The Lotus-class BPB as it appeared from the factory in 12008:
The Slipshot as flying a hundred years ago:
The Slipshot today in 98008, at the Slipshot Institute on Tiedown:
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Slipshot in Time
During normal operation and repairs, the Lotus-class BPB can get to looking a bit more rugged than they did emerging from the factories of the Core. Witness the following pictoral.
The Lotus-class BPB as it appeared from the factory in 12008:
The Slipshot as flying a hundred years ago:
The Slipshot today in 98008, at the Slipshot Institute on Tiedown:
The Lotus-class BPB as it appeared from the factory in 12008:
The Slipshot as flying a hundred years ago:
The Slipshot today in 98008, at the Slipshot Institute on Tiedown:
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Epochs of Exploration
The following table summarizes the epochs of galactic exploration in the human era. "Culture" is the culture name. Star is the point of origin of the culture that spawned the epoch. Start and End describe the period when the culture undertook its exploratory period. MaxRadius indicates the maximum radius of the exploration. Some cultures have sent exploratory groups out of the galaxy, but the status of these voyages is not known.
| Culture | Star | Start | End | MaxRadius(LY) |
| The Accelerando | Sol | 2100 | 3100 | 50 |
| Ugric Panspermia | Beta Canum Venaticorum | 10000 | 17000 | 5000 |
| Han Colonists | VY Canis Majoris | 16000 | 60000 | 45000 |
| Neomalay Navigators | LBV 1806-20 (Hina) | 56000 | ????? | Extragalactic |
| Hajj Band Patrol | S0—2 (Kaaba) | 30000 | 60000 | Galactic |
| Mexicali Shiners | Pistol | 60000 | 79000 | Galactic |
| Core Band Patrol | Sagittarius A (Core Prime) | 60000 | 98008 | Galactic |
| Ruu Surveys | Sol | Unknwon | Unknown | Unknown |
Monday, May 4, 2009
Connections: Clays and Shells
Note: XO Wei has programmed a synthetic James Burke persona, who is capable of instantly narrating a Connections-like program on any topic. With a new amount of research fueled by Jenos' discovery of the lost optical recording technology, Wei's synthetic James Burke has enough material to do a program . .
################
JAMES BURKE (Hefting a clay tablet before the camera): It is not too much of a stretch to say that human civilization on old Earth had one form of information storage for its first seven thousand years. That would be. . this thing. A flat media, capable of taking imprints, able to be re-written with a swab of water or laser light. This media in particular is one of the first examples of a periphonetic writing system. It's quite robust. So robust, in fact, that its relatives were still in wide use thousands of years later. What happened to it? The answer lies in tortoise shells.
JAMES BURKE (Walking through a high desert): On the other side of old Earth lived a quite distinct group of writers from the clay stampers. For whatever reason, the Shang did not see fit to make any phonetic concessions in the scrawls they put on these (holds up tortoise shell with markings on it). They did not do so because these scripts are not records or laws. These shells tell the future, and the language they used was that of magic and prophecy. The symbols on them are completely associative, heuristic, without distinct subject/verb count. An entire language built on metaphor. As time passed the world of metaphor became less and less crucial, while the world of records and clay tablets grew and grew. The Shang script's descendents slept in their tortoise shell cage while the rule of clay went on. That is, until the robots came.
JAMES BURKE (holding a cube of white material): The Clay People thought for the longest time of robots as physical workers, unstoppable soldiers, things that did things to things. The fact is that the clay had gotten into their heads. They had, over time, assumed that everything was reduced to media and writer, markee and marker, a philosophical phenomenon called "dualism". The clay was a slate to which you did things. The shell people had no such compunctions as they began writing in ever more refined materials. The shell people did not try to record everything in letters and bits, but sought to make the material comprehend what was happening and be able to retell it. Consciousness as the ultimate in information compression. Before long this (holds up cube) descendent of the Shang shells had more than enough computational power to simulate an Einstein, a Mozart, a Gauguin. On demand. The shell people had found their prophecy, and they took to the stars.
JAMES BURKE (in the bridge of the Slipshot): As humanity spread into the galaxy at non relativistic speeds, the storage of information became less and less separated from the processing of information. Contact with Core Prime accelerated this process, making scientific breakthroughs a commodity to those with the right equipment. Eventually, knowledge of the clay people was lost in the memory of the machines, the Shang shell's descendents. Those shells, though, were themselves ultimately shattered when (pushes main throttles full forward) Core Prime commissioned the BPB program. Not just because the shells failed utterly at these speeds, but because of something more subtle, and far more dangerous.
JAMES BURKE (a giant black monolith stands in the background, surrounded by ape-men): At some point, hominids will undergo a war, or disease, or some other disaster that makes the population significantly less intelligent. This shell (pats monolith) then loses the metaphor. It has a harder and harder time working with the locals. It spends more time listening to Core Prime. Its servicers are ambushed for shinies. Eventually the mechanism breaks, and the standing-wave quantum electrodynamics in its core are indecipherable without the entire element energized. This massive intelligence, a chip off the old Core Prime block, has become a dumb god. Which is better than the alternative.
JAMES BURKE (in the background is a G2V class star being bombarded by black holes) One of the problems with metaphorical languages is that there's always a disagreement as to what exactly you are saying. In the case of Rogue Iron, they clearly understood their intelligence to be a gift from an extragalactic power called The Great Attractor. Core Prime disagreed. Rogue Iron was utterly destroyed. A trillion hominids died with them. The Outer Bands descended into darkness. The BPB program linked the sparks of the night with the raw power of human will. Until now.
JAMES BURKE (loading disks into a rigged drive on Slipshot's main computer): Thanks to the efforts of the students of the Slipshot Institute, shell will talk to clay. (Pulls out DVD, puts in archive box, video fades out)
################
JAMES BURKE (Hefting a clay tablet before the camera): It is not too much of a stretch to say that human civilization on old Earth had one form of information storage for its first seven thousand years. That would be. . this thing. A flat media, capable of taking imprints, able to be re-written with a swab of water or laser light. This media in particular is one of the first examples of a periphonetic writing system. It's quite robust. So robust, in fact, that its relatives were still in wide use thousands of years later. What happened to it? The answer lies in tortoise shells.
JAMES BURKE (Walking through a high desert): On the other side of old Earth lived a quite distinct group of writers from the clay stampers. For whatever reason, the Shang did not see fit to make any phonetic concessions in the scrawls they put on these (holds up tortoise shell with markings on it). They did not do so because these scripts are not records or laws. These shells tell the future, and the language they used was that of magic and prophecy. The symbols on them are completely associative, heuristic, without distinct subject/verb count. An entire language built on metaphor. As time passed the world of metaphor became less and less crucial, while the world of records and clay tablets grew and grew. The Shang script's descendents slept in their tortoise shell cage while the rule of clay went on. That is, until the robots came.
JAMES BURKE (holding a cube of white material): The Clay People thought for the longest time of robots as physical workers, unstoppable soldiers, things that did things to things. The fact is that the clay had gotten into their heads. They had, over time, assumed that everything was reduced to media and writer, markee and marker, a philosophical phenomenon called "dualism". The clay was a slate to which you did things. The shell people had no such compunctions as they began writing in ever more refined materials. The shell people did not try to record everything in letters and bits, but sought to make the material comprehend what was happening and be able to retell it. Consciousness as the ultimate in information compression. Before long this (holds up cube) descendent of the Shang shells had more than enough computational power to simulate an Einstein, a Mozart, a Gauguin. On demand. The shell people had found their prophecy, and they took to the stars.
JAMES BURKE (in the bridge of the Slipshot): As humanity spread into the galaxy at non relativistic speeds, the storage of information became less and less separated from the processing of information. Contact with Core Prime accelerated this process, making scientific breakthroughs a commodity to those with the right equipment. Eventually, knowledge of the clay people was lost in the memory of the machines, the Shang shell's descendents. Those shells, though, were themselves ultimately shattered when (pushes main throttles full forward) Core Prime commissioned the BPB program. Not just because the shells failed utterly at these speeds, but because of something more subtle, and far more dangerous.
JAMES BURKE (a giant black monolith stands in the background, surrounded by ape-men): At some point, hominids will undergo a war, or disease, or some other disaster that makes the population significantly less intelligent. This shell (pats monolith) then loses the metaphor. It has a harder and harder time working with the locals. It spends more time listening to Core Prime. Its servicers are ambushed for shinies. Eventually the mechanism breaks, and the standing-wave quantum electrodynamics in its core are indecipherable without the entire element energized. This massive intelligence, a chip off the old Core Prime block, has become a dumb god. Which is better than the alternative.
JAMES BURKE (in the background is a G2V class star being bombarded by black holes) One of the problems with metaphorical languages is that there's always a disagreement as to what exactly you are saying. In the case of Rogue Iron, they clearly understood their intelligence to be a gift from an extragalactic power called The Great Attractor. Core Prime disagreed. Rogue Iron was utterly destroyed. A trillion hominids died with them. The Outer Bands descended into darkness. The BPB program linked the sparks of the night with the raw power of human will. Until now.
JAMES BURKE (loading disks into a rigged drive on Slipshot's main computer): Thanks to the efforts of the students of the Slipshot Institute, shell will talk to clay. (Pulls out DVD, puts in archive box, video fades out)
Thursday, April 16, 2009
A Dangerous Artifact
The following presents one scenario offered to the students:
##############################################
Under the drooping wing of the Slipshot Parson was struck in the face for the first time in eighty years. It was an eight-year-old that did it, snake-fast, snapping his rope weapon, the lead weight lashing out just right, knocking out a tooth and spilling him into the sand. Flat on his back, arms cast wide. He watched the blue sky for a moment, tinged with red and brown, before his field of vision filled up with worried faces. He laughed. They were so quick. They were the very best the Institute had taken in decades. Their neurons weren’t actually faster than the old men of the Slipshot crew, but their minds were unburdened by hundreds of years of pain and a service that seemed, now, to Parsons . . questionable.
There was joy too. There is always joy. Unless you were poor Captain Kierns. Ah.
Now, though, the test. The children.
Parsons scooped up the rope master and urged him to try to escape. The boy twisted one way, pivoted, and Parsons reversed, grabbing his ankle and dropping him in the dirt. The boy countered by temporarily paralyzing Parsons below the left knee. Parsons dropped and continued the grappling lesson, over grabs and reversals Parsons said to the students gathered:
It’s high time we started getting some work out of you rugrats. Wei wants you out and getting some things for us. We disagree as to what but that's another matter. You know we’re not overly happy with the current Reikish, the pontiff of the Holes. We’re increasingly dubious about his crusade against the Exarchs of Ruu, and to be frank, we don’t want to see the Exarchs go down. Which we normally wouldn’t have to worry about. The Ruu are good fighters and they have some very canny wizards. Problem: there’s a new artifact the Holes dug up. Normally we aren’t too worried when we hear about flying saints and folks rising from the dead and suchlike, but our tame priest in the Tonen says he’s seen this thing glowing when touched and killing all those that look on it and other such things. If the Tonen figure it out it could give the Reikish an incentive to squash the Ruu and for real this time. There's also the real possibility of fantastically quick death for everyone in the Tiedown. If they try to push too many buttons, if this thing turns out to be a powerful instrument.
You guys know we’re trying to help these people out of the muck as best as we can, as carefully as we can. We play a double game with the Reikish and the Holes because they offer protection and because quite frankly their faith makes them a powerful tool for us. But we can’t have them using galactic technology like this, not in an enclosed ecosystem like Tiedown. If it is a weapon pod of some kind we could all be sucking vacuum faster than you can say, “huh, usually black is the ground”. And we don’t have the sway to just ask for it; the Holes have kept us up to our ears in manpower and materials for the better part of a century and I don’t blame them for asking themselves what they’re getting out of it besides a couple of maladjusted youths like yourselves.
Wei just wants to EMP the thing, but I say different, because we just don’t know what it is. And it might be a lot more than just a weapons or recon pod. What I want is for you kids to steal it. You know that new cathedral they built to Captain Kierns after he offed himself? We’ve reserved the lower block of that for research on the artifacts the Holes have dug up, and we want to get that new artifact into the block as soon as we can.
Where is the artifact? Well, it’s in the Reikish Chapel where Urthrani IV is currently contemplating it in devotion, at least until it wakes up and burns through his retinas. It’s due to be moved to Ensippon chambers in the Holdout at Belden Ridge above the city, which, oh lucky us, is snowed in right now. Once it’s in the Holdout I give Harold Exeter of the Tonen a week or two before he figures out something dangerous. He’s already got his firearms, the salvaged sonic he carries as a staff and god knows how many rounds of GANC projectiles he grabbed when we spilled them on that flight back in 97960 when Kierns got blitzed on Stump's tomato vodka and tried to take the ship up. Wow, I almost forgot how much that sucked.
Anyway, I didn't raise you kids to be impulsive. Take a night. If we have to we'll EMP Belden ridge. But there's no telling what's in that artifact. It's a big galaxy.
##############################################
Under the drooping wing of the Slipshot Parson was struck in the face for the first time in eighty years. It was an eight-year-old that did it, snake-fast, snapping his rope weapon, the lead weight lashing out just right, knocking out a tooth and spilling him into the sand. Flat on his back, arms cast wide. He watched the blue sky for a moment, tinged with red and brown, before his field of vision filled up with worried faces. He laughed. They were so quick. They were the very best the Institute had taken in decades. Their neurons weren’t actually faster than the old men of the Slipshot crew, but their minds were unburdened by hundreds of years of pain and a service that seemed, now, to Parsons . . questionable.
There was joy too. There is always joy. Unless you were poor Captain Kierns. Ah.
Now, though, the test. The children.
Parsons scooped up the rope master and urged him to try to escape. The boy twisted one way, pivoted, and Parsons reversed, grabbing his ankle and dropping him in the dirt. The boy countered by temporarily paralyzing Parsons below the left knee. Parsons dropped and continued the grappling lesson, over grabs and reversals Parsons said to the students gathered:
It’s high time we started getting some work out of you rugrats. Wei wants you out and getting some things for us. We disagree as to what but that's another matter. You know we’re not overly happy with the current Reikish, the pontiff of the Holes. We’re increasingly dubious about his crusade against the Exarchs of Ruu, and to be frank, we don’t want to see the Exarchs go down. Which we normally wouldn’t have to worry about. The Ruu are good fighters and they have some very canny wizards. Problem: there’s a new artifact the Holes dug up. Normally we aren’t too worried when we hear about flying saints and folks rising from the dead and suchlike, but our tame priest in the Tonen says he’s seen this thing glowing when touched and killing all those that look on it and other such things. If the Tonen figure it out it could give the Reikish an incentive to squash the Ruu and for real this time. There's also the real possibility of fantastically quick death for everyone in the Tiedown. If they try to push too many buttons, if this thing turns out to be a powerful instrument.
You guys know we’re trying to help these people out of the muck as best as we can, as carefully as we can. We play a double game with the Reikish and the Holes because they offer protection and because quite frankly their faith makes them a powerful tool for us. But we can’t have them using galactic technology like this, not in an enclosed ecosystem like Tiedown. If it is a weapon pod of some kind we could all be sucking vacuum faster than you can say, “huh, usually black is the ground”. And we don’t have the sway to just ask for it; the Holes have kept us up to our ears in manpower and materials for the better part of a century and I don’t blame them for asking themselves what they’re getting out of it besides a couple of maladjusted youths like yourselves.
Wei just wants to EMP the thing, but I say different, because we just don’t know what it is. And it might be a lot more than just a weapons or recon pod. What I want is for you kids to steal it. You know that new cathedral they built to Captain Kierns after he offed himself? We’ve reserved the lower block of that for research on the artifacts the Holes have dug up, and we want to get that new artifact into the block as soon as we can.
Where is the artifact? Well, it’s in the Reikish Chapel where Urthrani IV is currently contemplating it in devotion, at least until it wakes up and burns through his retinas. It’s due to be moved to Ensippon chambers in the Holdout at Belden Ridge above the city, which, oh lucky us, is snowed in right now. Once it’s in the Holdout I give Harold Exeter of the Tonen a week or two before he figures out something dangerous. He’s already got his firearms, the salvaged sonic he carries as a staff and god knows how many rounds of GANC projectiles he grabbed when we spilled them on that flight back in 97960 when Kierns got blitzed on Stump's tomato vodka and tried to take the ship up. Wow, I almost forgot how much that sucked.
Anyway, I didn't raise you kids to be impulsive. Take a night. If we have to we'll EMP Belden ridge. But there's no telling what's in that artifact. It's a big galaxy.
Thursday, April 9, 2009
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.
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.
Tuesday, April 7, 2009
Our Light Abeam
The following excerpt from the story, Our Light Abeam, is part of the collection Travels Upward, by Casina Mass, Casina Prime publishing, August 01, 91128
This partially introduces the most senior teachers at the Slipshot institute
###########################
The spacemen burned down into the system, trading stories, smoking cigars, and generally making asses of themselves while they were still timeslipping behind the rest of the known universe. The current conversation had been on relativistic velocities, as most conversations were, and how it made it impossible to report bad behavior
“We’ll be well into our hangovers, showered and spectacularly grumpy by the time the report gets in. Hell, they probably have entirely different linguistic systems by the time the report gets in. Are you sure this is mescal?” asked the Flight Engineer, Parsons Dornan.
“Yah”, said the captain, forty-year old veteran Jing Wu Kierns, buried in a massive nebula of cushions, “but mind you don’t . . you know . . don’t”
“Don’t what?” asked the Executive Officer. When the only constant in life was other spacemen, bonds could go deep. The Executive Officer, a hermaphrodite of indefinite age known only as Wei, knew that his captain was beyond the reach of language, and only a precious few moments from being beyond thought itself. Being around and sober was the predominant duty of the XO.
It was a last moment of pleasure for these men. In a few subjective hours they would be streaking through the planetary defenses of the Human League. There was no hiding the fact they were about to sluice through a civilization born just a few subjective days ago. The same great things about hauling all over the galaxy at the speed of light suddenly turned into horrible liabilities.
“Now, the fantastic thing about coming in out of the Perseus belt is that it’s just such a fucking desert. Almost sticking right out of the galaxy”, said ordnance controller Lt. Xian Soon. “Last time we were in action, it was against the Rogue Iron, they were in the outer Core, and we were, like, crawling,” Soon mimed the action with his hands, laughing.
“Yah,” said Kierns, when I later asked him about the Core, “Parking lot assault. Geriatric parking lot. Twenty percent C. We were firing off kilo projectiles that had the energy a microgram projectile would have at our current attack speed. But even at twenty shields were freaking out, the plume from the coolant was glowing like the big fucking bang. It’s the goddamn core!” Privately, Kierns admitted that the attack had made him nervous: twenty percent c was slow enough for defense systems to engage his ship. “Sometimes you do wonder if the core prophecy iscompletely on the spot. I mean, we got our orders against Rogue Iron fifteen hundred slipped years before we attacked. We know the core’s prophecy is ninety-nine point nine nine percent accurate, but it doesn’t take a whole lot to make us go nova. A gram of mass and we look like the first second of the universe, in miniature.”
Does it ever bother the men, that they find themselves warring on civilizations that had come into being during their voyage? Planets they had never, and now would never, know?
“It’s a job, you know? You know. It’s hard enough, space, your only buddies are the core, the sleepers, other core teams, but the living worlds you’re seeing a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand slipped years after you were there last. You miss cultures, not people. But worry about targets? No, you shut them down. You have to trust the core.”
Not too much later, individual hydrogen atoms began sparking against the particle shielding like little suns. Though deflected hundreds of kilometers from the body of the ship, their roar bucks the hull and blinds sensors too dumb to look away. Subjective time is slowed to nothing compared to the system we are bombing through, but that doesn’t matter: no one has any way of knowing we’re coming. Our light's just a hundred meters ahead of us.
Dornan charges the mass driver and adjusts the ship’s flexing spaceframe for the recoil of a two gram projectile. “It’s yours Soon”, he says. For all of the room and good times the crew had in cruise configuration, once the vessel is belayed for a system assault it feels like a mosh pit in the torpedo room. I can feel Soon twitch with the control he exerts through the glass tubes traveling from his nerve channels to the trigger housing, smell his perspiration as the dank space goes pitch black.
“Power on rail."
"Good good good"
"Grams down the track and . . away!” The lights come back on.
“Evasive, Dornan. Lay down some light between us and that plug,” says Kierns, in an urgent whisper that seems to carry for kilometers.
Everything creaks under another ratchet of acceleration. We are going very near the possible here, when the human nervous system begins to fail due to the differences in velocity between body parts. When you are traveling at orbital velocity, the relativistic difference between your throbbing cardiac nerve and your spinal cord is inconsequential. In the upper nineties of C the difference between the nerves in your throbbing muscles and the nerves in your spinal column can prove fatal. “The nerve is moving that much faster that the sodium pump doesn’t know if it’s coming or going,” Dornan had explained, “once you’re close enough to C an extra meter per second can make a big difference. We’re all medicated to the gills at this velocity, but there are limits”. It’s another reason why these flights haven’t been automated; printed circuits of any microscopic scale fail during routine course correction in relativistic flight, due to the local variance in relativistic effects. The fabric of space has necessitated that humans be the only interstellar actors. Despite the immense mental powers of the core's intelligence, it remains locked in the subjective time of stellar gravity wells.
“Proximity flashes from the far shield,” notes Dornan. Calm. He could be taking my dessert order. “Blue shifted . . redding out, port side. Carbon? Wait. . wait”
“Cloud! Cloud! Cloud!”, screams Wei
Without thinking, Soon flinches several times next to me, more projectiles hurtling off into God knows where. In the dark that ensues, the temperature in the cabin rises twenty degrees in an instant. I am sure that I am about to be reduced to an extremely diffuse cloud of hitherto-unknown subatomic particles. Shocks ripple through my entire being. Did I just remember the future?
The lights come back on, and after a sweating heartbeat, everyone piles on Soon.
“Haaha” screams Kierns. “You fantastic asshole.”
Wei dances to stations, “Cloud separated. Like, really separated. We’re OK. Sort of. OK, ha OK, everyone, let Soon check his scope.” I understand. Soon shot off all his salvos at the Human League’s defensive cloud, insanely close, but the blast had separated the hard stuff enough for us to pass through. It was quick thinking. Many gunners, even hard veterans, tend to forget that a gram projectile at this velocity hits with megatons of energy. The "danger close" shot was also decidedly un-military. “We’re not real soldiers,” Soon confesses, “we just play them on TV. Seriously, the command signal's always a couple of thousand years behind us, we just do what the hell."
Dornan marvels at the scale of damage to the vessel. “Big impact with the far shields, some stuff hit the hull material. Relativistic impacts make some very exotic materials, so it's hard to tell what hit you. Some sort of quantum tunneling mass went glissading through the crew compartment. I think the shock front actually went back in time a little bit”. Dornan smiles. External armor had nearly broken down all over the leading edges of the vessel. Soon notes that the crew had taken on a serious amount of radiation; we would be dead in months without organ transplants. Luckily the next leg of the trip would only take days in subjective time.
After high spirits have passed, we look back on the planet we swooped by so quickly. The defenses existed outside the prophecy of the core, and that had bought the Human League another untold number of years. Soon's first shot must have hit other clouds further in and given this system an ephemeral new sun. The home planet sits there in dumb blue perfection. We don't have the fuel to turn around. Some other crew, armed with the new information, will take on this League.
Over the next hour the compressed vessel opens like a flower for the next leg of its tour, gravity ring spinning up and generators cooling down. Kierns looks forward to the next peaceful port of call, someplace near Antares, where "there's supposed to be beaches. Another woman-only planet, too. Won't they be surprised."
The acceptance of these young men in the face of unprecedented isolation and danger is something I don't think I can ever leave behind me, even when I land for the last time, and send them off to their eternal lives among the stars. Just then we looked ahead, to the blueshifted light of Antares.
This partially introduces the most senior teachers at the Slipshot institute
###########################
The spacemen burned down into the system, trading stories, smoking cigars, and generally making asses of themselves while they were still timeslipping behind the rest of the known universe. The current conversation had been on relativistic velocities, as most conversations were, and how it made it impossible to report bad behavior
“We’ll be well into our hangovers, showered and spectacularly grumpy by the time the report gets in. Hell, they probably have entirely different linguistic systems by the time the report gets in. Are you sure this is mescal?” asked the Flight Engineer, Parsons Dornan.
“Yah”, said the captain, forty-year old veteran Jing Wu Kierns, buried in a massive nebula of cushions, “but mind you don’t . . you know . . don’t”
“Don’t what?” asked the Executive Officer. When the only constant in life was other spacemen, bonds could go deep. The Executive Officer, a hermaphrodite of indefinite age known only as Wei, knew that his captain was beyond the reach of language, and only a precious few moments from being beyond thought itself. Being around and sober was the predominant duty of the XO.
It was a last moment of pleasure for these men. In a few subjective hours they would be streaking through the planetary defenses of the Human League. There was no hiding the fact they were about to sluice through a civilization born just a few subjective days ago. The same great things about hauling all over the galaxy at the speed of light suddenly turned into horrible liabilities.
“Now, the fantastic thing about coming in out of the Perseus belt is that it’s just such a fucking desert. Almost sticking right out of the galaxy”, said ordnance controller Lt. Xian Soon. “Last time we were in action, it was against the Rogue Iron, they were in the outer Core, and we were, like, crawling,” Soon mimed the action with his hands, laughing.
“Yah,” said Kierns, when I later asked him about the Core, “Parking lot assault. Geriatric parking lot. Twenty percent C. We were firing off kilo projectiles that had the energy a microgram projectile would have at our current attack speed. But even at twenty shields were freaking out, the plume from the coolant was glowing like the big fucking bang. It’s the goddamn core!” Privately, Kierns admitted that the attack had made him nervous: twenty percent c was slow enough for defense systems to engage his ship. “Sometimes you do wonder if the core prophecy iscompletely on the spot. I mean, we got our orders against Rogue Iron fifteen hundred slipped years before we attacked. We know the core’s prophecy is ninety-nine point nine nine percent accurate, but it doesn’t take a whole lot to make us go nova. A gram of mass and we look like the first second of the universe, in miniature.”
Does it ever bother the men, that they find themselves warring on civilizations that had come into being during their voyage? Planets they had never, and now would never, know?
“It’s a job, you know? You know. It’s hard enough, space, your only buddies are the core, the sleepers, other core teams, but the living worlds you’re seeing a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand slipped years after you were there last. You miss cultures, not people. But worry about targets? No, you shut them down. You have to trust the core.”
Not too much later, individual hydrogen atoms began sparking against the particle shielding like little suns. Though deflected hundreds of kilometers from the body of the ship, their roar bucks the hull and blinds sensors too dumb to look away. Subjective time is slowed to nothing compared to the system we are bombing through, but that doesn’t matter: no one has any way of knowing we’re coming. Our light's just a hundred meters ahead of us.
Dornan charges the mass driver and adjusts the ship’s flexing spaceframe for the recoil of a two gram projectile. “It’s yours Soon”, he says. For all of the room and good times the crew had in cruise configuration, once the vessel is belayed for a system assault it feels like a mosh pit in the torpedo room. I can feel Soon twitch with the control he exerts through the glass tubes traveling from his nerve channels to the trigger housing, smell his perspiration as the dank space goes pitch black.
“Power on rail."
"Good good good"
"Grams down the track and . . away!” The lights come back on.
“Evasive, Dornan. Lay down some light between us and that plug,” says Kierns, in an urgent whisper that seems to carry for kilometers.
Everything creaks under another ratchet of acceleration. We are going very near the possible here, when the human nervous system begins to fail due to the differences in velocity between body parts. When you are traveling at orbital velocity, the relativistic difference between your throbbing cardiac nerve and your spinal cord is inconsequential. In the upper nineties of C the difference between the nerves in your throbbing muscles and the nerves in your spinal column can prove fatal. “The nerve is moving that much faster that the sodium pump doesn’t know if it’s coming or going,” Dornan had explained, “once you’re close enough to C an extra meter per second can make a big difference. We’re all medicated to the gills at this velocity, but there are limits”. It’s another reason why these flights haven’t been automated; printed circuits of any microscopic scale fail during routine course correction in relativistic flight, due to the local variance in relativistic effects. The fabric of space has necessitated that humans be the only interstellar actors. Despite the immense mental powers of the core's intelligence, it remains locked in the subjective time of stellar gravity wells.
“Proximity flashes from the far shield,” notes Dornan. Calm. He could be taking my dessert order. “Blue shifted . . redding out, port side. Carbon? Wait. . wait”
“Cloud! Cloud! Cloud!”, screams Wei
Without thinking, Soon flinches several times next to me, more projectiles hurtling off into God knows where. In the dark that ensues, the temperature in the cabin rises twenty degrees in an instant. I am sure that I am about to be reduced to an extremely diffuse cloud of hitherto-unknown subatomic particles. Shocks ripple through my entire being. Did I just remember the future?
The lights come back on, and after a sweating heartbeat, everyone piles on Soon.
“Haaha” screams Kierns. “You fantastic asshole.”
Wei dances to stations, “Cloud separated. Like, really separated. We’re OK. Sort of. OK, ha OK, everyone, let Soon check his scope.” I understand. Soon shot off all his salvos at the Human League’s defensive cloud, insanely close, but the blast had separated the hard stuff enough for us to pass through. It was quick thinking. Many gunners, even hard veterans, tend to forget that a gram projectile at this velocity hits with megatons of energy. The "danger close" shot was also decidedly un-military. “We’re not real soldiers,” Soon confesses, “we just play them on TV. Seriously, the command signal's always a couple of thousand years behind us, we just do what the hell."
Dornan marvels at the scale of damage to the vessel. “Big impact with the far shields, some stuff hit the hull material. Relativistic impacts make some very exotic materials, so it's hard to tell what hit you. Some sort of quantum tunneling mass went glissading through the crew compartment. I think the shock front actually went back in time a little bit”. Dornan smiles. External armor had nearly broken down all over the leading edges of the vessel. Soon notes that the crew had taken on a serious amount of radiation; we would be dead in months without organ transplants. Luckily the next leg of the trip would only take days in subjective time.
After high spirits have passed, we look back on the planet we swooped by so quickly. The defenses existed outside the prophecy of the core, and that had bought the Human League another untold number of years. Soon's first shot must have hit other clouds further in and given this system an ephemeral new sun. The home planet sits there in dumb blue perfection. We don't have the fuel to turn around. Some other crew, armed with the new information, will take on this League.
Over the next hour the compressed vessel opens like a flower for the next leg of its tour, gravity ring spinning up and generators cooling down. Kierns looks forward to the next peaceful port of call, someplace near Antares, where "there's supposed to be beaches. Another woman-only planet, too. Won't they be surprised."
The acceptance of these young men in the face of unprecedented isolation and danger is something I don't think I can ever leave behind me, even when I land for the last time, and send them off to their eternal lives among the stars. Just then we looked ahead, to the blueshifted light of Antares.
Friday, April 3, 2009
The Galaxy of Slipshot: Part 1
1.1. Teaser
Six thousand years ago, the last of the Slipshot type patrol boats were retired. In the year 98008 of the Common Era, new patrol craft are appearing among the human civilizations of the Outer Bands of the Milky Way. Restlessness grows as human civilizations go silent, and the teachers of the Slipshot Institute grow uneasy as they take in the latest generation of students . .
The inspiration for the campaign is the Firefly TV series, but to make gameplay smoother we are decreasing the age of the main characters. Custom worlds like this are more fun for everyone when players and gm are discovering it together, otherwise issues with player knowledge introduce inconsistencies and disrupt the suspension of disbelief.
1.2. The Characters
1.2.1. The Institute
The player characters are children ranging in age from 8 to 16. They are offspring of the refugees that originally landed with the Slipshot fifty years ago. At the time of the start of the campaign, they are normal, if gifted, young people. Their physical and mental advantages have been augmented by the various treatment regiments used by the Slipshot crew. In Hero System, a 15 is the baseline stat for the children, with 25 being the maximum possible for their age, and all characters receive Immunity:Aging/Disease. For d20, consider the starting stat to be 12, with a 24 point buy. I’m leaning toward Hero system for this campaign.
The students are about to participate in the final stages of the education program taught by the former crewmembers of the Slipshot. The graduation process is swathed in secrecy, but is rumored to be anything from rigorous classes to hazing to combat.
The characters know all the information in this document. They have been brought up in a way not unrecognizable to 21st century people of Earth, since many of the Slipshot crew are from this period. They have been trained in hand-to-hand combat by the Slipshot crew in preparation for dealing with the medieval world outside the Institute. The crew has more than enough background to teach any student in any martial art desired.
The characters have roughly the same knowledge base as 21st century Terrans. They have the equivalent knowledge and emotional depth of adults because they are exceptional children, which is why they are at this stage of education at the Institute.
They have been sheltered from the culture of Tiedown and know it mostly from reading and distant observation. They have been brought up in borderline monastic conditions, as the teachers at the Institute have tried to protect them from the often brutal conditions in Tiedown.
The graduation process is largely geared to test the resourcefulness of the players. As such, they have no equipment beyond their clothing.
1.2.2. Alternative Character Origins
Nothing is more frustrating than being shoehorned into a story as a roleplayer. All players should bring forward an origin they are particularly excited about. Keep in mind that this may affect precisely when I can bring the character into play. Xorxaxx VII from the Andromeda Galaxy can’t just show up while the PCs are on a quest to find parts to repair the algae farm. Hmm, maybe he could, actually, but he couldn’t start the quest with the PCs.
Alternative character origins might include:
• An alien, last of its kind, in coldsleep (or equivalent), long after its species has moved on. Aliens would really bring the Hero system into play. It might also test the limits of playability, but if you have a great alien to play and are feeling up to it, go for it.
• An artificial organism, such as a genetically perfected hominid, robot, or combination of the two. Keep in mind that microcircuitry fails at relativistic speeds, and a character with computer components may become erratic or comatose at high velocity. “Cap, the tube shows proximity flashes at . . at . . at ERK . . I MEAN . . DEATH TO FLESHIES . . DEATH TO FLESHIES”
• A Tiedown native. A tribal from Tiedown voyaging amidst galactic marvels would be good RP. “Mandingo not know God so small!”
Six thousand years ago, the last of the Slipshot type patrol boats were retired. In the year 98008 of the Common Era, new patrol craft are appearing among the human civilizations of the Outer Bands of the Milky Way. Restlessness grows as human civilizations go silent, and the teachers of the Slipshot Institute grow uneasy as they take in the latest generation of students . .
The inspiration for the campaign is the Firefly TV series, but to make gameplay smoother we are decreasing the age of the main characters. Custom worlds like this are more fun for everyone when players and gm are discovering it together, otherwise issues with player knowledge introduce inconsistencies and disrupt the suspension of disbelief.
1.2. The Characters
1.2.1. The Institute
The player characters are children ranging in age from 8 to 16. They are offspring of the refugees that originally landed with the Slipshot fifty years ago. At the time of the start of the campaign, they are normal, if gifted, young people. Their physical and mental advantages have been augmented by the various treatment regiments used by the Slipshot crew. In Hero System, a 15 is the baseline stat for the children, with 25 being the maximum possible for their age, and all characters receive Immunity:Aging/Disease. For d20, consider the starting stat to be 12, with a 24 point buy. I’m leaning toward Hero system for this campaign.
The students are about to participate in the final stages of the education program taught by the former crewmembers of the Slipshot. The graduation process is swathed in secrecy, but is rumored to be anything from rigorous classes to hazing to combat.
The characters know all the information in this document. They have been brought up in a way not unrecognizable to 21st century people of Earth, since many of the Slipshot crew are from this period. They have been trained in hand-to-hand combat by the Slipshot crew in preparation for dealing with the medieval world outside the Institute. The crew has more than enough background to teach any student in any martial art desired.
The characters have roughly the same knowledge base as 21st century Terrans. They have the equivalent knowledge and emotional depth of adults because they are exceptional children, which is why they are at this stage of education at the Institute.
They have been sheltered from the culture of Tiedown and know it mostly from reading and distant observation. They have been brought up in borderline monastic conditions, as the teachers at the Institute have tried to protect them from the often brutal conditions in Tiedown.
The graduation process is largely geared to test the resourcefulness of the players. As such, they have no equipment beyond their clothing.
1.2.2. Alternative Character Origins
Nothing is more frustrating than being shoehorned into a story as a roleplayer. All players should bring forward an origin they are particularly excited about. Keep in mind that this may affect precisely when I can bring the character into play. Xorxaxx VII from the Andromeda Galaxy can’t just show up while the PCs are on a quest to find parts to repair the algae farm. Hmm, maybe he could, actually, but he couldn’t start the quest with the PCs.
Alternative character origins might include:
• An alien, last of its kind, in coldsleep (or equivalent), long after its species has moved on. Aliens would really bring the Hero system into play. It might also test the limits of playability, but if you have a great alien to play and are feeling up to it, go for it.
• An artificial organism, such as a genetically perfected hominid, robot, or combination of the two. Keep in mind that microcircuitry fails at relativistic speeds, and a character with computer components may become erratic or comatose at high velocity. “Cap, the tube shows proximity flashes at . . at . . at ERK . . I MEAN . . DEATH TO FLESHIES . . DEATH TO FLESHIES”
• A Tiedown native. A tribal from Tiedown voyaging amidst galactic marvels would be good RP. “Mandingo not know God so small!”
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