The stars of the four arms are awash with life, but so little is known about the Galaxy's center. For as long as anyone can remember, where the arms begin to meet marks the edge of death, for the middle is home of the First. So named by the Iylum, as even that storied people discovered them already waiting when first venturing to the stars, little is known of the inscrutable machine beings that dominate the center region. In all known history, no attempt to communicate nor to discover any of their motives has proved successful. But their hostility towards anyone who approaches their territory is all too certain, making travel between the arms a dicey venture at best. And at times, with no warning, the First are known to issue forth into the spaces of the peoples of the galaxy and strike with swift and ruthless force.
Nevertheless, a galaxy is a big place and the galactic community finds ways to go about its business. And as usual, the business of civilization isn't always pleasant. Enter the Ithica, a ship owned by enterprising Kiric caravaneers. They have a rather interesting enterprise in mind, and to assist in this, they've leased a team of prisoners from a SolFed detention facility. Prisoners who, if they can return alive from this task, might just earn their freedom.
Little do any of them know, some of the oldest secrets in the cosmos are about to be uncovered...
Overview:
The players begin as prisoners of the Solar Federation, though what landed them there is open for discussion between player and GM (if they do not wish it known to the others). There are several established races, but as the galaxy is vast and home to a myriad of different beings, players have a great deal of freedom in creating their characters, though they should take heed of the established details of the setting. There are large empires, covering hundreds and even thousands of star systems, but the galaxy is vast and swallows even them. The space between is filled with smaller nations, entities, freeholds, and simply huge expanses of unexplored space. Statistically speaking, more of the galaxy is lawless than isn't. And rumors of strange and mysterious things unknown to science abound...
Pseudoscience:
Threadweave
The resident FTL method, based upon principles of quantum gravity and dark matter. Ships can follow the Threads strung through the beads of stellar gravity wells. Consequently, it's easy to find Threads up and down the arms of the galaxy, but very difficult to Thread across the sparser areas between arms. With few bridges, travel between arms often requires moving closer to the center of the galaxy and circling around. However, ships Threading too close to First territory can often find themselves suddenly pulled out of the Threadweave and attacked. Needleships chart new Threads, reinforcing pathways that help other ships travel more easily.
The Gift/Psionics/Mindweave
A relatively well-known though poorly understood phenomenon, the Iylum hypothesize it to be similar to Threadweave, like a fabric made of a single filament strung between all conscious beings, though even those species with an intuitive connection to it have thus far been unable to create a complete scientific description of its workings. It is believed that any being with self awareness and sufficiently complex thought processes has the potential to manifest these gifts, but becoming attuned is a difficult process and likely requires as much pure luck as effort. Those who are so fortunate develop abilities that generally follow one of two paths: reading, sensing, and/or influencing other minds; and gathering and redirecting physical forces/energies through their mental processes and senses.
Though most people would say they've heard of this phenomenon, few would say they believe
Major Groups:
Earthlings
Ever a creative bunch, with their advances in artificial intelligence, biological engineering, robotics and cybernetics, and self-modification, humanity created a great big family for themselves as they spread across the stars, and altogether they are known as the Children of Earth. Over the past 900 years, the diverse society of the Earthlings has spread to a territory over 16000 lightyears long and 3000 wide, containing several thousand stars. The Solar Federation holds authority over most of Earthling space, but there are other powerful entities within. They have risen to be the second most prominent power in the Arm-Rouge, positioned lucratively on a spur between Arm-Rouge and Arms Jaune and Verde which allows for a rare Thread bridge. This has caused some tension with the Crimsons, based further down towards the inner ring.
Crimsons
A strange race of part organic, part mineral creatures. Their tissues build fiber-optic crystaline structures which carry their impulses and thought processes, and then atrophy into compact bio-luminescent masses when their mineralized forms are done growing. While they can garden themselves into a variety of shapes, some even being self-mobile forms more like other creatures, often times they simply grow to encrust and enmesh with their technology and structures. They think and speak in colors rather than sounds, and due to that and their superior starmaps (gained through highly advanced astronomy from a relatively central point of view), the common terminology for the galaxy's regions comes from them. They are accomplished threadweavers, mediators, and scientists.
They administrate an empire of many species, which is located much closer to the center than the territory of the other mega-empires, near the base of Arm-Rouge. Consequently, they have the most experience fighting against the First, though they posess little more understanding of them than anyone else. Their fleets, with some help from the SolFed's, keep the spinal Threadways of Arm-Rouge relatively safe, though the more distal reaches of the arm can be fairly wild.
Iylum
The oldest known extant space-faring people, the nomadic Iylum have roamed much of the galaxy and laid many of the Longthreads that would become the spinal Threadways of the arms, built upon by other peoples. In modern times, their activities are mostly confined to the Arm-Violet, somewhere in which lies their homeworld. History shows that they go between periods of isolationism and freely interacting with other peoples. On that scale, their current status is... hard to tell. Their psychic potential is so great that some among them are able to transfer their consciousness to clouds of ionized particles to survive the end of their physical bodies: in this state, they are able to symbiotically bond to other intelligent beings (which provides stability and prevents random dissipation), but without their original physical forms (which look somewhat like man-sized prawns with long tentacles around their heads), they are unable to reproduce.
Rtalis
A purely aquatic race with lithe, serpentine/eel-like bodies and twelve pairs of short but dextrous limbs. They traditionally communicate with a combination of noises, body language, and the flashing patterns of their intricately-controlled bio-luminescent skin, but are adept at picking up the languages of other peoples (though almost always needing speech synthesizers to speak them). They are gregarious and insatiably curious, and their government sees the galaxy as the ultimate "frontier safety valve," as those who grow restless can be encouraged to go forth and explore rather than breed unrest at home. Consequently, the Rtalis have grown to occupy a rather large, though only loosely-federated empire within the Arm-Jaune. They are fond of personal vehicles and mechanized armor, as they often need water-filled containers when interacting with other species in their own environments.
And here's the write-up, as far as I have it. I very much want to run this story, though as a game it's far from ready. For starters, I haven't picked any system or mechanics yet. That'll probably be weighed by what kind of characters people want to play, though I'm fairly sure it'll be based on missions with time to investigate and choose direction between. Also, I've left a lot of room for players to add to the setting between now and whenever this becomes a game.
Author
Topic: Interest thread: Errant Space - NEW THREAD (Read 1868 times)