The discussion in the Mind Flayer thread has brought me to recall my old favorite D20 horrors - the Aboleths. Unlike the Mind Flayers, both Aboleths and their bio-infested victim-slaves the Skum are SRD and OGL, so there are no projected copyright issues with them.
My idea is to write a horror adventure about an Aboleth for Stellar Reaches #4; the general outline would be somewhere between Aliens, the newer (John Carpenter's) The Thing and the Martian Gothic computer game.
A frontier colony (where should it be placed in the OTU?) on a frozen, very thin atmosphere world begins a slow terraformation process aimed to evaporate large parts of the ice in order to thicken the atmosphere and increase temerpatures and oxygen levels. As the ice near the main colony complex (inhabitated by terraformation engineers, quite small as the process is mostly automated) begins to melt, a cavern system is discovered not far from it. Deep within the caves, the thawed remanants of the planet's life await - an Aboleth, a lovecraftian horror with psychic powers, which captures the exploring crew and transforms them into Skum. Within days, the colony is overrun by strange monstrosities spawned by the Aboleth as well as by Skum, the infected, infested and "zombified" former colonists.
The type-S which visits the colony every two weeks to carry communications and minor cargos does not return from the colony. A second type-S is dispached, under emergency orders not to land unless contact is made with either the colony or the previous type-S. As the second type-S returns without making contact, the owning corporation pulls strings with the local Imperial government (on a world a few jumps from the colony) in order to get a Marine platoon look into the reasons for the colony's silence and for the loss of the type-S.
However, it will take the Marines four weeks (two jumps, one from the world to which the second type-S has returned to the world on which the Marines are stationed, another from that world to the colony) to reach the colony; meanwhile, an agent of a rival corporation has intercepted the message of the second type-S, and she hires the player characters as a strike team to accompany her to the colony in search of certain terraformation-tech-related research files that her employers would like to put their hands on...
My idea is to write a horror adventure about an Aboleth for Stellar Reaches #4; the general outline would be somewhere between Aliens, the newer (John Carpenter's) The Thing and the Martian Gothic computer game.
A frontier colony (where should it be placed in the OTU?) on a frozen, very thin atmosphere world begins a slow terraformation process aimed to evaporate large parts of the ice in order to thicken the atmosphere and increase temerpatures and oxygen levels. As the ice near the main colony complex (inhabitated by terraformation engineers, quite small as the process is mostly automated) begins to melt, a cavern system is discovered not far from it. Deep within the caves, the thawed remanants of the planet's life await - an Aboleth, a lovecraftian horror with psychic powers, which captures the exploring crew and transforms them into Skum. Within days, the colony is overrun by strange monstrosities spawned by the Aboleth as well as by Skum, the infected, infested and "zombified" former colonists.
The type-S which visits the colony every two weeks to carry communications and minor cargos does not return from the colony. A second type-S is dispached, under emergency orders not to land unless contact is made with either the colony or the previous type-S. As the second type-S returns without making contact, the owning corporation pulls strings with the local Imperial government (on a world a few jumps from the colony) in order to get a Marine platoon look into the reasons for the colony's silence and for the loss of the type-S.
However, it will take the Marines four weeks (two jumps, one from the world to which the second type-S has returned to the world on which the Marines are stationed, another from that world to the colony) to reach the colony; meanwhile, an agent of a rival corporation has intercepted the message of the second type-S, and she hires the player characters as a strike team to accompany her to the colony in search of certain terraformation-tech-related research files that her employers would like to put their hands on...