Free Starspiel Surveyor's Primer
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The price of this plenty is a need for constant expansion. New worlds with valuable resources must be found and exploited.
This job falls to the explorers, itinerants, revolutionaries, fugitives, exiles, criminals, and a thousand other stripes of misfit that call the frontier space of Free Starspiel home.
Who are you?
What brought you to the Starspiel?
How did you lose everything?
What do you want to do about it?
Welcome to Port Verdigris
Port Verdigris is a space station in orbit around the planet Truane’s Star, at the edge of frontier space. It is a staging platform to new systems with planets in need of surveying.
You are newly arrived, having just disembarked from a starliner and passed through border agents’ inspection.
Are you coming from the post-scarcity splendor of the galactic hub, or are you native to the frontier?
What is the nature of your association with the other player characters?
The Peoples of Starspiel
The most common lifeforms in frontier space are Dralasites, Humans, Vrusk, and Yazirians. There are many other types of sentients, but they are less likely to be found in significant populations.
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Robots. Robots are a common source of labor on the frontier. While most robots possess virtual intelligence—enough to hold a convincing conversation—they are not actually self-aware. The vicissitudes of manufacturing positronic brains are such, however, that occasionally truly sentient artificial intelligences occur. Galactic law insists that provably sentient robots must be given the rights and freedoms of all citizens (although they can be charged for the cost of their own manufacture).
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Planetary Natives. The last thing a survey team ever wants to find are sentient inhabitants. Any species suspected of possessing intelligence and self-awareness is granted rights and protections that make harvesting a planets resources vastly more complicated and expensive. Different organizations respond to the discovery of intelligent life on a planet with varying degrees of ethical and legal diligence.
The Matryoshkas. Built by distant precursor civilizations, the Matryoshka Brains are vast thinking engines, built to surround and harness the entire energy output of a star to fuel their computation. Matryoshkas exist on a different level of awareness and technology than the rest of galactic civilization.
There are six known Matryoshkas. Two are believed to be dead, their stars having burned out. Two are “unsociable” and only communicate with the other Matryoshkas. One, named 1.618, does not communicate, but allows self-aware artificial intelligences to “retire” there, joining their beings with its immensity. Only the last, Pogo, is sociable, in that it will occasionally answer questions and dispense reports and recommendations. Universities and governments vie for decades over the right to pose a question to Pogo.
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The Sathar. This vermiform race responds to all contact with other space-faring species with genocidal aggression. There have been no successful attempts at communication with the Sathar. Nothing is known about their culture, and very little is known about their biology. Their attacks show that they possess a level of technical expertise equivalent to the peoples of the galactic hub, but a greater (or, at least, less restrained) facility with the genetic and cybernetic modification of other lifeforms.
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