SHUFFLING DESTINY ENEMY GIMMICKS LIKE A DECK OF CARDS
Here’s a fun thought exercise for the discerning Destiny Lore Enjoyer™: What if you took the gimmicks of each enemy race and swapped them?
Here are the rules by which I loosely operated, in the sixty-ish seconds I spent thinking all this up:
The enemy race should remain broadly identifiable at a glance.
‘Gimmick’ herein references the aspect of the subject’s lore that dictates how they relate to themselves and wider universe (For example, the Cabal is a conquering empire that folds defeated client species into its dominion; the Fallen are desperate, disorganized scavengers; etc.), or maybe certain thematic elements.
Don’t think about it too hard.
Get weird with it.
And without further ado:
THE HIVE <--> THE CABAL: THE DOMINION OF THE WORM.
The Dominion are a vast assimilationist conglomerate of hundreds of different species the Hive have conquered and consumed. They are bonded not by common Krill ancestry, but by forced worm conversion; the bodies may appear different, sourced from different homeworlds, but the truth is that they are puppets for the Dominion’s true citizenry. Dominion morphs are based not on the instar system of an arthropod experiencing ecdysis, but on the life cycle of a parasitoid – they are alike to one another only in that there is a worm implanted where their brain should be, and it is slowly terramorphing their body into something more suitable to the Great Work, also known as the Sword Logic. At a certain threshold of age, the chitin-mold and fungal outgrowth has changed the host body dramatically enough to classify them as Knights or Wizards based on the worm that has infested them.
Different branches of the Dominion organize themselves into Courts; over centuries, worms of each Court have developed unique genetic tells in how they warp their hosts – patterns of color or chitin-mold, or predispositions to certain morphs. Acolytes still make up the bulk of the species’ fighting and civilian forces. After the implantation process (typically performed within two years of the birth of the host body) and lasting until approximate adolescence, Hive are wobbling, nascent, clumsy Thrall, still acclimating to the nervous system and motor functions of a still-growing host body. The oldest Dominion Knights and Wizards in existence, the pantheon of Gods that preserve the Wormlore and have transcended mortality by way of the Sword Logic, are the closest that the Dominion gets to ‘true’ expressions of the parasitoid race… and even then, each is unique unto themselves.
Don’t worry! By the time you would have been old enough to object to having a boring worm threaded into a trepanned hole in the back of your head, ‘you’ will have been the worm for a long time. It typically doesn’t grow big enough to burst through and replace the host’s cranium (If an endo- or exoskeleton is present) for six to eight years, but you wouldn’t mistake a Thrall for an un-infested counterpart of the same race. Think Cordyceps, or that old familiar snail parasite Broodsac. It is not infectious, as the ritual insertion of a wormling requires a sterile and calm environment as well as an actual staff of competent handlers… but it pays to be dead when the Hive are victorious over your poor, doomed race. They don’t want your secrets, they don’t need your intelligence or your memories, and they don’t need you to infiltrate and betray your people. They just want your brain. Or, rather, the real estate your brain occupies.
A Purist faction of Dominionists claim to be descendants of the original Krill, the long-extinct first peoples of the Dominion, and seek a way to purge the Worm-taint from their bloodline. The Purists are supposedly lead by one of the many Dominionist Gods, though which one and whether or not this is even true are subject to disparate rumor.
THE CABAL <--> THE HIVE: THE UNDYING EMPIRE.
Calus’s obsession with death and immortality has created a legion of the undead. The dead world of Torobatl is a planet of necropolises, stacked down to the core of the planet and then up to the stratosphere, their charnel war fleets staffed by psionic Liches mounted into powerful and gaudily gilded combat exoskeletons. Stasis was granted as a gift by the Darkness long ago; it allows the denizens of Torobatl to tether their souls to massive crystals – Phylacteries, in their buildings, their mausoleums, and their warships. And these Phylacteries are, in turn, tethered to the oversoul of God-King Calus, tithing him the experiences of his entire empire… the violence and the pleasure, and everything in between. When Cabal loves, Calus loves, and savors it. When Cabal hurts, Calus dies, and savors it. When Cabal dies, Calus devours – and your soul is folded wholly into his own. At the end of the universe, when there is nothing else, there will be Calus, and Calus will be everyone.
Warships and Seeder-Ziggurats, built around a Phylactery that serves as generator and Cryostasis and life support all in one, send a tide of undead out into any world that Calus desires for his Empire. The only way to kill them, of course, is to destroy the Phylactery in the warship. Or, cause fatal mental feedback by destroying the physical brain. Every Torobatlaan that has died since Calus instituted mandatory mummification rites is part of Calus’s devouring horde, representing a fighting force of at least several-trillion strong. Each Lich represents a soldier that can be sent into combat multiple times: first, in the hulking, bulbous, resplendent frames of Cabal Übercorpse legionnaires. Then, if the exoskeleton is damaged beyond repair, the Wight within may emerge, held aloft by its own Psionic might and wielding the death-cold touch of Stasis. Spare bodies, or bodies looted from the enemy, may afford a defeated Wight a second chance at corporeal un-life… assuming Calus values you more as servant than snack. The crème de la créme a la Calus, the Demiliches, are given their own discreet Phylacteries. Oftentimes these undying kings and queens of the Torobatlaan Necroworld have pared away the unnecessary portions of their bodies and reside in a crystal-encrusted skull – The rest of it is tithed lovingly to Calus. Let it never be said he does not reward dedication. All hail the new flesh.
Calus’s own daughter, by all rights a demigod, heads an underground insurgency within the Empire. The Living Resistance is small, scrappy, and fighting a losing battle – but they are always on the lookout for allies, and will take any advantage they can get.
THE FALLEN <--> THE VEX: THE ASCENDED.
When the Eliksni arrived in Sol, simultaneously chasing the Traveler and fleeing the Whirlwind, most of them first stopped at Neptune. They burned that world to the ground and ravenously devoured every scrap of technology they could get their hands on. And so, while the human race was wallowing in the mud during the Dark Age and their unlucky brethren were – also wallowing in that same mud, or pressed under the thumb of the Awoken – the Eliksni of once-Neomuna were… rapidly evolving. Achieving singularity, becoming one with their Servitors and Shanks and so much more. You know how those Eliksni enjoy their nanotechnology. By the time of the City Age, non-augmented Fallen are a rarity… but there is no shortage of Ascended, a collective consciousness dispensing sleek and sophisticated quick-fab machine bodies, controlled by telepresence, to every corner of the system. And where they go, infectious nanomachinery goes with them. Everything must Ascend. And so, everything must die.
Individuality is a dirty word to the Ascended, but it is not a cold, unfeeling machine-mind. It remembers its origins as an organic race. Remembers everything that was assimilated into it, really, with perfect computer clarity. It’s still young for a god-consciousness – far, far younger than the ancient Torobatlaan First Disciple or the Hive Conqueror-Pantheon. It relates to the natives of Sol; pities them, mostly. It is confused by the Exo, curious about the Awoken, and deeply embarrassed by the soft, squishy existence of humankind. It feels most strongly about its non-uplifted cousins: it loathes them. Despises them. The day when the last Eliksni hatchling is scanned and uploaded to the System, and its useless corporeal existence is squashed, can’t come too soon. Imagine the horror that the Iron Lords must have felt when the Fallen had finally been wiped out, and it turned out they were just running from something worse. A clean, smooth, white-paneled and gloss-coated mirror. The Ascended exists in networked systems across Sol, representing a cyber-threat that must continuously be monitored and combatted by technicians in the Last City and the Reef; when it has determined, via algorithm, an appropriate dispersal site, it sends a foundry through NLS – within hours of impact, an Ascended Nanofoundry can output a square quarter mile of nanite terraformer lattice and an army’s worth of construction, telecommunications, and servitor frames. These frames are not made for war! War is a consequence of the simplistic fear of a lesser entity. Of course, the equipment these frames use to perform their actual tasks are effective at discorporating non-augs. Sad, what is necessary in the pursuit of perfect oneness.
The remaining ‘Non-Aug’ Fallen of House Light live as Luddite ascetics, sheltering from the Ascended in the underground metro system beneath a run-down quarter of the Last City that was bombed out during the Undying Empire’s assault. They eschew all technology and networked communication as much as is possible – the more tech they use, the more likely it is that the Ascended will find them.
In the Reef, Eliksni augment themselves with crystal prosthetics. Better to submit themselves to the Queen’s will, and remain individuals, than be subsumed by the Ascended and lose themselves.
THE VEX <--> THE FALLEN.
Every encounter you have with the so-called ‘Fomorians’ is technically an encounter with the exact same crew of the exact same ship of scurrilous pirates, cast back through the Chronal Bleed from several hundred thousand years in the future. Or, a future, at least. The Foul Ship Gigantes has been making dives into the past for centuries. Or, well, actually, the ship has been making a single dive into the past, and arriving at disparate points in realspace nominal-present-time backwards along the timeline, scattered across the centuries. An unfortunate consequence of a bootleg of a stolen prototype of Braytech chronoaugural technology. Sometimes, even for Braytech, an idea is so half-cocked that it just can’t work. Imagine for a moment that you are Marcholles Antione Braythek IV (Pronounced ‘Marcus Anthony Braytech’), (in)famous pirate and disgraced son of the mighty Braythek Interstellar Dominion, and the weight of your family name inspires you to do reckless things in the pursuit of adding legends to your name. Imagine that you and your crew are maybe a little too desperate to become the first time-travelers in history. So, you use a bootleg of a stolen prototype and you don’t so much ‘travel’ through time as you do ‘smear’ through it. Look on the bright side: not only did you become the first successful time-travelers in existence, you also fuck up the laws of reality so bad that scientists in the past will designate the extradimensional skid-mark you leave through space-time as a ‘fundamental force in the cosmology of the universe.’ They call it ‘The Bleed,’ and researching it allows for the development of NLS travel. That first jump went extremely well! At least, it did from the perspective of the one version of Marcholles Antione Braythek IV that successfully made it to his destination – Humanity’s Golden Age, a couple decades before anybody had even heard the name ‘Bray’.
Funny, isn’t it? Marcholles Braythek thought he was a descendent of the most amazing tech empire in history. In actuality, he was his own great-great-great (repeating) grandfather. Another unfortunate consequence of bootleg Braytech chronoaugural technology.
I said something about ‘the one version’ of Marcholles Antione Braythek IV, didn’t I? Right. Well, when you travel through time, you leave from a single point in time and space, and arrive at a single point in time and space. But when you smear through time, you leave from a single point in time and space and you arrive at many points in time and space. Simultaneously and discretely, paradoxically existing in many places at once. And time isn’t the only thing that winds up getting smeared.
The crew of the Foul Ship Gigantes enters the Bleed intact, and emerges quite insane. The ‘Fomorians’, as they are called in the City Age, are warped, imperfect, and most of all completely unintelligible. Whatever happened to them on their journey through the Bleed has made them hyperviolent to the point that if two crews encounter one another, they’ll tear each other apart. Often, a single crew will turn on itself if nothing else is nearby to descend upon. It’s estimated that at any given time there are dozens of Gigantes in Sol, landing in random locales and then going beast mode, destroying everything around them and eventually themselves. Fomorian emergences come in semi-predictable waves, and the City has an algorithm that they can use to guess when and where a new wave will pop up. Each Gigantes ship crews several hundred time-warped post-human pirates, outfitted with mind-boggling far-future weapons tech. If they didn’t tear themselves apart within a few days of arriving in our present, they would be a massive problem! Thankfully, Light-wavelength radiation from the Traveler, specifically its effect on causal systems, prevents Fomorians from popping up anywhere on Earth or in near-Earth orbit.
Telling Clovis that his grandfather is his own great-great-great (repeating) grandson makes him experience a critical systems failure and forces him to restore from backup. Gives you a solid thirty minutes to do whatever you want in the Braytech systems around Eventide.