Hey everybody, looking for a little crowd sourcing help.

I'm trying to make a near mystical alien artifact for a fairly realistic SciFi game as a treasure/future plot point, think Jedi holocron.

Unfortunately, I'm a little stuck on how to present that in a game that's going for fairly realistic. Like there is travel in the solar system but not really all the way out and definitely not interstellar, a little like the Expanse story's level of realism.

One of the characters is a burgeoning sorceror, but he's only ever done one spell to save his militias life in a civil war scene where he speaks words he found in a family history. So he's the only person to have pulled this off at any point, so its kind of a fitting treasure for someone to learn about magic (or whatever mystical force guides your destiny).

So I really need ideas about how to present the holocron-thingy in a way that seems both mundane and potentially incredible.

Any help?

First thought that pops into my head: archaeology. Have the PCs (or maybe just that one) at a museum for whatever reason, and one of the exhibits is incredibly old. Some very early poorly preserved human remains, and a few examples of early tool use. Except they aren't human, and those tools are far more advanced than anyone realizes. One activates when near enough to the sorcerer's magic field, subtle enough that no one else can notice but strong enough that it compels him to notice it.

Aaaand that's all I got for now. Seems realistic enough (it was already discovered by some people who are nobodies as far as the campaign is concerned, and no one really thought much of it because it was just part of another, bigger find), while still being incredible (his mere presence brings it to life, but only to his enhanced senses).

Perhaps they find something that looks like a mundane object, like a sword, candlestick, or clay pot, but is really an mystical artifact in disguise.  Either the right words would change it or activate it, or the right twists and turns would unlock its power (like solving a Rubik's cube and having it turn into a projector)

Your best help is going to be from your players themselves. Anything you come up with yourself or that we help you come up with might have the desired effect on you, or us, but is likely to fall flat with anyone else, including your players.

That said, the classic approach is to present something that seems normal, like a wooden box, but that seems just a bit off. Like, when you rotate it to look at it, the designs carved into it change. Like, if you were looking at a carved triangle, and you turn it to look at the symbol on another face, but then turn it back, the symbol is not the triangle but something else.

The problem with something like that, though, is that the players might think there's a point to that and try to test it out, with cameras or whatever. But that's not the point, that's just part of the incredibleness of it.

Depending on your players, this problem might arise no matter what you do, even if you go with the Lovecraft classic of the angles being non-Euclidian. They'll have their characters break out protractors and try to figure out that "mystery" when there really isn't one.

So, when you go to your players for suggestions, make sure they understand that the suggestions don't have to do anything practical or have anything to do with how the item functions, but just need to be what they think of as creating that sense of incredibleness.

Good luck.

Thanks everyone for your ideas and engine, I can see what you mean. I've been small talking with them to take their temperature on what's acceptable realism and what kind of magic is cool to them. So hopefully we've got an interesting idea for that. I love the archeology idea, but they are at an asteroid currently. I think I can still swing it though. The 'company' will have the miners that stumbled upon it also perform archeological tests, since time and quietude would be of utmost import on evidence of extraterrestrials.

I think it could change its shape, waiting for the right person, my player, to come across it.

If anyone has other ideas I'm still open to suggestions too.

A couple of things to keep in mind:

1. Clarke's Axiom: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

2. The monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

3. TARDIS: It's bigger on the inside.

The characters could always find something on the asteroid. If there's no chance of it having found its way there from Earth, then it would clearly be extraterrestrial.

Regardless of where they find it, the item could be 'waiting' for someone with mystical talent to activate. In an archaeological exhibit, it might be an ancient book, whose text is unreadable. The sorcerer can somehow read it (perhaps as in the letters or symbols turning into something that he can read). Star Trek has lots of alien scripts you could use; most of them have been turned into fonts.

Or, perhaps the book has hidden pages in it, ones only the sorcerer can discover.

I suppose, ultimately, it depends on where you want to go with it. How big is the scope of the story you are telling? Is the sorcerer the only one in the whole world that has these abilities, or is this artifact the start of others 'awakening'?

Is this a contact device for the aliens to use to establish contact with Earth? With Earth's sorcerers?

Is the item forgotten 'technology' from Atlantis or other ancient civilization?

Is there a galactic war going on 'out there' and the aliens are looking for The Last Starfighter?


The other thing to keep in mind is that if you give an item to just one PC, are the others going to feel left out? Perhaps there is more than one item, with each being part of a whole that can forge the PCs into some super-elite cadre.

There's always two ways to look at it--item first and consequences, or where you want the story to go and how do you get it there.

The asteroid is the artifact.

I seem to be joining this conversation after the solution has been found. Regardless, I would like to offer some thought should anyone else read this thread. The asteroid solution is perfect if you want a macguffin. As a physical object, the rock could possessed by the PCs, stolen away from them, taken away from them, et cetera. It gives the players something to visual, moreso if a photograph is shown or a prop brought to the table. If you do not want a macguffin in the story, then the asteroid or clay pot or the mysterious box are not the ways to go. One reason you might not want a macguffin is that a PC might decide to smash the darn thing before you as the GM are finished using it. There are pros and cons to both methods.

If you are are ever in the situation where you do not want a macguffin, I suggest instead that your sorcerer-PC is himself the source of knowledge. This would be in keeping with the male-version of the Mythic Hero's Journey story template in which the hero discovers that the power he requires was hidden deep within him all along. There is a hard science way of achieving this as it turns out...

There's an old idea in biology that traits are based upon the experiences of ancestors. It's an idea which was abandoned around the beginning of the 20th Century and forgotten in the age of DNA-derived evolution (there was an episode of Radio Lab about it), but it is catching steam again slowly. It turns out that DNA and RNA do in fact change with the experiences of a body even within a single generation, and subsequent generations feel these effects. One easy example in humans is the connection between the age of a father when a child is conceived and the likelihood of the child developing dementia late in life; one study revealed that there is a strong correlation. With just a little bit of expansion on this general idea, we get genetic memory, exactly as it is portrayed in Assassin's Creed games. The experiences of ones ancestors (and therefor everything they learned from these experiences) lies as dormant information with the character's genetic code, and all that is required to retrieve it is a near-future technology that extracts it.

In the scenario outlined in the original, it was already established that the PC has magic in his family history. The PC can be his own Jedi Holicron.

Starmaster wrote...

This is an important question. We are talking about introducing raw magic into a low-level sci-fi setting after all.

I probably should have read this earlier if I was going to comment...

The biggest thing I'd suggest is to figure out why the artifact is there, who put it there, and when they put it there.

If you're in the main belt, I'd stick it in the core of Ceres.  Recent ice mining efforts have uncovered a hatch on the near-surface ice.  The hatch leads to an elevator that leads to a facility.  That's where you put the oddity.

Of course, that still leads to the question of why it is there.  Aliens tend to hide knowledge either to help a younger race along (see: Stargate's Mars thingie and sort of Mass Effect), to destroy a potential rival (see: Eclipse Phase and the Venus probe), to preserve knowledge of a foe (see: Mass Effect), or to somehow preserve their species (see: Eclipse Phase's Redoubt projects, Far Horizon, etc.).  Or it could have fell out of space guy's pocket, but that's... kind of meh.

It's tricky to include anything like that without also warping the game setting.  Even a seemingly mundane device could result in massive tech advances if they manage to reverse engineer it.

Thanks everyone, just about ready to enter the asteroid/derelict spacecraft. All the input has been welcome, since I haven't officially entered into any of those issues.

In reply to spectre (msg # 10):

Good luck!

So as I open this scene I'm thinking there is something guarding the asteroid and it's artifact as well. I set it up that a corp has required a mining crew to excavate further into the asteroid and explore the 'tomb' they found. It's all off the books since this could potentially be a huge discovery in the game world.

However as the captain of the mining vessel sends in folks, he's losing contact with them. Eventually the remaining two or three crew members abandon ship.

What I'm exactly stuck on now is really just what it is that's got the crew or disappearing them. Then I can set up what the PCs will find, mostly this is all to make it interesting to the rest of the players and not JUST my apprentice sorcerer.

From everyone's suggestions, I decided that this was a tomb that holds the remnants of alien sorcerers. It's been floating around for so long that it has become an asteroid covered with minerals, ice, etc. It's goal is to be found by a sorcerer, which will then make the asteroid's artifact come to life, so to speak and tap his latent power. He's the only person alive that could activate it currently, so it's the start of a sea change in human history.

I'm stuck on how to make this meaningful for the rest of the PCs at the moment and maintain that realistic feel. Any help?

My thoughts so far is that it is a test of sorts and those that do not pass go quietly mad, so there may be a few of the crew still within the asteroid that are mad. How's that?

My campaign has a similar setup to this, as I'm playing it as an homage to Blake's 7.

In that show, it was a kind of psychic thing that was killing off the crewmembers sent to investigate the derelict craft.

So think "advanced alien security system."  Maybe a droid defense bot, maybe a "psychic" defense mechanism, maybe it puts the intruders in stasis fields.  Any number of reasonable possibilities, you already are introducing magic to a fairly-realistic campaign so the rules are up to you and whatever your players feel passes muster.

In reply to spectre (msg # 12):

That sounds fine to me but your group may not engage with that.

I recommend that you ask your players what they would find engaging, and work from there. If they aren't sure, offer them some suggestions, such as:

Mad crewmembers, as you mentioned, who a) need rescuing, b) attack with insane range/mindless automation, c) get in the way and cause trouble, such as turning off systems, or d) some combination.

One of the people sent in is known to one of the other PCs and they want to find them to rescue/kill/recover them.

The other expeditions carried a valuable piece of equipment with them and there's a reward for its recovery.

Automated defense systems, perhaps run by ancient "spirits" or AIs, who have grown bored waiting for the fulfillment of their purpose. These can be opposed directly, or fooled, or negotiated with, or played against each other.

Another artifact or trace mineral that accreted with the ice and dust that is valuable but risky to collect.

Some outside crisis that arises that only the secrets of the tomb might be able to solve. The other PCs work to get the sorcerer through to the end, potentially sacrificing themselves to do it (replace them with the other lost expedition members, or something).

Yes, thanks for those ideas. It sparked something within my mind concerning an external crisis. I'm thinking that the asteroid may have a dampening field which has basically slowly siphoned their engine's power source till they were useless - like the longer they are there the more likely this is to occur. So they need to shut down the field by helping the sorcerer get through this place.

So there will be some mad crewmembers in the way, who need rescuing as well as getting in the way and causing trouble. The dampening field is also responsible for that too.

I know they aren't checking into this forum so I can lay out my longer term plan. I'm thinking the derelict mining captain is one of those whom is rescued, and also another potential budding sorcerer, though he will be quiet about it and the dampening field may or may not have had a lasting effect on the man's mind. There, short term big bad revealed!

In reply to spectre (msg # 15):

Don't be too worried about revealing your plans, or even discussing them with your players. If players think an idea is cool (like a budding nemesis for their character, who will cause them to have to sharpen their own skills) they're likely to work with it, rather than spoil it, to the point of not having their characters act on knowledge the players have - or even having the character act ironically, such as befriending their budding nemesis.

If the players are likely to spoil your plans, maybe they aren't that interested in them and would rather see the game develop in a different way. That's another good subject for discussion.