overbringer | Destination: Space! A Valor Campaign

Destination: Space! A Valor Campaign

This is an official interest post for a Valor campaign that will be an homage to early-mid twentieth century Science Fiction. VALOR is a tabletop RPG system that you can read more about here. It is a flexible system that is good for high action high drama campaigns, which I fully intend for this to be. It's a really good system and I recommend picking up a copy for yourself, but if you need me to I can lend you a copy of the eBook.

DESTINATION: SPACE!, A brief history

In the mid twentieth century, in this universe, Earth received it's first alien visitors: A trade delegation from the planet Mercury. Mercury was the first planet in the Solar System to develop space travel, and they sent out ambassadors of peace to every other planet, leading to a golden age of prosperity and trade. It all came crashing to an end around the year 2070, when a rogue planet in a highly elliptical orbit around the sun reached the perigree off it's 22,000 year orbit, and passed within a few million miles of the Earth itself. This mysterious "planet X" was the home to a horrifying alien race which were dubbed the "Exians". the Exians immediately went on the offensive and almost overwhelmed the combined military powers of the rest of the Solar System until simple physics proved their downfall. After about three years of war, Planet X simply moved along its orbit until it was too far away to support their war fleets, and eventually everyone else was able to get the upper hand.

It is now 2114AD. The Mercurians got the worst of the assault, having been wiped out completely by an Exian bioweapon, but the rest of the solar system is still recovering from the war. It's a dangerous universe out there, but if you're willing to take some risks and roll with the punches, it's also a universe full of amazing opportunities. Grab your trusty sword or raygun, fuel up your spaceship, and set your destination for SPAAAAAAAACE!

This campaign will be:
- Played on Roll20.net, so you will need an account there
- Potentially scheduled weekly on any day other than Monday, Friday, or Sunday.
- Largely open world. You'll have a spaceship of some kind, and will be able to go to any planet in the solar system. There will be things to do on all of them.
- I'm capping the party size at 5

What I need from you:

I will be appending this post with blurbs for each of the planets, to share a bit of worldbuilding and maybe jumpstart the creative process.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Without anyone around to maintain the delicate climate control technology that kept the planet survivable that close to the sun, Mercury's surface has reverted to a barren, airless ball of rock dotted with half melted cities. No one lives there anymore. UNDER the surface, however, is an endless network of caves. Mercury is famed for it's unparalleled mineral wealth, but also for being a cursed world. Many desperate prospectors go there looking to make a quick buck. Few return. Fewer still return as sane as they were when they left.

Sometimes people do get lucky, though. They come back with vast riches, and no more than the occasional nightmare. There are some very wealthy businessmen who owe their start to a last desperate gamble on Mercury.

IMPORTS: Air, Water, Food, Desperate fools
EXPORTS: Metal, Gems, Crazy people.
MERCURIAN STEREOTYPES: They're all dead.

Edited 2016-09-22 06:15 (UTC)

A beautiful, tropical world, covered by wide seas and dense jungles. Most of the Venusians live in insular kingdoms along the coasts that are protected by massive walls from the fearsome beasts that live in the jungle beyond. Venusians are famous for being clever scholars and having mystic powers.

Rumors of lost cities of gold, ancient technology, and other such fabulous treasures are commonplace, and indeed the few expeditions that come back usually have strange things with them, but only the best equipped expeditions make it back alive. They speak of fearsome savages that live out there and worse.

The worse is usually dinosaurs.

IMPORTS: Tourists, manufactured goods
EXPORTS: Medicine, Scholarly research
VENUSIAN STEREOTYPES: subtle, cowardly, spiritual, green.

Edited 2016-04-04 03:07 (UTC)

We all know what Earth is like.

Earth and Mars both had tectonic bombs dropped on them by the Exians during the war. The science is complicated, but basically Earth took far more damage than Mars did. Europe is gone, as are most of Northern Africa and Western Asia. The crust was shattered, leaving endless expanses of massive shards of rock alongside abyssal fissues, both of which are constantly being slammed by Earthquakes. The damage decreases the further away you get, leaving large swathes of the world largely uninhabitable, but the lands around the pacific rim are still pretty much untouched. The people living there have bounced back from the war admirably, and are rapidly working on rebuilding from the damage and re-establishing Earth's place among the stars.

Most Earthlings today come from southern Africa, Australia, The western half of the Americas, eastern Asia, or from various Polynesian islands.

IMPORTS: Raw materials, tourist crap.
EXPORTS: Manufactured goods, adventurers.
EARTHLING STEREOTYPES: Arrogant, Determined, Passionate

Edited 2016-09-22 06:17 (UTC)

Mars is an arid world of stark landscapes that has been slowly dying for millenia but is also home to the oldest continual civilizations anywhere in the solar system. In 12000 BC, six royal houses ruled six kingdoms across Mars. Today, five of them still rule more or less the same land. The sixth was destroyed in the war against the Exians, when an tectonic bomb was dropped on it, dropping the capital into a sea of magma and leaving the land for hundreds of miles around it shattered, shaking ruins. The martians are in a state of stunned chaos as they try to deal with a political upheaval of a level not seen in fifteen thousand years.

And still, each year, the deserts get a little drier, a little colder. Each year the canals flow a little bit lower. Unless something extraordinary happens, Mars will eventually become a dead world. The Martians have had to learn how to shape the bodies of the living things around them to survive in the increasingly hostile world, and so are masters of biotechnology.

IMPORTS: Water, metal
EXPORTS: Mercenaries, biotech
MARTIAN STEREOTYPES: Calm, Calculating, Violent, Red

Edited 2016-04-26 02:47 (UTC)

According to rumors, there used to be another planet between Mars and Jupiter at some ancient point in history. Now there's just a whole mess of asteroids, and most people don't give such rumors much attention. The asteroid belt is mostly a home for smugglers, space pirates, and other such people who wish to avoid the law. It is a place that only the most foolhardy would travel through without protection.

Some of the asteroids DO have strange things on them, though. Ruins suggesting that even if there wasn't a planet here at some point, there were civilizations before ours that visited this stretch of space.

IMPORTS: All your money
EXPORTS: Your life, if you're lucky.
ASTEROID BELT STEREOTYPES: Eyepatches, peg legs, parrots, jolly rogers.

Edited 2016-04-04 04:54 (UTC)

Jupiter is, much like in our own universe, a giant ball of gas with no real surface. UNLIKE in our world, the atmosphere is largely breathable air, and is dotted with strange floating islands on which live strange, dangerous creatures. It is not the home of any known civilizations. Jupiter's MOONS, on the other hand...

Europa, Calliso, Io, and Ganymede are the homes of four separate civilizations which all hate each other. The Jupiter sphere is an endless tangled mess of tangled and shifting wars, alliances, and betrayals. Numerous wrecked spaceships orbit the gas giant, but most of the fighting takes place on Jupiter itself. Those floating islands I mentioned are the only known source of a strange crystal that, when properly ground up and ingested, can temporarily increase your supernatural powers and give you strange visions of the future. Whichever moon controls more crystal mines is the one that gains power the fastest, and also the first to get torn down by the other three working together.

IMPORTS: Weapons, soldiers
EXPORTS: Crystal dust, dead people
JOVIAN STEREOTYPES: Untrustworthy, Quickwitted, Aggressive, blue, sometimes have animal features (Callisto: Wings, Europa: Gills/fins, Io: Horns, Ganymede: Claws)

Edited 2016-04-04 04:54 (UTC)

The generally accepted view is that no one important lives on Saturn. The view of the Saturnians is a little different, but they are small in numbers and do not have nearly the same level of technology as much of the rest of the solar system. As such, they are doing a very bad job at keeping prospectors from the rest of the solar system from marching in and mining the hell out of Saturn's moons and Saturn's rings. It's tragic, but what can you do? Settlers and prospectors do sometimes mysteriously disappear, though. The frontier can be a dangerous place.

IMPORTS: Settlers, manufactured goods
EXPORTS: Raw materials of all kinds
SATURNIAN STEREOTYPES: All the crap Europeans said about Native Americans, people say about Saturnians.

Edited 2016-04-04 04:55 (UTC)

The general advice is "Don't go to Uranus."

It's not that it's particularly dangerous. It's just...creepy. Derelict spaceships tend to end up in orbit of it for no clear reason, and the surface (Are you surprised there's a surface? So were the first people who landed on it.) is constantly suffering from strange spatial fluctuations. No one lives there. Few people visit. It is a mysterious world.

IMPORTS: ????
EXPORTS: ????
URANIAN STEREOTYPES: ????

Neptune is a big ball of water. It is water all the way through. No solid core. Granted, the intense pressure towards the middle makes it effectively impossible to get through it anyways, but it is still water down there. The local life is mostly fish, fish, and more fish. No one has found any intelligent native life, but it's a big planet and there's a lot of depths to plumb.

Recently, though, Europans from Jupiter have been settling there, where their gills and fins give them a substantial natural advantage over any other settlers who want to try and make a life for themselves in this wet world.

IMPORTS: Settlers, building material.
EXPORTS: Fish, Water.
NEPTUNIAN STEREOTYPES: Most settlers are Jovians. See Jupiter.

On the very edges of the Solar System lies the tiny dwarf planet Pluto. It and it's moon Charon are a strange pair of worlds, dotted with towering crystal structures that some people speculate may be some strange crystalline form of life. A small research base on Charon is devoted to studying them.

The only other people worth mentioning here are the Monks of Silence, who maintain their temple on Pluto and generally don't get up to much. They seek enlightenment that cannot be achieved in any of the busier planets out there.

IMPORTS: Air, Water, Food
EXPORTS: Enlightenment
PLUTON STEREOTYPES: Quiet, serious, thoughtful.

Orbiting the sun in a highly elliptical orbit at an almost 90 degree angle from the plane the rest of the planets orbit on, Planet X passes by the inner planets roughly every 22,000 years. The inhabitants of Planet X, the Exians, have highly advanced technology and are highly aggressive, though no one is sure why. The last time their planet swung by, they launched a massive invasion of the solar system and ALMOST won before orbital mechanics pulled their planet too far away to mount further attacks.

Without their homeworld to resupply at, the remaining Exian fleets in the solar system went into hiding. Occasionally, someone finds one of them and there's a pitched space battle to destroy their ship, but this is a rare event and only getting rarer. After all they have no way to get reinforcements.

The Exians eschewed ground combat, most of the time, and relied more on the strength of the fleet. This, combined with their ships tendency to self destruct when defeat seemed imminent, means that very few Exians were ever captured alive. What IS known about them is that they look more or less humanoid, but have jet black skin with marbled veins of other colors throughout, and that they seem to have several different castes with significant differences between them. Warriors, Pilots, Engineers, etc. Presumably there are Artisan and Farmer castes on Planet X itself, but no expedition to the planet was able to gain any significant insight on the matter before being obliterated by Exian orbital battle stations.

There is NO INDICATION that the Exians had a Hive Mind, as that is overplayed and cliche.

IMPORTS: N/A
EXPORTS: Death and Destruction
EXIAN STEREOTYPES: Violent, mysterious, deadly.

Edited 2016-09-22 06:20 (UTC)

NAME: Tex
PLURK: texside
WHAT TIMES WOULD BE BEST FOR ME: On weekdays, after 6:00 PM Eastern. I can't do Mondays or Wednesdays (but no Wednesdays until May, then it's fine). On Saturday, I can do basically any time afternoon and on.
CHARACTER CONCEPT(S): A couple! I lean to 1, but can do 2 gladly.

1) Self-styled adventurer from Earth, kind of a high-class swashbuckler who's full of herself.
2) Annoying and sarcastic Venusian robot mechanic, who operates on summoning ROBOT FRIENDS + hand cannons.
FAVORITE WORK OF SCIENCE FICTION: The Expanse by James S.A. Corey (book, never seen the show)

NAME: Peter
PLURK:

pikabot
WHAT TIMES WOULD BE BEST FOR ME: I'm good for any time any day from 7 onwards, except Friday and Tuesday when I have other campaigns.
CHARACTER CONCEPT(S):

A couple ideas:
- A veteran of the war who has been plying her trade in the forty-some years since as a pirate operating out of the asteroid belt.
- Celebrity fighter in (mostly, but not entirely, bloodless) gladiator matches on the Jovian moons. Think Zangief with horns.
- Former muscle for a Martian criminal syndicate, believed dead and now on the run
- Venusian monk with mystical power and a love for fighting huge animals.

FAVORITE WORK OF SCIENCE FICTION: Uuuuuh how do I choose? Ann Leckie's Ancillary Justice is damn good, so is most of Larry Niven'e short fiction, a lot of Star Trek (like Darmok, I love Darmok). And Hyperion. And...

If I had to pick just one, I guess it would be Makoto Yukimura's Planetes. Read Planetes.

Edited 2016-09-16 00:24 (UTC)

NAME: Emily
PLURK:

deerleisure
WHAT TIMES WOULD BE BEST FOR ME: Mon, Wed, Thurs, Fri after 6. If Wed, a hard needs-to-be-done-by-10 rule. Sat and Sun after 7 (I run games 3-6 and they sometimes run a bit late.)
CHARACTER CONCEPT(S): One of the "savage" Venusians living in the harsh Venusian jungles. Most likely captured and brought back by an unsavory type during an exploration mission, where she either broke out right before game start, or is rescued by the PCs early on. Expect: no idea how technology works, using spears to deflect lasers, and doing rly stupid things. EDIT: you know dis concept by now
FAVORITE WORK OF SCIENCE FICTION: Cowboy Bebop, maybe?
WHEN WOULD BE THE SOONEST I COULD START: I think I'm good now.

Edited 2016-09-16 00:06 (UTC)

NAME:Vehrec
PLURK:

vehrec
WHAT TIMES WOULD BE BEST FOR ME: Anytime except for friday nights when I'm in Nerdo's game and Sunday Afternoons when OPV is on.
CHARACTER CONCEPT(S):
1) Martian Princess with a secret agenda to conquer a new homeland or find some technology or resources to save her people. Also only one grandparent thanks to genetic engineering and inbreeding. Meldef the 59th of her name, uncrowned Queen of the sixth and lost Martian kingdom.
~~2) Saturnine shaman who warns of the terrible consequences of disturbing the moons and rings.~~
FAVORITE WORK OF SCIENCE FICTION: You know what, I'm gonna say that Star Wars is great when it's good, though also my least favorite when it's bad.

Edited 2016-09-16 00:12 (UTC)

NAME: BF
PLURK: @blazingfool
WHAT TIMES WOULD BE BEST FOR ME: Any time but Monday nights, as that's when I'm running VC.
WHEN WOULD BE THE SOONEST I COULD START: Immediately!
CHARACTER CONCEPT(S): -Blatant Shiro ripoff. Human soldier who was captured by an Exian remnant and experimented on. Has amnesia regarding the entirety of their capture, but probably has a robot arm from it or something.
-Brain slug, possibly working in symbiosis with a human or alien. Crafty, occasionally sinister, overall desperate to remain a brain slug and not being reduced to a regular slug.
-Some kind of classic scoundrel from the Asteroid Belt, maybe an old smuggler Han Solo type.
FAVORITE WORK OF SCIENCE FICTION: Mass Effect, baby.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Destination: Space! A Valor Campaign

PLANETS

Mercury

Venus

Earth

Mars

Asteroid Belt

Jupiter

Saturn

Uranus

Neptune

Pluto

PLANET X

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