New Sci Fi Setting Seeds

[jason taylor]

Originally Posted by Astromancer

My mistake. Still, much of what I said still holds. Bad guys normally see themselves as champions of virtue. Just look at the Nazis. There are reasons we "Hate those guys."

So do good guys. Naturally enough.

Now in fact the Jedi are not particularly tasteful in some ways. To simply reverse things is a bit odd. Remember Aldeberan?

In any case wars is a cartoonish morality. The true line between good and evil is within every person.

[jason taylor]

The PCs land in a Starport to take on fuel. Unbeknownst to them a knew dictator has emerged. His first order of business is to unite his factionalized world by giving orders to Kill All Offworlders.

[PTTG]

Virtual reality and augmented reality is omnipresent. Most people don't own real things anymore, but rather "rent" VR equivalents, and receive effectively real replacements. Homes are drab, bare spaces, barely livable, but comfortable and beautiful furnishings are available -- and they are even usable! Food is almost always just tasteless pulp, but can be easily augmented into feasts!

The ambient nanomachines that enable this can have even more material effect. Need a gun? rent a VR one! Need armor? Do the same! The virtual stuff is only effective against other virtual stuff (except weapons; the nanomachines apparently can injure and heal for real).

In essence, everyone has an expensive variant of Snatcher, and non-snatched things fetch a premium as being capable of ignoring "virtual" defenses and overcoming virtual weapons.

[Astromancer]

Originally Posted by jason taylor

So do good guys. Naturally enough.

Now in fact the Jedi are not particularly tasteful in some ways. To simply reverse things is a bit odd. Remember Aldeberan?

In any case wars is a cartoonish morality. The true line between good and evil is within every person.

I did mention that it was an ALTERNATE Star Wars setting riffing off Flyndaran.

[Astromancer]

Try this...

An artifact in a nebula maintains a volume of breathable air. How this superscience works the survivors of a long lost spaceship can't answer. The volume is vast, but solid matter isn't that common. Soil to grow crops in is rare. The tree reefs ( genetically engineered organisms that provide shelter and food for the stranded survivors) are carefully nutured as the basis of survival.

This is a TL3 society with a scattering of ancient TL12 items, some of which are supertech. The surving humans are all descended from transhumans bred to survive microgravity and still be able to function in One G or more.

Yes, I'm stealing from Intregral Trees but I never read the book.

[Astromancer]

Try this idea.

Superheroes show up on this world in the late 1930s. Unlike most fictional superhero continuities the actions of the superheroes significantly change the world. By the late 1960s Earth was entering TL9 with supertech.

Though the 1970 to 2090 period large numbers of people left the Earth to settle in deep space mainly on easily terraformed planets. Note: this means easily terraformed by a TL9 society with lots of powerful supers to help.

After 2090 a series of brutal wars rendered most of the Earth uninhabitable for several centuries. The refugees of the 2099 to 2115 period were more than 90 percent of the survivors of these wars.

Due to the actions of certain powerful cosmic beings, for a indeterminate time period supers will be rare and weak. The quid pro quo for this was Earth's foes would be fated to impotence for the same period.

The many settled worlds developed in relative, but not absolute, isolation. Cultural divergence was commonplace.

It is now 2368. The planet Augusta, settled from the USA and its allies and a stable social democratic society, has suddenly had a burst of supers. This is seen as a warning of danger. The planetary government is sending out exploratory expeditions to both seek diplomatic conections and gain understanding of any possible threats.

Augusta is an early TL10 society. Assume most human settled worlds are either mature TL9 or early TL10. As many as two fifths of human settled worlds are at lower tech levels either form cultural choice or social disruptions of varrious types.

The PCs would be a supers group with the expeditionary ships. Basically superpowered redshirts to protect highly skilled diplomats, and first contact specialists.

More later..

[DocRailgun]

Yet, there is an all-pervading Force that begins to corrupt one as they give in to strong emotions. What's more, sometimes the people strong in the Dark Side of that force can and do actively work to corrupt people who are sensitive to the Force.
Morality isn't always a choice when there are intelligences trying to cause people to go down a dark path.
[QUOTE=jason taylor;2146252
In any case wars is a cartoonish morality. The true line between good and evil is within every person.[/QUOTE]

[Astromancer]

This simply assumes that the Transhuman Space setting's version of Earth is forced to leave the solar system in the year 2150. Choose your reason for leaving the point of this setting is humanity in a set of vast spaceships much like the Norman Spinrad novella Riding the Torch.

The PCs would be in the middle of a long flight. Neither they nor their grandparents would have seen the Earth. Their destination, or probable destination, is a few generations away. Humanity is basically contained within one vast city. All of humanity's conflicts and struggles are in this one city-fleet.

[Flyndaran]

The Matrix, only you find out that you are a program like 99+% of humanity. You and the others were created to allow the very few actual humans some semblance of normalcy. The Earth suffered an apocalypse and to stave off nihilism, a vast virtual reality was created.
But you and a few other programs have gained true sapience.

Do you tell the humans, hide, or something else?

[AlexanderHowl]

An inhabited system is discovered, but its residents appear to be a STL civilization, so it is considered to be a relatively primitive society. Unknown to the rest of the galaxy, the members of the STL civilization are aware of the FTL civilizations, but they are uninteresting in expanding beyond their system because they have everything they need within their system. Visitors are ignored unless they attempt to contact the STL civilization, when they mysteriously disappear.

The STL civilization is actually more advanced than the FTL civilizations, having reached TL12 hundreds of millions of years ago, and their citizens have an average age of one million year (their vast knowledge contained within auxiliary brains that they access through the virtual universes where they spend the majority of their time). Alone in the galaxy, they have survived the disasters that have annihilated each cycle of FTL civilization and have destroyed any civilization that has sought to conquer them. Within the four asteroid belts that occupy the first, fifth, ninth, and thirteenth orbit of their star system exists millions of automated space stations, with a cumulative mass of small planet, that are capable of engaging any threat that appears within 100 AU of their system.