A Marathon Story (loose sci-fi canon, M for F)

[Monstrous Mr Reed]

There is an old set of tales that I've long been fascinated with, and continually return to again and again as I think about sci-fi elements and ways to balance story with action. These stories are those of the UESC Marathon. If you like freaky aliens, insane artificial intelligences, characters who may or may not be cybernetic super soldiers, and an operatic setting, this might be the one for you!

In terms of the overall setting, I would like to shoot for what I think of as loose canon. Most of the hard, specific information we have about the Marathon universe takes place almost fifty years before the time we would be playing in, allowing us to make some pretty liberal use of the technology and factions involved in order to tell a story we like. I imagine we'll spend a lot of time with the fleet, or with a single vessel, as well as some time on the surface of at least one alien world. The website I linked to above should really be considered a reference, not an instruction manual, so please don't be intimidated.

And anyway, I'm more than happy to give you the background in broad strokes. Humanity launched a generational spacecraft toward the Tau Ceti system over three hundred years ago, and somewhere along the way one of the three AIs tasked with helping run the ship went, well, a little nutty. This may or may not have had something to do with the ship and the nascent colony coming under attack by a previously unknown race of alien slavers. Combat happens, and it's very one-sided, but while a few holdouts soldier on, the cybernetic slaves of the attackers are incited to revolt. They capture the alien craft and proceed to seek revenge on their former masters, humanity not included. In fact, they feel so sympathetic to us that they decide to dump a veritable cornucopia of stolen alien technology on our doorstep before fucking off to God knows where to try and uncover the secrets of the universe. Maybe?

Meanwhile, the rest of us are left to fight a bloody and chaotic war against a very, very pissed off set of aliens. Oh, and we have to reverse engineer all that tech well enough to upgrade and expand our woefully outmatched military. And that's our backdrop. For character ideas, I'm thinking about engineers, scientists, pilots, soldiers, military commanders, politicians, and the like. The kind of story I have in mind would take place around 2858, when some of the most pitched fighting would be taking place.

This is probably pretty obscure, but you never know, right?

If you think you might be interested, drop me a PM and we can discuss specifics. Thanks for reading!