- They be mighty. Technologically, the Vorlons are not just unmatched, but actually inconceivable. There are examples of vorlon tech scattered about the galaxy, and engineers have gone mad trying to figure out how they could possibly do what they're doing. They've also made tremendous breakthroughs by that technique, from time to time, but thhe Vorlons remain ever ahead.
- They be inscruitable. Most of the things about the Vorlons are utterly unknown. They are never seen without their encounter suits, and the encounter suits resist even the most thorough attempts at detection. Psychic probes fail for a wide variety of reasons, and the shells themselves are opaque to most known forms of radiation. The remainder get nothing, as they travel through the armor and its contents unperturbed. Likewise, Vorlons never seem to display emotion of any sort, and no one has any idea how to even start determining if they're lying or under stress. They are not known to take in any sustenance of any variety, and noone has ever captured one successfully and lived to tell the tale. There's a lot that the universe at large doesn't know about them.
- random stuff...how they act in council, some vague and foggy connection to the darkvoid, and the fact that they've been gradually trading tech for favors and influence over the past few decades.
Random things established thus far. These are still pretty tenuous, and most certainly open to debate
- Conspiracy theories: everyone's got a theory about the vorlons, and most of them disagree.
- The Junior Vorlon Scouts: a group of humans who have managed to create convincing mockups of vorlon encounter suits, and use them to spread confusion and corroborate the more entertaining conspiracy theories. Looking back now, they do seem a tch silly for what this has become. Anyone who has a use for them, go for it. If no one wants them, there's no real reason to put them in.
- subtlety and skill: The Vorlons have, over the past while, proven themselves amazingly effective at influencing the political and social realities around them. They seem to have some serious masters in the art of the small push in the right place. No one has any real idea what they're working to acheive, but it seems to involve a truly impressive quantity of subtle and sweeping change.
- Humor: the Vorlons are strongly suspected of having a dry and subtle sense of humor. No one's ever quite sure, though. It's that subtle. Enough observation will also reveal that most Vorlons have truly bizarre quirks. It is unknown whether this is some evidence of racial derangement, or just part of some big joke.
I'm sure there's more. That's just off the top of my head.
My personal take:
The Vorlons are subtle and skilled. In those cases where they are played for laughs, it should be the Vorlons laughing. Vorlons can Lose, but when they do so, it should be recognized as a Big Thing, and played for the drama. Vorlons in first person can Lose without it being a Big Thing, but they should be able to keep others around them from realizing it, or at least from being certain of it.
I would prefer to see the Vorlon goal/role as a non-simple one. I don't want them to be complete shadowy benefactors, or treacherous villains. They are by nature more complex than that. I suppose my personal preference would be that they be on the whole benevolent, but with a few ideas/goals that most of the galaxy would disagree with/oppose.
Whatever. Done for now.
Fibula
Scoring disabled. You must be logged in to score posts.
Also they seem to prefer a methane atmosphere in their personal quarters. Whether they actually are methane breathers is unknown. 2 alternate theories are:
1) this is a way of discouraging casual visits since most of the major races are oxygen breathers and the need to wear breather masks just to stop by makes it hard to be 'just in the neighborhood'
2) this is another mindgame. either the Vorlons are Oxygen breathers, or they don't breathe methane or oxygen. Maybe they're waterbreathers, or they may not even need to breathe.
>The Vorlons are subtle and skilled. In those cases >where they are played for laughs, it should be the >Vorlons laughing. Vorlons can Lose, but when they do >so, it should be recognized as a Big Thing, and >played for the drama. Vorlons in first person can >Lose without it being a Big Thing, but they should be >able to keep others around them from realizing it, or >at least from being certain of it.
Or their appearant loss turns out to accomplish their true goals.
Veteran of the Bermuda Triangle Expeditionary Force 1990-1951.
Scoring disabled. You must be logged in to score posts.
Was walking to the grocery when realized more of why it is that I'd rather they not be simple. Thought I'd share.
- The Vorlons are subtle, and display manipulatice skill. They almost certainly have a good grasp of at least the first and second order results of their actions.
- The Vorlons are mysterious, and not just a little. They are the favorite target for conspiracy theorists, who they seem to encourage. They do things just to mess with people's heads. They spend a lot of time and energy being entirely incomprehensible at some fairly basic level.
They could just be playing the mystery thing for laughs, but it seems like a cop-out. On a storytelling level, the cheap joke isn't worth the buildup for us, and I don't see it being worth the effort for the Vorlons either.
So...the Vorlons Don't want people to know anything about them. Why? There are a ton of throwaway answers (religious, handicapping themselves, ect.) but for the most part, I think, from our POV,they aren't really worth the buildup either. Also, honestly, I want the readership to feel satasfied when they finally do find out, rather than cheated. So...they have to have something they're trying to hide, for whatever reason.
The other side of it is that I don't want the readers to guess everything straight off. "They're trying to save everyone from the Darkvoid and that's it. They're benevolent and good" is one of the first things people will think of, and "Truly, they are backstabbing and evil, they just hide it well. They intend to betray everyone" comes not far after. I want the truth, whatever it is, to come as a surprise, to the readers and the characters.
I dunno. I just wanted to get that down.
Fibula
Scoring disabled. You must be logged in to score posts.
>So...the Vorlons Don't want people to know anything about them. Why?<
After the Vorlons left they were replaced by a civilization known as the Tar-Aiym. Among their other accomplishments (Eric can fill you in on some of them), they created a very potent bioweapon.
Eventually, their civilization collapsed, and shortly thereafter the bioweapon was spread (by a series of von neumann machines programmed by a somewhat suicidal doomsday cult) to every inhabitable world in the galaxy.
This cult believed in doing things throughly.
Thousands of years later, new civilizations arose in the wake of this disaster. They were different from those that had preceded them mosty in that their inhabitants were mostly immune to the bioweapon - they thought it nothing more than those most persistent of annoyances, the common cold.
Of course, the Vorlon were outside the galaxy while all this was going on... and -they- have no immunity.
Blessed be.
-n
Scoring disabled. You must be logged in to score posts.
- Unless the common cold is somehow sentient, this only explains the encounter suits, not the amazing degree of information hiding. The encounter suits are *easy* to explain.
- it does sorta take the beginnings of Council history that we built and hack it into little pieces with an axe.
- "thoroughly" in this case is a rather dramatic understatement.
By your will, if you would have it so, but I would not suggest it.
Fibula
Scoring disabled. You must be logged in to score posts.
I suggest that the Vorlon's true purpose should unfiold like an Onion e.g. layers upon layers of misddirection. So there is the public face (just mysterious), then several back-up explanations to be discovered one by one (benevolent saviors; extra-galactic infiltrators; returned exiles feeling guilty about the mess they left behind; incomprehensible religious maniacs) and only after long investigation/association will the truth - whatever it is, be discovered.
Scoring disabled. You must be logged in to score posts.
I've got _sort-of_ an explanation, though it needs some work. It explains most of what we know, however.
Once upon a time, millions of years ago there arose, in the Galaxy a pair of races of great power. Their actual names are lost to us, because neither were remotely humanoid, and, in the case of the first of these, even the concepts that formed the name are either lost or so alien as to defy translation.
The first is known, to certain of today's researchers into arcane matters, as the Elder Things. They were masters of Pre-adamic Sorcery and builders of empires and the flew trough space without space-ships and altered the structure of life and terra-formed planets and generally played God, at least up until they made their Big Mistake.
The Big Mistake of the Elder Things was the creation of a race of protoplasmic monstrosities which are today known as the Shoggoths. These were originally non-sentient, but they possessed the ability to evolve certain aspects of their genetic structure with astonishing rapidity, and it wasn't long, in Galactic terms, before the Shoggoths had developed setience and an astonishing grasp of their master's arcane knowledge. It should not astonish anyone that they revolted. (And, believe me, a Shoggoth is a pretty revolting thing. Heh.)
Aaanyway, the first strike in the Great Revolt was ruthless and decisive, and the power of the Elder Things was broken. It briefly appeared the the victorious Shoggoths would sweep forward and exterpicate the Elder Things completly, but apparantly the Things had enough left in them for one massive counter-strike, and their retaliation broke the Shoggoths in their own turn. Both races retreated to their chiefest fastnesses and dissappeared from the Galactic stage thereafter. This much is known.
Somewhat later, there was a planet, near the middle of what is now the Darkvoid, where another powerful race made its home. They were fantasticly advanced scientists, engineers and toolmakers who had exploded onto the Galaxy from, apparantly, nothing, and they called their planet Yth, and themselves the Great Race.
They called themselves the Great Race, they said, because they alone in all of history had (or ever would) developed, and indeed mastered, the art of travelling in time: forwards, backwards and sideways. The bodies they were currently occupying, they said, were not their own, but rather those of the native proto-sentients of Yth, which they had usurped and raised to glory. Furthermore, they averred, in a few thousand years or so they would leave those bodies behind, as they had done many times before, and travel on to somewhere else in the Universe, there to carry on their endless quest for knowledge; and, in the meantime, was there anything interesting to look at around here?
Some time passed by, and one day a starship came into Ythport and set off a Nine-Days Galactic Wonder, when it reported that the Great Race had apparantly woken up one day, quietly turned off all of their technology and peacefully laid down and died.
There were all kinds of theories, of course, some of which are still to be found in certain obscure records. Among them are the ideas that the Great Race had made some kind of horrible scientific screw up, that some kind of cult frenzy had overcome them, and that their stories about Time Travelling had been truthful, and that they had seen something nasty coming up, and moved on before it could catch them.
Two or three thousand years later we have the Darkvoid Event, and so the planet can't actually be searched for clues. This much is also known.
The following is not known, nor should it generally become so.
The Great Race did detect the approach of Azathoth, and knew that the Entropy field it puts out would sterilize their planet. They could have warned the other local cultures around them, but weren't really that interested. They shifted into the future, where they went about their business.
At some point futureward of that, the Great Race made another jump, but this time they got a surprise. They turned out to have shifted into the bodies of the successors of the Elder Things, arriving at the climax of their eons long campaign against the successors of the Shoggoths. It should be noted that this was a pretty shattering experience for the Great Race, as the minds of the neo-Elder Things were at once very alien and very similar to theirs, and the combination had some interesting _neural_ effects on them.
The Great Race attempted to assume their usual Scientific habits, this time studying the society of the neo-Things and their junior allies, but it soon became apparant to them that first they would have to win the war with the neo-Shoggoths. They applied themselves to the fight with their usual efficiency, and were just on the verge of being victorious when ... something happened. Something so dangerous to them that the whole Great Race was forced into the equivalent of a full-strength, boosted jump into the dark.
And when they woke up ...
... they found that they had, somehow, lapped around. They had jumped back into the bodies of the Neo-Elder Things again, but this time the Neo-Elder Things of the distant past, when the secret war with the Neo-Shoggoths was just beginning to heat up again. Worse, the changes initiated by their first soujourn in the minds of the Neo-Things had sensitized them, and the mental alterations necessary for them to use the Neo-Things' Pre-Adamic sorcery in the War they had just left had rotted their Time Travel skills: they were stuck, and were begnning to actually merge with the remnant personalities of the minds they had displaced.
They found themselves in the middle of a war in which there could be no compromise, and in which they began with a severe disadvantage. They _knew_ that there was a solution available to them, as they had left a situation which, except for the Big Problem, they had been very much in the ascendant; but they weren't entirely sure as to how to get there. And then there was the question of solving the Big Problem itself, as well. And figuring out how to not get mind-blanked by their own incoming past selves, somewhere in the far future.
So, with all that on their plate, it's not too terribly surprising that they tend to be a little weird. Today, of course, we call them the Vorlons, hiding from their ancient enemies in plain sight and stabilising the power of far future allies.
And the Neo-Shoggoths, of course (when anybody finds out about them) will come to be called the Shadows.
Eric Hallstrom, Speaker-to-Dreamworlds
--
AB: Virtual particles are particles that spring into existence
from nothingness, in direct violation of the law of conservation of
mass/energy. But they exist for such a brief period of time that,
essentially, they disappear before the Universe notices.
Erekosė: I find that somewhat comforting, really. I like knowing that
I live in a forgiving and slightly confused Universe.
Scoring disabled. You must be logged in to score posts.
... Is what they look like. Their goals and or motivations can be subject to speculation, even guesses, if the speculator is so inclined.
Not so the face of the mystery.
What if, that was because they didn't have faces? What if, they were really just a race of protoplasmic monstrosities? What if, they had won their ancient war?
What if it wasn't over yet?
Blessed be.
-n
(Of course, doing that would -also- mean both that the Solenoid were a lot older than we'd previously planned on, and that they were a lot more than anyone who met them would suspect.)
Scoring disabled. You must be logged in to score posts.
Just a simple caution: It's easy to overdose on HPL's ideas, especially when dealing with the Big and Scary and Cosmic.
That said, the Great Race/Elder Things theory is internally sound and at the very least entertaining. I'm not entirely sold on it, partly b/c of the Lovecraft connection and partly b/c of the time travel aspect. (I have a innate dislike for time travel; too much exposure to Star Trek, probably.)
---
Mr. Fnord
GCU _So This Is What Throwing Cold Water On People Is Like_
http://fnord.sandwich.net/
Scoring disabled. You must be logged in to score posts.
>Just a simple caution: It's easy to overdose on HPL's ideas, especially when dealing with the Big and Scary and Cosmic.<
Honestly, the only part of the Mythos that really seems like it would have any potential to overpower previously extant components is the whole 'fry your brain' thing. And we can deal with that.
I mean, I hear tell that Cthulu got taken out by a hitting him with a -boat-. How overpowering is -that-?
>That said, the Great Race/Elder Things theory is internally sound and at the very least entertaining. I'm not entirely sold on it, partly b/c of the Lovecraft connection and partly b/c of the time travel aspect. (I have a innate dislike for time travel; too much exposure to Star Trek, probably.)<
Time travel offends my belief in an orderly universe. I find the fact that there are mathmatical models one component away from creating it to be very disturbing.
While I'm not going to go all LEy and forbid it, I will ask on a more personal level that any attempt to use it be executed very, very carefully.
Blessed be.
-n
Scoring disabled. You must be logged in to score posts.
>Honestly, the only part of the Mythos that really
>seems like it would have any potential to overpower
>previously extant components is the whole 'fry your
>brain' thing. And we can deal with that.
Well, in the sense of worldbuilding, the problem with overdoing it on the Mythos is that HPL put together an extremely complex and detailed cosmology of the universe. And the more of that cosmology we add to ours, the more it overwhelms our other contributions.
Chtulhu, Azzie and Nyarly are pretty well-known, but when you start getting into some of the lesser-known stuff like the Great Race of Yth, that's a sign to pull back a little.
>I mean, I hear tell that Cthulu got taken out by a
>hitting him with a -boat-. How overpowering is -that-?
Not very. But in situ power isn't my concern here.
---
Mr. Fnord
GCU _Scotty, We Need More Power!_
http://fnord.sandwich.net/
Scoring disabled. You must be logged in to score posts.
Note that one of the advantages of this theory would be thatit would imply that the _only_ still extant source of Time Travellers would be the Hounds of Tindalos. Who aare not going to be very ... uh ... helpful to PCs, in most instances, y'know.
IOW, we have here an excellent reason for forbidding Time Travel on an organized basis altogether.
Might be helpful.
Eric Hallstrom, Speaker-to-Dreamworlds
--
AB: Virtual particles are particles that spring into existence
from nothingness, in direct violation of the law of conservation of
mass/energy. But they exist for such a brief period of time that,
essentially, they disappear before the Universe notices.
Erekosė: I find that somewhat comforting, really. I like knowing that
I live in a forgiving and slightly confused Universe.
Scoring disabled. You must be logged in to score posts.
- I can definately see the point about not wanting to let too much of HPL's cosmology in. At the very least, I think that what we do bring in should be significantly modified so that this doesn't just become "Lovecraft in space with anime references".
- We don't have to admit all of the cosmology we have. The Shadows are never going to refer to themselves as shibbolths. Noone will ever refer to the Vorlons as either the Great Race or the Elder Things. The time travel references can be left out of the readers' view entirely (with the exception, perhaps of things that the Vorlons Just Know - because they've been there.)
- I'd rather leave the Hounds of Tindalos out of this entirely. It's simpler for Yog Sothoth, however he incarnates, to simply send most time travelers for a short trip through hyperIII or their personal equivalent along the way. "I am the laws of physics. Here, have a detour." type stuff. He left the Great Race alone because Nyarlehotep wanted to run his Cosmic Joke, and needed a species of mental time-travellers as straight-beings.
(Yog-sothoth is genderless. I use the male pronoun Just Because, and yes, it is wrong to do so. I can be wrong.)
right. Hitting that stall-pont again. Will likely write more later.
Fibula
Scoring disabled. You must be logged in to score posts.