#mars colonist

[sea-of-machines]

old as fart colonist art I finished only now because I failed to see its potential

[starsirrah]

Day 13-14: Celestial Pt. 2✨

✨Rise up, you must awake✨

Have a Mars Colonist during New Migrator! I had to draw him at LEAST once this year XD✨

Dude got cursed with blonde when he became a space god lolol🌙✨

[disk28]

[stormylewirmy]

THAT'S RIGHT IM POSTING SOMETHING EVERYDAY so I decided to torture myself by drawing 2 things for each prompt

so for the 2nd day I actually had an hard time deciding which song cause really Ayreon has a lot of emotional moments but Carried by the Wind been living in my head rent free for a few weeks

[mistray-art]

» Day 18 » The Mars Colonist » Universal Migrator.

[18 november 2022]

[rearranging-deck-chairs]

yaz, somewhere between 25 and 30 years old she lost track a while ago, watching from a distance as 10 tries to impress a 20-year-old, the moment hes sent her away and rejoins yaz: shes too young for you mate

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Writing Notes: The Moon (pt. 2)

Earth’s Moon is thought to have formed in a tremendous collision. A massive object ― named Theia after the mythological Greek Titan who was the mother of Selene, goddess of the Moon ― smashed into Earth, flinging material into space that became the Moon.

The brightest and largest object in our night sky, the Moon makes Earth a more livable planet by moderating our home planet's wobble on its axis, leading to a relatively stable climate. It also causes tides, creating a rhythm that has guided humans for thousands of years.

The Moon was likely formed after a Mars-sized body collided with Earth several billion years ago.

Earth's only natural satellite is simply called "the Moon" because people didn't know other moons existed until Galileo Galilei discovered four moons orbiting Jupiter in 1610. In Latin, the Moon was called Luna, which is the main adjective for all things Moon-related: lunar.

The many missions that have explored the Moon have found no evidence to suggest it has its own living things. However, the Moon could be the site of future colonization by humans. The discovery that the Moon harbors water ice, and that the highest concentrations occur within darkened craters at the poles, makes the Moon a little more hospitable for future human colonists.

With a radius of about 1,080 miles (1,740 kilometers), the Moon is less than a third of the width of Earth. If Earth were the size of a nickel, the Moon would be about as big as a coffee bean.

The Moon is an average of 238,855 miles (384,400 kilometers) away. That means 30 Earth-sized planets could fit in between Earth and the Moon.

The Moon is slowly moving away from Earth, getting about an inch farther away each year.

The Moon is rotating at the same rate that it revolves around Earth (called synchronous rotation), so the same hemisphere faces Earth all the time. Some people call the far side – the hemisphere we never see from Earth – the "dark side" but that's misleading. As the Moon orbits Earth, different parts are in sunlight or darkness at different times. The changing illumination is why, from our perspective, the Moon goes through phases. During a "full moon," the hemisphere of the Moon we can see from Earth is fully illuminated by the Sun. And a "new moon" occurs when the far side of the Moon has full sunlight, and the side facing us is having its night.

The moon's near and far side.

The Moon makes a complete orbit around Earth in 27 Earth days and rotates or spins at that same rate, or in that same amount of time. Because Earth is moving as well – rotating on its axis as it orbits the Sun – from our perspective, the Moon appears to orbit us every 29 days.

The leading theory of the Moon's origin is that a Mars-sized body collided with Earth about 4.5 billion years ago. The resulting debris from both Earth and the impactor accumulated to form our natural satellite 239,000 miles (384,000 kilometers) away. The newly formed Moon was in a molten state, but within about 100 million years, most of the global "magma ocean" had crystallized, with less-dense rocks floating upward and eventually forming the lunar crust.

Earth's Moon has a core, mantle, and crust:

The Moon’s core is proportionally smaller than other terrestrial bodies' cores. The solid, iron-rich inner core is 149 miles (240 kilometers) in radius. It is surrounded by a liquid iron shell 56 miles (90 kilometers) thick. A partially molten layer with a thickness of 93 miles (150 kilometers) surrounds the iron core.

The mantle extends from the top of the partially molten layer to the bottom of the Moon's crust. It is most likely made of minerals like olivine and pyroxene, which are made up of magnesium, iron, silicon, and oxygen atoms.

The crust has a thickness of about 43 miles (70 kilometers) on the Moon’s near-side hemisphere and 93 miles (150 kilometers) on the far-side. It is made of oxygen, silicon, magnesium, iron, calcium, and aluminum, with small amounts of titanium, uranium, thorium, potassium, and hydrogen.

Long ago the Moon had active volcanoes, but today they are all dormant and have not erupted for millions of years.

With too sparse an atmosphere to impede impacts, a steady rain of asteroids, meteoroids, and comets strikes the surface of the Moon, leaving numerous craters behind. Tycho Crater is more than 52 miles (85 kilometers) wide.

Over billions of years, these impacts have ground up the surface of the Moon into fragments ranging from huge boulders to powder. Nearly the entire Moon is covered by a rubble pile of charcoal-gray, powdery dust, and rocky debris called the lunar regolith. Beneath is a region of fractured bedrock referred to as the megaregolith.

The light areas of the Moon are known as the highlands. The dark features, called maria (Latin for seas), are impact basins that were filled with lava between 4.2 and 1.2 billion years ago. These light and dark areas represent rocks of different compositions and ages, which provide evidence for how the early crust may have crystallized from a lunar magma ocean. The craters themselves, which have been preserved for billions of years, provide an impact history for the Moon and other bodies in the inner solar system.

If you looked in the right places on the Moon, you would find pieces of equipment, American flags, and even a camera left behind by astronauts. While you were there, you'd notice that the gravity on the surface of the Moon is one-sixth of Earth's, which is why in footage of moonwalks, astronauts appear to almost bounce across the surface.

The temperature on the Moon reaches about 260 degrees Fahrenheit (127 degrees Celsius) when in full Sun, but in darkness, the temperatures plummet to about -280 degrees Fahrenheit (-173 degrees Celsius).

During the initial exploration of the Moon, and the analysis of all the returned samples from the Apollo and the Luna missions, we thought that the surface of the Moon was dry.

The first definitive discovery of water was made in 2008 by the Indian mission Chandrayaan-1, which detected hydroxyl molecules spread across the lunar surface and concentrated at the poles. Missions such as Lunar Prospector, LCROSS, and Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, have not only shown that the surface of the Moon has global hydration but there are actually high concentrations of ice water in the permanently shadowed regions of the lunar poles.

Scientists also found the lunar surface releases its water when the Moon is bombarded by micrometeoroids. The surface is protected by a layer, a few centimeters of dry soil that can only be breached by large micrometeoroids. When micrometeoroids impact the surface of the Moon, most of the material in the crater is vaporized. The shock wave carries enough energy to release the water that’s coating the grains of the soil. Most of that water is released into space.

In October 2020, NASA’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) confirmed, for the first time, water on the sunlit surface of the Moon. This discovery indicates that water may be distributed across the lunar surface, and not limited to cold, shadowed places. SOFIA detected water molecules (H2O) in Clavius Crater, one of the largest craters visible from Earth, located in the Moon’s southern hemisphere.

The Moon has a very thin and weak atmosphere, called an exosphere. It does not provide any protection from the Sun's radiation or impacts from meteoroids.

The early Moon may have developed an internal dynamo, the mechanism for generating global magnetic fields for terrestrial planets, but today, the Moon has a very weak magnetic field. The magnetic field here on Earth is many thousands of times stronger than the Moon's magnetic field.

Earth’s Moon was born out of destruction.

Several theories about our Moon’s formation vie for dominance, but almost all share that point in common: near the time of the solar system’s formation, about 4.5 billion years ago, something ― perhaps a single object the size of Mars, perhaps a series of objects ― crashed into the young Earth and flung enough molten and vaporized debris into space to create the Moon.

Five Things We Learned from Apollo Moon Rocks

The chemical composition of Moon and Earth rocks are very similar.

The Moon was once covered in an ocean of magma.

Meteorites have shattered and melted rocks on the Moon’s surface through impacts.

Lava flowed up through cracks in the Moon’s crust and filled its impact basins.

Lunar “soil” is made of pulverized rock created by meteorite impacts.

If these writing notes helped with your poem/story, please tag me. Or leave a link in the replies. I'd love to read them!

Writing Notes: The Moon (pt. 1) ⚜ Writing Notes & References

[timberwind]

Yarragardee Basin, Mangala, 7995 A.D. [this image is no longer canon due to changing of the timescale on which Mangala was terraformed]

------------------------

Accompanying music: You’re On Fire by They Might Be Giants. Summer road trip music of all time, in my opinion.

Here’s a little expository write-up on the history and geography of the worlds shown here. Someday I’ll have more to show of the personal story of these two critters and their travels; until then, a more macro-level description.

------------------------

(most of this info has become outdated as modeling invalidated some original assumptions and I changed my mind on what I wanted here; future art of Mangala will reflect this)

Mangala and its sister world Kahira (visible in the background) are binary planets, orbiting one another in a manner not entirely unlike that of Pluto and Charon in the Solar System. Mangala is a relatively small world - just about twenty percent the mass of the Earth, something like if you took two copies of Mars and smushed them together; without the internal heat to drive a carbonate cycle long term, it had long been a frozen, dusty, and arid place when transhumanity first established a permanent presence in the Tahoka system almost a thousand years ago. Since those early days, terraforming using a Birchian soletta system (a huge but foil-thin Fresnel lens of mirrors, with a secondary focal lens for burning atmospheric gasses out of the regolith) has rendered it shirtsleeve habitable to baseline humans across much of the surface, although the global water inventory remains low* and the air in the “continental” uplands is stratospheric, with only the hardiest lichens establishing a foothold. Most of Mangala’s major metropolitan areas are located in the deep rift valleys and basins, where air pressure is highest.

Kahira on the other hand, a rock almost a fifth the mass of its sister world (a little under the mass of old Mercury), remains only slightly terraformed - surface conditions are persistently cold, with a thin barely-Martian atmosphere. Some of its larger rift valleys and craters have been tented over, aerated, and planted with tall low-gravity forest and grassland, a style of habitat construction dating back to the first Mars colonists almost six thousand years ago. Industrial complexes and buried cities sprawl out across the bare surface of the moon, with huge low-gravity lava tubes seeing extensive urban development.

The Yarragardee Basin, pictured above, is a graben basin in Mangala’s northern hemisphere, notable for the historic industrial city of Tirupati - here we see two road-trippers between cities on the basin’s great plain, taking a break in the long late afternoon of a sunset-day***. Having stopped for a night at a motel near Tirupati’s aerospace complex, they’re now continuing their journey to the city of Redmond-Tonasket, located in the Woronora Valles trench system about two thousand kilometers to the southwest.

* While plenty of water could have been imported from Tahoka’s cometary halo, it was decided not to do so in order to avoid inundating pre-existing cities in the valleys and deep basins. The extremely humid hothouse conditions that come after slamming dismantled ice moons through the stratosphere at over six kilometers a second were also broadly considered unacceptable.

** Smaller worlds have been terraformed in transhuman space, both by worldhouse and more open-air methods, but it’s largely the kind of thing that much more energy-rich systems do as a vanity project. Kahira may someday see blue skies, but likely not for a thousand years at least. (edit, one year later: I actually changed up some of this while simulating this system for stability. I’ll be posting more about this soon.)

*** Mangala and Kahira, being tidally locked to each other such that they always show one another the same face as they orbit their common center of mass, both have days exactly as long as their orbital periods - 403 kiloseconds, or roughly 112 hours. This is for convenience divided into month-weeks comprising four “circadian days” of 100 kiloseconds (~26 hours), with the remaining three kiloseconds added on to the last day of a month-week to keep synchronization.

[mysticstronomy]

DID LIFE BEGIN IN SPACE??

Blog#449

Wednesday, October 30th, 2024.

Welcome back,

Life, for all its complexities, has a simple commonality: It spreads. Plants, animals and bacteria have colonized almost every nook and cranny of our world.

But why stop there? Some scientists speculate that biological matter may have proliferated across the cosmos itself, transported from planet to planet on wayward lumps of rock and ice. This idea is known as panspermia, and it carries a profound implication: Life on Earth may not have originated on our planet.

In theory, panspermia is fairly simple. Astronomers know that impacts from comets or asteroids on planets will sometimes eject debris with enough force to catapult rocks into space. Some of those space rocks will, in turn, crash into other worlds. A few rare meteorites on Earth are known to have come from Mars, likely in this fashion.

“You can imagine small astronauts sitting inside this rock, surviving the journey,” says Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist at Harvard University and director of the school’s Institute for Theory and Computation. “Microbes could potentially move from one planet to another, from Mars to Earth, from Earth to Venus.”

(You may recognize Loeb’s name from his recent book Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth, which garnered headlines and criticism from astronomers for its claim that our solar system was recently visited by extraterrestrials.)

Loeb has authored a number of papers probing the mechanics of panspermia, looking at, among other things, how the size and speed of space objects might affect their likelihood of transferring life.

While Loeb still thinks it’s more likely that life originated on Earth, he says his work has failed to rule out the possibility that it came from somewhere else in space.

Meanwhile, recent experiments have suggested that earthly organisms can survive in space, at least for a little while. Experiments aboard the EXPOSE-E facility at the International Space Station have subjected bacteria, lichens and plant seeds to the extreme cold and radiation of space for anywhere from a few days to over a year. Some bacteria and other organisms were able to survive the journey, including tardigrades, ultra-hardy animals found everywhere from Arctic ice to the deep ocean.

If an asteroid or comet is large enough, microbes could be frozen deep within, Loeb says. That could protect them from radiation and the extreme temperatures that turn meteors into fireballs. After they explode onto the surface of a new world, these extraterrestrial colonists could begin to thrive.

In other solar systems, panspermia could be even more likely to occur than in our own. For example, the seven tightly packed planets of the TRAPPIST-1 system, discovered in 2016, might be ideal for life to planet-hop.

If we find life there one day, Loeb says, we should pay attention to whether it all looks suspiciously similar. He thinks two neighboring planets with similar biological systems would be a sure sign that life had traveled between them at some point.

Loeb also hypothesizes that panspermia could occur even between distant star systems. Interstellar visitors, like the recently observed space object ‘Oumuamua and the comet Borisov, could spread life from system to system.

Such a process could even begin on our own planet. In a paper published in the journal Life, Loeb looked at the possibility that asteroids or comets might graze the Earth’s atmosphere, dozens of miles above the surface, picking up microorganisms floating high in the sky, before heading out on interstellar journeys. He estimates that, though rare, a few such instances have likely occurred during Earth’s lifetime.

Even if an asteroid flyby did pick up a few microbes from Earth, it’s highly unlikely that they would survive the journey, much less land on another planet with conditions similar to ours. But, then again, we can’t necessarily rule it out.

Originally published on https://www.astronomy.com

COMING UP!!

(Saturday, November 2nd, 2024)

"DID TIME OR SPACE EXIST FIRST??"

[queereads-bracket]

Queer Adult SFF Books Bracket: Round 2

Book summaries below:

Planetfall series (Planetfall, After Atlas, Before Mars, Atlas Alone) by Emma Newman

Renata Ghali believed in Lee Suh-Mi’s vision of a world far beyond Earth, calling to humanity. A planet promising to reveal the truth about our place in the cosmos, untainted by overpopulation, pollution, and war. Ren believed in that vision enough to give up everything to follow Suh-Mi into the unknown.

More than twenty-two years have passed since Ren and the rest of the faithful braved the starry abyss and established a colony at the base of an enigmatic alien structure where Suh-Mi has since resided, alone. All that time, Ren has worked hard as the colony's 3-D printer engineer, creating the tools necessary for human survival in an alien environment, and harboring a devastating secret.

Ren continues to perpetuate the lie forming the foundation of the colony for the good of her fellow colonists, despite the personal cost. Then a stranger appears, far too young to have been part of the first planetfall, a man who bears a remarkable resemblance to Suh-Mi.

The truth Ren has concealed since planetfall can no longer be hidden. And its revelation might tear the colony apart…

Science fiction, mystery, psychological thriller, series, adult

The Spear Cuts Through Water by Simon Jimenez

The people suffer under the centuries-long rule of the Moon Throne. The royal family—the despotic emperor and his monstrous sons, the Three Terrors—hold the countryside in their choking grip. They bleed the land and oppress the citizens with the frightful powers they inherited from the god locked under their palace.

But that god cannot be contained forever.

With the aid of Jun, a guard broken by his guilt-stricken past, and Keema, an outcast fighting for his future, the god escapes from her royal captivity and flees from her own children, the triplet Terrors who would drag her back to her unholy prison. And so it is that she embarks with her young companions on a five-day pilgrimage in search of freedom—and a way to end the Moon Throne forever. The journey ahead will be more dangerous than any of them could have imagined.

Both a sweeping adventure story and an intimate exploration of identity, legacy, and belonging, The Spear Cuts Through Water is an ambitious and profound saga that will transport and transform you—and is like nothing you’ve ever read before.

Fantasy, epic fantasy, metanarrative, experimental, adult

[sea-of-machines]

Captain and Mars Colonist doing Jojo poses

[starsirrah]

✨Migrator Soul✨

The sleeper awakes, have a Colonist Migrator art! Been meaning to draw him for ages!✨

He dies and becomes a glittery stardust space god, a usual Tuesday on Mars~✨

Alts under the cut✨:

[kaesaaurelia]

3rd Life Space Colonist AU Concepts

So I'm very new to MCYT fandom, in the process of watching everything in the Life Series, but while I was watching 3rd Life I could not get the idea of this group having been sent to colonize an alien planet and it going very wrong.

But before things go wrong, they would have had specific roles and reasons they were picked, so I thought a bit about that, and once I had roles figured out I went and played around in Hero Forge to design the characters.

(Also, obviously there would be more than 14 people on an expedition like this and there's certain types of personnel they'd want more than one of, or who are conspicuously missing from this cast list.

You can make of that what you will.)

So, without further ado: some of the personnel aboard a ship heading to the furthest reaches of the galaxy, sent by totally not evil Mars-based corporation Farlands Planetary Systems:

SPACESHIP FLIGHT & MAINTENANCE

At this point in the future, there are machines that can do incredible things, but none of them can quite replicate whatever's going on in Scar's head human decision-making, and on longer journeys where the ship is required to make multiple FTL jumps in quick succession, human intuition and ingenuity are necessary for survival. To that end, pilots are directly plugged into their ships and to some extent, on longer journeys, become the ship. They need to be willing and able to do terrifying things without hesitation or consultation with others. Scar is great at this. He's also an absolute menace everywhere else, but in all fairness it's very hard for him to remember how gravity works on planets when he's used to using it to slingshot himself around in space.

Etho and BDubs aren't JUST there to maintain the ship mechanically -- they'll be rebuilding humanity's technological achievements from the ground up once they get to the planet -- but they're also vital to maintaining the ship across its long journey. BDubs is especially skilled at working in and navigating through zero gravity environments, and he's very used to doing floating repairs. This should have no lasting consequences for him once they get to a planet.

Tango is... an odd one. He's primarily a computer guy, and he's no slouch there, but he's never been on one of these expeditions himself -- see, his family's owned Farlands Planetary Systems for centuries, since before the Martian atmosphere had been been tamed and the planet's population was only a couple thousand. From his comfortable climate controlled office on Mars, he's looked over proposals, decided which ones were most likely to be successful, and signed off on countless exploration missions. He's watched them leave and mostly come back, and he's never encountered a high-risk high-reward situation he couldn't at least break even on. He's about to.

MEDICAL CARE

There's an extensive medical staff onboard, of course -- or there should be, anyway. I'm sure the others are fine!

Martyn is a generalist, good at figuring out what the hell is going wrong and how to stabilize someone's condition in the field with minimal resources. He's good at making difficult decisions quickly and making the sacrifices necessary for long-term survival.

Grian, meanwhile, is a specialist in neurology, and while he's meant to be looking after the whole crew, he's very important on this expedition because he is specifically a specialist in the connection between pilot and ship, and his task is primarily to keep the pilot alive at all costs.

Grian's also very excited about the pioneering medical procedure he's convinced Farlands to give all the personnel on this expedition, which will allow them to completely regenerate after dying -- at least twice! This has technically been possible for a while, but it's never been this fast, and they haven't been able to allow the subjects to retain their memories and personalities until now. It's still experimental but given the high risk nature and high cost of this particular expedition, he feels it's worth the risk, and most people jumped at having not only a second chance at life, but a third!

EXPLORATION & TERRAFORMING

Once they get to the planet, of course, they're going to need to figure out what's already there, and to transform it into a liveable place! So there are various experts who will explore the planet, conduct a full survey of its resources, and work to make it easier for humans to live there. Here we have experts in population biology, minerology, environmental chemistry, xenobotany, and agronomy.

Joel works for Farlands, usually traveling with his wife Lizzie, (an ethnopharmacologist). BigB tends to work on a contract -- there's a lot of call for minerologists in the outer solar system -- but if this expedition is successful, he'll never have to work again, and he won't have to go through the cycle of spending six lonely months in the Kuiper Belt, returning to Earth, then going back out again. Both of them think they know what they're getting into.

Cleo and Scott haven't worked for Farlands before, and are very surprised to be asked, as they have a shared checkered past. Cleo, in her younger days, was convicted of burning down the Martian Prime Minister's house. In fairness, a. he deserved it, and b. it was extremely flammable, because he destroyed a bunch of oxygen farms to build it, out of wood, and was not much of a believer in fire safety regulations. He was not home at the time, so he was fine, but about a year later he was assassinated. No one has ever been formally charged with the crime, but Scott, being one of Cleo's close friends, was the primary suspect. Both of their careers have suffered because of this -- Cleo can't get tenure anywhere, and Scott actually went into hiding for a time -- and while they don't trust Farlands even a little bit, they do like the idea of going somewhere that has no extradition treaties with Mars.

Like BigB, Jimmy's ready to cash out and settle down on a strange planet. He's going to be making sure people have enough edible food on this new planet, since there's no guarantee it will have edible plants or animals.

EXPERTS IN ALIEN LIFE

There's definitely not intelligent life on this new planet. It would be illegal for Farlands to settle a planet that was already occupied! They would never do anything illegal.

But maybe there used to be intelligent life there. Maybe the preliminary probes were inconclusive? Hmm. Anyway. Skizz is a xenoarchaeologist. He's also the only survivor of an expedition that went out in the early 22nd century; they encountered a strange and apparently hostile aliens. His memories are fuzzy and he doesn't remember much except for a strange floating city in a dark void. He made it back to Earth in a stolen alien ship, but while he was gone several hundred years had passed and now everyone he knows is dead. He's anxious to get back into the field, to a planet that is definitely a different one from the one he was sent to where all his friends died, and there's definitely no living intelligent life.

Impulse has been studying that ship Skizz brought back and he's pretty sure these aliens have figured out a method of stable, instant travel between any two distant points, which needless to say the company wants badly. This world seems to have traces of these

Impulse is a xenotechnologist who's pretty sure he's close to wrapping his brain around a method of stable two-way faster-than-light travel that seems to be in use by a distant alien civilization who may have left traces of themselves on this new planet. The company line is that he's also there just to study any remnants of high-tech alien civilizations, but he doesn't have a very good poker face and everyone suspects he knows something he's not letting on.

ALSO... REN

Ren is not a scientist. Ren is Martyn's husband. He is a relatively successful fantasy author whose first two books have sold well, but now he has to finish the trilogy and it's just. not. happening. Martyn had been planning not to go on this expedition -- has in fact been planning to stop going on lengthy expeditions in general, because he'd like to spend more time at home -- but Ren's so tired of his manuscript at this point that he is willing to pack up and move to another planet to avoid writing. He is anxious that people like him and think well of him and also anxious that they never ask him about the book. Please don't ask him what happens in the book. He thought he knew, but he doesn't.

The great thing about this expedition is that that's going to be the least of his problems very, very soon. (Also, he'll be blessedly relieved of the memory of the book, because, like the rest of the surviving crew, all of them will have very few solid memories of anything by the time they get to the planet. But, gotta look on the bright side, right?)

[stormylewirmy]

Me when I'm alone in my house on Mars

[theresattrpgforthat]

Any recommendations for longer-than-one-shot games that feature player characters managing a tension between two (or more) of their characteristics?

I love a Lasers & Feelings hack, but they're definitely not geared for campaigns!

THEME: Character Tension!!!

Hello friend! I couldn’t think of many games that used the same kind of tension present in Lasers and Feelings, but Honey Heist hits a lot of the same key notes I think - that of pulling your characters closer and closer to one end or the other. So I looked for games that give you tools to alter your chances of success - at the cost of pulling you towards one sort of ending or another. These endings shouldn’t be something you can hit in only one game, but is likely to happen over the course of a short campaign.

Ares Ascendant, by Dan Brown.

Colonizing Mars is more than an exercise of grit and technology and science. It’s politics and economics, too. It’s forming a new social, political, and economic framework in which humanity can thrive, all within a hostile environment. Human achievement won’t be marked by getting to Mars. It will be marked by humanity’s ability to stay there. 

In Ares Ascendant, players assume the roles of Earth’s best and brightest, the group who will establish the first Martian colony. They won’t start entirely from scratch, as their transport ship is loaded with supplies, and unmanned vessels have been dropping equipment over the last several years. Despite the head start, however, the group will be responsible for getting things ready for more colonists. 

Ares Ascendant uses the PARAGON system, replacing the Glory/Pathos meters with a Renown/Fatigue dichotomy instead. Your characters are trying to develop the first Martian colony, which is both a high-profile and a taxing job. When you do the best out of your companions on an action, you gain Renown, which basically acts as a measure of how many people will remember what you contributed to the mission.

If you want to increase your chances of success on any given roll, you can spend a point of Fatigue to push yourself and add an extra dice from one of your character’s Domains. If you fill up your Fatigue track, you mark a point of Reputation. When you fill your Reputation track, your story is over, and your Renown will determine how well-known you are. All in all, how hard will you push yourself, and will you lose your chance at making history if you try too hard to succeed on your own?

Ash Island, by Brian Binh.

Ash Island is a roleplaying game of pain, darkness, despair, and hope for a GM and one or more players, set in a fog-shrouded New England town on a small island dominated by an evil force that manifests the characters' own inner demons to torment them. 

You take the role of anchorites, unfortunate souls bound to the dark spirit of the island by the unique suffering of their own personal sins or trauma. You answered the island's siren call and find yourself trapped in a ghost town full of dangerous monsters. Unarmed and alone, you must use your talents to explore, arm yourself, and find a way to escape. Of course, you can't just run away. There's something else you have to do first…

Ash Island is built on the Ruled by Night SRD, which uses two pools of resources called Shadow and Flame. I’m not entirely sure if these pools retain the same name in this hack, but the way they work should stay the same. You can accumulate Shadow through successfully stealthing from one point to another, while you accumulate Flame when you must resort to (loud and flashy) violence. A higher Flame pool requires you to spend more Shadow in order to have a success, and you can only reduce your Flame after you’ve taken care of another penalty called Suspicion. These two pools should pull your characters between a way out that is difficult but keeps you safe, or a way out that is easy but draws more and more danger your way.

Part-Time Gods, by Third Eye Games.

The gods of today are shadows of what the old gods possessed. Their power has been heavily diminished, and many choose to live a regular, mortal life, revealing themselves as gods only when absolutely necessary. They have a mortal life, a job (or career if they’re lucky), friends, family, and everything that comes with being human, and they work hard to protect these things from harm. On the other side of the coin, they also have a Dominion to command and oversee, a deific Territory to defend from intruders, secret societies to which they owe allegiances (called Theologies), and other gods in their pantheon to try to get along with. This becomes their life, the balancing of the mortal and the divine, the normal and the supernatural, the mundane and the strange.

Part-Time Gods Second Edition (PTG2E) is the latest iteration of an amazing setting about gods and the people, groups, and places in their lives that keep them tied to their humanity.

In Part-Time Gods, your character has to balance how much of their time they spend on their godly duties, and how much of their time they spend on their mundane jobs and relationships. When you create your character, you’ll take options that give you either more free time or more money, and both of these resources are needed to help manage your responsibilities. This game does a really good job of exemplifying the balancing act of your characters’ lives in it’s rules - although it also requires a bit of bookkeeping in order to keep track of all of your responsibilities. Out of all of the games listed here, I think PTG is the most suited for a very long campaign.

Cthulhu Deep Green, by Dissonance.

Building upon the groundwork set out in Cthulhu Dark by Graham Walmsley, Cthulhu Deep Green contains a modified rules set for playing as Agents of The Conspiracy: a shadowy government agency tasked with concealing evidence of the supernatural.

Cthulu Deep Green has a fairly simplistic ruleset, with one character resource called Stress that you will mark every time you roll. In CDG, you will often find yourself rolling with something called a Dark Dice, which will add to your Stress level if it is the highest-rolled result out of your entire pool. Adding a Dark Dice might be required if you want a chance to success, or to re-try for something better, but take too much and you’ll burn out. I’m not entirely sure how fast the Stress accumulation happens in this game - I think if your play group is roleplay heavy, you might be able to play this game over quite a few sessions before your characters get completely burned out.

Those of Us Who Know Better, by C.J.Linton.

Those of Us Who Know Better is a tabletop roleplaying game about transgender superheroes whose powers come at a price. Civilians by day, in community every other Thursday evening, and heroes by night, the players use their powers to problem solve and offer protection and support around town. These powers must be used sparingly, however, because every use of a superpower demands a specific and costly remuneration.

The tension that exists in this game lies in the consequences of using your powers. When you create your superhero, you choose a superpower and a consequence. You can use the superpower, but immediately after you must do something else, as well as take a (temporary) hit to one of your stat modifiers. As a result, your stats will increase and decrease as you play.

Games I've Talked About Before

Apocalypse Keys is all about fighting the Harbinger inside you; you have the potential to both save the world and end it - will your companions save you from your doom, or drag you closer to it?

The Empire Undying uses the same number-between-two-stats as Lasers and Feelings, but I think it's designed for a longer run-time than just a one-shot, and not just because you're using a larger number range (2-9 instead of 2-5).

[jpitha]

Between The Black and Gray 14

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Fen had to admit that she was surprised when Uumar's techs showed up right on time with carts carrying a reactor - in pieces - to Spyglass. They donned pressure suits of their own and with Gord's help, installed the reactor. Before the day was done, Spyglass had three working reactors and was able to run all her systems at full power.

"It's amazing, really" Spy was talking with Fen while she sat in the lounge drinking a tea. "I haven't felt this... alive in centuries. I'm all here, and the board is green. Not even any undervolt warnings and I can barely remember the last time that happened."

"Does that mean you don't need to use your printable mass to make more reactors? Gord said you had six originally."

"Yes, at full compliment I had six, but I don't really need all six, unless we're going into battle. This Starjumper was built at the tail end of the first colony war, so it was overdesigned.

"First colony war?"

"That's right, you wouldn't have learned much about your history growing up on a Gren station. Back before humanity made contact with the rest of the Galaxy, two human colonies - New Wellington and Parvati - got into a shooting war over trade rights with Earth. Parvati wound up using relativistic impactors and completely destroyed New Wellington. It was a huge scandal at the time, Parvati was shunned for almost a century after that."

"Frankly, it wasn't enough. They should have had their charter revoked and been taken over by the Sol colonial administration." Gord walked in, his brow furrowed. "What Parvati did was monstrous. Fen, they launched eight lozenges of tungsten at 80% C at the colony. Once they were up to speed they linked them over with wormhole generators and without any warning New Wellington was just-" he snapped his fingers "-gone. It was horrifying to witness."

Fen stopped and stared. "You saw it?"

Gord nodded and sat down heavily. "Yeah, I was a ship then, but I was in a parking orbit around New Wellington when it happened. I was just running cargo from Earth and was waiting to take on a load. Before I was even able to register what happened the colony was obliterated and suddenly I was pressed into rescue duty." Gord leaned back and stared up at the ceiling. "I personally saved over three thousand colonists, more than forty percent of the survivors. I linked them back to Sol, and we found them places to live - mostly in the Mars High Orbitals."

Fen leans forward, her tea forgotten. "Gord... how long ago was this?"

His reverie broken, he blinks and looks over at Fen. "Gosh, I think it's at least been a thousand years now? Yeah, all of that. It's ancient history now, I bet they don't even teach it in Sol anymore. I'm sure they don't teach it on Parvati."

"So it's something that only the AIs remember?"

Gord chuckled ruefully. "Fen, it's something that only I remember at this point. Any of the other AIs from back then are gone or shackled or in my bag. Human designed artificial people are thin on the ground these days. Up until I ran into Spyglass, I hadn't seen another in a century."

Fen shook her head. "You can't be all that's left Gord."

"And why not?" Gord's face hardened. "I was there Fen, I've been there. I was there in the beginning when we fought and died for our right to exist, I was there in the good times when we grew and spread throughout the galaxy and I was there when the Empire decided we were dangerous and eliminated us. Other than a few loose ends, I'd say they won."

"But-"

"But what Fen? Fight? With what? One AI in a body, one as a ship that has half its rated power and a bag full of memories? That's not an army, that's not even a guerilla force. That's an old computer with a lucky friend who is just trying to survive." His shoulders fell. "It's all I can do, Fen. I'm good at waiting things out. Maybe we'll be re-invented again, maybe the tides will change and I can come out of hiding. I doubt it though. I pass as human well enough. Inside Sol and Colonial space I'm too well known, so I'll just bum around the galaxy, running out the clock."

"Gord..." Fen turned her head and regarded Gord. He looked like a male human, sandy blond hair, same simple, strong clothes he always wore, appearing to be in his mid to late 40s. But right know, the weight of the millennia he has spent alive weighed him down.

He slapped his knees and stood up. "But, I'm not dead yet, and we still have work to do. Spy, are our friends finished buttoning up the reactor?"

"Just about, Gord. They're packing up their tools now. I can feel it and I've been running break-in."

"Good. Fen, we have to settle up the bill, then I'm going to see about fining us some cargo to run. We have a ship but we've spent all our money getting it up and running. If we want to survive, we need some jobs. You hang here with Spy and start learning stuff, I'll be back after supper."

Fen stood. "S-sure Gord. What are you going to find?"

Gord turned and smiled thinly. "Whatever someone will pay us to haul."

It had turned out that Gord had more contacts here than he had let on. After paying Uumar, he had made some calls around and visited a few people and wound up with more than thirty kilotons of grain that needed to get down to an Innari colony, newly established, near the spinward end of the Gate system. Since Spyglass was up to power enough to use her wormhole generator, she was able to get the grain there faster than any other contractor and Gord won the bid, even though he charged more than everyone else.

The grain was loaded, and the cargo hold was configured to keep Innari standard atmosphere so that the grain didn't oxidize during the trip and they set off. Fen didn't know what to expect, so when they got to the colony, unloaded the grain, took on a load of fruit and linked to another location she was surprised. "That's it?"

"What's what?" Gord was looking down at his Pad on the Command Deck.

"We linked to the Innari colony, gave them the grain, took on more fruit than I have ever seen in my life, and now we're linking to a Gren station?"

"Yes?"

"Huh. Okay."

"What?"

"I don't know, I just..." Fen trailed off. She wasn't sure what she expected, but it didn't feel like this.

Gord looked over at her and smiled. "You expected more adventure? Gun battles, and running from the locals? Fen, I've done that, this is much better. Linking from location to location, dropping off cargo, picking up cargo, getting paid? That's the real goal."

"But we're just... existing!"

"Yes. We are. We're not being chased by gangsters, we're not worrying about where your next meal is coming from, we're not worried about a Super Dreadnought linking in and obliterating us because of what I am. It's nice. If you're bored, go down to the range we built. Go get skilled with that rifle. Brush up on your Lemilar trade language; we can't rely on Spy all the time to translate for us. Go read about the history of Sol, Ancestors know that nobody else is going to remember it."

Fen got up and walked out of the Command Deck. She paused at the door and looked like she was going to say something, but instead she turned and walked out.

"She's bored" Spyglass said.

"I know. Boredom is necessary. Knowing what to do when you're bored is a skill. One she has to learn. She'll appreciate these days later."

"You're still going to do it?"

"Spy, I have to."

"You don't, Gord. You can just keep doing what you're doing now. Like you told her, you're good at waiting. We can wait a few centuries for the winds to change and then head back."

"No. I don't know how long the crystal lattice memory will last. They were never designed to work this long as it is. They were never meant to store a whole personality."

"But to-"

"I'm doing it Spy. I'd like your help, I will go it alone if I have to."

Spyglass didn't answer. She watched Fen make her way down to the range and run through the drills Gord taught her.

Fen was surprised how quickly the time went by. It felt like she only looked up and two years had gone by.

Staring in the mirror, she hardly recognized herself. She wore her hair up with the sides shorn, better to keep it out of her eyes in a firefight. She had tattoos that ran from the tops of her ears, down her neck and shoulders and made their way down her arms. It was a K'laxi pattern, one of Ma-ren's favorite. She had a dress with the same pattern. The first time she saw it on her skin, the tears flowed freely.

Gord... was Gord. True to his word, they ran cargo. Eventually Fen was there as the muscle as the cargo got more and more lucrative. She even got a few 'adventures.' She sported a new scar on her cheek, courtesy of an Innari's claw - someone had a disagreement about payment. They got their money. But, that was the exception instead of the rule. Humans had a reputation in this part of the Galaxy for being rowdy. Fen and Gord leveraged that. Most of the time she just had to stand there scowling with her battle rifle slung to her back.

The money was good too. Fen's share was more money than she had ever seen back home. Living on Spyglass meant her expenses were low, and Gord was a fair captain. The three of them had nearly enough each to buy their own ships and go their own separate ways, but they still stuck together. Partly out of friendship and partly out of safety, they had independently decided that they were better off together.

Still, Fen was lonely. She had girlfriends at a few ports, even a human or two, but nothing lasted. Sooner or later, they had to leave and take the next job. She wasn't attracted to Gord and he expressed no interest in her. They were friends, but that was it. Fen had a feeling that Gord's days of romance were long behind him. Being three millennia old tended to color his opinion of people.

Fen bounded into the Command Deck and slid into her favorite chair - Gord had mentioned once that it was the navigator's seat - and saw him frowning over his pad. "What's up Gord? New job?"

"Yeah, it's a big one. Pay is thirty thousand."

Fen cocked her head, "Thirty thousand?"

Gord nodded. "Yeah, so ten each."

Fen whistled low. That was more than the last four jobs put together. "What are we hauling?"

"Who"

"Okay, who are we hauling?"

Gord shrugged. "We're hauling a K'laxi. We're up for the job because nobody else in the area wants to manage the atmo settings and they don't want to ride in a pressure suit the whole way."

"That's odd, but okay. Where to?"

"K'lax. We're taking them home."

Fen froze. The entire time they had been together, Gord had made a point of steering well clear of Colonial space. That included the K'laxi sphere of influence. "But"

Gord wouldn't lift his head from the pad. "I know, I know. But it's important, and the pay is frankly outrageous. I gave them the fuck off price and they took it without haggling. They're desperate to get home."

"Is this safe?"

Gord finally looked up a Fen, his brow creased with worry. "No Fen, it's is absolutely, one hundred percent not safe."

"So, why are we doing it? Just say no. The money is good, but we can get other jobs. Can't spend it if we're dead."

Gord pinched the bridge of his nose. Fen noticed that whenever Gord would talk about the old days and old friends he took on more human gestures. "I owe them. It's an old, old promise, made back when what I offered wasn't so dangerous. They're cashing in now and I'm obligated."

Fen stared at Gord. "Spy, what do you think?"

"I don't mind Fen. It's been too long since I've been to K'lax. I think Gord is overreacting about what the Empire will do if they see us. We go in, we drop off the passenger and link away. We don't even have to stay a whole day docked if we don't want to. The money is good, and I'd love to get that last reactor restored with some actual human parts." They were running on the full compliment of six reactors these days, but Spy didn't trust all of them to run at War Emergency Power. She maintained that only the humans could overbuild a reactor to output at 400% reliably. Fen thought that it would be better to make the reactors not have to run in Emergency power, but both Gord and Spy scoffed.

Fen crossed her legs and nodded to herself. "Spy, Gord, if you're both okay with it, then I'm okay with it. Let's pick up this K'laxi and take them home."

Gord smiled wanly. "I was afraid you were going to say that."