Psi-Wars Monstrous Preview -- The Horrors of the Flesh: the Gaunt

While working on the Saruthim, I had to construct the things with they fought and defeated.  I already had "Gaunt monsters" from back in Iteration 6, but I wanted to update them for Iteration 7.  Alas, I was unable to finish them on time, and I've decided to put most of the "bestiary design" on a back burner for now, so these won't be finished soon, nor wikified for awhile.  However, I thought those interested in the Saruthim might like a sneak peak at the things that the Saruthim fight, thus I've put what I have below, with some of the half-finished material removed.  This is "take it as it is" material.

Necro-Psionic Technology: The Legacy of the Dead Art

Necro-Psionic Technology

The Ranathim mastered the Dead Art and used it and its synthetic flesh to craft unliving biological machines that fed off of psionic energy to empower their uses. This technology gave them the edge they needed to forge their empire, but also had drawbacks, both in slowly twisting and corrupting their users, and in the intense specialization and skill needed to train necrocrafters. Thus, after the Ranathim Empire fell, most of its Necro-Psionic technology fell with it. Even so, some practitioners of the Dead Art still exist in the Galaxy, and many Ranathim relics still use this technology, or the living warmachines created by the Ranathim Empire still roam the decaying remnants of their great empire.

In essence, Necro-Psionic technology is bio-tech with a highly specific focus (synthetic flesh or dead flesh), and shaped with a specific technique (Necrokinesis). In a sense, it’s similar to “Variant Biotech” from BT 30, except that we use psionics instead of magic, and the Dead Art has a very distinc thematic flavor. Anything, from plague engineering to human engineering to bio-tech gadgets and bio-mods can be made using synthetic flesh or dead flesh and necrokinesis. The following represents a catalog of “common” technology as inspiration.

The Dead Art: Necrocrafting

The Dead Art

Alternate Names: Anala Ivasur, Anala Ikafri, Dapomarvan, Jiburre, Necrocrafting

When the great armies of the Monolith marched on the nascent Ranathim Empire, they brought with them the secrets of Necrokinesis, a dark science gained from their deep understanding of Broken Communion and twisted psionic energy. The Ranathim stole a portion of that secret, Thanatokinesis, which resonated well with their powers of psychokinesis and psychic vampirism. Using it, one of their great mystic-technicians, Thamet Kafri, created synthetic flesh, vat-grown flesh that responded to the dark prompting of Thanatokinesis, and she mastered the art of embedding the animating force of Thanatokinesis into the synthetic flesh, or even into corpses, to create permanent half-living servitors. She also mastered the art of reshaping dead flesh, to give it a property she wanted.

This great breakthrough allowed the Ranathim to create strange, biological machinery that they crafted into war engines, monsters and soldiers that they used to defeat the Monolith. With the fall of their empire, Kafri’s art largely vanished, as much of the universe considered it and its creations abominations. Nonetheless, the ability to conquer death offers tantalizing possibilities and the relics of Kafri’s experimentations still litter the part of the Galaxy where the war was fought the fiercest, and she created one of the races of the Galaxy, the Gaunts (or the Tarvathim). It is, thus, the rarest and most controversial of the Zathare practices.

Patreon Post: the Gaunt (and the Dead Art preview)

When the Ranathim fought their great and terrible war with the "Monolith," they stole the secrets of Necro-Psi (and more here) and used them to forge an army of half-living constructs made of "synthetic flesh" that they called the "Tarvathim," but the rest of the Galaxy now calls the Gaunt.  The forbidden secrets of their construction have largely been lost (but not entirely!), and without their masters around to rule them, the hideous Gaunt have dispersed throughout the galaxy, struggling to eke out an existence in a galaxy that recoils from them in disgust, and when one of the ancient "True Tarvathim," immortal constructs built at the dawn of that terrible war, arrive in a community of the Gaunt, their lesser kindred flock to them, looking for leadership.

The Gaunt are a new PC race option, one deeply tied to the Ranathim, with extreme survivability balanced by unpleasant appearance (not to mention smell!) and psionic susceptibility.  The True Tarvathim are a new PC race option for players who want to try something ancient and terrifying, or for GMs who want to unleash an ancient horror upon the galaxy.

Both (and a Dead Arts preview, for context; it'll be available on this blog at the end of the month) are available now to all $3+ patrons on my patreon.  If you're a patron, enjoy! If not, as with all previews, these will eventually come out, but if you want to see them now, I'd love to have you.