Editing No Sharper Spur (section)

=Wyrm Sector Setting=

==Tech and Style==

There's a lot of military surplus floating around.  Most of it is up-jumped weaponry and personal body armor, but quite a few support vehicles are on the market as well.  The military has been moving towards fully T4 weaponry and equipment and is selling off its older stock.  Older, standard T2-T3 weapons are still common with civilians, but production is dwindling.

Print-o-Mats are increasingly common.  3D printing of a broad variety of consumer wares has driven the trend, wherein buildings house rows of printers and store raw materials in the basement, selling printing time and patterns to consumers.  The process can take anywhere from half an hour to an afternoon.  There are regulations in place limiting what can be printed, and custom designs and user-created patterns are common.  There's a DIY community around creating custom designs for printing.

Visually, things are a sort of retro-30's and 40's futurism mashup.  Vehicles might run on hydrogen cells and solar panels, but they have massive bumpers and running boards and big headlight sockets.  Chrome is very in right now.

Starship production is semi-custom to fully bespoke, with shops in the underwater cities producing ship hulls and setups by the individual order.  Ships are still modular, and the military does produce standardized hulls, but the private market still treats ships as luxury items, and they are designed, decorated and embellished appropriately. Inlaid patterns, filigree, decorative sculpture and other artistic flourishes are practically standard.  The underlying guts of the ship are produced by third parties and are more utilitarian, but the finished product is a nearly unique work of art.

===Overview===
*Space Travel:
**In-system travel is ubiquitous in Phoenicia. There are a bunch of mining operations and some remote science stations and a deep space refueling tower. System space tourism is a real thing. Tickets are cheap and easy to get, with flights everywhere nearly every day.
**Near Interstellar travel is common. Imperial Spaceways is a government-subsidized shuttle company that maintains regular flights to the colonies of Tyre and Sidon, both adjacent to Phoenicia. You can just buy a ticket and go when the next flight is available. IS also carries small cargo (mostly government contracted) and mail. Ticket prices are roughly equivalent to long-range business class airline tickets today, so about a thousand or so credits per one-way ticket. It's also possible to purchase transport on tramp freighters and the like, free merchants that move goods out to the colonies and materials back in to the home system.
**Far Interstellar travel is uncommon. Far Traders make runs to Trakkar and Delann, with little interest in the systems in between. The Authority operates embassies at both systems, and maintains communication links with a small squadron of free merchants kitted for speed and endurance. **Purchasing berths to Trakkar is at the mercy of the far traders, while it's pretty much impossible to buy a ticket to Delann, since it's quarantined. A berth anywhere else is also impossible; nobody is flying five jumps to the middle of nowhere because you want to, even if you pay them.
**Inter-sector travel is unheard of. In this game, sectors are a political and cartographical convenience, so there are no special barriers to doing so, it's just that the sector transits are near the edges of the map and the Authority has lost enough ships to blind jumps for the present.

*Starships
**Phoenicia is the only system in the sector building spike-capable ships. The military fleet is small and stretched very thin right now. It operates free merchants and patrol boats. The civilian fleet is also fairly small; spike drives have only been a thing for about 20 years. They have shuttles and free merchants.
**Purchasing a starship can be done by either buying a decommissioned military free merchant, which is cheap but risks operational quirks, or by going to a starship builder at one of the underwater cities off the coast and commissioning one. Starships are built to order, in layers of customization that run from factory custom to fully bespoke. They are still modular, but ships are works of art and are highly embellished and decorated.
**All starships must have the atmospheric configuration fitting, because they are all built on the planet. That will change when the Mare Industria moonyard is finished in about a year.
**If you only want to go to the colonies, tickets are fine. Buying a starship is perfectly legal, but they cost a lot. Salvage is an option, but it's dicey; you'd either have to hope for a good loot roll or go on at least one adventure setting up the find, then an adventure actually retrieving it.

*Ship sizes.
**Fighter-scale hulls are fairly small. An F-5 Tiger or X-wing would be on the light end of a fighter, while a Danube-class runabout from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine would be on the heavy end of a shuttle (in size, not equipment!). Ships in this scale have a cockpit or a single deck and are about 15 to about 25 meters long. They are fully modular, but not all modules are necessarily internal. Fighters might have external fuel bunkers, for example.

**Frigate-scale hulls are significantly larger. At the small end are the Space Shuttle Orbiter and the Millennium Falcon. Large aircraft like the Spruce Goose and the 747 are in the middle of the pack, while ships like the Firefly-class and the Corellian Corvette are at the upper end of the range. Ships in this scale have one to five decks, including partial decks for gun turrets or an equipment deck that isn't fully traversable. They always have at least one full deck. They range in length from about 35 to 115 meters.

**Cruisers are another big jump. Most of the Star Trek TOS ships would fit here, as would naval carriers and nuclear submarines. These ships are 200 to 350 meters long, have 5-10 decks, at least three of which are full, and can support attached fighter-scale craft. Currently there are no known ships of this class in Wyvern Sector, but the Authority is preparing a lunar shipyard in order to lay cruiser keels.

**Capital ships would be larger than anything known to the Phoenicians. They're not entirely sure they can build one, even with the zero-g shipyard.

*Tech Level
**Phoenicia is transitioning into a fully T4 society. There are a ton of upjumped T3 weapons on the market, as the Authority allowed its soldiers to muster out with their personal equipment in lieu of pay. The military is implementing full T4 weapons and armor, but it contracts the production of those items, and the contractors can sell to the private market. You have to jump through some hoops to get them, but nothing that would have hindered any of the PCs. Gunnery weapons and assault suits/powered armor have more substantial hoops.
**Upjumped ground cars, atmoflyers and helicopters are still the principle vehicles for most people. Naval vessels are common, due to the long coast and the underwater cities. Gravcars and gravfliers are a thing, but they're mostly limited to the military and the very wealthy. This isn't so much because they're super-expensive as it is that the economy was badly strained by the war and most folks don't have the cash to buy new anything right now.
**Cybernetics are real and available, but most people have a bias against using them except to replace a lost body part. There are some scary-ass ex-military street samurai wandering around though.

==Languages==

English is spoken as the primary language throughout the sector.  It was the official language of the Mandate and is thus very widespread and commonly used.  Plenty of other languages are still spoken, however.  On Phoenicia, there are significant populations who speak Swahili, Japanese or French in their daily lives or learn it at school.  Delann has significant pockets of Portuguese, German and Cantonese, while Tagalog is the daily tongue reserved for the warrior-leaders of Trakkar.  There are groups scattered across the worlds that use other languages for ritual or ceremonial purposes, but their numbers are small.  Many languages have been preserved primarily as academic curiosities.

==History of Phoenicia==
The colony at Phoenicia was set up for reasons lost to time and the Scream.  What is known is that the world was successful and well-populated during the Mandate Era, and played a central role in the economy of the sector.  The metadimensional event known as the Scream ended interstellar ties in Wyrm Sector, and the loss of sane psychics collapsed the planetary industries.  The period following the collapse saw the population fall from an estimated 1.5 billion to roughly 200 million.  These survivors formed loose, warring states around the remains of pretech cities.

After four centuries, these states were methodically conquered and absorbed by the nascent Phoenician Empire, then led by Emperor Harper, which succeeded over two generations of war and diplomacy in uniting the planet.  Following the Conquest Period, technological and industrial development improved sharply as pooled resources fed a sustained effort to reinvent and deploy advanced technologies.  In the same timeframe, power within the Empire was slowly being transferred from local rulers and nobility to the bureaucratic classes, partially to insulate Imperial power from rival nobles.  Empress Hinata presided over a series of democratic reforms that ended when she abdicated the throne 50 years ago.  

23 years ago, in-system spacecraft recovered the hull of the Naxos, a Mandate vessel left adrift in the mid solar system.  Reverse engineering and study of its systems led to the development of the first postech spike drive.  After several years of testing and analysis of its navigation maps, initial surveys of the sector began.  Twelve years ago, Phoenicia launched its first colony in the neighboring Tyre system.

After two years, the strain of supporting a fledgling colony while developing new shipyards and related technologies left the government overstretched, a situation that hereditary nobles along the hilly regions in the west and northwest attempted to exploit.  They rebelled, leading to a decade-long civil war that ended with the orbital bombardment and then nuclear bombing of Hill Prince military bases and urban centers.  Broken, the surviving rebel princes fled the system, leaving an exhausted world to rebuild.

In the last year, the Phoenician Authority has mapped the routes along the arms of the sector, made the Tyrian colony self-sufficient, began initial colonization of the adjacent Sidon system and made contact with two human-inhabited worlds.  Interstellar trade and diplomacy is slowly expanding, but the colony efforts and reconstruction on the homeworld have slowed efforts to build up the fleet.

===The Civil War===
*The Hill Princes rebelled because they used to have a lot more power, basically. The nobility used to run things, but the Imperial government had been chipping at them for a long time, and eventually the last empress took them out entirely. Lots of nobles still had power, but they had to be appointed or actually run for election (gasp!) to participate in the government. The princes up in the hills took that the most personally, in part because they were the most insulated from earlier changes and in part because (truly) the Authority hasn't been great at respecting the needs and unique challenges of the mountain communities. Also commercial spike drives gave them the ability to bail if things went south (things did go south and they did bail, hence the rebel pirates).

*So, from one angle, the civil war was nobles vs democracy. From another angle, it was a struggle for dominance between the heavily industrialized mountain regions and the advanced and prosperous domed cities off the coast. And while the rebels were obviously messing with maltech and killed Cortez' dad in cold blood, it's also the case that the Authority used orbital bombardment and nuclear warheads on civilian targets. Like, dozens of them.

*That the government was overtaxed and vulnerable was just the spark, really. The tensions had been there for decades.

==The Phoenician Fleet==
It's hilariously overstretched right now.  That will change in a few years, when the reconstruction of the northern ranges is complete and the moonyard is finished, but right now resources are pretty scarce.

Military ships are labeled with a Phoenician Naval Vessel prefix, a dash, a two letter code denoting hull model, a two digit issue number, a dash, and a suffix for role (combat or auxiliary).

[[The Phoenician Fleet]]

==Phoenicia==
*Location: 0405
*Planets: 7 (three inner, four gas giants)
*Population: 1 billion.
*TL: 4
*Government:  Parliamentary democracy.
*Description:  The northern continent is inhabited through an area roughly the size of Russia, bounded on the north, west and southwest by mountains and on the east and southeast by an inland sea.  There are small mining camps scattered across the continent.  The southern continents were colonized much less intensively and failed after the Scream.
*[[NSPTradeSheets]]

===The Norlight Impact Event===
First, the impacts were from starships that apparently fell out of the sky roughly 8 centuries ago. These vessels are alien. Next, the area is badly overgrown and topsoil generation is high, so the wrecks are beneath the surface. The rebels excavated several failed finds that generated only scraps, but one of the largest craters had the back half of a cruiser in it. They spent a long time exploring and studying it, and collecting bio samples. Some of these samples came from the dead crew, but most of them were from the ship. The ship samples were still alive.

The ships themselves are not living beings, it appears, but they have significant organic components. Nick confirms that most of the core technology of the cruiser is essentially postech in capabilities, though some of it varies substantially in design from current Phoenician models. There's no sign of life support, however. He concludes that in addition to their other functions, the biotech must be processing air and water.

There were several sections that the rebels did not explore, and they began excavation of another site before abandoning the area. Several crew members died from native beasts, and the ship itself killed a couple of them before they disabled the security.

The impact site has a large crater remnant that contains the aft cruiser section, a scattering of small craters that aren't large enough to contain more than scrap (three have been excavated) and a significant crater east of the cruiser impact that was partially excavated but not explored. It may be a second ship, or perhaps the rest of the cruiser.

====The Norlight Aliens====
Several alien bodies were left behind and examined by the rebel expedition. They were humanoid, with solid black eyes and keeled, gray scales covering their bodies. They had longer than average canines and a series of barbs jutting out of their forearms that may have been venomous.

These aliens (informally deemed Norlighters) had small muzzles and were slightly shorter than human average.  They preferred an environment that was very hot and that had dim, red light.  Based on the wrecks so far excavated, the Norlighters had a very communal society with little regard for privacy or personal space.  They may well have found constant, close physical contact psychologically stabilizing or desirable.

Their tech base was essentially postech, but they used a great deal of biotech as well.  They grew neural networks to act as transmission lines and aid computing, modified alien scorpions to act as security features and maintained jaw-like structures that grew the ammo for their unique 'fang guns' and also grew venom for use in those guns and in melee weapons.  These living systems also took the place of traditional life support, doing the work of atmospheric, water and waste recycling.

The Mandate classified the Norlighters as members of the Peleset, a grouping of several alien species that lived beyond Mandate borders and occasionally raided into both it and allied alien sectors.

==Tyre==
*Location: 0404
*Planets: 5 (two inner, two gas giants, one dwarf)
*Population: 5 million.
*TL: 4
*Government:  Parliamentary democracy.
*Description: The Tyrian colony is located on rolling plains on the eastern subcontinent, and is still developing local industry.  They are an important market for Phoenician production, and most of the systems resources beyond the planets atmosphere have been acquired by orbital mining concerns.
*[[NSPTradeSheets]]

==Sidon==
*Location: 0305
*Planets: 4 (1 inner, two dwarf gas planets)
*Population: 30,000
*TL: 4 (dependent)
*Government: Colonial oversight.
*Description: The Sidonese colony is very new, and still directly ran by the Colonial Administrative Board.  It receives frequent shipments of supplies and colonists, and cannot survive on its own currently.  The planet is frigid and icy, with taiga near the tropics and ice elsewhere.  The planned colony sites are situated on geologically active great lakes that vent heat into the surrounding area.  The weather is temperamental and nearly always foggy.  These hotspots are also incredibly rich in a variety of common and uncommon ores.
*[[NSPTradeSheets]]

==Trakkar==
*Location: 0301
*Planets: 6 (2 inner, 4 gas giants)
*Population: 50,000
*TL: 2
*Government: Oligarchy
*Description: They live in a mobile, underwater city because the atmosphere is nightmarishly corrosive and invasive, and have fallen to T2 from the lack of psychics and interstellar goods. They keep the city running (sort of) with massive steamworks and tight social controls, and are pretty eager for outside trade. The warrior-leader caste is said to be flatly stronger, healthier and smarter than the average person, and they have some pretty impressive melee weapons cut from T5 scrap. The Phoenician Authority, in turn, is pretty interested in their pretech caches.

==Delann==
*Location: 0607
*Planets: 7 (five inner, two gas giants)
*Population: 500 million
*TL: 3
*Government: Presidential democracy
*Description: Delann is a T3 society, maybe 20 or so years ahead of our own. They have insystem ships, fission power, orbital mining and basic quantum computing, but they're scarce on the trace elements needed to manufacture spike drives, which is slowing their research in that area to a crawl. The Authority has them on limited quarantine; they're populous enough to pose a threat if they get to TL4, but they also have a fully functioning psychic academy, which Phoenicia lacks. You basically have to buy permits to go there, and trade is restricted to goods that can't lead to astronautic or weapon-related breakthroughs.

==W0202==
*Location: 0202
*Planets: 4 (two inner, two gas giants)
*Description:  The second planet is temperate and has a thick atmosphere.  The Norlighters collected mirror-bird feathers there as cargo and there were no intelligent species inhabiting the world.  Nick recalls that Kazumi had dreams about the place, and that he thought there were humans there, but that hasn't been confirmed.

==Koilia==
*Location: 0505
*Planets: 7 (5 inner, 2 gas giants)
*Population: ~3 million
*TL: 1
*Government: Independent Poleis.
*Description: The third planet is temperate and has a breathable atmosphere.  The Norlighters encountered a primitive native population there and extracted a tribute of 'Koilian liqueur' from them.  They did not record their appearance or many details about their culture.
**New Horizons salvaged a dying cruiser in the first gas giant, a ship that was doomed by a rogue psychic event.
**The moon above the inhabited planet contains the ruins of a Mandate comm relay, staffed by robots.
**The planet is populated by Bronze Age bat people, who have converted to Catholicism and lived with Mandate-era humans that died out just over a century ago.  They have a Bat Pope.
*[[NSPTradeSheets]]

==W0702==
*Location: 0702
*Planets: 9 (4 inner, 4 gas giants, 1 outer)
*Population: 1 million
*TL: 2
*Government: Tribal coalitions
*Description: The fourth planet is temperate to hot and has a breathable atmosphere.  The Norlighters traded with native aliens there for various rare ores and an unidentified floating crystal.  They used ancient ruins as landing sites and base camps.

==W0101==
*Location: 0101
*Description: Information found in the data core on board the Loaves and Fishes
Outside the technical information, there is quite a bit of information about the Restoration Catholic religious movement and their operations in the sector, including a secondary base at W0101.

==W0608==
*Location: 0608
*Description: Unknown - location found in rebel navigation logs.

==W0706==
*Location: 0706
*Description: Unknown - location found in rebel navigation logs.