 March 27, 2014 - 6:10am | Just what is the Great Mission? to evolve a replacement species to eventually replace the eorna and stop the sathar. So what have the eorna been doing for 900 years? Their society is crippled and their industrial base is largely destroyed, so what makes them think they will be able to stop the sathar next time? In an in-elegant Borg of Star Trek sort of way the sathar pointed them in one possible direction- bio-engineered creatures. They have not been just evolving new sapient races but they have been developing air and "mechanized" role filling creatures. Queequeg is very much like the edestakai which we know it is possible for a radio reciever to be implanted into them so why not the queequeg? they are large and dangerous. Air whales make little sense to me as a evolved creature but as a designed creature I can buy them: http://www.starfrontiers.us/node/8128#comment-35286 The rogue crystals (SF-1) are an early prototype in the development of the air whale but because they are rogue they have been abandoned as a project. the Magma monster is a creature developed as part of this program but it proved difficult to find an application for using it in combat Clearly things are going in the direction of the Avatar movie's conclusion here but it makes more sense that the eorna would play to their strengths, bio-manipulation, and develop a conprehensive plan for defending against the sathar. If I remember correctly one of the battle encounters involves a cybernetically controlled megasaurus employed by the eorna. Thus the megasaurus may have been developed as part of the over all plan- its size has been increased over the past 900 years and it employs a cybernetic control unit reverse engineered from a cybo-dragon control unit. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
March 27, 2014 - 6:17am | The the Module SF-1 Volturnus Planet of Mystery should focus on the PCs beginning to realize that there are a number of engineered creatures around and discovering the eorna are responsible. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 March 27, 2014 - 9:29am | One important thing to remember is that due to their low numbers the Eorna have a rampant mental health problem. Now while this is shown by the number of Eorna that need to be taken care of there is another side. Quickly there are alot of high functioning Eorna who are just plain nuts. Possibly some of these Eorna created some of the weirder creatures thinking they were a great idea at the time. Sounds like a great job but where did you say we had to go? |
March 27, 2014 - 11:45am | @ rattraveller: thats a good point as well. In fact I think Oncefaroff explored that them with the development of the mechanons in his campaign. Perhaps the eorna council's decisions is to prepare a race to take over and leave it to them to develop their strategies for dealing with the sathar while the rogue/nuts/mad scientists are having nothing of the sort but rather are pursing their own vision ie things like the air whale and the magma monster. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 March 27, 2014 - 7:45pm | Maybe the Edestakai are a genetic manipulation of the Queequeg. A sort of "fast-track" type of experiment in evolution. Air Wale is something that could have mutated after the war 900 years ago and then been helped along by the whacky professor. I always thought the Rogue Crystals had something to do with Eorna robotics and the memory crystals the mechanons use. Neo-Mechanons if you will. Maybe there is a Mechanon scientist trying to train some to be pets. Time flies when your having rum. Im a government employee, I dont goof-off. I constructively abuse my time. |
March 28, 2014 - 2:44am | There is a symbiosis in the air whale between the plant part and the crystals on its back. since the rogue crystals and those on the back of the air whale can both initiate an attack I figure there is a relationship between them. Having rogue crystals play a role in the development of eorna robotics leading to the mechanons is an interesting idea. If the rogue crystals are an intelligence and yet the eorna "butchered" them to build robots and fragments of the rogue crystal intelligence merged with the programing of the robots then its easy to see that perhaps the eorna are in denial over the mechanon because on some level what they did is unethical. I just have a hard time believing in natural selection evolving the rogue cyrstals. I can live with them as a created entity a whole lot easier. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
March 28, 2014 - 5:54am | Rogue Crystals are another Eorna experiment gone wrong. The Eorna managed to foster silicon-based life, but failed at all attempts to make such life forms intelligent. At the point where semi-intelligence was reached, the silicon crystal life form invariably turned on its creator, as if it had an instictive hatred for carbon-based life forms. The Eorna eventually gave up. Some of the creatures escaped, however, and still survive. Maybe the original thought process behind these things was a self-replicating robot/defensive system. Who knows. But they have a potential to be fun. Guard dogs or early warning systems for the Mechanon. Seems like the Crystals would not attack them. Time flies when your having rum. Im a government employee, I dont goof-off. I constructively abuse my time. |
March 28, 2014 - 7:07am | I think based on that statement concerning silicone life that we can chalk the magma monster up to eorna experimentation. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
March 28, 2014 - 12:15pm | Here's a question. What if the Eorna decide to drop the Great Mission? The Great Mission was to develop a race to fight the Sathar if they return. Mission Accomplished. Races developed and contact with the Frontier races and lots of dead Sathar means they have no need for the Great Mission anymore. Now they have thousands of young to raise and a planet to resettle and all those created races are now competition, not the needed defense force. So what do these scientists do with experiments that are no longer needed? OR are they needed as labor for rebuilding the Eorna cities and industry. IE cheap/slave labor. Sounds like a great job but where did you say we had to go? |
March 28, 2014 - 12:27pm | Cheap labor. You have crazies running around and thoughsands being raised in a creche system. Its a situation rife for social disruption. what would be fun is having the eorna be holier than thou over the mega corps exploiting the primitives and yet they are quite willing to exploit them as well. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
March 28, 2014 - 5:59pm | Well that is kinda like the United States getting holier than though over Russia putting nuclear missiles in Cuba and having a few hundred nukes in Turkey themselves? History has alot of one side doing something and then getting mad at the other side for doing it, so let's not get into any current ones and think how the Eorna could exploit the other races. Maybe that is the real reason the Mechanons left. Sounds like a great job but where did you say we had to go? |
March 28, 2014 - 7:32pm | What if the eorna decided to manipulate the UPF and the core four? they do have some impressive bio tech and the ability to do memory wipes. Both of these things I tend to view as not being within the tech base of the UPF. They could release something like a rhinovirus as a vector for introducing a specially prepared gene into the general population of the frontier for the purpose of manipulation and or control. Perhaps this gene or the first attempt at producing it was the cause of the Blue Plague? I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
March 28, 2014 - 7:58pm | Could work. Since the Eorna would have learned alot from the Red Devil leftovers and the party they could then form a plan. They are realists and work toward a goal slavishly. Humans would seek to rebuild humanity no matter the cost. The Eorna took a different route. With the return of the egg ship things could et interesting. Sounds like a great job but where did you say we had to go? |
March 29, 2014 - 2:23pm | Red Devil leftovers LOL whats for dinner? I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 March 31, 2014 - 10:12pm | I've been stewing on this for a few days waiting for a time to sit down and write a detailed response. What if the Erona are hiding a secret that they fought a civil war after a first Sathar invasion years prior to the Day of Doom? The Erona were attacked once by the Sathar many years before the Day of Doom. The attack was brief and surgical, possibly to control the Erona. The Erona territories of Volturnus unified around the concept of defending against the Sathar. However, each territory favored a different plan. One territory pressed for the formation of planetary defenses and a space force to control the entire system and allow safe expansion. They felt that two homes was a better chance of survival than one. Another pressed for a large army and strong ground defenses. They argued that it was too dangerous to venture beyond their world and that they would be better served by just keeping the Sathar off their own world. Another territory pressed for low key tech that did not alert the Sathar to their advances so as to keep the Sathar from ever returning. Between these three large prominent territories there where the spectrum of other territories that believed in various ways the race should proceed to deal with the Sathar threat. However over time the three major territories ended up dominating the resources and citizens of the lesser territories to drive their agendas. They ended up in economic war among themselves competing to implement their favored plan. The biotech faction formed from the territory that favored avoiding technology detectable by Sathar probes. They dominated the small territories near them and genetically engineered creatures to replace as much mechanized technology as possible. They were the weakest territory but controlled the largest continental area. The military faction formed from the territory that favored the creation of a large army and planetary defenses. They actively fought with the planetary exploration faction that formed from the territory that favored expanding to other worlds to gain a safe haven and eventual strength equal to the Sathar. The planetary exploration faction eventually developed ships capable of exploring their system to the furthest reaches and developed a small colony on Anker. They claimed to have gained the ability to travel to other stars but the military faction suppressed any communications from the off world Erona. On Volturnus, the military faction took over territory after territory from the planetary exploration faction. They developed a crystalline technology to augment their drones so that one Erona pilot could manage several drones in their battles. When the battles resulted in the military faction taking space craft technology and pursuing the planetary exploration faction into space a Sathar listening post detected the new warships and alerted the Sathar that the Erona had become a threat. The Sathar invaded the system and destroyed everything they found in space and headed toward Volturnus. The colonists on Anker were warned about the invasion by the remaining explorers and they abandoned their colony only days before the Sathar nuked all evidence of the small outpost from existence. The Anker Erona drifted for years until their ship’s orbit around Zebulon brought them back to Volturnus. Meanwhile the military faction fought valiantly against the Sathar which resulted in a larger force of Sathar deploying to the system. This resulted in a full scale planetary war with the Sathar that engulfed all Erona. The military faction was all but destroyed. Only a few of their scientists remained. The biotech faction ended up fighting the ground campaign. They were unprepared however for the might of the Sathar. The Sathar were many times stronger and more numerous that the previous attack and doomed the planet in days. They brought attack beasts and set them free to breed and wipe out the Erona forever. The biotech faction fought back but dwindled swiftly in size and the Erona were wiped out as a species. When the Anker colonists returned to Volturnus they found a lost Erona society. They brought their cryonic technology intended for interstellar trips back to the surface and aided their brothers in enduring the Sathar aftermath. They gathered all remaining Erona together and counseled with them about a plan. The biotech faction held control because they were the most numerous. They opted to bioengineer creatures to eradicate the Sathar attack beasts and purge the world while all remaining Erona slept in the explorer’s cryonic chambers. The Anker colonists agreed to the plan but secretly launched their ship in space into a wide orbit with as many Erona eggs as they could find. They could not control the biotechnologist and feared their plan would fail by mutating all life on Volturnus. All of the Anker colonists died over the ages taking the secret of the egg ship and the history of Anker with them. The handful of military factionist that survived worked to fight the Sathar attack beasts by enhancing the biotech faction’s creatures with military crystalline control technology and new crystalline weapons. This arrangement worked out good initially until the military factionists began to gain power in the Erona councils. Then one of the military factionists created a force of autonomous crystalline controlled robots to fight the attack beasts. This caused a rift in the surviving Erona. The biotechnologist feared these machines would bring a fresh force of Sathar back to Volturnus so they began destroying the robots and imprisoned the military factionists in cryo-sleep. Some military factionists and robots escaped and thus the Mechanons were created. Eventually all the escapee military factionists died out without access to cryonic chambers and those that had been imprisoned were set free to wander the barren world as the cryonic chambers were needed for later generation Erona. The freed military factionists were always set free alone and assumed to each die alone. The biotechnologists then agreed to uplift several Volturnus creatures to fight the attack beasts. Over the centuries the new races developed and were genetically engineered along at an accelerated rate. Among the Erona the plan became so important the only those who were genetically engineering the new races were granted use of the cryonic chambers and the other Erona were left to the harsh world. These Erona slowly dwindled in population size. The cryonic chambers also began to break down, reducing the number of available chambers for successive generation of Erona to use. The Erona that remained clustered around the hidden base of the cryonic chambers. They tended to their sleeping elders and their culture, society, and history was recast. Much was lost, much was fabricated. The Erona discovered by the Frontier explorers believe in a pre-Sathar paradise that never had been. The elders that survived into the Frontier era spent their last days as triumphal heroes and took the truth to their graves, believing their own propaganda and hiding their own sins. -iggy |
 August 17, 2016 - 12:41pm | I've been stewing on this for a few days waiting for a time to sit down and write a detailed response. What if the Erona are hiding a secret that they fought a civil war after a first Sathar invasion years prior to the Day of Doom? The Erona were attacked once by the Sathar many years before the Day of Doom. ... Good thinking! Joe Cabadas |
