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 Post Posted: Tue Sep 15, 2015 5:15 am 
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I'm going to go with straight and simple FATE rules for character creation. The basic concept is as follows; all players volunteered to be a part of the first interstellar colonisation effort; a vast STL ship that would take you through space, until it reached Gliese 667 Cc - a potentially Earthlike but presumably barren world.

Included among the equipment packed is the full Global Village Construction Set (at least two copies of everything and three of most things, some assembly required), enough cryogenic sleep modules for everyone, a lot of seeds and spare food, and a certain allocation of personal space per person, which can be used for personal effects, memorabilia, or any additional supplies that your characters feel would be necessary on a barren new world. There are also enough hydroponic gardens that, with minimal effort, you should be able to fed everyone purely from the output of the gardens within two weeks of waking up; and enough frozen, hyper-preserved food supplies to feed everyone aboard for a full year after landing. Everything should keep for at least twice as long as the expected length of the voyage (with your cryogenic modules rated for maybe fifty times the voyage's length).

Cryogenic sleep is the only technology which you will have access to that is not plausible with modern technology, and cryogenic sleep is risky - tissue damage kills something like ten percent of cryosleepers within the first ten minutes. (Of course, if you survive those ten minutes, you're good to go for several thousand years - so those who didn't survive the first ten minutes were never loaded onto the ship to start with). All characters do survive going into cryosleep in the prologue, but it's probably not the best idea to try it again.

Of course, your characters all know each other in advance - you've met, you've trained together, you're gaining aspects by starring in each others' origin stories during the character creation process.

So. Given that setup, any characters?

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 Post Posted: Tue Sep 15, 2015 5:49 am 
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I'm going to be busy the next few days, but I'll likely get a preliminary character in sometime late friday. I'm thinking, Ranger survivalist. A rugged outdoorsman and adventurer who knows a few tricks about making do without an established infrastructure.

Also, has anyone else checked out evil hat's new edition of FATE? I tried it out, and it works really well. Things are alot clearer, and even easier then before.

Addendum: Soooo, I bought a PS4.

It may take me a little longer then anticipated to get a character worked up.

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 Post Posted: Mon Sep 21, 2015 8:00 pm 
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I'm thinking of a tool and die maker; the sort of person who makes industrial tools (and in a pinch, can do pretty much anything with metal). It's a skill of declining use in an increasingly robotic world, but a colony could make use of one. Question; are there any boundary conditions as to who and from where? No albino Serbo-Croats or whatever?

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 Post Posted: Mon Sep 21, 2015 9:18 pm 
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Rugged survivalist is good; tool-and-die maker is also good.

Finding enough colonists who are crazy enough to accept the one-in-ten chance of instant death that comes with cryosleep took a fairly all-inclusive international effort (and more than one small country had the bright idea of emptying out their jail cells). No-one currently suffering from any deadly diseases would make the cut, so no lepers or cancer patients; and no (known) psychopaths or mass murderers. Beyond that, just about anyone can go (including significant people from your character's backstory, whether allies or enemies). Albino Serbo-Croats are welcome.

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 Post Posted: Thu Sep 24, 2015 8:31 am 
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Why YOU should journey on the Pandora

The Pandora is an exciting new development in space travel, a colony ship which will take you to a whole new world. Free of governmental structures, YOU will be creating a new world with new rules - which you will create yourselves! Join a perfect society*!

Furthermore...

On arrival, you will find yourself provided with everything necessary** to create the village of your dreams! Sufficient supplies are provided to bootstrap your village directly to modern standards***! Among other facilities is included:

- Hydroponic farms, capable of providing enough food and oxygen to supply three thousand people indefinitely from two weeks after landing
- Food supplies enough to feed the entire colony for two years
- Tractors**, ploughs, seeds, and farming equipment** sufficient to establish vast farms on the surface of YOUR NEW HOME
- A 3D printer** large enough to create the parts for pre-fabricated buildings from easily grown organic plastics**!
- A full and fully automated biology laboratory!
- Complete databases of any and all information that could possibly be of any use^!

How Do You Get There?

Nothing could be simpler! Thanks to Cryosleep - the technology that makes this all possible - you will simply go to sleep here on Earth, and awaken^^ in YOUR NEW HOME! Though the journey itself will take a few centuries, YOU will be preserved through this time in perfect safety!

YOU can escape your nagging mother-in-law and bring your entire family to A NEW WORLD where there is more EMPTY LAND than anyone could use! Have you ever wanted to own a ten thousand acre sheep farm? Now you CAN^^^!

A WHOLE NEW WORLD at your feet! What are you waiting for? Sign up today!



* Reference material includes a recommended democratic decision-making structure. The onboard computer system includes vast amounts of documentation on historical societies, allowing you to see where they went wrong and avoid their mistakes. Reverting to canibalism is discouraged in the strongest possible terms.

**Some assembly required

***Bootstrapping process anticipated to require five to ten years

^Databases include a fully searchable Wikipedia copy, thousands of reference works, a full copy of Google's cache, and every scientific paper that several large universities could provide.

^^Side effects may include temporary cryosleep sickness, memory loss, digestive distress, frozen limbs, and death. A physician will ensure that every possible care is taken.

^^^Allow time for cloned sheep and sheepdog embryos to grow to term.

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 Post Posted: Fri Sep 25, 2015 8:10 am 
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In the backstory to this, are the heavens getting spammed with colony ships? Unless no one could care less if the colony fails, they aren't likely to be throwing this open to the wretched refuse of our teeming shores. Too many historical colonies failed to become self-sustaining for a very long time (if they ever did) because they were dumping grounds for layabouts, fools, and criminals. You need skills for a colony to survive, unskilled laborers are little more than ballast that competes for the food in order to compete with the tractor.

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 Post Posted: Fri Sep 25, 2015 10:16 am 
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The Pandora is the first of its type, and is not expected to arrive for something like five hundred years after its launch. I hadn't really thought about it that way, but I'm imagining it as a big international effort, with each country getting a number of "slots" proportional to the amount of money they contribute towards building the ship; and different countries use their slots in different ways, having different entry requirements.

Once they have a list of a lot of volunteers, most countries will pick out the ones they consider the best and most qualified. Other countries will disregard those they consider useful on Earth in the near future when selecting their colonists. Most of the colonists will have useful and relevant skills, at least...

This is mainly to ensure that any potential character idea anyone comes up with could be resting in one of the cryosleep modules at the start of the story.

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 Post Posted: Fri Sep 25, 2015 1:21 pm 
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Also something to consider is that most colonies have a very high initial mortality rate, and so, in order to preserve an adequate amount of genetic diversity, the ship is going to either have a lot of people on it, (several thousand at least) or will be carrying a large stockpile of genectic material to keep the bloodlines strong.

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 Post Posted: Fri Sep 25, 2015 9:24 pm 
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There are going to be several thousand colonists in coldsleep at the start of the prologue.

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 Post Posted: Sat Sep 26, 2015 2:21 am 
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Still trying to come up with a character idea. It's hard, trying to think of something interesting.

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 Post Posted: Sat Sep 26, 2015 2:15 pm 
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Well, you're going to be from a science-heavy world off to explore a magic-heavy world. Maybe play up on that divide a bit?

A scientist, familiar with the intricacies of his craft, attempting to reconcile the world he knows with what he sees around himself?

A cultured gentleman, who can take the wierdness, shrug it off, and remain calm and unruffled?

A brash and egotistical stage magician, master of sleight of hand?

A con man, purveyor of snake oil, stuffed into the colony by a dissatisfied customer/victim?

A soldier, seeking a respite from war?

A doctor, knowing that his skills will be needed anywhere that there are people?

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 Post Posted: Sat Sep 26, 2015 9:21 pm 
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We can also be reasonably sure the worlds clergy will not respond to this event by declaring 'oh, joy; what a golden opportunity for a branch of humanity to start over free of our influence.'

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 Post Posted: Sun Sep 27, 2015 12:12 am 
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Clergy in a magic-heavy environment? Now that is going to be amusing. Especialy when it comes to some of the more inflexible religions.

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 Post Posted: Sun Sep 27, 2015 2:24 pm 
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I might just take a page from real life and go with a heating and refrigeration technician. Wherever we were originally going, we would definitely have needed to freeze and refrigerate our food, air condition our buildings and heat our rooms. Someone like that would only have a minimal amount of use in the setting as described and would likely go through some time trying to figure out some way else he can help. Possibly by learning how to use the soldier's equipment or learning everything else about mechanics that he possibly could so he could actually fix and repair stuff he was never trained for.

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 Post Posted: Sun Sep 27, 2015 3:12 pm 
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Don't forget freezing people, along with the care and maintanance of the cryo-systems.

Refrigeration implies a knowledge of plumbing, electrical systems, and circutry, as well as basic fabrication and machineing skills for repairing, refubishing, and making new compressors and the motors that run them. Heating would include all of the above with the addition of a large amount of knowlege about flammable materials, and how to put them to use, whether for heating, or as an offensive system.(read: flamethrower.)

It's not what you were trained for, it how you can apply that training in new and spectacular ways. Like building your own rocket, using kerosine and liquid Oxygen you condensed yourself.

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