Volturnus idea: Encounter at Lizard Head Rock

The module “Star Spawn of Volturnus
(SF2)” has the following suggested additional adventure:

Solving the mystery of Lizard Head
rock. This strange rock formation is shaped like a giant lizard's head. The Eorna
have always wondered about it, what it is, where it came from, who made it,
etc. They have heard that there are large numbers of Yernoids in that area, but
have never investigated these reports.

It always struck me that this is an
odd little tidbit thrown in at the end of the series. Now, by the time your
players are through with SF0 –SF2, they may be ready to go gallivanting
elsewhere than being stuck for some vague adventure idea on the planet of
mystery.

A little more imagining needs to be
done about the Eorna. They are portrayed in the modules as being a peaceful,
gentle race… a peaceful race that manufactured combat and warbots that could
evolve into the Mechanons… a gentle race that had a vast underground command
post with various sensors to scan space for hostile ships.

Makes one wonder if the Eorna of
900+ years before were really all that peaceful or gentle. Maybe they were as
peaceful or as gentle as your average human or vrusk or dralasite… or yazarian.
Before becoming a high tech race, they certainly had a number of hostile flora
and fauna to contend with. Everything from Megasauruses to Land Sharks, Land
Whales, Air Whales, Magma Monsters, Roc-like eagles and the such, so the Eorna
couldn’t have been naïve about possible dangers when they went into space.

Now, did it strike anyone else as odd
that the Sathar are masters of hypnosis and cybernetic/genetic engineering and
yet so are the Eorna? Were the game designers hinting at a deeper connection
between the worms and dinos?

There was a story in Star
Frontiersman to that effect – that maybe the Sathar weren’t so unknown to the
Eorna and something went wrong in their interactions.

How long were the Eorna actually
exploring before the Sathar decided to wipe them out? I know the modules say it
was a relatively short time, but a short time compared to what? Was it decades?
A little less than a hundred years? Or maybe a century or two?

If they terminated the Eorna with
extreme prejudice – to use a little Apocalypse Now lingo – why were there so
many other species on Volturnus that survived? There were still enough
proto-Kurabanda, proto-Edestekai and proto-Ul-Mor to be genetically manipulated
to make into intelligent races… and then there was a failed attempt to work on
silicon lifeforms and the Rogue Crystals were created.

Others have written little fill-in
adventures for Volturns, such as Tom Verreult’s “Volturnus Desert Encounter” in
Star Frontiersman, or Jim Young’s “Eornal Defense Installation” and the “Eorna
Lunar Defense Battery” in Frontier Explorer.

There’s even another fan-created
Volturnus race, the Arborean, by R. Kevin Smoot in a Star Frontiersman issue…

But now I return to Lizard Head Rock
and a possible scenario for it.

So, was TSR trying to give game
referees the option of making a branch of the Yernoids intelligent like the
Ul-Mor, Kurabanda, Edestekai and Mechanons? Possibly. But I for one think
Volturnus has enough native and genetically enhanced intelligent lifeforms. The
Yernoids already seem to be a primitive race similar to the lokkuku of Alcazzar
or the Sapes in intelligence.

Fan speculation – which I think I’ve
read elsewhere on the starfrontiers.us site – is that the Eorna probably didn’t
think the Yernoids were worthy of being “raised up” in intelligence. So, why
don’t we leave them as semi-intelligent beings, probably with Log/Int scores of
about 15-20 and capable of making spears and using primitive tools.

So who built Lizard Head Rock and
why?

Some other Eorna who didn’t
participate in the Great Mission?

Or, can we provide some other
answer?

If the Eorna were capable of exploring
their surrounding systems for a period of time – a century or two – before
bringing the wrath of the Sathar down on them (deserved or undeserved), then
they probably visited a number of star systems in the Frontier/Rim area. They
might have established a few colonies too (as has already been speculated by
others here on starfrontiers.us).

It is very likely that the Eorna
would have encountered the Ifshnit, Humma and Osakar… (Yes, I know these races
probably weren’t even in the minds of the Volturnus module writers, but allow
me to continue.) …and interacted with them. A few Eorna may have been left
behind on those worlds when the Sathar nearly annihilated their fellow dinos.

The Ifshnit, Humma and Osakar
probably had not attained spaceflight capabilities when the Eorna encountered
them, but the dinos might have sought to “improve” the more primitive cultures
through education and possibly some genetic manipulation. Several hundred years
after the Day of Doom, the Rim races achieve spaceflight and then Void travel,
creating their own interstellar society even as the Frontier is being settled
by the Humans, Vrusk, Dralasites and Yazarians.

Maybe the Rimmers went in search of
their dino benefactors, found Volturnus (and probably Anker) in ruins and left
a monument behind – Lizard Head Rock, before departing back to home. Every so
often, a Rim ship might visit the Zebulon system with the intent of surveying
it for future colonization, but then they start encountering the Sathar and
fight defensive wars.

Then one day Truane’s Star and the
Star Devil disrupt the status quo on Volturnus. The Rimmers detect several
Sathar warships heading on a vector toward Zebulon and mount another expedition
to Volturnus.

A scout ship arrives. It detects the
Truane’s Star/UPF war fleet in orbit around Volturnus, but no worms, so they
depower and stealthily slip by and land on the planet at Lizard Head Rock.

About this time the
adveturers/Truane’s Star/UPF survey team also takes a jaunt over to the
monument and… voila, you have a first contact situation.

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