Showing posts with label free rpg. Show all posts
Showing posts with label free rpg. Show all posts

Sunday, June 14, 2009

The Interstellar Anarchists Movement (IAM)

In my sci-fi setting Blood of Sol, I have a group of counter culture called the Interstellar Anarchists Movement, they don’t have a strict hierarchy of government but more of a society and way of life. They move around human space by wake riding (thanks Arryn don’t know where that came from), their small shuttles hide behind larger ships jump envelopes and use the larger ships energy to propel their sub light shuttles through warp space.

IAM have a delegation to the united nations, and constantly try to get their “Nation” ratified as a sovereign state, however this is always difficult as they are merely a society of vagrants and drifters and have no borders, laws, money, economy etc.

This raises some questions, how do you deal with a state that has no bounds and simply drifts along from place to place, how do you tax it, control it use it. I find myself sometimes wondering why I'm in Australia, why not anywhere else why do I need a national identity when I spend so much time on the internet.

Most of the members of IAM are located in habitats orbiting Mars, Jupiter, Earth or on mining colonies that have depleted all their resources. A few of them are remnants from the collapse of the first colonization bubble when the bubble burst it left them stranded all over the solar system. When the UN returned it had been 20 years since the collapse and corporate wars, they simply assumed that the colonies now belonged to the people living there. This has lead to a huge influx of "crime" during times when the Anarchists colonies are having problems, anarchists simply take what they need believing that they can do a favor for it later.

The anarchists provide a vehicle for subversive types, criminals crazies and wackos, they also provide a fantastic comedic potential for crazies, conspiracy theorists and nut jobs.

In my next short story, Sovereign for You, happy IAM, Wendy Miller is tasked by the UN to asses the current case for the IAM sovereignty proposal in the story she meets with several anarchists who want the UN to name the movement as a sovereign nation.

In the previous posts I described the Collective as a free market, when asked I thought about how the free market would be affected by morals. So with enough monitoring and transparency, I postulated that this would happen in the setting.

Moral Market, how to sell to those who are so jaded about every product that they literally live like hermits.

The Collective is a truly free market. The level of transparency is such that not just mere components but the raw materials and video footage of manufacture is displayed for all to see. This means that overtime the level of moral production reached substantial levels where produces such as cars, hamburgers, toilet paper etc were produced with a measurable impact level, zero impact is the goal where products are so clean that they literally make people feel good about buying them.

The moral choice has become a market force that drives everyone towards that goal. I think that is only possible with laws in place, and those that break them are committing a crime worse that murder, information violations is the term used for company s that lie about their products. The first instance is a fine and the second all assets are seized by the state and the assets of the directors are liquidated to pay for the class action that follows.

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Collective Vs the Free Market and fuck those boomers

This is a bit of a rant, mainly because I talked to my dad about the moon landing and sputnik and how he tuned his radio to hear it.

In relation to space game, this is the crux of how the collective works, and how the united nations works in the setting. The collective is a free market economy with a large command directive for defense and social services. The UN directs companies through grants to develop certain technologies and certain services they pay for this by taxing companies and individuals, they do provide a basic social safety to some planets particularly the nice ones.

Now onto the rant.

It's interesting to note that experiment of the free economy is still running, it has lead the the biggest recession since the great depression. We have sacrificed stability and long term equality for short term spiky gains for some ideas and some people. Which is better for the survival of our species?

The developments in free markets seems to lead to some rapid innovations, in some places particularly low cost and rapid market innovation. We see great speculation companies like Google, Facebook, My Space, Enron, Time Warner etc.

Maybe this issue of control vs free has made the very large corporations of the US and Europe and Japan uncompetitive because they are effectively directed according to a plan. GM as far as I'm concerned is not an innovative company, they must have known years ago that they were not competitive yet they still continued to stay the course; This has lead to their reliance on the US tax payer to bail them out.

If GM behaved more like a free market, say more like Google with separate competing islands (correct me if I'm wrong in the comments) they may have been more flexible and more adaptive, however they would not have developed costly innovations like say clean car technology; somehow it seems that GM didn't innovate at all in the last 20 years, so the innovation must have been in making cars cheaper rather than improving the technology. GM is now suffering, because they had no plan and yet were run like a company that did have a plan.

Software companies probably can adhere to a free market economic model better than car companies; this is because the cost of development is less in both time and money. We see that software companies and companies like Nintendo can turn themselves around fast. Could you make a large company that that can behave as a collective economy, the answer is probably no because any long term innovation cycle is going to be viewed negatively if it takes longer than 2 years to get to market its not worth doing. The anarchist Kevin Carson pointed out that in a truly free market you wouldn't have companies, so the entire idea of globalization is false, because companies become less necessary in a free market, I make engine parts in my workshop and sell them as parts to people who assemble cars.

With that in mind the economy of the future should indeed be a command economy because if you do have a government run company even though its inefficient the vast economics of scale will outweigh the disadvantages. In my country Australia we have sold out our massive companies like our energy company for short term gain, most not for the country but individuals.

Those baby boomers and the generation before them sold us out, they got their moon landing on a command economy where is my moon landing dammit! shit we sold it for some houses at Noosa! They took all those gains, and divided the spoils between a few people. They took away free university and make us pay hex.

We are also being sold clean tech, Eco tech save the planet tech. This tech is old, and the very people who decided not do anything are going to profit from it. So, as a member of gen X or Y whatever, I'm not going to do anything and I encourage all the gen X and Y to do the same. Essentially screw those boomers don't buy into their bull shit and their crap let them sort it out in their walking frames. This has also created a new speculation market carbon trading so they can make more money, what a joke.

So being not any smarter and just a little further ahead and far greedier than us they managed to put our generation in a nasty place. The unwillingness of those people to change means that we will not see a man on mars, not see fusion, and be left with a stinking ball of rock with 8.9 billion people on it. But hey its ok, they can retire to the golf course at Noosa on the rent that we have to pay because they bought all the houses.

Saturday, May 9, 2009

Darken World, abound the storm

His long, dog like alien jaws opened, and he began to address the assembled members of the united nations, and the members of the committee, his body was a shiny obsidian and his eyes sparkled like gems. His long white and yellow robes seemed to be made from some cotton like substance. He wore simple jewelery which we had been informed earlier by MI5 was in-fact a graviton field generator capable of either projecting or deflecting forces, including bending light. He was for all intents and purpose invulnerable to us, and due to recent events where one of his species was tortured to death for information. I could understand his concern. Never the less the ambassador to Sirius had alerted the UN that their ambassador would be attending the conference and presenting information regarding a threat to all human kind.

The alien then spoke softly into the microphone, in English his presentation, began accompanied by very simple graphics as if he expected us to unintelligent thugs.

My name is Raheil, but that is unimportant to your species and your survival. Even though you have attacked us, and been soundly defeated my leader has decided that I should inform you of dangers close to your systems.

In ancient times, during the second war we discovered something new in the galaxy, a rare thing indeed for our knowledgeable and traveled race. I was a young warrior at time piloting a scouting ship looking for the light bringers near the arm of Sagittarius. Our leader, Osiris had given us strict instruction to find the colony world, confine the wormhole and slay all inhabitants of the breeding world, a simple task for warriors such as ourselves.

We found them there, already among the dark matter world a place where we could only detect their presence for at the time we had not learned how to transcend this universe of light matter to the universe of dark matter which exists in this same space and time. Somewhere within the cluster the world existed bending light from a nova behind them making their presence know.

The captain commanded us to investigate the presence of strange radiation, emanating from the worlds, he was detecting your species know this radiation as Bekenstein-Hawking radiation, the evaporation radiation from a black hole. Impossible we thought, why would this be emanating from the area?

Our navigator observed that there were three gravity signatures equality distant masking the source of the radiation, curiously they were orbiting quite quickly around the black hole. However, the worlds weren’t feeding the hole merely orbiting it.

The ship sailed into the subspace in the general region of the cluster to try to see if we could detect anything there. Our computers registered the presence of a great mass below our ship, about the equivalent of one of your suns. We observed nothing however other than a gravity signature. We then detected fluctuations in space time, in pockets in subspace and in our slip engines.

It was conceivable that there were dark matter ships nearby investigating our signature unable to interact but able to detect the graviton disturbance of our engines.

We recorded data for a few minutes, then re-entered real space and proceeded with our mission.

The breeders were primitive the way the watches liked it superstitious, terrified and wholly dominated by their priests, they had only a few watchers who posed a minor threat to our five warriors. We dispatched the watchers and the moved onto the breeders, none of them had developed any ability however we did discover some strange mutations, and they presented information, which had never before been seen in the genome. We deduced that, the mutations may indeed alter their species away from their original form and on the world we found the same mutations in all the plants and animals. Deep in the oceans, we found semi sentient colony creatures, which seemed to storing the Bekenstein-Hawking radiation within crystals that they grew in their cells. We had no theories at the time, so we proceeded with the cleansing slaying all the breeders quickly first using our neural stunners then severing the spinal chord, in the article prescribed manner.

We returned to our world, and handed the data to our scientists, who came after a few short months to an interesting hypothesis. This world, was indeed intended to be a breeder world, however the mutations had forced the watchers to abandon this world because the genetic differences interfered with the retro virus used to change the breeders into warriors. The light bringers had abandoned the world, because of this problem, but they had remained to study it. Had they been more through in their investigations, they may have studied the native life and seen the pattern repeated in every species on the world. The simple plants and animals that had evolved there had changed, some growing crystals to collect Hawking radiation, why? What purpose did this radiation serve? Our scientists deduced then from our subspace recordings that the radiation emanating from the black hole, pulsed and formed a wave a constant stream of information slowly and methodically adjusting the genetic sequence over centuries of live, slowly adjusting every living thing on the cluster light worlds to a new form, a new life.

This proved that there was a highly likely hood that the black hole and its three dark matter worlds orbiting were placed with deliberate intent. The inhabitants could not travel to our universe the universe of light matter but could arrive by slowly adjusting the DNA of creatures living in the light universe. The invasion had begun millennia ago this represented a potential threat, which we had not foreseen, nor had our allies.

I have told you this information human, because my time has come and the time of my people. We must go, to continue our fight against the light bringers, and follow those who have gone before to ensure a future for this all. All I can offer is my advice and this information formatted to your primitive computer systems so you may be vigilant and watch the clusters, we have marked all the dark matter clusters and you should have enough resources to deal with only a few hundred worlds.

And now, onto your very foolish invasion of Sirius two you attacked us and we have defeated you, in compensation I ask that you arm yourselves. We will make our caterpillar engine technology available to you, but in return you must create several dreadnought class ships and attack this world you can call it Ishtar, and you will find it on the other side of the galaxy…

Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Is it time for fiction to be fiction and life to be life...

This post is a little different... so if your offended don't read just kidding Fuk U.

Basically my friend Ad who works for a large games company that basically owns everything as far as pen an paper RPG's astutely pointed out that even if I were to publish this game and the related materials for free, the content of the setting is offensive to "Americans" however I have found humor in several political aspects of all countries, history, religion etc not strictly American.

I find that if your designing games and settings its best to have some themes and undertones through out the entire setting. My setting has themes of alienation, poverty, depression (we call them recessions now), corporate dominance, human failing, and religion. In the setting all religions are as real to the people as they are to people now, the texts are based on real events in the setting, that are known by the aliens, the demons are real, the exist and inhabit a different section of reality the religions are based on events or reinterpretation of events that occurred long ago. I used some of those ancient texts of the Bible, the Khabala, the Enuma Elesh, the Kybalion, the Qur'an along with the archaeological musings of Egyptology from all different eras. These texts have some great tales and are the basis for much of our literature, culture and world.
As far as countries I have made some jibes at Great Briton, France, The Middle East, China, Russia, South Africa, Nazi Germany, The Roman empire, etc all in what I thought were compelling story elements and I used them to tell stories like the "Votreckers" (thanks for the name Ad) who are South African and Australian colonists of the furthest reaches of space who stuck using 200 year old technology and have a very racist attitude to everything. Its not real its a setting, its funny! Now I know some people get offended, if they do don't read it but getting sued over jokes is not really very cool at all.

So to conclude, should I alter the setting to make it less offensive? Does anyone know any Christians or Jews that I can discuss my setting with so I don't get pwnd by some religious dudes?

PS, I'm still going to make fun of South Africa, New Zealand, America, China, Russia, India, Middle East, etc. Everyone else does.

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Space Game edits and potential concept art

Space Game is getting an edit I have been working on the book in my spare time. I first edited the front pages that describe the universe that the game takes place in. Then I was thinking about balance, currently the humans are behind the eight ball along with the Brack, Drooge and Bastazi (Alien species in the setting).

I was even thinking of adding a 3rd powerful potential ally and enemy to the human race. Creatures who were born with beginning of the universe their, genetic material carried on the shock wave of the big bang. The radiation mutates certain creatures that live on dark matter worlds. These creatures are for all intents and purpose un-intractable with the light matter creatures of the Blood of Sol setting, however they can travel to this universe by transferring their information to other things. Its all a little vague at the moment but a third ancient power means that rather than two sides in the conflict we have three.

I want to start getting some other gamers into the game, and especially someone else to run it besides me.

I also spoke to a concept artist about creating all the races for the book, collecting all the existing concept art and getting it paid for. I don't know how much cash I am willing to throw into the project but I think that making the book look slick will be important for its success.

After seeing the D & D insider service, I see how awesome CharacterSheet online could be and I'm re-enthused to start work on it.

Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Space Game hits 1.5.4

Well with printing of the rules nicely on a nice printer im going to work more on space game. Basically I have started a set of scenarios for some mercenaries. They take place just after the big ship has left for Ishta, the mercs are involved in a multi layered plot.

I have tried to keep the scenarios to one session the first one Ganymede Stomp is a rescue mission where the underwater exploratory lab owned by Berkley Genomics is walking along the bottom of the under ice ocean on Ganymede. It has four massive legs so its nicknamed the Stomper. The characters break in to find themselves confronted not by a crazy captain but a virus that phases in and out of reality. How cool is that a quantum virus that exists in both light matter and dark energy.

The next scenario in the series is called Titan Calling, I'm running that on Sunday it should be very sweet. In this one they are sent to investigate derilict space ship and find more than they bargined for. (no its not an alien rip off you noobs)

Thursday, December 11, 2008

Space Storys

There are some nice pod casts that I really like.

Tide Line is about a robot left over from a war. Chalcedony the war robot makes treasures for her fallen robot.

http://escapepod.org/2008/04/24/ep155-tideline/

Friction is a nice sci-fi pretty interesting

http://escapepod.org/2008/02/08/ep144-friction/