New Sci Fi Setting Seeds

[David Johnston2]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

The analogy I had in mind was Canton in 1840 which was an inherently unstable situation with no one-for good reason-trusting the other for fair play.

They have no reason to colonize in such close quarters.

[dcarson]

Originally Posted by Mysterious Dark Lord v3.2

With compressed air tanks and lots of padding - mostly made from human hair and soft leather, as well as scavenged insulation - a human could survive for brief periods outside. Their shelters would be partially or completely underground, on the surface having an igloo-like structure as a form of "aitlock".

A major industry for folks outside the big refuges would be atmosphere mining - carrying in buckets of frozen air to melt and let people breathe. In smaller shelters, there couldn't be enough plants to keep the air fresh so it would have to be constantly renewed. The big shelters would have greenhouses.

For ideas A Pail of Air by Leiber, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/51461
which deals with just this scenario.

[Mysterious Dark Lord v3.2]

Originally Posted by dcarson

For ideas A Pail of Air by Leiber, http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/51461
which deals with just this scenario.

That's where I got the idea.

In RPG scenario building, theft is the sincerest form of flattery.

[dcarson]

Originally Posted by Mysterious Dark Lord v3.2

That's where I got the idea.

In RPG scenario building, theft is the sincerest form of flattery.

There is a quote from some composer, lesser artists borrow, great artists steal.

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by Mysterious Dark Lord v3.2

With compressed air tanks and lots of padding - mostly made from human hair and soft leather, as well as scavenged insulation - a human could survive for brief periods outside. Their shelters would be partially or completely underground, on the surface having an igloo-like structure as a form of "aitlock".

A major industry for folks outside the big refuges would be atmosphere mining - carrying in buckets of frozen air to melt and let people breathe. In smaller shelters, there couldn't be enough plants to keep the air fresh so it would have to be constantly renewed. The big shelters would have greenhouses.

Somebody read a "Pail of Air" too. Yes, I'm rifting off of Fritz Lieber.

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

The dark planet, it got called Gogmagog, came out of nowhere to quickly for anyone to be all that prepared. Earth was torn out of the solar system and is now traveling in the general direction of the star Canopus. Earth is a dark and frozen wasteland. Only five groups of people survived the struggle to build shelters.

1) An American group, secular democratic. They we associated with various New England universities and built their shelter in the Taconic range near Mount Greylock. They were a research group on the dynamics of multiyear space flights.

2) A Welsh/Irish group, Buddhist Democratic. They built their shelter in the Ballyhoura Mountains. They were volunteers in a long term project to study what kind of communities were most stable in isolation. The other groups in the study were wiped out before Earth froze because they were on lower land.

3) An Iranian group, Islamic Authoritarian. They built their shelter in the Takht-e Suleyman Massif. They started as a military base. They were a prototype meant to stay hidden and attack invaders.

4) A Chinese group, Secular Authoritarian. The shelter was built in the Yunnan–Guizhou Plateau. They were also a group focused on the social dynamics of multiyear spaceflights.

5) An American/Australian/New Zealander group. Christian democratic. Built near the island of Maui. This undersea research base survived the immediate crisis of Earth being pulled out of it's orbit and the Earthquakes, tidal waves, and rapid freezing, and built a secure base on Maui.

It's now 190 standard years after the passage of Gogmagog (2275 AD). Populations are slowly growing. Explorers are seeking other groups and any resources they can find. Earth is a brutal airless ice ball, can you rebuild civilization and Escape to the stars?

As Mysterious Dark Lord v3.2 figured out, in many ways this combines Post-Apocalyptic survival with elements of Space-Opera (Planet of Ice).

Things to do?

Scavenge! There are books, CD-Rams, and whatever new storage media they'd have by 2085. The ruins of a TL9 civilization are valuable!

Bio-samples count too. With TL9 bio-labs even damaged cells might allow the rebirth of needed or desired species.

Art treasures will probably need restoration but humanity will want them.

Also, simple stores of stuff. A warehouse filled with intact and useful products, or products that can productively be recycled, would mean a lot. The group on Maui would be the worst off, since once they'd have picked Hawaii clean, they'd need to cross thousands of miles of ice to reach new salvage sites.

[Astromancer]

Try this one...

Massive droughts force hundreds of millions to migrate. Slight increases in temperature alter were various disease bearing insects live as well as unleash new agricultural pests. Plague and famine bring panic.

On the tech front fusion has come in, robotics have massively increased in usefulness, biotech is going forward in leaps and bounds. Vertical Farming has taken off in the USA and Canada. power stations in the sea are turning large areas of ocean that had stagnated because of global warming into vast new fisheries.

None of this tech change is happening fast enough. In a generation the globe could be transformed, but hundreds of millions are starving now. Vast numbers want to flee to the prosperous West. But the West is struggling with it's own issues.

The Elites don't see the need to share with the masses, and the masses want jobs at fair wages. The Elites rejected that long ago.

Basically a stripped down Cyberpunk. The local year is 2080. Socialism has made a comeback, mainly because automation and robots mean that machines will sweep the sidewalks and scrub the toilets. But also because the behavior of the Elites has discredited religion in most people's eyes (religious folk say this is unfair, but no one listens).

Forget net running. This is revolution versus counter-revolution.

[Astromancer]

Try this one...

In the year 2025 the aliens arrive. They aren't best pleased.

They announce that are species has had positive and negative judgement made on it. These judgments balance out to A) it's clear that when we mature, we'll be a profoundly worthwhile species, and B) our present morass of political and economic crises will take us down. We have been assigned a nanny, them.

They Aliens (pointing out that humans can neither say nor correctly hear their name, they choose to be called the Telchines after a tribe of gods that in some myths were teachers to the Olympians) are TL12 and have a wide range of weapons that can anesthetize humans with little or no harm. So arguments were futile.

Different parts of the world got different treatments. Whoever you are, you feel that your part of the world is being treated like dirt or worse. Maybe you're a religious conservative who sees the Telchines dismissing religion as primitive superstition. Maybe your an anarchist who sees the Telchines as imposing and alien order on the Earth, an inhuman hierarchy that would eternally corrupt the human spirit. Who or whatever you are, you're in the resistance.

Basically, the Telchines are trying to reform Earth. Maybe they're gentle, respectful, and wise, maybe they're cultural imperialists who don't understand how cruel they are, they could be both at the same time, either way, some humans won't tolerate it.

The human underground could be many different things at the same time. But it's certain they're up against a massive power with many human allies. By the way, don't dismiss the allies. If aliens brought food and peace, vast armies of the third world poor would embrace them.

[Astromancer]

The gate collapsed, no one knows why. No one seemed to really understand how the gate was so stable in the first place. But the opportunity of jumping 48,000 light years, twelve centuries of travel to a Star Cluster rich in inhabitable and terraformable planets was simply to great to pass up.

Events just before the collapse are confusing. Some people even say that the gate was attacked to collapse it. But no one knows. It was fifty years ago.

Meanwhile, 17 years of open settlement, and the few preliminary bases a couple of decades older have created a dozen or so stable settlements.The largest and most prosperous of which is Cashel, a port city of the planet Brigid.

Cashel isn't very large (around the size of early 21st century San Francisco) but it is the only real city in the human settlement area. As such, it's a crossroads for everyone with talent or ambition. It's also the only place with professional theater, movie making as a regular productive activity, formal higher education, cultural diversity, a restaurant culture, fashion as a business, a literary community, and regular production of luxury goods. Yes, compared to Earth of the past, it is all small scale. But it is all there is.

Given how few opportunities there are outside of Cashel, is it any surprise that some folks would kill to stay here?

Basically, murder mysteries in a frontier town. Cashel, like 19th century San Francisco is an isolated city, unlike 19th century San Francisco, there isn't anywhere to go that's a real urban community if you leave Cashel or someone needs you driven out. This means that Cashel's elites are suspects in a fairly large number of crimes.

Blend hardboiled detective fiction with Golden Age Sci Fi.

[tshiggins]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

The gate collapsed, no one knows why. No one seemed to really understand how the gate was so stable in the first place. But the opportunity of jumping 48,000 light years, twelve centuries of travel to a Star Cluster rich in inhabitable and terraformable planets was simply to great to pass up.

(SNIP)

EVE Online!

https://community.eveonline.com/backstory/