The year is EF 410. A millennium ago, the colony ship Icarus carried a wayward branch of humanity from Earth to the rogue planet Exile.
The vessel survived mishaps and schismatic conflict during its journey, shaping its crew into beings that had abandoned the very concept of humanity itself. Despite their struggle for survival, they remembered their duty to the slumbering colonists the Icarus sheltered.
By the time it arrived, humanity's birthplace had gone silent.
The crew created new life to serve as the docile caretakers of the planet. But the caretakers objected to their role. Incapable of waging war from orbit, the crew of the Icarus waited for Exile's biosphere to stabilize and diverted resources to new colonization projects.
Generations have been born and died on its sunless surface. Humanity's second home has proved a hesitant host, but the human spirit and determination to survive have won out.
For now.
Exoworld is a game that I've been working on for a while now and which takes place in a dark science-fiction setting. This vignette serves as an introduction to the setting that's short and simple enough to get people into it.
One rule I have for writing science fiction and making things stick is that you want to limit yourself in terms as much as possible when creating basic overviews. There's no need for specifics unless they serve a very specific purpose, so barring the name of the colony ship (which is going to be repeated, and it's easier to say "the Icarus" than it is to say "the colony ship" in neat sentences) and the name of the world they're settling I'm keeping it light on jargon and proper nouns.
By sticking around the 150 word mark, I'm making sure that this is short enough for things like DriveThruRPG and itch.io copy (though I'll obviously add some stuff about the game system when the time comes to release the game), an introductory spot in the book, back-cover text, etc.
It's also a constraint that forces me to pick the things that are most interesting. One small pain here is that by focusing so heavily on the history it creates some major issues with presenting the present, but I think I've struck the best possible balance.
There were really three parts of the conceit that I really wanted to hit as "promises" to the audience.
I wonder if I'm really getting across all that I want to in terms of the final feel of the setting and the characters in it. For a pitch of a sci-fi setting, this seems really good, but there's no real character role definition in it.
Of course, some of that is because Exoworld doesn't feature defined character roles in that way. Since factions and backgrounds are rather flexible, I'm using the setting itself to define plot hooks for each of the major places in the setting. This isn't intended to be a giant substitute for GM creativity, since the plot hooks are just a sentence or two, but the point is to give an idea of more or less what I expect the characters to be able to do in terms of power level and also provide some ideas for how to actually run the game.
I don't know that the setting is so exotic that GMs and players would have an issue when it came to actually figuring out what they're doing in it. There's also elements of "choose how exotic you want it" in the sense that the Exemplars may have a very alien society but they play along sci-fi tropes, while the Originals have essentially modern human societies on an alien world with notable issues.
To take a tangent away from the blurb for a moment, one thing that is going to be interesting is handling vision. There are in-universe explanations for how people see. There are very basic vision modifications that the Originals have that give them extra vision in the dark to capitalize on the starlight. Exemplars tend to extend their vision beyond the human visible spectrum, with the caveat being that a lot of these fancy extensions don't work in certain situations.
Most notably, infrared is useless for a lot of stuff unless materials are explicitly designed to be transparent to it. Ultraviolet is better to see through things, but the primary sources of that in-universe are starlight and technological devices, making it only slightly more accessible than standard light in any condition where regular light would be blocked by weather or terrain. The Spurned have a hybrid low-light augmentation and rudimentary echolocation, meaning that they can hard surfaces and movement fairly easily but don't get some of the advantages.
The gameplay effects of this are likely going to be nil, since there is artificial bioluminescence integrated in the fauna and flora that were engineered for Exile, and making the sort of low-power lights that would permit people with augmented vision to see is trivial for the tech level of the setting. I can still use darkness as a gameplay element in extreme circumstances, but sci-fi tech has a way of making those as rare as they would be in the modern era.
Interestingly, Exile isn't a particularly cold world. Earth analogues can have core heat provide a significant amount of environmental temperature, and all you would need is the right atmospheric mixture to hold it in to reach something approximating the livable human range. Everyone in the setting has at least a little genetic manipulation, with the Originals having subtle but very effective editing in the form of cellular symbiotes that can help them deal with conditions that would be unbearable for regular people.
The Exemplars and their progeny have this as well, since the crew aboard the vessel got the same treatments as the people in suspended animation, though with more of a tailored package for life in deep space.
One element of the setting that I haven't talked about yet, but which I want to flesh out, is the Gray March.
The Gray March is one of the colonization projects mentioned in the blurb, though in such an oblique way that it may not be a connection that most readers draw. During the initial schism between the Exemplars and the Spurned, the latter of whom are a sub-caste intended to terraform Exile, the Exemplars tried to use nanomachines to colonize the largest continent of Exile.
The result of this goes about the same way as any time people use nanomachines in sci-fi, with a massive area of the planet getting gray goo treatment.
The Gray March is dormant, however. The nanites that were intended to build structures and infrastructure built incomprehensible fractal forests and then shut down, seemingly of their own volition.
The Exemplars know that this shutdown is only physical. With their sensors aboard the Icarus, they can see electrical and thermal activity rippling through the Gray March, but so long as the nanites do not expand they will not try to do anything about them.
Two things complicate the relationship between the Exemplars and the Gray March.
The first is that their most valuable colonies are on Titania, the same continent as the Gray March. Anything that would cause it to grow and expand would threaten these colonies, including a nascent space elevator in the colony of Gagarin that is critical to their long-term operations. Although they don't expect to complete it for a century or more, the site itself is perfect and losing it would mean a greater investment of resources.
The second is that the Gray March itself is home to a hive mind that calls itself the Reaction. Although its motives are inscrutable and its consciousness is utterly alien, it seems to be behind the sudden stop of the nanite waves across Titania.
Attempts to contact the Reaction have largely met with failure on behalf of the Exemplars, in part because it's not clear that either party has the faculties to communicate with the others. However, people who wander into the Gray March report seeing figures moving in the shadows of the fractal spires. Anyone who steps off the beacon-marked pathways is almost never seen again.
One distinction between the Gray March and the Reaction in Exoworld and similar elements from things like Altered Carbon and Eclipse Phase that serve as some of the inspiration for it is that the Gray March isn't intended to be horrific.
And one of the EF (Exile Founding) 410 events that makes things interesting is that the Reaction has begun to produce emissaries to the outside world. They're unusual beings, made up of the remnants of the nanomachines that created the Gray March but endowed with individual consciousness.
I haven't figured out how to approach these beings as player characters yet.
One defining quality for them will be naivete. While the Exemplars use forced-growth and hyper-specialization to get their lower- and middle-castes up to full strength, at least they are using technological means to educate and inform their members about the world.
The Reaction views the world very differently than people, and has only recently figured out the concepts of humanoids and individual consciousness. Its first efforts at this have generally not worked very well and have been forced to stay inside the Gray March, but the new drones are actually individuals.
The best way to think of it would be as a small legion of Frankenstein's monsters. They're not good at passing as regular humans. Even though the Exemplars who can pass as humans may give themselves up by making mistakes when dealing with concepts like families, the Reaction's drones have literally no sense of any concept. They don't even have needs in the traditional sense, though they are reliant on a proto-biological form to act in the world.
One could say that the Reaction takes some inspiration from The Expanse (spoilers for the rest of this paragraph), and that wouldn't be wrong. I don't really put too much thought into unknown things in other peoples' science fiction unless they care to explain them, so I don't have a terribly developed idea of what the protomolecule and alien intelligence(s) that come up during the books are supposed to be in The Expanse. However, if the Reaction were ancient and had much more power than it does, it would be doing the same sort of reality-warping and megastructure-building activities that the protomolecule/its makers got up to.
The Reaction's overall motivation is pretty obvious: exploration.
Except for what limited information it could gain from its rudimentary first efforts at drones, it doesn't know much of the world outside the Gray March. And it is fully aware that the Gray March destroyed everything it touched, so it doesn't trust its information from inside the Gray March to a great extent.
It can't expand the Gray March for a couple reasons. First, the Gray March is to the Reaction as our bodies are to us, but it doesn't have the nanomachines on hand to move borders. The self-replication of the fractal-builders only worked for a certain number of generations, and now functional nanomachines are in high demand (hence the drones).
The other reason why it can't expand is that the Reaction is essentially a neural system contained within the Gray March, and one of the limiting factors was the distance in travel between the furthest extents before it would become asynchronous with itself.
This isn't to say that it's stuck that way forever. If it had the supplies, it could build upward and downward to expand its available "brainpower" by constructing additional strata without greatly expanding the distance between any given node.
And it would grow organically if given a larger network. However, the Reaction is not the first of its kind of consciousness to emerge within the Gray March, and it only reached the state it's in because of its self-preservation instinct. Whether any of these other consciousnesses are still around is still up in the air for me.
They could explain away some erratic behavior of the Gray March and serve as a plot hook for the Reaction's efforts to send drones out. They could also be a layer of esoteric nonsense inside one of the more complicated and alien parts of the setting.
Either way it goes, I think it'll be interesting and I'm looking forward to seeing the playtesters' responses. I almost wrote "response", so you know I've been thinking about hiveminds too much!
I've been going through and fleshing out various colonies on the planet. Right now I'm focusing on North Titania, which has three major Exemplar-aligned colonies. Then it'll be South Titania, which has research facilities (the Exemplars don't want to rile up the Gray March and have it eat the northern colonies, but the southern part of the territory outside the Gray March is so small as to be an acceptable loss).
Next I'll go over some more purely independent Original settlements, and then I'll work out the Spurned. I still don't really have much in the way of morphological sketches of them, other than knowing that they're very rugged and built to have senses that work in subterranean situations.
The rules are basically absent in Exoworld right now. I'm putting off writing them for a while, but I should get combat done at some point before I drift too much from what I've already written.
