Straight On 'Til Morning [Archive] - HERO Games Discussion Boards

Zachary Butler

Apr 5th, '07, 11:26 AM

The First Diaspora began shortly after the perfection of the Tunnel Drive. Starships filled with volunteers left earth to find homes on new planets. The crews and colonists tended to be from unified cultural and ethnic groups who, for the most part, wanted to remain homogenous (resulting in colonies like Mosiah, founded by a group of Mormons, New Saint Petersberg, founded by Russians, and New Camelot, founded by members of the Society for Creative Anachronism).

The beginnings of interstellar colonization directly led to the rise of the Terran Hegemony, an interstellar governing body controlled from Earth that ruled the mass of humanity for nearly five hundred years. Over time, the government of the Terran Hegemony became corrupt and bloated. The growing unrest among the people of Earth, combined with the pressure of overpopulation and a sense of political expediency sparked the Second Diaspora.

Unlike the First Diaspora, the colonists transported from Earth during the Second Diaspora were not volunteers. Most of the "colonists" were political dissidents, the poor, members of unpopular ethnic minorities, and no small number of real criminals, all being "disposed of" through involuntary migration.

In most cases, the colony ships of the Second Diaspora were sent to previously colonized worlds with no warning or advanced notice. Suddenly the previously homogenous worlds had foreign populations thrust upon them with no chance to refuse. In some cases, the new populations were quietly merged with the old. In other cases, the merger was less than peaceful.

After five hundred years, the Terran Hegemony crumbled under a wave of dissatisfaction and growing nationalism. Some of the more advanced colony worlds rose up in active rebellion against the "overlords" on Earth. While the war devastated most if not all of the advanced planets involved, the less advanced colonies suddenly found themselves suddenly independent... whether they were prepared for it or not. Interstellar civilization collapsed as the various colonies struggled to survive the loss of economic and technological support.

On the luckier planets, some semblance of a technological society was retained. On unlucky worlds, civilization collapsed entirely. Earth itself became the unluckiest planet of all. The fall of the Hegemony sparked off a series of wars between the formerly united nations... wars fought ultimately with weapons of mass destruction, devastating the planet and rendering it uninhabitable to man.

Now, six hundred years after the Fall of Man, the age of ignorance and isolation is ending as interstellar contact between the inhabited worlds begins anew.

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And Straight On 'Til Morning... is a Star Hero campaign set in the far reaches of space. The campaign revolves around the Player Characters, all crewmembers on sanctioned trade-ship and all hailing from the Harmonious Empire of Ojin-Jingu. While I expect to start the campaign out small, I hope to increase the scope of the campaign. Players should thusly not expect to save the universe their first time out.

Background information regarding the universe in which the campaign will take place is found in the Encyclopedia.

The campaign is firmly in the Hard Science sub-genre of science fiction. In Hard Science Fiction, the laws of physics are strictly enforced and obeyed with a small handful of exceptions. The advanced technology found and used in this campaign are extrapolations of current science and technology, and the GM will be carefully avoiding technology that fits perfectly into the definition of Clarke's Law.

Most of the exceptions to the Hard Science standard are included in the game-world for the purposes of role-playing expediency and campaign flavor. The existence of faster-than-light travel being the most notable exception. Others include universal vaccines, "naval analogy" space battles, some of the more esoteric sensor technology, some of the more esoteric medial technology, room temperature super-conductors, and a lack of relativistic effects from traveling at extreme speeds.

Earth is a half-forgotten legend... a utopian fairyland of long ago akin to the Atlantis legends in the modern day. At the start of the campaign, most inhabited planets are singular and isolated, with very little contact from other planets. Some small groupings of planets have formed under various governments, but nothing on the scale of the Terran Hegemony.

After a long period of relative isolation, the people of one such grouping, the Harmonius Empire of Ojin-Jingu, led by the example of their Tenno, the young and idealistic Kazuko al-Shirzad, has been reaching out to its neighbors. With Ojin-Jingu as a core of civilization, the players are entering the "high frontier".
For more information, please visit www.globalguardians.com (http://www.globalguardians.com), or contact Jack Butler at jbutler @ globalguardians.com (just remove the spaces).