Servants of The Stars

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

Terminology:

• Outsider: a thing, possibly elder, from the Deep Umbra.
• Ka Luon: the technology-wielding servants of the Great Intelligences, as named by the Void Engineers who first encountered them, after some sounds they made.
• Great Intelligences: the powers of the Deep Umbra behind the Visitors/Ka Luon.
• Visitors: another name for the servants of the Great Intelligences.

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

Backgrounds

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.

Equipment

Many of the technologies of the Intelligences produce effects which would require outright static or linear magic for terrestrials - a sign of their superiority. However, while these weapons are always thick with Dimensional energy, they are not fetishes in the usual sense. They do not contain a seperable alien spirit (unless otherwise noted) and are not subject to countermagic, spirit or otherwise (spheres can, of course, oppose their effects).

However, like anything alien to its local paradigm, these devices can break down. Anything in a context where it is clearly vulgar requires regular maintenance to retain function. For each day of active use this requires an Intelligence + Hypertech roll (difficulty 5 + 1 per previous roll) to keep working. If left unused, the interval is increased to 1 week.

Characters trained in a terrestrial Hypertech paradigm can use it to interact with Ka Luon technology once they have at least three dots, though particularly strange devices may still impose increased difficulty.

Plasma Weaponry

Guns that shoot bright green bolts of plasmid juice. They deal aggravated damage, but the shots are easily traced due to their visual appearance.

• Pistol: 6A, range 50
• Rifle: 8A, range 200
• Cannon: 12A, range 250

Illuminators

Many stories of alien encounters report bright white lights followed by nothing, or only confused memories. These are encounters with Illuminators. Illuminator light is actually a vector for delivering unprocessable alien information directly to target minds to overwhelm them. Illuminators project a diffuse white beam (+1 difficulty to dodge) that deals psychic bashing damage soaked with Wits + Enigmas. Mind shield successes and dots of Eldritch Insight act as hardened soak against this damage, as do dots in the vampiric discipline of Dementation. Lack of preparedness may increase soak difficulty.

Illuminator beams can penetrate thin layers (an inch or less) of light materials like wood, but are stopped by metal and similar dense materials. Metal protection to the head can provide bonus soak, from +3 for a fully enclosed helmet to +1 for a tinfoil hat.

The information and imagery imparted by illuminators is chosen for its incompatibility with terrestrial habits of thought and cannot normally be retained. Even successful soaking with Wits + Enigmas just enables the mind to keep functioning normally while it disposes of the garbage input. However, mind, time, or preferably both spheres could recover some of the information and perhaps discover real insight, as can skilled use of mundane abilities such as hypnosis or dream analysis. Those incapacitated by illuminators are highly suggestible and have difficulty retaining memories until the damage is healed (+2 difficulty on relevant rolls).

• Pocket Illuminator: 8B, range 25
• Rifle Illuminator: 12B, range 100

Critters

Spirits, strictly speaking, are the denizens of the near umbra. The Outsiders native to the deep umbra are a different thing and may use some or none of the same rules. However, as the Outside has begun to move closer to Earth in the Space Age, mages may more and more encounter spirits corresponding to or born of interaction with the new visitors, which will use the usual rules.

Generally speaking, Ka Luon 'life' can be affected with the Life sphere, albeit at +1 difficulty unless the mage is familiar with their biology. Ka Luon structures and tools can be affected with the Matter sphere with a similar penalty. Other forms of supernatural alteration such as the Vicissitude discipline or Glass Walker gifts should also encounter appropriate penalties, and of course sleeper biology and physics strain to comprehend what they are seeing.

The experience has been likened to dealing with a copy of something created by someone who has only heard a description of the original.

Plasmid

The plasmid is one of the basic forms of the servants of the Great Intelligences. Plasmids take the form of clusters of bubbles filled with a volatile, highly corrosive substance with an ambiguous relationship to fluid dynamics and a hostile relationship to physical matter. Outside the plasmids it rapidly evaporates in a crackle of paradox unless in a friendly paradigm. Plasmids usually glow green, but other colours with special properties are known.

Plasmid fluids are a source of energy, yielding 3 quint per health level to a mage able to extract their plasma safely. If not extracted safely, or the plasmid otherwise takes damage, the plasmid bursts and explosively releases its contents, dealing 1 die of aggravated damage per health level in a radius of 1 metre per health level. The smallest plasmids have 1 HL, while the largest might have 10 or more.

Grey

Small ones are stupid servitors, tall ones are intelligent leadership types.