Thursday 29 March 2012

To The Stars

A Microscope - derived shared world timeline for gaming in.

The idea is that we play different games each week, place them in a particular point in the timeline, and gradually fill in the details.

After trying numerous free online Timeline creators and finding tham all bugged to fuck, I am simply posting this on my blog.

CAPITALS are long periods of time. The whole thing should take fifty to 100 thousand years, so there is a lot of figurative space between the lines. 


We played for three hours and the whole of human civilisation collapsed twice.


The Rise of a People to the Stars


***********BEGINNING***************NOTHING BEFORE THIS POINT**********
MAN HEADS TO THE NEIGHBOURING PLANETS - dark

NATION STATES ON THE FIRST WORLD BATTLE FOR LOW ORBIT SUPREMACY
(HOT/COLD WARS) – dark

  • Echelon Zero's artificial consciousness emerges from a soup of logic and thought. - light
  • First recorded rampant echelon system – dark

STRANGE WAR WITH THE HIDEOUS MURDERING BUG THINGS – dark

  • Ill fated echelon 3 series used against the HMBT's – light
  • 'Blueprints' for Zero Point Way-station stolen by spies – dark
FOUNDATION OF ZERO POINT WAYSTATION IN OORT CLOUD – light

  • Ten million ships fly past Zero Point Way-station during opening ceremony – light
APEX TECH COLLAPSES ON EARTH – dark

ZERO POINT BECOMES CONSTANTINOPLE-STYLE REMNANT OF A FALLEN CULTURE – light

  • The last message arrives from a collapsing technological planet – dark
  • The last message is received by Zygmunt Blank, the final Soldier-Scholar, Edward Roosevelt, an Engineer and the sculptor Absolom Faringer. In a nihilistic rage Blank kills Absolom Faringer and out of regret he dedicates himself to preserving Absoloms art. Roosevelt attempts to bring Blank to justice but is himself murdered in the sculpture garden on Zero Point. The only witnesses are Roosevelt’s son Archibald and an Gene-engineered Velociraptor named Spielberg. The sublime Art of Faringer sparks a human renaissance that ultimately returns mankind to the stars. The future of mankind was midwived by murder. Both light and dark.

EXPEDITIONS HEAD INTO THE VOID SEEKING TO BRING NEW LIFE – light

  • Archibald Roosevelt agrees to be the founding genome in order to re-establish humanity because it is the right thing to do. - light

RECOLONISATION OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM – light

FIRST SCHWÄRM LADEN WAR – light?

  • Destruction of Zero Point Way-Station – dark
  • Bo Lucas, insane Space Marine, destroys Zero Point whilst under the incompetent command of Sebastian Fortesque during the battle against the Schwärm Laden. Echelon V was the artificial intelligence occupying the defending ship. - dark
  • Karl-4 the Hyper-Neanderthal President of Humanity is persuaded to let Echelon VII lead the Ontological-Warhead strike by Stanislaw Brock the Grand Hierophant of Earth. Echelon VII will encode humanity in the Sun's Corona then seed Jupiter with self-creating nanoswarms that will transform the Jovian mass into a Hypermind that can re-constitute and recreate mankind. Sigmund Ross - Chief Warlock, and mutated psychic, and Augustus Schwarzkopf, 11-Star General of the United Military of Mankind, decide not to accept the offer and will stay and to fight to the death - dark
  • The Echelon VII series leads the final strike against the Schwärm Laden proto-realm - light
  • Ontological warheads are used against the Schwärm Laden for the first time – light

ECHELON IX RECREATES THE HUMAN RACE - light

  • Sigmund Ross returns from Proxima Centauri – dark

THE FOUNDING OF AN INTERSTELLAR EMPIRE – light
*************END*********NOTHING BEOND THIS POINT*********************

3 comments:

  1. Really cool, I think you got everything there. What I think is great is there are no dates on anything, all could be really subjective. I think your rough estimates are pretty good.

    Printed out and really liking the look of GHOST/ECHO for this week's game. Am having a think about when in the timeline a one-shot I might GM could be set, and also what kind of game it could be.

    All good stuff.

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  2. I was thinking we could do 'In a Wicked Age'. We could pick one period in the time line that seems evocative and each write 12 (or 13?) parts of an oracle.

    You are right about the lack of dates making it more interesting. One of the bad things about the online timeline software was that I had to pin everything down to an exact time. It kills a little of the imaginative potential.

    We could just have a fractured timeline, there are two long periods with no central civilisation, so we could have the dating system break down and be re-created twice, a bit different each time. Plus, anyone living on an isolated world during the first long decay will have a totally different conception of time from someone lliving on Zero Point. It only takes one illiterate generation of people for oral history to take over, and that is a very different thing in the way it smushes distant events together and recombines them.

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  3. I like your suggestion for something IAWA-ish.

    And following on from your email, I think that there is lots of scope for setting things in periods, rather than picking events as the focus.

    Depending on how high the technology is, if a colony was cut off from regular supplies it might not take too long for things to break down. AI within a few generations of isolation could be seen as gods or demons...

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