Dead Black Planet | An Introduction & Some Player Origins
Dead Black Planet Black Sword HackReceived my copy of the Black Sword Hack a few weeks ago and it really resonated with me. Typically (for the publisher) high production values and a mix of influences that line up really well with my own. I've had an idea for a setting inspired by a bit of worldbuilding from China Mieville's The Scar and the Electric Wizard classic Funeralopolis.
The elevator pitch: a world populated almost completely by the undead, complete with a dead ur-god at the center, ruled by mummies in enormous pyramids, ever growing, ever building. The labor, a resource ever in short supply, fed by a steady stream of zombies and Frankensteins. The low end of the societal totem pole would be the vampire, forced to feed on insects and vermin with so few humans around.
Such a world would be a magnet for weird scientists, necromancers, and resurrectionists of all stripes. The never-ending Great Works of the Pharohs that forever rule the Dead Black Planet would also necessarily be rich and thus the planet could be a clearinghouse for any amount of weirdness that commerce brings.
I like the weird science of the BSH and I think that is probably the level at which things operate on the Dead Black Planet. There is very little science fiction here. Travellers from other worlds may arrive but it's unlikely that players in a game I would run here would ever set foot on a spaceship.
The setting I imagine would accomodate much of the other business you find in the BSH (Stormbringer-style enchanted weaponry, low-fantasy adventure, the Fae, Demons, & spirits).
Anyway, here are d20 player origins for Dead & Undead characters native to the Dead Black Planet.
| Roll | You live on the black planet as |
|---|---|
| 1 | A shambling corpse born out of the swamps, more mushroom than man |
| 2 | A dead man’s mind, preserved in a indestructible man-shaped fishbowl |
| 3 | A revenant, sent back from hell as an agent of a great demon |
| 4 | A promethean man, stitched together out of corpses by mad science to labor endlessly |
| 5 | An impoverished vampire, scuttling in the earth for the blood of rats |
| 6 | A pristine and powerful member of the pharaonic class, the preserved relic of a great king |
| 7 | One of the fleshless, a skeleton speaking through a raspy mechanical pendant kept around your neck |
| 8 | A ghost or radioactive echo of an interdimensional traveller, possessing a statue or a suit of armor |
| 9 | A forgotten god of a long abandoned underworld, nearly powerless |
| 10 | One of the natives of the planets, an oversized dog man who feeds on carrion |
| 11 | An immune, one of the blessed who cannot be raised after death, but whose flesh and blood represent an unbearable delicacy |
| 12 | A luckless visitor, killed and immediately put to work as a spaceport janitor |
| 13 | One of the plague carrying Nosferatu, lower than dirt, friend only to rats |
| 14 | A corpse rotted almost to a sticky black tar, with a rolling gait and a painful craving for human brains |
| 15 | A nameless one, waking in the great cairns with no memory of your past life |
| 16 | A chimera, a dead creature with a turtle shell, or dragonfly wings, or cloven hoofs |
| 17 | A lich, with a phlactery made of lead or gold, driven mad by an inability to sleep or dream |
| 18 | A necromancer, fallen prey to hungry vampires, on a quest to understand the secrets of the Dead Black Planet |
| 19 | A scholar spirit, dragged from world to world until landing here, the one planet in the galaxy where cataloging past experiences is a literally never-ending task |
| 20 | A saint, matyred, and awoken here to their great dismay |