Category: Uncharted Worlds: Carta Galaxia

So, general question: Should I work on creating an actual timeline of past events for each campaign?

Let me start by saying that I’ve always disliked the Date-PersonName-Event thing in history lessons, my mind immediately rejects the information. Like bleep blanked as soon as it enters.

You’ll note that in the current version of the Core preview, I’m purposefully vague about when things happen. I tend to talk about the past in terms of “in the past decades” or “centuries ago”.

Making a discrete timeline means a lot more work making sure it all “works”, timing-wise. It’s an extra system that has to be plausible. 

On the plus side, creating a historical timeline requires creating a time-keeping structure and language, which can help build the setting.

Basically: I have personal reasons to NOT do it, but as consumers of campaign settings, do you appreciate a defined timeline?

A new preview for The Core campaign setting has been uploaded to the preview materials DropBox.

If you have a bit of spare time, I invite you to give it a read-through. The opening pages are very rough, but the factions themselves should be more-or-less good to go. If you have any feedback about layout, presentation, content, whatever, I’d be delighted to hear it. Best to catch these early.

If the general structure of the factions passes muster, I’ll be using the same structure for the other 3 campaign settings (with some setting-specific variations).

https://www.dropbox.com/s/zxqqmq6fshwzb0n/CartaGalaxia%20Preview%20-%20The%20Core%20-%20v160331.pdf?dl=0

Faction Perspective: Core

Iron Assembly

Rough week at work, didn’t get a chance to finish the final faction’s perspective. On the plus side, I managed to get a lot of writing done today, so I’ll be uploading an update soon (tonight or tomorrow). In the meanwhile, hope you enjoy the 6th and final faction perspective.

Interfaction Politics – Iron Assembly Perspective:

The Ministry: They treat everyone like pieces of machinery, like tools. We won’t be used that way. They want to control the flow of information, silence dissent, and make sure our voices can’t be heard. But you can’t stop the signal.

GalSec: Let them come knocking. We’ll knock them right back. They’re proof that “the Law” serves whoever has the biggest gun. Well we’ve got a lot of very interesting toys in production, just waiting for these bullies to push us too far.

Heirs of Taaj: The worst of the lot. Slave-drivers and sycophants. They treat the workers like dirt, demand everything, and get violent when they get the bill. They have lives of luxury and privilege that they don’t deserve, while people starve in the undercity.

Brekengraf: The intellectual elite, looking down on the common people like we’re specimens. Their “accidents” always seem to threaten the lower caste districts. They prey on the desperate or unwitting as test subjects in order to develop treatments for the wealthy.  Creepy doesn’t begin to describe it.

Dai’Rho: Too many people fall for all the phoney wisdom and mumbo-jumbo, get hooked to the temple smoke, and are never seen again. They undermine the strength of the workers, divide families, and con honest folk out of everything they own.

Faction Perspective: Core

Brekengraf

It was interesting to try to come up with a scientific faction that is distinct from what I have planned with the Epoch Trust and the Xenarchs in the other settings. While I have no issue seeing the good they can do (they feed billions of people, have eradicated countless diseases and generally make people healthier all over the galaxy), the “genetic perfection” angle of their research risks becoming too dark for a Space Opera. Need to remember to keep them larger-than-life, just shy of comical, where “genetic advancement” involves super-soldiers and zombies and such, rather than… well, some very disturbing real-world stuff. 

Interfaction Politics – Brekengraf Perspective:

The Ministry: Their restrictions on our own work are frustrating, but their opposition to all kinds of progress is even more damning. They’ve got the whole galaxy locked down, trapped in stagnant torpor. Just like individual organisms, civilizations need to grow, change, and evolve.

GalSec: Yesterday’s trash, trying to intimidate and strong-arm people into behaving. The subjects of the New Soldier project are more disciplined, more obedient and infinitely more effective than the troglodytes that GalSec attracts. They will soon be replaced, and things will be a lot smoother.

Iron Assembly: Our counterparts in the material goods sector are simultaneously quaint and aggravating, like a neighbor’s pet that won’t stop barking. Their lack of education, coupled with their crippling inferiority complex, has led to a volatile situation. The pet may need to be put down.

Dai’Rho: To no one’s surprise, the religious fanatics are vehemently opposed to our scientific advances. They prattle and preach about “life”, as if it was some untouchable holy thing. Their rhetoric has instigated violence on many occasions, causing setbacks and casualties at our key clinics and labs.

Heirs of Taaj: Our best clients are also our most dangerous foe. They’re terrified of what we can do for humanity. They’re terrified that we will do to their genetic superiority what the Ministry did to their authority; entirely supplant it. They want all our advances for them and them alone.

Faction Perspective: Core

Gal’Sec

As I said with the Heirs of Taaj, I have to watch myself when writing as GalSec to not make them too one-dimensional. I want characters to consider joining them/working for them. I want them to occasionally be “in the right”. Yes, they’re violent, shock-truncheon wielding, jack-booted autocrats. But they keep the other factions in line, and stop the scum of the universe from preying on the innocent.

Interfaction Politics – GalSec Perspective:

The Ministry: These anal-retentive pencil-pushers have no business dictating law enforcement policy. They live by the letter of the law, rather than the spirit. Their insistence on protocol protects more criminals than it catches, sinking us in pointless bureaucratic red-tape for years.

Brekengraf: Most factions commit crimes against property, against people and against society. These lunatics are the only ones who gleefully commit crimes against nature. We’ve seen their so-called “New Soldiers”. They need to be shut down, hard, before they go too far.

Iron Assembly: If there’s one faction has the hardware, man-power and will to escalate conflict, it’s the Assembly. Definitely got ties to terrorist cells and space-pirate gangs, too. Seems like every week we need to bust up another “gathering” and arrest their ringleaders.

Dai’Rho: They hide a lot of shady stuff behind the wall of religion. Hard to tangle with the Rho, the citizens love them too much. Their wandering monks are a law unto themselves. Worse still, the temples provide sanctuary to tons of dirty criminals, where we can’t get them. “Sacred ground”, my ass. 

Heirs of Taaj: The other factions commit crimes. These guys are actually criminals. Bastards think they’re invincible, but they can be foiled. Taking out a hive-gang, space-pirates or slavers? Part of the job. Taking out the ones orchestrating the whole thing? Best feeling ever.

Faction Perspective: Core

Dai’Rho

Today’s Faction is the Dai’Rho. It was interesting trying to find their voice when writing this. The Heirs are dismissive and disgusted, the Ministry is frustrated, but the Dai’Rho are… disappointed? 

Interfaction Politics – Dai’Rho Perspective:

The Ministry: All that data, all that surveillance. They see, yet they don’t understand. It is important to draw wisdom from different places. If you take it from only one place it become rigid and stale.

Brekengraf: The body is a shell. No matter how beautiful, how large, how perfect you make the shell, what is within will still be rotten. Life simply happens wherever you are, whether you make it or not.

Iron Assembly: You struggled. You suffered. And now you lash out. But history will see it as just more senseless violence. A brother killing a brother to grab power. There is a better way, but your pain has hardened your heart.

Heirs of Taaj: You covet the prestige of your lineage, but you have forgotten your duty and responsibility to the people. Protection and power are overrated. The wise choose happiness and love.

GalSec: Wherever you hunt crime, you will invariably find crime, whether or not it was there before.If you look for the dark, that is all you will ever see. Focus less on punishing guilt, and more on protecting innocence.

Faction Perspective: Core

Heirs of Taaj

Continuing today with the Heirs of Taaj. Though I try to paint in primary colors, I have to be vigilant to not make the Heirs out to be flat-out bad guys. My own politics tend to color my writing quite a bit, and these guys (and GalSec) will likely get the short end of the stick. Still, I’m trying my best to give them important and meaningful redeeming qualities, hence the focus on art and culture.

Interfaction Politics – The Heirs of Taaj Perspective:

The Ministry: They impose and impinge on the freedoms of the creators, the artists, the entrepreneurs. They want a bright and vibrant society to function like dull, monotonous clockwork. Instead of inspiring greatness, they have created stagnation.

Brekengraf: Their idea of improvement and perfection is nothing short of revolting. Their life extension technologies and body-scultping are too useful to pass up, but those treatments are funding something hideous behind closed doors.  

Iron Assembly: Rabble. Dangerous, violent, uneducated rabble. Their usefulness as a workforce is debatable at best. Let them whine and complain and demand like the leeches they are, they will get exactly what they are worth and not a credit more. 

Dai’Rho: These silly, drug-addled preachers should be below contempt, yet they hold far too much of the populace under their sway. The most galling aspect of their fool religion is the ludicrous caste-abolitionism. They risk dragging us all down into mediocrity

GalSec: They throw their weight around, acting like the biggest predator in the wilderness. Their idiot laws are exceptionally frustrating, and their methods are pointlessly aggressive. Fortunately, GalSec officers are either very rigid and predictable, or easily bribable. 

Faction Perspective: Core

The Ministry

Started a new sub-group to hold my (hopefully regular) Carta Galaxia previews. I feel it’ll give me more incentive to write, as I’ve been suffering from major anxiety-induced writers block lately.

To start us off, every evening I’ll be posting a “Faction Perspective”. Basically, it’s what one Faction thinks of each of the other Factions in that sector of space. Since I’m currently working on the Core, those will be the first I’ll cover.

Without further ado:

Interfaction Politics – The Ministry’s Perspective:

GalSec: If only they were not so keen to resort to brutish displays of force. They lack discipline, tact and respect. Their violent methods and narrow-minded fixation on “justice” end up causing as much chaos as they prevent.

Heirs of Taaj: A vestigial remnant of a bygone age. They are proud, power-hungry, and only interested in themselves. They should be content with their role as figureheads, and leave the governance to us.

Brekengraf: Their fetishistic pursuit of “human perfection” has caused one too many catastrophes. If they persist in disobeying Ministry public safety protocol, then their unauthorized experiments will be terminated one by one.

Iron Assembly: A dangerous syndicate which must be monitored very closely. They provide too strong a voice for the lower castes, and are the indirect cause of much civil unrest and seditious activity.

Dai’Rho: They have forgotten their purpose: to shape the citizenry into a unified, obedient, productive force. Instead they’ve begun preaching dangerous ideas, like the abolition of the castes.

I spent the weekend putting together the faction symbols of The Core. Graphic design is in no way my strong suit, but I’m relatively happy with the way the individual faction symbols turned out.

Those who read the previously uploaded Core campaign preview will notice that the Sundered are gone, replaced with the Iron Assembly, and that a number of spheres of influence have changed. This was brought about by an analysis of the faction roles in the Core.

(Shout out to Patrick Murray for his analysis of the problems the Sundered posed, and for helping me work out the seeds of this new distribution)

The Faction Distribution chart (below) maps out each faction’s sphere of influence, and the overarching aspect they share with like-minded factions. That’s not to say that neighboring factions don’t have conflict: In fact, there’s probably more room for conflict in the differences of approach and philosophy. Similarly, “opposed” factions can also share common themes or ideals (the Dai’Rho and Heirs of Taaj both appreciate art and music, for example, GalSec and Iron Assembly both resort to force when diplomacy fails, etc.)

I’ll have a more in-depth post about each symbol (plus a smattering of rejected icons) later in the week.