Terraforming

[Prime_Evil]

Instant Amber Zone.

Agreed! It might be interesting to play the scenario out from the perspective of the mercenaries sent to repossess the planet for the banking corporation who provided investment funding the terraforming project, or from the perspective of the locals who are being held accountable for a massive debt incurred by their ancestors. If you are really cruel, perhaps the PCs are visiting free traders whose ship is impounded by the bank during the repossession campaign - after all, the fine print allows the bank to repossess everything on the planet's surface and to revoke the extra-territoriality of the starport so that the locals can't shift valuables off-planet...

 

[Reynard]

Eternal Interstellar Pyramid Scheme.

 

[Prime_Evil]

Eternal Interstellar Pyramid Scheme.

True...it's just like interstellar Amway

If terraforming is feasible at all, it's going to be expensive and take a long time to perform. This means that you are going to have to come up with some creative way to finance it.

In my homebrew campaign setting, the Office of Colonial Affairs (OCA) licences the formation of Planetary Development Corporations to finance terraforming ventures. The majority shareholders in these Planetary Development Corporations tend to be large institutional investors who are happy to wait three to five centuries for the mortgage on the planet to mature. There's also a brisk trade in terraforming derivatives as the financial institutions attempt to distribute the risks involved in these ventures - almost one in three terraforming projects is unsuccessful, so it's a good idea to package multiple projects together and sell portions of the combined stack. So long as the number of successful projects outweighs the number of failed projects, it is still possible to come out ahead.

 

[Tom Kalbfus]

I can think of a way to finance terraforming, What if the planet to be terraformed was in a rift, orbiting a single star, the nearest star system from that is more than 6 parsecs away, so its beyond the reach of any Jump Drive, so the only way to get their is with a slower than light maneuver drive. You send the terraforming equipment with robots to run it up first, then you send slower colony ship with colonists in cold sleep. By the time the sleeper ship gets there, the planet is terraformed and ready for occupation.

Why do the colonists go in the slower ship?
Maneuver Drives can reach high percentages of the speed of light, but the protection against hard radiation at near light speeds might not be all that great, so you can send robots, but not humans, the humans arrive in slower starships with heavy radiation shielding while in low berths, each of the passengers pays for the terraforming project, and when they arrive the planet is ready for them, or at least that is the plan. Now lets say a fleet of starships carrying a total of one million colonists in low berths, divide the costs of the terraforming by those 1 million colonists and each in return gets a share of the planet.

 

[Hopeless]

Huh and I've been picturing a game where the PCs are colonists sent to what was supposed to be an inhabitable garden planet only to find themselves stuck in a mining domed colony under siege by mercenaries hired by a competing corporation whose looking to steal the contract for the world's resources largely by enslaving any inhabitants.

The twist is that their original destination was swapped so the Corporation running the mines could have their idyll paradise home and turn the colonists into mindless drone workers... so both sides are equally evil, can the PCs be better than them... would they even TRY?

The part I'm considering is whether revealing an ancient crashed spaceship holds the means to terraform the planet or whether it be better to let them find someone who could pull this off.

But how many would even bother once they got their characters off world, how many do you know would bother to go back where they started if they could terraform that world?

 

[Reynard]

The best terraforming background for adventurers are you're there for the duration. Strange new world for colonization filled with strange places and life. Terraforming operations can be local and regional scales performing varied purposes giving lots of background flavor and story hooks without ever leaving the planet.