These are the campaign notes for the 'Welcome To Jhenge' GURPS adventures, in no particular order or structure. Have fun and leave comments.

Overview

Jhenge is a spoilt paradise at the very edge of the galaxy. A waterworld with few resources except, well, water. The rich sealife, island flora and breathable atmosphere eventually attracted human colonists. There is no moon, no tides and a tiny hot sun. The beautiful tropical islands look like paradise on the colonial recruitment posters. However, the lower atmosphere seeps with bacteria, pollen and other micro-organisms. They do much to absorb moisture causing a much lower humidity than one would expect. Filter masks are usually required (There are some who choose not to wear them though...)

A 'Who's Who' of Jhenge.

System and planetary information.

Technology

The planet provides little mineral resources - technology has barely developed in comparison to Earth. Power is provided by gas turbines and bulkier nuclear power units - all early 21st century tech. Medical tech includes hypercoagulants, spray skin and basic cybernetics.

Imported high-tech must be registered with colonial admin. This includes cold fusion drives, lihtan drives, particle weapons, photonic coil powercells and neural cybernetics. There are almost no maintainance facilities for such technology on Jhenge.

Because of the interest that biotech industries have with the planet, Jhenge is ahead with those technologies. Bioplastic is a major export. Jhenge is also the center for anagoic training and development.

Spindle drives are massive zero-point converters that reduce the amount of distance required to travel between two points. They only travel along pre-generated spindle lines, the points of which are located well outside solar systems. The line between Earth and Jhenge - one of the longest journeys to be undertaken - takes three years to traverse. This is, of course, technotwaddle. Intersecting spindle lines are generated by anthropophagi to allow them to enter our universe and follow no known physics. When humans discovered this they tried to cover the terrible truth but also tried to copy the technology. It is this that led to the collapse and the formation of the Regency in an attempt to contain the threat.

Lihtan drives are tight coils of spindle loops which are used to reduce the weight of machinery. Often used in conjunction with small ducted fans to provide air-mobile battlesuits for ESWAT. Like spindle drives, these are Regency restricted and the public are given a lot of technotwaddle.

Fashion: Bioplastics are knife and bullet resistant and so popular. 'Weathercoats' are weaved from synthetic assan fur: they look like white raincoats but cool the wearer and change colour depending on the temperature. They also have lots of pockets - very popular. Almost everyone carries a gun: Sitomi manafacture Alleymaster pistols which are cheap and available in a variety of colours (fluorescent and transparent are in keen demand) and are marketed much like mobile phones.

Marasmusine: A metadrug derived from 'marasmus' - the decaying sludge harvested from the peculiar lifecycle of Jhengian black lotus. Injested on its own it is classed as an hallucinogen; the user suffers from flu-like shakes, loss of coherent thought, and irregular heart beats (users call this the 'third pump' or a 'ghost heart'). However, the main use of marasmusine is as a component for a variety of combat drugs - Legal on Jhenge, Illegal on Earth and Regency aerospace, but often used by security corporations and paramilitaries anyway.

The black rot dissolves into my tongue, sticking into the roof of my mouth, it is a wasting candyfloss. A third beat to my heart, I feel my muscles atrophy. Time flicks, head nods, sound reverses sleeping in a groundcar engine noise snaps brain to conscious level, time flicks, head nods...
The tube tumbles from my lips, across the pillow, onto the hard brown carpet with a little tap. The parser kicks into the addiction zone, the data feedback tumbles a waterfall of future.

From Vecchi's diary - extracted by agent Hiyatona.

Agent returning through middle cantley stopped by enemy Anthropophagi and is civily escorted to a semi-detatched. Bedroom. Given LSD as a truth drug; although I know nothing about my information, the anthropophagi believes there to be subconscious thoughts pertaining to my mission. A sticky sense of sickly evil; the athropophagi becomes hermaphroditic and injects himself with the drug also, so as to initiate the mind reading. I prepare for the mental twisting. The staircase-pit snares me (descent of staircases is a severely mad thing spiritually) and although I am almost dragged down, I remind myself I am really just sat crosslegged in the center of the room; the hallucination goes. The carpet and air becomes back-yard moist. Colours become flat, saturated and vibrant. Lightheaded, in a moment of lucidity, I inject the anthropophagi with the last of the LSD with the hope that I will become sober first and thus be able to escape. With the sudden urge to shave, I head for the bathroom. With a disposable razor I scrape at the (imaginary) wirey sparse hairs on my face. Something in the mirror reflection disturbs me. On closer inspection, I discover that my face in the glass has no nose.
Report by unknown agent.

Factions and Agencies

RCIA

Reporting directly to the Secret Service, the Regency Colonial Investigation Agency have agents posted on Jhenge to minimise corruption in colonial administration and to eliminate anti-regency activies (which fall under terriorist/freedom-fighter arguments.) They also support local police during corporate investigations and technology restriction.

Because the anthropophagi have an unusual interest in Jhenge, the Secret Service also placed the anagoic R/D center within Jhengian RCIA jurisdiction. Anagoics are based on banned technology (mostly nanotech...) and thus are 'black ops' - totally deniable. Agents are usually kept in the dark about their true purpose - they believe they are mearly supporting RCIA activities.

Red Scorpion

A public and civilian organisation set up to investigate why the Regency will not give independence to Jhenge (Once colonies reach a certain population level, colonial admin are required to relinquish control allowing the citizens to form their own government.) They also perform anti-regency protests and petty crime. They were instrumental in the border islands war - an attempt by Colonial North to grab more landspace by assaulting Ring Island territory. The RCIA declared Red Scorpion to be a terrorist group. Ironically this caused the group members to assume a terrorist cell structure to protect themselves. The name 'Red Scorpion' has no special meaning other than to attract new members.

Church Of Armetis

Vecchi (The Unlabelled Man - see below) had a dream about a girl called Amarilla - in the dream she was the member of a cult of Artemis worshippers. He then met her in real life: she was the target of a wetworks operation he was to undertake. Both were 'trapped' on Earth in one way or another but together they managed to escape to Jhenge. To fulfill Vecchi's meaningless dream, Amarilla founded the Artemis cult on a small island in Colonial South. Cultists are pious and follow solumn rituals but this just hides an empty self-perpetuating joke. Many conspiracy theories incorrectly involve them but they don't deny the rumours.

ESWAT

This elite group report directly to the Empress's office. With the Regency navy they formed an interdiction group to quell the border island war. They are equipped with cutting edge technology which completely outclasses Jhengian standards - fast thermoptic camo, lihtan battlesuits, etc.

Races

Assan

Alien messiah disguised in human form. She is cowering in the corner of a closet-like low-floored room, scared wild eyes. Small, athletic build. Naked, but covered with thick knotted fur except on the upper body. She is bleeding heavily from no apparent wound. Blood on her abdomen and legs. She looks up at me confused, opens her mouth to speak, but more blood spills from her throat, glistening and viscous. From her pleading face it seems this is her first experience of human physical pain.
From Vecchi's diary - extracted by agent Hiyatona.

Dinhog

Reducer

Ring Islander

To avoid certain regulations, the first colonists declared the Ring Islanders as an indigenous species - there were certainly no official documentation to state otherwise.

Anthropophagi

'Move away, you there.' A sharpened female voice above and behind. Sitting crosslegged on a crate, a greyscale woman looks on with relaxed china-doll features. Her steel high fashion jacket shimmers with deep texture; a customer maybe? Not the police. Nevertheless I step away from the dying creature. It gave a little cough-sob of sudden lost hope.
From Vecchi's diary - extracted by agent Hiyatona.

Current knowledge about this entity or entities is limited. This is what Regency intelligence knows:

• They assume humanoid form to infiltrate our societies (human, assan, dinhog.) with malicious intent. These bodies are mere puppets for their enegry - combat reports state that the anthropophagi operate at full efficiency even with major wounds.
• They first appeared during the collapse to feed information on spindle drives. Humans developed them in order to establish trade routes with the other races. Catasrophe followed - millions vanishing - reason uncertain.
• Their material lifespans are limited - some age rapidly, dying within years of their 'inceptions', others have spans matching the race they are mimicking. It is possible they are programmed to die at specific times in specific locations.
• Interrogations on captured subjects proove completely fruitless. They are quite willing to talk but no information on their purpose or missions can be extracted. It is possible they themselves do not know. They are resistant to both physical interrogation and brain hacking.
• They can only be identified by their 'unwoundability', vanishing tricks, and peculiar purchasing habits. The people they get involved with often meet with sticky ends.
• There are several known high-level Anthropophagi infiltrations on Jhenge.

She came down from her perch and towards me. The black shadows in her hands and face and hair were flicking horizontally like a corrupted image file or a bad TV reception. The shade tugging at her, pulling her away, or maybe... the other way round. She strode up to me, choking my vision. I saw her face now, eyes and mouth filling her oval pearl face in an amused snarl.

From Vecchi's diary - extraced by agent Hiyatona.

The Regency keep anthropophagi existence a secret. The reason why they are a secret is also a secret - lost in time. It is privately known that the formation of the Regency was to rigorously control interstellar travel - to prevent these creatures entering our world.

A few years later, combat training sharpening my wits, I saw her a few snapshots of time in a doorway, white frame, in the slums of Newtower, looking down at her feet. Her eyes in the corrupted shadow, creases of rapid aging deepening as she smirks. Older... maybe ten years. A syndrome of some sort? A smell of burning sugar and she is gone. I never saw her again.

From Vecchi's diary - extracted by agent Hiyatona.

Misc Stuff

The Effects Of Bacterial Toxification

The density of the toxic layer varies with the terrain. It is
heaviest over ocean kelp fields and the higher altitude jungles. Air mask filters require changing every hour. To breath the air unfiltered causes immediate nausea, swiftly followed by hallucinations then unconsciousness. Lungs and nervous system may be permemently damaged. In urban and low-land areas, the effects are milder and swiftly treated due to quick access to broad spectrum antibiotics. Each town also has a specialist bacterial clinic.

Over the generations, the Ring Islanders have developed a racial immunity to some of the strains of bacteria - enough for them to dispense with filter masks in low level areas.

Because of the mild hallucinations experienced, some people spend
time with no mask on. This often results in being carried off to the clinic. Sleeping outdoors with no mask results in vivid dreams - always relating to the planet - that are described as prophetic and lucid.

Kinky Metal

This was the name given by M. Rix to his team's custom APC. It is a 6x6 all-terrain vehicle with a sleek submersible hull, designed with reduced noise and heat emission. An MHD Jet propels it rapidly underwater and allows it to 'skim' water surfaces. The whole thing is powered by an imported nuclear power unit with a 2 year operational time. Life support provides 96 man-hours of air.

A pop-up turret holds a 15mm minigun and L/IR searchlight. A single launch tube for a wire-guided or acoustic homing 120mm stealthed (anti-acoustic) torpedo with HESH warhead - they won't hear that one coming! Each torpedo costs $90,280!. Finally, a 57mm launcher can lob 12 IR homing missiles into the air in as many seconds.

Empty Weight: 3.15 tons. Loaded weight: 3.91 tons. Submersed weight: 13.75 tons. Ground speed: 75 mph, (25 mph off-road). Surface speed: 40 mph (planing, drafts at 2.6ft). Underwater speed: 20mph (crush depth: 150 yards).

Production cost: $1,187,510.

Sensorium

Rachael kills the unlabelled man and extracts the parse from his brain, crudely carving it out with her field knife. To play back the contents, she connects it to a sensorium and a sample of the unlabelled man's nervous system. The words appear as thoughts but the parser filters out background noise, only connecting language structures.

The sensation of another individuals neural patterns is nausiating to one's system. There is a danger of developing the subjects processes; subtle preferences, neurosis, etc. Rachael was chosen for this operation due to her versatile neural network.

She plays back the diary in 'short' bursts. Time goes strange in a sensorium; sometimes sentences take an age to transfer, some bounce around as the subject searches for a certain phrasing. Occasionally entire sentences arrive simultaniously. Rachael listens for about ten minutes at a time, cutting out before her brain warps.

Environment Specialised Close Strike Fighting

Internal Security agents in the SS or RCIA are trained to fight in a wide variety of environments - urban, low-G, zero-G, underwater and hostile. ESCS is a localised form for fixed colonial agents. Here is the Jhengian form:

Primary skills: Brawling, Knife.

Secondary skills: Swimming, Tactics.

Optional skills: Soft-style, hard-style.

Maneuvers: Aggressive parry, aggressive parrying kick, disarming, fast draw knife, retain weapon knife, stamp kick, knee strike.

It is a first-strike style, easy to learn. Because of various hidden enhancements available to the public, it is often too risky to attempt to detain an assailant with the self-defence form taught to police forces (arm-locks etc). ESCS emphasises kill strikes and anti-ambush training.

Plot Hooks

Conspiracy One

Jhenge is currently the only human colony - their other outposts became independent systems once a certain population limit was reached. Whilst they now enjoy mutually profitable trading sactions and their own governments, Jhenge still suffers crippling taxes and forced bureaucracy. When the colonists made a grab for more territory, Earth's naval and ESWAT forces came to prevent hostilities.

Conspiracy theorists (such as Red Scorpion) believe that any attempt by the colonists to achieve independence will be thwarted because the Regency want to keep direct control over the planet. But why? It's a poor production base and it's too far from the other systems to be a port-of-call...

The Border Islands War

It's the start of war and we're all fighting

It's the start of war and they're all frightened

We're gonna rip up this city piece by piece

We're just gonna blow it up whatever it is


We don't care about the innocents

We don't care at all

We don't care about the consequence

We don't care at all


We didn't get exactly what we wanted

So we trashed and burned and now they're dead

Now we've extended our border on the map

A nice new line drawn there in black


We don't care about the innocents

We don't care at all

We don't care about the consequence

We don't care at all


So we've fought and killed and occupied

We've been victorius and many have died

So now we own this land, over it we rule

But all that's left is just a pile of rubble

We didn't care about the innocents

We didn't care at all

We didn't care about the consequence

We didn't care at all

We killed all those without a defence

Just to get our goal

We died and killed without any sense

Just to rule some rubble


Nire - Start Of War

Disclaimer and Acknowledgements

Any real-life similarities to the (quite frankly wierd) names and events above are purely coincidental or synchronous. I don't think I've infringed on any copyrights but poke me on the arm if you can see otherwise.

Thanks to Derek Williams and The Jan Doyle Band for Nire's cheesy lyrics. Virtual nods to Kendrik Curtis for details on Annabella and Alice Miller. Thanks to James for the paragraph on Stacey Hardcock.