Servants of The Stars

It's a game about working for the villains from XCOM, more or less. Not deathly serious.

CELESTIA

CELESTIA is the salvation of mankind. It is the human hand of the Great Intelligences that have taken notice of humanity, and reached out to us. From its cloaked orbital mothership, Mary Celeste, it performs their bidding as part of the infiltration and analysis and ultimately invasion of the Earth.

• Hoshisuna Zigi commands the Mary Celeste. She believes the spiralling disasters of the 21st century prove that mankind is incompetent to handle its affairs. Better to let greater powers take charge, and build her own better society in their garden. Escargot claims she was a Void Engineer commander whose ship was lost in the deep umbra.
• Escargot is the chief cognitive scientist on the Mary Celeste. Once a Virtual Adept, who made contact with certain powers after hacking into a radio telescope. Deciphering their incomprehensible codes - and responding to them - became her intellectual passion, which she still follows today as the bridge between the great minds of the Intelligences and our own limited comprehension.

There are also a number of field agents on the Mary Celeste, who travel to Earth by UFO to perform vital elimination, retrieval or other tasks.

Special Rules Material

Eldritch Insight

Characters with Eldritch Insight have an ability to understand the thought of alien beings. They may have been born with an unusual intuition, have acquired it through study, or had it forced on them by a traumatic contact. This is not just a catalogue of facts as represented by dots in Lore, but real ability to think different.

A character may add their dots in eldritch insight to attempts to understand or communicate with aliens, or to resist madness or trauma from exposure to them. They may also add it to attempts to conceal or encode their thoughts, whether in written text or even inside their own minds, and to attempts to resist mind control or other forms of mental influence. Of course, other characters with Eldritch Insight can see through such deceptions by applying their own bonus, to say nothing of the Outsiders themselves.

There are dangers involved. A magus may find themselves more vulnerable to certain other effects designed for alien minds, which are normally incompatible with human psychology and which the magus is unprepared to defend against. In such cases insight would decrease the dice pool that can be used to resist. Many a greedy scholar of the Outside has prided themselves on passing through an ordeal that left their colleagues drooling messes, only to find themselves trapped in a deeper thralldom.

Characters with Eldritch Insight are often obviously unusual to observers. If engaged with sustained interaction with another person (anything from hours to weeks depending on subject matter and closeness of interaction), a Perception + Awareness roll opposed by Manipulation + Subterfuge - Eldritch Insight can reveal that there is something odd about the character, and further Psychology or Lore rolls may indicate just what. Eldritch Insight is very often associated with mental aberrations such as phobias, compulsions, or interpretive difficulties like dyslexia or lack of empathy, but it is also often associated with remarkable faculties such as lightning calculation or even psychic powers.

Players should discuss with their storyteller how their character's unique outlook affects their behaviour and abilities. Eldritch Insight is a difference in how you think, not just a piece of book learning for scholars and cultbusters like Lore and Enigmas.

In Servants of the Stars, Eldritch Insight is useful for interacting with the Great Intelligences and their servants (called Ka Luon by some mages) but not essential as CELESTIA is present to act as an intermediary. In the broader context storytellers might require it for interactions with True Fae, the Wyrm, Autocthonia (or Threat Null if they have appeared), powerful umbrood such as Demon Lords, or the most bizarre Marauders and Malkavians. They may also require different forms of Eldritch Insight for each of these - grasping the cold heuristics and Bayesian balancing of Autocthon is not useful for following the logical leaps of the denizens of the Deep Dream.

• 1: You have a talent for lateral thinking.
• 2: You find insight in what others dismiss as nonsense.
• 3: You can grasp the mysteries of strange cults.
• 4: You were raised by strange cults.
• 5: You were raised by Cthulhu.