Aug 17, 2015 5:37 pm
Hello! Exigency is my long-term tabletop RPG project, although I'm trying my best to be as PbP-friendly as possible. It's a homebrew that takes a lot of inspiration from the likes of Microlite and Old School Hack, with a science-fantasy setting that tries to balance all the intrigue and disaster with irreverence.
I'm currently planning to run a campaign that doubles as a playtest, and will thus be easy going re: respeccing/rebalancing underpowered character abilities etc. There's a WIP character creation guide and quick mechanics primer if you'd like to dive in to the crunch, otherwise read on and let me try to elaborate on the setting a little bit...
Exigency
The far future: but not necessarily ours.*
Humanity has been through the expected series of wars and disasters and much knowledge of our origins is, alas, lost to time. Or more specifically, lost to the Schism: the apocalyptic event that collapsed what was, by all accounts, a phenomenally successful and ridiculously technological human society. 1,000 years after reunification and we are starting to understand that which would have been mundane to our ancestors. Perhaps we are even besting it, according to the particularly optimistic scientists hired by advertising firms.
Aliens are conspicuously absent. Yes, there are various critters and beasties on frontier worlds, but nothing approaching sapience. People who humanity once briefly thought to be aliens are now accepted as alt-humans: altered by time and their environment, or through pre-Schism meddling with their genetics.
The only confirmed alien race are the Uclasions**, and they are long extinct. We know virtually nothing about them. Their artefacts are so rare as to be almost unique. Even the Paleons, the artificial lifeforms they left behind, are thought to have been tempered by their prior experience of Schismatic humanity: so there’s no guarantee the Uclasions were bipedal or even corporeal, for that matter. Or lack of matter as the case may be.
Paleons, incidentally, speak of the Blank. A side-effect of the Schism, it swept across humankind’s computers, Paleons included, and claimed much of their stored data. With databases scoured bare and networks fractured it hugely complicated the efforts to bring the ancient infrastructure back online. The Uclasions are responsible for much of the technology that made pre-Schism culture possible: notably the phasedrive, the setting’s FTL equivalent. With the phasedrive humanity has set foot on two thousand worlds, setting up a network of phase beacons and buoys that allows Alpha Sector to be crossed in days instead of centuries.
One trillion souls have come to reside in Alpha Sector: the portion of the galaxy that humanity has the nerve to refer to as "the galaxy". There’s no Beta or Gamma just yet. They’re working on it, but the isolated worlds on the fringes of inhabited space do not constitute enough of a voting bloc for anyone to care.
The First Colonial War saw the Sector unite to take down the Ploror Conglomerate, an organisation of such vastness and power that it became a byword for the nasty corporatism that today’s good, honest supercorporations clearly have nothing to do with. 600 years hence and the memory of the Conglomerate’s reign fades. Anti-monopoly laws are slowly eroding in the face of patient lobbying, and corporate powers are such that entire worlds are privately owned.
*Think more Wars than Trek, at least in terms of humans existing in circumstances that may not even involve Earth.
**A not-insignificant portion of the scientific community maintains that the Uclasions were human, pure humans, so far removed from their degenerate descendants that they might as well have been alien. The Paleons find this hilarious.
Some of the major factions include...
Domarian Legion
An unmatched military power headed by Command, governed by the Colonial Council and advised by the Supercomputer (itself the most powerful Paleon mainframe known of to date). The Domarian Territories are a massive alliance of systems but they are almost entirely nationalised: the end result is a monopoly on high-technology and a huge and well-equipped military. Indeed, the entire purpose of Domarian society is to support the Legion.
The Legion is expected to intervene whenever the heads of Alpha Sector, through the Colonial Council, decree that it is necessary. Sometimes the mere mention of the Legion is enough to re-open negotiations between quarrelling outworlds. The Legion fields, by far, the largest army and armada in known space with peerless training and equipment. They are proud, disciplined, and not entirely understanding of how the real world works.
Much of the Legion’s success is attributed to their early discovery of both the Supercomputer and Ucelsia: a gargantuan superstructure, thousands of miles wide, that now serves as their surrogate homeworld. Ucelsia is itself capable of phaseshifting, and regularly travels through other parts of space, having a major impact on commerce and trade routes.
The Legion was once the Domarian Trade Organisation, but discovering the Supercomputer set in motion the events that would lead to their reinvention as a superpower. Instrumental in defeating the Ploror Conglomerate, they were once hailed as galactic saviours: but now their allies grow increasingly wary, seeing the Legion as a cannon that has not been fired in centuries but remains squarely pointed at their homesteads.
Technically the High Council holds no sway over the Legion: but in practise anything they say will be heard by and acted upon by sympathetic (or sufficiently bribed) Councilmembers in the Colonial Council.
High Council
The High Council are an elitist, mostly-hereditary cabal of psions. Fantastically wealthy and influential, ostensibly a meritocracy with only the wisest and most potent of their number holding office.
Psi was once all but unknown, even dismissed as a myth during the First Expansion. Now as much as 1% of the population shows signs of some kind of psi-potential (only one percent of this one percent can actually manifest abilities, such as visible telekinetic prep or telecasting). Of these 33% are psychokinetic: capable of manipulating the physical as well as the mental, with the most common manifestation being telekinesis.
The High Council thinks of psychics (although psionor or psi-practitioner is preferred) as the next step in human evolution. Other groups consider psi to be a genetically engineered trait, first developed before the Schism… and then rediscovered and reintroduced by the Ploror Conglomerate and their then-peerless research department.
Regardless of the truth, psi is big money. The Highs treat every psion as a lucrative cash cow: trained, monitored, and then sent off to work for some supercorp or government. With the Highs getting a percentage of all their earnings, naturally.
And this is the law. All psions must be registered and trained by a High Council-approved body.
Attitudes towards psi-practitioners vary wildly between nations or even worlds. The Domarian Legion was instrumental in the foundation of the Extrasensory Protection Society but this respect for the plight of psions grew into revulsion at what the EPS became. Nowadays the Legion guards their psions closely and refuses to grant the High Council access. Sadly, this leads to a culture where Domarian psions are corralled into set roles and careers, commonly in the military or Security Service. Some even get surgery to neuter or entirely nullify their psi abilities.
Telekinetics are sometimes seen as uncouth, or blue collar, or violent— even by the High Council itself. Tragically an untrained telekinetic can often be a threat to themselves and others around them, but the Highs have weaponised fear of telekinetics for their own purposes.
The Orders
Orders are communities and organisations, often (but not always) religious or spiritual, characterised by a shared world view. The best known Orders are massive agglomerations made up of many different factions that strive to achieve a common purpose through dedicating their lives (either fully or partially) to a particular concept or tenet; merging and analogising traditions and theologies in order to be more inclusive.
The modern Orders began as a Domarian-led initiative to unite like-minded faithful despite interplanetary distances and the differences of language and culture. By focusing on common ground and not their disparities, the logic employed was that a fluorescent-skinned nomadic envoy would feel more at home in the metropolis of hirsute dwarves when he learns that they, too, subscribe to the worldview of the Awed Order. Gradually this shifted from mere classifications to an active effort by these communities to document and support each other. While they do have shared beliefs, there is still variety. Order members accept that deists, theists, agnostics and atheists can still find commonality.
There are hundreds of Orders, often the result of charities and foundations seeking further validation and tax assistance. The Vigilance Movement is sometimes considered to be an Order, but with the exception of a few academic theories this is largely meant in a derogatory sense. While it's true that the Vigil was born of mergers similar to those that formed the Orders, its nature as an organisation designed to legitimise bounty hunting is at odds with the philosophical, spiritual, and philanthropic aims of true Orders.
An Order's popularity varies greatly from nation to nation and even from planet to planet, depending on what appeals to the culture's mindset. The Wary Order is popular in the Domarian Territories (at least by comparison with others) whereas the Glowing Order and Contented Order are dominant in Lodori space, where the High Council originated. In some nations Orders are all but absent, in others they are a way of life and inextricably tied to government.
All Orders have their own extremes and fundamentalists. The best of the Glowing Order will make the last wishes of the incurably ill come true; their worst will squander fortunes on sex and drugs and pleasure sims and excess. The Bloodied Order supplies legal guardians and demands investigation into unjust arrests and persecution… but in their name, zealous mobs have tortured petty criminals to death.
Some Orders are defunct or outlawed, most notably those dedicated to death and nihilism. These tend to be branded cults, separated and alienated from others. The infamous End cult was never recognised as an Order.
Controversially, the High Council itself began life as an Order; the Extrasensory Protection Society.
System basics
Pretty much everything in the Exigency system boils down to rolling 1d20 and adding the appropriate attribute score and talent rank (see also the link at the top of this page!) P.S. sorry for using images, I couldn't format the icons properly!
Potential player character roles
These aren't set in stone, but these are the kind of archetypes you might put together: the system is modular, and I'm also very happy to discuss custom mechanics!
The Campaign
If there's any interest, I'm looking for 3-4 players (or higher?) for a campaign that, potentially, could either be full-length or just a brisk test run depending on everyone's preference.
The phase beacon for a moderately-populated world goes dead. Bad at the best of times, but a mysterious pre-Schism vault has just been discovered beneath the planet's capital city. All the factions based there begin to jostle for power, insisting that whatever lies within the vault is theirs by right. The resident Mercenary League detachments conveniently forget the famous Vursoun Treaty and accept contracts against each other, thrilled by the prospect of unfathomably valuable relics. With off-world travel and communication cut, chaos reigns.
They should have questioned the timing. For the occupants of the vault killed the beacon themselves: prisoners, held in stasis for aeons, and they are not very happy to wake up and find that their glorious endless empire ingloriously ended.
Any questions? Hit me! It's been a long time, but I'm excited to be back on the PbP trail and hope to start something soon!
I'm currently planning to run a campaign that doubles as a playtest, and will thus be easy going re: respeccing/rebalancing underpowered character abilities etc. There's a WIP character creation guide and quick mechanics primer if you'd like to dive in to the crunch, otherwise read on and let me try to elaborate on the setting a little bit...
Exigency
The far future: but not necessarily ours.*
Humanity has been through the expected series of wars and disasters and much knowledge of our origins is, alas, lost to time. Or more specifically, lost to the Schism: the apocalyptic event that collapsed what was, by all accounts, a phenomenally successful and ridiculously technological human society. 1,000 years after reunification and we are starting to understand that which would have been mundane to our ancestors. Perhaps we are even besting it, according to the particularly optimistic scientists hired by advertising firms.
Aliens are conspicuously absent. Yes, there are various critters and beasties on frontier worlds, but nothing approaching sapience. People who humanity once briefly thought to be aliens are now accepted as alt-humans: altered by time and their environment, or through pre-Schism meddling with their genetics.
The only confirmed alien race are the Uclasions**, and they are long extinct. We know virtually nothing about them. Their artefacts are so rare as to be almost unique. Even the Paleons, the artificial lifeforms they left behind, are thought to have been tempered by their prior experience of Schismatic humanity: so there’s no guarantee the Uclasions were bipedal or even corporeal, for that matter. Or lack of matter as the case may be.
Paleons, incidentally, speak of the Blank. A side-effect of the Schism, it swept across humankind’s computers, Paleons included, and claimed much of their stored data. With databases scoured bare and networks fractured it hugely complicated the efforts to bring the ancient infrastructure back online. The Uclasions are responsible for much of the technology that made pre-Schism culture possible: notably the phasedrive, the setting’s FTL equivalent. With the phasedrive humanity has set foot on two thousand worlds, setting up a network of phase beacons and buoys that allows Alpha Sector to be crossed in days instead of centuries.
One trillion souls have come to reside in Alpha Sector: the portion of the galaxy that humanity has the nerve to refer to as "the galaxy". There’s no Beta or Gamma just yet. They’re working on it, but the isolated worlds on the fringes of inhabited space do not constitute enough of a voting bloc for anyone to care.
The First Colonial War saw the Sector unite to take down the Ploror Conglomerate, an organisation of such vastness and power that it became a byword for the nasty corporatism that today’s good, honest supercorporations clearly have nothing to do with. 600 years hence and the memory of the Conglomerate’s reign fades. Anti-monopoly laws are slowly eroding in the face of patient lobbying, and corporate powers are such that entire worlds are privately owned.
*Think more Wars than Trek, at least in terms of humans existing in circumstances that may not even involve Earth.
**A not-insignificant portion of the scientific community maintains that the Uclasions were human, pure humans, so far removed from their degenerate descendants that they might as well have been alien. The Paleons find this hilarious.
Some of the major factions include...
Domarian Legion
An unmatched military power headed by Command, governed by the Colonial Council and advised by the Supercomputer (itself the most powerful Paleon mainframe known of to date). The Domarian Territories are a massive alliance of systems but they are almost entirely nationalised: the end result is a monopoly on high-technology and a huge and well-equipped military. Indeed, the entire purpose of Domarian society is to support the Legion.
The Legion is expected to intervene whenever the heads of Alpha Sector, through the Colonial Council, decree that it is necessary. Sometimes the mere mention of the Legion is enough to re-open negotiations between quarrelling outworlds. The Legion fields, by far, the largest army and armada in known space with peerless training and equipment. They are proud, disciplined, and not entirely understanding of how the real world works.
Much of the Legion’s success is attributed to their early discovery of both the Supercomputer and Ucelsia: a gargantuan superstructure, thousands of miles wide, that now serves as their surrogate homeworld. Ucelsia is itself capable of phaseshifting, and regularly travels through other parts of space, having a major impact on commerce and trade routes.
The Legion was once the Domarian Trade Organisation, but discovering the Supercomputer set in motion the events that would lead to their reinvention as a superpower. Instrumental in defeating the Ploror Conglomerate, they were once hailed as galactic saviours: but now their allies grow increasingly wary, seeing the Legion as a cannon that has not been fired in centuries but remains squarely pointed at their homesteads.
Technically the High Council holds no sway over the Legion: but in practise anything they say will be heard by and acted upon by sympathetic (or sufficiently bribed) Councilmembers in the Colonial Council.
High Council
The High Council are an elitist, mostly-hereditary cabal of psions. Fantastically wealthy and influential, ostensibly a meritocracy with only the wisest and most potent of their number holding office.
Psi was once all but unknown, even dismissed as a myth during the First Expansion. Now as much as 1% of the population shows signs of some kind of psi-potential (only one percent of this one percent can actually manifest abilities, such as visible telekinetic prep or telecasting). Of these 33% are psychokinetic: capable of manipulating the physical as well as the mental, with the most common manifestation being telekinesis.
The High Council thinks of psychics (although psionor or psi-practitioner is preferred) as the next step in human evolution. Other groups consider psi to be a genetically engineered trait, first developed before the Schism… and then rediscovered and reintroduced by the Ploror Conglomerate and their then-peerless research department.
Regardless of the truth, psi is big money. The Highs treat every psion as a lucrative cash cow: trained, monitored, and then sent off to work for some supercorp or government. With the Highs getting a percentage of all their earnings, naturally.
And this is the law. All psions must be registered and trained by a High Council-approved body.
Attitudes towards psi-practitioners vary wildly between nations or even worlds. The Domarian Legion was instrumental in the foundation of the Extrasensory Protection Society but this respect for the plight of psions grew into revulsion at what the EPS became. Nowadays the Legion guards their psions closely and refuses to grant the High Council access. Sadly, this leads to a culture where Domarian psions are corralled into set roles and careers, commonly in the military or Security Service. Some even get surgery to neuter or entirely nullify their psi abilities.
Telekinetics are sometimes seen as uncouth, or blue collar, or violent— even by the High Council itself. Tragically an untrained telekinetic can often be a threat to themselves and others around them, but the Highs have weaponised fear of telekinetics for their own purposes.
The Orders
Orders are communities and organisations, often (but not always) religious or spiritual, characterised by a shared world view. The best known Orders are massive agglomerations made up of many different factions that strive to achieve a common purpose through dedicating their lives (either fully or partially) to a particular concept or tenet; merging and analogising traditions and theologies in order to be more inclusive.
The modern Orders began as a Domarian-led initiative to unite like-minded faithful despite interplanetary distances and the differences of language and culture. By focusing on common ground and not their disparities, the logic employed was that a fluorescent-skinned nomadic envoy would feel more at home in the metropolis of hirsute dwarves when he learns that they, too, subscribe to the worldview of the Awed Order. Gradually this shifted from mere classifications to an active effort by these communities to document and support each other. While they do have shared beliefs, there is still variety. Order members accept that deists, theists, agnostics and atheists can still find commonality.
There are hundreds of Orders, often the result of charities and foundations seeking further validation and tax assistance. The Vigilance Movement is sometimes considered to be an Order, but with the exception of a few academic theories this is largely meant in a derogatory sense. While it's true that the Vigil was born of mergers similar to those that formed the Orders, its nature as an organisation designed to legitimise bounty hunting is at odds with the philosophical, spiritual, and philanthropic aims of true Orders.
An Order's popularity varies greatly from nation to nation and even from planet to planet, depending on what appeals to the culture's mindset. The Wary Order is popular in the Domarian Territories (at least by comparison with others) whereas the Glowing Order and Contented Order are dominant in Lodori space, where the High Council originated. In some nations Orders are all but absent, in others they are a way of life and inextricably tied to government.
All Orders have their own extremes and fundamentalists. The best of the Glowing Order will make the last wishes of the incurably ill come true; their worst will squander fortunes on sex and drugs and pleasure sims and excess. The Bloodied Order supplies legal guardians and demands investigation into unjust arrests and persecution… but in their name, zealous mobs have tortured petty criminals to death.
Some Orders are defunct or outlawed, most notably those dedicated to death and nihilism. These tend to be branded cults, separated and alienated from others. The infamous End cult was never recognised as an Order.
Controversially, the High Council itself began life as an Order; the Extrasensory Protection Society.
System basics
Pretty much everything in the Exigency system boils down to rolling 1d20 and adding the appropriate attribute score and talent rank (see also the link at the top of this page!) P.S. sorry for using images, I couldn't format the icons properly!
Potential player character roles
These aren't set in stone, but these are the kind of archetypes you might put together: the system is modular, and I'm also very happy to discuss custom mechanics!
The Campaign
If there's any interest, I'm looking for 3-4 players (or higher?) for a campaign that, potentially, could either be full-length or just a brisk test run depending on everyone's preference.
The phase beacon for a moderately-populated world goes dead. Bad at the best of times, but a mysterious pre-Schism vault has just been discovered beneath the planet's capital city. All the factions based there begin to jostle for power, insisting that whatever lies within the vault is theirs by right. The resident Mercenary League detachments conveniently forget the famous Vursoun Treaty and accept contracts against each other, thrilled by the prospect of unfathomably valuable relics. With off-world travel and communication cut, chaos reigns.
They should have questioned the timing. For the occupants of the vault killed the beacon themselves: prisoners, held in stasis for aeons, and they are not very happy to wake up and find that their glorious endless empire ingloriously ended.
Any questions? Hit me! It's been a long time, but I'm excited to be back on the PbP trail and hope to start something soon!
Last edited August 22, 2015 8:30 am
