YOUR IDEAS FOR STAR WARS CELESTIALS: No Idea Is Too Outrageous

[RobShanti]

I want to introduce elements of the Celestials into my Star Wars campaign, hopefully as an endstory for some of the PCs, and I need as many ideas as you can come up with to help me make them spectacular.

According to the mythos, the Celestials (a/k/a the "Architects") were a mysterious, advanced ancient alien precursor race of immeasurable power and malleable form that were the primary players in the prehistoric, pre-Republic era of the Galaxy Far, Far Away. Hundreds of thousands of years before the Battle of Yavin, the Celestials shaped the Galaxy itself as much as they shaped Galactic events, and left behind enormous, enigmatic artifacts, such as Centerpoint Station, Sinkhole Station, Celestial Palace and a "sensory operations complex" on Kessel that contained planetwide underground machinery tended to by Bogeys and containing a type of gigantic astronomical observatory detailing the location of gravity wells across the entire galaxy. The Celestials are believed to have "assembled" astrographic elements of the GFFA, such as the Corellia and Vultar systems, the Hapes Cluster, the Kathol Rift and the Maw cluster of black holes. The Killiks, the Gree, the Kwa and the Rakata all served as servant races to the Celestials. It was some perceived threat of the Celestials that prompted the Sharu to go undercover as the "Toka" and secure the secrets of the Sharu culture in their plastic pyramids in the Centrality, and that prompted the Columni to curb their galactic exploration and retreat into hermitage. Some speculate that the Celestials are a higher order of Force beings that guide the events of the galaxy and the balance between the Light and Dark sides of the Force, and that "The Ones" -- the Father, the Son and the Daughter (featured in the Clone Wars animated series) -- are believed to be what the Celestials eventually become.

In my campaign, I would like to bring the storylines of a few characters to an end with a climactic encounter with an ancient Celestial temple, ruins or somesuch that represents a singularity in the Celestials' society, possibly the point at which they became discorporate, transcendent extra-planar beings, possibly with the PCs transcending themselves.

What I need is ideas that I might not otherwise come up with...ideas of any sort: about the artifacts, or the history of the Celestials, or their present condition, or how the PCs might interact with those artifiacts or entities, or ideas for the final adventures of these PCs and how they might transcend...and particularly how I might tie these ideas into a playable adventure.

Homages to the works of other space fantasy or sci-fi works with similar themes, such as those of Vernor Vinge, Arthur C. Clark, Stanley Kubrik (2001) and Alan Dean Foster (Design for Great-Day) are welcome and, in fact, encouraged.

 

[sabrinathecat]

Celestials have 5D in all stats, Master Force users with knowledge of all powers (even dark side, but they know better), and have 15D in one skill, 12D in two other skills, and 10D in 5 more. They have 15 skill points and 8 force points.
And they look like ocelots wearing orange padjamas

 

[CAFRedblade]

You could take a few ideas for these Celestials from the Stargate 'Ancients'.. Potentially similar in nature. Both have ascended to a higher form of being.

The Celestials have become one with the Force, and while they watch from 'there', they are tasked with not interfering. Although there may be those who break such rules.
Or, in a need for overall balance and neutrality, they do interfere, and nudge things towards dark or light as the case may require.

Considering the time periods involved, and what continuity you are using, either many of the old artifacts have been discovered and re-lost/hidden away or destroyed. Or have been so well hidden, that only a very few ever find the way to them, and all require the Force to aid in tracking these items/places.

I would think most if not all remaining artifacts of the Celestials would be located beyond the Known Regions of the Galactic Core, and even the Fringe areas that house planets like Tattooine.

There may be places like The MAW (several Black Holes "encircle" a hidden locale) where a hidden temple may remain. Most people would never attempt entrance for being sucked into the Black Holes.

 

[M.L. Martin]

I take it you're up to speed on the Fate of the Jedi novels, which tied in a lot of this stuff? Bear in mind that there are hints therein that Abeloth was not necessarily a unique individual.

You could always borrow from Babylon 5's Shadows, Vorlons and First Ones. Given that the DarkStryder aliens wound up being very much like the Shadows (in a case of parallel development) to the point that WEG changed things to reduce the resemblance, that's a source of inspiration for mining right there.

 

[jonesy]

From wookiepedia:
"Around 30,000 BBY, the domain of the Celestials was usurped when the Rakata slave race revolted whereupon they waged a war against the other servant races. Some hypotheses over the hyperspace turbulence in the Unknown Regions also claimed that it was created to serve as a barrier between the Celestials and the upstart Rakata."

Have the characters hear about, be told about, or find, a Celestial hyperspace barrier generator. These devices are usually cloaked, but the cloak on this one has started malfunctioning after a swarm of comets struck through its failing defenses and part of the time the cloak allows through it radio bursts (that are created by as a side-effect of the creation of the hyperspace barrier) which have now at last begun to reach the nearest inhabited star system ('nearest' could be very far away indeed).

The radio bursts point to a specific direction and travelling in that direction the characters are sure to find the barrier still preventing travel to the generator. They will have to figure out a way to get past the hyperspace barrier. Something that would have utterly stumped the Rakata, but which the characters might be equipped for.

When they figure out a way to get through the barrier and make a jump to the location of space the generator is near they are immediately fired upon by its defenses.

Make up defenses here.

Defeating the defense system also shuts down the cloaking device because the defenses will rout all of their power into the weapons system.

Once the defenses are killed and the cloak powers down:
"What you see is a curious looking planet. The continents, for that is what they most resemble, appear to be sculpted into symbols of immense size. There seems to be vegetation growing on them, but it grows in strangely shaped clusters. Rivers of blue run from the continents into maze-like oceans. Between the oceans and continents run massive mountains of red stone. Looking at the planet as a whole the immediate impression you get is one a circuit board. A massive circuit board built using the natural surface of the planet. Just as this thought begins to sink in your gaze turns to the eastern edge of the planetary horizon. As the planet slowly turns the horizon becomes more and more pronounced until you realize that the planet has been neatly cut in half and both halves are several hundred kilometers away from each other. "

The planet is cut in half like an orange, and like an orange the characters can clearly see the rings of earth on the planets insides all the way to the two fiery core halves which are connected together with what looks like an axle made of magma. Somehow none of the insides are spilling out and into the planetary gravity well at the center. The axle made of magma is spinning like crazy and generating/sending all sorts of particles all over the place. This is also the source of the radio bursts. The planet is the hyperspace barrier generator, and somewhere on or in it is a way to find out where the Celestials travelled to.

Edit: and no, I'm not saying that oranges have fiery cores. Well, not most of them.

 

[RobShanti]

Wow. That was mind blowing, jonesey.

 

[jonesy]

More thoughts:
Somewhere inside the barrier generator there is a supervision room. The room is a hollow sphere a thousand kilometers across with a miniature version of local space. Local space being everything within range of the real barrier field. Everything in the room is a miniature (slightly out of scale) version of the real space it depicts. There will be small stars and planets, asteroid fields, a pair of black holes, comets..(and anything else you want the local space to contain).

What the characters are meant to realize is that the miniature barrier generator planet at the center of the miniature map has a moon rotating around it. They never noticed a moon outside. The moon rotates the planet exactly above the rift between the two halves, a hundred thousand kilometers away from it.

The real moon still has an active cloaking field. The characters need to shut it down somehow (the controls for this could be somewhere in the supervision room).

Looking up from the planet the moon looks like a dark red rock, with oddly stumped western and eastern sides. Getting to the moon will reveal that those sides are flat and a little reflective. Getting to the 'dark' side they will find that it is one huge circular hole all the way in.

The moon is basically a railgun system for travelling out of the barrier field, always pointing away from the planet. At the bottom of the huge moon chamber there is a room with a holographic map. This one shows a much larger area of space. There are several locations marked with symbols. Each symbol is a Celestial location. The location markers inside Known Space (known by the characters and most of the Star Wars universe) are not lighted up, as if they were no longer there (Taken over by the Rakata, or others, somewhere in the past. The characters might be able to recognize a couple of them, like maybe Tatooine?). Some location markers are very bright (the gun station is still in contact with them).

Firing the gun sends whatever is inside the huge chamber to another similar gun a looooooooooooong way away. The gun is basically safe, by which I mean: if the characters left their ship/s outside, and walked here, and one of them is inside the chamber when they manage to fire it, that character will be fired to the other gun in the most hair raising experience of his or her life, and arrive safely. Whether the gun creates a forcefield around its cargo to protect it, or creates a tunnel through space, I don't know. The gun also doesn't appear to utilize kinetic energy. If the characters leave their ship just outside the chamber entrance and then accidentally fire their own people at the ship, they will hit it, stop at the surface of the ship, and find that they haven't even bruised themselves. The gun is, basically, not a weapon. Just the wildest kind of transport device.

 

[jonesy]

One possible Celestial location:
Thirty minutes after the contents of the moongun are fired from it, a trillion kilometers away from the barrier generator planet, the contents find themselves, very briefly, inside an accelerator unit made of transparent something. They will only stay here long enough to notice the unit power up, dial the location chosen back at the moongun, redirect the trajectory, and then fire the contents towards that location. Thirty minutes after that, an unbelievable distance away (if the characters somewhow manage to deduce how far away they've been sent they still won't believe they've calculated right) they fly into a shimmering tube of energy incredibly quickly slowing them down. The tube begins to fade away just as they find themselves arriving to a gun much like the one they left. Righ before they end up in the circular firing chamber they see a violet star behind the moon. The room at the back of the firing chamber is different here. This one also has the holographic map, but behind that there is a tunnel. The tunnel leads to an abandoned base on the other side of the moon. The base has a gigantic observation deck with an entirely transparent ceiling overlooking the violet star (the ceiling is so transparent at first it seems the deck is exposed to space).

The star is behaving oddly. Violet streams of energy leap out of it like the lashes of a whip. Observing the situation the characters will realize that the view is shifting. There is a planet out there that the moon is orbiting, but it is so dark and so torn apart that the violet brightness was obscuring it at first. Then the moon begins to get hit by the star storm. Luckily the moon has an active forcefield and the lashes merely clash with it forming static-like interference in visibility outside.

 

[RobShanti]

Awesome stuff, guys. Keep it coming.

 

[RobShanti]

Okay...here's an idea I came up with in that penumbral region between sleep and wakefulness: melee combat on a starship scale...the transmutation of the PCs into Abeloth-like entities that do Evangelion-like hand-to-hand combat in spaaaaace. Weapons are useless against the Celestial entity (except lightsabers)...only hand to hand combat works against it, to get that Godzilla versus Mothra feel.

Trapped in space, in dimensional prison-pockets, are beings of immeasurable power that could destroy dimensions. Their goal is the destruction of all things.

Here's the twist: Palpatine is the only salvation against these entities. By wielding the power of the Sith, he avails himself of powers that are considered "unnatural," but they may be sapientkind's only salvation against the beings of chaos and destruction that the Celestials managed to trap before they destroyed the universe. The PCs have to ally with the greatest Lord of the Sith in order to save the Galaxy. OH the PATHOS!