Joerg

That would make the exile mainly their fault, as opposed to swept along by a political development. The next such convenient event is the Firebull uprising among the Sambari and the dissolution of the Dundealos around 1618. Going into exile is a major cutting of ties, even if it is understood as "for the time the Lunars are here" - as far as people know, that could be a couple of generations.

Exiles because of their participation in the Starbrow Rebellion, or due to subsequent anti-Lunar activities? The Starbrow aftermath requires two years of narrative bridging. If your characters are Colymar, 1615 is a good year to go into exile in the wake of Blackmoor replacin Leika Ballista.

The death of our star and the merger with Andromeda might come roughly at the same time, and it is extremely unlikely that there will be creatures resembling us witnessing either event. The gradual increase of heat output of our primary is orders of magnitude slower than the runaway greenhouse effect that we appear willing to provoke. We are at the (apparently quite rare) cusp of spreading into our solar system and establish a presence away from our home planet. This appears to be one of the big filters that create the Fermi Paradox.

Thanks, Martin. That looks like it is verbatim from Cults of Terror, much like I expected.

Counting on the (five) fingers actually supports a base 12 counting system. Dozens, a gros... and weird intermediaries between base 10 and base 12, like the "large hundred" of 120.

Being able to create a state where the rules of physics are re-written might enable us to do some things we deem impossible right now. My hard-to-obtainium exotic matter for my warp drives is a tunnel of such near-singularities in ring-shape Bose Einstein condensates (Rb in carbon nanotubes) around a vessel with a certain velocity to separate the vessel from lateral space, creating a warp tunnel. This probably doesn't work in theoretical physics, and the physics I learned as a chemist don't even begin to enable me to do calculations on this idea. But they don't allow me to refute the possibility, either. And no, slowing the speed of light doesn't take the hard limit up. It only allows relativistic effects at much lower energies. Might slow down shipboard time, for instance.

Rockets fail because we cannot afford to upset our atmosphere any more than we already have. Without a fuel-saving method, we're grounded. Atmospheric friction will do quite a good job reducing a falling skyhook to atmospheric pollution. The rest falling into the water will of course create a bigger splash than anybody could like, but over a quite long period of time. But things that go wrong don't necessarily mean that the skyhook comes down. And "too complicated" was what everybody said about booster rockets making a vertical landing after having done their job. Too complicated is just an engineering challenge, not impossible. Your proposal for relying solely on chemical rockets for a space setting reminds me strongly of Frank Miller taking the PDP 10 as the pinnacle of computer miniaturisation for his Traveller technology. A Raspberry PI has almost the same calculation power, and speed. Space 1999 is hilarious to watch nowadays... Present day technology for nuclear power plants are steam turbines and dumping heat into nearby bodies of water. Deuterium fusion produces high temperatures first and foremost, which means more steam and more heat, but no direct conversion of radiation into electricity. I haven't seen any plans for a tokamak involving photo-voltaics. (But then, keeping the prototypes running for long enough to break even in terms of energy expended to start it up is the current goal of the technology.) Yes. Possibly enough mass to create a 50km asteroid if all of that would be collected in the Earth Moon L5. Optimistically, you could maybe create a hundred collector areas the diameter of earth with that - practically nothing. The Belt and the Jovian Trojans have many times that mass, and they have the volatiles required to create habitats. (Although water should be the smallest problem... in The Expanse, the rise of the sea levels could have been ferried over to Mars, solving two problems in one go. The salt could have been separated out and deposited on the moon or elsewhere.) They need to use that thrust to gather more gas to poop out than the thrust cost them. After all, they probably have the imperative to procreate. Solar sails and bioelectrics are probably easier on their mass. They might also be useful for harvesting the matter portion of the solar wind.

If you can provide a medium which has a signficantly lower value for C, relativistic speeds might be achievable. Chains of Bose Einstein condensates apparently have already succeeded to slow down light by several magnitudes. This trickery might enable you to produce a singularity - a volume where normal physics don't apply.

Eventually. In the mean time (and much sooner), it will get hotter and hotter. Then, it will expand into a Red Giant, which will probably extend outward to our current orbit, before collapsing into a White Dwarf (not the magazine...). Our TV has gone to the stars for some decades (before we started digital encoding), and might be reconstructed. For documentation of our culture to persist, all we need are time capsules. With written instructions about our DNA etc., a curious squid or snail alien might even be able to re-create the monsters which produced this amusing antiques.

Actually, that's Midkemia Press' IP, maintained by Steven Abrams. I contacted him a decade or two ago about use of that IP. While Raymond Feist is the author of City of Carse, there appears to have been a swap of IP allowing Feist to use Midkemia for his novels in exchange for Midkemia Press keeping the revenues on the Carse license (e.g. from the German translation/adaptation by VF&SF, who kept it in print through at least two editions, under the name of Corrinis). Are you going to publish any material on Karse on a city-map or even house-to-house level? With Nochet and possibly Seapolis, you have two bigger fish to fry and in the queue. I am not the only one with some extensive notes on Karse. Martin Hawley used Karse as the anchor point for his (unpublished) naval campaign for HeroQuest 1 (a hint of which is in Men of the Sea). The basic concept of a citadel with an adjunct walled city is basically a slightly larger version of the new (RQG) Clearwine- (Which is a very different town of the same name compared to that in the HeroQuest material. And the cities of Sartar are likely to undergo a similar upgrade, only Pavis is likely to remain unchanged except by warfare.) The main difference to Clearwine is that Karse is a seaport on the river estuary, and that it is the second city by that name, after the original citadel city slightly further upriver on the opposite bank had lost access for sea-going ships. (It isn't clear when exactly, and whether the Closing or the redirection of the Creek-Stream-River were instrumental in this relocation.) There is a difference, though - no King's Landing map has ever played a role as inspiration for the Glorantha campaigns, and I doubt that there is a map even approaching the Nochet map in the level of detail.

Nontraya is the usual suspect, or some of his horde. The anatomy demons of Kimantor's story are probably a lot more allegoric than literally expressions of humanoid/devilish anatomy (the only known instances of these are the gloves hands in the Devil's Marsh in Prax and Snake Pipe Hollow).

Actually, Raymond Feist is only a co-creator of Midkemia, but when he parted ways with Midkemia Press as his Magician novel became a trilogy with follow-ups, he received the rights to the literary use (and subsequently computer rpg use, although I claim ignorance of those licensing deals, which may have been a joint venture) while Steven Abrams and his company kept the rights to the rpg use. Midkemia is very much a role-playing world with the typical late 70ies/early 80ies tropes done right. It was one of several sources of inspiration for my first (initially Viking-themed) RQ3 fantasy setting which had a few hundred pages of world background and maps, alongside Glorantha. I don't see much of a problem with the street layout or most of the NPC outlines, but I think I would twist the architecture, too. If Pavis remains canonical, the layout of Carse is possible, and only the individual houses (which don't have any descriptions of the interior except for a few text passages) need some attention. So IMO the aerial view map of the supplement as published by Chaosium in the eighties isn't usable as is. The Menai Strait at Caernarfon does resemble a river estuary if you don't look past Bangor. Other local details vary greatly from Caernarfon. From the handling in roleplaying sessions, the City of Carse supplement is way over-defined for running a scenario or two, and the paper format isn't that helpful, but for creating integrated characters and plot hooks it is a treasure-trove. Much of the data is nice-to-have rather than essential, but the same goes for parts of Pavis as well. I made first contact with this supplement in its German adaptation to the setting of the Midgard rpg, the first game for which I developed a campaign setting/game world (using shards of the official setting to integrate the official scenarios I started with), and that may have made me more aware of the possibilities and occasionally necessities for adaptation.

The first thing I notice about Oran is not the similarity to "Orlanth" (drop l and th), but the similarity to Orani, a demigod son of the Storm Bull whose mistake names a place in Prax. My theory would be that Oran is a son of the Bull, from the general migration that deposited the ancestors of the Hill Barbarians in the Barbarian Belt, and from a culture of bull herders (and possibly riders, too). Whether that makes him distinct from the Enjoreli and/or Tawari is another can of worms. The Dawn Age founder of this kingdom (tribal confederation) may have invoked the Godtime ancestor/predecessor as the protector of his kingdom rather than apotheosizing as such himself (in the way Sartar did). IMO that's less likely than the parallel to the Praxian Orani. Drona appears to be an Earth King, and he is an interesting anti-parallel to Aram ya Udram. I see a good probability for a Drona, son of Malkion and Kala (a land/mountain goddess of Brithos), to have entered Fronela and to have established a theist kingdom alongside his divine companions. An unsubstantiated theory of mine is that there were twins, Drona(r) and Dromal, one of which became the caste leader of the dark-skinned native Earth folk of Brithos while the other led those who rejected the teachings of Malkion into an exodus. Adjusting this with the Kachasti/Kachisti Speaking Tour/colonisation of Gennerela may take some work, or possibly some source revelation, but the Drona exodus probably would have preceded the Kachasti acquisition. Bakan the Boar appears to be tied to all cultures practicing agriculture in Fronela. In a bull-obsessed environment it is almost weird to have the boar as the main phallic deity. An arrival prior to the Bull/Hill Barbarians and subsequent assimilation would be an explanation. The Guide claims only that the dynasty has unbroken heritage since the late First Age. That's a fairly big claim in a place that has certainly been subject to the Arimadalla dynasty. The best explanation might be that their kingdom shrunk down to an inconsequential local power during that time but became a leader under the Ban as their history and the extent of the Ban fragment coincided. (Which may have been a consequence of one of their numbers having joined Snodal as one of the Syndics.) The exact role of the bull Orlanthi of Fronela in the struggle between Talor and Varganthar and Arinsor is obscure, as is the exact nature of the Tarjinian Bull - a monster to the Hill Barbarians, or a deity in chains? In 450 Harmast returned with Talor at Hrelar Amali, and the two of them (plus unnamed companions) went across High Llama Pass to Oranor, where Harmast convinced the local Orlanthi to follow Talor's lead against Gbaji, convinced by the success of the Battle of the Giants at Ulros (which, while taking place in the Nidan Mountains, is a different event from Gonn Orta's attack on Nida in Dara Happan Emperor Sothenik's reign, a bit more than a century later. We don't have any indication why the battle at Ulros was called Battle of the Giants, and if actual giants were involved, on whose side they fought, and in which capacity. A participation of giant Jolanti seems likely. Or there being both a Dawn (or Gray) Age demigod by that name, and a Godtime precursor.

Uhrwerk is still in business, working through its insolvency by continuing projects in advanced stage of production (though with a lot less ambitious print runs to minimize risk). Unfortunately, RQG isn't one of those. But hopefully, Uhrwerk can shake off the shackles of insolvency administration in the near future, and possibly find ways to shoulder more ambitious projects again. Still, there is little hope for a German edition of RQG concurrent (or only delayed by a dozen months or so) with the Chaosium edition. On the other hand, with the not so fast rhythm of Chaosium publications of RQG, catching up at a future time might be possible - the French edition of RQ3 under Oriflam managed that admirably. WIth the RQG Quickstart available in German and the Jonstown Compendium project going ahead, it might be possible to support a German language RQG well before its actual publication.

It is something that the Butcher and the Hunter share (there are various hunting techniques that deliver the prey alive, though not necessarily unhurt). The God Learner explanation probably makes Waha an avatar of the primal butcher, taking the original practice on himself. Not dissimilar from Orlanth taking over most of Umath's domain. (Further discussion of this probably belongs into the Glorantha part of the forum...)

That's similar to switching from 1H-Axe to 1H-Hammer. A problem of inflexible application of the rules. Although an Ikadz cultist with Craft(Butcher) 100% probably should restart from zero...

Micrometeorites punch holes. If you catch them front to back, the likelihood to have vital systems or organs punctured increases significantly. As a secondary effect, their delta V at impact is propagated as hard radiation. It is similar to the slugs fired in The Expanse. FTL but no sky hooks? At least you have orbital infrastructure. Lack of that irks me considerably in too many planetary romances marketed as SF. Crispr in the living organism? Ok, Red/Green/Blue Mars had retroviral re-writing (also as rejuvenation). They have lots of resources as soon as they pick them up. Depends only on the length and power of the acceleration unit. Same as a railgun. If that is your dealbreaker, go ahead and fix it. Fusion plants on board of space ships are a new peeve of mine - apart from the problem to get a fusion reaction up and running producing more energy than it takes to keep it going (and cooling the equipment), the only energy output that we are planning to use is heat, so it will be unobtainium thermocouples or unobtainium heat sinks to get them do any good on anything smaller than Rocketship Solaris. Vastly improved PV cells using the solar energy from that artificial sun are another form of unobtainium. Electricity appears to be the most versatile form of energy you might want, and unobtained-yet "high temperature" supra-conductors would limit waste heat considerably, but the internal energy source for high powered output, like weaponry, magnetic shields, or similar, requires a high throughput that fuel cells with capacitors have a hard time to satisfy for a short term, let alone sustain. Peter F. Hamiltons crystalline super-capacitors are a form of reasonable unobtainium for energy storage, and photovoltaics are an available if hopelessly underused source of electrical energy in space. While only using a fraction of the energy impacting the collector produced by that fusion reaction 8 light minutes away from us, that reactor is working 24/7, with an expected life-time of a few hundred million years before forcing us to find ways to move our planet (or whatever we value of it) further away from its current orbit. Space - yes. Matter for all the platforms you might want to build for populating the Goldilocks-zone with habitats - not really. You'll have to sling that in from further outward in the system if you don't start taking Mercury apart (and Mercury only provides planetary core matter good for structures, but not for the habitats). If you want water, you syphon off some methane from Jupiter and react it with regolith from further in-system as source of oxygen, and then add some cyanobacteria to make good use of solar energy. But even if you disperse humanity all around the Goldilocks zone, this still means all eggs in the same basket in case of solar flares, nearby supernovae or similar events. Having some underground habitats further out might at least allow some reclamation after such genocidal events. My own setting has a kind of polynesian colonisation of the Goldilocks Zone, with one of my unobtainiums being vacuum-inhabiting life forms. Their means of propulsion remains a design challenge, though, although I am playing with media that slow down speed of light to walking speeds, thereby making relativistic accumulation of virtual mass in ring-shaped media possible, and possibly warping space-time in a way that allows warp drives. (Not necessarily FTL.)

Thieves World is the easier of the two supplements to adapt to a less mediaeval layout than the Longshanks fortifications of Caernarfon. However, at least in my head canon, these supplements still fit with only slight surface jobs. For Refuge, I'll probably keep the map alterations drawn by Guillaume Fournier and adapt population to the recent canonical revelations about the Brithini, and I ignore the suggestion about a child of Eurmal as wyter. The road pattern and house assignments of Carse aren't a big problem. The citadel might take some re-furbishing on the inside. I've been to Caernarfon a few times, with the Carse booklet in mind, and the one thing that struck me as mos different from the aerial view impression in the Carse supplement is that it has been painted as a quite flat area when just marching from the strait through the walled city to the mill pond leads you several meters up, down again towards the walled city's moat, and then quite a bit up towards the area of the pond (where you are almost level with the crown of the city wall). The discussion on Orlanthi housing provides a number of possible layouts and building styles for Karse. I would go for saddle roofs, not quite sure how much thatching and how much shingle there would be. (And I am of two minds whether slate is available near the Marzeel mouth - the general geology of the region with chalk and limestone sedimental rock makes slate quarries like in the hinterland of Caenarfon quite unlikely before you enter the Storm Mountains.)

Is that a fortification across the peninsula between the Bullflood and Malthin estuaries?

To me, it is more like Mythras Traveller or Space Opera, with a more naval than airborn feel to it. But yes, it is an FTL setting, or at least provides all the tools for one. There is of course a generic SF guide involved, but ship design will always follow the assumptions of the tech tree - I know I have to adjust the system for the tech tree of the setting I am building. Sure. Once you have decided to use humans like ablative armor, there is nothing to stop you from crewing expandable missiles with them. Why? A micrometeorite creates a puncture and might require you to repair a number of vital systems or shut off certain systems (and activate the redundancy plans). Rather reaching a stable parking or docking orbit. So basically, you FTLed to your planetary destination and then used maneuver jets for the final docking or landing? If this is a genetic advantage, then you will witness the birth of a hereditary class of oligarchs. Since you are declaring these characters so, what is to stop you from declaring each and any of them to be a member of one of the spacefaring castes? "Exotic" reaction mass like metal ions evaporated from an anode, as I regularly do in my AAS lamps in the lab. I can name a couple of ion sources used in mass spectroscopy, where the ion source and subsequent accelerator is essentially an ion drive(r). The technology of the ion source is about as "complicated" as a vacuum tube TV screen. It offers you a heat sink, raw material, reaction mass, microgravity, shielding... everything you need for heavy industry. Doing a number of gravitational assist maneuvers, yes. It is almost like traveling on a raft in a current, yes. No false drama here. Travel is boring. ("Are we there yet?") Hence the show runners write "encounters" such as micrometeorite strikes (requiring frantic repair activity), solar flares (basically a "take cover" exercise, with some ominous rolling for system failures resulting in more repair activity), resource shortages (due to contamination or some other made-up reason), etc. If you have NPCs, you can let one of them go haywire. (It works... I cannot count how many times I have seen those scenes. Which, on second thought, means that you probably shouldn't use this scenario unless you manage to subvert it somehow.) "All stations - prepare for emergency thrust!" - another "take cover" excercise, plus not having secured your stuff creates a complication. In The Expanse, Amos had such a scene in Season 2 (IIRC). A table-top rpg cannot realistically simulate all the things that need to be considered for any futuristic or even contemporary activity without handwaving. NPCs usually remain quite one- or two-dimensional. Getting every aspect of technology right is impossible.

Other than being tumbled thoroughly by Veskarthan's fury in 1050, you're probably right. A ten foot wave going through the land may have left ripples which matter a lot at sea or river-bed level but may be invisible on the vertical scale of a map like that. The coastal flats in all likelihood aren't. I am pretty convinced that Kostern Island has a cliff of an average of four to five meters rising up above a beach line that may be just a few meters wide at highest tide and maybe thrice as much at lowest tide, similar to where the flint mines on Bornholm were found. At or near the tidal flats, a meter elevation means half a world of difference. Just above the flood line, willow, birch, black alder, blackberry vines, hawthorn, dwarf pine, gorse (the prickly kind), and out of the wind bushes like fuchsia or rhododendron would cover land not cleared for pasture and material to secure shore lines in the process of being washed away. Southern Genertela is probably not suited for mangroves, and extensive reed areas will probably be found only where the tidal outflow is compensated by river water. On top of the plateau, almost everything used to be forested - in my opinion a fairly open forest of predominantly deciduous hardwood trees in flat (but elevated) areas out of the wind. IMO soil coverage on the plateau is nothing to scoff at, and due to the massive Ice Age Glorantha has undergone, quite a lot of the top soil may be loess (fertile ground earth carried away from the glacier front and deposited here by Storm). Like Orlanth carried Ernalda out of the Evil Emperor's lands to the north... so let's assume a loose sediment layer of several meters above the limestone and karst bedrock in most places, with clays and possibly podsol from pre-Ice Age forestation providing water-retention layers making the plateau well provided with surface ground water. Where I live, we have some picturesque (but at best 15 meters high) cliffs of glacial marl clay topped by a beech-dominated deciduous forest slowly gnawed away by storm floods, with parts of that cliff and the trees above falling down every few winters. The cliffs of Dover have similar degredation (but no forest on top), the cliffs of Rügen have such forest on top of chalk cliffs. For the Heortland plateau near the cliffs, the vegetation of the Channel Isles like Jersey might be a good guideline (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jersey): For the southern part of the plateau (Esvular) closer to the Storm Hill foothills, the rising landscape might get closer to Istria, with occasional karst coming to the surface: The edges of the Footprint might look similar, too, although covered in forest. Possibly with quite a bit of cedar and spruce. But the Heortland foothills south of the Print also feature quite lush and well watered valleys: (I chose Istria for comparison as it used to be the forest region providing the timber for the Venetian fleet, now somewhat denuded.) Higher up in the Storm Mountains, the western Pyrenees or the mountainous regions of Greece, coastal southern Anatolia, or Cyprus might be a good guidance. The rather extreme vertical upfolding of the northern cyprus range (just south of Kyrenia) might actually be a good geological parallel for the upfolding caused by Larnste stamping down into the footprint, pushing up the general ridge of the Storm Hills through which Veskarthan's sons then rose to form the higher peaks, their trapped earth-fire finding a way up between the cracks left by that mighty stomp.

The highlands of Heortland? Do you mean the tree-line of the Storm Mountains, or the foothills north and south of the Footprint? Cypress is definitely a candidate (Redwood is a close relative), but so is pine. Overall, I might be willing to go for a vegetation beween Danube Valley in Bavaria and Austria on the cold extreme and Cyprus on the warm extreme. Probably only winter hard trees in most places, so no olives or oranges - at least not after the lack of summer 1622. Spruce is a candidate for Dekko Crevice and the Troll Woods.

Fair enough. But then it can be argued that Thed's broos were not Chaotic before she gave birth to the Devil, and the Wild Healer of the Rockwoods and the rumored warm valley beyond the Glacier nonwithstanding, all known broos are chaotic now. On the other hand, the encounter with Pocharngo mutated only a portion of the overall troll population into cave (and sea) trolls bearing the chaotic taint (and a quite benevolent one, too). There are a couple of associates of the Chaos deities which aren't chaotic of themselves. Most Lunar deities, to start with.

Those incredibly sophisticated magnetic field shapes sound like a handful of unobtainium with discrete field borders, or some almost fractal array of magnetic coils around the hull. Neither will be feasible without an unobtainium internal energy source, or alternatively an externally induced magnetic reaction to electromagnetic radiation. Yes, but a setting like that is not anywhere close to the setting outlined by M-Space. That is an FTL setting with workable, highly efficient fusion reactors (or a similar kind of unobtainium internal reactor), consuming rather negligible amounts of fusion fuel probably doubling as highly energetic reaction mass after fusion. Dark Matter is postulated to permeate the space almost everywhere baryonic matter (stuff like we know it) is found (I recently read about two satellite dwarf galaxies which may not have the uniform rotation of other galaxies like ours). If there is something influencing the inertia of the stars so that they don't drift individually, that something is available to be targeted by inertia-affecting hypothetical gravitics. I called that stuff "ether" because it provides an unseen medium between the stars which is a current hard science postulate. True. But M-Space provides the tools for an FTL setting similar to those of e.g. Classic Traveller. Applying it to the rocket age is similar to using Mythic Britain for a Clan of the Cave Bear setting as far as technology is involved. Only you wouldn't want to sit inside those vessels if you can remote-control them at much higher G-forces than you yourself could withstand. Something like the drone ship-to-ship combat of Hamilton's Night's Dawn trilogy. No, it transforms waste heat into infared laser exhaust generating thrust (in case of doubt by superheating hydrogen plasma to push the ship away reflected by low temperature plasma shields). Liquid H2? You don't want to expose that to micro-meteorites providing outlets for lateral thrust... H2O has sufficient density to filter out some cosmic radiation if you give it a 10m radius or so, and you might use the inner part for growing food (algae, animal plankton, fish) and supporting your life support. Anyway, using your fuel for shielding means that you are left without shielding for the last leg of your journey (if you plan for emergency fuel, plan on continuing the mission after having expended this emergency fuel). This is a bit hard on the crew and other sensitive payload, don't you think? Until we get a sky hook and a railgun into a useful orbit. There are quite advanced passive take-off systems for atmospheric lift-off, with transfer of external energy to accelerate reaction mass, or even to generate thrust by reflection of what the craft's target is shot with. Getting a rocket assembly into an orbit where most of the heavy lifting out of our gravity well has already been paid appears to be the basic requirement for a crewed Mars mission to me, regardless whether that is in Earth orbit or on the Moon. Apart from the protomolecule stuff, the main cases of unobtainium in the first two seasons/volumes of The Expanse are controlled fusion and the efficiency of the Epstein drive. (And the weird idea that an ice harvester ship would make the trip back to the customer when a railgun could send re-packaged ice cubes there in a constant stream of missiles). The amount of energy (and fuel) to lift an intact, fueled Saturn V rocket equivalent into a near earth orbit to start a Mars voyage is as unsettling. Chemical rockets allow a journey to the moon inside of 3 days. A trip to Mars at ideal constellation is in the order of 400 days, and in less than ideal constellations several times that. Unless you enjoy roleplaying camp fever, not much in the way of roleplaying opportunities for such a voyage. You can of course gloss over it, let the protagonists make a number of skill improvement and body deterioration rolls and say "two years have passed, and you have reached Mars orbit." Rather you claim that other active shipboard drives are softer SF. I still disagree - the main advantage of rocket drives is that they can be tested outside a vacuum. Or you skip the requirement for high delta V, and use external power for much of your acceleration. Chemical drives are fine if you want to have a game in Earth orbit, and/or possible Earth/Moon L4 and L5 NEO capture sites. That's not quite a space opera setting, though. For interstellar drone missions, the light sail approach riding laser beams is a real alternative. It takes quite a bit of initial expenditure for the infrastructure, but the free electricity generated by that infrastructure might be enough to pay for that expenditure. And you said you didn't want to limit space travel to a privileged few? Yes, no computer is ever going to need more than 640 KByte RAM. When it comes to pushing Near Earth Objects with usable material into convenient collection sites like Earth orbit or Earth-Moon L4 and L5 points, an ion drive making use of a fraction of the payload and solar panels is vastly more efficient than sending chemical rockets and the fuel to do the job. But that's just big money you're glossing over. This vessel is of course sitting somewhere where it doesn't have to care about escape velocity any more. A 9:1 fuel to payload ratio sounds extremely optimistic to me, anyway. Rather than a battleship, let's discuss something like a small O'Neill cylinder (or just a pressurized donut that diameter) being pushed to say Ceres to establish a human colony on (or rather inside) that planetoid (probably in a sub-surface O'Neill cylinder, or attaching your travel cylinder to a pole of Ceres). You'll probably want to send two such vessels at the same time. With a target like that, you need to provide enough fuel to brake at the target, then stabilize your rendezvous orbit for years. You don't even have to carry the fuel for the return trip - such reaction mass would be harvested from Ceres. Assuming similar mass and getting the initial acceleration from Earth completely by booster modules (some of which you might harvest a few years after your arrival for return missions to Earth), you can slow down from 10km/s. The shortest possible distance between Earth and Ceres is 250 million kilometers, resulting in a journey of a bit less than 3000 days or a little under 8 years. In practical reality, your path would probably be at least twice as long. Still, 15 years of interplanetary journey sound remotely possible with chemical rockets, and with mostly female passengers and frozen embryos (again mostly female, and some frozen sperm) you might be able to establish a viable second or third generation population of colonists with enough bio-diversity. So - an interplanetary journey of 8 to 15 years, and your entire fuel available for braking for less than an hour at full thrust. What's your hurry with acceleration and deceleration?

I was talking about the Malia cult and its runes - provided this was already part of that older manuscript, I would be interested whether there are significant changes to the runes of Malia.