New Sci Fi Setting Seeds

[PTTG]

Fracture Points

It was once thought that the Precursors were only legends; creator deities who traveled among the stars and bound them, who brought life only to perish in the end of the great golden age long before modern civilization. True, there were mysterious ruins, but until recently, there was nothing concrete besides a curious commonality of all the world's legends.

But under four thousand years of sediment in the To'challi desert, a clearly advanced object was uncovered. A machine - no, a computer with advanced storage media. The optical crystals were degraded, but intact enough to verify much that we thought to be myth. Now knowing what to look for, we found other crystals in museum vaults and religious reliquaries, one even cut into jewelry, all fragmentary, all found only under deep silt. But enough to cross-reference and uncover many long-lost secrets of the Precursors.

They had many wonders - many of them we still do not understand. But the most incredible and most promising of them all are their ancient gateways. Built using hyper-dimensional topological defects (sometimes simplified as 'fracture points,') these orbiting distortions sit acquiescent, nearly invisible, until activated by an energy pulse, then blossom into a vortex over a hundred meters wide; anything that enters emerges from a corresponding vortex orbiting some other world.

Probes have traversed these vortexes safely; so has simple life and experimental animals. Now, the first crewed vessels are preparing to journey to a new world. We go boldly, prepared to face the worst, yet joyful in pursuit of the unknown wonders yet to be uncovered.

The player's homeworld is not Earth. They are, however, humans, and their tech level is mostly 8, with TL 7 computing (on the assumption that OTL has anomalously advanced computing). That is merely how it starts, of course. As players find precursor crystal shards, more and more data emerges from cross-referenced bits, revealing technologies only dreamed about.

The civilization that preceded them spent 3200 years spreading outward at sublight speed, building gateways between adjacent 'interesting' planets, be they green and habitable, particularly weird and special, or in some cases just cosmic freaks; a few worlds are ordinary by the standards of real-life exoplanetology, but most are extremely Earth-like or weirder.

Interplanetary travel is brief; portals are situated around 40,000 KM above the surface of the major body, but can be closer or farther. As a result, from launch to any such spot can take only a day or two, even with TL7 rockets. The mechanism to open a portal requires a fairly powerful radio pulse, and actual travel is instant.

The naïvety of the player's homeworld should lead to conflicts with minor nearby powers but also to taking leaps and bounds ahead of where they can see. They will discover that the vanished precursors are they, themselves (or rather, they are the descendants of the tiny number of people who survived virtually all technology failing abruptly in the midst of some kind of other unknown calamity). They will encounter worlds occupied by relatively similar people, but often with dramatically modified genes. Or they will meet ancient survivors with strange and unnatural powers. With four thousand years to rebuild, many other worlds will have developed in strange ways and have strange alternative tech paths or politics -- any kind of star trek style scenario is possible; allies and enemies abound. They will uncover crystal shards which contain information that can help advance to TL 9 (at least in theory), while relic tech and exotic materials provide TL 10 and 11 options too - plus tools for more powerful spacecraft. And most importantly, they will find out what reduced an interstellar empire to scattered tribes bashing each other with rocks and sticks for four millennia.

One special feature is that the player's world is itself a character. Players are from a planet as diverse as any continent on Earth. Let them help create unique cultures and backgrounds - even conflicts. Early sessions might focus more on the space race than the threats in the cosmos. And later on, tricky planetary rivals are a hidden threat while you face external goes.

Play this as a fairly hard Sci Fi with only the one big lie (the jump points thing) set in the far future of Transhuman Space. Or play it as a pulpy-soft space opera with a merciless conqueror stopped by your Space Americans; it works either way.