Diaspora The Glory Cluster

Extended System Attributes:

Environment

Star: -4 No star ... 0 G2 yellow (Sol) ... +4 Blue-white supergiant

Night sky: -4 Pitch black ... 0 Sol-like night sky ... +4 A billion stars

Gravity: -4 No gravity ... 0 1G ... +4 Crushing gravity

Atmosphere: - 4Vacuum ... 0 Normal ... +4 Extreme (high pressure, toxic, corrosive)

Temperature: -4 Absolute zero ... 0 Optimum bio-zone ... +4 Steel melts

Biome: -4 Dead world ... 0 Varied ... +4 Booming Darwinian nightmare

Culture

Oppression: -4 Libertarian utopia ... 0 Rep democracy ... +4 Big brother police state

Cycles: -4 First gen colony … 0 A couple of cycles ... +4 Risen and fallen a thousand times

Economy: -4 Desperately depressed ... 0 Healthy ... +4 Booming crazily, eating up neighbors

Warfare: -4 Pacifists ... 0 Normal ... +4 Reactionary warmongers

Reason: -4 One giant cult ... 0 Diverse ... +4 Paralyzed by perfect skepticism

GRACELAND

Environment: 0

Star: 0

Night Sky: 0

Gravity: 0

Atmosphere: 0

Temperature: 0

Biome: 0

Tech Level: 2

Resources: 1

Culture:

Cycles: 0

Oppression: 0

Economy: 0

Warfare: 0

Reason: 0

Aspects:

All Hail the King of Rock and Roll

Down Home Folks

Squeal Like a Pig Boy!

Graceland was settled during the early expansion of the Terran Sphere. The three major continents maintain a lush temperate zone rain forest and wide savannahs. Multiple rivers run through land the original settlers decided to name the world Graceland, after a legendary place in Terra’s past.

After the collapse of the Terran Sphere, Graceland went through several boom bust cycles. This resulted in regions of Graceland where the people never truly recovered from the cycles and live at a -2 tech level and eschew any tech higher than -1. These backwoods types are dangerous for the unwary.

Overall, each continent, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama, each have their own local governments. Alabama was the first settled continent and is home to the first city and capital of the Confederate States of Alabama, Memphis.

With the connection to the Glory Cluster, Graceland is the other major player in the cluster, sometimes at odds with the Crimson Fold.

PACIFICA

Environment: 1

Star: 0

Night Sky: -1

Gravity: +1

Atmosphere: 0

Temperature: 0

Biome: +1

Tech Level: 1

Resources: 1

Culture:

Cycles: -1

Oppression: 0

Economy: +1

Warfare: -1

Reason: 0

Aspects:

The Word For Our World is Water

Solid Land is For The Weak

The Ocean’s Bounty is Our Riches

Pacifica is a warm Neptune. There is no solid land, and the core of this world is a small, moon sized rocky core surrounded by super ice, hot enough to melt metal. The ocean that wraps this world is thousands of miles deep.

Life appeared here and adapted vigorously to this massive biome. There are deep currents on this world that keep nutrients flowing to the surface, incredibly hot plumes of water that rise and foster rich regions of life. The colony that settled here built massive floating cities/processing plants. Terran life forms had no chance against the local fauna, except for one branch of Mollusks: Cephalopods thrive here and use the floating city islands and the native sargasso mats to host their eggs.

The people of Pacifica went through two boom/bust cycles and survived long enough to rebuild their space capabilities and have a healthy asteroid mining industry, feeding their need for metals and other minerals. There is no world government, instead each city island with it’s associated deep water bloom are independent city-states. They can and do work together, but they also compete with each other for offworld goods. Trade is strong here with the offworlders.

NANDIA

Environment: 0

Star: +1

Night Sky: 0

Gravity: +2

Atmosphere: +1

Temperature: -1

Biome: +1

Tech Level: -1

Resources: 1

Culture:

Cycles: +2

Oppression: 0

Economy: -2

Warfare: -4

Reason: +1

Aspects:

Life is Hard, But We are Harder

We Thought We Were Alone, Till The Ships Came

Gravity Pulls Harder Here

Nandia orbits an F type star, but at the outside edge of the habitable zone. It’s cold here, gravity is 1.5Gs, and the people that live here are shorter, stockier than normal, average height is 4.5 feet. (Aspect: Heavy Worlder).

The collapse of the Terran Sphere severely affected this world and it’s people. No one knows how many times Nandia crashed and rose over the intervening years. This last cycle saw them rise from the ashes, swearing to fight no more, raising their children to be total pacifists. (Aspect: Pacifist) This worked until the outside world contacted them. Now, some of their children are learning the old ways, much to the horror of their elders.

Nandia was on the crest of its last cycle when the slipknot opened and the ships from Graceland arrived. The easy going Gracelanders have done more to upset their society, with their demon Rock and Roll and superior technology. The Nandians can’t believe that such people could be more advanced than they are.

Trade with Nandia is difficult. Specialized interface craft are needed to reach escape velocity from the planet’s surface, exposing non-Nandians to 4.5Gs to 5Gs of acceleration. There is an orbital port, Angel Port that is run by a mix of Nandians and Gracelanders. There are two levels to the rotating portion of the station: one at 1G and one at 1.5G.

The Nandians are investing in interface craft from the Crimson Fold that are capable of breaking the bonds of Nandia’s gravity without breaking the jellybones of non-Nandians.

DELL’S WORLD

Environment: 0

Star: -1

Night Sky: +2

Gravity: 0

Atmosphere: 0

Temperature: -1

Biome: +1

Tech Level: -3

Resources: 3

Culture:

Cycles: -1

Oppression: +2

Economy: +3

Warfare: +1

Reason: -1

Aspects:

We Are Blessed By Riches

King Dell The First is Our Lord And Rule

A Wretched Hive Of Scum And Villainy

While contact with Dell’s World happened only 20 years ago, access to the Ilandria system has been open for nearly a century. Because there was absolutely no indication of an advanced civilization in the system, (no EM spectrum or space vehicles), the common belief was that this was a dead system, destroyed by one of the Ascended during the collapse of the Terran Sphere. So for 80 years, ships would come out of the slipknot, cool down, turn around and fly back through the slipknot on to the next world.

It wasn’t till a merchant from Graceland decided to pique his curiosity and actually look around the system while waiting for his ship’s radiators to cool post slip. He took the spectra of the star, Ilandria and found that it had three times the metalicity of other known stars. That got him thinking. Ilandria is a type K star, smaller and cooler than the normal type G stars, so its habitable zone would be closer in. After determining the plane of the system, the merchant scanned the probable habitable zone and then studied it after he slipped to Crimson Fold. In the zone, he found what he was looking for: An Earth-like planet.

On Crimson Fold, he put together an expedition and returned to Dell’s World with trade goods, an autodoc, catalytic hydrogen cracking generators, and several “security personnel”. Once in orbit, they located the largest city and landed their shuttles outside Tristan, the largest city on Dell’s World and the domain of Dell the First.

Just walking through Tristan proved that this world was lousy with metals of all type. Walls and buildings were made out of iron, not stone, gold was pretty worthless, and used as ornamentation. Luckily, the heavy metals were locked away in various ores, or this world would have been just deadly to breath the atmosphere.

Dell proved to be a shrewd trader, and after being treated in the autodoc, setup a new “Sky Merchants” guild and negotiated not only exclusive deals with off world traders, but had himself recognized as the ruler of this world. After a trip to Crimson Fold and some life extension treatments, Dell plans to rule this world for a long, long time.

Politically, the world is divided into separate kingdoms, all located around ancient mining operations. This world may have been a mining concern and each city represents the location of a previous mining company and the associated company town. Each minor “King” now owes allegiance and trading rights to King Dell and every one of them are plotting his downfall. There are minor skirmishes happening all the time over choice bits of farmland, and now there are skirmishes over old mining sites.

As a side note, Dell's World is famous for one other thing: The De Laurentis Nebula. Only 20 light years away and 40 light years at its widest, it dominates the night sky during half of the planet's orbit. Many claim to see faces in swirling gases and dust clouds, while more than a few of the higher tech observers know that there are four "eggs" in the De Laurentis Nebula: Four proto-star systems are growing within the swirling reds and blues of the nebula. The first should begin fusion in another hundred thousand years, give or take a millennium.

NEW EDEN

Environment: 3

Star: +1

Night Sky: +3

Gravity: -1

Atmosphere: 0

Temperature: 0

Biome: +2

Tech Level: 0

Resources: 0

Culture:

Cycles: +1

Oppression: +1

Economy: +1

Warfare: -1

Reason: -2

Aspects:

The Land Of Milk And Honey

Many Worlds, Many Homes

Why Work, When Nature Provides?

The New Eden system is home to three different habitable worlds: New Eden, Nirvana, and Enlightenment. The three worlds’ orbits are within a band 2 AUs wide, so during opposition, travel from one to another occurs regularly for the elite of each world.

Of course, one would be hard pressed to figure who the underclass are on these worlds.

The New Eden system is the Star System of Tomorrow. Such as “I need to fill my propellant tanks now!” “Tomorrow.” Or “How long will it take to get landing permissions?” “Tomorrow.”

To say Edenites are lazy is to insult lazy people. The flora of the three worlds literally provides everything they need: Food, shelter, and clothing. And not in the forms of raw materials, but in actual meals, tree houses and ready to wear clothes. The flora of these worlds has been gengineered into labor saving natural factories by some ancient Ascendant or pre-ascendant group.

You’d expect that these worlds would be the breadbasket for the Glory Cluster and you’d be wrong. None of the flora was designed for mass harvesting. Everything is single serving. To fill a hundred shipping containers with food, you’d have to bring your own workers, fast freeze everything since the food was meant for immediate consumption, not storage, and pray your workforce doesn’t go native while they are picking the food.

Edenite space travel is done by specialized trees, that when mature, form the gantries, the boosters, and the space capsules that can be used for the trip to another world. The plants mature just before two of the worlds reach opposition, and if you’re not onboard when they “flower”, you’ve missed your ride to another planet.

The Edenites have no idea how any of this stuff works, and really don’t care to find out how they work. Life is good, life is easy, why bother?

CRIMSON FOLD

Environment: -2

Star: 0

Night Sky: 0

Gravity: 0

Atmosphere: +3

Temperature: +2

Biome: -4

Tech Level: 3

Resources: -1

Culture:

Cycles: -3

Oppression: +3

Economy: -1

Warfare: 0

Reason: 0

Aspects:

We Live In Domes

We Must Work Together

Water is Precious

The people of the Crimson Fold are the survivors of the fall of the Terran Sphere. Their world had been home to an Ascendant culture and during the fall, a biome destroying nanoplague was unleashed on the world. It destroyed the atmosphere and every living plant it came into contact with.

In defense, nano-resistant domes were constructed and the survivors herded into them. Then the Ascendant either fell, or uplifted into the afterlife, leaving behind a collection of bewildered survivors, trapped inside their secure domes.

Over the centuries, the old ways were relearned, technology rediscovered, ancient transportation systems repaired and reestablished, and soon the domes were thriving beacons of life. New domes were constructed and while they were not up to the levels the original domes were at, they were more than adequate to deal with the world as it had become, a carbon dioxide powered greenhouse world. Temperatures were above the boiling point of water, rendering the world dry as a bone.

In this Hell was forged a highly dedicated people, all dedicated to the survival of their kind. The reopened the slipknots in their system and went looking for other survivors. They live by strict rules and regulations, their children are notoriously well behaved and polite, and destructive behaviors are ruthlessly weeded out of society. Newcomers to Crimson Fold, find life there to oppressive and bleak.