#Torchship

[torchship-rpg]

Dev Diary 19 - State of the Union Part 1

It’s been a while, cosmonauts, but we’re back at it. This last week has been an incredibly productive one for Torchship, solving a ton of longstanding issues holding up the Alpha, and digging back into the art.

But you’re here for the mechanics, and boy, we have some pretty cool ones for you this Diary. Today we’re going to be talking about the meta-campaign and the core of what drives a multi-episode run of Torchship; playing not just to encounter little morality plays out in the stars, but to find out how the resolution of those issues changes things back home.

To be clear; this is campaign mechanics, and long campaign mechanics at that. You can play short campaigns and one-shots too, but we want to write a game that’ll hold up to truly epic campaigns, or sequential campaigns if you ever wanted to do Torchship: The Next Generation.

Your campaign can take you a great many places, but all of them revolve around one question:

The Star Union & Representative Agents

As we’ve mentioned before, the players are not just playing the crew of their spacecraft as they go trekking around the stars. That crew is the product of a society, and when the players are out making decisions in the stars, we assume that similar choices with similar reasoning are being made by the people back home.

For that reason, players get to have a lot of influence over the direction of the Star Union both through their actions in the actual episodes, and through decisions and votes they hold over what the Star Union does. This isn’t actually their characters deciding what’s happening unilaterally; it’s the assumption that your crew are, in a sense, the median voter. When the players decide to invest the Union’s resources into a certain upgrade path or project, this represents the Union’s population settling on that course of action for all the same reasons the characters would make that decision in their place.

For this reason, while you can be many things in Torchship, you can’t really be a rebel. If you try, you will be part of an enormous rebellious movement that will very quickly become the new authority and now you’re right back to your day job as a government employee, looking wistfully at your old leather jacket as you file a T-18 Use Of Telemat Report.

I can already hear your protests that you want to be a bold iconoclast that strikes out in defiance of the norms of society. I regret to inform you that you want this because it is a norm of your society to be a bold iconoclast striking out in defiance of things.

It’s The Economy, Stupid

The Star Union is mechanically represented with its own character sheet and its own stats; changing that sheet over time is your job. It’s relatively simple, with stats primarily acting as ways of gating your access to the cool upgrades that improve your capabilities, make your rocket better, and get you shiny new toys, but it matters a lot.

At the end of every Episode, you go into a mode of the game called Resupply. This quite literally represents the time passing as your rocket flies from one star to another, usually taking about one week before arriving at the next planet/on the television sets of households across the nation.

Resupply is a portion of the game which can be resolved immediately after the start of one episode or before the start of another, but one of the best ways to do it is during the time between your play sessions; it’s designed to be something easily hashed out over chat programs and the like. We’ll go into more detail about what you do there and how in the future, but the important part is knowing that this is when the Union’s economy starts mattering.

The Union has two sets of Economic stats. The first contains just a single stat, Productivity. This is how many Credits the Star Union generates at the end of each Episode because it has a bunch of factories and farms and stuff. Productivity is difficult and costly to increase; you can do so by starting Projects, with the amount of time and Credits required varying depending on what kind of Project it is. 

Getting infrastructure in place to exploit a rich belt of Very High Rotation asteroids for the valuable quark nuggets inside is a relatively quick and cheap project; it just requires you the players to find and secure such a resource. By contrast, building up Production through modernization and expansion of existing industrial capability is slow, hard work that will take multiple episodes to complete.

The second set of stats is the Infrastructure stats, covering all the stuff that production is used to maintain. These are Social, Technological, Military, and Redundant Infrastructure. Respectively, this is the Union’s standard of living, how shiny and new its stuff is, how big Star Force has gotten, and how many warehouses you have. You increase all of the stats by paying into funds for them, investing your Credits when you have a surplus until you’ve paid them off.

For the most part, these are used to gate access to upgrades; if you want that shiny new laser, you need to get Technology and Military Infrastructure to a certain point first. Redundant Infrastructure is the odd-man out; it doesn’t really give you access to many new Upgrades, but it has a vital function we’ll get to in a second.

Every point of Infrastructure costs 1 Credit per Episode to run, and at the start of the Campaign, the Star Union is overextended; it’s trying to take on all the costs and responsibilities of being the leading power of Local Space while simultaneously managing an enormous humanitarian crisis partially of its own making, and integrating a large number of refugees from the aforementioned enormous humanitarian crisis. Infrastructure will be higher than Production, and that means the balance has to be paid by none other than the Star Union’s exploration, diplomacy, and prospecting service.

That’s you.

This difference is called your Union Dues, and it's very important that you pay them. If you fail to pay, you’ll have to roll on the WHOOPS I FORGOT TO PAY THE POWER BILL table. Regrettably, this is not its final name, but it is what’s in the document right now.

You might think that this isn’t too big a threat; you’ll just always make sure to save up enough Credits to pay your Union Dues even if you have a bad Episode. That’s where we smile maliciously and tell you that you can’t. Societies don’t typically like sitting on huge amounts of surplus production and not using it on things that people want and need, so for that reason, the amount of Credits you can store between Episodes is limited by your Redundant Infrastructure. You know, Infrastructure you also have to pay for.

If your Dues aren’t out of control, you aren’t running too many Projects that you don’t want to fail, and you’re not burning your expensive consumables, then yes, you can usually meet your Union Dues no problem using the banked Credits from Redundancy. But a streak of bad episodes or out of control spending can send your campaign into a death spiral. The good news is that eventually, the Star Union will contract until it reaches equilibrium, either voluntarily or through terrible rolls.

The bad news is that the Star Union will contract until it reaches equilibrium, and you live in the Star Union! And so do a great many people who are going to have opinions about that.

Speaking of…

Getting Political

The Star Union is more than just a series of economic stats. All the people those stats represent have hopes and dreams, and more importantly, they have voting power on local councils. Being a direct democracy, the Star Union has a tendency to undergo pretty seismic political shifts very quickly when circumstances change, and any good campaign is going to have a lot of Circumstances.

To represent this, we use a series of Movements. You may remember us talking about these way back, or rather an earlier version of them; we’ve since expanded how they work and set up a system which allows them to exist alongside others.

So… let’s meet a Movement.

The Centralists are the Leading Movement at the start of your Campaign; they’ll be largely unopposed for the moment, but the Civil Anarchists and the Neo-Trotskyites are waiting in the wings and can join them in a coalition fairly easily.

What that means in practical terms is that they have the highest Power Rank at 5. As both a Major Power and the Leading Power, the Centralists give you two passive effects. Their Major Power bonus relates to Stability, which we’ll talk about in a moment, while their Leading Movement Effect is the benefit you get for being at 10-12 Unity on the Unity track. You’ll remember that from Dev Diary 15; that universal rule is actually just the default you get from these guys being in charge!

They also have a Taboo, which represents a value of this Movement, the violation of which discredits their influence; it’s stuff that makes them look hypocritical or disgusts their followers. For the Centralists, that’s failing to keep Promises made to groups in negotiation; their reputation is built around being the trustworthy and reliable ones that follow through on their deals.

Here’s some examples of other Movements’ Major Power Effect, Leading Movement Effect, and Taboo:

Progress Triggers

Movements advance in Power Rank by gaining Progress; that’s what is tracked on that neat little circular dial. At the end of each Episode, you go through the Triggers for all the active Movements and add Progress based on which ones got done. As a Movement rises in Power Rank, the Triggers are reduced in strength proportionally; at Rank 5, the only Trigger which actually gives the Centralists Progress is bringing new Members into the Union. Don’t worry, though; they have another means of keeping power.

You’ll notice that the 4 Progress trigger, Focus on Fundamentals, triggers when you miss Union Dues. A lot of Movements have triggers like this; this is where we put the stuff that the Movement specifically believes they’d do better. So when the Centralists are out of power, they get a boost from the economic mismanagement of whoever is, but once they have influence in government, failing to balance the budget isn’t going to work in their favour.

By extension, lower-value triggers tend to be things that drive or revitalise a weak Movement, while high-value triggers are triumphs or threats that validate them, either mobilizing a weak movement with a victory, or cementing the authority of a strong one.

For another example, here are the Neo-Trot Triggers. You can see how their lower triggers, the first ones to fade, are the relatively small fundamental issues that form the emotional foundation of the Movement; the Neo-Trots won’t be irrelevant so long as we keep finding planets ruled by jerks and evil computers, and their quest for increased military spending grows more pressing every time a Star Patrol rocket limps back full of holes.

The #4 trigger here ceases to help the Neo-Trots once they take power; it’s expected of them. Both the Centralists and Civil Anarchists get this trigger at 5 instead, which creates an interesting contradiction; once they’re in power, winning battles empowers their rivals because, through victory, they are making themselves obsolete. If they keep winning their fights, why do we need to shovel more resources into Star Force?

That’s why their highest triggers are stuff that give them more material power directly instead. Producing and distributing weapons increases the size of those sectors in the Union’s economy and bureaucracy, increasing their influence, while a war breaking out mobilizes the economy and places all their experts in positions of authority. This also, of course, gives them an incentive to keep arming people and fighting wars once they’re in power…

Stability

Each time an Opposition Movement (that’s any Movement which isn’t the Leading Movement) goes up by a Power Rank, it prompts a Stability Check. You also have to roll Stability Checks if you fail to pay your Union Dues. This is pretty simple; Stability is a number from 0-6 representing people’s faith in the current leadership of the Star Union. You roll 1d6 for each Stability Check; if the result is above your current Stability, the Leading Movement loses 1d6 Progress, potentially sliding back to lower Power Levels. If that happens enough, they’ll be displaced as the Leading Power.

Note that passing Stability Checks has an effect; each test you pass lowers Stability by 1. Fortunately, restoring Stability is pretty easy; every Credit put into the Social Infrastructure fund raises Stability by 1, and incidentally also gives the Leading Movement 3 Progress. 

So basically, the Leading Movement can have whatever ideologically it wants, but once it's actually in power, it only stays in power by raising people’s standards of living, though it does benefit from a slow decay of everyone else’s Progress. If the Centralists spend the entire budget on giant golden statues of Yuri Gagarin, then they won’t be in power for very long, and if they really screw it up… well, that’s what Crises are for.

Endgames

Each Movement has a number of Endgames; the five major movements all have a sort of soft ‘win’ condition that cements their power in some way and makes a lasting change on your game. For example, Federation-Builders basically cements the Centralists’ power for the foreseeable future by having them make good on their promises, and in the process gain a new and fiercely loyal following.

Well, I say soft win condition; they aren’t always.

A ‘lose’ condition deactivates or disempowers a Movement, representing the movement breaking apart, being thoroughly discredited, or otherwise losing their ability to carry on. For the Centralists, the only thing that’ll knock them out of the game is the Cybernetic Democrats actually getting their wild experiment off the ground and fully implemented, which is a huge and expensive Project.

How severe these lose conditions are will vary. Some movements will be outright destroyed, either instantly or by fading out, but others are more resilient.

Finally, we have the Crisis. Crises are triggered if Stability hits 0, and they’re bad. The most survivable ones prompt multi-episode arcs in a mad scramble to save the Union; the worst functionally end the campaign. The Centralists being in charge when the state they build fails means that it all comes apart in their scramble to save it; the cordial competition for the future of the Union becomes a shooting war. This might be where you end your campaign, or it might be where you throw in with another Movement and try to win it for them!

Many Crises will be internal…

… but not all of them.

Expanded Movements

The five core movements we mentioned before are all primary Movements, with a full set of triggers, effects, and endgames. Each of them represents a potentially valid direction for the Union that you, as players, can choose to back or suppress. 

However, the nature of this system makes it very easy for us to add new Movements to the game. Most of these Movements are Minor Movements, with reduced triggers and rules which are usually single-issue and whose Endgames are simplified and easier to hit. Minor Movements don’t cause Stability hits when they gain Power Ranks and can’t take the Leading Faction slot, they can slot easily into a ruling coalition without breaking things, or fade once their purpose is achieved.

For an example, if you integrate the Nariene into the Star Union (either by defeating its current government or making an alliance that bypasses that; we’ll be talking about them in the next Dev Diary), you get the very pressing Minor Movement “Nariene Green Movement”, which is clamouring, quite reasonably, to have their planet saved from the runaway greenhouse effect they’re under. They’ll gain power quite quickly with triggers firing based on the Union’s economy growing, and once they hit Major they’ll mandate the funding of their Project. Once their homeworld is saved, their endgame is triggered and the Movement fades, leaving you with a nice permanent bonus as everyone in the Star Union gets a bit better at reducing, reusing, and recycling.

Not all late-joining Movements are Minors, though; some of them can very much become the Leading Power and change your game accordingly.

Finally… not all the Movements are intended to be viable paths forward. Movements can emerge in dire circumstances, reflecting adverse pressures, but they can also come out of your actions as Star Patrol, if you feed the worst impulses of the Union and give material power to bad actors.

Which is why you don’t start your campaign with five moments. You start with six.

[whirligig-girl]

Concept art commission for @open-sketchbook / @torchship-rpg

Star Patrol uniform turnarounds -- jumpsuit and minidress variants.

Showing progressively increasing Extravehicular Activity readiness. Without the shoulder-mounted life support unit (not uncommon, but against regulations), with the shoulder mounted life support unit and helmet attachment ring, and with the space suit helmet, backpack, and gloves.

Preliminary Star Works and Star Force uniforms.

[torchshippod]

Crew Profiles Part 1: Mary Gillham-32

Greetings Cosmonauts!

This is the first of a series of posts detailing the characters of Torchship: Forbidden Space, in the leadup to the release of our Pilot episode. And who better to start with than the most of important character of all, the rocket: Mary Gillham-32 herself! 

Tough little ship

By 2152, it had become clear that the Aquillian De-Militarised Zone was here to stay. A ceasefire intended to last until peace negotiations that never came. The Divine Empire, risen from the ashes of the old Aquillian Empire, officially refused to recognise the DMZ. But unofficially? They made it clear that so long as Humanity kept out of the DMZ, there would be no more hostilities. 

The Florence Bailey program was soon established. Tasked with venturing inside the disputed territory, with the primary objective of reconnoitring Divine Empire operations, charting the DMZ, and attempting to make secret alliances with any civilisations inside the region. By secretly breaking the cease-fire, it was hoped the Florence Bailey program could, if not prevent another war, at least ensure Humanity was prepared for it. Secrecy being paramount, the Florence Bailey program utilised civilian ships, modified to appear like those belonging to vessels of various alien polities, alongside ‘acquired’ vessels of Aquillian and other alien origin. 

While successful, the Florence Bailey program was rife with controversies. Including a minor political scandal when the Free Aquillian Republic Raptor Libre encountered Florence Bailey-4, a captured Raptor masquerading as Free Aquillian Republic Raptor Libre. 

Aquillian Free Republic Raptor Libre. Or is it Florence Bailey-4?

In 2162, Humanity developed their first cloaking device, finally allowing Star Patrol to explore the DMZ without the headache of acquiring alien rockets, or offending its neighbours. The Mary Gillham program was born. It carried the same objectives as the Florence Bailey program, but now using purpose built vessels, and operating openly inside the DMZ as Star Patrol vessels, using cloaking technology to remain undetected by Divine Empire rockets or listening posts.    

Mary Gillham rockets are built to contradictory standards, and Mary Gillham-32 is no exception. She needed a small profile and to appear non-threatening. Enough that if discovered, she would prompt a manageable diplomatic incident, rather than a full blown war. She also needed to be self sufficient, capable of cruising for months, potentially years, without resupply or official support, feature a cloaking device, advanced sensor systems, and be well enough armed to fend off rockets 3 times her size. How successful this was depends entirely on who you ask…

"You're shorter than I expected." - Mary Gillham-32 faces off against a Divine Empire Second Rate.

Mary Gillham-32 is one of the smallest interstellar rockets in Star Patrol, and carries the bare minimum crew complement of 4. All Star Patrol rockets are cramped, but Mary takes it to another level. Supplies and equipment are stashed anywhere and everywhere there’s room. Her moonchute (the zero gravity shaft used to navigate up and down decks) is claustrophobic, and her doors are often joked to have been designed by Martians to spite the tall. 

Mary’s most important and defining feature is her cloaking device. Effectively a second, specialised variant of the FTL drive, though rather than warping space to allow for superluminal travel, the cloak warps space so steeply that it creates a bubble through which no light, heat, or tachyons can enter or escape. Effectively concealing the rocket in a tiny baby universe all to itself. Of course, this works both ways, while cloaked Mary is totally blind, relying solely on computer calculations to determine position, and a periscope in the form of a tethered drone that can be extended from the cloak bubble, at risk of detection. 

Mary's periscope observes a pack of Aquillian Raptors.

This lack of creature comforts is most obvious when it comes to the matter of armament. Too small to fit particle cannons or railguns, when it comes to combat Mary’s best hope is to cloak and escape. If that doesn’t work, she has a set of six externally mounted torpedo tubes. With no room for anything as wasteful as autoloaders, reloading is a process that takes the better part of a day. New torpedoes must be manufactured in stages in the matter printer, transported up the ship and out the cargo airlock, assembled in space, and then manually loaded into the tubes after being fitted with the desired warhead.

With only six shots, it’s imperative that even one torpedo is enough to end any fight. So, in addition to a supply of standard flak, nuclear and a handful of antimatter warheads. She also carries a small stock of Graviton bombs. An experimental warhead that creates a pseudo-singularity with an event horizon diameter measuring tens of kilometres. Anything caught within is utterly ripped apart. Mary may only have six shots, but she only needs one. 

In short, Mary Gillham-32 is an undersized, overengineered, and overpowered rocket with an understaffed and overworked crew, embarked on a dangerous, politically dubious mission with no hope of reinforcements or aid if they encounter a problem. But whatever sticky situations their mission brief gets them into, the crew can rest assured that with a bit of clever thinking, Mary will get them out of it.

[sleepycatmama]

Live on Kickstarter:

Ultimate Conclusions, a collection of science fiction stories, including three new shorts in the Torchship universe!

A collection of Karl K Gallagher's short stories published in various anthologies and webzines, plus three new Torchship stories, is now up on Kickstarter.

I’m asking support to pay the cover artist (you can see the work in progress above) and offering the book in ebook, paperback, and hardcover. Other potential rewards include signed hardcovers of the Torchship trilogy, tabletop RPG sessions, and choosing the topic of one of my future stories.

Potential stretch goals include a deckplan of the Fives Full suitable for tabletop RPGs and a paperback of the Substack stories to date.

Paid subscribers will all receive the ebook(s) and may take this book as one of their annual rewards.

The stories included are:

Samaritan

Squire Errant

Basilisk

Bargain

You Will Be Uploaded

Long Freeze

Gratitude

Visitors

Letter

Duty

Plus three new Torchship short stories:

Recontact

Haunted

Farmhands

And about a dozen articles from gaming webzines, including the tabletop RPG Traveller scenarios which later became the plot of Torchship.

If you’d like to read more of my stories, please check it out on Kickstarter.

[kaelor0409]

Real strong @torchship-rpg vibes from this one...

Janet Elizabeth Aulisio

[greatwyrmgold]

Today's Torchship dev diary touches on the influence your crew has on the greater Star Union, which is handled in a real neat manner.

On one hand, they don't have much power over the Star Union. You're just another Star Patrol crew, albeit possibly one who deals with more interesting or unusual problems than average.

On the other hand, you are just another crew. It is assumed that your actions and values are typical of the Star Union. If your group wants, for instance, the Neo-Trotskyite Movement to become the Union's Leading Movement, you need to act in accordance with the Neo-Trots' ideals and ensure their needs are met; you can't compromise your ideals and expect everyone else to carry the torch, or hoard your credits and expect everyone else to foot the bill.

And there's a really good line I want to quote here.

I can already hear your protests that you want to be a bold iconoclast that strikes out in defiance of the norms of society. I regret to inform you that you want this because it is a norm of your society to be a bold iconoclast striking out in defiance of things.

On the (extremely personal) downside, there's this sci-fi setting that I've been tinkering with for years (and posted about once but no one seemed to care so I didn't post again) that I was thinking about retooling into a Torchship setting once I got my hands on the finalized rules.

But a hypothetical Torchship: Scavengers of Hygiea would focus on a crew of workers scrapping defunct megastructures, not active members of a major governmental institution. The PCs aren't supposed to represent mainstream voters; if they were, they wouldn't be stuck out in the Asteroid Belt!

Hm. One major component of the setting (that I don't remember if that one post mentioned or not) is the increasing irrelevance of Belters...

Like, back in the Golden Age of Space Development or whatever I end up calling it, there was a lot of metal available in the Asteroid Belt, so small groups of people could afford relatively cheap spaceships and go out in the Belt and prospect/mine/refine more metal, which got turned into more spaceships and space stations, which were available in great supply relative to demand, which is why this was the Golden Age.

And those Belters had an aspirational kind of freedom. A genuine terra nullius far from any authority, with enough unconsolidated wealth lying around for countless communities to spring up, either mining or providing supplies for miners, following basically any creed or code that was not directly contradictory with long-term survival. And if you didn't like how your Belter group was being run, you and others who agreed with you could take some of the ships and just leave.

But the M-type asteroids of significant size (and S-types with significant metal deposits) are mostly gone now, with the Solar System's metal demand being supplied by relatively new and scarce deep-core mines on Mercury and some of the larger moons. The Belters' traditional economy does not work any more. So what do they do?

Maybe I could make the PC crew a synecdoche for Belters. If they knuckle under and accept corporate control of their facilities in exchange for security, other Belters will do the same, and they'll be reduced to subsidiaries of the interplanetary corps. If they choose to abandon the Belt for deeper space, farther from Earth and the Inner System, other Belters will follow, and others will have preceded them. If they choose to fight for their traditional rights in a world without their traditional role...you get the point.

But all of that sounds like questions of what jobs the PC Belters choose to take, not how the PCs handle situations they come across. I'll have to think about that...

[lossofallwords]

Hades 2 new update got me thinking

Odysseus x Scylla Rockstar AU Give that boy his Electric Guitar and let him play his heart out while Scylla sings, they're gonna put the rest of the sirens out of business (Roxy and Jetty are safe dw) Get them to clown on Poseidon too by having them sing 'Ruthlessness' lmfao Put Carybdis in there for fun I can do whatever I want, cause imagine the feast she'd have on the ships drawn in by their singing. I just love combining everything into one its so fun.

[torchship-rpg]

Dev Diary 18 - Zinovians

Right, let’s talk another major species! The Zinovians are the other really ‘big’ species in Torchship on the level of the Aquillians, the folks you’ll be dealing with often. They’re not as widespread or numerous as the Aquillians, but they’re a powerful and highly present political force in multiple astrostates, and the shared history they have with humanity have set us on a collision course.

The most important thing to know about the Zinovians is that they got exiled from their own homeworld by the Aquillian Empire about four hundred years prior to the events of the game and scattered across the stars. This has created several very distinct groups of Zinovians to encounter or play as, with sizable cultural, political, and even genetic differences between them. The majority settled in a single state which humanity allied with during their war against the Aquillians; the Zinovians are the reason we caught up to Local Space’s tech level so quickly. 

We promptly paid them back by making peace with the Empire instead of helping them take their homeworld back. They’re still not over it.

Oh, also; all the alien species names in Torchship are exonyms. The Zinovians weren’t originally called that by humans; it’s a (derogatory) descriptive name that emerged after the war to describe the structure of their government by unflatteringly comparing it to the guy whose bureaucratic decisions laid the groundwork for Stalin’s rise to power, and it stuck where the competing approximations of their endonyms failed. As is a general theme with the Zinovians, this is a mutual kind of awful; their name for us is, literally, “The Little Traitors”.

Biology

The Zinovians are another of the local humanoid species, though they’re a little more alien looking than the Aquillians, who could pass for human with a hat on. They’re one of the most diverse species in Local Space; like Humans, they have no taboo on genetic engineering and have used it to adapt themselves to a variety of physical and social environments. But there’s still some commonalities across groups.

Zinovians are cat-people, though this is less ‘cute kittycat girl’ and more ‘oh god, there’s a panther on the loose!’. Think the Puma Sisters from Dominion Tank Police. They have tall tufted ears, retractable claws on their hands and feet for both climbing and hunting, and a lot of subgroups have vestigial tails. They’re descended from apex ambush predators with a similar hunting strategy to leopards, complete with hauling kills up trees, which gradually developed complex social structures in response to changing environmental pressures. 

As the only major sapient species of obligate carnivores in Local Space, their transition to sapience was largely driven by the complex competitive politics of reproductive suppression to avoid overhunting, which gradually shifted toward tool use for reshaping the environment to increase hunting yields. Their version of the agricultural revolution was the invention of the fishing net and nomadic groups settling along coastlines.

That gives us our first trait, the aptly named Ambush Predator Evolutionary Outlier trait. This gives some pretty meaty bonuses to short bursts of physical activity, but means you take Fatigue more quickly in return.

Zinovians have distinct structures of long hair and short fur; their fur and skin share pigmentation, which can make it hard to tell which is which at a glance. The amount, lengths, and colouration of fur has a dizzying degree of variance (with colours mostly clustered in the red/yellow/green range) thanks to their ancestors having some pretty cool camo fur patterns; those largely became solid colours in the transition to sapience, but you get deliberate or accidental genetic throwbacks. 

The claws give you the Built-In Weapons Trait; these are serious business, about as dangerous as walking around with iron daggers on hand at all times. This is connected to the somewhat-muted Zinovian pain response; with sociability being a relatively recent evolutionary development, pain’s signalling function of ‘stop and get help’ is less neurologically developed, meaning that Stiff Upper Lip here represents quite literally feeling less pain.

Finally, Zinovian sexual dimorphism and gender politics are a fascinatingly complex subject. Their crash evolutionary development of sociability has left rather significant holdovers from when their ancestors were highly hierarchical matrilineal fission-fusion societies resembling something between spotted hyena clans and lion prides. The psychological developments are no more present than in humans, of course (though, like in humans, pop science evolutionary psychology does crop up socially), but some of the physiological aspects have stuck around.

So, first off, baseline Zinovian sexual dimorphism is a bit exaggerated compared to humans, with females being larger. This is a bit more than the relatively small differences between human sexes; their evolutionary adaptation trait suggests you can take Efficient Metabolism over Ambush Predator if you want to play the far end of baseliner male dimorphism, more optimised for wandering off to find groups with gaps in the hierarchy than challenging it. This dimorphism has been genetically reduced in some Zinovian groups and exaggerated in others.

The other big thing is that Zinovians have two sets of sex expression, termed ‘major’ and ‘minor’ sexes, which is a holdover from alternative reproductive strategies that developed around the strict hierarchies of their presapient ancestors. Essentially, about 3-5% of Zinovians naturally develop what we might term inverted secondary sexual characteristics, with no way to tell before they hit puberty. Like, naturally occurring transgender hormone balances, sorta kinda. And then you layer socially constructed gender on top of that, and it gets complicated, with different cultures having vastly different answers to the social status of sex expressions, transgender people, etc…

Yeah, it’s an excuse to roll up your sleeves and get on some next-level gender stuff with these cat people. Don’t let it be said we don’t know our audience.

In the Zinovian Sphere

Okay, first off, they don’t call it that. We call it that, because it makes them sound like an evil hegemony. They call themselves the Universal Republic, and call us the Human Star Empire. See? This is a whole thing.

The Zinovian Universal Sphere Republic is the largest political body the Zinovians have and are in many ways the ‘second power’ of Local Space, being the largest unified group after the Star Union in the aftermath of the Aquillian Empire shattering like a pane of glass. Unified is being kind of generous, though; the Zinovian Sphere is more like a loose federation of eight semi-independent ministries which once had specific duties in the unified government, but who have gradually developed into messy mini-states within the larger whole. 

The logos of the Ministries. Resources, Loyalty, Labour, Peace, Space, Life, Sanitation, and Security. Once specialized, all now form mini-governments in their own right, complete with their own militaries.

They symbolize a borehole mine, a watchful eye, a churning vat, an interstellar transmission, a rocket launch, cell division, water purification, and a watchtower.

The Universal Republic began with the ragged survivors of their homeworld’s uprising against the Aquillians being directed to a group of marginally-habitable high-gravity worlds in a star cluster near the Aquillian border with one of their distant rivals, to be used as a buffer state and early warning system. Their founding ideology of hopeful liberation was one of the many victims of starvation, decompression, dehydration, and radiation poisoning that characterised this exodus and the crash terraforming projects that followed.

As a direct result, the Universal Republic adheres to an apocalyptic socialism the Union calls Social Triage; resources must be held in common to be distributed to maximise return. In accordance with ability, disregarding need.  It’s the cold logic of a mass casualty event, applied to entire societies and lingering long after the emergency is over. It’s a relic of the days when a community leader had to stand up in the shelter and tell a thousand people they will only have calories for eight hundred, when neighbouring communities would exchange rosters of their population so unbiased choices could be made as to who gets to live. 

They’re past the days of anyone actually starving, but that, uh, is going to leave a bit of a psychological mark. It’s the reason why their government can be eight Ministries in a trenchcoat and yet survive; for all their squabbling, the Ministries are dedicated with absolute zeal to not rocking the boat too much, in case it means somebody somewhere doesn’t get fed, and are equally dedicated to the dream of one day getting Lost Homeworld back and making the fucking elves pay for it.

Republican Zinovians are divided into three Identities for gameplay purposes. The first two represent the civilian population of the Republic, and share a bunch of interesting Traits. You get Heavyworlder, because the 12 worlds the Zinovians were forced to settle on were largely hovering around 1g. You get Radiation Hardened (Lesser type, with Radiation Absorbing Structures) and/or Built-In Armour, which represents the subdermal steel plates which are affected by most of the population; these plates are largely cultural now, but at one time these were there to keep major bones from absorbing too much radiation on worlds with marginal magnetic fields. You’re encouraged to take Psychrophile/Thermophile, or any other trait which reflects the harsh nature of whichever world you ended up on.

You also lose some traits. In the Republic, genetic engineering efforts have at times been directed to reducing sexual dimorphism as part of various (largely unsuccessful) efforts to combat matriarchal social structures. Republican citizens also get their claws removed as a public health and safety measure at a young age; this is largely seen as a kind of sad-but-necessary reality of modernity, and a lot of defectors to the Star Union go get them regrown or have mechanical replacements installed.

The first of the identities is the Citizens; these are the regular people of the Republic, the politically disenfranchised common folk with no overt loyalties to any one Ministry. As with all the major powers in Local Space, the Republic is dealing with an overabundance of labour; in the Republic this manifests as waiting. You don’t want for anything vital, the local Ministries work together to ensure you have food, shelter, education, and distraction, but what you’re issued is what you get, and what you’re issued is decided by a bureaucrat somewhere. If you want more, you sign up for a waiting list for job openings in the Ministries, and you wait.

Which is why there’s a wild black market among the common citizens, hence a recommendation for the Entrepreneur trait. Polyglot represents how these colonies were haphazard multicultural endeavours which maintain enclaves carrying on the traditions of Lost Homeworld, and War Veteran represents how the only widespread employment available to common citizens was the recruitment drive during the war.

The second group are the Ministry Families. The Ministries operate as densely entangled networks of nepotistic family groups, with entire departments run by extended clans. The definition of ‘family’ is pretty loose; Zinovian norms about adoption are extremely flexible. Ministry families live marginally better lives than the regular Citizens in material terms, but do so under constant scrutiny and the intense expectations of their families, creating an intense political thunderdome of inter- and intra-family competition.

This gets so serious that it's reflected in the main Ministry trait, Augment. If you’re a ministry couple expecting a kid, it’s not uncommon for the clan matriarch to drop by and talk about the job they have lined up for them when they grow up, so wouldn’t it be a good idea to make sure they’re well-suited for the role? This dovetails well with just about any other trait; you’re encouraged to think about what you were destined for and how your family tried to achieve that.

The final recommended trait is Foreign Connections, a Trait which gives you both friends and enemies in another state. Maybe those friends are family who still have your back… or maybe they’re the department you betrayed your family to in order to smuggle yourself out of the Sphere.

A fun detail about the Republic is that they’re intensely maltheistic; organised religion was one of the main tools of the Aquillian occupation, and a lot of them were very devout people. Given the subsequent traumatic Everything, the natural cultural conclusion was that their gods had sold them out to the occupiers, and when Lost Homeworld is taken back they’re going to make a point to lock their deities inside the temples and light a match. In the meantime, they practise with effigies. Their kids make them out of paper mache. It’s great fun for the whole family.

There’s one last Identity within the Republic, and they’re very different from the other two. The Republican Marines are a cultural group inside the state descended from a seafaring culture who had been given a position as warrior nobility under the Aquillian hierarchy; the uprising largely kicked off because they got sick of getting increasingly sidelined for foreign mercenaries and defected to the rebels. The Marines are essentially a separate nation bound by treaty to the Republic to serve as an apolitical military arm; though in theory they’re all soldiers, in practice the majority of them work the logistics that allow a small handful of them to be the scariest power-armoured infantrymen in the history of the galaxy.

Seriously. The main narrative purpose of Zinovian Marines is to act as a thing the GM can put in a scene to say to the players “nope, you need to talk your way out of this one, because you aren’t winning this fight”. They have rotary chainguns with sufficient armour penetration to shoot up your reactor from the top deck of your spacecraft, and their armour has articulating ERA shields that double as deck-clearing fragmentation mines. Your redshirts going up against them is going to look like that sick Astartes animation on youtube. Just don’t.

Marines get to keep their claws, and obviously get recommended the War Veteran trait. It’s also noted that you are extremely visually distinct and it's impossible to hide it; Marines get elaborate facial tattoos and piercings specifically so they cannot shirk their duties to the Republic and try to become a civilian. 

In the CNFT

The Zinovian Marines are one offshoot of the seafaring warrior culture, one that ended up in the Republic. But a lot of them ended up elsewhere, either through surrendering to Aquillian forces during the war and being repurposed, or fleeing reprisals. Like most refugees in Local Space before the Star Union became a thing, those people ended up in the CNFT, alongside some other Zinovians who quickly became culturally integrated.

So what do a bunch of soldiers do when they arrive somewhere with combat experience but no money? They offered their services as mercenaries within the cutthroat anarcho-capitalist nightmare of the Territories, and they were good at it.

The modern SEA-WARRIORS OF ZINOVIA! are what happens when an entire culture’s financial security depends on being able to sell themselves as the best mercenaries in the entire galaxy, playing up their foreign heritage and biological quirks as an intergenerational advertising scheme. According to the marketing, the Sea-Warriors are a barely-civilised society of bloodthirsty warrior women whose rigid codes of honour demand they seek out war and conquest, and they can be yours for the low low price of $29.99! They wear the furs of exotic animals and get cool tattoos and carry four-foot long cultasses around in public and pick fights in bars with the hope of getting cool scars. Where the Republicans downplayed their sexual dimorphism with genetic engineering, the Sea-Warriors exaggerated it (mostly in that the ladies got even taller). They even gene-modded their tails back in and made them fuzzier to look more animalistic.

And it worked. Every politician has a Zinovian bodyguard, every criminal kingpin has Zinovian enforcers, and when you turn on the TV you’ll see Zinovian athletes playing full-contact sports, chasing perps in cop shows, and selling gene-therapy treatments at the commercial break. The CNFT’s image of physical prowess is a six-foot-five cat woman with tattooed abs and a massive machete leading a platoon in the conflict zone of the week.

The thing is… it’s not entirely an act. It started as one, sure, and the ones pushing the envelope will wink and nod and admit to exaggerating, but a culture can’t perform a persona this long without becoming true believers. Yes, they put the furs and swords away and fight in power armour under a swarm of autonomous drones like everyone else when it comes down to it, their mercenary corporations have slick PR operations and genetic modification programs and R&D departments, there’s Zinovians in suits negotiating with the government over protection contracts, but at the end of the day this still is a culture growing up with a self-image that the coolest thing they can possibly be is a barbarian warlord with a laser pistol in one hand and a sword in the other.

The first recommended Trait from all this is Augment, because you don’t keep your edge in a market like this without a bit of help. Imposing reflects the brand, obviously, and you still have your Built-In Weapons (getting declawed is seen as a fate worse than death). You have the fun Cultural Tool trait to represent the exaggerated cutlasses that your honour demands you carry in public, and War Veteran is an obvious pick for a culture where the Territorial Army and then subsequent mercenary work is the only real career path for most. 

Finally, you’re encouraged to take Redundant Vitals, because a lot of Sea Warriors opt into a series of genetic and surgical procedures to duplicate a few of their vital organs, just in case. It makes getting life insurance so much cheaper that it’s always worth it. 

The Greater Diaspora

The final set of identities is a bit of a catch-all for everyone else, and is more a high-level summary than the detailed Trait lists for other identities by its nature. There’s a ton of Zinovians living spread out in Local Space; descendents of refugees, migrant workers, and ancient settler projects. Like with the Aquillians (or the human wildcat colonies), it's an excuse to take the basic archetype and make it your own. One part of this characterisation is the fact that the Universal Republic wants very badly to use this diaspora as an arm of state power, and its various Ministries attempt to do so, with various levels of influence and success. There’s also a fair number integrated into the Star Union, many of them advisors who came over during the war and decided they liked it better.

Finally, there’s a note that the Zinovian Sphere is, well, not just a Universal Republic in name; they actually do have a number of alien species among their ranks as well, who will be culturally integrated at various levels using the above Identities. There’s a fair number of humans who have jumped ship to the Universal Republic in the same way, mostly people who think the Star Union is too pacifist or forgiving for its own good, or advisors horrified by the voters back home leaving their allies in the lurch. Said humans are largely integrating into Ministry families at this point.

[whirligig-girl]

Statmun, geostationary moon of Mesbin, would like to have a word with you. :P

(ok, so teleporting from the equator of a Whirligig World is easy but that obviously doesn't invalidate your point--habitable planets close to breakup speed are probably not especially common. Though they are certainly not impossible!)

another inherently funny part of star trek is the very first show establishes a magic machine that sparklezaps them out of uncomfortable situations so for the next 56 years writers have to keep coming up with reasons why it won't work this time

[whirligig-girl]

Commission for @foxgirlchorix of a corrupted Tycho rocket in combat with a Piccard rocket.

[torchshippod]

Crew Profiles Part 2: Doctor Bleddyn Stevens

Ahoy Cosmonauts! First of all, I’m not dead! And neither is this project! Apologies for the radio silence everyone. Mary had a minor issue with the cloak and was trapped in a pocket dimension for a few months. Read: A series of upheaving life events including a total career change and a month spent in the worst place known to mankind: Texas, shudder, meant I was unable to make any progress with Forbidden Space. But I'm back now, and we're hopefully back on track! The pilot still needs some time in the oven, but with some luck we should be able to release it soon. Until then, enjoy the first dive into one of the characters of Forbidden Space.

Who better to start with than the person responsible for maintaining Mary Gillham-32’s most important component: Her crew. Meet Doctor Bleddyn Stevens:

Art by the excellent @whirligig-girl

Broken bones, radiation poisoning, acute psychological trauma. If suffering from any of these, you can’t go wrong with seeing Mary Gillham’s acerbic, long-suffering Doctor. Stevens is responsible for all aspects of the crew’s health, both physical and mental. It's his job to both patch people up after an away mission gone wrong, and act as rocket therapist, staving off mental ailments from cabin fever to imposter syndrome. And while his dry disposition and devilishly sharp eyebrows have been known to rankle, he brings a steadying level-headedness to all aspects of the job that his crewmates can’t help but find comforting. It doesn't hurt that he also happens to be the one with the keys to the rocket’s psychedelics cabinet. 

“Please, I’m your doctor, of course I have the best psychedelics.”

But he’s not just the doctor/therapist. Like everyone in the Mary Gilham program, Stevens pulls double duty. He’s also the rocket’s tactical specialist. Responsible for operating Mary’s all important cloaking device and her variety of torpedoes, ranging from mundane nuclears to the exotic graviton warheads. One of the most destructive weapons in the IUR's arsenal and enough to ensure that size is no object. It's his job to direct space-borne engagements, formulating the battle plans that ensure Mary comes out on top, or at the very least, unscathed.

"Torpedoes will have impacted by now. Deploying periscope, outputting visual to the main… oh… Would you look at that… We’ll have to add a new asteroid belt to the charts…"

While the ability to remain calm in a crisis is a prerequisite for any cosmonaut, it’s even more so for Stevens. The requirement to perform complex neurosurgery one day and fire continent-threatening anti-matter warheads the next needs a very specific disposition. Stevens is calm, analytical, and generally the voice of restraint and consideration in any situation, although often parcelled with a sarcastic thrust his crewmates have learned to put up with. He takes this requirement for coolness and clear-thinking so far he actively refuses to indulge in any kind of mind-altering substances, even for medicinal purposes. A practice his fellow cosmonauts often find baffling to concerning.

"What? But he keeps the biggest variety of recreational drugs I’ve ever seen!" "Apparently for morale only." - Specialists Yureli and Martin on Stevens

Perhaps the most notable thing about Doctor Stevens though, is that he is an almost unprecedentedly strong Psychic Void, an incredibly rare trait that renders him invisible to all but the strongest of psychic phenomena, and incapable of interacting with any psychic technology. While being immune to mind altering phenomena may sound like a boon, it’s an impediment he’s uncharacteristically sensitive about. For one he's unable to use the psychic translator, forcing him to rely on inaccurate machine translations and learning languages the old fashioned way to communicate. Luckily, he’s a prodigal linguist, and is fluent in over a dozen languages, Human and alien.

"You’d be amazed how many languages you can learn without a psychic translator atrophying your brain. Though I admit I do envy it sometimes. Cetacean Auxlang is murder on the throat."

Perhaps the largest issue being a psychic void presents however, is the wedge it drives between him and Mary Gilham-32’s resident psychic, Yvette Martin. To someone whose view of the universe is coloured by psychic impressions, the lack of all empathic feedback makes the doctor come across as cold and unfeeling at best, and at worst, impenetrable and untrustworthy… 

"Anyway, she gave me this little Voxyte entertainment device that makes holograms. They look, totally real. You can touch them and interact with them and everything. I mean, it’s just dialogue trees and a basic language model, but they’re totally convincing. Except… I can’t feel them. Their minds. They're like... hollow... That’s what you’re like! uh ex... except, I mean, you’re a real person! Obviously!" " I am? That’s a relief, I was beginning to get concerned." - Martin and Stevens, on holograms.

So there you have it, Doctor Bleddyn Stevens. A steady, reliable cosmonaut who can't be beaten in a crisis. Or a sarcastic prick with a stick up his arse, depending on who you ask and how recently they had their mandatory medical. We'll be doing some more dives into the rest of the cast soon, so watch this space!

[whirligig-girl]

more character art for @open-sketchbook's @torchship-rpg

A character design and reference sheet commission for my good friend, @foxgirlchorix

This is a Mars rover inspired character designed for the setting of the upcoming ttrpg, “Torchship.”

This was very different kind of piece for me, and provided a lot of good challenge and genuine fun during the process! I cannot overstate how much enjoyment I had putting this piece together, I’ve been somewhat nervous to post it, but now that I’m no longer out of town, I think now is a good time!

[vaguelyoriginaldrivel]

GANYMEDE

The largest and most important of the Gallilean moons. Continents of ice floating above an unfathomably deep sea, a thin and cold atmosphere barely clinging to its surface. Sprawling tundra of squamous lichens and icy shores piled high with red kelp. So distant from the sun, the dim light of the sky and the soft glare of Jupiter can provide only enough light and heat to sustain a paltry assemblage of primitive flora across most of the world, which in turn supports a meager assortment of radial-beaked rabbits and hexaped moose. At the poles, however, the situation changes. Unlike every other moon in the entire solar system, Ganymede has a magnetosphere, and this electric dynamo produces, when combined with the intense radiation of the jovian belt, a 24/7 aurora borealis, green and blue light dancing across the sky. There, the ecosystem is more advanced, transitioning from tundra and muskeg to scrubland, rolling hills, and, in a hundred-mile basin resting near the north pole, Ganymede’s only forest, an unknown land shrouded beneath the canopies of its towering pines.

The aboriginal people of Ganymede are the Lah-cyg, who look something like two swans sewn together back-to-back, using their twin necks to sling spears, row oars, and perform all the rest of the manipulations humans use hands for. They stand about as tall as men, but, adapted to Ganymede’s low gravity and evolved treading over thin ice and boggy ground, are considerably lighter and weaker. They’re a culturally diverse species, having spread across Ganymede millennia ago and formed into many now distinct peoples, from the canoe whalers of the southern sea to the bobsled-hunters of the deep tundra to the leshy-emperors of the great forest. Though their anatomy is alien, psychologically and behaviorally they are very near-human, even if they communicate as much with their eight flag-wings as their voices and their natural lifespan is near five hundred years.

Ganymede was already under an extraterrestrial yoke when the tsan-chan first arrived. The Garzbhel amphibians, polypous frog things either convergent on or distantly related to the moon beasts of luna, had, from their europan homeward, descended on Ganymede along with the rest of the jovian system, flying across the void of space on the backs of their slave-steeds, the xeno-pegasi known as the Oxarith. From their forts and feitorias of gelatinous stone, they meddled with the affairs of the Lah-cyg, demanding slaves, their compradors and tributaries among the ganymedians given access to their trumpet-spiraled guns to aid in the slave-raids. Ganymede was ravaged by slave-wars, the losers stuffed in cages and hauled across the void to toil and die beneath Europa, the winners given more guns and ammo to capture ore slaves. It was in this context that the Tsan-Chan arrived. The Garzbhel would not bend the knee, and so the Tsan-Chan beat them back to Europa. It was a brief war, Garzbhel void-chariots against Tsan-Chan torchships like roman triremes against 21st-century aircraft carriers - the Garzbhel retreated to the wine-dark seas beneath Europa, collapsed the ice-shafts behind them, and have not emerged in force since. The only ones seen now are the few guerrilla holdouts left hiding out in the uncharted wilds, and the scant few who submitted to Tsan-Chan conquest. The mere passing of the Garzbhel would have been enough to throw their accomplices, the warrior-kindoms which grew wealthy off the slave trade, into turmoil - the Tsan-chan did not even give them that chance. Those old kingdoms are now subjects of the cruel empire, and the entire moon is claimed as a possession by the tsan-chan - though, the control is more tenuous in reality than on paper. Ganymede is the largest moon in the solar system, and much of its vastness remains untouched by human hands (though not by lah-cyg beaks).

The Tsan-Chan, unlike the Garzbhel, do not come to Ganymede seeking slaves. Nor do they come seeking furs, or moss, or ice. From Ganymede they want only one thing - fish. The Tsan-Chan have raised on Ganymede a series of sea-ports, little bays with raised walls and guns on towers, but really the seat of their occupation is their only Gaynmedian city - Nuevo Francisco. The entire city is built and devoted to processing as much fish as possible, gutting, canning, and launching into orbit to provide the rest of the empire with cheap protein from the Gallilean sea. It reeks, of course, of salt and blood and brine - noisy, too, the grinding of the factory-machines, the rumbling of the ship-engines, the constant motion of the task.

The ice-trawlers that feed Nuevo Francisco dredge far and wide and deep, smashing through the delicate ecosystems perched on the iceberg-shelf. These are not the chief target, though - the native species too clever and wild and balanced in appetite and growth for the Tsan-Chan use. What they seek is fish in the true sense, not just the Ganymedian analogues. Hatchery towers spill into Nuevo Francisco’s bay, their insides churning with millions and billions of fry, bred in tanks, genelines broken and spliced and chained to maximize speed of growth, monstrous things as artificial as the ships which catch them.

Of course this monstrous industry has had wide-ranging impacts at every step of the process. The Lah-cyg of Ganymede’s coasts are impacted, of course, whether pushed off the seas directly to make room for Tsan-Chan ships, or indirectly by the competition, mauled by the malformed jaws of the hyperagressive terran frankenfish or poisoned by their unnatural flesh. So to is the natural life - anything in the path of the dredge-nets, is annihilated utterly, but the impact extends beyond the reach of ice-trawlers and their piscine quarry. Many of the species who rest on Ganymede’s icy shares dive for their food, and so the ravaging of the coastline has threatened them, and with them all the parasites and predators who attack them on land - the loss of this quarry driving starving carnivores inland, with it’s own knock-on effects. Even the fauna of the void above have suffered, the vacuum-pelicans which once dove for fish coming up more and more with empty beaks, and without the nutrients of their dung the high mountains and dead comets on which they nest struggle to survive. Ganymede’s seas are deep beyond measure, and the neritic zone which man has touched barely a fraction of it’s true extent, yet the easy life of the starlit waters is vital to the life of much of what lives below, but unlike land and sky the depths of Ganymede’s seas are truly unknown… few can even dream of what stirs below.

things I couldn’t figure out how to fit in the post:

Nuevo Francisco, and the tsan-chanese on ganymede more broadly, are by-and-large deep one hybrids - actually part of the reason why they stock the seas with earth-fish, because their abilities to call fish into nets don’t work on alien species.. there’s no full-blooded deep ones though because the true deep ones are on tenuous terms with the tsan-chan anyways and are frankly just not well-suited to the long transit to Jupiter, being enormous and requiring lots of space and water.. confinement in a metal can barely their own size for several months would be nearly unsurvivable

As always, the impacts of colonization has driven many Lah-cyg into the city to try and find work because their traditional lifestyle has been made impossible.. mostly been relegated to domestic work, wiping windows, scrubbing floors, peeling potatoes, etc -

Lah-Cyg essentially stone age because there’s no metals to work, best they can really get is good rocks from the gravel of the rocks embedded in some parts of the ice but they mostly work with bone and leather.. tundra and muskeg and stuff makes for poor agricultural soil, a few peoples in especially fertile regions able to get by with chinampas but by and large everyone’s either a fisher, hunter, or herder.. canoes mostly inuit-style umiak.. “Leshy-Emperors”, the people of the great northern forest, wealthiest, most advanced and last really independent Lah-Cyg state due to monopoly over wood trade granting historical wealth and in modern times cover of the forest shielding from Garzbhel and Tsan-Chan invasion

Mi-Go presence on Ganymede is very, very limited - a few emmisaries have been sent to try and torment rebellion among the Lah-Cyg but the lack of both mineral resources not buried under a million miles of uncharted water and much in the way of men of learning to brain-can means they care little for the moon itself

something something black citadel city of the billion-year past spawn of yuggoth, architecture similar to the prison-temple of ghatnoathao, inside a brother-god of ghatnothoa and rhan-tegoth but a dead one.. medusa-motifs dictate that chryasaor-style thing stalks inside, sea foams with horrid-flapping things that emerge from the sea-foam and fly off into space.. this original birthplace of the Oxarith pegasi, who instinctually fear it knowing that it would destroy them to know their own origins

Ganymede in the dream is a solid shell of ice, no seas no nothing, with enormous chains wrapping across the entire planet.. dreamers wander its surface shivering and freezing. . strange groaning beneath the ice

this is because the entire planet is a prison for horrible elder-gods held at it’s core, confined beneath the deepest ocean in the solar-system under countless layers of ice.. as secure as can be, great cthulu only gets one ocean on top of him instead of like five.. secure in the dream, where they’re awake, less so in the waking world where the ice is cracked

[lilacsmothership]

🛰🌌✨ Ships of Known Space

diverse hull forms populate the pancosmos (multiverse), from the more "practical" torchships of near-mundane space to baroque vehicles special-tooled to traverse various flavors of weirdspace, where wildly alternate physics abound and magic bears a much tighter grip on the everyday rules of reality. near-mundane ships aren't without their share of interesting developments and aesthetic flair, like the "lopsided sailboat" configuration of modern battlestars like the Type 230-A that presents a full broadside to the enemy while protecting the ship's squishy parts. straightforwardly aesthetic commuter boats and jump-yachts like Divine hallmark an economy of cheap starfaring. Escher Ships meanwhile form part of a pantheon of mysterious sightings and sensor signatures nourishing a burgeoning modern UFO culture. appearing relatively normal from afar, up close they resolve into nonsense geometry and impossible angles - fueling speculation that they are operated by beings from radically different forms of spacetime, ranging from alternate types of manifold where distances work differently to entirely topological forms of space where the concept of distance as we know it is altogether invalid.

[hardspaceships]

The "official" purpose of this blog is to encourage the creation of hard sci-fi in art and such

The *real* purpose is to curate a collection of kickass hard sci-fi art so I can keep it all in one place

Feel free to recommend creators (read: pleasepleaseplease I'm so normal about this I swear).

Hard Sci-Fi Artists I've Discovered So Far (Updated as Needed):

Holly Jencka, aka @hollyjonka: does art for the Torchship RPG, and makes glowing tapered radiators, which always makes me happy

@oblateone: makes really big spaceships for really cool and fantastic worlds

Mac Rebisz, aka @spacethatneverwas: fine blend of retro future and near future art

Theo Bouvier: big orbit-based cans of boom

dennis: murdercones

@dogwasp: 3d low-poly spaceships and ANIMATIONS that follow newtonian motion (and radiators!!)

@zandoarts: Intriguing world building for really stylish spaceships and space stations

Fan Wennan: Gorgeous and grand, and just a bit retro

[maklodes]

Thanks. Traveller was another possibility I had in mind, although I forgot to mention it for some reason. I haven't heard of Torchship before. If the base setting involves everyone being communist, but you can adapt it pretty easily, maybe. I'd ideally like something which just serves as a mechanical framework for a broad variety of space-opera stories.

I’d like a recommendation for a kind of fairly kitchen-sink-y space opera TTRPG system. It can be a mix of GURPS books. I don’t know which ones. Or it could be something other than GURPS. Come to think of it, I think Star Wars-based RPGs could fit. (I wasn’t really envisioning a Star Wars campaign, but Star Wars has a fair amount of overlap with the features I’d be interested in.)

Mechanics:

-Moderate preference for classless systems.

-Weak preference for level-less systems. (GURPS/Storyteller style continuous character progression is preferred to discrete leveling, but not that strongly.)

-I would moderately prefer “rolling high is better.”

Scenarios that could happen, that would ideally have immersive mechanics:

-Walking around on foot, exploring, fighting, etc, on planets, space stations, ships.

-Doing the above, but maybe in the vacuum of space, or on a planet with an unbreathable (to humans!) methane/ammonia atmosphere, possibly in a flimsy spacesuit, or possibly in tough power-armor.

-Piloting a starfighter, mech, or other one-person vehicle

-Collaborating, as a party (“bridge crew”), to pilot a larger vessel, like a space cruiser, freighter, or the like.

-Trying to hack a computer system without alerting security.

-Studying a Mysterious Anomaly, using remote sensor scanning, sending closer ranged telemetry probes, or even taking a Sample Specimen for close examination in the Laboratory.

-Conducting a diplomatic mission to broker a ceasefire between two factions in a planetary civil war.

Player Races I’d like to be viable:

-Humans

-Maybe a small assortment of Rubber-Forehead aliens, or Grey-style aliens.

-Alien furries

-Maybe the occasional insect-like or centaur-like or whatever

-Weird starfish aliens, but not so weird as to be unplayable. (Unplayably weird ones that don’t understand linear time or whatever might exist, but not as PCs)

-Androids, cyborgs and other artificial beings

I’m on the fence about psionics:

-I’m inclined toward not having psionics, the Force, or other magic (other than “future technology” that is magical in practice, like FTL travel)  in this campaign, but if you find The Perfect TTRPG for my campaign, and it happens to include psionics in a way that’s non-trivial to remove, I’d maybe be okay with psionics so long as it doesn’t reach “if you’re not a psionic character you’re a useless chump” power levels. Psionics as something weird space anomalies might have, rather than PCs, is more acceptable too.