Cutting Room Floor: To Boldly Go, Part I

Originally published May 15, 2013 

So last time I talked about my possible games for 2013. In a match up, urban fantasy triumphed (just barely) over exploratory science fiction. Since it may be some time before I get to run To Boldly Go, I thought it might be nice to share what material I had already developed for it.

To Boldly Go is a campaign focused on the exploration of space and the effect technology might have society and humanity itself. The basic concept is that there was a mass exodus from the solar system leading to hundreds of human colonies scattered across the stars. Now the people who stayed behind are venturing out to reconnect with these people and finding out just how much two centuries of divergent technological advancement can change things.

Inspirations

Fundamentally this is inspired by my marginally unsuccessful Transhuman Space game 7 years ago. Transhuman Space is a hard science fiction setting using the GURPS system. It is set in the year 2100 when humanity is settling the solar system and where artificial intelligences, uplifted animals, genetically engineered versions of humanity, digitally uploaded minds, and biological immortality are all possible.

The flaw in this game was twofold. First no one was on the same page about what the game was about. The visions ranged from Firefly to Bladerunner to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Second the setting was so alien that it was hard for players to understand and accept it.

So with this game I very much wanted to make the starting location, the Solar System based Federation, relatable to the players and have the cool and alien advancements of technology and society be things that they would encounter outside the Federation. That way the players' and the characters' view points would be similar.

Technology

An important consideration for me was what technology would exist in the universe and what was possible. I wanted a hard science fiction universe which meant that things should work according to physics as we know it as much as possible. So no force swords, no clones with the memories of their donors, and no humanoid aliens.

I still wanted the possibilities of alien seeming humanoids so that last one led me to the idea of lost colonies. With advanced genetic engineering it is easy to imagine numerous different versions of humanity altered to suit a particular environment or societal norm. The technology also allows for uplifts, animals with human intelligence. A wide variety of stories open up. What does an intelligent dog want? If a human has a prehensile tail and hands for feet are they still human? What about a person who has been alive for two hundred years due to an enhanced life span?

This technology would make the Federation fairly alien to modern sensibilities so that society has a taboo about extensive genetic engineering. Many genetic diseases have been erased but further alterations are illegal.

I also wanted to play with Artificial Intelligences and human minds being digitally modeled in a computer. Is a Ghost, or a copy of a human mind, a person? What about an AI with volition and possibly superhuman intelligence? In this case I decided the Federation has some AI technology but keeps it strictly under control. So no ghosts or human level AIs.

Nanotechnology, in the form of tiny robots that can remake and create things at a molecular level, are also tightly controlled as it could be dangerous in the wrong hands.

Weaponry and armor are simpler. Laser weapons are possible but bulky and temperamental. Autonomous missiles compete with linear accelerator beams of protons as the weapons of choice for space ships. Force fields are science fantasy so space ships are covered in thick armor, as a defense from enemy action, micro-meteors and cosmic rays.

In these areas the Federation excels. This is not a game of bitter combat but diplomacy and exploration so the players should start from a position of strength. They are already far from home and outnumbered.

Power comes from fusion and controlled reactions of antimatter. This provides plenty of power for exploring the galaxy and building space stations.

The last and most important technology is propulsion, both between stars and maneuvering around planets. This is where I needed to drop the hard science. Getting between stars or even planets takes far too long using realistic technologies. The limit of the speed of light means reaching the nearest star would take years, if not decades or centuries. Obviously we will need to break the speed of light. At the same time the distances and speeds involved with traveling between worlds would use up huge amounts of fuel using conventional engines. So we need some sort of drive system that doesn't use reaction mass to push it forward (reaction mass refers to the mass of expanding gasses from a rocket or other substances pushes away from a space ship to accelerate the vessel through space).

My solution to this is add the manipulation of gravity as a technology in the setting. This manipulation of space-time could be used to induce gravity or stretch space-time. Something like this would allow for a permanently accelerating space ship using no reaction mass, just the energy to manipulate space itself. There are some speculative ideas about this in real world physics though I remain dubious that we will ever realize it. A warp drive of this sort would allow quick traversing of a solar system.

While I like this idea for traveling around a solar system, for interstellar trips it presents some problems. Primarily if we can pick a direction and travel there, then we can also point a telescope in that direction and find out what happened there in the past. An easily navigable universe is one where the PCs will know what is coming up from the transmissions of the people living there and remote study of the worlds. Since I want some more mystery, this won't quite work.

So I decided to use another distortion of space-time, wormholes. In this setting, artificially created wormholes created a specific points in a solar system allow for replicable trips to other solar systems. But it isn't possible to know what is on the other side before going there at least once. This preserves the mystery. Each new 'jump' through a wormhole leads to a new solar system with no advance knowledge of what is on the other side. We will assume that you can be assured you appear in unoccupied space but since the location of a jump point is easily determined that opens to the door to ideas like placing mines or space stations at the jump points.

Next Time

That is it for now. Next time we will get to some future history as well as some of the resources I collected for building the game.