Collaborative Campaign Setting: Coup D'etat, Part I

We're doing a new RPG, a Mutants and Masterminds game currently codenamed "Coup D'etat." In order to make sure everyone knows the general layout of the setting, we jammed together early--fucking early--Sunday morning to hammer out the foundations of the setting. It went really well and we got a lot of good information. Below are the results:

Geography

-T's Hellworld – Inhabitable

-J's character comes from a planet on a rimward sector.

-T: Lunar station orbiting his home plant

-D. Spartan nomad. Totally has a home planet.

-R's character: Shipborn. His whole life.

-Space Voice: Finding it in an old, neglected area or something.

-The ship itself and its geography.

-Our headquarters: Space Voice leads them to the headquarters. Abandoned because no one else gets it to work. Base on an overlooked planet in a busy solar system.

-"Serious Nebula" – Base of operations or home for one or more species. With planets with species.

-"Variety"

-Timeworld for teleporters' home.

-Worlds with specific resources with difficulties concerning extracting those resources

-Primitive natives vs resources

-Shapeshifters are from a specific planet. There are less sentient ones. They find new resources and leverage to get more from those resources. 

-The empty sector

Politics

-Unaligned sector on the edge of space. Possibly under attack from the Big Bad. Contains J's shapeshifter race.

-Engineering Society/Alliance – Build things with influence on technology.

-Teleportation Guys – Major Alliance or economic interest

-The two space lizard Alliances fighting with Manipulative Space Sweden in the middle.

The S'Szera and the Pris are two lizard people who can smell one another's pheromones. They have a deep-seated cultural hate of one another, stemming from religious admonitions not against one another, but against members of their own society who have mutations that affect their pheromones. S'Szera and Pris are nearly identical to outsiders, having similar accents, physical characteristics, and attitudes, but are immensely put out whenever others physically or generally group them together.

-Samurai Wasps work to support alliances throughout the Galaxy.

-Monolith Alliance

-Space Mafia: Ties to Manipulative Space Sweden. Real ties.

-Non-Insect Samurai of the Galaxy: Abuses of power that justify itself. Obelisk worshippers. Obelisks' origins are the Obelisk Ships. New vs old school: worshipping obelisks vs obelisk-like race (even though the obelisk-race are pretty dumb).

-An Alliance with an entrenched space-bureaucracy. Semi-Ineffective Royal Oligarchy.

-The Collective: A group of individuals which share a network for governing. Scattered armories a poor, cobbled-together navy. Benignly racist.

History

-Patron gods for planets/ cultures. "Fates." Very modern gods.

-War between Lizard Alliances

-Emergence of Shapeshifter guys and fights on their ground

-Aftermath of war in the Free Alliances

-Contacting other galaxies is a historic fact.

-Lots of undiscovered ground in the Galaxy.

-Teleporters "1000 year dynasty"

-Space Sweden – as old as the teleporters

-J's Samurai Insects – Very old.

-Lizard Alliances some old some new.

Space Mafia – Origin: Race that was beaten and survived via guile as the Space Mafia. Involved in the winning side of the Free Alliances Civil War, giving them a freer hand in the Alliance.

Engineering Alliance: Black Market influence other Alliances and underground funding for unapproved engineering projects.

Biology

-Networked AI race.

-Plant life with monastic/fighter culture with neturality and balance. Emotion-based telepathy/empathy.

-Small race that is good with technology. Clever perceptive strategic. Put their life force/soul into matter. Some can do a permanent change.

-Manipulative space Sweden. Center a sector or alliance –wide conflict. Profiting from the war. Socially excel at manipulation and strategy. Don't know if this is a race or an alliance.

-Monolith people (play them like The Guardian)

-D's Supertoads. Toadlike. Stubborn. Showing an affinity for earth, fire, or water. Social divergence. Earth->Water->Fire. Near-immortality. Maybe fades over time. Protection whenever they've taken damage from a certain source. Some kind of proto-adaptable ability.

-Engineering Race that dominates the Engineering Alliance :(

-Shapeshifter.  Adaptable/ genetically unstable. Adapt to any planet. Social. Not physically aggressive.

-Samurai Insects. Hivemind. Military regime. Goal oriented. Not necessarily bad. Galaxy Protectors. Bodyguards, defenders. Ancient Japanese theme with Queen. Carapace color representing which subhive they work from. Shy away from politics. Hive wars in their history. Internal conflict is taboo now.

-Non-militaristic insectoid race.

Possibly selling some kind of hivemind technology.

-Non-sapient hellworld race. 1% sapeince. Apex predator. Pack predator. More saurian than mammalian.

-Humanoid. Self-teleporting and teleporting larger things. Natural spacefarers. Solar system with nearby planetoids/Asteroid belt/ Gas giant with lots of moons. Jumping further in larger groups. Commercial uses. Slendermen meets grays

-Maybe a Flash Gordon race (?!)

Tech

-Space lasers. Space ships.

-Some transportation via teleporter races.

-"Mass Effect" gates available

-Space Stations

-LosTech (previous civilizations)

-Individual exosuits within a system or for EVAs & some combat

-Variety in technology instead of one-size-fits-all energy

-Diverse weapons. Pistol/Shot gun/Sniper Rifle/Very Diverse Heavy Weapons . High & Low tech.

-Amounts of Biology "Zerg meets Trinity"

-Space Magic

-Miniaturization of cool stuff (micromissiles)

-Melee weapons (The slow blade still penetrates)

-Artifical Life: Always have a way to pull the plug. Mysterious Galactic Cognitive Speed Limit.

-Immortality is very rare, if present at all 

Purpose/Central Conflict

-Outsiders selecting "proxies" for a conflict (Thinking GL, Charlie's Angels)

-Revenge!!! Against something more relatable

-Reapers/Zerg enemies

-"The Doomsday Machine" as a patron

With mystery

-Size of the threat. One leader/w minions or a peoples?

-Political conflict

-Forerunning scouts for good, uniting folks versus enemies.

-Absolute good/evil vs no absolute good/evil: No absolutes

Final Answer: Ancient "computer in a cave" social figure-now discredited/unbelieved/unregarded by the powerful, chooses the players to unite the galaxy in advance of a coming enemy that the current power system does not believe in.

You'll notice a number of references. It's pretty hard by now to put together a science fiction setting without referencing some things. The general concepts are pretty well trodden, but it's up to us to come up with new ways to explore those concepts (mostly). The only thing I banned outright were cameos, with subsequent threats to drop Enterprises, Fireflies, TARDISes, and ships with names drawn from the "Time Interval + Bird" formula into the nearest star. 

Now, not everything is going to survive in its current form. While we did a good job of putting out a lot of ideas and connecting them, we really only reached a firm conclusion one item (the very last one). My job this week is pretty straightforward; get with R, KT, and D to make their characters, review T and J's characters, get the first story up to speed, sketch out the flow of the next five stories, and finish melding the universe into something wholesome (and blog and work and sleep, etc.).