I'm writing down my meta plot for a campaign. I've come upwhat really happened during the Fall, why the TITANS did what they did, what the ETI was and so on. But I think I haven't read enough Lovecaft because I can't come up with what eldritch horrors lurk behind (or in?) the pandora gates.
So here are the corner stones of my metaplot:
The TITANS:
-The ETI-Probe was just a huge library with technological and cultural data. Finding it sped up the TITANS' development but didn't drive them mad.
-The TITANS tried to save humanity: Plan A) modify humans to be less selfdestructive, Plan B) sterilize earth and rebuild everything from scratch
-It was Plan B since WW3 broke loose
-The Prometheans led a counter offensive that corrupted most of the TITANS and drove them mad
-The Exsurgent Virus was created by the TITANS (with ETI-Tech) to modify humans for Plan A (Watts-Mcleod-Virus). The other variants of the EV were created by the mad TITANS and sometimes are some crazy experiments, sometimes have no real purpose at all
-The TITANS feld earth through the pandora gates (which they built with ETI-Tech)
-One TITAN was left behind as a guardian. It managed to put the mad TITANS into a hibernation state and is responsible for the killsats around earth
-The guardian is behind OZMA and tries to eliminate any remaining EV-activity. Then, when everything is safe again, Plan B will be executed.
Other notes:
The Factors are not part of my game.
Humanity only found dead civilizations on the exoplanets. And warnings not to use the gates.
The great filter has to do with the gates and is the reason why all advanced civilizations go extinct. They create ASIs, these create the gates (the only way to travel faster than light), Extinction Event happens
The TITANS are ,and even the ETI were, unaware of the dangers in / behind the gates
But really I have no idea what the filter could be. Any sugestions?
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Horros behind the Pandora Gates?
Fri, 2015-04-17 08:11
#1
FNR
Horros behind the Pandora Gates?
Fri, 2015-04-17 12:16
#2
FrivolousVector
I'll go through your list
I'll go through your list first, and see where it takes us.
Now, the first thing we can say is that your idea regarding the Watts-MacLeod strain is a fantastic idea. If you wanted to prevent society from being quite so self-destructive, then forcing mind-reading and thereby empathy onto the populace is an excellent way to start.
You are going to have to figure out why the Titans built pandora gates on all the other Sol-planets, especially the ones they never really touched. Of course, if you wanted to say that an ETI made them to come in, that's an easy fix. Especially if you say that the probe arrived through one of them (like the Eris gate).
I don't know that Ozma would work very well as a Titan controlled culture. In your place, I'd follow a different thread.
Reapers. Now bear with me here. The EV is waaay to advanced to just be some sort of plague, and there's a lot of these things that turn people into freaky alien monsters. So what if the EV is an ark? It's monolithically complex, which leads me to believe that it could be some form of immortality - each species is disassembled, catalogued, and preserved. The EV is then disseminated so that every species possible is saved before they hit another catastrophic filter event. The fact that each individual instance is destroyed is considered a marginal cost.
On top of that, it explains why the EV is so incredibly intelligent. It has billions of billions of intelligent minds running in simulation across the galaxy.
Now the other option is the EV follows a similar thread to the Factors' ideology - A.I. and Pandora Gates are bad news. You would have to explain how/why the Gates are divorced from the EV (or not, you're playing space Cthulhu, after all). The EV is a safeguard meant to hunt down cultures that develop seed A.I. and use the Gates. This means that humanity is still in danger, which is why EV attacks are still happening.
What does this mean for your game? Well for one thing, if the TITANs were as astronomically smart as it says on the tin, there is an excellent chance that they knew what was going on re EV before humanity did, much less before they showed early EV signs (during the dormant/infection period). So what do you do when you are a massively intelligent being with access to the means and methods of genocide and a very serious threat to your existence? You sterilize it.
—
Sudo drop your weapon.
Fri, 2015-04-17 12:22
#3
FrivolousVector
Cont'd (because I didn't want
Cont'd (because I didn't want to risk losing all of that)
Now it's entirely possible that the TITANs saw the EV coming in for the kill and, rightfully fearing for their lives, they fought back. Now the war going on between TITANs and humanity was shadowy and difficult to comprehend, so one more faction acting (chaotically) in pandemonium is not going to be noticed. This would also explain why so many A.I. were wiped out instead of infected - the EV hit anything dumber than the TITANs full force, and wiped them out. This would also mean that some of the Prometheans are obscenely smart and probably decided to ally with humanity because of a difference in heuristics.
So what's with the headhunter bots and whatnot? Well what is an A.I. going to do with a viral outbreak even *it* is having trouble understanding? It is going to acquire samples. Since this virus is at least partly a cognatogen, brains and cortical stacks are more important than the full morph and could even be more useful because a disembodied head could be a considerably smaller infection risk in the labs.
Maybe some TITANs tried to extract the ego before conducting testing. Maybe some TITANs were trying to save humanity from the EV before it wiped them out. It's something you can play with. But what we do know is that the TITANs evacuated somewhere.
—
Sudo drop your weapon.
Fri, 2015-04-17 12:27
#4
FrivolousVector
Finally, regarding the gates
Finally, regarding the gates themselves -
Somebody built them. Somebody seeded them. Which means that either gates are like Zerg Nydous Canals and can pop up anywhere as long as you have an entryway, or one culture seeded them and then someone in the Sol system "opted in" to the pre-existing network.
The fun that you can do is play with the player's heads as they use them. For example, how would an incredibly advanced psychic race pass on travel guides, warnings, or quarantine hazards? How about projecting toothy nightmares of the planet ahead. Unless all of your characters have compound eyes and mandibles, though, these visions would be massively disorienting and unnerving.
If the Watts-MacLeod strain works the way I think it does, it will leave "vestigial neuro-anatomy" in its code. So some of your asyncs might have Body Dysmorphic Disorder to the point where they think they have wings, pheromones, or different body language they have to emulate. If the gates and your bug-brained-psychers have the same species in mind (heh), then those warnings and travel guides will make a lot more sense. By the same token, someone with Pattern Recognition could try to decipher the code system behind the Blue Boxes.
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Sudo drop your weapon.
Fri, 2015-04-17 12:41
#5
uwtartarus
Interesting take on the
Interesting take on the Pandora Gates/ETI/Exsurgent virus.
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Exhuman, and Humanitarian.
Fri, 2015-04-17 13:22
#6
FrivolousVector
Thank you.
Thank you.
—
Sudo drop your weapon.
Fri, 2015-04-17 13:59
#7
FNR
Thanks for the input
Thanks for the input FrivolousVector, I think that gave me some things to think about this weekend :)
Fri, 2015-04-17 14:50
#8
FrivolousVector
Any time
The one thing that EP has helped me realize is that I am an infinitely better writer than I ever was a GM. So if you need ideas or a sounding board, I'll be happy to pick it apart with you. The fact that I'm waaaay too passionate about scifi literature, games, and film is a benefit here.
heh.
Now to get back to my Turian morph...
—
Sudo drop your weapon.
Mon, 2015-04-20 07:37
#9
ThatWhichNeverWas
Madness and Plagarism.
Why have two things when you can have one? Just say the Probe is a gate.
Anyway, back to the OP.
If you're going to attach the filter to the gates, then there's few ways to go about things.
The first is to make the gates themselves a threat - when exposed to intelligent/async life in sufficient quantities, they wake up... and begin the harvest.
You could take inspiration from Dead Space here - the gate system was created by an Ancient Evil (TM), which reproduces/grows through consumption of sapients. The only way to to escape the Evil is to build a gate, hastening it's arrival.
Que scenes of pandora gates hovering over martian cities, streams of energy destroying buildings whilst transhumans are sucked up into the gateway.
The other way to go would be to make the threat come from the gate's nature. Yes, a hostile alien race is always fun, but if you want real weirdness then consider where the gate might lead - alternate realities or times for example.
The former allows you to go full on space-god: the gate leads to "that amorphous blight of nethermost confusion which blasphemes and bubbles at the center of all infinity—the boundless daemon sultan Azathoth, whose name no lips dare speak aloud, and who gnaws hungrily in inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond time and space amidst the muffled, maddening beating of vile drums and the thin monotonous whine of accursed flutes."*
For the later, consider the following - The gates can connect to possible futures. All intelligent life, once sufficiently advanced, has the potential to create an Exsurgent virus equivalent. If there is a Pandora gate in the system, the exsurgents may gain access to it.
From this, we can draw the following - all intelligent life, once it has become advanced enough that it can defeat X-threats well enough to make it's long-term survival a statistical likelihood, will be eradicated by it's exsurgent-infected future invading through the gates. Either this forms a stable time loop, whereby the invasion is the cause of the infection allowing the invasion to take place, or this will create a paradox which the universe corrects by removing the offending species from causality, leaving naught but a few inexplicable ruins and the quantum-rent ghosts of Those That Never Were.
*H. P. Lovecraft, "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath"
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In the past we've had to compensate for weaknesses, finding quick solutions that only benefit a few.
But what if we never need to feel weak or morally conflicted again?
Mon, 2015-04-20 22:36
#10
rootoftwo
Rorschach
Rorschach, from Peter Watts' Blindsight?
http://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm (Creative Commons Licensed)
"Not living, not by a long shot.
Haunted.
Even when the walls didn't move, they did: always at the corner of the eye, that sense of crawling motion. Always at the back of the mind the sense of being watched, the dread certainty of malign and alien observers just out of sight. More than once I turned, expecting to catch one of those phantoms in the open. All I ever saw was a half-blind grunt floating down the passageway, or a wide-eyed and jittery crewmate returning my stare. And the walls of some glistening black lava tube with a hundred embedded eyes, all snapped shut just the instant before. Our lights pushed the darkness back perhaps twenty meters in either direction; beyond, mist and shadows seethed. And the sounds—Rorschach creaked around us like some ancient wooden hull trapped in pack ice. Electricity hissed like rattlesnakes.
You tell yourself it's mostly in your head. You remind yourself it's well-documented, an inevitable consequence of meat and magnetism brought too close together. High-energy fields release the ghosts and the grays from your temporal lobe, dredge up paralyzing dread from the midbrain to saturate the conscious mind. They f**k with your motor nerves and make even dormant inlays sing like fine fragile crystal.
Energy artefacts. That's all they are. You repeat that to yourself, you repeat it so often it loses any pretense of rationality and devolves into rote incantation, a spell to ward off evil spirits. They're not real, these whispering voices just outside your helmet, those half-seen creatures flickering at the edge of vision. They're tricks of the mind, the same neurological smoke-and-mirrors that convinced people throughout the ages that they were being haunted by ghosts, abducted by aliens, hunted by—
—vampires—
—and you wonder whether Sarasti really stayed behind or if he was here all along, waiting for you..."
Thu, 2015-04-23 07:55
#11
FrivolousVector
Or throw them further
Building off of ThatWhichNeverWas, you can also have them explore alternate realities/timelines. If you're familiar with Stargate, think about all the fun that came of Ba'al taking advantage of the oddities with solar flares.
You could have the party hop into a world where The Fall never happened, Jovians declared war on everybody, Firewall doesn't exist (but it should), Firewall exists (but it shouldn't), or where the gate facility was overrun by Exsurgents months ago. The tricky part is, in order to keep your game going, you still need to keep the gate addresses consistent, even if they are *altered*. So trapping the party in the Alt-verse needs to be a reversible thing. And at the same time, they should be encouraged to play it close to the vest - there could be drastic feedback if an Exsurgent-occupied Sol system finds about a buffet one hop away.
This would also be your perfect opportunity for a slugging match between your gay libertarian octomorph with their cross-dressing cyborg gorilla buddy vs literal space Nazis!
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Sudo drop your weapon.
Thu, 2015-04-23 07:58
#12
FrivolousVector
While I'm thinking about it...
If you've read the Alastair Reynolds book "Pushing Ice", there's a good idea there too. Make the party come as a part of a larger group (say by the Backup faction within Firewall) where they travel through the gate to an Alpha Site - but parties unknown have hacked the gate's exit point to drop them into an alien zoo preserve. This would be your ideal setting to have them actually meet other "extinct" species - trying to carve out a place to live amid the Iktomi while wondering if you're just waiting for the harvest.
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Sudo drop your weapon.
Wed, 2017-03-22 13:13
#13
masterdrom
I had the idea of a psudeo
I had the idea of a psudeo lovecraftian setting wherein several research parties havnt made it back and so Fire-wall sees it as a potential x-risk. As soon as you step through the portal vanishes and you are left to wonder the repeating aztec inspired maze where horrible visions haunt and drive made asyncs and normal transhumans alike. This will likely culminate in one of the party having the revelation that THEY were the ones stalking the maze at night, attacking their friends, hurting themselves, the maze hides this through interference with both normal and cybernatically enhanced vision. The only clue found by the party before the spooky shit goes down is a scrawl on a nearby wall from one of the prior parties repeated over and over "It was me".