(no subject)
Setting idea: near-future 1950s-style-spaceflight campaign - mankind is spreading through the solar system; transistors work but microchips don't, so there's no Internet, no reliable robotics, all communications are analog. Inside Jupiter's orbit, the Solar System is what 1950s SF thought it was; from Jupiter on out, it's what we see it as today, with minor tweaks. In other words, the world of Lucky Starr and Heinlein's juveniles, updated.
So Mercury keeps one face to the Sun, and the dark side is awesomely cold; Venus is covered in jungle and swamp, steaming and near boiling at the equator, tropical at mid-latitudes and temperate at the poles, with dinosaur-like reptilian natives; Mars has a 300-mbar CO2 atmosphere, meaning you need a scuba mask and a parka, and it's criscrossed with canals dug by the vanished natives; the asteroids are the remains of a shattered planet.
The gas giants have enormous jellyfish-shaped floating life forms, which live for eons and carry secrets, if only we could communicate with them. Meanwhile, Io is a hot volcanic hell with sulfuric atmosphere; Europa is a pitch-dark subsurface world ocean with a thriving ecosphere; Ganymede is undergoing terraforming, with atmosphere squeezed from its rocks and energy provided by geothermal vents; Callisto is a dead world, like the Moon... Enceladus is an ice shell around a sphere of water; Titan has the survivors of an alien race that fought a war (which shattered the fifth planet as well as the moon that formerly orbited outside Titan: the dust and remnants of which formed Saturn's rings, scarred Mimas and Tethys, and left behind the fragment Hyperion, which is riddled with huge caves and voids all the way into its center... and the ice giants' moons are largely unexplored.
Frozen-sleep generation ships have been launched to Alpha Centauri, Epsilon Eridanii, and Tau Ceti, but we expect to hear nothing from them this century.
Stories could happen here, right? In the right circumstances, would it be a fun place for an RPG?
So Mercury keeps one face to the Sun, and the dark side is awesomely cold; Venus is covered in jungle and swamp, steaming and near boiling at the equator, tropical at mid-latitudes and temperate at the poles, with dinosaur-like reptilian natives; Mars has a 300-mbar CO2 atmosphere, meaning you need a scuba mask and a parka, and it's criscrossed with canals dug by the vanished natives; the asteroids are the remains of a shattered planet.
The gas giants have enormous jellyfish-shaped floating life forms, which live for eons and carry secrets, if only we could communicate with them. Meanwhile, Io is a hot volcanic hell with sulfuric atmosphere; Europa is a pitch-dark subsurface world ocean with a thriving ecosphere; Ganymede is undergoing terraforming, with atmosphere squeezed from its rocks and energy provided by geothermal vents; Callisto is a dead world, like the Moon... Enceladus is an ice shell around a sphere of water; Titan has the survivors of an alien race that fought a war (which shattered the fifth planet as well as the moon that formerly orbited outside Titan: the dust and remnants of which formed Saturn's rings, scarred Mimas and Tethys, and left behind the fragment Hyperion, which is riddled with huge caves and voids all the way into its center... and the ice giants' moons are largely unexplored.
Frozen-sleep generation ships have been launched to Alpha Centauri, Epsilon Eridanii, and Tau Ceti, but we expect to hear nothing from them this century.
Stories could happen here, right? In the right circumstances, would it be a fun place for an RPG?