Jewels of the IndraNet

This is the first original game material I've written for my current Maximum Recursion Depth Campaign, up to now I've just been using the book or other materials I've previously written.

It takes inspiration from Gardens of Ynn and also the Mycelium Matrix guest entry in Huffa's Between the Skies.

It references Buddhabrot City, a location briefly mentioned in the module in the book. Right now I just need it to last for 1-2 sessions, it's just a vehicle for other stuff in the campaign, but it would be nice at some point to expand this further, more like Ynn, with more entries per table, more tables, additional descriptions, location-specific tables, events, rogue poltergeist and nature spirit generators, etc.; and make it something that could work either for MRD or as a standalone thing.

In addition to the Jewels of the IndraNet I also wrote a few additional locations for Buddhabrot City, and it will incorporate Dharmatics using Concept Crafting. Not including that stuff in this post, maybe in the future.

Jewels of the IndraNet Generator (prototype version)

Roll d6+layer for each (starting from layer 0)

Locations

1. Residential neighborhood.

2. Neighborhood main street.

3. Natural space (park, lake, woods).

4. Liminal space (bridge, transit area, long road).

5. Industrial area.

6. Market.

7. Entertainment district.

8. Financial district.

9. Deep urban space (winding streets, alleys, Kowloon-dense spaces).

10. Deep nature (forest, desert, ocean).

People

1. Devas going about their business.

2. Rogue Poltergeist (peaceful or mildly disordered).

3. Nature Spirits in equilibrium with their environment.

4. Rogue Poltergeist (moderately disordered or engaging in petty haunting e.g. graffiti, stealing minor objects, opening doors and windows).

5. Deva merchant (pushy hawker, shady shyster).

6. Human refugees in tension with Deva locals.

7. Derailer scouting party.

8. Rogue Poltergeist (violent) or Asura.

9. Powerful Nature Spirit.

10. Derailer caravan sabotaging a Deva space.

Details

1. Serene stillness, even mild sounds echo, movements tessellate, light bends and slows like in fog.

2. Negative spaces, visual field pop-in like a videogame.

3. Low humming and synesthetic lines of poetry or dialogue taken out of context, peaceful yet ominous.

4. Rainbow sun, 3D rainbow shadows projecting from 4D spacetime, no darkness, no black.

5. Holographic mushrooms, psychedelic imagery, anachronistic technologies and robots.

6. Lights and music and animate graffiti like a naturalistic EDM club.

7. Overwhelming luminosity and pulsing waves of liquid sunshine.

8. Everything is a pareidolic Nature Spirit.

9. Industrial waste, dinosaur poltergeists screaming in pools of flaming oil, leprous-looking plastic-men.

10. Corporate takeover, everything is assimilated into a Corporate Spirit.

Star Trek-inspired Aliens

Recently watched the Paramount+ era Star Trek stuff (besides Strange New Worlds- waiting for that to wrap) and also The Orville. Felt mixed on Star Trek, but even the stuff I liked, it bothered me how few new ideas it introduced.

On the other hand, The Orville, despite clearly being Star Trek with the serial numbers filed off, feels more novel. I believe this is because rather than just having off-brand Vulcans and Klingons, they introduced new and interesting species that feel like Star Trek species. I was skeptical of this show bc I'm not a Seth MacFarlane fan necessarily, but it's quite good.

So this list is intended to be like that. As much as I like truly novel worlds, it's fun also to work within the constraints of an idea, to make something feel like Star Trek, while also bringing novel ideas to it.

Xanthians

This species has the vibrancy of ripe mango, tiger stripes of varying colors, and glowing cat eyes. Their world is idyllic and they evolved with few natural predators, and so most of the evolutionary pressures on their species were aesthetic in nature. They have many synesthetically-linked and hyper-acute senses. They are known for being intuitive, having an artistic temperament, and their culture values the sublime above all else. Even their language is in the form of abstract pictograms and essentially the medium of art; each painting a literal story. While artistic by nature more so than scientific, they are not technologically simpler than The Alliance; instead, they rely on a smaller number of intuitively crafted and irreplicable Wonders, rather than mass production of mundane technology.

Myculons

This species are pink-, blue-, or green-hued, with saturated lip tone that looks like lipstick, white dots across their face, and two fungal antennae reminiscent of "Super Mario" amanita mushrooms matching their skin tone. They are technically a symbiosis of two species, a humanoid and a fungoid, but few of the raw humanoids survive the nuclear hellscape they made of their world long ago. If they live to adulthood in reasonable health, they usually sacrifice themselves to the fungoid, protecting them from radiation and the effects of aging and leasing them a new life. Their original self is preserved in dream-like memories but they are mostly at that point a new being. They have limited verbal communication ability and are awkward by human standards, but can communicate fluently with mycelial networks by touch. The humanoid brain is more like a socio-cognitive mask, their true self is the fungoid, and they often have meta-conscious quirks, tics, or compulsions. When under duress, the humanoid conscious mind shuts down entirely. Other humanoids often find them uncanny, testing the bounds of personal comfort even in the largely post-xenophobic Alliance.

Droma

This species come from a world that underwent dramatic and peculiar atmospheric change at some point in its development, driving the evolution of an organ called the Micro-Atmospheric Selective Kinetic Filter. These "mask" filters are shed and regrown over the span of days, breaking down from a hard shell to plastic-y waste. They often appear to express emotion, or reflect elements of the lived experience of the individual, and are believed to be the linguistic "missing link" of their species. Perhaps because their masks obscure facial cues, they rely heavily on dramatic speech and exaggerated body language. Similarly, the masks limit their ability to hide emotions, and so instead they have adapted to value radical self-expression and openness, making for charismatic, albeit demanding, theater actors, people leaders, and emotional supporters. That said, their radical self-expression can also sometimes be perceived as self-centeredness, or otherwise be overwhelming or off-putting to other humanoids. 

Zab-baz (Semiurge)

Kind of like humanoid anglerfish, only instead of the tiny males fusing to the big females and atrophying into some gonads, the males and the females are effectively the right and left sides of a body, and fuse together to form a whole one. Considered war-like for their instinct towards aggressive consensus-making - they can get very pushy to get you to agree or else get out.

Aurunex

This species of sleek metallic carcinoids evolved on a world of naturally occurring silicon-based life. Their consciousness is highly disembodied, relying more so on algorithmic predictive heuristics than on direct sensory experience, making them significantly faster at processing and reacting to information than most organic life, but also more prone to glaring errors, missed signals, and hallucination. Although their sensory experience is comparatively lo-fi, this cognitive quirk also provides them a rich spiritual existence, and most Aurenex have a deep and ongoing personal relationship with their gods; forests of angular platinum arboroids, kaleidoscopic golden flowers, electric will o wisps, holographic silverfish angels, all slipping in and out of their consciousness at any time, giving them an academic absent-mindedness. They believe that embodied consciousness, sensory stimulation, gut instincts, and emotional outbursts are noise; that the material world is in fact a virtual reality created by a demiurge to trap them, or a god to test them, a distinction upon which many wars and atrocities have been committed.

Ornitheaons

This species evolved indigenously in space, like birds made of plasma. When interacting with most other species, they must wear bio-suits to protect others from the radiation. Creatures without solid form or solid planet, neither self nor state, they lack an understanding of many of the spatial or conceptual boundaries of other creatures. Coupled with their uninhibited curiosity, this can make them difficult companions and crewmates, although invasions of privacy, property, and personal space are not generally intended with malice. Sometimes referred to as Star Children for their god-like power and child-like temperament, The Alliance is wary of their inclusion, but they were too powerful, and too full of potential, to be ignored.