Cutting Room Floor: Zhou system

Originally published October 7, 2013

GURPS Handbook of the Planets Inputs: Personal user number 416; System number 508

The Sojourner Collective represents the greatest rival to the Federation. A so-called alliance of colonies, they share a technology embracing culture with a distrust of hegemony. The Collective 's origins rest with the prospectors and freeholders of the outer solar system of Earth. Called "Space Gypsies" by those who lived in the inner Solar System and ignored by Earth, they were among the first to leave the Sol system.

Seeking freedom to use emerging transformative technologies without interference from Earth, the war was in many ways a blessing. Now with two centuries of unrestricted advancement, they are among the most alien of the human civilizations existing among the stars.

Zhou system is home to a small but growing colony begun 163 years ago to exploit the rich resources of a tiny moon circling the second planet, called New Beijing. With the sky dominated by a massive gas giant and lit by a dim red star, the Sojourners here have built a world far larger than most can imagine.

While machines toil endlessly to mine the rich veins of metals and rare elements from the planetoid's core, 150 thousand souls live scattered through a subterranean hive of interconnected tunnels and chambers, relics of the first initial burst of mining and construction. Equally import to the citizens' needs is a vast network of computers that fill the tunnels with digital scenery, artwork, and virtual worlds that only those with access to the colony's augmented reality (AR) system can see.

Where a normal person would see dimly lit tunnels and chambers, the citizens of New Beijing might see colorful landscapes with fantastic virtual animals or an endless castle with its walls covered in artwork. Or any of a hundreds of other possibilities. Accessed via computer implants, the inhabitants are able to select what version of reality they live in as well as what virtual face they show to others.

New Beijing has become an artists commune with the dizzying variety of virtual worlds being its main product. Governed via a computer aided direct democracy, when important decisions are needed quickly, a Consul is selected to deal with them. This person is randomly selected from a pool of sufficiently qualified individuals and advised by the colony's main AIs.

Absent from their AR disguises, the inhabitants of New Beijing are mostly human. They share the tall thin bodies of most of the Sojourner Collective with grasping toes and bones designed for microgravity. Many benefit from advanced lifespans, increased intellect, and a diminished need for sleep. Several variant genetic templates include an invented third sex, people designed for high-speed intelligence, and a subspecies with an electromagnetic sensory array.

Game Aspects (using the Fate system):

New Beijing: Everyone's an Artist, The Art is Invisible

System Details:

Zhou: a M5V class star, roughly 6.4 billion years old.

New Beijing: a metallic asteroid captured by a gas giant the size of Saturn. The surface was landscaped a century ago to hide the evidence of the early mining activity. Now covered in a vast plain of hand sized gravel, it sports some of the rare examples of physical art on the planet, mostly large rock carvings and metallic statuary.