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So I was recently reading my old Dragonstar books and other sci-fi RPGs, as well as a bunch of PFS modules involving Numeria and decided to write this post to generate more thoughts and ideas about adventuring off-world, specifically on Androffa, but possibly in other places as well. It is also notable that D&D in general has a legacy of mixing ""out of genre"" things even going back into the 70s.
Now, on the specific topic of Androffa, I know that JJ technically has his own canon of the place, but I'm writing this post assuming slightly different assumptions, inspired by another poster on the topic.
In terms of general background, it would be similar to Golarion but different in many ways. A fallen high tech spacefaring empire, and their descendants in the post-apocalyptic ruins in the centuries after (I prefer to generally set the "dark age" of this time not extremely very long after the fall-- centuries, not multiple millennia). To paraphrase another poster, Androffans know as much about their ancient ancestors as Golarions do Thassilon and Azlant-- most people have no idea whatsoever, a few have heard rumors, and a very small group - mostly scholars, sages, and adventurers - know what really happened.
There would be huge dungeons that might be the ruins of ancient bunkers, or even communities and fortified cities that have sprung up out of these bunkers.
There are mysterious ruins, possibly former sprawling metropolises or crashed ships or even stranger things on Androffa, and these sites would be treated exactly like Golarions treat Hollow Mountain or Xin-Shalast: forbidden, mysterious, cursed, and packed with treasure.
In terms of races, the humanoid type present on Androffa would be prevalent (possibly with homebrew modifications to represent a small sort of alien-ness), but elves and dwarves and other fantasy races might need some explanation. A possible explanation or source is "genetic experiments made them," but personally I feel that's a bit boring. Thus, my interpretation also involves an explanation of why Androffa fell. The solar system of Androffa was located at a multiversal crosspoint, and a interdimensional disaster caused a massive interdimensional pulse to occur, blasting Androffa's early interstellar civilization with all sorts of strangeness from the multiverse, including wild magicks, and seeding the planet with races such as elves and dwarves and fantastic creatures. The chaos caused the fall of civilization, but centuries later Androffa rebuilds in new ways.
However, alongside these new arrivals, artificial races on Androffa such as androids would also be common, creating their own cultures and identities in the changed world. This is because Androffa is an entire world that was most likely once riddled with technological wonders. It stands to reason that the number of androids on that planet would be vastly higher than those on Golarion, probably by several orders of magnitude.
In terms of creatures and monsters, escaped alien creatures from cells might be common, and further become diverse through centuries of interbreeding and exposure to strange dimensional energies. Many creatures from the Bestiaries could be classified as such with minimal editing, if any.
A campaign originating on Androffa as it is now would involve a mashup of the high tech and low tech, of limitless horizons and crushing limitations. Specifically, Androffa. Specifically, PCs might be agents of a burgeoning multi-national alliance working to stabilize tenuous situations, or be thieves trying to survive in a ruined bunker-settlement, or wasteland barbarians surviving with jury-rigged tech.
In terms of a crossover, iirc Androffa is "in a galaxy far away", so getting there would probably need some kind of intergalactic portal. But in any case, a crossover adventure with Golarion would be very cool, in terms of crossing over existing campaigns (I notice there's been a slight uptick in interplanetary adventures in 2e APs).
Another major campaign idea could be made by taking a page from Dragonstar-- in essence, that setting basically posits the idea that all "prime" campaign settings are set in the same universe of the Prime Material Plane and that there exist advanced civilizations in the Prime (ie it is only a matter of time before someone in a spaceship comes across Toril, iirc there is a cool post on enworld called Realmsian Dragonstar that explores this very issue).
What are your takes on these possibilities? Any constructive ideas you have are encouraged!
PS: Some other materials I think are relevant here for inspiration could be Numenera and its two major companion books, and Planescape. As well as the Dragonstar setting.
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My players threw a major plot change at me in my Iron Gods campaign, so I had to rewrite the 6th module, The Divinity Drive. They ended up in orbit around Androffan in the Divinity's shuttle, but never landed on the planet. Nevertheless, I had written a history for the collapse of civilization on Androffa in case it mattered.
In my history, Androffa did not have a spacefaring empire. They had managed to send slower-than-light spacecraft to adjacent stellar systems using robot crews and suspended animation capsules for the human passengers, but the Divinity Drive was their first faster-than-light spacedrive.
As I ran the Iron Gods adventure path, I got a very strange impression of Androffan society. The crashed spaceships that the party explored were designed by the module writers for adventuring in and for game-balanced looting, which was a terrible design for them as spaceships. The battery system designed by Paizo to prevent high technology from spreading across Golarion was deliberately inconvenient. Why did they color-code their technology brown, black, white, gray, green, red, blue, orange, and prismatic to show their level? The Androffans seemed idiotic. I decided to treat them as excessively bureaucratic, because I used to work for the U.S. government and could explain Androffan idiocy as bureaucratic regulations and inconvenient licensing agreements.
The robot Bastion in C21, Control Center, pages 33-24 of The Divinity Drive was another oddity. Why would the Androffans plate a robot in the anti-magic metal noqual? I had to change Bastion's personality anyway, due to the plot changes (Make a roll for existential philosophy), so I made him one of those early crew robots from the days when Androffans had discovered that other planets had magic. They were scared of magic and built noqual robots as a defense.
Before the Divinity fleet was built, Androffa was in a social crisis. They had learned centuries before that their planet was deficient in magic. Their colonies on other worlds had faced native magical monsters and their own children grew up there with the ability to cast arcane spells. Androffa had only divine magic, an uncommon gift from the interstellar gods who thought that the Androffan humans should not rely on the gods too much. This was a PF1 campaign, so I did not factor in primal and occult magic, but Androffa lacked those, too. A large anti-magic faction developed that rejected the divine magic from the gods, too. They wanted to rely only on technology. New advances in medicine, cybernetics, nanotechnology, and artificial skymetals made technology as miraculous as magic.
Desna, a universal god worshiped on Androffa, saw a way to settle the split forming in their society. She gifted them with the Divinity Drive so that they could build the Divinity fleet, explore the galaxy at faster than light, and bring back tales and wonders to amaze the people of Androffa. The Desna-worshipers, who were a majority of their space-dwelling folk, invested their hopes and resources in the Divinity fleet and sent it out.
And the Divinity fleet never returned. That crushed their hopes.
Another religious faction grew, the worship of god of war Gorum, to challenge the anti-god technologists. War broke out and destroyed civilization on Androffa.
Meanwhile, the Desna worshipers had moved to space in orbit around Androffa to escape the conflict. But they could not maintain life support over generations without aid from Androffa itself. They summoned immortal azata to care for the stations and put themselves into suspended animation to await the re-emergence of civilization. Over the centuries, the azata combined all the space stations into one station, Grayling Station.
More centuries later, the tiny shuttle from the Divinity, with the Divinity Drive installed in it, arrived from Golarion. The Overlord Robot housing the backup mind of Unity had launched the shuttle, but the player characters had Dimension Doored aboard and activated the Divinity Drive to take them to orbit around Androffa. They had gotten the suggestion from Desna herself via a commune spell. The Unity robot was dumbfounded when Grayling Station contacted them. Unity had been grown overconfident from being at the top of the chain of command, but now an Androffan admiral popped out of suspended animation gave orders and Unity was programmed to obey.
Desna had made a new plan. The party gave the Divinity Drive back to the Androffans in orbit. Grayling Station was moved into orbit around Golarion's sun. The 100,000 Androffas in suspended animation would be awoken, trained in Common language and Inner Sea culture, and sent to live on Golarion by carving a new home in Sarkoris, the now-closed Worldwound, by clearing away the demons. More high tech versus magical monsters--maybe one day I will run that homebrew adventure.
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This seems cool. It's also an interesting way to work in gods and such. However, I personally take a more sci-fantasy take on it (see op).
In terms of the original problems with the module design itself, honestly I think a lot of the problems stem out of the poor design concerning Iron Gods and how I suspect JJ wanted to sandwich in more of his personal lore stuff.
Which of course can be improved simply by rewriting a lot of things in the metaplot.
For me at least, the Androffans were a VERY early rising interstellar civilization, and the Divinity Drive was not made by them, but rather by a group of cosmic outsiders.
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...Wait how the heck they ended up traveling to Androffa in first place? Like did you also change the whole "takes 2d6 days -1 for each five over engineering dc" thing?
The actual set of events is that the Unity robot knew that the party could defeat it. Instead of putting up a fight, it locked the electronics that controlled the Divinity Drive. Its plan was going to happen no matter what the party did to it.
So Boffin, the party's chief technologist, pulled out the technical manual that was stored with the Divinity Drive and made a Knowledge(Engineering) check to quickly find relevant information. He discovered that the Divinity Drive had three modes of control: electronic, nucleonic, and azata. Azata mode meant that an azata could place its hand on a certain spot and give it commands in truespeech. Remember, in my history, the Divinity Drive had been built by Desna, whose divine servitors were azata.
The party had an azata lyrakien Leadership cohort named Tay. He was a skald apprentice to the party's skald Kirii. Thus, Tay could command the Divinity Drive, despite the electronic lockout. The remaining problem was that Tay did not know the commands.
Lyrakien can cast Commune once a week, so Tay had that spell available. And I had already established in previous uses of Commune in my campaign that the gods could give more than yes and no answers. Tay cast Commune and Desna gave him a song. Tay performed the song in truespeech while activating the Divinity Drive and it reprogrammed it immediately. I said above, "They had gotten the suggestion from Desna herself via a commune spell," but really the party had no idea what Desna had decided.
Figuratively, the goddess Desna rolled above 100 on her Knowledge(Engineering) check, so high that the "minimum 1" in the Divinity Drive entry on page 60 of the module no longer applied. And she had wanted the Divinity Drive back at Androffa. Besides, I was so busy running a tense encounter that I had no time to check the details on page 60.
Furthermore, as the GM and the only person with access to the details in the Iron Gods Treasure entries, I could change the Divinity Drive. I made it no longer "The apex of Androffan technology" though I suspect that the cleric technicians who received the Divinity Drive as a gift pretended that they had built it in order to avoid conflict with the anti-magic technologists. And I dropped, "The area in a 50-foot-radius spread around the Divinity Drive is maintained at a constant temperature of extreme cold, and it actively leeches sources of heat from unshielded or unprotected sources. Living creatures in this area take 1d6 points of cold damage per round, ..."
Talking about gifts from the gods, D3stro 2119 had said,
The solar system of Androffa was located at a multiversal crosspoint, and a interdimensional disaster caused a massive interdimensional pulse to occur, blasting Androffa's early interstellar civilization with all sorts of strangeness from the multiverse, including wild magicks, and seeding the planet with races such as elves and dwarves and fantastic creatures. The chaos caused the fall of civilization, but centuries later Androffa rebuilds in new ways.
What if in the war between the god worshipers and the technologists, an evil god pointed out the multiversal crosspoint and had suggested a risky way to grant magic to Androffa by opening the crosspoint and stealing magic from another dimension? The consequences were much worse than the worshipers had hoped, a massive interdimensional pulse that brought in wild magicks, elves, dwarves, and fantastic creatures.
For me at least, the Androffans were a VERY early rising interstellar civilization, and the Divinity Drive was not made by them, but rather by a group of cosmic outsiders.
That reminds me of Larry Niven's Known Space series. Earthlings had colonized the solar system and several adjacent stellar systems, and was in a slower-than-light interstellar war with the alien Kzinti. A human exploration ship far from the war encountered another alien race, the Outsiders, who sold them the faster-than-light hyperdrive. The hyperdrive won the first Man-Kzin War for the humans.
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Yeah on the subject of the background I write, it's very much meant to fit Golarion and Androffa into the plot of my Planescape Future setting (which also incorporates MnM's Omniverse-- though that's honestly more of a philosophical term), specifically into Verse, a huge expanded solar system (based on Firefly's Verse) another major crosspoint that was slowly expanded with all manner of new planets, megastructures, and space/dimensional anomalies.
On that second point, yeah the setting is really meant to bring together all sorts of settings, which in turn means that tons and tons of alien tech of all kinds ends up everywhere.
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I decided to treat them as excessively bureaucratic, because I used to work for the U.S. government and could explain Androffan idiocy as bureaucratic regulations and inconvenient licensing agreements.
In my experience, corporate bureaucracy is just as idiotic, albeit easier to just...quietly change as long as no one invested in the current set up notices what you're doing.
They had learned centuries before that their planet was deficient in magic. Their colonies on other worlds had faced native magical monsters and their own children grew up there with the ability to cast arcane spells. Androffa had only divine magic, an uncommon gift from the interstellar gods who thought that the Androffan humans should not rely on the gods too much.
Complete non-sequitur, but this reminds me of my old 3.5 campaign world where I had it as "Elves invented Arcane Magic (because they have the longevity for trial and error), Humans Divine (because they can convince themselves of anything), and Goblins Psionics (because they lack other options)." I'm curious how I would have set things up with Arcane, Divine, Primal, and Occult as options? I know my second world, I split magic up into 4 options (Wizardry, Artistry, Witchery, and Divinity), but those were aligned with the 4 main goddesses, not the 4 racial groups (original 3 plus dragons).
Anyways, I bring this up because your world building that Andoffa lacked other options drove them to reluctantly use Divine magic is intriguing, and I could see using it.
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I decided to treat them as excessively bureaucratic, because I used to work for the U.S. government and could explain Androffan idiocy as bureaucratic regulations and inconvenient licensing agreements.In my experience, corporate bureaucracy is just as idiotic, albeit easier to just...quietly change as long as no one invested in the current set up notices what you're doing.
They had learned centuries before that their planet was deficient in magic. Their colonies on other worlds had faced native magical monsters and their own children grew up there with the ability to cast arcane spells. Androffa had only divine magic, an uncommon gift from the interstellar gods who thought that the Androffan humans should not rely on the gods too much.Complete non-sequitur, but this reminds me of my old 3.5 campaign world where I had it as "Elves invented Arcane Magic (because they have the longevity for trial and error), Humans Divine (because they can convince themselves of anything), and Goblins Psionics (because they lack other options)." I'm curious how I would have set things up with Arcane, Divine, Primal, and Occult as options? I know my second world, I split magic up into 4 options (Wizardry, Artistry, Witchery, and Divinity), but those were aligned with the 4 main goddesses, not the 4 racial groups (original 3 plus dragons).
Anyways, I bring this up because your world building that Andoffa lacked other options drove them to reluctantly use Divine magic is intriguing, and I could see using it.
Fwiw, the main baseline scifi tendency is to use "psionics" as the magic stand in.
But anyways, I must admit that I myself don't like the distinctions. They feel more made up than anything. Part of the reason is because I'm sick and tired of the cleric being the heal slave thing tbh.
Any ideas on actual campaigns or modules set on Androffa?
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Any ideas on actual campaigns or modules set on Androffa?
The Iron Gods adventure path and a few Pathfinder Society Modules such as Return to Sky have Golarian adventuring parties exploring sites with high technology. But those have a strong Numerian flavor and are written for Pathfinder 1st Edition rather than 2nd Edition.
For a homebrew setting, the classic manga Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind by Hayao Miyazaki and the animated film based on it come to mind. The initial setting of the manga is a region contaminated with poisons and mutated plants and insects from a civilization-destroying nuclear war and a seaside valley kept safe from the poisonous dust by a prevailing wind from the sea. The story opens with the heroine Nausicaä exploring the contaminated lands to study its biology. The next stage of the story has warplanes from another country arriving and wanting to take over the Valley of the Wind as a base in their current war with other countries. Nausicaä travels to the invading country and learns about their situation, but more important to her is trying to understand the new biology in order to protect the old ecology.
Thus, I can imagine a Valley of the Wind initial set-up on Androffa. How to get a good variety of fantasy species--human, elf, and dwarf--into a small valley will take some finagling, but the dwarves could live underground and the elves might have found some magical way to live in the radioactive lands, such as in tall trees far from the radioactive soil and purified from radioactivity by healing magic. At low levels, the player characters have a local mission, such as hunting magical beasts whose meat is guaranteed non-radioactive. At the next level, invaders sail in from another land, one what was not rendered radioactive. The party has to repeal the first invasion, and then find an ancient flying craft to seek out allies. The scale could gradually escalate to the the party going into outer space.
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Fwiw, the main baseline scifi tendency is to use "psionics" as the magic stand in.
Not in 3rd edition DnD or its derivatives, including specifically pathfinder and starfinder. Since 3.5 was system I was using, those rules are what I was world building off.
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Fwiw, the main baseline scifi tendency is to use "psionics" as the magic stand in.Not in 3rd edition DnD or its derivatives, including specifically pathfinder and starfinder. Since 3.5 was system I was using, those rules are what I was world building off.
Oh, I was just talking about mainstream media.