Logo Idea number one

 There is no telling whether this will stick, but it feels like a step in the right direction.

Also, an off-the-cuff illustration.

Solar System Work-in-progress

 Work-in-progress diagrams for the solar system. Icurus and Domus are captured asteroids, if you were confused by the appearance. This is 2288, of course you can change where the little spinny things live.

Trying to do these using 2D drawing methods is a pain the the maps. Instead, the solar system was quickly modelled in Blender, then rendered as black-on-white flat scenes, then inverted and labelled in Affinity Designer.

Some progress

This is a slow boiler,  not too much steam yet. This week I completed a first pass of the space vehicles chapter. Space vehicles, not space ships, we're ditching the old nautical analogy. There's little point in creating yet another science fiction game if you just recycle every idea and slavishly follow every convention. I felt that making space vehicles their own thing and not "vessels" based on the ancient conceptual crutch would help develop a more unusual flavour. That said, I've slipped and used the word "ship" about a hundred times already. Some traditions are hard to ditch.

I found some inspiration from an architectural practice that's already tackling the challenges of extra-terrestrial living.

https://saga.dk/projects

I really like the creative use of native materials -- creating artificial skies on the moon using sealed glass pools to shield the settlement from cosmic rays while providing light. Their efforts make me realise that taking an architect's perspective on the settlements and space colonies will add plausibility and some fresh ideas.

Hello worlds!

 

Orbital Elements is a hard science fiction roleplaying game,  inspired in no small part by High Colonies, a 1988 roleplaying game that featured a very similar hard science fiction solar system setting. High Colonies was more post-apocalyptic than straight space adventure. Earth is completely destroyed, so humanity's survival depends on settlements and space habitats. Come to think of it, the game would have had a really strong Battlestar Galactica vibe, if not for the reliance on cold war themes.

For me, completely destruction of Earth feels a bit too heavy-handed. I get that you want to make the high colonies the "whole universe", having Earth still in the frame makes it harder to keep the space colonies front and centre. I wanted the core-vs-frontier theme that GDW's 2300AD dabbled with. In the end, that theme had more impact on the character generation system than it did on published adventure material.

Another change in direction is what we mean by Hard Science Fiction. There is a convention that Hard SF means limiting speculation/fantasy technologies. This can ensure that you are not tripping over implausibilities or outright reality-breaking howlers, but this often results in a depiction of the future that seems inplausible in how little has changed. Think how much science fiction hand waves artificial intelligence away because adding strong AI to your world takes a sledgehammer to human agency.  To think that the arrival of mobile telephones pretty much made any plot point where the hero must race to save someone from danger completely implausible - "Why are they racing across the city, why not just call them?" The impact on AI on the world is orders-of-magnitude more distruptive. Star Trek: The Next Generation, recognising how sidelining the idea of AI was damaging to the show's science fiction credentials, added a thinking machine (Data) but made him a gimmick, something unique and special. Don't get me wrong, Data was an amazing curiousity-driven character. His Pinocchio quality made for interesting storytelling where questions about what makes us human could be tackled directly, but it was hardly a realistic look at machine self-awareness.

This overly conservative approach does help make games more easily playable because players and game masters don't need to think too much. AI, post-scarcity and the conquest of aging all make storytelling much more difficult. Games and movies struggle, leaving fiction writers, like Peter F. Hamilton to do all the worldbuilding heavy lifting, which is understandable, but still a shame.

I wanted to push a bit harder into the difficult territory, make a future solar system-bound civilization that was weird, wildly varied and yet still intuitive nad fun to play in.

Teaser

What a time to be alive, or for that matter a sentient machine - technically not actually alive. It’s 2288AD, there’s good news and bad. If you thought we were going to fix the climate, mark that one on the bad list. Earth is a hot mess. Burning deserts stretch across half the landmass, hurricane season is every season and almost everywhere. The biosphere is hanging on by a thread. Hey we stopped things getting worse - everyone moved into giant archologies that trap the heat they create underground, and when the archologies got full, we started to move people to the space colonies.

Now, we’re everywhere. Which is quite good. Kicking-up Helium-3-rich dust on Mercury, floating above the Sulphuric-acid-rich clouds of Venus, we’re big on Mars, and all the way out to the Keipers. First it was all about getting our hands on Helium-3 for Fusion and raw materials for making stuff. These days, the energy people are starting to use matter-anti-matter annilhation, mostly for giving our space ships some serious horsepower.

We made those sentient machines - pretty good. We programmed them to like us, which meant that they wouldn’t hurt us, or at least they’d really well up if they accidentally did. There were some accidents, and some people who never liked the idea of thinking machines started to turn against them. There were terrorist bombings, After a while some of those machines made their own thinking machines, optimized to protect their own kind. These AI Guardians were not programmed to like us, they weren’t so good. We had a giant scrap about that, two scraps, in fact. Lots of people died, some machines died to - I guess maybe they are alive then.

After the first AI war, the leader of the rogue AIs sneaked into the Oort cloud and started to create her own humans. In a crazy twist, she programmed these new humans to love AI. The people who didn’t like thinking machines, well some of them really didn’t like the new humans either. It got really messy. You might think that the AI wars were fought between humans and AI. If you thought that you’d be sweet-summer-child wrong. The wars were fought between Human nations that embraced or accepted AI and those that rejected them. Most of the friendly AI, we call them "Bound AI" remained neutral or worked to end the war, while their guardian AIs sort of had a plan to cull natural humans and replacement them with their 2.0 version. The last big spat ended with the AI leader, Athena changing sides to join the humans after her "destroy-all-humans" protocol got activated by mistake. Apparently the neutral AI managed to block Athena’s network, which triggered the activation of two really nasty AIs, Kali and Anubis. Athena and a human fleet managed to destroy Kali in a big space battle above IO. Anubis escaped and we think is hiding somewhere. Athena agreed to go into exile so long as her humans were allowed mingle with natural humans. Most human nations agreed, those that didn’t are still making trouble, but Athena kept her word and turned herself into a starship. She jetted off into deep space 50 years ago.

Since then, there’s been an uneasy peace. Everyone thinks Anubis is out there, waiting to start another war, which keep the pro-AI and anti-AI nations at logger heads. There hasn’t been another big war, but there are lots of little conflicts going on.