[Torg] Tharkold and Kadandra

[Kansas Jim]

I posted this last night over on the WEG boards, figured I'd
also post it here for those who don't read both.

The new RPG CthulhuTech got me thinking a bit about Tharkold and
Kadandra...initially it reminded me of one of my earliest ideas for
Kadandra, an anime-style world with power suits and mecha that got
invaded by Magical Demonic Beasts From Another Dimension.

As I got to thinking about it more and comparing it to the setting in
CthulhuTech, I had an idea. What if the reason the Kadandrans called the
Tharkoldu "Sims" was not because of a physical resemblance (which later
material obviously invalidated) but because of a more metaphysical
resemblance? What if Kadandra and Tharkold weren't just similar
realities, what if they were the same reality? Maybe Mara wasn't looking
into another cosm with her funky telescope after all but into a distant
part of her own cosm? Maybe Mara's telescope was built on intracosmal
principles (prototype dimthread technology maybe) but she didn't "aim"
it correctly and instead ended up seeing real-time images from the other
side of the galaxy or something and so she assumed that it was in
another cosm which appeared to have a reality very similar to her own
(and thus inhabited by "Sims").

Because of the telescope working on reality-manipulating principles,
Malgest detects someone is spying on the Tharkoldu and eventually
backtracks it to Kadandra. The Tharkoldu being what they are, they
naturally gear up to invade.

But the Kadandrans have time to prepare and when the Tharkoldu arrive
they find that the Kadandrans are able to put up much more of a fight
than they're used to from dealing for so long with the oppressed and
downtrodden Race. There's billions of Kadandrans, all organized into a
massive Tech 26 war machine that fights with all the ferocity the
LoFerocity calls for and that takes full advantage of the cosm's Social
axiom thanks to an application of the Law of Domination that the
Tharkoldu are incapable of doing and the Race just aren't organized
enough to pull off. The Tharkoldu get their butts kicked, hard. Those
that survive flee back up their maelstrom bridges and collapse them to
prevent the Kadandrans from pursuing them.

Then taking it further, would the Kadandrans, whipped up into a
war-frenzy by their WLs, stop there? I don't think so! (Obviously
diverting from official history now.) The Kadandrans analyze the ruins
of the bridgeheads left behind and are able to reverse engineer their
own form of maelstrom bridges and they take the fight to Tharkold. They
join up with the Race and lead a war of genocide on the Tharkoldu,
eventually prevailing. Thratchen and a small number of techno-demons who
were involved in preparing for the Earth invasion and so were off-world
end up being the last of their kind.

Meanwhile, in the ruins of Kranod's demense, the Kadandrans come across
Malgest. The Darkness Device cockily assumes that it will find a new
High Lord among the Kadandrans, perhaps it even betrayed Kranod and
abandoned him during the final battles as it did in official chronology
by siding with Jezrael. But the Kadandrans prove to be of superior moral
stock and instead drop the Darkness Device into a black hole so that no
Kadandran would ever be tempted to become what the Tharkoldu were.
Further exploration of the ruins uncovers material revealing the
Tharkoldu's participation in the Gaunt Man's plan to invade Earth and
the Kadandrans begin making plans to come to Earth's aid....


While I figure the Kadandrans could have localized axiom shifts that
would have aided them against the Tharkoldu (slightly higher Social and
Tech perhaps), it would also undermine again the whole Sims thing if
their reality differed so I'm going with the axioms being the same.
Having the Kadandrans in the same cosm even provides a new rationale for
why the Tharkoldu had to work so hard to prop up the cosm's Magic axiom,
the much larger population of Kadandrans lack a belief in magic and that
had the effect of pulling the cosm's axiom in a downward direction! The
Kadandrans are also why the cosm has a Social axiom so much higher than
what the Tharkoldu and Race require, they were the ones pushing it up
and the Tharkoldu just accepted it happening without questioning why.
The cosm's high Spirit axiom is the only one I'm having trouble with,
I'm having trouble coming up with a version of the Kadandrans that would
be that spiritual. (If they're not spiritual then they'd have had a
downward influence on the Spirit axiom as they did with the Magic
axiom, yet that didn't happen. I suppose I could just change the cosm's
Spirit axiom, lord knows we don't need that many Spirit 17 realities.)

The World Laws I think are going to need some tweaking. In the official
material Kranod has over time altered the WLs so that they offer more
benefits to the Tharkoldu than the Race. But just as the Kadandrans
created significant resistance that dragged down the Magic axiom I see
their beliefs also creating significant resistance to alterations in the
cosm's WLs. Kranod and Malgest kept dumping P-Energy into altering the
WLs but something kept fighting back and subtly undoing them. They
incorrectly assumed that it was some aftereffect of the Spasm, same
guess they made for why the Magic axiom kept trying to drop on them, and
just kept dumping P-Energy into it rather than investigating the
problem.

For the Law of Domination (which I think the Kadandrans would call the
LoCooperation, to borrow a name from Jasyn), I see that instead of
allowing for only one level of dominance (ie, a Greater Alpha gets
bonuses on his Alphas but not on his Alpha's techno-demons) it creates
an actual chain of command - there are bonuses for following the orders
of anyone higher than you in the chain rather than just from your
immediate superior. This fostered a scale of cooperation on Kadandra
great enough that they've actually exceeded the limits of the cosm's
Social axiom and have a unified one-world system of government.

The Law of Ferocity is mostly unchanged, the only change I see is
dropping the hardwired restriction on non-violent organizations being
limited to Social 12. Instead it is simply a consequence of Tharkoldu
biology and the oppressed Race being in too fractured of a state to ever
organize themselves any higher than that level. While the Kadandrans
appear peaceful on the surface, they all have the hearts of fierce
warriors beating in their chests. (Perhaps they're like Vulcans, they
developed a philosophy which allowed them to overcome their aggressive
natures but it's still there beneath the surface.)

I'm not sure what to do with the Law of Pain though, I just don't see
the Kadandrans as sadomasochists. Maybe extend it to include emotional
pain more and tie that into their philosophy of repressing their violent
natures? That might make them too much like Vulcans though.

-- 
Kansas Jim, Torg guru (ksjim (at) sdc (dot) org)
Torg website: http://www.sdc.org/~ksjim/index.html