Satrap of Saturn

Doc Illig, sometime celebrity science popularizer and streaming personality, best-selling writer, deep sea explorer, controversial treasure-hunter, mesmerist... Doc Illig has quiet quit from the intellectual influencer game, with rumors of substantial financing, both crowdfunded and donations from Silicon Valley futurists. The good Doktor observes exquisite data hygiene and operational security, but each of his monthly videos features intriguing objects placed oh so casually by his elbow or shoulder: a mastodon tooth and a picture frame incorporated bowhead whale teeth strongly suggest the Alaskan panhandle or islands of British Columbia. It is indeed a luxury mad scientist base, tidewater adjacent for interactions with deep ones, who are entirely blasé about their transactions with Illig. They borrow his cars without asking, apparently going for joyrides or private errand; they tinker with his observatory equipment at will, installing biological objects still dripping saltwater and m...

  "The Dead care not for Sorq! Not for its cities or seas or peoples. Sorq is a stain of squalor on an engine of unspeakable power. The Dead will take Sorq and possess it for eternity. We alone understand this instrument, we alone possess the whip to drive Sorq to the ends of this cosmos. We shall harry the foolish stars and cast them down into the Abyss! We shall feast on the murdered flesh of stars and defecate upon the restless churn of matter! The Dead will not rule this universe: this universe is beneath us, we will defile it and make of it what we will — and it is this orb presently smeared with living filth, that will doom any that oppose the Dead!!" —Propaganda message from the Lich Principalities, delivered by resistless dream-sending to thirty-five of the 156 Vicegerents; twenty-four of whom have retired from public appearances, four slew one another in a melee, and three more Vicegerents have declared for traitorous parties and rebels. Sorq is a planetary society...

  SORQ anti-canon Oops all tables all the time idea All of SORQ can be generated procedurally at table or in mini-games. Encourage sharing DM duties, rolling up new regions and springing them fully stocked and brimming with science-fantasy early-modern bureaucratic adventure. Generate world: session 0 with full table, all players and DMs Detail regions: each tableer takes homework, responsibility for rolling up one region; or table picks one region of interest to start with, and the Lifetime DM will begin to stock this home region.  Planetary regions come in bands around the globe. Equatorial sea, islands  Weather, ships, sea monsters, shipping lanes Shore lands — civilized in seven conventional regions (tables of names). City-states of note: metropole, large, ordinary poleis (tables of population and notables) [the poleis will receive substantial detail] Hinterlands inland from coastal poleis: , estates, reserves, parks, underworld access lands Scattered arc...

Sorq has a wide, wide orbit around its primary, Bale, the Usurper, a sullen and inconstant orange giant, but a refuge from the transformations of other local stars into compact objects. Bale was once of a pair with a blazing minor giant, the Old King, that Old One the Child. The Old King's transformation into a true giant was observed by the dominant sophonts of the system, and they shaped a moon of modest size but extraordinary mass of minerals, metals, fissionables into an orb that could bear their civilization and species well away from Old King's terrible light, changing its orbit in mere decades with no damage to structure, able to deflect and manipulate objects within several planetary radii, spread wings and stretch forth its grasp. That move accomplished, the originating civilization, the Children of the Old King, discovered talent for ontological translation, and quite soon ablated to minimal occupation and corporeal involvement with this cosmos . 1.5 billion years ...

So Barker named these three eyed flying sophonts hláka because of course he did; and he made them not only inscrutable and irrational but also unreliable and incapable of communicating their values and inner world, because of course he did — I've referred to this a couple of times, insha'allah I'll pull up the Blue Room listserv file where he explains how many human cultures are incapable of ever understanding each other, with the takeaway being "and why would i want to understand some dirty tribesman, and what do i care if they don't understand my sophistication", and also condescension that they have the right to be primitive and proud if they please to.  I hope I'm not exaggerating, in my memory it was brazen and dismissive. The peccant point being, why should he make up comprehensible aliens? Then players might want to play them, instead of this nice legionary of the Emperor's Own XXIV Child Molestor Regiment, they wear big red hats! I know you lik...

Worlds of Sorq's nexus TAMBRAX : metals, metallurgy, arms and armor — red zone, travel proscribed. The culture is chivalrous, with a universal kingship and a cosmic war on evil ideology [shiftingly defined]. Orrhinoechich : clockworks, recording and playback crystals Poasüu : Hyperborea, Atlantis, Mu, but with vast huge monsters. Rhiidusc : sorcerer-kings who would looove to rule the nexus, and have agents and conspiracies throughout; they are much hampered by one another, and rivals from Miidax Tam and Miibrax Cuu. Miidax Tam : mystics, ancient Tambrax colony moons of Miibrax Cuu. Miibrax Cuu : enormous shell world around a singularity. Home to the giants of Brax and Cuuax, long-lived and shrewd; mystics of a multiplanar, gnostic, levels-of-clearance, possibly shell-game nature — they interface benevolently in one instance, remain neutral or aloof in most, put vast energies into a few seemingly amoral events or apparent atrocities.      Whereas the Watchers of Tam are se...

I promised a certain Trilobite i'd get up to date on my Sorq notes; that was before i slammed down like ten new pages last night. SOME of these have already been transcribed, but where...? Notes to collect from numbered notebooks [in index i made in N.22] N.22 ...  N.16 cross-section of underworld Plutotects of Abadanih, great engineers and planet-crafters of antiquity Worlds of Sorq's nexus Underworld barbizans, access to deep places Regions, civilization, magics Great walls, wild areas planetology, ancient engines in planet core sketch from orbit; moons N.13 lots of 13th stuff that can be enSorqed, later: mummy cultists, Dream demiurge Šén reptiloids I have stolen from Tékumel; lots of material for a particular dungeon [Tetrarchs' Folly]; all Tetrarchy material should be imported, later. that amounts to...lots of information on this reptiloid species inhabiting Sorq. Šén icons. Bonecraft armor: so strong! so flexible! so necromantically attunable! Temple of Starless Night...

~reflexions upon viewing a harsh piece of satire~ — remember when men were men and we hurt each other and everyone and ate meat, that ruled — yes, i remember 80s comedians and 90s indie comix. i most associate this bitter apotheosis with a segment of the older cohort of gen X, fatalists of a sort; the last generation to grow up with electric mass culture—tv, vhs, music, radio, film, mixtapes, DIY, zines; bad drugs, because where were you going to learn what was good, much less find it? and, critically, the last generation entering adulthood before the net, before the radical connection to information, affinity, identity, empowerment—i retain an essential optimism about this world-change that i found at its beginning, in my context of the first generation to enter adulthood with a world at our fingertips, including all the bullshit in the world, so, so much more trivia and meretricious reward for spending one's time gorging on the bullshit... this is going to be one of those fun-to-...

Yr Hmbl Satrap's Personal Appendix N   ن Blogspot's sans serif Arabic nun is just killing me  This has been going around the OSRsphere — confer Vodka Gobalsky's . Many of my entries will be familiar to anyone reading this; rather than introduce them to some alien or time traveller who never heard of Jack Vance or Moebius, i've put a few words about the meaning of these works in my imaginarium. fantasy & fantasy adjacent sf/horror   Elric series, Michael Moorcock . I read a fair bit of lowbrow fantasy as a teen. Dragonlance, David Eddings. Elric was an antidote to all that: more than a role model to me and countless boys who thought a black trenchcoat made us more interesting (and we were right),  Moorcock showed me that a an awesome dude with a badass sword can be a vehicle for serious literature. The lost boys and I came for gothdom without wedgies, but if we wanted to stay, the point is to break all the high fantasy tropes: betrayed, defeated, reveale...