So, I recently finished Iain M. Bank's "Player of Games", which prominently features an empire whose entire social structure revolves around the playing of a hyper-complex boardgame and butts heads with a Culture run by artificial mega-minds. Can't imagine why my mind immediately went to Eclipse Phase... At first, I thought of adapting it to Bright station, as a way of them imposing more social structure and hierarchy though in the end I decided to make its own station. Anyway, here are my rough notes. Morat Station Station Type: Cluster Habitat Location: Uranian Orbit Allegiance: Independent (Strong Ultimate ties) Primary Languages: Azad (Conlang), English, Hindi Population: 3,333 Major Industries: Bio-engineering, morph design, hedonist-tourism Description: Morat is a recently-constructed habitat, founded by a number of defectors from Bright referred to as the Players. The Players, like all members of Bright, were highly intelligent, specializing in mathematics and especially game theory. Their services earned them sizable rep and cred accounts, but they found their personal political ideologies did not quite fit in with the Bright ideal. In short, they disagreed with Bright's ideas that one merely had to be intelligent and desired some form of more advanced screening or testing to determine social roles. They cashed out of Bright and sunk it all in the construction of their own personal habitat. Fans of their theories and papers soon followed to live in a more optimized society. For its population, Morat is still rather large and has yet to be properly filled, but much of the open space is left open for the playing of games. From a central hub, multiple interconnecting strands branch off in unusual designs; unlike most clusters which bud and spawn semi-organically and end up in an irregular pattern, Morat's construction has clearly been planned from day one. Each 'spoke' buds off three times - no more, no less - and the size and construction of the modular clusters reflect the three-tier social structure within the station, with differing quality of modules for the different residents. Three could almost be seen as some kind of sacred number of Morat. Residents sleeve into morphs designed around three sexes instead of two; male, female and apex. The apex (plural: apices) gender is the dominant one in Morat culture and almost all members of the higher class are apices. While it is permissible for one apex to have multiple husbands and wives, Morat tries to keep its population roughly equally gender-distributed - and thus always divisible by three. Their social structure is modeled around these three genders, which are practically synonymous with castes, with all important functions being carried out by apices. Typically, Morat males are grunt soldiers and unskilled labor, females carry out domestic duties and the apices carry out the roles of government and command. However, this social model is not totally rigid. This is where Azad, or The Great Game, comes in. Every three years, Morat engages in a station-wide tournament of Azad, a game created by the Players to be as complicated and reflective of life as possible. A proper formal game can take several days and moves through multiple stages, beginning with simple cards and moving on to massive boards containing pieces reflecting military actions or natural elements. Informal games are simpler, used to decide conflicts and rarely take longer than an hour. Either way, these games are almost entirely analogue rather than digital, to prevent hackers from interfering. Games are typically one-on-one or played in groups of five to ten, with an adjudicator observing. The adjudicator is mostly an apex, though the tournament will use a shackled and rigidly-monitored AI to impartially adjudicate. The tournament goes on for several months and how well one performs determines one's allocated social role for the next few years. The player who wins overall is declared head of the station - the current title is Emperor. Due to the gender-caste system, if one performs well or poorly during the tournament, one might be resleeved in order to move up or down the social ladder with new genitalia befitting your rank. Notably, personal motivations and beliefs are also part of the game and are submitted as part of your application to play; this allows Morat to adapt and alter itself to reflect the dominant and 'superior' memes, as well as making sure that only those who deserve power (according to Player philosophy) can hold power. The game is as much about warring ideologies as it is about actual war. Morat is not popular with the Autonomist Alliance, due to is fascistic ideologies and what are seen as gross inhumanities perpetrated by its ruling apices against the lesser genders and even against each other during games of Azad. Betting is common during even informal games and often involve the transferring of goods from the loser to the victor, but males and females are considered property of their apex and so are valid as gambling tokens. One can also wager mutilations, such as the loser having to be chemically castrated. These offend the delicate sensibilities of many anarchists, but have somewhat endeared Morat to the nearby Ultimates, who often send novices to Morat in order to learn strategy by observing and playing games of Azad. They have also become somewhat popular among circles of... illicit hedonists, those whose tastes would offend both the corporate and the anarchistic alike. Morat makes quite a bit of money through connections with organized crime groups, who put them in touch with people looking to engage in rough and non-consensual acts that would offend the Scum, whereas on Morat the victims have no rights anyway and were simply property. They also attract some interest from those afficionados of morph design and alternative social models, who are interested in the social dynamics and sexual processes of their trinary system. On the other hand, Morat sees a statistically-unusual lack of violent crime, due to the implementation of the game. Outside of the torture-industry it practices, the streets are completely safe and event white collar crime rates are very low. This is perhaps due to the small size but extremely ordered nature of the society, as well as the regular filtering the civilization gets through the game. The Players like to boast that there are no outcasts, no disenfranchised, no outsiders, no unemployed in Morat culture - the Game gives a place for all of them. The current Emperor of Morat is known only as Nicosar, one of the Bright Players and a game-theorist whose early writings were key in the designing of Azad. He sleeves in an apex Hyperbright morph and is known to be a firm, but fair ruler and maintains regular ties to the Ultimates for security purposes. He is expected to keep the position when the next Great Tournament begins in six months, but has put out a call to challengers from all polities to come and play the game. The other four Bright Players also occupy high office in this small culture, running the security forces, foreign relations and maintenance systems. Potential plot hooks: -The Great Tournament has been declared and all the PC's have been personally invited to play. -A Firewall Person of Interest in a recent bombing has fled the Inner System to Morat, where they are hiding in the personal retinue of one of the Players. -A dead apex is found on nearby Xiphos and one Ultimate is attempting to overthrow the Game.