worldbuilding

Miners, Magnates & Mercenaries: Hyperspace Opera 2022

All the way back in September, I wrote about how once or twice a year, I keep taking a break from the Sorcerers & Dinosaurs fantasy stuff I spend most of my time with and go tinkering with ideas for space adventure campaigns. I outlined an idea I had which I had given the production title Hyperspace Opera, but didn’t develop it very much further. Well, it’s been eight month since then, and here we are again.

While I didn’t create anything presentable to share, I did keep thinking about my initial ideas and concepts over the months. Discovering new source material to use as references. Discarding elements that didn’t really quite fit with the new sharper image that was emerging. Considering options for rules systems and how the setting could build on and support their game mechanics diagetically. And just overall refining the general idea into something more concrete that you can actually start creating content for. The main underlying inspirations are still the same, but in many ways I think the concept has evolved quite a bit. The term space opera doesn’t even really make any sense anymore, but since it’s a working title anyway I’m sticking with it until this thing gets an actual name. So forget about whatever I might have mentioned about an idea for a setting once over half a year ago and consider all of this with new eyes.

Inspiration and Concept

Everything started with the idea that I am a huge fan of classic Star Wars, but I think the original setting has been expanded in ways that are stylistically and thematically mismatched since 1999. It’s okay for me to just ignore all the Clone Wars stuff and everything made for Star Wars after 2003 as if it’s an alternative timeline, but you can’t really expect that from players you invite to play a Star Wars campaign. And there were plenty of terrible ideas being introduced even in the classic EU period. So my idea was to create a new setting that takes all my own favorite elements from Star Wars and expands them into something new, unconstrained by all the baggage of material I’m not particularly fond of. Of course, for me the ultimate gold standard for Star Wars is The Empire Strikes Back. Cloud City, Lando, Boba Fett, and the Millenium Falcon are the main touchstone for the overall style, tone, and atmosphere I am trying to pursue, followed by Jabba’s Palace and the forests of Endor from Return of the Jedi. As such, the overall campaign structure that the setting is going to be build around is “daring Scoundrels with a cool Ship”. No superiors ordering the characters what to do, and the law really is more like guidelines than actual rules.

I had also been thinking about both Cyberpunk 2077 and Dune at the time and somehow ended up with the image of 1920s industrialists as the new aristocracy of space. What’s really the difference between Leto Atreides and Saburo Arasaka? The terms magnate, mogul, and tycoon all originally meant nobles of outstanding influence and power, with baron being of more modest means but still referring to the same idea. The aesthetics of cyberpunk and many interpretations of Dune are rich with influences from Art Deco, which happens to be the mainstream design style going into the 1920s. And also influenced Cloud City in The Empire Strikes Back.

The time of the industrial barons was also the prime of the Labor Movement, and the cyberpunk of the 80s was all about economic inequality and the tyranny of the rich. So with these influences, it comes very easy to expand the concept for the setting in that direction as well. Season 1 of The Expanse and the movie Outland make for great sources for ideas in that regard, though their aesthetic is very different. It’s very easy to make stories about the people uniting to revolt against the evil industrialist that exploit and oppress them, but that’s banal because right and wrong are obvious and there’s no interesting conflicts. What I have long been very interested in is the repeated corruption of the labor movement, with communist leaders becoming the very tyrants they were meant to topple while still feeding the starving masses slogans about equality, unions being turned into pawns in political games, and left wing militias degenerating into drug cartels primarily fighting each other. Which isn’t a unique issue of the labor movement. The same thing happens all the time with vile hate preachers calling for violence and vengeance in the name of Jesus and his message of compassion, love, and forgiveness. (Seriously, have any of these people read the Sermon on the Mount?! He’s talking about you, my dearies. But I digress…) But touch your own nose, clean up your house first, and all of that. Infighting among the exploited and the rise of wannabe tyrants who relish their power over those even weaker than themselves is where I am looking for the main sources of conflicts that players can find themselves entangled with.

Scum and Villainy

And when your campaign concept can be summarized as “moral corruption and infighting among the 1920s labor movement, but in space”, you know that PtbA is really the only acceptable choice for a rules system. I’ve been fascinated with Apocalypse World ever since I first encountered it and the underlying system and approach to running and playing an RPG is really something remarkable. Blades in the Dark is widely regarded as the most sophisticated iteration of the system and Scum and Villainy is basically a repainted version of that, which takes the game from a Dark Fantasy Steampunk Crime Syndicate setting to Space Smugglers and Scoundrels. I’ve been notoriously fickle throughout the years about sticking to specific rules systems as I am developing new campaign ideas, but I don’t think there are really any other serious contenders in this case. Stars Without Number would certainly be a viable option, which I did originally tinker with when I started last year, but when there’s already a PtbA game tailored to this campaign style, I don’t see any real benefit in using a D&D retroclone based system instead.

Known Space

The setting of Hyperspace Opera is a region of a galaxy that is home to a dozen intelligent species that are engaged in interstellar travel and trade. As interstellar space settings go, the technological level in Known Space ranges from moderate to low. The greater civilizations all have extensive space industries and infrastructure that maintain large fleets of commercial space ships in the tens or hundreds of thousands, but a good number of planets do not have the technological capabilities to build hyperspace drives or artifical gravity systems of their own and rely on components or even entire ships purchased from other species.

The full population of Known Space is estimated to be around 100 billion people, the vast majority of which live on the homeworlds of their species or within the home systems. While there are large numbers of planets throughout Known Space where people can survive, they never quite match all the environmental factors that each species has evolved to for millions of years. While there are always people drawn to travel to the stars and live on alien planets, they are never more than a small majority, and since all civilizations that are capable of leaving their homeworlds and colonize other planets have fully industrialized many generations ago, there simply isn’t much population growth on newly settled worlds. Even though there are dozens of colonized planets with populations in the millions, they barely register in comparison to the eleven home systems with populations of billions.

The driving force behind space commerce and colonialization is the endless need for vast amounts of cheap metal in the home systems. While hyperspace jump drives are very complicated pieces of technology, the cost of manufacture and making hyperspace jumps is relatively modest. The costs for transporting huge amounts of material between star systems is so low that it is cheaper to mine easily accessible resources of high purity in distant star systems than trying to fully exploit hard to access resources of lower purity within the home systems. Huge industrial mining fleets are swarming throughout Known Space, harvesting the most easily accessible resources for a few years, and then moving on to greener pastures where profits are higher.

In their wakes they leave behind planets they considered depleted and of no further value to their high profit margin operations. They leave behind piles of broken and worn out equipment not considered worth repairing, but often also whole communities of miners and independent support workers running local businesses. Those who can afford to often pack up their things and follow soon after, leaving only those without the means to leave or nowhere else to go. Even though these planets are no lnger considered commercially viable by the great mining companies, they usually still contain large amounts of resources that simply require a greater amount of work to extract, reducing the amounts of profits that can be made by selling them. These resources are what is keeping the many small frontier outposts alive once the great fleets have moved on. They are also what attracts the vultures, companies much smaller than the mining giants, which have specialized in trading pretty much any kinds of goods and equipment imaginable in exchange for resources of any purity grade. They are usually organized in cartels that divide the frontier systems between them to avoid competition that would drive down the extortion level prices they offer to the independent mines. Far away from the home systems, there are no commercial regulations to stop them.

The settlers of small frontier worlds frequently attempt to pool their resources to form commercial cooperatives to increas their bargaining power with the trade companies or enable the manufacture of goods theh would no longer have to trade for exorbitant prices. Obviously the companies have no interest in seeing this happening and don’t shy away from bribery, sabotage, intimidation, and outright assassination to undermine any such efforts. This is where the Player Characters enter the picture. In this environment, people with fast small ships who aren’t afraid of company goons and mercenaries are exactly the kind of people the settlers need. Or which the companies could have use for when they don’t want their machinations to be too obvious.

Technologies

The most important technology for interstellar space travel are hyperspace drives. These engines allow ships to jump in and out of another dimension with very different laws of physics, including a much higher speed of light and vastly reduced energy requirements to rapidly accelerate. Jumping between systems usually takes only a few hours and all of known space can be crossed in a few days. Though unfortunately, ships in hyperspace are completely blind, and the gravity of stars and planets can severely send ships off course in unpredictable ways, which makes it necessary to travel to the outer reaches of a star system at sublight speed first, which for most ships takes several days. Predicting the exact arrivial point in the vicinity of the destination star is also impossible, leading to additional hours to possibly weeks of reaching the intended planet at sublight speed.

Communication through hyperspace is impossible. The only way to send messages between systems is to carry prerecorded messages one space ships. Highly populated systems have hundreds of mail barges traveling between them every hour, but in the frontier system, days or even weeks can pass between their arrivials.

Since communication within systems happens at lightspeed, all planets have their own independent and separate communications network. In the home systems, these networks are accessible from anywhere on the planet, but on colony worlds access is usually limited to only the vicinities of major settlements. Smaller frontier settlements often have only local radio communication and nothing else.

Two two main weapon systems are railguns and missiles. Railguns come in all kinds of sizes, from small pistols up to huge cruiser cannons. Most planets do not allow the carrying of guns in public and the energy cells of railguns are quite easily detected by security scanners. Railguns are also generally a bad thing to use inside space ships as they can cause catastrophic damage to survival critical equipment. For these reasons, large knives and short swords are very common weapons for people working and living in space.

And that’s the general baselines for the setting. Not drastically changed since the last time, but this is hopefully a more cleaned up version of how things are currently looking and what I intend to build upon in the comming months.

Goblins

Goblins are one of the many peoples populating the lands of Kaendor but they are barely seen in the cities and towns of Senkand, making their homes well beyond the edges of civilization. A large number of goblin villages exists west of the mountains in the forests of Dainiva, particularly in the caves of the lower mountain slopes and foothills, but they can also be found further west in places where the dense forest blocks out most of the sun, all the way up to the great river cutting the vast woodlands into two halves. Other settlements are located beneath the rocky highlands of the Yao, and they are also said to live in the far northen lands of Venlat.

Goblins are humanoid creatures of short stature, usually standing around four foot tall but occasionally reaching up to five feet in height. They have tough hides ranging from a dusty brown to grey that helps them blending in with rocky environments as they oftn wear nothing more than loose trousers and perhaps a simple shirt in similar natural colors. While goblins have faces similar to other humanoid peoples with small noses and big black eyes, most people regard them as rather expressionless and blank. Goblins that could be considered chatty are rarely encountered, giving them a reputation for being somewhat dull, but they are no less smart than other peoples. Many Yao who have had dealings with goblins describe them as refreshingly composed and unobstrusive.

While goblins frequently come outside to the surface, they mostly do so during the evenings and at night and prefer to stick to densely forested areas as their true home is found underground. Not only are they well adapted to living in caves, they also follow ancient customs of adapting underground spaces to their own needs. As they don’t make any metal tools of their own, and bronze blades and chissels from the surface are limited, their masonry and sculpting looks very primitive to the stonework of asura and naga and even the cities of Senkand, but their constructions are often much more sophisticated than their rough looks seem to imply.

Being fully at home in caves, goblins are incredible rock climbers, and their small and thin statures allow them to move through very tight spaces with relative ease. Many caves in Kaendor, particularly below the great mountain ranges, go incredibly deep, with many of them reaching all the way down into the Underworld. While being an incredibly dangerous environment to most peoples other than goblins, the goblins themselves make frequent journeys into the greatest depths of the Earth and are familiar with many of the main passages. Explorers trying to reach caverns and ruins deep underground without goblin guides face little chance of success, or returning.

In the woodlands of Dainiva, goblins are the only people truly native to the land. The more northern reaches of the forest close to the mountains have become home to a number of Fenhail villages, but these have only appeared in the recent centuries, after the First Sorcerers were already gone. The goblins of the forest have called Dainiva their home for much longer than that, even during the time of the Asura Lords. They still possess much ancient knowledge about parts of the woodlands that no Fenhail has ever set eyes on. While few goblin villages are exactly welcoming of visitors, few are openly hostile or ambush strangers found passing through their territory. They are most likely to stay out of sight amd wait for intruders to be on their way, but some are more open to talk, even if rarely enthusiastic. Many goblin villages are very interested in bronze blades and tool, though they rarely have much to trade other than food and leather. As one is moving deeper into the forests and away from the mountains, things are further complicated by very few goblins speaking any languages other than their own.

Goblin

Armour Class	13
Hit Dice	1-1 (1-7 hp)
Attacks	Weapon +0 (1d6)
Movement	30’
Saving Throws	D14 W15 P16 B17 S18 (0)
Morale	7
XP	5
Number Appearing	2d4 (6d10)

Infravision: 90′.

Hate the sun: –1 to-hit in full daylight.

Goblin king and bodyguards: A 3HD king and 2d6 2HD bodyguards live in the goblin lair. The king gains a +1 bonus to damage.

Surprise: Goblins surprise characters on a 3 in 6 chance in caves and rocky surroundings.

Source

Just Kaendor Things

The latest map and an updated overview of Kaendor

My old computer has been reaching the end of its life and the backup I am using now just doesn’t have the power to handle the large file sizes I usually like to work with, so for the time being I am limiting myself to basic layout sketches without trying to make them look pretty as handouts for players. I also decided to limit the scope of this map to just the part of the continent that I actually need for planning my next campaign.

30 miles per hex, 900 miles by 1800 miles.

This area actually covers a good 90% of all the content that I have already created for the setting. There’s still the far northern lands of Venlat where the white skinned and white haired Kuri live under the rule of Maiv the Witch Queen, but I am quite happy with that being a far off distant land that has no direct contact with the main civilized region shown on this map.

Senkand

On the east side of the map is a huge valley between two mountain ranges with a total size roughly on the same scale of France or Spain. I think that’s as big as I can go with the main city states (maked in red) still having meaningful regular interactions with each other. The eastern mountains and highlands are the lands of the Yao mountain people, while the great plain in the center of the valley is the lands of the Murya sorcerer kings. The woodlands north of Senkand are the home of the Fenhail tribes.

This incarnation of Senkand takes a lot of inspirations from Dark Sun, but instead of a barren desert its environment is more like Northern Spain and southern France, with the mountains being comparable to the Pyreneese and the Alps. In earlier versions of the setting it used to be more like the coasts of Greece and Southern Italy, but in the process of downscaling the city states considerably to make a more wilderness focused setting, I decided to drop the Mediterranean port city model (which is more a think of Antiquity) with the river valley structure that dominated in the Bronze Age.

I don’t have any specific plans for campaigns set in the east and I mostly want it to be background material for NPCs and factions. Though I think it would be a perfectly playable region that still works in the overall style I am pursuing with Kaendor.

Dainiva

The center of the map consists of a large region of temperate-warm woodlands that are bordered in the east by the mountains that separate it from the city states of Senkand, and in the west by a great river that marks the edge of the known world for most people. This area is what Kaendor was always meant to be about and that is most reflective of the kind of environment implied by the Dungeons & Dragons Basic and Expert rules. A vast wilderness full of ruins, monsters, and treasures, and only a few scattered villages and forts.

Dainiva, as well as the forests beyond the great river, were once the realm of the asura who ruled there for thousands of years. Their presence alone was what had kept the various early societies of Senkand from attempting to cross the mountains. But now the asura are almost entirely gone, and the lands of Dainiva have been abandoned for many centuries. The first people to cross the mountains where Murya shamans and witches seeking the occult secrets of the great asura kings. They brought back great amounts of esoteric knowledge about other realms and demons that became the basis of sorcery, but many of them stayed in the lands beyond the mountains to delve deeper into what the asura had discovered before them. Whatever they found, something covered the peaks of the mountains in clouds of poisonous ash and made the few passes crawl with ghouls and other undead horrors. For many generations crossing the mountains was all out impossible, but over time clouds of ash become more rare and the undead only rarely seen. Slowly Murya from Senkand resumed making the crossing into the lands beyond the mountains, while further north some Fenhail and the occasional Yao made the journey through the forest. Most of the people who came to Dainiva and settled down had fled from Senkand for one reason or another, which greately affected the kind of society that developed in the west.

The woods of Dainiva are home to scattered villages of rarely more than a few hundred people, often surrounded by wooden palisades or build on top of defensible hills and cliffs. Hunting is just as much a part of daily life as farming and great amounts of tools and weapons found by local traders have been imported from the East. The woods are also filled with ancient asura ruins, as well as the lairs and tombs of the first sorcerers.

Beyond the Great River

While the woodlands of Dainiva are a barely explored frontier, the lands on the western bank of the great river are a completely unknown wilderness. Rumors are that those distant forests are still ruled by asura kings, the mountains swarming with dragons, and that ancient gods are walking among the trees. But in truth almost nobdy ever returned to the taverns and trade posts of Dainiva with any proof that they actually had made it to the other side.

The Yellow Crystals Fields

There is something about areas that have been corrupted the demonic powers of sorcery that occadionally leads to the growth of formations of pale yellow crystals that can grow to enormous size. The crystals are extremely hard and almost impossible to remove once they have started to appear.

Instead of feeding on the sorcerous power lingering at the sites of demonic rituals, the destruction of powerful demons, or the lairs of ancient sorcerers, the growth of the crystals appears to actually increase the corruption of the surrounding area. While the initial spread of the crystals can happen quite rapidly over the span of just months, the growth seems to slow down and stop eventually. If this were not the case, some sages think the crystals could eventually take over the entire world, and would likely have done so long ago.

But even if they don’t pose a serious threat to the world as a whole, the areas covered by the hard yellow formations are left as otherwise barren wastelands. In many places corrupted by sorcery, the demonic influence seems to slowly ebb away over the course of man centuries and eventually become barely detectable. But as far as everyone’s been able to tell so far, the crystaline formations are eternal.

The crystals have some limited uses in a number of sorcerous rituals, but their incredible hardness makes it very difficult to remove large chunks of it. The corruption around them also makes them dangerous to carry, so there is little trade with these crystals among alchemists.

The Golems of Dainiva

Throughout the vast reaches of the Dainiva Forest rest the ancient and overgrown remains of massive stone giants. Sometimes found slumped against a hillside, sitting slouched among the trees, or lying face down in a river, these silent golems offer scarce insights into how they got to their final resting places.

Even though often heavily weathered, missing large pieces, and covered in moss and lichens, each of these golems seems to have had a unique appearance, with no two known examples being the same in size, proportions, or the stone they are made from. Some appear merely mishapen hunks of rock whose blunt arms and legs only distantly resemble a person, while others show great amount of carving and chisseling to give them simple but distinguishing faces and hands and the proportions of a roughly hewn statue.

The origins of the golems is a mystery lost to time. The clans of Dainiva and the surrounding lands have no stories of their creation, or even about them being encountered alive. As far as everyone knowns, they have always been sitting motionless under the canopy of the forest. With no way to tell their original purpose, they now only serve as landmarks for the occasional hunters making their way through the forest.