Image by Reimund Bertrams from Pixabay

I didn’t expect to be writing about this right now. I knew that I would need this sometime towards the end of the year for my Dr Who campaign, but I had months in hand.

What has brought this forward is the February 2021 Blog Carnival, hosted by the Sea Of Stars RPG Design Journal, which is all about Divine Artifacts like the thunderbolts of Zeus and Mjolnir, the hammer of Thor.

Well, I didn’t have any ideas on tap in that regard, but some of the concepts for weapons within the Omega Archive (AKA The Omega Arsenal) should translate into a Fantasy Milieu without too much difficulty, and from there, it would be a small job to adapt them to be specifically divine – little more than handing them to a divine being or agent, in fact, and maybe tweaking their origin stories to fit the culture of said divine being or agent. The normal sort of things that you have to do in adapting anything from an outside source to fit your campaign, in fact! So it seemed a good fit.

In some cases, the wielder is part and parcel of the weapon in question, and would represent an intruder into, or existing part of, the pantheon; the campaign background would need to grow to encompass the addition, and this might be an existing layer of effort. Only the individual can determine if it’s worth the effort of doing so.

The Omega Archive, AKA The Omega Arsenal

This is a sci-fi concept from televised episodes of Doctor Who, so – for the benefit of anyone who may be unfamiliar with that TV series – some background context is in order.

The protagonist is a Time Lord, which is to say that he’s a citizen of the planet Gallifrey. Not all Gallifreyans are Time Lords, they appear to be some sort of elite order within the population.

For the most part, Time Lords are non-interventionist; they observe history and protect their own lives of privilege, and that’s about it. The Doctor is not like that; he has a strong humanist streak and a firm belief that almost any bad situation can be improved. In particular, he has a fascination for, and a protective instinct toward, the human race.

From time to time, the Council Of Time Lords (elite of the elite) will elect someone with an altruistic turn of mind, and will stir themselves to meddle in the affairs of others. More often, though, they will be stirred into action when it’s necessary to protect themselves from outside threats.

From relatively early on, they started confiscating doomsday weapons of sufficient magnitude that they could threaten the existence of Gallifrey if deployed against them. They keep these in the Omega Arsenal, also referred to as the Omega Archive.

The story goes that in due course, there will be a Time War between Gallifrey and the Daleks (the Doctor’s greatest enemies) which will engulf all of time and space. In the course of that war, the Gallifreyans will utilize every one (bar one) of the weapons that they had forbidden to others, violated every one of their moral principles, broken every ethical rule that they had ever espoused – and still, the Daleks were on the verge of a fairly Pyrrhic victory (because there was virtually nothing left).

To prevent this, the protagonist, who had committed his own share of moral and ethical violations according to his own personal standards, took the last of those weapons from the Omega Archive and turned it on both sides.

This weapon, named The Moment, was so powerful that it had developed sentience and a moral code of its own – which is why it had not been deployed by the Time Lords, there was too great a chance that it would turn on the wielder (especially given the way the Time Lords had debased themselves).

The Doctor persuaded the Moment to exile both races from reality, sealing them into Time-locked stasis, and in effect rebooting the universe to what it might have been without either race (both have attempted to escape from this fate since, with varying degrees of success, it must be noted).

But to punish the Doctor, the Moment decreed that he would survive the experience and become the last of his kind, and have to bear the weight of his deeds.

So that sets an upper limit to the power of the objects emplaced within the Omega Archive: the most powerful of them are capable of restructuring all of reality. Not much of a limit, is it?

The lower limit is defined by the Time Lords themselves – the absolute masters of time, able to manipulate it as they see fit, they nevertheless had to see these objects as a threat. So all of them are going to need to be “Cosmic” in scope to some degree.

The Sources

The rebooted TV series has all this in its background; the protagonist is the last Time Lord, wandering the universe and trying to live with his past misdeeds, and – in some small way – atone. It all takes place in the rebooted reality created by The Moment, in other words.

In the course of his interactions with others, in particular those with another survivor of the Time War (who was specifically created by the morally-bankrupt Time Lords as a back door into victory and universal domination), the protagonist has named some of the contents of the Omega Archive. That was my starting point. In most cases, no information has been given about them – it’s simply been a name dropped into the conversation.

There have been lists generated by both Fans of the show and the writers of the contents; but for the most part, I found these to be uninspiring and conceptually too limp to be useful.

The Vortex Of War Campaign

My current Dr Who campaign is telling the story of the beginnings of the Time War, from the perspective of the Protagonist. While completely non-canonical, it nevertheless works hard at ‘fitting’ established canon, at least up to a point – that being the advent of the current incarnation of the protagonist (it has long been established that the protagonist is not above distorting the truth to suit his own ends, so any small discrepancy between events within the TV series and the RPG campaign are easily explained).

Since the Time War is to be central to the campaign, and the Omega Arsenal is central to the Time War, it behooves me to create a more impressive catalog of the contents.

Starting with the named entries from the TV show – the canonical ones – I let my imagination run wild and generated a list of thirty. They may be more – in fact, the current adventure (called the Omicron Derivative) relates to a super-weapon that the Doctor will have no choice but to store in the Archive, where time is frozen.

The Plan

I want these to be more than just a list of names. I was not afraid to dump items from the list that were insufficiently inspiring – I want to at least describe the item in conceptual terms (but not in game mechanics). These items are all to be powerful enough to pose an existential threat to beings of divine power level.

From past experience, I know that after a while, the imagination grows fatigued and its output is – shall we say, less than inspired? – so I don’t propose to write up all 30 in one hit. I also have limited time available – I was unwell this morning, and so chose to sleep later than usual.

If I can get 15 done, there will be one more post in this chain, and I’ll be over the moon. If I can get about 10 done, I’ll be more than satisfied, and there will be two more subsequent posts. If I can only get 6-8 done, I won’t be dissatisfied, and there will be three or four more posts over the next several months. I’m planning to play it by ear, and very much use today’s post to set a standard for how much I can get done in a reasonable time frame from a standing start.

The Process & The Contents

In each part of the series, I’ll include the full list, showing which entries are included in that post, which have previously been done (and in which part of the series), and those that remain outstanding.

These are not in the sequence in which the ideas came to me, I’ve sorted them alphabetically. Which means that I no longer have any idea which ones are Canon and which are not. That means that my first step has to be a google search for the name. But if canon exists, and seems too tame, I intend to freely disregard it, and will create something from whole cloth. I have definite ideas for some of these, some of which will take longer than others to write up, so there will be some variation from post to post.

This section, and an updated version of its contents list, will be replicated in each subsequent post.

Incorporating these existential threats into an existing campaign: how to use these ideas

These devices, should they come to be present or even possible in an existing campaign, pose so great a threat that they will become – at least for a time – the focal point of the campaign. This shouldn’t happen overnight; there should be a gradual buildup. There should be forebodings and dire oracles, perhaps for as much as a year before manifestation takes place.

The reasoning behind that last point is simple: Players aren’t used to such things. The more immediate you make the threat seem, and the bigger in scale, the more immediately they will expect something to happen. When that shoe doesn’t drop, and the warnings continue (growing more and more dire and certain), the magnitude of the perceived threat, and the ominous weight that it holds, will grow. In two words, the presence of the weapon in the campaign will loom and it will menace.

Of course, this is writing cheques that your GMing ability might not be able to cash – so you should always have an Epic-Quest plotline in mind centering around the arrival/presence/usage of the weapon, and you should ALWAYS have an exit strategy, a way out of this mess for the PCs to work towards.

These should never be a casual drop-in. They are too dangerous for that. They are all potential campaign-killers.

The current contents of the Omega Archive are listed below. Entries that are covered in today’s post will be in bold; entries that are still to be written will be in Italics.

IN PART ONE:

1. The Anima Device
2. The Anvil of The Photosphere
3. The Arc Of Nestrus
4. The Blue Bowl of Xiphilxus
5. The Cortex Realignment
6. The Could-Have-Been King and his army of Might-Have-Beens and Never-Weres

AND STILL TO COME:

7. The Cipher Plague of Dantus V
8. The Entanglement Grenade
9. The Festival Of Delphaeus
10. The Gauss Lock
11. The Greater Key
12. The Gridwyrm
13. The Halo Field
14. The Lord Of Travesties
15. The Meteorite Funnel
16. The Moment
17. The Nanodust Collective
18. The Nightnare Child
19. The Orphaned Hour
20. The Parallel Cannon
21. The Perspective Cannon
22. The Proton Shell
23. The Pyrovore Effector
24. The Singularity Locket
25. The Skaro Degradations
26. The Stellar Catapult
27. The Sword Of Eternity
28. The Tear of Isha
29. The Wormhole Reflection
30. The Time-Gun of Rassilon

The Anima Device

This fiendish creation of an insane Time Lord was one of the seeds that led to the creation of the Omega Arsenal in the first place, back when it was the Omega Archive, and the whole idea was to keep the contents out of circulation. It appears to be a slightly-oversized chrome-metallic skull mask, from the sides of which project a number of articulated mechanical tentacles, which give it independent mobility. It’s very appearance has been known to induce fits of unreasoning terror in those predisposed to arachnophobia. These tentacles are never still; they writhe constantly, and it is suggested that the GM emulate this writhing with his hands whenever speaking of the Device.

It uses its tentacles to grab hold of a target at the same time as the skull rotates itself horizontally to face in the same direction as the face of the target, and the back opens up like the opening of two mechanical doors. The skull then enfolds the head of the target and triggers.

It explores the past of the victim at the rate of about a second per decade of past life. It then winnows through every choice ever made by the target, following the path of alternative lives – any choice that leads to greater power, or to the exact opposite in morality and motivation (alignment, in D&D terms) is acceptable. When it has found the most powerful possible version of the antithesis of the target, it constructs a simulacrum of that being out of living metal and infuses it with the mind, experience, and life-force of the alternate-world version of the target. It then releases the victim and leaves him to face the most extreme version of his polar opposite while it looks for another victim.

To gain raw materials for its duplicates, it absorbs all metals that it comes across and stores these in a subspace pocket in its internal structure. This often means that the victim has to face his enemy unarmed, to make matters for him even worse. It will also drain any power source that it encounters to perpetuate itself and its activities. If it runs out of power, it will simply run down, like a clock that needs to be wound – but when next exposed to a power supply, it will reactivate.

The duplicates have a life-span of 1 hour for every year of life absorbed from the alternate timeline. Once it has dispatched its source, for which it will immediately have an unreasoning hatred, it will proceed to do whatever it can to achieve its’ perverted ambitions, unaware of the (relative) brevity of its lifespan. Since time lords are effectively immortal, this makes the Device an especially dangerous threat to them.

But its greatest threat is this: it does not discriminate between friend and foe – it simply seizes the closest target. It this poses an even greater threat to the wielder as it does to the wielder’s enemy, and the only certain outcome from its creation or deployment is destruction. It is, however, the perfect Doomsday Weapon.

Canon Notes: This was named canonically as a part of the Omega Arsenal. Two audio books give a quite different interpretation of what it is and what it does. I think my version is much scarier, more unique, and more interesting. Refer The Anima Device to compare for yourself.

The Anvil of The Photosphere

This appears to be a small, dense spiderweb, perhaps 2.5 meters in diameter. It draws power from sunlight, and is capable of doing so at a minimal level from even distant stars. It is drawn to the most intense such source, which is usually the closest star if it is released within a solar system.

As it approaches, it accelerates, and grows by absorbing fundamental particles output as part of the solar radiation, until it is about 1/3 of the diameter of the star across (1/3 of the diameter of Earth’s Sun is about 232,000 km). At the same time, the distance between ‘joins’ inflates.

When large enough, and close enough, it strips the star it faces of it’s third dimension, rendering it a flat planar 2-dimensional object, and compressing it’s total solar output into a beam of intense energy that can destroy an entire planet in seconds. This condition is unsustainable; in effect the core of the star is directly exposed; it is usually confined and compressed by gravity. As a result, the star immediately becomes a Nova (or Supernova), which destroys any remaining solid body in the solar system, especially in the habitable or “Goldilocks” zone (outer planets may or may not survive).

It also tears the Anvil into multiple smaller pieces, which contract and are propelled at something close to the speed of light out into deep space; most will simply break down due to a lack of power and become waste matter, but a few will come sufficiently close to another star that the process will continue. In time, whole galaxies can be destroyed as the “stellar infection” becomes a plague.

It is not known how long it takes for a moribund segment of Anvil to become permanently inert; it follows that once deployed, no control can be assured, no matter what precautions are taken, no matter how the target is isolated. Use this once, anywhere, it will linger and lurk in the vastness of interplanetary space in perpetuity, from which it may eventually re-emerge to threaten the galaxy.

If deployed close to the galactic core, this could trigger chains and clusters of Supernovae, potentially threatening all life within that galaxy. Even if deployed in one of the galactic arms, it may eventually migrate from star to star to such a critical location.

Canon Notes: This is a completely original creation.

The Arc Of Nestrus

Mathematics aren’t usually directly dangerous – dangers usually stem from the interpretations of mathematics by engineers. But Nestrus wasn’t any ordinary mathematician, and he formulated a mathematical concept so tightly integrated with the fundamental concepts of reality that his creation directly reorders reality in an expanding wave front from the point of expounding. This has multiple effects – physical, social, biological, chemical, subatomic, and fundamental.

Upon encountering the arc of the wavefront, physical matter distorts as though it were being seen in a fun-house mirror. Matter flows like a dense liquid, no matter what it is made of. This totally disrupts any electronics, of course. The wavefront soon passes, but the consequences of its transformation linger; reality resembles a Daliesque painting wherever the arc has been.

Social structures are reflections of the neural functioning of the beings populating the social structure, an emergent property of the way people think. At a fundamental level, then, the wave front distorts the structure of thought; survivors (and there won’t be many) are inevitably wildly insane by any standard. Other mental effects will also be experienced as a direct consequence; memories become scrambled and partially inaccessible, and fantasies and imaginings become reality to the individual’s perceptions. Morals and ethics may cease to apply, or may be perverted.

Biological Processes are also bound by the underlying physics of biology, which can be described mathematically and symbolically, and these processes are distorted by the reality alteration. In some cases, sufficient resemblance between the processes that were may persist to enable life of some sort to continue, but at least 70% will die, and the biochemical processes of the survivors – indeed their very genetic codes – will have been distorted by the wave front.

Chemical processes are dependent on the configuration of electrons at the atomic scale; nuclei and subatomic processes define an element, but it is the electrons that dictate the chemical reactions that define the properties of the element. These are likewise distorted, but will generally attempt to revert to a stable structure, emitting electromagnetic radiation and/or electrical current flows in the process. All matter becomes electrically charged and radioactive, however briefly. This will kill 30% or more of those who survive the initial transformation. Most macro structures will be transformed – they may become salt or salt-water, liquids may boil and freeze at the same time, and so on.

In part, those effects are due to subatomic transfigurations. Iron may become a rubbery liquid, water a superconductor. The effects are completely unpredictable.

Finally, the fundamental forces that define and bind physics to reality, such as the force of gravity, are also disturbed and distorted. This compounds with the other effects described in unpredictable ways. Copper may explode in a nuclear detonation, Oxygen may experience spontaneous nuclear fusion, or these effects may occur in other materials and substances, triggered by failures or strengthenings of the forces that bind nuclei together, and attract or repel other nuclei. This, of course, includes the biological matter that makes up the individual. Only a minuscule fraction of those who have survived everything else will survive this effect. What’s more, there is a high probability that some of these relationships will be permanently altered, which in turn will alter universal constants such as the speed of light. Reality itself is redefined in a Chaotic way.

Only complete isolation from surrounding space-time – something that doesn’t occur naturally – will halt the spread of this effect, the perpetuation of this wave-front.

So dangerous is this mathematical structure that the name itself has been disguised by the Archive Directory, lest it give clues as to the underlying mathematics; the name is a deliberate misnomer. This is another of those Doomsday Weapons that should NEVER be deployed.

Canon Notes: This is a completely original creation.

The Blue Bowl of Xiphilxus

Xiphilxus was an artist, scientist, and artisan on Lyros-II. He noticed the effect of a good photograph to fascinate, even enrapture, and of lesser photographs inability to do so. He also noted the power of the heavens to do likewise.

He extrapolated these effects to determine that the most perfect representation possible would enrapture the viewer for all of time. Such perfection was beyond his reach, but he devised a means to approach it using a self-improving representation.

His intent was to produce an artifact that would be spiritually uplifting, and at first, it worked; those who beheld the beauty of what he captured on the interior of a blue hemisphere were filled with an appreciation for the universe and their place in it, and the potential for their species to be a part of it. Criminals were reformed and filled with a new appreciation for society, and their personal potential. And all the while, the process embedded in the base of the 72-inch blue-black bowl continued to refine and more perfectly capture the celestial view within.

Soon people realized that the more deeply and intently the bowl was examined, the deeper and more profound the experience, and that the heavens depicted were more wonderful and perfect than human hands could create; surely, this was a mirror that held the reflection of divinity. The bowl became the central instrument of religion amongst Xiphilxus’ people, and still the process worked to perfect the sense of oneness with creation imparted by the bowl.

After two hundred years or more, people started staring at the bowl with such adoration that they forgot to eat or drink until they died. There were demands amongst those not of a religious orientation for the bowl to be destroyed. A war ensued, the last great Holy War of Lyros-II. The forces of religion and zealotry prevailed, though it was a close-run thing, by parading the bowl in front of the unbelievers, who forthwith were recruited into the theologists’ camp.

And still the process of refinement continued, until it reached the point of so overwhelming those who perceived it that they died immediately from the sheer beauty. With social systems and engineering failing for lack of attention, because all anyone could stare at was the bowl, the people of Lyros-II died. But the bowl lingered, becoming ever more perfect, for year after year, until even it’s image was sufficient to kill, instantly. Explorers and Conquerors and Historians found it, one after another, and died. But some transmitted images of the bowl home before succumbing, and those populations, also perished. So beautiful was the bowl that it was surrounded by a zone of death 122 light-years in diameter, when the Time Lords learned of it.

One of the Gallifreyan coming-of-age rituals involved gazing into the Untempered Schism of Reality, the temporal vortex along which they traveled. This had profound effects on their psychology – refer Untempered Schism in the Tardis Data Core. “Some would be inspired, some would run away, and some would go mad.” Having experienced the beauty of the totality of the universe in one way already, and survived with their sanity (mostly) intact, Gallifreyans were amongst the few beings who could apprehend the bowl and survive; with the arrogance and sense of self-entitlement that results from being ‘One Of Time’s Chosen’, they promptly claimed it for themselves, but realized that as it became ever-closer to perfection, even their ability to resist it would eventually weaken, leading them to store it in the Omega Archive for safe keeping.

Like the Untempered Schism, the impact of the bowl (or a less-perfect image of the bowl) is a psychological one that changes with the mindset of the viewer. Some perceive the universe reflected within as something that can be conquered, some are humiliated and diminished by it, others are enraptured, and a few experience a metaphysical awakening. Racial predisposition plays a major part; cybermen simply relate to its’ efficiency, Daleks become even more megalomaniacal. No-one is unaffected.

Canon Notes: This is a completely original creation.

The Cortex Realignment

Ever heard of a meme going viral? Ever heard of a thought taking hold on a population? Then, however dimly, you’ve heard of the Cortex Realignment. This locates the dominant social irrelevancy on the galactic comm channels and force-feeds it to your brain. And then the next. And the one after that. And still another. And then…. well, you get the idea.

These are impossible to ignore, because they get processed directly by your built-in neural network. It’s as though you have had this original thought that is completely fascinating and compelling. By the time you’ve started to get your mind back onto whatever you were supposed to be doing, the next such thought is being force-fed directly into your cortex.

Of course, the fact that some of these might be directly contradictory, and yet both seem to be your idea, creates additional layers of confusion. If under the influence of the Cortex Realignment for too long, all your opinions and capacity for individual thinking drown in a morass of confusion.

The Realignment itself looks extremely harmless – a small comm-pad, it fits in the palm of the hand. News-feeds and expressed opinions whistle from bottom to top of the screen too fast to be individually read. The device itself is a psionic machine that selects the ‘hot’ trending opinion or meme from this feed faster than human perceptions can grasp them.

And it’s completely indiscriminate – everyone in range gets blasted. The only way to shut it down is to remotely surround it with a shielding barrier that cuts it off from its news sources, or to shut down all galactic communications for long enough to get it into such a shielded enclosure; the two are about as difficult, given the range of the device, which is planetary-plus.

Canon Notes: This is a completely original creation.

The Could-Have-Been King
and his army of Might-Have-Beens and Never-Weres

Inevitably, in any branching space-time, there will be universes which evolve creatures that wreak total destruction within their local realities.

There once was a reasonably-gifted military commander, who felt himself entitled to higher office, and sought out parallel timelines to justify that belief. He found that in many time-lines, he ascended to royal office, and that his rule was always an unmitigated disaster for one reason or another – generally, because he was not as gifted a ruler or administrator or judge of character as he was a military commander. Rebuked and chastened and infuriated and fascinated, all at the same time, he began to refer to himself as “The Could-Have-Been King” and formed a mercenary organization with himself as its supreme commander and strategist.

While he started with a small company of citizens from his own cadre who were personally loyal to him, he sought out from alternative realities the worst of these creatures that – by virtue of this reality still being vibrant and alive – never evolved here, and recruited them, something that was only possible because the Time Lords had enabled cross-time traffic. With them gone, the natural boundaries between space-times prevent anyone from replicating this deed.

Using his own mastery of the subject, the Could-Have-Been King was able to ensure the personal loyalty to him of the last survivors of these Might-Have-Been races.

There are also timelines in which creatures evolved that ensured their own non-existence; these are known as “Never-weres”, and when he had several Might-Have-Beens as his subjects, the Could-Have-Been King branched out and started rescuing examples to add to his nightmare coalition. One of these, the Enfolders, permitted him to carry his entire militia in extra-dimensional pockets within his being, releasing them as the tactical situation demanded. His legion was the stuff of nightmares.

Unfortunately, the Time Lords also policed the migration of beings from one space-time to another, and what the Could-Have-Been King was doing went way beyond anything that they considered tolerable. They determined to trap his entire Legion in the Omega Archive, the only place from which this space-time would be safe from them, but because of the Enfolders, they had no choice but to imprison the Could-Have-Been King with his ‘subjects’, in a frozen instant of time. So they did.

Canon Notes: This is a semi-canonical creation, with the differences being relatively minor and stemming from interpretation. The original TV series refers to “The Could’ve Been King” and his “Army of Meanwhiles and Neverweres” – except that when I listened to the episode in question, I heard “might-have-beens,” not “meanwhiles”. The phrasing states explicitly that the King led this army on behalf of the Time Lords in the Time War, but the phrasing suggested to me that the King was already the leader of the army; certainly, there’s a thematic connection between a “Might-Have-Been King” and the members of such an Army.

“The Dangerous Book Of Monsters” (See “Link Note” below) is an official BBC publication that is intended to be a reference to the most dangerous creatures to appear in the (rebooted) TV series. It dedicates a page to “Neverweres”, describing them as “creatures that should never have existed, built from pieces of evolution that never happened.”

A Doctor Who comic, which is less canonical as a source, proposes “Never-weres” (note the addition of the hyphen) as creatures from an alternate reality that have resulted from divergent evolution.

There’s something very “through the looking-glass” about the whole concept to me, and that has also played a part in formulating the concept described above, which takes all the official material I had access to (and some that isn’t) and runs with it.

Link-Note: Link is to the book’s Amazon page, I get a small commission if you buy. US$21.36 for the paperback, but the hardcover is cheaper and there are more copies.

….and I’m right out of time. By the time this post is uploaded and formatted and published, it will already be late. Look for another in this series in four-to-six weeks!