Just Chilling with my Yeeps

Last Friday night I had a great time with the Gamer + group on the Discord server at Tenkar's Tavern. It was momentous for me as it was the first playtest of a system I devised and will release soon. The title is Universe Unleashed. This first game was SF. I like having Unleashed in the title because it is a very fast rules light game that gets out of the way and lets you role-play. In fact I think the game system is a success so far. The players were all a little confused at first but quickly got up to speed and it turned out no one had time to read the rules before but were learning on the spot with one or two examples in play. there were two standouts in this first game.

The first was a player who came by and asked to join on the spot. Since it was an initial game I ran a scenario that was a dungeon crawl through an enemy base and an alien ship that was docked. The new player mentions as combat is joined that he is wearing and eco-skeleton and has to move last in a turn. Okay, I didn't set limits on equipment. Amused I went along with it. Then he mentions he is wielding a brush cutter, essentially a sword. I ask him what department he's with and reply is "I'm a scientist." I immediately christen him 'Doctor Chainsaw. He goes me one better and says his nickname is 'Tex'.

The other stars of the evening were the Yeeps. Yeeps were small alien animals looking sort of like blonde ferrets with Fennec fox ears and toes similar to a chameleon's. All but one character liked them immediately (the one wanted to kill them with fire IIRC). A friendly NPC exobiologist insisted they were harmless creatures. In  fact they were not, but they were definitely on the side of humans and proved their yips (or 'yeeps') could harm or kill some non corporeal creatures who were hostile. A major complaint to their handler was her lack of imagination. She said she was too busy researching them to make up a clever name.

Some odd facts about Yeeps:

Their pulses are very closely synchronized. All the time.

Their body temperatures are exactly the same.

A Yeep will bond to a human fairly quickly. They keep an eye on humans who are hostile to them. Dolph, the security man, noticed whenever he stole a glance at them they were all looking at him.

They are very good at coordinating efforts.

No cage or enclosure seems to hold them for very long if they want out. They do like to be crated -especially together. But sometimes they will get up and leave somehow. Exactly how they do this is unknown. They are just somewhere else.

They refuse to be separated more than 100 meters from each other, becoming agitated first and then simply 'being' closer to their pack. So far this has happened with the estranged Yeep being carried in a crate and then reappearing elsewhere. Sometimes the mechanism securing the crate opens and sometimes the Yeep vanishes from a secured crate.

So far all tests have been minimally invasive. But the Yeeps have several anomalies. They have a  nervous system and several ganglia, but no discrete brain mass. Similarly they have a circulatory system but no central heart to do the pumping. There is no sign of a reproductive system.


**************************************Spoilers*************************************

The Yeeps encountered so far are all parts of the same organism. the prime life form is multidimensional (it has at least four spatial dimensions). Picture a human interacting with a two dimensional world. This world is like a plane the human 'hovers over. If they stick their arm through it, beings on that world would perceive it as a circular mass.

In this analogy, the six Yeeps encountered are fingers, toes or tentacles. The multidimensional being is dabbling in our world. Like tentacles, they can perform different functions. Being fourth dimensional they can leave an enclosure almost as easily as humans stepping out of a chalk circle (by 'pulling themselves free of our world/plane). They don't do it lightly as it seems to require some expenditure of resources (energy, stress or what have you).

The Yeeps are all attached, like fingers on a hand and exhibit similar behavior. They may have individual minds and some autonomy, We don't know. The prime creature might be intelligent or not. Higher dimensional nature doesn't mean you are intelligent. Most three dimensional creatures are not intelligent.

Encountering more Yeeps may tell us more about their nature. Are the new Yeeps another creature or another 'hand' of the same one already met?

I have not worked out the exact abilities of Yeep-Kind yet. Can they be killed, or is shooting one like cutting your finger? Are there always six? Can they survive in hostile environments? Vacuum?

My gut feeling is that they aren't hard to knock away or stun. Killing one is harder. If one Yeep is in an Earth like environment then they all have access to breathable air. Poison or drug one and it will affect them all in time.

The prime creature is intersecting our dimension but we don't know how far it extends beyond it. Are the Yeeps merely fingertips or a meaty cross section of a finger or tentacle or arm? Is destroying one a  minor injury or an amputation?

Yeeps have little or no protection against harm, despite being hard to really hurt. Hitting one with minor damage (hand weapons, fists, sticks) is usually ignored. Moderate damage (large melee weapons, firearms) seems to hurt and will make one disappear for 1d6 minutes. Hitting one with severe damage will make it retreat for 1d6 hours. Heavy weapons might 'kill' a Yeep, amputating it (3 in 6 chance). It also has a 1 in 6 chance of making all the Yeeps disappear for 1d6 hours.

Yeeps are poison to psychic or energy based beings. Their cries will stun them unless they pass a saving throw (Constitution/Endurance based) and cause them to retreat or take 1d6 damage.

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