Veeky Forums makes a sci-fi war game setting

OP of Fading Ember here. I see what you're doing... and I like it.

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Space communists done right.

You're a meme

can they be communist?

Shit, ya got me. Now you get 3 wishes

No, you're just being xenophobic.

OP here,
So the major factions currently are:
>heavily armoured xenophobic cute fuzzy things
>humans divided along national lines
>intergalactic couriers
>silicon based space crabs
>all female race of bioengineers

You Are free to try and change any ideas by getting dubs.
Next dubs determines general nature of the setting, I.e. Hard/soft sci-fi, scale and core themes.

>Soft sci-fi
>Galactic scale
>Mostly peaceful with intermittent war

To expand on this, the crabs continuously grow as they live, and have a culture based on war, combat, and honor. The largest crabs are the oldest, and thus the most powerful, crabs. The crabs are immortal, but a lot of them die in combat.

You mean:
>heavily armoured xenophobic cute fuzzy velociraptor things

Come on. Space velociraptors in power armour. Can't get better than that.

I was actually one of the first people to reply to your thread, I proposed the Byzantine sorcerous empire and dying earth setting.

I like it, I'll back this up

Not dubs, but it stands until dubs changes it.

Aliens are soft sci-fi, but humans are stuck with mostly hard sci-fi tech.

Humans, therefore, largely participate in galactic conflicts as mercenaries. We have to bum a lot of rides.

Soft sci-fi.
Regional-level focus, general knowledge of major happenings in galaxy.
Constant low-level, brushfire conflicts and skirmishes. Something brewing.

This now has dubs, therefore it is confirmed.

The courier race are the only ones with true FTL and are willing to courier anything from messages to armies so long as they get paid.

All factions have FTL communication, but it is very expensive compared to couriers, and can build warp gates between their systems, but can't warp into other factions without specific codes. Warp gates are also limited in how much they can transfer at a time.

Couriers do not participate in exploration missions, so anything like that has to be down at near-c travel. So it's possible but doesn't happen quickly. As well, new colonies are at risk of invasion by near-c fleets before they can set up FTL communication and a warp gate at which point Couriers will travel there.

This sounds like DocWagon or ComStar but with teeth.

Space opera, galaxy wide at most, differing and conflicting styles of government as the core theme

One of the factions is extremely libertarian and balkanizes for any reason, barely has a central government

Does this fit in?

So... stargate?

I second this, also the crabs organize in Klingon style great houses, immortal, but lay hundreds of eggs, majority of crablings die in rough spartan-esque childhood.

I vote female bioengineers for this faction. Mad Scientist Syndrome.

Yes

The oldest and largest one is their homeworld and top leader.

We got dubs. Okay, so who shot the Therian ambassador at the art exhibit?

The gates seem a bit to close to stargate, I like the idea of the courier race controlling FTL travel, it reminds me of the spacing guild in dune.
Let's have dubs confirm any idea, so if you like an idea, second an idea you likento increase the likelyhood of it being included.

•Vrh

Anthropomorphic egg laying otter like creatures with highly prominent sexual dimorphism - females being almost two time more massive than males.

In primitive times they started as swamp hunter creatures with male-harem structure. Drying of swamps and bogs pushed them into savannah where their bodies were nowhere good enough to survive if not for the spark of intelligence that they had. It's allowed them to survive and prosper even if road to civilisation was marred with many a blunder. Not that different from humanity.

They are omnivorous but with higher demand for meat in diet and were highly territorial. During primitive times females were main combat force and leaders but time changed it. With male to female ratio of 10 to 1 it's just not feasible to have modern armies completely made out of females. Though they still mostly keep leading position in politics and military with social and science branches dominated by males.

Vrh are hunters/ambush hunters and really don't like someone stumbling in their territory. Their civilisation expands outward from their homeworld and may very well clash with their neighbours.

A fuzzy thing rebel.

I was thinking more Dune. Give the Factions stable Empires but have distant proxy-ish wars possible in the fringe. Let the Couriers be an option for small scale conflicts against rebellions or other factions, but too expensive for full scale war.

Meanwhile because of the distance and time for new colonies, there would be spying and intrigue to find out if or when other factions are colonizing and rush to send a fleet out that wouldn't be able to receive support if they failed.

Huh. I was hoping for a Rigid Caste system, except with bioengineering instead of Gemstones.

Sounds like we got the setting's matriarchate.

I could second this. I kind of like the idea that the Couriers only deal with "established" systems, and that the factions have another option for traveling so they aren't dependent on the couriers, but it isn't efficient or fast.

Ancient Progenitors and Forerunner style races fighting at the height of their power over the multiverse at the height of their power vs the usual scrappy humans or underdogs stumbling into their relics for some b-movie tier shenanigans.

Like a sci-fi version of Exalted. More Lensmen with omnipotent beings and stuff.

I'd imagine the xenophobic fuzzballs are the ones that balkanize all the time. They are so xenophobic, they even trigger each other.

this is all true, but no warp gates, The couriers simply have the ability to create faster than light warp drives.

all the factions are attempting to secretly subvert the courier monopoly on fast travel either by creating competing tech(teleportation) or stealng the the courier tech,

Nah man. Different schools of Academic thought where they can work together and then suddenly have a schism over photosynthetic skin or condensed stored nutrients provided by a "consumer" sub breed.

And only unified in their disdain for other races.

So regarding Courier rules of engagement. Their intra-system ships are legitimate military targets if transporting an invasion force, but nobody fucks with the jump-capable ones? The jump ships have a fuck ton of shields and point-defense weaponry but minimal offensive punch.

We got one, boys

The problem is that without at least some form of fast communication and transport, the Couriers have way too much power.

Maybe have the Couriers have the only RELIABLE FTL, and nobody knows why sometimes it fails. Some suspect the Couriers, some suspect a flaw in the factions FTL, etc.

You would have to provide your own inter system ship. But yeah nobody Fucks with the Couriers ships.

Trips confirms.

We could go the Mind Flayer route, and have it be based on genetic purity. There's some strain that gets something like pointed ears or a silver pelt that makes them ultra-special and born leaders, but abnormally longer claws, large size, etc. Makes them lesser than "pure" VRH, to the point that they start comparing fur length, nail length, etc incessantly amongst themselves.

Okay, so every faction has FTL comms and can make short-range jumps, 10LY or so. Couriers are the only ones who can make the really deep dives.

Maybe the couriers don't even have "Ships" per se at all, but can "launch" or create tunnels to the destination?

Or they are deep space dwellers and don't come too close to planets and such, and just drop people off nearby.

The all-female faction wants to expand its influence, but their gene mods only are available to other factions with heavy restrictions. They generally only work on females or males willing to be 'converted' in the process, and they offer more favorable trade deals to groups with female rulers.

That works.

The Beholder route you mean? The try to maintain Governments by a complex system of intermarriage designed to prevent the ruling class from significantly diverging from the planet(s) they rule over, and split when an heir presents with too many characteristics of one type and either is killed or kills his competition?

Each planet has genetic drift from colonizing that makes them more or less hostile, with the original home world having long been bombed out and different groups from the First Wave of colonization claiming to be the only true original type?

Alternatively, everyone has reliable FtL but the Couriers are capable of the longest jumps and travel distance without resupplying by a wide margin.

As in, everyone else has to jump from system to system across predefined lanes while the Couriers can do multiple jumps in one while also being capable of more jumps overall
Basically the multi-jump organ in Escape Velocity: Nova

Well not everywhere. Some realms are run by males. But they are in minority. The sexual dimorphism goes much deeper than size only. More than a hundred thousand of years in the role of warriors and leaders can do a lot for evolution. Females are mush better at empathy, shrewd political moves, backstabbing and planning how to kill someone. Males historically tended to eggs and children while females hunted.

During stone-iron age when weapons started to appear males became support hunters/fighters and during modern era they became rank and file soldiers and hogged up most of science. That last part gave them a lot of political power.

The world is still divided in a lot of realms that collectively have something akin to UN but with more guns on each side. Realms compete with each other in space exploration and colonisation so it is actually possible to fight vrh soldiers why having some of them on your side. Unless of course you show some signs that you want to endanger their homeworld. Then all bets are off.

I don't like setting a specific number. More like deep ocean sailing, the further out or longer away from a system doing FTL through deep space, the more likely a ship is to be lost.

So you could risk it, but it's pretty expensive if it fails.

Couriers transit deep space. What aren't they telling? Are the ships running into something we can't see? Does the fabric of space somehow change? Are space whales eating them? Is it the Couriers themselves protecting their monopoly?

The all female faction is barely recognisable as humanoid due extensive genemoding, some have become incredibly bestial in apperance while others have gained the ability to shapeshift etc.

Well this has dubs. Also gives a nice tactical use for transporting armies with couriers, or urgent messages.

I like the idea of unreliable FTL too far into deep space though.

I don't think you even need genetics. Their leaders run whole harems of males that serve them. A household is female and her daughters plus up to fifty males and daughters always just itch to get free of their mother. Getting a whole new planet to themselves? There is no force in the world that will keep them under control. The moment colony becomes self-sustaining it will declare itself a full realm and you'll need to send armies to deal with it. Which is costly and probably won't work in the long run. Vrh more or less are okay with it.

It also means that if say they missed someone else starting a colony on the world or deliberately ignored it you'll have a hard time getting them out. Homeworld realms will just smile politely and say "It is not our problem".

Alright, I'd just like to point out why the "suggestions first, dubs confirm" method works: it keeps the thread moving while still allowing some form of solid progress being made, and keeping it flexible enough that it avoids the Randumb suggestions being shoved in. Everyone is motivated to keep posting, with OP coming in every so often to solidify decisions and move on to the next point of development. It works better than Dubs only, and requires less OP maintenance than constant Table rolling.

Reliable FtL is limited to how well charted FtL lanes are, and of course in deep, less charted space these lanes are more and more unreliable. You might accidentally warp into a sun's corona.

And the Couriers got the best maps. Maybe make them best at navigation, but not so much better in FtL tech, they might end being too overpowered.

...

So on the battlefield: large armies battling each other to the death, or spec ops teams carrying out an objective (a la Infinity)?

Depending on the faction and what makes the narrative most fun.

Depends on the system we use. Mutants and Ray Guns is an option, with an Emphasis on Your Guys, but is Skirmish, so Spec Ops would work there. The fantasy counterpart to it is what we're using for Fading Embers,

Yeah spec ops make more sense. Big battles are too swingy and don't make much sense with FTL technology. Too much chances for nuclear Armageddon, RKVs and other shit.

Small units trying to murder each other for political gains or stealing some technology is much more believable.

Fresh colonies where a couple of species clashed won't have resources and manpower to create real armies so they too will be mostly bogged down in border skirmishes.

IMHO the unequal mission goals from Heavy Gear are really nice.

>Vrh spies infiltrating a Couriers base to "erase" a FtL lane leading to a world of theirs
>Bioengineers trying to capture genetic samples of the crabs leadership so they can grow their own sweet claws

Oh, shit... this would be Pretty sweet as an RPG as well, but we'd need to make sure that some of the factions have allies so multiple races can play, or we do the 40k Abhumans thing or we use a 40k RPG so playing an All-one-race game doesn't get stale.

Heavy Gear could work. The BB3D devs are adding in support for Heroscape, so a Hex-based system could turn out really well.

Sweet claws... or maybe just make a bio weapon.

Why fight an army when you can kill/change their leadership?

"The crabs are crippled by their immortality. Social change cannot thrive if the supporters of the old ways never age out and die. We will help you move forward. A clean slate to build a new world."

Nah man. Their superior FTL is what makes them Couriers.

The deep space aspect is to enforce their neutrality to the rest of the factions. They don't seem interested in planets or politics. They're openly "bribeable" where they will carry anything anywhere so long as the price is paid, which keeps them from being excluded because they have the unique capability. They don't get involved in planets that are being colonized, keeping conflicts there from escalating because by the time reinforcements can be sent everything would be over.

So you have factions trying to low-key find new planets and colonize them.

Maybe make them have incompatible environments beyond gravity, temperature, and minimum atmosphere so that the race is to either establish or stop terraforming before it becomes unfeasible to reverse? Giving both a reason to act quickly as well as to not drag conflict on.

Maybe each species has multiple variations caused by deliberate genetic and cybernetic modification?

And to prevent an infinity of variations, how about colonies are set up like how polities are set up in Mass Effect: everybody colonizes the habitable/semi-habitable planets of the galaxy, which are pretty rare. They then begin expanding outwards to other systems from these colonies, which on the map looks like the entire galaxy is covered in factions, but in reality is mostly empty space.

Make it more Cold War and less Everyone for Themselves and it will be much easier to do. Species don't like each other but they are not dumb. Open war is a mutual destruction or close enough. At least everyone will fall back into iron age and no one wants that shit back. So they play a political game.

Vrh with their realms constantly try to one up their sisters and aliens. They have established a colony on some world where someone already lived? get ready for decades of guerilla warfare and general dickishness with no way to influence them through Vrh homeworld political powers.

Couriers try to keep their FTL monopoly but their population growth is incredibly slow and they don't have any genetic technologies to speak off. Also their traditions (founded on biological horrors created by mad scientists) prevent them from doing that research.

Crabs while powerful have trouble with progressing due to their leader almost never changing their opinions and glacial approach to planning. Some younger factions constantly try to splinter off and central government periodically crushes them.

Bioengineers don't know what is ethics even if you hit them with a book over the head multiple times. So they not only have periodical problems with viruses and can easily try to experiment on unwilling subjects but they also have a lot of problems with some of their more intelligent creations. Add some gene-modified slaves on the side and you are golden.

Make the factions all theoretically "at peace" but have political divisions within their Empires so that sometimes one faction would find it beneficial to ally with outside forces against their own side.

Like, we already have the Balkanized race. Maybe another race has a low key civil war going on between the ruling class that doesn't affect the citizens too much. They can have little mini-conflicts with a main organization that steps in if it causes too much damage or gets out of control. Heck, part of it could be trying to maneuver your opponent into doing something that results in censuring.

Like paying a Human force to raid your crab-rivals holdings, then when they retaliate against their base show up to defend what turns out to be a peaceful agriculture world being cruelly attacked by your fellow crab, possibly raiding for resources or to take human slaves and claim they are legally indentured servants after the fact.

Huh. Crabs are now Chinese space Arabs in my head.

Considering that their leader also don't die it's a scary thought. Cult of personality with an immortal crab at head? Stuff of nightmares.

I like this, and also like the threat of a galaxy wide MAD between each faction, sub-faction, splinter, rebellion and offshoot.

Truly a Mandate of Heaven

Which makes it all the more awesome.

What do we have in the way of ethereal powers? Any Psychic/Psyker/Magic abilities? I'd love to see a Spelljammer Wargame, but that's just me, and it probably doesn't work with what we're going for here.

Have we decided on what the Couriers look like yet? We have our humans, our space babes, two types of animal-like aliens - should we go with something more exotic or another rubber-forehead?

Maybe they're AIs? Or octopus/zero-G aliens? Or space ghosts?

Mother. Fucking. Pirates.

Have a "Free Planets" enclave where three factions meet. Finding more in common with their neighbours than their original Empires, this small system houses citizens from across the galaxy, working above board as mercenaries and below as Agent Provocateurs trying to foment rebellion. A small cluster of planets that were originally going to be new colonies and are rather distant and turned out to be almost more trouble than they were worth are also technically part of the "free state", their position and minimal value combined with a fourth faction supporting their claim and barely kept afloat by courier trade, they are more of a political statement and problem.

The three factions work to prevent any of the others from consolidating enough of a grip in the First Free States while also using them for denial ops, while unethical and secret science goes on in the Free Affiliated Colonies.

Power changes hands often in the FFS and anything can be had for a price, but with three powers eager to intervene and expand their control everything is hidden behind layers of conspiracies. Post-war Vietnam with a dash of Shadowrun Corporations.

While the AFC is far, small, and undeveloped so it's more of a Wild West where if there aren't any witnesses, it didn't happen. The Fourth power supporting them as a political point against the three involved in the FFS is the major single power there, but they don't actually care or want to invest more than the minimum. This allows for more riskier or high profile skulduggery. Still, if you don't pay your bribes or they get a whiff of something valuable they will remind everyone who's boss. Either with force, or more likely withholding supplies until the locals fix their shit.

IMHO leave it be. You can have some experimental telepathic biomods for bioengineering species. Maybe even some kind of creature that can read thoughts at not that big of a distance. But each creature must be fine-tuned for species on which it is supposed to spy, it's not that easy to hide and doesn't have anywhere close 100% success rate. People think differently.

Though if BE get a tissue sample from some individual they can fine tune the telepath to that individual for nice clear channel.

Of course they can read only surface thoughts but it is a nice addition for interrogations.

I think we should hold off on the space magic this time around. Liberal interpretations of genetic engineering, hacking, and force fields (etc.) feel more this game's speed in terms of powers and abilities.

AIs could be good, though space ghosts turns the ineffable factor up. Maybe constructs from a progenitor race that gained independence? They try to keep an air of mystery about themselves and their origins, hence a common "space ghosts" theory propagated by superstitious spacers.

Squid like creatures with triple symmetry instead of double. Talk through sounds and color codes on their bioluminescent bodies.

Maybe keep that a secret? Like, everyone thinks they ARE their ships because they integrate a lot of organics, but they're actually a parasite that lives within them.

And can actually live in some of the races undetected in a nascent state. It's treated as a minor irritation found across the galaxy that is easily flushed out, by still has a low level presence especially on less developed planets.

They can't take control of their hosts, but some studies show they are more prone to certain behaviours. Like Toxoplasm Gondii.

I think the "no one knows" might bring this a little too close to Dune's Navigators, though parasitism sounds cool - I can't think of any parasite races that are treated as anything but villains.

Nah. AI has to either be its own faction, or a taboo.

I would personally prefer a "crippled" AI that is too autistic to really be sapient and past a threshold any intelligent machine gets lost in its own internal thought and probability structures and becomes impossible to interact with.

Augmented intelligence is a thing, but still you can only go so far before people just can't understand.

Maybe one race has AI "blackboxes" where it gives them seemingly spontaneous analytical results for mathematical equations and large scale analysis, but becomes less and less accurate for more specific avenues of analysis. Like it could determine accurately the results of a national level poll, but less accurately the smaller the population and be useless for small groups of people.

Considering that they are the brains of operations so to speak they are not exactly parasites. More like symbiotes.

You can just postulate that there is limits on how smart an AI can be. It can think much faster than organical beings but it is not actually smarter. And they also must be made on the base of quantum computers which means that they cost a lot to create and look like a box 3x2x5 meters that eats a lot of energy and can't be opened after starting or you kill the AI.

Too much money for too little gain. There is some AI specialists but they are rare and new AIs are mostly created by old AIs when they have enough resources and a desire to do so. That's their way of having children.

True. But whereas in Dune the Guild was a political body that acted in Politics, I kind of was thinking of the Couriers as being almost like the Outsiders from Niven Space. Biologically strange even among the other races, uninvolved by the politics the rest of them have or at least unbiased. Nobody knows where they came from or why they prefer deep space, or why they don't come near planets.

I want them to be a source for speculation and mystery. Not a reliable option exactly, but a known "unknown" faction to be used by the others.

But that's just me.

That's fine by me. Keeping strong AI out of the setting makes a lot of stuff easier.

Humanoid, but with something... off. Something about them falls into the uncanny valley. In fact, that may be something they actively promote.

So... offhand, here's a few viable systems you could use to run this setting as an RPG(besides Gurps)

Savage Worlds + Sci-Fi supplement.
FFG Star Wars RPG(EoTE and Age of Rebellion more than Force and Destiny)
Rogue Trader/Dark Heresy(with the available mutant and alien homebrews)
SWON
Traveller.

What uncanny valley? We have otters, crabs, bioengineers with their insane projects and well humans. Humans may have some trouble.

Big fan of Niven and his stuff, if that's the direction we're going I'm totally on board. So if they have organic ships, how do the other races react? I'd expect the bioengineers would do anything to get their hands on samples, in case they had a key to the Courier drive.