New Sci Fi Setting Seeds

[Daigoro]

Maybe they have sent STL colony ships off as well, but as they're out of instant communication range they wouldn't have much effect on the campaign setting anyway.

[AlexanderHowl]

10 million nature preserves are hard to do in a single system though, especially with the fact that you are creating a 10 million body problem. Assuming a SM+25 habitat/preserve (two shielded and pressurized rotating cylinders 100 km long and 10 km in radius), you would need 3 quintillion metric tons of matter, which is quite substantial (4% of the Moon). They would have a total area of 126 billion square kilometers though (500 Earths) and would need a solar array with a radius of ~317,000 km, making them a mature K1 civilization. Alternatively, they could each have their own solar arrays with a radius of 100 km.

Regardless of the scale though, it is doable, just a phenomenal undertaking that would require thousands of years. You could easily support 400 trillion people in the system, so the economic activity would be truly massive at TL11 (which is really the minimum for that scale of endeavor). Each habitat would have a $3.88 trillion economy, meaning that the overall economy would be $38.8 quintillion per year.

[Astromancer]

Try this one...

"The old ones say that we came from a world that was formed by nature, like most other worlds. That we're descendants of lost explorers on an artificial world. I have my doubts. How could anything, much less oceans, stay on a spinning ball?

Still, we may be the distant children of explorers. I want to go and see far lands. The old ones say we live on a ring that goes clear around the sun, which is supposably just a small star, and the great sky arch is just another part of the ring. It only looks like an arch because we're on the ring. That as I get nearer to my goal the "Sky Arch" will always be just as far away, like the rainbow.

I am going to go to the arch just to prove those old fools wrong!"

Basically, young adventurers exploring a vast world. I am of course referring to the Ringworld. The PCs would be descendants of an exploratory mission snagged by the Puppeteers. The Puppeteers decided a human population on the Ringworld might come in handy at some point, so they dumped the whole 563 member expedition on a Madagascar sized island One Hundred fifty miles off the coast of the Great Star Shaped Ocean.

Assume that's many generations ago. The PCs know the Great River extends thousands of miles in the direction they seek the Sky Arch in. So they've got a ship and they are sailing upriver against a slow current.

Assume the PCs are on the border between TL3 and TL4, with some more advanced knowledge.

[dataweaver]

The Ringworld was a novel idea back before it was discovered to be unstable. But since then, I just can't take it seriously anymore. If it takes a massive array of stabilizing rockets to keep it in orbit, can out really be said to be in orbit?

Sadly, a lot of Larry Niven's science fiction suffers from similar issues of simply not aging well: nifty concepts that fall flat when you approach them with a critical eye, requiring ever more elaborate fixes that end up giving you a complicated, jumbled mess, like the old epicycles patch that was used to try to preserve the geocentric model of the super system before the heliocentric model won out.

[AlexanderHowl]

Unfortunately, I have to agree about Ringworlds, which is why Bishop Rings just work out better. Of course, a Bishop Ring is still a gigantic structure, with a mass of around 31.5 quadrillion metric tons, so it is always going to be impressive.

[Astromancer]

If the artificial structure is large enough to get lost on the idea works. And by get lost I mean travel for years without finding out the world is artificial and your navigation is wrong.

However, I think you'd need at least a Culture Orbital. This isn't a hard Sci Fi scenario so Ringworld's work better. And there have been plenty of Science Fantasy settings on this thread.

[Astromancer]

Try this one...

La Maison de l'heure Perdue

"I met him when I was young, my grandmother, who raised me, ( Mom was in an accident, died young) had just died, and my father, always a crook, had gotten mixed up with a new set of thugs. After not lifting a finger to raise me, his son, he expected me to be his loyal soldier. The real surprise is the thugs he was working with were aliens, you don't expect that in late 1940s LA. He was an alien too, a shapeshifter with a time machine. He stopped the aliens from conquering Earth and got my dad sent to jail (I looked it up, he was in jail until 1970) and then he took me to see the galaxy.

We became best friends and then lovers. But I'm a human and I grow old faster than his people. He helped me set up this little Franco-Italian Bistro here in this spaceport. He still visits, as do many other time travelers. My Bistro is sort of a time travelers hang space.


Basically, this is a place where time travelers go to hang out I'm assuming a Golden Age Sci Fi spaceport. A futuristic reflection of cities like San Francisco or London. The real use in campaigns is to have PCs from many different times and places in your Space Opera. Is your Five Man Band composed of a 17th century Pirate, an Irish woman (leader), Victorian Great White Hunter & English Peer (Lancer), 22nd-century African-American techno-girl (Brain), 6th century BCE Spartan warrior (Big Guy), and a 1930s West Coast Conman with a fascination for psychology (the Chick, even though he's a guy)? Here that works.

You can also have a group of PCs discover the place and its strangeness from outside. At first a mystery and then the doorway to infinity.

This idea can be shifted around. A strange bar in San Francisco circa 1968, a bordello in Paris circa 1910, a Kabuki Theater and Teahouse in Edo circa 1729, a rather louche private club in London circa 1888, or a nightclub with a reputation in Singapore circa 2135.

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

Try this one...

La Maison de l'heure Perdue



This idea can be shifted around. A strange bar in San Francisco circa 1968, a bordello in Paris circa 1910, a Kabuki Theater and Teahouse in Edo circa 1729, a rather louche private club in London circa 1888, or a nightclub with a reputation in Singapore circa 2135.

How about it is a franchise of time portals each appropriate to it's context?

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

How about it is a franchise of time portals each appropriate to it's context?

That's a fun idea in and of itself.

[Kale]

There's even a GURPS sourcebook for this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GURPS_...osstime_Saloon