Post by Catsmate on Feb 1, 2022 11:56:00 GMT
These are some background notes for a sub-campaign I'm working on set around the end of the fifth millennium in human history, i.e. before the events that led to The Talons of Weng-Chiang, posted for feedback.
It's an attempt to create a certain 'planetary romance' setting on Earth
The Tragic Centuries.
The Earth of the late fifth millennium is a backward, isolated and generally unimportant place, still recovering from its near total abandonment during the Solar Flares era1. The planet now has a population of almost a billion; from cryogenic and temporal stasis survivors, a million or so descendants of those who hid in bunkers near the core-mantle interface, natural and artificial births, cloning, genetic colonists2 and some limited live immigration to the ‘mother world of humanity’
Earth is frankly a bit-of-a-mess; the fall of the (First) Terran Empire3, the (literal) fall of the Overcities4 (and the Third Exodus) the weirdness of the Europan Era5 (which left a fair number of spatial and temporal oddities littering the planet), the Great War6 against the Daleks and their allies, the Recovery, the Stagnation, the Ice Age7 (and the resulting Fifth Exodus), the Solar Flares8 (and the Sixth Exodus) have taken their toll on the planet.
The various conflicts have seen Old Earth damaged with nuclear, bio-chemical, nanotech, radiological, kinetic, contra-Terrene, gravitic, warp and temporal weapons. Bits are just gone, others are relocated, encased in shimmering globes, subject to odd time flows or floating in the air. During a couple of incidents (including a slight accident with a warp gate) much of the planet’s water was lost, creating a whole new geography. And the planet has a new, and slightly more eccentric, orbit thanks to trying the GodEngine9 out.
There are new islands (artificial continents in the case of Atlantia and Lemuria), the Mediterranean Basin is a patchwork of rivers and settlements in the location of the former sea.
Several rounds of Reconstruction have left the planetary ecosystem rather peculiar; the herds of feral unicorns, while dangerous on an individual scale, are the least of humanity’s problems, certainly trivial compared to the potential threat of the sentient amphibious octopi (currently at war with the imported Newts10).
Space travel is uncommon for several reasons; Terra is inconveniently placed, far from the metropoles of civilisation, even for the warp ships of the period. Then there are the hyperspatial vortices and storms, so the result of the use of weapons now prohibited by Intergalactic treaty (and common sense11) making the trip dangerous for even advanced and shielded warp ships. As for driving a wormhole or stellar tunnel anywhere nearby, forget it. Even FTL comms is unreliable due to hyperspace distortion. Radio and gravitic communications are mostly reliable, though the Earth’s ionosphere is altered necessitating satellite relays (or cables) for planetary communications.
The Solar System.
The Sol system itself is so full of junk left over from previous eras, including rather too many autonomous weapons platforms, numerous bits of ‘dormant’ ordnance and active mines, that even spaceflight is hazardous12.
Most people just don’t bother.
Mars is mostly abandoned, though nominally claimed (or reclaimed) by a group of what Terrans still insist on calling ‘Ice Warriors’13. The rest of Neo-Gandoran society thinks of them as cranks, but better on Mars that anywhere that matters. There are monitoring stations on at least two of the planet's six moons.
Venus, the terraforming long completed, has opted out of the system long ago, surrounding itself with a planetary shield and refusing to talk; it seems to be developing some sort of planetary scale hive-mind. The kind of people who are worried by such things are rather concerned6. The main space facilities (and liaison to the rest of the universe when needed) is Port Dejima on the Veneran moon, Aphrodite. Unauthorised attempt to land simply disappear.
Mercury, once an industrial heartland for mineral exploration/extraction/refinement and solar powered anti-matter production, was scoured almost clear of settlements during the flares period, taking several direct hits from Solar CMEs with energy releases in the teratonne region. The planetary orbit is still full of trillions of tonnes of ejecta, and significant amounts of contraterrene liberated during the scouring.
Titan and the Galilean moons still harbour inhabited settlements; Titan especially is a refuge for Terrans who want to opt-out of the whole insanity of Terran Exceptionalism on the ‘mother planet’. Many of the Ionian settlements survived the flares, due to being dug really deep to survive the other problems of living on a satellite of an energetic gas-giant.
Much of the equipment supporting the magnetic flux taps are still in place, but no longer power the wormholes; some has been repurposed.
A lot of gas mining still takes place on the stations in the Jovian and (especially) Saturnian atmosphere, theer is a demand for volatiles and helium-3.
Pluto is mostly derelict; the population of three hundred million established there by the Usurians didn’t last long after the company abandoned them; the former 'work units' were generally insufficiently skilled and unable to perform much of the technical work on the fusion mini-stars and force fields that kept the cities habitable. Most of the population that weren’t rescued and evacuated died within a century.
Today the ‘planet’ is home to perhaps thirty thousand people cowering in the permanently lit tunnels and fearing the return of their great demon, Dekkter.
Vulcan, the largest satellite of the brown dwarf Decimus14 in the far outer-system, is still running. Just beyond the hyperspace limit, it’s a relatively calm location for FTL ships. It also acts as a communications hub and the endpoint for the sole surviving warp-gate serving the Sol system. It’s an interesting place, much terraformed (including an artificial sun), and a haven of tranquillity and advanced technology. And spies of course. lots of spies.
In the inner system, Luna is far less heavily settled than in earlier times, but the lack of climactic factors helped preserve many of the earlier facilities and settlements and many have been claimed by fringe groups15. That and dogging really deep into the lunar regolith. Barely a million people live there, less than one-tenth of one-percent of it’s heyday. While some of the city-states are tied into the alliance systems on Earth, those ties are loose at best. It’s connected to Earth by some rather unreliable transmat links and a number of former naval assault shuttles, heavily armoured and shielded against the debris in cis-lunar space. The largest settlement is still in, around, and under, the repaired Aristarchus Dome, near Port Luna.
Earth.
Much of the current terrestrial leadership has (or at least professes for public benefit) a grudge against the Galactic Federation who, in the view of Terran nationalists16, didn't help them enough during the flares era17. Anyway the Federation had its own troubles. But then, any significant off-world intervention on
Terra might well see the warlords, despots and scientific dictators
deposed, so intervention might be a bad thing for them. To most faction
leaders and elites the nationalists are useful idiots.
There is a lot of weird stuff happening on Earth; old nationalisms are being reborn, despite the planet being a very different place and some of the homelands no longer actually existing or being under an inconvenient amount of solid or liquid water, and experiments into ‘Weird Science’ and heading into odd directions.
The population is scattered; while there are some large cities there are plenty of isolated settlements of various kinds. Most of the smaller 'villes' are usually self-sufficient and with almost total autonomy; strange beliefs, customs and taboos are unpleasantly common. There are also huge areas of wilderness, numerous Badlands (often due to residue from warfare, dumping or experimentation) and Disputed Zones. And an interesting mix of flora and fauna.
There are desolate, often badly contaminated, areas (the Peripheries) in areas claimed by most states that are marginal for agriculture (even the of the geneered super-plant kinds) inhabited by equally marginal peoples, usually baseline/modded/mutated humans of various sorts, but some groups of non-humans exists.
Although the larger powers are currently mostly at peace, in a few years things will erupt as the Icelandic Alliance ruptures18 and World War Six begins, but at the moment it’s a cool war, with a certain amount of low-level skirmishing and testing of strengths and weaknesses going on.
The Supreme Alliance is eagerly pursuing some technological paths generally felt to be best avoided. This will lead to the horrors of the 'organic distillation' setup Greel used, research which would culminate in the awful New London Horror of von Wachten. Bio-tech was also popular, including weird cybernetic and/or genemod animals, often based on splices of creatures from different worlds or including entirely synthetic genes.
It’s a period when exclamations like “Look Professor Jamak, if we tie in a couple of carboxylate groups just there, the victims will drip green slime!!” could be heard in all too many research labs.
Technologically Earth has regressed substantially; locally sustainable technology is commonly a mix of 19th to 21st century, leavened with more advanced equipment.
In fact, local technology is an odd (and to some sociologists fascinating) mix of elements; many lines of technological development have just petered out or been discarded. More have been forgotten, lost in the eras of stagnation and chaos. Steam trains powered by fission reactors (with the fuel produced by one of the remaining nucleosynthesis facilities), geneered plants that harvest sunlight to produce food and biofuels, cities powered by centuries old geothermal taps and eight-legged horses are found side-by-side.
Of course there is a shortage of many minerals, with easily accessible deposits having been used millennia ago.
Further, as a Research and Development strategy ‘steal other people’s tech secrets’ doesn’t work too well. Non-organic Artificial Intelligence and seemingly human androids are controversial, there are still memories of the wars. There are rather too many pieces of misunderstood, and ununderstood, Clarketech floating around, left over from the Managra period, the product of inspired Mad Science or recovered elsewhere19. Sending seemingly reliable people off to the galaxy to be educated, and bring back valuable skills, is working as poorly as one might expect.
There's a moderately effective embargo against importing advanced tech (mainly because of the trouble getting there) as the Federation and Confederacy agree that supporting the terrestrial nation-states and alliances isn’t a great idea.
Then there are the numerous ‘archaeological’ expeditions seeking parts of Earth’s past. At least some of them are off-world Terran Nationalists, seeking symbols to rally the ‘True Humans’ to the cause (or at least their cause). Others are seeking caches of advanced technology. Such expeditions run the gamut of risks, from superstitious locals, hostile animals (and plants),dormant war machines and local politics. The disaster of the Lunnon Expedition of 4955 is a textbook example.
Time Travel.
Many powers, factions, organisation and individuals are experimenting with time travel, though experiments seem to oddly unproductive. Some researchers put this down to damage to the local temprosphere20, while others, more paranoid, are concerned about time travellers meddling21 and paradoxes.
There are at least four projects ongoing.
In the still frozen north of what was once Canada a researcher named Adamah is afraid of the wars she feels are coming and hopes to erase the horrific past22 of Earth. She's developing a Vortex Tunnel Generator23 and plans to start sending robots into the past quite 'soon' to establish parameters for organic life.
Adamah is being funded, on a rather small scale, to examine time displacement technology in response to rumours that of a similar project being developed by the Supreme Alliance. However Adamah has some unofficial off-world support (the true source of which she's not aware of) and a data-dump of previous temporal experiments, including the crude time-ships of Ahjonah’s Temporal Experiment Project before the solar flares, that was found buried in a bunker. And an assistant who seems strangely knowledgeable about both history and time travel. But that’s a story for another time.
Her tunnels through the Vortex will be causing a number of problems for other time travellers, and attract attention to her base.
In Lemuria Lord Alden, a ruthless researcher from Gredbritton, is ignoring his superior, Taral Kailen director of the Advanced Research Programme, and pursuing an odd gravito-temporal effect he can almost replicate reliably. Forbidden by Kailen24 to waste time with his 'dead end research' Alden is working without support or safety systems, eager to create the 'first' time machine using the Alden Effect25 with stolen resources.
Half a world away in the city-state of Melenba on the Inner Sea of the continent of Amyerkha, a scientist named Cathán Natal found crystals in a long buried museum and experimented upon them. Cathán is still a good way from creating a working time machine from the synthetic chronon crystals, but he's fascinated by their oddities and obsessed with the possibilities of seeing or even visiting the ancient Usay Empire during it's heyday.
In the heartland of the Supreme Alliance, once called China, Sa Yy Findecker is obsessively pursuing the 'double nexus' particle that he's sure is the key to reliable time travel26. So far his researches have only killed a few hundred slave laborers, hardly a blip in the Alliance's consumption and something Kailen and his other patron, the rising star in Supreme Alliance politics, Magnus Greel, are unconcerned about.
Comments? Ideas? The setting is ended for a mini-campaign of adventures set in a Mad Science/Post Holocaust/Planetary Romance setting.
1. The result of some rather ill-advised solar engineering attempts.
2. I.e. send a fertile, often geneered, embryo in place of oneself.
3. The Mutants et cetera.
4. The Overcities appear in Original Sin, So Vile a Sin and other works of the period.
5. Managra. The Managra entity introduced some interesting and advanced technology, including temporal and dimensional engineering. While the later Terrans couldn’t understand or copy it some bits remain.
6. The Dalek’s Master Plan
7. The Ice Warriors
8. The Ark in Space
9. As with my ideas on Mondas I've decreed that there is an Osiran planetary engine on Earth. Though at least the Terrans didn’t send the planet spinning off into deep space unlike some…
10. A matter that'll come to haunt the Supreme Alliance in the not-so-distant future.
11. Like Icarons.
12. Kessler syndrome has set in on a huge scale. Earth orbit is particularly hazardous. Whipple shields, heavy armour and deflection fields are advised for visitors.
13. It’s marginally better than ‘Greenies’.
14. A a Brown dwarf of 60MJ orbiting about 8k AU from Sol.
15. 'Loonie' has again become a pejorative term for fringers and marginals.
16. A geographically inaccurate term but one that has persisted in usage.
17. The generally sensible advice to stop messing with technology you don't understand and leave Sol alone was not well received by the preceding generations of Terran Nationalists.
18. Or is ruptured by the combined effects of the Peking Homunculus, internal betrayal by Gredbritton and a calculated Alliance memetic campaign.
19. Especially, for example, in the dying days of the First Empire when meddling with Things Terrans Were Not Meant To know was de rigueur for ambitious Imperial officers.
20. True to a minor extent, there are 'temporal echoes' that make time travel to and from the period difficult. Effectively it's always 'uphill' for temporal displacements.
21. Very true. The Time Agency is attempting to ensure it's own foundations aren't altered.
22. She's right, it’s a horrible period in human and Terran history, with outlandish scientific experimentation, death camps, internecine warfare and dictators. And it is going to culminate in a global war before things start to improve.
But it’s part of the Web of Time…
23. Somewhat ironically, given the trouble her researches cause for other time travellers, Adamah’s work on Vortex Tunnels lead to the development of human Vortex Capsules, and later the portable Vortex Tunnel Generator or Vortex Manipulator which will become the mainstay of the first era of mass time travel.
24. Kailen is a supporter of Sa Yy Findecker’s theories, which Alden disparages, and fears that the charismatic Alden might replace him.
25. Actually the Sinclair Field, 'first' discovered three thousand years earlier.
26. Spoiler: he's really, really, wrong.
It's an attempt to create a certain 'planetary romance' setting on Earth
The Tragic Centuries.
The Earth of the late fifth millennium is a backward, isolated and generally unimportant place, still recovering from its near total abandonment during the Solar Flares era1. The planet now has a population of almost a billion; from cryogenic and temporal stasis survivors, a million or so descendants of those who hid in bunkers near the core-mantle interface, natural and artificial births, cloning, genetic colonists2 and some limited live immigration to the ‘mother world of humanity’
- Though many of the immigrants don’t stay. At least the live ones, the genetic colonists usually don’t have much of a choice.
- The fiddling with Sol was an attempt to end the Ice
Age era; itself the result of an earlier round of planetary engineering gone
wrong. Tampering with stars is best left to professionals.
Earth is frankly a bit-of-a-mess; the fall of the (First) Terran Empire3, the (literal) fall of the Overcities4 (and the Third Exodus) the weirdness of the Europan Era5 (which left a fair number of spatial and temporal oddities littering the planet), the Great War6 against the Daleks and their allies, the Recovery, the Stagnation, the Ice Age7 (and the resulting Fifth Exodus), the Solar Flares8 (and the Sixth Exodus) have taken their toll on the planet.
The various conflicts have seen Old Earth damaged with nuclear, bio-chemical, nanotech, radiological, kinetic, contra-Terrene, gravitic, warp and temporal weapons. Bits are just gone, others are relocated, encased in shimmering globes, subject to odd time flows or floating in the air. During a couple of incidents (including a slight accident with a warp gate) much of the planet’s water was lost, creating a whole new geography. And the planet has a new, and slightly more eccentric, orbit thanks to trying the GodEngine9 out.
There are new islands (artificial continents in the case of Atlantia and Lemuria), the Mediterranean Basin is a patchwork of rivers and settlements in the location of the former sea.
Several rounds of Reconstruction have left the planetary ecosystem rather peculiar; the herds of feral unicorns, while dangerous on an individual scale, are the least of humanity’s problems, certainly trivial compared to the potential threat of the sentient amphibious octopi (currently at war with the imported Newts10).
Space travel is uncommon for several reasons; Terra is inconveniently placed, far from the metropoles of civilisation, even for the warp ships of the period. Then there are the hyperspatial vortices and storms, so the result of the use of weapons now prohibited by Intergalactic treaty (and common sense11) making the trip dangerous for even advanced and shielded warp ships. As for driving a wormhole or stellar tunnel anywhere nearby, forget it. Even FTL comms is unreliable due to hyperspace distortion. Radio and gravitic communications are mostly reliable, though the Earth’s ionosphere is altered necessitating satellite relays (or cables) for planetary communications.
The Solar System.
The Sol system itself is so full of junk left over from previous eras, including rather too many autonomous weapons platforms, numerous bits of ‘dormant’ ordnance and active mines, that even spaceflight is hazardous12.
Most people just don’t bother.
Mars is mostly abandoned, though nominally claimed (or reclaimed) by a group of what Terrans still insist on calling ‘Ice Warriors’13. The rest of Neo-Gandoran society thinks of them as cranks, but better on Mars that anywhere that matters. There are monitoring stations on at least two of the planet's six moons.
Venus, the terraforming long completed, has opted out of the system long ago, surrounding itself with a planetary shield and refusing to talk; it seems to be developing some sort of planetary scale hive-mind. The kind of people who are worried by such things are rather concerned6. The main space facilities (and liaison to the rest of the universe when needed) is Port Dejima on the Veneran moon, Aphrodite. Unauthorised attempt to land simply disappear.
Mercury, once an industrial heartland for mineral exploration/extraction/refinement and solar powered anti-matter production, was scoured almost clear of settlements during the flares period, taking several direct hits from Solar CMEs with energy releases in the teratonne region. The planetary orbit is still full of trillions of tonnes of ejecta, and significant amounts of contraterrene liberated during the scouring.
Titan and the Galilean moons still harbour inhabited settlements; Titan especially is a refuge for Terrans who want to opt-out of the whole insanity of Terran Exceptionalism on the ‘mother planet’. Many of the Ionian settlements survived the flares, due to being dug really deep to survive the other problems of living on a satellite of an energetic gas-giant.
Much of the equipment supporting the magnetic flux taps are still in place, but no longer power the wormholes; some has been repurposed.
A lot of gas mining still takes place on the stations in the Jovian and (especially) Saturnian atmosphere, theer is a demand for volatiles and helium-3.
Pluto is mostly derelict; the population of three hundred million established there by the Usurians didn’t last long after the company abandoned them; the former 'work units' were generally insufficiently skilled and unable to perform much of the technical work on the fusion mini-stars and force fields that kept the cities habitable. Most of the population that weren’t rescued and evacuated died within a century.
Today the ‘planet’ is home to perhaps thirty thousand people cowering in the permanently lit tunnels and fearing the return of their great demon, Dekkter.
Vulcan, the largest satellite of the brown dwarf Decimus14 in the far outer-system, is still running. Just beyond the hyperspace limit, it’s a relatively calm location for FTL ships. It also acts as a communications hub and the endpoint for the sole surviving warp-gate serving the Sol system. It’s an interesting place, much terraformed (including an artificial sun), and a haven of tranquillity and advanced technology. And spies of course. lots of spies.
In the inner system, Luna is far less heavily settled than in earlier times, but the lack of climactic factors helped preserve many of the earlier facilities and settlements and many have been claimed by fringe groups15. That and dogging really deep into the lunar regolith. Barely a million people live there, less than one-tenth of one-percent of it’s heyday. While some of the city-states are tied into the alliance systems on Earth, those ties are loose at best. It’s connected to Earth by some rather unreliable transmat links and a number of former naval assault shuttles, heavily armoured and shielded against the debris in cis-lunar space. The largest settlement is still in, around, and under, the repaired Aristarchus Dome, near Port Luna.
Earth.
Much of the current terrestrial leadership has (or at least professes for public benefit) a grudge against the Galactic Federation who, in the view of Terran nationalists16, didn't help them enough during the flares era17. Anyway the Federation had its own troubles. But then, any significant off-world intervention on
Terra might well see the warlords, despots and scientific dictators
deposed, so intervention might be a bad thing for them. To most faction
leaders and elites the nationalists are useful idiots.
There is a lot of weird stuff happening on Earth; old nationalisms are being reborn, despite the planet being a very different place and some of the homelands no longer actually existing or being under an inconvenient amount of solid or liquid water, and experiments into ‘Weird Science’ and heading into odd directions.
The population is scattered; while there are some large cities there are plenty of isolated settlements of various kinds. Most of the smaller 'villes' are usually self-sufficient and with almost total autonomy; strange beliefs, customs and taboos are unpleasantly common. There are also huge areas of wilderness, numerous Badlands (often due to residue from warfare, dumping or experimentation) and Disputed Zones. And an interesting mix of flora and fauna.
There are desolate, often badly contaminated, areas (the Peripheries) in areas claimed by most states that are marginal for agriculture (even the of the geneered super-plant kinds) inhabited by equally marginal peoples, usually baseline/modded/mutated humans of various sorts, but some groups of non-humans exists.
Although the larger powers are currently mostly at peace, in a few years things will erupt as the Icelandic Alliance ruptures18 and World War Six begins, but at the moment it’s a cool war, with a certain amount of low-level skirmishing and testing of strengths and weaknesses going on.
The Supreme Alliance is eagerly pursuing some technological paths generally felt to be best avoided. This will lead to the horrors of the 'organic distillation' setup Greel used, research which would culminate in the awful New London Horror of von Wachten. Bio-tech was also popular, including weird cybernetic and/or genemod animals, often based on splices of creatures from different worlds or including entirely synthetic genes.
It’s a period when exclamations like “Look Professor Jamak, if we tie in a couple of carboxylate groups just there, the victims will drip green slime!!” could be heard in all too many research labs.
Technologically Earth has regressed substantially; locally sustainable technology is commonly a mix of 19th to 21st century, leavened with more advanced equipment.
In fact, local technology is an odd (and to some sociologists fascinating) mix of elements; many lines of technological development have just petered out or been discarded. More have been forgotten, lost in the eras of stagnation and chaos. Steam trains powered by fission reactors (with the fuel produced by one of the remaining nucleosynthesis facilities), geneered plants that harvest sunlight to produce food and biofuels, cities powered by centuries old geothermal taps and eight-legged horses are found side-by-side.
Of course there is a shortage of many minerals, with easily accessible deposits having been used millennia ago.
Further, as a Research and Development strategy ‘steal other people’s tech secrets’ doesn’t work too well. Non-organic Artificial Intelligence and seemingly human androids are controversial, there are still memories of the wars. There are rather too many pieces of misunderstood, and ununderstood, Clarketech floating around, left over from the Managra period, the product of inspired Mad Science or recovered elsewhere19. Sending seemingly reliable people off to the galaxy to be educated, and bring back valuable skills, is working as poorly as one might expect.
There's a moderately effective embargo against importing advanced tech (mainly because of the trouble getting there) as the Federation and Confederacy agree that supporting the terrestrial nation-states and alliances isn’t a great idea.
- Of course the Feds have their own problems; the split that formed the Confederacy was peaceful enough (only a few millions died) but the Confed is expanding faster and encroaching on areas the Fed think are theirs. That said the rivalry is generally peaceful. No-one wants a large scale war. Not yet…
Then there are the numerous ‘archaeological’ expeditions seeking parts of Earth’s past. At least some of them are off-world Terran Nationalists, seeking symbols to rally the ‘True Humans’ to the cause (or at least their cause). Others are seeking caches of advanced technology. Such expeditions run the gamut of risks, from superstitious locals, hostile animals (and plants),dormant war machines and local politics. The disaster of the Lunnon Expedition of 4955 is a textbook example.
The team were funded to enter the remains of ‘Old Lunnon’ (actually the third rebuilt city) the almost mythical capital of what was to become Gredbritton, destroyed by a volcanic mantle plume which encased much of the Taam valley in the early 4400s. The target of the expedition was the lava covered dome of Saint Paulus’ cathedral. The expedition was beset by in-fighting, some of it purely academic, between those who attributed the cathedral to the worship of the Howling God, Arol Vilsen, and those who attributed it to the far darker deity known as the ‘Iron Lady’. Loss of equipment, supplies and personal in transit, attacks from feral Lunnoners (including the vicious ‘Cokeys’ suffering from Bells Madness), flash flooding, disease, rogue security ’bots and insanity (cause unknown). Rumours of the presence of time travellers persist.
Time Travel.
Many powers, factions, organisation and individuals are experimenting with time travel, though experiments seem to oddly unproductive. Some researchers put this down to damage to the local temprosphere20, while others, more paranoid, are concerned about time travellers meddling21 and paradoxes.
There are at least four projects ongoing.
In the still frozen north of what was once Canada a researcher named Adamah is afraid of the wars she feels are coming and hopes to erase the horrific past22 of Earth. She's developing a Vortex Tunnel Generator23 and plans to start sending robots into the past quite 'soon' to establish parameters for organic life.
Adamah is being funded, on a rather small scale, to examine time displacement technology in response to rumours that of a similar project being developed by the Supreme Alliance. However Adamah has some unofficial off-world support (the true source of which she's not aware of) and a data-dump of previous temporal experiments, including the crude time-ships of Ahjonah’s Temporal Experiment Project before the solar flares, that was found buried in a bunker. And an assistant who seems strangely knowledgeable about both history and time travel. But that’s a story for another time.
Her tunnels through the Vortex will be causing a number of problems for other time travellers, and attract attention to her base.
In Lemuria Lord Alden, a ruthless researcher from Gredbritton, is ignoring his superior, Taral Kailen director of the Advanced Research Programme, and pursuing an odd gravito-temporal effect he can almost replicate reliably. Forbidden by Kailen24 to waste time with his 'dead end research' Alden is working without support or safety systems, eager to create the 'first' time machine using the Alden Effect25 with stolen resources.
Half a world away in the city-state of Melenba on the Inner Sea of the continent of Amyerkha, a scientist named Cathán Natal found crystals in a long buried museum and experimented upon them. Cathán is still a good way from creating a working time machine from the synthetic chronon crystals, but he's fascinated by their oddities and obsessed with the possibilities of seeing or even visiting the ancient Usay Empire during it's heyday.
In the heartland of the Supreme Alliance, once called China, Sa Yy Findecker is obsessively pursuing the 'double nexus' particle that he's sure is the key to reliable time travel26. So far his researches have only killed a few hundred slave laborers, hardly a blip in the Alliance's consumption and something Kailen and his other patron, the rising star in Supreme Alliance politics, Magnus Greel, are unconcerned about.
Comments? Ideas? The setting is ended for a mini-campaign of adventures set in a Mad Science/Post Holocaust/Planetary Romance setting.
1. The result of some rather ill-advised solar engineering attempts.
2. I.e. send a fertile, often geneered, embryo in place of oneself.
3. The Mutants et cetera.
4. The Overcities appear in Original Sin, So Vile a Sin and other works of the period.
5. Managra. The Managra entity introduced some interesting and advanced technology, including temporal and dimensional engineering. While the later Terrans couldn’t understand or copy it some bits remain.
6. The Dalek’s Master Plan
7. The Ice Warriors
8. The Ark in Space
9. As with my ideas on Mondas I've decreed that there is an Osiran planetary engine on Earth. Though at least the Terrans didn’t send the planet spinning off into deep space unlike some…
10. A matter that'll come to haunt the Supreme Alliance in the not-so-distant future.
11. Like Icarons.
12. Kessler syndrome has set in on a huge scale. Earth orbit is particularly hazardous. Whipple shields, heavy armour and deflection fields are advised for visitors.
13. It’s marginally better than ‘Greenies’.
14. A a Brown dwarf of 60MJ orbiting about 8k AU from Sol.
15. 'Loonie' has again become a pejorative term for fringers and marginals.
16. A geographically inaccurate term but one that has persisted in usage.
17. The generally sensible advice to stop messing with technology you don't understand and leave Sol alone was not well received by the preceding generations of Terran Nationalists.
18. Or is ruptured by the combined effects of the Peking Homunculus, internal betrayal by Gredbritton and a calculated Alliance memetic campaign.
19. Especially, for example, in the dying days of the First Empire when meddling with Things Terrans Were Not Meant To know was de rigueur for ambitious Imperial officers.
20. True to a minor extent, there are 'temporal echoes' that make time travel to and from the period difficult. Effectively it's always 'uphill' for temporal displacements.
21. Very true. The Time Agency is attempting to ensure it's own foundations aren't altered.
22. She's right, it’s a horrible period in human and Terran history, with outlandish scientific experimentation, death camps, internecine warfare and dictators. And it is going to culminate in a global war before things start to improve.
But it’s part of the Web of Time…
23. Somewhat ironically, given the trouble her researches cause for other time travellers, Adamah’s work on Vortex Tunnels lead to the development of human Vortex Capsules, and later the portable Vortex Tunnel Generator or Vortex Manipulator which will become the mainstay of the first era of mass time travel.
24. Kailen is a supporter of Sa Yy Findecker’s theories, which Alden disparages, and fears that the charismatic Alden might replace him.
25. Actually the Sinclair Field, 'first' discovered three thousand years earlier.
26. Spoiler: he's really, really, wrong.