I would be curious to hear about your major points of divergence. My wife writes a lot of fan fiction (though mainly for the DC universe) so I might point her to this; I'm not certain how familiar she is with SC though to be honest. I agree with you in that I think it would make for a good campaign setting for sure, although I think it would need the Star Wars treatment where whoever picked up the license would need to interpret and fabricate quite a bit more of the setting whole-cloth to provide breathing room.
Yep. The SC world building is extremely shallow and the writers add to and rewrite it on the fly without regard for consistency. It tries to be military scifi fiction but immediately fails because it ignores the basic realities of things like logistics, economics, politics, geography, astronomy, etc. I won't bore you with the details.
BackgroundAnyway, to provide a bit of background: SC is constantly rewritten during development and between installments. SC1's development alone may be divided into several periods:
- The earliest known pitch was "space vampires." While this was quickly discarded, it did reappear years later in SC2 through the vampiric powers displayed by the character Alarak.
- We know little about how SC1's concept developed. What we do know is that the first protoss unit to be conceived was the dragoon and the protoss were initially conceived as a wholly robotic race. This changed and they then were conceived as looking similar to hydralisks except without mouths and clearly more civilized.
- The SC1 alpha had a unique appearance. It was based on the WC2 engine. The art style seemed to be very close to Warhammer 40,000 at the time: the protoss, terrans, and zerg seemed pretty closely modeled after the eldar, space marines, and tyranids. The Blizzard website at the time explained that the terrans and protoss were decaying galactic empires locked in a cold war with occasional skirmishes, then the zerg invaded out of nowhere. The playable terran faction was called the Confederacy and controlled the Koprulu sector on the border between the terran and protoss empires that would presumably be the theater of the game. The Protoss were basically generic space elves with a fancy galactic empire who fancied themselves defenders of Order from Chaos (capitalized on the original website) in a pretty obvious Michael Moorcock reference.
- The SC1 beta underwent dramatic art changes that would form the final product. The backstory received mild changes: the Confederacy was changed to lost colonies isolated from Earth on the border of protoss space.
- The SC1 manual goes into further detail on the details teased by the website at the time. The Confederacy and Protoss Empire remained pretty consistent throughout their appearances so far so little of the backstory revealed here was surprising, but now the zerg received a detailed backstory where the website had only depicted them from the POV of the terrans. Unlike the tyranids, they have personalities to make them more interesting to write about similar to the Gravemind from Halo released around the same time. Their motive is basically to consume the strongest species in the galaxy to achieve perfection; undeniably villainous, but understandable and refreshingly alien. The zerg invaded Koprulu to consume the terrans because plot device: the terrans had capabilities that would make great weapons against the protoss empire, who the zerg were otherwise unable to stand against.
- The battle.net strategy compendium for SC1/BW mostly explained the game mechanics and only a tiny bit of lore. Said lore remained consistent with the beta and manual.
- The SC1 gold release is where the problems start. The promo website, compendium, and manual teased a pretty interesting picture of an interstellar war for the fate of Koprulu with many different political actors involved. The game script discarded all those interesting plot hooks in favor of shoehorning a bunch of weird events that looked cool but made little sense if analyzed critically. All the cool world building teased prior? It was all shredded because the writer clearly had no idea what to do with it and didn't seem to think there would ever be a sequel.
- This was followed by the BW expansion pack. It introduced Earth in a blatant retcon to the previous lore that Koprulu was isolated (although to be fair the isolation was itself a decision made later in development and didn't seem all that important to the setting so I can excuse it; a few years ago it was even weirdly retconned that Earth sent a fleet to Koprulu before the alien invasion to stop rebellions or something, a retcon that I find to be one of the few instances of an okay/good retcon). Although this could have been done well, the story bent over backwards to make crazy bug girl the ruler of the sector, so the Earth fleet got shanked.
- Pretty much everything afterward is style devoid of substance, with SC2's story being a complete mess (you can read a review here). With two key exceptions. Firstly, Blizzard contracted a bunch of freelancers to write licensed short stories and novels to cultivate interest in the story. These licensed fiction were generally of much higher quality than the games' scripts. Sadly, the events of the licensed fiction are invariably ignored by the writers of the games' scripts. Secondly, there were some interesting ideas in SC2 whenever they tried to write about vaguely realistic politics or military research, but unfortunately this was overshadowed by the stupid stuff.
My pitchMy basic idea for a campaign setting is to recycle all the good ideas while discarding the bad ones. Rather than focusing on the romance of space cowboy and his bug waifu that ruined the setting, I'd focus on the political and military situations involving the Terran nations, the Protoss tribes, and the Zerg broods.
Koprulu sector is being fought over by the United Earth Directorate, the Confederacy, Umojan Protectorate, Kel-Morian Combine, Sons of Korhal, and various other groups. Pretty much your standard scifi fare. I like how the Confederacy is depicted as this weird cross of Southern heritage (they use a Confederate flag even!), space cowboys and cyberpunk dystopia. Really refreshing in the age of crazy leftism taking over the media landscape. (In the games the Confederacy was replaced by the Dominion, but they're pretty much identical except with all the political drama replaced by a generic evil emperor and the Southern heritage scrubbed away so I don't find them remotely interesting.) The Confederacy is a literal confederacy of hundreds of different colonies with their own colonial governments and militia, tho the federal government is authoritarian (par the course for scifi) and the de facto leaders are the "Old Families." The Old Families are basically the Houses from
Game of Thrones ported to scifi, so they're perfect for political drama. The world building is so generic that you can just import whatever concepts you like from other humanocentric scifi settings like
Battletech,
Cyberpunk 2020,
Serenity, or whatever.
Then you throw in the alien invasions. The zerg want to eat the terrans to acquire their useful transhuman traits, because that's the zerg's shtick. The protoss expedition to the sector, tipped off by the discovery of zerg deep space probes, wants to exterminate the zerg and after glassing terran colonies come into conflict with the terrans.
The protoss aren't universally genocidal, tho. There's a schism in the expedition where some protoss want to protect and even work alongside the terrans. Then there are protoss tribes who aren't part of the empire, whether because they never joined or were exiled. These include groups like nerazim, taldarim, ihanrii, and whatever else Blizzard retcons in the future. Basically the same thing you see with the oodles of elf varieties in fantasy games, except in space.
The zerg are an excuse to explore the players' "evil" impulses. Their whole shtick involves eating any species they find useful and creating biological weapons. If you liked mad scientists or the like in fantasy/scifi games, then you'll love these guys. Most of them are devoted to the Overmind, a Lovecraftian deity who talks to its children like the Old Testament God and promises they will become perfect by consuming the terrans and ultimately the protoss. Some of the zerg aren't affiliated with the Overmind, but those ones aren't interesting to me because they're either short-sighted talking animals or cyborg zombie slaves to terrans/protoss.
Basically, its Warhammer 40k lite. If you thought 40k was too depressing, convoluted or whatever, then I think this works as a cheerier simpler replacement. Honestly, the world building we have isn't actually all that much but damn would it work well in the hands of someone who actually cares to explore it. "No bad ideas, only bad execution" and all that.