Campaign Toybox
The Story: Many great minds-slash-crackpots have suggested that the ancient Egyptians could never have built their great pyramids without mastering an energy force beyond just human strength. So let’s give them one, some kind of electricity. But why stop there? If you’re manipulating electrical forces to move objects around, you’re going to have radio long before that, and that puts a whole new spin on the pyramids – they’re gigantic space aerials. After all, many great-for-a-given-value-of-great minds have suggested their points lined up perfectly with the positions of major stars.
The Egyptians believed that the human body was made up of several forces, most notably your ba – your personality – and your ka – your life-force, and your identity – your name and image and title. When you died, your ba and ka were free to roam around but they could be collected together again around something that bore your image or name. Add this to radio and you quickly realise the Egyptians used telepresence to achieve a kind of beaming.
Think about it: great Pharaoh Khufu not only had himself buried with all his bling and half his household, but also a full-size sun-barque, specifically designed to sail him across the sky to the sun from which the gods gained their authority to give him his authority. That can’t just have been a spiritual metaphor. It has to have been a spaceship. The moment he was sealed in the tomb the aerial on top broadcast not just his personality and memories but an encoded description of everything inside the pyramid. They were three dimensional blueprints, waiting to be uploaded into the heavens. The boat and all the crew was recreated in space, with no need for escape velocity, and The Pharaohs did live forever – in space.
Style and Structure: The trick with putting anything “...in space” is making sure it doesn’t feel exactly like the original thing only with the word space in front of everything (“So my space-barbarian kills the lunar-snake with his energy-sword”). Luckily, Egypt is a pretty exotic game setting anyway so that’s less of an issue here. You also, however, want to avoid it feeling like any other space story. Simply having the space captain say “Amun Guide Me!” instead of “For the Emperor/May The Force Be With You/Beam Me Up Scotty!” does not a unique setting make.
So let’s put Egypt in space. Since they can beam things around, they’re going to need a huge amount of energy, energy they used to get from harnessing the Nile. So let’s imagine a huge empire based around channels of solar wind. The big power centres are concentrated closest in, within the orbit of Mercury (planets are gravitational dead-ends) and the further away you get, the more power is vested in local leaders. However, everybody needs energy for the dark times, when the planets block the life-giving rays of the sun. To control tithing, religion is still the preferred tool, and for that the Pharaohs will still have their trusty space-viziers (dammit!). With Amon-Ra right there, driving the power of the ships, the religion is about as literal as you can get, so isn’t likely to go anywhere just because you’re in space.
Note however that although it may offend every fibre of your gamer soul, Egyptian religion, though centralised, was about as organised as Marvel comics canon. Just slightly more believable.
PCs and NPCs: Speaking of misconceptions, you won’t find very many slaves in Egypt. You will however find a caste system, something which slots rather nicely into a class system. Back on Earth it was farmers, then artists and craftsmen, then priests, doctors and engineers, then nobles and scribes at the top. This marries nicely to labourers, morale officers, engineering and science, then tactics and comms at the top. When it comes to fighting, everyone was expected to join up so no need for a soldiering class. Things can remain mostly feudal in space but Egypt has a different kind of feudalism to medieval ones, so hopefully it won’t feel too much like 40K. Freedom of information and the high prominence of the educated will help strike that difference, although all art and craft remains invariably religious, as all artists, just like farmers, are owned by a local sector lord/ship captain. Other differences from medieval feudalism include almost total gender equality, a lack of xenophobia and immortality.
That’s right: if the ba and ka can be gathered around a remade silicon replica, the space Egyptians need never die, be they Pharaoh or common farmer. That puts a lot of pressure on society, even population increase only occurs if you want the engineers to build you extra units. No doubt religious law forbids making new ka statues without permission, or in the event of war. This prevents you from doing stories about youth and the changing of rulers over generations but it also lets you play a bare-chested, bald-headed robot Egyptian who can literally be thousands of years old.
Plots and Villains: Of course, without death, both the individual and society tends to fester. And things that fester tend to explode eventually. And while they can’t die of old age, these robot Egyptians can certainly be exploded with ray guns. Internal politics is deeply blood-soaked (or rather silicate-fluid-soaked) – since you can’t wait for your rival to die, you’re going to have to throw him out an airlock. Just because people are immortal doesn’t mean there will be taboos against killing. No more than usual, I mean.
Meanwhile, external politics – that is, war – is equally violent. Now, the Egyptians may have had access to a secret magic that let them conquer space but even the most secret of magics can be stolen, copied or mimicked. So Ramseses II can still have his crusades against the space Hittites or even space Romans. Even if you don’t want to bring more of the ancient (or even modern) world into the heavens, the Egyptians may need to descend occasionally if they need slaves, and that requires warfare at times. Some of the slaves may even rebel and gain a religious leader with a big beard and a magic staff (+10 to Summon Plague, Cast Greater Water Walking once per day). Then there’s aliens. There’s no chance the Egyptians will see space travellers as gods – only as targets. Ready the chariots, my subjects. The ones with the spikey wheels.
Sources: For all things Egypt, try your local encyclopaedia, Wikipedia or several million documentaries. For more fun but less accurate sources (in the sense that 2+2=5 is less accurate addition), you can watch Sommers’ Mummy and Mummy Returns or Elizabeth Taylor smoking the screen in Antony and Cleopatra. Do not miss Yul Brynner as Rameses in The Ten Commandments or you will have lived in vain. Stargate in both film and TV versions (first one only) will also serve you well, even if they insist on the Egyptians coming from space (ie the boring way round).
RPGs: We’ve already talked about Warhammer 40K which is incarnated in three different RPGs right now, and is an excellent example of putting very different societies into space. For more transhuman immortal fun, there’s a ridiculous amount of options like Eclipse Phase, Diaspora, Remember Tomorrow and FreeMarket, For societies of immortals, the World of Darkness has not just vampires but the excellent Mummy 2nd edition (forget the later reboot). For ancient Egypt specifically, Green Ronin produced the excellent Hamunaptra d20 book and many fantasy settings had Egypt equivalents (the Undying Court in Eberron, Nehekhara in Warhammer). Call of Cthulhu visited the place in exhaustive detail in the 1920s in the Complete Masks of Nyarlathotep. If you like having complicated intrigue plots at the forefront, you could even try the excellent inter-relation drama rules of games like Smallville, In A Wicked Age and Fiasco.
