Otherspace Revisited

[JT Swift]

For “Otherspace” I kept the plot identical but changed the context a lot. Alternate universe’s are to “Star Trek” for my Star Wars game. So the hyperspace misshape sends them to a nearby dwarf galaxy [thank Essential Atlas!] that is known to be filled with black holes and that no scout has ever returned from.

I also changed the name to Darkspace instead of Otherspace. Astronomers call it this because all the stars in this dwarf galaxy are black holes and nobody knows why.

Oh and it wasn’t a hyperspace accident. Both the Celestial and the PC’s ship had been sent to Darkspace because of an Imperial spy who tampered with the Alliance MasterNav database. [the idea that two different Rebel ships could both have the exact same accidental one in a million malfunction within the space of a day or so boggled my mind]
The spy saw it as a convenient way to get rid of some dangerous rebels and some prisoners who knew too much.

The plot unfolded beat for beat in the identical manner. With the Charon being the exact same critters they always were. The only thing I added was a reference to them sending the Darkstrider on ahead to the Known Galaxy to prepare the way for their invasion. [This to foreshadow my eventual running of the “Darkstryder Campaign”]

Oh and the red Death Mist works using the Force. So space suits do NOTHING to protect you!
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- J.T. Swift

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[ZzaphodD]

I dont really get what you mean by 'Star Trek'...I hope Dr.Spock and the Enterprise wont appear more than for comical releaf (of course its your campaign, Im just kidding around).

Ill probably use a similar approach if I cant come up with a more logical reason for this happening (for example the ships jumping to/from a specific location in space where this anomaly exists).

Given the awful artwork (and similar idea) of the Charon I will switch the Charons to 40K Tyranids, which seem even more 'world consuming' down to almost the bacteria level. That will also get rid of the rather stupid 'death cult' and instead just make them more like a wandering locust swarm.
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[JT Swift]

I LOVED the Charon as a culture. It’s the only reason I even bothered with "Otherspace."

Their Death Cult tied in perfectly with a warped version of my view of the Force [see my Will of the Force article under Gamemastering]. If life transforms into the Force upon death and you see the Force as a god, then it’s possible that a suitable sick group might decide that to feed and worship their god they must kill EVERYTHING.

And they'd be right from a certain point of view!
I like my villains to have comprehensible POVs, and finding (an even poorly thought out) justification for universal genocide was too cool to pass up!

[Of course the point the Charon are missing is that more life creates more Force. So if you kill EVERYTHING the Force will stagnate and cease to grow. But they are a wacked out cult - so this flaw seemed permissible to me.]

I'm toying with throwing out the entire Vong invasion from my games continuity and replacing it with the Charon. I PROBABLY won't do that - but it is very tempting.
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- J.T. Swift

For Everything about the TARDIS check out
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For all things Gallifreyan check out
http://meshyfish.com/~roo/index.html

[ZzaphodD]

[Whill]

It took me a second to figure out, but when he said "to Star Trek" he meant "too Star Trek". Meaning Star Trek has alternate universes and other dimensions of existance galore and the Otherspace adventure is too much along the lines of Star Trek's more sci-fish type of space opera. When I was a kid my 1E adventures did venture into Trek territory on occasion, but I always thought there was really no reason for the Charon to be from another dimension. They could have come from a single star system (or a satellite galaxy) and didn't have access to hyperspace technology until it came to them. But that's not why I never ran the Otherspace adventures.

I have to agree with ZzaphodD at least on the artwork. It really is awful, and to this day bad artwork can turn me off from using an entire species in my game. The other thing that turned me off about them the whole bio-technology thing. That idea never sat well with me. When the New Jedi Order came out I realized the Buzzin Chong were just an amalgamation of the Charon and a couple other EU species I don't like, and that did not endear me to them.
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[Whill]

In my original setting (The Whills Nebulae Cluster) there is a binary system with a star and a black hole, and I thought it would be cool that one or more of the species that live there worship the black hole as a god of death while the star is (or at least was) worshipped as a war god...

And being a fan of mythology, I always thought it would be cool to have a centaur species that is nore horse-like in its humanoid upper-half. And being a fan of anthropomorphic animals, I've always liked the Verpine species but it bothered me a little that they weren't true insects because they don't have 6 limbs. So I first created a similar species called the Verinex ("true insects") which look like Verpine but have an extra pair of arms. The Verinex are the base species, and in my game the explaination for the Verpine are they were originally a genetically-engineered offshoot of the natually two-armed Verinex worker-drones, created to be a more intelligent slave/warrior race to battle a rival fellow six-limbed species that are more equine centaur-beings called the Kentauroi (but instead with 4 legs and 2 arms) who evolved on the same planet orbiting the star in the same system with the black hole. In retaliation, the Kentauroi stole the gene technology from the Verinex and not completely understanding how to use it created their intended slave/warrior race, the more humanoid two-legged equine species called the Svivreni. But the plans of the master species back-fired when the two slave species joined forces and rebelled against their masters. The war escalated to point of the two enemy master species completely destroying their homeward, but large enough populations of each of the 4 species escaped to survive, and the most members of the two genetically engineered slave-races eventually went their separate ways to colonize the Roche asteroid field and Svivren. The surviving members of both original six-limbed species remained in the Whills Nebula near the reminders of their former warrior ways: an asteroid field where their homeworld was, orbiting the god of war which is orbiting the god of death. Thousands of years later, the Verinex and the Kentauroi are generally peaceful now and have achieved an uneasy truce (and both still have a tendancy to look down on four-limbed species). Yet they are still in competition with each other as they mine the dead remains of their world, tragically searching for lost treasures, resources and really anything that might have survived from their once-beautiful and whole planet...

Then I was inspired by the reading about the original concept of the Borg of Star Trek being insect-like cybernetic beings (where a Borg Queen and the Hive-mind make more sense but this would mean they wouldn't assimlate humans). Then I thought there could be a perveres minority Verinex cult that has been warped by their love of technology into willingly mutilating themselves with the addition of non-Medically ncessary cybernetic enhancements. They've recently been on the rise, converting innocent Verpine by taking advantage of their child-like fascination with technology, first enticing them with the addition of two more arms to bring them into the Hive ("The better to manipulate technology with, my dear.")...

Then I was watching Spider-man and I thought back to the spider-like Charon death cult that worshipped a black hole. As ugly as the Charon artwork is, I started liking the idea that they have the 4 legs like the Kentauroi and 4 arms like the Verinex, and other arachnoid attributes. Maybe its alright that the artwork is bad because in this case they are just ugly creepy-crawly bad guys anyway (not a PC species). And in my life when I have marveled at the incredible diversity of life and the uniqueness of planet Earth in the evolution of universe that spawned it, I have thought how strange it is that life, and the universe itself even exists. I do not personally subscribe to the belief that the Big Bang and everything after it, especially the formation of life, was only a mere accident of circumstances, but I can imagine a culture of an extremely alien species that could develop into warping the awe and wonder that includes the question of "Why are we here?" into to the dark idea that "We shouldn't be here and all life is an abomination." So the death cult whose mission is to return all life and then itself to the Void isn't really that much of a stretch, at least not for space opera. Villains don't have to have complex motivations in Star Wars. "What if he doesn't survive? He's worth a lot to me" and "Everyone must die" completely work!

So now I'm thiking it would be cool to work in a version of the Charon into my game too. Maybe they lived in a nearby planet that orbited that star in the binary system, and when the Verinex/Kentauroi homeworld was blown to bits it ejected the Charon homeworld into orbit around the black hole. Maybe their world was pretty much ruined and that's how the survivors formed the death cult mentality after realizing that they shouldn't have survived. Maybe they thought the god of death (black hole) spared them for the specifc pupose of their mission to destroying all life before they dimished into the Void themselves. The PCs are scrounging for work and have to take a lackluster asteroid mining job when they stumble across the Charon and unleash them on the galaxy! But I'm still not sure about the bio-tech so I may still eliminate or alter that.
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[Whill]

[JT Swift]

I just ignore the bad artwork.

I like the idea that the Charon had wiped out all life in their universe. Its made them REALLY scary. Like even the Empire couldn't stop them. But [as mentioned] I didn't want things to feel like Star Trek. [I just got done running Star Trek every week for 9 years. I want my Star Wars game to feel very different from that.]

So I decided that wiping out all life in a satellite galaxy was still pretty damn disturbing. Especially if they destroyed every single star too! That's why I didn't just make the Charon some group in Unknown Space. I wanted the epic feel that they had totally sterilized everything they could and lack of decent hyperdrive was the only thing preventing them from doing so to the known galaxy.

I did liked the Vong a lot. But I like the Charon more. I'm still gaming in the Rebellion Era, so I've got YEARS to make up my mind about the Vong issue.
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- J.T. Swift

For Everything about the TARDIS check out
http://www.whoniverse.net/tardis/

For all things Gallifreyan check out
http://meshyfish.com/~roo/index.html

[garhkal]

[schnarre]

...I didn't mind the Charon at all as a culture base for a race, & their bio-tech had enough limitations to make it ultimately less effective than standard technology.

...Don't get me started on the Vong though. I didn't care for the NJO period much at all! I either replaced them with the Tyrannids from WarHammer40K, or used my own re-working of them. Which I've started listing on another site, if anyone's interested (but who really likes the Vong? lol).


...Sounds like a good game you had JT! 8)
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[ZzaphodD]

The 'Nids are making an appearance instead of the Charon. They are very much alike anyway except the Tyranida are not death-worshiping, more like a humongous interstellar locust swarm consuming all in its path. They too have the biotech, even more evolved than the Charon. Another bonus is the multitude of weird creatures with different weapons and tactics. Also, their 'psychic' powers can be translated into a weird form of the force.

Whats not to like?


Or this....

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My Biggest Beard Retard award goes to: The Admiral of course..