October 18, 2024
I’ve been meaning to try to post more on my blog/site following the death of Cohost, which made it very easy for me to toss design thoughts out. Writing into VScode and pushing to my site via git has no juice at all by comparison. But we press on anyway.
Phipps23
#
On November 27th of 2022 - a little less than 2 years ago as of writing this - Dan Phipps (of
Gem Room Games, go check them out, they’re cool folks!) posted
a neat approach to worldbuilding based on Gygax 75. I don’t know how long cohost links like the above are going to last so I’m going to reproduce the post here for general preservation’s sake, at least until I’m confident it’s been posted up somewhere else (drop me a line if and when it is):
...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.
...December 8, 2022
Origin, 1+2a, 2b, 2c
Part 2d: Icons for “The wildly disruptive nature of independent ship ownership”
- Event: In the early days of the Jovian colonies declaring independence from Mars, Mars had shut off all wormhole beacons in an attempt to starve them out. One lone sympathetic freighter, however, brought enough supplies via off-network beacons to keep them supplied so they could maintain their resistance. That ship is long since gone, but is celebrated yearly on the Jovian Independence Day on June 1st.
- Landmark: The Deimos Travel Consortium’s logo which still emblazons that tiny moon. The Consortium collapsed after independent investigators with their own ship used it to uncover evidence that a mass transit disaster due to improper maintenance was covered up. Rumor has it they were paid handsomely by a competitor to look into it.
- Person: Josiah Flake, the current CEO of Translunar Water, was once declared legally dead. It turned out that he had faked his death and, with the help of a ship’s crew, used the opportunity to turn the tables on a would-be assassin - and the only other person in line for the executive position once his boss retired.
- Peril: If you’re supplying workers with the means to secure a better deal with themselves, watch your back. Businesses watch closely for pro-labor ship captains and find ways to make them disappear.
- Treasure: It’s said that there are still the husks of ill-fated stations in orbit around Venus, but no company in their right mind would take the chance to salvage them. Which means they’re ripe for the picking if you’ve got enough thermal shielding.
- Secret: A Terran shipyard has made a prototype of a nearly self-sustainable ship: it has a new kind of engine that requires no fuel and its air and water recyclers run at an absurdly efficient rate. It could change the limits of the galaxy forever if made at scale.
Icons done! Time to move onto phase 3.
...December 6, 2022
Origin, 1+2a, 2b
2c: Icons for "Being thrust suddenly onto the fringes of society and having to figure out how to deal with that."
- Event: When the Terran and Martian beacon networks were merged, a lot of stations became redundant. Everyone manning those stations were fired and reactors were deactivated as soon as the merger went through. The stations who had suitable engineering knowledge to restart them did so for the sake of everyone on the station, but for their trouble, they were blacklisted from all future corporate work.
- Landmark: Adrastea station was the source of one corp’s experimental “study” into worker efficiency in high gravity conditions. When the study ended in a drastic failure, workers there were all forced to sign non-disclosure and non-compete agreements before receiving medical care. After receiving the bare minimum, they were all promptly fired.
- Person: Barnaby Russell was a pilot who got fired from ferry duty due to having a management inefficiency pinned on him. On his way out, he stole a security patrol fighter and used it to hijack several freighters. He’s still at large, along with a few old friends he managed to recruit, and occasionally his crew will disrupt an ore shipment leaving the colonies.
- Peril: Every once in awhile, someone decided to give a little too much control to an automated system. When that happens (and when it goes wrong), it’s quite standard for everyone involved in programming or maintenance to be let go and the mark put on their permanent record in spite of whoever made it happen.
- Treasure: If your station gets attacked or cut loose, strip the place clean, then hide it well. What are they going to do, fire you twice? Just make sure you don’t take anything traceable…
- Secret: A lot of corporations cut people loose or mark them as falsely dead on purpose. There’s a lot of things you can hire someone who doesn’t exist for.
(Read the original on cohost
here!)
...December 2, 2022
Origin, 1+2a
2b: Icons for "The farther out a station or colony is from any of the centers of corporate power, the more exploited and extracted they are, but the easier it is to achieve some kind of independence."
- Event: The first corporation to set up a headquarters in a colony. It's how you know a colony is about to become a proper hub, and that everyone living there is about to have their lives permanently changed.
- Landmark: A few decades ago, the first Martian worker housing unit was a deeply inhumane honeycomb-like structure with awful conditions. It's long since been demolished, and only a tiny museum exists in its place. Mars is now a thriving center for commerce, and anything that reminds people of its roots isn't suitable.
- Person: Joe Reyes, an organizer who was the public face of victories for workers in Callisto Station. He now lives in Ganymede and works as a fundraiser for similar efforts, but he's frequently accused of enjoying his relative fame and the comforts of the city while other stations and colonies languish.
- Peril: Diseases don't often hit colonies, but when they do, they spread like wildfire due to cramped, awful conditions. If it's something that's a serious risk, it's very common for the founding corp to quarantine the colony entirely to prevent spread, regardless of how well the colony can withstand that.
- Treasure: If you've got a ship and want to make salvage money, what you need to do is head to Earth and dig up old records of existing colonies and compare them to known ones. If you see one that doesn't show up on current records, head that way. There's a chance it's been completely abandoned and there's something worth salvaging there. Who knows what condition it's in, though.
- Secret: The destruction of the Enceladus commune. By official records, no colony could possibly exist without corporate sanction, and yet one did, for a surprisingly long time, exist. They were destroyed outright by Jovian corporate navies, and all official records were scrubbed. But some people remember.
(Read the original on cohost
here!)
...November 28, 2022
Working off of this list because it sounds like a good way to put a loose, anti-canon setting together. (Anti-canon is definitely something I'm aiming for for Liminal Void so I'm game.)
Step 1
(mostly a repost from here so it's in a useful place, made slight changes here and there)
Inspirations
- The Expanse
- Cowboy Bebop
- System Shock
- Alien/s
- FTL
About
If I had to narrow it down to statements would probably come out to something like:
...November 28, 2022
(For context, originally this was a reply to
this post).
This is a pretty cool idea! I'll give this a shot because I'm starting to sketch out a new thing (Liminal Void) and I'm trying to give it a little more to work with setting-wise than I normally do for a game.
Inspirations
- The Expanse
- Cowboy Bebop
- System Shock
- Alien/s
- FTL
About
If I had to narrow it down to statements would probably come out to something like:
...