Sunday, May 29, 2016

Shipbreakers

A strict hierarchy has been maintained, for eons, by the strength of claws against the strength of shells. The ability to kill and resist being killed are all that determines status. Winners devour losers, strengthening their shells and claws with with cannibalized minerals.

They lack whatever that certain something is that allows for true originality. All of their technology is trial-and-error derivations on the scavenged work of others. They would never have left their planet, were it not for the unfortunate crash of a survey vessel. They discovered the wreck, and applied their stubborn form of non-intelligence to it. Within the century, they were starfarers.

Emergency beacons from long lost ships draw victims towards isolated asteroids, and would-be salvagers and rescuers alike find themselves in a rapidly strengthening gravity well, until they are crushed against the surface. Then the shipbreakers will emerge, never engaging in combat, but attacking survivors indirectly, sabotaging life support, setting traps, and waiting. When there are no more survivors, they will disassemble the wreck, reset their trap, and begin to reverse engineer anything new.

Now their shells are steel and their claws are torn from military robots, but they still live by their ancient code: take the strengths of those you kill, hide from those you can't.

Saturday, May 28, 2016

Tusk and Fang

The curse spread like a plague, and the dead piled up faster than they could be burned. Humans, half-orcs, half-elves, and halflings are extinct, elves and gnomes have withdrawn into faerie, and the dwarves have sealed themselves in their holds. The goblinoid races find themselves, for the first time, with breathing room. Now is the age of tusks and fangs.

Goblinoids

There are four principle goblinoid races: goblins, hobgoblins, orcs, and ogres.

Goblins are small, with an ape-like stature and long arms. They are typically hairless, with jet-black eyes. They are prolific, hardy, and seem ever-present. They are the smallest of the goblinoid races and often coerced into labor whenever someone larger needs something done.

Hobgoblins are also hairless, are usually pale white or gray, and are always tall and lanky. Their most recognizable features are their earlessness and cat eyes. A majority of hobgoblins live in militia: mercenary cartels who live like Spartans and fight like landsknechts.

Orcs resemble neanderthals, with sloped foreheads and pronounced jaws, teeth, and noses. They are most often hairy, with reddish-brown skin. They are the most human of the goblinoids, once even interbreeding with humans.

Ogres come in two types. The majority are large and stocky, usually between 3 and 4 meters tall, with goat horns and goat eyes. In every litter there is a "magi", hornless and scrawny, who rarely survive childhood. When they do however, they have never failed to become geniuses, and have define many aspects of their society. It was ogre magi who formed the ogre banks, and an ogre magi who created the goblin script.

Goblinoid Society

Goblinoid society is not unified, and is composed of clans, petty kingdoms, and city-states, based on medieval Germany and eastern Europe. Few formal organizations last long, although the ogre banks and hobgoblin militia are notable exceptions.

The goblinoid races were never considered "civilized", in part because they have little interest in the heavenly and ethereal. They still remain interested primarily in their surroundings and their bodies. Old, "savage" traditions are maintained, but have been steadily refined and innovated. Body modification has especially blossomed, expanding from a ritual demonstration of pain tolerance to beautiful forms of tattooing, piercings and body paint.

Notes

Inspired by this thread from /tg/.

Monday, May 23, 2016

The Very Old Trees

Trees are the oldest and most hateful of all living things. Hateful not towards animals, as the trees themselves generated them for their own benefit. Hateful instead towards the people, the descendants of invading gods. The trees had lived for eternity in a perfect garden, until the people came with their gods' fire.

From the deepest shadows of their woods the trees birthed snakes, wolves, and elves. The forests became places of danger, places from which few returned. The people huddled together in their towns and cities, burning their surroundings out of fear, and slowly starving.

It was the druids who first pierced the dominion of the trees. Druids walked into the forest in the forms of animals, enslaved the plants and confined them to fields, tricked the animals into taming themselves, and struck down the trees with lightning and fire.

Now the cities of the people are well fed, served by animals and surrounded by fields. Those with the right skills can even venture into the woods, and return with hunted animals and cut plants. Yet there are still and will always be, the very deep woods, places where only druids can venture and return.

Sunday, May 22, 2016

Strange Aeon

...everyone felt that the world and perhaps the universe had passed from the control of known gods or forces to that of gods or forces which were unknown.

HP Lovecraft, Nyarlathotep

Strange Aeon

The galaxy has been, for billions of years and at all scales of power, perception, intelligence and activity, overrun with life. The geometry of reality gives spontaneous rise to minds and organisms, and they beget infinite variations of their kinds. Escaped experiments learn to breed, autonomous systems outgrow and abandon their creators, patterns self-select and iterate into extinction, ‘gods’ billions of years old delineate a living space in lesser minds, time and mutation turn every individual into an ecosystem, and always, new and ancient races build and fight and die.

Earth is no exception.

Timeline


after At the Mountains of Madness:

The Starkweather-Moore expedition recovers the Miskatonic antarctic expedition, and with them, the ancient city, its frozen inhabitants, and the secret origin of humankind. Despite attempts at secrecy, rumors, descriptions, and eventually images of the city make their way into the public eye. Still, skepticism rules, especially after the failures of subsequent expeditions.

What the public doesn't know is that a secret expedition was made, and eleven of the frozen "Elder Things" have been transported back to the USSR and carefully revived. With no other apparent options, the relatively genteel ancient beings resign themselves to tutoring their strange spinoffs. The USSR begins making strange jumps in the fields of cognitive science, hypnosis/subliminal messaging, AI, and biological enhancement.

after Shadow Over Innsmouth:

The raids on Innsmouth and Devil's Reef inspire a government conspiracy to investigate and counter the threat of the "Deep Ones". This conspiracy wages a secret war, and striking at the deep ones in their cities with underwater atomic "tests". The scattered survivors strike back against islands, coastlines, and ships. Coastlines must be either fortified or abandoned, and every sailor learns to keep weapons close to hand. The secret war continues.

all the while:


The "Mi-go", who for so long have secretly exploited the resources of Earth, are alarmed by the sudden acceleration in human science and technology. Unwilling to abandon even a backwater mining colony, they resolve, in a careful and peculiar manner, to engineer the extinction of the human race. Mi-go priorities are first, to eliminate the emerging threat of humanity, second, to remain hidden and unknown to their victims, third, to preserve Earth's resources for exploitation, and fourth, if possible, to preserve humanity for study and exploitation. Therefore they do not invade, assault, or bombard, but begin engineering Earth's biosphere into a hostile force.

now:

The year is 2001. The remnant nations of the 20th century maintain themselves with the aid of the United Nations Sustained Emergency Committee (UNSEC). The rest of humanity resides in collectives, city-states, cult towns, and anarchies both deliberate and desperate. Earth is an alien planet, we are stranded, and adaptation might be worse than extinction. It is the beginning of the Strange Aeon.

Notes

Strange Aeon is my take on a world where humanity spent the 20th century coming face-to-face with a Lovecraftian universe, and flounders in ever more social, scientific, and even metaphysical chaos. Every day there is a new cult, disease, or monster, and the world passes steadily beyond the human .

Think of it as CthulhuTech, with a re-imagined Lovecraftian mythos, but replacing the anime influences with, among others, Charles Stross' A Colder War, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's Roadside Picnic, and David Gerrold's The War Against the Chtorr.

Saturday, May 21, 2016

Reboot

I am restarting Seedware as a blog for worldbuilding ideas, both fantasy and scifi.

I plan on making two posts per weekend, one on Saturday and one on Sunday.