Tiedown

1.3.1. Tiedown: Physical Description
The Slipshot of the game title is in Tiedown City. Tiedown City lies inside Tiedown, an abandoned alien generation ship moving through the Crab Nebula in the Perseus Spiral Arm of the Milky Way galaxy, 6,000 light years from the location of old Earth. Tiedown is a football-shaped craft 2,000 km in diameter and 4,000 km in length. It spins on its long axis to provide a consistent 1 g at the widest point. This gravity decreases as one “climbs” to the axes at either end of the ship. Running through the center of the hollow space, on the axis of rotation, is a massive tube running (so the students of the Institute know) from fore to aft. Somewhere in the middle of the tube is a massive illuminator of some kind that fades on and off on a 30 hour cycle. The nature of the illuminator is not known, although the former Slipshot crew suspect it is a fusion device of some kind.

The climate inside Tiedown is driven by the interaction of Coriolis forces and the temperature differences between the thin air near the axis poles and the thicker, hotter atmosphere that gathers at the widest point. The hot areas are low, swampy, and densely populated, where the areas immediately “above” them are covered in parallel ridges approximately 1,000m above the surrounding land. Most of the landscape resembles the high desert of Southern California, where the low parts are more like the Deep South of the United States.
1.3.2. Tiedown: History
Historians and archeologists of the Institute have theorized that Tiedown was built by an unknown race in order to escape the explosion of the Crab Nebula’s origin star one hundred thousand years ago. Alternatively, the vessel may have been en route to the said star system or in the vicinity when the origin star of the nebula went supernova. Studies indicate that the giant ship suffered an ecosystem crash at about that time, the outcome of which left a gigantic biosphere suitable for human habitation, with a habitable land area equivalent to Old Earth. Over the millennia, crews of various relativistic ships have come here, voluntarily and not so voluntarily, and created a more or less permanent culture.

Although most civilized people have begun calling the world “Tiedown”, others still use the older world Fold. Usage of this word isolates the original settlers as being from the old Earth sometime in the last thirty thousand years. Old Earth came to be called Fold sometime in that period. The ancestral language on Tiedown is grammatically Ugric with a great deal of Melanesian loan words. Some hill populations have lost usage of the common tongue, or have regressed to prelingual tribe cant.

Tiedown’s ultimate progression as a civilization has been hindered by the fact that its people live basically inside a ball. Without a way to see the universe, the people of Tiedown have had no reason to progress beyond a medieval worldview. The scant ecosystem inside Tiedown likewise leads to nearly-constant warfare. The one constant power in Tiedown has been the Church of the Holes and Latter Day Saints, a bureaucracy strongly resembling the Roman Catholic Church at the height of its power.

The Holes have moved the center of their faith deliberately from the city of Uton two hundred miles to the northwest to Tiedown City.
1.3.3. Tiedown: Culture
1.3.4. Tiedown City
Tiedown City, though only fifty years old, is quickly becoming one of the largest settlements in the spacecraft, due to the significance of the Slipshot in Tiedown culture. It is located on one of the larger bodies of water in the low bands of the spacecraft (all water on Tiedown is fresh water- whatever mechanism that made Earth’s oceans salty is apparently absent here). The locals have even begun phoneticizing galactic names for the city and the spacecraft, much the same way the Japanese and Chinese phoneticize brand names like Pepsi and Coca-Cola.

The city looks and feels like a grittier, more murderous version of medieval Rome. It is the home of Reikish, the pontiff of the Holes, and Kapinjotish, the mayor of the city. Nuvash Yu is Kapinjotish’s equivalent to Interior Minister, and he is elected from an legislative council of ten, the Ensippon. The secondary tier of the legislature is a one-hundred man group of travelling prelate/assassins, the Tonen. The Tonen are respected by the people but sometimes reviled by the Church for their use of powerful magic. The Tonen/Hole split had festered rather badly until the arrival of the Slipshot. Some Tonen are graduates of the Institute.
1.3.5. Interaction with the Galaxy
The vast majority of the people believe that the interior of Tiedown is the entire cosmos, and that it came into being created by a hole in the fabric of things. The remainder of the creation legend is directly lifted from the Judeo-Christian Old Testament, as per the Church of the Hole and Latter Day Saints.

Other than the Institute, the only other faction centered on galactic civilization is the Church of the Hole and Latter Day Saints. The Holes have built a cathedral around the ship and have a complex relationship with the Institute. On the one hand, they revere and protect the Institute as a living testament to the powers of the Hole. On the other hand, they are jealous of its contents and constantly try to pry more information from the Slipshot crew than they are willing to provide.

Mystery cults also exist in Tiedown, and it is said that they propagate the notion that there is a world outside of Tiedown, and a universe, all larger than the Hole says that it is.

The Holes are currently calling for a crusade against these cults, particularly the Exarchs of Ruu, who have established a state outside of the control of the Holes near one of the most easily accessed paths to the aft pole. The Exarchs may have access to some technology, but they are based around an extremely secretive mystery cult, so it is hard to know for sure.
1.3.6. Technology
Tiedown technology is dark ages, with medieval technology in the hands of the warlords. Militia in the countryside are armed only with cudgels and the like, while town militias will use cudgels and polearms. A top-level mercenary will generally have an iron scimitar, a body shield, and a crossbow.

Each warlord employs any number of Hole “clerics” to work miracles. There are also freelance “wizards”, adventurers who have found more advanced technology and managed to make it function. The Church of the Hole sends Tonen to deal with an individual that has mastered world-shattering aspects of galactic technology.

The Slipshot Institute has engaged itself primarily in spreading non-destructive galactic technology and in researching the alien technology of Tiedown itself. Intact alien tech- even primitive alien tech- provides an immense amount of research value, as the alien minds approached common problems in novel ways. The crew of the Slipshot has reverse-engineered a good deal of the biofactory technology of the Tiedown Builders, and used it to equip some groups in Tiedown with inexpensive, durable chitin armor.

Newly built equipment inside the institute is sophisticated, but everything had to be built from knowledge stored in microfiche, books, and what the crew had in their brains. The reason is near light speed travel, which wipes molecular-scale memory devices and prevents micro circuitry from functioning during transit. The result is a highly analog world, much like that in the Dune series, or in the Fallout series of games. This does not mean the technology is low-powered. Personal fusion flight devices, posthuman artificial intelligence, and other advanced technologies are operational within the boundaries of the Institute. The former crew of the Slipshot, however, is adamant that most of it never even be glimpsed by the natives of Tiedown, and particularly by the Church of the Hole.