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

Cognitive Conditioning

Cognitive conditioning is rewiring the brain to follow inhuman logic. Those subject to it can understand alien thought, but find themselves estranged from human society. Your cognitive conditioning rating reduces difficulty increases arising from alien thought on a 1:1 basis (this cuts both ways: aliens of the appropriate type have an easier time reading and controlling your mind). A character can roll wits or intelligence + cognitive conditioning to encrypt their thoughts, increasing the difficulty of attempts to read or control their mind or predict their behaviour.

Characters with high levels of cognitive conditioning behave oddly in the eyes of others. A character whose cognitive conditioning rating exceeds their manipulation + subterfuge pool will have difficulty concealing their strange perspective on the world. Perceptive characters or Mind 2+ can reveal it even well-hidden conditioning.

High levels of conditioning are often associated with other mental aberrations such as phobias, compulsive behaviour or social disability.

• 1: You have a talent for lateral thinking puzzles.
• 2:
• 3:
• 4:
• 5: You were raised by Cthulhu.