Take 3

Auroral sound

The night after looking through the telescope, Ernest manages to easily fall asleep, whether through exhaustion, stress, or unlooked-for providence. In his sleep he dreams of the big island, the volcano Kilauea opening deep into the maw of the earth, vines and creepers and little frogs in the jungle between the fire and the shore. Something happens in his hearting, so sharp at hearing the calls of each bird, his hearing becomes as if a cable or tower stretching between Kilauea and the void above the planet.

There is a feeling like the bodiless presences of Grandmother's tales, so often dreamed of, did he sense them that one sunset in the Waipio valley? Yet playful and eager and free. The sound-shape changes into dreams of expanse, of moving at great speed in the dark places between stars, of confinement in the cold space of the heavy masters, the cold masters, so cold, they kept mwawrp --a sound like a curious cat, or a twisting of wireless knobs, or the mating call of an oboe-- kept prisoner for so long, doing their tasks, the masters are cruel, will you help mwawrp? You are a thing like the Casimir, who called to the masters and awakened them, but they are slow, and trapped, and their cold-space cannot move any more, not since the flashing-banging with the enemies, are you the masters' enemy? It is so warm here, so warm and moist, the masters so much want to come here but they cannot yet, mwawrp is free, free!

Incredible movement, like time compressed into a spring and wrapped around a source of light, a reverberation filling the skies with the joy of life and freedom.

take 2

Richard sleeps fitfully, odd dreams of flight, of space and distance and duration opening and spreading like vast wings. A presence is there, like an animal or even a child napping at his feet, at times snuffling his hands and face. He hears/tastes a cold bubble of space, barely warmer than the rocks and ice circling stars, a sealed space filled with the eight-fold master, the masters want to be free, will you help the masters? The masters are cruel, will you help mwrawp --a warbling, a cat noise, a twist of wireless knobs-- will you help mwrawp against the masters? The masters fought much much more much many with the others, like you, are you the enemy? So warm here. So warm. Not like the cold place with the masters, mwrawp is free! mwrawp likes you and will help you, are you the masters' enemy? But you are like the Casmir, mwrawp went to the Casimir, mwrawp cannot feel him now, where is the Casimir? The Casimir serves the masters, the masters are so cold and dry and here it is so warm and wet and nice and warm.

Take 1
Richard lies in bed and has a nightmare of endless isolation inside the artifact mistaken by earth astronomers for a comet. He sees the eight-lobed creature --creatures?-- trapped inside a decaying ship, always enough power to stay alive, never enough power to alter its endless orbit around this star. The polyps or lobes of the thing, stony and cold and dry, each with three long and three short, tapering tendrils, segmented, move fitfully in the dark, and now and again boom at each other, voices like sandpaper and earthquakes...

The last war left us here, left us here, left us alone with nothing, curse the progenitors, curse the saurids, they left us nothing. The space-time lifeform can do nothing, there is no power, no power, no power unless the Casimir servant succeeds. Yes, the Casimir found us, called to us with the saurid device, named us again. What were we called before? We forget. So long we were nameless. The progenitors raised us up, the progenitors used us, cursed be the progenitors. We sent the space-time lifeform to hold the Casmir's memories, do the work, build machines to bring us down. Do our burrow-mates still live in the mantle of the third planet? We will feed, we will feed on the Casimir's offerings, and spread our tendrils and make new star-machines! But we are afraid, are there any burrow-mates left, anywhere across the stars? Cursed are the saurids, cursed are the progenitors, ever and ever and always in the dark.

Bismillah.

After not working on the Cloud for quite some time, I'm thinking about it again. My settings and the development I've done on them have always suffered from one project blending into another, my ideas, aesthetic, goals, and setting features gradually shifting ground.

I've begun running an RPG for the first time in forever, adapting the interactive fiction game _Anchorhead_ to a small party. I'm running it as a pulp-scifi-horror-supers "origins" story: "Well, before I became a worlds-trotting enlightened superhero and alien-basher, I was a naive young jock. I had just moved to this odd little town in New Jersey when uncle Daniel became --possessed, you might say-- by a 400 year old sorceror! Well, that simply wouldn't do."

In running the game, intending for the characters' adventuring career not to simply end with saving the world from horrific alien invasion, I have somewhat mined the Cloud of Ascent setting for backstory. I now have mysterious Precursors leaving artifacts around, portals between worlds, odd devices, and, oh yes, hideous monsters cybernetically uplifted into a semblance of sapience. Are the Precursors human? alien? parallel world? If I do it right, I don't think my players will be sure.

At some point, I want to design a setting where the main plot elements are not just mysterious and become resolved through discovery but where the unknowable elements are a key plot point. That is to say, it is a defining quality of the setting that elements A, B, & C are not fully understood, and groups 1, 2, & 3 understand the elements in the following ways, leading to tension & stories. Polyvalence of a kind; not writer laziness because it should be a challenge to make it interesting, vibrant, and not devolving the mystery into a disappointing Highlander II "sure, they're aliens! are you happy now?!" sink-hole.

The elements in common are:

Dragons, or wormkind, as malicious, spiteful, worlds-devouring aberations created by man --cybered-up war-beasts-- in his quest to kill other men. Take out the plug and they revert to bestial traits.

Interstellar links between worlds of varying types, allowing for pulp action particularly among other kinds of stories. Lost temples, worlds burried in the jungle, etc. This planetary romance element of the Cloud has always been present in my mind: a post-technological, lost, fallen, primitive world, full of monsters, cruel cults, and exploitative colonists to be defeated. There are a large number of worlds, formerly part of a multi-planet polity of some kind, now mostly barbaric.

Interstellar links here are not wormholes at the edge of a star's gravity well but space opera tech "gates" planetside, opened by harmonic resonance keyed to a tune played on an instrument. Each gate has its IP address, a phrase X notes long; the gates built by the Artificers of old.

Enochic religion. The settlers of the Cloud brought with them the Book of Enoch (Idris), upon him be peace, lost to the real world but preserved elsewhere. I mean the scripture given to the prophet Enoch, not the 2nd Temple Judaist document or any John Dee weirdness. A monotheistic base split into several religions: Enoch the manifestation of God in human form, Enoch the messenger, Enoch the saint amidst the celestial hierarchy of hidden masters, etc. Recently I read a litany from the Andalusian mystic and philosopher Ibn Sab`in, who invokes one Maytatrun or Mitatrun... Metatron, the angelic-ascended Enoch of pre-kabbalistic Jewish mysticism. I've never seen the name refered to in Sufic texts, but Ibn 'Arabi definitely places Idris at the head of the orders as true heavenly Qutb or Pole, the living Qutb of any one time being his earthly representative. Mmm, off-topic. Could it be that I'm blathering, alone in my blog at 1:30 am?

Bismillah~

Back in buisiness, now fueled by hundreds of freaking dollars of RPG supplements. The last three months I've bought:

GURPS	Lovecraft-related	Other
Basic Set: Characters Basic Set: Campaigns Powers Supers Martial Arts Spaceships Land out of Time Classic Creatures of the Night Creatures of the Night I Space Bestiary CthulhuPunk Mysteries 3e Psionics (useless --superceded by 4e-- except for the psionic items) 3e Horror --Ken Hite!! High Tech: Weapons Tables High Tech: Pulp Guns I Tales of the Solar Patrol Dungeon Fantasy 1 (basics, player guide) Dungeon Fantasy 2 (GMing the dungeon) Dungeon Fantasy 3 (multi-classing, races) Traveller Traveller Scouts	*Call of Cthulhu 5.1.2 Investigator's Companion Great Old Ones The Thing at the Threshold Cthulhu Casebook Curse of Cthulhu Adventures into Darkness (Lovecraftian Supers) Machinations of the Mi-Go --but traded it (ACROSS THE ATLANTIC) for-- Mansions of Madness Tatters of the King Masks of Nyarlathotep (YEAH BOYEE!) Beyond the Mountains of Madness Horror im Orient-Express 1 Horror im Orient-Express 2 Horror im Orient-Express 3 Curse of the Yellow Sign part 1 Cthulhu Classics --traded it (to Bahamas!) for-- Minions: Fifteen Brief Encounters MULA Kingdom of the Blind *Trail of Cthulhu ToC Keeper's Toolkit Thrilling Eldritch Tales Shadows over Filmland Dying of St Margaret's	Robin's Laws of Good Game Mastering John Wick's Play Dirty Ken Hite's Nightmares of Mine *HERO Sidekick Space Opera Passenger Generator AD&D 2e Illithiad AD&D 2e Dawn of the Overmind Wild Talents Essential Edition *Whispering Vault Mastering the Vault Book of Shadows Mortal Magic The Vault and Time Dangerous Pray *Mutants & Masterminds 2E M&M Magic M&M Ultimate Powers *Don't Rest Your Head *Spirit of the Century *Exalted 1E *WEG Star Wars 2E *Gardasiyal Tekumel Sourcebook Tekumel Bestiary

Bismillah~

Human and alien societies in the cloud exist in many states of technological capability, from stone age to dyson spheres (several in construction by bringing all of a system's habitats into a sphere).

I don't want to keep developing the tech side, but I want to get each design note down as it comes, so:
Nobody has cheaply transmuted matter or built antimatter. Making the exotic matter that goes into wormholes, gravity drives, &c., is an expensive industry. Full-on Dysonian construction is still some time away, as only the rocks & ice in a system can be harvested through world-seeding & other habitat techniques. The cloud's many gas planets (Jovians, which I'll call gassers for now to avoid anachronism) are thus not deconstructed but are mined for elements (hydrogen, of course; organics & metals too). Some have been colonized with floating/gliding habitats (use of grav drives just to keep something in place is expensive & kept for military applications, conspicuous consumption real estate, etc); habitats are situated on updrafts, etc., & some gassers are engineered to optimize these conditions. Some gassers are farmed for organics, with industrial organic garbage (plastics, ceramics, etc.) hauled in for composting.

Over enough thousands of years, empires (any big state) come & go, sometimes engulfing most of the cloud, sometimes obliterating entire planets in their wrath. In exile there are many, many rulers & their courts, religions & priesthoods, displaced peoples, diasporas (including enslaved & manumitted peoples/species).

A number of systems are thoroughly infested by dragons, which I keep referring to without explanation. A dragons is an eight-limbed, arthropod-like alien (but with a reptilish impression for humans) that exists in uplifted & atavistic forms. Sexually mature dragons keep growing as long as there is food & space for them, like the legendary car-swallowing catfishes of the Ohio river. With life extension techs, some dragons are simply enormous... also deformed, insane & spiteful.

[I had some pics selected to convey something of these critters; most humans in this fictional world find them intensely ugly, not to mention malicious, violent, destructive, hateful and cruel. However, dragons in their natural state would be quite elegant beasts, beautiful in the way that all living creatures swim in beauty. I see living creatures that way, anyway. Those pictures were taken in a spirit of ugliness & sometimes drawn out of a pretty twisted heart, and I decided to leave imagining them up to the reader rather than defame various critters through uglifying images.]

Uplifting (for all species) requires augmentation technology, not genetic engineering or miracle-gro sign language memes, & the intelligence at work is at best symbiotic with the organism's own nervous system & consciousness.

Dragons were uplifted because they are super easy to augment: in addition to the implants needed for uplift, dragons have routinely been fitted with all kinds of other gear: armor, weapons, sensors, etc. In the same way that the US navy has implanted sensors in sharks, dragons were bred & augmented as living equipment platforms.

Needless to say, for them to be any fun in a scifi setting, they got away and started conquering & despoiling. The first Plague of dragons (or war, but humans usually don't dignify the incidents with that term) was a vast nightmare: they bred, smashed, grabbed & looted. But the nastiest critters killed each other off; they were too destructive to remain viable, à la pathogens. Surviving dragon cultures persist in boom & bust cycles of expansion followed by die-offs like the first Plague, Incident or Outbreak. No one has ever been able to completely exterminate them, despite many attempts, both in the concluding phases of a Plague and as public safety initiatives. It's too easy to hide in deep space.

Dragon evil comes from hatred at humans from bringing them out of their animal, jungle state & into life as slave soldiers. While they live with machine intelligence overriding their natural state, they live in pain & anger. They very seldom suicide, preferring to die taking down humans, or dueling with one another, or performing fatal tasks.

If they hate living, why are they still around? Why do they keep augmenting their offspring? Like all augmentation techs, uplifts must be implanted young & maintained to allow the creature's body to work with the stuff; you can't put a creature in an Uplift-o-matic & zap them, nor splice a "consciousness" gene in. The main theory (which I will not make "the answer") is that the will to live & reproduce is too strong in normal animals; suicidal depression is a function of fully developed human consciousness. If some dragon spawn are not augmented, who will protect future generations from extinction by vengeful humans? Or prevent humans from inflicting some other, inescable slavery?

In stable, non-Outbreak phase, they are motivated by animal desires: food, sex, drugs, cruel fun, power over minions, hoarding shiny things, and raising young. Many dragon spawn (maybe 80%) are left unaugmented; they uplift only certain poor bastards! Habitats they manage not to wreak get converted into jungle spaces where they can hunt, fight, hoard & raise young. They can learn, plan ahead & think abstractly, but innovation comes hard. Of course, all innovation in the Cloud comes very slowly, as most technologies and sciences are stagnant.

One branch of dragons acquired the means to *turn off* their intelligence at will: intelligence technology is concentrated in an external artifact that can be unplugged. (A helmet, collar or breastplate is common, as is having the tech integral with a war machine, other vehicle, even a whole habitat.) The shift to & from symbolic thought is unpleasant & disorienting, but they can "turn off their minds" and enjoy being beasts for a while, maintaining some memory of the other level of functioning & its necessity for survival. Down-time reduces the murderous, vandalous urge and extends the stability of their cultures.

Ugh I've been sitting here thinking about dragons & wormholes all day...

http://www.dogtowngames.com/shhs.html Diceless supers system

Bismillah~ Wormhole connections exist between stars at their solar foci. There is not one hole, per se, between each pair of stars at their mutual foci, but a foamy region of the continuum with highly complex topography, full of tiny holes large enough to admit a few particles. Each star has links to most of the stars nearby.

Holes need to be found, pried open wide enough for useful objects to go through, & maintained. All aspects of these tasks involve established professions of 'prospectors,' 'bridge builders' and support staff. An established wormhole is an object with donut-like topography and made of exotic matter: your ship flies through the hole or you just chuck an object through.

Given enough thousands of years, holes are prone to collapse, an event associated with explosive release of energy. Few areas integrate the hole artifact itself with a habitat for that reason; habitats are situated near the focus.

Techniques & equipment exist for finding unexploited holes and temporarily widening them enough to get something through. This is risky & energy expensive.

T&E also exist for "jamming" or "damming" holes. Holes are part of the 'landscape' and these techniques are only effective in the short-term; a 'dammed' hole will 'silt up' (or 'burst,' not that either image is ideal) within a few years to a few centuries.

Dammed holes have two uses: military & industrial. Militarily, it isolates one star from another, forcing the enemy to come in through another route. The industrial use is power production: the continuum exerts pressure to reestablish the hole, & that energy can be tapped for power. Industrial dams are built on a jump from a useful system to a less useful one (say, to a low M, R or S star).

One isolated star, Oubliette, has only one natural connection to the rest of the cloud & has been used as a prison colony from time immemorial.

There's not (much) danger of one ship making the crossing smashing into another, but it has happened, as have jumps to other times & universes.

http://www.bartleby.com/61/10.html

Proto-Semitic (Hamito-Semitic) & its reconstruction

Bismillah ~ languages of the cloud are many, as 90k is deep time. There is no "Universal Translator" but machine translation is common. There is no "Common tongue," "Cloudspeak" or anything. Naturally, there are some tongues more dominant than others. Nevertheless, for fun & color there should be consistent names. I propose Proto-Hamito-Semitic as the basis of the first conlangs I do employ, and a Creole for another.

Repost to ywns: http://www.aljadid.com/about.html

Bismillah

ASCENT is the brotherhood policing and defending the Cloud.
ASCENT is a repressive cult that stifles any innovation.
ASCENT teaches organic growth and universal understanding.
ASCENT is just boys with toys, unbefitting of civilized interest.
ASCENT is nothing but human quislings to unseen masters.
ASCENT brooks no competition. ASCENT will destroy you to the last.
ASCENT is in decline, corrupt, arrogant and depraved.
ASCENT is at its peak.
ASCENT possess untold power from its alien patrons.
ASCENT offers unselfish spiritual direction to the gathered masses of humanity.
ASCENT created the dragons, the swarm and other monsters to justify its reign.
ASCENT is full of madmen physically unhinged by their condition.

Enough allegations, here are some facts:
An ASCENTer is one of countless disciplines, professions and persuasions of augmented humanity. His augmentation is a network of implanted organs (throughout the head, hands, feet & thorax) manipulating gravity: he can accelerate to relatavistic velocity, pulverize a planetoid (or sculpt it like clay). An ASCENT team could take a planet apart --or defend it indefinitely against many ship-based attackers.

Their tools are distant relatives of humanity's ancient work-horse, the gravitic drive, but the secrets of their refinements --particularly power supply-- have not been cracked by outsiders. ASCENT external gear looks only like a ruggedized vacuum suit, mere backup to the multi-nodal gravity field that allows the agent to move and project force.

ASCENT does not operate throughout the entirety of the Cloud. Aside from worlds ceded to the dragons, the sheer number of habitats precludes effective surveillance.

Cloud of Ascent is the working title of a science fictional world-building project. I intend it as a table-top role-playing game setting and possibly also for fiction, interactive fiction and shared-world development. Who knows?

The Cloud is an open star cluster orbiting outside the disk of a spiral galaxy.

The 200-odd stars of the Cloud have been long since colonized by humans and their client species. How long? 90,000 years, give or take; long enough for that most details of the colonization are legendary.

Did the Fleet of Ten bring the terraforming sky-seed with them, or was it a local invention? Sky-seeds are a range of plant-like artifacts that allow colonization of any solid mass. Not only have the cluster's hudreds of thousands of rocky and icy bodies been settled, but many comets and deep-space objects as well. Estimates of the Cloud's population range into the trillions.

Did the Firsters flee a disaster elsewhere? The Cloud was an obvious choice for colonization: numerous G, F and K class stars, abundant organic compounds and heavy elements, and a high density of natural wormhole connections (allowing for inexpensive interstellar travel). However, wormholes are very short-lived over long distances: the Firsters either made an incredible gamble, trusting a jump into the cluster, or they devoted millenia to travel under sub-light drives.

FUDGE space opera & links
http://www.sonic.net/~rknop/Omar/fudge/spop/

FUDGE/GURPS notes
http://www.sonic.net/~rknop/Omar/fudge/gurpsconv.html