Tag Cloud:
This page is a catalogue of setting, background or rules elements that differ significantly from what people (gaming people anyway) would consider “the norm” for a science fiction live roleplay game.
Space is really, really big. Literally bigger than you can imagine. Most humans are incapable of properly processing large scales of space and time, so however big you can imagine it, you are not thinking big enough. The area of the Milky Way that the game takes place in (the Orion Sphere) is 5000ly across. In the game's timeline, light emitted from our star today will not have gotten to it's edge by the time the game starts, 4000 years in the future. There are 600 million stars in the Sphere - most have solar systems and a lot of them have planets around them. All the Factions claim membership of between 500 and 1500 inhabited star systems - but even within the volume of space that they claim as “theirs” the vast majority of stars are unoccupied, unclaimed, and even unvisited.
Next, imagine every system in a Faction's control is an inhabited island during the age of sail. The nearest other inhabited islands are days or weeks of travel away. In most cases, the only way to communicate with other islands in your nation is to physically go there and talk to them. In this island metaphor, there are hundreds of other islands in between, but nobody has visited them - they could contain literally anything, from pirates and monsters to rock and barren dust. With this sort of distance, you can't govern directly, no matter your power. You have to rely on local figures to rule in your name - governors, mediators, representatives or priests. They can't communicate with the ruling Faction power directly to get advice - they must interpret the “will of the Faction” on the ground, every day - through their own lens. They have to cope with the specific conditions of their locality - one planet might be an aristocracy, another might elect their representative directly, another might be ruled by its most powerful workers guild head.
* Every Faction Contains Diverse Multitudes
A key system might have ships that show up every couple of days, the occasional Faction Naval patrol ship every week or two - a less important system might only have a trading vessel show up a handful of times a year, and an “official vessel” once every couple of decades. With this time, isolation and distance - policies change, culture shifts, even language diverges fairly rapidly. Each Faction has its own “rulers”, but they are all different in what they consider to be the “right” way to govern or direct their Faction, and are often contradictory. The Ascendancy has the Noble Houses, who coordinate to protect and exploit their citizens, but compete viciously for prominence, power and status. The Free Union has their bureaucracy, the Bureaus and Divisions, who desperately try to hold their disparate worlds together and retain legitimacy. The Commonality has the Judges, who hold incredible psionic power but cleave more to rarefied ideals and concepts than practical conditions on the many worlds they guide, and they rarely, if ever, coordinate with each other. The Dominion has their priesthood, who interpret the guidance of the Immortal Spirits, directing individuals and whole worlds using their interpretation of the Path and their revelations. There is no one “Ascendancy” just as there is no single, monolithic representation of any Faction, power or institution - the distances and the communication delay is just to much to hold such a thing together.
* The galaxy is incomprehensibly old, and a lot of stuff has happened.
In the game setting, human civilisation (as in agriculture and buildings, etc), has been around for about 10,000 years. The Milky Way Galaxy settled into its relatively stable modern phase with larger elements and stuff about 11 billion years ago. You probably got the earliest spacefaring civilisations starting at around 10 billion years ago. So you could fit the entire space of human civilisation to our real world today, plus the 4000 years in the future spacefaring Factions of the OSVerse in that time a million times over. You could even fit the entire lifespan of Earth in there more than twice. So there have been countless Precursor civilisations rising and falling before the the game setting even starts. The amount of time they lasted, the strange technologies they built, and the legacy they left, echoes down and down into the present OSVerse, waiting to be uncovered and investigated. With stasis fields, lost rogue planets flying between solar systems, and evolution over time, there are endless threads of history weaving through the present setting. Characters with a mind towards archaeology can uncover and learn more about these alien civilisations, unlock the secrets of their technology, and maybe even discover the source of their downfall.
Although scientific progress in the game has been incredible, it has barely scratched the surface of what might be possible. New technology, never-seen-before phenomena crop up all the time. The galaxy is vast and wide and weird, and there is so much more to discover. This aspect of the game is designed to give scientists scope to discover, catalogue and invent all manner of things in the universe, but the focus here is on discovery. Practically anything encountered at events can be Sampled, and Researched to find out its keywords - which are decided by the Game Team when it is researched, and could be literally anything. Once these keywords are established, scientists can use them as a base material to create all manner of fantastical Inventions.
However, the setting of OSLRP has not yet incorporated some future technology touchstones that other science fiction media leans heavily on:
Sometimes because these things are a core part of a MegaCorp's identity, and hiding it behind their corporate secrecy veils provides more game to the system, and other times there are elements of these that we want to explore more as the game progresses.
A key part of the previous elements is that it’s impossible to know everything about the OSVerse – it’s just too big and diverse. In some LRP games and settings there may be an implicit or even explicit expectation to “know the brief” in detail, and for some people that can be intimidating and off-putting given the amount of setting info that has accumulated over time. The scale of the OSVerse is such that any individual character can expect to encounter new and unfamiliar things all the time – nobody is expected to know everything there is to know, even about their own Faction or species. Most of the Faction briefs are broad-brush, impressions, tendencies and “vibes”, and there are countless pockets of variety everywhere. Just as you wouldn’t be expected to know about the cultural practices and history of a country on the far side of the world in real life, you aren’t expected to know about the precise geography and cultural tendencies of another planet in a LRP game in order to play.
This also extends to space and the wider setting – planets and star systems are constantly being explored, surveyed, and new things are discovered (or rediscovered) all the time, even on inhabited worlds. This gives us the scope to create new plotlines, have interesting new things crop up and tell new stories virtually anywhere in the OSVerse, and follow the trail of what players are interested in to dive deep into detail in one particular area. Lost colonies can be found and hidden, remains of a new Precursor species unearthed, and new stellar phenomena discovered in previously catalogued areas all the time.
It’s important to note that this point also links into the Co-Creation system element (below) in that if you think of a cool background or cultural element, we can easily add it into the game. If you want to create new planets, star systems, antagonists or other small-scale setting elements as part of your background, or have a particular cultural ritual/practice or method of expressing your character, that’s great – as long as it mostly fits within the very broad bounds of your Faction or species (and within our Conduct rules), it’s generally fine. Similarly, if you want to show up as a blank slate and find out who you are in play, or as a humble backwater moisture farmer with dreams of being a starship pilot, that’s fine too. If you’re interested in playing a well-informed character, then having a bit of a trawl of the Galactipedia section of this wiki can useful to give you a good grounding in the “feel” of things, but it isn’t a requirement to create a character and play the game.
* Player characters are dynamic and the main driver of change and discovery.
Many elements of the OSLRP setting may seem like they are vast, inscrutable and untouchable, because of the sheer scale of it and the depth of possibilities. But crucially, we're running a LRP game - although you as a player are not at the top of the power pyramid, you are still the most effective vector for change in the setting. Almost all of the off-screen components of the OSLRP setting exist in an equilibrium - they tend not to change very much unless somebody notices and interacts with them in play. Cold wars tick along, wanted criminals or figures remain at large, space remains mysterious, technological innovations stay un-invented, or are kept hidden. This is a general state of affairs that does not, however, apply to everything.
You are the Lens because the actions of players to interact with threads of plot and storyline serves to reinforce and flesh out those storylines. A planet that is visited once and contains some strange substances that people harvest and move on continues to exist, but doesn't reveal its bounty until a player decides to go back and look again. A bounty target remains elusive until players start to wheel and deal, ask their contacts and start following up on the thin trail that may eventually lead to their capture - or co-opting. If you chase things, they will begin to appear on the road ahead.
You are the Key because the primary thing that player characters have over other characters in the setting is Access - to Jump Drive starships, to MegaCorp representatives, to people from other Factions all in one place. NPCs have power, but they also cannot move as freely or as widely as player characters within the setting - this is one of the reason why NPCs will move much more slowly. Regular starships take weeks or months to cross sectors, they are blocked by black holes and dust clouds. All PCs need to do to go anywhere they know the name of, or contact any named individual, is to pay some Energy Chits to the Spacer Collective.
One of the core design goals of Orion Sphere LRP is to allow all of our attendees to be able to create new elements and details to build out the OSVerse if they want to, and creating invitations and opportunities for doing so. Some ways are more explicit - like submitting new Species or running Sanctioned Events. Others are less prominent - like creating new details in your character background, coming up with shared cultural elements or rituals in your group or Faction, or joining the Plot Team to create story and plot for other attendees. We have purposefully left a lot of space for attendees who want to add detail or depth to the game. Even small things, like a certain ritual or a type of tea that people from your group's home planet like - these are all things that help make parts of the OSVerse feel alive and vibrant.
We encourage players and crew to add to the depth of the game setting in a positive, collaborative way. Although we do have a few restrictions imposed by the limits of the setting and the things we want to keep as IC mysteries, or by our Conduct rules and the type of game we want to run, we are usually more than happy to work with you to fit things into the OSVerse in a way that works and retains the integrity of your vision. If you have a cool idea that you think will add to the game, we encourage you to Contact Us and we can work with you to fit it in, or add it to the wiki so that it becomes part of the established canon of the setting.
