IntroductionThe year is 2788. Lucy, the board computer, awakens you from an unprecedented period of hibernation. A century and a half. You feel sick and exhausted, but you are alive. You are one of a small elite crew that just arrived at its destination: Delta Pavonis C. It is an Earthlike planet that is known to harbor life. What kind of life, no one knows. Yet. You and your small team will finally discover it now.
There is no way back. You will spend the rest of your life here and colonize the planet -- or die trying.
In this game you will play as a member of the first crew to colonize a planet outside of the solar system. Compete with the other players for influence. Come up with the best ideas for development of the colony, then convince other players they are in fact the best ideas.
Lifespan isn't necessarily a limiting factor, because progress in medical science made it possible for human beings to live up to hundreds of years. However, if you deliberately behave recklessly (or if everyone else agrees to have you sentenced to death) you can still die.
RulesThe crew is handpicked from millions of volunteer candidates; you are among the absolute crop of the cream. And because the spaceship only had room for twelve people, they have each been selected for having a broad array of survival skills, rather than narrow specialization.
In order to participate,
choose an area of expertise for your character. The ingame effect will be a bonus on any proposal that matches your specialty. You can choose between:
- Social: you are a natural leader and have a deep understanding of the social sciences. You are destined to play a formative role in the social structure of the colony, whether it concerns economy, politics, entertainment, psychology, law or diplomacy in case any intelligent lifeforms are found.
- Engineering: you are a Leonardi Davinci of your time. You're a genius; the colony would quickly die without your creative mind. Whatever problems the alien environment will expose you to, you are confident that you can build or improvise a machine or structure to deal with it.
- Biology: Who can tell what alien life might look like? Well, you. You're an expert in the interdisciplinary field of astrobiology. Your erudition includes the fields of agriculture, medics and chemistry. And last but not least, you know how to augment the human body with bionic extensions (artificial improvements).
- Defense: those nerds on board are cute, but if you didn't keep them safe they would get themselves killed in no time. You have a practical mind and almost superhuman strength and agility. You are skilled with a variety of weapons, be they technically advanced or improvised. You are also a master strategist. Where the Engineers know how to build a house, you know how to turn it into an impervious fortress.
It is encouraged, but not mandatory, to add fluff like a description or background of your character. Doing so may be rewarded with one bonus influence point to start out.
Every phase (see below), you can write proposals on how to develop the colony further. Every player can vote on the proposal they like best. The proposal with the highest number of votes will be implemented and the player who came up with it gains one point of influence. When the game ends (this is impossible to predict but will be announced in due time), the player with the highest number of influence point wins.
As noted earlier, reckless behaviour, accumulated problems in the colony or an outright backstab from the other players (only a unanimous vote counts in this special case) can get your character killed. If there are any NPC humans left on the planet, you can create a new one, but you will lose your influence.
Proposals are implemented as follows: their difficulty is rated and grants a penalty or bonus. The result is then determined by a 3d4 roll, modified by said bonus. The roll gets an additional +1 bonus if the proposal matches the area of expertise of the author.
The bonus / penalty according to difficulty:
- trivial +1
- very safe +0
- safe -1
- normal -2 (so that a 3d4 ends up in the value range 1-10)
- risky -3
- dangerous -4
- desperate -5
- suicidal -6 or worse
What the final value means:
- 1-: It results in a major disaster.
- 2: There is a big problem.
- 3: There is a problem.
- 4: It has a flaw.
- 5: Works as expected.
- 6: Works as expected.
- 7: Well-crafted.
- 8: Superior Quality.
- 9: Masterwork.
- 10+: Unexpected Boon.
Note that a "safe" proposal will never result in a major disaster. The flipside is that safer proposals generally have less impact than a succesful risky proposal. (The expertise bonus does not lower impact though.)
The game proceeds in turns. Each turn consists of four phases, with a vote in every phase. The phases are:
- Exploration. In this phase you can vote to explore a specific square, or, once the colony has sufficiently progressed, multiple squares. You can also come up with developments that make exploration easier. The polar and ocean regions can't be explored yet at the start of the game. Exploration of a tile will reveal available resources. If new technology for exploration is unlocked, exploring the same tile a second time may possibly reveal more information.
- Expansion. In this phase you can come up with ways to expand the colony in a broad sense of the word. Outposts, adding facilities, new cultural developments or exterminating local wildlife are some of the possibilities.
- Exploitation. You begin the game with minimal resources; they will have to be found and extracted locally. In the exploitation phase you can propose ways to exploit things you have discovered during earlier Exploration phases.
- Research. In this phase you can retreat to the lab and do a deeper study of things you found, or of any other topic you like.
The first turn is special. In the first Exploration phase you do not have a colony yet; your spaceship is in orbit around the planet and you can do some final measurements from there before you land.
In the first Exploitation phase you choose where to start out and land, turning the spaceship into a colony base.
See next post for more details.
You will start out with a few basic Resources and Equipment, but it's no more than the bare minimum to survive the first period, as weight had to be absolutely minimal during travel.
Everything else will have to be found, exploited and produced locally. There will be a list with resources in the environment per square, updated every phase. Equipment are listed as well and should be taken in the broadest sense of the word; it includes not just machinery and weapons, but also buildings, facilities or political institutions.
See next post for details. Please note that the first two phases are special, because you start out in orbit around the planet.
It has about 86% the gravity of Earth.
The atmosphere is amazingly good to breath, with a high oxygen content. That could be toxic at high pressure, but since the athmospheric pressure is rather low it is almost perfect.
Delta Pavonis rises in the west. It looks so much like the sun that you soon forget it is actually a bit more reddish.
large flying creatures. They make chattering and clicking noises and are extremely curious.
Large thrashing creatures: unnamed large creatures roaming the wetland forest in groups.
brightly colored bugs: unnamed brightly colored bugs. Attracted by light.
Crawling things in the wetland: They´re eaten by Pteroleons
Bioluminous large flying thing: Observed near one of the Light Posts at night.
Lorelei: A thing with tentacles that has been spotted in the river. It has consumed two Preroleons; they didn't offer resistance.
Striker: Observed in the dryer parts of the forest, to the south of the base. These animals seemed to be moving slowly and didn't make a single sound. The stand about 4-5 meter tall.
shy creature that the drone caught a glimpse of in the wetlands: It hid itself between the trees as soon as it spotted the drone.
Prickly Weed: A common type of plant in the wetlands.
Oddly shaped mushroom: An oddly shaped mushroom, found in the wetlands.
Softwood tree: The most common type of tree in the wetlands turns out to have a trunk made out of spongy material, too soft for solid construction.
Hardwood tree: A less common and smaller type of tree in the wetlands does turn out to be made out of sturdy, dark woodlike material.
rotting peanut tree: These trees, found in the dryer parts of the forest to the south, look almost terrestrial, although the trunk is really tall and quite thin. Grace thinks that this might be a result of the slightly lower gravity. Its bark and wood smells a bit like rotten peanut.
Further Background InformationYour trip has been the first ever manned travel to another star. It has been an insanely expensive project that was nearly cancelled, due to going far over the original budget. It took over sixty years to build.
The spaceship reached a peak velocity of 12.6% of the speed of light (there is no such thing as faster-than-light travel in this setting). It is good news that the spaceship made it to its destination intact. At this speed, hitting a speck of space dust would have had the impact of a nuclear bomb.
The bad news is that it will not be able to return. The spaceship, constructed on the spacewharf of the Saturn moon Titan, was a giant rocket that shed the great majority of its mass as boosters along the way. What is left is a satellite, tiny compared to the original ship.
The star Delta Pavonis is nearly twenty lightyears away from the Sun; it took 158 years to reach it. The crew (you) have been surviving in hibernation, just above freezing point. During this this time their metabolism slowed to such an extent that they didn't physically age nearly as much as would be normal over such a period. Such an extremely long hibernation period has not been tried before and you feel lucky to survive, but also terribly weakened. You long to land on the planet as fast as you can, because staying in this zero-g environment for too long will weaken your muscles and bones even further.
You don't even want to think about the fact that your urine has been recycled, cleaned and fed back to you this whole time.
Not much is known about Delta Pavonis C. The decision to attempt colonization was made, because it is the only known planet with confirmed biosignatures: various gases have been detected in its atmosphere by observations made in the Solar System. Oxygen, methane and a variety of more complex organic compounds. Taken together with its Earth-like size and location in the habitable zone of a sunlike star, scientists concluded that the planet must have a breathable atmosphere and almost certainly host life. But what kind of life was impossible to determine before starting the journey.
You have left the rest of humanity behind in the Solar system. Faster than light communication is impossible too, so messaging them now has a roundtrip time of forty years. You are well and truly isolated.
Nonetheless, your location of origin has had a deep influence on how your character thinks. The Solar System is divided into several domains:
- Earth still hosts by far the largest human population, over a billion, although a series of wars and disasters shook society to its core. Climate change resulted in a sea level rise of over thirty meters. Many people on Earth have become suspicious about science and technology, perhaps partly because it is seen as the root cause of those disasters.
- Mars has a fairly developed colony of over a million people. There is a lot of political tension between Earth and Mars. People on Mars actively use genetics, bionic extensions or exoskeletons to enhance their abilities. They generally worship technology to a near-religious degree. Or actual religion in the case of the followers of Zoab, who strive toward "spirotechnical enlightement", where humans and machines merge into one.
- Titan, the largest moon of Saturn, has the next largest population. Its eternal darkness and cold are perhaps one of the reasons why the people living here are known to be gloomy, cynical and no-nonsense. They regard it as immoral to stay alive if you are no longer productive, since every bit of resource has to be spared for the survival of the colony.
- Europa hosts a small manned science outpost, that depends on constant outside support for survival. It can't really be called a colony.
- Venus has a small floating military base, kept supplied by Mars because of its strategic position relative to Earth.
- The asteroid belt is heavily mined, but this process is completely automated and only visited rarely by human inspectors.
Player: Xvarion
Name: Phryne de Lys
Specialization: Defense
Gender: Female
Description: Phryne strikes a tall figure, an even six feet outside of boots or her usual gear. She has short red hair, brown eyes, and a freckle-marked face that seems to shift erratically between poised and different degrees of almost motherly concern.
Background:She was born on Earth, but her parents immigrated to Mars to try and start a new life away from what they saw as a slowly dying world. She served several years as a combat medic for the Martian military in the Sol system, but eventually grew disillusioned with their oftentimes horrific fascination with technology. She learned from them how to properly use an exoskeleton, and always opted for the heaviest armor kit she could reasonably use while serving squad after squad with her prodigious medical expertise and nerves of steel under fire. When offered a promotion to Lieutenant—which came with the expectation of "necessary" biomechanical augmentation to "ensure her safety"—she went off the reservation and hitched a ride in a container of silicate-rich gravel bound for Titan. While working a simple job as a heavy lift exosuit operator under an assumed name, she found out about the mission to Delta Pavonis C, and Phryne signed up to be ship security & "supplementary" medical expert. She was picked for her exemplary service record, diverse skillset, and a "well-balanced" psychiatric evaluation.
Player: a1s
Name: Grace Rayland
Specialization: Biology
Grace is a native of Titan and the foremost specialist on non-water based life (it's a small field and seemingly unnecessary one in the Solar System, where all life is water based, which is how Grace knew her destiny lay with the stars). Aside from that, Grace holds doctorates in Medicine, Botany and Pedagogics.
Player: mightymushroom
Name: Turo Celsa
Specialization: Engineering
Gender: Male
Background: Turo Celsa is not an accredited polymath as some of his companion colonists might be; accumulating degrees is politically inconvenient for someone neck-deep in Earther bureaucracy. His previous occupation, on the official payroll, was performing oversight checks of Earth's automated asteroid mining servitors; his talents include a knack for drone operations both programmed and direct controlled. What brought him to the fore of the Delta Pavonis project queue, however, is his rare experience performing "service calls" to the Belt when "high priority" situations became too FUBAR for ground control. He's survived more than one "undirected collision event" and repaired his vessel with limited materials at hand. Admittedly most of his work was in deep space, but weather and gravity are just a few more stress factors to account for.
His former superiors believed that they ordered persuaded him to represent his home world; Turo saw it almost as an escape from an increasingly jingoist administration quick to blame Mars for anything and everything. He has experience working in small, close-quarters crews from his history as a space handyman. A little under average height for an Earth male, Turo eats sparingly, speaks quietly, and is polite nearly to the point of formality even in a group he knows well, never using nicknames unless (repeatedly) requested.
Player: Nirur Torir
Name: Nigel Rosenburg
Specialization: Social
Background: Nigel was the only son of two Martian politicians, and a Follower of Zoab. He grew up intending to follow in their footsteps. Shortly before he graduated, they were part of a major scandal involving a Zoab biotech firm starting secret Earth clinics. They were made out to be scapegoats, and he signed up for this mission rather than try to enter politics under their stained legacy.
Despite being a Follower of Zoab, he remains 100% human.
Player: Naturegirl1999
Name: Lea Webster
Specialization: Biology
Background:
Background: Lea was born on Earth and spent time learning about as many different lifeforms she could, She focused on botany and mycology later since they were seemingly less studied, at least by people she was around, she also learned about various microbes as well, at some point she was able to go to Europa and help find new creatures and help discover chemicals that could be used in medicine, she helped with lab work more often than not, she would of course go out and sample the water, small creatures being caught as well, even if her target was mostly microbes, she was still able to help her colleagues research the larger specimens, she helped find new species, as well as make sure the machines were working right. She tried to sync her sleeping and wake up times to match with when the machines powered off for power saving when not in use, sleeping when they were in such a state, when they woke up, she'd wake up to the gentle humming of the equipment, cleaning them up often before her human colleagues woke up, sometimes she would stay up longer than the rest of them, collecting more data, cleaning the machines, making sure to thank them for the data even though she knew they'd provide it anyway. One of the new microbes she found was a bioluminescent eukaryote with 3 nuclei, they seemed to use chemosynthesis using the various chemicals in the Europan waters to survive, they glow a bright yellow, and through further research found that they made large molecules that could be used to synthesize medicine, she kept a small colony of these microbes to study on her own, most were given to the research but she kept some alive to ensure steady supply, some time later, when the data from Europa was being sent to nearby planets for storage and further analysis, she got a reply different from the usual replies, instead of just getting the "data sent" message, she noticed a new one mentioning the various medicines and the new species she helped find, "Europa Colony/Expedition, your lab has sent 6x more new medicines and 4x more species catalogued than the previous century set, the increase in microbiology submissions will allow for more detailed simulations of potential diseases and helpful microbes. we are looking for people willing and useful to assist in colonizing a distant planet, [Delta Pavonia C], the company will send a thought drone to assess which colony members will have useful knowledge for the mission" she smiled, she saved the email and made sure it was sent to all lab members, not everyone checked the main terminal every day. She did her final checks for the night, sterilizing the lab, then slept, dreaming she would be picked, that people considered her useful, that she'd help with a colony and discovering new life on another planet
This game was heavily inspired by
the Founders game, authored by Man of Paper
Author
Topic: Delta Pavonis C - Exploitation, Turn 2 (new players welcome) (Read 8507 times)