The Blood Moon - ideas for a revamped Bluetspur

[ewancummins]

I've always been partial to the brain collector. It's a monster from B/X D&D.

[HuManBing]

I seem to remember that. It looked like an octopus with a face and a load of brain cavities, right?

[cure]

Yes, a great monster.

[ewancummins]

I hadn't realized, but it's actually in the SRD!

http://www.d20srd.org/srd/epic/monsters/nehThalggu.htm

Of course. this is a powered up epic version of the beastie.
If you want something closer to the original, but in 3E terms;



http://pandius.com/braincol.html

[HuManBing]

My main problem with most of the Lovecraft creatures is that they all look a little too terrestrial for alien creatures.

Of course, that's hardly fair to them. Speaking purely from an evolutionary viewpoint, there are compelling reasons why life has evolved the way it did on Earth, and most of the body shapes and arrangements (snakelike, biped, quadruped, hexapod, and octapod for example) have very good justifications for them. Having a nervous mass of tissue in one place allows you to have a sophisticated brain, and also having all the really important sensory organs near that brain allows you to react very quickly to stimuli and cuts down on the dangers of injury leaving you deprived of that sense.

Still, from a purely aesthetic standpoint, I'm trying to steer as far away as possible from terrestrial forms of life. Mind flayers are basically bipeds with face tentacles, and the same could be said of Cthulhu himself. They're frightening, no doubt, but not exactly "otherworldly". The same goes for most of the ba'atezu, tanar'ri, and yugoloth creatures in the Outer Planes compendiums.

So far what I have are QuickCrystals:

The terrestrial name for the malevolent ancient inhabitants of Elidimeliblix. Nobody knows what their planet or their race is called in their own language. It's possible that they do not even communicate at all except by some telepathy.

Physically, they resemble accumulations of crystal minerals. They are capable of intelligence, and their brainpower increases as the mass of the crystals increases. Single crystals can range from microscopic to monolithic, but crystals smaller than a human fist in size are not sapient. In order to have full intelligence comparable to humans, the crystal mass would have to be significantly larger than a human brain.

This efficiency of human data storage is of great interest to the QuickCrystals, and is one of their motivations for visiting our world.

Physiologically, QuickCrystals earned their name from their ability to release stored energy to undergo a rapid change in physical state. The QuickCrystals can convert themselves from solid to liquid form for brief periods of time (hence "Quick"). This power is innate and cannot be affected by any magical or psionic means - the QuickCrystals themselves originated in far subterranean magma chambers where stone drew energy from the hot core of the satellite and formed mineral life.

Earth evolved life primarily from drawing energy from the Sun, in plant form. The moon Elidimeliblix itself is so desolate that starlight energy is the only external source of energy, giving rise to minute lichen and algae on the surface of the moon. Left to this pitiful energy source, the evolution of life could not progress past single celled creatures and algae.

Deep below the crust, however, energy is in abundance in the hot core of the sphere, and life took shape as mineral formations multiplied and replicated and continued to do so. Eventually the living magma struck surface, crystallizing in the weak light of the stars and the near-vacuum of the meager atmosphere. With its roots miles below, drinking in all the energy it needed, the crystal being prospered and multiplied across the surface, sprouting up in thickets and brushes of beautiful otherworldly prisms. Arcane structures in the cleavage of rocks and the cleft of lattices gave rise to sophisticated chemical and even nuclear reactions, allowing the crystal sprawl to create virtually any compound, given time.

Before long, the entire moon was colonized. Although vast wastes remain free from the crystals - perhaps too remote or desolate for even the most desperate flowing crystal-soup to take root - the crystal lattice had grokked and loved and hated the entire map of its small world. And it turned its attentions elsewhere, to the blue-white orb above it in the night sky.

The Quick-Crystals initially did not recognize any life on our world at all. The predominant form of life is vegetation, and the Quick-Crystals' primary sense is of psychic activity from sentient beings. Slowly but surely, animal life came, attracting their attention as faintly as tectonic shifts. Then at last came the Human era.

Current sketch:

The Quick-Crystals can sense emotions and sapient thought much more easily than anything else. This was an evolutionary trait that developed after the Crystal sprawl began hurling "spores" of its smaller extensions to inaccessible places. Each extension, once separated from the mass, decreased precipitously in intelligence - thus requiring the mass to develop a means of "scanning" for intellect to regain contact with these orphaned chunks of crystal and to safely reinforce them and colonize the moonscape.

Humans fascinate the crystals. For one, we are intelligent, and our intellect apparently has little to do with our mass or our number of individual units. (The average demagogue can prove this point.) Secondly, we are made of carbon - which just shouldn't happen. The Quick-Crystals view humanity as a fascinating if untenable study of a dead-end evolutionary branch: little bags of thinking water briefly held up by fragile accumulations of calcium.

The Quick-Crystals understand that human survivability is so poor that without air, water, and a variety of really finicky carbon based compounds in digestible form, humans die very quickly. The Quick-Crystals are in the evolutionary game for the long run - they require nothing more than heat energy and silicon to survive (although the occasional yummy mineral doesn't hurt either). It is a sad irony that they are the ones left on the smaller heavenly body, with a much smaller mass and therefore a core with a much shorter astronomical lifetime of heat activity. Meanwhile, these puny humans waste and squander the true treasure of their world - a rich molten core that will last for aeons longer than the moon's. Long enough, perhaps, for the Quick-Crystals to seek the heat of a star!

Encounters:

The Quick-Crystals can fairly simply fashion the means to throw small "seeding pods" of themselves around. After all, it's how they colonized the hard-to-reach places of their moon to begin with. To cross the vast distances between the moon and the human world, they must collect as much heat energy as possible in vast mineral reservoirs, forming it into volatile chemicals. Then, as the moon approaches perigee, they ignite the fuel stores and send a frozen comet of crystalline matter hurtling earthwards.

The crystals largely burn up on reentry and through the physical trauma of the crossing, but those that survive retain their psionic powers and their iridescent beauty. They function to attract humans and to better understand them. Some stones seek each other out across the terran landscape, reforming into beautiful crystal structures with sapience. The smallest stones merely observe the humans that handle them, taking metrics and recording data. The larger stones have an even more sinister goal - sentient at last, they begin perverting and subverting the will and desires of the fleshy throwbacks that wear them.

It is unknown how many such Quick-Crystals are on the surface of our world at any time, but each time the moon approaches, more impacts are recorded. The humans who find the stones rightly hold them to be extremely valuable and will happily pay great sums of money for them. This suits the Quick-Crystals just fine - having no mouth with which to say "Take me to your leader", they have learned that their own physiology encourages that exact behavior all the same.

With enough stones together, a truly apocalyptic plotline could emerge. The Quick-Crystals could seek the enslavement of humans, as our brains are more efficient in processing data per unit mass than their crystalline structures. Or they could decide to destroy us covertly, by triggering tensions, exacerbating social unrest, and starting wars between powerful leaders. Or the Quick-Crystals could mount a fullscale invasion themselves, hurling shards of their lithomass down upon the surface of our world.

Even a "stealth" operation could be terrifying. Imagine what a supercomputer-level intellect could do to human life on Earth with a few decades to plan and the presence of sufficient amounts of uranium and plutonium...


And ultimately despite their devastating agenda, the Quick-Crystals probably aren't guilty of being outright "evil" per se. If their plans mean the destruction of all human, mammallian, and even carbon-based life on the planet, too bad. We were doomed anyway, once the oxygen runs out and the water all freezes and the convenient plants and animals die out leaving us with no way of cannibalizing our energy from the sun.

They were merely hastening the inevitable.

[ewancummins]

I'm gonna love the part where these Sci Fi monsters realize that:

• evolution doesn't work like they think it works, in the D&D universe
  
  Ravenloft is not a spherical planet in outer space but a finite and mutable demiplane wrapped in the Ethereal Plane
  
  the 'sun' may not even be real , the world may well be flat, and there may not be a molten core such as the aliens had expected
  
  and the Dark Powers love screwing people over- even people made of crystal.

Muwahahahhahahaha!

[HuManBing]

I've included the pseudoscience so that this idea is compatible with all settings that want it - not just Ravenloft and d20's rules. Even with all the discrepancies you point out, there's nothing that a DM's handwave can't easily overcome.

Any comment on the rest of the ideas?

[ewancummins]

I've included the pseudoscience so that this idea is compatible with all settings that want it - not just Ravenloft and d20's rules. Even with all the discrepancies you point out, there's nothing that a DM's handwave can't easily overcome.

Any comment on the rest of the ideas?

Oh, that was all meant as serious commentary, but not as negative criticism.

Imagine the reaction of the crystalline beings, creatures of 'cold science', when they realize that they are now trapped in a world where the very laws of nature are wrong. The carpet has been pulled out from under them. They thought that they understood how things worked, and now they begin to understand how little they really knew...
Reversing Lovecraft, you've landed the monsters/aliens in a world so profoundly different from what they had thought of as 'reality', that to delve too deep into its secrets might drive them mad! Humanity= the Mythos.

Instead of handwaving this set of discrepancies, I'd mine the hell out of it.

[HuManBing]

That could work, sure. I wouldn't be able to do it, personally, but if you had a deft enough hand with it, you could build that into the mythos of the Quick-Crystals or alien beings. In fact, some of this would also make them slightly more sympathetic for human observers.

It's not what I'm aiming for in creating this for my setting but if it works for you, I'd say run with it. Plenty of good solid sci-fi and fantasy fiction has revolved around the trope of "meeting a dreaded enemy at first contact, only to learn they're more like us than we thought".

The main reason why I'm not able to make this work is because I specifically intended for the creatures to be as inhuman as possible. This would probably bar any sympathetic treatment, and may take them out of the realm of the standard Ravenloft trope of "sympathy for the bad guy" and more towards a Lovecraftian trope of "they cannot be reasoned with and barely understood".

Your mileage may vary, of course!

[ewancummins]

That could work, sure. I wouldn't be able to do it, personally, but if you had a deft enough hand with it, you could build that into the mythos of the Quick-Crystals or alien beings. In fact, some of this would also make them slightly more sympathetic for human observers.

It's not what I'm aiming for in creating this for my setting but if it works for you, I'd say run with it. Plenty of good solid sci-fi and fantasy fiction has revolved around the trope of "meeting a dreaded enemy at first contact, only to learn they're more like us than we thought".

The main reason why I'm not able to make this work is because I specifically intended for the creatures to be as inhuman as possible. This would probably bar any sympathetic treatment, and may take them out of the realm of the standard Ravenloft trope of "sympathy for the bad guy" and more towards a Lovecraftian trope of "they cannot be reasoned with and barely understood".

Your mileage may vary, of course!

Oh, but it's both. Have you read At the Mountains of Madness?

As I see it:

These things are inhuman. They cannot be reasoned with and can barely be understood, just so! They are implacable foes of all carbon based life, viewing it as intrinsically foul and unnatural (best approximation, that is- perhaps no human terms can adequately describe their thoughts).

The morally reactive nature of Ravenloft is incomprehensible for these inhuman beings, who cannot grok good and evil. The morphic supernatural nature of the demiplane defies their science.

I'd make them true neutral in alignment, BTW. They simply don't have the ability to discern good and evil in any way meaningful to humans. That means that they will never really be able to understand the in game effects and triggers for Power Checks, for example. They haven't got the conceptual tools to understand the world into which they've been thrust.

I'd also rule that Powers Checks don't apply to these beings. They are too alien for that.


YMMV,as it seems to do.

At any rate, you've given me some fun ideas.

[ewancummins]

HumanBing- You may have given me an idea for a campiagn setting. Do I have your permission to build some sort of variant of your idea (all due credit given, of course)?

[HuManBing]

HumanBing- You may have given me an idea for a campiagn setting. Do I have your permission to build some sort of variant of your idea (all due credit given, of course)?

Absolutely. Take it and run with it and all the best wishes for an awesome, kickass campaign!

Keep us posted with how it turns out, too! That's the most important part!

[Manofevil]

So far what I have are QuickCrystals:

The terrestrial name for the malevolent ancient inhabitants of Elidimeliblix. Nobody knows what their planet or their race is called in their own language. It's possible that they do not even communicate at all except by some telepathy.

I may have something to contribute in this.

In the '90s I was a fan of the Green Lantern comics. For those who don't know, Green Lantern is about a series of men who are chosen to serve as guardians of the sector of space where the Earth is. Earth's Green Lantern is one of thousands each of which stands as guardian of their home sector and clearly no two are of the same race.

Now this all leads us to Chaselon. [wikipedia]Chaselon is the Green Lantern of sector 1416; he first appeared in Green Lantern Vol. 2 #9 (November–December 1961). Chaselon is a native of Barrio III, a planet inhabited by silicon based crystalline beings with thirteen senses. They resemble faceted crystaline eggs with eyes and segmented arms and legs. Barrio III was one of the planets that the mad Guardian Appa Ali Apsa "harvested" cities from to create the planet Mosaic. [/wikipedia]

The passage from your post above reminded me of a sequence when Chaselon and Earth's Green Lantern are on a mission in space when the people of Barrio III who are "harvested" by the mad Guardian send out a distress signal to their Green Lantern. They do this by linking appendages and vibrating in perfect harmony with one another. This is then amplified as it spreads and sends sympathetic vibrations through the perfect crystalline structures of their buildings and finally beamed through the understructure of space itself to transmit itself across the cosmos. I went back to dig this comic up again and discovered that these beings actually communicate by audible vibrations made by their perfect crystalline bodies. I hope this helps you.

[HuManBing]

Hazgarn put into words what I'd been thinking as vague ideas for a while:

The moon could have a red, comet-like tail behind it each time it approaches the world. That way, it would still look like a "blood smear" or "blood trail" in the sky (Blüt Spur) as per the original meaning.

The tail could just be an astronomical phenomenon, or it could be something more malevolent. Imagine if it was the crystals launching themselves off their dusty moon each time they drew close to the world, trying to land on the fertile lands of the greater planet below...

[Zilfer]

Sorry this topic just has a line playing in the back of my head....

"When I'm gone, your planet will be free to live out its miserable existance as one of my satellites and that's how it's going to be...."

This topic has also drawn my interest to blutspur thanks. The wiki I think has some interesting things to say about this domain though i'm unclear in the original version is this land ON the Moon? Or does it have a bloody smeared moon? Anyone that can point my in the right dirrection thanks!

(forever the scholar looking to uncover the secrets of Ravenloft's domains for future games that may never come to pass)