By The Stars — Danger! Danger! — Week Thirty-One

My playtest is in six days and I’m not ready. It’s going to be extremely rough and my little panic-voice is screaming “Cancel the whole thing and take up something simple, like gardening or photography.” But I shall persevere. No matter how rough the game is this Sunday, WE WILL PLAYTEST.

One of the bits I did work on was a brief setting intro. Initially, I tried to mimic the setting-free approach I had done for WGP…, but science fiction (even space fantasy) is so much bigger than superheroes that I don’t feel it could work. The finished product will have details on crafting your own setting, but for starters, I have this. I hate writing setting stuff.

In the distant future, human civilization spans a thousand suns. Faster-than-light travel has spread humans through the entire galaxy, except for a dozen stars that defy the laws of physics and remain eternally distant. No one know why they cannot be reached, or how they remain inaccessible. But those stars bear silent witness to all the human doings that surround them.

Galactic Civilization

The government presided over millennia of colonization of outlying worlds. The frontier was pushed back and civilization ushered in. Civilization brought a single code of laws, a single set of standards, a single point of view. Sameness leads to stagnation, so new colonies were seeded on far-flung worlds. Cut off from interstellar contact for centuries, they sprouted their own cultures, their own ways of understanding. Ancient customs from humankind’s planet-bound past and radical new ways of being blossomed across a third of the inhabitable suns.

When the time came for the core to reap the diversity it had sown, many of the fledgling planets refused to allow themselves to be exploited. They fought back. Enraged at the colonies’ ingratitude, many within the government declared the Seeding a failure. Seizing control of the government, they resolved to bring the errant colonies back into line. These are the forces of the Singularity.

That’s it for right now. I don’t know if I’ll post again before the big playtest. Wish me luck. I’ll need it.