Aliens (Promptober 2025 #23)

Fantasy Aliens Within?

In a fantasy setting, we rarely see instances of extraplanetary high-tech aliens. Early on in TSR's history we have Metamorphosis Alpha, set aboard a generational ship gone haywire, with mutated creatures and forgotten technology. We also find the classic module S3 Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, where the party discovers a crashed alien ship containing robots, odd life forms, and laser weaponry to find and use. After that, things get a little more limited in the classic D&D canon: UK4 When A Star Falls has the party recovering a meteorite for a deep gnome sage, but no actual life forms.

I tried aliens once, back in my Adris campaign. (Good gravy, that game ended about 20 years ago now.)

The world around the town of Adris reeked of high-magic fantasy, as most D&D games do. The party ended up searching for the 7 cubes, artifacts each dedicated to an "original" god. The new gods had different names and faces, but they were all effectively masks on top of one of the original gods. And once they assembled all 7 cubes, they could fully power the crystal pyramid they had found and travel to other worlds. I just kept pulling the camera back and seeing what else jumped into frame.

A few things fell in the party's lap before the game dissolved.

They chased a falling star and found a psionic human who traveled with them for a time, training the party's wizard/monk into a true psionic. She may have let a few details drop about the existence of other worlds beyond the only one the party knew. The party fought an armed extraction team sent to retrieve her, and she ended up taking their shuttle back to the stars.

They found an extradimensional crystal pyramid that could teleport across the world. I sort of based it on Dr. Who's Tardis. They restored what they could, eventually unlocking a voice-activated AI avatar who answered their questions (albeit with centuries-old data). The party started depending on the pyramid quite a bit during the game, which solidified the plan to fully power it with the assembled collection of all 7 cubes and allow them into the interstellar arena.

At another point of their journeys under an ancient pyramid, the party discovered a room of a dozen statues standing in a circle as if talking with each other. There was an empty platform, and the party decided to leave it alone. The ever-curious bard couldn't resist, and ended up sneaking back and activating this communication room and talking with an elven envoy in a flight suit. The call went out that this world might rejoin the stellar network after centuries of quarantine. Things would probably start happening on a much larger stage after that call.

I laid the foundations for an interstellar adventure, but I had no real plans after finding all the cubes and getting the pyramid into orbit. The act of introducing this wider scope added depth to the game and a promise of ever-larger adventures, but I don't know if I could have juggled 20th level D&D 3.5E characters in space. It would have been epic in every sense of the word, I'm sure, but I had no plan and a newborn, so the game fell apart.

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Part of the Promptober project for 2025.