Steampunk Project - Advance of the Britannic Pattern
As (long) promised, now that I've had a bit of free time on my hands I've gotten back to work on the source material and background for the steampunk Roleplaying Game system me and my friend Dave have been working on. He's pushing for a unique roleplaying game system, but since I know from having played some of his test-runs that system is (A) Very complicated, and relies on a lot of "well, what kind of gun do you want?" and not a lot of hard skills/equpiment/etc+price lists, and (B) written on one easily-lost piece of paper, i'm working on it as a GURPS (General Universal Roleplaying System) setting for now. Thanks to demiincarnate i've been badgered into getting enough of it together to post. APPRECIATE!
So what's the plot?
This story takes place a thousand years after Queen Victoria died. Or should have. What actually took place is unclear, but the official story is that during the American War of Independence, the British Empire came into possession of plans for arcane, highly advanced technology. Whether these plans were found among ancient ruins, bequeathed by some lost race or simply invented is not recorded, but they were dubbed "Antediluvian-pattern" archetypes. The first any other nation knew of these was when the first superweapon developed from the archetypes - the first piece of "Britannic-Pattern" technology - was unleashed, wiping the entire southern United States off the map in one stroke. With this godlike power at their hands, the other empires quickly allied themselves with the British Empire: at the Treaty of Bucharest, the marriage of Princess Alice to Mustapha IV secured the official purchase of the Ottoman Empire from Sultan Abdul Hamid I, and treaties soon followed with Russia and China. Having secured their power, the British Empire revealed the next major Britannic-Pattern tech - schematics for a large-scale gate which, the plans promised, would link Earth up with a chain of other inhabitable (and, they would find out later, some inhabited) worlds. The first of these was constructed in the wastelands of what would have been Texas, and within the next few decades a working gate was established and (after the noble sacrifice of many pioneering scientists) a solid link was established between this world and Secundus, or 'Second Earth'. Having crushed the dissedence in the colonies, unified the world's territories and founded the beginnings of a scientific revolution, Queen Victoria finally saw her work as done, and prepared for her deathbed. Then, on the 22nd January 1901, the sun set and never rose again. The earth was soon rendered almost uninhabitable, save for those territories that were already terraformed by the Britannic climate-controllers, and the evacuation of Earth began.
A thousand years have passed since then, and the empire has expanded from Earth to Secundus, Tertius and Solomon. The Britannic Pattern has been codified and expanded under the Royal College of Alchemy, and from the dim corridors of the London citadel, Queen Victoria still extends the rule of the empire over the endless frontiers of the colonies. These events, the empire's "second founding", have since passed into History, then Mythology, then hearsay, as the seemingly Immortal Queen Victoria is to all intents and purposes the living goddess of the Empire - in the eyes of the Nth Generation emigrants, she is the once and future Queen.
Well, that's the long and short of the background plot, and what I've been doing with that is to flesh out the world of the Empire that the games'll be playing in. So far this has involved:
So what's the plot?
This story takes place a thousand years after Queen Victoria died. Or should have. What actually took place is unclear, but the official story is that during the American War of Independence, the British Empire came into possession of plans for arcane, highly advanced technology. Whether these plans were found among ancient ruins, bequeathed by some lost race or simply invented is not recorded, but they were dubbed "Antediluvian-pattern" archetypes. The first any other nation knew of these was when the first superweapon developed from the archetypes - the first piece of "Britannic-Pattern" technology - was unleashed, wiping the entire southern United States off the map in one stroke. With this godlike power at their hands, the other empires quickly allied themselves with the British Empire: at the Treaty of Bucharest, the marriage of Princess Alice to Mustapha IV secured the official purchase of the Ottoman Empire from Sultan Abdul Hamid I, and treaties soon followed with Russia and China. Having secured their power, the British Empire revealed the next major Britannic-Pattern tech - schematics for a large-scale gate which, the plans promised, would link Earth up with a chain of other inhabitable (and, they would find out later, some inhabited) worlds. The first of these was constructed in the wastelands of what would have been Texas, and within the next few decades a working gate was established and (after the noble sacrifice of many pioneering scientists) a solid link was established between this world and Secundus, or 'Second Earth'. Having crushed the dissedence in the colonies, unified the world's territories and founded the beginnings of a scientific revolution, Queen Victoria finally saw her work as done, and prepared for her deathbed. Then, on the 22nd January 1901, the sun set and never rose again. The earth was soon rendered almost uninhabitable, save for those territories that were already terraformed by the Britannic climate-controllers, and the evacuation of Earth began.
A thousand years have passed since then, and the empire has expanded from Earth to Secundus, Tertius and Solomon. The Britannic Pattern has been codified and expanded under the Royal College of Alchemy, and from the dim corridors of the London citadel, Queen Victoria still extends the rule of the empire over the endless frontiers of the colonies. These events, the empire's "second founding", have since passed into History, then Mythology, then hearsay, as the seemingly Immortal Queen Victoria is to all intents and purposes the living goddess of the Empire - in the eyes of the Nth Generation emigrants, she is the once and future Queen.
Well, that's the long and short of the background plot, and what I've been doing with that is to flesh out the world of the Empire that the games'll be playing in. So far this has involved:
- The Royal College of Alchemists, and their research
- Settings for the cities of Secundus such as the canals of New Varanasi, where the gondolas wade through scuds of Cremation ash, and Neo Kowloon, a walled city half the size of modern China and every bit as crime-ridden as its namesake
- The primitive natives of Tertius, identical to the people of Earth
- The millenia-old Gate already constructed on Solomon and the archaeological clues to its construction in the ruined civilizations of Tertius
- The social classes, from Navvy itinerants and Hindu Jati to those wealthy enough to buy continents
- The many adventures of Suleman Worthington; trophy hunter, raconteur and occasional Archaeologist
- The Goddess-Cults surrounding Victoria, from Kuan-Yin to Durga Britannia to the Eternally-Mourning Mother
- The..... interesting history of Nikola Tesla and his earthquake machine