halved.

9        Hibernation: On the point of death, you can create a cocoon of yellow goop that will heal you (once). Doing so takes all the energy you possess, and you will emerge starving and with permenantly halved HP.

10      Predation: Alien healing agents remake your body. As Hibernation, but you also gain a chameleonic skin and become an obligate carnivore.

Blue Comet

You can't eat stone . If you manage to chip a piece from the comet and swallow it without looking, roll on the table below.

1        Blue Cancer: You die an extremely painful and visually interesting death, as blue tumours erupt across your body and eat you alive.

2-9    Obsession: You become terminally obsessed with the Blue Comet (see Moonbase Blues)

10      Sapphire Majesty: You can move in zero-G as easy as swimming. Your eyes and mouth emit blinding beams of Blue Comet light. Comet cultists worship you. 

Deep Androids

Taste: Pale imitation of pork, foul chemical aftertaste. 

Chefs tip: Synthflesh tends to melt like plastic when cooked and release toxic fumes. For best results consume raw.

1       Imitator: That's not an android, thats a human. +1d10 Stress and Bends

2-4    Connection: MONARCH scans your body as the meal moves through you. The brainscan it takes it bizarre- obsessed with food and the act of consumption.

5-7    Infiltrator: You consumed an infiltration Android. +1d10 Bends as the knowledge of its mission washes over you. Memories not your own fill your dreams. 1/day, change your face to someone elses.

8-9    Soul Eater: Gain the ability to consume brainscans. Doing so allows you to recall their memories perfectly, but take 1 stress when doing so. Androids and AIs regard you with hostility and suspiscion. 

10     Deepmind: As Soul Eater but gain no stress. Your appetite extends to human minds too, which you can consume straight from the brain. You can sense sapient beings at a range of 20 meters.

1d10 Ship Spirits and curses

'It ain't hard to keep them happy. Uusally alcohol, cigs and food; and don't let the place get too dirty. Try not to spill too much blood around, or it might get a taste for it.'

-Common spacers knowledge on appeasing a ships spirit.

When a ship becomes a home to its crew, infused with their dreams and lives, a spirit will inevitably manifest. Whether they generate sponteneously or, like spacers, mill about at docks waiting for a likely vessel, is the matter of some debate.

1d10	Appearance	Offerings
1	A wizened figure, the size of a small child, with a beard of soot and embers. Clad in a cloak of reflective foil.	Hard spirits and cigarettes left outside the engine airlock.
2	An elongated fox with 8 legs, empty eyes that glitter with stars.  Tail turns to pale flames at the tip.	Something meaty, ideally real but krill or soy is fine.
3	An extra cryopod, glass misted over. Faint figure seen inside, curled into a ball. Wet footprints appear in the night.	An extra place at the galley table, a locker left empty.
4	Thin, 8-Armed man, coal-glasses and a bushy mustache. Squats in life support, arms snake through ventilation.	Herbal tea poured into the water recycler and burnt incense.
5	Stencil of a fat golden fish, swims along the walls of corridors. Appears by itself or in shoals.	Drawings, paintings and fried fish curry.
6	Enormous 8-tailed rat, fibre-optic strands for hair. Steals small trinkets from crew and passengers for its nest.	Gigabytes of junk data loaded onto USBs and intentionally lost.
7	Unknown. Cloaks itself in a pile of blankets woven from rubbish and lost things. Enormous eyes, four pupils.	Shredded items of comfort- jumps, gowns, onesies and slippers.
8	Squat iron furnace, moves on lion-clawed legs. Carved face alternates between human and animal visage. Lives inside the reactor.	Spent jump cores. Coal. Used clothes and furniture.
9	Disembodied head in a vascuit helmet. Trails thick hair to the floor.	Empty oxygen tanks, prayers sharpied on.
10	Vulture-like head and neck protrudes from a heavy radiation suit. Leaves feathers everywhere.	Credits and shiny things. Flesh from those who die aboard the ship.

Sometimes the relationship breaks down, due to neglect, carelessness or ignorance. A ship spirit can place a curse on the crew, which will remain until the spirit is either appeased or evicted.

1d10	Curse	Appeasement
1	Becalmed. Thrusters produce no movement, jumps cannot be made.	A living sacrifice, pushed out an airlock or thrown into thrusters.
2	Water turns brackish and foul, pipes begin to rust. Vents clogged with hair.	Purification. Crew must fast for a week, meditate and thoroughly clean the vessel.
3	Glitches cascade through systems, impossible to use any terminals or workstations.	Votive candles and written prayers arranged around computer core and terminals.
4	Food rots, no matter how well preserved.	A pint of blood from every crewmember, smeared on the exterior hull.
5	Freak accidents become impossibly common.	Statues and icons of the spirit, placed throughout the vessel.
6	Temperature fluctuates, between freezing cold and scolding hot.	Feed 90% of food on the ship to the reactor, leave just enough to survive.
7	Credits or valuables aboard the ship turn to dust and rubbish.	Sacrifice items of sentimental value to the spirit.
8	Interior corridors become a maze. Takes hours to get from room to room.	No clothes or modern technology for 10 days. Crew must smear bodies with engine soot.
9	Large, aggressive rats and insects fill walls and swarm across the ship.	Spirit takes a crewmember's body for a joyride on a station.
10	Sleep interrupted by howling, banging, scraping at walls and raucous singing over the intercom. Rest is impossible.	Bacchanalia! Music, dancing, wine and song. Liquor on the walls and debauchery in the bunks.

The Carapetti Collection: d12 Anomalous Media

Throwing my offering onto the table, inspired by these other posts

 ...

 Materials recovered from the basement of Vera Carapetti, currently missing, presumed dead.

  1. 'Episode ##' - An unaired episode of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond  is Unbreakable, recorded to a USB drive. Over the course of the episode, the character of Okuyasu incapacitates and buries the rest of the cast alive whilst under the effects of an enemy stand (not shown in the episode). The final scene, in which a dirt-covered Okuyasu is shown sitting in front of a nondescript apartment door, runs for a total of three hours before the episode ends.

 

2. 'Scale 06' - Cello score scrawled on the back of a small flip notebook. Begins as a standard G Major scale, however goes higher and lower than exist in standard musical notation, with unknown symbols representing the new notes. When played, musicians allegedly develop alien hand syndrome in their bowing hand over the following few days.

 

3. 'House of Thorns' - An unpublished sequel to Jane Eyre, detailing the Jane and Rochesters life following the events of the novel. After falling into a sinkhole in the garden and experiencing a disturbing vision of heaven, Jane is haunted by nightmares and insomnia. Jane's mental state steadily degrades and she begins to inflict an escalating series of psychological tortures on Rochester. The book ends abruptly with a bright light illuminating the house as it rises into the sky.

 

4. 'RossisSleeping' - A dvd containing the fifth season of Friends. In every episode the character of Ross is clearly dead, having suffered a throat wound. The other characters seem oblivious to this, acting as normal. The corpse visibly rots as the season progresses, with flies, rats and vermin seen feeding on it at several points.

 

5. '7thInternationale' - A hand-held video camera of unknown make, containing 157 hours of footage depicting the final days of a failed revolution in Detroit, Michigan. All footage is filmed inside an apartment building that appears to be under siege by forces the revolutionaries refer to as 'yellowboots'. The footage ends as the decision is made to detonate the building using stockpiled explosives.

  

6. 'Map of the Stars' - A fold-out map depicting a crude rendition of Los Angeles with the houses of celebrities marked with golden stars. None of the names refer to currently living people, instead matching the names of missing Slovakian children from the years 1980-1985. Following the map does not lead to any houses, instead one will find themselves led to a variety of sewer access manholes.

 

7. 'LaraAlone_v8.4.exe' - A copy of Rise of the Tomb Raider, in which players find themselves unable to progress beyond the introductory mountain mission. The climb continues indefinetly, with Lara eventually forced to kill and cannibalize her companion as she runs out of food. Longest recorded play time is 18 hours, by which point the mountain is surrounded by a black void and Lara is suffering severe frostbite.

 

8. 'My Summer Holiday' - A series of videos posted by an anonymous user on 4chans /wsg/ board, in which an unseen woman falls down a tunnel. Over the course of the series, the tunnel walls change from natural rock to concrete to carved marble. The videos averaged 5.4 hours in length, and 12 were posted in total. In the last uploaded video, a faint red light can be seen far below, as well as the sound of electronic dance music. 

 

9. 'Hippo Fanciers Monthly' - A magazine, apparently published in Mexico in 1970. Aimed at  professional Hippo farmers and competiton breeders. Photos inside depict several currently non-existant breeds of the animals, as well as details of 'desirable traits' such as tusk length, skin taughtness, agression and speed. 

10. 'Recipe for Harold' - A recipe for Beef Wellington that extends to 24 A5 pages, and calling for ingredients such as broken glass, corpse ash and wool. Handwriting changes style several times. Margins contain a rambling story in which 'Harold' is force-fed meals in an effort to achieve apotheosis.

 

11. 'Magdalen Street Murders' - Footage observing murders taking place in the kitchen of several different houses, shot from the back garden. The murders follow the same pattern- a figure wearing a Burger King mask emerges from beneath the table and attacks with a set of garden sheers. An unseen commentator then offers critique and a numbered rating from 1 to 10.  

 

12. 'Strobe Sun' - A large crowd gathers on a beach at night, singing hymns in an unknown language. This proceeds for 2 hours, until the sun begins to rise. As it does it begins to flash rapidly, similair to a strobe light. The crowd begins to scream and suffer seizures as a blurred figure emerges from the waves.