 January 31, 2017 - 7:08pm | found this at STrolen's Citadel and thought it would work with some adjustment for entering a Tetrarch pyramid. https://strolen.com/viewing/The_Guest_Star_Portends I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
 January 31, 2017 - 8:29pm | Yes, it certain could lend itself to being converted into a mysterious Tetrarch pyramid. Just watch out to see if any ancient sentinnels are still active somewhere nearby. Joe Cabadas |
January 31, 2017 - 10:10pm | So here's my problem the tetrarchs died out 10,000 years prior and if they have a written language than it would orders of magnitude harder to decipher than Egyptian hieroglyphs were. So there is little chance the PCs will decipher it. I'd be OK with them figuring out the symbols for months and perhaps numerals. Murals with clues will require a visual depiction of the tetrarchs as well and I feel that's problematic too. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
January 31, 2017 - 10:24pm | So here's my problem the tetrarchs died out 10,000 years prior and if they have a written language than it would orders of magnitude harder to decipher than Egyptian hieroglyphs were. So there is little chance the PCs will decipher it. I'd be OK with them figuring out the symbols for months and perhaps numerals. Murals with clues will require a visual depiction of the tetrarchs as well and I feel that's problematic too. Yes, unless the adventurers discover the Frontier equivalent of a Rosetta stone, they would be like the primatives in Gamma World trying to play around with any artifacts. Fortunately, any Tetrarch technology should be long depowered and useless.
Joe Cabadas |
 February 1, 2017 - 12:51pm | If the Tetrach language is very different from Pan-Galactic such as the differences between Hangul and English then just figuring out how to work it out could be a good challenge for the more intellectual members of the party.
Some people who are "illiterit" can still function by knowing some basics such as not knowing what STOP or YIELD means but know what the shape of the sign means. The party might be able to use the certain objects as long as they figure out what the object does and the symbol it represents means in that relationship. Sounds like a great job but where did you say we had to go? |
 February 1, 2017 - 1:59pm | Read the short story, Omnilingual, in the science fiction section of project Gutenberg. The story addesses how science can provide a path to translating dead alien languages. This discussion inspires me to draw another tetrarch pyramid in sketchup but make it only three sided. BTW, I imagine the one I previously drew as being made of a durable transparent material, maybe crystal. I imagine the clock like dials and combination from your link could be a display activated in one of the transparent panels, a hologram suspended inside the crystal. -iggy |
February 1, 2017 - 2:25pm | I keep going back to tetrarch= rule of 4 and this lead to the idea of them having 4 in charge or four races they ruled which then resonates with a phrase we use around here: core four. With a background in theology and interest in history and archaeology I'm aware of the story of how the heiroglyphs were translated. For a long time scholars pondered them with no useful advances till the Rosetta stone. A tetrarch rosetta stone could be if primitives of the core four were brought to serve the tetrarchs and a stone was inscribed with primitive ancient text of these primitives along side the tetrarch script much like the rosetta stone had cuniform, heiroglyphics and greek. Any human language that is 10,000 years old is effectively lost to us but a 10,000 year old ancient vrusk dialect might not be. Also I would, just for mystery and fun, make the core four non traditional in that it was four of the Races in the AD rule book but one of them was the sathar. leave either the dralasites or the yazirians out of that group of four. So for a clue (besides a rosetta stone) you'd want some murals (Egyptian style kind of ) of the core four plus a mysterious figure that is ill defined that would be the tetrarch or a god like figure- maybe rays of radience coming off the figure that is a vague humanoid shape. Pictured in the mural is a constellation with a comet and text that calls this "the harbinger of change". The clockwork mechanism would need to be set to the 10,000 year ago date of the long period comet that has been identified in Dixon's Star system. There should be 3 long period comets so that its not on the first setting that the pyramid opens. Maybe a mural depicts the leaving of the tetrarchs and the destruction of the primitives by a Tetrarch destroyer proposed elsewhere. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
February 1, 2017 - 2:39pm | Ok, spoiler for Omnilingual. They find a university building and one lecture hall has the periodic table on the wall. Of course it is rendered a bit different but someone with a background in chemistry recognizes it as the periodic table. From this they figure out the numbering system and which characters are numbers. They then start searching for engineering and science literature that covers the fundamental principles and start learning words for universal concepts such as force and velocity. The story then emplies that they apply experts in other disciplines to learn words dominate in their fields. -iggy |
February 1, 2017 - 3:01pm | Ok, spoiler for Omnilingual. They find a university building and one lecture hall has the periodic table on the wall. Of course it is rendered a bit different but someone with a background in chemistry recognizes it as the periodic table. From this they figure out the numbering system and which characters are numbers. They then start searching for engineering and science literature that covers the fundamental principles and start learning words for universal concepts such as force and velocity. The story then emplies that they apply experts in other disciplines to learn words dominate in their fields.
One key problem is that the Tetrarch's way of illustrating or presenting things may be quite alien to the Frontier. Now, I did present a few things in my S'sessu story where they have some bare (and I mean really insignificant) understanding of the Tetrarchs including some sort of still functioning device. (My concept was that it was more of a pleasure device, though not mentioned in that work. Kind of akin to a Stargate SG-1 episode where the team found a world with an addictive device that offers pleasure.) In Jedion's "Digging in the Dust of Laco," FE issue 2, he offers this as a possible Tetrarch data storage device: "Crystal cubes (hundreds found) that seem to have Tetrarch written characters stored at the molecular level.... Black market value: 10,00030,000 cr." Now that's a pretty odd -- and, by the way, a creative -- way to visualize the storage of data. I still say, if the characters did find anything useful, they'd have to use a modified version of the Gamma World tech chart  to figure it out or, he he, possibly get killed in the process. Any PC who figures something out will become legendary like Professor Alorne Zebulon. Joe Cabadas |
February 1, 2017 - 3:01pm | I was looking at Egyptian murals for idea and the ankh jumped out at me. Its symbolic and uniquely connected to Egyptian culture. So it got me thinking of a symbol that would be "tetrarch" something that says "4" and would become uniquely part of tetrarch culture- immediately I thought of the pyramid. Murals with stiff profile views of figures with their hand out with a pyramid sitting on it. EDIT: The data storage cubes should be changed to pyramids Easily represented at the gaming table with a d4 I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
February 1, 2017 - 7:20pm | A d4 is the three sided pyramid I was speaking of. The one I drew for the article about wonders of the frontier has a square base. -iggy |
February 1, 2017 - 8:03pm | But cubes are four sides times two! Maybe they would have a mathematical system based on four instead of five and ten? Joe Cabadas |
 February 1, 2017 - 8:15pm | I got some illustrations from the original publication of omnilingual published in SFMan as a mews break FIAWOL
TANSTAAFL!! |
February 1, 2017 - 8:23pm | Yeah why not a base 4 math system for the tetrarchs? That would be part of the puzzle of figuring things out I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
February 1, 2017 - 10:22pm | Explosive mural discovered in Tetrarch ruins. The first like it. Its chiseled in granite not native to Laco. It may have been painted at one time. depicting an ill-defined god like figure with four arms presumed to be a tetrarch in the center with a giant eye super imposed over its face and some sort of radiance eminating from his head. there are four figures depicted flanking him that are seemingly worshiping the central figure three of them have had their faces chiselled away at some point in antiquity There are several "registers" of script in apparently 2 differnet languages, the primary language seems to be made up of geometrical figures. the other is an unknown script one register depicts what could be a constellation and a comet as well as some other mysterious figure.  I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
February 2, 2017 - 4:24am | I get too many stargate vibes. I like how the linked adventure was a clock like dial. I also like the geometric writing. -iggy |
February 2, 2017 - 5:14am | I get too many stargate vibes. I like how the linked adventure was a clock like dial. I also like the geometric writing. that is almost inevitable with the pyramids but I get you what your saying. I'm a fan of Stargate the movie but not so much the TV show. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
February 2, 2017 - 7:47am | What if the crystalline pyramids had holograms of the core four and many other races in them. This then opens up lots of speculation about what the relationship with the tetrarchs is. Did they uplift all these races or did they just catalog them all. Also, who are all these races that have never been found and are the tetrarchs themselves among the collection. I imagine the images carved inside the crystals like the stuff in gift shops but they are holograms that move. How they are powered or if they actually need power is a mystery. -iggy |
February 2, 2017 - 9:01am | powered off of the subatomic vibrations of atoms and molecules? I still like my wall mural though Lets say the crystal storage devices have been found but scientific investigation has provided no insites to them other than the speculation that they are indeed storage devices for information. Just recently a technician was careless with his laser scaple and when the laser beam was directed into the pyramid at a certain angle the hologram was projected out the other side or when a laser beam is directed at the peak of the pyramid holgrams are projected out of all of the pyramid's sides except the bottom. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
February 3, 2017 - 4:29pm | Jedion, What if each of the races in your picture were holding up a world. And these worlds are not known in any records, present or historical. They are not the home wolrds of history. This causes a myriad of questions. Are the rsces holding up their "real" home worlds and the ones in history are not their actual home worlds? If so, did the tetrachs uplift the races? Are they other worlds that they are giving to the tetrarchs? If so, are the races old servants to the tetrarchs? Are the tetrarchs world builders and the races are asking for their perfect world? Etc. Etc. Etc. -iggy |
February 4, 2017 - 7:27am | Ok, my mind is playing with four. What if there are four murals. Each mural has four different races, each holding four unknown worlds. -iggy |
February 12, 2017 - 6:33pm | What if something like this existed in the Tetrach Pyramid? A tetrach holo tetrahedron, 50m along a side, about 45m tall. Note the yazirian female standing outside. Holograms are of various races inside each tetrahedron. -iggy |
February 13, 2017 - 1:30pm | Interesting. I like this idea, need to kick it around some. I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
February 25, 2017 - 10:07am | Although, instead of showing the Core Four plus a Satharoid, you could have the pyramid portraying a Clikk, a Satharoid, an Eorna, a Heliope and a few other mysterious races. Joe Cabadas |
 February 25, 2017 - 11:33am | Somewhere, something like the Arecibo Message could be found which helps unlock the first level of understanding... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message |
February 25, 2017 - 2:35pm | Somewhere, something like the Arecibo Message could be found which helps unlock the first level of understanding... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_message sorta like the 5 tones from Close Encounters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AphKxQ2NsQo I might not be a dralasite, vrusk or yazirian but I do play one in Star Frontiers! |
