Alien Sky
Premise
Alien Sky is a science fiction SD that is meant to be a coupling of the ecological science fiction epic Sid Meyer's Alpha Centauri with the mecha stylings of Studio Bones' surfer culture tribute Eureka seveN.
The Alien Sky setting is meant to be a setting debate where various factions engage in warfare using biomechanoid units known as Fractals that are not made, but grown, bred and improved over time. Because of the nature of war in this setting, combat is more strongly geared towards small units of elite forces and maneuver warfare rather than mass combat.
Players take control of individual military units rather than nations, customizing them and focusing on unique individuals and mecha rather than swarms of identical forces. Options range from elite special forces, raw recruits, roaming mercenaries and idealistic freedom fighters, set against the backdrop of a growing cold war between various colonial powers and the nascent sentience that seems to inhabit the verdant world of Gaia.
Setting
Alien Sky:Organizations
Alien Sky:Terms and Concepts
Alien Sky:Unit History Rules
Alien Sky:Character Generation Rules
Alien Sky:Unit Special Rules
Alien Sky:PC Plans
History
In Alien Sky, humanity spread left a ruined and war-torn Earth in search of a new home, with many colony ships heading towards the distant stars of Alpha Centauri. Settling the rolling red ocre plains of Chiron, humanity rebuilt, founding many great and flourishing civilizations. As dozens of centuries passed by, the new era was renamed in honor of their adopted homeworld and most people forgot of the Earth and the disasters that drove them from it.
Despite the promises of peace and a united humanity offered by the technologies of the future and the paradises offered by terraforming virgin planets to a state ideal for humans, increasing ideological racial and religious tensions between the various colonial powers continued. As relations strained and a state of open war between the many allied nations seemed most likely, the Centauri League, the most powerful of the powers in the system, stepped in and declared a guarantee on any single nation that would resort to open conflict.
Instead, it advocated a contest for the distant stars and brokered the Treaty of Pholus, allowing for open warfare only over distant worlds far from the Centauri system. This in turn led to a second space race, with every faction in a race to build a working colony ship that would allow them to claim the worlds of Sin, the yellow star nearest to Alpha Centauri.
In the end, it was the Centauri League and her six allies that claimed victory at the end of a three-century race to the star, turning back their rivals and claiming the pristine blue and green world that rested as its third orbit. These seven nations built the Tannhauser Gate over the world, seizing control of the only means of zero-time travel between the stars, and named the planet Gaia, in reverence to an old name for the lost Earth.
Initial colonization is disrupted by the mysterious lifeforms that seem to permeate the planet's crust, referred to only as the Vectors of Gaia, attacked emerging colonies and caused great destruction until the united efforts of the colonial powers succeeded in pushing the dormant superorganism beneath the earth into remission. The cost was great, with thousands of lives lost and the Tannhauser Gate destroyed. Contact could be maintained with Alpha Centauri through the use of high-bandwidth bluebox quantum entangled communicators, and the delivery of new components to rebuild the gate would only take a few centuries, something irrelevant to a clinically immortal populace.
As per the Treaty of Pholus, the other six other participants in the Gaia venture were open to warfare with eachother, with the League acting as a neutral intermediary. Weapons of mass destruction and atrocities against civilians were forbidden, but a new weapon adapted from the Vectors might yet be the key to seizing control of the world and disrupting League hegemony on Gaia...