[Targan]

Okay, well for those who weren't there right at the beginning when I started talking about my campaign, the central supernatural stuff all had its basis in Harnmaster. There were two reasons for this: firstly my player group and I had previously been playing mostly Harnmaster together back as far as 1989, and secondly the rules system we were using for my T2K campaign was Harnmaster/Gunmaster. In Harmaster the standard metaverse that most campaigns take place in is called the Seven Worlds, they being Terra (standard Earth), Midgaad (Tolkien's Middle Earth), The Blessed Realm (Tolkien's heaven and home of the Valar and the Maiar), Kethira (the planet where the island of Harn is), Sherem (in our campaign Jorune from the RPG Skyrealms of Jorune), Losenor (a solar system whose main habital planet was blasted into an asteroid belt millenia ago) and finally Yashain (the God Plane, a jumbled up mish-mash of a place which isn't really a planet, more of a paranormal realm where strength of will and power of spirit creates local reality and of which Runequest's Glorantha is a part).

The Seven Worlds all exist in different universes, each of which has different physical laws, but are linked together as loose P-variants of each other. At certain points on each of those worlds the walls of reality are thinner (or deliberately weakened) allowing individuals of sufficient knowledge or spiritual/magical/psychic power to cross from one world to another. Terra (our Earth) has the lowest level of what in the simplest terms could be described as "magic" and so it is difficult both to get into and out of compared to the other Seven Worlds. But tens of thousands of years ago a race colloquially known as the Earthmasters rose to great power and travelled between the Seven Worlds, colonising many of them. Their main transport network consisted of what later became known as the Godstones. The majority of the Godstones look just like the Monolith on the moon in 2001: A Space Odyssey. Many of the Godstones on various worlds had protective structures built around them made out of a virtually indestructible substance known as pseudo-stone (which when looked at with extreme magnification can be seen not to be made from any kind of natural matter but in fact is made from billions of tiny black or white monolith-shaped frozen energy packets).

In my T2K campaign the Earth had a number of (I never decided exactly how many but perhaps around a dozen) Godstones scattered across the globe, nearly all hidden underground and completely unknown to human civilization. A few Godstones were known to humans (a couple had been known of by humans for thousands of years) but as Earth-born humans inherently have little psychic or magic potential very few can make the Godstones function. One Godstone in Yugoslavia was discovered by the CIA during the early 1990s as a result of remote scrying experiments conducted as part of the (real life) Project Star Gate. The US Government had only just started to intensively research the nature of the Balkan Godstone when the USSR and China started their fateful conflict. In my campaign part of the reason why CivGov kept pouring reinforcements into the Yugoslavian Theatre during the Twilight War was due to pressure from the CIA to maintain control of the area around where their Godstone was buried.

Just before the war broke out researchers controlled by the CIA/NSA etc discovered that a small number of psychically-talented operatives were able to activate the Godstone and, using strength of will and careful visualisation, were able to open a gate to any location that the could accurately picture in their minds. Some of those individuals were also able to open psychically-locked doors in the ancient facility built around the Godstone, where they discovered a number of ancient alien devices, the functioning of which were all far beyond the understanding of current human science. Some of those devices included what came to be known by the PCs in my campaign as "The Blanket", a 7' x 4' sheet of brownish-grey glossy material which was warm and slightly tacky to the touch and would would, of its own volition, try to wrap itself around any living (or recently living) organic creature which its ancient programming made it believe was injured, genetically flawed or even dead and try to heal/repair it. Unfortunately "The Blanket" had not had any preventative maintenance performed on it in thousands of years and was dangerously prone to malfunctioning. Instead of using up its available charge and becoming dormant until re-powered in the way it was intended, "The Blanket" would sometimes when it was low on charge completely consume what/whoever was wrapped in it, leaving no matter at all behind. In consuming its patient/victim it would become fully recharged (the PCs learned to tell the difference, as "The Blanket" would be glossy and active when charged and dull and torpid when in need of charge).

Quite a few of the artifacts recovered from the Balkans site were sent with a psychic operative through the Godstone with the intention of returning them to CivGov control in the CONUS during late 1999 but the operative was unable to visualise the intended destination well enough and ended up arriving in the mountains in northern Czechoslovakia. There he and several colleagues who went through the mis-targeted gate with him ended up linking up with other CivGov agents and made their way into southern Poland. That was where they eventually encountered Major Anthony Po, US Army Special Forces and his band of merry psychotics and were relieved both of their lives and of the artifacts. That is how Po came into possession of "The Blanket".

One way or another most of the other paranormal creatures and events in my T2K campaign were directly or indirectly linked to the presence of Godstones scattered around the Earth. If these ramblings have not doused everyone's interest in my campaign's supernatural elements I will post more background to this thread.