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Showing posts with label The Onyx Battle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Onyx Battle. Show all posts

Friday, January 28, 2011

Worlds Enough and Time: An Urutskan Travel Log-

I was thinking of all of the adventures I can remember gaming on Urutsk, as well as fiction I have written for it, and came up with these locations and time periods:

The Marnharnnan Continent: From the Fall of the Ancients, through the Vrun Colonial period, and the years of play in Latter Autumn, and into the surrealistic dark-fantasy of the Winter Era.

The Vrun Continent: Pre-history, Spring Era, Summer, Autumn, and bits of Winter (7,000 years of history). From the Crystal Pyramid through hunter-gatherers; from the standard fare of 'mediaeval fantasy' through Sci-Fantasy of the war against the Aelbaan; Late Summer and Early Autumn's mass-warfare campaigns, cults, disease and famine; The Humanoid and Frontier Campaigns; the pseudo Napoleonic gatling-gun and cannon period of Consolidation; the rise of the Vrun Continental Authority and highlights of the First Tyrrhean War with its necroborgs and gas-masked cavalry sorties; Latter Autumn's Second Tyrrhean War and the urban malaise of capitulation to the People's Automatic Union; all the way into Winter's madness and desperate subterranean scramble.

The Black Crown / Marnharnnan Yirinn Empire of Bereme Oykh: Autumn and the Departure, and Winter's Discontent.

The Chaos Isles: Scattered incidents throughout Autumn.

Tuliri / Lhoman Border region: Late Summer and throughout the Autumn Era, especially during the Second Tyrrhean War. Hours and hours of miniatures wargaming took place in this region, as well as a religious insurgency on the Tuliri side of the border. Martial Arts action, Pulp adventure involving serpent men, and the rise of an Immortal.

The Durn Continent: Early Autumn's visitation by the contemporary Playtest Party as well as a one-off with a Big Game Hunter, his trusty sidekick, and a powerful Durn Holy Warrior versus Guild Council slavers; Latter Autumn's challenge to modernise, and the Durn Maximist Covenant's polite refusal of the PAU's invitation.

All of the above is but a small percentage of the total gaming done in the milieu, and fails to touch upon the exploration and colonisation of Aqmlk, the Red Planet, and its latter eras; the entire span of the Space Age with its Hyperspace Shunt Network and Dragon Wars; Alien worlds crawling with unspeakable horrors and confounding alien technology; and the actual Sphere of Stars built around the galactic core; and other bits and bobs throughout these past 26+ years of my cultivating this wild and wending garden.

What adventures will you have here?

Friday, September 11, 2009

[RPG] Origins of Martial Backgrounds-

When the Ancients, the First Parents, fell from the sky in the War in the Heavens, they brought with them a diverse range of martial traditions dating from millennia before, and millions of worlds amid the infinite Empyrean.
Because of the haphazard manner in which they tumbled to Urutsk from the great heights of the Space Beyond the Sky <Aya 'Eye-Ah'>, the variety of troops and armed units became so dispersed that individuals or detachment-sized remnants of squads and larger groups simply became associated with enclaves of other survivors.
From this jumble of civil servants, constabulary, home guard from dozens of environments, to elite and specialised warfighters, isolated societies cobbled together their individual tables of organisation, training, and deployment as Black Winter set in with its scouring celestial wind of space debris and plasma storms.

In some locales, due to the distribution of more favourable geographic features, limited surface activity was possible over the time-forgotten span of the Scourge. However, the vast majority of the scattered Imperial cantons were forced literally underground and expanded their holdings over the centuries.
It was not long before the tunnelling unearthed and awakened long dormant creatures and monstrous civilisations as recent as their own, also escaped to Urutsk. These wars, The Onyx Battle , never truly ended. It was only the gospel report of the Scourge's cessation that allowed Humanity to flee the Stygian depths for the sunlit world of the surface.

While certain kingdoms and other cultures did meet during that long period, few had the resources to maintain larger communities and had often kept the contact secret from their constituents. Now upon the surface, the enclaves and empires of thirty or more generations removed cousins gradually were reunited.
Naturally, the grand traditions of the Imperium made the re-integration of the disparate colonies more easily possible. Of course, there were those who desired no part of the resurrected behemoth that had created the Cataclysm, and from these 'deserters' came the first intra-Human wars.
But Fate was kind to renew the enmities with the non-Human, and in some cases, also the Allied Peoples (human-like aliens). More often than not, Human enemies were brought past their bickering and resource grabs to unite briefly against their common foes.

Through these various organic mechanisms of transmission and re-implementation, there became a great commonality to Human military endeavours that was retained as various groups spread out to seed the barren planet with animal and plant life from their long-destroyed homeworlds and others once held within the Imperium's grasp.
From the hereditary melange that had defined the Core of the Imperium ('The Sphere of Suns'), as had been recorded in myths of the long vanished past, Humanity became a species of multiple peoples. As the Human pool of bloods split and refined, specialised, and re-introduced other groups, the ethnicities of Urutsk came into being in only a few hundred years. With these divisions, martial procedures changed and were lost to time and replaced with more ideal methodologies and practical measures as suited each group's particular needs.

As the planet grew lush and green, as the rains fed the multitudes with blue and white-tipped marsh grains and fattened game animals, in many cases, the non-human races began to find more ideal conditions above ground, and expanded rapidly -- often out-breeding humans by several generations.
These groups usually fell upon each other as readily as upon Humans, but in some cases, great bands or more subtle confederacies were formed, and these both were a thorn in Humanity's side for much of the Mad Spring.

Saturday, April 25, 2009

[Milieu][Wargaming] Preview-

(c) Copyright 1998, 2000, 2006, 2009 Kyrinn S. Eis All Rights Reserved

WARGAMING URUTSK-
: Autumn Garden


I - Overview
II - Colour Logic
III - Constructive Dice Pool Basics
----------------------------------------
IV - Unit Data
V - Squad Structure
VI - Cohort Rules (Attached Units)
----------------------------------------
VII - Formations & Distributed Assets
VIII - Command & Control
IX - Poor Order, Disarray, & Route
----------------------------------------
X - Terrain & Movement
XI - Darkness, Weather, & Circumstance
XII - High Energetics & Magical Effects
----------------------------------------
XIII - Optional Complications
XIV - Roster of Forces
XV - Scenarios
----------------------------------------
XVI - Postscript



I - Overview
II - Colour Logic
III - Constructive Dice Pool Basics
----------------------------------------

I - Overview-


Daqhtshal:Ikarentes-Yahannl
<"I am a dutiful, trained soldier: Proud First Wave Air Cavalry, a Devastator">

No, knowledge of the Vrun language is not necessary to use this rules-outline, but it certainly wouldn't hurt. In fact, you may be surprised at just how much of it you will learn through the process of reading these pages.
I took the opportunity to illustrate the manner in which Vrun structure their divisions, and the idiomatic manner in which, in this instance, the Resth Clan Confederacy name their companies.

When the Ancients, the First Parents, fell from the sky in the War in the Heavens, they brought with them a diverse range of martial traditions dating from millennia before, and millions of worlds amid the infinite Empyrean.
Because of the haphazard manner in which they tumbled to Urutsk from the great heights of the Space Beyond the Sky < Aya 'Eye-Ah' > , the variety of troops and armed units became so dispersed that individuals or detachment-sized remnants of squads and larger groups simply became associated with enclaves of other survivors.
From this jumble of civil servants, constabulary, home guard from dozens of environments, to elite and specialised warfighters, isolated societies cobbled together their individual tables of organisation, training, and deployment as Black Winter set in with its scouring celestial wind of space debris and plasma storms.

In some locales, due to the distribution of more favourable geographic features, limited surface activity was possible over the time-forgotten span of the Scourge. However, the vast majority of the scattered Imperial cantons were forced literally underground and expanded their holdings over the centuries.
It was not long before the tunnelling unearthed and awakened long dormant creatures and monstrous civilisations as recent as their own, also escaped to Urutsk. These wars, The Onyx Battle < Yuon Hakar >, never truly ended. It was only the gospel report of the Scourge's cessation that allowed Humanity to flee the Stygian depths for the sunlit world of the surface.

While certain kingdoms and other cultures did meet during that long period, few had the resources to maintain larger communities and had often kept the contact secret from their constiuents. Now upon the surface, the enclaves and empires of thirty or more generations removed cousins gradually were reunited.
The grand traditions of the Imperium made the re-integration of the disparate colonies more easily possible. Of course, there were those who desired no part of the resurrected behemoth that had created the Cataclysm, and from these 'deserters' came the first intra-Human wars.
But Fate was kind to renew the enmities with the non-Human, and in some cases, also the Allied Peoples (human-like aliens). More often than not, Human enemies were brought past their bickering and resource grabs to unite briefly against their common foes.

Through these various organic mechanisms of transmission and re-implementation, there became a great commonality to Human military endeavours that was retained as various groups spread out to seed the barren planet with animal and plant life from their long-destroyed homeworlds and others once held within the Imperium's grasp.
From the hereditary melange that had defined the Core of the Imperium ('The Sphere of Suns'), as had been recorded in myths of the long vanished past, Humanity became a species of multiple peoples. As the Human pool of bloods split and refined, specialised, and re-introduced other groups, the ethnicities of Urutsk came into being in only a few hundred years. With these divisions, martial procedures changed and were lost to time and replaced with more ideal methodologies and practical measures as suited each group's particular needs.

As the planet grew lush and green, as the rains fed the multitudes with blue and white-tipped marsh grains and fattened game animals, in many cases the non-human races began to find more ideal conditions above ground and expanded rapidly -- often out-breeding humans by several generations.
These groups usually fell upon each other as readily as upon Humans, but in some cases, great bands or more subtle confederacies were formed, and these both were a thorn in Humanity's side for much of the Mad Spring.