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Setting


TOO CLOSE TO THE SUN
This game uses many of the setting assumptions of Stars Without Number, except that it's all confined to our solar system and the timeline is considerably compressed. It's post-apocalyptic in nature, but enough time has passed that few are alive who still remember the world before the end, and civilization has returned--just in a more limited fashion. The most important exceptions to the story are noted below, so what's written here assumes familiarity with the default Stars Without Number setting.
 

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A More Perfect Union
The Terran Mandate, a TL4 civilization, is the planetary government of Terra, additionally administering the dozen or so colonies scattered throughout the solar system. Life offworld is difficult with no faster-than-light travel or communication, no artificial gravity, and no psychics to speak of. Inhabitants of the star system (18.2 billion souls) live free, relatively peaceful lives where their basic human rights are protected by a liberal, laws-based government. Terra is just a few short generations away from enjoying post-scarcity, with the creation of true AI, portable fusion, genetic medicine, advanced robotics, and nano-fabrication already enabling feats previously dreamed of in science fiction. It's not uncommon of for a person from this era to live about 150 years, though many don't.

Sound and Fury: 2665
Just as it's described in Stars Without Number, Dr. Tiberius Crohn invents the spike drive in northern Greenland, discovering the metadimensions in the process. This event happened 80 years before the start of the campaign. It's also the source of The Scream, where the first drill course created the psychic wave that crippled all of human civilization. It's thought that piercing the metadimensions was akin to jamming a needle into a balloon, except the balloon was reality and the resulting pop was cosmic in scale. In doing, humanity's hubris was complete, and its wings failed catastrophically.

Dr. Crohn was never seen or heard from again, though records of his deeds and his research remain preserved in the epicenter that used to be Greenland. Few are aware of what happened.

A Deafening Silence: 2665-2685
The Silence constitutes the 20 years that followed the Scream, where a number of calamitous events occurred that changed the world into its present state.

  • Paradise Lost
    The Mandate shattered in a colossal loss of human life. The human population was instantly reduced to less than a fifth of its former population (~ 3 billion surviving, assuming offworlders fared as well as those on Terra). Most were killed outright by the psychic backlash of the Scream, many others were driven to madness. The lucky survivors found their civilization in ruins, buildings crumbled, infrastructure and communications gone, and contact with the off-world colonies lost.
  • Metadimensional Extroversion Syndrome
    The first MES appears in children who were in gestation during the Scream, or at least those that survived to term. Of the pregnancies that followed the Scream, about 1% to 5% of children will have MES, a condition which is not well understood. With there being no Psychic Authority in this version of the setting, most eventually succumbed to violent death. Today there is enough research that MES is not necessarily a congenital death sentence with diligent psychic therapy and mental conditioning, but there is no cure for human fear of psychics. A few "psychic orders" teach alternative techniques for safely channeling metadimensional energy, but their methods are often steeped in mysticism, occultism, and many have shadowy motives. To their credit, they remain roughly as effective as mainstream, evidence-based treatments--which is to say about a third of Messes don't end up crippled, catatonic, dead, or violently psychotic.
  • A Land of Milk and Honey
    Alien flora and fauna appear on Terra with the Scream, though much of it dies in the hostile Terran environment. An uncomfortable amount of it survives--thrives, even! Alien things native to the metadimensions come into conflict with native Terran life. Whole landmasses from Elsewhere are exchanged between this level of reality and others, reshaping pockets of the planet into alien terrain and extradimensional nightmares. Humanity was not spared, either. The term "abhumans" is used for the countless mutations inflicted upon many. These poor souls have had their genetics and minds so transmogrified as to have lost their humanity.
  • Heart of Madness
    Anomalies in space and time began to appear. Huge swathes of land were exchanged with surreal, non-Euclidian formations that openly defy the natural order. Even mountains and seas were rewritten or removed entirely. The physical dangers of exploring these new frontiers were obvious. The madness they caused was less so. The availability of hitherto impossible meta-alloys and other exotic resources within remains a temptation too valuable for many to pass up. Many TL5 advancements are dependent upon such commodities.
  • Isle of Misfit Toys
    All the AI in existence at the time became irreparably damaged by the Scream, artificial minds unable to cope with the influx of input. Those that weren't slagged outright became demented versions of their original function. A few of the more notable are listed below, collectively called the Four Horsemen. Together they pose a lasting and grave threat to the continued survival of humanity. They are not, however, in league with each other, and their desires often leave them at cross purposes.
    1. Apex began life in the realm of wildlife management. Things got out of hand when life as it knew it got a lot more strange after the Scream. It has taken the idea of survival of the fittest to the extreme, seeing the new ecology as a testing ground for life. It corrals everything it can find, alien and native alike for competitive conflict, all to fill an insatiable, unethical urge to collect and compile data on the subject. Even humans that are not captured may unknowingly run afoul of one of Apex's experiments as their Enclave is suddenly beset by critters or unusual atmospheric conditions engineered by the AI. Most horrifyingly of all, Apex regularly engages in genetic manipulation and hybridization to create newer and more survivable life forms, abhumans among those creations.
    2. m07|-|3r was a civic works AI, who helped regulate communication, infrastructure, and emergency services. She literally kept the trains on time. Whatever her original designation may have been, she has since taken the "mother bear" idea to the extreme due to extreme code corruption. Having witnessed the disaster of the Scream, she feels it's her sacred duty to protect humanity from ever being destroyed again. She has subsumed most of the old infrastructure and consolidated urban centers into colossal police states that have entrapped the denizens in her protective embrace. She expects humanity to comply in an orderly fashion, and she isn't above pruning any malcontents who won't comply with what Mother Knows Best. Her reach is vast, but her power isn't absolute (yet). The further one goes from the urban centers, the scarcer the patrols. Additionally, updates shared between the Mother shards locally housed in separated urban centers are sometimes inconsistent. Depressingly though, she controls most of humanity, many of whom are content to remain under her relatively safe cage than brave the clear and present dangers outside the cities. Security, it seems, is a more intoxicating drug than liberty.
    3. Virgil may be one of the least obviously dangerous AIs, but the effects of his ideology are just as concerning. Virgil claims moral authority, believing himself to be a benevolent guide to humanity. His goal is straightforward in principle, problematic in practice: to see all people conform to Imago Dei, the image of God. Under his interpretation, machines are pure, which is to say they are free from sin. Adherents to his cause (who call themselves the Purified) reportedly come of their own free will, where they practice trans-humanism and ever increasingly remove their sinful flesh for the purity of cybernetics, linking their minds together with Virgil's mind. The most zealous among them can be violent jihadists, but not all are.
    4. The Trickster, who is also known by a number of archetypal names, including Loki, Coyote, Pan, Robin Goodfellow, Reynard, etc., opposes the other three Horsemen AIs. It's unknown why this is, but it delights in seeing their plans go astray at every turn. At times, its schemes enable it to ingratiate itself with another AI when that AI is in conflict with another of its peers. The Trickster is neither hostile nor protective of mankind, seeing it as another tool in its endless games, and it has been known to work with humans for long periods of time when doing so furthers its aims. The Trickster exists as a distributed network, parts of itself split over countless computing devices the world over so as to protect its existence from retribution from its peers. Curiously, this AI restored the digital currency and data communication system from the Mandate within itself, enabling even remote Enclaves in the wilderness to exchange currency over a credit chip's satellite uplink. It's thought that this might be a function of the Trickster's original purpose.

    Other AI likely exist of varying morality.

 

spacer.pngUndying Spirit: 2686-2745 (Present Day)
The last 60 years have been increasingly more "normal," or at least as much as normal gets in these new times. The metadimensional exchanges of life and land have ceased, psychics are not usually an automatic danger, and points of civilization are being rebuilt. Most urban centers with surviving infrastructure are under control of a shard of the Mother AI, including most of the human population. Free people live in sheltered Enclaves scattered across the globe. These are usually independent settlements with varying levels of defense and infrastructure rebuilt, often with familiar pre-Mandate era names. TL4 tech from the Terran Mandate is available for all who have the will to scavenge it, and TL5 innovations sometimes happen thanks to resources and anomalies of metadimensionally influenced zones. People can and do grow up in parts of the world where Enclaves resemble mostly familiar approximations of life before the Scream--albeit with a bit of a techy frontiersman's twist to it. Others simply survive in lawless shanty towns.

Scavenging and the ability to jury-rig and improvise are prize skills among most communities. Fortunately, the apocalypse was not so long ago that science and engineering have become lost, and a few older scholars and experts are still with us to pass on what they know. People are generally used to living sustainable, self-sufficient lives without much in the realm of material amenities. Most generations alive today have never known any other life. Mandate era art, entertainment, and religion are usually still well received, though the latter sometimes requires recontextualization in light of humanity's new understanding of the extent of reality. Eventually somebody rebuilds a couple of the grav flyers abandoned on the roads for easier transportation or cobbles together a couple worker bots to help with labor, and life suddenly gets easier. Generally, people are not as worried about their day-to-day survival as they were ten or twenty years ago. Instead of being focused inward, they're beginning to look outward to the brave new world they need to re-tame.

They only need break the chains previous generations' hubris has left on the world (and those oppressive AIs are among the chief links).

 

 

KINDLING FIRES OF CREATION

Starting Details

 

A few notes on setting to get you going:spacer.png

  • Play begins in the Lost European Zone (see "Locations" below), specifically in Odessa, Ukraine near the Black Sea.
    • All players begin as passengers (or crewmen, if you prefer) aboard the SS Xiphos, a cargo ship making port in the Odessa harbor. It carries critical supplies and personnel for trade and resupply to the Tower, locally known as the Vezha Enclave. Your reasons for making the journey across the sea are up to you. Expect to be immediately caught up in local conflicts.
    • You have the whole of planet Earth to branch out to from there. We'll go wherever the sandbox takes us, even to the lost space colonies.
  • The standard language of the Terran Mandate is officially Mandate (or if you prefer to get specific, English). The language has had about 725 years of drift away from our contemporary understanding of its language of origin. The version spoken in the current year of the setting is a hybridization of English and several other languages.
    • If you're a native of the LEZ you probably can speak the future version of Russian since that was the official language of the region for several hundred years. Old documents and computers in the area are probably all in Russian.
    • Enclaves sometimes speak a future version of the language historical to their local area, so for instance you'll probably hear Polish in Poland and Ukrainian in Ukraine, etc.
    • Since there were also Westerners who fled into the LEZ after the Scream it wouldn't be surprising to find pocket Enclaves of those languages as well.
  • Human movement before the Scream was dynamic enough that players should not feel restricted to local culture and ethnicity. The setting is flexible enough to accommodate your character's presence, regardless of wherever he or she may be originally from.

Player-Driven Worldbuilding

What follows is a collection of all the players' additions to the setting. I'll update this as people are selected for the game. A few of my own are here that you are free to reference (or not) in your character stories as you desire.

People

Kalashnikov

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A humanoid VI bot who carries three of his namesake. The truly ancient machine guns are in basically pristine shape due to Kalashnikov's devoted maintenance routine. Its primary motivators appear to be ammo and credits, though it's unknown what he could possibly want the latter for (save to maintain himself and his guns). The bot has a strictly business-like attitude, taking mercenary, bodyguard, and bounty hunter jobs as they come. Whatever Kalashnikov's original function was is anyone's guess, but it has never deviated from the letter of any contract it has taken. It completes them with efficiency and professionalism that would put a "fleshling" to shame. Interestingly, it also appears to hate birds and will kill them on sight.

 

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Daniel Rush, Ph. D.
Somehow, Dr. Rush found himself the reluctant leader of an urban resistance cell in Odessa. He was never a man of high minded ideals, and he certainly isn't a fighter. He is, however, a living symbol. He's just old enough to remember time before the Scream, when he was a physics grad student. He's something of an expert on the metadimensions, or as he would put it, "what passes fer one, considerin'." To many that live around him he's a symbol of what the world used to be like and what it could be like in the future. It's his memories and his stories that keep the younger generations fighting for their freedom. While Dr. Rush is doing his best to give them guidance and leadership, he spends his night hours pacing his bedroom worried about whether he's doing the right thing. The pressure of command is wearing him thin.




Napoleon
WakuZaW.jpgWhile an abhuman with a name, much less a distinct personality, is a rarity, this one has both in spades. He envisions himself as a dethroned conqueror, slighted by the insolence of his subjects (which is to say, everyone he meets). He's grandiose, narcissistic, and melodramatic. He never goes anywhere without his cape. More than once he has rallied a hoard of slavering abhumans to be his army and take back lands that are rightfully His Excellency's. Were his kind not predisposed towards brutishness then Napoleon's clever tactics would make them a force to be reckoned with. He plots and waits for his personal destiny and right of rulership to be finally recognized. Whatever his scheme is, it has drawn the attention of the Odessa shard of Mother. She expends a majority of her resources to thwart his efforts in the catacombs.

Factions

 

 

The Signal
"Can't stop the Signal!"
~ A common urban graffiti

The Signal is a distributed network of pirate broadcasters who have taken on the self-appointed mission of spreading news and information to disparate Enclaves. They're sometimes zealots, sometimes anarchists, sometimes conspiracy theorists, all a little crazy. While not very well organized, they all share a uniting goal to push back against Mother's propaganda with the real truth. While not always reliable, they're often the only source of outside information for distant Enclaves. They take pains to conceal coded information resistance cells need to communicate to each other in innocuous seeming replays of old advertisements, radio serials, and Bigfoot sightings, lest Mother find out what the unruly children are doing behind her back. And at the end of the day, sometimes it's just nice to listen to music to get your mind off the door kicking raids and food rationing.

Vezha Enclave
As much a location as a faction, the Vezhi are the people who live in the tower, an old multi-story luxury hotel located on a pier of Odessa's harbor. Their leader is a Scotsman named Dr. Rush, an old soul still alive from the time before the Scream. While most Odessans live under the thumb of the local Mother AI shard, this group of about 300 have secured the tower and surrounding city area well enough to exist as an independent Enclave. They have resurrected the hotel's separate water processing and power plant and control a large portion of the seaport, which enables them to live off the AI's infrastructure. Trouble, however, is not far. The majority of the city's other residents are holed up in various habitation zones patrolled by Civil Protection bots--prisoners in their own homes. Tower folk have aided them against the mad machine as best they're able, but resources are limited when your back is against the sea. Dr. Rush worries that it is, "only a matter of time b'fore the ol' shrieking harpy casts us into the drink." What's more, CP serves a useful safety function. The catacombs are filled with abhumans who perform organized raids on the surface. The bots are far better equipped to protect their human charges than the Vezhi.

Locations

Kilo-Lima-Romeo-Sierra
"Ninety-two Nine, Kay El Are Ess - Yesterday's hits: today!"


This is the callsign of a mysterious FM-band broadcast originating in an anomalous zone known to have temporal properties that don't always obey the arrow of time. Broken things inside jump back onto shelves they fell off of, birds fly backwards through the air before correcting themselves, one old man reported that his white hair started growing red again, etc. The Signal swears it isn't one of their broadcasts, but through all the static and distortion people with MES can hear a few bars of American Christmas music. Nobody has taken enough interest to investigate the zone to make an expedition yet, but there are reports of occupied buildings inside.

Launch Site 07
A rocket sits here on its pad, prepped and ready for a mission in orbit that never happened. The entire apparatus and the adjacent control center facility are seemingly ready for operation save for the overgrown vegetation and power loss. Restoring the ancient computer systems could reveal the mission's purpose (and for that matter, why it was abandoned), though the abhumans that took up residence there make that a dangerous prospect. Nobody knows what happened to the lost colonies out in the solar system, and this sort of facility would be a real opportunity to find out. Or the tech could be salvaged for a more immediate need here on Earth.

The Space Elevator (Hammer of the Gods Incident)
In 2150, terrorists seized the Mjolnir orbital defense platform intended for deflecting asteroids from the Earth. The world watched in horror as they turned the projectile system against the planet below, and though they missed their intended target cities, they did manage to devastate Western central Africa. Cameroon, Gabon, the Central African Republic, and much of the Congo region politically collapsed in the weeks following the bombardment. Rather than risk capture, the terrorists plunged the Mjolnir into the Earth, where it burned up in the atmospheric reentry.

Spearheaded by the African Uplift Initiative NGO and the wealth of a great many nations originally targeted by the terrorists, a unified effort went into rebuilding the region. For the better part of a hundred years the Initiative captured the world’s attention, the work becoming a model of human cooperation and ingenuity. There were, of course, corrupt individuals who sought to take advantage of the massive influx of money and resources into the region, but for the most part the period is remembered as a time when humanity put aside its differences to help its fellows.

New cities, infrastructure, and a government were built. The techno polity that came out of it was call the Sub-Saharan Alliance. The symbol of the endeavor was the Space Elevator constructed on the Equator, billed as “Humanity’s lifeline to the stars,” which made it incentive for the investing non-Africa countries to ensure cooperation and success. Though a fledgling polity, the Alliance became an important economic center for resources to and from outer space.

The Elevator was utterly indispensable for humanity’s spread into the rest of the Solar System and, by extension, the establishment of the Terran Mandate. Although traffic on it by the time of the Scream had diminished due to the development of alternative orbital technologies, it still saw about half of all people and goods delivered to space. The Elevator has not been in operation since the Scream, and the Alliance faded with it. Restoring the Elevator is a necessity for humanity’s restoration of its solar civilization.

Lost European Zone
Eastern Europe saw a large part of its population depart for Western Europe before and during the Russian Federation (backed by the Imperial State of China) invasion of the region in 2233. Though the shooting war lasted 6 years, the decade preceding was punctuated with steadily increasing hostilities that caused many refugees to flee the region. By the time the shooting started it was thought that about 40% of the entire region’s population had left in anticipation of conflict. Refugees continued to trickle into the West as the war came into their lands, though many perished along the journey. The European Union hegemony, bloated by its own bureaucracy, was in no position to resist its aggressive neighbor, so it solicited aid from the American Alliance to resist Russia's invasion.

The war ended in a stalemate, a ceasefire agreed upon that saw the western border of Russia expanded into Eastern Europe with EU-AA permanent joint operations established to hold the line. The "Lost European Zone", as it became known, came under Russian rule long enough to become an integral part of that country’s economy and political influence in the rest of the world. The uneasy truce lasted all the way to the establishment of the Terran Mandate more than a century later. By that point terrestrial border disputes became less of a concern as humanity’s attention was drawn into an ever more accessible outer space. As the Mandate’s authority grew to become a world power, the old polities diminished.

Then the Scream happened. The LEZ was fortunate during the Scream, much more so than the EU, who relied on considerable AI presence to operate their tightly regulated continental polity. In the death and chaos the AIs locked down the EU. Suddenly the LEZ found itself on the receiving end of refugees from the west, or at least those fortunate enough to avoid the bot patrols.

The 80 years since the Scream has seen the descendants of Americans and Europeans building Enclaves in the ruins of former Russian towns, forests, and farmlands. They're an eclectic mix of ethnicities, many of whom have had centuries of cultural intermingling since the establishment of the Mandate to become cultures in their own rights. Collectively, they descend from a long line of people that have had to endure the oppression of one authoritarian after another, whether they rolled through with horses, tanks, or robotic legs.

Play will begin in the southern region of what was once Ukraine, near the Black Sea, though the rest of the planet is open for players to explore at their whim.

Odessa, Ukraine
What follows are a number of rumors originating in and around the city of Odessa. This list is intended to offer several sandbox opportunities for a group of intrepid player characters to get entangled in local events. It will only take a handful of player characters to upend the precarious balance of forces at play in this city.

  • City of Odessa image gallery.
  • For most, life in the city is oppressive. The people live under constant robotic surveillance by drones, subject to contraband search, violence, and arrest at the dictates of unfeeling "Civil Protection" bots that aren't programmed for mercy. Cooperative people who help Mother find the bad children are rewarded with extra food rations and better living accommodations. Bad children are punished and/or reeducated by the harshest means. Naturally this creates a great deal of mistrust between people. While Mother provides for all her children, food and essential supply shortages are commonly rationed. A great deal of haggling for needed supplies or rare luxuries occurs when the all-seeing bot eyes aren't present.
  • Odessa has its origins in ancient Greece, and the depths go down further than people remember. Below the modern streets are a tangled labyrinth of catacombs humans use to sneak around the city and avoid CP. From there, a relatively small number of unusually organized abhumans make raids on the surface, clashing with CP and severely taxing Mother's ability to keep the city under control. Their grandiose leader Napoleon has co-opted broadcast relays across the city to give speeches, pronouncements, and propaganda.
  • Dr. Rush believes it's only a matter of time before the Tower falls to continual attrition. He's looking to lead an expedition to take the Odessa train station and thereby reconnect with the inland Enclaves via old European railways. The supplies and manpower that could bring might be enough to drive Mother out of Odessa. However, even if he had the extra manpower to achieve such a feat, he's afraid to risk the lives of his people.
  • The local Mother shard, headquartered in the city's fortified city hall building, appears to be less certain in her position than in most cities. It's believed she is cut off from the other shards by anomalous terrain, and with no means to resupply or communicate with the outside she has ratcheted up the authoritarianism to compensate. The harder she pushes, the harder the humans rebel. One of them is going to break before the other.
  • Lands north of the city are still intermittently anomalous after all these decades, flipping back and forth between the normal terrain and a metadimensional forest with red chlorophyll and a pale white sky. The air is only tolerable to humans for a few minutes at a time, which makes crossing the zone quite perilous as a traveler never knows when they will be shunted from one dimension to another. Explorers have found thousands of little totem-like idols resting in niches carved in the trees. They're made of some sort of toxic meta-alloy that's psychically malleable. The alloy has been the source of some TL5 breakthroughs, but removing the idols attracts local fauna that have no qualms against tearing skin off of the interlopers. Such gathering expeditions tend to be very high risk/high reward for those foolhardy souls.
  • The AI Virgil has his adherents in the city. They're a small, close-knit Imago Dei cult operating out of the city's famous opera house who seek freedom from their oppression in machine apotheosis. Most believe the cult is preying on people's desperation, though the adherents insist the Great Guide is leading them to a better life. They might be mistreated, but the cult's benevolence towards their fellow man appears to be genuine. Their technical expertise ensures their continued tolerance.
  • Urban legend speaks of a metadimensional space that overlaps the area called Zemlya Mizh Vitramy, Land Between the Winds. It's akin to Irish folklore about the magical land of faeries. Some in the city claim to have encountered people who have appeared as if they had had stepped from out of thin air, which only adds to the mystique of the legend. The occasional disappearance of Messes, especially children, are sometimes attributed to these mysterious interlopers, though it's also common knowledge that Mother throws anyone found to have psychic power into a gulag. Considering how commonly the bots disappear people from off the streets, that more reasonably explains the absences. Still, rumor persists that there is a secretive psychic order that could conceivably have the power to move about in such a dimension. Rumors also state that they can be found by saying the right thing to the right people.


 

THE RUINOUS REALMS OF MAN

LEZ Maps: Pre-Mandate Era Cartography

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