Introduction (Maelstrom)
The Game
Humans were wrong about a lot of things in the twentieth century. One of the things they were most wrong about was that they were alone in the universe, that other planets in other solar systems (if they existed at all) were incapable of supporting life, let alone intelligence.
In fact the galaxy is filled with life, most planets (which are very common) play host to it, and a large proportion of those evolve intelligence. When humans came out onto the galactic stage, they found wonders and terrors far beyond anything they expected.
But that was a long time ago, today, we have other things to worry about.
[b] Ok then, what kind of SD is it? [/b]
Maelstrom is an empire based SD where players will control an alien race or human faction stepping onto the stage of the Milky Way Galaxy (specifically the Orion Arm) attempting to survive and thrive. Technology is high but not to high, being above Star Wars but below super entities such as the Culture.
It takes place in around three thousand two hundred AD by the human calendar, (though human's can't agree as to what precisely the date is,) in the Orion Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy.
The Map is split into sectors, each of which contains its own polities, nations and species, along with many thousands of Stars.
In order to play you will need to design an alien race or human faction.
Making a Faction
Maelstrom is a free form game with certain restrictions.
Because people are primarily supposed to play aliens, human factions are subject to GM approval. Approval will be granted providing the GM finds the faction idea interesting enough. Alien factions are not subject to a rigorous approval process.
No faction should have less than one hundred star systems and expect to make any impact on the game, and no faction should control more than ten thousand stars in the Orion Arm: powers newly arrived from another galaxy, another universe or the depths of the galactic halo might have more, but would still be unable to devote their full resources to the area.[b] No matter how big its territory is, no PC faction begins with territory in more than one sector of the map.[/b]
Similarly, fleet sizes are open ended, however the bigger a fleet is the worse its individual units will be, or the less of it will be able to be deployed against a given threat.
In broad terms the bigger a polity is the more problems it will have to deal with.
As well as a faction description, technology and the like, each player should create a group of main characters with names and some background that they will mostly tell the story through, and who are protected by character shields.
Technology
Technology in the 30th century varies by species and area, but is mostly extremely high. Faster than Light Travel, control over gravity and even inertia and large scale transmutation of matter are all common.
Weapons include not only attacks based on heat or kinetic energy but blasts of gravity, of folded space time or other exotic effects. Teleportation is another common technology, though an easily disruptable one, hard to use in combat.
Most powers have drive engines capable of reaching tens of thousand of times the speed of light. However, combat is all but impossible in the various realms of FTL space and must still generally be conducted within “normal” space time.
In space craft design there are roughly two schools. First those who create fast but lightly armoured vessels which cover their range in a relatively short time, like a 20th century aircraft, or slower, more heavily armoured units that take as long as a 20th century ship.
Due to the constraints of FTL drive, many powers use both, or one to carry the other.
Weapons vary: everything from simple nuclear and fusion bombs to beams that combine electromagnetic energy, exotic particles and gravity into a seamlessly destructive whole are used by galactic powers.
Technology Rules
Any unbalancing buzzword technology is disallowed. This means no technology where the only defence would be to have a similar or higher level of the same technology.
Combat should also take place at slower than light speeds, (even if it features faster than light jumps) and over distances of no more than a few light minutes at the very most.
Star killers, nova bombs and planet busters should be treated as strategic weapons and used with care. Planets worth taking are heavily defended with anti space weapons, planetary shields and smaller city shields in such a way that it is often necessary to send down ground units to shut them down. This is also desirable since it allows the planet to be captured relatively intact.
Mechanics=
Combat will be mostly handled as via adversarial or agreed story posts, with the GM having final say.
There’s no real building mechanic at the start of the SD, however if one becomes necessary it will be introduced later. You should however set the basic size of your fleet at the beginning of the game.
The Galaxy
The Milky Way is vast and old, an immense collection of more than three hundred billion stars. It would take a million exploration ships a million years to fully map the myriad star systems of the galaxy - assuming one could even reach all of them via hyperdrive. Needless to say, very little of the galaxy is surveyed in any meaningful manner and an almost unlimited supply of mysteries await discovery.
The current star-faring Clades are not the first to have explored the galaxy, either. Evidence of greater or lesser reliability exists for waves of colonization into deep time billions of years ago, but for the modern galaxy only the two most recent waves are of real import.
Unambiguous evidence points to a major phase of colonization capped by war approximately 120 million years ago. Archaeological evidence suggests that many of the clades involved at this time were descendants of genotypes spread during earlier colonization phases, leading to particularly acute competition for habitats. A series of exceptionally brutal and thorough wars resulted in the virtual extinction of intelligent life galaxy-wide for over 50 million years. This opened the galaxy up for a sustained period of colonization and civilization lasting from approximately 60 mya to 25 mya. The era of the intelligent races popularly and collectively known as the Precursors, the 'Long Complex' lasted for a sixth of a galactic rotation before slowly fading away. By 20 mya the galaxy was quiet again, with only a few stay-at-home or retired clades thinly populating the great disk and ancient Precursor machinery winding down or entering long dormancy. Many artifacts of the Long Complex still exist and function, ranging from archives to galaxy-spanning Longjumpers to Ringworlds and Dyson swarms to the all-important Grid. It has been hypothesized that a major hyperspace crash hastened the declined of the Long Complex.
Broad colonization of the galaxy has only recently (as such things go) restarted, with a significant pulse approximately a million years ago that led to the Dawn War and more recently a much larger number of tool-using species developing spaceflight in the past 100,000 years or so. And so the galaxy rolls on, with new races emerging and old ones jockeying for position. Rumours of amazing precursor artefacts being discovered and visitors from other galaxies run rampant. Some whisper it is the beginning of a new cycle of Galactic Affairs, a time when old empires will be thrown down, the shadows of the Precursors discarded and a new epoch will dawn on the Maelstrom.
The Orion Arm
The current hotbed of civilization is the Orion Arm, fortuitously sited in the middle of the galactic 'green belt' where conditions are optimal for the development of life-bearing solar systems. It was at the junction of the Orion and Sagittarius arms that the Dawn War started a million years ago and more recently it is where prolific races such as Humans emerged into space.
The Orion Arm is also particularly well Gridded, making it overall rather cosmopolitan as rapid transit (physically or informationally) is enabled by ancient Precursor wormholes. Many species of sophont manage to access the Grid soon after or even before achieving FTL travel, entering the galactic stage to seize their destiny. This contrasts with the Perseus Arm, where all Gridpoints are controlled by the vast and domineering Nilfari Hegemony for a significant section of arc.
Few travellers take the Grid inwards past the mostly-fallow Sagittarius arm. Those brave souls that have and returned to tell of it speak of the Dawn War still raging inside the Scutum-Crux arm. Other legends speak of grand, golden civilizations at the antipode that exceed even the glories of the Orion Arm, but as the Grid runs foul of feral Tozol and Jalk to spinward and Chan-Su to antispinward, any treks to reach them would need to go off-Grid and as a consequence be the work of decades or centuries. By default this leaves the Orion Arm as the center of galactic civilization.
The Grid
The miracle of Precursor technology that welded the Long Complex together and has been inherited by the current inhabitants of the galaxy, the Grid is a vast series of wormholes anchored in the dark matter disk of the Milky Way. This makes them static against the chaotic rotation of the galaxy's stars; save the occasional segment disrupted by unanticipated catastrophe, the Grid is the exact same shape and arrangement it was when it was built, fifty million years ago.
From a galactic perspective, the Grid is a series of barred wheels that provide rapid transport either radially or circumferentially at much higher speeds than any common star drive. Some zones tend to have a greater number of Gridpoints than others, such as the Orion Arm.
Gridpoints proper are characterized by no less than two and no more than six termini of 2-2.5 kilometer diameter spaced approximately 400 light-seconds (0.8 AUs) apart. They may or may be linked to a star which is anchored into the dark matter disk. The termini themselves are surrounded by large structures of Progenitor construction that can range in size from 5-25 kilometers. These structures appear to be involved with management and regulation of the termini. Two types have been identified.
The first type is the 'closed' structure; the internal workings are [i]believed[/i] to consist of abnormal matter inside space bounding walls and then encased in a durable Progenitor-standard shell. These often become the bedrock for stations or other latter-day structures that encrust on them like technological barnacles.
The second type is the 'open' structure; these appear to be at least partially exposed to outer space and have significant energy signatures. They appear to be Precursor cities - full of light, but nobody is home. No explorers have managed to penetrate into them, as Precursor autodefenses are particularly deadly to interlopers that stray from spacelanes to/from the termini near active structures. Unsurprisingly, they are never used as foundations for stations, unlike closed structures.
No Dawn War race will willingly go within the solar environs of a Gridpoint except in unusual and extraordinary circumstances
The Dawn War
More than a million years ago four intelligent races looked to the skies and in the light of a hundred billion stars, saw their destinies. The first space-faring tool-users to emerge since the fall of the Long Complex, they all saw themselves as heirs to the galaxy that seemed barren. For centuries and millenia they expanded at sublight speeds, locked into a purely Einsteinian framework by the fading echoes of a hyperspace crash twenty-four million years previously. They built great empires and embraced the future.
The discovery of each other and of the Grid changed that forever.
No records survive of who shot first, or why, or how or where. All that survives is a history of battle. They fought for habitable planets, for resources and then simply because of the crimes the others had committed.
The four races were all hugely powerful, though for much of the Dawn War they often travelled at speeds slower than light, unpacking their entire civilisation and war machine at the end of a centuries long flight. It was only after a hundred millenia of war that the hyperspace again became permeable and independent superluminal travel became possible. The war entered an ever deadlier phase.
Of course the Grid had long been used as a logistical pipeline, but now the Dawn War races were freed from it and plots were hatched to use it to annihilate the opposition. Somehow, a single Gridpoint was destabilized, sterilizing a zone over a thousand light-years across in a wave of exotic neutrino radiation.
By 500,000 years before present, the Dawn War had moved into the core of the galaxy, leaving only pockets of fighting across the Orion and Saggitarius arm. Three races had become something unrecognizable and one was almost extinct. Neither history nor archeology says how many developing races were destroyed as collateral damage in the mad, senseless conflict. Even today, the three remaining Dawn Warrior races still fight, their reasons for fighting long forgotten.
Today the Dawn War’s artefacts are looked upon with amazement by many for their seamless blend of technology both above and below what those in the modern galaxy have access to.
Cybaeon: The Makers
The masters of engineering, construction and physical science, the Cybaeon led the other two races in terms of gadgetry and engineering. They were also the first to (re)discover the principles of superluminal travel, though they never took it to its full strategic possibilities.
Once they were oxygen breathing amphibious creatures slightly resembling dolphins, but have long since migrated into a purely virtual realm, now they inhabit a network of servers in inter-stellar space, ruling as gods inside their virtual world. Some of these servers have fallen into solar systems, and even become entrapped within planets as they formed. The Cybaeon are highly protective of these servers and if one is found will send a force to get it back, usually by force.
The Cybaeon way of war is based on mass, with a Cybaeon command unit or ship quickly creating swarms of units to be hurled at the enemy in great numbers, taking vast losses but hopefully overwhelming enemy defences.
This is not to say there are not artful Cybaeon commanders, but most simply throw mass at the enemy.
Mknar: Warrior Kings
In order to over come the engineering of the Cybaeon and the super science of the Tivlin, the Mknar developed the strongest warrior arts of any of the three combatants in the dawn war. The primary Mknar unit was the battle shell, delivered as a seed to a planet and then cannibalising surrounding mater to grow the war machine. Rather than the vast bases and specialist units of the Tivlin or Cybaeon, the Mknar use a single multi role unit type for most operations, one capable of constructing more of its self on the move.
A battle shell is capable of producing lesser units, or reproducing its self either by splitting like an amoeba, by the creation of new seeds, or virally, after having taken over an enemy production facility. Battleshells have no constant form, rather reshaping themselves to fit the situation: giant tanks and humanoid walkers are both common. No matter the physical form they are protected by heavy energy shields and armed with an array of advanced weapons.
The controlling intelligence of a battleshell is the mind of a Mknar warrior, a member of the elite who has volunteered to be uploaded and subsequently copied into each new generation of shells.
Battleshells are sometimes still found in area’s where the dawn war raged heavily, and usually go on the rampage when found.
Originally the Mknar were reptilian, but now they are almost entirely cybernetic, though they have not migrated to virtual reality in the same way the Cybaeon have, instead inhabiting a huge number of free space colonies, often in interstellar space or around brown dwarf stars, and usually with extreme stealth precautions in place.
Tivlin: Those who would be gods
Where as Cybaeon units are blocky and dull, and Mknar units black and hard edged, the Tivlin create devices that shine like stars, golden or silver skinned aerospace craft with numerous curves and glowing vents and ports.
While the Mknar were masters of war and the Cybaeon of engineering, the Tivlin wished nothing short of godhood, seeking to master every kind of exotic science, tirelessly investigating precursors operations (often to their cost) and scavenging any advanced technology they could get their hands on.
Though Cybaeon were the first of the dawn warriors to create really practical FTL travel, the Tivlin were the first to use it on a large scale, creating massive portals between planets that would allow their battle fleets through.
The Tivilin use a variety of unit types and construct large bases. However their primary command unit is the mothership, a vast flyer which servers the same builder function as a Cybaeon commander.
Physically, the Tivilin were once tall, slender humanoids and unlike the other two Dawn war species Tivilin planets and cities still exist, however many of them live as mind states inside their computer systems.
Gek: The survivors
The fourth and ultimately weakest of the Dawn Warriors, the Gek were almost eliminated many hundreds of thousands of years ago. Only a small number managed to escape down the Grid, hiding from the vengeful fleets of the Cybaeon, Mknar and Tivlin behind the awesome and nigh-impenetrable Precursor defenses surrounded Gridpoints. It is this way that they survived the millenia. Now a forgotten shadow of what they once were, the Gek have become fiercely competitive traders, known for being hyperactive, lively and deceptively honest.
A average gek stands 5 foot tall at the top of his crested head, and resembles a small dinosaur. They are extremely fast, capable of running cheetah speed on level ground and never seem to stay still.
Modern Gek culture is based around capitalism. Gek love to exchange, be it information, goods, services, or whatever, since many Gek are happy to rip off their customers when dealing with them it’s always advisable to read the small print. The one thing they will never sell however is information about their history; all that is known about their history in the Dawn War has came about from independent investigation. When confronted with it, the Gek will simply respond with 'We don't talk about such things' and seek to change the subject. It is difficult to be more rude to a Gek than to press them on their ancient history, but as it is an obscure subject that is rife with rumors and untruths, it rarely comes up.