The Pillared GardenThe Search For Crafts That Time ForgotYour landing capsule rumbles and shakes and you fret over your precious cargo as the heat shield peels away, bleeding off velocity rapidly. It's been hours since you ejected from your ride here, and it's not gotten any less cramped. You'd be throwing up now, but you got it all out when you woke up after a busy night of drinking yourself half to death with your motley crew of associates in an impromptu Holy-Fuck-There's-No-Turning-Back Party following a more-or-less-simultaneous standard Holy-Shit-This-Is-Really-Happening epiphany.
You are about to land on what the resident Frog People call Kwarrem. You vastly prefer this name over the Simple Galactic common name of Death Hole, as catchy as it is. If the numbers the shady Spider captain gave you are accurate, you should be landing slightly off the coast of its only supercontinent, Kwar.
You get to find out how wildly optimistic this estimate was in not very long, as the turbulence eventually subsides, you become subsonic and eventually your parachutes deploy, and in what feels like way too long you make a soft landing upon the waves. Desperate for fresh air, the most anxious of you pops open the hatch.
It's a sunny day on this part of Kwarrem at least, but you don't see even the slightest smidgen of land in any direction, or even the characteristic browning of the water you were told to expect in the vicinity of the Great River's delta. Just blue waters every which way. You're glad the effort of kissing your ass goodbye might not have gone to waste, at least.
One of your crewmates turns on the distress transponder. Or, rather, the backup distress transponder, the main one seems to have malfunctioned. That done, you sit here and reflect upon your wild ambition here. You were going to be the dream team! The ones who would venture into the depths of forbidden Kwar, unearth its deadly secrets... study them, learn them... manipulate them. You were going to return home as legends,
kings,
GODS, wielding the tools that the ancient Frog People used to usher in the glorious, almost entirely forgotten First Galactic Age!
For now, though, you draw straws just in case. The one who forgot that the longest straw is actually the losing one (as settled during Serious Time in your Holy-Fuck-There's-No-Turning-Back Party) will be the first to get eaten in case nobody comes to get you.
Wait. That
was the rule, right? You're starting to have second thoughts from the looks your crew is giving you.
Welcome to Kwar, the Pillared Garden, where technologies beyond your wildest imaginings lie buried in the ruins of lost millennia and collective minds of the resident Frog People, and you're just the Person to find them! Expect trouble and transpersonism to ensue in the wild, woolly and probably not at all natural landscapes of Kwar, and for the galaxy as you know it to be reshaped by your research!
Or, well, the closest thing to research your education allows anyway. Craziness turned out to be a more important criterion for being included on this illustrious crew.
The die used is a d12, with 1 and under being terrible failure, and 12 and over being disturbing success.
For the sake of utmost fairness, the first five to post a complete sheet will get in. You may reserve a spot for 24 hours if you really want to take your time with all these exquisite choices. The rest will go on a waitlist, to be introduced when a brave explorer meets an untimely end at the hands, claws and vicious tongues of horrors too dreadful to even properly dread.
Finally, players are expected to keep track of their character sheet during play.
Name: you can use either your original name, or your Simple Galactic name, whichever sounds better.
Gender: how this applies to you I'll let you decide.
Race: you have five choices, see Races spoiler.
Profession: what are you? A biologist? A programmer? A general? A janitor? Die rolls within your profession have your stat bonus doubled or set to +1, whichever is higher.
Stats: your four beautiful stats start at -1, and you can distribute 6 points between them at the start.
- Body: physical ability, great for lifting boulders, crushing skulls, dodging hazards and doing other things everyone told you an actual archaeologist doesn't normally do.
- Finesse: sneakiness, skulduggery, speechcraft, sharpshooting and doing quite a lot of things it would normally be illegal for an actual archaeologist to do.
- Mind: perception, wits, argumentation, how sharp you are when you can't sit down and brain undisturbed, what you'd imagine an actual archaeologist doing out in the field.
- Science: SCIENCE, what you would do if you were an actual archaeologist, but a little less rigorous and a little more improvised.
Wounds: you don't have any, so 0. You die at 5. Regain them by sacrificing time in which you would be normally doing SCIENCE!
Equipment: you have 200 dollars to work with in personal savings. Spend wisely. Or don't spend at all - maybe the feeling of having money is comforting to you. Jot down what you buy, and how much money you have left afterwards.
All races can do two things that no other race can, says functional race theory. This is in opposition to classical race theory, which assigns certain temperaments to certain races, as well as wide variety of cultural traits that collectively conveniently explain their current position in galactic society. They have a word for people who say that these days: racists!
Worm People
Can squeeze into very tight spaces.
Can regenerate quickly.
Barnacle People
Can hold on, clam up and never let go.
Can reach for 15 meters with their appendage.
Spider People
Can climb vertical walls and horizontal ceilings with incredible ease.
Can spin extremely sticky webs with some prep time.
Fly People
Can manage short bursts of chaotic flight.
Can find out more about things by licking them.
Shiny People
Can empathize with minerals.
Can instinctively position themselves to blind people with their reflections.
Smoke Bombs - $0.99 per bomb - for when you need to cultivate an air of tactical competence or make a dramatic escape. Also there's a big sale right now.
Bargain Meds - $1.99 per handful - they're assorted and have a wide variety of colorful shapes and passed expiration dates!
Defective Souvenirs - $4.99 per armful - the overripe fruits of a bygone age of galactic pop culture, you can find just about anything in here that you'd expect to line a bargain bin's very bottom, from magnetic tapes to novelty figurines to toys that all make the same noise to autobiographies of reality video stars, each with more entertaining defects than the last.
Tear Gas Grenades - $5.99 per grenade - like smoke bombs, except with a lot of pain instead of concealment.
Blasting Charge - $9.99 per charge - for your mom-and-pop asteroid mining operation on the go, these charges are guaranteed to tunnel through any rock, provided it's not on the list of 39 (and counting) known rocks it's been proven to have some trouble with.
Single-Shot Thermonuclear Pistol - $15.99 - rather than solve the problem of the pistols melting after the first few shots they decided to just start making them out of much cheaper materials, leading to the modern plastic single-shot variant, combining the best characteristics of a derringer and a dirty nuclear grenade.
Flashbangs - $17.99 per bomb - for when you need to cultivate an air of tactical formidability or make a dramatic entrance.
Frag Grenades - $29.99 per grenade - like flashbangs, except with death instead of disorientation.
Actual Meds - $39.99 per dose - probably much better for you than the bargain variety (at least you didn't have to sign a waiver at the counter for them).
Scary Mask - $49.99 - focus tested to produce maximal terror in psyches of varying degrees of stability.
Fish Mask - $59.99 - lets you breathe water with only a modicum of extreme discomfort.
Metal Helmet - $69.99 - will definitely save your life if you're the type to get into potentially lethal situations, and I think at this point we can say you probably are. Wear it at all times.
High-Powered Potato Cannon - $74.99 - by complete coincidence the modern potato, designed to be maximally ergonomic, has dimensions almost identical to the modern grenade. Just to be safe, though, it comes with a bunch of different-sized tubes if you happen to run into more unconventional tubers along the way.
Keg of Napalm - $79.99 - put on the included hose, point away from face and open up the pressure valve. Complimentary disposable lighter very much included.
Plasma Machete - $89.99 - stylish weapon and excellent bush clearing solution all in one package.
Exquisite Timepiece - $99.99 - comes with a 1-year-guarantee that what it's measuring is actually still a cesium atom, and a status symbol among space hobos like none other.
Sonic Boomstick - $129.99 - shoots and explodes things pretty well, and you can make it play whatever music you like as you do it!
Canister of Concentrated Nerve Gas - $149.99 - there's enough in here to kill a whole village within minutes, if you're man enough to unseal it. If you're not though, there's also a remote control available.
Designer Disease - $169.99 - a heavily subsidized mostly nonlethal ailment of your choice held within a flimsy paper envelope, with included immunization kit with 3 doses. Share with your friends and enemies alike!
Laser Street Sweeper - $179.99 - a fancy piece of consumer electronics that lets you burn people with continuous laser light, with the option to adjust spread and wattage (for lethal and nonlethal applications!).
Artificial Omni-Limb - $189.99 - replace a missing limb, get yourself an extra limb, or even use it as your personal limbservant - the Artificial Omni-Limb does it all.
Wild-Grade Power Generator - $199.99 - a portable white plastic box that you can feed with combustible material to produce electrical power for all of your marvelous tools. When powered, provides positive reinforcement for those terribly lonely nights you'll have after eating all of your friends.
Your Fortune Read - "how much ya got?" - what a probably wise, lightly irradiated, visibly shedding Fly Person saw fit to tell you in return for your spare change if you're the kind to give him any or the kind to trust hobos licking your palms.
Author
Topic: The Pillared Garden: A Miracle of Rare Device (Read 26032 times)