Friday, February 14, 2020

Expanded Pandora Gate Map

Draw.io saves the day yet again.


The Pandora Gates are easily my favorite part of Eclipse Phase. Unfortunately, the book dedicated to them is a mess I'd never recommend to anyone and a poster child for "good idea, terrible execution".  This is an attempt to fix that, consolidating the contents of the proper Gatecrashing book with content from the blogs Farcast, Seedware, and H-Rep.

The map only shows the five Sol system gates (Vulcanoid, Mars, Pandora, Fissure, Discord) and connective systems between them.The vast majority of extrasolar planets are a single transit away from one of the five main gates, as detailed below.

Planets marked with a * are connector systems..

GC is Gatecrashing, FC is Farcast, SW is Seedware, HR is H-Rep.

Planets with a dearth of information got a friendly [REDACTED] from me, because that's a solid way to get something from nothing.

Vulcanoid Gate

Found in the Vulcanoid asteroid V-2011 Caldwell, owned by the TerraGenesis Corporation. They'll work with basically anyone, going real gung-ho on colonization and terraforming efforts.
  1. Aerie (GC) - Watch out for this one, the gate is free-floating in orbit around its parent world.
  2. Chrysaor (GC) - Moon of a hot Jupiter. Only 51 LY from Earth, but nothing else noteworthy.
  3. Hiranyaksha (GC) - Largest colonized world with highest gravity at 1.9G
  4. IronSky (HR) - Terrestrial world that once held a diverse global biosphere before the onset of a "Blast Winter". A single cataclysmic event ejected enough particulate into the atmosphere to block out sunlight, leaving the world with a permanent grey overcast and only extremeophile bacteria.
  5. Mockingbird (GC) - Notable primarily for being destroyed by the inhabitants of Rorty. Reclamation efforts have [DATA EXPUNGED]
  6. Piazza III (FC) - A hot, humid, swampy, fungus-encrusted world. Home to the urvinoids, sluglike beings weighing over a kiloton whose brain and stomach are the same organ.
  7. Portal* (GC) - A frozen terrestrial world notable for containing six gates, all within 1 km of each other. The primary settlement, Isra, is the launch point for career autonomist crashers.
  8. Sky Ark (GC) - A terrestrial planet nearly a mirror to early Earth. TerraGenesis has established it as a reserve world, and has begun to resurrect and rehabilitaate as many species and environments of old Earth has possible. This includes creatures that were extinct before the Fall, ancient megafauna and even neogenic dinosaurs.
  9. Sunrise* (GC) - Life-bearing, tidally locked world, bearing seven different gates along the equator and signs of Iktomi settlement around those gates - the windharps, delicate structures that play musical tones on the constant winds
  10. Takshaka (GC) - Backwater colony. Not noteworthy, save for a disastrous event wherein [REDACTED].
  11. Willowane (GC) - Artifacts found. Further information [REDACTED].

Martian Gate

On lock by the corporate bastards of the Planetary Consortium. Sees the most traffic, nearly all of it working for the Pathfinder Corporation.
  1. Arcadia / Overlook (GC) - A venusian world and its rocky moon. Colonization efforts are totally off the books, a single habitat for the oldest and richest gerontocrats the Consortium has in store where they shall never die.
  2. Ascension* (GC) - Consortium-run Earthlike world, home to largest human colony.
  3. Babylon* (GC) - A sun-baked, tidally locked world. The surface displays recent significant impact craters, and long-range telescopes have picked up some kind of vessel hiding out in the stellar corona.
  4. Bacchanalia (HR) - An earthlike world with significant volcanic activity due to tidal stresses from its three suns and large moon, which leaves many rare materials in easy reach near the surface and a sulphurous atmosphere. Outside investment mogul York Aston has flooded the colonization effort with funds in an attempt to make a prize party getaway world, a corporate competitor to Carnivale.
  5. Brak Kodel (GC) - A hot rockball whose sealed canyon habitats are home to horrifically altered TITAN experiments with captive transhuman populations. Whether or not it is a live infection vector remains unknown, but suspected.
  6. Chang-Er* (HR) - Prime terraforming real estate. Alien artifact ("The Eye") several hundred kilometers in diameter floats tethered above the surface, casting a gravitational anomaly that prevents the tidal effects of the planet's five moons.
  7. Dreamgate (FC) - A mirror image of Mars as it was and was thought to be. The oceans are long gone, but the towers and cities of the inhabitants (and most importantly, their computers) are still active. Some folks get lost in the xenoMesh, never to pull their egos out.
  8. Haplopelma (GC) - Minor Iktomi ruins nonetheless attract throngs of xenodeist pilgrims.
  9. Bromeliad / Harker (HR) - An icy terrestrial world and its nondescript moon. Pockets of life can exist in regions where volcanic activity has cut through the glacial cover. Would be a prime target for colonization, save for the packs of psychovore aliens that are clearly not related to anything else on the planet. Corporate is very, very interested in this place.
  10. Krypton (GC) A resort world for the corporate hyperelite, crystal fields under a bright sky-filling nebula. The indentured Martian infomorphs brought in to work the resort are plotting a rebellion.
  11. Nihilus* (HR) - An asteroid mined out by a species long vanished - only bits of tools remain. A group of Buddhists are in the planning stages of building a monastery there.
  12. Nirvana (GC) - A free-floating gate in orbit around a pulsar. The facility there, due to its incredible security, is used both as prison and testing grounds for exsurgent-related experiments under the Consortium's eye.
  13. Nótt (GC) - An icy moon and a corporate research station made significantly more exciting by whatever is stalking the research teams outside the habitat.
  14. Nova York (GC) - [DATA EXPUNGED]
  15. Olaf (GC) - An honest-to-god dyson sphere, built around the red dwarf of a binary pair. The atmosphere is suitable for an unmodified human, the local life isn't particularly dangerous, we've mapped less than 1% of the surface, and it's got an active orbital defense system that'll shoot down anything launched towards space. The interior of the sphere is a complete unknown.
  16. Ruby (FC) - A lumpy planetoid clearly mined in the past for its radioactive materials. Orbiting above is a ring-shaped structure that will draw in nearby objects and launch them at 30 gs of acceleration towards a nearby asteroid belt, which looks like it used to be a single planet. Oops.
  17. Templeton's World (GC) - A Consortium colony that went dark and defected to the Commonwealth when it was determined that the settlers were considered illegal copies.
  18. Tirian (GC) - Hot rockball home to the Singer Institute for Biological Anomalies, who are kind of folks who like doing experiments on outliers of the uplift process. Definitely slept through their courses on consent and ethics.
  19. Thera (HR) - A slushy, cold waterworld. The only land is a chain of volcanic islands, once of which bears the Labyrinth - a maze hundreds of square kilometers on the ground, with walls a kilometer high and passages only 6m accross. No one has reached the center.
  20. Vohaul (GC) - Venusian hellhole world used exclusively as a garbage dump for toxic and exotic materials. Home to a developing sapient species of silicon-based organisms living in the sulfurous lakes of the surface. Transhumanity has no idea about them.

Pandora Gate

Located on Pandora, Saturnian orbit. Run by Gatekeeper, under direction of the Titan Commonwealth cyberdemocracy. Lots of exploratory missions.
  1. Apocalypta (HR) - Hot Martian world home to vast complexes of monolithic pyramids and towers, all containing elaborate vaults touched only by ultrasound for millions of years. Expeditions to the vaults have been put on pause after exploration hit the end of the unsecured sections of the complexes. The builders remain anonymous.
  2. Babylon* (GC) - A sun-baked, tidally locked world. The surface displays recent significant impact craters, and long-range telescopes have picked up some kind of vessel hiding out in the stellar corona.
  3. Candee Apple (FC) - Opens on an island on a pristine earthlike world, home to a species of apelike beings on the cusp of sapience. The leave only footprints factions in the research corp that found the place have held majority so far, but who knows when that will break.
  4. Corse (GC) - A recently-discovered and incredibly distant rocky moon of a typical Jovian giant. A dense, nearby dust cloud (and something indistinct within it) can be made out with telescopes. More concerningly, someone was here recently - not aliens - and they built themselves a ship and headed off towards the cloud. Then they changed course and started heading back towards the gate.
  5. Droplet (GC) - A water-rich (only 8% land) terrestrial world with incredible biodiversity, plus the archaeological remnants of three vanished alien species: the native Amphibs, the Iktomi, and some other spoecies that built at least one settlement on the ocean floor. Of note is "The Toadstool", a curiously shaped stone peak.
  6. Dyggvi (GC) - Ice moon, first colony consider to be a direct extension of a Sol polity (in this case, the Commonwealth)
  7. Echo IV/ V (GC) - Two terrestrial planets. Echo IV has no gate, but is filled with a bustling, megafauna-rich ecosystem. Echo V has the gate, Iktomi ruins, and the complete and total devastation of its entire biosphere at some point in the past.
  8. Indra (HR) - A cold, lifeless Martian world with enough atmosphere to maintain some liquid water. Surface is covered in deep impact craters, all of which line up very nicely with good places to build a colony. Someone bombed this place from orbit, and one of those ships lies buried under just underground - with the reactor still on.
  9. Just-in-Case / Basilica* (GC) - A young and lifeless terrestrial world and it's young and lifeless moon, similar to a very early Earth. It is being set up as a backup world, a planet that could house millions of refugees in case of existential disaster. Cut off the gates, and there's still plenty of untouched planets nearby in its local cluster. Most of the major (non-autonomist) polities are involved - except the Consortium. No invitation for the hypercaptialists. Or for Firewall.
  10. Moravec (GC) - Terrestrial world with a lively oceanic biosphere. The landmasses have very little life, likely extinct due to climate change. Likewise can be found trace remnants of a sapient species, including a distributed computer network. It is abandoned. Where did the uploads go?
  11. Moria (GC) - An icy dwarf planet. The immense caves which house the colony are heated by geothermal activity.
  12. Portal* (GC) - A frozen terrestrial world notable for containing six gates, all within 1 km of each other. The primary settlement, Isra, is the launch point for career autonomist crashers.
  13. Spark (HR) - Tidally-locked vesperian planet. Huge temperature differences mean constant, extreme winds. Crust contains high levels of metallic salts, leading nearly all local life to store or generate electrical current
  14. Synergy (GC) - The second colony ever established went dark for five years, emerged as a networked hive-mind.
  15. Tanaka (GC) - Moon of a hot Jupiter, home to five warring fungal megacolonies, all of which are universally hostile to tranhumans.
  16. Wormwood (GC) - Thousands of kilometers of squirming, tangled tunnels carved out of what is presumed to be an asteroid. No exit to the surface has yet been found.

Fissure Gate

Located on Oberon, Uranian orbit. Overseen by the Love and Rage anarchist collective, and as such is open to anyone with good rep.
  1. Bluewood (GC) - Terrestrial planet and one of the major autonomist colonies. Named for the forest that covers almost 60% of the single landmass and the vibrant azure trees that make it up. The entire ecosystem seems engineered - there are no predators, it self-maintains, it strikes back if threatened, and it actively grows to encompass settlements built within it.
  2. Carnivale (GC) - A bunch of extreme hedonist anarchists partying it up on an paradisical earthlike world. Even the grass will give you a high. Only line is consent, everything else is on the table. This entry has aged very poorly in the last decade.
  3. Emmerich's World (HR) - Earth-sized moon of the superJovian Anchorhead. Great night sky, local bacterial and fungal life provides a bounty of fun narcotic and hallucinogenic toxins. The gate to Nihilus is built atop a spiral-helix-pyramidal structure on the opposite pole from the main gate; within the structure is the WETWARE AUTOMATA artifact, that triggers compulsive and repetitive minor actions in nearby sapients.
  4. Etched (GC) - [DATA EXPUNGED]
  5. Fortean (GC) - Icy moon host to a bunch of really out there researchers big into neogenic life, genesplicing, and cryptozoology. Makers of specialty morphs.
  6. G'harne (HR) - A Titanian ice world, boasting a robust hydrocarbon-and-ammonia-based ecology. Impressive volcanoes. 
  7. Isolation (HR) - via Carnivale gate only. An icy moon of a Neptunian giant (Mirror) with a high albedo and pretty rings. Used as a cool down colony for folks from Carnivale. Exploration has found twenty-six precision-carved cliffside alcoves of unknown maker and purpose.
  8. Krapotkin (GC) - Icy moon, anarchist settlement, somebody once told me the world was [DATA EXPUNGED].
  9. Lassiter (GC) - via Carnivale gate only. Does not officially exist. A tiny moonlet orbiting the gas giant Lassiter, now home to one of Firewall's friendly Promethean AI, Asterius. It's already begun disassembling the other moons.
  10. Logos (GC) - Moon of an ice giant. Colony established by AGIs wanting to get away from transhuman societal strictures and norms.
  11. Luca* (GC) - A cold marslike world with a native biosphere. A native sapient species was wiped out by an asteroid impact about a thousand years ago. Conflicts between anarchist preservationists and TerraGenesis terraforming efforts are commonplace, and get even more heated when folks discuss resurrecting the lucans from the preserved bodies that have been found.
  12. Merowech (HR) - A frozen, airless, tidally locked world. Crystalline artifacts colloquially called "elf trees" can be found on the day side, which give off a soothing humming when in an atmosphere demonstrate anomalous responses to outside stimuli (ie, crumbling under the higher gravity of a planet, but not that of a rotating habitat)
  13. Nightfall* (HR) - A rocky moon with extreme temperatures and high radiation. Enough resources to spark conflict between TerraGenesis resource extraction and autonomist synthmorph settlers.
  14. Portal* (GC) - A frozen terrestrial world notable for containing six gates, all within 1 km of each other. The primary settlement, Isra, is the launch point for career autonomist crashers.
  15. Tempest* (HR) - An ocean world with a venusian atmosphere. Notable primarily for the permanent hurricane caused by the heat and rotation of the planet and the aerostat filled with art and non-active servant bots built by a single, vanished colonist.
  16. Veronica* (HR) - A slightly-more-habitable martian type world originally settled by a few bands of anarchists. Quiet and unnoeworthy, until the gate to Ascension opened up and the Consortium started dumping thousands of its own colonists onto the world.
  17. Wonderland (HR) - Heavy, hot atmosphere, home to a single, highly-differentiated colonial fungal megaorganism. Ground-penetration scans reveal widespread tunnel networks with clear nanotech toolmarks.
  18. Ymir (FC) - A banded gas giant. Gate situated on a small icy moon. Upper atmosphere of the planet home to pods of gigantic invertebrates nicknamed "frost giants".

Discord Gate

Located on Eris. Run by the Go-Nin group and a band of ultimates who are very vocal about being over the whole morality thing and have been fighting back and forth with fringe exhuman clades. Even getting out there is difficult, and it's unpleasant when you get there.
  1. Giza (GC) - An earthlike world with early plant life, bearing hundreds of black pyramidal structures. These are interfaces to what appears to be a galaxy-spanning anonymous interspecies chat room with aggressive content moderation bots. Everyone is paranoid about information leaks. 15% chance of helpful comunication, 35% chance of trolls.
  2. Mishipizheu / Nanabozho (GC) -A life-bearing water world with a rocky moon, famous for colorful reefs of gas-bladder floaters. Its sun will soon run out of hydrogen to burn (though it should by all means last much longer) and begin to contract, freezing the planet solid. Its moon has less gravity than it should; hypothesized to be hollow or artificial.
  3. Ne No Kuni (GC) - Metal-rich cthonian, home to largest exoworld mining operation.
  4. Oyamatsumi & Konohana* (HR) - A high-pressure CO2 world bearing impact craters believed to be from the debris of a large space-faring vessel. Its red-and-white moon, Konohana, is so strictly geologically stratified that it is clearly artificial, though its poisonous atmosphere makes investigating whatever is under the crust extremely difficult.
  5. Rorty* (GC) - Cold, lifeless world home to exhuman dreadnaught-minds chased there by Go-Nin's ultimates, planning on further raids of other colonies.
  6. Skoyz (GC) - [REDACTED]
  7. Tartarus (SW) - A rogue planet, a big black iceball drifting between suns with a complex microbial ecosystem feeding off the radioactive elements at the bottom of the subsurface ocean.
  8. Vortex (GC) - Gate is suspended in the depths of a gas giant's lower atmosphere. Leaving the gate proper would be instant death from the pressure.

Connector Systems

  • Ascension (GC) - Consortium-run Earthlike world, home to largest human colony.
  • Babylon (GC) - A sun-baked, tidally locked world. The surface displays recent significant impact craters, and long-range telescopes have picked up some kind of vessel hiding out in the stellar corona.
  • Boreas (HR) - An icy moon of a subNeptunian giant. The survey mission to found a second settlement vanished in the subsurface tunnels, which appear now to mirror TITAN structures on Iapetus. Singularity seekers have started to gain access to the world, and are being turned away at the gate.
  • Cairn (HR) - The hellish tomb world of an insect-like species that was driven extinct by runaway greenhouse effect. Pathfinder and TerraGenesis are squabbling rights to the site,
  • Chang-Er (HR) - Prime terraforming real estate. Alien artifact ("The Eye") several hundred kilometers in diameter floats tethered above the surface, casting a gravitational anomaly that prevents the tidal effects of the planet's five moons.
  • Cocytus (HR) - A cold, dark world orbiting a brown dwarf formation. Nearly all light to reach surface is infrared. Massive doses of ionizing radiation make long term survival difficult. The atmosphere is thick enough to support a biosphere capable of gathering energy from magnetic interference.
  • Emmerich's World (HR) - Earth-sized moon of the superJovian Anchorhead. Great night sky, local bacterial and fungal life provides a bounty of fun narcotic and hallucinogenic toxins. The gate to Nihilus is built atop a spiral-helix-pyramidal structure on the opposite pole from the main gate; within the structure is the WETWARE AUTOMATA artifact, that triggers compulsive and repetitive minor actions in nearby sapients.
  • Just-in-Case / Basilica (GC) - A young and lifeless terrestrial world and its young and lifeless moon, similar to a very early Earth. It is being set up as a backup world, a planet that could house millions of refugees in case of existential disaster. Cut off the gates, and there's still plenty of untouched planets nearby in its local cluster. Most of the major (non-autonomist) polities are involved - except the Consortium. No invitation for the hypercaptialists. Or for Firewall.
  • Luca (GC) - A cold marslike world with a native biosphere. A native sapient species was wiped out by an asteroid impact about a thousand years ago. Conflicts between anarchist preservationists and TerraGenesis terraforming efforts are commonplace, and get even more heated when folks discuss resurrecting the lucans from the preserved bodies that have been found.
  • Nightfall (HR) - A rocky moon with extreme temperatures and high radiation. Enough resources to spark conflict between TerraGenesis resource extraction and autonomist synthmorph settlers.
  • Nihilus (HR) - An asteroid mined out by a species long vanished - only bits of tools remain. A group of Buddhists are in the planning stages of building a monastery there.
  • Oyamatsumi & Konohana (HR) - A high-pressure CO2 world bearing impact craters believed to be from the debris of a large space-faring vessel. Its red-and-white moon, Konohana, is so strictly geologically stratified that it is clearly artificial, though its poisonous atmosphere makes investigating whatever is under the crust extremely difficult.
  • Rorty (GC) - Cold, lifeless world home to exhuman dreadnaught-minds chased there by Go-Nin's ultimates, planning on further raids of other colonies.
  • Portal (GC) - A frozen terrestrial world notable for containing six gates, all within 1 km of each other. The primary settlement, Isra, is the launch point for career autonomist crashers.
  • Set (HR) - [DATA EXPUNGED]
  • Simulacra (HR) - A barren terrestrial world with a toxic atmosphere and a few extremophile bacteria. Absolutely nothing of interest, despite the area around the gate being a perfect replica of London in 1920, sans inhabitants. The simulation breaks down the further one goes from Charing Cross, however, devolving into unfinished buildings and fractal streets.
  • Sunrise (GC) - Life-bearing, tidally locked world, bearing seven different gates along the equator and signs of Iktomi settlement around those gates - the windharps, delicate structures that play musical tones on the constant winds
  • Tempest (HR) - An ocean world with a venusian atmosphere. Notable primarily for the permanent hurricane caused by the heat and rotation of the planet and the aerostat filled with art and non-active servant bots built by a single, vanished colonist.
  • Ulmo (HR) - An ocean world with a thin atmosphere, now home to a growing population of uplifted octopi, cetaceans, and amphibious humanoid morphs.
  • Venom (HR) - A molten, Co2-choked world with seas of sulfuric acid. There's literally nothing here.
  • Veronica (HR) - A slightly-more-habitable martian type world originally settled by a few bands of anarchists. Quiet and unnoeworthy, until the gate to Ascension opened up and the Consortium started dumping thousands of its own colonists onto the world.
  • Void Reef (HR) - A band of resource-rich asteroids in a mostly-empty system. The gate location contains traces of fossilized marine life, indicating it was once part of a life bearing planet. A hivemind nest of Rortian-allied exhumans have settled in the Reef, lashing out at the Go-Nin miners sent in-system.

Jokers  

There were  whole lot of fanmade planets that didn't have gates listed, including thirty-seven different locations from the Renegade Octopus blog alone. I decided to not use these just to make it easier on myself.

What We Learned

  • Most of the fanmade planets interested me more than the default ones in GC, and even those that weren't were much easier to read on account of being shorter and single-column.
  • No one, not even Posthuman Studios, likes the Discord Gate. For good reason, I say, exhumans and ultimates always struck me as two bands of terrible folks who deserve each other.
  • Please please please please front your planet entries with tags for if it has a settlement, if it has life, what you need to wear to go outside etc. Open with those. That is stuff I as a sci-fi game referee absolutely need to know.
  • Carnivale (and the scum in general) sounded way better in 2010. It's bad. There's a very short list of folks I would trust to write hyper decadent sex drugs and rock & roll RPG material and none of them worked on this book.
  • Overwritten first-person narrative is guaranteed to make me have a bad time reading whatever game thing is being made. Give me bullet points.
  • Making a single interesting planet with interesting people is more worthwhile than an entire system of nothings.
  • If you only get a sentence to describe it, at least put something interesting there. I shouldn't have to dump [REDACTED]s in there to give it the appearance of something interesting.
  • There was a point I wanted to give up on this. Gatecrashing is a painful book to read, and I hate that it is compelling enough to drive me to do this out of love for the idea.

1 comment:

  1. I kid you not if you even whisper 'hey Dan go make a star map with this prompt" I will go into an outright fugue state, one that cannot even be defeated by bad book layout.

    ReplyDelete