GODSTAR - a Science Fantasy Civilization Quest

With the War Councils once again in charge, the full strength of the League is mobilized and sent north to turn back the invasion by the Machine Army. Your Warrior Societies gird themselves with war magics, your levies are called up and equipped with what weapons can be found. To the north, the League of Strength does the same, sending their armies south to intervene at the request of the beleaguered tribes, and together you squeeze the Machine Army like a vise.


The Machine Army fights as well as it possibly can, but they are outnumbered and fighting a war on two fronts. You get a firsthand taste of what they can deploy – giant, armored metal vehicles on wheels and treads, equipped with heavy weapons that can tear through your war magics, capable of crushing and burning most anything in their path; small flying machines operating independently of human control scout your locations and drop bombs on your positions. Those who command these machines are no less dangerous, hardened men and women equipped with an array of melee weapons and firearms. They are tall and pale, their heads usually shaved and their bodies marked out with scars and tattoos that mimic mechanical designs, their bodies pierced with metal.

Still, they are not invulnerable. Their strengths are their mobility and their heavy mobile armor, but they are restrained by numbers and the terrain, which you use to your advantage. After a few harsh lessons, you melt away whenever they seek to give open battle, using the woods and hills to restrict their movements before striking from unexpected places with masses of troops, your warriors the speartip backed up by levies. Your sharpshooters take down their drones and motorcycle scouts, and that doesn't even begin to touch your magical advantage.

Tree roots and vines tangle up their wheels and machinery, slowing their movements and damaging their vehicles. You use magic and superior knowledge of the terrain to outmaneuver them, scrying and divination to predict their movements, your raiders guided by forest spirits to attack them at night. Your warriors, their morale bolstered by rituals, are not frightened by the machines, no matter how big, loud, and dangerous they may seem. Once, a great ritual calls up the river spirits while they are in the middle of a crossing, their bridge and a number of machines washed away by a wrathful flash flood.

You also get your first look at what the League of Strength is capable of. The air around their warriors shimmers with magic, and you see warriors flip over technicals with their bare hands. Their war priests cast spells that make whole units break and run in terror, and there are whispers that they have called up terrible spirits, nightmares made flesh, primal beings of tooth and claw that stalk their enemies in the night. They seem to face some setbacks – reports are unclear, but it seems that one overconfident commander lost an entire army by attempting to engage the Machine Army in the field.

You make contact with them, acting as cobelligerents, and find that they are people much as you are, perhaps with differences in their values, culture, and religious practices, but they laugh, eat, sleep, and fight bravely.

Eventually the Machine Army finds itself drawing back to the city they took, and they begin to surrender, piecemeal, and then all at once. The war is over…but the crisis is not.

Almost immediately, your brief camaraderie with the League of Strength fades as you begin arguing over the spoils. You both want access to the machines and the surviving mechanics who maintained and operated them, who could possibly tell you something of how they work. There is also the question of the neutral tribes, who formed a buffer between you and who are now weak and, in many cases, bereft of leadership, having taken serious losses to the invaders that left their political structures in jeopardy. The League of Strength wishes to add them to its number, and they have local collaborators calling for annexation. Other factions in the tribes turn to you, asking you for help, for protection against the League of Strength as they asked not so long ago.

Your diplomats scramble to find a solution that will not provoke an open war, but there are heated words exchanged as both sides, flush with victory, seek to benefit as much as possible from the new state of affairs.

Technological Access
[] Demand Technological Access
[] Concede Technological Access
[] Split Technological Access

Neutral Tribes
[] Demand the Tribes Join You
[] Concede the Tribes' Entry to the League of Strength
[] Maintain the Tribes as a Neutral Buffer

Pick one from each category. Two demands will force a war with the League of Strength, one concession will allow you to get away with one demand, two compromises will risk the conflict breaking out at a later date, Two concessions…well, I don't know why you would do that, it would be bad domestically.

There will be a moratorium to allow for debate.