Liminal Void Phipps 23 Worldbuilding, Part 3

December 9, 2022

Ok, no more icons. Here’s the next step:

Integration

Name the following

• Two Factions
• A Settlement
• A territory
• A Dungeon
• A Season

Your Icons and Inspirations should help a lot here. Be explicit about how your icons relate to these larger organizations or areas. You don't have to use all of them.

Given that this isn’t really a fantasy thing as such, “Dungeon” and “Season” are going to have liberties taken with them. And Factions are going to be very loose because I’m actively trying to avoid faction tech for this game: as fun as a more explicit Expanse-like game of Great Powers would be, the biggest players are mostly intended to be out of reach, these will be mostly groups of broad-strokes similar corporations.

• Faction 1: Mars. (Icons: A-Event, C-Event, A-Landmark, B-Landmark, D-Landmark) The first “real” colony (Luna doesn’t count) was where Terra’s capital fled the planet first to set down roots. Many attempts at getting a colony “right” still stand, and many more have been destroyed: a lot of people suffered and a lot of blood was spilled to get here. The various corporations there have a lot of legacy pull and a lot of ties throughout the solar system: it was from Mars that most of the stations and colonies that dot the system launched. In the past few decades, though, it’s lost its luster, and most of the new blood has tried to set up shop elsewhere. But the old corporations have too much money at stake to be pushed out of the loop forever.
• Faction 2: Jupiter. (Icons: D-Person, C-Secret, D-Event) The first colonists on Ganymede were offshoots of former technology corporations who were fired for various reasons - sometimes for being a little more tech-smart than politics-smart, sometimes for being too politics-smart. They had a casual manner and a revolutionary ethos: to think differently, to break the old and reshape it into the new, to worry more about long term progress than short term profit. How any of those values got interpreted over the years has been different for any of the corporations who spread across the Jovian system, but the results have at least been different, if not as utopian as their initial visions. There have certainly been life-changing things coming out of the system’s labs and shipyards, including a lot of tech that had been broadly considered decades away like inter-system communication, but in recent decades it’s rarely lived up to any of the hype. With Mars and Terra making leaps of their own, the operative question is what Jovian corps will try next - and what it will cost those in their sway.
• Settlement: Callisto Colony (Icons: B-Person, B-Event, A-Peril, A-Secret) Callisto Colony is one of the few truly independent colonies, established on the surface of the Jovian moon of the same name. It won this right through hard-won battles with its founding company, Ganymede Freight - and though it suffered greatly for it, it finally won a true foothold when CSTO Transit, their trade brand, won several key Jovian transport contracts. Since then, they’ve run into many problems, like bug infestations - of late, though, many of their ships are disappearing mid-transit with no warning, which deeply threatens their continued independence.
• Territory: The Saturn system (Icons: A-Person, C-Person, B-Secret, B-Peril) Some attempts at establishing a foothold to mine Saturn’s moons have been made, largely by Jovian corps. Some of them were abandoned because of environmental reasons. Some simply lost contact over time, their fates known mostly to a corporate assessment team, if even that. The system, however, is also known to be the territory of a ruthless set of pirates who have made it very difficult to maintain colonies or stations. Despite the best efforts of various intelligence firms, their hideout has never been established.
• Dungeon: The Graveyard Belt (A-Treasure, B-Treasure, C-Peril, D-Peril). The remains of many ships in a major battle for Martian independence hold an eternal orbit around a lonely abandoned station near Ceres. The station itself is intact, as are many ships: the belt has resisted salvage thanks to automated targeting systems on otherwise dead ships, as well as rumors of intentional sabotage on the part of corps wanting no part of the battle’s story being changed, have discouraged salvage crews. A sufficiently armed and reckless ship and crew could make a killing from selling old drives, databanks, and weaponry to the right bidder, though.
• Season: Scrap Market Boom and Bust (C-Treasure, D-Treasure, A-Treasure, B-Treasure). Every once in awhile, every few years or so, the amount of machined materiel to make new ships runs low. That’s when salvagers go to work: old stations, old ships left derelict, and such are brought in and stripped for parts. The need for new ships eventually wanes, and the salvagers either rest on their winnings or find other work until the next boom.

The game doesn’t exist yet so I’m probably going to take part 4 and run with it in some direction - since I’m just writing the thing from scratch, not running a game with it yet, I think I’d rather flesh things out while still being vague in the anticanon sense. I guess in the next installment I’ll try to figure out how I want to do that? Sure.

(Read the original on cohost here!)