zarpaulus

I've been working on this setting for over a decade now and I'm making a lot of progress on an RPG using the Cepheus system right now.

I thought I might share a broad overview of the setting's history that I wrote up for the RPG.

Timeline:
Most calendars in Parahuman Space are oriented around the launch of the first parahuman-built starship as the start of the exodus from the clade’s system of origin, Sol. On the Georgian calendar the year 0 Post Exodus (PX) would be in the early 22nd century AD. So the Federation would be founded in the 32nd century AD and collapse in the 45th century, or roughly the year 4600 AD.
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Instead of NaNoWriMo this year I'm participating in National Game Design Month and working on a tabletop RPG based on my Parahuman Space setting.

The rules are based on the Cepheus Engine, an open content fork of the long-standing sci-fi RPG Traveller. It's a fairly simple system reminiscent of the "most popular RPG" save that you roll 2d6 instead of 1d20 and you never get bloated with hit points, you stay a squishy mortal the whole campaign (I recommend some armor). You can read the full system reference document on this site but the final Parahuman Space RPG will include all the rules needed for play.

The RPG assumes campaigns set after the collapse of the Federation, and instead of the typical tramp trader or mercenary campaigns seen in Traveller the default campaign will be based around salvaging wrecked starships.

AKA "space dungeons."

Think Hardspace Shipbreaker or Lethal Company rather than Elite: Dangerous.

So far I have the character creation and skills chapters, which I've attached to my most recent Patreon post for patrons. I needed to come up with a system for genetic modification of parahuman characters, but the skills are mostly unchanged from the SRD save for removing all references to gravitic vehicles. I also set career mishaps to non-lethal by default ;) I intend to leave the Combat chapter mostly unchanged as well. Psionics, though, will be replaced with Technomagic while the Equipment chapter will need extensive work for augmentations.

Originally, I was planning to use a more "rules-light" system titled Faster Than Light: Nomad for this project, but the step system that used for building spaceships was not as conducive to tearing them apart for spare parts.

Eventually I intend to bring this project to Kickstarter, I'm hoping that if even if you decide not to subscribe to my Patreon you will throw a few bucks my way once it launches.

The large-scale multi-ship battles seen occasionally in interplanetary warfare are almost unheard of when the combatants are located in entirely different star systems. The main reason is simply the orders of magnitude difference in travel time and cost. Starships using reaction drives require many cubic kilometers of reaction mass just to get up to the speeds where ramscoops are effective, while gravity and warp drives require unfathomable amounts of energy and matter just to build.

Therefore, would-be interstellar invaders tend to adopt one of two strategies: The WMD approach is usually only effective against technologically inferior opponents, but if they pull it off a single starship can conquer a star. A G-Drive ship can dance around a fleet of reaction ships, slicing them to ribbons without even taking a hit, while even the least r-drive starship is a colossus compared to system ships. The power of their drives, combined with the purpose-built weapons that civilizations capable of building starships can design, means that almost any starship can lay waste to a defenseless star system in a matter of weeks.

Of course, if the invaders want to capture the biosphere intact (which most do, as it tends to be the most valuable part of a star system), they can’t simply throw nukes and c-bombs everywhere. Which means that the ship’s crew has to negotiate the tricky task of persuading the local governments to surrender with minimal devastation. Even if they succeed in this task, the resulting political arrangements tend not to last long. The elites and masses of such worlds tend to resent “quisling” leaders and efforts to depose them are soon to follow.
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One of the most important, but divisive, features of a science fiction setting is space travel. It determines the scope of the story, where the characters can go and how easily. Realistically, space travel is very difficult and expensive, but in many stories one can commute from one end of the galaxy to another. Space travel might as well be magic the way it is presented in those stories.

Now magic systems have been debated six ways to Sunday, they’re a highly contentious issue among writers. They’ve been unofficially classified into “hard” and “soft” magic systems, with advocates for both and neither. Since the terms “hard and soft” already have their own baggage in sci-fi, we’ll use the terms “defined” and “open” instead.

Like hard and soft magic systems, defined and open space travel exists on a spectrum rather than a binary. The more defined a space travel system is, the more limitations are imposed on the system and the fewer opportunities the writer has to introduce something unexpected. While a more open a system is the fewer established limitations there are and the more potential there is to introduce new features.

In longer-running franchises space travel might become more defined or open as characters experiment with FTL or new writers introduce new ideas. As an example, Star Trek’s warp drive was initially rather open but the writers established a speed limit while also leaving the possibility open for introducing faster methods of travel. This made the story of Voyager possible, a precursor system transported the Voyager to the far side of the galaxy, where they had to rely on the speed-limited warp drive or find a new way to get home.
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Entries tagged with sci-fi

The History of Parahuman Space

National Game Design Month

Interstellar Warfare

A Rat in a Maze, Ch. 1 (Korps)

How FTL is Intertwined with Worldbuilding

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