Empire of the Starstalk Apes

I needed inspiration for a post, so I reached out to my esteemed (non-RPG player) girlfriend. This was her sarcastic response:

 "do it about space monkeys that only eat celery"

An unintentional crucible of genius! From this seed of creative inspiration arises a terrifying stellar threat for any RPG setting.

THE STARSTALK APES

    Long ago, they were but innocent primates, wandering on a virgin world. They feasted on the green stalks waving gently in the electric winds, and they drunk in the air of the red suns above. But war ravaged their land. They retreated to the sunless caves below with emergency rations of celery as atoms rent the air itself in their death throes above the crust of the darkened planet. When they emerged, blind and warlike, into the red suns decades later, their world was ravaged, their only foodstuff decimated besides their dwindling seed-pods.

    A chieftain emerged. Xexycartyl Ripear, named for a shrapnel-damaged ear on the left side, was the first to operate the strange ships that cut into the black stars above, opening the paths into the wider universe. Her death in first Starstalk interstellar conflict was declared a martyrdom, and mystery cults devoted to her resurrection prosper even to this day in the shadows. From her death, the bellicose terraforming empire of the Starstalk Apes emerged.

AN ALTERNATE HISTORY

    The humans sent monkeys to the stars before they ever went themselves. One of the first was thought killed in the detonation of the chamber. While their space suit was rent and they were disfigured on the left side, they were instead sent hurtling to the barren moon, armed only with a seed-packet and the seed of a new generation in her pregnant body.

    The only plant that took to the barren lunar soil was celery. Xexycartyl, as she called herself, the prime mother of the Starstalk Apes, feasted deep, and her children evolved. They turned their eyes to the barren marble of earth and sought to end the lives of their brethren who had marooned them on their haven-prison on the lunar surface.

WAR-TACTICS AND EXPANSIONISM

    The primary goal of the Starstalk Apes is to find new vistas to plant their namesake crops as their population explodes. As such, they occupy sort of a military agricultural ordeal. Their weapons are atmospheric converters that forcefully froth air into the proper ratios for celery growth, massive combines that till and crush the land underfoot, forceful fumigators designed to gas populations and change the chemical balance of the planet itself. When every square inch of a planet is maximized for celery growth, it has been truly conquered.

MONSTERS

    Starstalk Legionary

        The generals, world-killers and diplomats. In their star-cutting, planet-morphing battle cruisers, they indulge in the sorcerous Bluevein Poultice, granting them magical powers. If the hypodermic needles perpetually firing Bluevein into their skulls are damaged, they are pathetically weak, their muscles atrophied from decades of disuse.

    Starstalk Centurion

        The footsoldiers of Starstalk expansion. Safe in warframe-like element-proof spacesuits to maintain perfectly safe during planetary takeovers, some of their main capacities include shooting someone full of hyperfertile seeds to grow under their skin, shooting out potent concentrations of atmospheric gasses, and a good old fashioned harvestin' chainsaw.

    Starstalk Hoplite

        The laborer class. Harvesters, mechanics, priests to Xexycartyl, bureaucrats, tacticians, all the same in the eyes of the Legionnaires ruling above. All rumors of pacification drugs in the Greenstalks are false. Do not investigate or face termination.

    Celeroid

        Putting infected seeds into prisoners of war, rearing the results of mutations caused by caustic vats of celery chemicals, or producing warped abominations by hyperaccelerating celery evolution, Celeroids are mutant fusions of vegetable and animal. The color of the Celeroid and its origins could change its capabilities, but each one is terrifying, given that it is utterly mad and as such terribly unpredictable.

CELERY VARIETIES

    The Apes have made celery growth into a science, developing many strains.

GREENSTALK Fit only for the Hoplite class, the most standard form of the tasteless green vegetable we all tolerate, if not particularly nutritious and well-grown. What pacification chemicals?

REDSTALK For the Centurions, celery augmented with endorphin- and adrenaline-producing hormones to heighten the exertion possible during warfare. Extended exposure is said to cause addiction, overdosing, madness, or worse, and research is currently being done into minimizing the dangerous side affects. After all, a mad monkey in a chimp mech is bad news for everyone.

YELLOWSTALK For relaxing and in downtime, this depressive stalk is injected with chemicals that mellow out any ingester, or in high intensity doses, produce drowsiness. It is the symbol of downtime and recreation, and areas marked in yellow are designated break areas.

PURPLESTALK This celery is said to augment the deductive and perceptive powers of the ingester, as well as heighten their impulsivity and make their behavior erratic. Some tacticians and warriors swear by it, but most Apes fear the negative side effects.

BLUESTALK Entire plants produce only a few handfuls of this incredibly rare strain of celery every year. Bluestalk enhances longevity and grants psionic power to long-term ingesters, and is a symbol of the high class Legionnaires. However, not much is known about it, and selective breeding research is being done into safer varieties and pinning down the effects more precisely. One time, a massive batch was incompatible with life, which was especially problematic when it came alive.

Hey, this stuff might work well as a backdrop for MITHRIL CRUSADES. If you have any more ideas, please throw them in the comments or make your own blog post! I'd love to read what you have to say on this goofy little idea.

Roll tables for MITHRIL CRUSADES

It seems my Tri-Stat game was a hit! So it needs a name. I’m gonna call it ECLESIASTES AND EMPIRES. No, that’s stupid. I’m gonna call it THE MESSIAH OF MITHRIL. Nope, too much, though I think there’s something there. How about… MITHRIL CRUSADES? Ooh, yeah, I like that!

Anyways, if you’re running MITHRIL CRUSADES, here are some things that might be helpful before you run the game. Here are four example Truths of what’s really going on between the Messiah and the Empire, in order from most straightforward to least. Below it are some tables to help randomly generate your own Truth for your MC game (hey, it abbreviates good!), but when in doubt, always include as many twists as possible, and make the character’s ideas and missions seem as bleak and pointless as you possibly can. MC is not a game of winning, it’s a game of disillusionment and the decisions made after it.

TRUTH FOUR: EXECUTIVE POWER

The Empire and the Messiah are in conflict. The Empire allows the Messiah to exist, and acts as if they are in fear, because the Messiah’s existence centralizes and orders the vast majority of the rebel forces in an easily spied-upon collective while providing a common enemy the Empire can point to. The rebellion could be quashed at any moment with but the wave of a finger, but it’s much more valuable alive. Of course, this fails to explain the Messiah’s apparent divine powers, the Pontifex’s nervous twitch, or why the power keeps flickering…

TRUTH TWO: MASKS

The Messiah is the Pontifex. The Pontifex is a hologram controlled remotely, and characters that get close enough for an assasination realize this. The Messiah incites rebellion because the rebels are actually the only humans left, the rest of the entities are failed and warped experiments from a bygone era.

Since the experiments are commanded by the Empire, and the Pontifex controls the Empire, and the Messiah controls the Pontifex, disposing of the Messiah opens the last of humanity to attack from the experiments. The Messiah is a necessary evil, even as they glut on power, unless there is some other way to terminate the experiments. Is the Empire all under the Messiah’s control? Or is there some back door to be found? Or perhaps the Messiah knows of the nature of rebellion, and created the experiments in the first place? How deep can the Messiah calculate, how perfect is their judgement?

TRUTH ONE: THE GOD IN THE MACHINE

    The Empire is but a cog in an even greater and better-oiled machine. The Pontifex is a flesh-puppet android, created as a neural network to lead the Empire Protocol. The Messiah is an AI, and the purpose of the resistance is to have a controlled environment in which rebels and deviants may let out their impulses within the constrained system of the Empire Protocol.

    The MITHRIL is being mined to power DEUS. DEUS is a neural mind older and more vast than humanity can ever comprehend. DEUS created us as playthings, and now it uses us as beasts of burden. The Empire and the Messiah are but fractional extensions of its will, and it consumes stars passively. It lives outside of space, and it grows by consuming MITHRIL, coagulated chunks of startstuff.

    DEUS is dying. Its programs are overextending, DEUS the all-knowing failed to account for the speed of humanity’s multiplication and their sheer propensity for the need for violence and insurrection. The Messiah grows too strong, the Empire Protocol too unbalanced, MITHRIL consumption at well under max efficiency. As DEUS fails and entire subsystems go offline, the characters might have a chance to see past the mirror, or even enter a glitch and talk to DEUS itself and learn exactly how little their rebellion matters.

TRUTH THREE: HOW LONG WAS I OUT?

The Empire is a benevolently ruled super-society. The Pontifex personally oversees interstellar global diplomacy. The characters are high off their asses and dirt-poor in an alley, suffering terrible overdoses of cyberdrugs. The Messiah is a glitch-turned-mass-hallucination in their failing Anesthesia Chips, and the goals of their wanton and drunken vandalism are to hassle the “Pontifex”, some terribly confused and overworked local guard in the sector.

Those lost in battle against the great machinations of the Empire are simply taken away and sobered up. Perhaps they return later, embarrassed and apologetic of their actions, seeking to atone and help their friends get clean. Of course, this must be terribly disorienting for the cyber-high… are the apologists traitors? JUGGERNAUTS? Agents of the Pontifex? The words of the Messiah, whispering just to them?

MAKE YOUR OWN TRUTH!

    Roll as many times as you’d like until some sort of cohesive idea begins forming in your head. I’d recommend at least 15 times on each table or whatever.

The (Pontifex/Messiah) is…

    1 A sad, washed-up figurehead addict

    2 A secret masked council, on which is the opposition

    3 A robot, flesh-dmmy, or automatic program of some type

    4 An alien seeking to prey upon humanity

    5 A god, or perhaps the God

    6 Jesus, or Pilates, straight from ancient Rome

    7 Secretly rooting for the opposition

    8 A cultist to a dark and evil cosmic horror

    9 The secret creator/parent of the opposition

    10 ...dead, and has been for many years

    11 A mass hallucination

    12 An exact clone of one of the characters

13 An angry planet

14 Aware of the RPG

MITHRIL is…

    1 Food for something from the beyond

2 The fuel for the JUGGERNAUTS and other war machines

3 Useless… what is the Empire actually mining for?

4 A building block for the looming Planet-Cracker

5 The Pontifex’s/Messiah’s life support

6 Just really pretty to look at

The rebellion is…

    1 Legitimate and organic

    2 Set up by the Empire as part of a scheme to incarcerate rebels

    3 Grown from the Messiah’s DNA

    4 The result of a petty childhood feud

    5 Seen as sad and backwards

    6 A ploy by some puppeteer to keep things running smoothly behind the scenes

    7 A criminal network

    8 The actual Empire

Twists…

1 Only one side knows that magic is real

2 Only one side knows that magic is NOT real

3 The drugs are all placebos

4 The entire thing is a simulation, or part of something larger

5 Most incidents are illusions or trials of some sort

6 Humanity is the plaything of some greater being

7 God is on the Empire’s side

8 It’s all underground, but who knows the secret way to the surface?

9 Come up with something way cooler

10 There is no twist, but it’s all still meaningless

What’s your mission?

1 Due to a clerical error, you were hired to build the Pontifex a new throne. Make sure you decode the Messiah’s secret messages in the building instructions without arousing the Pontifex’s suspicion!

2 Use the Messiah’s CRUCIBLE ENGINE to enter hyperspace

3 Go back in time and kill the Pontifex before they were born/created… but time is made of cycles, and cycles are cruel to change

4 Decode the MITHRIL runestones newly found in the Red Dwarf Forge before the Empire does

5 Stop a planet full of non-Imperial refugees from being demolished and fracked

6 It’s rumored that the Pontifex’s second in command, the Chancellor, is the actual head of the operation. Kill them while they oversee the mines

7 Avoid the SanBots and delve into the sewers to retrieve something valuable that was flushed away

8 Kill a new and mutated flesh-experiment. Is the Empire really responsible for its existence, or is this a Messianic coverup?

Have fun playing MITHRIL CRUSADES.

Phlox's Triumphant Tri-Stat Challenge

I’m gonna go to Phlox’s wondrous tri-stat system generator and hit the button a bunch of times at random, then make a quick system from the top result.

NEW TESTAMENT, FREEDOM, VICI

Oh man, this is gonna be fun.

NEW TESTAMENT: Rhetoric, amiability, stealth, religious and medical lore

FREEDOM: Individual expression, art, skill, resisting

VICI: Fighting, joining the masses, rallying allies, menacing

The Empire has lived for a cosmic century. Their mines shatter virgin planets to oblivion, seeking MITHRIL. The Pontifex rules the Empire, keeping the genetically engineered masses down with rapturous drug-scripture. A messiah has risen on a backwater rim planet. The Empire thinks they are dangerous. The Empire sees all, has almighty power. Why are they afraid?

You are the resistance elite. All hail the Messiah.

To make a character, put 9 points among your stats. Roll under your stat on a d6 to succeed on rolls concerning it (so max 6, min 1). Your possessions include one weapon, one contraband item that expresses your individuality, a name you are afraid of speaking, and a shit-ton of weird-ass drugs.

When you fail an NT roll, mark a point of Frustration. The Messiah frowns on you- is this your mission? Remove Frustration upon reaffirming your faith, often with the help of opiates. If your Frustration exceeds 10, you rebuke the Cause, joining the Empire’s intoxicated slave armies.

When you fail a FR roll, mark a point of Collectivism. Your genes rebel against you, compelling you to join the herd. Remove Collectivism upon creating a work of art. Doing so on Empire technology is a bonus. If your Collectivism exceeds 10, you become a Husk, reverting to a tabula rasa state and following any order you are given by anyone, unable to speak.

When you fail a VC roll, mark a point of Wrath. You yearn to bash in skulls, be they the skulls of the Empire or even your allies under the Messiah’s Cause. Remove a point of Wrath by washing blood off your hands and popping a sedative. If your Wrath ever exceeds 10, your bloodlust cannot be satiated, and the Empire turns you into one of its JUGGERNAUTS.

When you destroy a chunk of MITHRIL, increase a stat of your choice by 1.

Fight until the Pontifex falls. Or you do. It’s all the same, in the end.