[Space] Adding flavour to 'man in a can'

[Frost]

If you were building a setting that was heavy on artificial habitats how would you go about giving each one a bit of character?

I am currently playing around with a setting (initially for a one shot adventure) that is likely to be dominated by places that are not naturally habitable.

My setting his built on the conservative hard SF lens (the nominal TL is 10) and high bio-tech (in this case meeting TL10 with far fewer restrictions). Superscience is limited to FTL which will mostly be a background element.

Characters will most likely be upgraded humans, para-humans will be fairly rare and slightly stigmatized (the PC's will be dealing with a para-human colony) as will the occasional uplifted animal.

[Edit]The main focus of the initial adventure is as of now a subsurface colony on a ice moon (think Calisto) inhabited by Brownies (Bio 68).[/Edit]

[whswhs]

I worked with this idea in a Pyramid article back in 2006, "Omicron Polypi." Most of the human settlements were on nonterraformed planets; a big part of their characterization was their various political cultures and what they thought of each other.

[Frost]

I will have to check that out do you remember the number?

[Bruno]

Any kind of human-built structure will be distinguishable by architectural style, maintenance, customization by the residents, etc.

MIR and the ISS are pretty distinct structures; MIR was famously pretty stinky by the end of its life due to an out of control contamination problem, the ISS has avoided this plague so far.

A habitat could have a graffiti problem, be decorated with commissioned art, be purely utilitarian and beige, made with bright primary colors, etc etc.

[Anaraxes]

Purely cultural differences are good, and likely common. Even if the habitat dwellers all came from the same source culture, they could have drifted from each other. (Amount of time those habitats have been up there matters, of course.)

Economics will vary. Those habitats presumably exist for a reason, and specialties tend to build their own momentum. Silicon Valley exists not because it's a special place, but because a small trend attracted more people and more businesses associated with that kind of business, and the thing snowballed. It's a kind of network effect; the only special thing is that it's special (and still not unique, even in the US). Habitats that have immigration and migration can well tend to specialize; isolated habitats can do so as well, thanks to children being brought up in their parent's trades (for a nice semi-archaic contrast to all the shiny white plastic and aluminum).

The real world often has a lot of engineering tradeoffs in any solution to a problem. There's not always only one way, or even always one best way. There's also historical accident and inertia -- once there's an industry that's started doing things some particularly way, it can keep on doing so even if less ideal than some other technique, simply because it costs more to completely retool all the supporting industry and rebuild the habitats than the improved method is worth.

So, you might introduce some different preferences in different populations for the way they provide lighting, or implement life support, or power, or other such engineering problems. The differences can exist just for variety and color; they don't have to have game-mechanical benefits or penalties. (You perhaps can get away with that as well if you want to make sure the effects show up in game. But the bigger the mechanical impact, the more motivation there would be to change out the poorly performing systems.)

[Frost]

Ok, how about this:

'The Free Gonk Republic'

This is a cut and cover habitat, essentially a man-made valley with a roof located on the as yet unnamed outer moon of an as yet equally unnamed gas giant. The habitat was constructed by and for a more or less self sustaining group of Brownies usually referred to in setting as Gonks.

Gonks are one of the more common para-human species and were traditionally fairly wealthy despite their social and biological isolation.

The Free Republic however came about at a time of increasing hostility and declining material wealth. Needing to save time and money the final structure was both small and cheaply built. Even after four decades these problems have yet to be addressed.

The physical environment is Spartan, little more than clumps of small buildings interspersed with algae farms and sickly parkland in a cavern. The one major investment the first settlers made was in the communications infrastructure which offers several publicly maintained AR overlays.

[Daigoro]

You could throw together a bunch of random tables to roll against.

Some questions to throw in...
- How many cultures live there?
- How old is the habitat?
- What was its original purpose?
- Has its purpose changed? (e.g. Mining habitat now used as pirate base.)
- What level of affluence does it have?
- Is it on an asteroid, moon, planet or an orbital station?
- Who is it allied with?

[whswhs]

Originally Posted by Frost

I will have to check that out do you remember the number?

Unfortunately, no. I checked my files of Pyramid and couldn't locate the relevant issue.

[AlexanderHowl]

I am curious, why did you end up choosing Callisto? While it is the safest of the Galilean moons, there really is nothing there that would justify colonization if you had Some form of FTL. Even if FTL was discovered after colonization, it would cause enough of an emigration pull that economically marginal locations like Callisto would end up being depopulated within a couple of generations. Is there something special about Callisto in the setting that would justify its continued habitation after FTL was discovered?

[Frost]

Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl

I am curious, why did you end up choosing Callisto?

I chose Callisto as a template partly for narrative convenience, and partly for a private shout out.

Practically the environment is fairly benign as uninhabitable environments go but probably too harsh for paraterraforming so I get the enclosed colony I want for my adventure. It is also fairly large giving scope for other colonies and so multiple avenues of escape.

As for the shout out, one of my inspirations for running with this kind of setting is The Quiet War which uses Callisto as a major location so it felt right to make the 'GFR's' location pseudo-Callisto.

Also now I think about it the low value actually makes a small degree of sense for a habitat that is part gated community part refugee camp.