Brain Baby: Dark Age Space
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Bigger than an idea, not fancy enough to be a cognition, more ingenious than a mundane thought is the brain baby. It’s something complicated, substantial and is going take some work to get out. “Mind shit” doesn’t reflect it’s probable beauty.
My reading of the new Starblazer Adventures RPG and my success with using a similar game system with my ancient fantasy Fate of Dominia campaign have tag team knocked up my creatively fertile mind. Enough cerebral sexual metaphors.
I game master sci-fi settings as a forte of mine and want to plot a new course. Could do Star Trek or Serenity , but really when you’ve written for a while, have your own blog and swam in the adoration of fellow gamers you kind of want to try the original.
My Jovian Chronicles is a so far so good stab at planetary romance, but it’s just one planet and the exploring the unknown theme of the genre encourages a narrator to create things as the story moves along. There’s no need to detail multitudes of exotic cultures when the player character protagonists aren’t native and would have no idea that they existed.
Many a novice has slaved to produce content then feel beholden to get their creation seen:
“You beat up the street thugs trying to rob you? OK, their boss commissions the notorious Barcavian Laser Monkey Assassin Cult on your asses!
“So, what looks like a camouflage green chimp swings at you from a rope by it’s left foot while booth hands and the other foot brandish black photon pistols … Piously.”
The premise is a great and gleaming socialist paradise advanced interstellar alliance of transhuman idealism - like these queers - is destroyed by a savage alien species from beyond. Four generations later, their descendants cling to life with salvaged technology in the hostile worlds that was once frontier territory. Grim pragmatism rules the day as humans and the species of the last alliance struggle to coexist or conquer indigenous aliens of the frontier and powerful new cultures they hadn’t know existed until now.
Space Dark Age is what I call this genre, suspecting that this is positively ripping off atleast a hundred other writers; but one can’t plagiarize in ignorance. Technology will definitely be borrowed, but I’m focusing on the dynamics to be setting. Nationalism is going to be a big thing for humans with the xenophobia one developes at having your civilization destroyed by the unknown. The older species of the neighborhood may view them as the invader. Resistance movements for the low-tech natives for having their homeworlds jacked is another angle. The rebirth of imperialism, the attempt to hold on to ancient ideals, unity versus freedom: they’re all there.
I think it’s a matter of making the factions - humans and not - that embody these themes and represent them mechanically. Those of pure human stock would be the neo-conquistadors with cultural aspects backing that viewpoint. Alliance crossbreeds - like Spock and Beh’lonna Torres types - would be looking to carry on their multicultural traditions of acceptance in contrast, and conflict. Other former allies regressing to a more feral nature and becoming the Goths of space - think the sackers of Rome, not pale pirates with black eye shadow. Ancient civilizations vigilantly watching their borders against this new sector riff raff, or sizing them up for exploitation.
I’ll be doing this in the future, perhaps weekly, since Technomancer Chad is going to be running Traveller for us - cock-blocking your Dominus. Any original ideas? I’m listening citizens.
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King Stephen calls it his muse “shitting upon (his) head.” I like “brain baby” better.
I’d like to see a setting where the known universe is collapsing into barbarism. Not the “everybody just uses their advanced technology to kill each other” kind, the “there has been a wide devastation so terrible that most people have forgotten what it means to be a space-faring civilization.”
A “What if Harry Seldon had never started Foundation?” scenario. Supertowers rising into the outer atmosphere with unknown purposes, unstable Dyson spheres, worlds stuck in wormholes so they have one star (and star system) on one side, and another on the other, so it’s never night. THE FETID CORPSE OF SOME GIGANTIC FREAKING SPACE BEING, FLOATING IN THE VOID, LIKE THE ROTTED REMAINS OF ETERNITY!!!!!!!!!!! Dogs and cats living together. Mass hysteria. Really, a true post-apocalyptic universe-style setting. What if Starfleet collapsed into The Road Warrior — or better yet, Waterworld? A Boy and His Dog? Yeah.
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Your first paragraph is exactly what it’s going to be. Technology is just at the level where interstellar travel is doable, most else shit.
Had the idea to kick off a campaign with the elderly last officier of the glorious alliance - a hero of three generations - dying. The values of the lost society passing with her.
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That campaign idea sounds wonderful. I’d like the setting even better if only a small group of people even knew how to operate spacecraft. Even more still, if there were a system of jump portals (large ones in space, and small ones on worlds and on ships) that people use to travel from place to place without understanding what they are or how they got there.
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Stargate SG whatever the fuck has done portals to death. You want something like Diaspora.
I want the systems to be like the fallen empire, but different stellar cartography, with one system cluster like a trade nexus bordered by the strong natives of the sector - those can defend themselve against human encroachment. Research the Dark Ages
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