Scourges Of The Galaxy

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: Scourges Of The Galaxy

 

My local store unexpectedly ordered Scourges, and I bought it in today's little exercise in credit card maximisation. I also bought two Dresden File books (I know, I know, that train left the station so long ago it went out on steam) and Robin Lane Fox's newest on the "Homeric moment--" Travelling Heroes. I don't know what to read first, but I have read enough of Scourges to be impressed. Lots of flavour text and fun. The Church of the Infinite Dark in particular was not what I expected, and I'm glad to see a scheming mind cop and the Great Equatorial Boneyards.

[Lord Liaden]

Re: Scourges Of The Galaxy

 

My primary interest in the Star HERO setting materials has been in fleshing out the modern-day Milky Way for my Champions games (what with Champions Beyond on indefinite hiatus). From initial promos this book didn't sound like it would suit my needs, but after reading some remarks about it here on the forums I'm beginning to think it has enough useful material to be worth checking out.

[Lawnmower Boy]

Re: Scourges Of The Galaxy

 

....And read it.

I'l leave reviews of this vastly entertaining and even useful supplement by Jason Walters to others, because I'm not feeling the ambition to organise my thoughts that way on this sunny weekend (for me) morning.

The problem with SF RPGing, apart from delivering a compellilng overall setting, is that the adventure possibilities are almost too open-ended. What, exactly, are the heroes going to do that will generate exciting role play?

Will they be politicians and assassins interacting with the highest ranks of society? Will they crew a tramp freighter? Explore space? Pit themselves against the ruins of a lost civilisation on an alien world, or a Big Dumb Object? Inhabit the demi-monde and travel to a distant planet to execute a hit? Or will it try to build in openness, allowing adventuring parties to veer from one subgenre after another? And that is what SotG does.

SotG is laid out like previous pulp and fantasy rogue's galleries, with sections on masterminds, organisations, and individual menaces.

The masterminds are three: Archimandrite Lanzol Callixtus is science fiction's anticlerical tendencies taken to 11. The primate of the major religion of the planet Polyphemus (the crater planet of World of Empire) is also the local mob boss of this major nexus of interstellar trade. He's dissolute, decadent and dangerous, a good run-in for trading/smuggling/criminal RPG parties.

Next is Geiger Cray, psionic policeman and supremacist conspirator (since Felice Landry is one of his henchwoman, I'm guessing that this is a tribute, but my memory is not yielding the original.) He is linked to the ruling clique of planet Hermetica and to the mysterious Omega operatives of the Mind Police, but his conspiracy is much more subtle than either of those. PCs may run into Cray in a psi-heavy space opera campaign. In that light, it is a pity that we're given little guidance in what the Omega operatives might be like. IIRC, Terran Empire makes them out to be quasi-superheroes, although my personal preference woudl be that James Schmitz-style Agents of Vega. The Omegas are not part of Cray's conspiracy, but contact with them would lead to their official boss.

Or, PCs could meet Cray as one of the many individuals circling Empress Marissa's court, with agendas of their own.

Rather like Senator Leopold D'Estaing of the Kinzareth Imperium, the third mastermind, a master villain who relies entirely on his NCI, although his bodyguard is impressive and his cohort of blackshirts make for a good mob. Like Cray, he seeks more influence over the empress to promote his sinister, xenophobic agenda.

 

King Narch is head of the Xenovore Fleet. Although not the overall commander of this great pirate organisation, he is the head of the largest single fleet within it, and the ambitions of this cannibal king of wild space are proportionately grand. He intends to restore a (more civilised) Xenovore Empire. Both the lieutenants detailed, Captain Matsumoto Hapsburg [sic] and Captain Haru!'alan disagree with his plans, but have no alternative vision to offer. Habsburg is the half-brother of Empress Marissa and is in hiding from the factions within the Security Service that purged her family and brought her to power. Haru!l'alan just likes being a pirate. He even has an eyepatch.

The Xenovore Fleet may be more dangerous than it looks. It is linked to the rebels on Tetsuo, and while of course it is only Chris Rowley's original version of Tetuso that hides the Starhammer in its equatorial depths, the hidden resources of the Great Equatorial Boneyard are still significant.

 

Tateklys is a Malvan adventurer and the head of the Hzeel Outfit. The Grays, having reached the limits of what anal probing could teach them, have become one of several interstellar mobs detailed in the book, and given that some PCs will play criminals, it is nice to shoehorn them in here. That said, Tateklys can play a rather grander role in a campaign as Star Hero's resident Q tribute, carrying them off through space and time and challenging them in various ways. (One wonders about his connection with Galactic Champions' Examiner.)

The PCs could, in fact, easily find themselves participating in the destruction of the Hzeel homeworld. As much as Tateklys enjoys the company of the short-lived Hzeel, he probably wouldn't care.

 

Chapter 2: Groups

First, the Church of the Infinite Dark will be familiar in its outlines from previous encounters with Mr. Long's take on the nature of Qliphotic penetration. That's all I will say, except to add that this is not one of those covert bands of cultists who hunt PCs through spaceports because they desperately need a new human sacrifice. The influence here is more Space Hulk, but there are a great many ways of taking this little concept.

Not suitable for minor readers, though neither is the Callixtus section above.

The Clone Mob is another of those underworld outfits I mentioned. They're all clones of the original founder, with packages to make them a little unique, and a particular take on interstellar crime. Or, in other words, they live in the bug-nuts crazy niche.

Pelga's Fist is a pirate ship converted over from a major warship, rather like Habsburg's command. That makes it dangerous, and the crew is extremely unpleasant and lethal, so don't expect to save your hides by surrendering. The crew includes the first of several Zurite immortal psis, but with access to "nomad Zurite" ATRI 12 tech. It also has Cyberlock, a cybernetic killer created by unknown entities of identity to be determined by reference to a PC's backstory. He's the first of several killing machines in the book who could be ported over to Champions or even the right kind of Dark Champions campaign. Finally there is M537, a software copy of old Mechanon himself. He's somewhat demotivated, apparently because at some pont he's lost the killallhumans.exe subroutine and had it replaced by tormentallhumansifit'snottoohard.exe. Still the connections back to Mechanon and forward to Mechanon 3000 are interesting, to say the least, and M537 seems like a much safer route of exploring the possibility that there's a user_doc. pdf still stored in with the core programming.

("Golden Hunters of Malva: FAQ

.....

Q: What do you do if your Golden Hunter suddenly develops a fixation on destroying all organic life?

A: Turn it around and lift its shirt. You will see a switch. If it is set on "Evil," toggle it over to "Good." If not, call the User Support Hotline...."

 

The last mob is the "Psindicate," dedicated to using the superior psi powers of its members to....get very rich. In contrast to the approach taken elsewhere, the members of the Psindicate detailed here are not its ruling Seven but the local organisation on the frontier world of Karilath IV. It has a frightening mob boss, the oversized Mister More, an even more frightening Nan enforcer (with a little tweaking, the perfect Migdalar servitor) the Varanyi master thief and potential social revolutionary Senorat the Silent, and the cyberkinetic and former explorer of 20th century Earth, BEM, the immortal Zurite.

Chapter 3, Independent enemies, brings it all together.

The underworld connection and all-purpose snitch Fast Eddy Adaraz of Tau Ceti V can get your character into and out of trouble with anyone from Callixtus to Tateklys himself. His plot-enabling abilities to know everybody and everything are statted out as powers, a good example for anyone who needs a plot device of this kind, although a Hzeel pimp would probably stand out a little in Hudson City.

Lucas Bellair is that...uhm, guy who gets in Indiana Jones' way. His backstory is a little fleshed out. He's the guy who figured out the origins of the Xenovores --or, rather, plagiarised it from an obscure, decades-old paper. Grogan Cartagena is a Mon'dabi with much the same agenda but rather more muscle to back it up. Double H is a hotshot Xenovore smuggler pilot, just the guy to deliver the goods.

Doctor Maximilian Landau has a backstory of skullduggery in Imperial politics, but his current location and function is to involve the heroes in a replay of Black Hole --if I remember the title of the Disney sf entry right. His Leviathan has a deliberate Moby Dick vibe, and perhaps even a "Worm Weather" schtick, as phantoms show up all over space, strangely prefiguring whatever it is that will happen when he finally plunges through the great black hole Leviathan is orbitting.

Doctor Emilio Moreau is one of..that family of Moreaus. As we know from World of Empire, he somehow ended up on the waterworld of Trovatore a very long time ago, but chose to make his home in the remote and frigid waters of New Kerguelen Land, where he is involved with local anarchists. Moreau is, however, past his prime as a mad scientist mastermind, confined in his old age to hobbyist puttering. Too bad for everyone that a Moreau's idea of building a sailboat in the basement involves growing a Xenovore dreadnought! I personally have difficulty imagining anarchists or libertarians running a dreadnought effectively, but, hey, get it in the water first, then worry about what comes next, right?

Personally, I've never been happier than being out on the open road at dawn on a sunny summer morning, knowing that I was first on the road. I have an Icehenge-inspired hunger for stories that turn interstellar space into that road, and tell the story of people who got out first (and covered their tracks, as otherwise they'd just be boring explorers). That hunger is tickled but not satisfied by Moreau's enigmatic backstory. I'm sure we'll hear more about it eventually. And get a more satisfying resolution than Kim Stanley Robinson's goofy "the memory is a funny thing" resolution of Icehenge.

Darryl Revok and Blackjack Thorson are both, in their own way, guys to populate dark alleys with (and good candidate writeups for porting over into other milieus), but Thorson has the advantage that he can be played for laughs as a sort of Dog the Bounty Hunter in space.

The same cannot be said for Lord Zorm, Varanyi master agent masquerading as a midlevel bureaucrat in the Varanyi legation on Earth. He's the toughest psi written up so far in the Age of Empire, and, more importantly, another of those figures around the Empress. While not nearly tough enough to penetrate Cray's humungous mental defence, he is definitely a player in the Game.

 

And that brings me to the thread that links the various genres of Star Hero campaigning. By consistently buildilng bridges between these subsettings, Jason Walters has given me a vision of an integrated campaign. There's other ways to take this, but the point is that those bridges allow the campaign to shift from high politics to the underworld to unexplored space and back again.

Something like this:

When the clue to the location of that alien psionic amplifier is discovered on Tetsuo, I foresee a chain of events. The PCs will not be left out, because Tateklys will not let them be. Treachery in the excavations on Ravanche will make it difficult to just claim the object, but they can still win the pirate auction on Venwordien, at least with Habsburg's help. If they try to smuggle the object into the Empire itself, they will lose it on Polyphemus. Mob connections will get it back. And then, more sensibly, they can hire Double H to deliver it to Earth. Lord Zorm is willing to use it; but that's a trap. Hopefully the PCs have built bridges to the Psindicate. (If not, they can do so now in a night of terror directed at the Clone Mob

will be the coin of favour they can pay.)

Punch through Cray's defences, and his plans foiled. Will the Empress be freed from his mind thrall, or will Matsumoto Habsburg ascend the throne?

(Season with Xenovore organic dreadnoughts, Black hole passages, Qliphotic monsters, &tc to taste.)

[Armitage]

Re: Scourges Of The Galaxy

 

I just picked up a copy today at my FLGS, joining the chorus of "didn't know it was out."

 

I may be mistaken, but looking at the write-up of Lord Vorpal it seems that his ship's deadly "Snicker-Snack" weapon has the power to...do absolutely nothing.

 

35d6 Major Transform (standard effect: 105 points) Type G star into a black hole, All or Nothing.

The same sidebar lists a Type G star as having 104 BODY.

A successful Transform would requires 208 points of effect, which is impossible for a 105 point Standard Effect with All or Nothing.

[input.jack]

Re: Scourges Of The Galaxy

 

I just got it today, having not even heard of it before. But Im gearing up for a space game, and...well...you know...the PCs need people to shoot! ;D