Lancer The Three Sisters - The Tom Bloom Planets

Edit: I forgot The Three Sisters was also a thing in another Lancer product. Names repeats.

Another stupid idea I had, that I never gave the appropriate attention to and probably should have thought through more before putting it to text. Since Netflix Castlevania and Devil May Cry came out, I’m in the unfortunate position of repeating what Adi Shankar did to those stories. And I think he is an awful producer and writer.

Massif Press was originally the work of two, Tom Bloom and Miguel Lopez. And while it has expanded nicely into a label for a variant of other people willing to work in the tactical space of the Lancer RPG. The original two have taken different paths. Miguel went to Wizards of the Coast and ate a non-compete clause, and Tom continued to work of smaller tactical RPGs and wargames, partly under the Chasm label. Most notably Icon, Magnagothica: Maleghast and Cain. All powered by his artwork just as much as the mechanics.

There’s a natural overlap to merge the lot of them together. To leverage a shared visual style and ethos into supplementary work for the bigger Lancer RPG. While providing a totally different set of places to visit that aren’t just repeats of the same UN Mecha vs Human Greed and Artificial Gods. Even if it might just end up like that.

First the scene must be set.

At the approximate distance between Kunlun Line – Blink Station Arka Tagh and the Ural Line is a cluster of three worlds, settled under the Second Committee. From a colonial fleet, equipped with what was the latest in genetic replication and terraforming equipment. Crafting a group of likely worlds into suitable habitats for humanity and in turn provide a springboard forward into the region, each growing symbiotically with one another. This was called Operation Three Sisters, after the companion agriculture principle.

Space is a hostile place, however. Although all ships made planetfall, the circumstance of their transit made Operation Three Sisters non-viable. Passing through a radiation cloud during transit, the convoy experienced irregular and inconsistent equipment malfunctions, resulting in each colony missing vital technological systems required to maintain even a Pre-Fall technological base.

Tom Bloom

The Games

CAIN

Tom Bloom too

The most stable world is Eden, not exactly the most original, but most Second Committee names were not. Eden was settled by Seedship Tasman as the second of the three in the convoy, but the last to founded. Suffering partial failures in the archives and powerplant, it limped into orbit 30 years after it was due to arrive. Worse, the colonists found that not only were they missing large stretches of the knowledge database, but they could not restart the engines.

Eden has persisted as an early-spaceflight planet. Fusion plants prevent it from degrading to mere industrial levels. But the reliance of disassembling and recovering hard-copy material from the Tasman has meant knowledge has been reset to pre-Fall Cradle. To most of the population, who have grown and died, Cradle may not even exist except as a half-remembered line in a history class. Cradle and Eden’s pasts slurring together. Eden is called Earth in parlance, for it is earthly.

What makes Eden so special is the technology is not something that just stays still. Even the remotest and least concentrated human society will develop technologically to manipulate their environment, even if other useful technology is forgotten. Unlike what they call Union “High-Band”, Edenic “Low-Band” networks piggyback off quantum states found in large-scale computing. Providing low-energy solutions to which Union had never considered.

To early colonists, the nano-scale technology on the Tasman was junk. Not simple enough to use without instructions or immediately reverse engineering. But with the growing energy needs of the glass and steel cities, their time has come. Integrated into the population, they provide the substratum for the network, computing with their host’s spare brainpower and digital technology. They perform calculations for everything and are so ubiquitous as to be forgotten. But as the world’s scientists cracked paracausality, the network’s capabilities have grown, super-charging a data-hunger world economy.

The cost of this is, just as Union NHPs are a black box, fragments of a god less than a cosmic moment from becoming a reality-warping Eidolon. Eden’s Low-Band network is just as capable of transforming. The nano-systems pull from the neural connections. The human body has evolved to treasure its bad thoughts so it can avoid them or inflict them. Now they have machines to manifest them outright.

Those who know, obfuscate, they call it grace. Those with nanobot bioaccumulation so severe to be medically diagnosable, Exorcists. The best are called virtues. The connection between thought and reality, psychic powers. Those in the know call them blasphemies. When people with high grace crack, the resulting network-based Semi-Eidolon mashed from their subconscious, bodies and whatever material that happens to be nearby, are called Sins.

Those in the know are called CAIN, they are the ones who own the lucrative rights to the genie they could never put back in the bottle and are so obliged to clean up the mess. SERAPH is their orbital rail station. The first point of call for a Dispora or Union ship. They claim the planet is quarantined for domestic viruses, but the computing queue is available for Manna/ mineral ore. Plenty of people want to see the stars though. If the anti-nano blockers fail for a visitor (say if a transfusion occurs), CAIN will try and eliminate them before word gets out.

An SSC research team is poking around, trying to figure out why weird stuff happens they cannot perceive but local can. Harrison Armories is making bids to governments to get Low-Band technology for R&D. The Union administrator is being corrupted by CAIN for the greater good. Horus cults run rampant, local Sin-worshiping nutjobs masterminded by a sinister telecommunication company with an illegal omninet hook and a fondness for baroque iconography. IPSN wants to start shipping workers and ore about the system but doesn’t understand why their expensive ships turn into slaughterhouses after too long and their NHPs are having issues.

Magnagothica: Maleghast

Tom Bloom as well

The planet is the city, but the city is not the planet. Anzenmezzeron is a colossal city buried deep in a crater/valley/hole in the planet’s grey crust. When the Seedship Flinders reached orbit, the crew were faced with a difficult decision. The terraforming systems were fried, and the planet could never be rendered truly habitable enough for the human species. So, they found the deepest and widest hole and burrowed down into that. Letting the organic sludge they could save fill it with air and food. Hoping someday the combination of urban waste gas and primitive ecosystem could transform the planet. Planetary population remains at low altitudes. With some tens of millions dwelling around reclamation facilities, mining towns and self-made ecosystems. Technology has stabilized at post-industrial levels, with solar technology supplemented by fusion and a focus on preserving mechanical and medical technology.

Anzenmezzeron is called the city of One Billion Corpses, a descending ramble of gothic structures and primitive corpse reclamation facilities, deep in what should have been a marine trench. It is wholly ungoverned except for the urban gangs and “Houses”, corporations and cartels with power. The Houses are heavily linked to external corpostate influences, though such efforts are coordinated by local representatives, who travel to Anzenmezzeron for business from nearby urban centres, incognito. It is known the SSC has a strong interest in aquiring novel, if not revolutionary trends and technologies. Others have more cursorary interests, a planet's worth of customers is still a valuable resource.

At the heart of the city is the engines for the Flinders, now the source of the city grid. The engine sheds have taken on a superstitious dread in the planetary culture, referred to as Hell and seen as the source of the urban social-security system. Inhabitants who dwell there, the so-called “devils” receive radical genetic splicing and medical work as a privilege of maintaining the decaying engines and ply their influence over the ascending sprawl.

As the genetic banks were deemed useless without a supporting ecosystem, early colonists transformed them into engineered urban and wasteland compatible organisms, many which matched cultural tastes before functionality. This includes the creation of biological components, tissue samples without a supporting organism that are surgically grafted into the recipient. The so-called Ending of Death social policy has further encouraged a culture of radical body-modding and gene-splicing as a sign of affiliation.

Anzenmezzeron's Ending of Death social policy is unique. Inhabitants have genetic samples taken and are regularly synchronized to the city grid. As the inhabitants die of non-natural causes, the grid attempts to reboot their vitals using the genetic signature and composite material from the corpse reclamation facilities. No more than six days later, most of the inhabitants are flash cloned into unstable and unhealthy bodies. Why such a measure exists is not known, but it’s speculated to do with the original crew of the Flinders trying to preserve their lives to oversee the terraforming. Certainly, Union observers have noted the corpse reclamation facilities are constructed from the terraforming equipment of the Flinders. Including whatever new technology was developed by early colonists. Alternatively, holographic and nano-cloud copies of inhabitants, referred to as spirits are possible.

This system does not extend beyond Anzenmezzeron. The immense power requirements rely on the Flinders, and the concept is despised outside the city. Nevertheless, it is custom to return corpses to the city for burial. Those who have undergone the process cannot leave the city except with the help of ritualized medical workers/morticians. Necromancers, as they are called, exude the organic compounds required to maintain the partially human tissue of the city inhabitants.

Morbidity in all forms is common in the city and less elsewhere, where religious devotion or fatalism are more common philosophies. Cannibalism is also noted to occur within the city. Union policy is to avoid dangerous areas and rethink travel.

The sole planetary port is a large expanse of cleared wasteland adjoining the trench. Orbit to ground shuttles must be used as the planet has never supported an atmosphere dense enough for local traffic.

ICON

Tom Bloom yet again

The first and possibly the most successful of Operation Three Sisters, undone by unseen forces and Second Committee attitudes. The Seedship Cook seemed to have escaped serious damage from the radiation. And was the first to make planetfall, establishing settlements and terraforming the planet Garden into an ever-increasing approximation of pre-industrial Cradle. However, the radiation had damaged the systems that regulated the genetic banks. Effectively the entire ecosystem was spliced before arrival, mutating out of the assumed limits. What was worse is that human genetic material had entered the environment. Though the initial embryos were safe, there was no telling if the ecology could have some unexpected genetic interaction.

The colonists decided to make the best of it. Clean samples could be obtained in the future from System 2 (Eden) and System 3 (Anzenmezzeron). The ecology proved tameable, with scientists mapping out the shifted niches of new flora and fauna. Garden achieved system-wide spaceflight and awaited signals from the other members of Operation Three Sisters. With the crises on the other to planets though, Garden found itself increasingly isolated. Over generations, increasingly large numbers of human-influenced fauna or worse, humans with animalistic traits were occurring in the deeper wilderness, where the spliced ecosystem was continuing to cross-pollinate and supercharge growth. Historians within Union and Purview who specialise in the psychology of Second Committee worlds, suggest that a bunker mentality developed from a triple isolation from assumed norms.

Increasingly, a technological gap developed between the spliced communities and the less altered population. Certainly, spaceflight dropped off and increasingly large, monumental and fortified urban sprawl developed. The Arken Empire as the inhabitants of Arden Eld (modern planet name) recall, was a tyrannical and increasingly industrial state bent of ripping up and remodelling the world. Favouring subaltern and automated processes, even as it increasingly employed spliced populations. Arken seems to have even unlocked the secrets of paracausality, but seems to have used it to develop storage spaces for mind-uploading, rather than communication or FTL. The end of the empire is surrounded in myth, but seems to be explosive and subducted numerous urban areas. Amateur archelogy and tomb-robbing (locally termed Churnning) shows grandiose plans to upload their civilisation to be immortal in the face of the apocalypse. In which case, they might have ignored warning signs of power fluctuations or nuclear exchanges.

Modern Arden Eld comprises of numerous city-states set between impressive ruins and dense wilderness. Ruined areas appear to be leaking toxins into the soil, local refer to those as “Blight”. Biological subalterns seem to thrive across large stretches of land, though they are seen as spiritual by the inhabitants. Their purpose is unknown, it is speculated they serve an ecological regulation function in the face of unknown mutations. Human-derived genetic groups “Aethrynn” and “Trogg” differ from the baseline in a way no recorded ethnic group or even archaic human species has done. The remainder of sapient life is only not aliens on the basis they are derived from Cradle life. Union policy about NHPs applies. Integrated nanocloud technology is widely understood, if limited, and used for resource manipulation (local term elemental control).

Arden Eld is beginning to emerge into a second industrial age, based on acquiring technology and salvage from the Arken ruins. The subsequent rise in militarisation has attracted the attention of corpostates and local representatives are present. Harrison Armoury is pursuing arms contracts and non-military technology upgrades with preexisting Second Committee/Arken technology. SSC maintains a network of biologists in cooperation with Union administration to catalogue the unique ecology. Horus cells are not known, but Omninet rumours suggest that at least one cell on Eden is offering bounties to confirm the existence of so-called demons. Suggesting that NHP-equivlents were developed and Eidolon exist deep below the ruins. With a ruined if preexisting asteroid mining infrastructure, IPSN has suggested that reopening them could be a valuable concern.

The United Nations of Eden and the city of Anzenmezzeron have both suggested deploying their armed forces as Union Auxilleries in return for increased development and and lifting of travel/commerce restrictions. The unreliability of thier armed forces and ongoing health concerns mean such suggestions are limited.