Friday, December 19, 2014

Baroque Space: Among the Asteroids


I may do a more robust drop dice and random table thing for this that might be fairly applicable to weird islands, but for now here are some asteroid encounters for this setting.

1. A dwarf planet inhabited by naked, acephalous dwarfs. They are primitive of speech and manner and cannot be understood, nor do they understand any Earth language, though they do comprehend Enochian, the language of the angels. They zealously guard a crashed starship and their shamans perform crude rituals before it, including (perhaps) human sacrifice.

2. What appears to a solid asteroid at a distance, is only a loosely held pile of gravel, rocks, and sand. Any ship landing will likely sink to the core and become trapped. Debris from previous, unfortunate landings is buried within.

3. A peanut-shaped asteroid with a vertiginous, tumbling spin and the giant, vitrified skeleton of an angel embedded in the surface of one end. The crystalline bones would fetch a handsome price, if they could be mined.

4. A small world with great mounds at either end like giant anthills. Dome-headed, dwarfish creatures less than two feet tall dressed in skins and brandishing cudgels and spears swarm angrily from each if any vessel should land. The creatures from either mound are roughly identical, save that those from one are orange and the other purple. They will attempt to overwhelm any intruders they find and drag them back inside their respective mounds.

6. A rocky, desert world where lives a wretched hermit. He is along but for one-eyed, whimpering things he calls his "dear companions." Perhaps he has been driven made by his isolation, but his rants will frequently return to a great treasure who's location he alone knows.

7. A jagged. ice-streaked asteroid with a faintly luminous, ice gynosphinx, much larger than the sphinx of Egypt, in a gorge between peaks. There is rumored to be a great antediluvian treasure horde buried beneath it, but no one has found it. The sphinx emits a vibration that causes the space armor to thrum ominously, driving some mad who are exposed to it for too long.

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