From the Ashes 3

From the Ashes Three builds on decades of success in running long-term strategy roleplay on Spacebattles and elsewhere. The creative/moderation team sports over a century of RPG & Strategy experience between its members and is committed to running a long term, successful game for its players.

From the Ashes Three incorporates some of the deep lore of previous Spacebattles games into its backstory but also presents a new, unique setting that shouldn’t be daunting to new players. To FTA veterans, think of this as yet another Manifold of reality. To new players-there’ll be some weird references and backstory elements that may need some explanation but you’ll be good to play out of the box without any prior knowledge of the history.

Intro

Eighty thousand years ago Humanity crawled out of its home star system, Sol, and into centuries of exploration, settlement and intercine conflict. They slowly unified into what became known as the Overculture, eventually joining with the Chelonians to be bequeathed the governorship of the Open Palm Federation by the Xan, already ancient when Humans were young. These two - followed several thousand years later by a third technic species of particular promise, the TKK - governed the Open Palm Federation for fifteen thousand years, becoming the galactic elders behind only the withdrawn Xan.

Sixty thousand years ago, the Overculture folded in upon itself. Having long led the Open Palm Federation in advanced if not downright esoteric physics and cybernetics, Humanity 60,000 years ago had become a species steadily losing touch with the material world. After preparing their successors - the Tharngolst - the Overculture vanished into incomprehensible software realms and with it, the vast majority of Humanity.

Thirty-seven thousand years ago, long-simmering disputes in the Open Palm Federation broke out into uprisings and conflicts. No interstellar polity dies quickly, and the Great War lasted for thousands of years. The Long Night that followed lasted for tens of thousands more.

Five thousand years ago the Long Night finally ended with space split between the darwinnowed Chelonian Protectorate - the last vestiges of the Open Palm Federation but so changed over time as to be unrecognizable - and the resurgent TKK 3rd Empire - the third and most lasting post-Great War TKK polity, each separated by vast gulfs of dark ages. Lesser species scurried between these titans, once friends but now tired foes, too entrenched in their ways to move beyond. The Tharngolst are believed extinct save devolved predators on the edge of known space. Humanity (what was left of it after the Overculture) had cladified into divergent strains of techno-survivors, these Ultramen and xFolk and Homo Extremis incomparably deviated from those that left Sol.

And then a century or two ago, the children of the Overculture returned. The softly humming server-spires that underpinned so much galactic infrastructure and survived the Long Night woke up and began to disgorge Humans. These reHumans were as if awoken from a dream, the descendants of a million simulations and fanciful worlds, forming polities new and retro. Ancient treaties and customs saw some treat these revenants and reclaimers with reverence if not outright awe, others saw reHumans as unwelcome.

It is 82,000(ish) AD and Humanity once again strides across the stars, but it will not be an easy path.

Joining the Game

Players can play as a Polity, either a human derived one, one populated by non-human sophonts, or anything in-between.

Every player begins with the following:

1. One of the Polity Templates that helps define your polity’s basic history and gives appropriate modifiers to match.
2. Four ethea, with one being your dominant defining ethos.
3. One Capital Territory (that is, a territory with a Capital Landmark in it), and three more territories in the same starting node.
4. 300 CI, which generates $15000 for the first year of game play, this can be distributed amongst your starting Territories as you wish (Both inherent starting & those from Polity Templates/Ethos)
5. 200 DI, Distributed amongst your territories as you see fit. (DI is tracked for capture purchases, but is pooled for actual production)
6. 3 General Tokens per year
7. Three Landmarks from the Landmark list distributed to your non-capital starting territories. Eligible Landmarks are marked in the appropriate rules with an (S).
8. $20,000 of DI-independent spending representing your initial standing military.
9. One starting Espionage Agency, generated with 12 Statistic points, 1 Specialization and 3 Asset unlocks.
10. One Operational Doctrine tree unlocked with one trait selected.
11. 1000 Supply
12. 12 Ship Designs. You may choose one beneficial quirk from the Ship Design Quirk Table for five of these Designs. No quirk can be duplicated for a starting Design.
13. Choose between either the Explorer or Strike Cruiser Specialist hulls, powerful cruisers equipped with the rare Fold Drive. You may start the game with up to 3 of these ships in your Starting Military.
14. One Specialist hull unlocked.
15. A single Supply Base at one of the starting ‘plot systems’ as designated by the mods.
16. Two preferred planet types and two hostile planet types selected from the list towards the end of this document.
17. 5 Points to “buy” from the following list:

• 4 more Ship Designs.
• Another trait in your starting Doctrine tree.
• 20 CI to distribute across your Territories.
• 10 DI to distribute across your Territories.
• $2000 more starting Military.
• $1 additional Territory in a system outside your Capital Node with 10 CI.
• 400 additional Supplies
• An additional Espionage Agency with the same points as your starter (12 stats, 1 Spec, 3 Unlocks)
• Upgrade an existing Agency with 5 Statistic points and 1 Spec or 3 Unlocks
• A Forward Operating Base in another plot system of your choosing.

Polity Templates

Residents

Space aliens! Residents are the various ‘native’ techno-sophonts of the Grid; some may have clawed their way into space under their own power while others might be ancient uplifts Some may even be humans, the far-flung and much-changed descendants of those that never entered the great digital oververse. No matter their exact origins, Residents all share the trait that they are well-established in known space, having their own defined region of settled space.

• Gain two Territories with 15 CI each in systems other than your starting one, with moderator discretion.
• Gain an additional Ethos or two territories as per above (total of 4)
• Generate 1 Military token annually
• You will have one hostile or two neutral NPCs of comparable size placed near you. They will generally be amenable to cooperating against you.
• Residents may also choose to take any or none of the following options:

• Imperium Rex: You may have two additional Territories as per above (possibly up to 6!), though your token production is reduced by 1 Diplomacy and 1 Other annually.
• Veni, Vedi, Vici: You may yet again have two additional territories as per above (8?!), though you will have at least one significant and hostile NPC or possibly an entire coalition of lesser powers ready to defend themselves against you.
• Astro-Hungarians: You may add one additional system with 30 CI but your Stability decays towards its resting point by an extra point per turn.

Reclaimers

The Reclaimers are one of the two dominant philosophies of reHumanity - Reclaimers seek to return to a position of preeminence and have begun campaigns of expansion. These could be direct military conquests or rapid colonization of fallow worlds. The result is an expansionist human polity, though often one that is limited in the recovered technology - there seems to be a certain inverse correlation between reHuman polities that managed to extract significant advanced technology out of the server spires and those that adopted the Reclaimer mindset. Perhaps they’re compensating?

• Gain a Territory with 15 CI in a system other than your starting one, with moderator discretion
• Your resting stability point is increased by one point.
• Generate 1 R&D token annually
• You may have a large NPC on your borders, if you do so your territorial bonus becomes 2 x 15 CI in two non-starting systems.
• You may have two small hostile NPCs on your border. If you do, you generate 1 Military token annually.

Revenants

The other main reHuman philosophy are the Revenants. The main difference is that Revenants do not have a driving objective to return to the alleged glory days, instead looking to a new and different future in this new and different galaxy. That doesn’t mean they’re all fluffy bunnies; individual Revenants can be just as arrogant and superior as any other reHuman and as a polity Revenant states are hardly shy at using force when needed. They also often pack unexpected surprises and more than one Resident has thought to bully a small Revenant polity over some meaningless dispute only to have a force of advanced warships materialize and tear their forward fleet apart with various deadly sorts of weaponry. It's an error few make twice.

• The cost to restore OPF relics, infrastructure and landmarks is reduced by 50%
• You start with a second specialty hull (non-Fold drive) unlocked and open to production.
• You start with three TL6 Strike Cruisers.
• Generate 1 Diplomacy token annually.
• Begin the game with 1 fully repaired OPF Landmark (Moderator discretion).
• Your militia forces start at TL4.5 rather than TL4.
• Your starting intel Agency starts with 2 points of Specialization built-in instead of 1, and an extra Unlock.

Roamers

The derogatory term for the numerous nomads that sail across the grid, some Roamers are the last remnants of ancient empires driven from their homeworlds, while others are simply wanderers that have formed up into like-minded societies. Many have picked up all manner of curios along the way and most polities on the grid will at least accept their temporary presence inside their space to engage in trade, diplomacy and exchange. Roamers do not have preferred planet types for obvious reasons.

• Generate 2 Diplomacy, 1 Espionage and 1 Economy token annually.
• Roamers are migratory, instead of Territories they can either build Convoys of Worldships or establish Satrapies.

• Convoys can move freely one jump per year, and all Convoys can perform an additional jump by spending a Token of any variety up to a maximum of 5 per year. Landmarks designated as Mobile can be moved aboard a Convoy, but they lose any benefits tied to their system of origin (IE, espionage token generator in the Big E, etc). All economic indices ($ income from CI, DI, etc) are reduced by 40% in a Convoy. Newly acquired Territories can be converted to Worldships, but only after their culture has been fully converted to match your Ethea. Territories below 10 CI can be converted to a Convoy free of cost.
• New Territories above CI 10 can be set up as Satrapies. These are a special kind of NPC in that the territory’s internally produced resources are all funneled to your state, but they are counted as demilitarized neutral states by the rules of diplomacy on the Grid. Pirates may bother them but it’s generally unwise for nation-states to do so. As these territories do not move, they produce economically at their unchanged value.

• Roamers have three Ethos points instead of four. Instead you gain the ethos abilities of Low-Key and Starbound without selecting them as an Ethos. You can also choose to gain the Dominant abilities of both for one ethos point.
• I Know a Guy: You may spend a military token to instantly purchase $1000 in military or espionage units for the year as you dig through your rolodex.
• Jubilee! If a Convoy arrives at a system you have not ‘landed in’ within the past ten turns, your $ income is doubled that year and the locals gain 10% in $ income (All CI in territories in the system). You get one Jubilee a year.
• Research costs are reduced by 50%. Token cost is unchanged, however.
• When moving between sectors, Roamers can impact the trade market significantly, acting as either a significant modifier for either Piracy or Commerce Protection (Roamer player designates how their forces are acting).

Rumpus

Species that have only just clawed their way up to interstellar travel. Maybe you were isolated on a relic vault for forty thousand years, or maybe you just happened to evolve to sapience over the course of the long dark and only just made your first steps into a wider world, but regardless everything- and particularly the history of space- is new and interesting, and you’re going to point your nose every which-where regardless of accepted custom or culture and especially regardless of any warnings claiming that this isn’t a place of honor.

• Your Tech Level is 4. Don’t ask how to get to TL5, you’re a thousand years too early.

• Up to 50% of your front-line military fleet may be TL5 ships, purchased third-hand from Crazy Chelon’s Honest Scrapyard.
• You may reduce the TL of all your purchased starting equipment by 1. In exchange, rampant xeno-paranoid militarism gives you three times as many base forces. Lower technology forces have a lower upkeep cost (see the military rules for details)

• You will generally have a number of fallow systems near you.
• No Respect: All diplomacy actions cost double tokens. The loudness of espionage operations is halved.
• You can choose one of three options:

• Starry-Eyed: Generate 2 additional General tokens per year.
• Scrappy: Generate 1 Economy Token per year. Additionally, every time you suffer a meaningful defeat or setback (eg, military defeats, exogenous stability loss, etc), you gain 1 General Token.
• Rally Around the Flag: Generate 1 Unity Token per year. In addition, most exogenous events that would decrease stability instead both increase it and provide special Rally Tokens with GM-determined effects.

Playing the Game

The Game Economy

The game economy uses three primary currencies: Cash money, generated by civilian infrastructure and represented as $, and Tokens, which are a more esoteric concept representing everything from the lobbying power of a state’s various actors to a people’s mindset and even more esoteric concepts. Tokens by nature represent different things and there are both generic tokens, representing the organs of your government doing stuff, and specific types of tokens representing, say, the efforts of a large research university or an organized religion in your polity.. The final currency, Defense Industry or DI, represents shipyards, autofactories, training camps, and the like, is replenished yearly based on your production and other factors and can only be expanded through the investment of $ and the usage of particular tokens.

Civilian Infrastructure

Civilian infrastructure represents office buildings, farms, roads, schools, and everything that is required for people to live their lives and function in the early third century after the Return. As might be expected, this generates cash, through taxes and fees and what have you, that can be used by your government to buy stuff. CI is assigned to Territories, which are the principal building blocks of any Polity. A territory could represent a continent on a Garden world, a mineral-rich cluster of asteroids, an airless moon, or anything broadly comparable. Each point of CI generates $50 annually at game start. New CI can be generated through the investment of $ and the appropriate tokens, be given out as the result of an Event, etc. In theory, CI can also be lost due to certain circumstances at the discretion of the moderation team (Usually because of war or some sort of event).

Defense Industry

In most regards, DI is the least complicated currency as it has really only one function-equipping your military and using it. You start with 200 DI, and can build 5% more through the expenditure of $2000 and a Military Token. This DI takes a year to come online and add itself to your annual production.. DI does not carry over from year to year, but whatever unspent DI a polity has in a calendar year generates $5 each, representing selling the excess production to various non-state actors. You are capped at an increase of 10% each year, as functionally speaking your existing DI infrastructure can only expand so quickly and keep up.

Renting DI

Plenty of defense contractors scattered across the galaxy have excess capacity and are willing to sell it to polities that aren’t actively shooting at them. It is possible to purchase access to this pool of DI. It costs $1000 to rent 25 DI for a year. As with purchasing tokens, this price doubles for every 25 DI or token you rent.

Tokens

Tokens represent the organs of your polity, be they government, religious, social, or whatever, putting their willpower into doing stuff. A significant number of actions require the expenditure of tokens, which regenerate annually, but cannot be saved from year to year. They can be swapped both between players, and players and NPCs, representing various relationships be they economic, religious, political, etc.

Token Types

General: These represent your government’s basic operating capabilities (or the equivalent) and can be spent on any (almost) action. Diplomatic: Representing your ties to other polities, be they economic or through your Foreign Ministry. Generally a pretty broadly applicable token. Military: Representing the capabilities of your Military-Industrial complex, often used for constructing new Defense Industry but also expanding your ability to conduct operations outside your polity’s borders, as well as other functions. Research & Development: Representing the abilities of your educational infrastructure, think-tanks, labs, and such. Used for things like researching new technology, reverse-engineering OPF or alien technology, etc. Economic: Representing the “heft” of your CI, in whatever form it takes. Unity: Representing internal order, social stability or cohesion, and other more esoteric organs. These tokens can be played either dystopian or utopian depending on whim. Espionage: Tokens for underhanded shenanigans of various sorts. Plot: A special token that is not generated automatically but is instead awarded to players by moderators as the result of the outcome of Events and gameplay resolution.

The Map

The map is a Node based system, with important systems linked by gate or tram lines. A Node represents a primary system and some degree of surrounding space, generally comprised of Red Dwarf type dying stars and celestial debris, where minor development takes place called the Cloud. This cloud is abstracted for the purposes of rules and events and what have you. Your starting home system territories could be in the surrounding cloud, if it makes sense narratively. When game rules refer to territory in another system, they mean another node on the map, NOT something in the same node’s halo.

Planet Types

The galaxy is a diverse place and while OPF terraforming technology was good, it wasn’t perfect, and thirty thousand years of war and decay has ruined plenty of planets that might have once been nice places to live. Moreover, plenty of environments that are outright hostile to human life might be paradise to other life forms-even aside of extreme examples like the Genumet or Taloid, the Sondrak prefer worlds we would identify as deserts.

Settling a territory on a celestial body that aligns with your preferred planet type comes with some discount-a 25% reduction in the $ cost of establishing Landmarks and new territories there-while settling on a world that’s hostile incurs a 50% $ cost increase, representing the additional assets required to make the place liveable for your people. Even the most transophont have some requirements. Your starting infrastructure generally is assumed to be located on non-hostile worlds, and as a result these modifiers are only relevant to new construction in-game. Due note that this is whatever the dominant planetary trait is, and as a result these cannot be stacked.

Gaian World: These worlds are broadly similar to humanity’s homeworld, have large oceans and a varied climate.

Ocean World: Technically usually defined as “archipelago worlds” are those with only a small percentage of their land above water. These worlds often have shallow continental shelves that provide vast areas of productive, accessible resources. True “Ocean Worlds”-that is, worlds with no dry land whatsoever and a world ocean vastly deeper than Earth’s, exist but are generally not targeted for settlement given how difficult it is to access resources and develop infrastructure..

Desert World: Desert worlds are dry, dominated by desert and taiga biomes, typically with a relatively low percentage of surface water. They have significant day/night swings in temperature and large parts of their surface are inhospitable to baseline humans-however, their polar areas can be quite pleasant.

Swamp World: A world covered largely in water, but with little topographic variety so most of the planet’s land surface is, well, swampy. Fairly rare, simply as the very process that makes a world home to organic life often also makes it geologically active enough to produce normal continents, but broadly habitable by most oxy-nitro based life if unpleasant. The Grunt prefer these worlds and engage in heavy internal fighting to control them when they’re found.

Tundra/Glacier World: In some ways the very opposite of a desert world, these worlds are locked into an ice age. They might, in other geological epochs, be Gaian type, but whatever combination of tectonics, climate, and solar activity has resulted in large swatches of these worlds being covered in ice and snow. This constrains the biome variety found on the world as a result. Earth in the current era straddles the boundary between this state and a Gaian world, only held in check by active measures by the caretaker AI overseeing the cradle world from slipping back into another period of glaciation.

Volcanic World: Generally younger worlds, with a very high fraction of radionuclides, resulting in active plate tectonics and crustal activity. Volcanism and earthquakes are a fact of life here and while an oxy-nitro based biosphere may be present, it likely has large amounts of contamination from heavy metals or other elements released as a result of outgassing. Many “Super-Earths” with biospheres fall into this category.

Eyeball World: These are tidally locked worlds, not having a normal rotational period but instead a “light” pole and a “dark pole”. Depending on their primary and orbital position, they may host fairly normal twilight-adapted biomes or an array of unique life forms. These factors also determine how large the habitable zone is on such a world.

Cratered World: These worlds are defined by their geology, or, rather, their lack of it. A lack of active weather or plate tectonics mean these worlds are still covered in impact basins or craters from their formation. Depending on the topography, it’s possible that deep canyons or basins may be habitable. These worlds range from “Warm Mars” type worlds through Earth’s moon depending on size and circumstance.

Methane World: These worlds are akin to Titan in the Sol System, with large atmospheres, rich in organic materials, hydrology based on ethane and methane instead of water, and often exotice life. The taloid arose on such a world.

Radiated World: These are worlds that for whatever reason are exposed to high amounts of hard radiation-Io in the Sol system is a good, if extreme, example. Some may still be inhabited but not by life familiar to baseline humans, depending on environment and temperature conditions.

Toxic World: Worlds with reducing atmospheres or those completely lacking in oxygen, marginally habitable in the sense that there’s a local biosphere that certainly doesn’t mesh with baseline Earth life. They can be a ready source of chemicals and other industrial products too finicky to produce in nanoforges and have zero concerns about environmental protection for more exotic types of production.

Tomb World: The fall of the OPF, from the first madness of the tharngolst to the last fleet engagement between the chelonians and TKK, was long, and bloody. Many worlds that were once thriving, full of life and development, are no longer so. Some remain barely habitable, choked with fallout and the detritus of orbital battles raining down. Some have had their atmospheres scoured completely. These worlds are not nice places to live, but, in theory, they are absolutely rich in potential salvage opportunities for those willing to take the chance.