Saturday, December 26, 2020

Mothership Extrapolation Game 2

There's been a lot more Mothership material published since the last time I did this post, so let's get rolling. Same principles as before: take a background detail, flesh it out.

For this I'll be using primarily Pound of Flesh, Gradient Descent, Dead Planet, the adventures found in Dissident Whispers, and some from the 3rd party itch bundle (ALCOR Station, Primeval, Dinoplex Catycylsm, Black Pyramid)

The Dino Gene Wars

Theme parks filled with reconstructed dinosaurs had a brief moment in the spotlight before fading into sad obscurity. This has not stopped those businesses clinging to life from attacking their competitors like crabs in a bucket. The crux of the matter is, as always, immensely stupid: the shitty first generation source genomes, despite being wracked with errors and scientifically inaccurate, are, for immensely stupid reasons, the only templates that can legally be called dinosaurs in advertisements. And since the ability to use the word dinosaur is critical to running a dinosaur theme park, the surviving parks are locked in a simmering war of attrition, constantly trying to one up their competitors within the tight boundaries the original templates will allow.

The Orange Catholic Bible

Initially a joke or a dedicated fan project, now pulled so far out of its context that it is take for real (if only as a curiosity). It has remained popular enough to spawn imitators, which follow a similar naming pattern and arrange / adapt its contents towards a different ideological end. Commonly found offshoots are the Green (ecological stewardship), Silver (cyber-enhancement) and Black (Redoubter).

Neo-Haram Anarchists

The name is intentionally nonsense, a way for teenagers to scare their isolated, conservative community. Not actually new, Muslim, or anarchist, as the name trademark and graffiti tag were scooped up by an investment firm over a century ago and have been juggled around between minor companies trying to take advantage of the branding of a defunct fake terrorist group that never really existed in the first place.

Lenin's Tomb

Following the Moscow Disaster of 2113, the tomb of Vladimir Lenin has been declared a quantum anomaly for its habit of appearing at apparent random in locations where it is extremely improbable, though not impossible, for the tomb of Lenin to be observed. Well over 100,000 other fragments and artifacts of what has been named Quantum Moscow (Москвант) demonstrating the same qualities are known and tracked, though none of the others approach Lenin's tomb in terms of dedication and size of fan club.

Model A Sleeve Series

Public domain gene clone templates. Can be found at any resleeving or exowomb facility. Given their commonality and the very simple modularity built into the templates, most Model A users will undergo additional cosmetic modifications. Model A sleeves comes in male, female, intersex, and neuter varieties.

The A Series has accumulated an dedicated online fandom over time, with the ten models given names and broad-strokes personalities for use in fanworks. They are, in order from A1 to A10 - Ai, Alice, Alexi, Ahmed, Anjali, Achebe, Achilles, Alfonso, Adelaide, and Angel.

Meatapede

Open-source splice of a variety of velvet worm. Common and cheap source of protein. Popular flavors include garlic and butter, smoky barbecue, cool ranch, [REDACTED AND RECALLED], blood sausage, roast beef dinner, teeth-kicker spicy, 

Megacorporations

(n) - A for-profit organization capable of dictating law within its sphere of influence.

  • ALCOR Fuel & Services (Fuel depots and waystations) - A well-earned reputation for being cheap, just shoddy enough to pass muster, and everywhere. Even so, fresh food and a warm bed is enough to give most spacers a sort of warm nostalgia for these tacky stations.
  • Anders-Klimt Mining Corp (Asteroid mining) - Known for aggressively assimilating mom & pop belter outfits en masse, and then legally salting the earth so no one can spring up afterwards when they move on to the next boom.
  • Anodyne Construction (Luxury Space Habitats) - None of the endless litany of tabloid controversy ever seems to stick to them for more than a week.
  • Armadyne Weapons Inc (Weaponry) - For when you need weapons that are cheaply made and poorly put together, but are priced and marketed like luxury goods.
  • Black Dawn (PMC) - War crime central. No one hires them unless they have several solar systems worth of plausible deniability.
  • Carter Tactical Concerns Ltd (Organizational security) - A company hired to manage all the other private military companies you have hired. No one (employee or client) can get in touch with management.
  • Cloudbank Synthetics (Androids and robotics) - Technically defunct, after MONARCH pink slipped the entire biological staff and a blockade was raised around the primary station.
  • Confederated Systems Inc (????) - The fuck do these people even do. No one knows. But that have immense amounts of money, big shiny ships, and are sponsoring goddamn everything nowadays.
  • Drax Corporation (Anything and everything) - A generalist and a scavenger, specializing in nothing but surviving in whatever economic environment it might find itself it.
  • Dyson Phytology (Foodstuffs and health supplements) - Has a reputation of being "the good company" purely through not having as catastrophic ethics violations as their competitors and rivals.
  • Emerald Horizon (Terraforming) - Brute force methods, tend to pack up as soon as the job is technically done. Have been expanding into mass seawater conversion techniques to get the leg up on competitors.
  • Exo-Credit Federated Union (Cryptocurrency) - Has a tendency to offer its services to the federal reserves and mints of struggling colonial nation-states.
  • Pandora Corp (Exotic neogenic livestock) - Markets itself as this artsy paradise for up-and-coming gene-engineers. Chews them up in endless crunch and never hires full time.
  • Pantech Pharmaceuticals (The biggest pharma) - Has a dedicated scouting fleet, just incase they stumble across an exotic biosphere in need of trademarking.
  • Salo-Mercury Biomotors Inc (Bioware) - A "disruption company" devoted to building biological alternatives to mechanical devices. While they have seen some success, they greatly overstate their market share, popularity, and quarterly profit statements.
  • SEBACO Mining Ltd (Ice and gas mining) - An old, old, OLD company. Can trace its operations all the way back to Saturn. Infamous in business circles for not being publicly traded - company is owned evenly by five individuals, one of whom is centuries old and was part of the original founding board.
  • Shikewara-Tarmec Corp (Orbital infrastructure) - A mind-bogglingly big holding company, so large that there is at least one incident of a corp-war breaking out between two subsidiary corps that didn't realize that they were both owned by S-T-C.
  • Sindec Alloyed Metals Corp - (Metal processing) - An early adopter of the "all-inclusive corporate ideology" package for its contractors, to great success. You can always identify a Sindec employee, on account of how they sound like they're from a cult.
  • Takahashi Advanced Genetics (Human gene-engineering) - Family-run zaibatsu that actually started off with half of a moral backbone. That evaporated soon after the founder died.
  • Tempest Company (PMC) - Old in the tooth. Will be hired out because of their history and record, but everyone knows they've been on the decline for a while now.
  • Vondrey (Prefab surface colonies) - A budget contractor for dome cities. Likes using disposable waves of slightly-modified workers to cut down on setup costs.

"Fat Baby" Nuclear Warheads 

Low-yield nuclear weapon built on the cheap, typically used by pirates and other Rim parties. Named so due to combination of ancient custom, the propensity to decal a laughing baby on the casing, and their common use as traps by attaching them to a wreck and setting off a standard distress signal.

Saturn Ale & Venus Whiskey

Technically, these are both made on a space station orbiting Neptune; Venus has been uninhabited for eight decades now, following the failure of the Revolution, and the entire Saturnian system was suddenly and unexpectedly replaced with a completely different gas giant and it's moons ("Paradox Saturn" or "Ops" due to a catastrophic warp core cascade event.)

'Old Country Mars'

An attempted tourism branding for the struggling Martian communities on the Tharsis Plateau. With the economic depression in the inner Sol System showing no signs of letting up, the Martian government has focused on drumming up nostalgia for the "pioneer spirit" of the early colonization waves (ignoring the fact that those first waves devolved into violent despotism or charisma cultism at best).

Gemini Echo Expeditionary Force

An immensely expensive and hyped-up military joint operation, traversing some 530 light years towards what was believed at the time to be signs of an alien civilization. 12 years later, the planet was found completely barren, and it was never certain if the readings were simply wrong or if they were deliberately faked for the sake of certain defense contractors. "Gone GE" has become slang for a job shoddily done in the years since.


3 comments:

  1. Dan, you've done it again! great post.

    ReplyDelete
  2. These are all real good. Makes me wish I was running momship space campaign next instead of post-apoc

    ReplyDelete