The Refuges: Stornuso (stars in an ocean)

Miruso paddled his kayak through the ice in darkness. The last great star, Friend, had dimmed and then disapeared. The sound of the waves and his paddle in the open ocean were a strong contrast to the darkness of the long night around him. He pulled his fur parka tight -- this was a long trip, and there was no need to waste his heat reserves. He shifted his weight to balance his supplies -- mostly fishing equipment and dried fish.

Off in the distance, Miruso saw a twinkle of light on the water. The familiar light of another traveler! He strengthened the light coming from the skin of his face, hoping that the other traveler would see the increased glow and they could meet up. 

welcome to Stornuso, a dark world of water, ice, fire, and stars.  Its one of the Refuges: one world among many. Its designed for a specific setting, but the geography, cultures, magic and other aspects are free to be used where seen fit.

The World

 Stornuso is a cold world covered almost entirely by water, sheet ice, and iceburgs, and dominated by long periods of darkness. The sky is always black, lacking a proper sun, but studded with a variety of stars that wax and wane in their places. Sometimes they are bright enough to see by, but at other times they are as dark as any night. As the sky is studded with stars, the ocean is studded with volcanic islands. These flare up periodically, belching out light, smoke, and most particularly heat. A hardy folk with their own strange breed of magic ply the seas between islands, following the marine life and the heat.

Human life on Stornuso is made possible by phage magic -- the magic of storing energy for later. Phage magic focuses on Light, Heat, and Motion. The magic always happens at the skin. Light can be absorbed by the skin and released at a later time. Stornusoan mages can slow down ice burgs if only they can stand to touch them with their fingertips ... and later propel their boats with that same power. 

The Islands

The major source of heat on Stornuso is geothermal activity: geysers, hot springs, volcanoes, and so forth. These hot spots are intermittent, and cold one can get very cold indeed -- its the active ones that are important. People and creatures flock from all around to these literal 'hot spots'. Hot spots wax and wane, growing warm and then cold. Different spots stay warm for different amounts of time. The most important spots are the ones that stay hot for a long time. The Stornusoan's children don't know phage magic yet, and so cannot weather the long cold between islands.

Each Island has a hot, steamy, volcanic center, often belching out lava and smoke. Strange vegetation grows here, seemingly more like a fungus than a plant. The temperatures are hotter than an oven. Stornusoans come here when the volcano is active for to gather heat so that they can travel in the long cold, and to gather 'wood' for their boats. The foliage is not good to eat, and even if the island isn't infested with trolls, some of the other wildlife in this region can be dangerous.

Outside of the volcanic region is the hot springs. All sorts of hot springs abound, from scalding hot to comfortable to clear to caustic mud to beautiful colors. There is some silt, and some rock, but little vegetation.  Fewer creatures live here, though sea birds, trolls, or humans usually make it their abode. This region is a comfortable temperature for humans.

On the beach there are many animals: seals, birds (including penguins), crabs, and other aquatic life. The volcano heats up not only the island itself but the ocean around it. Here seaweed grows and arctic life in general blooms. This is were humans gather most of their food.

The Ocean

Most of Stornuso is open ocean. Because heat comes from volcanoes that may or may not be active at any given moment, much of the ocean is cold and covered in sheets of ice. Food most densely found around islands, but in the deep are many creatures it is profitable to hunt. Out in the open ocean a hunter may find fish, seals, whales, and even bears, as well as other creatures from the beach. Various wanderers in boats, sleds, or funny combinations of the two wander on the ocean, looking for their next island -- or perhaps just for their next meal. Heat from phage magic will keep them warm --- until it runs out.

The ocean is a cold world marked by ice, water, and emptiness. While food can be found in it, food is much more abundant in the heated waters near a volcanic island. Whatever system you are using to keep track of getting food, you should treat the cold ocean as a difficult area. terms of Gurps Low-Tech Companion 3, the area is Very Poor or Desolate, with occasional poor spots. If using a simpler Gurps system, a -2 to attempts to find food may suffice. Living off the ocean normally uses up resources, and a traveler will keep a supply of food to help his family survive until they find an island. 

The People

The Stornusoans are a simple people who live on the bounty of the sea. For all intents and purposes they seem to be human -- they physically look like the tribes of the arctic. Short of stature, shorter limbs, slightly dark skin, black hair, and round faces.

They travel around in small family units -- young men will often set off to seek their fortune. The exact size of the unit varies: most of the time they are driven to separate by hunger and hunting conditions rather than social pressures.

Religion is centered around the islands and stars: each island is considered to have a spirit, as is each star. Sacrifices include worked possessions and food, but most often consist of heat, light, and motion: Arrival at an island is usually followed by a sacrifice of excess energy -- often a large one. The best sacrifices don't involve lots of dumps, but one single moment in which as much energy as possible is sacrificed. This is comparative of course, given the slow moving nature of phage magic,  but can still give impressive results. Care is taken that the energy does not come from the entity sacrificed to. Religious rituals are commonly practiced by the head of a boat when on the ocean and by a dedicated shaman on an island. Sacrifices are typically made to the stars when on the ocean, or  to the island you are on when on land.

Island Culture

Every island has a chief, who decides whether new comers are allowed on his island or not, and how long they may stay for. Chiefs are chosen by community vote of all the hunters. Usually, a chief is an older and charismatic individual. Claims of holding office on different islands are common but not taken at face value: such a claim can be hard to prove. Chiefs may be benevolent, or they may rule as tyrants, but the ability to leave the island is pretty common, and all reigns eventually end. Or at least most of them. Chiefs may be removed when they die, leave the island, retire, or in a massive and rare ceremony that involves most (three fourths is typical) of the inhabitants entering boats just off of shore and electing a new chief. Severely unpopular chiefs are as likely to be assassinated as to be voted out.

When an island goes cold, the different families split up all go different directions, each looking for a new hot spot. Because of this, stable tribes rarely form outside of the context of a single island. However, a tribe equivalent exists in the form of  'totems'. A totem is an form (usually an animal) to represent its supporters. The exact philosophies of totems vary, even within the totem, but cliques on islands form based around totems, and a chief is most likely to accept newcomers who share his totem. Battles do happen, particularly on islands with longer life spans, but these are rare: Warriors are more likely to battle trolls.

There are many totems, and some people invent new ones, but some of the most common include:
The Troll: Resilience, Battle, Willingness to Kill
The Bear: Independence, Freedom, Strength
The Crab: Home, Planning, Defense
The Gull: Community, Friendship, Strength in numbers
The Barnacle: Stubbornness, Resourcefulness
The Orca: Strength, Community, Hunting

Despite the cliques and the chiefs, society is fairly flat, with any hunter, fisher, or craftsman is able to fully participate in society and possibly become chief, island elder, or any other role.

The Technology

While their outward facing technology appears to be all leather and wood equivalent, Stornusoans are actually quite skilled with working metals -- they can work in forges with their bare hands. They don't like metal and pottery because of the difficulty in transporting it: spear and arrow heads are much more common than swords or other heavy metal items., They are generally somewhere between TL 1 and TL 2. Islands that stay hot for generations will sometimes develop some TL 3 technologies.

The Magic

Phage magic is always absorbed and stored for later. It does not lend itself to combat, but to survival. These are the 'Laws' of phage magic:
Energy release and absorption are slow, but can be powerful. In other words, you can't absorb a fire ball, but you can slowly stick your hand into lava -- but if you're dropped in lava phage magic won't protect you. Conversely, you can't shoot out a fireball, but melting a doorknob to slag is quite possible. As a general rule, most uses take 5 seconds or more.
Everything happens at the skin. If the skin isn't touching it, the magic can't happen. This is particularly important for kinetic energy, bit can also be an important limitation when heating something up or cooling it down. Flicking something repeatedly is a valid tactic, and doesn't violate the 'slow' rule: you can work up to getting into lava that way. Its also worth noting releasing light always results in a part of the body glowing. Most of the time its the face.
Everything must be stored. Heat, motion, and light all must be stored before they are released. If the mage doesn't have them, he can't create them. They also cannot be converted from one type to another: motion cannot be converted to heat.
There is a limit to how much can be stored. Every person has their limit. Its not the same for every person, but their is a limit. The limit can be exceeded for a short time only, and then the energy will bleed away without effect. The 'bleeding' happens faster the farther over the limit you are, but few amounts of energy can last for more than 5 minutes. Amounts stored should be fairly high: 12 months of human heat is typical.
The energy can be passed from person to person. This follows all of the other rules given, particularly about slow power use and skin contact -- handshakes or embraces are typically used to transfer energy. Kindly but crowded islands will often give heat to travelers before they send them away.
Kinetic motion is stored by 'slowing things down' -- in other words by increasing air resistance and friction. Only the object needs to be touched. The classic place to get this energy is icebergs. however, only icebergs being sped up by the flow, turned, or bumping into one another can provide energy. This can also be used to slow a fall-- if the fall is far enough. It rarely is.

On stornuso, this magic system is used by everyone -- an inability to use phage magic is as bad as an inability to walk. From the stornusoans, there is no genetic point of view. When others from the refuges arrive, they find themselves able to use the magic, though their is a lot of work involved in learning how to use it. If stornuso is used in a different setting, a GM may wish to decide their is a genetic component, but all stornusoans have it.

Pricing the magic can be tricky. Gurps magic as powers is one route, but may perhaps be too complicated. My two instincts are to treat the magic either as Realm Magic  or as magic as technology.

If treated as magic as technology, Phage magic raises the TL of low TL practitioners by about 2 levels. It allows increased production (going directly into kilns), drastically increases survival, and helps a little with transport and communication. These gains are somewhat offset by the fact that it doesn't really help with combat at all.  So those who have the magic in a setting where most people don't have high TL 2, and those who lack it in a setting where its common (most often minors) have   low TL 2.

If pricing phage magic as realm magic, we have a Lot more to count than just the three types of energy. By my count, there is the equivalent of 12 realms***. We have three limitations on what you can do with a realm: speed, distance, and creation. Each of those will represent a level that we theoretically could have but don't. So at a base of 60 per realm, multiplied at 2/3 for having 12 realms, and divided into 4 levels, we get 10 points per level, for a total of 10 points. These points should NOT be used as alternate abilities.

In either, a skill should be assigned and purchased for each ability.

Yes, this is a light treatment of the magic system, but I've given enough to go on, and anything more deserves its own post.

The Trolls

Trolls* are dumb brutes no more intelligent than gorillas -- which is to say they are quite good at forming packs, using clever hunting strategies, and can even figure out the occasional tool! Trolls are notable for their regeneration: they can recover from just about any wound. With massive teeth and a predatory view on life, they are the top predator (and herbivore) on the islands.

There are two limitations to the trolls astounding regeneration: they must have the mass to heal, and they must have a different core temperature than the area around them. If they lack either of those two requirements, they cannot heal from a wound. The classic way to defeat a troll is to hack off a limb and ran away with it.  Trolls will also go inert when the heat goes away (or if they reach the temperature of their surroundings for too long), and Stornusoans take advantage of this time to hack up trolls as best as they can.

Islands overrun by trolls are not safe -- the creatures would feast on human flesh as readily as any other. Yet often Stornusoans have no choice but to try and co-exist with the brutes. These situations are tense, with each side trying to catch the other off guard.

Each GM may build his own troll, but I suggest the following as a base:
ST 15, DX 12, IQ 6, HT 10
HP 15, Per 12, Will 11, FP 10
High Pain Tolerance, 10 ER, Regenerates 1 HP/ sec (requires heat differential),  unkillable 2, regrowth (requires ER, GM call on amount), sharp teeth, claws, Discriminating Smell, Temperature tolerance 20, 5 DR (heat based only),  Blood Lust, goes inactive in heat differential. 

The Stars

Light on Stornuso comes from four stars: Comfort, Mystery, Majesty, and Friend.  They do not change their position in the sky, but they do change their brightness. At any given time any combination of them can be bright, dim, or gone.  Time is counted in days (half cycles of friend, which is, conveniently enough, approximately a real day). Full darkness happens about every 100 days, and full brightness every 300 days or so. Both full darkness and full light have their actual

Friend is the quickest of the four stars, glowing for 24 hours, then dark for 24 hours. Comfort has about a 45 day cycle (not that they have days here -- thats 20 cycles of Friend) but stays bright for half of it and is only dark for about 10 days -- comfort is almost always in the sky -- that's why its called comfort. Majesty has a balanced cycle of about 90 days, twice that of comfort, and mystery show up for about 20 days every 120, for some odd reason**.

There are other stars in the sky, much fainter, that do not provide meaningful light to Stornuso, but can be used to navigate. They, like the main stars, wax and wane. 

While the locals undoubtedly have a convoluted calendar system that tracks all of this, For gaming purposes its probably sufficient to count days, full darks and full lights -- full lights average out to be about a year each. The GM then sets an illumination level and cycles friend every 48 hours.

The Campaign

Stornuso can fill several roles in a campaign. A campaign set among just the Stornusoans plays like many other survivalist campaigns. While the TL is as high as 2, there is no agriculture, and so it can feel like a much lower tech game. In addition to the normal struggles of survival there is the challenge of battling trolls, and a lot of potential for politics.

The setting is designed to be visited rather than played exclusively in. Its a Refuges world, and it obeys the rules of the setting. It also is a great place to have climatic battles: volcanoes, open ocean, icebergs, and so forth.  Most of the culture works as the far north of another setting. The magic system is designed to fit in with many others, and Stornuso is essentially an 'exotic land' to adventure in.

I hope you find this fantastic land new and a fine playground for your heroes to play on. If you only use one part of it, that's enough for me to call a success. I wish you luck as you ply the frigid oceans in search of your next landing!

* ok, you don't have to call them trolls, but its essentially what they are. If your pc's are outsiders to the world, make them come up with a name as part of their discovery. Other names include volcano apes,

** as far as I know, this cycle is not astronomically possible -- and its not meant to be.

***This was an involved calculation I will cover in a different post -- but realm magic is its own beast, and worth covering.