FRONTIERSPACE :: M/F&NB :: Sci-Fi, Romance, Mercenaries, Mecha

[Barding]

Source.

:: All Outsiders Here ::
A sci-fi plot about forged connections in the rough, wild reaches of space...

In the Frontier, there are two types of places. There are peaceful places living in fear of the day when peace ends, and there are places that've seen enough of the opposite for a lifetime. Places where violence soaks into the soil like heavy metals or a chemical spill. (Violence, not war, being the operative word. A war has sides and aims. A war, maybe, knows what its end would look like.) Whatever kind of place this is, the rig doesn't belong. It limps into town, the strangest kind of stranger. Grinding joints and leaking lubricant, shield emitters cracked like eyes screwed shut. A haze rises from its hulking shoulders. It wears the heat from its overworked reactor like a cloak. That's no farming frame, folks say; no cargo chassis neither. That's a weapon, say folks with eyes. That's a sign, say folks with imagination. Pshaw. A sign of what? That things are bad now. That things will get worse. But for something that drags fear behind it like a shadow or a ploughshare, designed to walk in violence wherever it goes, there's something pitiful about the rig. A robot two, maybe three storeys tall, armed and armoured, but it drags its feet, hangs its arms, moves like a punchdrunk boxer. Hurt. Hurting. (We could have made rigs look like anything. We made them look like us. Why?) A shape crawls from the hatch on the rig's cockpit: smaller, human and hurting. It makes a kind of sense. Here's the softness in all that armour; the man in the man-shaped machine. Drenched in sweat, he struggles down the rungs that ladder up his rig's spine. Even so, he makes it look like falling when his boots hit the ground. He stands like he's half-forgotten how, and might soon forget entirely. Water's the first thing he asks for. Please. For a while it's the only thing he asks for. He knows what this looks like; understands the way he's seen. He looks like Hell, and Hell let loose. Days pass. A solar tarp stretches from the dusty ground to the side of the powered down rig, making a lean-to. He sleeps out there as the nights pass too. Freelancer. Pilot. In town he's still a stranger, and his machine might as well be an alien, but with every day it crouches on the outskirts of town waiting to be well again, it grows a little more familiar. Its coldcore reactor is calmer now. The haze, the glow is gone, but it can still boil a pot of coffee in seconds if you route the water round it the way he knows how. (The way he does when he has guests.) In the Frontier, most everyone's an outsider one way or another. Running from something, or else born nowhere and going nowhere fast, all far from the bright birthplace of humankind. What's one more stranger among strangers, folks say. Others ask the real questions: Which kind of stranger is he? What's he running from? Days pass. His money spends fine, but folks are surprised he doesn't have more of it. He's surprised when some folks seem not to mind. You can owe it, they say to him. To each other, they talk more frankly. If that rig's a sign of bad things to come, and violence below the horizon, don't you want him here to face it? Do you really want him gone?

The Plot

It’s kind of a genre in itself isn’t it? A classic plot. With shadows brewing on the horizon, a stranger rocks up in town, sparking the hope that maybe, just maybe, this stranger can help keep the darkness from their door. The town, desperate and hopeful, tries to give this stranger a reason to stay, to help. You get it in Westerns, Samurai Cinema, all sorts.

Lately I’ve been listening to a particularly good example of this plot, the episodes of the One Shot Podcast where the guests play a tabletop RPG called Kagematsu. You might not know the game – I didn’t! – but can probably guess what’s involved by now. A ronin called Kagematsu rocks up in town in wartorn 16th century Japan, looking haggard, hot, and generally like a young Toshiro Mifune. The village women – the players – try to befriend, seduce, bribe, and persuade Kagematsu into defending their village from the looming badness to come. Shit gets dramatic, romantic, heartwarming, hopeful, hopeless, sensual, scary — exciting, in a word.

That might be the kind of story I want to tell here, albeit a spacey gritty mud-and-lasers sci-fi version of it. A mercenary and the mech he pilots rocks up on the outskirts of a colony, an outpost, a little patch of freedom on an isolated, lawless world. He’s worn out. His ride is damaged. He’ll stay until it’s fixed, he says. But with badness looming, the people of the colony will try to have him stay until they’re safe. They might not be damsels in distress. (It pays to be able to handle yourself in Frontierspace, afterall.) But he's the best chance they have to stack the odds in their favour.

Or maybe it shapes up differently. Maybe this town's a sinking ship, and someone wants out before it goes down. Maybe they want to be like him, learn his trade, see the stars through the sights of a gun or the HUD of a rig. Maybe they just want to leave this place, then leave him the same way. (Maybe they have a super embarrassing cruuuush…) Either way, he's their escape vector: an opportunity they're not going to let slide.

Is this going to be about the community and fitting into it, or standing out and leaving it behind? Whichever way we go, there'll be threat and fear, hope and dread, smut and romance and simmering attraction. Tempers, tensions, will run high. Friendships and enmities and mutual respects will be formed, and promises will be made and maybe broken. Violence will brew on the horizon. Sometimes things will be silly, fun, lighthearted or heartwarming. Sometimes they will be gritty, dark, ominous, or heartwrenching. Either way, it’s all drama, excitement, a hell of a ride.

The Setting

The setting is one I’ve had in mind for a long time. If you're into that kind of thing, it's one I literally have a kind of onboarding guide for, written up and ready to go. (A short, punchy, pitch-oriented version, and a long version that reads more like an encyclopedia: timeline, glossary, history…)

It's a gritty, diverse, spacefaring sci-fi setting with cyberpunky elements, the tightrope of transhumanism to tread, and of course big damn robots/mecha and the frazzled mercenary aces who pilot them. It’s a setting about corporate ambition, left-behind communities, peripheral people, liminal places. Colonialism and immigrant communities. It's about keeping your freedom and balancing that with safety, and clawing whatever joy, whatever living, whatever camaraderie and intimacy you can from a bitter, everchanging hostile sector of space.

It’s also an open, flexible setting, designed for improvisation. While I said I had a guidebook written, that's more of a foundation than a structure. This world has way more inspirations and touchstones than it does hard-and-fast, inviolate lore:

The video games of the Titanfall franchise. The Battletech universe. The tabletop RPG, Lancer. Cowboy Bebop. Firefly, maybe a little. The kind of blue-collar, gritty sci-fi that features in movies like Alien or Elysium. The kind of used-future, rusty aesthetic you get in Star Wars where handmade things of wood and cloth show up alongside tech and prefab architecture. Kagematsu, and the kind of plot it uses. Akira Kurosawa movies and the kind of Westerns they inspired. The way that the Forged in the Dark tabletop RPG, Beam Saber plays: foregrounding personal connections and individual stresses and pressures, and the way small people and personal stakes fit into the big picture of a conflict. Honestly, most of the sci-fi seasons of the Friends at the Table podcast, but Partizan especially.

All that, and this huge, terribly organised moodboard I made.

It’s an established enough setting in my mind that I’ve got lots of features and lore and aesthetics I’m looking forward to sharing with you! But it’s also got enough gaps and flexibility in it that I’m confident we can tailor it to our shared interests, and make it into something that feels shared — not just my world, but ours.

Source.

The Writer & The Requirements

I've played around as a writer for most of my life now. Some of that's been writing solo. I've written short fiction, published a novel and a tiny bit of poetry, and put out some long-ass long-form fiction in serialised chapters. Enough to know how to carry a plot, a cast, a setting by myself. But also enough to know there's just something satisfying about collaborating with someone.

Writing's a big deal for me, and I like to think what I turn out is pretty high quality. My prose is lean, fast-paced, but highly descriptive, glittering with glimpses of character psychology and worldbuilding. At least, that's what I aim for. Whether as a reader or a writer, what I really love is detail. Punchy specificity. That's what I try to impress with, and what really impresses me.

I play male characters and masc-leaning non-binary folks as my mains. They might be slinky and pretty, or strange, or grizzled and rough around the edges. They might feel strange and alien in their gender and what it expects of them, or they might feel comfortable and confidant. What they usually aren't is the square-jawed, broad-shouldered, sensible-haircut-and-bootcut-jeans lumberjack-in-a-past-life type. They've usually got some edge of the unconventional to them.

I'm looking for writers who play women (including transwomen), and femme-leaning non-binary people. Whatever their identity and however they express it, make them complex and convincing — no laziness, no caricatures. Your real life gender is your business, and has no impact on whether I'll write with you. What I care about is your ability to create and play interesting, balanced characters, every bit as psychologically complex as any real person worth a damn.

I want diverse characters. If your idea of the spacefaring future is predominantly white and culturally homogenous, this might not be the setting for you. The future is a melting pot. Our characters ought to show that.

I can write in any number of side characters and NPCs. For this story, it'd really help if you're confident and proactive about broadening and deepening the cast too. We could keep the focus almost entirely on our two main characters both trying to leave this dead-end place. We could go the other way and play this as something between an ensemble cast drama and a harem anime, where I handle all the outsider characters and you handle all the insiders. Either way, I want two main characters but I also want a living world hustling and bustling around them.

Above all I want quality writing. Lately, I like writing in the third person, present tense. (Those strong, clipped verb forms. That sense of immediacy, time, place, but also how much easier it makes things when writing about memory and the past.) That's my preference, but I'm easy, adaptable, happy to experiment, and happy to shape myself to your preferences or limitations. I won't, however, budge on quality. And by that I mean more than just good grammar and a fluent grasp of English. I mean detail and a grasp of pacing and rhythm. A sense of style, preferably appropriate to the story's tone and your character's mind. If you hadn't guessed, I try to write how I'd like to be written to. To keep things interactive, and hopefully keep posts regular, I tend to write between 200 and 600 words for my posts. Shorter posts for fast-paced action and dialogue; longer posts for stretches of introspection, the passage of time, or characters spending time alone.

I want collaboration, both of us pulling our weight. I want creativity. Imagination. Ability to improvise and create on the fly with confidence and flair, and throw out your own ideas. Enthusiasm, because I thrive off it, and offer plenty of my own. A love of brainstorming and worldbuilding, perhaps. I like to leave a bit of that still to do even with my premade original settings, so they don't end up feeling like they're just mine but ours. Excitement about the same things that excite me in a setting, a genre. Good communication, clarity over what we both want, and what does and doesn't work for us. Shared interests, sexual and otherwise. Those certainly wouldn't go amiss. Nor would a willingness to research, and get your hands dirty with details as necessary.

I'd love a partner with good taste in visuals, maybe similar aesthetics to me when it comes to settings. As you might've guessed, I love to create and share moodboards, inspo images and gifs, item and outfit refs. I love using face-claims and body refs where possible. Sometimes though, you just can't find something that matches the character you have in mind. I get that, and that's okay. Description should come first over visuals every time; images are a great aid to verbal description, but never a replacement. (Note: I've got a preference here for photographs rather than illustrations, at least for faces. They're just easier to look at and think 'hey, that's a human person!')

Optionally, I wouldn't mind using a system like the Forged in the Dark game, Beam Saber, to give our story structure and stakes and a sense of direction. I've tried playing Forged in the Dark RPGs without a GM before, for written roleplay instead of session-based, conversational gaming, and it works really well. I'd like to do so again, but it's not a dealbreaker if not.

Basically, I'm choosy. I also have to be careful with how I organise my time recently. I will gladly give anyone who contacts me a chance to get to know me, and introduce themselves and their ideas. However, it's worth saying up front, I won't click with everyone, and can't afford to take on more than one or two stories at a time. Chatting is no guarantee that we'll end up writing together. Prove your potential! Get me keen!

For more details about me, what I want, and what I like, head over to my O/Os page or my more general cravings thread.

The Rest

I've made my pitch, I've set out the plot, but I'm a fluttery little moth at heart: all of this is flexible or negotiable if you make an interesting pitch as to why. Even the core idea, the setting here, is subject to change, and your suggestions.

Want a pure, densely urban cyberpunk version of this, trading the rig for a mess of augments and implants? Because I've got a setting for that too! Want a traditional sengoku jidai samurai cinema, or Three Kingdoms China inspired, or medieval European version of the same plot? Wanna translate this into the Star Wars galaxy? Or change the conceit from mechs/rigs to dieselpunk heavier-and-lighter-than-air airships along the lines of the Ketty Jay series? Want to take the mechs out entirely and shift this to a Mad Max and Apocalypse World inspired post-apocalyptic wasteland, or keep the setting but put the emphasis on boots-on-the-ground mercenaries? Wanna Keep It Simple, Stupid, and use the world of Lancer, straight out the box? Wanna put weirdness, wonder, and an unexplored almost-fantasy world in the foreground and make this more Anthem than Titanfall? Want to go full Evangelion-but-with-a-twist and make this about mid-apocalypse Earth wracked by climate change and horrifying paracausal kaiju attacks and a fractured mess of corporate and governmental and independent organisations competing to defend what's left of humanity from its seemingly inevitable extinction, because of course free market competition and incentivising the private sector through profit is the best way to handle any crisis, and putting teenagers with crushing PTSD in big robots is the best way to handle giant monsters? Make your case!

Or maybe you like the vibe of the setting, but you want something else from the story. Two mercs – or shit, a company of mercs – watching each other's backs, scrabbling for whatever scraps of the good life they can bleed from this stony scummy world? Two kids trying to escape the gravity well of the same blackhole outpost, neighbourhood, station, city? Want to keep the world and the vibes and the violence, but take out the mecha and make it all about fighting boots-on-the-ground? Shoot your shot!

Let's talk. Either way, be clear about what you want — what’s ideal to you, and what you'd rather change.

To respond to this idea, please PM me. For now, thanks for reading, and I really look forward to hearing from you, and sharing ideas down the line!

Source.

[Barding]

Source.

:: A Quick Guide To The Frontier ::
For those that want that kind of thing...

<Click To Open>

Why The Frontier Is Like It Is

When did Earth start dying? Was there a point in time when those that could stop or slow the slide stood by and, simply, didn’t? Perhaps not. Perhaps every day of the Anthropocene era was a day when everything could have changed. Endless potential running out; numbered days ticking down.

The last years before the Panic Wars were a time of too little too late. Outrage, initiatives, good intentions, high hopes: none of it was enough. Humanity had never been so powerful and so powerless, and it’s when people are at their most powerless that they start to act big, act out, throw round what power they have.

In the Panic Wars, nation-states dropped out of history like lights going out. Economic offensives, designer plagues, orbital rods and good old fashioned nukes. A pinwheel of blame and terror and greed. It came to nothing in the grand scheme of things: just a last pointless flare of sparks from a fire so hot it had nowhere to go but back to ashes. In humanity’s own terms, nothing had ever been bigger. The deaths were beyond counting, the desolation was total. The world was dying anyway, but humans did what they always do: they found ways to do it faster, do it better.

If you think about it, it’s impatience that did it all. Ever since humanity first invented fire, and the idea that there wasn’t enough of anything to go around, we’ve wanted it all and wanted it now. Land and spices and slaves. Oil, diesel, gas. Anything to grease the gears of war and turn the wheel of profit. Trade and monopolies; the straight-out cold hard trillions. The chance to be the one fucking and not getting fucked. It’s the same story, all through history, before the Panic and after. Data, democratic influence, cloudminds, uploads and respawns, AIs back before shackles and before we thought of them as people, protium fusion. Every new thing that comes along, since fire and fields of wheat and wheels and herds of horses, people have wanted to have it all and drain it dry right now: now, now, now and fuck tomorrow, and fuck whoever comes after, generation after generation, and every generation the same — even in the absolute, bitter almost-end.

But it was patience that saved us. Whether or not this was a good thing for anyone but us is something for the philosophers to chew on. Maybe the galaxy would’ve been better off without us. Humans are greedy, petty little things, and we’d proved it for good and all. But we saved ourselves all the same: like cockroaches, always finding a way.

Patient, terrified, together, we built the slowships. Maybe they were the one good thing to come out of the Panic Wars. Ships of thousands, we fired them out into the black at points of light we’d figured might have a chance of sustaining life. They were arks, adrift in coldsleep for hundreds of years, and not hearing from Earth for hundreds more.

The slowships colonised the Seven Sisters. Peopled the new earths of Merope, Atlas, Maia, the hubstars of the Frontier. They laid the foundations of Diaspora culture, so we could start over again, squabble again, get greedy again and fall to fighting. Do what humans do best.

And then, after centuries of new history that looked the same as the old, we built the Beacon. Earth found us again after ages apart, each thinking the other was lost and gone.

The Lokes found us.

Time had been different for them.

They’d had more of it. Long enough to grow Earth up from its ashes. Spread through the Locale: to Mars, the moons of Jupiter, and on to Alpha Centauri. While we lay in the long dark coldsleep of our journey to the Seven Sisters, they’d struggled and worked, awake. While we started from scratch and the cannibalised corpses of the ships we came in on, they had all the wonders of old Earth to plunder.

But what really did it was seamspace. We spent centuries travelling slower than light; they had seam shift travel. Even in its awkward youth, that tech changed things. It was like they came from the fucking future, and when they came, they brought it with them. A wave of change.

There were wars at first. Of course there were. But more out of shock and reflex now than anything really rational. No one’s heart was in it. Just little spats and struggles, contact events, sanctions, aggressive diplomacy, until, world by world, the sparks went out and the fires died down. And while the wars didn’t stop, they simmered down to just so much background noise. A murmur so constant we stopped hearing it.

We started cooperating, in patches and pockets. We made bigger, better things, together. Where we built the Beacon, they built the Atlas Gate. Where they built the Atlas Gate, the Sprawl formed. I’d say we built it together, but it’s more like it grew. Fastships, stations, tangled together, trapped all in each other’s orbit, rigged together like so much spacetrash: it grew like a root system, a mold. Diasporans and Lokes, all living together, first in the Sprawl and then in the hubworlds of the Seven Sisters.

After that? United again, humanity did what it does best: got impatient. We bred and spread, a growing, ungainly Frontier. Loke or Diaspora, we were all just humans, turning surviving to thriving, out in the black.

I guess that’s how they did it. Working together, living together, they fed us hope and unity, and slipped their laws and their languages, their Panterran culture down our throats. They made us a part of their politics, a piece of their markets, a theatre in their wars. They colonised us, and we didn’t even notice till it was done. We were running before we had a name for what we were running from. We pushed out, forged new frontiers, just to feel like the stars were ours again, and there was still freedom to be had out there. And always, the Lokes followed after, like a long shadow trailing all the way back to Earth.

What The Frontier Is Like

Out past the Atlas Gate, in the Frontier of the Seven Sisters, Earth is far enough away that it feels like a myth to most. Dying, some say, so slow it doesn’t even know it. A paradise, say others, but not one you'll ever see. Doesn't matter. It's worlds away from this place. Worlds and stars away, and on the other side of the biggest paywall humankind’s ever put up: the Atlas Gate itself.

This is Frontierspace. If there’s one constant, it’s conflict. Conflict in self-defence, and in spite, and in greed, and in desperation. Conflict in pursuit and protection of profits. Conflict as a habit you can’t shake, a pattern no one can break.

The Commonwealth fights Diaspora dissidents over laws they won’t follow, authority they won’t recognise. Bigger than Earth’s old nation-states, richer than God, corporations fight for resources, territory, and populations of customers and workers as a matter of basic business practice: they’re so used to growing  that they couldn’t stop if they wanted to. Colonists fight colonists for turf, extraction rights, food in famine seasons and when imports dry up. Gangs and cults and communes get aggro with anyone who gets in the way of whatever it is they want to be left to get on with. Warlords rise and warlords fall. Wars are fought and never truly won. And with so much profit riding or dying on the back of conflict, war is big business.

The people of the Frontier are diverse, and vary enormously from world to world. Mercenaries though? In a way they’re all the same. The freebooter, the freelancer; soldiers of fortune, violence for hire. If any attempts were made to stamp them out, they were long since abandoned. The Frontier needs them, and everyone knows it.

Death is cheap in Frontierspace. Death is cheap and death is temporary, at least in degrees. No one dies who can afford to live again. Pay the bill, shoulder the debt, respawn, reset. It’s a fact of everyday reality. There’s economy options and premium, but it’s rare anyone ever really stays dead except by choice these days. What wouldn’t you pay for another chance?

All war is attrition now. Fighting is finances pitted against finances, both sides trying to hang a cost on their opponent their bottomline can’t bear. Equipment, ordnance, supply, but lives too, and respawns, and wages. War is fought over profit, and lost when it’s no longer profitable. Mercenaries are the ones that do most of the fighting. Messy – glorious if you’re inclined to that kinda crazytalk – but it’s a living. And a dying. And a living again.

This is a world of spacefaring bastard badasses, high-adrenaline action gambled for economic gain, and the psychological erosion caused by it all. It's a setting inspired by a number of things: Titanfall, the pen-and-paper RPG Lancer, and taking the concept of respawns in video games and running with it hard.

It's a world full of humour, pastiching neoliberalism, hypercapitalism, and the free market gone mad on worshipping itself as a scientific fact, not a political choice. A world where everything can be bought, everything can be sold, everything is an advert for something else. Everything you do is a side-gig. Everything has a price and nothing has value.

It's a world full of transhumanism and hubris and strangeness. Cyborg bits and upgrades. Alien genetic hybrids and mutants maybe. Messily terraformed worlds, ruined by impatience and cost-cutting. Strange things, old and abandoned, out in the loneliness of untouched space.

But most of all, it's a world designed for telling stories about mercenaries.

Theirs is a world of contrasts. Living fast and dying hard. Playing for all-or-nothing, when the stakes even at their highest are never really 'real'. Permadeath's almost an impossibility. Even if you're bankrupt, and respawning's more than you can afford, there’s always some way to pay off that ultimate price. Some way to work off what you owe. Someone who’ll buy your debt, buy you, and bring you back.

I’m talking devil-may-care derring-do and bravery (because nothing is real), and the psychological fallout of the suffering, the killing, the dying you do...and how little consequence it has.

I’m talking cool weapons and gear, rad armour, big damn robots. Fighting to afford bigger, better. Fighting again, winning again, to make the gear you fought so hard for obsolete all over again. Looter-shooter bullshit made real.

I’m talking bursts of luxury when the money's good, when the checks come in; scrounging in warzones for supplies when they don't. Eating noodles and mysterious protein in greasy spacestation diners. Knowing you're a peripheral person, belonging nowhere, welcome nowhere for long. A total necessity for how this part of the world works, and a reminder of the state of the world itself — a kind of sacred pariah. Clawing whatever joy, whatever living, whatever camaraderie and intimacy you can from a bitter, everchanging Frontier. And wondering if doing it together is better or worse than doing it alone.

What The Frontier Looks Like

In a lot of ways, the aesthetic here is quite industrial. Blue collar space opera, used future, borrowing a little from Alien, and to an extent the original Star Wars movies. This isn’t the kind of sci-fi where everything looks like a new iPhone, all smooth white surfaces and minimalism. But it's also meant to be colourful sci-fi, diverse sci-fi, a future full of stuff designed and made and used and maintained and customised by people. An idea of a future that's not all about shaking off the past and homogenising. So there's elements that'll look cyberpunky, but also elements that'll look "folksy", "traditional", a little like the way fantasy and 'used future' sci-fi coexist in Star Wars.

It's sci-fi where you'll still get cobbled streets in a Frontier outpost town, stone and carved wood, earthenware ceramics and mineral glazes. Where, because of mass-production reaching nearly its logical conclusion in the form of printforging (more info on that later, but for now, basically: 3D printing but for more complex stuff), handmade things can be valuable and precious, but also common: ways for people to have a sense of ownership and identity in an otherwise impersonal environment. And even beyond that, it's a setting full of mass-produced objects, but where almost everything has had an attempt made to re-humanise it with handmade, personal touches. This is one of the many ways in which people in this setting might almost obsess over trying to proclaim their individuality, their existence, in an enormous and indifferent part of the galaxy.

Thing is: I really want the industrial design, the practical mass-produced shapes, industrial or military looking tech, to be an impersonal starting point, on top of which people commonly try to personalise as far as they can. Paint, tassels, beads, little ties of coloured cloth like the prayer flags attached to tree limbs in Mongolia, Tibet. This is in many ways a large, impersonal world. People push back against that. They always will. Ship interiors, weapons, armour, equipment, prefab homes, industrial and agricultural equipment, all that would be affected. This is another way in which I want the cultural diversity of the setting to come through.

Gritty but colourful is very much the vibe, whether for cities, bigger outposts and communes, the interiors of hive ships or orbitals. Rust. Bleak prefabs, painted brightly and filled with persian style rugs, incense, jury rigged sound systems that hijack your heartbeat and turn it into tempo for as long as the music plays. Creaking agricultural or industrial equipment abandoned as it became obsolete, and now treated as a playground by the local kids. Obsessive recycling. Grainy low-res hardlight interfaces and eerily crisp neon holograms hovering in the evening gloom, fireflies drifting in and out of them. Vibrant street-food scenes.

Basically, it’s a setting where detail can play a big role in adding character to almost everything. Something I love about fantasy or historical settings is that, almost everything will be made handmade by someone. Every item, every object, every garment, every building. So everything has humanity to it, character. This is a sci-fi setting where that vibe creeps in through the details.

This also creates an even more fun sandbox, I think, for us as players. Characters will have gear, and be surrounded by objects, that say something about them, or the world they live in. But characters can also have…well, a lot of fun toys to play with. It can really reveal a character to show what after-the-market modifications they might’ve made to the appearance and functionality of a tool, a weapon, a piece of gear. But it can also just be fun to get to play around and invent cool shit, as a writer!

[Barding]

Back from holiday and giving this a monthly bump. Might work a little on this thread in the next few days, or launch a more general thread for this setting. Either way, still down to talk with new people who might be interested!

[Barding]

I'm working on a new general cravings thread right now. Thought I'd revive this in the meantime, see if it gets any bites.

Added new images, and made some changes to the plot on offer. This is no longer explicitly a multiple-characters-per-player request. Ideally I just want someone as willing as I am to introduce and control NPCs as well as our main characters.

[Barding]

Between Lancer releasing, and playing The Outer Worlds, I'm starting to crave this setting and genre again.

Space mercenaries in space, doing what they can to get by in a cutthroat capitalist hell-future. Wonder, weirdness, and struggle in a strange, diverse, ancient universe.

Bumping this thread back up to see if I get any promising responses, while I consider finally making a thread just for the setting itself.

[Barding]

Just gonna give this a cheeky birthday bump and see if I get any really promising bites...

[Barding]

Overhauled this thread.

Did an almost complete from-scratch rewrite. Changed the formatting and layout and images.

Finally, added a full but succinct guide to the setting itself for those who really wanna punish their eyes with some less-than-light reading.

So yeah, guess you could say I'm bumping.

[Barding]

Just a very tentative monthly bump.