The Secret of the Ancients. Part 1

 The crew relives a series of events in the distant past.

This chapter is based on Kay’s and Carl’s notes from our May 13, 2023 session. Since we are scattered around the country, we use Discord for voice communications and the Roll20 online virtual tabletop to connect with each other.

Continued from: Secrets of the Ancients – Otherworld,Conclusion.

Location: On the edge of the Droyne Empire

Date: about 310,000 years ago.

Characters:

·         Ayude - Droyne scholar.

·         Emyakoy – Human naval officer.

·         Eskekuk - Droyne scientist.

·         Gvorr - First-generation Vargr.

·         Urd - Modified Human, a mix of stone age and modern tech.

Part I – Chariots of the Gods

We are on board the Imperial starship Krinyaoth, a standard transport with only moderate defensive weapons. Our mission is to go to the human birthworld on the fringes of the Empire and get a tribe of Neanderthals and transplant them to a selected destination world.

We were unlikely to encounter hostile forces within Imperial space but that could change as we get closer to the borderlands – the Varsheen Caliphate’s fleet has been destroyed but the renegade League of New Thought and the hostile Thao might have ships in one of the systems between here and our destination.

We have shipboard manufacturing facilities to make more weapons if needed, but we have limited resources. The ship has a big cargo hold and onboard factory.  We expect to take a year to transport 500 people to our destination.  We will need to collect the entire tribe intact.

We decided to transport the tribe in stasis pods, so we fabricated 550 units and five autodocs. If any of the tribe has illnesses or genetic diseases, we’ll tag them and use the autodocs to repair them before offloading on the new world (Cordillon in what will become the Trojan Reaches). We will study them for a year to see if they need any plants or animals to go with them for nutrients or cultural/religious reasons and transport those as well. Grandfather wants to terraform the new planet but will begin after they get there, so we need to make sure they have proper resources until they can begin to adapt to the new world.

Our job is to find the tribe (pre-selected before we got there), and figure out how to get them on the ship; we will have to establish the colony on the new world and need additional resources. The tribe consists of Neanderthal hunter-gatherers who follow migratory animals. The locale is an icebound valley in what will become Germany in the far future.

Emyakoy finds a report with info on the destination world, thin breathable atmosphere in the deep canyons and in low lying areas, few resources.

Leaving the Empire to go to Terra, we take a standard route. Two months into the journey, we detect a Thao fleet. They are a species of gastropod with TL14. They are hostile pirate raiders with ships bigger and better armed that we are.

They call and demand our factory pods and feed stocks. They are not a major threat to the ship but can inflict damage to it. On an economics basis we could give them a few pods and it will not change the balance of power as they can’t reverse engineer our pods. Their sensors can’t penetrate the surface of our ship so they don’t know how many pods we have.

We decide to fight.

Urd created a plan to use our existing defensive weapons and black globes in a clever maneuver against the Thao fleet.

The plan succeeds and we jump to safety.

We have few outposts on Terra but the planet is surrounded by a web of space stations and satellites. Yaskoydray has designated the native sophonts to be a species of special scientific interest, so the planet is closely guarded by automated defense stations and observatories.

Our time limit is about a decade, so we can take our time. We watched the tribe from autumn to the next year’s winter to see what resources they use that we’ll need to take with them. They stay in one cave system during winter so we’ll gas them at night while they sleep and use drones to put them in the stasis pods.

Eskekuk finds the tribe’s leader is an elderly but still hale hunter whose name translates as ‘Big Old Red.’ Other notable power blocs within the tribe include a band of younger hunters led by ‘Fast Boy’, the best craftsman ‘Stone Speaker’ and the oldest female, ‘Mother of Nine’.

We use drones to gas them in their sleep and put them in cold sleep. We also collect their plants and animals (minus the wooly mammoths).

We spent a year in transit to Cordillon, our target world. The world has a native ecosystem, mostly consisting of a species of lichen that evolved from seaweed, and a few crablike scavengers. We bio-engineered the tribe to be able to digest them.

Cordillon will be terraformed within 30 years but as part of the experiment Yaskoydray wants the humans to learn to adapt to their new environment before altering it.

We were surprised to find a renegade Droyne colony on planet. They are part of the Consensus, a Droyne movement that argues for a return to traditional social organization. They reject Yaskoydray’s leadership, preferring their own Leader castes. The Droyne Empire considers them a nuisance.

The Consensus also rejects Yaskoydray’s technology; they are deliberately bringing down their technological base to the minimum ‘socially cohesive level’, although they have yet to agree on exactly what that entails. The Cordillon Consensus are at TL12.

Their city is in the ideal place for a human colony.

Our ship’s sensors found them before their tech noticed us. They have space ships and sensors and would discover us eventually. They do have defensive capability and could wipe out the Terran colony.

We decided to contact them and talk. We have a video call with Usstori, their leader, and she speaks for the colony.

She tries to get us to join them.

She claims the following points are true:

·         The percentage of leaders drops in each generation; the Consensus has 1-5 %, ten times what the empire has.

·         Technology is robbing the Droyne of their heritage and culture; the influence of uplifted slave races is further diluting the species.

·         Yaskoydray is a fictional figurehead.

Ayude said that there is some supporting evidence for some of her claims.

Usstori offers to let the humanity colony have 10% of the planet, which is more than we planned to have, so we agree. We add that terraforming will start in 30 years. They will stay, but their city will be underwater; they’ll have to move it. We show them our colony site well away from theirs, and our invasive species we’ll settle. Their experts were OK with that.

We agree to live in harmony. We stay to establish habitat first, and wake up colony; warning them about not climbing the mountains.

Turning loose the tribe was our last act here. Good luck to them.

We finish our mission and send off our report.

 

Part 2 – The Art of War

5,000 years later.

There were now some five million humans living on Cordillon, divided into several dozen petty queendoms and empires. Genetic tampering has brought out several traits, including a predilection for synesthesia and higher intelligence. Approximately 5% of the population is psionic; most psions are recruited into across-kingdom religious organization that worships folk memories of the Precursors.

Cordillon is now terraformed into a garden world, thriving medieval TL with psionics. Yaskoydray wants humans there bred for creativity. Our mission is to alter them to achieve it. We arrive with a Droyne fleet for defense in-system.

We discovered that in the last 5,000 years, the colony has spread across the world and divided up into nations.  They are:

• Jol: Located on the shores of the largest sea, with their capital, is on the site of the old Consensus colony, Jol is primarily a merchant power but their navy gives them considerable military force.

◦ The elderly queen of Jol, Aja, is senile and easily confused; she is a puppet of her advisors and the church.

◦ Artistically, Jol is by far the most cosmopolitan of the kingdoms. Their culture is influenced by dozens of other nations.

• Perid: Expansionist Perid is a loose coalition of hill tribes and mercenary bands who have conquered several small kingdoms in recent years.

◦ The queen of Perid is a shield-maiden named Laja, a powerful telekinetic witch who escaped a church-run nunnery as a young girl. She despises the church and has banned the organization within her kingdom; she still respects and honors the sky-gods but considers the religious structure to be hopelessly corrupt.

◦ Peridian culture is dismissed by the other kingdoms as barbaric but they are easily the most vibrant, energetic and neophiliac of the cultures.

• Dunsan: Old Dunsan is the largest and best-established kingdom on Cordillon. However, it is in decline; the army is now in control of the crown and the kingdom is riddled with internal divisions, dissent and economic problems.

◦ The queen of Dunsan is Hilae, an ambitious woman from one of the older noble houses. She is trying to wrest control of the crown back from the armies by playing generals off against each other.

◦ Dunsan is also the seat of the church.

◦ Dunsan is the most stable and powerful of the kingdoms; their culture is increasingly degenerate and concerned with worship of the past, however any cultural movements not endorsed by the Dunsanians will have trouble finding traction elsewhere.

• Thalio: The isolated but powerful kingdom of Thalio has an extremely complex, ritualized culture centered around martial arts and poetry. They have the highest proportion of psions.

◦ The Sacred Master’s vizier is a man named Idec, a sneering eunuch.

◦ The church has a few missions in Thalio’s ports, but has almost no political influence.

◦ Artistically, Thalio is the most advanced and erudite culture but their art is heavily bound up in their ritual behavior. Convincing them to develop new styles may be difficult.

In addition, there is the Church of the Sky Gods. The psion-dominated Church has branches in almost every kingdom.

◦ The head of the church is the Speaker for the Sky, a male psion named Yerak. He is a fervent believer in the sky gods and believes that the barbarians of Perid must be wiped out in a holy crusade.

◦ The church has sponsored art in the past, mostly depictions of the sky gods. The church controls many artists but they produce little innovative work.

 

There are no Droyne colonists here now; their city was near Jol but was moved to the other side of the sea when the oceans rose and later moved off-world, abandoning the humans who no longer remember them.

Our mission was to sponsor artistic movements and introduce new cultural elements.

We started in Thalio with recon. It’s run by the Sacred Master and a vizier “face of royal compound.”

After the first day of recognizance, we find out that the Sacred Master is a Droyne and his family. They’re psionics and rule through the Vizier (a sneering eunuch). They don’t appear to have higher tech than the locals. Ayude finds a shuttle in their palace, hundreds of years old and non-functional. They’ve been living here for generations and are inbred.  They are worshiped as gods – secret gods. They have maintained their language. The Vizier knows they are Droyne.

We contact the Droyne by drone (our safety and theirs). Their ancestors crashed and they escaped in a shuttle three generations ago. We ask if they want to go home. Short answer:  yes. We take the Droyne to our ship and plan to use the Vizier as our mouthpiece. We asked the Droyne for intel on local conditions. We bring vizier up with the Droyne to bring him up to speed on what is going on.

Next, Perid: Queen Laja, who is prepping for war, though we were not sure against whom. We come down in a shuttle.

Shuttling down, force shields intact for safety, we got their attention for sure. Laja came down herself, and assumed we were there to help her crusade against the church.  We asked her to meet with everyone and listen to our proposals.  Talk, no killing. Laja can bring one advisor.

Next, Jol. Elderly queen Aja, senile and confused. Emyoday contacts her as more human-looking and she can bring one advisor. She mistakes him for a foreign country representative. We pick the most influential advisor; these people are greedy and even try bribing us to pick them.

Dunsan: Queen Hilae is under house arrest; we tell general to bring her out and they do, with jaws dropping.

Next, Speaker of the Sky, as the seat of the church is in Dunsan, we pick him up too.

Jol went smoothly at first, but fell into civil war as soon as we left. Different factions start rapier duels and the others hot-foot it back to their castles to prep. The Church splits into schisms between those worshiping “the old gods” (who were us) and us.

The world’s leaders were up in the ship, all glaring at each other.  If looks could kill…

 Continued in The Secret of the Ancients, Part 2

 

See Also: Dramatis Personæ, Skylark 2, Campaign Starts, The 2nd Adventure, The Chamax Plague, Horde, Shadows, Research Station Gamma, Twilight's Peak, Prison Planet, Leedor on Aramis, First Call at Zilla, Trade War, The Bloodwell, ANNIC NOVA, The Kinunir, Kesser's Return, Justice, Mission to Mithril, Outback, Skylark and the Pit, Last Flight of the Amuar and One Crowded Hour and Secrets of the Ancients.