RPGnet - User contributions [en]

File:StarmapWiki.jpg

2016-09-26T20:32:31Z

Bert: Bert uploaded a new version of File:StarmapWiki.jpg

Aquila Sector

2014-06-07T01:17:56Z

Bert:

Aquila Sector's 000 point lies at 0 parsecs spinward, 10 parsecs rimward and 0 parsecs north of Earth (0,-10,0).

It is not the very fringes of Known Space, but not far off it, with many uninhabited and sparsely inhabited worlds and a few that have seen maybe one scout expedition and little traffic else. An on board fuel purifier is a necessity for any starship and they will probably have to pass through a fair few backwater worlds with no starport and no people to get anywhere populated.

To work out distances between any two worlds take the square root of x2+y2+y2, where x, y and z are the differences between the coordinates.

So,
Epsilon (451) to Clive's Bar (351) is sqrt(1+0+0) = 1 parsec

Epsilon (451) to Saint Anne (474) is sqrt(0+4+9) = 3.6 parsecs

Saint Anne (474) to Zelos (660) is sqrt(4+1+16)= 4.58 parsecs

[[File:StarmapWiki.jpg]]

Notes: Pink routes 1-2 parsecs, Blue routes 2-3 parsecs, Yellow routes 3-4 parsecs

'''Better quality version can be found here: [https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B0YmlnWDqBSNUmJKakpYZm5mc00/edit?usp=sharing]'''

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Location
! (xyz)
|-
| 007
| [[Kanaloa]]
| B789896B
| Rich
|-
| 016
|-
| 027
|-
| 034
|-
| 070
| [[High Veldt]]
| C8B2416A
| Fluid Oceans, Non Industrial
|-
| 071
|-
| 103
| [[Quintus]]
| C8585268
| Agricultural, Garden, Non Industrial
|-
| 110
| [[Fargen]]
| E332527B
| Non Agricultural, Non Industrial, Poor
|-
| 119
|-
| 121
| [[Torch]]
| D5407455
| Desert, Low Technology, Poor
|-
| 125
|-
| 139
|-
| 140
| [[Ed's World]]
| D330412A
| Desert, Non Industrial, Poor
|-
| 152
| [[Tudamot]]
| D5882129
| Garden, Low Population
|-
| 160
|-
| 173
|-
| 176
|-
| 183
|-
| 193
|-
| 230
| [[Aquila]]
| A985858A
| Garden, High Population, Rich
|-
| 239
|-
| 254
| [[Shingdu]]
| B45361AA
| Poor
|-
| 268
|-
| 269
|-
| 272
|-
| 268
|-
| 286
| [[Nua Domhan]]
| X8B11103
| Low Population, Low Technology
|-
| 294
|-
| 298
|-
| 319
|-
| 325
|-
| 334
|-
| 351
| [[Clive's Bar]]
| E0003125
| Asteroid, Low Population, Non Industrial
|-
| 352
| [[Zephyr]]
| B610515B
| Desert, High Technology, Non Agricultural
|-
| 359
|-
| 375
| [[Myrmidia]]
| D5782107
| Low Population, Garden
|-
| 393
|-
| 410
|-
| 411
|-
| 419
|-
| 447
|-
| 451
| [[Epsilon]]
| C644643A
| Agricultural, Poor, Garden, High Technology
|-
| 460
| [[Mongo]]
| E8B61116
| Fluid Oceans, Low Population
|-
| 463
| [[Orpheus]]
| E75764A7
| Agricultural, Garden
|-
| 472
| [[Annabel's Grave]]
| E3341139
| Low Population
|-
| 473
| [[Brandy]]
| B100542C
| Non Agricultural, Non Industrial, Vacuum
|-
| 474
| [[Saint Anne]]
| C7687875
| Agricultural, Garden, Rich, Low Technology
|-
| 493
|-
| 494
|-
| 496
|-
| 519
|-
| 535
|-
| 552
| [[Riley]]
| X89A000 0
| Barren, Waterworld
|-
| 557
|-
| 566
|-
| 586
|-
| 587
|-
| 588
|-
| 602
|-
| 612
|-
| 621
|-
| 622
|-
| 625
|-
| 656
|-
| 660
| [[Zelos]]
| X8450000
| Barren, Garden
|-
| 661
| [[Tchernik]]
| DA792167
| Low Population
|-
| 669
|-
| 674
|-
| 688
|-
| 705
|-
| 706
|-
| 707
|-
| 715
|-
| 717
|-
| 746
|-
| 786
|-
| 794
|-
| 797
|-
| 804
|-
| 818
|-
| 844
|-
| 848
|-
| 863
|-
| 874
|-
| 875
|-
| 897
|-
| 906
|-
| 910
|-
| 912
|-
| 926
|-
| 937
|-
| 948
|-
| 949
|-
| 954
|-
| 955
|-
| 957
|-
| 959
|-
| 981
|-
| 982
|-
| 987
|-
| 988
|-
| 998
|}

Brandy

2014-06-07T00:21:10Z

Bert: /* Aquila 473 B 100542 C Non Agricultural, Non Industrial, Vacuum */

== Brandy ==

=== Aquila 473 B 100542 C Non Agricultural, Non Industrial, Vacuum ===

There are stars of all sizes and colours, white, yellow, orange, red and brown. There are quite a lot of brown dwarfs dotted around, dimly illuminating star systems consisting of interstellar dreck and slurry, particles of dirty ice too small for a beetle to colonise. Most don't appear on any but the most detailed star maps, it is very rare one even rates as a navigational hazard and they rarely impinge on the direct routes between more interesting inhabited systems. The exception is Brandy.

Brandy lies in the middle of a dark nebula made of a mix of organic molecules most notably ethanol (well methanol actually exists out there so why not?).

Four different colonies compete, run by British Petroleum, New Standard Oil from the US, Lukoil from Russia and a gang of mainly Scandinavian freelance belters called the Berusadine Brotherhood.

Each of these has a base (BP have bagged the only orbiting body big enough to be a planet and built a starport called New Milford Haven) and a number of refineries and mining vessels trundling round the system, grabbing the oil/ice asteroids and sucking in the denser strands of gas.

From the main world Brandy gives about as much light as a 40 watt bulb, a dull purplish brown star about 20% covered in black sunspots edged in dull red. Every few hours a cloud of ethanol gets close enough to be caught up in one of the sluggish solar flares, making it burn with a dim blue flame. Residents say its looks a bit like a Christmas pudding, if you squint and are three sheets to the wind.

The main product of the system is a variety of interstellar light mineral oil, but inevitably various bored engineers have found a way of distilling off the booze to make 'Starshine' - various kinds of 90+% proof liquor dosed with food colouring and flavourings cooked up by organic chemists from the heavier fractions. Most people find it vile, but it is popular among the growing number of semi-feral spacebums who work asteroid belts and Oort clouds throughout Known Space, especially with a couple of ice cubes freshly chipped off a comet and shot of Ultra-Bee venom.

=== Adventure Hooks ===
* New Standard Oil are trying a new venture, the 'booze cruise', taking college students out into deep space in a gas scooper on a fun filled holiday of liver damage and high jinks. If a given batch of dipsomaniacs drink an entire asteroid they get their money back.

* British Petroleum Health and Safety have had it with the 'Starshiners' running illegal cracking plants in unoccupied craters, they want undercover agents to infiltrate their organisation.

* Clive Lam of the infamous Clive's Bar wants a hundred gallons of top quality interstellar liquid brain damage, and he has heard the Berusadine boys are the ones to get it from. Don't screw it up, if they don't chuck you out of an airlock, Clive will.

* One of the Lukoil mining vessels, the St Valdimir, has not been heard from in some time. Find it and find out what the hell they have been drinking, last known location has massive cyrillic swearwords, crafted from frozen poop from the vacuum toilets, doing a three body orbit round each other.

* The New Canaan temperance society are in town with a US Navy surplus frigate and a hold full of tracts. Tread carefully around the Standard Oil stations.

* Astro-chemists have wondered where the millions of tons of ethanol has been coming from, things of that molecular weight shouldn't be possible to build out of drifting carbon dust,hydrogen gas and radiation. Professor Stella Artois has made a shocking announcement – it is made by a bacterium-like thingy that evolved in deep space! Wonder if it any are still floating in that Starshine gunk that has got so popular? And what effect will they have if ingested?

Nua Domhan

2013-11-10T00:54:36Z

Bert: /* 286 Aquila X 8B1 110 3 Low Population, Low Technology */

== Nua Domhan ==

=== 286 Aquila X 8B1 110 3 Low Population, Low Technology ===

Ireland in 2313 is still part of the European Union, and Irish settlers can be found all over Known Space wherever the EU has stuck its starry circle flag. But for one Irish patriot and freelance star-scout, David Delaney, that wasn't good enough, he wanted a bit of outer space that was forever Ireland, and so the unclaimed world of Nua Domhan was colonised in 2278. This was rather against the Irish government's wishes. Nua Domhan had gone a begging since it was one of the most useless hunks of junk in Known Space, a large Venusian type world with boiling temperatures, sulphuric atmosphere and more volcanoes than you could shake a stick at. What attracted Delaney was its rather pretty version of the Giant’s Causeway, a plain of hexagonal basalt columns larger in land area than Ireland itself, lapped by an emerald green sea of sulphuric acid and dissolved copper sulphate.

When the Irish Navy took absolutely no interest in guarding the place, a popular charity appeal raised enough money to by a second hand picket vessel to be despatched to guard Ireland's new interstellar empire.

Colonisation was a dead letter. Delaney's Irish Imperial Exploits company went broke, but not before purchasing, at a knock down price, Fionn MacCumhail, a giant construction robot. This was a failed project of Nakamura Industries to create a passenger carrying walker that could take tourists across the Pacific sea floor. Now it would stride across Nua Domhan planting atmosphere reduction machines that in a mere 30,000 years (at the current work rate) would make the planet a sizzlingly hot but just about inhabitable paradise!

This quixotic project is currently funded by the son of a former Saudi Prince who retired to his horse stud in Waterford county after the Arabian revolution, an Irish-American software baron, a national lottery and the occasional grant from the ever complaining Irish Dail. There are four personnel on the planet itself, living in extremely cramped quarters in Fionn's torso and going quietly mad from cabin fever and the stress caused by Fionn's frequent break downs and many niggling malfunctions. Another two guys mind the orbital picket ship and storage facility. They spend up to a year on duty at a time, with next to no visitors. The current owners keep making vague promises about buying another robot, or making a proper orbital station with enough room to swing a cat, or finding a way round the communications problems that mean Fionn can't be controlled from orbit, but nothing ever seems to get done. The low TL does not reflect the technology of Fionn (actually about TL10, TL11 for the self-repairing acid resistant smart material kilt), but the local capacity for manufacture, ie pretty damn poor. They can bang out a few very crude machine parts in the engineering section of the picket ship and that's it.

=== Adventure Hooks ===

* Fionn has had it. He fell into a crevasse and broke and the crew need rescuing.

* Nua Domhan has been invaded! Well, a gang of hard up belt miners took over the orbital station and stripped it for scrap metal. Quite how the Irish government will react no one knows, the speed of communication means they probably haven't even heard about it yet, but anyone in the area could defend Irish national honour and nab the varmints if they felt so inclined.

* The guys on the ground are going off the rails. They say there's a monster following them, but the whole system is only a billion years old, there's no way bacteria could have evolved on the planet, even if a living system could ever cope with the bitterly acidic atmosphere and boiling temperatures, which the planetologists doubt. Lay off the Jameson's guys.

* There's good money to earned on Nua Domhan for the right kind of people. The Nua Domhan Development Co co want experienced spacers used to spending a long time in a cabin to run the robot. They go broke about a month into the PCs contract, and the picket ship is out of action.

* Fionn's got a new brain! PCs deliver and possibly install an up to date AI unit. Thing is the provenance is a bit dubious, it looks a bit second hand really, and you had to pick it up on Annabel's Grave…

* The new terraforming bot has arrived, CuCuhlainn, an updated version of Fionn. The old soldier has been stoically plodding the sulphurous wastes for years. He's an old bot with no true AI, but could he have actually got a bit territorial? Anyway he's not responding to commands and heading for the new bot in what might be interpreted as a menacing and deliberate air.

Fargen

2013-11-10T00:42:05Z

Bert: /* 110 Aquila E332527B Non Agricultural, Non Industrial, Poor */

=== 110 Aquila E332527B Non Agricultural, Non Industrial, Poor ===

Fargen is a rather cold and Martianesque colony world, a small globe on the outer fringe of the inhabitable zone of a dim M class star. It nearly tidally locked rotating three times in two orbital periods (about 130 days). Both the extant colonies is a university, originally founded by the EU colony on Aquila that eventually became Merovin and parts of New Dorset. The university split when a civil war separated the French speakers of Merovin and their allies from the Germans and East Europeans who later merged with New Dorset.

The two colonies are a couple of hundred miles apart. The Merovinese University is a Grand Ecole on the old French lines - actually called Le Grand Ecole Polytechnique d'Aquila - studying economics, politics, sociology, history etc. and has 10,000 or so population around half of whom are students. The English/International University of Fargen is somewhat elitist - it is expensive to live there - and emphasises the sciences. In fact there are labs here in outlying annexes and in orbit doing work in genetics and high energy physics that people might not be keen to share a planet with. This has 20,000 students, staff and employees, and owns a chain of colleges on Aquila and throughout the sector.

The two sites are a mere 100 miles apart, both in rugged mountain valleys near the equator. The air is very thin, but does have appreciable amounts of oxygen from the local plants, sturdy little things that combine aspects of the cactus and of shrubs and can stand being frozen solid for months. The glacial lakes at the equator have little except algae living in them.

Tchernik

2013-11-10T00:35:11Z

Bert: /* Aquila 661 DA792167 Low Population */

===Aquila 661 DA792167 Low Population===

Tchernik is a large planet almost completely covered in water. The only land is one vast mountain that reaches high into the atmosphere. The settlement lies on a crag near the top, the air being so dense and laden with water vapour lower down as to be uncomfortable to breathe even with a filter mask. It is recommended that people who do go down to lower altitudes take care against the bends.

The 500 EU citizens are recent arrivals, and are struggling to acclimatize to the gravity and the soupy atmosphere. They are all mostly employees of Tchernik Enterprises, an agribusiness/genetics firm that is trying to turn the mighty mountain into a massive vineyard, once they have got the grape varieties just right. Their test farms at various altitudes are linked by cable car and the winery dubbed 'The Chateau' lies at the highest point. It has been going maybe 20 years and is beginning to look more like a town than a collection of labs and test factories, with houses made from the local stone, gardens and flocks of sheep and goats in the high pastures.

There is the mystery of what the hell the mountain is and where it came from. The geologists reckon Tchernik to be a world with a heavily fractured crust that has dozens of microplates, that never crunch into each other for long enough or with enough force to create any actual land, though undersea earthquakes and hot geysers are frequent. The sea is even deficient in algae, since more accessible energy comes from sulphurous compounds coming up from the sea floor than from the sun, usually hidden by low lying sea fogs.

The upper reaches of the mountain are bright and sunny and subject to only minor tremors, but native life is small and sparse. The lower slopes are covered in fungal forests full of the biggest and most ugly insectoids you ever saw. This zone is comparatively unknown and unmapped in detail, but Tchernik has allowed a couple of pharma companies to take expeditions down and check through the local flora for useful compounds and a mining corp to look for metals, though the best place to look would be on the sea floor.

Orpheus

2013-08-09T19:15:31Z

Bert: /* 463 Aquila E 757 64A 7 Agricultural, Garden */

== Orpheus ==

=== 463 Aquila E 757 64A 7 Agricultural, Garden ===

Back in the early 22nd century warp drive vessels became cheap enough for all kinds of small companies and political fringe groups to go of into space and found colonies. Some very nasty racist and sectarian groups took the chance to set up their own warped ideas of utopia, including some neo-Nazis. Most people on Earth at the time thought 'good riddance', and most of the colonies didn't do well, collapsing into faction fighting and pissing off their neighbours and getting invaded and broken up. But there are persistent rumours of the existence of 'Eagle's Nest', a Nazi planet that has remained stable and prospered in isolation for 200 years and now allegedly constitutes a major threat to Known World security.

No one knows where it is. Sightings of alleged Nazi starships come from all over the rimward end of Known Space, conspiracy theorists are sure that they ply well known space lanes in disguise.

One well known world with a neo-Nazi presence is Orpheus, their colony here is small, but it does provide some insight as to how the fabled Eagle's Nest might work.

Orpheus has a population of 7 million in four colonies. The oldest is Asgard, founded early in the expansion period by American white supremacists. The planet has a thin oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere, a well developed ecosystem with a full range of native animals and plants with plenty of Terran imports doing well, but it is a bit on the cold side.

The Asgardians have only 750,000 people and a small subcontinent left. They successfully captured and enslaved the occupants of a number of colony ships from a diverse range of nations in their early decades, but eventually a large contingent from Vietnam landed far enough away from them and were sufficiently well armed and warned about their presence to fight them off. The Asgardians had not managed to maintain a very high tech level – crucial minerals on Asgard are not as accessible as they are on Earth and they had a habit of ideologically purging educated personnel – and their outdated weaponry failed to make an impact

The Vietnamese were soon joined by Khazaks, Egyptians and French Canadians. Fifteen years ago the Asgardians attempted to take over the planet and made great inroads thanks to an unexpected nuclear strike, but an alliance of all three colonies, plus forces from neighbouring planets, the European Union – the Asgardians had captured a ship load of Italian colonists early in their history – and a foreign legion of anti-fascist activists and adventurers from across Known Space counter invaded. The war eventually bogged down into a stalemate, and an armistice signed.

The current major power, with 4 million inhabitants, is the Orphean League, a rather grim but multi-racial police state which controls the bulk of the former Asgardian territories. They are subject to frequent uprisings and rebellions from ex-Asgardian citizens, 'forcing' the government to impose serious limits on local freedoms. They have resorted to forced internal migration and outright off-planet deportation to control them, and re-education camps allegedly exist in the boondocks of the world. A fair proportion of the younger ex Asgardians have become normal enough, but the population was subjected to a century and a half of vehemently racist propaganda and the erosion of this mindset has been slow.

The Asgardians live behind a massively fortified frontier, and can only maintain a tech level of 5 due to massive destruction of industrial capacity and trade restrictions. They can manage TL 7 genetics though, and a corps of certified 'Purifiers' have everyone's DNA on record. Those who carry what they define as 'impure genes' are given the choice of sterilisation or deportation, and encourage those the regime deems fittest to have numerous children. There are known to be barracks like boarding schools where hundreds of children are 'educated'. The many small farming communities are given a lot of independence, but sadly they just compete to be more hard line than the next lot, with councils of wilfully ignorant and brutal farmworkers monitoring each other's every utterance for deviation from the ideological norm. The one remaining town is, on the surface, quite pleasant. The Asgardians are desperate for foreign currency, technology and trade and go out of their way to give a good impression to outsiders. The model town is of course inhabited by an army of informers and secret police, and has many foreign infiltrators equipped with cybernetic implants from a variety of secret police forces on the look out for evidence of links with Eagle's Nest.

=== Adventure Hooks ===

* PCs offered a mission to be dropped in a deserted area inside Asgardian territory to spy on a military testing range where they appear to have a suspiciously high tech artillery system.

* An Asgardian exile met on a different world claims that his DNA changed between the mandatory test at birth and a later update. He claims the Orpheans are releasing a retro virus into Asgardian airspace infecting people with mutant genes, a blatant crime against humanity. The Asgardians are bastards but do they deserve this? Or is the guy a raving paranoiac?

* The Orphean police have a standing list of wanted Nazis whose location is unknown. Fancy some bounty hunting? Maybe some have fled to Eagle's Nest if you follow the trail long and hard enough...

* A shipload of diehard rebels have been deported from Orpheus and taken in by the Adelbert Corporation on Epsilon. What the hell do they want with these racist lunatics? Load the fools with cybernetic implants and use them as 'special security' when the war against the New Canaanites comes?

* What really happens in those Asgardian schools? The rumours are lurid to say the least, but hard data would be nice – might even enable the Orpheans to get enough military aid to restart the war.

* Reformed Odinism has become popular among the New Age set on Aquila. The usual moral panic and rumours of a cult are going about, but a local reporter thinks the leader is in fact an exiled Asgardian, which puts a different complexion on things.

KnownSpace

2013-08-08T18:37:57Z

Bert: /* Worlds */

= Known Space =

A communally created Traveller setting for Google Hangout games.

See here for further details.

http://expanduniver.blogspot.co.uk/

=== Why? ===

Lots of fun has been had over on G+ with hangout based games of D&D and near D&D, with players with characters made up in any number of different systems dropping in and out of various GMs games more or less on a whim, GMs linking different campaign worlds, running games in other people's homebrew settings, all kinds of unholy inter-game miscegenation and perversity.

While there have been some Traveller games run, there hasn't been the same buzz. The closest thing to it has been Jez Gordon's Star Wars game, with ever changing parties drawn from a moderate sized group of characters.

Traveller ought to be ideal for the Flailsnail style of play – PCs are space bums, liable to turn up on any planet anywhere (any GMs pet planet/subsector) and dive into the first outrageously daft money making scheme dangled in front of their snotty noses by a patron (whatever evil scheme the GM has up his sleeve for this session).

But things have got a bit chaotic in the Flailsnails looniverse – I have to say I roll my eyes whenever a mutant race/sub-class undead amphibiod PC whips out a ray gun these days. So rather than colliding universes, how about a loose-ish collaborative meta-setting thingy in which a GM can concoct some pretty outlandish planets and scenarios, but which maintains some internal coherence and puts some limits on the crazy?

== Known Space 2312AD ==

=== Tech level maximum 12 ===
Guns and lasers, no (or very, very few) twerps turning up in power armour with a plasma cannon and wasting everything in sight.

=== No Psionics ===
State of play with spooky powers is as it is today, the province of a lunatic fringe, charlatans and conspiracy nuts. Doesn't happen, won't work, and if your cousin's brother-in-law's mate's sister reckoned she saw some twit levitating on Epsilon 5 it was because she was high as a kite on Cake (THE party drug of the 24th century). Of course if the GM wants to deploy them then that's just fine, as long as they are in the hands of some drastically alien villain NPC, but see below...

=== No Aliens ===
The human race has bimbled across a good couple of thousand cubic parsecs of the galaxy and has found some alien ecosystems with suitably oddball animals, but no actual intelligent alien civilisations. There's arguments as to whether species A is actually intelligent, and whether humans would recognise an alien civilisation if they saw it. But no blokes in furry suits and bandoliers making bear noises, no people in fake tan with corrugated heads, humanity it appears is alone. Of course there almost certainly will be alien civilisations out there someplace we just haven't met them yet.

As with psionics, aliens should be something truly spooky and out of this world, and first contact fraught with strangeness and unguessable hazards and complications, not something you meet by the zooload down at the local bar.

=== Limited Cybernetics ===
Not that many people have managed to successfully stick silicon into themselves in Known Space and most of those only did it to replace genuinely injured and damaged parts of the body. I have no idea of how real science is really doing at splicing electronics onto nerves, but in the Known Space setting it's dubious and unreliable and the people that do it are regarded as a bit wrong in the head and to have eaten too much Cake.

=== Anarchy! ===
Human beings in the 24th century are no better organised than humans now. World governments? Only on worlds of a million or fewer people of the same general origin, otherwise there is bound to be several rival statelets, factions, commercial exploitation enterprises etc.

When the human race made jump drive work every country on Earth launched colonisation missions, mostly grabbing land on the same few vaguely inhabitable planets. Then it got cheap enough for corporations to have a go, then every separatist, religious, extremist, utopian, libertarian, authoritarian and otherwise misunderstood gang of loons leapfrogged the lot and plunged into the void looking for a place to set up their dream society away from anyone else. Some worked, some didn't. Any world in known space could have any kind of society on it, usually several, and usually at loggerheads with each other, if not actual war.

Genuine interstellar wars have been few and far between, but plenty of Earth states and alliances and the more established and populous off-world colonies are geared up with space navies. With Known Space so vast and sparsely populated and so many colonies having hostile planetbound rivals to fend off there hasn't been much call for them as yet.

=== A world of your own ===
When a player generates a PC he generates a home nation and sketches in a planet for that PC too, all of which will become setting canon, to be drawn on by any later GM or player if they so wish.

=== Rules ===
I only know Classic 1ed Traveller and Mongoose, but any Traveller ruleset should in theory be permissible, and if reliable conversions from other sci-fi systems can be made then lets use them.

==== [[World Generation]] ====

= Sectors =
Only one mapped sector so far

=== [[Aquila Sector]] ===

= Worlds =
An alphabetical list of worlds detailed so far.

[[Annabel's Grave]]

[[Aquila]]

[[Brandy]]

[[Clive's Bar]]

[[Ed's World]]

[[Epsilon]]

[[Fargen]]

[[High Veldt]]

[[Kanaloa]]

[[Mongo]]

[[Myrmidia]]

[[Nua Domhan]]

[[Orpheus]]

[[Riley]]

[[Saint Anne]]

[[Shingdu]]

[[Tchernik]]

[[Torch]]

[[Tudamot]]

[[Zelos]]

[[Zephyr]]

= Earth =
In 2312AD Earth is still the centre of the human universe, and I have no better idea than the next man as to what is likely to have happened to it in the next couple of hundred years. Players and GMs will be free to make up whatever stuff they like about the history of their own nation or district, and how this affects Known Space at large.

== United Kingdom ==

''(UK readers feel free to argue the toss over this version of our future history, nothing is set in stone)''

The UK is no more. Scotland, Wales and Ulster all went their separate ways over the course of the 21st century, and although initially still 'united' under the Crown, Scotland and Wales became Republics, and Ulster joined the Republic of Ireland. Even within England there is devolution with regional parliaments (the legacy of the last Labour government ever back in the 22nd century) in the north west, northeast, Yorkshire and the north midlands, the Midlands and the southwest. England left the EU while the other parts of the British Isles stayed in, and there is agitation amongst the outlying regions to ditch the rump English parliament and become independent EU states.

Interstellar colonisation has added half a dozen new regions to England, one of which has successfully rebelled and become an independent state in its own right and a couple of others are on the way. The regional governments have even set up colonies of their own independent of the main English effort - visitors to the joint Geordie/Scouse/Tyke outpost on New Elmet are so baffled by the local argot that they refuse to believe they are in an 'English' colony at all.

The Royals are still going, but there is agitation even in the conservative south for a Republic, possibly because Prince George, the heir, has married a Jamaican and spends most of his time in Tibet hanging out with the Panchen Lama, and resigned rather than go and do his duty as a Royal Star Navy officer putting down the New Berkshire rebellion on the planet Orion.

= Starships =
There will be some.

= Characters =
And some of these.

= General Background =
[[The Scout Service.]]

Aquila Sector

2013-08-08T18:34:34Z

Bert:

Aquila Sector's 000 point lies at 0 parsecs spinward, 10 parsecs rimward and 0 parsecs north of Earth (0,-10,0).

It is not the very fringes of Known Space, but not far off it, with many uninhabited and sparsely inhabited worlds and a few that have seen maybe one scout expedition and little traffic else. An on board fuel purifier is a necessity for any starship and they will probably have to pass through a fair few backwater worlds with no starport and no people to get anywhere populated.

To work out distances between any two worlds take the square root of x2+y2+y2, where x, y and z are the differences between the coordinates.

So,
Epsilon (451) to Clive's Bar (351) is sqrt(1+0+0) = 1 parsec

Epsilon (451) to Saint Anne (474) is sqrt(0+4+9) = 3.6 parsecs

Saint Anne (474) to Zelos (660) is sqrt(4+1+16)= 4.58 parsecs

[[File:StarmapWiki.jpg]]

Notes: Pink routes 1-2 parsecs, Blue routes 2-3 parsecs, Yellow routes 3-4 parsecs

'''Better quality version can be found here: [https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B0YmlnWDqBSNUmJKakpYZm5mc00/edit?usp=sharing]'''

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Location
! (xyz)
|-
| 007
| [[Kanaloa]]
| B789896B
| Rich
|-
| 016
|-
| 027
|-
| 034
|-
| 070
| [[High Veldt]]
| C8B2416A
| Fluid Oceans, Non Industrial
|-
| 071
|-
| 103
|-
| 110
| [[Fargen]]
| E332527B
| Non Agricultural, Non Industrial, Poor
|-
| 119
|-
| 121
| [[Torch]]
| D5407455
| Desert, Low Technology, Poor
|-
| 125
|-
| 139
|-
| 140
| [[Ed's World]]
| D330412A
| Desert, Non Industrial, Poor
|-
| 152
| [[Tudamot]]
| D5882129
| Garden, Low Population
|-
| 160
|-
| 173
|-
| 176
|-
| 183
|-
| 193
|-
| 230
| [[Aquila]]
| A985858A
| Garden, High Population, Rich
|-
| 239
|-
| 254
| [[Shingdu]]
| B45361AA
| Poor
|-
| 268
|-
| 269
|-
| 272
|-
| 268
|-
| 286
| [[Nua Domhan]]
| X8B11103
| Low Population, Low Technology
|-
| 294
|-
| 298
|-
| 319
|-
| 325
|-
| 334
|-
| 351
| [[Clive's Bar]]
| E0003125
| Asteroid, Low Population, Non Industrial
|-
| 352
| [[Zephyr]]
| B610515B
| Desert, High Technology, Non Agricultural
|-
| 359
|-
| 375
| [[Myrmidia]]
| D5782107
| Low Population, Garden
|-
| 393
|-
| 410
|-
| 411
|-
| 419
|-
| 447
|-
| 451
| [[Epsilon]]
| C644643A
| Agricultural, Poor, Garden, High Technology
|-
| 460
| [[Mongo]]
| E8B61116
| Fluid Oceans, Low Population
|-
| 463
| [[Orpheus]]
| E75764A7
| Agricultural, Garden
|-
| 472
| [[Annabel's Grave]]
| E3341139
| Low Population
|-
| 473
| [[Brandy]]
| B100542C
| Non Agricultural, Non Industrial, Vacuum
|-
| 474
| [[Saint Anne]]
| C7687875
| Agricultural, Garden, Rich, Low Technology
|-
| 493
|-
| 494
|-
| 496
|-
| 519
|-
| 535
|-
| 552
| [[Riley]]
| X89A000 0
| Barren, Waterworld
|-
| 557
|-
| 566
|-
| 586
|-
| 587
|-
| 588
|-
| 602
|-
| 612
|-
| 621
|-
| 622
|-
| 625
|-
| 656
|-
| 660
| [[Zelos]]
| X8450000
| Barren, Garden
|-
| 661
| [[Tchernik]]
| DA792167
| Low Population
|-
| 669
|-
| 674
|-
| 688
|-
| 705
|-
| 706
|-
| 707
|-
| 715
|-
| 717
|-
| 746
|-
| 786
|-
| 794
|-
| 797
|-
| 804
|-
| 818
|-
| 844
|-
| 848
|-
| 863
|-
| 874
|-
| 875
|-
| 897
|-
| 906
|-
| 910
|-
| 912
|-
| 926
|-
| 937
|-
| 948
|-
| 949
|-
| 954
|-
| 955
|-
| 957
|-
| 959
|-
| 981
|-
| 982
|-
| 987
|-
| 988
|-
| 998
|}

Aquila Sector

2013-08-08T18:32:38Z

Bert:

Aquila Sector's 000 point lies at 0 parsecs spinward, 10 parsecs rimward and 0 parsecs north of Earth (0,-10,0).

It is not the very fringes of Known Space, but not far off it, with many uninhabited and sparsely inhabited worlds and a few that have seen maybe one scout expedition and little traffic else. An on board fuel purifier is a necessity for any starship and they will probably have to pass through a fair few backwater worlds with no starport and no people to get anywhere populated.

To work out distances between any two worlds take the square root of x2+y2+y2, where x, y and z are the differences between the coordinates.

So,
Epsilon (451) to Clive's Bar (351) is sqrt(1+0+0) = 1 parsec

Epsilon (451) to Saint Anne (474) is sqrt(0+4+9) = 3.6 parsecs

Saint Anne (474) to Zelos (660) is sqrt(4+1+16)= 4.58 parsecs

[[File:StarmapWiki.jpg]]

Notes: Pink routes 1-2 parsecs, Blue routes 2-3 parsecs, Yellow routes 3-4 parsecs

'''Better quality version can be found here: []'''

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Location
! (xyz)
|-
| 007
| [[Kanaloa]]
| B789896B
| Rich
|-
| 016
|-
| 027
|-
| 034
|-
| 070
| [[High Veldt]]
| C8B2416A
| Fluid Oceans, Non Industrial
|-
| 071
|-
| 103
|-
| 110
| [[Fargen]]
| E332527B
| Non Agricultural, Non Industrial, Poor
|-
| 119
|-
| 121
| [[Torch]]
| D5407455
| Desert, Low Technology, Poor
|-
| 125
|-
| 139
|-
| 140
| [[Ed's World]]
| D330412A
| Desert, Non Industrial, Poor
|-
| 152
| [[Tudamot]]
| D5882129
| Garden, Low Population
|-
| 160
|-
| 173
|-
| 176
|-
| 183
|-
| 193
|-
| 230
| [[Aquila]]
| A985858A
| Garden, High Population, Rich
|-
| 239
|-
| 254
| [[Shingdu]]
| B45361AA
| Poor
|-
| 268
|-
| 269
|-
| 272
|-
| 268
|-
| 286
| [[Nua Domhan]]
| X8B11103
| Low Population, Low Technology
|-
| 294
|-
| 298
|-
| 319
|-
| 325
|-
| 334
|-
| 351
| [[Clive's Bar]]
| E0003125
| Asteroid, Low Population, Non Industrial
|-
| 352
| [[Zephyr]]
| B610515B
| Desert, High Technology, Non Agricultural
|-
| 359
|-
| 375
| [[Myrmidia]]
| D5782107
| Low Population, Garden
|-
| 393
|-
| 410
|-
| 411
|-
| 419
|-
| 447
|-
| 451
| [[Epsilon]]
| C644643A
| Agricultural, Poor, Garden, High Technology
|-
| 460
| [[Mongo]]
| E8B61116
| Fluid Oceans, Low Population
|-
| 463
| [[Orpheus]]
| E75764A7
| Agricultural, Garden
|-
| 472
| [[Annabel's Grave]]
| E3341139
| Low Population
|-
| 473
| [[Brandy]]
| B100542C
| Non Agricultural, Non Industrial, Vacuum
|-
| 474
| [[Saint Anne]]
| C7687875
| Agricultural, Garden, Rich, Low Technology
|-
| 493
|-
| 494
|-
| 496
|-
| 519
|-
| 535
|-
| 552
| [[Riley]]
| X89A000 0
| Barren, Waterworld
|-
| 557
|-
| 566
|-
| 586
|-
| 587
|-
| 588
|-
| 602
|-
| 612
|-
| 621
|-
| 622
|-
| 625
|-
| 656
|-
| 660
| [[Zelos]]
| X8450000
| Barren, Garden
|-
| 661
| [[Tchernik]]
| DA792167
| Low Population
|-
| 669
|-
| 674
|-
| 688
|-
| 705
|-
| 706
|-
| 707
|-
| 715
|-
| 717
|-
| 746
|-
| 786
|-
| 794
|-
| 797
|-
| 804
|-
| 818
|-
| 844
|-
| 848
|-
| 863
|-
| 874
|-
| 875
|-
| 897
|-
| 906
|-
| 910
|-
| 912
|-
| 926
|-
| 937
|-
| 948
|-
| 949
|-
| 954
|-
| 955
|-
| 957
|-
| 959
|-
| 981
|-
| 982
|-
| 987
|-
| 988
|-
| 998
|}

File:StarmapWiki.jpg

2013-08-08T18:23:55Z

Bert: Bert uploaded a new version of "File:StarmapWiki.jpg": Added Planets

Aquila Sector

2013-05-31T17:49:15Z

Bert:

Aquila Sector's 000 point lies at 0 parsecs spinward, 10 parsecs rimward and 0 parsecs north of Earth (0,-10,0).

It is not the very fringes of Known Space, but not far off it, with many uninhabited and sparsely inhabited worlds and a few that have seen maybe one scout expedition and little traffic else. An on board fuel purifier is a necessity for any starship and they will probably have to pass through a fair few backwater worlds with no starport and no people to get anywhere populated.

[[File:StarmapWiki.jpg]]

Notes: Pink routes 1-2 parsecs, Blue routes 2-3 parsecs, Yellow routes 3-4 parsecs

'''Better quality version can be found here: [https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B0YmlnWDqBSNQzBpUFF6THJKVDQ/edit?usp=sharing]'''

{| class="wikitable"
|-
! Location
! (xyz)
|-
| 007
| [[Kanaloa]]
| B789896B
| Rich
|-
| 016
|-
| 027
|-
| 034
|-
| 070
|-
| 071
|-
| 103
|-
| 110
|-
| 119
|-
| 121
|-
| 125
|-
| 139
|-
| 140
| [[Ed's World]]
| D330412A
| Desert, Non Industrial, Poor
|-
| 152
|-
| 160
|-
| 173
|-
| 176
|-
| 183
|-
| 193
|-
| 230
| [[Aquila]]
| A985858A
| Garden, High Population, Rich
|-
| 239
|-
| 254
|-
| 268
|-
| 269
|-
| 272
|-
| 268
|-
| 286
| [[Nua Domhan]]
| X8B11103
| Low Population, Low Technology
|-
| 294
|-
| 298
|-
| 319
|-
| 325
|-
| 334
|-
| 351
| [[Clive's Bar]]
| E0003125
| Asteroid, Low Population, Non Industrial
|-
| 352
| [[Zephyr]]
| B610515B
| Desert, High Technology, Non Agricultural
|-
| 359
|-
| 375
| [[Myrmidia]]
| D5782107
| Low Population, Garden
| -
| 393
|-
| 410
|-
| 411
|-
| 419
|-
| 447
|-
| 451
| [[Epsilon]]
| C644643A
| Agricultural, Poor, Garden, High Technology
|-
| 460
| [[Mongo]]
| E8B61116
| Fluid Oceans, Low Population
|-
| 463
| [[Orpheus]]
| E75764A7
| Agricultural, Garden
|-
| 472
| [[Annabel's Grave]]
| E3341139
| Low Population
|-
| 473
| [[Brandy]]
| B100542C
| Non Agricultural, Non Industrial, Vacuum
|-
| 474
| [[Saint Anne]]
| C7687875
| Agricultural, Garden, Rich, Low Technology
|-
| 493
|-
| 494
|-
| 496
|-
| 519
|-
| 535
|-
| 552
| [[Riley]]
| X89A000 0
| Barren, Waterworld
|-
| 557
|-
| 566
|-
| 586
|-
| 587
|-
| 588
|-
| 602
|-
| 612
|-
| 621
|-
| 622
|-
| 625
|-
| 656
|-
| 660
|-
| 661
|-
| 669
|-
| 674
|-
| 688
|-
| 705
|-
| 706
|-
| 707
|-
| 715
|-
| 717
|-
| 746
|-
| 786
|-
| 794
|-
| 797
|-
| 804
|-
| 818
|-
| 844
|-
| 848
|-
| 863
|-
| 874
|-
| 875
|-
| 897
|-
| 906
|-
| 910
|-
| 912
|-
| 926
|-
| 937
|-
| 948
|-
| 949
|-
| 954
|-
| 955
|-
| 957
|-
| 959
|-
| 981
|-
| 982
|-
| 987
|-
| 988
|-
| 998
|}

Kanaloa

2013-05-31T17:36:03Z

Bert: /* 007 Aquila B789896B Rich, High Technology */

== Kanaloa ==

=== 007 Aquila B789896B Rich ===

Total population 116 000 000
'''Colonies:'''
Free Kanaloa State - 1
Austro-Zealandia - 9
HappiCorp - 4
Disneyland - 10
Pleasantville - 6
New Lundy - 3
Akatonian Islands - 6
Oceanic Union - 6
New Taiwan - 7

Kanaloa is a resort planet predominately owned and operated by an interstellar travel and entertainment conglomerates, most notably the Disney corporation. With almost no land bar a few pleasant but tiny coral islands, tourism and fishing are the major industries. The different states send 1 representative per 2 million citizen district to a world board, with the world board currently numbering 51 delegates and led by a chairman of the tourist board, almost always a Disney exec.

Most natives of Disneyland choose to work for the company directly, as the company has a vested interest in seeing the planet is a pleasant and peaceful place for it's wealthy clients to visit, with a high tech level and pervasive sense of honesty and honour among the natives. The original colonists/employees mostly hailed from the south pacific on Earth, though there has been some discontent over the fact that Disney pretty much Disneyfied their native cultures in order to bring in the tourist creds. The planet's most recent colony, Free Kanaloa State, is inhabited by rebels who are militantly reviving a mish-mash of polynesian, micronesian and maori traditions and heritage, and grabbing some of the better educated tourists with their more 'authentic' visitor attractions.

Rumours of a training camp, dubbed 'Mouse-schwitz' by the scurrilous Austro-Zealandian media, educating staff/citizens in the truth of the Disney version of South Pacific history and implanting them with artificial 'Goofy glands' dispensing constant low level endorphins persist.

Austro-Zealandia, the second biggest state, also relies heavily on tourism, but public paranoia about huge corporations dominating, or even becoming the government means they have a plethora of small entertainment firms and no one big one. Ironically this view is promoted by the largest media and brewing company on the planet, Castlemaine News. The Campaign for Real Ale is far more than just a bunch of beer-bellied old farts in this country.

HappiCorp are based on this world, and their cheery, jolly island hosts the biggest and happiest starport, and the biggest and most hilarious marijuana plantation (It's legal on most worlds folks! Forget what them miserable sods over in Disneyland have to say! Have a HappiBurger... or three...).

Pleasantville is an EU allied nation that seems to have been taken over by retirement home companies and has the oldest and wealthiest population, the Akatonian Islands hail from a different part of the EU and is mainly Greek, Italian and Croat speaking (and has a few separatists on the loose), the Oceanic Union are Fillipino, Indonesian and other east asian Moslems, some of whom have a bit of a chip on their shoulders about being expelled by their home nations. New Taiwan resolutely rejects the tourism route and is trying to replicate the industries of old Taiwan back home, leading to increasing pollution. The other nations are getting pissed off, but the New Taiwianese reckon they could fight off a bunch of beer swilling, burger scoffing security oafs in Mickey Mouse ears pretty easily.

Finally the most idiosyncratic state is New Lundy, originally founded as Ned Kelly Land by criminals on the run from Austro-Zealandia, now inhabited by a motley collection of English, Caribbean, Irish, Breton and Danish 'pirates'. This does appear to be bit of a schtick to get the tourists in, but it all seems a wee bit too authentic for comfort. Rumour has it they banned antibiotics in the Port Royal red light district just so they could revive the Pox to see what it was like, and now can't eradicate it. And there have been a few hijackings on the high seas of late, fishing ships taken and cruise liners despoiled. There has even been a hijacking in orbit, a shipload of old codgers on their way to a life of weak tea and warm slippers in Pleasantville kidnapped and held for ransom. Fingers point in New Lundy's direction, after all, who else would be bonkers enough to get the captain to walk the plank in zero G?

Kanaloa

2013-05-31T17:34:28Z

Bert:

== Kanaloa ==

=== 007 Aquila B789896B Rich, High Technology ===

Total population 116 000 000
'''Colonies:'''
Free Kanaloa State - 1
Austro-Zealandia - 9
HappiCorp - 4
Disneyland - 10
Pleasantville - 6
New Lundy - 3
Akatonian Islands - 6
Oceanic Union - 6
New Taiwan - 7

Kanaloa is a resort planet predominately owned and operated by an interstellar travel and entertainment conglomerates, most notably the Disney corporation. With almost no land bar a few pleasant but tiny coral islands, tourism and fishing are the major industries. The different states send 1 representative per 2 million citizen district to a world board, with the world board currently numbering 51 delegates and led by a chairman of the tourist board, almost always a Disney exec.

Most natives of Disneyland choose to work for the company directly, as the company has a vested interest in seeing the planet is a pleasant and peaceful place for it's wealthy clients to visit, with a high tech level and pervasive sense of honesty and honour among the natives. The original colonists/employees mostly hailed from the south pacific on Earth, though there has been some discontent over the fact that Disney pretty much Disneyfied their native cultures in order to bring in the tourist creds. The planet's most recent colony, Free Kanaloa State, is inhabited by rebels who are militantly reviving a mish-mash of polynesian, micronesian and maori traditions and heritage, and grabbing some of the better educated tourists with their more 'authentic' visitor attractions.

Rumours of a training camp, dubbed 'Mouse-schwitz' by the scurrilous Austro-Zealandian media, educating staff/citizens in the truth of the Disney version of South Pacific history and implanting them with artificial 'Goofy glands' dispensing constant low level endorphins persist.

Austro-Zealandia, the second biggest state, also relies heavily on tourism, but public paranoia about huge corporations dominating, or even becoming the government means they have a plethora of small entertainment firms and no one big one. Ironically this view is promoted by the largest media and brewing company on the planet, Castlemaine News. The Campaign for Real Ale is far more than just a bunch of beer-bellied old farts in this country.

HappiCorp are based on this world, and their cheery, jolly island hosts the biggest and happiest starport, and the biggest and most hilarious marijuana plantation (It's legal on most worlds folks! Forget what them miserable sods over in Disneyland have to say! Have a HappiBurger... or three...).

Pleasantville is an EU allied nation that seems to have been taken over by retirement home companies and has the oldest and wealthiest population, the Akatonian Islands hail from a different part of the EU and is mainly Greek, Italian and Croat speaking (and has a few separatists on the loose), the Oceanic Union are Fillipino, Indonesian and other east asian Moslems, some of whom have a bit of a chip on their shoulders about being expelled by their home nations. New Taiwan resolutely rejects the tourism route and is trying to replicate the industries of old Taiwan back home, leading to increasing pollution. The other nations are getting pissed off, but the New Taiwianese reckon they could fight off a bunch of beer swilling, burger scoffing security oafs in Mickey Mouse ears pretty easily.

Finally the most idiosyncratic state is New Lundy, originally founded as Ned Kelly Land by criminals on the run from Austro-Zealandia, now inhabited by a motley collection of English, Caribbean, Irish, Breton and Danish 'pirates'. This does appear to be bit of a schtick to get the tourists in, but it all seems a wee bit too authentic for comfort. Rumour has it they banned antibiotics in the Port Royal red light district just so they could revive the Pox to see what it was like, and now can't eradicate it. And there have been a few hijackings on the high seas of late, fishing ships taken and cruise liners despoiled. There has even been a hijacking in orbit, a shipload of old codgers on their way to a life of weak tea and warm slippers in Pleasantville kidnapped and held for ransom. Fingers point in New Lundy's direction, after all, who else would be bonkers enough to get the captain to walk the plank in zero G?

Aquila Sector

2013-05-31T15:07:47Z

Bert:

Kanaloa

2013-05-31T15:06:04Z

Bert: /* 007 Aquila B789896B Rich */

Kanaloa

2013-05-31T15:01:54Z

Bert: Created page with "== Kanaloa == === 007 Aquila B789896B Rich === Total population 116 000 000 '''Colonies:''' Free Kanaloa State - 1 Austro-Zealandia - 9 HappiCorp - 4 Disneyland - 10 Pleasant..."

== Kanaloa ==

=== 007 Aquila B789896B Rich ===

Total population 116 000 000
'''Colonies:'''
Free Kanaloa State - 1
Austro-Zealandia - 9
HappiCorp - 4
Disneyland - 10
Pleasantville - 6
New Lundy - 3
Akatonian Islands - 6
Oceanic Union - 6
New Taiwan - 7

Kanaloa is a resort planet predominately owned and operated by an interstellar travel and entertainment conglomerates, most notably the Disney corporation. With almost no land bar a few pleasant but tiny coral islands, tourism and fishing are the major industries. The different states send 1 representative per 2 million citizen district to a world board, with the world board currently numbering 51 delegates and led by a chairman of the tourist board, almost always a Disney exec.

Most natives of Disneyland choose to work for the company directly, as the company has a vested interest in seeing the planet is a pleasant and peaceful place for it's wealthy clients to visit, with a high tech level and pervasive sense of honesty and honour among the natives. The original colonists/employees mostly hailed from the south pacific on Earth, though there has been some discontent over the fact that Disney pretty much Disneyfied their native cultures in order to bring in the tourist creds. The planet's most recent colony, Free Kanaloa State, is inhabited by rebels who are militantly reviving a mish-mash of polynesian, micronesian and maori traditions and heritage, and grabbing some of the better educated tourists with their more 'authentic' visitor attractions.

Rumours of a training camp, dubbed 'Mouse-schwitz' by the scurrilous Austro-Zealandian media, educating staff/citizens in the truth of the Disney version of South Pacific history and implanting them with artificial 'Goofy glands' dispensing constant low level endorphins persist.

Austro-Zealandia, the second biggest state, also relies heavily on tourism, but public paranoia about huge corporations dominating, or even becoming the government means they have a plethora of small entertainment firms and no one big one. Ironically this view is promoted by the largest media and brewing company on the planet, Castlemaine News. The Campaign for Real Ale is far more than just a bunch of beer-bellied old farts in this country.

HappiCorp are based on this world, and their cheery, jolly island hosts the biggest and happiest starport, and the biggest and most hilarious marijuana plantation (It's legal on most worlds folks! Forget what them miserable sods over in Disneyland have to say! Have a HappiBurger... or three...).

Pleasantville is an EU allied nation that seems to have been taken over by retirement home companies and has the oldest and wealthiest population, the Akatonian Islands hail from a different part of the EU and is mainly Greek, Italian and Croat speaking (and has a few separatists on the loose), the Oceanic Union are Fillipino, Indonesian and other east asian Moslems, some of whom have a bit of a chip on their shoulders about being expelled by their home nations.

Finally the most idiosyncratic state is New Lundy, originally founded as Ned Kelly Land by criminals on the run from Austro-Zealandia, now inhabited by a motley collection of English, Caribbean, Irish, Breton and Danish 'pirates'. This does appear to be bit of a schtick to get the tourists in, but it all seems a wee bit too authentic for comfort. Rumour has it they banned antibiotics in the Port Royal red light district just so they could revive the Pox to see what it was like, and now can't eradicate it. And there have been a few hijackings on the high seas of late, fishing ships taken and cruise liners despoiled. There has even been a hijacking in orbit, a shipload of old codgers on their way to a life of weak tea and warm slippers in Pleasantville kidnapped and held for ransom. Fingers point in New Lundy's direction, after all, who else would be bonkers enough to get the captain to walk the plank in zero G?

KnownSpace

2013-05-31T14:55:49Z

Bert: /* Worlds */

= Known Space =

A communally created Traveller setting for Google Hangout games.

See here for further details.

http://expanduniver.blogspot.co.uk/

=== Why? ===

Lots of fun has been had over on G+ with hangout based games of D&D and near D&D, with players with characters made up in any number of different systems dropping in and out of various GMs games more or less on a whim, GMs linking different campaign worlds, running games in other people's homebrew settings, all kinds of unholy inter-game miscegenation and perversity.

While there have been some Traveller games run, there hasn't been the same buzz. The closest thing to it has been Jez Gordon's Star Wars game, with ever changing parties drawn from a moderate sized group of characters.

Traveller ought to be ideal for the Flailsnail style of play – PCs are space bums, liable to turn up on any planet anywhere (any GMs pet planet/subsector) and dive into the first outrageously daft money making scheme dangled in front of their snotty noses by a patron (whatever evil scheme the GM has up his sleeve for this session).

But things have got a bit chaotic in the Flailsnails looniverse – I have to say I roll my eyes whenever a mutant race/sub-class undead amphibiod PC whips out a ray gun these days. So rather than colliding universes, how about a loose-ish collaborative meta-setting thingy in which a GM can concoct some pretty outlandish planets and scenarios, but which maintains some internal coherence and puts some limits on the crazy?

== Known Space 2312AD ==

=== Tech level maximum 12 ===
Guns and lasers, no (or very, very few) twerps turning up in power armour with a plasma cannon and wasting everything in sight.

=== No Psionics ===
State of play with spooky powers is as it is today, the province of a lunatic fringe, charlatans and conspiracy nuts. Doesn't happen, won't work, and if your cousin's brother-in-law's mate's sister reckoned she saw some twit levitating on Epsilon 5 it was because she was high as a kite on Cake (THE party drug of the 24th century). Of course if the GM wants to deploy them then that's just fine, as long as they are in the hands of some drastically alien villain NPC, but see below...

=== No Aliens ===
The human race has bimbled across a good couple of thousand cubic parsecs of the galaxy and has found some alien ecosystems with suitably oddball animals, but no actual intelligent alien civilisations. There's arguments as to whether species A is actually intelligent, and whether humans would recognise an alien civilisation if they saw it. But no blokes in furry suits and bandoliers making bear noises, no people in fake tan with corrugated heads, humanity it appears is alone. Of course there almost certainly will be alien civilisations out there someplace we just haven't met them yet.

As with psionics, aliens should be something truly spooky and out of this world, and first contact fraught with strangeness and unguessable hazards and complications, not something you meet by the zooload down at the local bar.

=== Limited Cybernetics ===
Not that many people have managed to successfully stick silicon into themselves in Known Space and most of those only did it to replace genuinely injured and damaged parts of the body. I have no idea of how real science is really doing at splicing electronics onto nerves, but in the Known Space setting it's dubious and unreliable and the people that do it are regarded as a bit wrong in the head and to have eaten too much Cake.

=== Anarchy! ===
Human beings in the 24th century are no better organised than humans now. World governments? Only on worlds of a million or fewer people of the same general origin, otherwise there is bound to be several rival statelets, factions, commercial exploitation enterprises etc.

When the human race made jump drive work every country on Earth launched colonisation missions, mostly grabbing land on the same few vaguely inhabitable planets. Then it got cheap enough for corporations to have a go, then every separatist, religious, extremist, utopian, libertarian, authoritarian and otherwise misunderstood gang of loons leapfrogged the lot and plunged into the void looking for a place to set up their dream society away from anyone else. Some worked, some didn't. Any world in known space could have any kind of society on it, usually several, and usually at loggerheads with each other, if not actual war.

Genuine interstellar wars have been few and far between, but plenty of Earth states and alliances and the more established and populous off-world colonies are geared up with space navies. With Known Space so vast and sparsely populated and so many colonies having hostile planetbound rivals to fend off there hasn't been much call for them as yet.

=== A world of your own ===
When a player generates a PC he generates a home nation and sketches in a planet for that PC too, all of which will become setting canon, to be drawn on by any later GM or player if they so wish.

=== Rules ===
I only know Classic 1ed Traveller and Mongoose, but any Traveller ruleset should in theory be permissible, and if reliable conversions from other sci-fi systems can be made then lets use them.

==== [[World Generation]] ====

= Sectors =
Only one mapped sector so far

=== [[Aquila Sector]] ===

= Worlds =
An alphabetical list of worlds detailed so far.

[[Annabel's Grave]]

[[Aquila]]

[[Brandy]]

[[Clive's Bar]]

[[Ed's World]]

[[Epsilon]]

[[Kanaloa]]

[[Mongo]]

[[Myrmidia]]

[[Nua Domhan]]

[[Orpheus]]

[[Riley]]

[[Saint Anne]]

[[Zephyr]]

= Earth =
In 2312AD Earth is still the centre of the human universe, and I have no better idea than the next man as to what is likely to have happened to it in the next couple of hundred years. Players and GMs will be free to make up whatever stuff they like about the history of their own nation or district, and how this affects Known Space at large.

== United Kingdom ==

''(UK readers feel free to argue the toss over this version of our future history, nothing is set in stone)''

The UK is no more. Scotland, Wales and Ulster all went their separate ways over the course of the 21st century, and although initially still 'united' under the Crown, Scotland and Wales became Republics, and Ulster joined the Republic of Ireland. Even within England there is devolution with regional parliaments (the legacy of the last Labour government ever back in the 22nd century) in the north west, northeast, Yorkshire and the north midlands, the Midlands and the southwest. England left the EU while the other parts of the British Isles stayed in, and there is agitation amongst the outlying regions to ditch the rump English parliament and become independent EU states.

Interstellar colonisation has added half a dozen new regions to England, one of which has successfully rebelled and become an independent state in its own right and a couple of others are on the way. The regional governments have even set up colonies of their own independent of the main English effort - visitors to the joint Geordie/Scouse/Tyke outpost on New Elmet are so baffled by the local argot that they refuse to believe they are in an 'English' colony at all.

The Royals are still going, but there is agitation even in the conservative south for a Republic, possibly because Prince George, the heir, has married a Jamaican and spends most of his time in Tibet hanging out with the Panchen Lama, and resigned rather than go and do his duty as a Royal Star Navy officer putting down the New Berkshire rebellion on the planet Orion.

= Starships =
There will be some.

= Characters =
And some of these.

= General Background =
[[The Scout Service.]]

Aquila Sector

2013-05-27T11:17:45Z

Bert:

Aquila Sector

2013-05-27T11:12:15Z

Bert:

File:StarmapWiki.jpg

2013-05-27T11:09:20Z

Bert:

File:AquilaStarmap.jpg

2013-05-27T11:00:33Z

Bert: uploaded a new version of "File:AquilaStarmap.jpg"

Ed's World

2013-05-27T10:50:42Z

Bert: Created page with "== Ed's World == === Aquila 140 D 330 412 A Desert, Non Industrial, Poor === Ed's World is named for Edwina Campbell, an ultra-feminist biotechnologist who dreamed of making a ..."

== Ed's World ==

=== Aquila 140 D 330 412 A Desert, Non Industrial, Poor ===

Ed's World is named for Edwina Campbell, an ultra-feminist biotechnologist who dreamed of making a world without men. And with the right tech, she reckoned she could and would do just that, though the results haven't been wildly successful. Ed's World is inhabited by 60 000 people of mostly female sexual characteristics, though more than a few are to some degree hermaphrodites. Edwina started cloning at first, then got onto a method of combining eggs in the lab so as to create an embryo with two female parents. Many minor genetic faults were introduced at this stage, and persist on Ed's World - albinism is relatively common, as are a couple of even worse mutations - and the low initial population of under a hundred led to more problems.

Initial work in parthenogensis was a disaster, the people created were mostly haploid and prone to all kinds of problems, and at this point the UN stepped in. Though distant and theoretically a sovereign state, Ed's World was invaded on the grounds of massive human rights violations - no one could do experiments with such a massive failure rate on humans, and that was that. The occupying force is still there a century later, few new colonists, and almost no men, have settled here, and the experiments continue in a more careful and measured way. Edwina's successors give diverse accounts of what refinement of human biology they are currently aiming for, and their stated method of reproduction of their people - egg-mixing from within their own population - quite patently isn't true, as the genetic diversity of the population remains high and may be getting higher.

Male visitors find Ed's World disturbing, though the locals are friendly and polite enough, they ban men from going beyond a certain underground city near the spaceport, and off world women from going beyond a settlement a few kilometres beyond that. These are grim places by most standards, rough tunnels and sealed surface habitats with a low standard of living.

They do have a discreet genetic hospital where they make money from rich people who want their DNA 'improved' or have embryo selection done, however frowned upon this may be on their homeworlds, though they do not do germline modification. Further cash is donated from less extreme feminist movements on other worlds, and rumour has it, various corporations and governments who contract out their dodgier experiments to the local experts. The planet has few resources otherwise, TL for genetics and medicine is effectively 12.

Saint Anne

2013-05-27T10:07:35Z

Bert: /* Adventure Hooks */

== Saint Anne ==

=== Aquila 474 C 768 787 5 Agricultural, Garden, Rich, Low Technology ===

If you haven't read 'The Fifth Head of Cerebus' by Gene Wolfe, do so, it's a great book. One of the worlds featured in it is Saint Anne which I am shamelessly stealing and mangling into my Known Worlds Traveller setting.

Saint Anne is a very earth-like world, with a thriving ecosystem of land and sea vertebrates and has attracted a population of 60 million colonists in eight separate colonies. One unusual feature is the fact that is was not discovered until 120 years ago, long after the rest of the worlds in its vicinity were located and mapped.

The world has one land mass, quite mountainous with deserts on one side and a large area of forests and marshland on the other cut by a number of huge rivers.

The first colonists were French 'primitivists', devout Catholics who believed that technology had ruined human spiritual development and who created a quiet rural society. They were followed by Americans, Chinese, Indians, Romanians, Nigerians, Arabs, Brazilians and a colony from the independent Mercian state on Alpha Centauri.

The French claimed that when they landed they were met and attacked by stone age humans, perhaps the survivors of a previous colonising attempt that had foundered, and that these 'Annese' lived on the fringes of their colony for decades before disappearing. No other colonists came across them, though rumours persist of finds of stone tools and occasional sightings. Who these people were, and if they existed at all, remains a mystery.

The second group of colonist were American, who unfortunately crash landed and lost most of their supplies. The French assisted them in their early years and soon colonists were flooding in from across the US. Despite the lack of easily accessible minerals the Americans adopted a rapid industrial policy at odds with the French conservationism and in a war 20 years ago most of the French territory was invaded, and act of quite staggering ingratitude in the opinion of the French. The French resistance has taken an unusual form – the rebels claim that they are at least partly of 'Annese' native descent and no Earthman has a right to their world. Out in the forests bands of rugged survivalists make life hard for settlers of all nationalities, but American logging companies bear the brunt of their ire. Constant guerilla warfare has become the norm all along the inland borders.

The total failure of the Brazilian colony is also a mystery. Latecomers to Saint Anne they picked an isolated spot in the steamy jungles of the far south of the continent and had an initial settlement underway in a couple of years. Then all radio contact stopped. When a boat from the Chinese colony sought to find them a few years later they found the place abandoned, pre-fab buildings collapsing and abandoned vehicles rusting away and overgrown with jungle plants.

The most standoffish colony are the Romanians. They settled in the cooler far north, but since they were a splinter far right organisation who wanted to get away from the EU and its policy of equal rights for gypsies and Hungarians, they found it easy to transfer that mistrust to the other nationalities they shared Saint Anne with. They may have had some internal disagreements – refugees turned up in the Indian state of Coromandel a few years back after a gruelling three month trek through the forests, but they were uncommunicative about what was going on.

Tensions between all the colonies are rising as populations expand and as the booming economy based on forest products and biofuel farming creates winners and losers. Chinese attempts to create a local Planetary Court have been scoffed at by all the other colonies, pointing out their repression of their own local rebels – Revisionist Maoists who tried to set up self sufficient collective farms independent of the Central Committee – has been brutal.

Local technology remains stubbornly low. The fact that you can make a decent living out of the rich soil with only the most basic of equipment has meant there has been little local impetus to improve. The main space port is a class C operation at Chengdu city, though the US port at Hambleton is also rated at class C and is nearly as big.

Large amounts of the inhabited land across the whole world is a collection of small to medium sized farms with a distinctly neo-medieval air. Wealth on this planet comes primarily from land ownership, and the importance of taking and holding it has led to all kinds of dubious goings on and rural militias, armed smallholders unions and the use of armed guards by the bigger enterprises to defend against the 'Annese' have created a tense atmosphere.

The towns and cities are almost all fishing ports and ships are the main form of transport between colonies and up river to their hinterlands. The Indians have some railways, allegedly built by chain gangs of criminals and rebels sent from hot spots back home, and have revived the ancient technology of diesel locomotives, while the Chinese have taken to using airships. The Americans import expensive grav planes, but their limited capacity makes steam powered riverboats the best way of getting farm goods to market in their territory.

=== Adventure Hooks ===
* Stone tools have turned up on the antiquities market on Earth that allegedly come from Saint Anne. A rich eccentric, Ulrich Von Daniken, has decided that they are evidence that there was a spacefaring Atlantean civilisation and that the mysterious Annese were their last survivors. Time to pay the place a visit, with archaeologists, biologists and armed guards in tow. Oddly one of the tools seems to have been crafted from shards of an old coke bottle.

* A mass grave has been discovered on the border of American and Chinese territory, dug up by Ghoul Bears, a local scavenger species, and found by big game hunters from offworld. The FBI have sent a forensic team to investigate. Who lies in it? The politicos at Hambleton are hoping its Chinese Maoists, an excuse to start a war, but the locals are acting unfriendly – did they find a lost tribe of Annese (real or faux Annese French rebels). Did some local land dispute get ugly? Did they off a bunch of Chinese settlers? Or are they something else again?

* Yellow Fever has come to Saint Anne. Long controlled back home on Earth the bug is tearing through one of the coastal cities. How did it get here? Biowarfare? People are getting panicky and there is anarchy on the streets.

* Lovely climate in Saint Anne, sub tropical, well drained mountain soil, just right for growing coffee – and a quite a few other stronger narcotics. Someone has taken to growing cocaine up in the hills, PCs are contracted by one of the governments to take them out, or to smuggle the stuff off world.

* Starbucks want a coffee plantation, but the most suitable land is currently occupied by a motley collection of French peasants. Persuade them to sell up.

* A new narcotic is on the market, a local plant that causes strange hallucinations, visions of what might be the past. Now the low-lifes of Hambleton's slums are taking to calling themselves 'Annese', and walking around naked bar ritual scarifications and carrying stone hand axes. Are they tripping their nuts off? People are being found floating in the harbour torn to shreds by being beaten with whips strung with sea shells, just as old accounts say happened to the first French landing party – this shit is getting real.

* The Arabs are in a serious tizz. One of their factory ships has been lost with all hands deep in the vast but placid Annese oceans. What happened to it? One tale of the old Annese said they were amazing swimmers – has everyone been looking in the wrong place for them? Are they aquatic? Or is there something else living in those deep blue seas?

* Nothing has been heard from the Romanian colony for months. Have they gone the same way as the Brazilians? Their main settlement was quite a ways inland, up the Kirsco River. Their president's name was Vlad Caecescu. Time for a boat trip into the Heart of Darkness...

Saint Anne

2013-05-27T10:07:06Z

Bert: Created page with "== Saint Anne == === Aquila 474 C 768 787 5 Agricultural, Garden, Rich, Low Technology === If you haven't read 'The Fifth Head of Cerebus' by Gene Wolfe, do so, it's a great bo..."

== Saint Anne ==

=== Aquila 474 C 768 787 5 Agricultural, Garden, Rich, Low Technology ===

If you haven't read 'The Fifth Head of Cerebus' by Gene Wolfe, do so, it's a great book. One of the worlds featured in it is Saint Anne which I am shamelessly stealing and mangling into my Known Worlds Traveller setting.

Saint Anne is a very earth-like world, with a thriving ecosystem of land and sea vertebrates and has attracted a population of 60 million colonists in eight separate colonies. One unusual feature is the fact that is was not discovered until 120 years ago, long after the rest of the worlds in its vicinity were located and mapped.

The world has one land mass, quite mountainous with deserts on one side and a large area of forests and marshland on the other cut by a number of huge rivers.

The first colonists were French 'primitivists', devout Catholics who believed that technology had ruined human spiritual development and who created a quiet rural society. They were followed by Americans, Chinese, Indians, Romanians, Nigerians, Arabs, Brazilians and a colony from the independent Mercian state on Alpha Centauri.

The French claimed that when they landed they were met and attacked by stone age humans, perhaps the survivors of a previous colonising attempt that had foundered, and that these 'Annese' lived on the fringes of their colony for decades before disappearing. No other colonists came across them, though rumours persist of finds of stone tools and occasional sightings. Who these people were, and if they existed at all, remains a mystery.

The second group of colonist were American, who unfortunately crash landed and lost most of their supplies. The French assisted them in their early years and soon colonists were flooding in from across the US. Despite the lack of easily accessible minerals the Americans adopted a rapid industrial policy at odds with the French conservationism and in a war 20 years ago most of the French territory was invaded, and act of quite staggering ingratitude in the opinion of the French. The French resistance has taken an unusual form – the rebels claim that they are at least partly of 'Annese' native descent and no Earthman has a right to their world. Out in the forests bands of rugged survivalists make life hard for settlers of all nationalities, but American logging companies bear the brunt of their ire. Constant guerilla warfare has become the norm all along the inland borders.

The total failure of the Brazilian colony is also a mystery. Latecomers to Saint Anne they picked an isolated spot in the steamy jungles of the far south of the continent and had an initial settlement underway in a couple of years. Then all radio contact stopped. When a boat from the Chinese colony sought to find them a few years later they found the place abandoned, pre-fab buildings collapsing and abandoned vehicles rusting away and overgrown with jungle plants.

The most standoffish colony are the Romanians. They settled in the cooler far north, but since they were a splinter far right organisation who wanted to get away from the EU and its policy of equal rights for gypsies and Hungarians, they found it easy to transfer that mistrust to the other nationalities they shared Saint Anne with. They may have had some internal disagreements – refugees turned up in the Indian state of Coromandel a few years back after a gruelling three month trek through the forests, but they were uncommunicative about what was going on.

Tensions between all the colonies are rising as populations expand and as the booming economy based on forest products and biofuel farming creates winners and losers. Chinese attempts to create a local Planetary Court have been scoffed at by all the other colonies, pointing out their repression of their own local rebels – Revisionist Maoists who tried to set up self sufficient collective farms independent of the Central Committee – has been brutal.

Local technology remains stubbornly low. The fact that you can make a decent living out of the rich soil with only the most basic of equipment has meant there has been little local impetus to improve. The main space port is a class C operation at Chengdu city, though the US port at Hambleton is also rated at class C and is nearly as big.

Large amounts of the inhabited land across the whole world is a collection of small to medium sized farms with a distinctly neo-medieval air. Wealth on this planet comes primarily from land ownership, and the importance of taking and holding it has led to all kinds of dubious goings on and rural militias, armed smallholders unions and the use of armed guards by the bigger enterprises to defend against the 'Annese' have created a tense atmosphere.

The towns and cities are almost all fishing ports and ships are the main form of transport between colonies and up river to their hinterlands. The Indians have some railways, allegedly built by chain gangs of criminals and rebels sent from hot spots back home, and have revived the ancient technology of diesel locomotives, while the Chinese have taken to using airships. The Americans import expensive grav planes, but their limited capacity makes steam powered riverboats the best way of getting farm goods to market in their territory.

=== Adventure Hooks ===
* Stone tools have turned up on the antiquities market on Earth that allegedly come from Saint Anne. A rich eccentric, Ulrich Von Daniken, has decided that they are evidence that there was a spacefaring Atlantean civilisation and that the mysterious Annese were their last survivors. Time to pay the place a visit, with archaeologists, biologists and armed guards in tow. Oddly one of the tools seems to have been crafted from shards of an old coke bottle.

* A mass grave has been discovered on the border of American and Chinese territory, dug up by Ghoul Bears, a local scavenger species, and found by big game hunters from offworld. The FBI have sent a forensic team to investigate. Who lies in it? The politicos at Hambleton are hoping its Chinese Maoists, an excuse to start a war, but the locals are acting unfriendly – did they find a lost tribe of Annese (real or faux Annese French rebels). Did some local land dispute get ugly? Did they off a bunch of Chinese settlers? Or are they something else again?

* Yellow Fever has come to Saint Anne. Long controlled back home on Earth the bug is tearing through one of the coastal cities. How did it get here? Biowarfare? People are getting panicky and there is anarchy on the streets.

* Lovely climate in Saint Anne, sub tropical, well drained mountain soil, just right for growing coffee – and a quite a few other stronger narcotics. Someone has taken to growing cocaine up in the hills, PCs are contracted by one of the governments to take them out, or to smuggle the stuff off world.
Starbucks want a coffee plantation, but the most suitable land is currently occupied by a motley collection of French peasants. Persuade them to sell up.

* A new narcotic is on the market, a local plant that causes strange hallucinations, visions of what might be the past. Now the low-lifes of Hambleton's slums are taking to calling themselves 'Annese', and walking around naked bar ritual scarifications and carrying stone hand axes. Are they tripping their nuts off? People are being found floating in the harbour torn to shreds by being beaten with whips strung with sea shells, just as old accounts say happened to the first French landing party – this shit is getting real.

* The Arabs are in a serious tizz. One of their factory ships has been lost with all hands deep in the vast but placid Annese oceans. What happened to it? One tale of the old Annese said they were amazing swimmers – has everyone been looking in the wrong place for them? Are they aquatic? Or is there something else living in those deep blue seas?

* Nothing has been heard from the Romanian colony for months. Have they gone the same way as the Brazilians? Their main settlement was quite a ways inland, up the Kirsco River. Their president's name was Vlad Caecescu. Time for a boat trip into the Heart of Darkness...

Orpheus

2013-05-27T10:01:31Z

Bert: Created page with "== Orpheus == === 463 Aquila E 757 64A 7 Agricultural, Garden === Back in the early 22nd century warp drive vessels became cheap enough for all kinds of small companies and pol..."

== Orpheus ==

=== 463 Aquila E 757 64A 7 Agricultural, Garden ===

Back in the early 22nd century warp drive vessels became cheap enough for all kinds of small companies and political fringe groups to go of into space and found colonies. Some very nasty racist and sectarian groups took the chance to set up their own warped ideas of utopia, including some neo-Nazis. Most people on Earth at the time thought 'good riddance', and most of the colonies didn't do well, collapsing into faction fighting and pissing off their neighbours and getting invaded and broken up. But there are persistent rumours of the existence of 'Eagle's Nest', a Nazi planet that has remained stable and prospered in isolation for 200 years and now allegedly constitutes a major threat to Known World security.

No one knows where it is. Sightings of alleged Nazi starships come from all over the rimward end of Known Space, conspiracy theorists are sure that they ply well known space lanes in disguise.

One well known world with a neo-Nazi presence is Orpheus, their colony here is small, but it does provide some insight as to how the fabled Eagle's Nest might work.

Orpheus has a population of 7 million in four colonies. The oldest is Asgard, founded early in the expansion period by American white supremacists. The planet has a thin oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere, a well developed ecosystem with a full range of native animals and plants with plenty of Terran imports doing well, but it is a bit on the cold side.

The Asgardians have only 750,000 people and a small subcontinent left. They successfully captured and enslaved the occupants of a number of colony ships from a diverse range of nations in their early decades, but eventually a large contingent from Vietnam landed far enough away from them and were sufficiently well armed and warned about their presence to fight them off. The Asgardians had not managed to maintain a very high tech level – crucial minerals on Asgard are not as accessible as they are on Earth and they had a habit of ideologically purging educated personnel – and their outdated weaponry failed to make an impact

The Vietnamese were soon joined by Khazaks, Egyptians and French Canadians. Thirty years ago the Asgardians attempted to take over the planet and made great inroads thanks to an unexpected nuclear strike, but an alliance of all three colonies, plus forces from neighbouring planets, the European Union – the Asgardians had captured a ship load of Italian colonists early in their history – and a foreign legion of anti-fascist activists and adventurers from across Known Space counter invaded. The war eventually bogged down into a stalemate, and an armistice signed.

The current major power, with 4 million inhabitants, is the Orphean League, a rather grim but multi-racial police state which controls the bulk of the former Asgardian territories. They are subject to frequent uprisings and rebellions from ex-Asgardian citizens, 'forcing' the government to impose serious limits on local freedoms. They have resorted to forced internal migration and outright off-planet deportation to control them, and re-education camps allegedly exist in the boondocks of the world. A fair proportion of the younger ex Asgardians have become normal enough, but the population was subjected to a century and a half of vehemently racist propaganda and the erosion of this mindset has been slow.

The Asgardians live behind a massively fortified frontier, and can only maintain a tech level of 5 due to massive destruction of industrial capacity and trade restrictions. They can manage TL 7 genetics though, and a corps of certified 'Purifiers' have everyone's DNA on record. Those who carry what they define as 'impure genes' are given the choice of sterilisation or deportation, and encourage those the regime deems fittest to have numerous children. There are known to be barracks like boarding schools where hundreds of children are 'educated'. The many small farming communities are given a lot of independence, but sadly they just compete to be more hard line than the next lot, with councils of wilfully ignorant and brutal farmworkers monitoring each other's every utterance for deviation from the ideological norm. The one remaining town is, on the surface, quite pleasant. The Asgardians are desperate for foreign currency, technology and trade and go out of their way to give a good impression to outsiders. The model town is of course inhabited by an army of informers and secret police, and has many foreign infiltrators equipped with cybernetic implants from a variety of secret police forces on the look out for evidence of links with Eagle's Nest.

=== Adventure Hooks ===

* PCs offered a mission to be dropped in a deserted area inside Asgardian territory to spy on a military testing range where they appear to have a suspiciously high tech artillery system.

* An Asgardian exile met on a different world claims that his DNA changed between the mandatory test at birth and a later update. He claims the Orpheans are releasing a retro virus into Asgardian airspace infecting people with mutant genes, a blatant crime against humanity. The Asgardians are bastards but do they deserve this? Or is the guy a raving paranoiac?

* The Orphean police have a standing list of wanted Nazis whose location is unknown. Fancy some bounty hunting? Maybe some have fled to Eagle's Nest if you follow the trail long and hard enough...

* A shipload of diehard rebels have been deported from Orpheus and taken in by the Adelbert Corporation on Epsilon. What the hell do they want with these racist lunatics? Load the fools with cybernetic implants and use them as 'special security' when the war against the New Canaanites comes?

* What really happens in those Asgardian schools? The rumours are lurid to say the least, but hard data would be nice – might even enable the Orpheans to get enough military aid to restart the war.

* Reformed Odinism has become popular among the New Age set on Aquila. The usual moral panic and rumours of a cult are going about, but a local reporter thinks the leader is in fact an exiled Asgardian, which puts a different complexion on things.

Nua Domhan

2013-05-27T09:55:04Z

Bert: Created page with "== Nua Domhan == === 286 Aquila X 8B1 110 3 Low Population, Low Technology === Ireland in 2313 is still part of the European Union, and Irish settlers can be found all over Kno..."

== Nua Domhan ==

=== 286 Aquila X 8B1 110 3 Low Population, Low Technology ===

Ireland in 2313 is still part of the European Union, and Irish settlers can be found all over Known Space wherever the EU has stuck its starry circle flag. But for one Irish patriot and freelance star-scout, David Delaney, that wasn't good enough, he wanted a bit of outer space that was forever Ireland, and so the unclaimed world of Nua Domhan was officially colonised in 2278. This was rather against the Irish government's wishes. Nua Domhan had gone a begging since it was one of the most useless hunks of junk in Known Space, a large Venusian type world with boiling temperatures, sulphuric atmosphere and more volcanoes than you could shake a stick at. What attracted Delaney was its rather pretty version of the Giant’s Causeway, a plain of hexagonal basalt columns larger in land area than Ireland itself, lapped by an emerald green sea of sulphuric acid and dissolved copper sulphate.

When the Irish Navy took absolutely no interest in guarding the place, a popular charity appeal raised enough money to by a second hand picket vessel to be despatched to guard Ireland's new interstellar empire.

Colonisation was a dead letter. Delaney's Irish Imperial Exploits company went broke, but not before purchasing, at a knock down price, Fionn MacCumhail, a giant construction robot. This was a failed project of Nakamura Industries to create a passenger carrying walker that could take tourists across the Pacific sea floor. Now it would stride across Nua Domhan planting atmosphere reduction machines that in a mere 30,000 years (at the current work rate) would make the planet a sizzlingly hot but just about inhabitable paradise!

This quixotic project is currently funded by the son of a former Saudi Prince who retired to his horse stud in Waterford county after the Arabian revolution, an Irish-American software baron, a national lottery and the occasional grant from the ever complaining Irish Dail. There are four personnel on the planet itself, living in extremely cramped quarters in Fionn's torso and going quietly mad from cabin fever and the stress caused by Fionn's frequent break downs and many niggling malfunctions. Another two guys mind the orbital picket ship and storage facility. They spend up to a year on duty at a time, with next to no visitors. The current owners keep making vague promises about buying another robot, or making a proper orbital station with enough room to swing a cat, or finding a way round the communications problems that mean Fionn can't be controlled from orbit, but nothing ever seems to get done. The low TL does not reflect the technology of Fionn (actually about TL10, TL11 for the self-repairing acid resistant smart material kilt), but the local capacity for manufacture, ie pretty damn poor. They can bang out a few very crude machine parts in the engineering section of the picket ship and that's it.

=== Adventure Hooks ===

* Fionn has had it. He fell into a crevasse and broke and the crew need rescuing.

* Nua Domhan has been invaded! Well, a gang of hard up belt miners took over the orbital station and stripped it for scrap metal. Quite how the Irish government will react no one knows, the speed of communication means they probably haven't even heard about it yet, but anyone in the area could defend Irish national honour and nab the varmints if they felt so inclined.

* The guys on the ground are going off the rails. They say there's a monster following them, but the whole system is only a billion years old, there's no way bacteria could have evolved on the planet, even if a living system could ever cope with the bitterly acidic atmosphere and boiling temperatures, which the planetologists doubt. Lay off the Jameson's guys.

* There's good money to earned on Nua Domhan for the right kind of people. The Nua Domhan Development Co co want experienced spacers used to spending a long time in a cabin to run the robot. They go broke about a month into the PCs contract, and the picket ship is out of action.

* Fionn's got a new brain! PCs deliver and possibly install an up to date AI unit. Thing is the provenance is a bit dubious, it looks a bit second hand really, and you had to pick it up on Annabel's Grave…

* The new terraforming bot has arrived, CuCuhlainn, an updated version of Fionn. The old soldier has been stoically plodding the sulphurous wastes for years. He's an old bot with no true AI, but could he have actually got a bit territorial? Anyway he's not responding to commands and heading for the new bot in what might be interpreted as a menacing and deliberate air.

Myrmidia

2013-05-27T09:46:56Z

Bert: Created page with "== Myrmidia == === Aquila 375 D 578210 7 Low Population, Garden === Myrmidia ought to be the ideal colony world, warm climate, oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere, developed ecosystem e..."

== Myrmidia ==

=== Aquila 375 D 578210 7 Low Population, Garden ===

Myrmidia ought to be the ideal colony world, warm climate, oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere, developed ecosystem etc. but unfortunately the local lifeforms are a bit unfriendly.

The single land mass is overrun with Ultra-Bees. Bees stand for Bee-like Endoskeletoned Exocranial Semi-sapients, they are vertebrates, mostly in the 12-25kg range, with a brain outside their skulls, a small knot of nervous tissue covered in sensory hairs. They have two small eyes on stalks, a rounded furry body with eight spindly legs and a gas sac and small wings that function very well in the low G.

The taint in the atmosphere is entirely due to their many varieties of pheromone. These have some effect on humans, making them dizzy, inducing panic and euphoria, aggressive outbursts and depressive misery or a very uncomfortable combination of all of these depending on what kinds happen to be floating by at the time. Trying to breathe the stuff without a gas mask results in a bad effect on a roll of 10+ (End and Int mods) in the first round, 9+ the second, 8+ the third etc. and each fail requires a d6 roll on the table below

1 Dizzy – lose 1d3 Dex, roll vs Dex or fall over
2 Panic – roll vs Int or lose -1 on all skill rolls. Second result gives a -2 modifier, then -3 etc. and run away
3 Euphoria – as above, but tendency to drop equipment and strip naked
4 Aggression - +1 Str and End, save vs Int or attack colleagues. Each repeat gives -2 to the save
5 Depression - -1 to all skill rolls automatically, each repeat add 1 to this, Euphoria effect above counteracts it.
6 Two of the above.

The beasts themselves have a nasty bite and though they rarely attack immediately they will summon more ultra-bees (1d6 in the first round, 2d6 in the second, 3d6 in the third etc.) until they outnumber the party at least 5 to one. Use the attack/flee rolls below until the total mass of bees outweighs the mass of the party or the vehicle they are in, then attack is automatic and flee is 2-. Attacking them first will just make them mad, doubling the number flying in and adding two to the caste table roll below.

The little bastards do seem to have worked out that humans don't like their air. Any attack has a 1 in 6 chance of being on the characters breathing equipment.

They come in a variety of castes from the typical flyer/worker bee to diggers, transporters and soldier bees. They have eliminated all other animals on the planet and changed the plant ecosystem to a variety of fruits, flowers and brassica like species grown in neat gardens. They don't eat this stuff, they take into their hive for purposes unknown. Their hive is made more like a termite mound, dug into the ground and built up into vast twisted spires made of dirt and tree-trunks bound together with concrete like tree-sap/sand amalgam. And it is vast, covering the entire surface of the one continent and tunnelled up to two miles or more under the surface.

No one has seen the Queen Ultra-Bee or Bees; 'take me to your leader' type speeches just result in a typical massive bee attack, trying to get inside their hives is suicidal, the little wretches wall off the tunnels and tunnellers dig holes under the attackers dropping them down pits hundreds of meters deep and often ending in lava pools or subterranean lakes.

Bee caste roll d8
1-4 Worker Flyer 12kg Scavenger/Reducer 39612 Teeth+1, 0AP 1d6 dam A9+ F7-
5-6 Transporter 50kg Herbivore/Intermittent BAA01 Teeth and Claws 2AP 2d6 dam A10+ F4-
7 Tuneller 200kg Herbivore/Filter DAF01 Claws 3AP 2d6 dam A10+ F5-
8-10 Soldier Flyer 50kg Carnivore/Chaser BG923 Thrasher 3AP 2d6 dam A* F5-

For each soldier in a group reduce A and F scores of the rest by one, for each five soldiers give +1 attack to a max of +3

The human colonists live on an artificial island/oil rig kind of affair way out in the deepest, most distant part of the ocean where the stink of the pheromones is weakest. Originally an EU scientific outpost it is now a communist aquafarming collective barely scraping by on kelp, oyster beds and lobster herding. The locals do not visit the mainland, it just isn't worth the hassle, and only half-heartedly searching for the artificial pheromone mix that will enable them to do so safely. In fact they are working to emulate the bees, researching powerful enough human pheromones to ensure a harmonious and cooperative society.

=== Adventure Hooks ===

* Some people will get high on anything. Drug barons are offering good money for Ultra-Bee aggression glands.
* A lobster herder got attacked by some strange fish-thing. He reckons it had a fuzzy external brain. Have the Ultra-Bees learned how to swim?
* The Ultra-Bees are at war! Who the hell knows how it happened but the southern and northern halves of the continent are having at each other in billion strong assaults featuring artillery bees never before recorded by science.
* Bees in spaace! Some silly sod has managed to trap a couple of dozen bees and has them in a freighter hold, hoping to take them to a zoo. No one has heard from him for a while and there is a suspiciously termite mound looking asteroid floating through space near the PCs ship, heading for somewhere civilised.
* At the hive's core. A really really determined scientist, Professor Jules Vernon, has built a hopefully bee proof tunnelling machine, want to try looking for those queens?
* Crews of visiting starships have been joining the local colony, becoming happy communards toiling for the greater good of all.
* For shits and giggles a couple of spoilt rich kids dropped a load of marijuana seed on the bee-lands from a high altitude grav speeder. The stuff took root, the bees are actively farming it and are apparently going a bit weird. Time for friendly contact? Or to take an armoured combine harvester and get as much dope as you can before the bees sober up and kill you?

Brandy

2013-05-27T09:42:34Z

Bert: /* Adventure Hooks */

== Brandy ==

=== Aquila 473 B 100542 C Non Agricultural, Non Industrial, Vacuum ===

There are stars of all sizes and colours, white, yellow, orange, red and brown. There are quite a lot of brown dwarfs dotted around, dimly illuminating star systems consisting of interstellar dreck and slurry, particles of dirty ice too small for a beetle to colonise. Most don't appear on any but the most detailed star maps, space is big, it is very rare one even rates as a navigational hazard, space is big and they rarely impinge on the direct routes between more interesting inhabited systems. The exception is Brandy.

Brandy lies in the middle of a dark nebula made of a mix of organic molecules most notably ethanol (well methanol actually exists out there so why not?).

Four different colonies compete, run by British Petroleum, New Standard Oil from the US, Lukoil from Russia and a gang of mainly Scandinavian freelance belters called the Berusadine Brotherhood.

Each of these has a base (BP have bagged the only orbiting body big enough to be a planet and built a starport called New Milford Haven) and a number of refineries and mining vessels trundling round the system, grabbing the oil/ice asteroids and sucking in the denser strands of gas.

From the main world Brandy gives about as much light as a 40 watt bulb, a dull purplish brown star about 20% covered in black sunspots edged in dull red. Every few hours a cloud of ethanol gets close enough to be caught up in one of the sluggish solar flares, making it burn with a dim blue flame. Residents say its looks a bit like a Christmas pudding, if you squint and are three sheets to the wind.

The main product of the system is a variety of interstellar light mineral oil, but inevitably various bored engineers have found a way of distilling off the booze to make 'Starshine' - various kinds of 90+% proof liquor dosed with food colouring and flavourings cooked up by organic chemists from the heavier fractions. Most people find it vile, but it is popular among the growing number of semi-feral spacebums who work asteroid belts and Oort clouds throughout Known Space, especially with a couple of ice cubes freshly chipped off a comet and shot of Ultra-Bee venom.

=== Adventure Hooks ===
* New Standard Oil are trying a new venture, the 'booze cruise', taking college students out into deep space in a gas scooper on a fun filled holiday of liver damage and high jinks. If a given batch of dipsomaniacs drink an entire asteroid they get their money back.

* British Petroleum Health and Safety have had it with the 'Starshiners' running illegal cracking plants in unoccupied craters, they want undercover agents to infiltrate their organisation.

* Clive Lam of the infamous Clive's Bar wants a hundred gallons of top quality interstellar liquid brain damage, and he has heard the Berusadine boys are the ones to get it from. Don't screw it up, if they don't chuck you out of an airlock, Clive will.

* One of the Lukoil mining vessels, the St Valdimir, has not been heard from in some time. Find it and find out what the hell they have been drinking, last known location has massive cyrillic swearwords, crafted from frozen poop from the vacuum toilets, doing a three body orbit round each other.

* The New Canaan temperance society are in town with a US Navy surplus frigate and a hold full of tracts. Tread carefully around the Standard Oil stations.

* Astro-chemists have wondered where the millions of tons of ethanol has been coming from, things of that molecular weight shouldn't be possible to build out of drifting carbon dust,hydrogen gas and radiation. Professor Stella Artois has made a shocking announcement – it is made by a bacterium-like thingy that evolved in deep space! Wonder if it any are still floating in that Starshine gunk that has got so popular? And what effect will they have if ingested?

Brandy

2013-05-27T09:42:08Z

Bert: /* Brandy */

== Brandy ==

=== Aquila 473 B 100542 C Non Agricultural, Non Industrial, Vacuum ===

There are stars of all sizes and colours, white, yellow, orange, red and brown. There are quite a lot of brown dwarfs dotted around, dimly illuminating star systems consisting of interstellar dreck and slurry, particles of dirty ice too small for a beetle to colonise. Most don't appear on any but the most detailed star maps, space is big, it is very rare one even rates as a navigational hazard, space is big and they rarely impinge on the direct routes between more interesting inhabited systems. The exception is Brandy.

Brandy lies in the middle of a dark nebula made of a mix of organic molecules most notably ethanol (well methanol actually exists out there so why not?).

Four different colonies compete, run by British Petroleum, New Standard Oil from the US, Lukoil from Russia and a gang of mainly Scandinavian freelance belters called the Berusadine Brotherhood.

Each of these has a base (BP have bagged the only orbiting body big enough to be a planet and built a starport called New Milford Haven) and a number of refineries and mining vessels trundling round the system, grabbing the oil/ice asteroids and sucking in the denser strands of gas.

From the main world Brandy gives about as much light as a 40 watt bulb, a dull purplish brown star about 20% covered in black sunspots edged in dull red. Every few hours a cloud of ethanol gets close enough to be caught up in one of the sluggish solar flares, making it burn with a dim blue flame. Residents say its looks a bit like a Christmas pudding, if you squint and are three sheets to the wind.

The main product of the system is a variety of interstellar light mineral oil, but inevitably various bored engineers have found a way of distilling off the booze to make 'Starshine' - various kinds of 90+% proof liquor dosed with food colouring and flavourings cooked up by organic chemists from the heavier fractions. Most people find it vile, but it is popular among the growing number of semi-feral spacebums who work asteroid belts and Oort clouds throughout Known Space, especially with a couple of ice cubes freshly chipped off a comet and shot of Ultra-Bee venom.

=== Adventure Hooks ===
* New Standard Oil are trying a new venture, the 'booze cruise', taking college students out into deep space in a gas scooper on a fun filled holiday of liver damage and high jinks. If a given batch of dipsomaniacs drink an entire asteroid they get their money back.

* British Petroleum Health and Safety have had it with the 'Starshiners' running illegal cracking plants in unoccupied craters, they want undercover agents to infiltrate their organisation.

* Clive Lam of the infamous Clive's Bar wants a hundred gallons of top quality interstellar liquid brain damage, and he has heard the Berusadine boys are the ones to get it from. Don't screw it up, if they don't chuck you out of an airlock, Clive will.

* One of the Lukoil mining vessels, the St Valdimir, has not been heard from in some time. Find it and find out what the hell they have been drinking, last known location has massive cyrillic swearwords, crafted from frozen poop from the vacuum toilets, doing a three body orbit round each other.

* The New Canaan temperance society are in town with a US Navy surplus frigate and a hold full of tracts. Tread carefully around the Standard Oil stations.
Astro-chemists have wondered where the millions of tons of ethanol has been coming from, things of that molecular weight shouldn't be possible to build out of drifting carbon dust,hydrogen gas and radiation. Professor Stella Artois has made a shocking announcement – it is made by a bacterium-like thingy that evolved in deep space! Wonder if it any are still floating in that Starshine gunk that has got so popular? And what effect will they have if ingested?

Brandy

2013-05-27T09:38:39Z

Bert: Created page with "== Brandy =="

== Brandy ==

Aquila

2013-05-27T09:34:42Z

Bert: Created page with "=== Aquila 230 A 985 858 A Garden, High Population, Rich === A very earth like world of temperate climate, Aquila soon filled up with dozens of little colonies from all over Ear..."

=== Aquila 230 A 985 858 A Garden, High Population, Rich ===

A very earth like world of temperate climate, Aquila soon filled up with dozens of little colonies from all over Earth and Known Space and now has a population of 310 million. A series of mostly peaceful amalgamations has left five states in control (numbers indicate relative power):

Merovin - independent mostly French speaking nation 5
Onika - very loosely affiliated extra-planetary Japanese prefecture, with lots of non-Japanese residents 9
New Dorset - English colony, currently torn by agitation for independence, many Russian speakers, Americans, Scots and Irish 5
The Eagle Khalifate - Small Shia state in an on and off state of war with Merovin, accusing the Merovinese of being in thrall to Shaitan 1
Federation of American Aquilan States - Actually only one state, of the original three US colony sites one became a county of New Dorset by popular plebiscite and another simply fizzled out to become little more than a military outpost as colonists moved to the cities of Onika and Merovin 2

There is an Aquilan League of Nations which includes all of the states. The FAAS are frequently a bit dubious about their membership, though promises of return of lost territory keep them hanging around, and the Khalifate frequently storm out accusing the whole thing of being a Merovinese plot to take over the world.

The planet is wealthy, with many large and mostly pleasant cities and tolerably democratic and bureaucratic governments, though there is a growing class divide in Merovin and the FAAS.

Oddities are the presence of a Hobbit colony, the strange monument Icehenge on one of the outer worlds and the presence of plenty of New Age space-hippies.

The New Age lot are a very mixed bunch and can be traced back to a number of odd semi-cultic groups who founded mostly failed colonies in the more far off parts of the world. Odinism is popular, as is Druidism, and the magic crystal mines do a roaring trade. There is a Scientologist presence, though they are officially banned from Onika after a nasty financial scandal, and even an 'Institute of Psionics', where rich fruitcakes sit about doing pseudo-yogic exercises and claim to be able to read people's minds. Even the staid and religiously conventional Eagle Khalifate has got in on the act, with the first new Sufi saint in centuries, Dmitri Alikiran, attracting hundreds of followers. Offworlders say there's something in the water, while Ayatollah Isidri accuses all of them of being seduced by the devil, who is, of course, French!

=== Icehenge ===

Icehenge is a circle of columns of ice, each slightly different, averaging 3m wide and 9m tall. They can be found on an otherwise dull and unexciting ice ball, the outermost planet of the Aquila system. The ice-liths all have sloping upper surfaces and it looks more like a slightly smarter modern art version of the Callanish stone circle than Stonehenge, with is lintels and nested circles and horseshoes of stones.

What the hell is it doing there? Endless quantities of cranks have theorised about the place, coming up with the usual blather about prehistoric starfaring cultures from Earth and extinct aliens, interstellar ley lines, astronomical alignments and so on.

Serious archaeologists know only that the ice is local (they checked the chemistry), the site was smoothed off before construction and that they have no idea how old it is, dating ice left standing out in a near vacuum is not something they have any firm idea about. It is also damned far from anywhere, getting there even at 6G acceleration from the system's inhabited world takes a couple of weeks and the amount of comet debris nearby makes a short warp inadvisable. Someone tried it once and got their ship smashed to bits, giving the tin foil hat brigade plenty of theories about curses and warp distorting defences to witter about.

Standing as it does on a flat white plain so far from it's sun that Kibara Prime is lost in the starfield and with a ragged ring of ice chunks that orbit the planet hanging in the sky above it, it is a very beautiful and spooky place and tourists are willing to pay a pretty steep price to go and see it.

==== Adventure Hooks ====
* It is a meeting place for space druids. Various eccentrics from around Known Space built it and they have built others yet undiscovered in systems more less in a line back to Earth. On the appointed day all the rings will be occupied by twits in spacesuits with pointy hats waving freeze dried mistletoe and they will supposedly telepathically contact each other. Will it work? Who knows, but the PCs have a bunch of nerdy computer programmers and accountants calling each other by made up celticy sounding names led by a systems analyst calling himself Arthur with a ice sword he keeps in a bucket of liquid hydrogen willing to pay oodles to be taken out there. Lets hope they don't have a theological split along the way eh? Or get too riled if it doesn't work, or too over excited if it does.

* It really was aliens. It will soon be midsummers day on this isolated world, which only happens every 300 years and that's when the true alignments will come right, according to anyone who knows anything about megaliths on Earth. Various rival scientific expeditions are setting out to see what happens. They know the stars the alignments will point at already from computer models, this is just a sightseeing trip really, but some are a bit curious to see what happens. Does a space portal crossing hundreds of parsecs open? Do disembodied alien intelligences appear and dispense ancient wisdom? Or do the various squads of scientists squabble and have a fight and miss it all?

* The main tourist carrier is Jellaby Lines, founded by Douglas Jellaby, they guy whose starship fell out of warp in the outer system and who found the ring by accident 40 years ago. Or that's his story – he actually built the thing himself as a money spinner. A boffin with an answer to dating the thing properly is aboard his ship, along with the PCs. Is he going to fall out of an airlock?

* The Duke of Hereford from England, not having anything better to do, is on his way to the place. Terrorists from New Dorset, a colony trying to secede from the English Empire will be there to meet him.

* The bit about astronomical alignments is pish, a PC realises, its places on the planet that are important, like that big ice mountain on the line from lith 18 to lith 6... what is under there?

* It's a graveyard. A scout ship with a crew from the Western Isles of Scotland crashed here a hundred and seventy years ago, well supplied, but with no comms and no way off the world and at that time precious few ships passing through. They built it as an homage to Callanish back home to pass the time and maybe, just maybe, a signal to passing vessels to come down and save them. Deep seismic probes, only useable with big explosives, will find the graves and deep buried ship.

* A bored teenager throws a chunk of ice at a lith while the PCs are there, and the thing vibrates. Now there's no sound in a vacuum, but perhaps there's a way to listen to the noise with a contact microphone – what tunes can you play, and what happens when you do?

* There is a lake under the ice – liquid nitrogen mostly, it being effin cold out here in deep space – is that why the henge is here? Drilling down into it awakens the Elder Thing lurking within, and as it squawks its spawn, frozen for aeons in the ice chunks in the rings above begin to wake...

* It was aliens, no kidding, really it was – they put this here as a marker for a strange matter waste dump that would warn any sensible species to stay well away. And what kind of buffoonish species couldn't read the clear warning signs from the variations in height of the liths, reflecting the extended tentacles of a Multiploid Quercate in pain? The overgrown monkeys digging a ruddy great tunnel under the site with laser drills, that's who.

* The liths were built by drug smugglers. Why take the risk of having a maser or electromagnetic beacon for your dropped drug packages when a visual sign will do? Make it something suitably weird and silly and no one will suss it out.

Zephyr

2012-11-30T20:53:16Z

Bert: /* Zephyr */

== Zephyr ==

'''UPP: B610515B'''

'''Trade: Desert, High Technology, Non Agricultural'''

A nearly airless and waterless world with one of the best starports in the Aquila Sector. The world has 800,000 people, almost all employees of the massive Korean chaebol LG, and are mostly of Korean origin. The colony is a cluster of domed towns and factory units manufacturing or assembling all kinds of consumer goods. It is placid, calm and civilised, almost too civilised in the opinion of conspiracy theorists who are searching for the tranquiliser drug plant plumbed into the water system. Since there is no agriculture, food is at a premium and very expensive for anything beyond basic ration blocks. Kimchi smuggling sounds like the stupidest occupation going, but on Zephyr it is a thriving business. There is allegedly a secret pickling factory somewhere in the outer reaches of the system turning foodstuffs and spices from Epsilon into a crude but passable kimchi... but what do they use for fish sauce?

=== Characters ===
Computer 0 and Trade 0 are automatic education skills, and any career can be followed. Rank in Citizen: Corporate can be used as a bonus to SS on world, and half rank (rounded down) in Worker likewise.

KnownSpace

2012-11-29T20:54:46Z

Bert:

= Known Space =

A communally created Traveller setting for Google Hangout games.

See here for further details.

http://expanduniver.blogspot.co.uk/

=== Why? ===

Lots of fun has been had over on G+ with hangout based games of D&D and near D&D, with players with characters made up in any number of different systems dropping in and out of various GMs games more or less on a whim, GMs linking different campaign worlds, running games in other people's homebrew settings, all kinds of unholy inter-game miscegenation and perversity.

While there have been some Traveller games run, there hasn't been the same buzz. The closest thing to it has been Jez Gordon's Star Wars game, with ever changing parties drawn from a moderate sized group of characters.

Traveller ought to be ideal for the Flailsnail style of play – PCs are space bums, liable to turn up on any planet anywhere (any GMs pet planet/subsector) and dive into the first outrageously daft money making scheme dangled in front of their snotty noses by a patron (whatever evil scheme the GM has up his sleeve for this session).

But things have got a bit chaotic in the Flailsnails looniverse – I have to say I roll my eyes whenever a mutant race/sub-class undead amphibiod PC whips out a ray gun these days. So rather than colliding universes, how about a loose-ish collaborative meta-setting thingy in which a GM can concoct some pretty outlandish planets and scenarios, but which maintains some internal coherence and puts some limits on the crazy?

== Known Space 2312AD ==

=== Tech level maximum 12 ===
Guns and lasers, no (or very, very few) twerps turning up in power armour with a plasma cannon and wasting everything in sight.

=== No Psionics ===
State of play with spooky powers is as it is today, the province of a lunatic fringe, charlatans and conspiracy nuts. Doesn't happen, won't work, and if your cousin's brother-in-law's mate's sister reckoned she saw some twit levitating on Epsilon 5 it was because she was high as a kite on Cake (THE party drug of the 24th century). Of course if the GM wants to deploy them then that's just fine, as long as they are in the hands of some drastically alien villain NPC, but see below...

=== No Aliens ===
The human race has bimbled across a good couple of thousand cubic parsecs of the galaxy and has found some alien ecosystems with suitably oddball animals, but no actual intelligent alien civilisations. There's arguments as to whether species A is actually intelligent, and whether humans would recognise an alien civilisation if they saw it. But no blokes in furry suits and bandoliers making bear noises, no people in fake tan with corrugated heads, humanity it appears is alone. Of course there almost certainly will be alien civilisations out there someplace we just haven't met them yet.

As with psionics, aliens should be something truly spooky and out of this world, and first contact fraught with strangeness and unguessable hazards and complications, not something you meet by the zooload down at the local bar.

=== Limited Cybernetics ===
Not that many people have managed to successfully stick silicon into themselves in Known Space and most of those only did it to replace genuinely injured and damaged parts of the body. I have no idea of how real science is really doing at splicing electronics onto nerves, but in the Known Space setting it's dubious and unreliable and the people that do it are regarded as a bit wrong in the head and to have eaten too much Cake.

=== Anarchy! ===
Human beings in the 24th century are no better organised than humans now. World governments? Only on worlds of a million or fewer people of the same general origin, otherwise there is bound to be several rival statelets, factions, commercial exploitation enterprises etc.

When the human race made jump drive work every country on Earth launched colonisation missions, mostly grabbing land on the same few vaguely inhabitable planets. Then it got cheap enough for corporations to have a go, then every separatist, religious, extremist, utopian, libertarian, authoritarian and otherwise misunderstood gang of loons leapfrogged the lot and plunged into the void looking for a place to set up their dream society away from anyone else. Some worked, some didn't. Any world in known space could have any kind of society on it, usually several, and usually at loggerheads with each other, if not actual war.

Genuine interstellar wars have been few and far between, but plenty of Earth states and alliances and the more established and populous off-world colonies are geared up with space navies. With Known Space so vast and sparsely populated and so many colonies having hostile planetbound rivals to fend off there hasn't been much call for them as yet.

=== A world of your own ===
When a player generates a PC he generates a home nation and sketches in a planet for that PC too, all of which will become setting canon, to be drawn on by any later GM or player if they so wish.

=== Rules ===
I only know Classic 1ed Traveller and Mongoose, but any Traveller ruleset should in theory be permissible, and if reliable conversions from other sci-fi systems can be made then lets use them.

==== [[World Generation]] ====

= Sectors =
Only one mapped sector so far

=== [[Aquila Sector]] ===

= Worlds =
An alphabetical list of worlds detailed so far.

[[Clive's Bar]]

[[Epsilon]]

[[Riley]]

[[Mongo]]

[[Zephyr]]

= Earth =
In 2312AD Earth is still the centre of the human universe, and I have no better idea than the next man as to what is likely to have happened to it in the next couple of hundred years. Players and GMs will be free to make up whatever stuff they like about the history of their own nation or district, and how this affects Known Space at large.

== United Kingdom ==

''(UK readers feel free to argue the toss over this version of our future history, nothing is set in stone)''

The UK is no more. Scotland, Wales and Ulster all went their separate ways over the course of the 21st century, and although initially still 'united' under the Crown, Scotland and Wales became Republics, and Ulster joined the Republic of Ireland. Even within England there is devolution with regional parliaments (the legacy of the last Labour government ever back in the 22nd century) in the north west, northeast, Yorkshire and the north midlands, the Midlands and the southwest. England left the EU while the other parts of the British Isles stayed in, and there is agitation amongst the outlying regions to ditch the rump English parliament and become independent EU states.

Interstellar colonisation has added half a dozen new regions to England, one of which has successfully rebelled and become an independent state in its own right and a couple of others are on the way. The regional governments have even set up colonies of their own independent of the main English effort - visitors to the joint Geordie/Scouse/Tyke outpost on New Elmet are so baffled by the local argot that they refuse to believe they are in an 'English' colony at all.

The Royals are still going, but there is agitation even in the conservative south for a Republic, possibly because Prince George, the heir, has married a Jamaican and spends most of his time in Tibet hanging out with the Panchen Lama, and resigned rather than go and do his duty as a Royal Star Navy officer putting down the New Berkshire rebellion on the planet Orion.

= Starships =
There will be some.

= Characters =
And some of these.

= General Background =
[[The Scout Service.]]

KnownSpace

2012-11-29T20:27:48Z

Bert: /* Worlds */

= Known Space =

A communally created Traveller setting for Google Hangout games.

See here for further details.

http://expanduniver.blogspot.co.uk/

=== Why? ===

Lots of fun has been had over on G+ with hangout based games of D&D and near D&D, with players with characters made up in any number of different systems dropping in and out of various GMs games more or less on a whim, GMs linking different campaign worlds, running games in other people's homebrew settings, all kinds of unholy inter-game miscegenation and perversity.

While there have been some Traveller games run, there hasn't been the same buzz. The closest thing to it has been Jez Gordon's Star Wars game, with ever changing parties drawn from a moderate sized group of characters.

Traveller ought to be ideal for the Flailsnail style of play – PCs are space bums, liable to turn up on any planet anywhere (any GMs pet planet/subsector) and dive into the first outrageously daft money making scheme dangled in front of their snotty noses by a patron (whatever evil scheme the GM has up his sleeve for this session).

But things have got a bit chaotic in the Flailsnails looniverse – I have to say I roll my eyes whenever a mutant race/sub-class undead amphibiod PC whips out a ray gun these days. So rather than colliding universes, how about a loose-ish collaborative meta-setting thingy in which a GM can concoct some pretty outlandish planets and scenarios, but which maintains some internal coherence and puts some limits on the crazy?

== Known Space 2312AD ==

=== Tech level maximum 12 ===
Guns and lasers, no (or very, very few) twerps turning up in power armour with a plasma cannon and wasting everything in sight.

=== No Psionics ===
State of play with spooky powers is as it is today, the province of a lunatic fringe, charlatans and conspiracy nuts. Doesn't happen, won't work, and if your cousin's brother-in-law's mate's sister reckoned she saw some twit levitating on Epsilon 5 it was because she was high as a kite on Cake (THE party drug of the 24th century). Of course if the GM wants to deploy them then that's just fine, as long as they are in the hands of some drastically alien villain NPC, but see below...

=== No Aliens ===
The human race has bimbled across a good couple of thousand cubic parsecs of the galaxy and has found some alien ecosystems with suitably oddball animals, but no actual intelligent alien civilisations. There's arguments as to whether species A is actually intelligent, and whether humans would recognise an alien civilisation if they saw it. But no blokes in furry suits and bandoliers making bear noises, no people in fake tan with corrugated heads, humanity it appears is alone. Of course there almost certainly will be alien civilisations out there someplace we just haven't met them yet.

As with psionics, aliens should be something truly spooky and out of this world, and first contact fraught with strangeness and unguessable hazards and complications, not something you meet by the zooload down at the local bar.

=== Limited Cybernetics ===
Not that many people have managed to successfully stick silicon into themselves in Known Space and most of those only did it to replace genuinely injured and damaged parts of the body. I have no idea of how real science is really doing at splicing electronics onto nerves, but in the Known Space setting it's dubious and unreliable and the people that do it are regarded as a bit wrong in the head and to have eaten too much Cake.

=== Anarchy! ===
Human beings in the 24th century are no better organised than humans now. World governments? Only on worlds of a million or fewer people of the same general origin, otherwise there is bound to be several rival statelets, factions, commercial exploitation enterprises etc.

When the human race made jump drive work every country on Earth launched colonisation missions, mostly grabbing land on the same few vaguely inhabitable planets. Then it got cheap enough for corporations to have a go, then every separatist, religious, extremist, utopian, libertarian, authoritarian and otherwise misunderstood gang of loons leapfrogged the lot and plunged into the void looking for a place to set up their dream society away from anyone else. Some worked, some didn't. Any world in known space could have any kind of society on it, usually several, and usually at loggerheads with each other, if not actual war.

Genuine interstellar wars have been few and far between, but plenty of Earth states and alliances and the more established and populous off-world colonies are geared up with space navies. With Known Space so vast and sparsely populated and so many colonies having hostile planetbound rivals to fend off there hasn't been much call for them as yet.

=== A world of your own ===
When a player generates a PC he generates a home nation and sketches in a planet for that PC too, all of which will become setting canon, to be drawn on by any later GM or player if they so wish.

=== Earth ===
In 2312AD Earth is still the centre of the human universe, and I have no better idea than the next man as to what is likely to have happened to it in the next couple of hundred years. Players and GMs will be free to make up whatever stuff they like about the history of their own nation or district, and how this affects Known Space at large.

=== Rules ===
I only know Classic 1ed Traveller and Mongoose, but any Traveller ruleset should in theory be permissible, and if reliable conversions from other sci-fi systems can be made then lets use them.

==== [[World Generation]] ====

= Sectors =
Only one mapped sector so far

=== [[Aquila Sector]] ===

= Worlds =
An alphabetical list of worlds detailed so far.

[[Clive's Bar]]

[[Epsilon]]

[[Riley]]

[[Mongo]]

[[Zephyr]]

= Starships =
There will be some.

= Characters =
And some of these.

= General Background =
[[The Scout Service.]]

Mongo

2012-11-29T20:26:21Z

Bert: Created page with "== Mongo == '''UPP E8B61116''' '''Trade: Fluid Oceans, Low Population''' Mongo is a boiling world with a corrosive atmosphere and oceans of sulphurous gloop that would put Ven..."

== Mongo ==

'''UPP E8B61116'''

'''Trade: Fluid Oceans, Low Population'''

Mongo is a boiling world with a corrosive atmosphere and oceans of sulphurous gloop that would put Venus to shame. It has one subterranean settlement called Mingo City, after Ming the Merciless's city in Flash Gordon, inhabited by 60 profoundly bored and probably mentally unstable employees of Greenfield Incorporated, an English company that claims to be a Known Space leader in terraforming. None of their techniques worked on Venus back in the Sol system, but the eternally optimistic and smooth talking CEO, Gilbert Phipps, raised billions more pounds to have another go on what he claims is the far more promising world of Mongo. Disgruntled employees reckon he's pocketed the cash while sending them to do busywork on an impressively shiny but utterly useless atmospheric detoxifier to impress visiting investors. Supply ships come ever more infrequently, and requests to head office in the Channel Islands for replacement life support equipment seem to be falling on deaf ears. Little actual work has been done for years, and the base crew sit watching endless reruns of vintage 2D sci-fi flicks from the collection of the Project Manager, Menzies McGoldrick, who has been growing a suspiciously goatee beard these last few months.

=== Characters ===
Mongo's inhabitants are a collection of technicians and engineers from England and Scotland, with a few Canadians, Americans, South Africans, Indians and other anglophone countries mixed in. Any Scholar: Scientist or Scholar: Field Researcher can be a former employee of Greenfield with a contact on the planet, and be thanking their lucky stars they got out of this damn fool project before the rot really set in.

Zephyr

2012-11-29T19:52:31Z

Bert:

== Zephyr ==

'''UPP: B610515B'''

'''Trade: Desert, High Technology, Non Agricultural'''

A nearly airless and waterless world with one of the best starports in the Aquila Sector. The world has 80,000 people, almost all employees of the massive Korean chaebol LG, and are mostly of Korean origin. The colony is a cluster of domed towns and factory units manufacturing or assembling all kinds of consumer goods. It is placid, calm and civilised, almost too civilised in the opinion of conspiracy theorists who are searching for the tranquiliser drug plant plumbed into the water system. Since there is no agriculture, food is at a premium and very expensive for anything beyond basic ration blocks. Kimchi smuggling sounds like the stupidest occupation going, but on Zephyr it is a thriving business. There is allegedly a secret pickling factory somewhere in the outer reaches of the system turning foodstuffs and spices from Epsilon into a crude but passable kimchi... but what do they use for fish sauce?

=== Characters ===
Computer 0 and Trade 0 are automatic education skills, and any career can be followed. Rank in Citizen: Corporate can be used as a bonus to SS on world, and half rank (rounded down) in Worker likewise.

Zephyr

2012-11-29T19:45:12Z

Bert: Created page with "== Zephyr == '''UPP: B610515B Trade: Desert, High Technology, Non Agricultural''' A nearly airless and waterless world with one of the best starports in the Aquila Sector. The..."

== Zephyr ==

'''UPP: B610515B

Trade: Desert, High Technology, Non Agricultural'''

A nearly airless and waterless world with one of the best starports in the Aquila Sector. The world has 80,000 people, almost all employees of the massive Korean chaebol LG, and are mostly of Korean origin. The colony is a cluster of domed towns and factory units manufacturing or assembling all kinds of consumer goods. It is placid, calm and civilised, almost too civilised in the opinion of conspiracy theorists who are searching for the tranquiliser drug plant plumbed into the water system. Since there is no agriculture, food is at a premium and very expensive for anything beyond basic ration blocks. Kimchi smuggling sounds like the stupidest occupation going, but on Zephyr it is a thriving business. There is allegedly a secret pickling factory somewhere in the outer reaches of the system turning foodstuffs and spices from Epsilon into a crude but passable kimchi... but what do they use for fish sauce?

Aquila Sector

2012-11-29T19:26:01Z

Bert:

Clive's Bar

2012-11-29T19:25:08Z

Bert:

== Clive's Bar ==

'''UPP: E0003125

Trade: Asteroid, Low Population, Non Industrial'''

Clive's Bar is in the midst of an asteroid field worked by several thousand wandering hard-case freelance Belters. They are an ornery lot and regularly meet up at the eponymous bar for rest, recreation and a brawl. Clive Lam, the bar owner and unofficial mayor of the system is a genuine former member of the French Legion Extraplanetaire, a bunch of notorious thugs who took over where the Earth bound French Foreign Legion left off. He tolerates a lot of brutal goings on in his bar cum spacestation, but when Petit Clive, his autoshotgun, comes out from under the bar, you leave, fast.

Good place for buying ore, tall tales, smugglers, chartering daredevil pilots and their leaky starships, and getting chucked out of an airlock without a spacesuit ('A little dance with Clive' in the local parlance).

Now has some big corporate operators trying to move in with refinery ships, the locals are tooling up to kick them out.

=== Characters ===

No actual natives, any Drifter: Scavenger with Streetwise 1+ and a spare Contact can declare themselves to have put some time in mining the Clive's Bar system and be part of the local Belter Brotherhood.

Clive's Bar

2012-11-29T19:24:26Z

Bert: Created page with "== Clive's Bar == '''UPP: E0003125 Trade: Asteroid, Low Population, Non Industrial''' Clive's Bar is in the midst of an asteroid field worked by several thousand wandering har..."

== Clive's Bar ==

'''UPP: E0003125

Trade: Asteroid, Low Population, Non Industrial'''

Clive's Bar is in the midst of an asteroid field worked by several thousand wandering hard-case freelance Belters. They are an ornery lot and regularly meet up at the eponymous bar for rest, recreation and a brawl. Clive Lam, the bar owner and unofficial mayor of the system is a genuine former member of the French Legion Extraplanetaire, a bunch of notorious thugs who took over where the Earth bound French Foreign Legion left off. He tolerates a lot of brutal goings on in his bar cum spacestation, but when Petit Clive, his autoshotgun, comes out from under the bar, you leave, fast.

Good place for buying ore, tall tales, smugglers, chartering daredevil pilots and their leaky starships, and getting chucked out of an airlock without a spacesuit ('A little dance with Clive' in the local parlance).

Now has some big corporate operators trying to move in with refinery ships, the locals are tooling up to kick them out.

=== Characters ===

No actual natives, any Drifter: Wanderer with Streetwise 1+ and a spare Contact can declare themselves to have put some time in mining the Clive's Bar system and be part of the local Belter Brotherhood.

Aquila Sector

2012-11-29T19:02:40Z

Bert:

Aquila Sector

2012-11-29T18:51:46Z

Bert:

File:AquilaStarmap.jpg

2012-11-29T18:47:30Z

Bert: uploaded a new version of "File:AquilaStarmap.jpg"

KnownSpace

2012-11-29T18:11:44Z

Bert:

= Known Space =

A communally created Traveller setting for Google Hangout games.

See here for further details.

http://expanduniver.blogspot.co.uk/

=== Why? ===

Lots of fun has been had over on G+ with hangout based games of D&D and near D&D, with players with characters made up in any number of different systems dropping in and out of various GMs games more or less on a whim, GMs linking different campaign worlds, running games in other people's homebrew settings, all kinds of unholy inter-game miscegenation and perversity.

While there have been some Traveller games run, there hasn't been the same buzz. The closest thing to it has been Jez Gordon's Star Wars game, with ever changing parties drawn from a moderate sized group of characters.

Traveller ought to be ideal for the Flailsnail style of play – PCs are space bums, liable to turn up on any planet anywhere (any GMs pet planet/subsector) and dive into the first outrageously daft money making scheme dangled in front of their snotty noses by a patron (whatever evil scheme the GM has up his sleeve for this session).

But things have got a bit chaotic in the Flailsnails looniverse – I have to say I roll my eyes whenever a mutant race/sub-class undead amphibiod PC whips out a ray gun these days. So rather than colliding universes, how about a loose-ish collaborative meta-setting thingy in which a GM can concoct some pretty outlandish planets and scenarios, but which maintains some internal coherence and puts some limits on the crazy?

== Known Space 2312AD ==

=== Tech level maximum 12 ===
Guns and lasers, no (or very, very few) twerps turning up in power armour with a plasma cannon and wasting everything in sight.

=== No Psionics ===
State of play with spooky powers is as it is today, the province of a lunatic fringe, charlatans and conspiracy nuts. Doesn't happen, won't work, and if your cousin's brother-in-law's mate's sister reckoned she saw some twit levitating on Epsilon 5 it was because she was high as a kite on Cake (THE party drug of the 24th century). Of course if the GM wants to deploy them then that's just fine, as long as they are in the hands of some drastically alien villain NPC, but see below...

=== No Aliens ===
The human race has bimbled across a good couple of thousand cubic parsecs of the galaxy and has found some alien ecosystems with suitably oddball animals, but no actual intelligent alien civilisations. There's arguments as to whether species A is actually intelligent, and whether humans would recognise an alien civilisation if they saw it. But no blokes in furry suits and bandoliers making bear noises, no people in fake tan with corrugated heads, humanity it appears is alone. Of course there almost certainly will be alien civilisations out there someplace we just haven't met them yet.

As with psionics, aliens should be something truly spooky and out of this world, and first contact fraught with strangeness and unguessable hazards and complications, not something you meet by the zooload down at the local bar.

=== Limited Cybernetics ===
Not that many people have managed to successfully stick silicon into themselves in Known Space and most of those only did it to replace genuinely injured and damaged parts of the body. I have no idea of how real science is really doing at splicing electronics onto nerves, but in the Known Space setting it's dubious and unreliable and the people that do it are regarded as a bit wrong in the head and to have eaten too much Cake.

=== Anarchy! ===
Human beings in the 24th century are no better organised than humans now. World governments? Only on worlds of a million or fewer people of the same general origin, otherwise there is bound to be several rival statelets, factions, commercial exploitation enterprises etc.

When the human race made jump drive work every country on Earth launched colonisation missions, mostly grabbing land on the same few vaguely inhabitable planets. Then it got cheap enough for corporations to have a go, then every separatist, religious, extremist, utopian, libertarian, authoritarian and otherwise misunderstood gang of loons leapfrogged the lot and plunged into the void looking for a place to set up their dream society away from anyone else. Some worked, some didn't. Any world in known space could have any kind of society on it, usually several, and usually at loggerheads with each other, if not actual war.

Genuine interstellar wars have been few and far between, but plenty of Earth states and alliances and the more established and populous off-world colonies are geared up with space navies. With Known Space so vast and sparsely populated and so many colonies having hostile planetbound rivals to fend off there hasn't been much call for them as yet.

=== A world of your own ===
When a player generates a PC he generates a home nation and sketches in a planet for that PC too, all of which will become setting canon, to be drawn on by any later GM or player if they so wish.

=== Earth ===
In 2312AD Earth is still the centre of the human universe, and I have no better idea than the next man as to what is likely to have happened to it in the next couple of hundred years. Players and GMs will be free to make up whatever stuff they like about the history of their own nation or district, and how this affects Known Space at large.

=== Rules ===
I only know Classic 1ed Traveller and Mongoose, but any Traveller ruleset should in theory be permissible, and if reliable conversions from other sci-fi systems can be made then lets use them.

==== [[World Generation]] ====

= Sectors =
Only one mapped sector so far

=== [[Aquila Sector]] ===

= Worlds =
An alphabetical list of worlds detailed so far.

[[Epsilon]]

[[Riley]]

= Starships =
There will be some.

= Characters =
And some of these.

= General Background =
[[The Scout Service.]]

KnownSpace

2012-11-29T18:10:59Z

Bert:

= Known Space =

A communally created Traveller setting for Google Hangout games.

See here for further details.

http://expanduniver.blogspot.co.uk/

=== Why? ===

Lots of fun has been had over on G+ with hangout based games of D&D and near D&D, with players with characters made up in any number of different systems dropping in and out of various GMs games more or less on a whim, GMs linking different campaign worlds, running games in other people's homebrew settings, all kinds of unholy inter-game miscegenation and perversity.

While there have been some Traveller games run, there hasn't been the same buzz. The closest thing to it has been Jez Gordon's Star Wars game, with ever changing parties drawn from a moderate sized group of characters.

Traveller ought to be ideal for the Flailsnail style of play – PCs are space bums, liable to turn up on any planet anywhere (any GMs pet planet/subsector) and dive into the first outrageously daft money making scheme dangled in front of their snotty noses by a patron (whatever evil scheme the GM has up his sleeve for this session).

But things have got a bit chaotic in the Flailsnails looniverse – I have to say I roll my eyes whenever a mutant race/sub-class undead amphibiod PC whips out a ray gun these days. So rather than colliding universes, how about a loose-ish collaborative meta-setting thingy in which a GM can concoct some pretty outlandish planets and scenarios, but which maintains some internal coherence and puts some limits on the crazy?

== Known Space 2312AD ==

=== Tech level maximum 12 ===
Guns and lasers, no (or very, very few) twerps turning up in power armour with a plasma cannon and wasting everything in sight.

=== No Psionics ===
State of play with spooky powers is as it is today, the province of a lunatic fringe, charlatans and conspiracy nuts. Doesn't happen, won't work, and if your cousin's brother-in-law's mate's sister reckoned she saw some twit levitating on Epsilon 5 it was because she was high as a kite on Cake (THE party drug of the 24th century). Of course if the GM wants to deploy them then that's just fine, as long as they are in the hands of some drastically alien villain NPC, but see below...

=== No Aliens ===
The human race has bimbled across a good couple of thousand cubic parsecs of the galaxy and has found some alien ecosystems with suitably oddball animals, but no actual intelligent alien civilisations. There's arguments as to whether species A is actually intelligent, and whether humans would recognise an alien civilisation if they saw it. But no blokes in furry suits and bandoliers making bear noises, no people in fake tan with corrugated heads, humanity it appears is alone. Of course there almost certainly will be alien civilisations out there someplace we just haven't met them yet.

As with psionics, aliens should be something truly spooky and out of this world, and first contact fraught with strangeness and unguessable hazards and complications, not something you meet by the zooload down at the local bar.

=== Limited Cybernetics ===
Not that many people have managed to successfully stick silicon into themselves in Known Space and most of those only did it to replace genuinely injured and damaged parts of the body. I have no idea of how real science is really doing at splicing electronics onto nerves, but in the Known Space setting it's dubious and unreliable and the people that do it are regarded as a bit wrong in the head and to have eaten too much Cake.

=== Anarchy! ===
Human beings in the 24th century are no better organised than humans now. World governments? Only on worlds of a million or fewer people of the same general origin, otherwise there is bound to be several rival statelets, factions, commercial exploitation enterprises etc.

When the human race made jump drive work every country on Earth launched colonisation missions, mostly grabbing land on the same few vaguely inhabitable planets. Then it got cheap enough for corporations to have a go, then every separatist, religious, extremist, utopian, libertarian, authoritarian and otherwise misunderstood gang of loons leapfrogged the lot and plunged into the void looking for a place to set up their dream society away from anyone else. Some worked, some didn't. Any world in known space could have any kind of society on it, usually several, and usually at loggerheads with each other, if not actual war.

Genuine interstellar wars have been few and far between, but plenty of Earth states and alliances and the more established and populous off-world colonies are geared up with space navies. With Known Space so vast and sparsely populated and so many colonies having hostile planetbound rivals to fend off there hasn't been much call for them as yet.

=== A world of your own ===
When a player generates a PC he generates a home nation and sketches in a planet for that PC too, all of which will become setting canon, to be drawn on by any later GM or player if they so wish.

=== Earth ===
In 2312AD Earth is still the centre of the human universe, and I have no better idea than the next man as to what is likely to have happened to it in the next couple of hundred years. Players and GMs will be free to make up whatever stuff they like about the history of their own nation or district, and how this affects Known Space at large.

=== Rules ===
I only know Classic 1ed Traveller and Mongoose, but any Traveller ruleset should in theory be permissible, and if reliable conversions from other sci-fi systems can be made then lets use them.

==== [[World Generation]] ====

= Sectors =
Only one mapped sector so far

=== [[Aquila Sector]] ===

= Worlds =
An alphabetical list of worlds detailed so far.
[[Epsilon]]
[[Riley]]

= Starships =
There will be some.

= Characters =
And some of these.

= General Background =
[[The Scout Service.]]

Epsilon

2012-11-28T21:54:07Z

Bert:

The Epsilon system has a G8 primary, Chess, and three worlds, Steinitz, a huge gas giant orbiting at 0.9 AU, Capablanca, a medium sized gas giant at 12 AU and Alekhine, a large rocky world at 58 AU.

= Epsilon =

'''UPP C 644643 A'''

'''Trade: Agricultural, Garden, Poor'''

The major inhabited world is Epsilon Steinitz, or Epsilon for short, the fifth moon of the hot gas giant Steinitz.

It is cold, with ice caps reaching down into the tropics, and round the equator is a large ocean dotted with islands. There are two continents, mostly ice bound, with frozen tundra and bleak mountain ranges as the only non-icebound terrain. The biosphere is primitive, with very simple sponges and graptolite creatures and algae in the oceans and tough lichen-like vegetation on the tundra-like permafrost plains, which have thin waterlogged topsoil interspersed with gravel beds and bare rock left by previous even harsher glaciations. The air is thin and tainted with sulphur dioxide from frequent volcanic eruptions and has precious little oxygen from the sluggish plant-life.

Epsilon has a population of 7 000 000 and four rival colonies, Neuland, New Canaan, Adelbert PLC and the Cyber-Raj (relative sizes 8, 7, 2 and 3)

There are three major states, Neuland, New Canaan and the Cyber-Raj, plus the semi independent Adelbert Corporation.

== Neuland ==
Leftist Euro-anarchists with a participatory democracy (Govt Type 4, Law level 3, TL 10) and a bit of a fetish about computers and software (TL 12 electronics available), often called 'the Bakhuninite Extents'. One of the few places in Known Space you can get cyberware, but it is expensive. Everyone is an eternal student plugging into online university, only local currency is used (Roks), handcrafted goods sold offworld at premium prices. Main exports subversive MMORPGs, expertly pirated media and software, freelance 'creatives', punk rock bands, designer drugs and financial brigands who use corporate buyouts to break up other states economies to keep their own ramshackle system going.

Everyone has a wristputer at the very least and is a memeber of several co-operatives and communes. They vote on everything and anything, and proudly say they are the freest people in Known Space. Critics say that is because they have no government and no laws, but that is an exaggeration. Neulanders are bound by all sorts of conventions from their residence arcology, work-group and the fact that pissing someone off can sometimes get you shot dead.

The locals only deal in their own currency, Roks, and no one may own more than 100 000, and are forced to spend the excess, which the locals claim keeps the economy buoyant. Everyone gets 50 Roks per month per year of residence from the Neuland Financial Cooperative, up to a maximum of 800 Roks, and citizenship is pretty easy to get. The NFC gets it money from exchanging credits to Roks and gets a cut from all exports and offworld earnings of citizens. It also runs banking operations on a number of other worlds.

Everyone also gets free access to the University of the People, a mostly virtual university giving high quality education in every imaginable subject, though understandably more staid jurisdictions don't take their economics and politics qualifications very seriously.

Physically Neuland is a low rise sprawl of pressurised 'arcologies' like blocks of flats with covered courtyards within and between them, with extensive tunnels recycled from mining operations connecting them. Private transport isn't common, but endless grav busses, taxis, ground cars and even rickshaws ferry people about the muddy half finished streets. On the outskirts of the main settlement this turns into factory buildings and metal works, abandoned and recycled as the fortunes of various communes rise and fall, interspersed with hydroponic sheds. A few outlying towns of a couple of arcologies each exist, and a wide hinterland of ramshackle farms, workshops and marginal enterprises extends for two hundred kilometers into the lichenous tundra.

Locally Neuland is usually called the 'Bakhuninite Extents', though if Bakhunin himself were alive to see what these nutjobs have made of his philosophy he'd probably wish he'd never bothered.

=== Characters ===
Neulander characters get +1 Education, but they also add (or subtract) their Education bonus from their Social Standing, and take an extra -2 for being part of a dodgy state that looks weird and subversive to outsiders. In any case their dedicated egalitarianism means no one can be below Social Standing 3 or above 10.

All have Computer 0 as part of their basic education, must choose either Streetwise 0 or Carousing 0 as their second education skill and have Gun and Melee Combat 0 as part of their educational options.

None can join the Nobles, Navy or Marines, and their Army, such as it is, has no officers.

All Neulanders start with a state issued wristputer weighing 300g and acting as a computer 1 worth 15 Roks, a filter/oxygen mask good for four hours outdoor use on Epsilon and a set of cold weather clothing.

== New Canaan ==
Dominated by fundamentalist religious nuts of US origin, and theoretically an extra planetary territory of the US. Govt Type 13, Law level 8, except for guns, TL 8, but with plenty of higher tech imports. Everyone is required to be armed and all males required to put time into the national guard. Plenty of small farming communities defecting to the Neulanders as they like the libertarianism and lack of interference. Government heavily influenced by the corporation running the only viable industry, dredging biological gunge off the sea floor and turning it into oil. Exports are petrochemicals, a little bit of farm produce and missionaries. Claims to be a representative democracy, but since only accredited pastors of the First Church of Jesus Christ, Astronaut, may stand for office and only church members may vote they are fooling no one, especially not the Federal government back on Earth who are refusing them any hint at statehood until they sort themselves out a more reasonable constitution.

The citizens are mostly upright, sober, hard working, judgemental and mind bogglingly hidebound and dull. They have a small domed town, New Canaan itself, surrounded by small domed suburbs and a large hinterland of small villages where the colonists attempt to farm. There is also a larger, more bustling town called Reagansburg, run by the Epsilon Oil Company.

The citizens of the town of New Canaan are the dullest nosebleeds possible, weighed down with innumerable rules and ordinances inspired by their fundamentalist pastors. They are regularly rocked by scandal when it is revealed that a leading citizen ignores the rules in private and they loudly proclaim themselves 'individualists'. Reagansburg is a bit more liberal. New Canaanites are theoretically banned from visiting Neuland, the kind of freethinking, free loving, druggy, commie paradise their pastors regard as a fair simulation of Hell, but Reagansburgers, including the small detachment of US Colonial Marines based there, frequently take a little trip down the coast to let loose after months afloat digging gunge off the sea floor.

The farmers are a stroppy lot, frequently at odds with the townies over taxes and the like, and are often attracted to joining the Neulanders, admiring their libertarianism, if not their liberalism. New Canaanite officials have been shot at, and settlements have switched allegiance frequently.

The outlands are also dotted with Neulander squats, in fact as far as New Canaan is concerned most of Neuland is one big squat. They claimed the whole unfrozen territory on the northern continent not actually built on by the Neulanders when they arrived, an ordinance they had no way of enforcing and which the Neulanders regarded as so much bullshit anyway. A whole bunch set up a fort-cum-mining camp a hundred kilometers from New Canaan's dome just to prove the point, though the ore veins were poor and they moved out again a few years later. The site is now the grandly named Fort Genesis, the base of the New Canaan National Guard and bible school, and the Neulanders have, for a laugh, tried to use US law to have the lot evicted as squatters themselves.

The New Canaanites have also tried to impose a protestant whites only immigration law, also with no great success. Shiploads of American Poles and Hispanics keep turning up anyway, discover they aren't welcome, declare themselves Neuland citizens and set up settlements illegally. Gangs of radical New Canaanites regularly try and evict them, resulting in some nasty firefights. The Espilonian Situationist and Solidarity Association, a gang of hackers from Neuland, regularly run the militia ragged by hacking into their geosat system and feeding false data and fake communications, kidnap them and leave them roaming the wastes out of their minds on synthetic peyote wearing pope outfits.

New Canaan's basic TL is 8, though weaponry is often of a TL 10 standard, ironically often bought from suppliers in Neuland. They stay clear of the computer enhanced stuff, Neuland hackers build backdoors into the software and the bloody things go off randomly or just plain pack up whenever they are facing Neuland bandits or their friends in a firefight. Law level is 7, 9 within New Canaan itself, though the only restrictions on personal firearms is that you MUST have one and alcohol, tea, coffee and anything else that might lighten the Bible-black mood are banned.

=== Characters ===
New Canaan citizens have -1 Education and +1 Endurance, and all get Gun Combat 0 as part of their basic education. Their second skill is Survival 0 or Trade (Farmer) 0, and Social Science (Theology) 0 is a further option. New Canaanites get +1 Social Standing per level of Theology known, though this is really only applicable on their own territory. They cannot join the Navy and the only kind of Scholar they have is Physician.

They start with a light autopistol or shotgun, a copy of the Bible and a filter/oxygen mask good for four hours outdoor use on Epsilon.

== Adelbert PLC ==
A corporate state within Neuland, or the largest and best organised commune depending on your point of view. Citizen/employees have traded in a lot of democracy for stability and protection. Govt Type 3, Law Level 5 (within their own installations and when protecting their own people), TL 10. Often called 'the Napoleonic Tendency' by Neulanders, and has a constantly rotating citizenship as people fall out with the petty bureaucracy and snotty Francophone bosses and leave, or get equally pissed off by the uncertainty of self-employment, temporary workers coops and outright violence of some bits of Neuland. With tensions rising with the New Canaanites many feel being part of something with a proper army would be a good idea, not trusting the bolshie survivalist eco-terrorists who 'defend' Neuland by picking fights with the Christian Militia and blowing up oil installations. Adelbert's execs are trying to get recognition as an EU member state.

Effective law level for the Napoleonic Tendency is 5, though this only really counts inside their installations and if you commit a crime against one of their people and have their security branch on your case.

=== Characters ===
Adelbertians have the same skills and stats as ordinary Neulanders.

== The Cyber-Raj ==
Oldest colony occupying an equatorial island where the eccentric CEO of an Indian cybernetics firm has created a Hindu Bollywood version of North Korea with robot peasants and computerised Brahmins. Govt Type 10, Law Level 11, TL who knows? Have extensively mucked about with the environment, and have a forest they claim is stiff with cloned Bengal tigers who will eat intruders. Export only foodstuffs, including tea and spices, their robot technology while obviously advanced is a secret. Very few people go in or out, and the Maharajah has made it clear that vessels approaching his airspace will be shot down out of hand, and downs spy satellites with guided missiles. What are they building in there? It is a Charismatic Dictatorship, and the Maharajah, Kalayavan, is supposedly the same one as founded the colony 150 years ago. Outsiders seriously doubt this.

The most well known Cyber-Raj citizen is their ambassador to Neuland, the gloriously eccentric Rajah 'Dave' Davidaram Bhose-Wainwright, who rides around on an electric elephant guarded by large gents dressed in tiger heads he calls 'Rakshasas' and accompanied in his bulletproof howdah by several improbably proportioned dancing girls. He has a highly secure palace near the starport where he hosts lavish drunken 'nautches' and is patron of the local Noisecore rock festival.

=== Characters ===
No PC can come from the Cyber-Raj, finding out what really goes on there may happen during play.

= Other inhabited worlds =

Steinitz has reasonably sized clusters of Torjan asteroids, the preceding cluster being claimed by New Canaan and the trailing cluster by Adlebert PLC. Neither has any actual presence there beyond an automated beacon proclaiming ownership. There are small deposits of nickel and iron, but nothing worth mining.

Delta (X 510 100 2) is the next moon in towards Steinitz from Epsilon and is a ball of ice and rock with a enough wisps of an atmosphere to whip up a permanent blizzard over most of the surface. There are 11 people here, nine in a scientific team from the Epsilon People's University trying to drill through the ice to see what lies in the great trapped ocean beneath the ice cap and two colonial marines trying to tell them to bugger off as it is allegedly US territory and owned by the Epsilon Oil Company.

Epsilon

2012-11-28T21:50:42Z

Bert:

The Epsilon system has a G8 primary, Chess, and three worlds, Steinitz, a huge gas giant orbiting at 0.9 AU, Capablanca, a medium sized gas giant at 12 AU and Alekhine, a large rocky world at 58 AU.

= Epsilon =

'''UPP C 644643 A'''

'''Trade: Agricultural, Garden, Poor'''

The major inhabited world is Epsilon Steinitz, or Epsilon for short, the fifth moon of the hot gas giant Steinitz.

It is cold, with ice caps reaching down into the tropics, and round the equator is a large ocean dotted with islands. There are two continents, mostly ice bound, with frozen tundra and bleak mountain ranges as the only non-icebound terrain. The biosphere is primitive, with very simple sponges and graptolite creatures and algae in the oceans and tough lichen-like vegetation on the tundra-like permafrost plains, which have thin waterlogged topsoil interspersed with gravel beds and bare rock left by previous even harsher glaciations. The air is thin and tainted with sulphur dioxide from frequent volcanic eruptions and has precious little oxygen from the sluggish plant-life.

Epsilon has a population of 7 000 000 and four rival colonies, Neuland, New Canaan, Adelbert PLC and the Cyber-Raj (relative sizes 8, 7, 2 and 3)

There are three major states, Neuland, New Canaan and the Cyber-Raj, plus the semi independent Adelbert Corporation.

== Neuland ==
Leftist Euro-anarchists with a participatory democracy (Govt Type 4, Law level 3, TL 10) and a bit of a fetish about computers and software (TL 12 electronics available), often called 'the Bakhuninite Extents'. One of the few places in Known Space you can get cyberware, but it is expensive. Everyone is an eternal student plugging into online university, only local currency is used (Roks), handcrafted goods sold offworld at premium prices. Main exports subversive MMORPGs, expertly pirated media and software, freelance 'creatives', punk rock bands, designer drugs and financial brigands who use corporate buyouts to break up other states economies to keep their own ramshackle system going.

Everyone has a wristputer at the very least and is a memeber of several co-operatives and communes. They vote on everything and anything, and proudly say they are the freest people in Known Space. Critics say that is because they have no government and no laws, but that is an exaggeration. Neulanders are bound by all sorts of conventions from their residence arcology, work-group and the fact that pissing someone off can sometimes get you shot dead.

The locals only deal in their own currency, Roks, and no one may own more than 100 000, and are forced to spend the excess, which the locals claim keeps the economy buoyant. Everyone gets 50 Roks per month per year of residence from the Neuland Financial Cooperative, up to a maximum of 800 Roks, and citizenship is pretty easy to get. The NFC gets it money from exchanging credits to Roks and gets a cut from all exports and offworld earnings of citizens. It also runs banking operations on a number of other worlds.

Everyone also gets free access to the University of the People, a mostly virtual university giving high quality education in every imaginable subject, though understandably more staid jurisdictions don't take their economics and politics qualifications very seriously.

Physically Neuland is a low rise sprawl of pressurised 'arcologies' like blocks of flats with covered courtyards within and between them, with extensive tunnels recycled from mining operations connecting them. Private transport isn't common, but endless grav busses, taxis, ground cars and even rickshaws ferry people about the muddy half finished streets. On the outskirts of the main settlement this turns into factory buildings and metal works, abandoned and recycled as the fortunes of various communes rise and fall, interspersed with hydroponic sheds. A few outlying towns of a couple of arcologies each exist, and a wide hinterland of ramshackle farms, workshops and marginal enterprises extends for two hundred kilometers into the lichenous tundra.

Locally Neuland is usually called the 'Bakhuninite Extents', though if Bakhunin himself were alive to see what these nutjobs have made of his philosophy he'd probably wish he'd never bothered.

=== Characters ===
Neulander characters get +1 Education, but they also add (or subtract) their Education bonus from their Social Standing, and take an extra -2 for being part of a dodgy state that looks weird and subversive to outsiders. In any case their dedicated egalitarianism means no one can be below Social Standing 3 or above 10.

All have Computer 0 as part of their basic education, must choose either Streetwise 0 or Carousing 0 as their second education skill and have Gun and Melee Combat 0 as part of their educational options.

None can join the Nobles, Navy or Marines, and their Army, such as it is, has no officers.

All Neulanders start with a state issued wristputer weighing 300g and acting as a computer 1 worth 15 Roks, a filter/oxygen mask good for four hours outdoor use on Epsilon and a set of cold weather clothing.

== New Canaan ==
Dominated by fundamentalist religious nuts of US origin, and theoretically an extra planetary territory of the US. Govt Type 13, Law level 8, except for guns, TL 8, but with plenty of higher tech imports. Everyone is required to be armed and all males required to put time into the national guard. Plenty of small farming communities defecting to the Neulanders as they like the libertarianism and lack of interference. Government heavily influenced by the corporation running the only viable industry, dredging biological gunge off the sea floor and turning it into oil. Exports are petrochemicals, a little bit of farm produce and missionaries. Claims to be a representative democracy, but since only accredited pastors of the First Church of Jesus Christ, Astronaut, may stand for office and only church members may vote they are fooling no one, especially not the Federal government back on Earth who are refusing them any hint at statehood until they sort themselves out a more reasonable constitution.

The citizens are mostly upright, sober, hard working, judgemental and mind bogglingly hidebound and dull. They have a small domed town, New Canaan itself, surrounded by small domed suburbs and a large hinterland of small villages where the colonists attempt to farm. There is also a larger, more bustling town called Reagansburg, run by the Epsilon Oil Company.

While the citizens of the town of New Canaan are the dullest nosebleeds possible, weighed down with innumerable rules and ordinances inspired by their fundamentalist pastors. They are also regularly rocked by scandal when it is revealed that a leading citizen ignores them in private and they loudly proclaim themselves 'individualists'. Reagansburg is a bit more liberal. New Canaanites are theoretically banned from visiting Neuland, the kind of freethinking, free loving, druggy, commie paradise their pastors regard as a fair simulation of Hell, but Reagansburgers, including the small detachment of US Colonial Marines based there, frequently take a little trip down the coast to let loose after months afloat digging gunge off the sea floor.

The farmers are a stroppy lot, frequently at odds with the townies over taxes and the like, and are often attracted to joining the Neulanders, admiring their libertarianism, if not their liberalism. New Canaanite officials have been shot at, and settlements have switched allegiance frequently.

The outlands are also dotted with Neulander squats, in fact as far as New Canaan is concerned most of Neuland is one big squat. They claimed the whole unfrozen territory on the northern continent not actually built on by the Neulanders when they arrived, an ordinance they had no way of enforcing and which the Neulanders regarded as so much bullshit anyway. A whole bunch set up a fort-cum-mining camp a hundred kilometers from New Canaan's dome just to prove the point, though the ore veins were poor and they moved out again a few years later. The site is now the grandly named Fort Genesis, the base of the New Canaan National Guard and bible school, and the Neulanders have, for a laugh, tried to use US law to have the lot evicted as squatters themselves.

The New Canaanites have also tried to impose a protestant whites only immigration law, also with no great success. Shiploads of American Poles and Hispanics keep turning up anyway, discover they aren't welcome, declare themselves Neuland citizens and set up settlements illegally. Gangs of radical New Canaanites regularly try and evict them, resulting in some nasty firefights. The Espilonian Situationist and Solidarity Association, a gang of hackers from Neuland, regularly run the militia ragged by hacking into their geosat system and feeding false data and fake communications, kidnap them and leave them roaming the wastes out of their minds on synthetic peyote wearing pope outfits.

New Canaan's basic TL is 8, though weaponry is often of a TL 10 standard, ironically often bought from suppliers in Neuland. They stay clear of the computer enhanced stuff, Neuland hackers build backdoors into the software and the bloody things go off randomly or just plain pack up whenever they are facing Neuland bandits or their friends in a firefight. Law level is 7, 9 within New Canaan itself, though the only restrictions on personal firearms is that you MUST have one.

=== Characters ===
New Canaan citizens have -1 Education and +1 Endurance, and all get Gun Combat 0 as part of their basic education. Their second skill is Survival 0 or Trade (Farmer) 0, and Social Science (Theology) 0 is a further option. New Canaanites get +1 Social Standing per level of Theology known, though this is really only applicable on their own territory. They cannot join the Navy and the only kind of Scholar they have is Physician.

They start with a light autopistol or shotgun, a copy of the Bible and a filter/oxygen mask good for four hours outdoor use on Epsilon.

== Adelbert PLC ==
A corporate state within Neuland, or the largest and best organised commune depending on your point of view. Citizen/employees have traded in a lot of democracy for stability and protection. Govt Type 3, Law Level 5 (within their own installations and when protecting their own people), TL 10. Often called 'the Napoleonic Tendency' by Neulanders, and has a constantly rotating citizenship as people fall out with the petty bureaucracy and snotty Francophone bosses and leave, or get equally pissed off by the uncertainty of self-employment, temporary workers coops and outright violence of some bits of Neuland. With tensions rising with the New Canaanites many feel being part of something with a proper army would be a good idea, not trusting the bolshie survivalist eco-terrorists who 'defend' Neuland by picking fights with the Christian Militia and blowing up oil installations. Adelbert's execs are trying to get recognition as an EU member state.

Effective law level for the Napoleonic Tendency is 5, though this only really counts inside their installations and if you commit a crime against one of their people and have their security branch on your case.

=== Characters ===
Adelbertians have the same skills and stats as ordinary Neulanders.

== The Cyber-Raj ==
Oldest colony occupying an equatorial island where the eccentric CEO of an Indian cybernetics firm has created a Hindu Bollywood version of North Korea with robot peasants and computerised Brahmins. Govt Type 10, Law Level 11, TL who knows? Have extensively mucked about with the environment, and have a forest they claim is stiff with cloned Bengal tigers who will eat intruders. Export only foodstuffs, including tea and spices, their robot technology while obviously advanced is a secret. Very few people go in or out, and the Maharajah has made it clear that vessels approaching his airspace will be shot down out of hand, and downs spy satellites with guided missiles. What are they building in there? It is a Charismatic Dictatorship, and the Maharajah, Kalayavan, is supposedly the same one as founded the colony 150 years ago. Outsiders seriously doubt this.

The most well known Cyber-Raj citizen is their ambassador to Neuland, the gloriously eccentric Rajah 'Dave' Davidaram Bhose-Wainwright, who rides around on an electric elephant guarded by large gents dressed in tiger heads he calls 'Rakshasas' and accompanied in his bulletproof howdah by several improbably proportioned dancing girls. He has a highly secure palace near the starport where he hosts lavish drunken 'nautches' and is patron of the local Noisecore rock festival.

=== Characters ===
No PC can come from the Cyber-Raj, finding out what really goes on there may happen during play.

= Other inhabited worlds =

Steinitz has reasonably sized clusters of Torjan asteroids, the preceding cluster being claimed by New Canaan and the trailing cluster by Adlebert PLC. Neither has any actual presence there beyond an automated beacon proclaiming ownership. There are small deposits of nickel and iron, but nothing worth mining.

Delta (X 510 100 2) is the next moon in towards Steinitz from Epsilon and is a ball of ice and rock with a enough wisps of an atmosphere to whip up a permanent blizzard over most of the surface. There are 11 people here, nine in a scientific team from the Epsilon People's University trying to drill through the ice to see what lies in the great trapped ocean beneath the ice cap and two colonial marines trying to tell them to bugger off as it is allegedly US territory and owned by the Epsilon Oil Company.

Riley

2012-11-28T21:49:46Z

Bert:

= Riley =

'''UPP X89A000 0'''

'''Trade: Barren Waterworld'''

Riley is a tidelocked waterworld orbiting an M2 star, with an atmosphere heavily tainted by nitrogen oxides and a sea of dilute nitric acid. There is little reason to visit and none to stay and the planet surface has been visited only twice.

The first visit was by a scout named Nigel 'Gabby' Williams who surveyed the world a hundred and fifty years ago. His report consisted of the words 'Cockles and Mussels alive alive-o', and the planet's new name. The second visit was by a Brazillian survey team, who sent down an automated probe which confirmed the presence of vaguely molluscan lifeforms and then abruptly stopped transmitting.

Riley

2012-11-28T21:49:15Z

Bert: Created page with "= Riley = '''UPP X89A000 0''' '''Trade: Barren Waterworld''' Riley is a tidelocked waterworld orbiting an M2 star, with an atmosphere heavily tainted by nitrogen oxides and a ..."

= Riley =

'''UPP X89A000 0'''
'''Trade: Barren Waterworld'''

Riley is a tidelocked waterworld orbiting an M2 star, with an atmosphere heavily tainted by nitrogen oxides and a sea of dilute nitric acid. There is little reason to visit and none to stay and the planet surface has been visited only twice.

The first visit was by a scout named Nigel 'Gabby' Williams who surveyed the world a hundred and fifty years ago. His report consisted of the words 'Cockles and Mussels alive alive-o', and the planet's new name. The second visit was by a Brazillian survey team, who sent down an automated probe which confirmed the presence of vaguely molluscan lifeforms and then abruptly stopped transmitting.