Playing Dice With The Universe:Main Page

Playing Dice with the Universe is a soft science fiction campaign setting. It encompasses the greatness humanity can achieve with continued advancement, as well as the dangers posed by human failings.

Campaign Setting Overview

It is approximately the year 2800 CE, and humanity has expanded to fulfill its wildest dreams. Faster-than-light travel allowed colonization of distant solar systems. New quantum theory made matter replicators feasible, and energy the only true currency. Psychic potential, formerly dormant in homo sapiens, was finally unlocked, and augmented with advanced technology. And finally, perhaps most significant of all, an independently-evolved alien race has been discovered, possessing intelligence and self-awareness.

Areas of Interest

• Earth
• Space
• Domum Advena

Groups

• United Planetary Federation
• Alliance of Independent Systems
• Associated Interplanetary Sectors

History

The Second Space Age is considered to have begun with the discovery of "hyperspace." Around 2050 CE, experimental evidence of other "branes," layers of reality in M-theory, was acquired. Research into the properties of the branes reachable from this universe immediately began, and by 2100 CE, the "hyperspace brane," characterized by little to no solid matter, but a speed of light far higher than seen in this universe, had been discovered and used to transmit a stream of subatomic particles through the Earth in under a nanosecond. The way to interstellar travel was open.

At the same time as ideas of space and time were being rewritten by physicists, a second challenge to conventional views of the universe arose. In 2103 CE, the first claim of ESP by a self-professed psychic was verified in laboratory conditions. A web of inter-department power struggles prevented the proof from becoming truly mainstream, while unbeknownst to them, psionic abilities in humans were actively gaining in strength and soon would be indisputable. As a result, the world was caught almost wholly off-guard when the world's first recognized psychic attack went off in a major city, temporarily knocking hundreds of people unconscious and leading to massive chaos. Direct proof of increasingly widespread psionic powers almost instantly lead to escalation, as various religious groups found certain members were suddenly capable of "true miracles" through prayer. The most all-pervasive war the world had ever seen erupted, with national boundaries meaning little as individuals adhered to whichever organizations supported their own beliefs.

The years 2105-2125 CE are now referred to as the Earth Wars, as they were marked by multiple periods of greater or less combat, in different regions all over the globe. It was the first war to truly encompass all of Earth. The wars had far-reaching consequences for the future of mankind.

The boundary-ignoring nature of the wars lead to nations being dissolved, reformed, and altered irrevocably. Unlike many wars, technological advancement slowed, due to a lack of large governments able to fund research. Often, psychically gifted individuals lead warbands of ordinary people, forming alliances with other warbands as they seemed strategically advantageous.

Throughout the destructive terror of the wars, however,