Michael Walton

I hate being kept waiting to kill someone. I’d been sitting in my car for so long that my backside had forgotten what it was like to not be numb. The abandoned church across the street looked exactly the same now as it did when I pulled up six hours ago. An old Three Doors Down tune drifted up from the CD player – softly, so that no one could hear it outside the car while the windows were up – and tried vainly to
tweak my soul in places that were as numb as my ass. I pulled out my bone-handled lighter and lit my umpteenth cigarette of the evening. As I took that first deep draw my familiar drifted up beside me. “Those things will kill you, boss,” he quipped.

I gave Dyson my best “up-yours” glare and blew a smoke ring where his face should’ve been. Dyson was a featureless ball who usually floated at about shoulder height (on me, anyway). He appeared to be made of glass, but God knows what my mentor had crafted him out of. Glass wasn’t bulletproof, and I’d seen Dyson
take a .38 slug at point blank and show not so much as a scratch. His color slowly shifted to match my mood, which meant that right now he was deep, non-reflective black. “Not likely,” I responded, “If guns and knives can’t kill me, I don’t think bad habits will.” I shifted in my seat in a vain attempt to restore some feeling to my nether parts. “How much longer is this gonna take, Dyson? I have other appointments to
keep.”

“Don’t get your knickers in a twist, boss,” Dyson said jauntily, “I scan that the mark will enter the building in 11.023 seconds.” I turned my gaze to the door just in time to see two figures fade out of the night shadows. I blinked the darkness out of my eyes to see them clearly. It was a girl and a boy, both Latino teens. She was a bit chunky but firm, cute if you like chubby girls, with a jiggle to her middle that suggested baby weight. He was tall and wiry with multiple piercings and the half-mohawk haircut that all the wannabe hardboys were wearing in these parts. No doubt about it, this was the mark and the expected companion. The boy jimmied the lock with the ease of long practice and pushed the girl through the door, then he slipped in behind her.

“About time,” I grumbled as I tossed my half-smoked cigarette into the Shadow. I opened the car door as the church door clicked shut, unfolded my six-foot-three height from the cramped confines of the Firebird and crossed the street in what I hoped was a confident swagger. Dyson bobbed along beside me in silence, all business now that it was go-time. I stopped at the door and eyed my familiar. Dyson gave an electronic sigh and willed the sounds inside to percolate through the wood and into my ears.

“I don’t know about this, Raphael,” the girl whined, “Isn’t there some other way?” I could hear her clothes rustle as she fidgeted and a squeaking sound that was probably one of her hands twisting a ring on the other. Various thumps and bumps told me that Raphael was moving things around. I needed more information than my ears alone could provide. I signaled Dyson to oblige, and he extended my other senses into the church. My projected vision revealed desolate absence. The pews and pulpit were long gone, probably broken up for firewood, and any curtains or hangings that had once adorned the walls had long since been
converted to blankets. Such is the way of the world after civilization collapses, yet the locals retained enough piety that the stained glass windows were unbroken. Jesus remained on the wall, staring forlornly at the empty space where the sanctuary used to be. I knew how he felt. The girl stood next to her boyfriend while he knelt on the floor surrounded by boxes. He was unloading ritual paraphernalia and carefully arranging it according to some formula. A ring of candles surrounded a thin sleeping mat that lay where a more suspicious girl would’ve thought a sacrificial altar might go. One box remained unopened as he worked. I didn’t see them carry any of this stuff inside, so Raphael must have stashed it here ahead of time. The
room stank of mildew, but over that I noticed an aroma of peaches from the girl’s hair. I couldn’t tell if it was homemade or pre-Burn, but it was distractingly pleasant. I grabbed my attention by the scruff of its neck and pointed it back to the business at hand.

Hundedämmerung is something different in the world of role-playing games. Most games allow players to portray beings of greater than human power wielding forces that ordinary people barely understand. This game allows you to play… a dog. Not just any dog, but a dog that has been lifted to human levels of intelligence, albeit the lower end of the scale, and endowed with minor telepathic powers that serve as
speech. In this game you will fight for the survival of your pack or the safety of “your” humans. And always, in the background, there looms the specter of a cat that is many cats – the undead, the undying, the (probably) evil Ozymandias. In Hundedämmerung you have no spells, you wield no magical or high-tech weapons and your psionic abilities aren’t much good for combat. What you have are your wits backed by natural canine ability. Use them right and evil will be your chew toy. Mess up and Ozymandias will use you as a scratching post. Welcome to the doghouse, sucker.

Master of Orion is a game of interstellar intrigue and combat. Players will contend against the conquering Antarans, ravaging Harvesters and vicious space monsters for fame and fortune — and sometimes for their very survival! The Master of Orion rpg includes material from all three Master of Orion games.

HISTORY

Long ago, in a past so distant that beings who have themselves passed into legend remembered it only as myth, there was a civilization called Center One. Center One was a nexus of commerce and culture whose denizens commanded technologies that would seem magical to the peoples of today.

At some point in this shadowy past the primary star of the Center One system became unstable, and some scientists predicted that it would go nova. The society’s leaders scoffed at this and branded anyone who subscribed to the “nova theory” as delusional or dissident. Those who wished to flee the system were encouraged to do so. FTL travel wasn’t possible at that time except by one means. The Center One system boasted a stable wormhole that provided the only way into or out of the system using STL drives. Hundreds of ships left Center One through the wormhole to become the Traveler Tribes. Fewer than 2 Tribes would survive to become the ancestors of today’s peoples. Those who stayed behind died when Center One’s star did indeed go nova ? and the disruption of the space-time continuum that followed that explosion made FTL travel impossible for centuries to come.

The surviving Tribes prospered (or failed to) largely due to their choices of where to settle. Two Tribes in particular made excellent choices. One group settled in the Orion star system because of the abundance of habitable and mineral rich planets there. A second group was just as fortunate in finding the equally rich Antares system. When the hyperspace disruptions from the Center One nova finally calmed down it was the Orions and Antarans who first ventured out into the larger galaxy to contact their lost kin. This head start allowed these two races to dominate their respectiveregions of space.

With their empires established the Antarans and Orions both started to develop their genetic sciences. The idea of unlocking the secrets of evolution appealed to the inquisitive Orions, while the Antarans saw genetics as a means to create super-soldiers. The Orions’ announcement of their discoveries lead to the first Orion-Antaran war. The Elder Races fought each other ? with the help of minor races on each side ? for over 4 years. The war ended when Orion scientists found a way to “fold” space around the Antaran homeworld so as to isolate the planet from the rest of the galaxy. Whether or not the spatial disruption that followed was the Orions’ fault has never been determined. What is know is that space-time was once again altered so that FTL travel was impossible, and most other civilizations blamed the Orions. The Long Night lasted for over 15 millennia ? plenty of time for knowledge to be lost and empires to collapse.

When the Orion Sector finally awoke from the Long Night the various races expanded into space once again. The inevitable conflicts over territory blossomed into the Orion Civil War. The Human race proved to be the dominant force in this conflict. Through a combination of shrewd diplomacy and military might the Humans founded the Orion Senate with themselves at the head. The Orion Civil War ended with the establishment of the Pax Humanica. The galaxy remained at peace for nearly 1, years.

Meanwhile, the Antarans had not been idle within their bubble of nonspace. They had developed their technology and their space fleet to terrifying capacities with no fear of outside interference. Mastery of dimensional science finally allowed the Antarans to escape their prison, which they left intact as a kind of fortress ? the Antarans reasoned that getting in would be just as hard as getting out. Scouts rediscovered the former Antaran Empire’s subject races and reunited them under the new Antaran Hegemony. The Hegemony then began a slow build-up of military power in preparation to conquer the rest of the galaxy.

The Pax Humanica ended when other races tired of Human rule. The Orion Senate fractured, and a second Orion Civil War broke out. This time the Orion Sector races succeeded only in weakening each other enough that the Antarans could move in and dominate them all. The Antarans declared themselves the new Orions ? the original race had disappeared during the Long Night ? and established the New Orion Senate. The six races that openly opposed the Antarans ? the Alkari, Bulrathi, Darloks, Elerians, Gnolams and Mrrshan ? were ruthlessly put down by the Antaran fleets. After this example the other races settled down and pretended to be content with their new roles as Antaran subjects.

The modern day has brought many changes to the Orion Sector. The peoples of the Antaran Hegemony, once unknown to the Orion peoples, are now common sights on Orion worlds. The mysterious Ethereans no longer hide on the gas giant worlds that other races dismiss as uninhabitable. Worst of all, the Antarans’ early genetic experiments have borne fruit in the form of the Harvesters ? living weapons who have become intelligent beings. The people of the Orion Sector now struggle to survive in the face of extinction at the hands of the Antarans, attacks by space monsters and consumption by the Harvesters. Any hope that remains is in the hands of brave adventurers who can discover the lost secrets of the Orions or some clue to the continued existence of the Orions themselves, who may not be extinct. After all, if the Antarans could remain safe in another dimension, the creators of dimensional science could do the same. In spite of the dangers ranged against them, those who unlock the secrets of the galaxy still have a chance to make themselves masters of Orion!

Gaming is a strange thing. It’s one of the few endeavors where people will buy a product because it has a big grinning demon on the cover and then complain about those who think that the hobby is satanic. So much for the correlation between intelligence and adolescent rebellion?

If you’re one of those players who likes games that run down religion because you’re still mad about your parents making you go to church, stop reading. This ain’t that kind of game. If you like a game that allows you to have some good, clean fun while at the same time offering opportunities to explore religious themes and moral questions ? whether you believe in God or not ? this game is for you. Immaculate is a deliberate departure from the “Hell this, demon that” school of game design that assumes that the forces of evil are going to win. In this setting the war between good and evil is still very much anybody’s game. The reality of Immaculate isn’t that evil is more powerful and will inevitably triumph, but that the soldiers of light can’t go on fighting the good fight unless they continue to win their most personal battles. Let other games take you through a world of darkness. In Immaculate there’s always a light at the end of the tunnel ? but the only way to get there is to make a conscious decision to keep walking.