Lloyd Dupont

This is good relevant info too.. 

Hi yall.. as some might have noticed.. I seem kind of stuck at trying to come up with a satisfying scifi setting I can believe in and that is a fertile ground for adventures...
(the general idea I am aiming for now is adventures somewhere inside one of the Master of Orion empires. A video game where aggressively techno-expansionist-industrialist space empires compete for galactic dominance)

First, curiously, even though I quite enjoyed playing the following scifi video games: Mass Effect, Star Wars Knight of the Old Republic or Cyberpunk 2077, none of thee please me as GM. ME or KOTOR have singular super powerful enemies obviously labelled as guy, not my cup of tea. and Cyberpunk has an insane amount of street violence that I can't just believe for a successful space empire aggressively pushing against other equally hungry and successful space empire (the Master of Orion formula).

But yea! I got a breakthrough! just sharing here for posterity... And brainstorming / comment?
The space empire government need be illegitimate. Hell even our democracy are only about 70% legitimate these days, and declining I reckon (By legitimate I mean the people support the system of government and feel protected by it). Once a government is illegitimate, it's a fertile ground for corruption, secret society, private security forces... Many of those government are dictatorship in MoO, and the few democracy can be old "corpocracy" and no longer supported by the people either.
In such situation the state monopoly on violence is shaky, at best.

From that, and the ongoing conflict with border empires, so many consequences:
- first they might be long never ending war zones, all the private contractor milking the money making war machine
- here comes: idle mercenary forces (racketeering), criminal union, smuggling of good - even ordinary ones, yeah!
- also, I could easily prevent player from walking in the street in full combat armor (a bit annoying) and force a stealthy game play: if the player are too obvious the state will arrest them and fine them 10,000 credit for "public disturbances" and if they make too big a mess of their missions, the state might investigate and the result might displease both their enemies and their employer...
- plus I can always arrest players for whimsical reason (they got served first at a bar, where a dignitary's son was in queue! 😛 ), always good fun! 😄 

Nice recap of progress against Covid

It's a twitter thread all by himself.. 😮
Anyway I found it Item 8(?) quite funny (and I know just the type as well!), and I quote

Quote

Most of the US acts like that version of life would be only slightly better than the Gestapo taking your home & imprisoning you.
There being an obvious slippery slope from saving lives to mass murder. 9/

Hey D&D  can be quite fun, and 5e got the balance and fun mostly better than previous edition!
As a player, if my friend really insist on playing D&D, I can totally have fun with it! 🙂

The few things I don't like about D&D are:
1. it really is a (fantasy) super hero game (I am not into super hero myself)
2. level and are inherently frustrating (you seldom do the level 20 stuff for a few reason: it takes too much time to reach 20, and a level 20 party is mostly unmanageable and out of this world) (but in CoC you can, unfortunately, meet the Great Cthulhu anytime!!!)
2. class are inherently frustrating (I don't want to buy 20 supplements to find the right class for me or my mate, which don't make sense to exists in such number, I prefer a simpler skill based approach)

To be fair, there things that annoy me with BRP too! 😅

3 hours ago, svensson said:

I had to take a couple days away from the thread for personal reasons.

please put it in your time sheet! 😛 
 

Not me, the famous beige one!

Nurse Carefully Weighs Whether She Better Off Getting Vaccine Or Losing Job And Dying (theonion.com)

On that topic....

Mmm.. I procrastinated on reading Traveller many times... might have to dive in.. eventually....

3 hours ago, Alex said:

But you may actually have just successfully dragged it back on-forumate!  Obviously these people are a secret(?) cult of Malia and/or Cthulhu worshippers!  HP, POW, and SAN losses all round.

Thanks! 🙂
Oh, and don't forget Ragnalar! 😄

Hi Simon,

That a really good point!

I want to complain I am following another contentious idea I have.. Just like Master of Orion and unlike Star War (and possibly unlike what will "really happen" if we could explore space and travel it's... 3D space) I only have about 20 solar systems. Because, somewhat like MoO Ship have a range of 2~5 parsec, there might be about 1 star every 1 to 3 parsecs. And the Bulrathis empire is a potato of about 15 by 20 parsecs.... (going outside the empire is difficult, no fuel and other civilisation dont accept much migration in general)

That said one planet is already big enough.. A star system has many celestial body and with even as low as 20 star systems for the one empire I focus on, there is certainly a lot of room for adventure...

starting my adventure brainstorm idea booklet now ... 🙂 

5 hours ago, Joerg said:

Why would it be a singular society?

I you have a federation that includes corporate states, functional democracies/constitutional monarchies/plutocracies, religious states and autocracies, and federal controlled areas or barely controlled development areas where people from all of these disparate backgrounds interact, you can have that infighting.

There have been long-lived, dysfunctional empires, like e.g. the Holy Roman Empire of German Nation.

Trying!
Might suffer from lack of imagination or excessively pointlessly critical mind ... 😞
Meanwhile I started write down any "acceptable" gig idea down in a word document. when th elist will be long enough, perhaps I'll be satisfied...

5 hours ago, Joerg said:

If the players work for an agency, they could be the corrupt law enforcers, or straight law enforcers for an agency subect to corruption. If they are an underground civil rights organization, they might have been pushed into a terrorist role, with staged evidence accusing them of such deeds.

Different treatment by law enforcement depending on ethnicity or money is a sad reality even under somewhat working democratic control.

As I said.. I was loath to have the player be part of government agency. But aware I might have to give in on that front.

At the risk of being political (we shall see if my post get deleted I reckon, haha)(but hey, behold, this whole thread would already qualify as political in some circle, how strange), I think many ill informed people are falling victim to evil propaganda here...

But who will waste money on such senseless propaganda I was wondering for a long time....

Recently I started to suspect, I reckon our small government loving elites are sponsoring this chaos causing propaganda. the more chaos the more ineffective the government, the better for them... A classic case of divide and conquer.

14 minutes ago, Baron Wulfraed said:

21 hours ago, Lloyd Dupont said:

(for example pirates are labelled as bad guy and will definitely give a bad first impression, but might turn out to be the gooder guys sometimes and have a chance to be on the winning side, occasionally, with PCs help).

That describes some 90% of old Pirate movies  -- "Captain Blood", anything with Captain Morgan, "Dr. Syn"/"the Scarecrow"/"Captain Clegg" -- (or even less old -- Jack Sparrow, anyone)?

Damn.. I didn't realize I was so main stream! 😮😅

I can imagine. My sister is one of those... 😞 
Worst I think there is evil propaganda at work. From people who are not particularly crazy....

Sorry long rambling below. But maybe someone has some helpful suggestion to unstuck me?

I kept having problem visualizing an adventurer friendly future setting I can believe in, ie. finding the right protagonists...
I try to temperate my disbelief meter by remembering I quite enjoyed playing Mass Effect or Cyberpunk...

But here is the core of my disbelief problem, when I try to envision a future with gang warfare, corporate warfare, etc... I kept thinking of those political essay which reminds me that one important trait of the state is the monopoly on violence, ultimately not out of good intention but to prevent challenge to its power. It's not a particularly modern trait, as an example when the shogun united japan it destroyed most of Japan forts.
Even in the case of a careless state that only protect its few important assets, it won't let random agent damage big tax payers or private army to raise to any level of challenge.
So how could a space faring aggressively industrial, expansionist and scientific society have multiple infighting internal agents? 

I know, who cares, it's a game, right?
Where it's a bother though is we get all these cameras, detection tool, certainly used by the players, but when crime happen, as it often does in adventures, how much involved and efficient should state agency be?
I have a hard time letting players getting away with stealing vehicles and killing people. But same for NPC, then not much happen.

I realize there is a solution, the Cthulhu / New Horizon solution of having a nebulous underground movement of powerful nemesis to provide endless action. But it's not one that take my fancy as a GM. 
Another possible solution would be for adventurer be part of the military or law enforcement. Which I also would like to avoid - though perhaps I will eventually give in - because I'd like to have revolutionary movement or pirate and I'd like players to be free agent with no particular initial side preference, or perhaps switching allegiances (for example pirates are labelled as bad guy and will definitely give a bad first impression, but might turn out to be the gooder guys sometimes and have a chance to be on the winning side, occasionally, with PCs help).

On a tangent topic walk-in Covid shots are finally available in Brisbane, Australia, so finally got my first shot Saturday, yoohoo!
Phew, about time! 😮 🙂

That said I was not too concerned, at worst we had like 10 cases at the same time in the whole state, and more often than not, 0 cases for months! 😄 

44 minutes ago, Atgxtg said:

Ironically, the Spanish Inquisition always gave the people being questioned advanced warning so that they could get thier affairs in order beforehand. So everybody expected the Spanish Inquisition! Which actually make the skit funnier.

But the dark depressing tone of the setting concept combined with the black humor of Paranoia could make the whole situation funny. Especially if there was indeed time to turn the ship away from the black hole, but the A.I. computer running the ship won;t accept any deviations from the pre-programmed route to the new homeworld. Doubly so if the ship is loaded with nuclear and biological waste (including the crew) that the other inhabitants of the homeworld were trying to get rid of and the flying into a black hole was deliberate.

Maybe too much of a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy vibe there?

Or what if the crew are already dead from some other cause  and the PCs are all robots on board wondering what to do now? Imagine what the Alien movie could have been like if all the crew were androids. 

 

Sorry just getting some weird ideas with this.

 

Those are excellent idea that will make the adventure more lively! 🙂

5 hours ago, Alex said:

Not exactly?  More of a... season 216.

nailed it!

10 hours ago, Atgxtg said:

This would be a great setting for Paranoia. Perhaps the group could be on Habitat 47 to find out what happened to Habitat 46? Next session their clones could be the crew of Habitat 48, tasked to find out what happened to Habitat 47.

 

 Wow.. you must have been a Spanish inquisitor in a past life, I certainly didn't expect that! 😮😛 

we are not talking absolute here.. but conjecture..  and sharing which conjecture was talked about 😉

i.e. let you understand better what other people probably means.. not whether it's right or wrong or certain or uncertain... 😉

What he was referring to, and what I heard as well... and it's a little confusing, is that dark energy will forever grow to the extent it will eventually distort galaxy clusters, then galaxy, the star system , then planet, then atoms... not only the universe is slowly cooling (by extending) but dark energy is gonna make it extra cool....

21 minutes ago, Atgxtg said:

Well despair is only a sensible option when you look at the big picture. For example, one day our sun will stop working and the Earth (assuming it still exists) will no longer be able to support human life. Thus all life on Earth is doomed, eventually.  But that is a long time off, and even assuming that we do not or cannot do anything about it, humanity still has generations before that happens. Likewise Habitat 47 might be in a death spiral but if it is a long slow death spiral then it might not matter all that much to people on board. I mean if the end is going to happen in two hundred years or so would people feel quite so doomed? They'll all be dead of other causes long before it happens.

true, true.

As a side note, I feel compelled to mention, this is the end of time, this civilization is the omega of all civilizations, these people are beyond mere mortality (I mean immune to aging, not invulnerability, of course, although, perhaps a little)... But yea the doom is in a while, and perhaps despair can wait!.... 
I wanted the players to not despair as well! 😉

Hey Atgxtg, thanks for your lengthy post!
Very good for people like me who didn't watch a single Dr Who episode! ^^

As a side note, to nitpick on physics concept if ever there was a need to, falling into a black holy only take an infinite amount of time from the perspective of an outside observer. For whoever is unfortunately falling into it, it happens as fast as one would naively think. Which can be quite long when falling from a few light year away 😉 

Other side note, personal thinking on the matter, after watching numerous video on the topic. I believe nothing can go backwards in space once one cross the event horizon, hence I guess all matter should instantly lose cohesion and death will be instantaneous I reckon, despite the assertion that falling into the biggest black holes might go unnoticed for a while due to the size of their event horizon, i.e. no spaghettification at that point - funnily enough though, one can move back and forth through time once the event is crossed, how weird.

Other than that I am not really into dark hopeless story, it's just how the idea came to me wholly formed... I had to brainstorm a bit for the hopeful ending when I realized despair was too sensible an option. And will take it, my ideal scenario ending will be either die a fiery radiation death in a whole new universe, or "you are god of this new universe now"....

8 hours ago, g33k said:

Regarding a "transuniversal drive"... do consider the possibility of a "ringularity" based drive.

A black hole is their doom, to be avoided.  A different black hole is their salvation...

"a "ringularity" based drive." wow, it's whole new conceptual level! so new and high level that.. please, tell me more! 😄