Miners, Magnates & Mercenaries. In SPACE!

[Yora]

I've been pulling out again a concept for a campaign that I had put aside for a while but still think is really cool and promising. The idea is to create some kind of blend of Space Opera, Neo-Noir, and Italo-Westerns with an overall Retro-Future style of 1980s technology and 1920s design.
I had started a thread on some of my ideas last year, but that one's well past its expiration date, and I want to talk about other aspects of such a campaign of setting anyway.

The overall premise that I have in mind is an interstellar society of several alien civilizations, that remain heavily concentrated in their Home Systems as there are few economic reasons for people to leave. Most resources can be found in near limitless amounts in almost any star system, and if not they are readily available just around the nearest other star. People who travel out into the depths of space in search of a different life do it because they want to, believing things will be different if they leave their homeworld behind to create a new society somewhere else. But no matter how far you go, you still end up surrounded by the same kind of people. And the environment is never as comfortable as the planet you evolved on.
In the galactic economy, resources in the ground are as cheap as dirt, because there's billions of planets made from just the same rocks. It is the work put into the extraction and refinement of the minerals that gives them value. Which is good for the colonists, because mining minerals is a business you can do on the most barren planets with the most basic equipment, and nobody cares how many month or even years this kind of cargo has been drifting through space by the time it reaches the buyer. Mining is something every outpost can do, and something that provides them with something they can trade for machines, technology, and medicine they can not produce themselves. The only problem is that the further out in the fringes of space you are, the fewer ore traders are interested in making the increasingly long journey to pick up cargo in amounts that the big mine in the Home System produce every hour. Longer transport means higher transportation cost, and less competition means you can push down the prices. Who else is coming out here they could sell to instead? As a result, frontier colonies tend to be dirt poor. With just enough resources to survive and continue to produce ores for a pittance.
On the other end of thing, nobody is shooting at each other over rocks in space. They kill each other over controlling trade. Buying from the suppliers that sell for the lowest prices and selling to the buyers who pay the most is where astronomical profits are to be made. Or you could just straight up steal the goods by raiding transport ships. Minerals are minerals, and there are hundreds of tiny independent mines that are not registered or documented with the trade agencies in the Home Systems.

The concept is for a setting in which small mining colonies get squeezed by giant megacorporations who have a stranglehold on all trade outside the territories of the Home Systems by not paying the miners what their ores are worth on the great interstellar markets, and asking exorbitant prices for goods that are almost free on civilized planets. And they are not standing idly by if colonists start their own ore transport companies, or form cooperatives to produce some necessary goods themselves by pooling their resources together. When sabotage and intimidation doesn't work, there's always still good old bribery. Giving one or two local officials or leaders a small seat on the gravy train is a great incentive for them to make sure the gravy keeps running. And sometimes you just get a guy who's not feeling so hot anymore about running an anrcho-syndicalist commune, but start to consider that it's good to be the king.
In this environment, there's an endless demand for mercenaries and "independent shipping contractors". There's a lot of money to be made for a Kid with a Ship obtaining or delivering certain rare items for both colonists and companies. Getting shipments of medical supplies bought in the home systems past company-paid mercenaries, helping corrupt officials to assassinate popular union leaders, and literally everything between those.

I think it's a really strong campaign concept that should work very well with "sly scoundrels on a small ship", and simply dropping them into the middle of things with the task of paying the bills for fuel and repairs. There's a good handful of works that I think make for good references to draw from, though some more for visual style than thematic elements.

Spoiler: Reference Sources

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Star Wars 5: The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
Outland (1981)
Blade Runner (1982)
Star Trek 6: The Undiscovered Country (1991)
Fallout (1997)
Riddick Series (2000-2013)
Bioshock (2007-2010)
Mass Effect 2: Lair of the Shadow Broker (2010)
The Expanse Season 1 (2015)
Prey (2017)

What I am looking for with this thread are all kind of ideas anyone might have about this concept. What other works could provide great inspiration? Ideas for types of NPCs and factions that could make for great antagonists or allies. Is there anything in which the choice of available technologies would have a big impact of what the society would look like and what shape conflicts take. Any special things to consider when going into such a campaign as GM. Any kind of worldbuilding information that players really would need to have some degree on detail on before going on. Really just want ideas thrown at me to see what sticks.
The old thread was mostly about space combat. If there's some great ideas about that specific to this campaign concept, I'd love to read them too, but mostly I am interested in the social aspects of such a campaign and how to run them for the best effect.

[BRC]

First thing you need to spin up is who the major Players are. Considering the nature of the setting, let's go with Corporations.

Give each one a strong Theme and Agenda, a distinct feel to how they interact with the world and what systems under their control feel like.


Distant Star Enterprises or DSE is one of the bigger ones, at least when it comes to pure mining operations. DSE operates on a pretty exploitative Franchise model. DSE will sell you all the equipment your colony needs to Mine and Refine, they'll also sell you pre-fabbed buildings, luxury goods, anything you need! They'll even rent you security forces, or recruit Miners and other experts to come work for you. With DSE, you are technically an independent colony!

...However, to receive all this support, you need to sign an exclusivity deal with DSE. Technically, you don't OWN any of this, the equipment, the buildings, nothing. It's all leased to you by DSE. If DSE catches you selling ore to a competitor, or if you don't keep up with your payments, they'll send in the goons to Repossess their property.

Or they'll just kick you out of your own colony and sell control of the "Franchise" to somebody else.


From a Worldbuilding Perspective, DSE is ideal for when you want the story to be more about the colony itself than the corporation. Some DSE colonies are worker-controlled communes, others are brutal dictatorships. DSE has no ideology besides profit, and doesn't especially care what it's colonists do so long as it doesn't hurt DSE's bottom line. The key is that the miners don't work for DSE directly, they work for the Franchiser, so DSE colonies are as close as you can get to "Independent".

As antagonists, DSE can be simply enabling some evildoer, or may be actively malicious, trying to sabotage a colony so it falls behind on payments and they can sell it to somebody they like better. As an Ally, their approach means that they do, on occasion, have reason to be genuinely benevolent. They don't want to lose colonies that earn them good money, so they may hire people to escort supplies or protect a colony.


Seekers of the Cosmos: On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have the Seekers of the Cosmos. Equal parts Corporation and Cult, the Seekers started out as a utopian project, syncretizing religions from several different core world cultures, they set out to build a society in line with their ideals. The planet they chose happened to have very rich mineral veins, and while the Seekers are supposedly detached from such worldly concerns as wealth, the rest of the galaxy isn't, so they set up a corporation and started expanding. The Seekers use their wealth in pursuit of their mission to explore the galaxy in search of (I dunno, if you like this concept, we can figure out their exact ideology later. ).

Spoiler: Potential Thoughts about their Ideology

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My current thought is that the Seeker's ideology is based around some entity called "The Sleeper", insert all the Cthulu vibes you want, but the basic idea is that the Sleeper is somewhere out there, probably buried underground. It is the duty of the Faithful to seek out and awaken the Sleeper. The Sleeper will then remake the planet it is on into the ultimate Paradise world where the Faithful can live in glory. The Sleeper will then travel around the galaxy, remaking every planet where it is Welcomed into a paradise.

The Cult's mining operations are not only a convenient way to fill the coffers, they're also something to do while hunting for The Sleeper.

As a corporation, the Seekers tend to have high morale, since so many of their miners are also Believers. They also have a major advantage when it comes to recruiting and retaining skilled professionals (Doctors, Engineers, Pilots, ect), since they can attract Believers from their comfortable lives in the Core Worlds.

As Antagonists, the Seekers are fanatics, and deeply concerned with the Orthodoxy of their members. Since the corporation funds their religious endeavors, the success of the corporation is considered key to the Sacred Mission, and woe be to any who threaten the Sacred Mission.

As potential Allies, I see the Seeker's faith as being at least theoretically benevolent. They are motivated to perform acts of genuine charity, even if their purpose is to recruit more followers.

Outer Cabaravia: Outer Cabaravia would never call itself a Corporation. It is a Government-in-Exile, the result of a deposed core-world leader taking all the ships and troops (And treasure) they could get and running for it when the mobs started storming the palace gates. Theoretically, they are gathering power to one day retake their homeworld from the perfidious rebels that overthrew them, but even within their ranks, this is considered, at best, an extremely distant goal. The power of this corporation is like a sparrow compared to the elephant of the Homeworld.

...That said, out here they're a Sparrow in a world of Flies.

While they're generally considered just another corporation with crisp uniforms, the Cabaravian's play soldier like their lives depend on it. Colonies under their control are "Protectorates of Outer Cabaravia", Corporate officials use military ranks, and they strictly enforce the Law in territories under their control. Even common miners are often recruited to the "Auxillery Engineer Corps".

Their centralized control structure, as well as the fact that they have genuine battleships and military equipment (Even if it's well out of date) mean that they've got the firepower to enforce their holdings, and can be a very dangerous enemy to cross. They can serve as a decent stand-in for any "Evil Government" stories you want to tell.

On the other hand, they're pretty unpopular. The Seekers may be sanctimonious, but they're at least Polite, and know how to play nicely with other corporations and colonies. The OutCabs have a reputation as Bullies, seeing their interests as more Legitimate than that of mere corporations.

Of course, plenty of them are just in it for the money. It's a decent job if you can get it, and the Supreme Commander doesn't mind his Officers living the good life.

[Yora]

Those are all really cool ideas. And they feel really fresh.

Unitology from Dead Space is basically a Cult Corporation, but they are obviously evil and worshipping death demons. A more neutral version could be really interesting.

Guerilla groups raising money to fund their rebellion is also a cool idea. One that makes me wonder why they aren't already an established archetype. Such factions are always only buying illegal weapons, but there's never much said how they are making the money to pay.

Which reminds that speed of transportation and communication is probably a big factor in how a space setting works. As much as I love Star Wars, the basically instant communication and travel always seems a bit odd when you stop and think about it.If you can jump from the Outer Rim to the Core Worlds in what looks like maybe an hour at most (both Tatooine-Alderaan and Corruscant-Mustafar), then dividing the galaxy into regions based on remoteness makes little sense. Or even the concept of continuous territory when you don't have to hop from star to star to refuel or switch between jump gates.

I think it might also contribute to give individual systems more of an identity if interstellar travel takes days or weeks. That way you have one adventure per system, separated by a week of downtime before action picks up again in a completly different place. And you keep things more confined. Enemies can't simply bring in reinforcements from other systems once the PCs attack a base. And similarly, the players are limited to the resources and allies they have at hand. They can't just make a quick call to bring over some friends with big ships with big guns.

Slow communication takes that even further. If the setting of the campaign has internet, it's limited to only what's on servers in the system. In a retro-future, "low-tech" setting, I think limiting communication to each star system goes a long way to create a 20th century dynamic of remoteness and isolation.

[BRC]

Those are all really cool ideas. And they feel really fresh.

Unitology from Dead Space is basically a Cult Corporation, but they are obviously evil and worshipping death demons. A more neutral version could be really interesting.

You mention the Old West as an aesthetic inspiration, and wandering preachers are a staple of that Genre.

If you'd like, you could establish that not every believer is, strictly speaking, a member of the Cult. So you can have characters who are Believers without making them necessarily tied to this faction. If we go with the idea that they have a holy mission in the stars, other people could believe the mission is more metaphorical (Go out there and look for opportunities to do good, rather than finding some sleeping god that will make everything paradise), feel that the Cult has become too concerned with the day-to-day, or simply feel like, yes, it's a nice goal, but even the Cult admits they're unlikely to find the Sleeper anytime soon, so you go to church once a week and otherwise live your life.

Guerilla groups raising money to fund their rebellion is also a cool idea. One that makes me wonder why they aren't already an established archetype. Such factions are always only buying illegal weapons, but there's never much said how they are making the money to pay.

Thanks. Do you think they work better as a sleek, professional millitary operation, or more of a pirate vibe.

Which reminds that speed of transportation and communication is probably a big factor in how a space setting works. As much as I love Star Wars, the basically instant communication and travel always seems a bit odd when you stop and think about it.If you can jump from the Outer Rim to the Core Worlds in what looks like maybe an hour at most (both Tatooine-Alderaan and Corruscant-Mustafar), then dividing the galaxy into regions based on remoteness makes little sense. Or even the concept of continuous territory when you don't have to hop from star to star to refuel or switch between jump gates.

I think it might also contribute to give individual systems more of an identity if interstellar travel takes days or weeks. That way you have one adventure per system, separated by a week of downtime before action picks up again in a completly different place. And you keep things more confined. Enemies can't simply bring in reinforcements from other systems once the PCs attack a base. And similarly, the players are limited to the resources and allies they have at hand. They can't just make a quick call to bring over some friends with big ships with big guns.

Slow communication takes that even further. If the setting of the campaign has internet, it's limited to only what's on servers in the system. In a retro-future, "low-tech" setting, I think limiting communication to each star system goes a long way to create a 20th century dynamic of remoteness and isolation.

I would do as follows

Travel

Ships generally fall into two categories: Big and Small

Big ships are Cargo Carriers and Battleships. They generally take weeks to get places, on account of technobabble, but can carry massive amounts of cargo and easily hundreds of people.

Small ships carry a fraction of the supplies, and maybe 20 people max, but are much faster, able to jump between near systems in a manner of a day or two, with most trips taking 3-6 days. This is the class that PCs are expected to have.

Finally, you have some very rare ultrafast couriers which can get between systems in as little as a day. These ships carry at most one pilot, strapped into a roughly coffin-sized cockpit, and have maybe a few cubic feet of cargo capacity. The pilots who can fly these things must be extremely skilled to make a landing, and it's not uncommon for some bad math or simple pilot error to result in a Courier crash-landing on a planet somewhere (Thus being an excellent plot hook).


PC's will generally have a Small Ship.

Communication

I don't think people should have cell-phones. Instead, use the old-west Telegraph as a model, but with more functions.

There are walkie-talkies, which can be used to communicate over very short distances. Unless a planet is civilized enough to have full coverage from Communication Satellites (Rare on the Frontier. ComSats are easy picking for raiders looking to loot valuable components), most settlements have an internal communication network that can be used to call places nearbye, and a CommHub, which connects to other Hubs around the planet.

So you can call your party members on your headset, or call somebody in the same town, but calling somebody in the Starport means going to a central location to send your message.


Starports have bigger Comhubs which can be used to call ships in orbit, or other stations/planets/ asteroids in the same system.

Inter-system communication is exclusively done via couriers, either the small ultrafast ships, or just putting your letters on a ship.


What this means is that if the local baddies want to request some info, they can get it in a day or two by sending an Ultralight Courier.
If they want to call in a small goonsquad, or get a small delivery, it takes a small ship 3-7 days to get here once they get the message.

If they're calling in serious firepower, that means 2 weeks easily, assuming that their overlords have a transport ship and a regiment of troopers ready to go.

[Satinavian]

What other works could provide great inspiration?

Maybe have a look at Crest of Stars/Banner of Stars. While not exactly the same, it shares a couple of ideas like relatively autonomous planets with interstellar actors controlling or trying to control all cross-system travel and trade, communication via small courier ships only, long, but not prohibitively long travel time etc. Also while not super hard SF, at least internally consistent.

[Pauly]

For sources.
TV
Space 1999 - strong on the survival in space elements.
Blake’s 7 - Higher tech than what you propose, but has a great cross sections of worlds visited.
Books
The Stainless Steel Rat series by Harry Harrison - lots of shenanigans and plot hooks suitable for RPing,

[BRC]

Also think of the recent history of this setting. These sort of "Frontier" settings tend to take place in the aftermath of something, usually a war back home.

The biggest issue I see with the setting right now is the question of why anybody moves out here. Quality of life is far better on the homeworlds, so unless there's a massive population crunch, or some sort of disaster, who in their right mind would move out to the colonies for a life of drudgery and exploitation, where roving pirates or corporate goons might show up at any moment.

The most convenient thing would be a big War, probably intra-system, since the logistics of an interplanetary invasion between roughly compatible civilizations make a classic "Alien Invasion" Scenario absurd, unless they're deploying superweapons at each other. That generates plenty of refugees, and a decent collection of veteran soldiers who may be unwelcome at home, and will find life as pirates or mercenaries on the frontier.

An intra-system war means that you've got one group making up most of the refugees, even if other homeworlds send armies to help one side of the conflict or another. If there is some event that caused civil (or intra-system) wars across multiple of the core systems, that would be best.

One idea might be a single intra-system war, with other home systems joining in on one side or another, until somebody figure out a way to chuck asteroids at planets. Now the home systems are in kind of a Cold War Scenario, since mass devastation is on the table, and the initial conflict kind of stopped cold once the Asteroid-chuckers were introduced as a possibility. So you have people fleeing to the colonies in case the war restarts and people start throwing WMDs around.

[Yora]

I find the whole idea of interstellar war rather implausible, and did set things up with that not really being a factor in politics and security.
The reason I see for people living in space is people really wanting to live in space and paying for that privilege. It's uneconomical to do so, but in a world were ordinary people can go to other stars, they might not be overly concerned about that when they are leaving their homeworld. Which is why those frontier worlds are overwhelmingly rather poor. It was a poor economic decision from the start.
A consequence of that (which I see in all space colonization scenarios) is that colony worlds all have very low populations. 95% of people still live in the systems of their homeworlds. Which when you have a dozen species, with populations in the low billions, still gives you thousands of millions of people to inhabit those frontier worlds. Even if you have a thousand colonized planets, they each can have average populations in the millions. (Even though they keep blurring together in economic statistics, billions are a significantly greater number than millions.)

[BRC]

I find the whole idea of interstellar war rather implausible, and did set things up with that not really being a factor in politics and security.
The reason I see for people living in space is people really wanting to live in space and paying for that privilege. It's uneconomical to do so, but in a world were ordinary people can go to other stars, they might not be overly concerned about that when they are leaving their homeworld. Which is why those frontier worlds are overwhelmingly rather poor. It was a poor economic decision from the start.
A consequence of that (which I see in all space colonization scenarios) is that colony worlds all have very low populations. 95% of people still live in the systems of their homeworlds. Which when you have a dozen species, with populations in the low billions, still gives you thousands of millions of people to inhabit those frontier worlds. Even if you have a thousand colonized planets, they each can have average populations in the millions. (Even though they keep blurring together in economic statistics, billions are a significantly greater number than millions.)

Yeah, most of my ideas have been built around an internal war on one or more homeworlds, rather than one home system invading another, since the logistics involved seem absurd.


The issue with that is that the core premise of the setting seems to be built around something that the setting itself thinks is a Bad Idea. If the only reason people have to leave the core worlds is because they are enamored with the idea of living among the stars, then every character needs to fall into that category. The poor exploited miners are fools who threw away their lives to go live in space, same with the corporate goons, the pirates, ect. I feel like there needs to be SOME explanation beyond "People really want to live in space".


If you want, what you could do is have there have been a major Space Colonization Effort amongst the various core-worlds, big propaganda movements to recruit colonists to go out and settle the stars for the glory of the Homeworld (Think the Space Race)! With the idea being that there would be continued follow-up and support from the homeworld to develop the colonies into thriving societies. The initial wave of homesteaders, miners, and construction workers would be followed by engineers and artists and the like. It was a huge idea that spread like wildfire, with different systems having different takes on it and aggressively recruiting colonists and building massive Colony Ships.


However, after the colony ships actually got out there and started seeding colonies, it soon became apparent that there wasn't much to gain from it. Minerals you could mine closer to home, some exotic alien lifeforms you could display in the zoo's back home, and the Prestige of having your flag flying in space. A handful of unique compounds that they quickly found out how to synthesize better versions of, maybe a handful of scientific advancements you could study, but nothing life-changing, and certainly nothing worth the massive expense of the colonization efforts compared to a handful of research cruisers. There were tech advancements made GETTING people to space, but the actual practical benefits of those technologies were far more profitable used in the home systems. None of this was, strictly speaking, unknown. The Colonization Efforts were driven largely by Hype (COLONIZING THE STARS!) and the vague promise that once they were out there, SOMETHING would materialize to make the whole venture worthwhile.

Maybe there was a rare mineral that had long since been mined out of the core worlds that were plentiful out in the stars...but alternatives existed that were basically as good, and so shipping the stuff in en-masse wasn't really worth the effort of sending people to space.

So, the second wave of colony ships turned into a handful of ships carrying supplies, turned into some government officials "Checking In On Things", turned into the colonies being basically forgotten and left to run themselves when it became clear that they were not worth the investment, and the shine of "Having a Colony in Space" wore off as something to brag about.


Most of the people living out there are the descendants of the first wave colonists with no real loyalty to their home systems. Their parents and grandparents bought into the idea of Conquering the Stars (And thought that they'd be supported in doing so), but they're just trying to make a living.

People are generally split into three categories

First-Wavers: The vast majority, descendants of the First Wave of colonists. They're generally dirt poor, their ancestors were promised great things if they went out and settled the unsettled reached of space, but those promises were forgotten.

Second-Wavers: Still mostly descendants born out here. The Second Wave of colonization was much smaller, and better prepared. These were people who knew that the colonies were going to be forgotten backwaters, but came out anyway, usually with the idea that if they brought enough weapons and water purifiers they could set up their own little kingdoms out in space. This is where a lot of the Corporate Executives came from.

Homeborn: Slang for "Idiot", people who were born in the home systems well after the craze died down, but still chose to come out. Usually exiles, people enamored with the idea of living in space, or opportunists. Some of them have dreams of getting rich and buying a ticket back to the core systems, but doing so is basically impossible.

If we go with the "Seekers of the Cosmos" idea, they'll have a decent number of Homeborn, since they're ideology can attract people to the stars, and they've got the infrastructure to move pilgrims into space.


Edit:


This does raise the question of how does getting back to the homeworlds work?

In my mind, most small ships don't have the range to make it, not without puddle-jumping between settled systems for fuel and taking years.

Bigger ships are faster because they carry the fuel to make more direct trips. The old Colony Ships were long ago scrapped for parts, so these days it's mostly slow-as-hell cargo haulers owned by the corps. These ships are massive, but only a very small part contains breathable atmosphere, so there's only room for a handful of passengers on each.


People generally don't try to head back to the homeworlds because, even if they could get a ticket, there isn't much for them there. The only currency out there is usually Company Scrip from the corporations, which won't do you any good at home. So even if you can afford a ticket, you're probably getting dropped off on the homeworld with no papers, no home, and without a cent to your name.

Moving Back to the Homeworlds, a dream for many, means somehow getting your hands on something valuable enough that you could get back and sell it for enough Homeworld Money to start your life. This isn't exactly likely.

[Pauly]

I find the whole idea of interstellar war rather implausible, and did set things up with that not really being a factor in politics and security.
The reason I see for people living in space is people really wanting to live in space and paying for that privilege. It's uneconomical to do so, but in a world were ordinary people can go to other stars, they might not be overly concerned about that when they are leaving their homeworld. Which is why those frontier worlds are overwhelmingly rather poor. It was a poor economic decision from the start.
A consequence of that (which I see in all space colonization scenarios) is that colony worlds all have very low populations. 95% of people still live in the systems of their homeworlds. Which when you have a dozen species, with populations in the low billions, still gives you thousands of millions of people to inhabit those frontier worlds. Even if you have a thousand colonized planets, they each can have average populations in the millions. (Even though they keep blurring together in economic statistics, billions are a significantly greater number than millions.)

If you look at history, the Europeans who settled in remote and harsh places like Iceland, Greenland, Australia, or the Falkland Islands did so on the promise of being able to build a better life and to have opportunities unavailable to them at home.

The driving force is ambition, not escape from poverty. To go to these harsh places obvioulsy you aren’t going to attract the well settled and comfortable, but by the same token you aren’t getting the poorest either.

[BRC]

alright, I've been thinking about it, and a few setting details I'd want to see.


1) There IS genuine good money to be made by mining in the colonies just not for miners. Since the corporations work hard to maintain a monopoly on both buying from a given settlement, AND selling them manufactured goods, they get to squeeze on both ends ( I think this was explicitly a feature of your setting anyway. I might have just read the "No Scarcity" thing and imagined that it meant demand could have been met by just mining the core systems.) I think for the setting to be fun to play in you need to establish that the mining in the colonies is, in fact, important, and the corps probably do aggressively recruit with the promise that you'll work a mine for a bit, then earn enough to buy yourself a nice big plot of land to live off of, or get education and start some other profession. Back at home, it's not hard to assume that life in the colonies is hard work, but decently high standard of living.

2) The mass of raw materials brought from the colonies to the core systems far outstrips the manufactured goods brought the other way, so it's easy to get passage out from the core worlds. It's Not especially comfortable. In the core worlds they convert some cargo bays into passenger compartments, and when they get to the colonies it's all stripped out to fill with as much cargo as possible. Unless you can join a freighter crew, getting passage back is very expensive.

3) While there may not be a single Big Event (A War or disaster that motivates people to move out), you're dealing with multiple planets with populations in the billions, all with plenty of stuff going on there to generate refugees. Corporate recruiters aggressively target such people as new colonists (Especially ones with useful skills), convincing them that they'll have a better life In the Stars than they will trying to find a new home on the core world. The massive population imbalance between the core worlds and the colonies means that even a relatively small event (on a planetary scale anyway) on the core worlds can lead to a wave of immigration to the colonies.

The result here is that you can have a wide variety of reasons why somebody may have come out to the colonies.

As for other groups, let's whip up some criminal syndicates. I shouldn't take the time to do a full writeup right now, but I'm imagining


1) Some sort of loosely aligned pirate confederation, along the lines of the Pirate Republics of Nassau. The Corps hate them, but at least one corp is willing to fence their stolen goods for profit.

2) Some equivalent of the Mafia, an organization with a deep code of professionalism and honor. They specialize in protection, loan sharking, arms dealing, murder-for-hire and finding hard to find goods.
The Corps theoretically hate them, since they're the ones who sell weapons to rebels and pirates, but individual corporate execs are often in their pockets, either accepting bribes, or because they rely on them to supply certain goods. Lots of luxuries are impossible to find without going through the black market, not because they're illegal, but because they're so rare that the few pieces that get shipped in from the core worlds almost immediately get stolen and passed around the underworld.

3) A true Independent faction, one which wants the colonies to become completely self-sufficient and cut off from the Core Systems. They hate the corporations with a passion.

On one hand, their habit of bombing corporate facilities means they're a threat to the livelihood of plenty of innocents. On the other hand, they're one of the few groups putting real effort into building independent infrastructure out here, trying to bootstrap manufacturing capabilities, and developing new technologies that, while not more advanced in the traditional sense, can be built and maintened without access to homeworld (Or corporate) infrastructure.

[Yora]

Coming back to this idea after being distracted with other stuff.

3) While there may not be a single Big Event (A War or disaster that motivates people to move out), you're dealing with multiple planets with populations in the billions, all with plenty of stuff going on there to generate refugees. Corporate recruiters aggressively target such people as new colonists (Especially ones with useful skills), convincing them that they'll have a better life In the Stars than they will trying to find a new home on the core world. The massive population imbalance between the core worlds and the colonies means that even a relatively small event (on a planetary scale anyway) on the core worlds can lead to a wave of immigration to the colonies.

I think with the general concept being about small scale, local conflicts involving people with little power or influence, it might actually work better as a more planetary setting than truly interstellar society setting. Something like 4 planets with urban centers and 8 planets with minor outposts at the most. A much larger galaxy with great powerful states exists, but it lies beyond the immediate horizon of the local populations. Despite dealing galaxy level threats, Starcraft is actually a setting for that kind.

While my initial thematic focus was labor exploitation, within the existing outlines there's also a focus on industry and rural poverty. Those thoughts on different generations of colonists were a great idea.

Putting these things together, it gives me the idea of making the playable setting a region that is actually no longer economically viable. All the industry used to much more developed and profitable, but those boomtown days are long over. With space travel being cheap and easy for giant companies, they are only interested in mining the most easily accessible deposits where you can get the most material with the least effort. Instead of digging deeper into deposits of lower quality, the companies simply pack up all their things and move over to the next planet.
But when that happens, you always have people who want to stay behind or are left behind. As things continue to decline after the big industries have gone, the people who can still afort to move away as well eventually, leaving behind only the most poor. These people don't like living on these depleted mining planets and don't want to stay there, but they don't really see anywhere else to go. Even if they could find passage on a cargo ship they can afford, where would they go? What would they do there? All the nearby worlds are free for all oligarcies who don't have any interest in providing any kind of assistance to economic refugees.
Staying where they are, salvaging old broken and abandoned mining equipment to scrape some minerals from the mostly depleted mines will often seem like the safer option.

The companies still doing business are actually only B-tier companies or lower. They can't compete with the true galactic titans of industry with their fancy mining fleets. Instead they make use of the cheap labor available on the planets that the A-tier companies have already abandoned.

[BRC]

This gives me an idea for a timeline, a paradigm shift in the way exoplanets were mined.


So, our setting was the epicenter of the initial phase of the exploitation. The prevailing model was a colonial one, with the idea being that you could find resource-rich habitable planets, and Build a complete homeworld-style society there. This was the site of that grand experiment.

However it became clear that there wasn't actually a demand for a bunch of extra little Homeworlds out there, and things moved on to a different model, one focused purely on resource extraction. Rather than trying to build permanent infrastructure for the extraction and processing of ore to be shipped home, the Corporations figured out how to build massive refinery-barges.


The bulk of AAA Corporate mining operations takes place around these mobile mining fleets. These fleets don't bother building anything, they just land on a planet, spend a few years extracting all the resources they can, and sending them back home. Miners who complete a tour in a mining fleet get a trip back to the home systems and a massive paycheck.


The old system, with it's skeletal infrastructure (Roads to cities that were never built, abandoned industrial centers that were used to build the Mining Fleets, but then left to rot, old mines that were no longer considered worth operating) is kind of forgotten.

Options for leaving are few. Trade does exist between these planets and the mining fleets, so you COULD try to go there and sign up for a decade of work in the mining fleets, but few are willing to subject themselves to the mercy of the major corps. In fact, new arrivals to the systems are likely to be people who signed up to work in the mining fleets and, for whatever reason, didn't finish out their contract, meaning they got dumped onto these systems, paid only a pittance due to the considerable "Early Termination Fee" baked into all the contracts.


This can set up a few distinct Biomes for adventures

Crumbling infrastructure, either cities that were never completed, or the massive industry built to construct the Mining Fleets, and then abandoned when they were done.

Desolate Wastes, where all the resources were extracted long ago.

Untouched wilderness, marked for some grand project that never saw the light.


You could also include the old exploited labor ideas, but around agriculture rather than mining, as corporate farms exist to feed the Mining Fleets.


You can keep the three corps from my earlier post. Distant Star Enterprises is a corporation that didn't have enough raw capital to build a Mining Fleet of it's own, so it instead bought a bunch of abandoned stuff secondhand and is dedicated to wringing what it can out of the forgotten systems.

The Cult views this place and it's people as prime recruiting fodder and a place to build their utopian society.

Outer Cadabaria is trying to raise money and troops to retake their home. The Real money comes from the Mining Fleets, but if all you have is a few companies of exiled soldiers and some ships, it's a lot easier to secure some abandoned factories and mines than trying to seize a Mining Fleet. Like, the Mining Fleets are not well armed, but they're big enough that even the proper millitary ships that The OutCads have might not win, and attacking a Mining Fleet is a good way to get unwanted attention from the Homeworlds. Nobody cares if you seize territory in the forgotten colonies.

[Pauly]

One thing you can do is that the mega-corps extract ore on a strictly what is profitable for them and their large scale operations.
Consequently there are pockets of high value ore that can be extracted by smaller operators once the big boys move on. This may be because of distance from their other operations, geographical oddities that prevented their large equipment from operating, incomplete surveys, time constraints, and so on.
The mega corps are fine with this and their refineries will pay market price for the ore as long as you extract it and deliver it yourself.
The benefit for the mega corps is more ore, a functioning society into which they can dump their mavericks and not have to pay to send them home, R&R for their crews and good PR for them. The mega corps will give the original survey maps to anyone who asks, they will be out of date and no use to another megacorp, but will encourage privateers to take their own risks.

[Yora]

I have continued to be busy for the last weeks. And been using quite a number of ideas from this discussion to come up with something a bit more specific and coherent:

I quite like the system for sector maps and space travel from Stars Without Number, and I think it should work quite well for what I have in mind now as it is. In this system, traveling a medium distance between two random stars in the same sector takes between 12 to 24 days. If the next sector is directly touching, going from the center of one sector to the center of the next sector takes probably some 24 to 36 days, plus several stops to refuel. That is quite a lot, but apparently even a hundred years ago empires maintained control over colonies separated by much longer travel times, and before that without any instant communication to colonial officals. I want to run my campaign without faster than light communications, so if you don't want to travel but call for help instead, the transit times above are doubled.

I want to put the focus of the campaign on the Esekar Sector, which has three main players. The Ordos Cartel and the Lupai Cartel, who are competing over a monopoly for all consumer goods in the sector, and the Dresat Mining Clan, that is opperating the last industrial strip minining operation in the sector. All the other mining clans have packed up and left years ago, but on the planets Kulpin and Tornesh there's still plenty of independent miners who are scraping buy digging up ores that the great mining clans consider economically unviable for the kind of profit margins they are after.

With most of the big mines closed, the two merchant cartels are dealing with a greatly reduced market for the goods, which really can only support one of them in the long run. So they are both trying to destroy their competition. Once there's only one of them left, prices for everything will go up, so nobody else wants either side to win.

The big Dresat mining operation is a bit of a scam. The only reason the owners haven't shut it down and moved the whole operation to a new planet in another sector is because the regional director is submitting fake productivity reports. The two merchant cartels really need the big mine to stay open to make money themselves, so they are bribing the director. The director wants to keep the bribes coming to him, and so tries to keep the mine open for as long as possible. But he still needs to deliver all the minerals he claims he's producing to his bosses.
The Ordos cartel is buying up resources from the small independent mines for cheap and then sell it to the director so the mine can keep filling up as many ore freighters as it's supposed to be.
Unknown to the director, some of the mid-level managers also fake their own productivity reports. To still produce the amount of ore they are supposed to, they are buying slave miners from the Lupai Cartel. Who get them from pirates who raid ships and colonies.
All of this is currently semi-stable, but once just one element fails, the whole thing is ready to collapse. And the small independent miners who get paid scraps for their minerals by the Ordos Cartel and kidnapped as slaves by the Lupai Cartel very much had enough with all of it.

One additional wildcard that I have in mind, but not fully figured out yet, is the large multi-system state in the neighboring Teoher Sector. They have a population much larger than the whole Esekar Sector combined, and have a decently sized heavy industry that buys up most of the exported minerals. They also have an actual military.
The people of this neighboring regional power are the same species as the Ordos Cartel, and the bosses of the cartel almost all live in the Teoher Sector. But since the Esekar Sector is extrateritorial space under the control of no government, they have always been able to do whatever they want over there without having to pay taxes on any of that. Now suddenly a sizable military fleet from Teoher has arrived in Esekar, with only very vague explanations of fighting piracy and protecting interstellar commerce. Which absolutely nobody believes. The Ordos Cartel is afraid that they are going to be annexed into the state and lose their extrateritorial status and all their wonderful tax-free profits. Their competitors from the Lupai Cartel believe the fleet has been send by powerful friends of the Ordos bosses to help them gain a trade monopoly by destroying the Lupai. The independent miners don't care, they hate either scenario and don't want to become part of another state.
I think it would be the most interesting if the fleet isn't interested in annexing anything at all, but is really after something completely different that is top secret. But so far I really couldn't think of anything. Typically these situations have something to do with advanced ancient technology, but I'm not a fan of the advanced ancient aliens cliche.

[Pauly]

What are the Teoher military after?
1) Esekar is between Teoher and [X].
The Teoher military is there either to outflank the foe or prevent the foe from outflanking them. This isn’t war but tensions are rising behind the scenes and is part of the general saber rattling and show of force designed to get the other side to back off.
2) Julius Caeser in space.
Caeser basically conquered Gaul while running a private army against the wishes of his nominal political controllers in Rome. He created a series of crises that then needed his intervention to resolve justifying his continued conquest.
The fleet commander has political ambitions and is there to throw his weight around to resolve problems and make himself look like the big goddam hero. He isn’t interesting in conquering or annexing the whole sector, although a few secure bases might be nice, just to do enough to be seen as a man of action and resolve. He doesn’t care about the long term consequences, he cares about getting a string of successes that can propel his political career. This can be humanitarian interventions as well as traditional anti-piracy/peace keeping operations.
3) Alien invasion.
Aliens from another galaxy have developed an inter galaxy jump. The Teoher government has detected signs that an inter galaxy jump arrival is imminent in the Eseker sector. Just how hostile the enemy will be can be dialled up or down. Motivations for the aliens could be colonization, conquest, refugees escaping a superior foe, exploration of surrounding galaxies for threats. I’d suggest a modest scouting force full of sneaky fast stuff. Teoher wants to defend their interests and if possible obtain as much alien tech as possible. I’d suggest a tech level roughly comparable to existing tech. The galaxy jump tech is powered from a huge device in the home galaxy so the alien ships will have no galaxy jump tech on their ships. This isn’t the Allen’s first jump into human space which explains why Teoher can detect the incoming jump and why the aliens can communicate with humans, so you don’t have to go through first contact issues.

[Yora]

What about all of the above?

I've been thinking about time travel conflicts today, and while I don't want to include time travel in the campaign, the idea that the fleet knows where something will happen but not when sounds very interesting. They are just hanging around looking simultaneously unthreatening and having something to do because they are waiting for something that will take place somewhere in this part of space.

I also like the idea that they would be there to intercept something as far out from their own borders as they can deploy and supply the fleet. As it is, even with their high speed military drives, it would take 2 weeks to send a message to their nearest base, and another 2 weeks before any kinds of reinforcements could arrive.
There was a major sea battle in 1939 between German and British ships off the coast from South America, with Germany having no possessions in the area and Britain only a few tiny island, which were irrelevant to the war in Europe (cargo ships in the Atlantic, however, were not). These ships would probably have taken at least 2 weeks to get to London or Hamburg from the position of the battle.

Since I'll have no faster than light travel or even communication in the setting, there's also no faster than light detection of anything. I'll have to tinker with the SWN space travel rules a bit, but normally you can't just jump a fleet straight into any system and instead have to make multiple hops. If there's an enemy base, they can send out messengers with ultra fast drives to warn other nearby systems before you can take the base. So it could make sense to send an invasion fleet along a really long detour to avoid messengers being send.
But if the enemy has learned about the fleet through spies, then traps can be set and there's no way to warn the fleet while in transit.
I'll have to think this through a lot more, but I really like the idea of two fleets trying to outmaneuver each other without communication faster than ship travel, and the Esekar Sector simply being the place where the clash is going to happen. And then damaged and scattered survivors from both sides will end up all over the place, trying to regroup or getting home without running into enemies hunting for them.

[Pauly]

What about all of the above?

I've been thinking about time travel conflicts today, and while I don't want to include time travel in the campaign, the idea that the fleet knows where something will happen but not when sounds very interesting. They are just hanging around looking simultaneously unthreatening and having something to do because they are waiting for something that will take place somewhere in this part of space.

I also like the idea that they would be there to intercept something as far out from their own borders as they can deploy and supply the fleet. As it is, even with their high speed military drives, it would take 2 weeks to send a message to their nearest base, and another 2 weeks before any kinds of reinforcements could arrive.
There was a major sea battle in 1939 between German and British ships off the coast from South America, with Germany having no possessions in the area and Britain only a few tiny island, which were irrelevant to the war in Europe (cargo ships in the Atlantic, however, were not). These ships would probably have taken at least 2 weeks to get to London or Hamburg from the position of the battle.

Since I'll have no faster than light travel or even communication in the setting, there's also no faster than light detection of anything. I'll have to tinker with the SWN space travel rules a bit, but normally you can't just jump a fleet straight into any system and instead have to make multiple hops. If there's an enemy base, they can send out messengers with ultra fast drives to warn other nearby systems before you can take the base. So it could make sense to send an invasion fleet along a really long detour to avoid messengers being send.
But if the enemy has learned about the fleet through spies, then traps can be set and there's no way to warn the fleet while in transit.
I'll have to think this through a lot more, but I really like the idea of two fleets trying to outmaneuver each other without communication faster than ship travel, and the Esekar Sector simply being the place where the clash is going to happen. And then damaged and scattered survivors from both sides will end up all over the place, trying to regroup or getting home without running into enemies hunting for them.

I think the getter analogy might be the Battle of the Falklands (1914) not the Battle of the River Plate (1939). The German Pacific cruiser fleet was commerce raiding on its way home from China when they encountered a British squadron of superior ships. The interesting point is that both sides engaged in intelligence gathering and subterfuge to try to get an advantageous position. The Germans were tricked into believing the Falklands were undefended and were lured to their doom.

[Yora]

Having done a bit of the math, it seems you could in theory make extremely long jumps without stopping at a fuel station. But that would require ships that have several weapons and armor removed to make space for more fuel, and enormous fleets of tankers with lots of stops to transfer fuel. Not to speak of the amount of fuel.
The amount of resources that would have to be commited to move just a small force gets totally out of scale very quickly, and even the biggest galactic empires don't have infinite resources.

Just look at this tanker-apocalypse from Operation Black Buck, just to get a single bomber to the target.

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