DIASPORA: Thus Spoke Belisarius (Hard SF Roleplaying with FATE)

CLUSTER CHART

SYSTEM #1: NEW CHANCELLORSVILLE
[T0 | E3 | R0]
"Cold War Between Colonies"
"This system can't be natural"
"Offworld Artifact Hunters"

SYSTEM #2: SANGALEA
[T-1 | E0 | R-1]
"Magnetic Tape For Everything."
"Green Power Only."
"The Southland Quagmire is Their Shopping Center"

SYSTEM #3: ONEIDA
[T3 | E1 | RO]
"Space Hippies"
"Heavy Biopunk"
"We Act For Their Own Good"

SYSTEM #4: OZYMANDIAS
[T-3 | E4 | R0]
"Hot Hydrogen Holistically Historic Home"
"World of a Thousand Mountain-top Kingdoms"
"Proxy Conflicts"

SYSTEM #5: AKNA SECUNDUS
[T-2 | E-3 | R-2]
"Heat like Hate: Burning and Devouring"
"Elegy for a Dying World"
"Spies Everywhere"

SYSTEM #6: SHORTSTICK
[T-1 | E0 | R-1]
"Solarpunk because we don't have the gas for dieselpunk"
"Big Hungry Sun"
"The Backwater of Backwaters"

SYSTEM #7: VULCANTHIS
[T2 | E-3 | R3]
"The Nomad Traders"
"Family First"
"Arrogant Upstarts"

SYSTEM #8: NYX-OMEGA VOIDYARDS
[T0 | E-4 | R-3]
"Deep in the Black"
"Ancient Shipyards and Stations but failing hydroponics"
"Vassalized-Uplifters of the Canths"
 
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[X] You were a bit unlucky. Your escape pod was picked up by pirates - hard bitten scavvers that ran at the edges of the system and hit unarmed and unmanned drone ships, as well as people emerging from the slipknot - people like you. You were immediately thrust into their crew...and fortunately, you had been trained by the tutor programs and the education software in how to use even their primitive, scrappy ships. Your adroit handling of fusion torches and teakettle starships let you end fights without shots even needing to be fired and, ironically, saved many lives. However, even your piloting skill met its match when a pair of high tech A/M torchships from the OES arrived and, working together, ran you down. But hey. At least it got you out of the system - even if it was into an Onedia correctional facility.

Space Pirate and a hippie therapist/lover/straight laced counterpart yes good
 
[X] You were taught, your entire life, the history of the Belisarius Sector. So, when you emerged and were scooped up and asked about it...you could give answers. Up until about a thousand years ago, which is when you think the data-banks ran out. Give or take five or six hundred years. That information is now one of the most wanted commodities in the Cluster, and catapulted you from the Nyx-Omega system to your choice of the Academies of New C and Onedia, not to mention the trade-fleets of the Vulcathines. But it left you feeling dislocated and out of place - and looking for a reason. Why did the Cluster Fall? What caused it? ...might it happen again?
 
Given the name of the cluster, I feel like we maybe ought to become a general, but archeology sounds more fun. Find all the secrets.

[X] You were taught, your entire life, the history of the Belisarius Sector. So, when you emerged and were scooped up and asked about it...you could give answers. Up until about a thousand years ago, which is when you think the data-banks ran out. Give or take five or six hundred years. That information is now one of the most wanted commodities in the Cluster, and catapulted you from the Nyx-Omega system to your choice of the Academies of New C and Onedia, not to mention the trade-fleets of the Vulcathines. But it left you feeling dislocated and out of place - and looking for a reason. Why did the Cluster Fall? What caused it? ...might it happen again?
 
[X] You were taught, your entire life, the history of the Belisarius Sector. So, when you emerged and were scooped up and asked about it...you could give answers. Up until about a thousand years ago, which is when you think the data-banks ran out. Give or take five or six hundred years. That information is now one of the most wanted commodities in the Cluster, and catapulted you from the Nyx-Omega system to your choice of the Academies of New C and Onedia, not to mention the trade-fleets of the Vulcathines. But it left you feeling dislocated and out of place - and looking for a reason. Why did the Cluster Fall? What caused it? ...might it happen again?
 
[X] You were taught, your entire life, the history of the Belisarius Sector. So, when you emerged and were scooped up and asked about it...you could give answers. Up until about a thousand years ago, which is when you think the data-banks ran out. Give or take five or six hundred years. That information is now one of the most wanted commodities in the Cluster, and catapulted you from the Nyx-Omega system to your choice of the Academies of New C and Onedia, not to mention the trade-fleets of the Vulcathines. But it left you feeling dislocated and out of place - and looking for a reason. Why did the Cluster Fall? What caused it? ...might it happen again?
 
PROLOGUE: MOMENT OF CRISIS
You had everything set up - as an outsystem immigrant from the Nyx-Omega to the best academies on your choice of New C and Onedia, it looked like your life was going to be a life of easy academics and applied archeology of every breed - industrial, cultural, programming.

That wasn't how it shook out at all.


[ ] You went the Abigail University, on Brightstar, the better (in your opinion) of the two garden worlds in the New C. System. There, you were fasttracked into the expeditionary archeology services and made a lot of friends. Expeditions were mostly to the unexplored parts of Brightstar and Shalerock, but you always had a theory that the true history of New C. had to be somewhere in the ecliptic. Combining your archeological knowledge with applied navigational, piloting and some probe-wrangling, you found a coal black mirror that hid...not an Ancient ruin but, instead, Shalerock Black Ops Listening Post. There, you met Captain Isabella Swan and only thanks to her deciding you and your archeo-nerds were too harmless to be anything but legit did you avoid the next twenty years being in a Shalerock high security facility.
ASPECTS: "Bad Luck On Every Outing", "Probe Wrangler"​
SKILLS: 4 Navigation, 4 Gunnery | 3 Piloting, 3 Charm, 3 EVA​

[ ] You settled on Onedia's primary university in Lung City, LCU. While living inside of an engineered house made of bone and breathing flesh took a bit of getting used to, you had to admit, the grub was better than most places. The Expeditionary Service hounded you through your entire academic career, and you worked the pressure off by throwing yourself into longsword practice - and to your shock, you actually got damn good at it. What was even more shocking was when, after graduation, you signed up for the OES and were put onto an expedition to Ozymandias - only to go down when the repair-grub that was supposed to check for faults in the fusion reactor caught a bug and died, and the technician for the ship missed the containment issues. Crashing into an Ozymandias fiefdom and needing to survive until the OES could pick you up, you made an eternal enemy of High Priest Azola and his cabal of astrologers. The Longsword sure as fuck came in handy.
ASPECTS: "My Trusty Longsword", "More Bronze Age Expertise Than You'd Think"​
SKILLS: 4 Close Combat, 4 Survival | 3 Stealth, 3 Charm, 3 Intimidation​

[ ] You went to Maud-Witkowski Technical Institute, on Shalerock - the better (in your opinion) of the two garden worlds in the New C. System. Things went well. Until the Purity Party won a majority in the lower house and the Prime Minister's spot. With the Queen ailing and unable to reign them in, the Pukes (as most people sharing your background in genetic augmentation - be it clones, tweaks, or just taking the wrong hormone for the wrong reasons) started to enact more and more draconian procedures on both augmented individuals and just anyone they didn't like (a list that got longer with every day.) You never expected to make an alliance with Nugent Coriolis, one of the most hated terrorist leaders on Shalerock, let alone to lead him and the SDD-2 paramilitary into an Ancient's weapon cache. Turns out, the guns still fucking worked!
ASPECTS: "Unexpected Liberator of Shalerock", "Kill Mark On Four Systems, Paid for by the Purity Party"​
SKILLS: 4 Tactics, 4 Energy Weapons | 3 Oratory, 3 Stealth, 3 Intimidation​

[ ] Eschewing either of the main "academic" settings of the system, you chose the hands on fieldwork of an apprenticeships at the Dockpoints, the circular ring-city that has grown up around the polar entrance of Ozymandias' enderworld. It is a place where people who came to study the world and the people who want more than living under kings and astrologers flock together and, thanks to a string of mismanagement and poor planning, almost immediately became a stratified slums. While living here was dangerous, your apprenticeship under the brilliant (if eccentric) Dr. Lazarus led you to multiple archeological finds that pushed back the mysteries around the Belisarius Cluster in fascinating ways. It all went great! ...until the Akna mercenaries, hired by some Trade Baron with an idea for massive profit in his head, kidnapped you, the doctor, and stole all your notes. If you weren't so incredibly good with computers and hiding, you'd never have gotten away. Worst? The data was lost as well.
ASPECTS: "Protégé of THE Dr. Lazarus!?", "Hacked Tracking Implant, in the base of your neck"​
SKILLS: 4 Computers, 4 Stealth | 3 Kinetic Weapons, 3 Engineering, 3 Piloting​
 
[X] You settled on Onedia's primary university in Lung City, LCU. While living inside of an engineered house made of bone and breathing flesh took a bit of getting used to, you had to admit, the grub was better than most places. The Expeditionary Service hounded you through your entire academic career, and you worked the pressure off by throwing yourself into longsword practice - and to your shock, you actually got damn good at it. What was even more shocking was when, after graduation, you signed up for the OES and were put onto an expedition to Ozymandias - only to go down when the repair-grub that was supposed to check for faults in the fusion reactor caught a bug and died, and the technician for the ship missed the containment issues. Crashing into an Ozymandias fiefdom and needing to survive until the OES could pick you up, you made an eternal enemy of High Priest Azola and his cabal of astrologers. The Longsword sure as fuck came in handy.

ASPECTS: "My Trusty Longsword", "More Bronze Age Expertise Than You'd Think"
SKILLS: 4 Close Combat, 4 Survival | 3 Stealth, 3 Charm, 3 Intimidation

I love the idea of us SOMEHOW turning into a Treasure Planet style sword lesbian in an otherwise hard sci-fi setting.

Hey DC! If you're taking suggestions for your next game, you should totally run one using the Thirsty Sword Lesbians system!
 
[X] You settled on Onedia's primary university in Lung City, LCU. While living inside of an engineered house made of bone and breathing flesh took a bit of getting used to, you had to admit, the grub was better than most places. The Expeditionary Service hounded you through your entire academic career, and you worked the pressure off by throwing yourself into longsword practice - and to your shock, you actually got damn good at it. What was even more shocking was when, after graduation, you signed up for the OES and were put onto an expedition to Ozymandias - only to go down when the repair-grub that was supposed to check for faults in the fusion reactor caught a bug and died, and the technician for the ship missed the containment issues. Crashing into an Ozymandias fiefdom and needing to survive until the OES could pick you up, you made an eternal enemy of High Priest Azola and his cabal of astrologers. The Longsword sure as fuck came in handy.

Knight-Errant Archeologist sounds like fun.
 
[X] You went to Maud-Witkowski Technical Institute, on Shalerock - the better (in your opinion) of the two garden worlds in the New C. System. Things went well. Until the Purity Party won a majority in the lower house and the Prime Minister's spot. With the Queen ailing and unable to reign them in, the Pukes (as most people sharing your background in genetic augmentation - be it clones, tweaks, or just taking the wrong hormone for the wrong reasons) started to enact more and more draconian procedures on both augmented individuals and just anyone they didn't like (a list that got longer with every day.) You never expected to make an alliance with Nugent Coriolis, one of the most hated terrorist leaders on Shalerock, let alone to lead him and the SDD-2 paramilitary into an Ancient's weapon cache. Turns out, the guns still fucking worked!
ASPECTS: "Unexpected Liberator of Shalerock", "Kill Mark On Four Systems, Paid for by the Purity Party"
SKILLS: 4 Tactics, 4 Energy Weapons | 3 Oratory, 3 Stealth, 3 Intimidation

Viva la Revolution!
 
You know... Ozzy is 0.02g, is it even practical to sword fight in that environment? Swordfighting seems to use a lot of footwork, and microgee is more suited to grappling styles... punch daggers, or some other short blade would feel more appropriate for a side arm there.
 
[X] You went to Maud-Witkowski Technical Institute, on Shalerock - the better (in your opinion) of the two garden worlds in the New C. System. Things went well. Until the Purity Party won a majority in the lower house and the Prime Minister's spot. With the Queen ailing and unable to reign them in, the Pukes (as most people sharing your background in genetic augmentation - be it clones, tweaks, or just taking the wrong hormone for the wrong reasons) started to enact more and more draconian procedures on both augmented individuals and just anyone they didn't like (a list that got longer with every day.) You never expected to make an alliance with Nugent Coriolis, one of the most hated terrorist leaders on Shalerock, let alone to lead him and the SDD-2 paramilitary into an Ancient's weapon cache. Turns out, the guns still fucking worked!

What's that? Being a brave freedom fighter? Sign me up!
 
[X] You settled on Onedia's primary university in Lung City, LCU. While living inside of an engineered house made of bone and breathing flesh took a bit of getting used to, you had to admit, the grub was better than most places. The Expeditionary Service hounded you through your entire academic career, and you worked the pressure off by throwing yourself into longsword practice - and to your shock, you actually got damn good at it. What was even more shocking was when, after graduation, you signed up for the OES and were put onto an expedition to Ozymandias - only to go down when the repair-grub that was supposed to check for faults in the fusion reactor caught a bug and died, and the technician for the ship missed the containment issues. Crashing into an Ozymandias fiefdom and needing to survive until the OES could pick you up, you made an eternal enemy of High Priest Azola and his cabal of astrologers. The Longsword sure as fuck came in handy.

Power Metal Band Voice:

LAST IN THE LINE OF A LONG DEAD KINGDOM
SKILLED IN THE BLADE, SHARP AS A TACK
SUPER CLONE FIGHTING FOR SPACE FREEDOM!
FIGHT THE OPPRESSORS SUPER CLONE YEAHHHH!
 
I thought it was 1G at the edges?

Oooooops, no, it's a microgravity habitat, basically a bigger gravity baloon. The exterior shell is used to pressurize the balloon to approximately 1 atm by putting a heavy mass on top of the breathable atmosphere.

Dani Eder suggested steel, which under the local acceleration of gravity of 0.02 metres per second squared (generated by both the mass of the core cell and the living space) has to be 500 metres thick to produce a force down equal of the atmospheric pressure up. As a whole an Ederworld is a micro-gravity environment but it is possible to hang smaller, spinning habitats from the cap.

I imagine native Ozzyes have microgee adaptations that let them avoid the negative effects, and that the Dockport is lined with baffled rotating habitats for visitors:


Details, Details
 
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I still think leaving it at 0.02g is perfectly viable. It generates an absolutely fascinating ecology. Huge, shallow oceans no more than a dozen metres deep, teeming with life, stretching between mountains that are the remains of asteroids drawn into the interior volume.
The interior is crisscrossed with cables that connect the inner and outer shells to they don't drift out of alignment.
Giant sun lamps are spread out all over the interior surfaces, lighting the interior with a diffuse glow - except for zones where they've failed and haven't been repaired yet, plunging the area into darkness.
Storm systems move in slow motion, driven by heat differentials between the inner hydrogen sphere where fusion reactors generate heat and power, and the outer shell that acts as a radiator.
There are definitely forests of floating trees.
All kinds of life forms adapted for microgee, that the Ozzies can ride:
 
Why not both?

There are continent sized areas where the "cladding "hasn't failed, surrounded by massive storm systems created by the gravity differentials, but once you're past the storms, they're at semi-earthlike gravity.

But other parts of the sphere (most of it, even), the cladding has failed and produced the 0.2G environment known elsewhere.

Plans to mine the cladding out have run into the issues that the biggest local kingdoms are there, they're under hundreds of meters of earth and stone, past the storms, and people have only been exploring Ozymandias for a century or two (barely a pinprick.)
 
PROLOGUE: SIDETRACKED
Adhoc vote count started by DragonCobolt on Feb 6, 2022 at 10:46 PM, finished with 12 posts and 5 votes.

  • [X] You settled on Onedia's primary university in Lung City, LCU. While living inside of an engineered house made of bone and breathing flesh took a bit of getting used to, you had to admit, the grub was better than most places. The Expeditionary Service hounded you through your entire academic career, and you worked the pressure off by throwing yourself into longsword practice - and to your shock, you actually got damn good at it. What was even more shocking was when, after graduation, you signed up for the OES and were put onto an expedition to Ozymandias - only to go down when the repair-grub that was supposed to check for faults in the fusion reactor caught a bug and died, and the technician for the ship missed the containment issues. Crashing into an Ozymandias fiefdom and needing to survive until the OES could pick you up, you made an eternal enemy of High Priest Azola and his cabal of astrologers. The Longsword sure as fuck came in handy.
    [X] You went to Maud-Witkowski Technical Institute, on Shalerock - the better (in your opinion) of the two garden worlds in the New C. System. Things went well. Until the Purity Party won a majority in the lower house and the Prime Minister's spot. With the Queen ailing and unable to reign them in, the Pukes (as most people sharing your background in genetic augmentation - be it clones, tweaks, or just taking the wrong hormone for the wrong reasons) started to enact more and more draconian procedures on both augmented individuals and just anyone they didn't like (a list that got longer with every day.) You never expected to make an alliance with Nugent Coriolis, one of the most hated terrorist leaders on Shalerock, let alone to lead him and the SDD-2 paramilitary into an Ancient's weapon cache. Turns out, the guns still fucking worked!


Bronze age madness is in your past! However, this next stage is...in your hands. You wrote yourself into the story of the High Priest Azola - and like it or not, he's coming along. Or maybe she? Them? It's up to you! The details are in the air, not well defined. You get to write the next section from THEIR perspective - how did they interact with this sword-weilding star traveler, and how did the two of you leave Ozymandias together? This will produce two aspects for your character AND define Azola's character and your relationship with them.

Everyone gets to write one version of Sidetracked (which should be a short paragraph, roughly as long and detailed as the paragraphs I described in previous parts), then I will pick the one I like most, in a WILD INVERSION of normal play.

...this is me trying to adapt the chargen system of Diaspora to a single player quest, so it's weird, sorry if it's weird.
 
So do we want a Fanatical High Priest chasing us to 'avenge the insult on their god'? Or do we want to do something were say, the High Priest was actually a High Priestess and you've both been sent running because a neighbouring Kingdom saw whatever we did as the prophesied sign of their triumph over the age-old rival... Yet said prophesy turned out (or was made to) be accurate. So we're running to escape the people from the next Kingdom over which just conquered the local Kingdom which wasn't happy with you either. And whilst we were their prophesied herald, the role said herald plays isn't anything we want to be involved with.

Thus the High Priestess is headed to the stars to find a way to liberate her people. Whilst we've made deals with her to be freed (and perhaps she knows the location of some 'Gods Lore' which is likely to have insights into the mysteries of our past she's offering if we help her liberation effort)...
 
High Priest actually puppet used by cabal of astrologer-astrogators.

I mean, it does say we made an eternal enemy of the High Priest AND the astrologers…

What if the astrologers are (as far as they are concerned), trying to rescue Azola.

Or perhaps the enmity is this sort of extremely formal thing, and the astrologers are getting sad because our astro-archeological adventurer isn't sending them death-day letters or vague threatening missives the way an enemy is supposed to, and so Azola must coach her through the extremely formal process of writing vaguely threading letters?
 
"The Aldare Mountain kingdom was a treacherous place on the best of days, but their relgious orders were eve worse. It was rare for death to be the route to promotion, but nonlethal methods abounded to get others excommunicated or otherwise shamed. As the current High Priest there was none better at grabbing for power or backstabbing. But then one day, a starborn stranger entered the kingdom. Their starborn nature gained them instant prestige in your relgious order, and try as you might, they foiled your every plan over and over again. Nothing you could hit them with would lessen their standing, often just improving it with the grace they dealt with it. It drove you madder and madder, til one day, they suddenly announced they were leaving. Undefeated. You couldn't have that. No, you would finally beat them if it was the last thing you did even if you had to leave your home entirely. You took your loyalist astrologers with yourself, and well followed the starborn. With plans to finally triumph over them."

...Ok. So I guess what we have here is a trickster type high priest. Not because they are 'evil' or their order is corrupt, they just have a strange culture. Sure, they might have some blood on their hands but its considered bad form to resort to assassination. They definitely have a weird obsession with the PC, which ...ok is probably very unhealthy but hey maybe they could tone it down. Point is I feel like an enemy to lover route is still open with this, even if they are well still in the enemy phase.
 
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