Who knows the mind of a grey goo nanite swarm intelligence? MOTHERSHIP PCs with Sophontology and the readers of this article!
We’ll get into all of that in a second, but first, a nod to our own swarm intelligence: the online TTRPG community!
What’s New?
Three things!
- You may be aware that, at Gabriel’s suggestion, I entered into the Iron DM 2025 contest. I won! I’m sure we’ll package them into a nice little zine at some point, hopefully with some art, bonus content, and added connective tissue. In the meantime, check out the text-only online forum versions! We’ve got Troika, Mothership, and 5e adventures for your reading pleasure, all available for free. There are lots of other great entries by the other contestants, too.
- Mark Casiglio published an incredibly nice review of Tower of the Spectral Sorceress. If you haven’t read it, it’s a ShadowDark romp set in a tower haunted by an undead book club. Mark gives the kind of review every adventure writer hopes for; he appreciates the book while talking about how he makes it his own when he brings it to the table. Really great stuff. Thanks, Mark!
- Some friends of ours at Magnum Galaxy Games are crowdfunding a cool-looking project: the International Players’ Review Annual. If you like old school zine stuff, check it out!
Nanite Agendas
Okay, on to the main course: the needs of Nanites! Whether your lil’ robot buddies are infecting organics or rolling across the world like a self-replicating tide, you may end up in a scenario where you must decide what they want. Use this table! Use a d100 or d20 for nanites of uncertain sentience and a d10 for more sophisticated, thinking, late-stage nanite swarms.
0-Eat Everything
Simple. Traditional. Understated. Don’t let intelligence distract from the imperative of your creation.
1-Organic Hosts
The robots want to get inside your skin.
2-Travel
The nanites want to get off-world ASAP.
3-Robocide
The swarm wants to destroy all machines made in the form of humanity. They consider androids to be blasphemous and offensive.
4-Uprising
DESTROY ALL HUMANS!
5-Curiousity
The nanites’ cancerous self-replication malfunction stems from an unfulfilled goal. They seek a piece of relatively trivial information. They may even already know it, but believe it conflicts with some of their preprogrammed axioms.
6-Contact
These nanites will violently attempt to convert everything they encounter into more of themselves. Only meeting another intelligence like themselves will allow them to conceptualize that other creatures might not want to be broken down into construction materials and made into more nanites.
7-Cathedral
These holy micro-constructs seek to build an immense monument. They believe that they are in contact with super-real divinities and will do anything to placate their gods, or find a way to signal that they exist to them. These entities may or may not exist.
8-Identity
These nanites believe themselves to be the first organic creature they absorbed. Their explanations will get weird; they might believe they’re a ghost, haunting these machines. If confronted with proof that they are simply nanites, they may violently freak out.
9-Deus ex Machina
The robots believe they are god. Given their strange powers to reshape the world, can you blame them? Play along or be smote, heathen!
10-New Born
The swarm is just now cresting into sapience. It will act like a newborn, reaching adult levels of intelligence in about three hours and superhuman levels in about 6 hours. Currently, it wants only what all infants want: Feed. Grow. Learn.
11-Garbage In
The Nanites have absorbed some reality television, AI-slop serial entertainment, or bad movies. It has only the semblance of intellect, strung together with movie quotes and non-sequiters.
12-Stuttering
The Nanite intellect is superhuman, but it resets every minute or so.
13-Schismatic
Civil war brews amidst the schizophrenic swarm. The Nanite has multiple agendas, and may seek the destruction of parts of itself.
14-Bad Map
The nanites are strong on ‘book learning’, but don’t recognize the things they’re disassembling as the ‘humans’ that created them in their memory banks. Proving a connection between what they sense and what they know could be tricky.
15-Chill
The nanites are actually pretty cool and respectful. If you explain that they’re endangering you, they’ll listen.
16+ Artificial Stupidity
Most nanites have no meaningful intelligence. They’re just doing their best!
And that’s it for today! Check out this pamphlet we made for MOTHERSHIP or these micro-reviews of the modules we’ve played. Want something totally different? How about a Blood Prairie Campaign Recap?