Stargate: The gritty reboot

Hello Veeky Forums, I need help fleshing out a setting I'm working on: Inspired by Stargate, but with a universe inspired by Lovecraft. The US government has recovered a gateway in time and space from a doomsday cult, nobody knows how to close it and none of the places it leads are good. Aggressive, amoral Darwinist invertebrate parasites are the dominant form of intelligent life in the universe and Earth is a world of bizarre aberration, albeit aberration that produces excellent host organisms as evidenced by the colonies of abducted humans sent as tribute by various cults that have sprung up across the inhabited cosmos.

I've been studying up on parasitic crustaceans and the like, but I'd like your thoughts on what the poor JSOC bastards sent to the variety of horrible destinations Farside to scope out potential threats and bring back useful artifacts will face.

As far as "why don't they just close it?", at first they can't, or even control where it connects to, and later they learn that it wouldn't be a good idea: The gate creates an effective choke-point for all portal traffic coming to earth (inspiring over a hundred esoteric cults to either seek its destruction or capture) and that it can connect instantly and safely to any other gateway in existence without time-dilation or limited time open. This is why the gods of the powerful, predatory empire that lost it in a seemingly safe gamble for a new capitol world and machine-clever servitor race badly wants it back, as do their ambitious would-be rivals. and they're coming here through the much less efficient network of one-way portals and dangerous border-worlds that connects everyone else to claim it, even if they have to just hop to somewhere relatively close and just eat the cost of building starships for the last leg of the journey.

Other urls found in this thread:

lmgtfy.com/?q=The Objective
projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/worldbuilding.php#rocheworld
youtube.com/watch?v=6QFwo57WKwg
what-if.xkcd.com/136/
twitter.com/AnonBabble

Will you flesh out the reetou?

Inspired, not a continuation of, altough I never did watch SG-1 in order and hadn't heard of these guys, thanks. I may use them as inspiration.

Stargate should have been darker, more like Aliens than the comedy tv show.

Question:
How far do these gateways span? Are we talking local galactic clusters, our universe or full on realms-behind-the-stars level of crazy?

How safe/secure are these guys going to be when they go through? And WHY are they going through? What is inspiring them to basically alert the universe that 'YO, HUMANS THIS WAY'?

So, basically Eclipse Phase?

You will want to read "A Colder War". It will help you.

Did Strauss ever follow up with that, or is the Laundry series the closest he got?

The visible universe potentially, it hijacks any technological, mystical, or natural portal near enough to a star on command, although the library of adresses only contains most of the Milky Way at start and is mostly solar systems that the previous owners thought might contain habitable worlds (broadly compatible with our definition) or were otherwise useful or interesting. Under the right conditions the very distant past, future, and nasty alternate universes could be accessed as well.

Not at all. By "safe" I mean the journey itself won't kill them, beyond that it's bullets, wits, and kevlar against OH GOD I CAN FEEL ITS VOICES BEHIND MY EYES.

At first just for the sake of exploration, having no idea what they're dealing with: Later, by deciphering cult writings and bringing back intelligence, they start learning the truth: the previous owners, the top dog among vicious alien empires in the known Milky Way, sent it to Earth in a gamble to gain a new resource-rich capitol world and billions of these "human" servitors they'd heard so much about, using the psychic potential of the human cultists who contacted them to shunt the gate to a world outside the charted network of portals, worlds-between-worlds, and laboriously slow Starship routes (They found the Gate on their current prime world, and you can't send a gate through a gate without dismantling or shutting it down, and neither was an option here). This backfired, and now the monkeys have it and their ambitious would-be rivals have learned of it through prophets and spies, meaning that they have to race to reclaim the Gate of Gates, the crown jewel of their Throneworld and the key to their dominance, before someone else does. Incidentally, this means Earth has to brace for something like 6 different competing alien invasions and inserting head into sand is not a viable strategy.

Set in the modern day without the transhumanism and post-apocalyptic elements, yes.

One of my main inspirations, although here nukes wouldn't be quite as ineffective. The Laundry is the closest we ever got. A Colder War basically ended with mankind losing everything and survivors huddling on a dead world while K'Thulu gorges itself on the souls of humanity, not much sequel potential.

More like the original movie would have been nice, more of the "New XCOM in the early game" desperation of that first firefight from the pillars room and less "let's build our won starships while maintaining the secrecy of the program somehow".

Shit is going to go very bad the first time the team encounters a non-corporeal entity, or some sort of intelligent virus.

I'm curious as to how they manage to keep their facility under their own control.

Unless the joke is that it isn't, and that quickly after its implementation it was taken over by some greater power that is using them for nefarious purposes.

At some point parts of the government are going to be subverted, by outside powers or infiltration by native cultists.

Initially containment would consist of lots of soldiers in MOP suits manning emplaced guns deep inside the Cheyenne Mountain Complex, but we don't just have technology to rely on. The Farside Recon program will pretty quickly absorb the existing Men In Black-ish agencies and we'll start seeing CIA-recruited sorcerers and psychic Green Berets from the Armies Enhanced Soldier program leading expeditions and designing defenses. I'm also tempted to work in some Biblical mythology and elementalist Western Esotericism, at the risk of straying dangerously close to pure Derlith considering that most other intelligent species have some kind of godlike originator or patron, and humans are just so different from literally everything else I've envisioned. Mostly because I actually kind of liked The Objective and wanted to work in a friendly Djinn task-force for exactly such a scenario, and I love lovecraftian angels of the wheels-within-wheels hundred-hands/thousand-eyes variety.

>The Objective

Good taste, brotherman.

Depending on how dark you want your setting, I wouldn't put the possibility past that each recon team is essential a single-burn use. They get sent, record all their data and send the results back and are just left on the other side, to minimise the risk of infection and contagion.

Which will be great, until they encounter memetic dangers.

What is The Objective? Googling a name like that is pointless

That's a good point. If unmanned probes fail, I could see the early missions doing that under unscrupulous blackest-ops supervision. Later when they figure out that giving away information on Earth and examples of human weapons technology is sort of a bad idea, they'll have to go back and attempt recovery missions.

Movie, very heavy on the Delta Green feel. IMDB it.

lmgtfy.com/?q=The Objective

A movie.

>they'll have to go back and attempt recovery missions.

Fuck a duck, that'd make for a hell of a session. Going back to a pre-explored environment, only to find that it has radically changed in response to the last team struggling to survive and the environment reacting to that.

Fuck, a final fight against human operatives that have gone native with lovecraftian entities.

The best part is that humanities only relative advantage, discounting magic, is technology. Technology that the other intelligent races have mostly not developed entirely because most organic life can change drastically to respond to a different environment, especially when directed by an intelligent host. One of the reason human slaves are so sought-after is their instincts for tool-use and the original abductees skills for metallurgy and building (this is a factor in some of the would-be rival empires surviving: an agreement to not let human servitors with knowledge fall into the hands of the Predator Empire and keeping the building of stone forts and metal weapons for themselves to help even the balance just slightly. Of course this makes everyone want to get to Earth even more...). This means that not only are the recovery teams going to be facing at least a few subverted special operations soldiers now controlled by alien puppeteers, but the rest of the natives may very well be pointing muskets at them instead of squirting acid from their mandibles or rushing into close combat.

>but the rest of the natives may very well be pointing muskets at them instead of squirting acid from their mandibles or rushing into close combat.

Fuck that, go full on Tuckers Kobolds with them. Unique traps, falling into concealed pits full of parasitic ooze, snares linked to exploding soul jars.

>Stargate
>Gritty
Fuck off

Also, the series stopped being worth watching regularly somewhere around 5th season, if not sooner. Still, not a material for "gritty" sci-fi. It was always pure kitsch and they were aware of it.

Weaponizing hostile environments, I like it. I'm going to have to feature a few worlds inhabited by planet-covering Man-O'-War-esque organisms or intelligent clouds of carnivorous hive-microbes to fill in the 10% of intelligent life that isn't some kind of brain-hijacker. Any encounters with non-corporeal entities without the backing of a sorcerer or something like a Djinn are going to end up looking a lot like Spectral, except you don't get plasma weapons and only maybe the goggles.

Read the thread.

Stargate-inspired. I loved the original show for being what it was, but in a less kind universe the concept has a lot of room for horror.

>In an alien environment.
>Weird fungus like growths in the distance, looks like a mushroom forest
>Low hanging clouds, looks like rain in the distance, don't want to be here when that hits.
>Ruins that look like they were grown surrounding the portal entrance.
>Don't notice the clouds slowly sinking lower as we explore the flesh-ruins.
>First moment we notice something wrong is when Russell starts screaming. Sgt. cuts off his comm-channel damn fast, don't need to hear that shit.
>We can all see him now.
>He's being hauled into the air on razor fine tendrils
>The fucking clowds have opened up.
>Their 'mouths' are just dark pits
>I can see the stars in their stomachs

It seems pretty hopeless, like what's the point?
This is just my personal feelings on those certain themes in games and movies and while I enjoy watching them from an outside perspective I don't feel very into it when someone says "roll up a dang ol character and prepare to be canon fodder and die".
I think someone mentioned that each expedition is one way? What's the fun in that.

At least in SG-1 They had a goal of looking for allies against the bad guys and had their fair share of setbacks and defeats like that black hole episode always freaked me out.

This is just my opinion and something to consider for audiences that aren't down with the grim horror prepare for mind death 24/7.
Sometimes us vanilla types like positivity and a goal that can be accomplished.

Feel free to throw this in the trash if you have a theme and player base in mind chief.


Now, I do think the setting sounds awesome and I do wish you the best of luck at it and hope you post a version for everyone to enjoy in the future.

OP here, thanks for your input. In the same boat, actually: I love works that contrast hope and optimism against darkness and horror. In this case I'm very much considering working in old biblical mythology and Western occultism: Humanity is different because we were made that way by a being from a top-tier race of sundwelling Boltzmann Brains normally reclusive and solitary in the extreme, our planet so from a universe connected by a hodgepodge of gateways between worlds and stars because it was built that way over 7 billion years, to not just be isolated but inimical to Gate connections until the stars came right again.

Of course, things went awry, a planet turned into an asteroid belt and a wandering rock smashing into Earth, resetting the clock and producing a moon and a tilted axis, the ready-made garden on Mars drying up, colonists who had to be persuaded to leave over a million years of psychic war, a senseless meteor taking out the first wave to really get somewhere, but still we are loved.

Because even if our parent is slumbering in the heart of Wolf 359 for another 500,000 years, there are ageless, formless protectors still stationed beyond the magnetic field of Earth with swords of pure radiation, and even the one, once chief among them, who railed against the insane importance given to such small creatures and was cast down among them and set to test their will has come to care for us in its own way. If nothing else, though, technology and magic are two sides of the same coin, and where there's a nation of engineers there's a wizard in a cave

Of course, failing all else, we got the bomb.

i love the basic idea, but my first question was: if Earth is a bizarre aberration, and everything else in the universe is invertebrate parasites - what do all those parasites eat when they can't get human? what did they evolve to eat?

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Also Missile Gap. Specifically, the scenes with explorers on the barren alternate earths.

>unmanned probes fail
>gone native with lovecraftian entities

I liked that humanity made improvements to tech as the series went on, and getting a starship was the inevitable consequence of that.

I think the problem was more that the creators didn't end it at the right time. After the Goauld were defeated, there was no point in introducing yet another extremely advanced race of aliens masquerading as gods.

I LOVED THE VOID!

>masquerading
They were gods, though. They *actually* had powers and shit, they fit the description of basically every god except the Christian/Jewish/Muslim god. And if you stretch a bit, their kind did create man.

I loved that movie, loved it.

Also, if you learned about parasitic crustaceans on Veeky Forums, I'm fairly certain it was from one of my posts.

So, how physics-complying must their destinations be?

What the fuck am I looking at here?

projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/worldbuilding.php#rocheworld
>Rocheworld is an exceptionally fine example of extreme worldbuilding by Robert L. Forward. The twin planets are so close that their atmosphere commingles. You can actually travel from one planet to the other by airplane!

So artistic license as fuck? The red one looks like Mars and has no atmosphere and the blue one looks like Neptune.

Hellboy and the BRPD spinoffs are a good source for how Lovecraftian infection and cults might work, and how a military force handles it. BRPD: Hell on Earth especially has tons of neat ideas for an organization desperately holding back a lovecraftian apocalypse.

>how physics-complying must their destinations be
Are the destinations even in the same physical universe as us, just light-years from earth or somewhere/something even more alien?

youtube.com/watch?v=6QFwo57WKwg

This thread is fucking great.

>I wouldn't put the possibility past that each recon team is essential a single-burn use. They get sent, record all their data and send the results back and are just left on the other side, to minimize the risk of infection and contagion.

A possible twist, the Gate doesn't actually transmit matter, it duplicates it at the destination. This gets exploited. Reusable suicide missions and if the explorers ever find a barren but safe alien environment, they can keep sending themselves back to earth and create a clone army.

>a barren but safe alien environment

At least once, the explorers find a garden world, arriving at night. Sunrise is surprising to say the least, even if the Solar Angler doesn't actually do anything but float in space, occupying half the sky.

I've wanted to do a Stargate reboot game of some kind for a long time. Good luck, OP. You'll have to tell us how it goes.

Or this:
what-if.xkcd.com/136/
Little suns all over the planet. And the planet itself orbits a gigantic spider.

yeah this setting needs other specially-bred slave races. but they're just too stupid and bulky or chosen for "spiritual purity" or some Xel'Naga-y (Starcraft) quota like that. maybe the only smart ones they have breed really slow, and slavery slowly renders host species docile and outmoded. humans are prone to forming strong psychic hives in groups of 3 to 10, but when you go higher than that there a 500% chance of melding and erratic behaviour, which is just delicious to outworlders.
maybe the slavers sloughed off "unnecessary features" and became full-time parasites gradually?