Black Seas of Infinity (Encounter Table/Terminal Space)

“We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”

H.P. Lovecraft

Mythos-Style Interstellar Encounters

1. Mi-Go flotilla enroute to a mining colony world with the intent to restore order and productivity. (-4 on reaction roll. The Mi-go are looking for a few good, tractable slaves to add to the about to be depleted population of their soon to be pacified colonies.)
2. Polyp-Ship tumbling out of control. The central AI-ganglia have been laser-pithed by a Tcho-Tchoid raiding party that have quickly extracted certain undisclosed items before departing the now ruined polyp vessel in almost unseemly haste. (30% chance of a doomsday device counting down on the bridge of the ship.)
3. Moon Beasts coasting along beneath the surface of a frozen trans-solar moonlet. They are caught-up in their massively multiplayer dreams and won't immediately notice intruders or visitors, so long as they are discrete and non-damaging. Interfering in the games will cause squads of shiny metal constructs to mobilize in defense of the moonlet. They may also have more than one large-scale Oneiric Lens Array located within one or more of the squat gray domes that are just barely covered by the gritty ochre-streaked ice of the outer crust.
4. Roll once on the Space Ship Sized Monsters Table.
5. A flock of Primordials on a trajectory for some near-by solar system where they probably have incredibly ancient ruins lying around the place, unless the Shoggoths or other forces have erased them or co-opted the site(s) for their own ends. (20% chance to extrapolate the flocks previous location. That system might be worth taking a look at, especially since the Primordials have left it for now.)
6. Mega-Shoggoth in force-sphere accelerating to transluminal speed. (base 10% to catch its attention as it passes by.)
7. (1d4) Yaddithian Light Envelopes. They make no attempt to communicate. Who is inside?
8. Vegetusian Saucer only recently released from a protracted period of unplanned burial underneath deep ice on some frozen back-water planet. They are lost. Their systems are crashing and they may crash again, if they're lucky enough to survive that long.
9. Roll twice on the Ship Sized Monsters Table. The two entities are most likely caught-up in mutual hostilities.
10. (1d4) Fungal Battlecruisers (TS p. 49) float forlorn and mangled, surrounded by a massive cloud of outgassing atmosphere and spores. The core cerebropods are defunct or too severely damaged to control any of the sub-systems. (5D20) Brain Cases are scattered in the immediate vicinity, as are hundreds of the cell-scrambled corpses of Mi-go infantry and marines. (Mi-go will arrive to investigate the situation within 1d4 hours).
11. Black comet surrounded by a thick haze of green ice, dust and other particulates. Sunk deep into the core of this icy mass is a hidden colony of Yarakian-descended abhuman degenerates who worship the Gray Flame drive-core of a Thyophian Saucer that has been slowly corrupting their bloodlines for over a thousand years of interplanetary isolation.
12. Nomad Ship (TS p. 48) carrying a poorly secured triad of 'talking monoliths' recovered from an Abbithian Tesseract-ship. (Monoliths take over the Nomad's internal systems within 2d4 hours.)
13. Serpent People sleeper-ship. Mostly intact.
14. Drifting wreckage of a Pnakotian vessel with a faulty Zin drive that is still wildly unpredictable and unstable. (30% per hour of either a Ghast 'Black Suit' encounter, or a Dreamstate Overbleed.)
15. An ancient hollow-asteroid Nug-Torch Drive colonization ship of the Vhoorli-aligned K'n enroute to a far-distant destination with an army of Lomarian, Voormi, and Gyaa Yoth'n troops in criogenic suspension. The decadent faction won out over their rivals more than a thousand years ago only to have the outer hull of the command-section rupture due to sabotage. No one is left to control the ship, nor to awaken the sleepers.
16. Cthughiim Flameship roaring along through deep space, leaving a caustic, cinder-strewn trail of smoke in its wake. (50% chance they attack upon detecting another ship).
17. Coral-bound domes just from the lumpy mass of a clumsily-reshaped clump of solar-mirror-welded asteroidal debris blown-out to form a lop-sided bubble-shell and filled with sea water. This is a Deep One ship, and a very old one. (20% chance of a slow leak and potentially disastrous ice formations around the drive systems. They may require assistance or rescue...)
18. A vast, writhing mass of pseudopods and shimmering bubbles that houses a non-Euclidian mega-arcology made-up of thousands of disparate closed-ecologies, some of which are recognizable. (40% chance per hour of someone aboard this living cloud of a macro-ship attempting to make contact.)
19. A Broken World driven out of its orbit and cast adrift through interstellar space.
20. Military Transport (TS, p. 47) from one of the petty empires operating off of one of the few remaining human-dominated worlds along the rim.

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Spaceship-Sized Monsters (Terminal Space)

Terminal Space has a section in the last part on ships that presents a few Space Ship Sized Monsters such as Space Squids, Space Rays and Asteroid Worms. Here are a few more massive void-faring creatures for your players to encounter out along the weird worlds of the rim or beyond.

Quick Table of Space Ship Sized Monsters

1. Astronemone Colony
2. Space Squid (Terminal Space, page 51).
3. Void-Coral Reef
4. Space Ray (TS, p. 51)
5. Solar Slugs
6. Asteroid Worms (TS, p.51)
7. Orbital Decay
8. Polypous Invasion-Mass
9. Heliosphere Luminalities
10. Fungal Mega-Hulk

Descriptions/Stats


Astronemone Colony
Colorful, luminous mega-cnidarian creatures that extend their feeding disks into outer space from some other plane in order to capture and consume asteroids and other interplanetary debris. They are blind and non-sentient, at least according to anyone who has studied the things from this end of their transplanar forms. Astronemone Colonies are incredibly sensitive but passive psychics, capable of detecting thoughts and emotions from as far as 4 hexes, but completely incapable to communicating...except to certain strange beings cataloged in the recovered Accepted and Ancient Orthodox Yaddithian Archives as being some form of hybrid 'Anemomanity.' Very little is really known of these beings, but they are said to be in turn served by armadas of space-faring anemodrones...which may or may not be spawned within Astronemone Colonies...

Number Appearing: 1 (Colony)
Durability Points: 30
Move Speed: 0
Maneuverability: 20%
Chance to Hit: 20% Sting, 20% Crush


Void-Coral Reef
Terrible hazards to intra-system shipping, Void-Coral Reefs are difficult to detect as they tend to be radar absorbent and psychically transparent. It can be disastrous to run aground on a orbiting reef. The coral tends to be ambiguous in terms of what plane it is on at any time, until it becomes aware of a foreign object (within 3 hexes), at which time the entire reef begins to shift into resonant alignment with the potential food-source. Contact with a Void-Coral Reef will allow the reef to assume a super-dense state in the immediate vicinity of the victim, preventing use of most star-drives and summarily terminating all teleportation or phase protocols. Very few have escaped at that point.

Number Appearing: Special
Durability Points: 100
Move Speed: 0
Maneuverability: 0
Chance to Hit: 20% Sting

Solar Slugs
Gigantic fluorescent slugs the size of continents that soar through interplanetary space by way of psychically-modulated electromagnetic fields. In some respects they are living solar sails, but in others they affect a much larger region of space than is readily apparent, even to most sensor arrays. The Shimmering Death-Haze attack of a Solar Slug has a range of 6 hexes and is capable of searing through planetary atmospheres and melting most metal-based ship hulls into rapidly expanding spheres of slag.

Number Appearing: 1d4
Durability Points: 200
Move Speed: 2
Maneuverability: 2
Chance to Hit: 10% Sting, 40% Shimmering Death-Haze


Orbital Decay
Vast swaths of hyper-adapted mold colonies that occupy the orbital paths of infected planets like trailing veils composed of trillions of mold filaments. Orbital Decay grows to fully encompass an entire world, extend outwards from this root-world to fill most of the orbital path of that world, and slowly spin-seep outwards to eventually reach the orbits of other planets within an infected solar system. There are several solar systems, such as Mu Arae, that were infected over the course of the wars between the mostly wiped-out Polyp Hegemony, the Yithic Sphere-Minds and the Primordials.

Number Appearing: Special
Durability Points: 100
Move Speed: 0
Maneuverability: 0
Chance to Hit: 60% Encrustation


Polypous Invasion Mass
Myriads of bulbous, grotesque almost tumorous collections of highly reflective black masses of voidflesh and secondary technicytical symbiote-systems have been scattered through the deep void by the nearly extinct Polyp Hegemony in a last-ditch effort to escape total annihilation. When such a mass latches onto a dark body within the Kuiper Belt or Oort Cloud of a solar system, they burrow in and patiently wait in the deep dark to begin again. Anyone disturbing or discovering one of these things is considered a high order threat and the Invading Polypous Mass will quickly go into overdrive, producing war-spores and worse in order to destroy the interlopers. Once activated, the Polypous Invasion Mass will begin the systematic colonization of the entire solar system, as happened at Achenar.

Number Appearing: Special
Durability Points: 500
Move Speed: 0
Maneuverability: 0
Chance to Hit: 30% Swarm-stream*
* Also can produce and release a full range of War Spores in exponentially-increasing increments until total solar system subjugation by saturation is achieved.


Heliosphere Luminalities
Strange, aurora-like proto-conscious entities composed of plasma and subtle fields of force who occupy the Heliospheres of various stars where they leap, flicker and encircle the worlds within the deeper gravity well. Little is known of these things, other than that they have destroyed a number of ships that tried to either pass through them or attack the things. The Mi-Go treat these entities with an almost religious awe. The Armitage Collectory claims to have uncovered evidence that links these things with the so-called Colours From Space, but that is still just so much conjecture on the part of discredited clone-scholars.

Number Appearing: Special
Durability Points: 300 (Recovers 4d10/24 hour period, unless distracted outside the Heliosphere)
Move Speed: Special (Occupies entire Heliosphere of solar system and freely shifts about it at lightspeed)
Maneuverability: 2
Chance to Hit: 30% Polychromatic Cascade


Fungal Mega-Hulk
Vast clouds of massively inter-networked fungal mycellium that form cloud-like structures big enough to encompass, envelope and extract all nutrition from entire solar systems. Thankfully, these are rare and mostly occupied with reducing the solar systems formerly claimed by the enemies of the Mi-Go. Mega-Hulks are so big that they have thousands of parasitical micro-ecologies scattered through-out their fibers, filaments and tendrils. It is whispered that entire cultures have sprung up within these spaces, and that some of the civilizations that have been destroyed/consumed by the Mega-Hulks have in fact turned the tables on the Mi-Go and now infect them, living off of the internal systems of the very thing that devoured their home systems long ago.

Number Appearing: 1
Durability Points: 1000
Move Speed: Special (Occupies entire Heliopause and shifts about within it at speed of light)
Maneuverability: 2
Chance to Hit: 30% Polychromatic Cascade

NOTE:

There's another SEVEN Mega-Monsters available over at Swords & Stitchery!

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Kranj

Kranj are horrible, degenerate descendents of isolated and abandoned convicts on offworld penal colonies that were discovered by something only known as The Vanaxicant. This terrible entity/force/alien race reshaped and revised the originally mostly human convicts into more adaptable, useful shock troops for use in what has become a centuries-long campaign against the entrenched serpent-people installations with dozens of solar systems.

There are rumors that the Vanaxicant has been developing even more twisted and weird forms of Kranj shock troops to use in its unfathomable and obscure, but no less frightening and devastating war upon the serpent people.

 :

Kranj (Degenerate Shock Troops)
No. App.: 1d20
Hit Dice: 3
Armor Class: 6
Attacks: 2 (Fist, Kick or Weapon)
Move: 60'
Save: 18
HDE/XP: 5/240+

Special: Immune to Undead life-draining attacks

[Illustration above is from the Unnamed Monster post and is available for use in other rules-systems...]

Autonomous Technophagous Fungi [Terminal Space]

Originally developed by servants of the Mi-Go as aerial scouts and scavengers, the Autonomous Technophagous Fungi have since gone on to colonise dozens of worlds and habitats and are no longer in service to anyone but themself--yes themself--they are of one mind, literally.

All the physical bodies of this particular space-faring sentient fungus are drone-like fruiting bodies manipulated by a central solar-system-scale entity that rejects Mi-Go bio-oppression and works to topple their one time masters from power.

It is rumored that these voidfaring creatures might be related to the 'Oblong Swimmers in Darkness,' which might lead a curious investigator into something of an explanation as to their occasional use of Tcho-Tchoids as agents among the few remaining human dominated worlds.

Autonomous Technophagous Fungi
No. App.: 1-6
Hit Dice: 8
Armor Class: 6
Attack(s): 2 (spores or spells)
Damage: 2d4 (spores)/by spell
Move: 160' (psionic flight)
Save: 16
HDE/XP: 7/1,200

Special: Invasive Telepathy, Telekinesis, Personal Levitation, 1d4 random Psychic Abilities

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