Wednesday, June 3, 2015

Porting Over Grimmsgate to Stars Without Number

I'm currently running the Swords & Wizardry adventure Grimmsgate for my D&D 5E group, and so far it proves to be an interesting and enjoyable adventure. But yesterday, when I was re-reading this adventure while riding the train to the Tel-Aviv University, it dawned upon me - this could be an excellent Stars Without Number adventure as well! How so? After all, it has various strong fantasy elements such as demons, undead and courses. But this could be easily ported to sci-fi concepts.

The Ancient Temple becomes a pre-Scream Perimeter Agency research lab, which once upon a time housed a crazed Unbreaked AI. Three Perimeter Agents defeated the said AI after it wreaked some havoc on a nearby world, and brought it, locked in a datacube, to a research lab where it would be studied and stored safely. The facility had some robotic laboratories and a medbay as well. Eventually, as the Silence crept in, the facility's staff become little more than an atavistic religious group, following ritual after ritual in place of the old protocols. A young initiate, Arumvel his name, tried to breath some technological life into this dying ritual, and used his dataport (implanted into all initiates in a barely-functional initiation ritual) to jack into the mainframe where the AI was used. The old AI quickly "hacked" Arumvel's brain and brainwashed him into releasing it into the facility's still-functional computer network, using the remaining robotics to murder the other initiates and priests. However, it was unsuccessful in subverting the facility's own breaked AI ("Tomb Guardian") which still controls some of the robotics. Using the facility's Pretech medlab, the AI converted Arumvel into a full cyborg equipped with a nanite-cloud weapon. Arumvel now captures local peasants and transforms them into crazed cyborgs (Mogura-Jin) under his (and the AI's) control. The AI would wish to eventually take over the area and rebuild communication arrays in order to transmit itself into passing ships... Unless someone stops them.

The PCs will be hired by the regional government to investigate disappearances in the remote colonial village of Grimmsgate (or Givat-Giram) near that facility...

Conversion Notes:

The demon Vuod - Unbreak AI
The Tomb Guardian - Break AI security system
Arumvel - now a Cyborg!
Mogura-Jin - full Cyborgs!
Cursed Humans - Cyborgs with partial implants (due to lacking supplies).
Undead skeletons - humanoid service robots.
"Powerful" undead skeletons - security robots (also humanoid in shape)
Etarra and Albraith - locals captured and kept restrained to tables in the medlab pending Cyborg conversion!
Manes Demons - improved robots under AI control.
Paladins - Perimeter Agents (placed in cryogenic storage but dead due to the unbreaked AI's machinations)
Fane - mainframe
Altar - backup mainframe; orb is replaced by a dataslab with full data backup.
Dragon on the regional map - local apex predator (see stats for Traveller here - easily convertible to SWN)
Golden Treasure - Pretech salvagecomponentss

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