I wrote this scenario for a D&D-like game that I played a few times with a small group. We never completed a campaign but we had fun. It’s yours to steal for whatever purpose you deem worthy. There is a stat system at the bottom, for which I could, on request, unearth a spreadsheet we used to keep track of character growth.
Late Earth-Autumn, Year 39,624. The Chelona, the second-largest freighter in the solar system undergoes routine maintenance on Digitus, the largest station and capital of the Archipelago, an interconnected system of space stations, home of the Nerezore.
Nerezore engineers prepare the Chelona for its once-a-century voyage to Earth. Earth is the solar system’s only reliable source of Thorium, which powers the Lunar nuclear reactors that generate 99.9% of all energy used by Sapioids. Every hundred years, the Chelona departs from the Archipelago, docks on Earth and loads approximately a gigaton of Thorium, mined and extracted in a joint effort by the Nerezore and the Humans. The Chelona then embarks on a short flight to the Moon to offload its payload. Tropos scientists and engineers, native to the Moon, generate energy in lunar reactors which is then stored in batteries. Powerful cannons fire batteries to Earth and to the Archipelago, resupplying energy to Human and Nerezore societies.
The upcoming voyage is the third since the three strains of Sapioids reached the solar-system-wide agreement that ensures Humans, Tropos, and Nerezore can all rely on abundant energy and thus avoid the wars that plagued the history of the Homo sapiens. The three descendant species of Homo sapiens ratified the Posto Yenasil Treaty hoping to usher in a mutually-assured Golden Age of Sapioid flourishing. So far, the treaty has held. The first two trips of the Chelona succeeded without glitches or conflict, but insiders on all sides have grown nervous because of the ever-increasing trimorphism that weakens the common ground between the three species of Sapioids. Inter-species communication shrunk to almost zero in the previous century, with cultures growing apart, occupied by their own internal struggles.
Humans have grown distrustful of Tropos and Nerezore. The religion of Durism has become the dominant ideology on Earth; Durism prizes the strong, the everlasting: the durable. The weak, spindly bodies of the Tropos disgust Durist, as do the Tropos’ core value of growing towards the light, which, to Durists, seems to come from an internal weakness, a spiritual disease that can only perpetuate dissatisfaction. Human Durists generally hold an ambivalent but ultimately negative view of the Nerezore; the Durists admire the hardiness and hardness of mechanical bodies but reject the Nerezore’s retreat to digital realms back on the Archipelago. To a Human Durist, to live without a physical body is not to live at all, and that a being would choose to exist as data rather than flesh is as incomprehensible as it is offensive.
The Tropos see themselves as having transcended the Earth-bound Humans whose primitive and physicalist ways keep them tethered to the bloody history of apes. They view themselves as having outgrown gender, violence, and religion, concepts which signal an ugly and brutal past. Tropos people moreover see themselves as masters of the Nerezore, whose total reliance on energy-intensive computation make them slaves to the minerals of Earth and the batteries of the Moon. An initially radical but ever-normalizing and -growing faction of Tropos encourages secession from the three-way status quo. This faction targets interplanetary and then intergalactic expansion of Tropos philosophy, which exalts energy expenditure as a holy act that moves time forward. These energalitarians believe that societal inequities can be smoothed out by an abundance of energy so that no person is consigned to a life of labor or hardship. One pursues one’s pleasures, but, as the inevitable irony of the Cosmos would have it, the pleasures one desires betray one’s status — to spend the gift of boundless energy on something as basic as eating and drinking would be a classless waste, whereas abstract yet energy-intensive pursuits such as searching for new prime numbers command respect and admiration among Tropos elites.
The Nerezore, by and large, revere Humans and Tropos as their ancient and recent forebearers, respectively. Nerezore also know that their society could never function without the batteries manufactured on the Moon using Earth elements. As such, Nerezore see Humans as flawed but necessary predecessors, as prehistoric apes were to earlier Humans. And it was Tropos technology that engendered the Nerezore way of life in the first place, allowing the upload of consciousness to Silicon without any substrate of Carbon, so that the first Fleshless pioneers could build utopian Datarealms, vast digital worlds computed on machines smaller than a Human’s fist. Though Nerezore spend almost all of their time as computed beings inside Datarealms with no physical instantiation, they also maintain Human- and Tropos- habitable space stations in the Archipelago, complete with oxygen, artificial gravity, and vast crop gardens that lay dormant, suspended in time. A Nerezore consciousness can load onto a temporary robotic body when the need arises for labor or repairs in the physical realm. Nerezore in Robocasts handle maintenance of the Archipelago, radioactive materials on Tropos, and the impossibly hot Thorium mines on Earth.
A large number of Human Durists have been mounting support for an upheaval of the tri-species equilibrium that defined the last three centuries. Humans have all but lost the knowledge contained in the industrial machines powered by the Lunar batteries that sustain the Human economy. Nothing remains of the scientific and engineering knowledge beyond basic operational procedures. At the same time, ancient ways of life have risen in popularity, as have their corresponding sources of energy. A spiritual mystique glistens off the notion of fire. Humans rediscovered coal 80 years ago. The most radical Durists meet in secret and dream of returning to a historical Earth that does not rely on aliens and robots. “Bash the 'bots! Smash the spiders!” A two-line, two-slur slogan, first mumbled, then spoken, then yelled. Humans hold a gravitationally-endowed physical advantage over the Tropos; moreover, the progressive Tropos have not developed weapons in decades, while the Humans’ rekindled fascination with ancient techniques has led to an uptick in the manufacture of blades, spears, slings, and bows. Even the most rudimentary of the Tropos’ old energy weapons could massacre a primitivist Human mob, but many radical Durists claim the Tropos have totally lost the spiritual backbone it takes to pull the trigger. These radical leaders name the upcoming voyage of the Chelona as the perfect opportunity to strike — to send a message.
Meanwhile, in Elefteria, a large city mere kilometers from the Moon’s Shadow Meridian, a cabal of Tropos-supremacists schemes in whispers. The Tropos have known for millennia that the Moon is rich with Thorium, but since the Posto Yenasil Treaty was signed, almost all machinery relating to mineral mining and processing has been stationed on Earth. It would be impossible to fabricate any equipment capable of extracting a usable amount of Thorium anywhere on the Moon’s Solar Hemisphere without being detected. But if the cabal could manage to set up a modest operation in the Shadow Hemisphere, away from the Tropos population and away from the loose lips of the cargo-dockworkers… as the thinking goes, the Moon could sever its umbilical ties from the base and bloody Earth, and unprecedented speeds of Tropos intellectual evolution could begin. A new kind of mind and a new paradigm of culture, one worth disseminating across the cosmos: to Mars, then to moons of the gas giants, then to new galaxies. And so, in flagrant breach of the Posto Yenasil Treaty, the cabal, the Tzelem, a radical subgroup of the energalitarians, has taken an unretractable, crossing-the-Rubicon first step: illegal semi-permanent habitations in the Shadow Hemisphere, and increasingly-frequent expeditions into the Hemisphere in search of craters and caves large enough to hide a clandestine mining operation.
Finally, at the same time, a Nerezore group, the Silicites, imagines the first truly digital utopia, untethered from the fleshy beasts once and for all. For proto-Silicites, reverence for Humans and Tropos withered into pity of their humble, limited cultures. Pity fermented into disdain and resentment. The Silicites were formed when enough Nerezore decided that carbon was not just quaint, it was disgusting, unclean, a problem to be dealt with. But as the richness and fantasy of the Datarealms have grown, so too has grown the weight of the computation underneath it all. The Nerezore appetite for energy, once an infinitesimal sliver compared to the inefficient needs of meaty biology, has ballooned with no sign of stopping. Therefore, the Nerezore cannot decouple from Earth and the Moon without a replacement for the nuclear batteries launched from the Moon every 108 hours. Nerezore are easily able to augment their neural processing with Calcubanks, blazing-fast computers that run subroutines outside of DataRealms’ main environmental renderings. Once wealthy Nerezore joined the Silicites and offered up Calcubank access to thought leaders, an unprecedented plan took shape. To Biotes (Humans and Tropos), the Archipelago is merely an illusion of a functional space station. Yes, you could survive on the the fruits of the garden, assuming it can still be resuscitated from its dormant state, but there’s no industrial-scale machinery to repair or defend any of the stations. Nerezore maintain only the most basic physical mechanisms at a perfunctory level; who needs security when you have millions of backups of yourself on millions of floating computers? The Silicites’ separatist plan? Go straight to the best nuclear reactor of them all: the Sun. That they are legally bound not to own or fabricate any physical equipment powerful enough to manufacture solar panels (so as to maintain the equilibrium of energy-interdependence), but through repeated simulations, Silicite scientists have hatched a scheme to isolate, then improve and synthesize the mechanisms behind photosynthesis using the gardens as raw materials. Harvesting infinite energy from the Sun breaks the shackles to the horrendous gassy bodies on the Moon and Earth; it would then be so easy to scatter into the Cosmos, undetectable by any biology, united by pure-data communication forever.
Early Earth-Winter, Year 39,625. A crew of two-thousand Nerezore slips into hardy robotic bodies and sets off for Earth on the Chelona. The novelty of existing in the Old Physical Realm has been dead for generations; most of the crew treat the trip as a necessary inconvenience, a way to get paid a little extra, and a chance to absorb some stories to tell. It’s easy, managerial work, nothing like the brutal punishment Nerezore criminals face in Earth mines.
A cohort of two-hundred Tropos, half dockworkers, half “presiders” and political celebrities, intercepts the Chelona’s path halfway to Earth and disembarks on the huge freighter.
When the Chelona enters Earth orbit, Human cargo-masters sync up the radios and engage the centuries-old dock. The Hundred-Years Festival kicks off with loud acoustic musical and great pillars of flame. A preposterously ancient rocket blasts off from the surface with a skeleton crew of 12 Humans. 100 Nerezore float out to “catch” and stabilize the pitiful rocket and affix its bridge to the Chelona. The Humans stride onto the ship with characteristic bravado, their stocky legs thumping on the ground.
“Alright, let’s land.”
“Let’s.”
“Starting the sequence now.”
“It won’t be but a minute.”
“I wouldn’t mind savoring it, you know?”
“Well, it’s really more like 48 minutes.”
“We all know that.”
A mundane silence.
[Dramatis Personae]
Aboard the Chelona just before it enters Earth’s atmosphere:
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Gorth, a human cargo worker, politically uninvolved, but whose father is an ardent Durist and among the group of radicals who wish to destroy or otherwise damage the Chelona. Gorth knows of his father’s affiliation but only hears bravado-laden whispers of actual plans. Stoic but unfilfilled, waiting for the “big moment” of his life;
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Shayna, a human filling in on the rocket-crew as an alternate. A non-Durist semi-outsider in her community who holds a fascination and fondness for Tropos and Nerezore. Romantic and imaginative;
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Fils, an early-career Tropos politician on his first voyage aboard the Chelona. They hope to be seen by other important Tropos so that they are associated with a significant moment in history. While Fils tows a standard, pacifistic Energalitarian line in public, they harbor an intellectual curiosity with radical and dissident thought, and are aware of the ideas of the Tzelem. Perhaps this curiosity could grow to something more than intellectual, to something more than a curiosity…;
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Axelle, a Tropos dockworker dissatisfied with their career, feeling that others condescend their humble, repetitive, and physical work. A naturally concrete thinker whose interests do not skew “abstract” enough to command respect from Tropos elites. Daydreams of the “real,” primitive, straightforward lives of Humans, but also of a fully automated Nerezore-style existence: no neck pain, no restlessness, no soreness. Disgruntled and disdainful, but down-to-earth, deep down;
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Beftuneh, a Nerezore volunteer trying to save up cash (Zeitcoin) to afford more computational power so that her render and her slice of the DataRealm can be rendered with more speed and detail at a higher resolution — the Nerezore equivalent of cosmetic surgery. Shallow and perfunctory;
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Sogomon, an over-eager and hyperactive Nerezore crewmember. Infinitely energetic but naive and not aware of any Tropos or Human norms. Not yet fluent in his robotic body;
as well as:
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[Player Character 1],
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[Player Character 2],
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[Player Character 3],
among a crew of around two thousand Nerezore, two hundred Tropos, and nine other Humans.
Every character has the following four main Stats, each scored 1-7:
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Vinegar [Vg], one’s conviction and acidity of personality, as well as physical vigor. High-Vinegar characters manhandle problems, jump to conclusions, and pick fights. Low-Vinegar characters equivocate, shy from confrontation, and compromise readily.
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Mentorics [Mn], one’s ability to discern, retain, and manipulate information. High-Mentorics characters brainstorm, play out scenarios, and weigh options in their heads. They are quick and clever, able to think a step ahead in any matter of strategy. Low-Mentorics characters struggle to simulate outcomes and tend to focus on the literal: what they can see and feel.
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Aufgeschlossenheit[Af], or “openmindedness,” one’s curiosity and empathy for others and their cultures, their ideas. High-Aufgeschlossenheit characters ask questions and see the world as a big place. Low-Aufgeschlossenheit characters see their cultures as natural but also immutable, and fail to see the point of walking any distance in someone else’s shoes.
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Duplicitousness [Dp], one’s ability to lie — to oneself and others. High-Duplicitousness characters deceive and subvert at the risk of losing a grip on their own convictions and self-assuredness. Low-Duplicitousness characters tell it like it is, whether or not they should.
Play the campaign in rounds, subdivided into players’ turns.
Roll 1 d20 each to determine turn order.
Add Agility value to dice roll.
[Agility = Vg + Mn – Af – Dp.]
Highest roll begins.
On each turn, each player character [PC] must take one primary action and may take one secondary action. Players may choose to comment (not directed at any other character) or confide (converse with nearby PCs) during their turn. Primary actions, secondary actions, and commenting/confiding can happen in any order.
Add the total of every dice roll (not including modifications) during your turn to your Experience.
Your level increases by 1 for every 100 Experience points.
Level up by increasing 1 main stat by 1 point and learning 1 new ability.
Players may move reasonable distances at any time but cannot interrupt in-progress actions to move.
~Primary Action~ Choose from one of four primary action paradigms:
and assert your action as well as its target [character or object].
Roll 1 d20. Add your Vg/Mn/Af/Dp Stat to your dice roll.
Primary actions cover significant dialogue and altercations.
~Secondary Action~
Choose one ability (and its target, if required) and roll 1 d20.
Add the attribute corresponding to the ability to your dice roll.
Secondary actions may embellish or augment primary actions but may also target other aims.
~Comment~ Say anything aloud so than any nearby character can hear. Comments are not part of conversations and do not elicit responses.
~Confide~ Say anything to a nearby PC. Can be aloud (public) or whispered (private). Nearby PCs can respond to confider.
After all players have taken their turns, DM will update relevant NPCs.
Each round concludes with Discussion, in which all characters may speak freely without time or any actions progressing unless otherwise noted. Discussion is time to strategize, manage belongings and equipment, choose whether to rest or push on, etc.
Between rounds, DM may describe surroundings or relevant happenings.
Equipment alters stats and can cause other effects when equipped.
Status alters attributes. Statuses include:
- Fired Up: +1 to Vg attributes.
- Focused: +1 to Mn attributes.
- Bighearted: +1 to Af attributes.
- Sly: +1 to Dp attributes.
- Defeated: -1 to Vg attributes.
- Distracted: -1 to Mn attributes.
- Skeptical: -1 to Af attributes.
- Ashamed: -1 to Dp attributes.
- Exhausted: all attributes cut in half.
- Ill: -2 to all attributes.
- Drunk: +2 to Vg and Dp attributes; -2 to Mn and Af attributes.
- High: +2 to Mn and Af attributes; -2 to Vg and Dp attributes.
~Character Creation~
Characters start at Level 1 with a budget of 14 stat points to be allocated so that each stat has at least 1 point but no more than 7.
Within each category of attribute, characters may either choose the plain template in which each attribute’s value matches its containing stat, or characters may choose one talent and one aversion, giving +1 and -1 to their respective attributes.
Create a character with one ability in each of the four stat types, each corresponding to an attribute. A character may only have one ability per attribute. A character learns one new ability per level so that he/she/they has a full list of 16 attributes at level 12.
Attributes
Vg:
- Musculature [msc]: Physical presence and strength.
- Impulsiveness [imp]: Tendency to spring into action without due consideration.
- Pugnaciousness [pgn]: Combativeness; likelihood to fight and antagonize.
- Frustratability [fru]: Shortness of fuse.
Mn:
- Wit [wit]: Your humor, wordplay, irony.
- Absorption [abs]: Speed and volume of information retention and synthesis.
- Inner Abacus [abc]: Power to calculate.
- Estimation [est]: Size up a situation.
Ag:
- Faith [fth]: Religious trust and conviction.
- Empathic Simulation [emp]: How many miles you can walk in their shoes.
- Tsavut Dnem [tsv]: Take others’ pain onto yourself; sympathy.
- Conversational Suction [suc]: Get information out of people, warm them up to you.
Dp:
- Webspinning [wbs]: Construct more and more believable details within a story, true or not.
- Doubtcasting [dbt]: Cause second-guessing and low confidence in others.
- Self-delusion [del]: Convince yourself of anything.
- Ninjutsu [nin]: Sneak around and operate undetected.