Category: Coriolis

The Order of the Pariah are my favourite faction, but not for the reasons you might expect. I think most players read about the Order of the Pariah, their religious fervour, militaristic outlook, animate armors and Monastery Cruisers, and picture Games Workshops’ Space Marines in their head. And frankly that’s not a bad shorthand, but I like to think of them as more nuanced.

The Order of the Pariah are the Third Horizon’s first freedom fighters, leading the uprising against the First Horizon, and their agents, the Sacrifice of Nazareem. And of course when independence was won, and the portals closed, it was the Order that carried on the fight, seeking out the vestiges of the Nazareem’s Sacrifice while the other factions thought the war was won. In doing so, they are more true to their origins than the other first come factions, who were “fortune seekers, religious dissidents and rebels” from the First and Second Horizons. So, unlike the 40k Space Marines, the Order not only don’t have imperial ambitions, they seem more willing to isolate than to spread their creed. So what is behind their lack of missionary zeal? Having defeated the forces of the First Horizon in the Portal Wars, why did they not use their military might to spread the word of the Pariah across the third Horizon and cast out the false Icons? Do they not want converts? Indeed you have to be born of Zalos to live on Zalos – offworlders are restricted to the moon, Karrmerruk, the City of Foreigners. Are they as racist at the Zenithian Hegemony?

Their activities on Coriolis would suggest not. Apart from the famous Sanatorium, they run a network of soup kitchens and other poverty relief charities. Anyone (or at least anyone with the grades) is free to study at their Medical Academy. And yes, they become neophytes of the order while they train, but are free to seek work for other factions when they graduate. The Academy, and the charitable work of the Samiritans seems at odds with the reputation they earned during the portal wars. And their scientific advances, including biotechnology and antimatter propulsion suggest they they are not by any means dogmatic primitivists.

I like to think of the monasteries as places learning, the the sword of the judge, or the Sickle of the Martyr, is equivalent to Occams Razor. If you have read Anathem by Neal Stephenson, you have an idea of how I imagine the monasteries of concentric circles of learning… Here too is kept the memory of the all the Third Horizon knows about the old enemies, Al Ardha and the First and Second Horizon.

In the cities, the plebeian population worship the Judge/Pariah of course – what choice do they have? But their jobs are like any others, the industries servicing the great monasteries at each city centre. To truly become an adherent of the faith your must enter and monastery and learn. Monks are the equivalent of stationaries and their priests, prophets and elders are Privileged. There is no inheritance of title or estate. Everything is given to the Order when you die, but poverty is reduced to almost zero.

So I argue that their reputation as religious zealots that cry heresy at every new thing is in fact carefully crafted. Not for nothing do they consider the Foundation their biggest rival. Within the Zalosian monasteries are repositories of truth and knowledge. Knowledge which the Foundation wants, and which, given their isolationist stance, the Order believes no one should have. Yes, a fierce war rages against the “Heretics” of Zahardan, or Zalos-B, but the rest of the Horizon knows little about it. What is the nature of their Heresy? Personally I like to think that the population of Zahardan are even stricter religious zealots than those on Zalos A, but the Nomad Federation speak darkly of a war crime committed against one of their clans on that planet (core book p211), so it seems that Zahardans are at least less isolationist than the Order of the Pariah. Perhaps they do want to proselytise, to recruit new followers and to kill those who don’t covert… perhaps they are more dogmatic, less pragmatic than the Order of the Pariah. And the true Order are the misunderstood good guys – friends of all Firstcome genuine seekers of truth.

And therein lies a way to play some of the concepts that you might not quickly associate with the Order – as an Operative or Data Spider, you could be a spy on the Foundation, checking up on what they have found out, and how close they are to the hidden truth. As scientis, you could be a priest-researcher looking for evidence of portal builder technology in all the secret places of the Horizon. As a Negotiator you could be a diplomat, steering the other factions away from a Truth they could not stand to know.

Think about it, Zalosian Monastery ships, heavily armed scientific vessels. Remind you of anything? Its crazy I know, but I am going to say it – if you want to play the Crew of the Starship Enterprise in Coriolis… maybe they should come from Zalos.

This is a transcript of my piece in Episode 97 of our podcast, on The Emissaries. It reveals spoilers for the Mercy of the Icons campaign, if you are a player and don’t want to be spoiled, read no further.

If you can level one criticism at the Core book in Coriolis, it’s that it teases you with, seemingly, a million snippets of lore that it doesn’t explain fully. Most of these are fine, I have imagination enough to make something up, and indeed some of those snippets have provided inspiration for pieces on this very podcast.

But one bit of lore left me, and I expect, a lot of other readers very confused. Who, or what, were the Emissaries? In this piece I am going to answer that question, drawing exclusively from the published books, not adding any of my own ideas. The first we read of the Emissaries is in an extract of THE REALM OF THE ICONS – A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW OF THE THIRD HORIZON by Kaldana Mourir, quoted on page seven:

“Zenith heralded the dawn of a new era – and the Horizon blossomed once again. Three dozen star systems, linked by fate and by the will of the Icons, wandered together towards a brighter future. But as the Emissaries arrived, the happy days drew to a close, and the Dark between the Stars slowly came creeping back.”

The Emissaries are a BAD THING then, or at least they are in the eyes of Mourir, who is obviously a Zenithian apologist. Perhaps the Firstcome see them as allies? Perhaps not, because on page 13:

From the depths of the gas giant Xene rose the faceless Emissaries. Spectres from another world, Icons or Portal Builders? The theories about their origins are many. The Emissaries demanded a seat at the Council – and got one. One of the Emissaries claimed itself an incarnation of the Icon the Judge, to which the Order of the Pariah cried “sacrilege!” and closed their home system to all travel. A new age of shadows and suspicion has dawned, and the peoples of the Horizon all wonder: what is the true agenda of the Emissaries?

I think it was at this point, with their description as “faceless” that I started to imagine them as the Vorlons from the TV show, Babylon Five. On page 184 they are described as “ghosts from another world.” And, indeed on page 240 is says “often described as either spirits or spectral phenomena”. Often described? So, rarely actually seen it seems. And mostly spoken about in rumour. We are not even sure how many there are: “rumors claim that there are really nine altogether and that the Foundation and the Consortium are hiding the truth.”

But we know about only five of them, three of whom are out and about, location unknown, ready to meet your adventures whenever time, and story are right. This I like, we don’t need to pin them to a place your players might never choose to visit. One remains on the Foundation station orbiting Xene, now a place of pilgrimage, because that one claims to be the icon the Judge. The fifth is on Coriolis itself, as a (non-voting) member of the council. And one has to ask, what power do they have that one can “demand a seat on the Council”, and get it?

Talking of powers, we also know that people only started manifesting mystic powers when the Emissaries appeared. Obviously the two phenomena are connected, but how?

Moving on to the Atlas compendium, the back cover teases “the true nature of the mysterious Emissaries [has] only been myth to the common people of the Third Horizon – until now.” But does it really deliver?

It does explain the war between the Terran Empire of Ardha, and the Symmetry of the Second Horizon, which is known in our Third Horizon, of strategic value to both sides, as the Portal Wars. It also describes (on page 23) nodes: “A node can create a mystical and physical link between systems in a fashion that falls outside of the technology and methods used by the Portal Builders.” Nodes were created and destroyed during the portal wars as the First and Second horizons used the Third to attack each other. Eventually most were destroyed. But one survives on Xene, a weak point in the Second Horizon’s defences.

On page 25, the Compendium describes how, when a prospector ship made an emergency landing on Xene, mystics of the Second Horizon possessed the crew. Or tried to at least. Only one crew member was successfully taken over, with the mystic in the Second Horizon managing to retain her identity as she took over her host. That one is the one that now sits as an observer on the council. The other four (or eight?) were affected to varying degrees by the Darkness between the Stars.

So, not Vorlons after all, or Faceless, or even “described as […] spirits or spectral phenomena”- they look human it seems… except … in the book Coriolis: The Art of the Third Horizon there is an image captioned, The Spirit of the Emissary. It shows a cloud of fractal light and darkness above a writhing human on an altar or bed, so perhaps some people can see the Emissary as a spectral phenomenon in certain circumstances.

Most people can’t though, because we can witness actual possession if we play A Song For Jarouma, from Emissary Lost (page 228): “Mid-argument, or on their way to the next installation, a person believed to be dead or dying suddenly comes to life. With a spasmodic jerk and a terrifying scream, the team member tumbles onto the floor. Then, equally suddenly, they stop spasming, and stand up slowly. Looking around, they nod and blink, confused. They look like they are uncertain of their whereabouts (the person has been taken over by an Emissary.)” No mention of fractal clouds there. In that adventure we create the true story behind that prospector ship making an emergency landing. (It turns out not to be prospectors, and not quite the sort of emergency that the Atlas Compendium suggested.)

Emissary Lost has more to divulge about the Emissaries. It turns out they are Santulans, the highest ranking mystics in the Second Horizon. They introduce themselves to the people of the Third Horizon as “The Light of Peace” but whether they are remains to be seen.

*Update* I published this early because of a discussion on Facebook, and to get it out quickly, I didn’t do my usual check through the “primary source” – the published books. Preparing this for recording, I have now added references in.

Zeni is uncommon on Sadaal. The language is growing slowly on Bahram, but the indigenous tongues still dominate in Alburz. Priests and diplomats claim not to understand a word of Zeni and use translators in all meetings with foreigners. (Atlas Compendium page 17)

I am not generally a fan of language skills (or lack of them) getting in the way of fun roleplaying. But I appreciate the point of view of players who might be inspired by the cultural history of the Third Horizon to play with language difficulties. The core rulebook makes a number of references to the diverse languages of the Third Horizon, but apart from providing a couple of technological workarounds (such as the Language Unit on Page 109 and the cybernetic Language Modulator on Page 75), doesn’t offer much mechanically to emulate the complexity of communication. If I had a group of players eager to be explorers, traders in exotic goods, or missionaries, and turned on by the difficulties of communicating in the Third Horizon, I’d house rule it like this:

Zeni is the common tongue

“The language of the Zenithians, Zeni, has grown into the lingua franca of the Horizon today, as trade and commerce are dominated by the Zenithians. Most travelers (and PCs) speak Zeni in addition to their native tongues” (page 223). A closed community traveling for generations to the Horizon, would have a strong shared language. The work the Zenithians did in opening up the portals and bringing together Firstcome communities who had cut themselves off from one-another puts them in the place of colonial Britain, spreading English around the world and replacing French as the Lingua Franca. Even if what results in some places is a Patois like Singlish in Singapore, there will be enough Zenithian words in the dialect that even the least educated Plebeian can make themselves understood.

I am not ruling out the idea that different Zenithian families might have preserved their own language, or that the sleepers on the Zenith might have struggled to learn the Zenithian that evolved during the centuries of the voyage. But those are complexities that I am not going to get into here. Maybe in the future sometime, if I have a campaign based around the politics within the Zenithian Hegemony, there will be an opportunity to get into the nitty gritty. Speaking of the Hegemony, you just know they have a Language Institute defining Zeni grammar and vocabulary, and ineffectively banning words borrowed from Firstcome languages.

How many languages are there?

All Zenithians speak Zeni, and all Firstcome speak their native language and Zenithian. These are the base languages for every PC. Yes, this puts Firstcome characters at a slight advantage, but I don’t care. If you really do care, how about this? Only Privileged Firstcome speak Zeni like a Zenithian, Stationaries take a -1 modifier when rolling to, for example, manipulate a Zenithian of equal reputation, and plebeians a -2.

What IS their native language? Whatever the player thinks fits their character. A number are mention in book, including: Dabari; Miri; Kuan; Algolan; and, Zalosi. And we know that the Nomad tribes have enough different languages to make presenting themselves as a single faction to the political structures of the Third Horizon very … confusing.

One imagines that the Order of the Pariah have ensured there is only one Zalosi language, and everything else spoken in that system is heresy, but you can also imagine the heretics of Zalos B have also stamped out every language other than their TruZalosi. I like to think the planets of the Third Horizon are not monocultures, and that each has developed a variety of linguistic communities. But just how detailed your players want to go is up to each table to decide. If your native community is a particular forest of Labuan you could say that tribe’s dialect is your native language, but you might prefer to say you speak “Labuanese”. And let’s not forget the languages of the semi-intelligent – the ekilibri and the nekatra on Kua and the skavara on Amedo.

Cultured Linguists

“Ameda from Amedo is perhaps the most popular artist in [Tattoo] alley. She is well traveled, [and] speaks several languages” (page 256). In a multilingual Horizon, your PCs will have the opportunity to speak more than one language, but how many? A simple house rule I’d use to manage this would be that you can speak as many exotic languages fluently as you have points in Culture. Thus a Zenithian with three points in culture can speak a total of four languages: Zeni and three others. A Firstcome with three points can speak five: their native language; Zeni and three others.

I would recommend that players don’t pick which Languages they speak at character creation (though a Zenithian player character choosing to speak TruZalosi at creation is that player lobbying the GM for an adventure set on Zalos B, surely). Rather, when the party encounter an exotic language, any player with an unassigned culture point and a decent reason why they might speak it should claim to right to be translator for the party.

If none of the party have unassigned languages, or a technological solution, then it’s up to those with Culture to make a roll with any modification the GM chooses, every time they need to make themselves understood.

People listening to our most recent Coriolis Actual Play may have picked up on a few “references” – from a start, and a bad guy, inspired by the movie The Bad Batch, through scavengers modelled after Steptoe and Son (which our American listeners may know better as Sanford and Son) to a wrecked ship absolutely and openly based on the Liberator from Blakes 7. 

But when it came to the creatures infesting that ruined ship, it was the Coriolis rulebook I turned to. I didn’t really find what I was looking for, but I did find some inspiration. And this is the story of how I riffed on that inspiration, fudged the details, and tested my half-formed ideas in play. 

The inspiration came from a creature that was almost what I wanted: “The darkbound are regular people that are somehow claimed by the Dark between the stars.”

Until that point, I hadn’t decided whether the creatures I wanted were native to the planet, creatures of the Darkness, or as suggested here, fellow prisoners who were somehow changed. And given that the adventure is partly about how prisoners are changed by exile, it struck me, on reading about the Darkbound, it was suddenly obvious that my creatures should be changed prisoners. The description for the darkbound seemed perfect too, looking “like a thin and twisted human, with only a few torn patches of hair left, and with burning eyes and long claws instead of fingers.”

But the real inspiration came from their mystic power. They only have one – well, arguably they have a couple but more on that later. The only power which is most actually described mechanically is NIGHT VEIL. I won’t quote it here  but in short, it is a mental attack. It does not deal out mind-point damage, but it does make it difficult to think , with a -2 modifier on roles for observation, advanced skills and initiative. Now, I didn’t actually use that attack per se, but the idea suddenly made sense of what my creatures were, how they came to be, and the nature of the AI, Qadim, and the ship itself. 

Fans of Blake’s 7 may remember the ship’s computer, Zen.  When I started planning my adventure, I imagined an advanced AI like Zen, having been ripped out of its ship, enlisting the PCs to get him fitted back back in. The Darkbound’s mystic power unlocked a deluge of different, better, ideas. 

What if the relationship between Qadim and the ship was more complex? What if Qadim was the rational thinking part of the ship, the ego? And when it was ripped out what was left behind was the id, the instinctive, feeling part? What if both parts of the ship were damaged by the separation? Qadim can calculate and communicate but it can’t really understand the humans it works with because it has to fake empathy.  I’m going to say it’s autistic, while recognising that’s a massive oversimplification of a complex condition. 

Meanwhile, the ship, which Dave called Starsinger, but I am going to call Siren, can feel, and emote, it can run subroutines, and try to repair itself but it can’t really communicate. It moans, it sings it’s despair.  And it’s that which makes it difficult to think. It’s not a mystic attack at all – the longer you spend in the ship, the closer you get to where Qadim had been ripped out, the harder it becomes to make a wits roll. Mechanically I ran this as a -2 penalty to any wits based skill roll when they were in the chamber which is equivalent to the bridge (but I think I’d recommend doing it slightly differently in future). 

So these creatures are not the perpetrators of the mind-dimming effect, but it’s victims. Previous salvagers who spent too long in the vessel, and literally lost their wits. It’s more than that though, they have been transformed in other ways by prolonged exposure to the song of the Siren. They have become automata, part of the ship’s systems. I wanted the alien technology to feel properly alien, unknowable. I wanted it to be composed of strange sealed units that would be absolutely baffling to my engineer. So I imagined these creatures bodies were so changed by the influence of the Siren, long longer eating, sustained only by the song, that they are almost etherial, they can reach into the strange machinery of the ship to maintain and operate it.

They also needed to be a threat to the PCs though, and I had stolen their only mystic power to use as a more general effect. Well, I say it is their only power, and if you look at their stat-block, it is the only one listed. But the description mentions a couple of others, they “move incredibly fast, closing in on their victims in the blink of an eye to sink their claws into them.” And “Just the touch of a dark-bound can paralyze someone completely.” So I treated their touch like a paralysing poison, activating it not on “just the touch”, but when they actually do damage to a PC. 

I didn’t want them to be too aggressive though, so I wanted some sort of trigger for an attack. Thinking back to the separation of Qadim’s ego from the Siren’s id, I decided that they would only attack when a PC would try to reason with them, talk to them, so unused were they to communicating in anything other than the raw emotion of The Siren. I liked the idea that they might now be integral to the operation of the ship, and that, if they manage to get off planet in the Siren, the PCs would have to put up with them scuttling around and also remember not to talk whenever they were nearby. 

So I was done. However testing them in the play, I decided that, for our ill- equipped adventurers, the paralysis power could be … not dangerous, exactly, but not fun. Combined with their natural speed I saw that it could easily create a situation where the whole party was paralysed, and though they might not be dead (why would the creatures kill them if they were quiet) it might be a very frustrating experience. And the scenario was already frustrating enough. So I am thinking instead about a mystic power which, for the cost of a darkness point, allows them to ignore the effects of PC armour (and maybe, for another DP, makes it easy for them to inflict unarmed crits). 

Finally I needed a name, because I feel these creatures are now quite different from the Darkbound that inspired them. I have called them Aabdel’rd, a corruption of an Arabic word that means, simply, crew.