Quote from: Arduin;711436Hmm, would explain why Jeff doesn't understand gravity.  To much time spent doing hand exercises... :eek:

Less of that, anyone can have a bad day.

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;711481Fringe is back on in my area.  I'll take a look at it.  I saw some of it when it first aired.  Some sort of parallel universe exists in the story?

Yes, I won't give you any spoilers though, it's pretty good. Oddly disaffecting in some ways but nonetheless magic for limbering up the mad science nodes in the brain. I love periods where science races ahead of the ability of society, law or indeed humanity to keep up.

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;711481Yes.  Anything can happen with any kind of PCs in this setting.  Open possibilities.

Depth is something sadly missing from a lot of settings, the kind of depth one finds in D&D or The Lord of the Rings. By scaling settings up from cyberpunk->solar system->light huggers->wormholes->FTL drives I hope to build an enormously deep corpus of engaging causality that baffles and astounds. Who knows, I may even succeed.

Quote from: The Traveller;711489I love periods where science races ahead of the ability of society, law or indeed humanity to keep up.

Me, too.  I've seen so many shows where someone goes back in time and changes just one thing (maybe by accident) so that the present is all different and the government now controls every aspect of peoples lives using high-tech that didn't exist before. A totalitarian dystopic high-tech gulag of a world.

ADDED:
The Traveller, I deleted my posts here that were derailing things.  I didn't know posts could be deleted until now.  Trying to clean this thread some.

Quote from: The Traveller;711403As for what the PCs will do see post #6, it's basically a giant sandbox. There are numerous more specialised and thematic roles that will break it out of standard futuristic tropes but they're still a bit rough around the edges. The big up and coming event is the transhuman war, when the erstwhile saviours of humanity turn really, really nasty.

Sandbox is a bullshit term. Telling me I can do anything is only slightly more useful than saying I can do nothing. In an average game based on the RAW of your setting, what kind of characters are we playing? Are we a bridge crew ala Star Trek on a capital ship? Are we down and out dregs on a crappy scout ship? AKA, what is the default assumption?

How do you define Transhuman for your setting?

Quote from: The Traveller;711403There's a whole tactical side to it, then of course the dust has its own hazards and surprises. Already mentioned are the electrical arcs but there are many more.

The nebula is sounding quite interesting.

Quote from: The Traveller;711489By scaling settings up from cyberpunk->solar system->light huggers->wormholes->FTL drives I hope to build an enormously deep corpus of engaging causality that baffles and astounds.

What do you mean by this?

Quote from: The Traveller;711489Less of that, anyone can have a bad day.

This was beyond a bad day.

I have come to realize that in my treatment of you, The Traveller, I have managed to become the exact kind of poster that I myself despise. Your science is still sloppy, but I was inexcuseably rude to you. I am sorry.

Quote from: jeff37923;711616This was beyond a bad day.

I have come to realize that in my treatment of you, The Traveller, I have managed to become the exact kind of poster that I myself despise. Your science is still sloppy, but I was inexcuseably rude to you. I am sorry.

It's grand Jeff, we're all a bit mad around here, that's why I like the place. Just so you know though, most of those threads on CotI are closed to the public, so almost nobody knew what you were talking about. I still don't, and don't particularly want to.

Quote from: Spinachcat;711612Sandbox is a bullshit term. Telling me I can do anything is only slightly more useful than saying I can do nothing. In an average game based on the RAW of your setting, what kind of characters are we playing? Are we a bridge crew ala Star Trek on a capital ship? Are we down and out dregs on a crappy scout ship? AKA, what is the default assumption?

I'll be able to tell you that when I've fleshed it out a bit more! But all of the above really, I want to offer a wide array of character options. There is no one central theme though, except to go forth and adventure. File under "not ready for public view".

Quote from: Spinachcat;711612How do you define Transhuman for your setting?

Able to move from mind to computer and back again, able to take over "unmanned" fighters and control them, that sort of thing. More or less the same as Eclipse Phase. The whole affair starts to get nightmarish when you realise that there's no guarantee that the mind which went in is the same as the mind which comes out.

Quote from: Spinachcat;711612What do you mean by this?

This setting is one of a series, I've already burbled about the initial cyberpunk setting a fair bit around here, and those others are the more advanced ones. Like a future timeline of games.

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;711494Me, too.  I've seen so many shows where someone goes back in time and changes just one thing (maybe by accident) so that the present is all different and the government now controls every aspect of peoples lives using high-tech that didn't exist before. A totalitarian dystopic high-tech gulag of a world.

ADDED:
The Traveller, I deleted my posts here that were derailing things.  I didn't know posts could be deleted until now.  Trying to clean this thread some.

It's fine Shawn, just completely bewildering at the time. Now it all makes sense.

The internet is a good example of science racing ahead of everything - we're still in the throes of understanding the implications of this kind of ubiquitous communication, and it is rocking the hell out of society, politics, everything. We live in interesting times!

I like the idea of the transhuman dudes being villains (always found most transhuman ideas, "put your conscience inna machine" etc, to be fairly scary and off-putting).

Aah, campaign premise and scope. It's one of the big challenges of space settings. When you have so many places to go and things to do, what do you choose?

Granted I'd probably choose something like being the scandalmonger housewife of mining camp housing block 7a on Mimas. Isolation leads to small town politics, closed quarters leads to forced civility. You can do a lot of mental & social damage in such a claustrophobic setting. Very "Real Housewives of Saturnine Satellites."

This setting reminds me of a cross between an Alastair Reynolds' novel and a Red Dwarf episode. Not saying that it's a bad thing.

A couple questions:

• If the hyperminds wanted to cause an extinction-level event, why put the time and calculations into targeting something outside the system, to set up this precise chain of events to hammer Sol and Earth - so that everything's just right. Seems like a hell of a lot of work when there might be quicker alternatives - and time seems an important factor when the hyperminds are getting extinguished. You'd think that they could railgun Sol much more immediately, calculating how to produce as devastating a reaction as possible to kill those fucking humans. You might not get pretty space clouds, but you check a few boxes.
  
  
• Why would you choose to use Traveller as the rules system for this setting? I mean, you'll probably get near what you want if you tack on a lot of extras (supplements), but I'd think you'd have some work on your hands shaping the system to meet the vision of your setting.

Quote from: The Ent;711632I like the idea of the transhuman dudes being villains (always found most transhuman ideas, "put your conscience inna machine" etc, to be fairly scary and off-putting).

The basic idea itself isn't too bad, but when you mix it up with the traditional human sociopath, things go way off the charts. A dictator or religious cult hiding in the clouds, infiltrating the transhuman nexus, co-opting all the minds that pass through without them ever being aware, next thing your brother, your wife, your children are at your throat in a civil war where anyone can be an enemy.

The warriors who were powerful enough to outdo AI hyperminds, godlike intelligences, are now trying to suck all of humanity into an enormous version of tangency, by hook or by crook.

A battle for the very soul of mankind - glorious! This is where the Borg came from, an enforced conformity that ultimately negates all creativity and individuality, leading to a sort of sterile evolutionary dead end that can only grow by feeding off "lesser" intelligences.

You will be assimilated.

Quote from: K Peterson;711660If the hyperminds wanted to cause an extinction-level event, why put the time and calculations into targeting something outside the system, to set up this precise chain of events to hammer Sol and Earth - so that everything's just right. Seems like a hell of a lot of work when there might be quicker alternatives - and time seems an important factor when the hyperminds are getting extinguished. You'd think that they could railgun Sol much more immediately, calculating how to produce as devastating a reaction as possible to kill those fucking humans. You might not get pretty space clouds, but you check a few boxes.

Well, a couple of answers here; most importantly the bulk of cosmic radiation is kept at bay by the heliosphere, the influence of the sun. Even then some of it gets through - NASA has attributed several electronic failures in satellites to cosmic radiation, and right here on earth chip manufacturers today have worked in a modifier to electronic failure rates based on the effects of cosmic radiation.

After the blast, the heliosphere is somewhere inside the orbit of Venus, so everything else is completely exposed. The ruination of the earth's ecosphere and atmosphere, while ultimately reversible, is only the tip of the iceberg.

Unfortunately for the hyperminds, the same effect is even more detrimental to their delicate inner working than it is to organic life or cruder mechanisms (hence flicky switches and blinky lights instead of ipads in spacecraft). This is why it was used as a weapon of last resort, if your enemies are at 1000 points and you're at 4 points, reducing yourself to 2 points in order to reduce them to 10 points is a pretty good bargain.

Once the break even point in the conflict was reached, it was the only logical course of action.

As to the second part of your question, the inner system was wholly controlled by humanity and transhuman forces, the last sieges were taking place out past Pluto. The gravitational lenses need a lot of space to pick up speed, several times the diameter of the solar system (reference the amount of energy transferred by your basic slingshot maneuver for more details), not to mention building inward would inevitably have attracted hostile attention.

They had lost, it was over.

And of course it's a great deal harder to blow up a star than you might think - the primary sources of antimatter production are right next to the sun to accumulate the neccessary energy. Given efficiency losses and so on even they can only collect a miniscule fraction of what the sun puts out every instant. Plus that would adjust machine intelligence survival rates from 3% to 0%.

However a big fat powderkeg like a hydrogen cloud is a much more attractive target. Right time, right place.

Quote from: K Peterson;711660Why would you choose to use Traveller as the rules system for this setting? I mean, you'll probably get near what you want if you tack on a lot of extras (supplements), but I'd think you'd have some work on your hands shaping the system to meet the vision of your setting.

The thread wasn't intended to showcase the setting at all, just let traveller RPG fans strut their stuff, maybe inspire some ideas by kicking it around.

That didn't work out too well.

Quote from: K Peterson;711660Why would you choose to use Traveller as the rules system for this setting?

Traveller can be used for any setting.  Just add the careers, skills, weapons as needed.

Quote from: Shawn Driscoll;711691Traveller can be used for any setting.  Just add the careers, skills, weapons as needed.

No, it really can't.

I wouldn't say so either.

The Traveller rules bend extremely well and much of the rules are modular so you can hack out chunks and replace them with your own stuff without "breaking" the game.

No system can do every setting, but I am not seeing where Traveller could not handle the ideas we are seeing in this thread. I am just not sure if SWN or something else may turn out to be a better fit.

IIRC, there is Flynn's guide to magic, mongoose style, and old school, Chaosium's Thieves' World was stat'd out in CT terms.