White Noise: The Galaxy of Man

[Brother Adso]

CHARACTER CREATION

1. Ability Scores

Initial ability scores are created using a Point Buy system with 20 points available.  This will lead to seemingly low-powered characters, but improving abilities is easier in White Noise than in D&D, so don't fret too much.

If you don't remember, in a point buy system, a score of 9 costs one point.  Scores of 9-14 go up by one point per point in the score.  A 15 costs 8, a 16 costs 10, a 17 costs 13, and an 18 costs a full 16 points.

2. Character Background and Template

Choose one of the three general backgrounds for your character: Rim World, Core World, Farworld.

Rim Worlders: Are from one of the millions of varied planets throughout human place that are less than fully integrated into the commercial and political webs of the Core Worlds.  Rim Worlds can be anything from lightly-populated agricultural colonies to fiercely independent industrial worlds, or even exotic locales like huge space stations or colony ships.

Core Worlders: Are from one of the few thousand fully terraformed, super-urbanized and arcrologized worlds that form the buzzing, dangerous center of the Galaxy, and from whom most of the White Noise of human existence emanates.  Core Worlders range from sophisticated and suave corporate heirs to desperately poor Maze Proles, but share a greater familiarity with the interconnected and chaotic nature of the universe.

Far Worlders: Are from the uncountable far-flung colonies of Man, the farthest from the centers of white noise.  These range from bucolic farm-planets and moons whose occupants are merely the monks of a huge monastery complex to near-uninhabitable mining worlds and obscure military colonies.  Far Worlders tend to have more extreme physical attributes and less familiarity with the everday language and politics of the Galaxy, and are sometimes less-than-comfortable with technology more advanced than a solar-powered tractor.

Optional Rule:
Far Worlders may add +2 to one physical characteristic, but must take -1 from one physical characteristic and –2 from one mental characteristic.  This should be based on their world of origin – for example, a Far Worlder from a low-G world of cliffs and giant forests might add +2 Dex, -1 Str, and –2 Wis.  The tough, stunted natives of a high-G world might add +2 Con, -1 Dex, and –2 Cha, or the wild inhabitants of a seaworld might add +2 Str, -1 Con, and –2 Int.


2.  Character Skills

Rim World Characters may take 5 + their intelligence modifier non-knowledge, language, or profession skills with (4 + Int Mod) x 4 points to distribute among them.  They may take 3 + Intelligence mod Knowledge, profession, and Language skills with (Int Mod + 2) x4 skill points to dstribute among them.

Core World Characters may take 3 + Int Mod non-knowledge, language, or profession skills with (4 + Int Mod) x 4 points to distribute among them.  They may take 5 + Int Mod knowledge, language and language skills, with (Int Mod + 4) x4 points to distribute among them.

Far World Characters may take 8 non-knowledge, language, or profession skills with 34 points to distribute between them.  They make take 2 + (Wisdom modifier) knowledge, profession, or language skills with (4 + Int Mod) x3 points to distribute between them.

Class Skills: The initially selected skills are your character's Class Skills.  These can change and evolve through the game.

Max Ranks: At character creation, maximum ranks in a skill are equal to 3 + your ability modifier in that skill.

Knowledge Skills:  In a futuristic setting like White Noise, what you know is often an aid to what you can do.  High ranks or successful checks in Knowledge skills will often add a bonus to active skill checks like Pilot, Sneak, etc.

3. Character Hit Points.

All characters begin with 8 + their constitution modifier in Physical Damage.  This is a rough equivalent to hit points and represents grit, toughness, muscle mass, and external wounds.

All characters begin with 4 + their Constitution modifier in System Damage. This is a rough equivalent to 'true damage,' and represents the breaking of major bones, rupturing of organs, going into shock, and such things.

All character begin with 4 + their Wisdom modifier in Mental Stability.  In a futuristic world, one can't rule out the possibility of psychic attackers, nanotech brain parasites, space trauma, and other such threats.  Mental Stability is a combination of a character's sanity and psychic resistance.

Optional Rule
All Characters begin with 1 + their Charisma modifier in Reputation.  After all, once you're off the radar for good, you're of no importance to the world.  Reputation represents the narrative importance of the character in the game world, and when it is reduced to zero, they effectively 'disappear' from the narrative.

3.  Character Saving Throws

Characters must choose one throw to be their 'good throw' and two to be their 'bad throws'.

The three saving throws are: Fortitude (Con-based), Reflex (Dex-based), and Mental Fortitude (Wis-based).

The character's good throw begins with a +2 bonus.  The poor throws begin with no bonus.

4.  Character Attack Bonus

All characters begin with  no base attack bonus, though Str bonus applies to melee attacks and Dex bonus to ranged attacks.

5.  Character Feats

All Characters begin with three feats, at least one of which must be a background feat, providing bonuses to skills or the ability to use a specific type of equipment.  

Feats may be chosen from the D20 Modern or D20 Future sourcebooks.

The only feat all characters are considered to have is Simple Weapon Proficiency.

6.  Character Wealth Bonus

White Noise uses Wealth rather than a specific numerical system to keep track of a character's money.  However, this is open to change, cause cold hard cash is less abstract and can give the players a more gritty feel which I may need.

Character's wealth bonus is equal to 2 + 2D6.  Characters may add 1 for each rank above 2 in a profession skill or each successful DC 17 Craft skill check.

Wealth is recovered after large purchases at the GMs discretion, since wealth recovery doesn't fit into White Noise's XP system.



-Adso[/b]

[Grex]

Hello Adso.

I think that your setting seems very intriguing, and I think that D20 will fit your needs well. It has a large userbase, and -- with the exception of the D&D magic system -- it lends itself well to tinkering and tweaking.

On player advancement: As you can see, I agree with removing level as a concept, because with it goes a lot of the gamism inhernent in D20, although it certainly doesn't entirely erase it -- after all, we need some gamism, since we are playing games.

Brian Gleichman's now sadly defunct Age of Heroes had a very novel system to alleviate the "artificialness" of leveling: When you perform a heroic (or dastardly) deed, you level up.  For lower levels, the deed was fairly mundane, but as your level increased, so would the magnitude of your next heroic deed.

So while you may only need to bring a friend out of harms way to get to 3. level, getting to 10. level will require you to perform a deed that affects a minor kingdom!

Perhaps such a mechanic could prove inspirational to you?

(And it just occurs to me that the Heroic Deed requirement could be combined with a Story Goal for even more crunchy goodness!)

Anyway, just my 2 cents.

[Brother Adso]

At the moment, I rather like my "Players propose, GM Decides" method of experience distribution.  I think it's original and allows the characters to decide where to weigh story goals, characterful action, and sheer combat bad-assery.

It also may go a long ways towards alleviating the feel that player advancement is random or at the whim of the GM, giving players a stake in where the game goes rather than soely having them respond to the challenges I set out.

Those were a pair of fairly heft posts I made...other thoughts?

-Adso

[John Harper]

About rolling for actions:

I don't have a hard mechanic, but I do have some general advice. Let the total ranks in a skill (or value of an attribute) be the GM's guide for when to call for a roll.

Novices should have to trust fate (and roll dice) for almost any trivial task related to the ability. Someone with zero ranks in Driving will have to roll just to parallel park, for example.

Experts should be able to perform almost any normal application of the ability without rolling. An expert driver can parallel park, in the rain, at night. No need to roll. The player bought all those skill ranks to represent what a great driver the character is. Great drivers don't screw up parallel parking.

Experts have to roll when performing normal tasks under duress. What if you *must* parallel park, right now, while the hood of the car is on fire and someone you can't see is shooting at you? Now you roll and take your chances. Failure to park is now possible, even for the Expert.

It's a sliding scale. It might help to provide solid benchmarks to the GM about what 10, 15, 20, or 25 ranks in a skill mean. Is 20 ranks a "Master"? What can a Master be expected to do without rolling? When does a Master have a chance to fail? That's when you roll.

Another way to look at it:
Your ability level automatically buys you a certain grade of performance. If you want a different grade, you need to roll the dice and take your chances.

The Novice driver automatically parallel parks, but he dings up the fenders. Wanna do it without hitting the other cars? You need to roll.

The Expert driver automatically parallel parks, on a wet road, in a tight space. Want to do it so quickly and smoothly that you impress your date? Time to roll.

The result of the die roll detrmines the quality of your performance, but you always start from a baseline depending on your ability level. This shifts the resolution system from pass/fail to generating a range of outcomes from poor to perfect.

[Sydney Freedberg]

Just to pull this thread over to setting (rather than system) for a moment, allow me to applaud these themes and make a suggestion:

Themes: Singular:
Diversity (of the millions of worlds and societies),
Stagnation (of technology),
Anarchy (of belief, politics, and trade).

Themes: Conflict:
Anarchy vs. Unity (governments trying to consolidate their power in their local areas),
Power vs Entropy (Governments falling apart from within),
Idealism vs Reality (Ideas confronting the diversity and anarchy of the White Noise of other ideas, or idealist movements being compromised to govern effectively),
Self-Interest vs Social Focus (the classic Han Solo dilemma).

There's a lot of neat potential in here, particularly if you combine some of these bipolar conflicts to create more complex dilemmas.

To drag in poor Conan again, people tend to think those stories are about "honest, hardy barbarism vs. degenerate, sorcerous civilization" -- but it's actually more complex than that, because in the Howard stories I've read the overcivilized softies are frequently threatened either by evil barbarians or supernatural nasties or both (e.g."Black Colossus"), and it's Conan standing between civilization and savagery, less like a "barbarian" than a Texas Ranger or two-fisted pulp detective, rough-edged and uncouth and occasionally outright criminal but also driven by a powerful personal sense of what is right.

Now applied to Brother Adso's setting (yes, I had a point, dammit, stick with me), and especially looking at the themes above and the character generation suggestions, which make the people of the galaxy look pretty wildly diverse, a key conflict might pile up anarchy, diversity, & entropy on one side vs. unity, power, & stagnation on the other -- with the player characters, like Conan, in the middle.

In a galaxy so vast, where human nature itself is up for grabs, there is limitless freedom to do and be whatever you want -- but as everyone rushes in all directions, any common sense of "we are humanity" gets pulled apart, leading to entropy as the productive energy of human society is dissipated and any unifying structure is dissolved. So the natural response is to try to re-impose unity, if necessary by force, which if successful freezes everything in place and leads to stagnation... which inevitably decays and opens the door to anarchy again.

You could see this pattern on a galactic scale, or in a local cluster as a particular Core World tries to control a bunch of ornery outworld colonies and its urban underclass at the seame time, or on a single planet, where the original settlers had a vision of the kind of perfect society they wanted to create but now many of the second generation colonists are heading off into the wilds to do whatever in defiance of the Elders.

And the fun part, from a gaming perspective, is that both sides are always at least a little right, and always at least a little wrong, which means the characters can come down however they want.

EDIT: As a postscript, this complicates one level further, because either extreme leads to stagnation & entropy. Too much unity, and the system locks down: innovation must be suppressed as deviation, and rigidity (inability to adapt) leads to entropy. Too much anarchy, adn the system flies apart: there's so much innovation that none of it can ever taken hold and spread, because everyone's off in their own corner not communicating -- maybe no longer sharing enough common humanity even to be able to communicate -- and all the dissipated effort, the waste heat of civilization, leads to entropy.

So players who care are constantly forced to juggle how when freedom goes too far into anarchy, and when harmony goes too far into conformity.

Or they can just blow stuff up.[/i]

[TonyLB]

Sydney, I love that setup.  You're right that both sides are always a little wrong and always a little right.

What would help address this (IMHO) is to steal a page from Dogs in the Vineyard and ask "What does each side want, specifically, from the PCs that they cannot get any other way?"

[Sydney Freedberg]

With the additional option that White Noise PCs, unlike DiTV's Dogs, have no moral obligation to fix things and can always say "you're both wrong, so screw you all, I'm taking the money and a-runnin'! By the way, see that beeping red thing? Your planet explodes in six seconds."

[TonyLB]

Yeah, but the planet exploding thing should not be optional.  The PCs don't have a moral obligation to fix things, but they should not be able to avoid being important.  If they don't pick a side it's not just back to status quo:  Both sides must lose as a result, big-time.

[Sydney Freedberg]

Both sides must lose as a result, big-time.

Which can be very satisfying if both sides are portrayed as thorough bastards who had it coming.

Which requires the GM to play along with the players' lack of sympathy for either faction, but is doable. Your model here is the Kurosawa samurai movie Yojimbo, remade in the US as the Bruce Willis gangster flick Last Man Standing (only seen the Kurosawa myself).

[Brother Adso]

To develop on some of these ideas within a game setting....

First, some general background:

"And lo, on the seventh day of the hundredth year of the tyrant's reign, a bright light was seen on the eastern horizon, and all proclaimed to Heaven that the Deliverer had come!  But mankind was created forgetful and deceitful, and the Delivererance was yet to come, yet Mankind followed the Light into the Stars..."
   -From the third chapter of the Astral Revelation, preserved in the Librarium on Jamison's Moon.

The Prehistory of White Noise

Mankind originated on a planet called Earth, in the Sol system.  After fighting and working over the surface of his planet for thousands of years, he began to reach out to the stars with frozen fingers.  Sleeper ships of enormous size were dispatched to habitable planets, and man on his home planet continued to build and war himself into oblivion.

Time passed.

On one of the far-flung cities of Man established by the sleeper ships, a man named Frazier discovered the principles behind what we today call hyperspace travel, and the first Frazier Ships began to tentatively reach back towards Earth.  Frazier drive was effective at moving ships through space, but no one knew how much time dilation would be experienced by the crew, and the lack of a form of faster-than-light communication to go along with the drive made progress halting and fraught with danger.

Time passed.

Over hundreds of years, the Beacon Trails were blazed across the stars by intrepid pioneers and the marks of a thousand and one Frazier Drives, linking together the largest and oldest worlds of humanity.  The Terran Hegemony rose and fell, and the White Star Republic had its glorious march across the galaxy, the Crusade of Ji'lal drove to the end of the Core and back.  But

Time passed.

And today the Galaxy is nothing but noise – Frazier Boats dive into the untrailed frontier, and the Beacon Trails are the lifeblood of the huge band of worlds known as the Core.  No one can count the planets of Man, nor his governments.  The great names of history live on in some form, Jesus and Buddah and Muhammed and Confucius, Haratha and Frazier, though they have been worn and changed by time like rocks in a river.  Despite many attempts, no form of communication faster than a Frazier boat has yet been invented, and human worlds drift apart or together as the tides of shipping dictate.  Without a change in their basic technologies, humankind has had no imputus to expand beyond Frazier drive and its various derivations – some ship designs have been in service since the days of the Crusades and earlier.

"The fleet of Earth stands to meet us again, compatriots!  Like an ancient dragon she circles our two homeworlds, bellowing in greed and might.  Not unless you wish to see a new Archonic era shall you shirk your duty, not unless you wish ill on your parents, children, wives shall your courage fail you this day – now to stations!"
   -Fleet Commander Uther Lynyyd on the eve of the Third Battle of Ceti


Technology in White Noise

"OK, see this thingy?  Yeah, the red one over...no, the other one.  Right.  That's the Frazier Compression Valve, and it leads to the main energy conduits here...the problem should be in that linkup.  What?  Of course I know what I'm doing, it's just a Frazier drive, come on."
    -Last word of Gordon MacHearty, smuggler and amateur mechanic

The universe of Man has been stuck refining itself for many thousands of years.  The invention of the Frazier Drive and its attendant technologies has never been equaled, and despite (or perhaps because of) the creative anarchy of the Noise, all that seems to work is refinement of what exists.

Frazier Free Drive uses mass shadows and energy analysis to plot a ship's location relative to the Galactic Core and the Outer Rim, and then uses a tremendous boost of energy to translate the ship into Whitespace. Whitespace is really an unknown quantity – it is a dead space for all things outside of a Frazier Translation, as countless experiments have shown, and its total incapacity to retain or reflect energy has rendered detailed study of it impossible. In Free Drive, ships move at a speed based on the power and proximity of energy readings, meaning trips through nebulae or starfields take place at higher velocities than those between stars with few energy phenomenon between them. Moreover, Free Frazier translations can only occur where Whitespace is 'softened' by large gravity wells – usually well inside star systems.

A Free Frazier drive moving between two stars in a spiral arm of normal density usually obtains what amounts to a velocity of 3.5x-5x lightspeed, meaning travel between distant destinations can still take years. On the far fringes of the galaxy, Frazier translations only seem to move ships at a speed of between 2.5-4x lightspeed, making these worlds isolated and rarely worth the trouble to colonize.

Beacon Drive: More common in this day and age than Frazier Free Drive is Frazier Beacon drive. After about two hundred and fifty years of regular use, it was noted that regular routes were beginning to develop an energy signature in whitespace, which had previously been a dead zone as far as anyone could tell. It was also around this time that the principles behind heavy particle emission were discovered, allowing the emulation of solar radiation on small scales. Eventually, it was discovered that placing well-contained beacons that emulated the energy emissions of small stars at either end of these 'Frazier Routes' sped up travel enormously, taking Frazier Drive from 5-6x to 15-25x lightspeed. Indeed, new and more efficient derivations of Frazier Drive that operated soely off the guidance of these Beacons were quick to develop, and slowly, as ships plied the space between the core systems, more and more Beacon Routes were discovered.

In today's world, the deployment of new Frazier Beacons is quite uncommon, and is usually an occasion for great celebration. In fact, many people distinguish between Beacon Worlds or Core Worlds and their less-developed neighbors, to whom the only access is through much slower Free Drive. The great trade hubs of the Galaxy have ossified, and it is rare that enough traffic will cross a route to initiate the energy signal needed for a Beacon; much less that any group with access to the money and technology needed to create the Beacons will take an interest and deploy them.

-Adso

[Brother Adso]

An now, some more general design text:



What Is White Noise?

White Noise is the anarchy that fills the cosmos. It's also a nickname for the spacer's illness that claims men who spend too much time staring into Whitespace on long frontier hauls. White Noise is the seven hundred ninety-five Novae-Rap stations that a ship in Tau Ceti Prime's docking orbit is bombarded with, White Noise is the thirty-fourth Prime Minister of Ceres VI in as many months, White Noise is the buzz in the local beer hall on Jurgenson's World about a corrodrium strike in the asteroid belt and the buzz of your decompression alarm when the customs inspectors come a-knockin'. White Noise is creativity and destruction, White Noise is what you are stuck in.

Where Is White Noise?

White Noise takes place in the Galaxy of Man, a huge and indecipherable Rorschach blot on the cosmos of worlds and stories and histories. No one remembers much about Earth or its histories or petty conflicts, and precious few remember how the Frazier Beacons that glare through the pea soup of Whitespace got there. Anything you can think of happens in the Galaxy of Man somewhere, and most likely someone is already trying that scheme you thought of last week.

What is the Galaxy like?

Without faster than light travel or communications, mankind reached out to bat the stars. From those sleeper colonies were born new worlds and cultures, who solved the problem of interstellar travel through Frazier Free Drive, but could not solve faster-than-light communication – in fact, no one ever has, and this is a fundamental fact of existence in the everyday world of White Noise – keep it in mind as you read.

The galaxy consists of three main types of systems and worlds (usually only one world and its nearspace in a system is inhabited, except in rare cases.) The core worlds are bound together by a network of Frazier Beacons put into place hundreds of years ago, which reduce interstellar travel times to weeks under Beacon Drive rather than the months and years of Frazier Free Drive. These worlds were probably settled during the initial Hajj/Exodus from Earth long ago, many of them by the first gigantic sleeper ships, and today are huge, bustling urban centers. Few can provide for their own food or even water, and their nearspace is often a mess of space stations, orbital habitats, and military installations. Usually the Beacon Station is the most important feature of such a system outside of the planet itself, since without a Beacon, core worlds are cut out of the fabric of speedy trade and communication that defines their existence.

The Rim Worlds have never entered the Beacon Network, but are well developed and well-placed enough to have had significant development and human habitation. Often, Rim Worlds are dependent on a Core World and do most of their trade with the nearest Core outlet, since Free Drive ships take months to cross the light-years and years to cross true interstellar gulfs. Rim Worlds are where White Noise is lessened somewhat, and they often have a chance to develop stable, coherent cultures and ideals of their own. Rim Worlds are more numerous than either Far or Core Worlds, though in population they do not even come near to equaling the massive numbers of the Core.

Far Worlds are even more removed from the networks of trade and communication that describe the Galaxy. Often years removed from the nearest Core World, they are usually settled by pioneers, idealists, and prospectors, or claimed by aspiring imperialists on Rim Worlds with visions of forcing their entry into the Core.

Who Controls the Galaxy Of Man?

Only the inscrutable patterns of White Noise control the galaxy, their tides sweeping back and forth across its face and scattering the best-laid plans of governments, people, and whole worlds into pieces: the Galaxy of Man is chaos theory in action.

However, people are social creatures, and, as Plato taught us, society inevitably leads to government of some kind. There are far too many governments, corporations, interstellar churches, and world revolutionary movements to even try to delve into here, and in the gleaming cities of the Core new ones are born and old ones collapse every week. However, here are a few samples:

[Brother Adso]

And finally, an actual adventure setting.  This is what you all are probably most interested in, tell me how it corresponds to the ideas of thematic conflict and moral ambiguity you've been developing in this thread.


The Celestial Empire

With perhaps thirty-five core worlds and upwards of one hundred Rim Worlds in its unique web of controls, the Celestial Empire is one of the largest contiguous and stable political units in the Galaxy. The Celestial Empire was founded after the end of the Terran Hegemony over nine hundred years ago or so, and its culture and ethos have flourished and spread across the Web.

The Empire is governed by an absolute monarch, the Enthroned Emperor, whose duties are primarily religious and symbolic, but who reserves the right to appoint and dismiss members of the administrative Yuan. Yuan, or commissions, make up most of the high-level administrative machinery of the Empire, and are staffed with experts who have passed specifically tailored tests – one, a test of cultural and moral refinement, and between two and five to enter into successively more specialized Yuan. Most of these are located in the White City on the homeworld of the Empire, but many of the larger core worlds have administrative Yuan of their own. However, the reason the Celestial Empire has held together so well over the years is its system of viceroy appointment. All worlds that aren't under the direct administration the emperor are controlled by a Viceroy and his staff, all of whom have passed the tests required for entry into administrative Yuan but were chosen for the provincial service. These Viceroys hold local exminations and recruit minor officials to collect taxes and manage local affairs, and arrange for annual trips of promising students to take the official examinations at the Seven Celestial Schools. To ensure their honesty, they and their higher-level staff are transferred every four years or so to a new province, and receive regular monitoring visits from the dreaded Five Pious Reviews Yuan, which inspects the Viceroy's domains for corruption and mismanagement.

The Empire's military is as ponderous as its administrative structure, using giant ion-drive and photon-sail combinations to maneuver great battleships and cruisers-of-the line into position, while locally constructed frigates and support ships flit about on chemical drives. On land, they use well-disciplined shock troops to supplement locally armed forces raised by the Viceroy, and long lines of military families provide the basis for quality leadership and highly motivated elite troops.  Technologically, the Empire is on par with or slightly behind other local governments, relying primarily on heavy missile batteries for long and medium range combat, and on heavy projected-energy weapons, drawing on the power reserves provided by the sails, for close ship-to-ship combat.  Lighter frigate and support type ships often mount one large forward-facing rail projector and numerous light chainguns in a distinctive configuration known as the Dragon Prow.

The Empire is largely self sufficient, but trades extensively in the one area it is ahead of much of the rest of the Core in: medical technologies. An extremely effective anti-aging treatment has been developed for hundreds of years in the Empire, as have gene-modded crops and extremely effective broad-spectrum vaccines.  These irreplaceable goods are supplemented by some of the more unique luxuries which the Celestial Real extracts from its many Viceroyalities, making their trade system fairly expansive, if mostly one-sided.

Internally, the Empire is overpopulated and unstable, but presents a face of bucolic quietude to the casual visitor on many of its worlds.  Religious and political movements bubble on isolated Viceroyalities who see no part of their trade, and the rich medical houses and ostensibly-Imperial trading houses are willing to do almost anything to increase their own power.  Within the great core worlds, crime gangs dominate the trade in quality items and weaponry under the nose of well-meaning Viceroys, and the urban poor slave for minimal wages in the halls of universities and grocery markets, living in fear of their landlords or local powerbrokers.

Plot hooks in the Celestial Empire:

1.   The local viceroy is being replaced, and the characters are involved in his attempts to clean and cover his abuses before the inspection squads arrive, or, alternately, are out to expose him for money or idealism.  To give this the moral twist that White Noise tales should have, the Viceroy may be quite good, or have military skills desperately needed at his own posting – or, alternately, his preservation could be essential to the maintenance of an entirely different corrupt institution.

2.   A religious leader, claiming communion with the spirit of the "Throneless Emperor," is stirring up the ignorant masses on one of the core worlds by distributing the medical resources usually reserved for the upper classes and promising life extensory treatments for all, rather than just those who pass the exams.  The players must struggle with the movement's motives, where it gets its resources, and whether or not it actually has the potential to change society for the better.

3.   One of the Rim Worlds in the the Empire has been secretly buying up excess weapons and hiring mercenaries for over a decade, and has finally declared itself a stellar republic.  Its people are of a different ethinicity, religions, and language than the Empire, but Yuan decide to come down hard to teach the rest of their worlds a lesson about the results of rebellion.  The players, as garrison troops or Imperial advisors, smugglers or citizens, choose sides and weigh consequences.  The rebels may be working for their own ends, their rebellion probably takes on ugly ethnic overtones, and war starves and impoverishes the people.  But what is it worth to be free of the dead weight of the Viceroys?



There you all go!  I hope that cavalcade of posting won't scare away readers -- don't worry, no one needs to read it all!

-Adso

[Sydney Freedberg]

A flavorful translation of the Middle Kingdom into space opera. A few initial thoughts:

- With advanced neurological technology, a Confucian exam system can actually work -- maybe they can scan the candidate's brain and augment it, or even put the candidate in a virtual reality for 20 years of subjective time to see whether they would be corrupt or incompetent. Of course the simulations may be totally off-base from reality, especially after a few centuries of ossifying tradition.

- With advanced bio-tech, you can bring in another classic Chinese image, huge paddies tilled by peasants (or robots...), only here with genetically engineered plants producing the advanced anti-aging drugs.

- With cybernetic enhancement and genetic engineering, all those Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and (Matrix ) -style martial arts become possible too.

[DevP]

I read over your backstory. I don't think parts of it are necessary, but they are good to have - many players will earnestly want something more than just a "blackbox" explanation for their interstellar drives, for example, or some greater basis for the origins. I like the way you treated the origins - you basically touched just slightly on things that a lesser setting would have gotten fixated on. But the curtness with which you blow through the Beacon Trails and so on - that emphaisizes how little those little manmade empire really matter. And of course, you backstory can be quickly summed up: "After times of trouble, mankind was cast to the winds. The worlds are developed, developing or underdeveloped." The two-second summary is a good sign. (Not that said summary does justice, but being able to condense is good.)

Instead, I hope to get players into a "wanderer" mindset that will allow them to express their creativity and the GM to explore the uncreated universe.
...
Finally, the universe is deliberately uncreated.

So, this is interesting: in what ways do you want them to express their creativity - is the world creation in fact part of the process? As a GM, this is a great creative engagement for you, but the world is also a great tool for engaging the players in.

Should I introduce mechanics for narrative control and world building?  This would be a hard step.

It would indeed, but it could be worth it. You might not need "mechanics" as such for world-building, or you might not want to 100% share world-building (in my case, the players didn't really want it), but you should come up with some process where whomever (GM or players or all) create a setting that engages the themes of White Noise and engages the players. I dig your themes:

Themes: Singular:
Diversity (of the millions of worlds and societies),
Stagnation (of technology),
Anarchy (of belief, politics, and trade).

Themes: Conflict:
Anarchy vs. Unity (governments trying to consolidate their power in their local areas),
Power vs Entropy (Governments falling apart from within),
Idealism vs Reality (Ideas confronting the diversity and anarchy of the White Noise of other ideas, or idealist movements being compromised to govern effectively),
Self-Interest vs Social Focus (the classic Han Solo dilemma).

So, just for starters: what if, after a session (and if it was a clear the characters would arrive at a new world next session), have the players (1) quickly toss out a few interesting elements to integrate, Iron Chef Style (a sea of mercury! cyborgs flying zepplins!), which you might try mixing in; but more importantly (2) highlight which of the "axes" of themes above they would want to play with.

Maybe even define the players, NPCs, and major power groups / organizations in terms of the relationships above? Kind of like a Relationship Map, but different? Or creative a multipronged axis on the issues above where you draw jagged lines between conflicting issues? Or perhaps, when players decide on an interesting axis or two of conflict in step (2), create a setting based entirely around a few Color hooks and otherwise on agitating those axes?

Anyway, those are a few thoughts in the direction. How do you go about creating a new world (like the one above), and how do you think it should go?