Metamorphosis Alpha to Omega: Part 11: Deck 5: Ranch Deck

Dusty prairies, sprawling ranches, and the distant lowing murmur of cattle all form the first impressions of visitors to deck five. Herds of what appear to be cattle, sheep, bison, and other, less-easily identifiable creatures blanket swathes of the deck's grasslands. Riding herd upon these great throngs are what seem to be riders of the ancient cowboy mold. But the closer a stranger gets to these herds and their tenders, the less familiar they become.

An array of mankind's domesticated animals was brought aboard Warden to provide a genetic pool from which to draw the DNA necessary to replicate meat.The plan was to select from these herds and flocks to supplement the stored genetic material, to provide variety in bloodlines and to ensure healthy, viable stock. Numbers were kept low, relative to the vast swarms of the ancient slaughterhouse days. A spectrum of non-domesticated animals, including predators, was carefully constructed to provide a sustainable ecosystem. The crew and passengers with an interest in animal husbandry and ranching found the deck to be an idyllic, if sleepy, place.

And then the radiation disaster struck Warden.

Gripped in the throes of accelerated mutation and made a battleground between mutants and crew, deck five became anything but sleepy. Factions formed among the inhabitants of the ranch deck, absorbing those mutants and crew who decided to take a stand.

The Ranchers are classic cowboys, all spring-steel and rawhide, laconic and respectful to those who show respect in return. Fiercely protective of their chosen herds, they are quick on the draw against any attackers, their "hog-legs" barking out prairie justice. "One riot, one Rancher," a saying goes, dredged up from an ancient past. These throwbacks to a rugged time would be right at home in Texas or Montana, were it not for the fact that they are centaurs. The ultimate melding of man and mount came during the great chaos that overwhelmed Warden, and may well be the result of a shard of Warden's AI being either too literal when directed to create "horsemen" for the deck's security, or having a warped sense of humor when devising guardians for the herds. However they came to be, the Ranchers are generally a force for good on the deck.

The Rustlers are the sworn enemies of the Ranchers. Made up of bizarre mobs of mutant animals, from massive razorback-and-snout hogs and slippery coyotes to the Unhangables and even some non-mutated humans, the backbone of the Rustlers are hulking amalgams of bulls and humans, instantly recognizable as minotaurs as depicted in ancient Greek mythology. Vicious, bullying, evil, and carnivorous, the Rustlers enslave any whom they can steal away from the Ranchers. The Rustlers are nomadic, never settling long in any one area. The more peaceful folk of the deck dread the appearance of a band of Rustlers. But, secretly, the Rustlers dread the appearance of a Rancher.

The Cattle are just that: the herd animals and livestock. But it's not that simple. There are still large numbers of non-mutated stock, but there are increasing numbers of mutants. Hellcows and lightning bulls dominate some herds, while a surprising number of fully sentient animals have grown in prominence over the years. Contemplative ducks, preening chickens, and panic goats cluster in small towns, their courage and resolve in adversity tending to melt without the presence of a Rancher or seven.

Next: Part 12: Deck 4: Water Deck

Metamorphosis Alpha to Omega: Part 4: The Decks of the Warden

The Warden is a vast slab of metal, ungainly yet somehow majestic. Within, there are nine main decks and a labyrinth of interdeck passages, spaces, and sub-decks. Even the outer hull of the great vessel is bristling with blisters, turrets, and domes that are, in effect, their own decks. Lift tubes run to every part of the ship, carrying passengers in small cars, traversing the length of the ship in minutes. For shorter trips, ladder tubes and stairwells are located in many locations. It may be vast, but Warden was designed to be accessible. Accessible to those with the proper credentials, that is.

The entrances to all these tubes and access ways are airtight and kept sealed unless they are presented with authorization. In the days of the original crew, this simply involved being recognized by the Warden’s omnipresent AI. Now, of course, the AI recognizes a scant few authorized personnel, at least until the back-up crew is on duty.

The majority of the life on Warden that is ambulatory and awake exists on its nine vast decks. Each was designed to prevent space madness caused by the constant claustrophobic knowledge that the world of the Warden was a relatively tiny mote in a great cosmic void. 

Pains were taken to conceal the walls and ceiling of each inhabited deck with appropriate holographic camouflage, giving the illusion of unlimited room to move and a living, dynamic world. Of course, the original crew and passengers were aware the Warden was merely a ship, but the illusion helped ameliorate that. And ameliorate it the camouflage did; very few cases of space madness ever manifested themselves.

The nine decks of the Warden each have their own function and, where appropriate, ecology. After a number of traumatic centuries, though, some of those functions and ecologies have changed, in some cases drastically.

The decks of the Starship Warden. The quality isn't great, but it gives you the general idea.

Deck Nine is the main cargo space of Warden. A seemingly ceaseless maze of pallets, shelving, warehouses, and horticultural stations, this entire deck hums with robotic activity. Even during its most chaotic times, the ship’s autonomic routines kept every area supplied with everything from foodstuffs to axel grease. In addition, raw materials procured from beyond Warden’s confines are brought onboard here by robotic mining and survey craft to be processed and stored. Most importantly to the ship’s original mission, the bulk of the cryogenic storage facilities are located here, housing genetic samples and full-grown specimens of humans, animals, and plants. These facilities were hard-hit by the radiation the Warden passed through centuries ago, decanting a stream of strangely mutated creatures.

Deck Eight is the factory deck, taking the raw materials of deck nine and manufacturing all the complex parts, tools, machinery, and automatons that kept the ship running. Sometime in the lost centuries, the deck was overrun by tropical flora and fauna, and the ship’s AI adjusted the atmosphere here to accommodate it. The resulting heat and thick humidity caused the factories here to gradually break down, with Warden’s androids and robots working ‘round-the-clock to keep at least a few of them online, if only to build more androids and robots. The city built on this deck to house the factory workers has been long abandoned, overgrown and rusting.

Deck Seven is the farm deck. One of the more climatically pleasant decks, with rolling land and verdant green, spangled with quaint farmhouses and processing plants built to look like old-fashioned barns. Though it looks like a rustic idyll, this deck was as affected by the turmoil of the past centuries as any, and intruders would do well to be on guard.

Deck Six is colloquially known as the jungle deck. In fact, it is a rainforest deck, consisting of the thick green flora of equatorial Africa and the Amazon, as well as the coniferous trees of the Pacific Northwest. The ship’s enviro controls make the transition from a tropical climate to a cooler temperate one gradual. This deck is riotous with life, the most vibrant deck on the Warden. Intelligent plants have effectively claimed this deck for their own, but animal life is abundant, including small tribal cultures of intelligent species.

Also present on deck six, except from outside, is an alien vessel that has attached itself to Warden via a number of tendrils or tentacles that burrowed their way through the ship’s massive metal side. Designated the Tick Shallop by the Warden’s AI, this vessel is a mystery. No record of its arrival, subsequent attachment, or the presence of any crew can be found in the AI’s memory banks.

The Tick Shallop, mysterious alien intruder vessel attached to Warden's hull.

Deck Five is the ranch deck. The livestock here – cattle, swine, poultry, etc. – was intended as an alternative source of fresh genetic stock. While the slaughter of animals for meat had long since been obviated by the generation of meat via carno-replicators, there was still a call for variation in the genetic material used for replication. Unfortunately, the replicators and their genetic samples were particularly vulnerable to the radiation belt the Warden passed through. Now, the deck is overrun by strange amalgamations of humans and horses, humanoid cattle, and intelligent forms of every type of animal to be found on the deck, from pigs to ducks.

Deck Four is the water deck. Huge reservoirs of fresh and salt water are found here, with the attendant purification and waste reclamation equipment. While the source of the ship’s water, it is also a preserve for various aquatic environments. There are also islands scattered in a pleasant distribution. These are used as preserves for appropriate flora and fauna, as well as recreation for the crew and passengers. While the water helped serve as a barrier for a good part of the radiation that engulfed the Warden, there is still a spectrum of mutations to be found here, though many are subtle and difficult to detect.

Deck Three was another cargo space for the Warden. The difference between this deck and deck nine is that deck three contained much of the terraforming equipment used on the planets that were Warden’s destination. While the prefab cities and factories were offloaded and put into place, they were intended to be replaced onboard the Warden by new construction produced by the facilities on deck eight. With that deck’s production facilities brought to a virtual standstill, deck three now lays mostly empty. That includes atmospherically, as well over a century ago a meteor managed to make its way past Warden’s point-defense systems, creating a hull breach that evacuated the atmosphere here before the crippled AI could halt it. While the hull breach has been long repaired, the AI decided to not waste resources on pumping in new atmosphere. After all, with so much of the ship’s complement dead or hostile, the fewer places usable as bases for hostile mutants, the better.

Deck Two is the wilderness deck. The climate and terrain is much like that of Yosemite, and the deck once served as a haven for those people on the Warden who sought the solace of rugged uplands. This deck ended up being one of the most war-torn sections of the ship during the worst of the chaotic years. The most evil of the mutant factions ended up destroying each other and themselves, leaving the deck to the sapients who wanted nothing to do with any faction. In the intervening years, the deck has become a true howling wilderness, with isolated homesteads and rustic villages of mutants and non-mutants standing as points of civilization continually besieged by hostile monsters and remnants of the factions that once dominated the deck.

Deck One, or the Command Deck, isn’t a deck, per se. It’s the topside of Warden, and consists of several domes or protrusions on the ship. These range from the large, clear-domed city and garden domes, to the blisters of the observation domes, to the outrigger-like Command Nucleus. The remnants of what life on Warden was like before the radiation disaster can generally be found in these areas.

This overview is to give a taste of what's to come. I tweaked a good bit of it from the original source material to suit my taste. 

Next: Part 5: Deck Nine: Cargo Deck

Ducks!

Sometime in the late fall or early winter of 1976, my 10-year-old self was sifting through the magazine shelves of Open Pantry, the convenience store at the top of my street. The cover below caught my attention. This was no Disney duck, though the resemblance was strong; this was a duck living in a world of superheroes. I was hooked.

Art: Frank Brunner, pencils; Steve Leiahola, inks; Marie Severin, color

Howard the Duck was a comic unlike any I'd ever read before. There was an atmosphere of dark lunacy running as an undercurrent, though I would never have been able to articulate it like that back then. There was just something off about it, a weirdness that set it apart from both the superhero comics I usually saw from Marvel and DC, and worlds away from the more stylized and silly Disney fare. Howard was, as the cover says, "trapped in a world he never made." Grumbling and caustic, yet possessing an inherent goodness about him, Howard tried to find his place in a world of insane "hairless apes." His sanity slowly crumbled as each issue appeared; it was bad enough to find himself in such a skewed version of the world he'd come from, but this was a world in which costumed beings did their level best to bring him low. Yet Howard persevered. Each opponent and obstacle he surmounted seemed to bring him at least a small sense of control over his own fate - though he never quite managed to get his equilibrium.

When I finally became a D&D player, Howard had made an indelible impression on me. As the years went by, the idea of adventuring ducks became even more intriguing to me. It was with more than a bit of surprise that I discovered the RuneQuest, via its iconic setting, Glorantha, offered ducks as a sapient player character race. It seemed natural to me, though, due to Howard's early adventures hopping across the planes, fighting vampires and giant frogs, taking on the mantle of the Sorcerer Supreme for a while, and, in the first issue of his eponymous comic, being thrust into a rather Conan-esque/Heavy Metal-ish swords and sorcery adventure.

From Howard the Duck #1; Frank Brunner, pencils and color; Steve Leiahola, inks; written by Steve Gerber

I often see the idea of ducks in RPGs as player characters, or as just intelligent creatures with their own society, dismissed with derision, scoffed at as being too silly. On one hand, I understand what is meant, but on the other is the fact that fantasy RPGs like D&D are filled will silliness. Goblins, centaurs, lizard men, dragons, and even D&D-invented critters like the beholder seem no less silly or oddball when you really look at them. I'm sure Disney has a lot to do with this. Donald, Daisy, Huey, Dewy, Louie, and Uncle Scrooge have left an indelible mark on the concept of intelligent ducks. But the comics of Donald and Uncle Scrooge are filled with adventure, ranging across the world, as colorful as any pulp character like Tarzan, or more recent pastiches of the pulps, like Indiana Jones. So the precedent is there, in spades.

All of that was meant as introduction for my own take on ducks as a player character race in D&D, specifically 5th edition. So here goes:


DUCKS!

I’m hearkening back to the days of yore when something like a duck could make it into a campaign world as a viable choice for a PC.

The sapient race of ducks is descended from ducks awakened by the legendary adventuring swamp druid, Dahnold the Everstrange. Dahnold loved the wetlands he protected, but knew that he needed companions who could also defend them in his absence. He awakened the intelligence of numerous pairs of ducks of varying species, transmuting their wings into human-like arms and hands - they lost the ability to fly, but gained the ability to manipulate the world around them. Hoping to ensure that they would breed true and produce a whole race of intelligent avians, Dahnold spent much of his adventuring career questing for Daphee’s Bill, an artifact from beyond this dimension. His success in locating this item is commemorated by the Ducks themselves, in a weeklong festival they call “Duck Season.” Unfortunately, early on this festival conflicted with the more locally common “Time of the Lepus;” oddly, this mix-up has caused a neverending cycle of tension and strife between the Ducks and just about everyone else.

Ducks, in general, are irascible and hot-tempered. Although small in stature, they are often spoiling for a fight and unwilling to back down when threatened. They can be charming and lovable, but can also quickly become annoying with their often mercurial moods. Ducks generally keep to their marshes, content to occasionally foray forth to the lands of Men for wealth and adventure.

Duck Traits

Ability Score Increase. Their small size, hollow bones, and avian origin have resulted in ducks being surprisingly nimble, and gain +2 to their Dexterity score. They are also tough, and gain a +1 to Constitution.

Age. Sapient ducks mature and age like humans.

Alignment. Sapient ducks are as varied in their approach to life as humans. Although this means they can be of any alignment, they do show a tendency towards leading orderly, peaceful lives, though with a good deal of personal freedom; thus, neutral good is a common alignment for ducks.

Size. Sapient ducks average just over 2 1/2 feet tall and weigh around 30 pounds. They are Small for game purposes.

Speed. Ducks have a base walking speed of 25 feet.

Lucky. Like halflings, ducks are unusually lucky. When they roll a 1 on a d20 for an attack roll, ability check, or saving throw, they may reroll the die, but must take the new roll.

Brave. Also like halflings, ducks have advantage on saving throws against being frightened.

Strong-minded. Ducks are obstinate and quick to argue, with a strong sense of being right in most circumstances; this results in them also having advantage on saving throws against enchantments.

Natural swimmers. Ducks have a Swim speed of 30, and have advantage on Strength (Athletics) checks for swimming.

Languages. Ducks speak, read, and write Common.