#convoy game is a pretty bad name believe me I am looking for alternatives

[garden-ghoul]

spooky shit in convoy game

jsyk the space whalers were emilie’s fault, I was JUST talking about star wars

Augmented Reality: This is the Beam Saber equivalent of ghosts from BitD. The internet, but you can see it all around you! Holograms and stuff, smells and tastes if you’re rich. Sentient programs that can Go Wrong, et c. People who program in AR are called augmentors. We also know that if the interface is altered in certain ways--for some reason mold and fungi alter digital AR interfaces without rendering them unusable--it can make AR really fucking weird.

Wild AR: When humans invented AR and the interfaces to view and program it, they found that there something their interfaces could pick up and interact with that they didn’t put there. And in remote places, you may not even need an interface to experience wild AR. Wild AR isn’t directly programmable, except in certain locations on the planet Tir (’AR temples’), which aren’t working very well any more for the most part. Nevertheless the Aurish and Sagittan armies are racing to find complete information on how these temples work, because whoever can make a mobile version can manipulate reality itself any time and anywhere.

The Aurish squad dedicated to researching AR temples is the Archaeological Expeditionary Force. Sagitta doesn’t have one yet, because you can just as easily send a normal combat squad to guard some augmentors, but I kind of assume it’s eventually going to be the player squad, Rickshaw Convoy.

Blackwhales: A couple decades ago it became apparent that blackwhales (’whales’ that traverse the Black) can travel interstellar distances in practical amounts of time. The immediate question was: how can we get this ability from them? They didn’t prove amenable to towing spaceships around, so Sagittan scientists created the next best thing: the bone doors. Bone doors are structures made from blackwhale bone and skin, with blackwhale blood pumping through. Nobody really has confirmed theories about WHY bone doors work, only empirical evidence for HOW they work: you point them in a direction and they shoot whatever goes through into the nearest solar system the path intersects with. This has obvious potential for all kinds of nasty accidents; you can't use a bone door to retrieve a ship if you misaimed and sent it 1000 light years away. Sagitta has settled on making a larger number of bone doors that all point to different places so they don't have to be readjusted, but it does take more raw material (dead blackwhales) to maintain them. Each system generally only has one Aurish-held bone door, which is reprogrammed for each jump. This does unfortunately mean they have about a 1.5% chance of sending you somewhere they didn't intend, to starve slowly in the Black, but hey! It saves on whales.

The Sagittan whaling fleet call themselves the Bonesmen and are very grim and salty about it all. Aurum actually has no dedicated whaling fleet; instead they have a privateer company called the Blackwhales Brigade who occasionally bring down a blackwhale but prefer to just rob the Bonesmen’s transports when practical.

Empaths: What is an empath? The White Group would LOVE to know. Their chosen research subjects are people with essentially an extra sense, which variously manifests as precognition, clairvoyance, or reading thoughts and emotions. This last is the most common in the wild, as it were, which is why they’re called empaths, but it’s not clear how they do what they do or why others can’t. They are often gifted pilots, but Dr. White and zir researchers are divided on whether that has anything to do with the empathy.

Sagitta and Aurum for the most part keep known empaths out of battle, but the fact that Sovereignty has no formal research or much infrastructure at all means they have an entire squad of empaths: Tremor, a seven-person unit that has never lost a member yet.