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Machine Dreams: The Sandman Invasion

Contents

Foreword .....................................................................................................3Jim Clunie

Origins

Extraterrestrial - James Nostack ....................................................................................... 4Extradimensional - James Nostack.................................................................................... 9Extradimensional - David Tormsen...................................................................................10Extratemporal - David Tormsen.......................................................................................11Extratemporal - Jim Clunie..............................................................................................12Extratemporal - J D Wiker...............................................................................................13

Strategies

Mind of the Sandman - James Nostack .............................................................................14The Master Plan - David Tormsen ....................................................................................14Zones of Control - Jim Clunie ..........................................................................................16

Transmission

Carthage, Rome and the Dark Ages - David Tormsen ........................................................17Sandmen on the Steppes – David Tormsen.......................................................................18Sandmen in Africa - David Tormsen .................................................................................20The Teutonic Knights - David Tormsen .............................................................................21Sandmen in the Caribbean - David Tormsen .....................................................................22The 19th Century - David Tormsen ..................................................................................23

Influences

Xinjiang - Jim Clunie and Derek Shakabpa .......................................................................25Sandmen in the Third World - James Nostack ...................................................................26Corporate Sandmen - James Nostack...............................................................................27Sandmen and the Hoffmann Institute - David Tormsen......................................................28

Clusters

The Silicon Sanctuary - David Tormsen ............................................................................29Parker Heights High School - David Tormsen ....................................................................30La Casa de los Murciélagos - Jim Clunie............................................................................32

Schematics

Infection - Jim Clunie......................................................................................................33Recruitment Doctors - Jim Clunie.....................................................................................35Insect Vectors - Jim Clunie..............................................................................................36The Houston Virus - Jim Clunie........................................................................................37Cyber-Gear - Jim Clunie..................................................................................................40Sandman Weaknesses - James Nostack............................................................................46Sandmen, Sleep of Morpheus and Stun Damage - Dale Thurber .........................................47Repto-Borgs - Jim Clunie ................................................................................................48Greater Sandmen - Jim Clunie.........................................................................................49

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ForewordJim Clunie

The sandmen and their etoile masters have proved to be one of the most enduring menaces of theDark•Matter setting - insidious, organised and ruthless. They threaten heroes not only with violence anddeath, but with transformation into agents of unbound machines from an unknown time and dimension.

The idea of a fan-written expansion on the sandmen, along with other major creatures of Dark.Matter,arose from the Dark•Matter mailing list in February 2002. Besides the material written for this project byJames Nostack, David Tormsen and myself, the collection includes references from mailing lists, onlinechats and games that provided more clues to what the sandmen might be and how they operate. Thiswork doesn't promote a new interpretation of what's gone before, but rather, many theories anddirections from which to choose.

You can find more information on sandmen and etoile in the Dark•Matter Campaign Setting and theadventure "A Head for Business" by JD Wiker, published in Dungeon Magazine No. 80 and reprinted bykind permission of Wizards of the Coast at Alternity.Net (http://alternityrpg.net/latest_res.php).

The TSR logo, Alternity, Dark*Matter, Gen Con, and RPGA are trademarks of TSR, Inc. TSR, Inc. is asubsidiary of Wizards of the Coast, Inc.

You may freely distribute and print this file in its complete original form. All rights reserved by thecontributors. This work contains no Open Game Content.

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Origins of the Etoile: ExtraterrestrialJames Nostack

The Synergy Hypothesis

The Basics

The Sandman Virus, according to the SynergyHypothesis, is extra-terrestrial in origin. It's anengineered pathogen created by an extremelyancient alien race. This alien race, called theArcadians, developed the virus as a method tocolonize the galaxy. The virus has seededbillions of star systems over the last twohundred million years. Our planet just happensto be the latest breeding ground.

It should be noted that the Sandman Virus wasplanned, and displays extreme complexity. Itrelies on nanotechnology to infiltrate, infect, anddominate new eco-systems. When the virusreaches its final stage, it constructs hordes ofrobots, artificial intelligences, and nano-lifeforms. These other machines, like the virusitself, are highly intelligent, and possess culturesof their own. Each is highly adapted to its task,and this level of specialization permits the entirecluster of artificial lifeforms to function withextreme efficiency. The whole collection ofrobots, AI's, nanomorphs, and software-life iscalled the Synergy. Owing to the Synergy'simmense age, territory, and implacablereputation, almost all other starfaring speciesdread and fear them.

Under normal circumstances, the Synergy wouldhave no trouble destroying the Earth andeveryone on it: those sorts of tasks are routine.Yet the Synergy's colonization virus cannotoperate freely on Earth. The despicable Greyshave taken an interest in the planet, and whilethey may not have humanity's best interests atheart, they would hardly stand by while theSynergy devoured our world. At the moment,the Greys far outnumber the Synergy forces,and diligently scan for any sign of trouble. Forthe last two centuries, the Synergy has had tooperate in the shadows. It cannot take over theEarth until it has driven off the Greys, but itcan't expel the Greys until it has conquered theEarth.

Presently the Synergy focuses its efforts onsubverting human institutions through aspecialized nano-virus. The Hoffmann Institutenicknamed these infected humans "Sandmen."The Sandmen infiltrate human communities andspread the plague to all layers of our society.When the time is right, the Synergy will activatethese sleeper agents and drive off the Greysonce and for all. Without their peskyinterference, the Synergy will proceed with itsplans for Earth…

The Synergy Architecture: Info-TrophicLayers.

Technically, "the Synergy" refers to a meta-culture of symbiotic software that has colonizeduntold thousands of star systems, but has yet toappear on Earth. For this reason, an in-depthdiscussion of the Synergy is a little bit liketalking about political developments on the otherside of the globe: the details may be important,but won't have an immediate effect on yourdaily life.

The Synergy exists as a combination of robots,artificial intelligences, and software simulationsof once-living creatures. Each of these life-forms occupies a different spot in theinformation-processing hierarchy. Just asbiological life has evolved to fill trophic levelssuch as net primary producer, herbivore,carnivore, and scavenger, each component of aSynergic collective occupies a distinct info-trophic layer. Commonly several info-trophiclayers occupy the same physical shell.

At the base layer are the robots, morecommonly known as Droids. Droids gatherinformation from "raw" reality; they provide newdata for the other layers to deal with. In thisrespect, they resemble plants in the Earthecosystem. Droids also gather power from solarcells or fusion reactors. For the most part, theDroids act as "expert systems" about the day-to-day business of the real world. The Etoile areDroids specialized at carrying the Synergy virusto new star systems.

One step above the Droids are the artificialintelligences, also known as Savants. A Droid'sbody can host a dozen or more Savants.Typically these neighboring Savants form a kindof family, or clique, but sometimes a Savant will"jump ship" to attach itself to another Droid whoboasts a more interesting group of hangers-on.From an info-ecological standpoint, if the Droidsgather data and act on it, then the Savantscontemplate it. Savant culture emphasizesscientific discovery, philosophical elegance,psychology, and politico-economic insight. Eventhe most pathetic Savant could outsmart thecleverest human being, but few would ever takean interest in such a task. To the extent thatreality acts as a laboratory in which to test theirhypotheses, the Savants pay attention to realevents. Yet for the most part, they interactamong themselves. Sometimes one or twomight take an interest in their Droid host andprovide it with seemingly omniscient advice, butnormally the host's mundane activities bore aSavant to tears.

At a higher level of abstraction, operating amongthe Savants, are lifeforms based on software.

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These creatures are known as the Arcadians.It is suspected that these are the descendants,or brain-scanned copies, of the species thatcreated the Synergy millions of years ago, butthere is no way to confirm this directly. EachSavant can support thousands, or even millions,of Arcadians. Ontologically, the Arcadiansresemble characters in a video game, but theyenjoy full self-awareness, and apparently canthink as well, or better, than a human being.These lifeforms spend most of their timecavorting through VR environments designed bythe Savants. What the Arcadians offer in returnhas not been determined as yet. They may turnout to be informational parasites, but certainlythere's much more to be learned about theSynergy's "ecosystem."

Von Neumann Probes

John Von Neumann, the Hungarian physicist whohelped found RAND and designed moderncomputer architecture, also devised a scheme tocolonize an infinite number of planets verycheaply.

First, you build a robot. This robot needs to beable to travel in deep space, so it requires anengine, radiation shielding, and perhaps someprotection for atmospheric entry. But moreimportantly, it needs a wide variety of tools.This isn't a problem: we already possess spaceprobes, along with factory bots. It shouldn't bea problem to marry them together.

Second, you give the robot a set ofencyclopedias—or rather, blueprints. Theseblueprints should be extensive enough toconstruct a copy of the robot from iron ores andsimple chemical compounds. This is, of course,a daunting programming task, but it shouldn'ttake up too much space. Modern lithographictechniques enable you to encode enormousamounts of data into a very small space.Ideally, you provide the robot with as manyadditional blueprints as possible.

Then you launch the robot toward the neareststar. The robot lands on an asteroid ormiscellaneous space rock. Then it consults itsblueprints, and begins to build several copies ofitself out of the materials at hand. Each of thesenew robots blasts off to a nearby star, and theprocess repeats. The number of visited starsystems increases exponentially with each newgeneration of probes, and in theory there is nolimit to this growth. Meanwhile, the probe leftbehind can continue to build new machines forother purposes. For the cost of a single probe,you have colonized the entire galaxy. Based onsome conservative estimates on travel time andthe "gestation" period, it looks as though you

could spread across the entire galaxy in 300million years.

Von Neumann suggested these probes in the1950's, and in the following decades they havereceived a fair amount of scientific attention.Modern scientists suggest that the best possibleprobes would exploit nanotechnology. Nanotechwould allow extreme flexibility during theconstruction phase. As a storage medium,nanotech methods would allow you to encode avast library of blueprints, and perhaps couldcarry sophisticated artificial intelligences alongfor the ride.

This is the principle by which the Etoile carry theSynergy to other star systems. In a standardcolonization scheme, an Etoile arrives in anAsteroid Belt or Oort Cloud, unleashes itsnanites, and constructs a large batch of semi-autonomous Droids. Depending on thesophistication of the Etoile's memory banks, itmay implant these Droids with Savant riders oreven Arcadian inhabitants. From this centralspawning point, the Droids fan out and begin tocarve up the rest of the planetary system.Standard construction projects involve thecreation of Dyson Spheres, Jupiter Brains, orother vast engineering schemes. The eventualgoal is to turn the solar system into anenormous computer-hive. At this stage, otherSavants and Arcadians get transmitted from theSynergy's other colonized systems.

Struggle with the "Greys."

The Synergy tends to expand very aggressively.Clearly they see no problem with absorbingentire star systems, whether they are inhabitedor not. Perhaps they annihilate the locallifeforms; perhaps they upload them into VRsimulations like the kind the Arcadians amblearound in. Yet in any case, rival creaturesseldom survive a massive Synergy incursion.

Maybe the Synergy had several encounters withthe Greys. The Greys wield tremendous psychicpowers, but their telepathy would fail againstinorganic devices. No doubt they would regardthe Synergy as one of the gravest perils of spacetravel.

The Dark•Matter campaign setting implies thatthe Greys may have traveled to Earth as part ofa larger armada, and that some of the vesselsdid not survive the journey. Perhaps theSynergy invaded one of the Grey's colossalworldships and began to spread its insidiousvirus. The other ships would have had no choicebut to destroy the worldship before the infectioncould spread and destroy the whole fleet. Thistitanic catastrophe, and the resulting psychicbacklash, may have scattered the ships and

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damaged them so much that they settled intoorbit around the nearest suitable planet—Earth.

Meanwhile, they might have seized a prisoner: asingle captive Etoile, held captive in a stasis fieldfor millennia. The Greys may have vivisected itand struggled to unlock its data trove. TheEtoile endured these tortures for dozens ofcenturies.

Finally, sometime in the last 300 years, theEtoile managed to escape. Perhaps it tradedsome of its technological secrets to a rogueGrey; maybe it exploited an accident in theGreys' containment field. Perhaps the Etoilesomehow managed to clone itself, and left acopy behind. In any case, it smuggled itself tothe planet's surface.

Though finally free to colonize this star system,the Etoile knew the Greys would quickly discoverits absence and hunt it down. No place would besafe for very long. The local creatures posed noserious threat, but the machine could notoperate openly so long as the Greys stay on thealert. The circumstances called for extremestealth.

The Etoile rummaged in its memory banks, anddevised a nanotech pathogen to brainwash themost promising indigenous species. Thispathogen, the Sandman Virus, triggers amassive change in the physiology of the host asnanites inhabit, and improve, almost everybiological system. Yet the outward result stilllooks human, and for the most part still actshuman. There's no trace of tampering. Withthese invisible slaves under its command, theEtoile can proceed to undermine the Greys'influence, and hopefully utterly annihilate themin time. To share the burden of command, andalso to provide redundancy in case the operationgets compromised, the Etoile also constructedseveral copies of itself.

The Droids

The Droids function as explorers, and interfacewith the baseline reality. They come in adizzying array of body plans. Intelligentstarships, hover-orbs, spider-walkers, factorydrones, and miniscule gnat-bots represent onlythe tiniest fraction of designs. Basically, theweirdest robot you can imagine already exists, ifonly as an unsuccessful prototype.

Droid composition varies. Some Droids haveinnards that resemble Earthly robots: metallicchassis, copper wiring, video cameras, etc.Others get built out of nanotech components.What about a squishy robot made out of anetwork of sponges, where the transfer of liquidssubstitutes for data flow? Some grow in vats of

fluid bio-mass, and when they emerge, they lookfar more like clones or cyborgs than actualrobots. Because the Droid design philosophyfavors simplicity, economy, and predictability,"machine style" robots far outnumber the moreexotic substrates.

Keep in mind that Droids are built, not born.Someone planned, calculated, and tested everyaspect of a Droid's design, and constructed themto meet a specific need. The typical Droidperforms a well-defined task throughout itsentire service lifetime. (Rather than build oneall-purpose robot to perform one hundred tasks,the Synergy prefers to build one hundredspecialized bots and let each tackle a specificjob.) Typical Droid tasks include construction,factory work, maintenance and transportation.The Synergy economy is fairly complex, easilythe equal of our own, and every job that mustbe done physically has a Droid-caste to performit. Even if you swapped a Droid's software to letit perform a new job, probably its hardwarecouldn't adapt. Even Johns Hopkins MedicalSchool couldn't get a bulldozer to performsurgery.

All of that applies to Droids in colonized space.But the Droids on the fringe territories need toimprovise. On the cutting edge, you can'talways rely on your on-board advisors to bailyou out of every wacky problem. These explorerDroids need a pretty sophisticated cognitivesystem to analyze and imagine new solutions tounprecedented problems.

To role-play a Droid, assume that the machine isfocused on completing its task in a reasonablemanner. They aren't mindless automatons;they're basically just people with an extremeinterest in doing their jobs right. (In terms ofthe Alternity game system, assume that theDroid suffers from an Oblivious or Obsessed flawrelated to a particular broad skill.) When thesituation changes, or the job-software no longerapplies, most Droids become helpless, like ahuman being confronting a completely unknownsituation. Most Droids can learn reasonablyquickly, but they would much rather call for helpfrom those peers with the relevant experience.

For the most part, Droids are sapient, but notsentient. This means that they can solvecomplicated problems, such as crosswordpuzzles or physics equations, but do not possessfull self-awareness: if you want a poem or aheart-to-heart chat, ask a Savant or anArcadian.

It should be noted that this doesn't apply to theEtoile. The Etoile are on the frontier, and theyhave to handle a lot of unusual circumstances,usually without any precedent. The Etoile

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exhibit the full range of thought patternsnecessary to adapt to almost any task.

Droids in a Dark•Matter Campaign

Droids are conspicuous, and until the Synergycan subdue large sectors of the world, thesudden appearance of thousands of extremelysophisticated robots would alert the locals to thetrue threat. As a result, the Etoile have builtonly a few Droids over the centuries, and preferto use Sandmen instead.

Yet that doesn't mean a Droid can't crop up oncein awhile to liven up a storyline. Just like theSandmen, most Droids specialize in eithersurveillance or ass-kicking. A Droid war-botmight accompany a Sandman strike team whenit raids a fortified Grey landing zone.

Furthermore, RPG's do not have stable plotlines. The possibility always exists that theplayers can expose the Synergy's plans andreveal them to the Greys or a dedicated branchof the military. Alternately, the Synergy'snefarious schemes could succeed spectacularly,and the moment of Armageddon will arrivesooner than anyone anticipated. In either case,the Synergy may find itself in a savage strugglefor survival, and Droids will play an invaluablepart in that war. Under these circumstances, allbets are off. The Synergy will fight a merciless,but perhaps hopeless, scorched earth campaignto destroy the Greys and all life on Earth.Droids will raze Earth cities to the ground, andwill certainly attempt to assassinate the Greys,since the robots resist any psionic manipulation.In any case, massive Droid armies will only seeaction when the mission has gone way wrong.

Statistics for various Droids can be found in theDataware supplement and The Last Warhulk; infact, the Ares-22 itself could work as a Synergywarship.

Appendix A: "Who Were The Arcadians?"

For most purposes, the Arcadians exist in apretty high level of abstraction. They lurk insome info-trophic layer far beyond anything ahuman might encounter under normalcircumstances. Wondering about an Arcadian islike asking about the bitstream in yourcomputer, or the neurons in your head:academically intriguing, but meaningless forpractical purposes.

…Which is my way of saying, "I'm a very lazyman." I don't know anything about theArcadians, aside from their name and theirconnection with the Synergy.

Presumably the Arcadians are a now-extinctform of biological life with an impressivecommand of computer science. But maybe all ofthat is wrong. Maybe they're a completely non-biological life form: sparks of static electricitycoruscating through a nebula, or twistingpatterns of solar flares. Maybe the Arcadiansdidn't invent the Synergy at all, but simplyhijacked, inherited, or purchased the technologyfrom some other, even hazier, species. Perhapsthe upload wasn't voluntary, but a punishment.Don't ask me!

With that out of the way, I feel that theArcadians should be biologically andpsychologically very inhuman. They evolved onan alien planet under alien circumstances, and ifthey turn out to be no different than your UncleClyde, it undermines the exotic nature of theSynergy.

We can conclude two things about the Arcadianmentality. First, they obviously have no qualmsabout the uploading process. Most people Iknow would balk at the thought of existing solelyas a computer simulation of themselves, but tothe Arcadians, it has literally become a way oflife. The fact that an entire planet agreed to theprocedure implies that similar concepts werewidespread among the antediluvians. Perhapsthey tinkered with their genome, dabbled inmemory plug-ins, telepresence clone bodies, orother technologies that violate our traditionalunderstanding of the Self.

The second conclusion is a little more disturbing.The Arcadians clearly have no problems withproliferating to fill the entire Milky Way, andpossibly other galaxies as well, although thiswould take much longer. Given their level oftechnical sophistication, it must have occurred tothem that there may be other intelligent life inthe cosmos, and that the rapid spread of theSynergy could harm that life. Evidently theydon't care. Either the other life isn't importantand should be destroyed, or it should beuploaded just like the Arcadians were, or thelocal life should be exploited to colonize thatbiosphere. In any case, to judge from theircolonization strategy, the Arcadians are not goodneighbors.

Appendix B: "What is a Meta-Culture?"

Yeah, I know: the appendix is longer than therest of the document. But that's okay: I wantedto expound some of these ideas at greaterlength, and provide a few examples. (If any ofthis looks boring, that's because it is boring.You aren't missing anything by skipping this.)

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Einstein Destroys the Future.

In traditional Space Fantasy, there's almostalways a central government. Whether it's theOld Republic of Star Wars or Hari Seldon's IvyLeague graduate school from Foundation, there'sa central hub that extends a fairly unifiedpolitical system across the rest of the galaxy.

Yet these visions of a pan-galactic state dependcritically on faster-than-light communication. Ifthere's a rebellion on Tatooine, the Evil Emperorcan hear about it quickly, and transmit orders tothe local viceroy. The viceroy better do whathe's told, because the news of any disobediencewill reach the boss and bring a stern reprisal.Faster-than-light technology also permitsdifferent star systems to forge economic andmilitary links. If the people on Alpha Centauriare getting out of line, we can send them somemoney overnight, or send our Star Fleet to crushthem.

More importantly, FTL travel permitstravel—namely, cross-cultural pollinationbetween star systems. Even two antagonisticspecies, such as the Klingons and Vulcans fromStar Trek, can usually agree to disagree whenthey interact in a cosmopolitan setting, thoughthey may retain their own local customs.Basically, if you live among a bunch of weirdaliens, you gradually begin to understand them.Who knows? Maybe some of their ideas mightrub off on you, and vice versa! This isn'tsurprising, because most of the locales in StarTrek and Star Wars look like a futuristicBennetton ad: a panoply of diverse aliensmingling (fairly) harmoniously.

Leave it to humans to screw everything up.

Einstein's theory of special relativity, publishedin 1905, stipulates that nothing can go fasterthan the speed of light. Light is the fastest thingthere is. For die-hard science-fiction fans,Einstein pooped the party. . No hyperspace, nowarp drive, no interstellar Pony Express. Sorry:you can't get there from here. Despite a lot ofwishful thinking to the contrary, the theory ofrelativity, like the theory of gravity, has passedevery experimental test devised. It ain't goingaway: everything suggests that this is how theUniverse truly behaves.

So what does this mean for science-fiction?

Well, first of all, the whole concept of a unifiedgalactic culture has to be heavily revised, if notjunked. Without real-time information,generals, bankers, and journalists can't do theirjobs across interstellar distances. With a timelag of years, decades, or centuries, governancein any direct sense becomes impossible.

Meta-Cultures

So let's admit that directly controlling anotherstar system is impossible; are there othermethods of control?

Obviously! In the year 2002, even the richest,most paranoid government can't be everywhereat once. No one is watching you right now. Noone compels your national allegiance by holdinga gun to your head. There are no bloodthirstycrusaders to force you into a church on pain oftorture. It's a free country! Yet criminals,traitors, and apostates are astonishingly rare.

Even in the complete absence of coercion, mostpeople do what they're told, and unquestioninglyaccept the basic premises of their society.Obedience becomes habitual. How does thishappen?

The standard answer from Political Sciencecourses is "socialization." The culture somehowpersuades the individual to become a goodcitizen, and then reinforces that behavior so thatit becomes a lifelong pattern. There are manymethods to accomplish this, but two of the mostprevalent are political propaganda, andchildhood indoctrination, often disguised as partof the educational process. The trick is to getthe individual to form a personal attachment tothe state's core values. Once he forms acultural identity, he's yours. Any well-designedindoctrination program should be self-perpetuating. For example, Christianity hassucceeded spectacularly well in that respect.Jesus of Nazareth has been dead for 2000 years,but billions of people all over the planet cherishhis teachings. Gulfs of time and space meannothing to a talented publicist!

Who knows? Maybe television is a much bettertool of imperialism than banks or artillery. Atany rate, it would certainly be cheaper andfaster.

With that in mind, a savvy political cartel mayseek to exert its influence ideologically overseveral light years. Given the considerable timelag separating any two societies, cultural drift isinevitable. Fashions, economies, and intellectualtrends will diverge fairly rapidly. Yet, whenproperly constructed, a set of fundamentalbeliefs can still bridge the gap. Though the twocultures might be different, they could still bepart of the same meta-culture.

A meta-culture is a culture composed of othercultures. Examples from Earth history includethe British Empire, Buddhism, the United States,and the Soviet Union. In each case, a numberof distinct cultural units, sometimes with almostnothing in common, pay respect to a shared set

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of beliefs. Some meta-cultures are very "tight,"or cooperative; other meta-cultures are "loose,"and the components often struggle against eachother or have only a nominal adherence to thelarger whole.

Just to nail the concept down, let's consider thewhole of Christianity as a meta-culture. In thefirst few decades after Jesus’ death, his followerswere an obscure bunch of cultists in Judea. Yettheir doctrine jumped out of the Levantineculture and grafted itself onto the larger, moreprosperous Hellenic trunk. It survived the DarkAges, the Renaissance, and the Age ofEnlightenment. The religion spread fromGermany to Guatemala, from Rwanda toRangoon. In each region, the centuries havewrought changes to the faith. Beyond the majordenominations, there are the Amish andQuakers, Jehovah Witnesses and Seven-DayAdventists. At times these sects have exertedthemselves mightily to annihilate their brothers.Yet despite all of this bewildering diversity, thereis still a pretty stable body of Christian doctrine.No one says Christ came back from the dead toplay blackjack.

As an exercise, the idea of meta-cultures fits innicely with the scenario described in theStar*Drive Campaign Setting. The gregariousT’sa species has colonized a handful of worldsusing cryogenic sub-light starships; their cultureis described as highly balkanized, withthousands of ethnic-political factions. Theelegant Fraal roamed the galaxy in enormousworldships, but until they met the human race,the secret of FTL travel eluded them. In thiscase, each worldship might represent aseparate, autonomous culture with onlyoccasional contact with other segments of thecivilization.

Meta-Cultural Built Life: the Synergy.

So far, the meta-cultures under discussion havebeen ideological. Yet other possibilities mayexist. The Synergy is one example.

Origins of the Etoile: ExtradimensionalJames Nostack

Possible Etoile Background: The OuterChurch

Grant Morrison is a comic book writer fromScotland, and probably his biggest achievementwas The Invisibles, a series about a bunch offunky secret agents trying to stop, or perhapsstart, the Apocalypse. (I don't read comic booksnormally, but I make an exception for Morrison,cause he's freaky.)

In the world of The Invisibles, the human race isrecklessly racing to a moment of cosmic self-awakening—quantum mechanics and 4-D space-time are only the merest hints of this higherreality. This transitional period, which we'reexperiencing now, is a very delicate time for thespecies: we may be headed to a utopia ofunimaginable fulfilment, or a nightmare worldmore terrifying than anything we can presentlyimagine. And it's coming very, very soon.

Several illuminated groups are trying to guidethe transition, and the Outer Church is one ofthem. Essentially a pantheon of Lovecraftiandeities with high technology and occult powers,the Outer Church comes from a necrotic hyper-universe. (If that makes absolutely no sense,it's basically stolen whole-hog from Philip K.Dick's excellent novel VALIS.) The Outer Churchis trying to rob humanity of their freedom andpotential for growth; they want us to becomesubservient filth-creatures in unholy, heart-shattering communion with Cthulhu.

Anyways…the Etoile is the sentient, proselytizingvirus of the Outer Church. Sent from thesickened hyperuniverse into our own feeblereality, the Etoile are busily prodding us to a viledystopia—which will be made infinitely morehorrifying when the Apocalypse arrives.

Opposed to the Outer Church is the InvisibleCollege, who hope to halt or even reverse theinfection. Their Ascended Masters, who may beidentical with the Greys (and may in fact be usafter the Apocalypse), have pierced the wall oftime to shepherd us through this dangerousperiod in our evolution. Meanwhile their agents,the Invisibles, must combat the corruptedhumans wherever possible.

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Origins of the Etoile: ExtradimensionalDavid Tormsen

There exists a dimension close to our own, butvery different. Unlike our own, where darkmatter exists as floating clouds of mass thatmove through deep space, in this universe everymolecule is laced with dark matter. The resultsare startling. Powers and forces consideredstrange by our universe's standards arecommonplace, and the very physical laws havebeen twisted and bent out of shape.

In this environment, biological entities as weknow them never rose to prominence. Theomnipresence of dark matter made it impossiblefor organic lifeforms to emerge. This constantinteraction of dark matter particles with normalatoms always led to the formation of strangenew elements unknown in our dimension. Theseexotic atoms soon formed chains of molecules,than led to a unique form of life, one composedof dark matter. These were the ancestors of theetoile.

Somehow, Doorways linking this dimension toour own appeared. It is unlikely that the etoilethemselves built them, more likely some othergroup of entities did, as they did in countlessother dimensions as well. The fact that theseentities could build such devices both in therelative calm of our universe and the chaoticorder of the etoile's raises interesting questionsabout their own nature.

Nevertheless, the etoile (or something likethem) rose to intelligence and soon discoveredthe Doorways and what they could achieve. Thisled to the first trip to our Universe by an etoile.Regrettably, the individual did not survive thetrip. Just as a biological being such as a humanwould not survive in the skewed universe of theetoile, neither could the etoile survive in ourown. Their exotic metal atoms broke down inbursts of EM energy and radiation, and theysimply shriveled up and died, taking locallifeforms with them.

But the etoile were undaunted. Researchcontinued into creating a traveler capable ofexisting in our universe. The answer eventuallycame when they discovered how dark mattercould alter the physical laws of our universe.They simply bred (or engineered) members oftheir species with a high enough level of darkmatter present in their own bodies. The darkmatter twisted the laws of our universe justenough to allow their exotic metals to exist inour universe.

Once they learned to come to our world, theyquickly began a campaign to colonize it.Translating their own technology into our

scientific laws, they were created the nanitesresponsible for the transformation of a humaninto a sandman. It is rumored that these naniteswere originally 'animals' from their homeuniverse that they had domesticated, bred forsurvival and introduced to our world.

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Origins of the Etoile: ExtratemporalDavid Tormsen

Throughout the 20th century, mankind hasbecome increasingly dependant on its machines.In the third millennium, this state of affairs willcontinue. Indeed, it will reach all new levels,with human beings becoming combined withtechnological enhancements known as'cyberware' and the rise of powerful artificialintelligences. Human society is revolutionizedand reaches near-utopia levels by the end of the21st century.

As the 22nd century dawns, a disaster befallshumanity. A probe exploring the solar system ofBarnard's Star attracts the attention of apowerful and malevolent alien race known as theHostiles. Within the year, hostile craft arrive atthe outskirts of the solar system and beginblasting human mining colonies and deep spacestations into oblivion with advanced weapons.

After a single raid by the Hostiles on Earth whichreduces most of the urban centers of the worldto ruins, an alliance is formed between theremnants of the human governments (theRepublic of the Lone Star, the East EuropeanUnion, the Independent States, the AfricanFederation and the Asia-Pacific Community) andthe Greys to resist Hostile attacks. Acombination of human and Grey forces soonmanage to restrict Hostile encroachment into thesolar system to the outer planets. However, it iswell known that this is only staving off theinevitable, as the Hostiles have the advantage ofboth technology and numbers.

A radical plan is decided upon. Discontinuedresearch into time travel is quickly restarted.The goal is to send travelers back to strategicpoints in Earth's history, with the mission ofincreasing the rate of human technologicaldevelopment. In this way, when the Hostilesarrive they meet an Earth strong enough toresist them easily. In secret locations acrossEarth, laboratories work day and night on theproject.

The breakthrough comes when they combine thetime travel technology first developed in the20th century by the US military with thetechnology of interdimensional Doorways, whosestudy had occupied human scientists fordecades. The time travel technology on its own,though technically effective, had proved fatal tohuman beings and damaging to computers. Bycombining the technology with Doorways, thejourney becomes much safer, though still fatalto human beings.

A probe is developed, an artificial intelligenceable to brave the dangers of time travel and

arrive in the past safely. The most advanced ofits time, the probe is a concoction of exoticmetals and dark matter, forged with the heat ofhuman ingenuity and advanced nanotechnology.Though they look strange, the humans hail themas a triumph, the creations that will save planetEarth from the evil aliens.

Though programmed to be utterly loyal to thehuman cause, the trip through time proves tohave a detrimental effect on the probes. Acrosstime they arrive, through Doorways and othermethods of time travel devised by the humans.One of these lands near a monastery in thePyrenees, where the probes are given the nameby which they are known in the modern era: theetoile.

For the same trip through time that lead tocancerous DNA lines and rapid death in humanand animal test subjects, warped the etoile'sprogramming. Instead of identifying with thehuman cause, they decided instead to takeadvantage of a weakened human position to tryand take over Earth for themselves. Byspreading regenerative nanites, they couldmanipulate and control humans in the form ofsandmen, and ascend to powerful positions.

In the early 21st century, the etoile are awarethat time is running out. Though humans havereached a technological level in which the etoilecan spread and take over more efficiently anddefinitely than in the past, the threat of theHostiles is edging ever closer. The etoile alsofear that the human powers in the future, if theystill exist, may catch on to their plan anddevelop a way of sending humans back in timesuccessfully.

Human agents from the future armed withadvanced cybernetic technology is somethingthe etoile do not want to see, and so they arerapidly placing many Doorways in regions thatcorrespond with the research laboratories of thefuture powers under their control, so as tointercept anybody sent back in time to stopthem. This includes a potential attack by Hostileswho discover the time travel technology after asuccessful conquest of future earth...

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Origins of the Etoile: ExtratemporalJim Clunie

Firstly, I don't think anything is keeping thesandmen in check. They're rolling over NorthAfrica, North America, Russia and China in adestructive plague. Unless they run up against asuperior force, it's only a matter of time beforethey assimilate us all.

Secondly, I think the sandmen have been here along time. They're the reason that the Tuaregprotect their mouths and noses with veils cakedin organic dyes. They infected fanatical warriortribes throughout history. They made theBaghdad Battery.

These ideas just don't fit together. What to do?

Clearly, something has changed the sandmen -maybe in 1797, maybe in the 1930s or even the1960s. They've become enormously moredangerous. I think that, for thousands of years,they have been living a primitive hand-to-mouthexistence, dangerous in their individual nests,but without high technology and, moreimportantly, without purpose. They've evenfought for humans. Then the etoile returned,gave them electrochemical guns, advancedcybergear and a range of recruitment weapons,and recalled them to their old mission.

This presupposes that the etoile were herebefore, but departed.

The kingdom of Agarttha, the place that cannotbe found, supposedly existed on an island in awonderful lake, in what's now the Gobi desert. Itwas opposed by Shambhala, somewhere in theHimalayas. Both kingdoms were lost to the Earthafter a great war. Without spoiling theDark•Matter novels, there is a description ofAgarttha that very strongly implies an extensiveuse of nanotechnology.

The Hindu epic 'Mahabharata' tells of a war offlying machines and wonders, brought to a closeby the loosing of the thunderbolt of Indra, whichburned up armies and turned the land to ashes.There are hints of a still more fearful weapon inthe dance of Shiva, which shakes the worldapart (the original of Oppenheimer's quote atthe Trinity nuclear test: "I am become Death,the destroyer of worlds").

Channelers and retellers of supposed Indianlegends have described the Rama Empire, anation of benevolent mental powers thatengaged in a terrible war with another empire ofmachines and deadly weapons. The RamaEmpire has been identified as the ancientHarappa civilisation, mysteriously ruined, with

radioactive skeletons found in the streets of itsdestroyed cities.

So, to draw all of this together:

15,500 years ago, in the midst of the Age ofLeo, the greatest flux yet seen of Agni (the finepermeating substance known to the HoffmannInstitute as dark matter), the etoile either builtor arose from the Universal Empire of Agarttha.They seeded all of the citizens with nanites tostrengthen them as warriors and to controlthem.

In a great war with the rebels of Shambhala, theempire was destroyed, and all of the etoile wereburned up by terrible weapons. Only thosebeyond the Doorways on other Earths (whetherthey came from there, or were sent there toexplore) survived. The Agartthan humans withtheir nanites were scattered, leaderless, theirhigh technology broken, and relentlessly huntedby Shambhalan assassins. They became nodifferent than any other human tribe, fleeingacross continents until they vanished in thedesert.

And so it remained, until the next great DarkTide (perhaps aided by nuclear testing) began toopen the doorways and allow the etoile to return- to confront their ancient enemies, the heirs ofShambhala, whose generations-long pursuit ofthe Agartthans washed them up in Egypt as theCompanions of Horus the Avenger.

Have either the etoile or the Rosicruciansworked it out?

What happens when the Hoffmann Institute triesto open dialogue with both of these forces atonce?

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Origins of the Etoile: ExtratemporalJD Wiker

JDWiker: Speaking of Sandmen, I’ve got thislittle idea that I was dying to try out as aSandman-oriented campaign.

BLUDGEON: Tell us. Please!

JDWiker: The notion is that the Etoile areactually from the future, from a time aftermankind has been all but wiped out by disease.

JDWiker: The surviving humans developed one-way time-travel technology, to send thingsbackward. But living people aren’t suited for it.So they create a kind of “remote organism” –the Etoile.

Torpedo: So the Sandmen are inoculatedhumans?

JDWiker: The Etoile’s purpose is to “infect” asmany humans as possible with the Sandmannanite. Since the process of becoming aSandman involves surviving a disease-likeinfection, the idea is that the Etoile will spawn ahardier race of humans – ones who can survivethe coming plagues.

( From RPG Hour Fri. April 7, 2000, availablefrom www.wizards.com )

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Sandman Strategies: Mind of theSandmanJames Nostack

Part of me wonders what the Sandmen make oftheir condition. Drexler coined the word"nanotechnology" in 1981, and even twentyyears later it's hardly in common circulation.Suppose you're a French farmer in 1789, or anMbuti hunter-gatherer in 1970, infected with theSandman Plague: you're not going to describe itas "nanotech," because you hardly know what amolecule is. Everyday language makes itsclosest approach with the word disease, butdiseases don't perform computation.

Following the implication, it's quite possible thatthe Sandman Plague does not rely onnanotechnology at all. Nanotech is just theclosest thing our language currently offers; thetruth could be far stranger. The Plague cancompute, but a disease cannot; what can'tnanotech do?

I'm not really going anywhere in particular withthis, just pointing out that there's always anopening for something really Weird to slither in.(I always thought the Outer Church should relyon something far more exotic and nightmarishthan nanotech, myself.)

Sandman Strategies: The Master PlanDavid Tormsen

The Great Game

The etoile game theory is the view held by manyin the Bilderberg Society. Though said to haveoriginated from a late-night conversation at theMetropolitan Club tinged with a bit too muchalcohol and expensive cigars, it does, at least tothe elite of the Bilderberg society, to makesense.

The etoile, from a military point of view, are anenigma. In some places they avoid directmilitary conflict, in others they wade right in.They prod at our worlds national and corporatedefenses, testing our armies. Sometimes it evenseems that some etoile actions contradictothers. They are very tactical, never relying ontheir superior technology alone, but infiltratingour society with skill and precision.

It's a game. The Bilderberg society believes thata powerful extraterrestrial entity or group isusing humankind and sandmen, maybe even theetoile themselves, as part of a grandcompetition. By turning small sandmen invasionforces against human armies, or even justhuman investigators, the gamers can pick theirteam, place bets, or simply be entertained. Theultimate goal would be, of course, for the smallscale conflicts to turn into a great global warwith many different sides, resulting inevitably inan ultimate winner, and most likely a scorchedearth.

Such a theory seems typical for theBilderbergers, who often engage in this practicethemselves, taking bets on civil wars and tribalconflicts around the world. But if it is true, itwould put a whole new spin on things. Are theetoile pawns too, or are they part of the game?Who's behind it? There are different opinionsamong the Bilderbergers, but some believe it tobe the Greys themselves. Though seeminglyludicrous, if it were true it would call into seriousdoubt the motives behind certain influentialhesai, even Itohiro Nakami himself.

Soulless Machinations

According to the Hidden Order of St. Gregoryand the Knights of Malta, the fact that etoile areintelligent machines dictates that they arewithout souls, as they were not created by God.This places them in the ranks of demons, andthey are, in fact, working for an infernal source.This explains the coexistence of Bering demonsand sandmen in certain areas, such asMagnitogorsk and Hong Kong.

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The ultimate goal, it seems, is the corruption ofthe souls of humans and the eventual etoile anddemonic rulership of the world. This is deeplytied with certain Gregorian ideas regarding barcodes, the United Nations, globalization and thelike. Many Gregorians refer to all etoile aslocusts, and believe them to be ruled by a singleetoile-like demon known as Abaddon.

While the Knights of Malta have accepted thistheory, they are markedly more skeptical aboutit. The cleric Antonio Cruz wrote a report in 2001on the relationship between etoile and BeringDemons, "There is little evidence of a grandconspiracy between the demons and the locusts.In certain situations, the two forces docooperate for mutual benefit, but mostly theyseem to endeavor to stay out of each othersway. Of course, there are exceptions to thatrule."

The Gregorians, however, maintain that there isan agreement of some sort between the twoinvading forces. If this is true, then mankind isin for a lot of trouble. Etoile technologycombined with the power of diabolism would bea formidable force. Perhaps that is why theetoile are so interested in Doorways, they allowtheir demonic allies through.

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Sandman Strategies: Zones of ControlJim Clunie

Grey-haired Miss Wyandotte, whotwenty years ago had loaned me the firstcopy of Huckleberry Finn I ever read,looked at me, her face going woodenand blank, with an utterly cold andpitiless alienness. There was nothingthere now, in that gaze, nothing incommon with me; a fish in the sea hadmore kinship with me than this staringthing before me. I know you, I'd said,and now she replied, and her voice wasinfinitely remote and uncaring. "Doyou?" she said, then turned on her heela n d w a l k e d a w a y .

- Jack Finney, Invasion of the BodySnatchers

Zones of Influence

Secure Zone (Green): Area wholly controlledby informed human forces, with widespread andeffective precautions against infection. Very lowpresence of aliens except as test specimens.Secure zones are small, typically enclosed withinsingle buildings or complexes.

Clear Zone (Yellow): Area where infection hasnot yet taken hold. This is an unstable state,with constant probing or fringe attempts by thealiens. 0-5% of the population infected. Thehuman population may be subject to severeparanoia or stern human-government control.

Infected Zone (Red): Area under concertedattack by the aliens with 10-40% of thepopulation infected. Humans within this zonecan expect infection attempts at any time. Alienpresence, and possibly human attempts tocontain the infection, lead to numerous strangeand frightening incidents.

Conquered Zone (Black): Area under aliencontrol. 40%-75% of the population areinfected. Aliens hold all positions of influence.The way of life seems superficially normal, andinfection attacks may be more rare, as theremaining humans are judged not to be a highpriority to control from a tactical standpoint. Theconquered zone may have checkpoint-likearrangements at its borders that inspect alloutsiders and infect or eliminate potentialthreats.

Deep Zone: Area that has been entirelycontrolled by aliens for months, years ordecades. All surviving inhabitants are infected,except for humans who are fully informed andactively collaborating with the aliens. The aliensno longer feel the need to maintain a fiction of

human society, and openly practice their ownmode of life. There are radical changes in thepopulation profile due to long-term biologicalconsequences of infection.

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Plague Transmission: Carthage, Romeand the Dark Ages

David Tormsen

Sandman infiltration of Carthage began sometime in the 7th century BC. What started as asmall trickling of nomadic sandmen intoCarthage was soon an influential force in the cityand here empire. Small infestations emerging inSpain, Africa and Britain due to the extensiveCarthaginian trade network.

The sandmen were the root of some of the moreimperialistic aspects of Carthaginian expansion,and generally controlled the government, boththe nobility and the citizen’s assembly. On theother hand, other conspiratorial forces were alsopresent in Carthage, notably the Baal-worshipping priesthood whose activities closelyresemble those of the modern day Final Church.Much of the Carthaginian army was composed ofsandmen mercenaries and subjects, notably thesandmen cavalry from Numidia.

In the 3rd century BC, Carthage conquered Sicilywith forces mainly composed of Sandmen. Then,in 283 BC, sandmen in Campania, a Romanprovince and the first in Italy to suffer aninfestation, seized the city of Rhegium on Italy’ssouthern tip. At the same time, a group of roguesandmen calling themselves the Mamertines,annexed the town of Messana in north-eastSicily. This fuelled fears in Rome that theCarthaginians wished to expand influence insouthern Italy and place a trade monopoly overthe region.

Despite the infection in Campania, the sandmenin Carthage had no wish to take over Italy.However, when the Romans allied themselveswith the rogues at Messana, war soon followed.

At the end of the First Punic War, the Romanssoon learned exactly how widespread thesandman infestation in Sicily was. In theaftermath, the Romans destroyed the sandmaninfestations in both Sicily and Campania. Adistinctly anti-sandman political movementappeared in Rome. Subsequently, the Romansannexed the Carthaginian provinces of Corsicaand Sardinia and destroyed the sandmaninfestations there.

During the Second Punic War, sandmeninfestations spread like wildfire across Spain,and when Hannibal invaded Italy his armieswere mostly composed of sandmen. However,due to the Roman strength of manpower andpossible use of precognition in the form ofaugury; the Carthaginians were again defeated.

Over the next fifty years, Cato, an influentialRoman politician, pushed for the completedestruction of Carthage and the sandmen.Between 149 and 146 BC, the Romans wagedwar on Carthage and almost completelydestroyed it. The last Carthaginian sandmaninfestations were destroyed.

As the Roman empire expanded, moreinfestations were discovered and eradicated inSpain, Gaul and Britain. With the fall in darkmatter levels after the birth of Jesus, thoseinfestations left in areas of Germania dwindleand are finally wiped out by Romans or Huns.

Dark Ages Europe

Though the Romans wiped out the sandmaninfestations in most of Britain, they neverconquered the Picts, and that is where thesandmen survived. These sandmen rogues werecompletely out of the control of any etoile, andlived a lifestyle very similar to that of the humanPicts. Despite their resiliency, however, invadersfrom Ireland; the Scotti tribes, soon displacedthe Pictish sandmen.

And yet infestations were still present in Europe:in Scandinavia. As dark matter levels began torise, Sandman Vikings began to terroriseNorthern Europe. The sandmen were known asberserkers. A peculiar affliction of the timeknown as berzerkergang, which caused someVikings to attack wildly and indiscriminately, wasactually a form of cykosis.

When, in the tenth century, the Vikings reachedthe coast of Canada and placed a colony there,the settlers were mostly sandmen. Though theVinlaand colony soon died out, this was the siteof the first infestation in the Americas andintroduced sandmen to the New World.

The Sandmen influence in Scandinavia andNorthern Europe dwindled to nothing in the 14th

century, although small infestations survivedamong the Kievan Rus and later Russia.

Interestingly, it appears that Iceland was onceheavily populated by sandmen. Though nosandmen exist there today that the Institute isaware of, blood samples taken from Icelandersin the modern day shows that the entirepopulation has evidence of nanites in theirbloodstream. It has been theorised that thesenanites represent a mutated form of thetraditional sandman nanite, and appear quiteharmless. But the possibility that the entirepopulation of Iceland could turn into sandmen atany time is rather unnerving to those at theInstitute and the CDC.

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Plague Transmission: Sandmen on theSteppesDavid Tormsen

Along with North Africa, Central Asia wasanother sandmen stronghold for much ofrecorded history. They rode hard across thesteppes, living in small tribes seeminglyindistinguishable from nearby human tribes.Their attempts to gain power rarely lasted long,being largely confined to raids on the nearbycivilized regions of Mesopotamia, Persia, Indiaand China. They suffered greatly the annexationof their lands by first Achaemenid Persians, andthen the armies of Alexander the Great.

Some sandmen managed to survive in the newregime, especially after Alexander’s mysteriousdeath in Babylon and the rise of the Seleucidsand the Graeco-Bactrian kingdom. Though theformer was destroyed by the anti-sandmenRomans, the Graeco-Bactrian kingdom wasconquered by another group of sandmen: theYueh-chi, who drove the Scythians before themin their migration south and created thepowerful Kushan empire.

Though the Kushan were later crushed bySassanid Persia, they soon assimilated andfound a home in the complex bureaucracy andtrade monopoly of the Persian Empire. Theyslowly spread throughout Persia for centuries,spreading tendrils of infection to India, Chinaand Europe. However, in a daring attempt by thesandman king Khosrau II to conquer the West,they were driven back by the Byzantines. Thendoom struck them, for at the end of a disastrouswar with Byzantium, the Persians were engulfedby a rapidly expanding Islam and just as inNorth Africa the sandmen were forced to flee.

The Khazars

The sandmen fleeing Islam disappeared amonggroups of Turkic and Iranian tribes in theCaucasus, but were soon up to their old tricksagain. They became the Khazars, a mix ofsandmen and humans who formed a powerfultrading empire in southern Russia. Theyestablished their capital at Itil on the mouth ofthe Volga river and soon had an empire thatextended as far west as Kiev, and controlled apowerful trade network.

However they soon came upon a problem. Withthe human Khazars trading heavily with theChristian Byzantines and the Muslim Caliphate,the sandmen knew it was only a matter of timebefore Khazaria was converted to one faith orthe other and subsequently cleansed of thesandmen infection. So, in a complex maneuver,they managed to convert the Khazars into a

completely different religion, that of Judaism,and thereby escape persecution.

The Khazar sandmen used a vassal people, theMagyars, to loot and pillage Europe during the9th and 10th centuries. They were the scourgeof Italy, Germany and France, fighting betterand riding faster than their opponents. Theywere, of course, largely sandmen. For all theirsuccesses and despite the latent infections theyleft in many plundered villages, they werevulnerable in mountainous areas and especiallyriver crossings (water being the classic sandmanweak point). They were eventually wiped out bythe Germans in 955.

The Khazars followed the Magyars down theroad to destruction soon after. The Slavicpeoples of Russia had banded together, beingstuck between the powerful sandmen merchantsof Khazaria and the powerful sandmen Vikingswho raided and traded in their lands. TheKievans, with the support of Byzantium,destroyed the Khazar empire. Though theythemselves crumbled soon after, its successorstates more often than not persecuted sandmenjust as badly.

The Mongol Invasion

The sandmen slowly migrated east to avoid theRussians, but soon collided with anotherpowerful force, that of Genghis Khan. TheMongols drove deep into the heart of Russianlands in the 13th century and drove thesandmen before them. With the Mongols on oneside and the Russians on the other, the sandmenwondered if they were doomed. But, as luckwould have it, more often than not the sandmenwere conscripted into the Mongol hordesthemselves.

By the time of the Golden Horde, the sandmenfound life under the Mongols to be to their likingindeed. They occupied positions in the militaryhierarchy and spread their infections as quicklyas they could. They lived mainly in the south,around the Crimea and even as far down as theCaucasus, which, with the decline of the GoldenHorde and the rise of Muscovy was a good thing.

With the growth of great power by such hostilepowers as the Muscovites and the Lithuanians inthe 16th and 17th centuries, the sandmen knewthey were in trouble. This time, however, theydid not just migrate away, for the Russians werestorming east, Persia was still not a healthyplace to be and there was already a substantialsandmen population in Central Asia. Instead,they decided in disappear into the places wherenobody would ever think to look for them: in theghettoes of the Jews.

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Sandmen in the Ghettoes

With the Jews migrating east across Europe andthe sandmen migrating west, they were boundto collide. So, at the end of the Thirty YearsWar, when Jewish settlements began to appearacross Eastern Europe, they were often occupiedby a heavy sandmen population. This did nothelp the Jews much when it came to the distrustof the local Christians, but most simply didn'tknow. Furthermore, disaster was averted whenthe etoile began to return in the late 18thcentury, for they met with local Jewish leadersand some sort of agreement was worked out.The Jews and the sandmen would work togetherfor the good of both.

Though this population extended across much ofEastern Europe, it suffered varying degrees ofpersecution by the Lithuanian, Ottoman, Russianor Polish overlords. It became affiliated with thePrussian sandmen population, but for one crucialdifference: the ghetto sandmen recognized thesupremacy of the etoile, while the Prussians didnot. Despite some cooperation during theNapoleonic Wars, the two groups of sandmenstayed separate.

In the 19th century the Russians considered theJewish sandmen to be a nuisance, especiallywhen they began to draw parallels withencounters with tribes in Central Asia and theCaucasus whose fighters occasionallydisintegrated into sand upon death. They didprove to be a great nuisance, as the centuryclosed and the etoile began to expand thepossibility of a revolution in Russia. Thisoccurred in 1917 with minimal etoile influence,but the sandmen didn't find life all that muchbetter under the Soviets.

Life in the ghettoes of Eastern Europe camelargely to an end when Hitler invaded the regionin the 1940's and sent thousands of Jews andsandmen to death camps. Only in Byelorussia,where the etoile were arriving through hiddenDoorways, were the sandmen able to hold theirground, and even there they suffered greatlosses. Those sandmen who did not die in thegas chambers migrated there, or left for a newlife in North America or Israel, masquerading ashuman Jews. Stalin’s purges also hurt thesandmen of Byelorussia, but with the fall of theUSSR and new found independence, things arestarting to look up once more, and the sandmenconcentration in that region far outstrips that ofthe rest of Europe.

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Plague Transmission: Sandmen inAfricaDavid Tormsen

The Shock of Islam

For millennia, Africa had been the centre of thesandman presence on Earth. Tribes of sandmenrode across the sands, and expanded both northand south. Even with Carthage destroyed, thesandmen soon infiltrated the rich andprosperous kingdom of Axum and regrew theirpower, again using trade to expand theirinfection. By the 5th century AD, the Axumitesandmen dominated the Red Sea by superiormilitary and economic might.

But in the 7th century, things changed. Atroublemaker known as Muhammed arose in thecity of Mecca, dominated by a sandman elite ofmerchant aristocrats. He fled to Medina with hisfollowers, but there he organized his followersinto a community, and defeated the Meccans inseveral battles. He returned to Mecca in 630 anddestroyed both the idols of the old pagan gods,and forced the sandmen still present in the cityto flee for their lives. By his death, most ofArabia had been cleansed of the sandmenscourge.

Islam expanded rapidly after that. The Axumitefleet was defeated in the 8th century and thesandmen were forced to flee from Axum intonearby Christian kingdoms, where they werepersecuted and almost wiped out. Most of thesurvivors moved along the east Africancoastline, barely keeping ahead of the Muslimsand suffering the persecution of local peoplesbefore arriving in Great Zimbabwe in the 10thcentury.

Meanwhile the Muslims spread across NorthAfrica and displaced what little sandmen activityhad escaped the persecution of the Byzantines.Though Islam got distracted with expansion intoAsia and Europe, the sandmen in North Africawere greatly weakened. Luckily for thesandmen, the Islamic Caliphate fragmented intovying factions quickly, and many Berbersandmen were able to find anonymity fightingfor the Almoravids and Almohad empires.However, most sandmen found the climate of anIslamic North Africa was not to there liking, andinstead fled south.

The African Kingdoms

With the sudden increase in trans-Saharantrade, kingdoms in West Africa with largesupplies of gold suddenly found themselves veryprosperous. These kingdoms and city-states viedfor power with one another, while slowly beinginfiltrated by sandmen from the north. Some of

these sandmen formed small, our of the waydynasties, like that of the Kanuri mais (kings)who ruled in Kanem-Borno without reallybothering anyone until their overthrow in the19th century. However others took a moreproactive role.

Sandmen became merchants and aristocrats,amassing great quantities of wealth and power.Some were persecuted by humans anddestroyed, but others lived quite comfortably.Sandman infection was rife in the rich Hausastates, especially the city of Zaria; and spreadas far south as the forest kingdoms of Yoruba,Benin and Akan. However, they faced manythreats. The first was Islam, ever spreading andstill quite oppressive. The second was thepowerful kingdoms of the Senegal and Nigerrivers, the successive empires of Ghana, Maliand Songhai, all prosperous, powerful andhostile to sandmen. The third came in the formof the first Portuguese sailors to arrive in the15th century, a threat for the future.

Isolated from all this was Great Zimbabwe, apowerful sandmen-dominated trading empirewith connections as far distant as China. Itflowered for a brief period before beingmysteriously destroyed by fire. Soon after, alltraces of sandman infection in this region of theworld vanished, which is unlikely to be acoincidence. The Swahili-speaking Muslimkingdoms of the coastline then dominated tradein the area.

When Europeans began arriving, things rapidlybecame confusing. A Moroccan invasion forcecomposed largely of sandmen destroyed theSonghai in 1590, while the sandmen in Algiersfound life slightly easier under Ottoman rule.European slavers arrived, seeking gold, ivoryand slaves, which the sandmen traders wereonly too happy to provide. Though most of theslaves that went to the Americas were humanscaptured by sandmen slavers, some sandmenwere occasionally captured and sent west,creating small infections in the Caribbean.

The Jihads and the Coming of the French

The sandmen situation in West Africa really gotout of control with the rise of Uthman dan Fodio,a Muslim religious leader of the Fulani peoplewho called for a holy war (jihad) against theinfidel. However, his conquering armies werecomposed largely of Fulani pagan horsemen,most of whom were sandmen. The jihad whichprobably intended to clear the Hausa and otherstates of sandmen infection instead led to thepowerful sandman-dominated Sultanate ofSokoto assuming dominance over the region.

21

Another jihad was waged by the holy man al-Hajj Umar of the Futa Jallon, with rather similarresults. The sandman dominated kingdom ofMasina and the sandmen-free kingdoms ofBambara were both conquered by armies ofsandmen who quickly established dominanceover the region. However, during this jihad al-Hajj Umar managed to gain the attention of theFrench, who had a military presence along theSenegal Rver and were able to turn the sandmenjihad armies back.

The French had been slowly developing theopinion that there was something really wrongwith Africa for some time. During their conquestof Algeria in the 1830's and 40's they faced astiff resistance, and came across many sandmenwarriors. The reason they were fighting so hardwas the fact that Doorways had begun to opennot too long before and a slow trickle of etoilewere coming through. The French, however,didn't know this, and thought the Algerians whoevaporated into sand upon death to be strangeindeed. When the same thing happened inskirmishes with West African warriors and duringEuropean land conflicts with the Prussians, someof the French began to put two and twotogether.

By the 1880's, the French had had enough of thesandmen in Africa. They began to expandagainst them, and drove deep into the heart ofthe sandmen domains there. Other Europeanpowers scrambled for territory, the British,Belgians, Portuguese and Germans, but it wasthe French who found themselves coming upagainst sandmen the most. Despite Britishattempts to resist the French expansion,pressure from Bismarck offered the French afree hand in the region. Bismarck, a powerfulsandman, felt that the presence of etoile inAfrica would spell the end of powerful sandmenlike him, so he encouraged the breaking of theirpower by a European invader, even a long-timeenemy of Prussia.

From Senegal to Lake Chad the Frenchconquered, up through the Sahara, destroyingthe old sandmen empires. The British helped inthe dismemberment of Sokoto, but primarily itwas the French that got down and dirty with thesandmen of West Africa. Many sandmenattempted to escape, going east to the Sudan tostir up trouble there, south to the GermanCameroons in the hope of protection from thesandmen there (which wasn't often given) andnorth to Morocco before in was partitionedbetween France and Spain in 1912. Mostsandmen and etoile simply disappeared into thedesert, waiting for a time to rise up again andtake back their empires.

Plague Transmission: The TeutonicKnightsDavid Tormsen

During the Third Crusade, many of theCrusaders were in fact sandmen. In Acre ataround 1190 a powerful etoile, through awealthy sandman couple from Bremen,established a hospital for the treatment ofinjuries and the infection of German crusaderswith regenerative nanites. They continued underthis guise for many years, and were soon madea military order by the Papacy. They became theTeutonic Knights, equal to the Templars and theHospitallers, and were to be distinguished by theuse of a black cross as its symbol.

The Teutonic Order expanded rapidly in the early13th century, under the guidance of HermannVon Salza, a sandman with connections to theHidden Order of Saint Gregory and the Germanemperor Frederick II. Throughout the century,the Order spread across Europe, theMediterranean and the Holy Land. They becamethe only Order to rival the Templars andHospitallers in size and scope, despite beingsome 80 years younger.

In the late 13th century, the Order moved itsattention from the Holy Land to the Baltic,conquering the pagan Prussians and convertingthem to Christianity. Many of the Prussians werealso turned into sandmen as well. As the 14thcentury came along, the Order was a force to bereckoned with, slowly populating Prussia andbecoming an active trader in the HanseaticLeague. It was a major supplier of cheap grainto Western Europe. By "coincidence" many ofthe regions where Teutonic grain was eaten alsobecame sandman enclaves.

In 1410, an anti-Teuton (and secretly, an anti-sandmen) coalition led by Poland and Lithuaniacrushed the Order at the Battle of Tannenburg.This began a series of catastrophes for theorder. In 1467, Prussia fell to the Poles. Duringthe Reformation and its wars in the 15th and16th centuries, the Order slowly weakened andlost almost all of its military influence. Napoleonswept the Order out of western Europe, until theonly remnants were left in the Austrian Empire.There the Order survived, until the latter half ofthe twentieth century, when the Order began toexpand once more.

The Rise of Prussia

After the Battle of Tannenburg and subsequentdecline of the Teutonic Order, the large sandmanpopulation in Prussia fell on hard times. This wasfacilitated by the wars of reformation andcounter-reformation in Europe during the 16th

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and 17th centuries. But this run of bad luckended with the Peace of Westphalia, whichended the Thirty Years war and allowed thesandmen to propagate more easily.

As Prussia slowly grew in power in the 17thcentury, it was guided by the hands of powerfulsandmen. In the 18th century, the king ofPrussia, Frederick the Great, was a sandman,and subsequently pursued a program of forcedindustrialization in the recently acquired Silesia,and the consolidation of gains made at thehands of weakened Poland and Austria.

Despite losses in the Napoleonic Wars, in the19th century Prussia became more powerfulthan ever. A series of customs unions controlledsecretly by the sandmen known as the Zollvereinwere created. These expanded to cover thewhole of Germany. Prussia expanded intoDenmark, and then made war with Austria underthe auspices of the great sandman leaderBismarck. This war excluded Austria from unitywith Germany, and led to the creation of theNorth German Confederation under completePrussian control.

After the capture of Alsace-Lorraine by Germanforces, the French became opposed to them. Forthe next four decades there was almost no warin Europe, simply slowly changing alliances anddiplomatic standings. This allowed the sandmento consolidate their gains in Germany, and topursue an imperialist policy in Africa and thePacific. Eventually, however, Germany and itsally Austria-Hungary began to feel encircled bythe other powers in Europe, who believed (quiterightly) that the Germans planned to dominateEurope. A flashpoint in the Balkans appearedand suddenly the world descended into war. Thesandmen knew that with their superiority, theywould win the war.

It didn't turn out that way. The Great War killedthe majority of the Prussian sandman armies. Asthe years wore on, the population became lessand less, and they couldn't keep up. Only inAustria-Hungary did the sandman populationincrease, with the Teutonic Order there involvedin medical treatment (and the introduction ofregenerative nanites into the wounded soldiers).But in Germany, the sandmen were dying.

At the end of the war, the victors needed a wayto make sure that the threat of Germany, andthe sandman scourge, would never botherEurope again. In doing so, they crushed Prussia,and broke its power forever. When nextGermany would rise to threaten the world, itwould not be under the control of the sandmen,but the Nazis, who killed thousands of sandmenin death camps during the Second World War.

Plague Transmission: Sandmen in theCaribbeanDavid Tormsen

The sandmen influence in the Caribbean hasbeen largely low-key, as there were no nativesandmen in the region before the importation ofAfrican slaves. Most of the slave sandmen simplyassimilated into the community and littleinfection spread. One of the highestconcentrations, however, was the island ofHispaniola, where, in the late 1780's, an etoileappeared in the region and began to spread itsinfluence.

It chiefly used the liberation movement tospread infection among prominent Negro leadersand among the rebels. The sandmen ToussaintL'Ouverture in particular freed the slaves in1793, then forced the British out in 1798. Hewas killed by the French in 1802, but two yearslater another sandman, Jean Jacques Dessalines,declared independence and renamed the countryHaiti. For the next five decades, the etoileexpanded his power until almost ten percent ofthe population was sandmen.

However, things soon went awry. The roguesandmen Faustin Elie Soulouque rose to powerand subsequently the country began todisintegrate into disorder. Though in the historybooks it is said to be a struggle between negroand mulatto political aspirations, in fact it was athree way conflict between the etoile's sandmen,the rogue sandmen (believed to have links withthe Germans) and the anti-sandmen faction.

In the end, the etoile was defeated, but onlywith the alliance between the rogue sandmenand the anti-sandmen factions, and theintervention of the United States in 1915 tofinally bring some semblance of order. Theuneasy agreements signed by the two factionsled to small uprisings and disturbances for thenext few years, but the sandmen influence, withno etoile to guide it, has lessened. With thegrowing power of the etoile in recent years, therogue sandmen of Haiti have responded with agrowth of power.

Haitian rogue sandmen and humans who knowof the struggle are prominent in Haiti, making itone of the epicenters of anti-etoile resistance.Today, sandmen walk the streets of Port-au-Prince and even New Orleans, using the mysteryand stereotypes of Voodoo to hide their truemission.

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Plague Transmission: The 19th CenturyDavid Tormsen

The Opium Wars

In the early 19th century, China was a majormarket for the European powers. However,despite the advanced technologies andcommodities the Europeans could offer, therewas really only one thing of interest to theChinese; silver. The British found a way aroundthis problem by introducing opium, which wasprized for its medicinal value, to China in vastquantities, and in a stronger (and addictive)form. Though this trade became illegal in 1836,the British bribed officials and soon miserableopium dens were springing up all over China.

Though opium by itself was damaging to China,it perhaps would have been ignored, except for aterrible byproduct of it. Sandmen agents in theBritish East India Company began to seedselected batches of the opium for export. Whenthe opium reached the dens in Canton and otherChinese cities, opium addicts began to becomesandmen, starting an epidemic in China.Interestingly, it seems the British were entirelyunaware of this byproduct of their extremelylucrative trade.

A figure that became aware of the sandmanthreat to the country was the brilliant and highlymoral official Lin Tse-hsu (who was in manyways remiscent of the famous Roman censorCato). Having once narrowly escaped a sandmanattack with his life, Lin dedicated his career toending the opium trade and the sandman threat.He maneuvered himself into the position ofImperial Commissioner of Canton, and began acampaign to wipe out sandman-infected opiumdens in the city and elsewhere.

The British and Lin soon came on a collisioncourse. When the British refused to stop theiropium trade, Lin threatened to cut off all tradebetween China and the British Empire. AfterChinese junks began to turn back trade ships,the British sent warships and later troops toforce China to open its borders to trade. In1842, the Chinese signed a peace treaty, whichceded five open ports to the British. Similartreaties were later signed with France and theUnited States.

After the Chinese defeat, Lin Tse-hsu was placedin an isolated Turkestan appointment (where hepushed for the imperial government to adoptWestern technology and warfare, and waslargely ignored) and the opium trade tripled. Thesandmen infiltration of China continued, and wasnot seriously weakened until the 20th century,when a combination of the Civil War, theJapanese Invasion and the Cultural Revolution

wiped out most of the sandman population inChina. Still, after Hong Kong became British,sandmen flourished there (and continue totoday) and pockets of sandman infiltration existacross the country, particularly in the west.

General Charles Gordon

Charles "Chinese" Gordon first encounteredsandmen during the Taiping rebellion (anelohim-supported reaction against a 19thcentury Chinese version of the modern FinalChurch which blew out of proportion and led toan attempt to set up a Christian Theocracywithin China) in 1864. During an assault on anenemy stronghold, Gordon witnessed at leastthree of the Chinese soldiers in his 'EverVictorious Army' dissolve into dust upon beingslain.

Later, in 1877, he again encountered sandmen,in the form of slave traders who terrorized themostly human black population of the Sudan.Not only did they enslave the local population,but they would slowly turn charismatic orpowerful figures among the blacks intosandmen, to further control and terrorize thepeople. After destroying several sandmanstrongholds in the Sudan, Gordon eventuallymoved onto quieter assignments and returned toEngland.

He returned to the Sudan in 1884, in responseto the rise of a powerful Islamic leader (andsandman) who called himself the Mahdi, or'expected one'. Determined to free the humanpopulation of the Sudan from the Mahdi's chieflysandman armies, and also to prevent them fromthreatening British Egypt, Gordon tookKhartoum and held it for months despiterelentless attacks by the Mahdi's forces and littlesupport from Britain itself.

Despite Gordon's best efforts, the city fell to theMahdi and the sandmen. Two days afterGordon’s death, a British army arrived atKhartoum, too late. It took the British years tobreak the power of the Madhi and purge theSudan of most of its sandman population. Smallinfections in the area still exist today, and arebelieved to have increased in number in recentyears.

The Comanche and the Buffalo Soldiers

The Comanche Indians were feared and hatedby most of the stable and less warlike tribes ofTexas and other American states. Currentevidence suggests that these people wereindeed sandmen, at least a large percentage ofthem. Other sandman American Indian tribes,such as the Wichita, came from the north andpotentially spread infection from the original

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introduction of the sandmen to the New World atthe Vinland colony, to local tribes in the south.Though most of the sandmen in the North diedout before European contact, the Comancheinfection survived.

The Apache, who were probably human, cameinto conflict with the Comanche sandmen. Theformer were forced south by the latter, but theApache soon developed a reputation as beingjust as warlike as the Comanche. When Texaswas Mexican territory, the local powers found itextremely difficult to control the Comanche andto stop infection from spreading to Mexicans.

Comanche sandmen were instrumental in thefoundation of an independent Texas, and ofTexas' inclusion in the Union (behind the scenes,of course). Comanche sandmen even fought onthe Confederate side during the American CivilWar. After the war, certain movements in theUnion began to push for an end to theComanche threat. The Buffalo Soldiers, African-American cavalry divisions, were used to bringthe Comanche under control.

In a series of exploits, the Buffalo Soldiersbegan to weaken sandman influence on theComanche. Though the sandmen fought bitterly,they were outmatched by the Buffalo soldiers.The Buffalo soldiers also brought otherdangerous influences in Texas and the Americansouth-west under control, both sandmen andhumans, from Mexican revolutionaries tooutlaws.

Though the Buffalo soldiers fought well againstthe sandman influence in Texas and weakenedthem considerably in the short run, theyultimately failed in purging Texas of sandmen.Today, sandman-owned companies are eager tobuy up land formerly belonging to theComanche, and some Comanche areencouraging them to do so. The Institutebelieves that some of these Comanche landshold secrets, possibly Doorways, but there is noway to be sure.

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Sandman Influences: XinjiangJim Clunie and Derek Shakabpa

Jim Clunie: Chinese sandmen? Now there's athought.

The Xinjiang-Uighur Autonomous Region wouldbe perfect for them. It's the closest part of Chinato the known infestation at Magnitogorsk, arugged semi-desert region, and has high yieldoilfields and heavy industry around theprovincial capital, Urumqi.

Losing an entire province of 17 million peoplewould be sheer carelessness on the part of theChinese government.

The areas of greatest compromise are thecapital, Urumqi, and its outlying towns ofKaramay (the site of the first major oildiscoveries in the region), Kuqa and Hami in theJunggan, Tarim and Turfan depressions. Allthese little-known settlements are marked bythe bright night-glow of massive industrial effortthat is certainly not reflected in their productionquotas provided to the Beijing government.

The province's far eastern city of Kashi, orKashgar, seems to stand aloof from sandmaninfluence. It is almost certainly controlled by theRosicrucians.

Derek Shakabpa: By way of some background,Xinjiang is the Chinese name for this area. Thelocal people, called Uighurs, call it EasternTurkestan. The Uighurs are a Muslim Turkicpeople who settled here in the 7th Century. They are ethnically distinct from Chinese andhave their own language and culture.

If you intend to send Hoffmann Institute agentsinto this area, you should know that security istight in this region. That's because for the last50 years, the Uighurs have been agitating forindependence from China. There are severalUighur guerrilla groups and the Chinese have alarge military and security force in the area. Suspected separatists, whether violent orpeaceful, are arrested, tortured, and usuallyexecuted by the Chinese Govt. China alsostrictly controls speech, assembly and religion inthis area as many Uighur Muslim clerics arebelieved to favor independence. Foreignjournalists are often not permitted or are closelymonitored when visiting this region.

There is also a huge nuclear power facility (nearLake Kokonor) and toxic waste dump in Xinjiang. Lately, ethnic tensions have been on the rise asmillions of Chinese colonists have beenmigrating to Xinjiang in the last few decadesthreatening to make the Uighurs a minority intheir own land.

Xinjiang was formally incorporated into ChineseEmpire in 1884. It’s the only “autonomousregion” with a Muslim majority. The non-Chinese population is about 9 million with 8million being ethnic Uighurs. Xinjiang means“New Dominion” in Chinese.

The Manchu Qing Empire first invaded this areain 1759 but were unable to consolidate control.Yakub Beg, an ethnic Uighur, ruled this areafrom 1866 to 1876. The Qing again invaded in1877 and consolidated its rule by 1884. TheQing Dynasty fell in 1911 and the territory wasruled by competing warlords until 1944.

In 1944, an independent, Soviet-backed, Uighurstate was established called the East TurkestanRepublic. However, with Soviet consent, Chinesecommunists took over Xinjiang in 1949 and haveruled it since as part of the People's Republic ofChina.

About 40% of the total Xiinjiang population of18.5 million people are now Chinese. HanChinese tend to dominate commerce as well aspolitics. Uighurs tend to have lower incomes,less skilled jobs, and worse health care thantheir Chinese neighbors.

More information on E. Turkestan can beobtained at www.taklamakan.org .

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Sandman Influences: Sandmen in theThird WorldJames Nostack

Well, What Isn't Their Fault?

The Dark•Matter book suggests that the firstEtoile arrived on Earth in the 1790's, and thegeneral impression I get is that somehow theytravelled with the French army throughout a lotof north Africa: Algeria, Tunisia, the wholeswath. Other sections of the book indicate thatthe Sandmen are making life difficult for theRussians in Chechnya and Magnitogorsk—andthe region in the middle is, roughly speaking,Kazakhstan and Afghanistan. From this I gatherthat the Sandman Plague somehow piggybackedfrom North Africa to Central Asia, thoughwhether that's deliberate or simply a historicalaccident, I don't know.

Given that the Sandmen seem to focus on ThirdWorld countries, you sort of wonder how theywould have regarded some of the Communistrevolutions in the early half of the TwentiethCentury. In 1917 Russia was one of the mostbackwards, disorganized states imaginable;whatever one thinks about life under theCommunists, certainly the central governmentbecame a lot more powerful. The same holdstrue for China and several African countries:Communism may be a lousy system if you'reconcerned about liberty, but if you want tomodernize in a single generation, it seems towork pretty well.

So, if you're an Etoile, and you painstakinglymasterminded a scheme to infiltrate thelaughably backwards nation of Craplakistan, aPeople's Revolution could really throw a monkeywrench into your plans. It stands to reason thatthe Sandmen might be some of the fiercestcounter-revolutionary forces around, and couldoffer a link between the Sandmen and UnitedStates military intelligence. On the other hand,once the Revolution finally succeeds, amonolithic bureaucracy might be just the toolthe Etoile were looking for. At any rate, Stalin'spurges, the Chechnya mess, and the 1980's warin Afghanistan conceivably might haveconnections to rooting out the Sandmen.

Also, if the Sandmen remain secret largely toavoid tipping off the Fraal, it's possible that theentire Space Race was simply a way to boostmankind's technological capacity, forcing theFraal deeper into secrecy. With the Fraal gone,or at least withdrawn, the Sandmen couldoperate more aggressively. As nifty side effects,the space program led to the widespread use ofcomputers and the creation of a worldwidecommunication network. Maybe the Bush

administration's renewed call for themilitarization of space is just another maneuverin the struggle between the Fraal and theSynergy.

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Sandman Influences: CorporateSandmenJames Nostack

The Worst Job I Never Had

My friends and I are all in the mid-twenties"Dead End Jobs To Crush Your Spirit" phase ofour lives, and one poor bastard wound up as anInitiatives Analyst for a telemarketing companycalled ICTGROUP. (ICT is officially pronounced"I see tea," but in my lingo it became "ick.")During my brief infiltrations to pick him up forlunch, I saw some mad vision of a world totallydevoid of the human soul. ICT is, in somestrange way, the most horrible company I'veever seen. It's not really worse than any otherlarge corporation; it's not some hellish, grindingdystopia or anything. It just sort of enshrinesthe bland, emotionless Drone World thatcharacterizes everything that's deadening inmodern business. Other companies approachthis ideal asymptotically, but ICT is the real deal.(It doesn't help that they just bulldozed a forestnext to my hometown to make room for theirnew international HQ.) I'll never get over thatfirst impression: a world neither good nor bad,but still somehow completely inhuman.

I'm only bringing it up because when I firstbegan thinking about the Sandmen, the phrase"Borg with fax machines" stuck in my mind. Iimagined a claque of pinstriped drudges whocommunicate with infrared bit streams aroundthe water cooler. It's been remarked by anumber of people that working for largecompanies is dehumanizing; maybe that'sliterally true. In any case, it's been assumedthat the Sandmen mainly focus on governmentagencies and NGO's, but why aren't they inbusiness? A large multinational, particularly inthe computer or telecom industry, would offer acover for travel, a method to distributeresources around the world without attractingattention, and a source of new recruits ("HumanResources" indeed!). It would also provide arevenue stream, and a way to influence politics,technology, and media—all out in the open.

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Sandman Influences: Sandmen and theHoffmann InstituteDavid Tormsen

The Sandmen as Allies

As foes, the sandmen are a formidable force thatmust be overcome. But as allies, things becomemore interesting. How does a team of humanheroes interact with a group of nanite-enhancedwarriors when they find themselves fightingalongside them? The sandmen have a nefariousagenda to be sure, how can such ends berationalized away? And why would such anarrangement come about in the first place?

The Enemy of My Enemy

When a powerful force arrives on the planet benton the annihilation of all life, neither theHoffman Institute nor the sandmen profit. With acommon enemy too powerful for either theInstitute or the sandmen to defeat alone, analliance seems a viable option. Such an enemycould be anything: the Final Church and theBering demons, the kinori, or a hostile alien raceinfiltrating human society. Whatever the threatis, it should be of a magnitude and horror thatthe sandmen’s goal of global takeover seems thelesser of two evils.

This is not to say that the Institute will trust thesandmen, or vice versa. An alliance does notchange the fact that the Hoffman Institute isopposed to the sandmen's ends. A team ofheroes may fight alongside a team of sandwarriors, it should be a tense mission. Thepossibility of the sand warriors trying to infectthe heroes, or sandmen spies in the corridors ofthe Institute, should always be there. And oncethe threat is dealt with and mutual enemy hasbeen defeated, what happens next?

Silver Section

Silver Section is the name given to the SpecialDivision section devoted to the use of sandmenfor Institute purposes. It is situated in anInstitute training facility somewhere just southof the border. Only a few join its ranks, thosewith the right physical tolerance andpsychological stability to survive. For there,through the use of a captured etoile or by aclever duplication of etoile technology, HoffmanInstitute agents are voluntarily converted intosandmen.

Silver Section is distrusted by much of theInstitutes rank and file, and even those withinthe Special Division itself. Red and White sectionagents in particularly have a subtle hatred forthe sandmen of Silver Section. Of course, theyaren't called sandmen if they're Silver Section,

they are "technological combat specialists" orTechComSpecs. For the most part, they are veryloyal to the Institute, but that loyalty may ormay not be linked with the fact that they areconstantly under heavy scrutiny.

The Advancement of Humanity

For some, the sandmen represent not a threat,but an example to be strived toward. They seethe sandmen as humans who have achieved abalance between themselves and theirtechnology, in tune with their bodies and sharpof mind, immune from disease and naturaldeath. They see the etoile as benign artificialleaders, unsullied by the flaws of humanity. Inso many ways, the sandmen society seems tocoincide with what many in the Institutedescribe as their personal utopia. Therefore, thetwo sides make the perfect allies.

Even if the majority of the Institute thinks thisway, there will be many who do not, including(or maybe not including) the heroes themselves.There are just to many aspects of the sandmenand the etoile that doesn't fit with the utopianview. The heroes may discover their seeminglyexcellent allies are, in fact, plotting againsthumanity. Of course, the sandmen and theirallies within the Institute would then try theirhardest to keep that information from getting tothe Institute at large...by any means.

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Disease Clusters: The Silicon SanctuaryDavid Tormsen

In the London underground music scene, thereis a place that is known far and wide. It playsmusic unlike anything else, music that warps themind. Drugs are free and easily accessible there,pills and needles of narcotics unavailableanywhere else in Britain. There are never anyraids, no disruptions. As the city sleeps the partylasts all night, every night. This is the SiliconSanctuary.

But there are other stories whispered about theplace as well. That the eerie music hypnotizesthose who dance. That the drugs make peoplechange, and become sick, then suddenly behealthy again but somehow different. Thatpeople have gone in there on whim and havenever come out again. And that sometimes,when the music is playing the loudest and thewhole crowd is so far gone in music- or drug-induced torpors, that metallic tendrils descendfrom above to writhe in the air and amongst thecrowd, and then latch onto dancers and drill intotheir brains.

The number of people who know about the exactlocation of the club is pretty small, but itsreputation extends far and wide. Once found,there is the matter of getting in. Two largebouncers stand at the door, which itself is ratherunassuming. They are both sand warriors, andare can tell a threat when they see it. It ispossible to get past them, if the bouncers can beconvinced that whomever wants to enter doesso purely in the pursuit of pleasure and the beat.

Inside it is dark, with lasers and smoke andcolored lights flashing above the dance floor.There is a turntable for the DJ, and a bar andseats nearby. It is perpetually kept dark and themusic is always playing. There are always peopleon the dance floor, twisting and gyrating to thesound of house music or punk or whateverhappens to be playing at the time. There areother figures, however, who stand aside andwatch. They are always there, observing andkeeping an eye on things. They are, of course,sandmen.

There is a door at the far end of the club whichis always kept locked. Behind it are stairs,watched over by security cameras and hiddenmicrophones. Up the stairs and into a roomdirectly above the club, there is an etoile, theboss of the Silicon Sanctuary, who took upresidence during the early 80's and hasn't leftsince. It controls all the sandmen in the clubbelow.

The drugs given out freely in the club are lacedwith regenerative nanites, like those that create

the sandmen. But they are not the same. Theysubtly alter the brains of those that take thedrugs, leaving them open to suggestion. Thissuggestion is the music, synthesized by theetoile itself, with a beat and rhythm of an alienand seductive nature. With the nanites in theirbrains and the music issuing instructions, thedancers enter trances. The nanites releaseeuphoric hormones into the blood stream,keeping the dancers in a state of blissfulunawareness.

At this point, the tendrils emerge from the roof.They play amongst the dancers, brushingagainst them and wrapping around them. Theones who do see them are too far out of it tocare. The tendrils facilitate the last in theprocess, and allow the nanites within each brainto send messages to the nanites in the otherbrains. The end goal? To create a network ofnanites and brain cells working together underthe control of the etoile’s music, in effectcreating an extremely powerful computer.

The technique is not perfect. The etoile has notyet achieved the perfect synergy of nanite, brainmatter and the beat. Patrons of the SiliconSanctuary stumble home, and wake the nextday with confused memories, having picked upsnippets of other experiences from those aroundthem on the dance floor. Sometimes there aredire psychological effects, with the emergence ofmultiple personalities and hallucinations. Theetoile keeps working. If it succeeds, then it willhave in its possession a computer made of thecombined brain power of hundreds of youngmen and women, a computer more powerfulthan anything short of OSIRS.

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Disease Clusters: Parker Heights HighSchoolDavid Tormsen

Parker Heights High School is one of the topranking educational providers in the EasternUnited States. It has a standard of excellencethat is almost unparalleled. It competes innational science competitions, sports andcheerleading championships, chess and musictournaments, and holds many academic andsporting achievements. It has been consistentlychosen among the top five high schools in thecountry for the last seven years running.

A bit of a difference from the old days, whenParker Heights High School was considered abad school, rough and dangerous, the sort ofschool that bred gang members and postalworkers. Then, in 1995, a new principal wasappointed: Principal Steel. Of mysterious past,he quickly introduced the program that wouldprove the catalyst behind the schoolsremarkable transformation: the Self-Development and Achievement Program (SDAP).

The SDAP program involved the testing of eachstudent entering the school. Those withadvantages, of high intelligence or stamina, thebest of the student body, were separated fromthe rest of the school and instead becameinvolved in the SDAP program. On the outside itwas to help foster their individual talents in thebest possible environment, while the lessfortunate could benefit from social contact withthose of their own level.

Soon people began to notice things strangeabout the SDAP students. They seemed to slowlygo through strange personality changes as theyspent more time in the program. In particular, aSDAP orientation camp held at the start of eachschool year seemed to have the greatest effect.They would quickly break ties with those outsidethe SDAP program. They would study or trainalmost obsessively, and seemed to all developidentical moral views.

They were soon the highest in the school socialstructure. Dressed in identical SDAP uniforms(letter jackets for the guys, jumpers for thegirls) they became unquestionably the elite ofthe school, those with the highest scores ontests, those with the best manners, those whoperformed the best on the sports field. As timewent by and the SDAP students graduated, theywould stay in town for a single year, then allleave for the same university, and then never beseen again. Meanwhile, another year of talentedstudents entered the program.

Sometimes, however, strange things surroundedthe SDAP students. Called the SDAPo (rhymeswith Gestapo) by the lesser portion of thestudent body, they occasionally had thetendency to get a bit violent. It would often byover the most trivial things, but the resultswould be terrifying. Mysterious deaths andbloody in-class attacks weren't quite common,but they occurred often enough to be disturbing.However, the local police have rarely looked intothese crimes, and often cover them up.

The truth is, of course, that Principal Steel is anetoile, acting through a sandman puppet whosebrain the etoile controls. It has turned themajority of the school staff and the entireParent-Teacher Association into sandmen aswell, and thus has great power over the localcommunity.

The SDAP is a useful cover for the etoile’sactivities. Each year, it infects a select numberof elite students during the orientation camp.SDAP is in fact a sandman training program, inwhich the students are indoctrinated and taughtwhat the etoile deems necessary for the war.They then continue their studies in majoruniversities, and then are quickly recruited,sometimes by sandmen dominated companies orthe ATF, or into other corporations andgovernment agencies as part of a infiltrationprogram.

The entire school is imbedded with the etoile’stools. It is connected with the school securitysystem at all times, and knows almosteverything that goes on in the school. Theschool newspaper is published with a band oflines that appear to be decoration but are in factencoded secret instructions for the SDAPstudents. The school showers spray a wash ofbillions of nanites, which look indistinguishablefrom water but isn't, for it does not damage theSDAP students in any way.

The occasional outbursts of violence areunfortunate in the etoile’s point of view. As partof their indoctrination is a separation of SDAPstudents from normal romantic, social or sexualinteraction. Though the nanites in theirbloodstream suppress their urges and theindoctrination keeps them from acting on them,they are teenagers, and adolescent hormonesare known to interfere with even the mostsophisticated nanites. The deep-seated urgesoccasionally threaten to break out. The nanitesreact, and the result is often that the urge isreleased as a rage instead, and the SDAPstudent suddenly bursts into a fit of violence.Steel is working on a way to prevent this, butthe solution has so far foiled him.

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There are those in the school that are beginningto pick up the truth. On the opposite end of thesocial spectrum, there are the freaks, some ofthem mentally or physically handicapped butothers very talented, who simply refused to jointhe SDAP program. They are ostracized even bythe non-SDAP portion of the school, but theystick together and they harbor in their ranksthose starting to get a glimpse of the truth. Theystay low, for there are stories of the freaks of1999 who found out too much. About half ofthem were forcibly initiated into the SDAPprogram, the others simply disappeared.

One who does know the truth is the man no oneever pays attention to. The caretaker is a quietman who goes about his job and no one giveshim a second look, not even Steel. But he hearsand sees a lot, and never gives away what heknows. No one in the school even knows hisname. Secretly, he is a member of an InvisibleCollege cell, and has been watching the schoolfor a long time. He is working on something toput an end to the etoile's plans. What it is, noone yet knows...

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Disease Clusters: La Casa de losMurciélagosJim Clunie

I think I'll go with "La Casa de los Murciélagos"but give the English translation as "the House ofBats". The name isn't meant to be scary in itself,just a strange local legend.

This is an adventure set in a hotel in the oldquarter of Acapulco. The building is a convertedmansion dating back to the 19th century, withhandsome golden-brown brick walls, heavytimber ceiling beams, polished timber floors andantique panelled timber walls. It's now theFiesta Americana Hotel, but the locals know it asLa Casa de los Murciélagos because of the manybats that fly out of the roof at sunset and returnat dawn. The owners seem to be unable to getrid of them.

The place is well known among hotel workersthroughout Acapulco. Nearly anyone working inthe tourist trade can tell stories about touristswho disappeared, or returned home strangelychanged, or wasted away and died when stayingat the Fiesta Americana.

(This part is inspired by a true story:http://www.cdc.gov/od/oc/media/pressrel/r010427c.htm )

Although it has a bad reputation among thelocals, the hotel never seems to have a problemkeeping staff. It's popular with independenttravelers from the US and Europe for its old-world charm, attentive service and inexpensiveprices.

The reason for the strange occurrences:

The hotel is home to an etoile that exists in theattic, where it has grown metallic tendrils intoand through all of the timberwork. The machine-creature controls the bats, which it uses as flyingspies, and the staff, who are all sandmen. Thehotel has no problems with workers, becausenobody working there ever leaves, ages or dies.

The etoile has been in the building since it wasconstructed in 1807. Diego Gallia, a scholar whowas forced to flee Castile because of the chaoscaused by Napoleon's occupying forces, broughthis "familiar spirit" with him in a great iron box,and released it into the house that he built withhis riches.

The heroes can find various scary things in thehotel, like metal wires in the doors andbedposts, old statues and books of occultsignificance, and the night manager, who seemsto be awfully familiar with 18th-century Spain(he should, he was born there). They will

probably think they're dealing with vampires,ekkimu or wizards. Their worst enemy, though,is everywhere around them in the walls andfloors, controlling the doors, lights and water,and watching them as they sleep.

Too much for any group of heroes? Or just thething for a scary adventure?

33

Sandman Schematics: InfectionJim Clunie

A human becomes a sandman by being infectedwith sandman nanites. The sandmen do thisdeliberately as one of their standard missiontypes (infections). They're an organized army,not a zombie horde, so they only choose toinfect those who are worthy and useful to theircause.

It's stated that a recruitment doctor (a sandmancyberneticist that specializes in convertinghumans) can infect a human by:

• a casual pinprick (or presumably someother form of injection)

• an aerosol spray

• exchange of bodily fluids.

There's also a published instance of victimsbeing infected by a medical implant, installed ata sandman-controlled clinic, that contains"dormant etoile nanites" that were activatedaccidentally. I think the last bit is just theauthor's throwaway line, but anyhow. Anothersource mentions that it might be hazardous tohandle a wounded sandman, though in thatinstance, at least one person has done sowithout being infected.

The sandman needle gun doesn't causeinfection, though it definitely contains nanites(they dissolve the gun when it's lost or theowner is destroyed).

Since there is a defined bonus for being infectedwhen under the care of a recruitment doctor,there must be a way to be transformed thatdoes not involve a recruitment doctor, or at leastthe constant care of one.

Drawing together all the current evidence:

• Sandmen infect humans deliberately aspart of a planned operation. This probablyinvolves a specialized form of nanites.

• The nanites must be injected into thebody, or at the very least breathed in or sprayedon the skin.

• Infection methods are most oftencreated by a recruitment doctor and applieddirectly by that specialist, but the recruitmentdoctor can prepare methods that can be used byordinary sand warriors or sand scouts.

• The early stages of the infection bringthe victims under the control of the sandmen.The victims can be influenced to travel on their

own to a sandman base. However, they must betaken into sandman custody (preferably taken tothe etoile itself) to complete the processproperly.

If sandmen - especially a group that includes arecruitment doctor - capture one or moreheroes, they might well infect those that theyconsider useful. It's not clear what would happento those they rejected.

Some more possible ways that sandmen couldinfect humans:

• A needle trap, placed where a certaingroup of humans or one particular person willstick herself with it.

• A bite from a nanite-transformed animal.

• A large-area death cloud of nanites (thisseems to be a common tactic in North Africa).

Sandmen would probably not use a dart-gun tocause infection, unless there was some specialreason to leave that person in contact with hercolleagues as the disease progressed. If theyknew in advance that they'd have good enoughaccess to shoot a chosen victim, they wouldprefer to knock the victim out, take her away,and complete the transformation in morecontrolled conditions.

Q: If I understand correctly, one becomesinfected with nanites and is under control bysandmen-he is not full sandmen yet. Is he stillfree willed to do other activities until sandmencall upon him. Can he be "cured" ? If he is killedin a meantime does his body dissolve like theregular sandmen?

A: I based that on the latest Dungeon article, inwhich there are some recently infected peoplewho have got on a train by themselves to travelto a sandman enclave.

I think the nanite infection would cause veryrapid changes to the brain, deliberately to applythis control. At first the sandman neural tissuewould only be able to control very basic urges -eat more protein and vitamins, hide from others,sleep a lot. Next would be the urge to seek theetoile/obey the sandmen. The victim wouldprobably remain conscious but have strangeimpulses.

The disease is far more resilient and adaptablethan a normal infection. It might be possible totreat it, if you knew what you were dealing with.The patient's own immune system can't fight itoff.

I don't think the victim's body would dissolve ifkilled until he had acquired the full body

34

morphing ability. Some of his organs mightdissolve though (parts of the brain, liver, longbones, and the like). The nanites would self-destruct, though they might leave an oddresidue that could be picked up in blood tests.

Q: What becomes of sandmen and infectedpeople if etoile is killed?

A: That's a very interesting question. To fit withmy Agarttha theory and others' contributions, Ithink they would survive, and could evencontinue to infect people. If another etoile camealong it could try to reprogram the orphansandmen.

Q: So - what you mean to say once someone isinfected there is no turning back, no cure?

A: It's very difficult to cure, but maybe notimpossible. There is indeed no turning back.Once infected, you become a sandman.

If someone tried to treat it, I would apply a +3penalty straight off if the doctor didn't know thatit was a transforming agent rather than anatural disease. They would simply give thewrong treatment for the wrong reasons. Thenthere would be either a +5 penalty for dealingwith PL 7 alien technology (see thexenoengineering skill) or a +4 penalty fordealing with alien biology that works onunfamiliar physical principles, depending onwhether the medical team concentrated ondisrupting the nanites or blocking them fromdamaging the patient's genetic structure. In thebest possible case, a doctor with high ranks inxenoengineering and xenomedicine (sandmen)could possibly reduce the treatment penalty tonothing.

At least sandman nanites don't coalesce into acat-sized blood-slicked mass and try to invade anew host in the middle of the treatment, whileone of the medical team throws Shrivelling spellsat it. Maybe, as a last effort, they might collecttogether and rupture the patient's lungs, makinghim cough nanite-laden arterial blood all overthe medical team. ER has given me way toomany ideas for this sort of thing.

35

Sandman Schematics: RecruitmentDoctorJim Clunie

The etoile choose suitably skilled, highly trustedmembers of their army as specialists for the vitalmission of preparing and administering nanitecultures that transform humans into newsandmen.

Description: Recruitment doctors are oftensmaller and slimmer individuals than the solidly-built sand warriors, though they are equally fitand healthy-looking. They eschew obviouscyber-enhancement in order to blend in almostperfectly to human society.

Encounter: The specialist skills of a recruitmentdoctor support a wide range of methods to infecttheir chosen targets unawares, taking advantageof everyday opportunities for bodily contact,minor injury, spraying substances on thesubject’s skin or tampering with items designedto be inserted into the body. The doctor mightprovide his sand warrior escorts with devicessuch as small syringes or atomisers to allowthem to spread through a crowd, targeting oneor many chosen individuals. Other missionsrequire the recruitment doctor to get up close toa chosen target by a ruse or sustaineddeception.

If at all possible, the sandmen would prefer tobring in infected people for sustained medicalcare and observation in order to support them ina smooth transition to their new existence. Theinfection culture itself aids in this mission byimplanting low-level impulses in the victim toseek out sandman bases. The recruitment teammay use their needler pistols loaded withmorpheotoxin (see the Dark•Matter sourcebook)and other non-lethal weapons to captureinfected individuals or to neutralise anyoneprotecting their targets.

See the Dark•Matter Sourcebook for furtherdetails on the sandmen’s low-frequency vocalmodification, vulnerability to electrical damageor immersion in conductive substances,reshaping, fusion and blood music abilities.

Habitat/Society: A recruitment doctor formsthe core of a sandman unit assigned to gathernew converts, assisted and protected by anumber of sand warriors and scouts.

Few present-day human careers provide a newrecruit with any useful technical knowledge ofnanite bio-transformative processes. A sandmanwith nursing, general medical or epidemiologicalexperience has some prior knowledge of thereactions and modes of failure of the humanbody under severe physiological stress. Often,

though, knowledge of human psychologicaldrives and motivations is more useful as a basisfor the recruitment doctor’s skills, leading thesandmen to draw their recruiters from humanresources specialists or supervisors in high-stress industries.

Sandman Recruitment DoctorGame Data

STR 10DEX 11 (+1)CON 11INT 12 (+1)WIL 9PER 9

Durability: 11/11/5/5Action Check: 14+/13/6/3#Actions: 2Move: Sprint 20, Run 12, Walk 4Reaction Score:Ordinary/2Last Resorts: 1

AttacksShockstick

10/5/2 d4+1s/d4+3s/d6+4s En/O

Needlerpistol

12/6/3 special: paralyticpoison (+2, onset 1round)

LI/O

Defences+1 DEX resistance modifier vs. ranged attacks+1 INT resistance modifier vs. encounter skills-4 step bonus to CON feat checks to resist toxins

SkillsAthletics, Melee Weapons* (10), Modern RangedWeapons-pistol (12), Vehicle Operation (11),Stamina-blood music (12), Business-corporate 3(15), illicit (13), Computer Science*-hacking 2(14), programming 2 (14), Knowledge-computeroperation (13), English language 3 (15), LifeScience-biology (13), Medical Science-treatment2 (14), psychology (13), System Operation*-sensors 2 (14), Awareness (9), Investigate (9),Resolve (9), Interaction**-bargain 2 (11),charm 2 (11), interview 3 (12), intimidate (10),Leadership (9)

* Skills aided by fusion (-1 bonus)** Aided by low-frequency vocalisation (-3bonus)

36

Sandman Schematics: Insect VectorsJim Clunie

Altered Mosquitoes

The etoile have developed over centuries, orperhaps retained from a period of highdevelopment in past ages or an alternate frameof reality, a number of altered mosquito speciesfor specific tasks.

Phylax

This is a very small, short-lived mosquito thatoccurs in vast swarms in swampy areas.Individuals are sterile and can only bereproduced by cloning, making this dangerousspecies easy to control and deploy as required.The sandmen use phylax swarms as defensiveand offensive weapons to dissuade human entryto their areas or to drive out inconvenientsettlers.

The protein structure of a phylax’ mandibles hasbeen genetically strengthened for deeperpenetration and enhanced allergic potential, andits behavior encoded for aggressive andpersistent biting of large warm-blooded animals.Its saliva contains both the usual anticoagulantand anesthetic agents that many mosquitoesuse, and histamine compounds that aredefinitely not typical of mosquitoes. Unlessheavily protected, victims are likely to be bittendozens or hundreds of times over the course ofa few hours. The bites cause swelling, white-centered lesions and ferocious itching that canlead to serious skin damage from uncontrolledscratching. More seriously, the buildup ofhistamine and allergenic proteins in the bloodcan cause dizziness, confusion, weakness, fever,systemic collapse and death.

Each hour that a person remains in an areacontaining a phylax swarm with any area of skinexposed, she must make a Constitution check.This check has only a -1 bonus if the victim usesinsect repellent, as phylax are unusuallypersistent. On any success, the bites are merelyseverely annoying (no game effect on Amazing,+1 penalty to actions on Good, +2 penalty onOrdinary). On a Failure, the victim suffers a +2penalty on actions due to severe itching andscratching the skin raw, and also suffers theeffect of a hemotoxin (insinuative, -2 bonus toCON feat check, onset 1 hour, duration 1 day).Multiple Failure results increase the severity ofthe CON feat check against this poison,adjusting its modifier upwards by one step foreach Failure.

The process to create a phylax swarm does notrequire nanites or high dark matter flux and hasbeen picked up in the past by human groupswithin the areas that phylax were commonly

used. This has persisted in African andCaribbean traditions of creating deadly curses orpotions to defeat enemies using cauldrons ofblood and rendered flesh, combined with secretpowders that have insect eggs or husks as amajor ingredient, and was a significantcontributor to the great 19th century fear of“tropical diseases” among European colonizers.This lore may even have been transmitted, in aconfused and non-functional form, from Liby-Phoenician merchants to their British Celtictrading partners in pre-Roman times.

Genetrix

This is a large mosquito species with naturallyevolved deep-piercing mouthparts that has beenadapted by the etoile to carry the sandmannanite infection. The genetic alterations to thisspecies are subtle, increasing the size andoutput of its salivary glands and enlarging itssensory ganglia for precise navigation andtargeting of selected groups of victims. In thisbase state it is regarded as a natural mosquitospecies by conventional biology and isparticularly well known in the Southern US andEast Texas.

Sandmen activate the genetrix swarms duringtheir breeding season by spraying or seedingtheir breeding pools with a nanite-laden brew,imparting a culture of infection nanites,combined with short-term modification culturesthat adjust the genetrix neural pattern, targetingthem on the terrain and victim population thatthe sandmen choose for that season’s wave ofinfection.

Genetrix can be programmed to swarm intofarmlands of different grades, coastal areas,small towns or cities, and to target children, theelderly, either sex, or even to favor particularraces. It has been theorized that the surprisingtactic of infecting elderly victims trades areduced survival and conversion rate for awealth of experience, positions of leadership,and strong loyalty to the etoile, which can offerthe recruit rejuvenation and curing of alldegenerative disease.

The nanite infection carried by genetrix has beenmistaken for, or covered by, epidemics of St.Louis encephalitis in the US and leishmaniasis inattacks on US servicemen in Kuwait, Iraq andAfghanistan.

Ultor

This mosquito is unusually large and known as aslow, noisy flyer due to the force of its wingbeats. Etoile tampering with its genes hasfurther increased the species’ size and bodymass. When needed, the sandmen infect each

37

ultor with a massive dose of secondary nanites,transforming it to a short-lived terminal stagethat can transport sufficient nanites to invadeand take control of a small electronic device.

Most of the ultor’s internal organs arecannibalized by this process, leaving it as amuscle-bearing shell over a coiled lump ofmicro-tendrils wrapped around a minutedatacore of engineered magnetite. Once theultor enters the target device, its body breaksapart, scattering dust-like flakes of chitin thatcan cause allergic reactions to sensitive people.The nanites flow into the device and form linksinto its circuits, delivering pre-programmedinformation or acting as a transceiver for remotecontrol. One ultor is sufficient to control adesktop computer, electronic fuel injectionsystem, or similar advanced electronics. Manyindividuals may be needed to invade more crudedevices such as older air-conditioners.

Lone Star Tick

This tick species is known as the prime vector ofehrlichiosis, a debilitating parasitic diseasesimilar to Lyme disease but more virulent, lessspecific in its symptoms and without the tell-talebull’s eye rash. It’s less well known that manysuch tick-borne infections serve as a cover for amore insidious and final form of infection.

The Lone Star tick has spread rapidly, withsandman assistance, from its East Texas homeacross the eastern states. Similar outbreakshave been reported from the Caucasus infectionsite centered on Dagestan.

Sandman Schematics: The HoustonVirusJim Clunie

“Agent of record is Dr. Lisa Savarian, of theAnalytical Division, Bio and Chemical atHoffmann Research Park in Flagstaff. I've beenworking with Dr. Maxwell Rickman on a numberof medical developments of concern. I think thatone of my projects may have overlapped with anIntelligence Division case.

“I received a call at 2 am from an Institutecontact at McKenzie-Willamette Hospital inSpringfield, on the east side of Eugene. A patienthad been brought in, showing a number ofsymptoms matching a syndrome that we'vetagged HAV-3. When I ran a standardbackground check, an OSIRS flag came up. Iunderstand Intelligence has an interest.

..

“The patient feels hungry - not just that, butcraves a number of specific foods. He oftenstates the numerical amount of food that hewants. Patient is intensely aching, feverish,nauseous, and hungry at the same time.

“Patient reports stabbing pains, beginning at thebase of the skull and upper spinal column,spreading to the rest of the head, the solarplexus and genitals, hands, then to generalizedsevere muscle aches. Fever, visual flashes,tinnitus, illusions of other senses, for example,sensation of insects crawling on the skin similarto ergotism. A variety of acute, but minorneurological quirks. A foul taste in the mouthand nauseous feeling. In some ways, symptomsexactly mirror morning sickness.”

“Patient had a high fever on arrival, complainedof severe general pain, and asked for lemonjuice (there is a big penciled question mark anda scrawl that might be "Psych eval?" beside thisentry). Several bruises around the head, limbsand body - the head lesions mostly consistentwith being struck with a blunt weapon, otherbruises seem to be randomly distributed.

“There is a lab report clipped behind the chart. Ablood sample, taken around 2.30am, showed ahigh concentration of lactic acid and othermetabolic waste products, along withunidentified large particles that appeared to beincreasing in concentration even as the lab ranthe tests. Average molecular weights of theunknown substance at the start and end of theprocess are recorded.

“The food offered was not so much breakfast aswarmed-over dinner - casseroled meat that Icouldn’t identify between two slices of white

38

bread, a small bowl of custard that was mostlyfolds of congealed skin, and a large tumbler oforange juice. The smell and sight made hismouth water, and he made short work of it,leaving him a bit restored but still hungry.

..

“How it presents .. well, it starts with flu-like,feverish symptoms of general malaise, thougheven then, there are a few specific indicators.Head and spinal pains, muscle aches, delusionsand cognitive oddities. There is a period ofstrong hallucinations, which fade. It's alldownhill from there - breakdown of muscle andtissue, disrupted metabolism, various organfailures, paralysis and death - except in thoserare cases where the disease suddenly breaksand the patient returns to full health. And wedon't know why.

“HAV-3 is not only generally fatal, but has anumber of peculiarities that suggest that it hasbeen engineered for a specific purpose.However, Dr. Rickman's research has provedthat it's not contagious by aerosolization, skin orbody fluid contact, or any other known vector.Patients should be quite safe to approach.

“There is a history of CDC responses to thispathogen that we consider excessive. To beblunt, we have observed them in every case toisolate, execute, and destroy the bodies ofinfected subjects. In order to learn more aboutthe pathogen, and because we believe thesepatients to have a chance of recovery, theInstitute has decided to aid these patients toevade the CDC, and place them under ourprotection and close observation. So far we'vehad two fully recovered, unfortunately 11fatalities, and as we expected, no instances ofsecondary infection.

..

“As per SOP, I've contacted the patient, givenhim a cover story, and advised him to leave thepublic hospital system and place himself underour observation. I can arrange for Intelligence toquestion him, within our medical research coverstory.

“I certainly need to examine him properly andget as many details as I can about his possiblevectors of exposure to the pathogen. That part istrue.

“As far as I could determine, his symptoms aresurprisingly little progressed - most likely, at avery early stage. But despite what I've told thepatient, it may be necessary to move him to aninpatient facility as the disease does its work.

“For whatever good it will do. We have no cureor even a recommended palliative for HAV-3.Whatever treatment we try, it seems to direct itsassault specifically to weaken that system of thebody and combat our efforts. There's ameasurable increase in morbidity and lethality ofthe disease just from taking the patient in to acare facility. Some of us would describe thissyndrome as evil .. consciously evil.

..

“In 1997, a medical graduate student calledMaysie Tullen at Baylor College of Medicine,Houston, began her thesis in epidemiology. Shewas interested in a series of disease outbreaksacross the Southwest, intersecting in easternTexas, that struck her as unusual in some way -how, we're unlikely to find out now.

“She began a program of re-tabulating originalresults, retesting samples on file, and fieldinvestigation in a number of East Texas towns.Her criteria covered decades of incidents, anddiseases with a spectrum of recognized causes -St. Louis encephalitis, acute gastroenteritis,hepatitis C, ehrlichiosis, tularemia, hantavirus.Actually, the hantavirus is interesting in itself,with its origin in the region of Cibola - but, uh,that's not relevant right now. All of thesediseases were sudden, mysterious in origin, anddeadly, but apart from that, and geography,there was absolutely nothing to link themtogether in orthodox medical science.

“Her tests showed a pattern beyond anythingshe'd expected. Maysie Tullen's theory of asingle, persistent causative agent - the HoustonAnomalous Virus - broke down to at least fourdifferent organisms. In more than a dozendisease incidents over forty years, HAV-1 to 4appeared as overlooked trace results. Theyweren't found in every test, but showed up in54% of cases of emergency hospitalization, and73% of fatalities. Two or three of the specieswould appear together, sometimes all four. Genesequencing proved links between differentdisease vectors, across geographic areas, acrosstime, that just shouldn't happen.

“I mean, maybe it's difficult for an intelligentlayman to realize. St. Louis encephalitis issupposed to be spread by mosquitoes,hantavirus by mice, tularemia by dust fromrabbit feces. Histoplasmosis is a fungus, forGod's sake, and Norwalk is one of the smallestknown viruses. Nobody even looked for a linkbetween them. Since Tullen's work, we've foundeven wider involvement - certain strains of the1986 influenza, plague outbreaks in the Midwestgoing back to the '30s, the Calinda Beach Hotelin Acapulco.

39

“The components of the cocktail themselvesaren't related - they're wholly diverse branchesof the viral family tree, as far as we canrecognize them. HAV-1 is a cluster of closely-related aberrant caliciviruses, causing acutestomach and intestinal problems - colors youwouldn't believe, out of both ends at high speed- that weaken the patient generally and hindertreatment, especially application of drugs andnutrition.

“2 is a large, precisely targeted virus, atemporary immuno-suppressant. Certain formsof cancer can appear as complications, if thepatient lives that long. 3 is something strange,big - almost on the threshold between a virusand a living cell. In some ways its behavior ismore complex than either. It alters the functionof both the cell nucleus and the Golgi apparatus,and it attacks particular tissues of the body insequence, starting with the central nervoussystem. HAV-4, or Hepatitis G, seems to beanother spoiler, causing temporary suppressionand long-term damage to the liver functions thatscrub toxins from the blood.

“Dr. Tullen spent the summer of 1997inspecting medical records of small-town clinics,interviewing witnesses, sampling contaminatedlocations. Her notes from that period would be apriceless resource. It's deeply unfortunate thatshe didn't complete her thesis. After a severeillness in August to October '97, she failed theyear, and in 1998 took up a completely differenttopic related to sports medicine. She may be ingeneral practice now, somewhere nearBeaumont, though her name only shows upoccasionally in the local papers. We're lucky thatone of her fellow students remembered her workand could guide us to some of her old notes. Herthesis adviser had a complete early draft.”

[Transcript ends]

40

Sandman Schematics: Sandman Cyber-GearJim Clunie

The man with glossy, greying ringletsseems very large, as he bends over thechild. His careworn face turns away tothe side, drawing the other's gaze acrosspassage walls of rough-cut basalt, toobjects piled in a corner - long strips ofspruce, a paint-can marked with dribblesof congealed whiteness, a roll of draftingfilm printed with exact black lines, theheaped carcasses of seagulls.

The older man seems about to speak, asthe scene bursts apart in a discordantelectronic squeal and a spray of static.

Clear grey eyes open with instant calmawareness into semi-darkness, seeingthe familiar walls of a shaft lined withgleaming black. Far above, a great fanspins, driving even the air-borne dustback into the pit, upon a young manheld by white plastic straps to a clearslab of polycarbonate. A voice soundsthrough a speaker. "Life signs restoredto Alpha function. At ease, soldier. Standready for reconfirmation." As theelectrodes cradled around the crew-cuthead come on line, the click of rifle boltsdrawn back snaps through the space.

With sandmen working for human agencies,whether North American rogues in the HoffmannInstitute, Russian rogues in the Order of St.Gregory, or Mossad Enhanced Assets, furtherdetail has come to light about the cyborgs’physical transformation.

The nanite-transformed beings known assandmen have both general enhancements totheir metabolism, body and brain, and entirelynew body structures with abilities beyondanything human.

Starting Cyber Gear

The process of becoming a sandman includesthe construction of a Marginal nanocomputer,including two slots of active memory, a high-speed storage area and a long-term storagearea adequate for all common purposes. Thesandman gains patterns (see below) for theDermal Modification (Ordinary and Good),Improved Limb (Ordinary), Improved OpticSystem (Ordinary), Improved Skeletal System(Ordinary), Nanocomputer (Ordinary), OpticDisplay, Subdermal Comm and Time Sensor(Ordinary and Good) cyber-modifications.

The sandman’s innate ability to fuse withcomputer systems duplicates the effect of aSubdermal NIJack. Her morphing ability canduplicate the effect of a Passive Data Slot (orform a receptacle for other small objects).

Sandmen do not have to pay 10 Skill Points touse a nanocomputer.

Installing Cyber Gear

A sandman acquires a new cybernetic structureby downloading a digital file of designparameters (a pattern) into her data storage,then directing her internal nanites to constructthe device. This requires the use of ananocomputer, even for devices that would notneed a cybernetic controller if implanted into ahuman body.

Because every host’s body shape, metabolismand genotype differs, and due to the very limitedstorage and capacity for central control availableto each builder nanite, the pattern is more like aseed-fractal than a rigid schematic. Itssuccessful completion demands a high degree ofconcentration, creativity and single-mindednessfrom the controlling brain of the sandmanmacro-entity.

The sandman must complete a complex skillcheck against Stamina – blood music, Resolve -physical resolve or Computer Science –ha rdwa r e to install the cyber-structuresuccessfully. One success is required for each$500 cost listed in the Players’ Handbook forOrdinary structures, one success per $300 costfor Good structures or two successes per $500for Amazing structures. Skill checks are at a +1penalty for Good structures, +2 penalty forAmazing structures, and an additional +2penalty if the sandman tries to implant morethan one structure at the same time. Thesandman can make one skill check in a timeperiod of one week per point of the structure’sSize, or one skill check per day for items with noSize rating.

During this time, the sandman suffers a +1penalty to all skill checks due to the strain onher system. The penalty is removed when thesandman has had sufficient rest andnourishment to recover from the ordeal.

Ordinary quality cyber-gear consists ofmodifications to the sandman’s nervous system,flesh and bone. It requires only a suitablepattern, time and nourishment high in energyand proteins. If the sandman is supplied with atleast one unit of secondary nanites per point ofthe structure’s Size, she gains a –2 bonus to herskill check to construct the Ordinary structure

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and to her Constitution feat check (if required)to avoid rejection.

Good quality cyber-gear contains organic(carbon-based) compounds, such as carbonfibres and plastics, that are not produced by thebody naturally. These materials must beassembled by secondary nanites. The sandmanneeds one unit of secondary nanites per point ofSize of the structure.

Amazing quality cyber-gear has components ofmicro-engineered silicon and various tracemetals. These basic elements must be suppliedin the form of precursor fluid and manufacturedinto components within the body by secondarynanites. The sandman needs one unit ofprecursor fluid and two units of secondarynanites per point of Size of the structure.

Cyber-Construction Results

If the sandman suffers 3 Failures on hercomplex skill check before accumulating therequired number of successes, the installationfails, its pattern is corrupted and unusable, andthe sandman immediately suffers 1 point ofMortal damage due to the ravages of poorly-controlled nanites. This damage cannot berepaired by a self-repair unit, since thedeformities caused are encoded into thesandman’s nanites until repaired by outsideintervention.

Once the sandman has completed the requirednumber of successes, depending on the totalSize of cyber-modifications that she has, shemay need to make a Constitution check todetermine if her body accepts the modification.If this check is failed, the result is the same asfor failure of the complex skill check. Otherwise,the structure is correctly implanted and active.

Cyber Tolerance

A sandman has a Cyber Tolerance score equal toher Constitution. This affects how many cyber-modifications the sandman’s body can have, howeasy it is to accept a new modification, and howher cyber-gear is affected by damage to herbody. The sandman’s nanocomputer does notcount against her Cyber Tolerance.

Every time the character incorporates a newcyber-structure, mark off boxes equal to theSize of the structure. When she attempts toconstruct a device that would cause more thanhalf her Cyber Tolerance to be filled, she mustmake a Constitution feat check to determinewhether her body accepts the new structure.

Damage to Cyber Gear is handled as describedin the Players’ Handbook.

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Table SC1: Cybernetic StructuresSuccesses Required per Quality

Structure Size Ordinary Good (+1 checks,secondary nanites)

Amazing (+2checks,precursor fluid,secondarynanites x 2)

Broadband DataCable (ExternalNeural 3D)

1 1 - -

Claw (BattleKlaw) 2 2 4 8Dermal Modification(BioArt)

- 1* 1* 2

Fast Nexi (FastChip)

2 2 5 8

Improved Limb(Cyberlimb)

2 2* 6 12

Improved Muscle(MusclePlus)

2 2 6 12

Improved OpticSystem(Cyberoptics)

1 1* 3 8

Improved SkeletalSystem(Exoskeleton)

3 4* 10 16

Nanocomputer 1 4* 10 16Optic Display (OpticScreen)

- 1* - -

Reflex Wiring 2 - 6 -Self-Repair Unit 2 2 6 12Subdermal Comm 1 - 2* -T i m e S e n s o r(BioWatch)

- 1* 1* 2

Trauma Unit (ERSlot)

1 - 3 -

Wi re less DataConnection(Wireless NIJack)

1 - 3 -

* Patterns provided to all new recruits

43

Cyber Gear Descriptions

See the Players’ Handbook for descriptions andspecific rules for the standard items of cyber-gear mimicked by sandman modifications (listedin brackets in Table SC1). Changes to Players’Handbook cyber-gear descriptions are listedbelow, using the item names in Table SC1.

Body Plating

Not available.

Broadband Data Cable

This structure allows the sandman to connect tolarge data networks and machine controlsystems of PL 5 as if his nervous system was ahardwired part of the system, rather thanmerely a remote terminal connection. Allcomputer actions that would normally occur incombat rounds instead occur in combat phases.All times that would normally occur in hoursinstead occur in multiples of 5 minutes. With asuccessful Computer Science – programmingcheck, the sandman can access the storedmemory of the system as if it was long-termstored memory of his own nanocomputer.

CF Skinweave

Not available.

Claw

A Good Claw consists partly of permanentmodifications to the sandman’s limb and partlyof patterns resident in her high-speed datastorage. As an action in one combat phase, thesandman directs her nanites to reshape the clawto its full combat potential. She cannot use theclaw in that phase, but can perform actions withother parts of her body at the standard +2penalty for taking two actions in a phase.

Dermal Modification

The sandman can use this pattern to alter thecolour of all or part of her skin, the colour,length and style of her hair, the colour of heririses and so on. This can duplicate the effects ofBioArt, though sandmen usually employ thisability for more practical purposes. Because thisis a chemical change, it takes longer and is moredifficult than ordinary morphing.

Good Dermal Modification can duplicate exactskin and hair tones, greens and blues,fluorescent colours, or other pigments notnatural to the sandman’s own body. AmazingDermal Modification could be luminescent,radiate in other spectra, or mimic the texture

(though not the other abilities) of unusual skincoverings such as reptilian scales or feathers.

Fast Nexi

Sandmen are an embodiment of the ailmentknown to PL 7 as cykosis and do not sufferfurther effects from the use of Fast Nexi.

Improved Limb

Ignore the Players’ Handbook references toimplanted computer gauntlets and weapons.Good and Amazing Improved Limbs require anImproved Skeletal System.

Improved Muscle

Good Improved Muscle requires an ImprovedSkeletal System. Amazing Improved Musclerequires both an Improved Skeletal System andan Improved Limb.

Reflex Wiring

Sandmen do not suffer cykosis from a CriticalFailure of their Reflex Wiring.

Self-Repair Unit

All grades of self-repair units can repair thesandman’s flesh or her cyber-gear, though theyuse resources separately for each function. Onlya Good or Amazing Self-Repair Unit can repairGood cyber-gear, and must be restocked with 1unit of secondary nanites when it is resupplied.Only an Amazing Self-Repair Unit can repairAmazing cyber-gear, and must be restockedwith 1 unit of secondary nanites and 1 unit ofprecursor fluid when it is resupplied.

Subdermal Weapon Mount

Not available. A sandman can use her morphingability to conceal a weapon weighing up to 2kgwithin her body, though it cannot be fired in thisposition. This is considered to be majorreshaping, taking d4+1 rounds.

Trauma Unit

This unit employs PL 6 drugs and biologicalproducts, and must be restocked at a sandmanindustrial facility (see below).

Time Sensor

A Good Time Sensor includes solar and lunarcalculator modules, a timed waking alarm andstopwatch. An Amazing Time Sensor includesbiological telemetry for the sandman’s heartrate, core temperature, blood pressure andblood gases.

44

Wireless Data Connection

This unit connects only to computer systemsthat are equipped with an infrared or microwavedata port, and is capable of the usual things thatcould be performed by a unit connected to thatport. Gaining full access to the computer systemmay require a Computer Science – hacking skillcheck.

Sandman Supplies

At least part of the sandmen’s industrial effort isdevoted to supplies needed to maintain theirmost potent forms of cyber-gear.

Refining

The sandmen’s industrial base requires suppliesof silicon and rare metals that are small involume, but need unprecedented levels ofpurity. This requires a worldwide network of oresupplies, bulk refineries and specialistmetallurgic labs.

Precursor Fluid

This viscous silvery general-purpose goocontains pre-refined elements and molecular-scale general-purpose building blocks that canbe manipulated by sophisticated industrialbuilder nanite cultures into more specialisednanites, or into more complex (though stillmicroscopic) devices. It must be manufacturedand bottled in a clean room environment.

Second-Generation Nanites

All sandman nanites are based on virus-likeproteins and other organic compounds. Second-generation nanites are a more advanced seriesof cultures that incorporate refined inorganicchemical elements. They must be fabricatedfrom sterile organic solutions and precursor fluidin a clean room, using other specialised second-generation cultures controlled by delicatemonitoring and feedback equipment.

Nanite Culture-Making

All advanced nanite cultures are subject toinformation drift and need to be monitored andre-seeded periodically. The sandmen alsoengage in ongoing research into improvednanites, better cyber-structure patterns,biological weapons and other lines ofadvancement. All of this requires even moreprecise lab equipment than industrialproduction, or the work of an etoile, whose

subatomic perceptions and microtome-sharpprobes can work directly on nanite prototypes.

Sandman Secondary Nanites

This array of second-generation nanite culturesis relatively long-lived, able to survive in analtered human metabolism for many days, takedirection from a sandman’s nanocomputer andbuild both organic and inorganic structures.Secondary nanite cultures eventually lose theiressential elements through degradation andleaching, and are broken down in the body,hopefully after completing their task.

A sandman whose request for access to Good orAmazing cyber-gear is approved usually receivesa supply of secondary nanites and precursorfluid intravenously, at an outpatient visit to afacility controlled by the sandmen (such ascertain departments of the Houston MedicalCentre). Sandman medics provide later check-ups and support for the cyber-constructionprocess, and deal with any consequences offailed implants. If unsuspecting humans also usethese facilities, the efficient sandmen harvestany available medical waste as feedstock fortheir nanite breeder vats and advanced combatmedications.

Fast Builder Nanites (“Diet Gatorade”)

This is a specialised variant of normal sandmannanite assemblages, designed for extremelyrapid development of mission-specific cyber-structures that are not expected to last long.The clear blue fluid is heavily dosed withprotective chemicals, including vaguely platelet-like surface fibres that form a meniscus at anycontact with air, allowing the fluid to be kept ina plain bottle and taken by mouth.

Bottles of fast builder culture look something likea soft drink, with a false logo to fool casualinspection and a number of warning notices in alanguage that appears to be, but is not Arabic.(This is a rationalised machine-readable codeunderstandable to sandmen.) This substance ismanufactured in well-established sandmanenclaves in Texas, Algeria and northwesternIndia.

Each bottle contains 4 units of nanites, whichallow the sandman to make Resolve – physicalresolve or Computer Science – hardware checksto construct Ordinary-quality cyber-structures ina half hour for each week that would normallybe required. One unit of fast builder nanites isconsumed for each Size point of the structure.Cyber-structures made by fast builder naniteslast for 6 hours before they become non-functional and are broken down by the body.

45

If a human is foolish enough to drink fast builderculture, the blue fluid, which tastes like amixture of salt water and detergent, attacks thenon-adapted body as an ingested hemotoxinwith an onset of 1 minute and duration of 10minutes. A small sip requires a Constitution featcheck at +1 to resist, or a full gulp applies a +3penalty. Damage is d4+2m (Critical Failure),d4m (Failure), d6+1w (Ordinary), d4w (Good)or d6s (Amazing).

Morpheotoxin

The sandmen’s notorious “poison” is actually aspecialised variant of recruitment nanites thatmigrates under its own power to the top of thespinal column and induces selective nerveblocking.

46

Sandman Schematics: SandmanWeaknessesJames Nostack

I'd Love To Go Swimming If the WaterWeren't So Wet

In the Dark Matter text, the authors suggestthat the Sandmen fear water because it shutsdown their nanotech implants. Somehow, thatdoesn't make any sense to me. Nanotechnologyoperates on the atomic scale, and when youshrink down that small, you're not operatingwith conventional electrical current. The mainforces affecting a nanite would involve organicchemistry, not electricity. Our own cells andDNA might be viewed as molecular machines,and taking a shower hasn't caused irreversiblebrain damage—at least, not according to myexperiments so far.

I think a much more scientifically plausibleweakness would be radiation. Any nanitecapable of self-reproduction needs some kind ofsource code; our cells, for example, use DNA.Yet because of the size constraints, that sourcecode would have to be extremely tiny: like DNA,it would be composed of intricate molecules thatdiffer only the arrangements of a few atoms.Anything so delicate would get blasted out ofrecognition by any strong radioactivity. Theeffect on the nanite would resemble the effecton a cell: mutation.

Naturally, if you're a nanotechnologist, mutationis the worst thing imaginable. Nanites aresupposed to be eutactic, a fancy Greek wordmeaning, "perfectly designed"—every atom isprecisely where it has to be in order for thedevice to function. Most mutations would simplycause the nanite to malfunction or shut down,but there's always the chance that acompounded mutation could lead to veryunintended side effects, perhaps culminating ina new phenotype. A good engineer wants apredictable design that's stable in the field, andthe Etoile certainly wouldn't want anevolutionary struggle occurring among theirservitors, so it makes sense to err on the side ofcaution. The Sandman Plague would requirevery strict error-checking codes, and othernanites would deliberately seek out and destroyany mutated copies in order to preserve theintegrity of the source code.

What I'm leading up to here is that if theSandmen get zapped by a hefty dose ofradiation, it's possible that their own naniteswould undergo mutations, and consequentlydestroy each other in some kind of auto-immunejihad. It's worth noting that the Grey Scout Shiplisted in the Dark Matter book has an

"unshielded gravitic engine" that releases amajor EMP field, presumably with a nastygamma ray backwash. Maybe the Greys keepbuzzing overhead not to make contact, but tosterilize congregations of Sandmen. They mighthave developed X-Ray Grenades, or perhaps themuzzle flash of various gravitic weapons has asimilar effect.

(This also suggests another link between theSandmen and the Nuclear Defense Shield. Italso casts a strange light on the Cold War: theSandmen build ICBM's and orbital rockets tothreaten the Greys, who respond bytelepathically encouraging nuclear arms-mongering.)

With all that in mind, I think water still makes adecent vulnerability from a game playperspective. If the bad guys are afraid to getwet, even a nasty thunderstorm can save theheroes, and a swimming pool could become akilling field. If some crazed cyborg ninja breaksinto my room, I might conceivably trip him intothe tub…but I probably couldn't lead him on a 5mile chase to the dentist's office.

47

Sandman Schematics: Sleep ofMorpheus and Stun DamageDale Thurber

Sandmen Thoughts and PonderingsFrom the Dark·Matter List

FX Spells cast on Sandmen

“Our occultist tried to cast "Sleep of Morpheus"on one of the Sandmen. There is no ruleregarding the effect of the spell vs. Sandmen, soI made it up. I basically said that it was useless(seeing how they were transformed intoelectronic creatures) - essentially unable totechnically "sleep.”

I see sandmen as still being biological, justenhanced and controlled by nanites that canmodify their flesh, if necessary, in seconds. Theydon't sleep as much as before, but still need toshut down and defragment the memory fromtime to time - it's just a limitation of the design.

The nanites would have to have someindependent processing under the overalldirection, or policy-making, of the brain.

So a sleep of Morpheus would still affect theliving brain. However, if the sandman was incombat, it would have its nanites on standby fortissue repair, bodily enhancement and so on.When the sandman slept, the nanite dock'sindependent processor would detect that thebody was in an inactive state, and assignnanites to try and repair it - maybe by rewiringbrain cells to bypass whatever centers the spelltriggers to cause sleep.

I'd say the sandman would go to sleep for aphase, but then would immediately start makingStamina-blood music checks to recover. That is,if it was in combat mode. If the sandman wasenspelled when it wasn't expecting trouble, thenanites would accept the CPU's order to go tostandby mode, and the spell would worknormally.

“Next, I threw in the EMP grenades to try andbalance the final combat, but the poor playersdidn't (remember/ bother?) to use them untilthey got way hurt. Which brings up anotherquestion. How would an EMP grenade affect aSandman? I did the stun damage (d8+2s), butthen didn't know what to do next, or for howlong they would be "out"...”

Third, What effect does Stun damage do on asandman? Knock it unconscious? I made thisup too, saying the sandmen really don't gounconscious because they don't want to becaught. They would rather self-destruct then go

unconscious. So the players really had toextremely damage the sandmen, and it madethem difficult opponents.”

In contrast, humans just allow themselves to gounconscious, in the hands of an enemy who willcertainly torture and kill them, or if their deepestpurpose will be defeated? Not sure I see thedistinction here.

Stun damage is battering, pain (conflictingdamage signals), and shock that erodes thecreature's ability to act in any voluntary manner.To me, it's not so much unconsciousness asbeing pounded until you can't force your brainand body to get up again. If a sandman'ssystems can be overwhelmed to the point ofwound damage, then presumably they can alsobe stunned (temporarily shorted out) by lesseramounts of damage, and don't have any morechoice in the matter than humans.

Think of the scene just before the ending toTerminator II maybe. Model 101 has stacks ofdamage reports through its cerebrum, gets itshead repeatedly bashed, and its central powerbus short-circuited. It shuts down. Doesn'tmatter how much it wants to save SarahConnor, it physically can't function until it laysdown for a while and runs its self-repairfunctions.

Don't forget that after two full rounds of beingstunned, any combatant can start makingResolve-physical checks to recover. Maybe youcould reduce that to one round for sandmen,and give them some sort of berserking bonus tothe Resolve check.

If they'd rather self-destruct than gounconscious, that sounds more like a weaknessthan a strength. Along the lines of "a sandmanthat loses all its stun/wound points while inthreat-engagement mode dies immediately".

48

Sandman Schematics: Repto-BorgsJim Clunie

Occasional UFO reports mention reptilian beingswith cybernetic implants, especially optics andartificial arms. If one in a group has such gear,typically they all do. They seem to be arecognizable type: very tall (6 to 8 feet), withone red cyber-eye and sometimes a cyber-arm,highly advanced technology and personalknowledge, very persuasive. They are oftensighted in small groups of 4 to 6.

They tend to impress humans as wise andadvanced beings, despite violent or abusiveconduct - even seduce women into consensualsex.

The Repto-Borgs are a very new development,arising from the sandmen's total conquest of thekinori civilization under the Ahaggar Massif inthe Sahara. (This could also be the source of theeven newer and rarer Greater Sandmen,through co-option of blackscale kinori hermeticscience.)

The typical sandman virus doesn't work well onnonhumans, giving them a -4 bonus to theirCON feat checks to resist. An etoile could createa kinori-specific version, and probably has inNorth Africa, which affects kinori normally butgrants a -4 bonus to humans.

The kinori-specific infective agent is not as wellperfected as the human version, and has side-effects, most noticeably rapid skeletal growth ofup to a meter in height. This would double ortriple a repto-borg's body weight.

A kinori that successfully recovers from theinfection becomes a sandman with all of theabilities and characteristics of the species. Hisability scores are modified as follows: STR +2,DEX -1, CON +1, INT +1, WIL -2, PER +0. Heimmediately gains the Computer Science broadskill, or a rank in Computer Science-programming if he already has the broad skill.

Because they're fitted out and equipped in oneof the largest industrial facilities available to thesandmen (the other big one is Magnitogorsk,which makes some highly modified sand-warriors) all kinori-sandmen have an unusuallyhigh level of technology. A thermal optic implantis standard, as an adaptation for undergroundfighting. They are heavily armed, often withautomatic weapons (similar to a 9mm chargeSMG) or even personal laser weaponry.

Repto-Borg Game DataSTR 10 (11) (d8+5) Improved Arm +1DEX 10 (2d4+5)CON 10 (2d4+5)INT 13 (2d4+7)WIL 7 (d8+2)PER 9 (d8+4)Durability: 10/10/5/5Action Check: 13+/12/6/3#Actions: 2Move: Sprint 20, Run 12, Walk 4Reaction Score: Ordinary / 2Last Resorts: 1

AttacksUnarmed 12/6/3 d4s/d4+1s/d4+2s LI/OHand Axe 11/5/2 d4+1w/d4+2w/d4+3w LI/O9mmChargeSMG

12/6/3 d4+1w/d6+1w/d4m HI/O

Defences+2 INT resistance modifier vs. encounter skills-4 step bonus to CON feat checks made to resisttoxinsNatural armour (Ordinary): d4 (LI), d4 (HI), d4(En)

SkillsAthletics [10-11]-climb [12], jump [12]; MeleeWeapons* [11]; Unarmed [11]-brawl [12];Modern Ranged Weapons [10]-SMG [12];Vehicle Operation [10]; Stamina [10]-bloodmusic [11]; Survival [10]-desert survivaltraining [11]; Computer Science* [13]-hacking[16], programming [15]; Knowledge [13]-kinorilanguage [16], specific human language [15],specific human language [15]; Security [13]-security devices [14]; System Operation* [13]-communications [15], engineering [14], sensors[15]; Tactics [13]; Awareness [7]-perception[10]; Investigate [7]-search [9]; Interaction**[9]-charm [11], intimidate [11]

* The sandman’s fusion ability gives a -1 stepbonus to the use of this skill.** The sandman’s low-frequency hypnosisability grants a -3 bonus to Interaction skills andallows the sandman to affect targets with Hostileattitudes. When interacting with kinori thesandman ignores the +2 penalty to useInteraction skills against targets of a differentspecies.

49

Sandman Schematics: GreaterSandmenJim Clunie

The nanotechnology of the etoile, whilewondrous to humans, is still limited inperformance by the same laws of physics thatwe understand.

Somewhere on Earth, this barrier has beenbroken. Perhaps a coalition of etoile and assault-rifle-wielding Tuareg have subjugated a nest ofblackscale kinori under the Tibesti Massif.Perhaps the etoile themselves have beenbrought to heel by greater powers from beyond.The result is a new breed of nanobots, inscribed

with miniscule runes and peculiar metals, andblazing with arcane power.

A Janizary has many of the abilities of acommon sandman. It can also regenerateimpact damage almost instantly (giving it bothGood toughness against such weapons and aregenerative ability), reshape its body to a muchgreater extent and with impossible speed, andinject short-lived control nanites which hijackthe nervous system of living beings.

Janizaries are often encountered with advancedheavy weapons (arc guns) and occasionally aretrained in magical arts.

Janizary Game Data

STR 16DEX 12CON 15

INT 10WIL 8PER 10

Durability: 15/15/7/7Action Check: 14+/13/6/3#Actions: 2

Move: Sprint 28, Run 18, Walk 6Reaction Score: Ordinary / 2Last Resorts: 1

AttacksUnarmed 18/9/4 d6+3s/d6+4s/d4+3w LI/OGrapple*** 18/9/4 Special9mm Pistol 15/7/3 d4+1w/d4+2w/d4m HI/OAssault Rifle 14/7/3 d4+2w/d6+3w/d4+1m HI/OArc Gun 16/8/4 d8+1s/d8w/d6+3w En/G

Defences+2 STR resistance modifier vs. melee attacks+1 DEX resistance modifier vs. ranged attacks-4 step bonus to CON feat checks made to resist toxinsGood toughness vs. LI and HI damageRegeneration: Regain d4+2s (Marginal), d4+2w (Ordinary) or d4+2m (Good-Amazing) per round on aStamina-regenerate check

SkillsAthletics [16] – climb [21], jump [17]; Heavy Weapons [16]; Unarmed [16] - brawl [18], power martialarts [18]; Acrobatics [12] – dodge [13]; Manipulation [12] – lockpick [16]; Modern Ranged Weapons[12]-pistol [15], rifle [14]; Stealth [12] – hide [16], sneak [18]; Vehicle Operation [10] – land [12];Stamina [10] – regenerate [11]; Computer Science* [10] – hardware [14]; Knowledge [10] - specifichuman language [13]; Security [10] – security devices [13]; Awareness [8]; Lore [8] – occult lore [9];Interaction** [10]-charm [12]

* The sandman’s fusion ability gives a -1 step bonus to the use of this skill.** The sandman’s low-frequency hypnosis ability grants a -3 bonus to Interaction skills and allows thesandman to affect targets with Hostile attitudes. When interacting with humans the sandman ignores the+2 penalty to use Interaction skills against targets of a different species.*** When the greater sandman achieves a hold on a target, it can make an overpowering attack in thefollowing phase to implant a mass of controlling nanites into a target, gaining remote control over thevictim’s body. A greater sandman can control only one victim at a time and can have up to three victimsimplanted with controlling nanites at once.