CthulhuTech Stargate

[Wakka]

GRIM DARK alternative:

The Asgard fired off their time warping device as in canon, but had no SG-1 equivalent to throw at the Replicators when they reversed it. Now the Asgard's fleet is decimated, and the Replicators have had over 1000 years relative to crack the arcanotech libraries. Fuck knows what they've unleashed by now (Hive-mind is just asking for corruption), but it has access to ships that can cross a galaxy in minutes. Naturally, the Asgard have assumed the worst has happened and opened up the libraries of horrors to combat what they believe is coming. And the neo-Replicators *are* coming.

The Protected Planets treaty is wavering, because the Asgard haven't been enforcing it due to both a profound lack of ships and a lack of time (busy arcanoteching). The System Lords are beginning to realize this fact, and previously safe worlds are beginning to fall.

Anubis is quietly building his strength from both conventional and the "lighter" forbidden tech. As a partially-ascended being he is better at containing insanity from this stuff... but this is arcanotech. Better is not perfect.

The Tollan don't exist. The Tok'ra are dying.



So yeah. Cthulutech SG-1's version of 40k.

 

[Carandol]

In their heyday, the Asgard were able to gather arcane texts from across the galaxy, and explore the ruins of a myriad fallen civilisations, some of them dead for hundreds of millions of years. With that much data to cross reference, the arcane lore in their dark archives will dwarf that of every earthly faction, combined. Thus, if they decide to develop arcanotech, it won't just be slightly more advanced than the NEG's, it will be millennia ahead, on average.

I say on average because, until recently, the Asgard kept this knowledge firmly theoretical. They will only have tried putting it into practice when a Replicator victory was otherwise inevitable, and implementation will be tricky. Many labs will have been lost to experimental mishaps, with the worst cases requiring planetary sterilisation, and the results will be a patchwork. In some areas, Asgard arcanotech will be godlike, on a par with any thing Cthulhu has, but in others it will be primitive, perhaps behind the NEGs.

Where those strengths and weaknesses lie can be determined by the needs of the story, though not too blatantly. They might, for example, have no mecha, but be able to permanently summon and control any creature that could ever have naturally evolved in this universe - reaching across time and into alternate histories Press one button, and 50 T rexes materialise in the target area, all subject to preset compulsions, with the entire process automated. If that's not enough, well, some of the turns evolution could have taken are very strange indeed. The same technology can also be used with sufficient precision to grab alternate people, with obvious abuses.

Assume that the Asgards' libraries are decentralised, one of the reasons they can't easily be destroyed. Even before their final defeat, the replicators may have captured one copy of the dark archives, perhaps only partial, but they would not differentiate between arcanotech and any other kind, nor do they have any instinctive fears. The result would be terrible to behold.

Note too, the Ancient's arcane library would be of similar quality to the Asgards', which might prove a temptation too far for the NEG, and would certainly attract hostile interest from the Chrysalis Corporation.

 

[grant]

Which could meant that instead of being semi-allies that get along but don't work together much humans and Asgard might actually be at best rivals and at worst actively trying to subvert each others efforts. I can see the NEG siding with the Replicators (who appear to have little interest in fighting humans but great interest in Mi-go tech) and Asgard helping Mi-go (who aren't a threat to their interstellar holdings but have some interesting knowledge of cloning and genetics). Remember that in the RPG the Mi-go could warn the NEG about the Order of Dagon and so eliminate a threat, but their mentality doesn't even consider it. That kind of alien mind could be extrapolated to the Goa'uld and Asgard.

 

[Xon]

But the so-called Ancients aren't. They rose and fell within the last ten million years. The Elder Things built their first cities billions of years ago, a time abyss that reveals how pathetically feeble the Ancients' claim to truly is, and yet they were not the first to travel between the stars.

Stargate Ancients are at least 30-40 million years old and don't even hail from this local group of galaxies.

And as stargate universe shows, they have starships several billion lightyears away, and the stargate network functions over those insane distances.

They have teraformed galaxies worth of planets into Earth norms and seeded it with life as we know it.

Perhaps it would be best to make sure you've got the right interpretation, before blowing any stars up.

The Ancients have the technology to time-loop the entire galaxy for the rest of time.

 

[grant]

Even if they are old by human standards, they're still little children compared to the Cthulhuverse species. We are talking billions compared to millions. Again I suggest that we simply cut Ascension out of the entire universe, it creates gods a bit too nice for the right feel.

 

[Carandol]

Or put a darker spin on ascension - the ancients were actually subsumed by Nyarlothotep, reduced to mere avatars whose mimicry of their pre-ascension selves concealed a dreadful truth.

There also the possibility of confusion between the Old Ones, the Ancients, and others - who knows how many different races have been referred to as the oldest or similar at some point in the universes long history? For our purposes, anything that would put the SG_1 ancients too high on the power scale can be assumed to be a mistranslated reference to the Old Ones, or possibly some other race. It's a natural mistake, if the researchers underestimate the depth of galactic history.

 

[AbyssalDaemon]

In another Stargate/Lovecraft crossover I've seen, the Ancients where supposed to have been the Elder Gods and in the story where also responsible for keeping Cthulhu imprisoned within R'lyeh (at a heavy cost to themselves mind you).

One way to keep the Ancients in the story without them being able to directly interfere is that the their the main reasons that the Old Ones are currently incapable of acting directly and must wait for when the Stars-are-Right. Any attempt by the Ancients too act to overtly has the potential to let the Old Ones and worst of their servants to do the same thing.

The Ori on the other hand probably don't really care about such things but going by the Lovecraft universe they'd count as cosmic horror themselves...

 

[grant]

I find Carandol's idea much more delicious just because I could see Jackson's expression in SG1 when he realizes that all those times Olma helped Earth it was really a cosmic plot to makes things much worse.

 

[JumperPrime]

Would also explain why the 'Ancients' stopped Daniel from taking out Anubis over Abydos, and why they didn't just smite Anubis themselves at any point in the game. When Daniel chose to descend after the Anubis incident, it wasn't a simple disagreement over the Anicents' non-interference policy, he'd just discovered the awful truth of Ascension and he just barely managed to avoid being completely absorbed by 'blowing ballast' as it were and even that was a near thing. That-Which-Must-Not-Be-Named almost got him before he could crash back to the material plane, and it actually caught a piece of him before he managed to slip away, resulting in his amnesia when he initially retook human form.

Also explains why they never lifted a proverbial finger during the war with the Ori. Both the Ancients and the Ori are aspects of the same guiding intelligence, one which is Not Nice At All. In the Ori home galaxy, they're trying to inspire a rebel movement to find some hidden bit of ArcanoTech that they THINK will destroy the oppressive "gods" but will really unleash the Old Ones onto the Ori Galaxy. Meanwhile, in the Milky Way, they're trying a more "hands-off" approach to see if mortals who only need to contend with other mortals will do a better job of finding and using the tech to break the locks. The Ori invasion is intended to motivate the people of the Milky Way to step up their efforts to find and develiop more powerful ArcanoTech. Oh, and Merlin's anti-Ascended weapon? If it works as designed, it'll actually make it a lot easier for the Old Ones to bust through what's been keeping them locked away.

 

[Rift120]

Just got to reading this thread....

and there is a small problem with everyones assumption that the ASgard and Replicators will have access to arcaneotech...


Arcaneotech is a RECENT invention by humanity... the D-drive and everything came about by human research on earth. And even that was likely a freak accident, with Ashcroft stumbling acorss its secret enough before going mad.

THATS WHY the Migou invaded, HUmanity had come up with something completely new and unprecendented... Its also why it took so long for them to invade, they had to refit the Arcaneotech to their data.

So the only data teh Asgard would have on Arcaneotech would be what they picked up on scouting missions.

And all things considered... cannonly that probably means only LOKI has Arcaneotech, as prior to SG-1 finding thor and co, none really paid attention to earth except Loki for his research... which created the Alien Abduction phenomnon... OF course with Nazzadi, and Migou showing such advances in cloning, Loki may be paying more attention to earth.. but still.

Aracneotech would at the start be only in the hands of Earth forces and the Migou... at best Loki may have some prototypes, but his emphasis is on genetic research and D-engine insanity is well documented so he is not likely to have pursued it to seriously.

The real quesiton is how does the Migou empire fit into things (Remember the Migou on pluto are a MINING OUTPOST cannonicly...)

And what happens when a Go-aiuld trys to inhabit a Dhoanoid or Tager?

 

[maquis]

I could see the Asgard quantifying the arcane, rationalising and studying 'magic' as primitive manipulations of dimensions and energies beyond their perception, and developing their own uses for it.

Their warp drives are based on gate spells (much like the stargates themselves?), transporters built off of summonings. Their weapons are gleamed from evocations, mental downloading originates in possessions and so on.

Not Arcanotech, just sufficiently advanced magic, indistinguishable from technology. Or high tech DnD wands, ("What this room here? This controls our wand of teleport. It's that big engine thing over there.")

 

[Prince Charon]

The last time this thread was at the top, Stargate Universe was still running, and I think there's some other things that hadn't gone out, yet. So, does the new information since then effect how this crossover would go, and has a fresh look given anyone new ideas?