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the_taken

King of the Impossible
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So here's an idea that's been mulling around my head. This whole concept is inspired by lots of old sci-fi like Ringworld, Starwars, EVE, Aliens, Deus Ex and Avatar: Giant Space Smurfs, encouraged by binge watching a whole bunch of sci-fi concept videos on YouTube, and then recently cognitized by playing Civ:AE, Stellaris, Warframe and Deep Rock Galactic, but also my experiences with D&D and Dark Heresy shenanigans. This is a game about brains in a jar remotely controlling cloned bodies and gradually doing more and more physics defying feats.

The setting is a slightly more realistic take on a high-tech galactic civilisation that suddenly has a small social upheaval from the development of consistent and reliable FTL, and people gaining psychic powers; both are related.

Faster than Light Communication was achieved a long time ago by the creation of stabilised negative dark matter wormholes. While no matter could pass through them, the interactions with light and matter would be noticed on the other end. While the size of the wormholes could be scaled up, there was no obvious benefit for the longest time.

Faster than Light travel is achieved by using a boundary field to phase a vessel 'up' some fourth dimensional axis, taking advantage of both void energy and ambient WIMP particles. This allows people to cheat the speed of light, spending less kinetic energy to impart momentum on the vessel and get past the speed of light without running into issue caused by relativity. Better drives allow for climbing higher 'up' that fourth axis and getting better returns. The downside is that the laws of relativity itself becomes inversely proportional across the boundary field. If the vessel physically encounters any matter from outside the field, it will impart it's own relative energy to the object but will receive energy proportional to the encountered object's actual speed plus the missing energy from the vessel's shifted relativity. If this disrupts the boundary field then all relative velocities and energy levels snap back to normal, though the vessel may well have been completely disintegrated by the encounter. This is how people are getting around super fast, but aren't using hyperdrives on little rocks to blast away whole enemy fleets and planets.

Hyperlanes are whole swaths of space between two points that are kept cleared of all possible debris, allowing any ship with hyperdrives to go as fast as they please without worry of a random atomic particle impacting their hull and turning everything into dust.

Hypergates use much larger version of stabilised negative dark matter wormholes as it turns out they can only be traversed by active boundary field of a hyperdrive.

While both the hyperdrive and star lanes had existed for a long time, it wasn't until the development of psychic abilities that hyperlanes had become a reality.

Psionic abilities didn't develop slowly or naturally over time. What brought it about was actually the invention of hypersleep. Before, ever with a hyperdrive, it would take decades or even centuries to move from star system to star system forcing the use of generation ships, even with biologists having figured out how to grant biological-immortality. The purpose of hypersleep was to extend a person's lifespan even further by preventing them from doing anything that could even remotely have any risk of death, up to and including becoming bored, by forcing them to sleep for a whole trip at hyperspeeds. Scientists aren't certain what the process is that causes it, but upon waking up from more and more extensions of hypersleep, people were more and more able to perform more and more baffling feats previously requiring large amount of high tech equipment to do the most mundane 'magical' trick. Soon most random citizens were accurately predicting lotteries despite all attempts to prevent it, floating food to their mouths on will alone, reading each other's minds, or setting off random environmental sensors. People gaining random psychic abilities was considered to be a problem until a government black-ops division was destroyed by scandal of their own making.

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For the game system, I decided to use the base scaffold of the D20 system and D&D3.5 psionics. I say scaffold because I'm coming up with custom rules for level and skill advancement, feat acquisition, wealth and item creation. I'm mostly happy with the combat system.
 
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