Toribergquist
SOC-1
I've been running a new SF campaign for a while now. It's set in 2486 at this time, featuring a humanocentric universe in which mankind has not invented or discovered anti-gravity, but has managed to harness powerful gravitic pull drives that create a warp-effect by pulling the ship along lines of graviton particles. The net effect is an almost inertialess method of acceleration which can rapidly accelerate a ship to light speed in a matter of days or hours, depending on mass and fuel consumption issues.
Part of the back story assumes that a revolution in antimatter production and bottling came about around 2050, and dirt-cheap, nearly unlimited power from harnessing anti-matter for energy because so freely available that it rendered the variance between the 1st and 3rd worlds of Earth meaningless.
The gravitic-pull drive is only part of the FTL process, however. The warp-effect defies most acceleration side-effects, and sidesteps relativity (nothing is actually moving with the ship; the graviton particles are really folding space around the vessel) but the ship, by "riding" the graviton lines, does technically exceed the speed of light. When this happens, the vessel moves in to hyperspace, or ftl-space as it is usually called. The ship becomes a hyopthetical point of quantum instability in the universe; it is potentially everywhere at once. The ship itself, augmented with AI navigation systems, is redifined by the AI (which acts as the quantum obersvor on the ship) at the point which the vessel is to reappear. During this transit period, which takes from 1-2 weeks, the human passengers must be sedated and placed in stasis-pods, which have a sort of "quantum stabilizer" effect....they keep the passengers frozen on a quantum level, preventing them from becoming additional "observers" in ftl-space, which creates additional navigational calculations and difficulties for the AI navigator system.
Humans who wake up in transit can move around, but need ot be injected with a drug called Sativin, which dulls the higher-order functions of the brain, leaving them in a dream-like fugue, and allowing them to be more easily defined by the AI in its calculations. Mishaps in which a human awakens without sativin can result in quantum fluctuations caused by dueling observers; a person can literally "blip" out of existence, slide in to a bulk head, or simply cease to exist. Madness has been known to set in.
Some of the other tech issues of this universe: as mentioned, gravitic pull drive works, but there is no artifial gravity other than that caused by acceleration or spin, so ships are usually compartmental, and include ring-design crew regions. FTL communications are ship-fast, no one has figured out how to do it instantaneously....yet (see more below). High tech beam weapons are around, but are mostly military, and conventional projectile weapons are far more practical, as are electrolasers and other stunners (emp microwavers, chemical, etc.)
The universe is humanocentric. Man is a divided species even in space; the League of Independent Worlds, The New German Stellar Republic, Russo-Ceit Commonwealth, the African League and the Muslim Al'Jazira are all major powers, but many smaller independent worlds exist. One problem: for all the scouting and surveying, in the previous centuries, only 50 earthlike worlds have been found, and almost all appear to be terraformed remnants of a species which went extinct or destroyed itself almost 70 million years ago. These worlds are all that remain of the "progenitors."
Aside from the artifacts of this fabulously ancient species, no other aliens (other than noninteliigent life) are known to exist....and yet that may not be so. The League of Independent worlds is rumored to have a quarantined world which has tripodal aliens that conspiratos claim are genetic descendants of the progenitors. Also, about two centuries ago, a brief and cataclysmic war erupted when scouts of the NGSR encountered and awoke hostile Von Neuman Machines which followed the scouts to the NGSR colony world and began to disincorporate it and absorb the genetic content and technology of mankind in to their systems. The first (and so far last) planet-cracking Anti-Matter weapons were used to stop the overwhelming threat of this Von Neuman Machines, and all ships hold protocols on what to do if a new batch is ever discovered. Their origins remain buried, but it is known that they must have appeared many millions of years after the last progenitor supposedly died.
Other plots in this campaign include researchers who backward-engineered progenitor tech to create FTL-communicators, which would resonate messages through graviton particles, creating instantaneous FTL communication. One campaign arc involved this tech gone horribly wrong, as it was discovered that the communication attracted strange, non-baryonic dark matter entities which existed only in ftl-space, but then attempted to parastically attach themselves to the researchers as riders, being pulled back in to the normal universe, where they attempted to propogate in a lethal manner. Subsequent encounters in the campaign have revealed more than one non-baryonic species, including one which is obviously intelligent and techologically advanced.
Another mystery involves the disappearance of the progenitors, which may have been more than one species, it turns out. Some rather simply and "smart" species on certain worlds, including dolphin-like creatures on Nimbus Prime and the Ab Aabheels on the holy world of New Panium have been revealed, in the course of the campaign, to be genetic descendants of more sophisticated species; they may have been intelligent beings that either naturally or intentionally were devolved back to more primitive, stone-age creatures.
Anyway, hope some of you find some interesting ideas in this summary for your own campaigns. Enjoy!
Part of the back story assumes that a revolution in antimatter production and bottling came about around 2050, and dirt-cheap, nearly unlimited power from harnessing anti-matter for energy because so freely available that it rendered the variance between the 1st and 3rd worlds of Earth meaningless.
The gravitic-pull drive is only part of the FTL process, however. The warp-effect defies most acceleration side-effects, and sidesteps relativity (nothing is actually moving with the ship; the graviton particles are really folding space around the vessel) but the ship, by "riding" the graviton lines, does technically exceed the speed of light. When this happens, the vessel moves in to hyperspace, or ftl-space as it is usually called. The ship becomes a hyopthetical point of quantum instability in the universe; it is potentially everywhere at once. The ship itself, augmented with AI navigation systems, is redifined by the AI (which acts as the quantum obersvor on the ship) at the point which the vessel is to reappear. During this transit period, which takes from 1-2 weeks, the human passengers must be sedated and placed in stasis-pods, which have a sort of "quantum stabilizer" effect....they keep the passengers frozen on a quantum level, preventing them from becoming additional "observers" in ftl-space, which creates additional navigational calculations and difficulties for the AI navigator system.
Humans who wake up in transit can move around, but need ot be injected with a drug called Sativin, which dulls the higher-order functions of the brain, leaving them in a dream-like fugue, and allowing them to be more easily defined by the AI in its calculations. Mishaps in which a human awakens without sativin can result in quantum fluctuations caused by dueling observers; a person can literally "blip" out of existence, slide in to a bulk head, or simply cease to exist. Madness has been known to set in.
Some of the other tech issues of this universe: as mentioned, gravitic pull drive works, but there is no artifial gravity other than that caused by acceleration or spin, so ships are usually compartmental, and include ring-design crew regions. FTL communications are ship-fast, no one has figured out how to do it instantaneously....yet (see more below). High tech beam weapons are around, but are mostly military, and conventional projectile weapons are far more practical, as are electrolasers and other stunners (emp microwavers, chemical, etc.)
The universe is humanocentric. Man is a divided species even in space; the League of Independent Worlds, The New German Stellar Republic, Russo-Ceit Commonwealth, the African League and the Muslim Al'Jazira are all major powers, but many smaller independent worlds exist. One problem: for all the scouting and surveying, in the previous centuries, only 50 earthlike worlds have been found, and almost all appear to be terraformed remnants of a species which went extinct or destroyed itself almost 70 million years ago. These worlds are all that remain of the "progenitors."
Aside from the artifacts of this fabulously ancient species, no other aliens (other than noninteliigent life) are known to exist....and yet that may not be so. The League of Independent worlds is rumored to have a quarantined world which has tripodal aliens that conspiratos claim are genetic descendants of the progenitors. Also, about two centuries ago, a brief and cataclysmic war erupted when scouts of the NGSR encountered and awoke hostile Von Neuman Machines which followed the scouts to the NGSR colony world and began to disincorporate it and absorb the genetic content and technology of mankind in to their systems. The first (and so far last) planet-cracking Anti-Matter weapons were used to stop the overwhelming threat of this Von Neuman Machines, and all ships hold protocols on what to do if a new batch is ever discovered. Their origins remain buried, but it is known that they must have appeared many millions of years after the last progenitor supposedly died.
Other plots in this campaign include researchers who backward-engineered progenitor tech to create FTL-communicators, which would resonate messages through graviton particles, creating instantaneous FTL communication. One campaign arc involved this tech gone horribly wrong, as it was discovered that the communication attracted strange, non-baryonic dark matter entities which existed only in ftl-space, but then attempted to parastically attach themselves to the researchers as riders, being pulled back in to the normal universe, where they attempted to propogate in a lethal manner. Subsequent encounters in the campaign have revealed more than one non-baryonic species, including one which is obviously intelligent and techologically advanced.
Another mystery involves the disappearance of the progenitors, which may have been more than one species, it turns out. Some rather simply and "smart" species on certain worlds, including dolphin-like creatures on Nimbus Prime and the Ab Aabheels on the holy world of New Panium have been revealed, in the course of the campaign, to be genetic descendants of more sophisticated species; they may have been intelligent beings that either naturally or intentionally were devolved back to more primitive, stone-age creatures.
Anyway, hope some of you find some interesting ideas in this summary for your own campaigns. Enjoy!
