Traveller 2300 meets Mass Effect Idea

[Hopeless]

So was wondering your opinion on this;

Mercury: mainly used to anchor solar satellites intended to absorb and transmit solar energy due to their proximity to the sun back to the rest of the system.

Venus: pretty much still uninhabitable has an orbital space station intended to allow for emergency repairs to the solar satellite system as well as continue research of various kinds including ongoing research into the planet it orbits.

Earth: Overpopulated the moon has been colonised but this has problems as the use of a genetic engineered virus to help offset the problems of living in zero gravity is far from perfected so the only people who remain here long term are those who wouldn't survive the trip back down to Earth.

Mars: Being terraformed there are a growing number of domed cities and is largely controlled by the Corporations with the tacit agreement of the military who in return are able to retire comfortably if not actively recruited into a corporate job to keep the populace in line.

Mars Moons: Are research labs and often maximum security prisons often using the prisoners as guinea pigs with rumours of having found an xeno facility within the moons being an urban myth.

Jupiter and the Asteroid Belt: Home to a sort of Babylon V style space station used as a base for transporting supplies to and from the various mining facilities and functions as a military base protecting the inner planets from any threat coming in from the outer planets.

Outer Planets: still being researched I am assuming Outlands on a certain moon which is good enough reason to rewatch that film!

Pluto: a dwarf planet hiding an awful secret as it now serves as a military base near an alien artefact called the Extra-Stellar Gate which was originally mistaken as its satellite.

Found inactive it was reactivated and a probe sent through before a means to reverse engineer its ability to jump objects passing through it to another star system succeeded in proving its true nature.
The jump drive however has never been successfully mass produced so the stutter drive was developed to offset this problem.

This is an attempt to explain the background to a campaign I'm still hoping to continue but figure having something that makes sense (somewhat) would help.

I'm hesitant to use transhuman space although it would actually allow for what I had planned to come about, it feels a mite silly to not allow for a bit more finetuning after all no dm's game plan survives contact with their players!

 

[Hopeless]

The original campaign is set in the Spinward Marches a few millennia ahead of this origin game I'm thinking of running... eventually.

My original idea is that an inventor who patented a number of inventions was responsible for developing the original jump drive and used their inventions to explore the solar system eventually discovering the first Extra-Stellar Gate and even figured out how to activate it before the Earth Governments found out what she had been doing and deliberately stole all of her research and inventions even going so far as to cover up her discoveries after accidentally killing her in an attempt on her grandson's life that was supposed to persuade her to work for them.

Her death is why the jump drive couldn't be mass produced as she kept her best inventions to herself and left nothing written down to prevent what the Government did.

Eventually the Governments revealed their "discoveries" and this allowed for the eventual colonisations and terraforming of Mars even the building of the massive space station at the asteroid belt.

One of the secrets of this campaign is that Morganna Tuarte had already established a secret colony at an inhabitable world in another star system which was self-sufficient at the time of her death with another system intended for mining purposes taken over by the Government but at the cost that they couldn't access the new colony when their ill advised assassination of Tuarte had the reprisal of the colony mining their extra-stellar gate with the makeshift stutter drive being unable to traverse the space to their system.
Tuarte's immediate family was killed in an attempt to discover what she had left behind save for a grandson who was hidden by horrified friends of the family who witnessed Morganna's death and eventually realised the sole remaining Tuarte had to be protected as he was the only one left who could rediscover his grandmother's lost discoveries.

I think I'm going too far better see what you think first!

 

[Hopeless]

Have definite ideas about which Governments were responsible but believe for now it would be better to leave it plural since whilst the United Nations isn't viewed as that viable it still leaves alot to be desired than placing the blame on a single government rather than explain the actions of a more Corporate entity who would naturally seek to seize and plunder any extraordinary discovery and resource even to the point of violating any so-called law under the premise they could lie and cheat and claim the credit for themselves if everyone who could say otherwise were either discredited, killed or otherwise dealt with.

Sorry typing my thoughts as i go and I don't think this is the best way to express this or in the most understandable since I actually want to put this into a format thats clear and simple and thats something I'm not known for! :roll:

 

[Hopeless]

Now please remember that nothing I plan can be set up properly until i know what my players intend to do with their characters.

I could start off with pre-gens say have a scholar (physician), naval pilot, scout (explorer), dilettente (patron maybe) and agent (intelligence or maybe former law enforcement) and have them arrive at Jupiter IV the Babylon class space station located between the asteroid belt and Jupiter (although thinking maybe one of Jupiter's moons...).

Their patron is investigating rumours of an anomaly found in the asteroid belt and sends her/his operatives to check it directly.

The anomaly is actually an abandoned colony which looks like it predates the building of Jupiter IV and is marked by a symbol that they can later identify as being that of Tuarte Industries a long defunct business.

Now I plan on one of the players (not necessarily the Agent) sends a message out whether to confirm the symbol or just alerting the authorities (theirs) who send a ship and a strike team to secure the site if they can get inside without being detected this could end with the PCs being taken into custody, questioned and released with nothing to prove their story of the lost colony as by that point its been either destroyed or moved.

On the other hand if they manage to put up enough of a fight the strike team's ship will probably blow up the colony rather than have its existance being revealed.

Still a long time to go before I even get as far as developing the opening adventure so those of you using T2300 what kind of opening adventures have you considered especially if it means starting off within the solar system?

Hmm have an opening sequence where a mining team investigating the asteroid belt encounters debris that matches one of their ships, they close in and have a video feed close in as it reveals an airlock built into the side of a planetoid that when they pan out reveals a great big hangar bay door... might have to work on that opening bit so that when the PCs get involved they find out their patron received some information including a copy of the video feed but the seller was later found dead with the patron left wanting to know what was so important.
Yes still needs a lot more work...

 

[Hopeless]

Babylon Class space stations:

The first was built on Earth specifically somewhere in Sweden intended as a test bed for the later developments, the second was built on the moon and serves as the main Moon Base although not named Jupiter II even thought that was its official title before the base was taken over during the Governments' illegal takeover of Tuarte Industries facilities.

Jupiter III was built within one of Mars's moons which revealed the presence of the xeno-facilities however Tuarte forcibly cleared the moons of any harmful material which the Governments sought to discover any surviving parts within the moons or on Mars itself with no luck as Tuarte made sure the hazardous nanotech found by her people was completely destroyed to avoid endangering any subsequent visitors to the planet or its moons.

Jupiter IV was being built at the time of Tuarte's downfall which meant it took several decades longer than it should have as they had to rebuild vital technologies their illegal action inadvertedly destroyed, whilst further stations are being built and are publically declared superior to the Babylon class stations they're nowhere near as advanced thanks to the fact it had been well into construction by the time Morgan Tuarte was murdered.

There are a number of legends concerning these stations, although widely known as the fourth constructed station only three are known to exist to the Government, the public only know about the Moon and Mars base as Jupiter I was never revealed and even the surviving employees of Tuarte Industries never knew of its location as Tuarte herself insured that if Earth was attacked there was one place on the planet that could serve as a final defence against the threat she had foreseen.
The Government are aware of Jupiter I they just don't know where it is and have been led to believe its hidden offworld due to Tuarte's habit of building the earlier models on natural satellites.

Another legend is that there are hidden facilities within the station as yet undiscovered by the Government, even the Government believe this although one part they're unaware of is that there is a hidden base on Mars which has been discovered and used by the colonists as one of their dome cities undercities complexes remaining completely off the Government and Corporation's radar due to them having been built as early inhabitations for the workers as they built Jupiter III.

Pluto base is largely an outpost where they researched a means to reactivate the extra-stellar gate after the original orbital base was destroyed by Tuarte after the US deliberately sent through a manned mission to the next system ignoring the evidence she had provided to explain why she was hesitant to use the Gates before she got the jump drives operational
She ended up sending a jumpship to rescue the stranded US mission after they discovered the next gate was wrecked the result of an unexplained supernova style event that left the system largely in ruins.

In the far future campaign this is because the Gates are spread throughout the galaxy and a violent series of super nova's spread unwittingly by the extra stellar gates in those systems and destroyed every linked system with only those with deactivated gates uneffected by the destruction, earth's gate had been deliberately switched off by an unknown force whilst the future campaign the gate leading to the Earthside of the galaxy was disabled by three nanotech warship being dragged into an active gate that was reset by the second gate detonation

The revelation she had operational jumpships was the last straw for the Governments whose attempts to force her to share her technology is why she established an offworld colony and tried to set up the means to insure humanity survived the inevitable destruction of Earth.

Sorry going too far ahead, the nanotech she encountered on Mars' moons made her realise humanity was far from ready and her success in eliminating the nanotech menace effectively delaying the First Nanotech War by about a century or so, in my version of the T2300 setting the game starts after the end of the First Nanotech War and the Governments still haven't realised their mistake which would lead to the Second Nanotech War where nanotech is released on Earth causing its destruction leading to humanity eventually fleeing the system at the end of the Third Nanotech War

In the future campaign setting its set a century or so after the end of the Thirteenth Nanotech War which seemingly left the humans of the Spinward Marches as the only known surviving humans left in the Galaxy...