I'm thoroughly enjoying the Pact Worlds, but I'm contemplating running some games in a home-brewed Starfinder setting... in part because this would allow me to actually write down and sell modules and adventure paths for money at some point.
For now the working title of the setting is DIADROME. There are a few setting elements that I'm contemplating. I'm interested in ideas and feedback (things I should think about in a setting like this, ideas or literature or other media I should learn from and so on... and especially feedback about ideas for classes, themes and rules).
"Facts" about the setting and basic concepts:
- The setting is the Erita Cluster. It's a fictional globular cluster 40 parsecs across. The Core is four parsecs in diameter and contains more than 350 thousand stars. The Reaches are less dense, containing a total of twelve thousand stars.
(This is small for a globular cluster but still offers Epic Scale and the possibility of vast interstellar civilizations. It's also a setting where the stars are densely-packed enough to make trade and travel between them at "lightspeed" in human lifetimes possible.)
- The Core is subdivided into four quadrants and thirty-five sectors (each occupying a cubic light-year). Sectors are divided into Glimmers a cubic light-month in volume. These are the "local area" of a campaign, containing an average of three dozen star systems at about 20 light-hours' distance from each other.
(A functioning interstellar government can span about five of these, but many have no centralised authority. Anything larger is a loose association or alliance. There are nearly two thousand small interstellar states in the Core.)
- There is lightspeed travel. It uses something like an Alcubierre warp drive, and it needs infrastructure to dissipate the warp bubbles and any asssociated radiation. Ships travel between hubs. From major centers of civilization, long-haul light-speed craft called diadromes travel between mega-hubs the size of star systems in their own rights. Places with a common sense of civilization are places that have these kinds of links.
- There is faster-than-light communication through the old "ansible" concept. It's a kind of simple telegraph system that uses links between quantum-entangled particles to work.
(By virtue of various complicated overlapping ansible systems, the Core has a degree of cultural unity and transmission and something like an old-timey internet -- similar to the Net in Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep -- despite being politically fragmented. Even worlds out in the Reaches, where travel to new systems takes months or years, are heard from on the Net.)
- The setting is based on deep time. Starfaring species have been coming to the Cluster for billions of years. There are dead worlds with ecospheres vanished billions of years ago, living worlds that have hosted life for three times longer than our Earth has held any lifeform, and evidence of wave after wave of alien civilizations, many of them mysteriously disappeared because one always needs to Lost Ancients around. Even in the core, many systems remain unexplored, long-neglected or off-limits to all but the most reckless.
- Terragenic cultures have been in the cluster for about fifteen millennia, learning from alien remnants and artifacts and slowly building their own diadrome network. They have reached the cusp of having something like an interlinked civilization five thousand years ago. These cultures include:
--> The Ajata. Bioroids who consider themselves to be the heirs to Old Humanity. The name means "the Born," and these bioroids place great stock in being born instead of manufactured. The dominant Terragenic race, Ajata look like cartoonishly attractive humans -- often with a free attitude toward self-redesign and exotic augmentations, skin and eye colours and so on -- and tend to loosely imitate what they imagine human cultures to have been like. Some Ajata cultures are called Recidivist because they take the imitating-Old Humanity thing to the extremes of reproducing superstition, authoritarianism, reckless aristocracies and gender, ethnic and racial prejudice.
--> The Kaulka. The "ancestral." Old-timey humans like you and me, kept around on "museum planets" and preserves to allow Ajata cultures to study and learn from them and keep fresh memories of what Old Human cultures were really like. Some of these "proto-human" enclaves have long since slipped their bonds and developed their own independent societies.
--> The Vijata. The "transformed." Species from Old Terra that have been redesigned and "uplifted" into sentience or something resembling it. There are dozens of these, creatures that have technological capability but also retain much the ancient physical forms they have always had. Many of them are insectoid or aquatic.
--> The Okaja. The "bred." Bioroids made out of exotic blends of nanomachines and the splicing of human and non-human DNA, to allow them to adapt to a wider range of environments or perform specific tasks. The "bred" often cannot reproduce sexually (though there are exceptions); they are the products of experiments and manufacturing processes and are often looked down-upon.
--> The Sarga. The "created." Manufactured androids and automata of various types. Unlike in the Pact Worlds, it is rare for Sarga to have recognized rights in the Cluster, although much depends on where you are.
--> The Parashu. The "dead." Trans-humanist cultures that fundamentally do not believe in "sentimental" attachment to one kind of form or indeed any kind of flesh, their aim is to transcend the material and become pure Data. They are rejected by most other civilized cultures because of the bizarre experiments in form and consciousness they run, but they have their own parallel system of societies and settlements operating in environments that other beings would find too hostile.
(These should account for most of the normal distribution of sci-fi "races." Parashu can taken almost any form and "resleeve" at will, on the Altered Carbon model, though in practical terms they have a lot in common with Eox.)
- Alien Cultures have been in the Cluster far longer. Many of them are fallen or senescent now. These are all the really alien aliens who are not-life-as-we-know-it.
- Characters could optionally belong to a Codana. These are themed subcultures that originated in deep time as some version of the gaming hobby, now grown into long-running equivalents of the ancient "schools" like the Bene Tleilax and the Bene Gesserit in Dune. (How exactly this idea fits with Themes I'm not sure yet.)
- The setting would contain no objectively-real gods, but it would certainly contain exotic things -- from hyper-advanced AI to sentient star-creatures to ancient alien consciousnesses -- that could be construed and treated as gods. There would be more emphasis on psionics, and Mystics as a class would be replaced by something more like the Phrenic Adept (but more interesting).
- Technomancers would be based on studying the fine mental discipline needed to control a technosphere (aggregate of hi-tech objects) using just a brain implant and a few simple mnemonic devices. They would have some different powers and spells and class features from baseline technomancers, and on going to wild places would tend to take their own miniature "technosphere" with them.
- The setting would have room for much of the wacky space opera that makes Starfinder what it iss, it would contain much less outright magic and supernatural power. This might affect item lists a lot, along with spell lists.
[That's what I've got so far. Questions and comments are welcome.)
- The Core is subdivided into four quadrants and thirty-five sectors (each occupying a cubic light-year). Sectors are divided into Glimmers a cubic light-month in volume. These are the "local area" of a campaign, containing an average of three dozen star systems at about 20 light-hours' distance from each other.
Yikes, these figures are way off. The Core would contain around thirty-five thousand stars and a "sector" would be a cubic parsec. There would be around thirty star systems in a cubic light-year, putting systems light-weeks or -months from each other. The cubic light-year is the "Glimmer." Knew something felt off, there.
(I might actually wind up doing this concept with a system different from Starfinder, but I'm not sure. In any case, this thread is just jotting down ideas.)
The setting in DIADROME works for campaigns at various levels of resolution.
Adventures inside a system very much in the register of Buck Rogers / Flash Gordon-style adventure (or Firefly-style adventure) that the Pact Worlds setting does so well. The nature of the system dictates the nature of the campaign: a system at war for military drama, a wild and "unexplored" system for explorers, an unevenly-developed frontier system for smugglers and criminals and so on.
Adventures in a subsector or Glimmer, episodic outings between weeks- and months-long treks in the style of the Odyssey or age-of-sail romances like Master & Commander. Hopping over the relatively short distances between systems in the Core is still possible for smaller, independent ships.
Adventures across a sector following the unfolding, over years, of tales and cosmic mysteries and civilization-shaping power plays on a massive scale. Travel on this scale is powered by the great and mysterious Diadrome ships of the title. (Inside the Core, a sector is a thousand suns and has room for dozens of competing factions with ancient schemes to unfold. The stuff of hard SF "cosmic mystery" stories like Revelation Space or more science-fantasy fare like Dune.)
Adventures between sectors reaching deeper into the Core, or out into the Beyond where the stars are sparser. Exploration of Grand Mysteries like "how did our people come to the Cluster?" or "what's out there beyond the Cluster?" and stories of radically different and more experimental tone. The careers of characters in stories like these might wind up spanning decades and generations.
"DIADROMES" AS A CONCEPT
Instead of the Drift, "Diadrome" has a version of the Alcubierre drive. It's driven by a whole range of possible technologies, united by certain necessities and limitations.
- The "warp drive" does not allow faster-than-light travel, because the "warp bubble" it generates destabilizes -- and wipes out anything inside it -- at superluminal speeds. But it does make NAFAL (nearly-as-fast-as-light) travel possible.
- The "warp drive" requires infrastructure. Using it requires travel between large structures called "gates" or "hubs" that can safely disengage a "warp bubble" and dissipate the radiation of transit.
- The "warp drive" requires the ability to produce exotic matter and navigate between incredibly remote points -- using faster-than-light "ansible" communications -- with amazing accuracy.
All the technologies that warp requires also power something called "gravitic" technologies, which powers a range of sublight weapons and drives that propagate gravity waves and create and manipulate gravity in other ways. Running around a system on gravitic drive doessn't have all the restrictions of "warp."
Travelling NAFAL over a distance of light-weeks or -months is doable for any ship with warp drive. The hazards of longer journeys require larger ships with more powerful protections, power plants and computational power. These massive ships, conceptually something like the Guild Heighliners of Dune, are called Diadromes. They come in a variety of forms, many of which are sentient and relatively self-sufficient.