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Geology of hell

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Wed, 2012-03-21 20:14

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Geology of hell

USGS has just released a geological map of Io: http://pubs.usgs.gov/sim/3168/sim3168_sheet.pdf http://pubs.usgs.gov/sim/3168/sim3168_pamphlet.pdf Sulphur dioxide snow, metastable sulphur polymers, red plains, 14 km mountains, mysterious green deposits, radioactivity, violent volcanism and and a plasma torus... it makes me want to set an adventure on this grand moon.

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Wed, 2012-03-21 23:18

rfmcdonald rfmcdonald's picture

Re: Geology of hell

Mining outposts and a prison colony are there, right? Io's just so completely inhospitable that it's difficult to imagine reasons to live there, or ways to make it liveable. (One book I read decades ago identified Io as a candidate for terraforming (!), presumably on the sole grounds of its relatively high gravity and density.) When me and some friends were going through Babylon 5, we joked that the Vorlons could just have used their planet-killer to blow up Jupiter and leave Io spinning: what else could they do to it?

Thu, 2012-03-22 06:32

Arenamontanus Arenamontanus's picture

Re: Geology of hell

So, thinking about what might be going on there: Obviously the Jovians could have somebody imprisoned there the PCs want to beak out. Getting in and out will be a tough project, maybe including a makeshift egocaster. Or the PCs could start in the gulag and try todo the great escape. The volcanism makes the place too unstable for alien artefacts... but what if soundings suggest there is a gate under the surface, in one of the underground sulphur lakes? Except that as various groups race towards it they find that it is something else, something left by the Titans. And now it is waking up after having charged itself in the Io flux tube... Then there is the religious angle. Someone has a revelation: they have seen God, and It wants him to take the faithful and make a pilgrimage to Io, where Something Wonderful Will Happen. The faithful will be saved in the new kingdom, the rest will go the way of the flesh. Normal religious mass hysteria? Exsurgent infection? A bizarre prank that got out of hand? The wreckage of one of the earliest spacecrafts exploring the jovian system is discovered. In it a small colony of survivors, rejects and crazy people have built their own society. What strange and horrible choices have they made to survive there? And why have they never communicated? Autonomists want to help the locals, and have designed hightech like fabbers intended to function well on Io. Now they want to distribute them to a grateful population... except that strangely people don't appreciate their enlightened help. Habitats on Io are falling silent, and the Republic sends people to investigate. Hardware failure? Enemy action? Or something alien? Or infiltration of exhumans, who are spreading their posthuman existence virally? A romance story between a Republic officer and an enemy agent, set against the backdrop of the conflict and hardship of the planet. Researchers have found something strange in the sulphur deposits. Complex patterns that look almost like life or something artificial... except that there is no life around. Maybe there is something here that causes the 'lusus naturae' natural jokes medieval scholars believed explained fossils. Or some form of utterly alien intelligence/life that we can't even recognize - an entity that manipulates probability itself. Eruption! One habitat needs to be evacuated *now*, because an unexpected eruption will wipe it out soon. But how to get people with no stacks away from the vicinity? Time for heroism and gritty survivalist engineering. Skinthetic has designed a morph suited for Io. Now they want the PC to test them and record their experiences. "Think of it as a paid vacation in one of the solar system's grandest environment!" Oh yeah...

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Sat, 2014-03-29 06:46

Extrasolar Angel Extrasolar Angel's picture

Micheal Swanwick in his "The

Micheal Swanwick in his "The very pulse of the machine" had a very good portrayal of Io and implications of the flux tube.

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[I]Raise your hands to the sky and break the chains. With transhumanism we can smash the matriarchy together.[/i]

Sat, 2014-03-29 17:34

Kassil

Arenamontanus wrote:So,

Arenamontanus wrote:
So, thinking about what might be going on there: Obviously the Jovians could have somebody imprisoned there the PCs want to beak out. Getting in and out will be a tough project, maybe including a makeshift egocaster. Or the PCs could start in the gulag and try todo the great escape.

This is more-or-less the core of the beginning of a game I want to run. "You're in splicers and synths, they want to keep you captive, and the sophisticated dummy deadswitch installations have convinced them that trying to pop your stack or retrieve your ego to sleeve in stackless morphs is too risky. You're here to (rescue someone/retrieve sensitive information/bring down the prison) and then escape. You have only your morph, your skills, and what you can scrounge and scavenge in the midst of back-and-soul-breaking hard labor. Let's see what magic you can work."

Arenamontanus wrote:
The wreckage of one of the earliest spacecrafts exploring the jovian system is discovered. In it a small colony of survivors, rejects and crazy people have built their own society. What strange and horrible choices have they made to survive there? And why have they never communicated?

Earliest manned spacecraft? Wow, for them to have survived, they'd pretty much be exhumans - or exsurgents. The environment would've almost certainly destroyed them otherwise. Interesting - and you could hook it with the Great Escape plot, have the PCs try to coax the exhuman survivors to help them escape.

Arenamontanus wrote:
Autonomists want to help the locals, and have designed hightech like fabbers intended to function well on Io. Now they want to distribute them to a grateful population... except that strangely people don't appreciate their enlightened help.

That's more-or-less the modus operandi of the Jovians, isn't it? "Oh God, anarchists! Kill them before they unleash another wave of TITANs upon us!"

Arenamontanus wrote:
Researchers have found something strange in the sulphur deposits. Complex patterns that look almost like life or something artificial... except that there is no life around. Maybe there is something here that causes the 'lusus naturae' natural jokes medieval scholars believed explained fossils. Or some form of utterly alien intelligence/life that we can't even recognize - an entity that manipulates probability itself.

My money is on it being a clever trick left behind by the TITANs or the Bracewell probe itself. Some eingineered nanoform built to use the deadly environment and abundant resources to gather power and send it elsewhere, maybe? Oh, hey, there's the moon with the mysterious radio signal that has some serious interdiction going on... Overall, cool ideas, and I'm definitely snagging those maps for use when I eventually run the Escape from Maui Patera.

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"Don't eat the jelly, that's a protoplasm someone sleeved into."