I'm going to start this off with what I have presently planned out. Then I'll put a list of problems/questions I have as to my plan's viability.
At the outset, the players are informed that a hypercorp(*) is establishing a mining colony on the far side of a Pandora Gate. Rare minerals of some sort in a relatively dense asteroid field. They are to play the colonists; primarily, indents and low-level corp lackeys. I would like for them to be placed inside a vehicle(1), then shoved through a gate in a manner that does not allow them to see outside. The idea is that their destination is not actually an asteroid field at all, but a tiny moon orbiting a near-Earth planet. After passing through, an alarm sounds and the ship comes crashing down. Players are tasked with finding a way to minimize damage to a vessel not built to design reentry. Best case, their supplies stay together; worst, they're wounded, their supplies scattered. They then have to find materials and survive in a world they soon discover to have been touched by the Titans. Terrain and local wildlife could serve as a barrier, and finding the scattered colonists could be goals. The eventual goal, assuming the players decide to pursue it, could be making it back up to the Pandora Gate and finding a way home.
*: May just have Planetary Consortium itself be backing the endeavor, to avoid confusion. Thoughts?
1: I read that the Pandora Gates range in size from just large enough for a person, to large enough "allow a freight train of supplies," etc. I'm wondering if the size of the Pathfinder Gate is ever specifically given, since I can't seem to find it. Also, whether or not there are any modular "colony kit" ships small enough to be sent, even in pieces, through it?
2: Are there any good ways to fake an ego's suicide? IE, destroy the stack, but in a way that could possibly be self-inflicted? (Aside from a massive explosion.) Mystery!
3: Anyone have any tips for running a materials-scarce game? How to scale the difficulty curve for finding the materials required to produce equipment, that sort of thing.
4: So, I acknowledge that putting the players in this position sort of takes away the "immortality" aspect. One way I was thinking of getting around this was to adapt the morph design rules. They mention how most morphs take teams a very long time to design. I was thinking that if I just require a person to have all relevant schematics, then program the morph itself as a separate item, that might be okay. Thoughts?
5: Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, does the scheme sound like something a hypercorp/the PC would pull? Using a mining colony as a cover for illegal research, even at the cost of several hundred lives, that is. ("They have back-ups, so they're not really lost.") I figure with how unreliable the Gates can be, it would be pretty easy to establish plausible deniability for why the colony failed.
Thank you. I apologize if the answers to these questions seem obvious, or if I've overlooked anything.
Welcome! These forums will be deactivated by the end of this year. The conversation continues in a new morph over on Discord! Please join us there for a more active conversation and the occasional opportunity to ask developers questions directly! Go to the PS+ Discord Server.
Campaign Overview w/ Specific Questions
Tue, 2015-12-08 03:31
#1
Wikrin
Campaign Overview w/ Specific Questions
Tue, 2015-12-08 04:26
#2
MrWigggles
The only thing I would object
The only thing I would object is the whole rare elements things. EP is exploiting most of solar system, and has started to exploit like good score or two of planets.
Hypercorps go to other planets for the lack of competition.
Tue, 2015-12-08 06:17
#3
Wikrin
Hm. I read the bit in
Hm. I read the bit in Transhuman about rare materials, the bit in Gatecrashing about mining colonies, and the bit in Sunward about the Olympus Mons Space Elevator being used as a sort of shipping hub, and extrapolated that it might be cheaper to pull materials through a gate than to have them shipped in, if they weren't plentiful in your immediate area. I may have been incorrect in this assumption. :/
Tue, 2015-12-08 18:31
#4
Trappedinwikipedia
1: The Pathfinder gate is
1: The Pathfinder gate is large enough to put trains through, as it has rail lines connected directly to it. Anything more precise than that is hard to figure though. As for ships, that depends on a lot on what needs to go through, a single GEV has everything it needs to start a colony, if you're will to nano fabricate everything, but something like an SLOTV or LLOTV would probably be a better minimum. Depends on how well equipped it is.
2: Spacing could work if the body isn't found for a while, as cosmic rays could damage the stack enough to make it unreadable. Suicide by radiation exposure could work as well. Certain weapons are also pretty likely to damage a stack, such as particle beamers, microwave agonizers, and plasma weapons. With good aim a rail weapons of shredder could as well. Unsafe disassemblers or nanites could also work.
3: The difficulty of manufacturing stuff will vary a lot by what it is, and what's available. What kind of terrain are you thinking of? The biggest obstacle would likely be making feedstock, as it typically takes a lot of energy to separate rocks and dirt into elements/feedstock. If you want to bottleneck them, energy is a good place to do it. If you want real world-isa energy costs, nanofabrication and feedstock production theoretically take about as much energy as melting/disassociating the substance to build.
4: For designing morphs from scratch, or just making spares? Making some synths with blueprints is pretty easy, so I don't see a problem with that.
5: It could happen, I mean the Lost Project was a lot crazier than that, and there are already several secret research stations beyond the gates.
Wed, 2015-12-09 03:42
#5
ringring
Why didn't they send probes?
Was there an accident or some sort of sabotage?
Wed, 2015-12-09 03:59
#6
Wikrin
ringring wrote:Was there an
They did send probes. They just lied about what they found. The idea is for a select few to don high-dive suits, ditch the ship, survive reentry.
Would respond to TiW, but want to check a few things out first and am on my way out the door. Suffice it to say, thank you; you've given me things to look into, and some helpful tips! :)
Wed, 2015-12-09 04:54
#7
Wikrin
Trappedinwikipedia wrote:1:
(Realized I had more time than usual. Start work an hour later than usual today, forgot.)
1: That gave me an idea. In the entry for Standard Transports, they mention that each typically has four rotating passenger cars, designed to simulate Mars-level gravity. They hold a total of 200 people, so 50 per car. That number doesn't seem too high, and I assume that isn't counting personal cargo. I was thinking, how hard could it be to have one designed with modular pods, each about the size of a train car? (Possibly longer for cargo, but you understand.) Once through, you could hook them up to the central node, fly to your destination, then decouple for use in establishing the colony. Also conveniently allows me to separate some of the colonists, as an adventure hook.
2: What about orbital re-entry with a damaged high-dive suit? Or better yet... I think I have a good idea! :D Stack doesn't have to be cracked if someone takes it, and with everyone scattered, folks are unlikely to detect the foul-play. Plus, it opens up the option that someone might have a legitimate recourse if they find it.
3: Sort of a grassland, near the coast. Don't want to start the players off in too harsh a location; they need to feel safe enough to venture out at first. I hadn't even thought of energy requirements, though; that's a great idea! Initially, I was just thinking "oh, you want a knife? You have don't have any metal. You have sand - you want a glass knife?" You know, give more incentive to venture out. (That's sort of a bad example, because the wreckage will be available to start.)
4: Well, I didn't figure they would have much in the way of morph blueprints, and so would have to make illegal copies or throw something together themselves. I didn't want to hard limit them. You make a good point, though; synths shouldn't be too hard, provided they've got someone with the knowhow.
Wed, 2015-12-09 05:38
#8
Tango
1. Afaik. all the gates
1. Afaik. all the gates change shape depending on the address, so the same gate might let trains through to a certain destination, and then squeeze into a mere crawling space sized passage when a new address is punched in. Perhaps the gate changed shape mid operation causing the ship to break up?
2. Well, how I would do it would be to program a virtual ai to have my mannerisms and let it do the "suicide". Should the players discover odd pehavior before the act, they would probably credit it to mental problems instead of the virtual ai's limited capabilities.
3. This depends on the morphs the players use. For such an operation, 100% synch would be preferable. If the party has access to nanofabrication, they can resycle their own morphs to build systems optimized to the local conditions. With synths, it's less about material, and mode about power. If they have adequate power source available, they can always mine and refine materials and nanofabricate anything they need.
4. If you're talking about biomorphs, then yes, growing them in tanks takes time (and modifying them is harder). Synths? They're just machines, and i would imagine there would be open source synth schematics floating around for printing. They might not be the latest/best models, but better than nothing hey?
5. Absolutely. It doesnt even need to be "something evil". Studying titan tech is important to the transhumanity, even if there are huge risks. I could see the the Autonomists & Titanians doing something like that. Creating an off system colony for that would be ideal for containment purposes.
—
- "Mom's chicken soup, maybe?"
Wed, 2015-12-09 13:25
#9
Trappedinwikipedia
1: Probably, modular
1: Probably, modular shipbuilding should be pretty easy with EP smart materials.
2: The stack might survive, but finding it will be quite similar to hunting a specific marble somewhere in an area possibly larger than texas. (how the suit was sabotaged could effect how large an area there is to search) It won't be found quickly, that's for sure.
3: In that scenario you could turn the sand into elemental silicon to make a silicon knife, though it wouldn't be great, or get some carbon and make a silicon carbide knife, which still wouldn't be great, but would probably be better. The point is, making inert/nonmoving items probably won't be super hard with common material, even if you have nothing but mud you can still manufacture fullerenes after all.
This is of course assuming they have a cornucopia machine, if they only make a maker/fabber/decomposer than things get a lot harder.
4: One thing you could do to make for a partially solved body problem would be to have blueprints for robots and cyberbrains, but not real morphs. You could modify a bot with a cyberbrain, or simply run an infomorph on it and jam it to give people a body, but there would be problems. I'm make them extra hard to adapt to, and potentially give stress tests for staying in one for a prolonged period, as they might lack fully human supporting architecture, making them hard to use.