The wheeled beasts of the wilds

Today's post on Hogintu, themed around ten.

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The deep desert holds terrors unseen, unsuspected. Creatures prowl the undulating blue dunes, creatures more fearsome than the stabbing skrab and harrying haak, more yet than the nekrobra, those giant cobras with the faces of men. Not all are even flesh.

Great glinting beasts, the tenzers have five articulated sections, each with a pair of balloon wheels. They are sentient, but rarely communicate with others than their kind. They crawl the peaks and troughs, bask in the sun charging tired batteries, dream.

Once they were the mainstay of dune sea-going transport, heavily loaded, powerful and maintained. Now the humans are few, the trade gone, the loneliness great. Madness can strike and send them barrelling into the habzones, howling over their loudspeakers.

Troobloo respect their mastery of the expanses; habbers-on seek to win them over to the Cause, bring them gifts of oils, drives and chips; smugglers see a planetside asset, hunt them as they do all else. If they have any purpose of their own, none know it.

They roll on, below the dust on the horizon, ancient machines lost in their subroutines.

Rule: Vehicle-building rules are not yet available for Humanspace Empires so here are the playtest stats for the new game. The universal approach is still being smoothed out, but seems to cover vehicles well. There's no non-scenario encounter pattern for it yet.

Tenzer

1  |  5  |  Long  Ponderous  Modular [ 5 | 2-3 ]  Sealed [ 5 | lin | 3-34 ]  Dilapidated

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