Update: There is now a wiki entry for Cypher, which supercedes this.
I guess if I'm going with Cypher System I have to decide on some things about creating characters. From the SRD:
To create your character, you build a simple statement that describes them. The statement takes this form: “I am a [fill in an adjective here] [fill in a noun here] who [fill in a verb here].”
Thus: “I am an adjective noun who verbs.” For example, you might say, “I am a Rugged Warrior who Controls Beasts” or “I am a Charming Explorer who Focuses Mind Over Matter.”
In this sentence, the adjective is called your descriptor.
The noun is your character type.
The verb is called your focus.
In the base game, "type" is limited to Warriors, Adepts, Explorers, and Speakers, but each setting tends to have its own. (In one of the convention games this weekend I was a Stalwart Juggernaut who... uh... something setting-specific about the particular order of post-apocalyptic knights I was in, not a great example of focus. I rode a particularly large crafted steed (motorcycle) through a crowd of Cobra Slugs. It was messy.)
Anyway, I probably need to come up with character types. Hmm.
More PC types
I have been debating about pulling out Zozer Games' Solo (the 2017 version – I think there's a newer one but I don't have it) and sort of "play-testing" what I have so far. Not sure I'll do it in "public" but at any rate, the list of PC types has made me consider whether I should factor in things for PC groups other than a free trader crew. Apart from that, they have:
Miners – that feels like a limited option for adventuring.
Criminals – okay, though I think that's often the PC group regardless.
Starmen – not what I would call them (non-inclusive much?), and I lack a military background at all so I dunno.
Hunters – if I can settle on how void hunting works, sure. Not sure on-world hunting seems like something I want to build a campaign around.
Explorers – not much room for this in my deliberately-small universe.
Staffers – of a noble, this is, and... hmm. Maybe?
Chancers – basically, adventurers but without their own ship.
My first reaction was that Zhdez should not be, but then I thought it through and the Zhdez should absolutely be the most cohesive of empires, at least as viewed from the outside. Zhdez love cooperation and organization and bureaucracy, so the Zhdezplier is organized from interstellar trade on down to the local level. They're just very loosely held, and they neither want to nor can incorporate non-Zhdez worlds. They assure non-Zhdez that this is exactly what everyone wants, that disconnecting municipal from regional from planetary from interplanetary government is simply inefficient. Non-Zhdez assume there's a lot of coercive telepathy involved to make that so.
The Terrans are trying their best to be an Evil Empire, but of course that's why they're not really a unified empire.
The Wolves occasionally have an emperor type spring up but mostly they're just chaos.
And then there's the Inukari.
The Inukari Union is a federation, and very explicitly doesn't manage on-world anything. This leads to a lot of conflict, I am sure, in the same sense as federal vs. state powers in the United States, except that it's a weak federation and hasn't been able to usurp planetary power on most worlds. (Capital is probably under federal control, hopefully not as dysfunctionally as DC.) Union law ends at the starport pale, which may lead to some "oh no, the Prime Directive!" sort of situations.
As with Cherryh's Alliance/Union universe, I think the Union has come from a trade union of starship families. In Cherryh's work, this came about because stations (I'd say "planets" but they mostly didn't settle the actual world) were doing intrusive searches of ships and so forth. The merchanters demanded independence, basically. And that's what the Inukari Union is for: keeping trade flowing, which means keeping pirates under control, keeping spacers from being subject to local laws (provided they stay within Union-designated areas), and providing a shared currency.
And, of course defending their borders. Their expansion into the Ring and pushing the Zhdez out is not exactly empire-building, it's more a function of Inukari vs. Zhdez outlooks, but the Zhdez probably don't see it that way.
I guess no empire really thinks it's the evil one.
Voidspace's voidspace
If I'm continuing my oceanic parallels, I need to have both "distance from shore" and "depth." I kind of have a littoral/continental shelf effect, in that once you get outside of the correspondence zone you can't safely drop out of voidspace, but I wanted a "whales surface and dive" situation as well.
They can't enter realspace, but it is believed that they can enter whatever "corresponds" to the deep void outside of a system. "It is believed" is load-bearing, given that they're somewhat ephemeral in the first place. They're barely corporeal to begin with, it's possible they're just invisible when they're not glowing like an aurora.
It is of interest to starship engineers, who hope it provides a shortcut to the shortcut (given that voidwhales and possible other voidlife seems to get from place to place faster than their observed top speeds at times, as do Ancient worldships).
Revising voidspace fauna
Update: There is now a wiki entry for voidlife, which supercedes this.
If I continue to assume that the gates have some sort of energy that is the basis of life in the void, the food chain might look something like this:
Phykons: The algae/krill equivalent, which convert the energy of the gate/star into brightspace energy. (I feel like it might be neat to have them also cluster around planetary orbits, lighting up as the planet passes through and they feed, and going dormant when it moves on, which gives a visual representation of the correspondences.)
Shoalers: The bunker/baitfish/forage fish equivalent, filter-feeding on phykons and accumulating brightspace energy. Combers pick up these and phykons, providing about half the brightspace energy harvested by humans. Some shoalers travel from star to star, taking months to do so.
Voidsharks et al.: The equivalent of predator fish: salmon, tuna, sharks, etc. They follow the shoalers, generally through the spaces between gates, but not always.
Voidwhales: I need a qualitative difference in these, to parallel the fish/mammal one. Something over and above the (inconclusive) evidence that they're sophonts. Hmm.
Voidwhale mapping
Moby Dick discussions continue to turn up interesting things: the chart of whale species distribution coincidentally has a bit of a Trav sector map proportion which makes me think: I need multiple types of voidwhales, and it would be interesting if they were unevenly distributed through voidspace.
They will, of course, need to migrate; I imagine them being as fast as slower (at least) ships, but also that there is some argument about whether they can go even faster because the same pods will supposedly be seen in different places sooner than they might be expected to have gotten there.
Voidspace size and speed
If J1 gates in voidspace are half a light-second apart, or about 93,000 miles, a ship taking about 144 hours (six days) to traverse it needs to go about 650 miles an hour. This is comically slow, about the speed of sound. Of course, J4 ships are four times as fast, and most ships are J2 to J3. But it still makes things closer to fighter jet dogfighting than what realspace interactions would be.
It means a Traveller sector, which is to say the voidspace side of Charted Space, is all of twenty light-seconds tall, or just over thirteen lunar distances.
Because the various gates open into different universes, this isn't the same as saying "half a light second in voidspace is equal to four light years in real space." That would make the correspondence of Earth's orbit... uh... three-quarters of a mile? That's actually larger than I expected, but still not big enough. Doesn't matter: the "gate" area corresponds to roughly 75-90 AU of realspace. Most ships would not risk dropping out farther than 60 AU, though since they're generally headed for a planet the issue doesn't come up.
