CLASS: Shamanic techno-wizard

Techno wizards are tinkerer sorcerers that explore science as if it were a shamanistic art form and practice magic as if it were a scientific discipline. The blending of these two concepts is not unnatural to them. Often a techno wizard will have had a life long curiosity with strange and wondrous objects. By young adulthood they will seek a master to begin an apprenticeship in the three schools of study.

First School - Psionic Magic (Levels 0-3

Derives from implanted biologic technology of an organic nature. Powers are bestowed through serums, potions, vaccines, salves and other medicines. Effects of these concoctions are temporary, but necessary to help train the mind of the Techno-Wizard. Abilities can be mastered in any order and include:

• Empathy bond (soak up the mental energies of another to interpret their intentions and mood)
• Telekinesis (level 0 = force push; level 1= force tug, level 2=move in X,Y,Z directions, level 3=complex manipulation of objects in midair)
• Psionic Screen (mental barrier against all forms of psionic attacks)
• Commune with animalia (speak with or command fauna)
• Mental Blast (attack with 1d6 per level; increases all the way to 10th level)
• Familiar (gain a familiar animal no larger than half your size that will help you in rituals by giving you +1d4 to all rolls per your level; forthcoming posts will outline how certain familiars can also unlock other cosmic powers)
• Detect psionic flow (energy sources, read auras for empathic readings, etc.)
• Illusion projection (project a vision, dream, etc. to one target per level)
• Astral travel (travel anywhere without interaction in a corporeal manner)

Success is based on Wisdom/Presence attribute checks. Take into account any modifiers gained through biological/psionic enhancements.

Note: Due too background noise of the Song of Kings, direct telepathy and prophesying are extremely difficult to perform at this time.

Second School - Energy Magic (Levels 4-6)

After mastering the First School, Second School abilities are opened to the Techno-Wizard. Calling on the fires of the cosmos (subatomic particles et. al.) requires intense focus and concentration, but also a good deal of ritual practice. Drawing of runes on the skin, scarification, and scrawling artifacts or rooms with special "paint" consisting of a techno-alchemical composition is used to harness these energies. The written words are activated through speech and gestures. Techno-Wizards cannot create energy, only attract it, store it, redirect it, and manipulate it.

Abilities must be mastered in the following order:

1. Detect and call radiation glyphs (allows for drawing energy from the weakest of background sources)
2. Emanate heat glyph (energizes a weak heat source up to blowtorch flame)
3. See infra (lizard glyph) and ultra (moth glyph) wavelengths
4. Create light source (pure light, as a torch or non-harmful ray - paint object you wish to be light source)
5. Battery Body (illustrate on the inside of an empty vessel to store energy of 1 megawatt per Techno-Wizard's level)
6. Concentrate/Attenuate (draw rings on entire body along limbs, etc. to create holograms, laser blasts, etc.)
7. Transmit (full body paint as well as runes on a rod or staff to act as emitter for radio, microwave wavelengths and the like)
8. Saturate Target (paint large target area on floor, and two walls for X,Y,Z coordinates
9. Energy sheath (paint armor or shield to become a barrier of energy or magnetism)
10. Spacetime bending (full psionic concentration and paint body a mosaic of alternating colors in a full-body grid; allows for shaping spacetime, albeit on small scales to create small backward time fluxes for reroll opportunities, causing antigravity fields, bend light for invisibility, etc.)

Success is based on Intelligence attribute checks. Take into account any modifiers gained through cybernetic enhancements.

Note: Dark Energy is akin to "black magic" and very dangerous/unpredictable. You might power a spaceship or you might create a singularity!

Third School - Matter Sculpting Magic (Levels 7-10)

Once the First and Second schools are complete the Techno-Wizard graduates to a much more robust class of abilities. These require advanced technologies that must be worn as circlets, rings, bracers, helms, body harnesses, or other wearable forms. Abilities are not possible, if these items are removed.
Items may be permanently integrated through cybernetics, be they robotic upgrades attached to the PC's biological systems or a constant supply of nanomite supplements. If nanomites, they make take the form of a gas (as through a sealed mask), tiny capsules to swallow, or as a replacement for blood. 

Abilities must be mastered in the following order:

1. Organize matter (simple objects of just one material, think Green Lantern's early constructs, i.e., swords, shields, hammers, fists, simple wheels, etc.)
2. Teleportation (move PC or any single object same size or smaller)
3. Transmorphism (change PC's shape only)
4. Disintegrate object (range is equal to 10 meters per level - target at a time - effect is permanent)
5. Composite constructs (more complicated creations made of multiple materials)
6. Transform Object (change anything's shape)
7. Technomancery (complex machines, objects capable of computations)
8. Element conversion (reformulating matter at it's most basic level, e.g., stellar conversion, etc.)

Success is based on Constitution attribute checks. Take into account any modifiers gained through technological enhancements.


Note: This class is a work in progress, and may be updated. :)

Ancient Secrets: Planetary Alignment

Eons ago, the Temple of Ru sat atop the end of a long rocky pier that was cut from the landscape by philospher stonecutters. The roofless, pentagonal temple sat peering into the night sky, with five sets of staircases (three steps each) that faced each other and met in mid-air.

Inlaid in the first step of each stair, rests brick with an ancient inscription of glyphs for each season. Four of the five stairs still have their glyph bricks. Today, the temple is long fallen, but the three steps for each season remain.

There are five solstices in the Benuvian calendar that take place at the crossroads of the seasons:

• Veral - growth season (although little grows easily on Benu)
• Aesat - high season
• Aumut - falling away
• Borea - season of death
• Indeko- twillight before rebirth

Reckoning of Ru: Astral Alignment

A solstice on Benu is anything but ordinary. On these holy days, the constant stars in the sky that make up the Circlet of Nioro (Warrior Huntress)--align along one of five different paths. Beginning at noon, a priestess of Ru (Five-headed Celestine Godess) would speak an incantation--saying aloud the season inscribed on the aligned stair--and a doorway to another world would open.

Five different stairs. Five different solstices. Five different conjunctions. Five different seasons. Five different portals to outer realms.

Intrepid scholars excavating the site have identified three destinations, based on centuries of research and self endangerment during solstice times.

• Veral - Kurust (although little grows easily on Benu)
• Aesat - Raathnor
• Aumut - Trigor ("third" in Benuvian tongue)
• Borea - Quadrat ("fourth" in Benuvian tongue
• Indeko- Lagol

Three stairs still seem to function, while the other two lie dormant. They've been named numerically for now. It's unknown why they no longer activate. It's possible the destinations were destroyed or migrated to another plane by some cosmic force.

Different Days, Different Worlds

There's a rumor, that more worlds appear on other holidays too, when different constellations are in alignment. But since those occurances happen with even greater rarity, it's unknown where those portals may lead.

In recent times, few are brave enough to ascend the Stair of Ru, and those who do are never again seen. A low, briny lake now covers the area surrounding the stair, and it's been said that an ancient codex of all the possible portals may lie hidden below the surface. Just one of many lost secrets of the Temple of Ru.

Song of the Kings

The Bando speak of the "Song of Kings" which is not a song that can be heard with ears, but with the mind. It's a channel of psionic energy that ripples through the planet and acts as a carrier wave for thoughts, memories, impressions left in the collective unconscious of time.

The Ancient Kings were the first to employ this power, and subsequently taught it to their followers. When they took their empire to new worlds, they were able to "awaken" the song by geophysical manipulation of a planet's core and tuning it to the local solar winds. These worlds then lit up like auroras with immeasurable psionic energies, creating a intergalactic grid between them that could then be tapped, mapped, and traveled.

Ruined temples throughout Benu are thought to rest over areas the song can be best "heard" or utilized. These places act as amplifiers where the song can be made corporeal, (i.e., produce sounds, sights, even scents) and help bring forth bits of the spacetime stream (past, present, and future) into being.

Gifted psions can "sing" and telepathically commune with living as well as the long lost. Relics from ancient times could be permanently imbued with the song, but that technology has long been forgotten.

Cryptotherium: Keeping Place of Secrets

The Bando know that the things they find in the wastes of Benu are from ancient and powerful civilizations that fell long before they set foot across the salt flats. Those finds that hum and glow with unknown energies are transported to the Cryptotherium, a massive museum and laboratory in the capitol city.

Here the wisest and most learned among the Bando try to uncover the secrets of the past. More often than not, the artifacts stored here are relegated to storage and deemed undecipherable.

Physical Structure, Azure and Ancient

The Cryptotherium is a 20-story tall tower with an observatory dome on top. The entire building is covered in ancient glyphs, scrawled on thousands of pieces of ornate stonework that have been scavenged and fastened together to create this monumental edifice and shrine of the past.

The inner layout of the building is honeycomb of passages and skyways connecting hundreds of vaults and labs. Many dangerous objects are housed here so the walls are thick and seemingly impenetrable. The building's original blue glaze, while cracked and faded, still quite captivating, while trimmed with a precious platinum-colored metal that gleams brightly in direct midday starlight.

The observatory dome crowns the top of the building with colorful and strange stained glasses that at one time filtered out direct sunlight so observations could be made during the day. In the waning light of Benu's star, the windows have taken on new properties--shifting auras and colored shapes of light in mid-air--which Bando astronomers are at a loss to explain.

There are three entrances to the Cryptotherium, one main ramp that leads to a hall of vaults and two skyway bridges 10 stories from the ground that lead from the adjacent buildings. These are ramshackle bridges covered with deep blue canvas tenting. Similar coverings dot the building over breaches or fallen walls where passages are now vulnerable, as the building has been in general disrepair for the last millennia. 

Powerful Secrets Means Tight Security

The building is heavily guarded--not against threats from within (the punishment in Bando society is to be abandoned beyond the Indigo Gates of the city, a fate of certain death) but from without. Seekers from other worlds, competitor races on Benu, and other oddness have besieged the tower in the past.

The Bando forbid all outsiders from entering and installed an permanent garrison of 300 Bando sentinels called Mazhji to watch over their precious treasures. Armed with weapons familiar and ancient, these Mazhji will lay down their lives to keep intruders from making off with any secrets of The Kings.

While the tower appears to have it's weak points, the Bando's resolve to protect the Cryptotherium is boundless. An outsider looking to get in should consider that there are better ways to die.

Zeth, Benuvian Moon

Image: Blue Cloud Planet 2.0 by Fragile-stock

Zeth is a windswept moon that orbits Benu. It was formed out of the detritus from it's larger host planet and later became fortified with heavy metals from meteors. Eons later the planet would be mined for its rich ore complement to the point of being riddled with deep shafts and sinkholes.

The Winds of Zeth

When Benu and Zeth had grown old and the solar winds stirred up the climate of both bodies, Zeth's gale-force gusts began to pulverize what was left. With so much material in the air, lifeforms on the surface had little chance of survival. What did remain retreated to the sinkholes, canyons, and subterranean caverns or under the pillowed dunes.

Life On-Planet

Zeth's atmosphere is filled with particulate (dust, etc.) and air-breathing lifeforms native to the world have evolved special lungs lined with filters to extrude dangerous matter. (visitors require artificial means to breath.) The winds also carve anything and everything, breaking solid objects down with the passage of time, adding all matter to the winds' mighty rending will. Special precautions must be taken in order to venture out into the wilderness by natives and visitors alike.

Fauna on the planet is especially hardy and distempered. The Nikac is a native species to Zeth.

Cultural Impact

Zeth is named for the daughter of the great creators Oduz and Erul. In Benuvian lore, she was the first sired princess and Queen of Secrets. During the high season, when the moon is full, her reflection is said to reveal all betrayers. The moonlight from Zeth bathes Benu in silver twillight during these periods--during day and night--making the ambient sky much brighter than ususual. Runes written while Zeth is full can only be read on other full moons--regardless of the method of rendering.

Astronomics

When Zeth and Benu are in alignment with their parent star, the winds die down on the surface and great celebrations occur across the orb. The entire surface of the moon appears transparent--as a ghost--during an eclipse. Seers, astralmongers and cosmotographers have been known to peer into the eclipse, and auto-scribe starmaps, calendars, and witness other strange visions. Ships looking to land on Zeth during these times find the moon has quite simply disappeared.

 Rumors

• Some say that Zeth was once the shipyard that built the great tetratic "colony" ships (a cross between a warship and planetary seed engine) and the discus-shaped escort fleets. The planet's rich iron core is mixed with other unknown metals made it a favorite source for magical weapons, shields, and starship hulls.
• Either due to it's geologic makeup or for other unknown reasons, the moon is a bright source of psionic energy, which has affected everything from sentient culture development to the lifeforms in residence.
•  Zeth still has great cities, buried beneath the dunes and embedded inside abandoned mines.
•  A great war was once fought between Zethian slaves and their Benuvian masters. While the rebellion was eventually put down by Benu, several space vessels, crafted in secret, made it off-moon. It's rumored that their descendants began their own empires elsewhere and are among many reasons why Benu has fallen from its former glory.