When I read "Ride hybrid ships through astral space connecting planets and galaxies..." I thought: "Damn, sounds like my own setting." However I've just read "quantum-entanglement communicators" in EP and thought again: "Damn, that's in my setting as well."

And before someone gets mad at this "quantum-entanglement communicators", my setting's Space Fantasy, not SiFi. I just took a mediaeval Fantasy world and gave it about two millenniums of technological development (and some millenniums towards the other end of the timeline). - Oh, and it's based in a binary star system with eight - more or less - habitable planets and moons.

Im my setting dragons and demons were originally brethren of two differend saurian species fighting each other. Dragons created elves out of humans and the demons created orcs. No one really knows, who or what created the dwarves out of the human race. When the dragons finally won, they exiled the demons to the remote otherworlds. I fact, the near otherworlds are just some form of 'hyperspace' and the remote otherworlds are other, alien planets. Some of them home of the fairies and gnomes. About six millenniums later humankind tries to reverse engineer some lost tech of an ancient and vanished species (maybe related to the Stone Trolls and crystalline Ho'dims) that allows to transfer artificial constructs (like space ships) into the near otherworlds, exclusive to mages until now. As all life's conected via the near otherworlds one can travel from world to world within them.

Moved to appropriate forum.

Thread murderer.

I keep hearing this in Gollum's voice in my head... Creepy.

Oh , yeah, it was definitely me. Couldn't have been Doc byte going "quantum-entanglement communicators" and such.

....



Grinder say something. Save the thread.

What? Me? C'mon, everybody loves a system-wide, near real time computer network! Kind of plugging into the Seattle LTG from Olympus Mons Base and the longest dealy's the way down from an earth orbital comsat to the earth receiving station.

Wait...instantaneous communication aren't there some horrible munchkin-like things that does the the laws of physics?
I know I've seen how, its just of question of remembering how it worked.

Yes it does, because any kind of faster than light travel is actually time travel, so "instanteneous" communication will be communication through time, and, given the right circumstances, you will be able to receive messages and react to them before the events prompting someone to send you the message will have happened, from your frame of reference.

And yes, this all will lead to some horribly complicated, mind screwing mess of reality, which is why most SciFi authors just tend to do the simple thing and just ignore it (if they're even aware of such problems)

Yeah. Uhm. Well.... we're working hard to get everything done and shit. And I don't think instantaneous communication is possible within the setting.

*shrugs* Imagine Star Wars without the Holonet. Who cares about physics?

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This quantum-stuff's just a minor concern in my setting where spaceships travel at a rate of 1 local AU (1.5x times the distance Earth - Sun) per day.

That's actually kind of odd. Don't the denizens of the 8th World use Astral Space for interplanetary travel? If so, and it's at all common, why haven't they developed a means of using metaplanar shortcuts or other similar techniques for communication? If any game setting could get away with it, it's one that relies on magic...

As I said, I'm not sure. Gonna check it and come back here then. Maybe Dammi or Jason chimes in in the meantime and gives us more detailed insight and stuff.

What 8th World are you talking about by now?
Still Battlerun or Ecplise Phase or whatever that was?

Equinox. See the first page. It's a game that will hopefully come out sooner than later taking place at the dawn of the 8th World, complete with interplanetary travel, piracy on the astral seas, and whatnot. At least that was my initial take when I read the blurbs.

Equinox.
OK, at least i knew it was something with E <.< . .
Sounds a bit like WH40k to me from the setting.
Or is it not all that grimdark? O.o

so what are these "demons"? Like Horrors or something?

I keep hearing the redrum kid from The Shining. Him and that.....finger.

Time for a bit of thread necromancy then.
*clear throat*
Arise! Arise chicken! Arise! ARISE!

If one who has not had the pleasure of saturation with the bounty of Earthdawn and pre SR4 content, could someone fill me on on the following?

For the sake of comparing the threat level of the Horrors and for that matter the Inveae, how do they stack up to say the Elder Ones from Lovecraft or even the Chaos Gods from Warhammer 40k?

Are they purely terrestrial bound threats? Can they appear anywhere there's a sufficiently dense mana-sphere? Or is their presence distinctly intertwined and limited to the scope of the Gaiasphere?

They're pretty much the epitome of Lovecraftian horror, just with less octopus. What follows is a hodgepodge of random tidbits about them.

According to the dragon's mythology, they essentially created dragons and basically all other life on Earth. That seems to be the myth that Earthdawn embraced as the truth, and there's lots of support for it. But whether or not it's actually true is anyone's guess. They're immensely powerful spirits from the deepest of metaplanes, and they can only break through to our world when the mana levels are high enough to support them. Bug spirits/invae are from a much closer metaplane, and their arrival tends to act as a measure of how close the Horrors are to breaking through.

They have a wide range of power, from greater-than-even-the-greatest-of-great-dragons to annoying little watcher spirits. The more powerful ones each have their own niche and preferred form of perversion/menace/attack. Some love technology, some love to seduce and corrupt, some love to just fuck with your head, some love to go on killing sprees, etc. If they infect a metahuman, they lose the ability to express themselves artistically or creatively, and you can detect them by asking them to do something as simple as dance, sing, knit, or even recite a poem.

In a nutshell, they're what we'd call demons and encompass pretty much anything horrific you can image. Whether they're a distinct lifeform of their own, or the creation of metahumanity's nightmares is up for debate. But during every mana cycle so far, they come in full force and wreak havoc upon the earth for the majority of each cycle.

Apparently in Equinox, metahumanity actually wages war and successfully defeats them rather than going into hiding like they did in the 4th (and presumably 2nd) World. But while the brunt of them have been defeated/forced to return to their metaplane/whatever, some are still around having a bit of a laugh at our expense. At least that's what I've gathered of it. And since they're very much a threat in Equinox, which is a setting that spans solar systems, I'm inclined to believe that they can be supported anywhere that astral space can be accessed. Considering that Equinox's interstellar capabilities are dependent entirely upon the astral plane, chances are that means pretty much everywhere.

Sorry for not being more coherent or exacting. There's a lot of information out there, and I'm not exactly the most eloquent of writers. But hopefully you'll get the picture.

Good hodge podge.

They require a certain level of mana to get through, but once they're in "our" astral space, they rquire less to survive. Since space is supposed to be some kind of manawarp/void (depending on which edition you're in) one of the ideas to dodge them was to go into space. In the Equinox setting, they mentioned evolution, so maybe they found a way to bridge the gap.

The horrors are the suck because they feed on negative emotions (hate, pain sorrow,etc) or just feed on every damn thing in sight depending on how powerful the horror is. Some of the real basic ones are just nasty beasts with big scary teeth.

No, the feeling of the setting wil be different: Equinox is centered around playing outcasts from society, much like SIN-less shadowrunners. Not much focus on questions of faith, but struggle for survival, rebellion, fighting Horrors, exploring new worlds and shit like that.

Damn this is getting interesting.

Well what im wondering about is how the classes will play out. Ofcourse I can imagen the mage classes being relitively the same, aside from the fact that casting spells in the viod of space will be tricky. But I was thinking the mundayne classes will either be converted to something similar or just stay the same:

Rigger- Ship Engineer
Face- Captian
Driver- Pilot

Whos to say this isnt gonna be almost EXACTLY like Serenity/Firefly?

I didn't get the impression that the majority of the game would be taking place on ships.

Aside from exploring new worlds, this does sound more or less like WH40K.
If you are not limited to playing an imperial, nothing says you have to have any faith at all. And in WH40k, basically EVERYBODY is either a nobody worthless drone or an outcast.
Survival in the Hive-Cities is practically civil war between the gangs and the police too. The horrors would be the lesser daemons of the powers of corruption.

As for the horrors evolving to bridge the gap of the great big beyond the mana shallow void of space?
infect someone, watch them go off into space, go into hibernation, wake up somewhere else where there's enough of a sphere to support you.
have fun.

Never thought that Dark Heresy was intended to play outcasts from society and not members of the Inquistion (shadow ops, sure but no outcasts). Silly me.



It's up to you how you run the game - it can take place entirely on ships, but also at asteroids, space stations, habitable planets, the Ravaged Worlds...

It honestly sounds like a much cooler version of D&D's old Spelljammer campaign setting to me. Which I absolutely loved in concept, but hated how they went about it.

Agreed on both. Spelljammer seemded like it should be cool. But once you got past the idea of magic-powered ships, everything else was dumb.

Not even Nigel Findley could save it.

For one, the mechanics will probably be a lot nicer.

Much thanks for answering my questions

They're not outcasts, but they live as such: on the fringe of the Imperium, without the possibility to integrate because of who they are and what they have to do.

Equinox Savage Worlds Playtest



Click here to download the playtest file!