Ancestry: Memonek (Patreon)

I said you’d get another update from me soon!

We think, we HOPE, there’ll be 12 ancestries in the Heroes book. Most of these are ancestries everyone’s already familiar with. We didn’t invent humans or elves or dwarves, even though we have our own ideas about how all these classic ancestries work in Orden.

And we assume that, just like whatever game you’re currently playing, people will use these rules to run games set in their own setting or some classic fantasy setting, and that is all to the good. 

But it’s also important to us that, when people open the Heroes book up for the first time and flip through the ancestry section, there’s at least one or two new ancestries that will make folks say “Whoah! I can play one of these!?” Probably followed soon thereafter by “What even IS this?!”

And that comes from our own experiences as players. I remember opening up the original EARTHDAWN core rulebook and seeing some really cool new species you could play. Obsidimen! T’skrang! Super cool! 

Well we sort of have Obsidimen (The Hakaan) and I think something T’skrang-like would require a visit to Ix, which isn’t happening anytime soon. But we have other ideas!

We want to show people ancestries that would be popular in various parts of our multiverse. So Revenants and Devils for a game set in Capital, or any other urban fantasy setting. What about The Timescape?

The Timescape is our 70’s Retrofuture Space Fantasy setting. Unlike Capital, a normal person from Orden can’t just decide to go there, but there are ways. There are myriad worlds in the Timescape, some we already know a little about. Quintessence the Plane of All Elements, home of Alloy, The City at the Center of the Timescape. There’s Primordius, The Sea of Eternal Change, the Plane of Uttermost Chaos.

And then there’s AXIOM, the Plane of Uttermost Law, home to the 5-tiered city of Ordos, the City of Light. 

All these worlds have their own intelligent, sapient, humanoid denizens. The human-analog. In Alloy, it’s the Fire Dwarves. In Primordius, the Proteans. 

The native denizens of Axiom are the MEMONEK. They are humanoids, same basic form-factor as Humans, but they “evolved” (if, indeed, a fantasy setting can be said to have evolution. I don’t think they were created by Gods, like the species in Orden, but I could be wrong!) on a world where biology involves a completely different set of chemicals than it does here on earth. Inorganic compounds. Metals, ceramics, glass. 

So they’re people, like you and me, but they look super different. I think of them as “not robots, machine people.” But the analogy is imperfect. They don’t think in binary, they don’t run code any more than we do. 

We had a Memonek meeting a while ago where we threw around some art reference until eventually Grace was inspired and said “Ok, lemme take a crack at these people,” and this is the result!

Warning! These may not be final! We may see more, different, takes on these folks before we decide which are the real Memonek.

Wow! Look at these people! Amazing! I was so relieved when I saw these. I often annoy my art friends when they’re trying to draw something I’m describing and I feel like I “know” what they look like, even though I can’t exactly picture them in my head. I’m not an illustrator, my brain doesn’t work like that.

I don’t think being a writer is much different, actually. I often don’t know what I think about something until I sit down at the keyboard and start writing about it. The discipline required to order thoughts into words and sentences forces those thoughts into shape when before they were just chaos. I think it’s the same imagining new species like this, except I can’t just sit at the Cintiq and order my thoughts into images. Well, not without a few years of art school.

So this is one take on Memonek, Grace’s take. We may see more, different takes, or this take refined. We’ll see. But it was sufficiently cool to prove to me at least that we could make this work.

Of course lots of people will look at this and think “that is too weird for my setting.” Good. That is a good thing. As we said waaay back when we started down this road; the only thing that doesn’t offend anyone, also doesn’t excite anyone. Oatmeal. It’s the exact same thing that excites me, that turns other people off. And we got plenty of bog-standard fantasy ancestries in here already.

Also, any time we talk about something that isn’t universally popular? People look for the shortest route from “I don’t like this” to “it’s a mistake to include this.” Missing the point that we think it’s cool. 😀 

This is not an ancestry we expect to be common in any normal fantasy setting. The memonek belong to the Timescape! People would freak out if we put a Skroderider in the game, but no one batts an eye at Groot, because he makes sense in the universe of Guardians of the Galaxy. Groot and Rocket’s weirdness defines their setting. “This is a world where people like this are normal and common.”

There might be only four Memonek walking around in all of Orden at any given time. Maybe your hero is one of them! Normal people in Orden would have no idea what one of these was. To me, that would be part of the fun of running one, or being a Director running the NPCs who meet one. That moment of awe and fear and wonder. “What is that? What are you?”

Anyway, armed with this spectacular vision of the Memonek it was time for me to take a stab at their write-up.

The Hook

We think we know a little about them mechanically. We think they’re Fast (bonus to speed, which in this game is a big deal), but Light (they take bonus knockback when pushed around, sort of the opposite of a Dwarf). But when I sat down to write them I realized that these traits do not an ancestry make. I needed to know something about their psychology. 

I needed a hook! I needed some cool point of view, or internal conflict that would make playing one of these folks fun for a certain kind of player. I thought; these are citizens of Ordos, they would have “highly ordered minds” whatever that means.

I kept coming back to Spock. I grew up with the Original Series of Star Trek on TV as a wee bairn and I loved the idea that Vulcans were beings of pure logic. And I don’t like it when corporations end up “owning” these ideas. I thought “Maybe the memonek are like the original version of the Vulcans,” beings of pure logic.

But I couldn’t reconcile that with the kinds of Heroes I expected to see among the Memonek. There should be swashbuckling Memonek Star Pirates! 

We just hired a new full-time designer, and we talked about this in their first Design Meeting. “What if,” they said, “They are beings of perfect reason at home but something happens to them if they end up on Orden?”

Ah-HAH! That’s what I needed! This showed great insight, I thought, into the A Fire Upon The Deep nature of the different worlds in our setting.

Armed with this idea I sat down to write up a first draft of their entry in the Heroes book. What I came up with was based on that conversation, but I took some liberties with the phrase “beings of pure reason.”

This is what I got, it’s not final. I’m not completely happy with it, it needs to be shorter for one thing, I’m not sure Count Revile is a real Memonek name (I think Urusistra might be real!) and I’m not sure these are ALL the things we should say about Memonek in this write up. So expect something different in the final book. Maybe really different! But maybe just a shorter version of this.

I’m just going to paste it here at the end without further commentary. I hope y’all had a great weekend!

Memonek

“This world of yours. Ships of wood and swords of steel. It’s so…primitive. Like a fairy tale.”

“Where do you come from, lady, that our world seems a fable? You have no ships and swords?”

“We have them.” Lady Urusistra cast a hand across the glittering night sky. “You see these stars? That is my home. Our ships are great starfreighters that ply the spacelanes. And among those stars, light hits as hard as steel.”

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The native denizens of Axiom, the Plane of Uttermost Law, Memonek are from a land with lakes and trees and birds and flowers. But in a world of perfect order the lakes are seas of ammonia, the birds glitter with wings of glass stretched airy thin, and the flowers’ petals are iridescent metal as flexible and fragile as any earthly rose.

Their minds are perfectly ordered. Their reason is their great pride. But when descending to the lower planes, a manifold like Orden where Law and Chaos mix, a sickness comes over them. An uncontrollable sensation called emotion.

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“Count Revile! Count REVILE!!” Gorjack practically slammed himself into the memonek. Though slight of build and seemingly fragile, there was steel in the machine man from Axiom. It took all the orc’s strength to hold him back.

Count Revile struggled against the beastheart. He surged forward trying to reach the wizard they’d captured. The wizard, seeing the memonek’s own teammates come to his defense, sneered at Count Revile. 

“I will kill this one!” Count Revile said.

“Darling,” the wizard said. “You must grow a thicker skin!”

“John, do something!” Gorjack called out. Their de facto leader stepped forward and put a hand on the memonek talent’s shoulder, pushed it back until the Mind Master from Axiom was forced to turn and look at his friend.

“Listen,” Sir John said. “We’re all on the same side, okay? We want the same thing, but killing this wizard solves nothing. We need him alive.” Gorjack saw their tactician had it handled, and went to start questioning their captive.

Count Revile turned in disgust and walked away. Sir John followed. Revile stopped and turned to look at the wizard and the rest of the party. The memonek’s polished white porcelain chest heaved as he tried to calm himself. His ceramic skin looked as strong as plate, but John knew it was brittle, fragile. Almost like skin, he thought.

“What is it?” John asked. Revile said nothing. John thought he was mostly upset at himself. “Whatever it is, it’s getting worse,” he continued. “I’ve seen it, we’ve all seen it. Half the team are too polite to say anything, but they’re all worried. They don’t know what happened in that fight, but I do. You lost control. However strong your mind is? You’re useless to us like that. Worse than useless, you’re a danger! That’s what everyone's afraid of.”

Hurt, the memonek talent defended himself. “I took the cloth of seven hues as a boy,” he said. John realized this was the glittering reflective chasuble he wore over his shoulders that marked the memonek as a member of the Prism, an elite order of talents on Axiom. “I am the master of my mind.”

“Right” John snapped at the Count, he took a step forward, tried to keep his voice down. “You want to lie to yourself, that’s fine, but don’t lie to me. I know what I saw. You went into a bloodlust. I know the signs. And it’s not the first time. Whether you like it or not, whether I like it or not, I’m in charge of this mission and you’re not giving me a lot of options. Either you tell me what’s going on with you, or I have no choice. I have to conclude you’re a danger to the team and cut you loose.”

Count Revile took a deep breath, straightened up, and Sir John could see he’d mastered himself, for the moment. “The term is velloparatha. In your tongue it would be…worldsick. Or world-sickness. It is a thing that happens to…my people…when they come to your world. It is an illness of…feeling. Emotion.”

“Are you going mad?” John asked the question matter-of-factly, as though, if their memonek talent were losing his mind, it would just be another problem to solve.

The memonek smiled ruefully, an expression so human Sir John was taken aback. “It feels that way sometimes. I spent an hour this morning at daybreak staring at an insect that landed on my finger. A grasshopper the polder called it. I thought I had never seen a thing so perfect and beautiful. That was awe. As powerful as I have ever felt. In the battle today, anger. Just as powerful.

“I thought…I thought I could resist it. When I arrived here and felt no different I thought perhaps worldsickness was a legend. Or an exaggeration. But it is a slow process, this illness. These insidious emotions.”

“No emotions where you’re from?”

Count Revile shook his head. “Not like this. We are creatures of reason, we of Axiom. It is our art, our pride. Our religion sometimes methinks. We have emotions; joy, sadness, wonder, grief. But they are…a fashion. They do not happen to us, they are something we indulge in, out of propriety. Here…everything is order and chaos mixed. Even in me. In me,” Revile placed his hand on his own chest. 

“In the battle today. That anger was not directed at Ajax’s dog soldiers. It was at myself.”

“At yourself? Why? What did you…”

“John,” the memonek said, and now it was his turn to whisper. “I was afraid. Afraid of…of being wounded, of losing, of failing you, failing my friends. Of dying. And out of that fear came…enormous anger. At myself. Anger that I was so weak so…useless. Anger so…strong, so powerful…I forgot who I was.”

The tactician sat there waiting for more, then realized that was the confession. He chuckled, and turned to look at the rest of the group. They were interrogating the wizard, but discreetly casting glances over at the two of them.

He looked back at his friend and smiled. “That’s just…,” he smiled broader. “That’s normal, man. That’s just normal…we all feel that way.”

“What? No, you don’t understand…”

“Oh I don’t understand, ok , let me guess; it felt like you were gonna piss yourself.”

“Yes!!” 

“Yeah, happens to all of us, man.”

“Even you?!”

Sir John shrugged. “Sure. Are you kidding? But it doesn’t help anything. You still got a job to do. In fact I’d say that is the job. Anyone could learn to use a blade,” he said, putting his hand on the pommel of his sword. “Nothing special about that. It’s learning to deal with the fear. That’s the job. What separates the professionals from the amateurs.”

Count Revile said nothing, just thought. 

“Feeling better?”

Revile nodded. “I always recover afterwards. But these outbursts come unbidden. Like thunder from a clear sky.”

“Hm. Yeah. Well that explains what happened when you met Mistress Liiarwn.”

Count Revile did not like being reminded of that. He looked to the sky and shook his head. “I made a fool of myself.”

“Oh I dunno. She’s seen a lot of shit, but I don’t think anyone’s ever just spontaneously quoted poetry to her at first sight.”

The memonek looked hurt. “No, that was not a quote, that was an original! Authored in the moment.”

“Well if you’re trying to seduce our void mage you made a good start of it. She’s three thousand years old, I’ve known her since I was fifteen, I don’t think I’ve ever seen her blush. Anyway, now that I know what’s going on, now that I know you’re basically a giant teenager with overactive glands, I can relax a little.”

Sir John, human tactician and Count Revile, memonek talent, stood together on the bloody battlefield looking at each other.

“Talking about it help?” John asked.

Count Revile nodded. 

“I thought it would. This world’s a mess, but you’ll get used to it. Strong emotions aren’t bad, you just gotta learn to…you know, channel them into something productive.”

“John, I fear this may get worse before it gets better.”

“So, just like everything else?” He clapped the memonek on the shoulder. “Don’t worry about it. We’ll help you get through it. I’ll let the others know. Once they understand, they’ll help too. They’ll probably just take the piss out of you, that’ll help, you’ll love that.”

“You’re a good friend, John.”

“Heh. Is that you, or the worldsickness talking?”

“Me, I think. The worldsickness would have me say…you’re a bastardly son of a bitch. But you’re my bastardly son of a bitch.” Count Revile smiled.

John laughed and put his arm around his friend. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go piss off a wizard.”