Succubus: A Quantum Two World

[oldgringo2001]

Succubus is a world line Infinity hasn't discovered yet, but Centrum knows about through one if its world jumpers.

The Succubans are basically a tribe of women who almost all have the Warp and World Jumper advantages, and the inability to carry a male fetus to a survivable term. They speak an English dialect which might have diverged in Elizabethan times, but with many loan words and a lot of cant. Racially they are quite mixed. They depend on surreptitious trade and theft from other worlds to maintain themselves, and on temporary liaisons with men from other worlds to sire new generations. Long-term ties with men are viewed as foolishness or perversion. Occasionally men are taken back to Succubus, but for their skills. Artists, musicians, and physicians are the most commonplace abductees.

Like Gypsies, they instinctively protect their secrets from outsiders. While many Succubans have amazing abilities to learn to speak or parrot other languages, girls are taught from childhood to play the mute when roving the stranger lands.

The Interworld Service hasn't surveyed the world in great detail yet, but it seems the Succuban tribe must have migrated from somewhere else and made their home base here. If there are native humans, they must be rare. The local present is 2019.

Unknown to the Interworld Service and every other out-timer, a Succuban has attached herself to a Swagman, conning the con men to accept her origin as a runaway peasant from a Chaucer-era England. She has successfully re-contacted the Sisters. For now, she's still playing along, learning as much as she can without giving her real talents and origin away.

[daniel_gudman]

Well, for now I'll leave aside the uncomfortable gender politics you're getting in to, although the thread might get back around to that later....

Anyway, I guess I want to ask, where are you going with this?

Are you a GM that's putting together the next campaign arc and you want input or what?

[combatmedic]

Originally Posted by daniel_gudman

Well, for now I'll leave aside the uncomfortable gender politics you're getting in to, although the thread might get back around to that later....

Anyway, I guess I want to ask, where are you going with this?

Are you a GM that's putting together the next campaign arc and you want input or what?

These women don't like men? They don't like sex? They don't have normal , common human feelings, like love? They have no fathers(none present in their lives), no husbands, no male role models, no male friends, no sons?

As described, the Succubans have a dysfunctional, even pathological society. They are seriously messed up, in other words. Their whole culture is parasitic, even evil...Hence the name 'Succubus."

This could be read as read as a spoof of feminism. :) On that level, it might be entertaining for some gamers.

[oldgringo2001]

Originally Posted by daniel_gudman

Well, for now I'll leave aside the uncomfortable gender politics you're getting in to, although the thread might get back around to that later....

You mean like the gender politics on the Enigma-2/Enigma-3 thread I started?

As for where I'm going with this, I don't know. Right now it's just an adventure seed, sort of like the “who might have been” seeds in the Who's Who books. And with some help from the third poster in this thread, I'm going to explain the whys and wherefores in a bit more detail.

It began last night as a short post in the middle of the Enigma-2 discussion, which is about a world where all the men disappeared. I got a good response on that post right away, so I thought, hey, why not do a little more work on it and re-post it as a new thread?

I like the meme of the succubus. It's a really, really old meme, probably going way back into prehistory, and at least a couple of thousand years before the Catholic version, demons to blame those naughty dreams upon, especially the wet ones. GURPS already has its own official scary succubus in Carmen Cazotte, usually encountered on Merlin-1. But I also like to throw curves, so I created a sort of gypsy/Irish Traveller tribe that don't have any demonic connections (except perhaps in men's minds) and I gave them a home base which would be hard to reach.

Originally Posted by starslayer

Centrum/infinity would view 'whole planet of warp/jump gifted inter-dimensionally aware' individuals with drooling desire trying to recruit as many to work for them as possible (hopefully the whole planet).

Yes, they would, wouldn't they? The only catch is, right now, they only way they can reach it is by using their own precious World Jumpers. Given the suspicious nature of the Succubans toward strangers, it's a miracle that their jumper found her way back safely.

Originally Posted by starslayer

Reich-5 would view it as a priceless bastion of genetic information; dismantling the gypsies would give them all kinds of information, likely enough to reliably induce warp/jump in there genetic engineering, and provide countless tissue samples for grafting.

Why, yes. One hopes for the sake of those poor, defenseless women that there isn't a section of the Chronobahn out there on this vast, empty, scarcely explored planet, hidden under an icecap or a jungle canopy...

Of course, even if there is an off ramp on this world, it's probably nowhere near the Salisbury Plain (which is where the tribe has its settlement.) Reich-5 people could spend years poking around without running into one of these wonder women. They could even be on the planet already, still blissfully ignorant of the real treasure awaiting discovery. It could look like a speed bump on the road to worlds with better prospects.

I was thinking about a population about the size of Elizabethan England's at first (a million or three) but I cut that down to the thousands-scale. Succubans have already been on some of the worlds known to Centrum and Infinity. There aren't enough of them to develop their own industrial base if they wanted to, and they don't believe they need one because of their special abilities. Ecologically, they are can be viewed as parasites, predators, or scavengers.

In a way, Succubus can be viewed as an alternative take on what Homeline is becoming, where original creative work is drowning under a flood of stolen intellectual property.

For the time being, it would seem, contact with Succubans would be almost entirely confined to chance encounters on other worlds. What would a “typical” Succuban be like?

Well, they would probably be at least Attractive. After all, they are products of many generations where the ladies have had their pick of sires for their children. The tribe is racially mixed, but they are also smart enough to choose “front” people who look like they might fit in with the locals, or at least not stand out too much. There should be no inborn physical defects other than the problem with male pregnancies, and acquired physical disadvantages would be rare—any woman with them among a roving party should have compensating talents and/or skill levels, such as fluency in one of the local languages, cultural familiarity, and a lot of Fast Talk. They should have a point in Brawling and Knife, and perhaps Poisons (not necessarily fatal); more combat skills would be Cinematic, or require an Unusual Background. Besides the obvious Stealth, they should have Survival (Plains) or (Woods), and experienced rovers should have an Urban Survival specialty (cities are where most of the best loot is.) Did I mention Riding (horse)? The tribe brought horses with them—while there aren't that many of them who can bring a horse-sized burden back from the stranger lands, there are always some around, and the ladies always have an eye out for an especially promising stallion wherever they rove.

English race tracks would be a good place to start trolling for Succubans.

[Fred Brackin]

Originally Posted by oldgringo2001

Why, yes. One hopes for the sake of those poor, defenseless women that there isn't a section of the Chronobahn out there on this vast, empty, scarcely explored planet, hidden under an icecap or a jungle canopy...

Of course, even if there is an off ramp on this world, it's probably nowhere near the Salisbury Plain (which is where the tribe has its settlement.)

In IW canon the chronbahn starts as a big 4-way intersection right where Europe meets Asia. Then it it passes on to a new world approx. every 300 miles.

So it would eventiually get quite cold somewhere near the arctic circle but I don't think it every reaches anywhere jungly unless the altenrate is highlym divergent.

It also doesn't reach England unless it diverges somewhere in a radical fashion. Of course, there are natural portals in every world Infinity has ever found (bar Coventry......they think). Other dimensional highways are know as well. One of them allows for female travellers only.

[oldgringo2001]

Originally Posted by combatmedic

What about the elder men?

There aren't any at the moment. Trueborn are only born to women of the tribe. Even with all the attention to breeding, “A mother's a mother; a father's an opinion.”

Very rarely (once or twice in a given generation) strangers are adopted into the tribe, but they can never be elders.

Originally Posted by Apache

Wasn't there an old Buck Rogers episode like this?

Probably. And at least three Star Treks, one in the original series, one in Next Generation, and one in Deep Space Nine.

The “real” Hercules is connected with the Amazons; one of his labors was to bring back their queen's girdle. The Sarmartians might be the source of the Amazon myth; some of their women were buried with weapons and armor.

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

I don't think it every reaches anywhere jungly unless the alternate is highly divergent.

The landforms are almost the same, given the absence of human activities over the last 10,000 years or so. The Knowing Ones don't have any reason to go to most places beyond England on Succubus.

The Chronobahn doesn't have to reach Succubus England. Given access to Succubus, Reich-5 will eventually occupy it, all other things being equal. The basic problem isn't defeating the Knowing Tribe; it is keeping them from running away. Of course, even the dead ones will be valuable...

Originally Posted by Fred Brackin

Other dimensional highways are know as well. One of them allows for female travellers only.

The elders know of it, but rarely use it. The Knowing Ones avoid most worlds with magic or any other evidence of widespread powers they don't have. Basically they prefer worlds that have some kind of English-speaking England, or are so primitive they can pass themselves off as wizards or minor goddesses. Since these are exactly the same kind of worlds Centrum prefers to take over, it is amazing Centrum took so long to find out about the Knowing Ones.

There is one exception: Yrth. They have a pact with an obscure Magical organization there. The tribe performs some tasks for that organization in return for help in getting back Sisters who have misjumped to Yrth and become stranded there. Interface is usually accomplished by a small ship of Aralese construction which appears in the Bristol Channel once or twice a year. Naturally, this is an opportunity for trading, even when there aren't any Lost Sisters returning.

[oldgringo2001]

Well, while I was writing that last post, combatmedic chimed in.

Originally Posted by combatmedic

These women don't like men? They don't like sex? They don't have normal , common human feelings, like love? They have no fathers(none present in their lives), no husbands, no male role models, no male friends, no sons?

Ah, the love that dares not speak its name! Well, at least not where your sisters can hear you. It's all right to like men, even love them—the same way you love a good horse. But one must always remember, they are only men.

There are a very few sons, brothers, and blood-nephews. I said that almost all the women of the tribe could not carry a male fetus to term. I won't have the tribe expose the males as the Greeks accused the Amazons, so I guess they are sort of honorary women. Growing up in a culture of women might make them tend to identify more with women than those strangers with their weird ideas, anyway. And a trustworthy male could come in handy in the rovings.

[combatmedic]

Thousands definitely seems better than millions, in terms of population.

I think it would be more interesting if the rare Succuban males are well aware of the difference between men and women. They are not women, and this should be obvious to any of them. Not only are their brains wired differently (that is true if they are still humans, at any rate), and their hormone levels are quite different, but there are gross anatomical differences.

Do the Succubans breed with the 'native' males? It seems impossible that there should be males among a tribe of women without at least some hanky panky going on at some point.

Maybe the males lack the world jumper ability?

[oldgringo2001]

The males know they are males, but they identify with their own tribe and its culture. Wild males are certainly not to be trusted. The elders hold that no man born into the tribe has ever betrayed it, and since trueborn women outnumber the trueborn men by hundreds to one, there's an excellent chance this is in fact the truth. Besides, the men never go roving alone.

The men do occasionally have children with the women, but most of them feel uncomfortable having sex with their "sisters." They have no moral compunctions about consensual sex with stranger women, but both sexes do know about venereal diseases. Still, it is quite possible that even the few roving men of the tribe of Knowing Sisters have introduced the genes that have given the Warp and World Jumper gifts to some of their unknowing descendants on many other worlds. The tribe may have originated in some Elizabethan England, but for all we know, its Earth might be in the 57th Century now.

[starslayer]

This world would be of huge interest to everyone involved in inter-dimensional travel.

Centrum/infinity would view 'whole planet of warp/jump gifted inter-dimensionally aware' individuals with drooling desire trying to recruit as many to work for them as possible (hopefully the whole planet).

Reigh-5 would view it as a priceless bastion of genetic information; dismantling the gypsies would give them all kinds of information, likely enough to reliably induce warp/jump in there genetic engineering, and provide countless tissue samples for grafting.