Last month, I talked about a campaign that mixes elements from Dune and A Song of Ice and Fire with superpowered people. Today, I'm going to address a few tweaks that can modify the feel of the campaign and add diversity.

Elderborn ho!

As you might recall, the Luminarum includes two types of super-humans (actually, three, if you count the Acheronian legions): the high-powered Others and the more super-soldiery elderborn. The last installment concentrated on the former, but maybe four-color power levels in a science fiction setting is not your cup of tea.

In that case, assume there are no greater transmutation chambers in the Elder Stations and erase the Others. The focus of the campaign becomes elderborn PCs. And although they are not as earth shaking as Others, they should still represent a serious advantage for those houses that have them.

In this scenario, the PCs retain their 'badassitude'. Using Dune as a point of comparison, elderborn should be the Luminarum's Fremen in contrast to the Sardaukar-like Acheronian legions. This means one PC should be a threat to a four- or five-legionnaire team and to a ten-men unit of regular soldiers.

If you want to make the characters even more special, you can reduce the number of active elderborn by half or by five: 250 and 100, respectively. If being 0.2% of the total super-soldiers of the setting is kick ass enough, imagine representing 0.4% or even 1%.

Monk, Warriors and Assassins

Although Others, and to a lesser extent, elderborn are the channels for superpowers to enter the setting, there may be other special abilities that exist independently or that can be explained as very minor manifestations that don't depend on eldertech.

One example is martial arts-derived quasipowers. In the Luminarum, these are the province of the Order of the Neocordoban Monks, a semi-religious organization that provides assistance and services to the various noble houses.

Much like Dune's Bene Gesserit and Westeros' maesters, the Neocordoban Order has evolved alongside the Luminarum and has representatives assigned to all the houses as instructors and advisors.

The monks also have martial training and their warriors and assassins are feared throughout the Luminarum. The almost supernatural abilities associated with them come from their mastery of two unique disciplines: taodo and zenshi.

Taodo is an advanced martial art developed from a combination of other combat forms. It is very hard to master, but proficiency in it makes one a superior hand-to-hand fighter, able to hold his own against more powerful foes.

Zenshi is the ultimate meditative form. It allows complete awareness and control of one's body and mind. A zenshi master can perform all the feats we usually associate with fakirs and shaolin monks.

Expertise in both taodo and zenshi gives an individual advanced physical and mental conditioning, and grants him or her the ability to employ seemingly mystical combat techniques, like pressure points, ki-focused strikes, etc.

It is possible for a lordling to be trained in both Neocordobite skills, but to learn the deeper secrets, he must join the order, forfeiting his allegiance to his birth house. From them on, his first loyalty will be to the Neocordoban monks.

Obviously, the order would love nothing more than have one of its own undergo transmutation, even if it's the lesser one. Of course, no great lord has been crazy enough to allow this. They all know the Neocordobites have their own agenda and giving them access to such power would bring unforeseen consequences in the future.

Luminarum's menta... err, I mean, mements

As explained in the last installment, the Luminarum doesn't trust advanced computers or anything that slightly resembles artificial intelligence, what with the apocalyptic war waged against sentient machines. They do have computers though, but only basic models.

However, there are many times where high-volume processing and calculation are required. Not to mention that having portable versions of such enhanced computing tools can come in handy. But how to have all this if you can't build an AI? Well, you can train one.

That's what the Luminarum houses did. They created a special school to change regular people into living computers. The mements, as they are called, are trained from an early age to enhance their cognitive skills and mnemonic abilities.

All mements have photographic memory and any mental advantages that your system of choice associates with advanced cognition, like Lightning Calculator. The Luminarum living computers also gain special skills that reflect their higher analytical abilities.

These could include: a type of superperception, a skill that lets the player predict occurrences in the game, one that enhances concentration and gives bonuses to other skill rolls, etc. To be fair, this idea comes from Last Unicorn Games' Dune RPG. If you can find a copy, you can plunder it for mechanics.

Like Neocordoban monks, mements are assigned to the noble houses, but unlike the Neocordobites, there's no superior hierarchy. So nobles tend to place a higher degree of trust on the living computers. You can find mements in several activities, including analyzing eldertech and working as back-up astrogators (see below who are the main astronavigators).

Also like Neocordobite skills, mement abilities can be taught to promising lordlings. Again, full mement training can only be gained by leaving the house and committing fully to mement school.

Astrogation and prescience

The next great school, as the Luminarum calls these specialized professions, is the astrogation one. Jump-related navigation is a complex affair, so complicated, in fact, that an advanced computer or a mement can take days to plot the course for a single jump.

Fortunately, there are people with the gift of prescience. Left untrained, these individuals will live their lives having prophetic, but difficult to decipher, dreams, or be plagued by confusing daydreams that most of the time have some detail come true.

If they make it to astrogation school, however, they become something more. Astrogators can use their precognitive abilities to identify the perfect course through jump space. Doing so takes at most a few minutes and can be almost instantaneous if the astrogator has been injected with trilirium, a purified extract from the plant known as trisanthemum.

For that reason, the vast majority of jump-capable ships have at least one astrogator. The correct term should be 'prescient astrogator', since mements can fulfill that obligation as well, but nobody makes this distinction, since in everybody's mind the job is completely associated with precognitive ability.

Being able to take a ship from one star system to another should be amazing enough, but a few prescient go beyond that. They attain such a high-level understanding of their gift that they can employ it in various endeavors, like combat and piloting, where being able to predict an opponent's move or an obstacle confers a big advantage.

These advanced prescient also gain a danger sense that makes it very difficult to surprise them. Finally, they become true precogs, able to gaze into the future and see what is yet to come.

The masters of swordsmanship

Finally, the last of the great schools was located in the world of Pratt, formerly the holding of House Suray. It was the Swordmaster School, where many of the Luminarum nobles went to become deadly bladefighters.

Admission to the school was tough and only those talented enough made it through the try-outs. Graduating made you a swordmaster proficient in the Suray fencing techniques. They are to blade combat what taodo is to hand-to-hand fighting.

If you made it to the end of the course and displayed superior skill, you were selected to the advanced classes, usually made up of members of House Suray. Succeeding at those made you a grandmaster, able to perform maneuvers that bordered the supernatural (again, like taodo, only limited to blades).

You may have noticed I used the past tense in describing the Swordmaster School. I did that because it doesn't exist anymore. Ten years ago, House Moritur declared a war of extinction against the Suray and were victorious. Only two nobles survived: Corwin, the heir, and his uncle Duncan. The former is a ward of House Perseides and the latter hasn't been seen ever since.

Most swordmaster instructors died defending the Suray, but some survived and it's rumored they took residence on difference planets as mercenaries or fencing instructors. Whenever they identify a promising student, they teach her the Suray techniques, thus keeping the style alive.

A motley crew

The default assumption for Luminarum is that the PCs will be Others, but as I said earlier, this might not be to your liking. Maybe you want a more diversified party, where the characters have different abilities with different origins.

Well, now you can have it. The party could have an elderborn, a Neocordoban monk, a mement, an astrogator and a swordmaster. You could even have an Other, using some form of metagame mechanic to compensate the imbalance in power level, like the Buffy RPG does.

Such an odd group would probably be backed by one of the great lords or, better yet, the chancellor himself. They could be a special troubleshooter team that travels the Luminarum investigating whatever the chancellor wants and solving any problems that might arise.

They could also be rebels, intent on taking down the feudalistic society of the Luminarum and instituting true democracy. They travel from planet to planet attacking the houses' interests and creating all sorts of trouble for the nobles.

Wait, what about the Consortium and the Elder Stations?

Oh, yes, those things. As always in this columns, the idea is that you fill out the history of the elements in the seed, adapting them to what you want or need in your specific campaign. As such, I usually avoid going into much detail.

But I guess I can give you a couple of options, right? For example, in my campaign, the Consortium is a more benign branch of the machines that survived the war with humankind. They settled a non-colonized planet and developed there for centuries.

Eventually, they explored space again and found the Luminarum (and maybe other recuperating human civilizations). These machines don't want to battle their former creators, but are wary of just letting them rediscover all their tech. It's bad enough they got the jump drive back by themselves.

So the Consortium decided it would become the main supplier of advanced technology to the Luminarum, making it dependent on them. In this way, they could control the expansion and aggressiveness of the humans and ensure a peaceful coexistence. Unfortunately, the Elder Stations were found and upped the ante.

Where do they come from? Well, the correct answer is when do they come from? The Elder Stations were created millions of years ago, buy an unknown alien species. They were fortresses, command centers and cities used by these aliens to expand their civilization.

The transmutation chambers were how they "armored up" for battles. For them, the process was known, predictable (they knew how they would come out and what abilities they would have), repeatable and reversible.

Something happened and the aliens had to leave the galaxy, possibly the continuum. Instead of taking their bulky stations with them, they stored them in an extra-dimensional space until they returned. Forty years ago, the Elder Stations picked up a signal from their creators - they were coming back.

So they started dropping back into normal space. The signal has activated them in a cascade sequence and it takes a while for their systems to boot up. That's why there aren't many of them yet. Also, the ones that have returned are restarting their power generators, so in a few years they - and the transmutation chambers -- will be fully operational again.

When do the aliens get back? You decide. Who they are? They could be Cthulhoid Old Ones, but that's been overused. Maybe they are like Fringeworthy's Tehrmelern and Mellor crossed over. Or they could be the Progenitors who seeded the galaxy. There are a lot of options.

I hope you liked it. Feel free to share any comments, suggestion and criticisms on the forum. If you ever run this, let me know too.