079: Starmothers

ENTRY 079: Starmothers

Embedded in human imagination are monstrous and miraculous births, stories of women raped by gods and demons, or men impregnated with parasitoid alien embryos. Medical history records men and women who suffered under delusions of such strange inseminations, or sought them out. Some saw themselves as victims bringing forth antichrists, others as blessed martyrs destined to carry messiahs; a few deluded fools sought through science or magic to achieve their goals, to give birth to something other than—perhaps greater than—human.

Needless to say, the advent of transhumanity into space and the advance of medical science has not precisely helped matters. Rather than support groups and therapy, potential “Starmothers” of all sexes find positive and social reinforcement of their beliefs, and sometimes facilitation of their fantasies through medical intervention—false pregnancies, artificial implantation of xenosculpted fetuses, unadvisable multiple pregnancies…

Many of these procedures are scams or ineffective, as likely to leave a cancer eating the subject’s uterus as anything, but even the successful surgeries leave nothing but victims: a biomorph implanted the reproductive track from a transgenic dog, slowly dying from infection as the antirejection meds strained its immune system to the breaking point; a formerly-female synthmorph with a mother complex and fishbowl-like womb-vat to display the fetuses she collects, only to flush them away when they get too big for her liking; the transgirl accidentally raped to death during an “insemination event” crashed by the Carnival of the Goat, and so many others.

Using the Starmothers

The Starmothers in particular are not obsessed with sex, but in the product of sex; they are transhumans of every gender, faction, and ideology that have become fixated on the idea of birthing. For some it is a fetish, for others something closer to a religious calling, but it provides for the gamemaster a group of NPCs with a single-minded motivation. For some, this may be harmless—a devoted geneticist that wants to design her own child, for example; others may be totally out of touch with reality, and in need of rescue from those in the Starmother network that are encouraging and facilitating their delusions.

Sex is a part of every roleplaying game setting; the only question is how the players and gamemasters choose to use and address it. Every group needs to find its own balance as to what they feel comfortable addressing and talking about at the table—most people aren’t open to a reading of the gamemaster’s latest erotic fanfiction, or two players having their characters roleplay having sex with each other. That said, in moderation themes and descriptions of sex and pregnancy can make for interesting, edgy scenes and plot elements in adventures. In the case of Starmothers, the GM need not craft an adventure around sexually explicit scenes of impregnation, visceral images of breech birth, or loving descriptions of inhumanly pregnant biomorphs; in most cases a few bare but suggestive descriptions are more than enough to set the players’ imagination at work without making them uncomfortable.

Seed

• The Starmother network has posted a report of a xenoarchaeological site beyond the Pandora Gate, a ruin whose carvings suggest it a sight where an alien race would impregnate members of another race with a half-breed child. The report has spawned a rush of traffic to the site, but a leading xenoarchaeologist is concerned the whole thing is a scam, and asks the PCs to investigate first.