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synodiporia_ooc2016-01-05 10:23 pm
powersthatbe) wrote in synodiporia_ooc2016-01-05 10:23 pm
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ESCAPE FROM JUNKWORLD: JAUNT INFO.
Welcome to the Junkworld of Gehenna: a radioactive cinder twice the size of Earth, used as a rubbish heap and ship graveyard for centuries by cultures across the cosmos, guarded by automated gunstations (left by cultures from across the cosmos), and with its only native inhabitants being Leaping Fireworms who feed on metals and thrive in heavy-gravity environments. Occasionally used as a penal colony as well, but really a death sentence - the only way people are sent to Gehenna is being placed in gutted ships in decaying, unguided re-entry orbits. Still, over the centuries, some have survived this process, and settlements have grown on the surface, giving the world a total population in the high hundreds or low thousands.
And now, the Tachyon Storm is coming. Nobody knows exactly what that means, but it’s bad.
You see, tachyons are particles that travel faster than light and back in time, and the slower they are, the more energy they have. And what few sensors on Gehenna work have started detecting increasing bursts of tachyon radiation, denser and denser, slower and slower moving. The best guess is that some incredible high-energy phenomenon is coming in the near future. No normal lightspeed shockwave can be seen before it hits - so by the time anyone knows what it is, it’ll be too late. And judging by the rate the tachyons are slowing down, it’s only a few weeks away.
The refugees, prisoners, scavengers, smugglers, and accidental colonists of Gehenna have a plan - or some of them do. Smuggler ships small enough to slip to the surface past the automated gun satellites are too small to travel faster than light, and they don’t have time to call for a ride. But the planet is all but covered in wrecks, hulks, derelicts, and crashes, and two large, durable vessels of dubious design are nearly intact. It’s just barely possible to put them together, strap on the smuggler vessels as armed outriders, and blast off for escape.
But as the source of the Tachyon Storm gets closer, things are getting weird. The laws of physics are bending or breaking entirely. The ships, barely understandable or able to be kept together as it is, are behaving in strange ways, and that strangeness is carrying over to the synthetics and cyborgs who interface with ship systems to operate them. And everyone on Junkworld Gehenna had an agenda or an axe to grind, anyway - trustworthy, safe, sane people don’t wind up banished to radioactive cinders, after all.
Ancient, unknown ships falling apart around them. The combined dark secrets, dubious pasts, and skeletons in the closet of a hundred different interstellar scofflaws. Even with an oncoming shockwave approaching at least as fast as light, the open question is still: what’s going to get around to killing them first?
WORLD INFO
With a thick, murky nitroxy atmosphere similar to Earth’s, but one and a half times as much gravity and unstable plate tectonics, its land masses and shallow seas are entirely carpeted from (melted) pole to (melted) pole. The only pristine areas are recent impact craters.
As many species use fission or fusion for power sources, a wealth of radioactive material and waste is buried amidst the rest - not enough or close enough to the surface to cause widespread or severe radiation poisoning, but enough that lifespans are shorter (except among Hecatites and Diabolin), mutations and birth defects are more common (even among Hecatites and Diabolin), and in some few areas you can get a tan in the middle of the night, if you’re so inclined.
‘Scavengetown,’ the alleged capital of the planet, is nothing more than some safe and habitable wrecks piled around the edges of a crashed cruiser large enough that its side is big enough and flat enough to be used as a landing pad. The population is under a hundred, there’s no government, no law, just people living in proximity to one another for safety and trade. There may be other settlements, but they’re smaller and don’t have landing pads big enough for multiple ships.
Leaping Fireworms are burrowing, superheated, serpentine metal-eaters covered in ceramic scale plating. They range from one to five meters long. And they can, as the name suggests, jump an uncomfortably long distance- about three times their length, or one and a half times vertically. They melt through most metals at about the same speed as an industrial blowtorch, and consume the molten refuse.
Information on ships, technology, and the cultures and homeworlds of various aliens can be found in the corresponding sections. For those interested in carrying over characters from Questing Country - it’s been about a century, long enough that any humans, Spartoi, or Vodyanoi would be dead; any teenaged Gorgons would be in the prime of their middle age, and any teenaged Hecatites or Elves would be about space-thirty. Additionally, of course, elves, spartoi, and vodyanoi are not spacefaring races, and so unlikely to be encountered, although some elves were abducted into slavery by the Diabolin.
SPECIES INFO
Gorgon - Gorgons have brightly tinted skin, prehensile tentacles for hair which have sensitive eyespots & other sensorium, & the ability to slowly calcify what they touch or breathe on. An individualistic people who prefer to dwell underground, Gorgons are very practical, often cranky and withdrawn & with poor long-range vision & light sensitivity meaning they prefer to stay inside or underground. Gorgons are accomplished biochemists, architects, and engineers, making organic ceramics and mineral compounds. Gorgons have only been in space for a few of their (two century) generations, but are enthusiastic terraformers, although each world tends to be home to its own religious, cultural, and political movements, completely independent of (and often hostile to) their homeworld of Khthon. Colonies include Sublune & Hypocaia. Rebels and prisoners of war might be sent to Gehenna, but not many others.
Hecatites - are long-lived elective humanoids who can grow crystalline structures from within their bodies. Hectatites have a great deal of scientific advancement, but they tend not to use tools except what they grow, instead focusing on the disciplined acquisition of knowledge & yogi-like control of themselves . Hecatites tire easily and are vulnerable to loud noises and bludgeoning, but have much keener intellects than other species. Hecatites have traveled across space for generations, but generally not settled outside their home system’s urban world except for isolated industrial and scientific colonies. Highly organized with a central government of their most educated and accomplished elder scientists, there are a great many crimes that would lead to a deviant Hecatite being banished, from political dissidence to gross negligence to espionage, theft from the government, impersonation of a higher class, or scientific malfeasance. Violence among the Hecatites is very rare except when used by the government, but violent offenders would also be cast out.
Diabolin - horned, grey and black-skinned psionic species who do not sleep or dream, but process their mental energies in an unstable mood and perception cycle while awake. Considered volatile, untrustworthy, and dangerous. The oldest and most scattered civilization, the Diabolin once ruled an interstellar empire with many colonies, and were the first species to visit Earth, Faerie, & Khthon in their respective dark ages, starting legends of demons and goblins. A few Diabolin still keep genetically altered Elven slaves. But the golden age of the Diabolin is passed, and they now suffer from many congenital psychic diseases and instabilities. With their homeworld long lost and forgotten, Diabolin live on many colony worlds or on massive ships, and have little organized central authority. Much of their ancient technology is now beyond their power to use. As a volatile people for whom one generation’s murderers and terrorists might be the next generation’s revolutionaries and war heroes, they tend to put criminals in cryofreeze somewhere out of the way, so they can retrieve them later if they want. Diabolins on Gehenna might be political prisoners or genuine criminals, and might be recent arrivals or have been there, frozen, for a thousand years since their people ruled the starlanes.
Synthetics - artificial intelligences taking on humanoid form to experience the world, most synthetics achieve consciousness by the melding of two or more intelligent programs uploaded onto a utilitarian platform that bears at least a passing resemblance to a sentient species. Common among humans and Hecatites, less respected and with shorter lifespans among the Diabolin, and entirely illegal (but not unheard of) by the Gorgons, synthetics are universally second-class citizens, as they can download their consciousness into other bodies and are often considered a disposable labor caste. Only among humans is there a recognized, organized robotic rights movement. Still, on the fringe of space, little of that matters. Some synthetics have platforms which are indistinguishable on initial examination from their species of choice, except by the psionic senses of the Diabolin.
Other Species - Players are more than welcome to devise their own alien species, and nonhuman Travelers who wish to appear as themselves may encounter curiosity, but no real surprise or suspicion - it’s a big universe, and out on the fringe of it you encounter all sorts of other beings. The above species are simply the most common in this part of spaces, the ones whose territories overlap in this region of space.
THE SHIPS
A shape like an iron, or a bullet cut in half with a ring welded to the top, this five-decked vessel is 25 meters in height, 25 meters in width, and 125 meters in length. It’s built from cobbled-together Hecatite, Gorgon, and Human wrecks, with a few unknown pieces in its gravity and hyperlight systems. Filled with analog hydraulic circuitry of an ancient alien design, its arc-shaped crest is a power generator, a Hecatite particle accelerator fusion generator. Its prismatic crystalline viewports are hand-grown Hecatite replacements for the originals, long missing. Its hull is alien alloys patched with Gorgon-fused ceramic tiling, also hand-made and jury-rigged. Its sublight drive unit has been replaced, salvaged from a human Orion-class vessel: a nuclear-explosion driven propulsion system. Its hyperlight drive uses the same thrust nozzles but relies on alien mechanics and strange particles from an experimental Hecatite particle accelerator to fuel a quantum entanglement reaction which pulls it through space at an acceleration of approximately 150 kilometers per second per second, up to a maximum of about 100c, or 30 million kps. Its gravity systems are complex, allowing variable gravity inside, as well as on or near the hull.
This vessel resembles an almond-shape buried point-first in the top of an hourglass, with folding-fan wings extending from the waist of the hourglass. These wings are tachyon sails, which carry it at a steady speed of up to 30c at hyperlight speeds, and almost instant acceleration and deceleration as they are activated or deactivated, but sublight accelerations of no more than 100 kps, It has no exterior viewports, but an electrically charged hull that can ‘feel’ particle flow with synthetic or cybernetically enhanced crewmembers plugged into its systems - and many of the control systems only operate via plug-in, although kit-bashed interfaces have replaced many of the consoles on its electroplasma conductive relays, which are high-powered but prone to overload and possibly explode. It has seven decks, more vertically cramped at 22 meters in height, a maximum width of 30 meters, and an overall length of 156 meters. Its power system is a sealed, eerily glowing, highly radioactive bio-fission generator, using hypothetical particles of biological origin to propel itself, and its interior corridors are segmented circular tubes with gravity even along the walls and perfectly balanced (nonexistent) in the center. It is completely unknown what species designed and built this ship.
Small, nimble smuggling vessels with conventional weaponry but without the capacity for hyperlight drive, ten to twenty meters in length, as many as four can attach to the exterior of the larger ships and be carried along faster than light. Outriders are cramped, usually with room for no more than four people inside. Players are encouraged to design their own. if interested.
CREW POSITIONS
Captain: The commanding officer, whose word is law. In a crisis, there’s no time to argue about who’s in charge, and a competent captain has unquestioned power of life and death over the crew.
Computer Interface Officer: A Synthetic who interfaces directly with the ship’s computer to monitor electronic systems and make sure data and informational security are functional. While the Interface Officer answers only to the Captain, they command no-one else.
Communications Officer: A Synthetic or Cyborg who manages the ship’s external communications, as well as the internal software which allows everyone to seemingly speak the same language. May also be the Interface Officer.
Sensor Officer: A Synthetic or Cyborg who manages the ship’s internal and external sensors and reports on conditions. Often works very closely with the Navigator, who needs all this information immediately, but usually more relatable than a Navigator.
Navigation Officer: A Synthetic or Cyborg who manages the ship’s navigation. Mystical, artists, possessed of strong mental discipline, they plan hyperlight courses which even little particle flows or gravity anomalies can interrupt. The math is time-consuming. Many find navigators to be eerie visionaries.
Helmsman: the one who flies the ship. Hot-shot jet-jockeys with lightning reflexes, fueled by pure ego - or that’s the stereotype.
Gunner: If you can point and shoot, you might be a gunner.
Engineer: The master mechanic who keeps the reactors and both sublight and hyperlight engines operational. Usually highly educated and scientific; often eccentric, used to working in obscenely dangerous conditions.
Bo’sun: The bo’sun isn’t an officer. The bo’sun handles crew discipline and hull repair with the same delicate hand - that is to say, usually with a hammer, in a hurry.
CASTING CALL
Synthetic Revolutionary - exiled for advocating synthetic revolution, this android is an ideologue. They’ve made themselves Interface Officer for the Corona by the simple expedient of encrypting all its computer systems. We’d like to see this role played by someone who expects to make Skill AC.
Diabolin Criminal - a volatile psychotic psionic who spent centuries in a cryotube and came out still expecting to be the nobility of the cosmos, this being is simply too dangerous to turn away, more than capable of sabotage or assassination. This role has no special AC requirements, but should be someone comfortable with taking initiative & playing negative CR.
Hecatite Archaeologist - a scientist in willing exile to study the wreckage on-planet, they’re an academic who insists on being captain or chief engineer of the Empress of Moths for their own reasons, and because they’re the only one with even a vague idea of how it works or how to fix it. Optionally, they may be partnered with a second archaeologist of any species in the other role. If played as a single part, we’d like this role to be played by someone who expects to make Double Skill AC. If played as two parts, there are no special AC requirements.
Gorgon Astronomer - a dreamy, abstract cyborg navigator, a mathematician and sensor specialist who first detected the Tachyon Storm, is trying to understand it, and who may be the only hope of correctly navigating away from it. The more they know about it, the more cryptic and mystical they sound. This part should be played by someone who expects to make Skill AC.
Synthetic Pinocchio - A Synthetic, heavily self-modified, originally modeled after the alien species of the player’s choice, they’re currently acting as Interface Officer of the Empress of Moths. Their real interest, however, is in becoming more like an organic sentient being, whose lives and behaviors fascinate them. Hostile to the Revolutionary. If they serve as Interface Officer, we’d like this part to be played by someone who expects to make Skill AC. If another Traveler playing a Synthetic takes over as Interface Officer, there is no special AC expectation.
Please sign up for the above roles here! And please note that the AC expectations are just that - they’re not requirements, only preferences. If you’re enthusiastic about the character and ready to thread actively and take initiative, we’re less worried about the specific number of comments.
We’re going to try to cast these roles by 6 PM CST January 7th, to give people time to plan with them. It’s still not first-come, first-serve, but let us know if you’re interested ASAP!
INVESTIGATOR ROLES
INFILTRATOR ROLES
Convicts are often dangerous criminals of some sort, but Refugees and Political Prisoners might have been banished here merely for offending someone powerful.
Scavengers were born here - while they come from families of convicts and exiles, they can be anyone, seek any career path - but there’s not much opportunity or education available on-world.
Shipwreck Survivors - rarely, for whatever reason, someone might wind up on planet accidentally - if a transport navigates poorly and gets shot down, a stowaway doesn’t realize a ship is being mothballed, or an escape pod doesn’t have range for somewhere more civilized to land on.
Cyborgs & The Conditioned: Many people who interface with high technology have cybernetic implants in their bodies or brains, giving them additional knowledge or abilties. Cybernetics are not merely prosthetics, but built-in tools adding new hardware to the human condition. Cybernetics are common in all species, but there is still some stigma to becoming implanted with machines that change what you're capable of or how you think.
The Conditioned are people who have embraced a discipline of hypnosis, meditation, and heightened physical sensitivity to unlock the true potential of their bodies and minds. Conditioned have amazing reflexes and reaction times, can suppress pain and use their full physical strength, even if it damages their bodies, control automatic responses, and observe even the smallest changes in their physical environment. Some are even capable of implanting hypnotic suggestions in others, usually only of their own species.
SKILLS
Gorgon Form: the ability to assume the form of a Gorgon. Racial Traits: prehensile tentacle hair, brightly colored skin, darkvision, vibration and electromagnetic field sensing, calcifying touch/breath; light sensitivity, poor long-range vision, antisocial tendencies.
Hecatite Form: the ability to assume the form of a Hecatite. Racial Traits: mineral composition, easily overwhelmed by sound, metabolic control, crystal growing, bludgeoning vulnerability, high intellect, low stamina.
Diabolin Form: the ability to assume the form of a Diabolin. Racial Traits: do not sleep or dream, enhanced strength and fortitude, radiation and poison resistance, horns, tough grey or black skin, close-range psionics, volatile mental state.
Synthetic Form: The ability to assume the form of a synthetic being, with the physical and cognitive capacities and vulnerabilities that implies. As a general rule, synthetics possess enhanced strength and durability, rapid thinking, and the ability to physically interface with some computer systems, hardware permitting. However, they also do not heal naturally, may appear or behave obviously artificial, and tend to be deferential towards organic life-forms. Specifics will vary, and that’s fine.
Jury-Rigging: the ability to make improvised repairs with improvisatory parts. This sort of creative engineering is unreliable, but can be performed quickly and without proper equipment in a wide variety of situations. Examples include patching together frayed wiring with bubblegum, or replacing a burned-out fuse with a paperclip.
Kit-Bashing: the ability to create new devices out of improvised and unlikely parts. While jury-rigging will only repair existing systems, kit-bashing would allow, for example, the creation of a plasma pistol from a length of pipe, a portable battery recharger, a glass marble, and a lightswitch. While it would have short range, poor aim, and burn out after a few shots, it would work. This skill requires Jury-Rigging.
Somatic Conditioning: the ability to duplicate the physical abilities of the Conditioned. This includes superb balance and reflexes, the ability to use one’s muscles to their fullest extent, conscious control of breathing, and even the ability to suppress or encourage the release of adrenaline within the body.
Sensory Conditioning: the ability to duplicate the sensory abilities of the Conditioned. This includes shutting off pain, sight, or hearing when they’re inconvenient, or detecting the approach of someone unseen by changes in air pressure; the ability to detect all but the most superb liars through body language, tone, and eye contact, and the kinesthetic knowledge of whether or not one is physically capable of jumping a gap, or exactly how much force is needed to kick down a door without injury.
Conditioned Hypnosis: the ability to use eye contact, tone of voice, conscious manipulation of pheromones, and careful word choice to implant simple suggestions in others. Nonsensical or obviously harmful suggestions will not work, and thoroughly changing an opinion is unlikely, but it’s enough to hold or deflect attention, soothe or increase suspicion, startle and intimidate someone for a moment, or convince them to let a secret slip. Because it relies on knowledge of physical and psychological characteristics, it may not work on other species, non-neurotypical individuals, or those in an altered state of consciousness, unless the user has sufficient familiarity with the group or individual to know what cues to use instead.
Stellar Education: space-age learning. Basic generalist knowledge about other planets and their species and politics, or about a specific specialty area, such as cybernetic or alien medicine, the history of other cultures, or any imaginable sort of space-aged collegiate-level education. This skill may be taken multiple times for multiple specialties, or for doctorate-level knowledge in a specialty.
Stellar Weaponry: the ability to keep and use one or two pieces of advanced personal-scale weaponry. Specific examples of weapons are given under the technology toplevel, but details may be adapted by players.
Stellar Technology: the ability to keep and use one or two pieces of advanced personal-scale technology from this jaunt. Specific examples of technology are given under the technology toplevel, but details may be adapted by players.
CALENDAR
Apastron +17: Escaping Orbit/The First Anomalies
Apastron +25: The First Jump/The Shockwave
Apastron +33 (February 2): Superliminal Anomalies & Breakdowns
Apastron +41 (February 10): Race Against Time
TECHNOLOGY
Cybernetics: cybernetic implants come in two basic forms: prosthetics and enhancements. Prosthetics replace or improve regular body parts - a stronger prosthetic hand, or one with a built-in tool; a prosthetic eye that can see using infrared light or millimeter wave radar; a prosthetic liver or kidney providing poison immunity - these are all basic and accepted. Enhancement cybernetics, on the other hand, make cognitive changes, giving the brain new hardware and software, like the mathematical ability to calculate hyperspace jumps in one’s head, or to use the ship’s sensors as if they were human senses, or to implant knowledge. These cybernetics tend to alter behavior and personality in subtle ways, and so cyborgs of all types are viewed by the unenhanced with a degree of superstition, curiosity, and suspicion.
Gravity Manipulation: For high-speed spaceflight, it’s necessary to make it cheap and easy to get to orbit, to make down a consistent direction, and to buffer the effects of rapid acceleration. Every species with interstellar flight capabilities can do this with devices that manipulate gravitons, the way hyperlight drives manipulate tachyons (the two discoveries are easily linked, so any species who has one is likely to have the other). While gravity manipulation is cheap, it’s also easy to disrupt, so most ships have backup systems rather than trying fancy, advanced tricks like variable-direction or variable-strength gravity fields. However, in the heat of combat, when energy to systems and directions of acceleration change rapidly, there are often light fluctuations, or basic gravity may be turned off to focus power on acceleration compensation (it’s more important to keep you from being flattened and blacking out than it is to keep your feet on the deck). Exceptions do exist or can be created, and there are extremely short range gravity weapons - a gravity “lance” can intensify gravity, pulling things in like a tractor beam; change the direction of gravity, showing objects away like a deflector shield, or crush or pull apart matter with intense conflicting gravity fields in a small area. However, such systems are high-energy, unreliable, and unlikely to extend further than a hundred meters from their projector, and so rarely see use in space combat.
Hyperlight Drive: Hyperlight drives, for the most part, rely on tachyons, a particle which travels backwards in time and faster than light, and gets slower the more energy it possesses. This means, hypothetically, that superfast, teleportation-like travel would be possible - but it would short out any gravity manipulation system ever built to accelerate and decelerate that fast, and any crew would be reduced to a fine 2-dimensional paste in a pancake that used to be a ship (which would also destroy the systems that allow manipulating gravitons and tachyons, anyway). So in practice, hyperlight drives are limited to low acceleration rates far away from the interference of gravity - a ship uses sublight drives for approximately a week’s travel distance to or from a planet before engaging the drive, and then travels between 10-100 times the speed of light, depending on the vessel. This means that even the shortest voyages between star systems take weeks or months - like sea voyages in the age of sail.
Practically speaking, ships in hyperspace are completely undetectable, but also completely blind, because all sensory equipment except tachyon detectors relies on slower-than-light particle interactions. However, the arrival point of an incoming ship can hypothetically be detected for a short distance and time beforehand, if someone has a tachyon sensor on-hand (which is unlikely, given their size, and just how many you’d need to surround a star system in all directions).
Weapons Systems: There are a great many different weapons systems available, varying from one species to another, or even one ship to another. The two most common ranged weapons systems are railguns, which shoot super-dense bullets made of heavy metals (like depleted uranium) at high supersonic speeds through magnetic acceleration, and plasma weapons, which shoot superheated ionized matter, also at very high speeds. Lasers, microwave, and X-ray weapons are sometimes used, but function unreliably near gravity manipulation systems - although they’re also much faster and therefore far more likely to hit. ‘Tesla’ weapons send short-range electrical discharges, electrocuting people and scrambling mechanical systems, including synthetics and cybernetics.
Most handheld firearms are some variation of plasma or Tesla weapon, as those are least expensive, most lightweight, and work in a wide variety of situations. Reflective, laser-repellent mirror armor is only infrequently used, but its mere existence means that lasers are used less - especially inside a ship, where a high-energy weapon traveling at the speed of light can melt a hole through your hull real quick.
Melee weapons are often made of super-hard or super-dense materials, or have blades with molecule-wide edges. Personal-scale gravity weapons are a horrifying possibility, disrupting local ship’s gravity and striking with devastating force through armor and personal defenses - but power limitations keep the hand-held versions from reaching more than a few inches, so gravity generators are built into swords, maces, hammer, or axes. Electrified melee weapons are also widespread, as are weapons that discharge small bursts of plasma on contact, appearing to be momentarily wreathed in flame.
Cybernetic and synthetic warriors often use weapons baseline species cannot - short-range gravity guns that alter gravity fields for a brief period of timing, accelerating people backwards or forwards, up or down - so-called ‘telekinetic guns’ that require enhancements to use, as calibrating the correct amount and direction of force at a range of even a few meters takes dizzyingly complex mathematics.
Finally, Conditioned often use dual-state whipstaffs. A whipstaff consists of two small spherical weights at either end of long strand of dual-state memory fiber that can be either stiff or flexible, and changes between those two states when gripped in certain subtle ways. A whipstaff can be a quarterstaff, a whip, a flail, a pair of nunchucks, a bolo, a pair of handcuffs, a length of rope, a blackjack, a crowbar, a garrotte, or a club - and can change between these things at high speed.
Psionics: Most humanoid brains require REM rest cycles to function, and process this as dreaming. Diabolins do this while awake, with the end result that they're in a near-constant state of low-level hallucination. Diabolins in a group will check with one another to maintain a general consensus on what's real and what's unreal, but Diabolin alone are often forced to make a best guess.
One manifestation of this is a complete blurring of conscious and subconscious, intellect and instinct, which manifests itself as short-range bio-electrical empathy; the ability to pick up on tiny environmental cues or create them in ways that alter the mood of themselves or others. This ability is not reliable, although it's easier to match emotional states (you're calm and I want to be calm, you're angry and I want to be angry; I'm happy and I want you to be happy, I'm sad and so should you be) than to create disparate ones (you're angry and I want to be calm; I'm angry and I want you to be afraid). Diabolins trying to create unmatched states may randomize both their own emotions and those of people nearby.
Diabolin ESP in this way also manifests as hallucinatory hints or instincts about who around them is dangerous or untrustworthy, about patterns such as codes, ciphers, or engineering diagrams, about trends such as progressive glitches indicating deeper mechanical or medical malfunctions, in ways that seem clairvoyant or precognitive to others... but which are also wrong about 50% of the time.
Other species who are surgically and genetically altered are hypothetically capable of psionics, but the high-complexity cybernetic of synthetic systems which would hardwire knowledge of how to use them are beyond the technology of anyone except Hecatites, who generally disapprove of such deviant abilities in any case, and even for Hecatites, such systems would be prohibitively expensive. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible - just that psionics of other species would be clumsier with their powers and less stable.
Conditioning: Originally an ideological movement focusing on the potential of un-augmented bodies and minds, Conditioning is a discipline like a martial art, but more intensive, carrying with it an almost necessary spiritual component, as a certain serenity and emotional discipline is necessary to master Conditioning. It has spread between species over time, and is not an organized political movement in any way, simply a personal choice and way of life. The Conditioned abilities (detailed in depth under Skills & Infiltrator roles) take a lifetime commitment and a deep understanding of one’s consciousness, so it is rare for a Conditioned to have cybernetic implants, and Synthetics are either already capable of using mind and body to the full potential of their hardware, or unable to grasp the nuances of the social disciplines that permit hypnotic suggestion. Likewise, Diabolin Conditioned are rare and somewhat bizarre - and cannot simultaneously use psionic and Conditioned abilities, as one relies of mental instability or emotional volatility and the other relies on strict mental control. In human Conditioned, the study of Zen Buddhism, Shaolin Kung Fu, yoga, or similar disciplines that bridge mental, physical, and spiritual aspects is common.
GLOSSARY
PLAYER RESOURCES
Tropes:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpaceOpera
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TropesInSpace
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SpaceWestern
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/WagonTrainToTheStars
Player plotting:
http://www.plurk.com/p/ldwh69
http://synodiporia-ooc.dreamwidth.org/132301.html?thread=5553869#cmt5553869
http://synodiporia-ooc.dreamwidth.org/132301.html?thread=5554125#cmt5554125
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Also I made an inquiry re: other established planets and such and got the following from Megan (all info from either Q&A threads or Waking World plotting for Questing Country or from Matt himself):
Hecatite Homeworld - Hecate, Gorgon homeworld - Khthon, Elves homeworld - Faerie (only the Diabolin know where it is), Diabolin homeworld is gone. The Gorgons have subcolonies on Sublune and Hypocaia.
Diabolin names for places tend to be titles, not names, like the English might name a house "the Hollyhocks". The Diabolin white dwarf diamond mine is "The Dead Reach"
Gehenna isn't the only junkworld. There is also Meggido and Potmos - those are the only other ones in the region and in use. You don't have more junkworlds than you need to.
QUESTIONS & PLOTTING