Backer Post: The Daemons of the Deep Engine

 

This turned into a longer project than I expected.  When I began Undercity Noir, one player wanted to play as a Zathan, a Ranathim Sorcerer, with connections to the Deep Engine, the monumental, necromantic infrastructure left over by the fallen Eldoth race. (Yeah, this is pretty "insider baseball"). But he didn't want to mess with Dimensional Induction, he went straight for a Daemonic Contact.  That is, he wanted one of the sentient servitors of the Deep Engine to act as his interface with the Deep Engine. Rather than risk exposure to the corrupting power of the Deep Engine itself, he'd ask the Daemon to do it.

"But I need some details on what Daemons are like."

Hence a month of working on this.  I dove into some of my weirder sources, and came up with at least three ideas.  Oh, but technically I'd need to cover military protocols, oh and more than one security daemon would be nice, oh and how did they handle transits between Deep Engine sites? Oh and I forgot Zathare daemons! Oh, and what about Corrupted Daemons!  And shouldn't you be able to fight them? And do you have to invest in them to interact with them? The result blew up from a quick three samples to a full treatise on the topic and ELEVEN daemons.

• The Carrion Lord: A surveillance daemon tasked with commanding, maintaining and building the the Ash Crows of the Deep Engine.
• The Cyber-Angel: A zathare daemon that exploits the Deep Engine to hack into physical computer systems, but has been corrupted with a messianic complex.
• The Knight of the Black Sun: A bored military daemon who once monitored the materiel of the Eldothic Union as well as commanded some its engines of mass destruction.
• The Lady of the Symoblic Donative: A vain daemon tasked with handling transactions and issuing Deep Coins.
• The Lethean Archivist: A data-collecting daemon that will exchange valuable information for memories.
• The Mysterious Stranger: A zathare daemon dedicated to helping sorcerers evade the security of the Deep Engine and, sometimes, to find love.
• The Slender Sentinel of Nightmares: A former security daemon now monstrously corrupted by the false Exarch, the Orphan King
• The Sorcerers’ Nemesis: A paranoid daemon tasked with securing the Deep Engine for zathan sorcerer infiltration.
• The Star Weaver: An overzealous daemon tasked with governing the transportation networks of the Deep Engine.
• The Unconquerable Wyrm: A zathare daemon that defeats the security of the Deep Engine through sheer, brute force.
• The White Magistrate: A corrupted security daemon once tasked with cleaning up necrokinetic overflow, but now uses its position to command the ghosts and dark gods that arise from broken Deep Engine sites.

I've been drip-feeding this to my backers for awhile, to give them a sense of momentum, but it's ready now.  You can read the entire work if you're a $3+ Patron and Subscriber. It clocks in at a bit more than 20k words. Once again, thank you to all my backers!

• Daemons of the Deep Engine (SubscribeStar)
• Daemons of the Deep Engine (Patreon)

Wiki Highlight: Federation Remnant Culture (Galactic Culture)

 The winner of this month's "Release the Balloon People" poll was Federation Remnant Culture, a lengthy document detailing the "standard" Galactic Culture of Psi-Wars.

I wanted to write it for a few reasons.  First, whenever I read up on a sci-fi game, I find myself at a loss as to how the world works.  With a fantasy setting, I assume it works like every fantasy novel ever written unless told otherwise (for example, I do not need to be told that taverns exist or how they work). For games set in the modern world, I can draw on real world experiences and cultures (and likewise, I can research historical settings).  But when it comes to sci-fi settings, I need to be grounded in how the day-to-day life works. Do kids go to school in Trinity: Aeon? What's a day of work look like in Transhuman Space? What does romance look like in Eclipse Phase? How do people dress in Sufficiently Advanced? And so on.

The answer to these questions in Psi-Wars are "pretty much just like you'd expect," and I wanted to emphasize that, to set the reader's mind at ease. Psi-Wars is to space opera what D&D is to fantasy, after-all, but I find it helps to be told that explicitly, so I don't have to worry.

That said, there are almost certainly in-universe things that tend to be very specific that players would like the option of name-dropping.  What TV shows do people watch in Psi-Wars? What drink does Space James Bond what shaken, rather than stirred? What game does a smuggler get caught cheating at? In principle, these don't matter: the character likes some TV show, the spy likes some drink, and the smuggler plays some game, and we can abstract this away (Current Affairs (Pop Culture), Connoisseur (Alcohol) or Gambling) but players often like to name-drop.  So the last section of culture mostly references these things and consists of a variety of names and simple concepts and some traits that a player might tie into them.

I released it as a draft to my backers rather than on the wiki because the real reason I wrote it was to settle on a baseline before I started writing Lithian culture, which is the next big project (and likely most important non-standard culture in the setting), and I wanted to know what I was contrasting it with, and what topics I should cover.  So I wanted that written up, and then once I had Lithian culture written up, I could compare, contrast and edit them to work better.  But once my backers overwhelmingly chose this as an option, I realized they're probably right: I can always go back in and edit Federation Remnant culture, it's extremely useful already, and it's going to serve as inspiration and a foundation for Lithian culture anyway.

So, I hope you enjoy it.  You can read it here.