Its that balky computer again! I've had that problem myself, your computer freezes, you press "add reply" and nothing happens so you press it again. Kind of like what happens when you press the call button on an elevator and it doesn't show up fast enough. Just delete the other two copies when you get the chance, that's all.
Zhodani nightmares?
- Thread starter archhealer
- Start date
This is mean! I like it!
The only means of destroying the creature is careful unravelling of the hold it has on the victim by a trained psionic psycho-therapist.
This could be a great game premise as the PCs are exposed to some really nasty experience and all begin to suffer post traumatic disorders. Oddly, they all seem to have similar nightmares and flashbacks
I remember reading a book, I think it was Harry Harrison's Deathworld Trilogy, that had a lot of psionic influence. The entire world, plants and animals, seemed intent on killing the humans living there. It ended up that the flora and fauna had a rudimentary empathy. The people felt and acted like the environment was their enemy so the environment responded in kind.
GypsyComet
SOC-14 1K
See if you can find a copy of the Telzey Amberdon stories by James Schmitz.
Also,"The Masters of Everon" by Gordon Dickson for another take of the "big psionic cats" thing.
Then there is Christopher Stasheff's Witchmoss, as seen in his "Warlock" series.
More than a few of Andre Norton's tales involve psi talents, though not much in the way of critters. Eet (from Uncharted Stars) comes to mind, however.
Read Alan Dean Foster's "Midworld" and imagine some psionic talent mixed into some of the nastier predators. A psionically invisible silverslith would be plain mean to the group of PCs who have no fear otherwise...
Also,"The Masters of Everon" by Gordon Dickson for another take of the "big psionic cats" thing.
Then there is Christopher Stasheff's Witchmoss, as seen in his "Warlock" series.
More than a few of Andre Norton's tales involve psi talents, though not much in the way of critters. Eet (from Uncharted Stars) comes to mind, however.
Read Alan Dean Foster's "Midworld" and imagine some psionic talent mixed into some of the nastier predators. A psionically invisible silverslith would be plain mean to the group of PCs who have no fear otherwise...
Fritz_Brown
Super Moderator
xenodoc, you are correct - it was Deathworld. I don't think the environment was responding to the colonists worries, though. IIRC, it was just a very "xenophobic" planet and didn't want them there.
Just saw a somewhat similar episode of ST:Enterprise yesterday, where members of a race travel to a rogue planet to hunt creatures. Turns out they're psionic (?) and shapeshifters and manifest as familiar things from the target's past -- in the case of Archer, a pretty blonde woman from a poem he'd known as a child.
Rogue Planet
In Palladium's Megaverse, they have mutant animals that can develop psionics, including a "Mind Trap" which fits your "all in their head" type of deal.
Dark Sun (AD&D) is filled with psionics and some particularly nasty psi-creatures, which you could also mine and scale-back if need be. I remember Rikus fighting one nasty psi-beast in one of the novels. Sorry I don't recall particulars as it's been many years.
Easterner9504
SOC-13
HIGH PASSAGE Magazine, I think #2, had a system called THE EDGE (Old Expanses). Ships went into orbit and never leave.
Psi creatures loose!
Psi creatures loose!
One of the water world LBBs (I can't remember the adventure, but it deat with an underwater research station), had a number of psionic animals... all vicious if I recall correctly, or at least a nuisance.
In Traveller you're supposed to conjur your own monsters with the animal table, which is why it's kept generic and only describes environment and behavior. In the adventure I ran a couple months back I created several critters, one of which was a static crystalline creature the size of a small whale, that had an appendage that acted as a "laser carbine". It was actually the most tame of all the creatures, but the description I provided in the library data had one of the guys wiping sweat from his hands
In Traveller you're supposed to conjur your own monsters with the animal table, which is why it's kept generic and only describes environment and behavior. In the adventure I ran a couple months back I created several critters, one of which was a static crystalline creature the size of a small whale, that had an appendage that acted as a "laser carbine". It was actually the most tame of all the creatures, but the description I provided in the library data had one of the guys wiping sweat from his hands
We already have those. They're called cats and dogs (cromagnon-Vargr).
For my current campaign, the players visited a world called Sharrip - an iceball style planet. It is populated by a largish herbivore about half the size of a ranch house. The beastie is called a snow-cow because of the way it feeds. It's lower jaw resembles something like a steamshovel in that it scoops up snow for which the world's primative plantlike lichen and moss grows. The creature's size helps it protect against heat loss, and its constant shovelling of snow and lichen into its system makes it such that it has to urinate constantly. Everything from its growth to its aging to its reproductive rates are glacially slow. It probably doesn't help that the thing has 4 brains to move its body about, and that it takes the destruction of 3 of its 4 brains to paralyze it - let alone allow you to kill it. Admidst all of this - is this little itty bitty ferret like creature with grey fur (Snowcows have whitish fur). With four canine teeth that protrude from its upper jaw, this beastie slinks, bounds, leaps in a manner not unlike a ferret. The body's skeleton is such that like a cat's, its bones are not a rigid structure, but relatively loose knit which allows it to squeeze into small holes and tunnels as it hunts its prey. Oddly enough, this creature also seems to act like an enhancer or psionic multiplier such that when it is in contact with another of its kind, latent abilities become magnified - a sort of mating ritual where the female in heat induces a mental mating frenzy rather than one that is cued from scent. Its life span is a short 8 to 10 years, and its native habitat is not Sharrip. It turns out that someone tried to smuggle some zoo specimans of creatures that come from the Zhodani homeworld. The smuggled specimans wound up in a warehouse in Sharrip, and the owner died before he could get them back again. As fate would have it, the time span prepaid for the warehousing fees is about to expire (not that it matters any more - the crate was an animal version of a sleep tube and it broke down. Unfortunately, there was this 300 lb carnivor who also has a rudimentary psionic ability to induce massive "freeze" style fear in its intended victims. It appears the ancients tried inducing psionic abilities in animals first before tying to induce it in humans. Lacking a clear cut reason for destroying the animal experiments, the Precursors let the animals free to fend for themselves as a means of a secondary experiment.
The players found out the hard way when they discovered that the preditor had consumed the warehouse owner. They had had dealings with the now dead warehouse owner because he had another "package" that the other guy had left behind in addition to the smuggled Zhodani animals - and that is a girl. They've not yet put two and two together yet to realize that if the animals are Zhodani in origin, and the girl was part of the same "shipment" as the animals, that the girl likely has some link to the Zhodani - somehow.
(turns out the girl is a latent psi should she ever get the training, she'll be a full blown psi)
The players found out the hard way when they discovered that the preditor had consumed the warehouse owner. They had had dealings with the now dead warehouse owner because he had another "package" that the other guy had left behind in addition to the smuggled Zhodani animals - and that is a girl. They've not yet put two and two together yet to realize that if the animals are Zhodani in origin, and the girl was part of the same "shipment" as the animals, that the girl likely has some link to the Zhodani - somehow.
(turns out the girl is a latent psi should she ever get the training, she'll be a full blown psi)