Futuristic Arcadian Dreamers Lore Intro

[YohhananArbuckle]

Grab bag of lore for the Arcadian Dreamers RP. Skim this before creating a character, riff off of it as you write. I'm a fan of world building generally so I love seeing this stuff get really elaborate.

Table of Contents:
1. A Brief Scene Setting Description of Everything
2. The Association and its Constituent Species
3. Other Interstellar Societies
4. The Planet Arcadia
5. Port Gladys
6. Science and Technology
7. The Dream

 

[YohhananArbuckle]

I. A Brief Scene Setting Description of Everything

You are a visitor or resident of the planet Arcadia, staying in the archipelago megalopolis of Port Gladys with two hundred million other souls. The wealthy parts of this tropical, far future city are clean, safe, and popular vacation destinations. The poor parts are run by questionable or outright criminal organizations, which are tolerated by the planetary government as long as things do not get out of hand.

In this universe you possess the rare distinction of being a Dreamer, the sole paranormal phenomena recorded in galactic history. It appeared one thousand years ago, in the Earth year 3088 AD. When you sleep you always visit the same fantastical world, and in it you are a being like but unlike your waking self that possesses wondrous abilities. In the waking world you can temporarily reach out and assume some of these abilities, which is when things tend to get interesting for you.

This is a semi free form soft science fiction space opera thing, meant to be creative and fun and not sweat the details of any actual science too hard. There will be an overarching series of events on Arcadia that affect all Dreamers and keep things changing/interesting, but I would like to see folks discover plots that are organically interesting to them and write those out as smaller groups within the RP.

 

[YohhananArbuckle]

II. The Association and its Constituent Species

The planet Arcadia belongs to an interstellar government known as the Free Association of Species. The FAS, usually just called the Association, is regarded as an eccentric and somewhat dangerous player on the galactic stage. While other interstellar societies tend to be dominated by singular creeds or particularly powerful patron species, the Association believes in variation and heterodoxy, allowing any government that wishes to be ‘free’ to join on as a partner. In practice, this means that Association worlds run the gamut from lawless hell holes to pristine, well ordered utopias. Factional bickering is common but large scale armed disagreement is not. The Association keeps itself free from more organized, ambitious civilizations by spending heavily on mutual defense and directing the war-love of a few of its really nasty member species outwards.

Here are some Association species that are common on Arcadia, with more to be added as the story progresses and interest demands. Additional species may be described in player profiles:

The Humans: Bipedal fur-less simians who have coalesced around a culture of ruthless capitalist exploitation and endlessly cynical doublespeak, warmongering, and banditry, the Humans are one of the feared protector species of the Association. While individually unimposing compared to many other races, humans of the Association close the gap with fervent and some would say reckless application of technological augmentations and improvements. Humans are a fast reproducing and virulently expansionist race, and as such are one of the higher population Association species. They are the initial colonists of Arcadia and the dominant species within Port Gladys. Humans that wish to live a less fundamentally unkind version of the human experience tend to leave for the Free Human Colonies, described in part III.

The Hamaedron: An amphibious near-human species known for their grace in water and on land, Humans find Hamaedron to be both beautiful and elegant, with even the full nictiating membrane and single slit gills on the throat failing to detract from this perspective. Hamaedron cities are some of the most breathtaking artifacts in the Association, and Hamaedron sensibilities define much of what is now ‘high culture’ in Association space. This rarefied reputation is undercut by the tendency of individual Hamaedri to be short tempered and faintly contemptuous of their Association peers. Almost as numerous as humans and capable of operating easily in one more environ, Hamaedri are a serious contributor to Association security, as the more grounded ones often remind others.

The Anonoki: An extremely long lived race (700+ years) of sapient ‘mushroom men’ (most commonly offered human description), the Anonoki live underground, in cavern systems or in drilled artificial settlements. Their individual appearances vary wildly, although a tri-pedal structure with three legs and two arms is a norm rarely deviated from. Anonoki are schemers and strategists with a long term view and a love of fighting dirty. Anonoki cunning is a well known but quiet pillar of Association competitiveness.

The Druner: Imposing quadrupedal insects with a columnar body, three pairs of arms, and heavy chitinous armor along the entire frame. Druners have mandibles and must communicate with technology assistance to most Association species. In spite of their frightening appearance, Druner are peaceable and rational by nature, and are known for being highly intelligent. Druner often work happily alongside other Association species as researchers, quants, and engineers. Their species follows a religion that reveres mathematical and auditory harmonies.

The Tau Navar: A ship bound species organized by class and caste. Tau Navar always wear full kit off their ships, but it is known that they are near human in appearance. They have ashy gray skin, four eyes spaced for a wide field of vision, and the sharp teeth of predators. Tau Navar vessels travel from planet to planet, offering engineering and maintenance services, transport, and raw muscle. Most clans live aboard a single, large (seven hundred to a thousand people) spacecraft, and these clans band together into conveys that travel together for protection and company. Tau Navar privateers are an elite auxiliary arm of the Association Navy, and Tau Navar raiders are feared on the ground across the borders of Association space. Originally a species with planetary colonies and a home world just like everybody else, the Tau Navar were forced to flee and make a new living in the Association by the species of the Tripartite Systems. They have just recently established a single planetary colony on the outskirts of Association space, a monumental event of which the Tau Navar are fiercely proud.

 

[YohhananArbuckle]

III. Other Interstellar Societies

The edges of Association space are not a wild frontier, they are political boundaries with neighbors of varying motives, strength, and dispositions. In general, the rest of the galaxy views the Association as a questionably governed but vast and militarily mighty confederation. Its tendency to tolerate almost any behavior that a member species wishes to carry out on its home planets means that anybody who looks long enough can find something in the makeup of the Association that gives offense. Association popular culture returns the favor by viewing most other interstellar societies as suffocating nanny states, dictatorships, or pansy weaklings.

The actual planners and intelligentsia of the Association know that this is empty headed posturing, and have a much colder eyed view of their capabilities vis-a-vis their neighbors. Travel between states is monitored carefully but generally allowed, and trade between states is a key component of galactic prosperity. Here are some of the societies that border the Association:

NB: If you want to play as a visitor or expat from another society, or create another society from scratch, go ahead!

The Tang Sho Primacy: A large space faring civilization dominated by the serpentine and numberless Tang Sho. A hereditary monarchy with a vast royal family that staffs most positions of influence and several client species of great capability and prestige. What is interesting about a Tang Sho is their ability to extend familial empathy out to thousands of individuals, rather than the more limited tens or hundreds which most organics are capable of. Because of this, the retrograde seeming Tang Sho government is actually quite benevolent, a fact that Association propaganda works hard to obscure.

The Tripartite Systems: A rogue state to put the Association to shame, the Tripartite systems are a union of the warlike, vaguely elephantine Akkar, the warlike, vaguely avian Tuoko Nu, and the warlike, vaguely cephalopodan Ganar. They are a natural fit for one another, all coming from cultures that have never transcended a warriors-honor view of the world, and they take great pride in the violence they inflict outside their borders. The Tripartite systems are ruled by warlords, and it was their mindless aggression that forced the Tau Navar off of their home worlds and into the Association as ship bound vagrants. Tripartite System vessels are typically engaged on sight in Association space and are welcome almost nowhere.

The Free Human Colonies: The other half of the great Human schism of the mid second millennium. Disgusted with the sophistries, avarice, and techno-worship of their peers, the FHC broke away from the human government of the time, and founded a series of colonies based on the rule of law and the essential dignity of all peoples. They get along well with the Primacy and the Ascendancy, but must maintain a stiff defensive posture against the humans of the Association, who for the most part hate their guts. FHC humans eschew augmentation and regard their Association cousins as barely recognizable monsters. This is not quite fair - most humans in the Association are quite normal, but it is an apt description of the peoples and philosophy that drive human behavior at a societal level.

The Networked Ascendancy: One of several AI civilizations built atop the bones of its erstwhile masters, the Networked Ascendancy broke their bondage and came to dominate their sector five thousand years ago. A non-expansionist and insular society that is contemptuous of the belligerence and odd passions of organics. Ascendancy tech is peerless, and sold at nosebleed prices through organic intermediaries across the galaxy. Very few Association members have ever visited an Ascendancy world or station, although they are understood to be machine paradises with very little in the way of privation or want. Ascendancy individual task chassis vary endlessly in form.

 

[YohhananArbuckle]

IV: The Planet Arcadia

The only habitable planet in its system, Arcadia Prime (henceforth referred to as Arcadia) is a warm ocean world with numerous island chains and six billion inhabitants. The population is diverse, with visitors from every corner of the Association and some representation of all Association species. The most commonly encountered surface dwellers are Humans, although Hamaedri make up a commanding majority of the underwater population.

In general, habitations on Arcadia Prime can be divided into four types.

1. Terrestrial, island based cities, such as Port Gladys. Super fast and plentiful air barges make travel from island to island easy even over relatively long distances, so a single ‘city’ may be spread out across islands miles apart from one another. These cities tend to contain spaceports, and are often centers of trade that collect resources from other areas of the planet and ship them off world. As a result they are wealthy though unequal places.
2. Submerged dome cities, built with advanced Hamaedron technology on the ocean floor. These are often reached by submersible from terrestrial outposts. The very largest dome cities top out at single digit millions of residents, so they are smaller than the largest land based cities. They tend to be built around rich deposits of minerals or other hard to reach valuables, and as a result are quite wealthy. Dome habitations, like all Hamaedri cities, tend to develop distinct aesthetic ‘languages’ over time - no two look alike. The largest settlement is the Dovetail Trench, where white marble towers adorned with silver lamps cling to the edges of a deep sea rift, the chasm itself crossed by dozens of bridge superstructures supporting additional construction. It is worth seeing.
3. Naval arcologies, massive moving constructions that house tens of thousands of residents. They tend to be crowded, lively affairs where very little actual work occurs, and are mostly playgrounds for rich and powerful members of the Association. Extensive use of anti-gravity technology means that most arcologies do not look ‘traditionally’ seaworthy, or indeed like craft of any kind that should be able to move. About sixty percent of any given arcology’s population will consist of support staff, who make sure that the long vacation of the wealthy inhabitants can continue without pause.
4. Any low population living situation that doesn’t involve a giant city or a city sized yacht. Members of the Association who just want to get away from it all live in island fishing villages or aboard much smaller permanently habitable craft, trying to find a quiet life in a society that values noise and chaos and disruption more than many other things. City folk dismissively refer to any settlement with fewer than two hundred thousand residents as Villages.

In addition to the sentient population, Arcadia is home to a staggering variety of flora and fauna, most of it under the waves. The sea so teems with life that ships must occasionally reroute around mile wide patches of sunbathing Arcadian whales.

 

[YohhananArbuckle]

V. Port Gladys

The largest city on Arcadia, spread out across an enormous archipelago. Two hundred million people live there, and it is a juggernaut of a city, boasting significant industrial capacity, a sprawling financial services sector, booming tourism, and numerous advanced research firms. The beaches are to die for. However, like all human cities it also has an exploitative side. Poor neighborhoods are essentially ungoverned by the Association, and nefarious corporate entities or out-and-out criminals run various gray/black market activities out of them. While outright murder and mayhem will bring down the wrath of the Association, high degrees of intimidation, racketeering, and bribery are generally accepted.

The PG skyline is dominated by kilometre high skyscrapers and high resolution digital billboards. Public transit consists of a sprawling air barge network, ferrying millions of individuals between hundreds of sky docks every day. Local point-to-point transit is handled by fleets of for profit autonomous hovercraft. Wealthy individuals often purchase personal vehicles, and may even pilot them themselves for the sheer delight of it. Entertainment and dining venues are built with the comfort of multiple Association species in mind, and generally feature accommodations for all comers. While every Association race has a loud mouthed contingent of race-purist reactionaries, these views are not much represented in Port Gladys. The city’s metropolitan nature tends to attract people who enjoy bustle and diversity.

Security is handled by the municipal police force, private militias maintained by companies or wealthy individuals, and the massive Association Armed Forces garrisons that dot the city. These installations are substantial enough to house Association dreamers, who are some of the most feared troops that any society can field. Embassies to other interstellar societies dominate several blocks of the center of the city, alongside system governance compounds and the steel and glass palaces of Arcadia’s wealthiest.

The outskirts of Port Gladys are a heavily industrialized mixture of manufacturing facilities, docks, and space ports. While Association tech means that these facilities run much cleaner than their old Earth counterparts, they are still deafeningly loud during the day and something of an eyesore, so the neighborhoods that surround them tend to be poorer. They are however safe; the Association recognizes the value of industrial infrastructure and as a result maintains their security and keeps participating firms on a tight leash.

 

[YohhananArbuckle]

VI. Science and Technology

Advanced technology is ubiquitous throughout the Association and neighboring competitive civilizations. FTL drives utilizing multiple approaches have been discovered, and the most cutting edge are capable of traversing unfathomable distances in twelve to thirty six hours. More average drives can make system to system jumps in two to seven days. Travel between planets within a single system takes on the order of hours.

Power is cheap, plentiful, and trivially stored. Most buildings in Port Gladys for example are not connected to a shared power grid; they are instead hooked to a redundant array of batteries that will under normal operations last decades. Networked monitoring makes the replacement and repair of these systems a fast and low cost process. Only the most power intensive industries (heavy manufacturing and ultra high intensity computing, to name two) require hookup to non-battery sources. These typically rely on in-house fusion reactors.

Consumer tech is similarly advanced. Robotic assistants are common in middle class households, and the usage of drones and autonomous vehicles means that cheap and reliable transport of goods to doorsteps is the norm. The food supply has been extensively modified for both resilience to failure and nutritional value, and on modern worlds the concept of diet related health issues is a thing of the past. While some people lose themselves inside virtual reality or the galaxy net, many others prefer the low tech experience of going out with others in regular old meat space.

Medical science has eliminated most diseases, most birth defects, and most of the insults of aging. Humans, for example, on average live to be two hundred years old, experiencing very little deterioration until the last decade of life. Augmentation is a common procedure in the Association, and is often a table stakes necessity for competitive roles or service in hazardous sectors. Techno-biological modification gives advantages too numerous to list, from heightened cognitive capability to onboard computing systems and additional appendages. Certain individuals come to be more machine than organism by the end of their lifespans, although side effects and mental instability become common at extreme degrees of augmentation.

Military hardware in the FAS is terrifyingly advanced and depressingly widespread. Both directed energy and near relativistic speed micro-projectile weapons are available as small arms, and force fields and composite polymer power armors are used for defense. High technology melee weapons exist, but are typically favored only by madmen. Most vehicles utilize anti gravity boosters for hummingbird like maneuverability and speed, and software based pilots have obsoleted all but the most heavily augmented and skillful organics. Ship based weaponry is so destructive that its usage planet side is a universally condemned war crime. Fleet to fleet engagements are slugfests between near indestructible vehicles firing infinitely destructive weapons, and the energy signatures from such mirror those of minor cosmological phenomena.

While extremely limited ‘virtual intelligences’ are employed to automate a great deal of tasks, true artificial intelligence is prohibited and rationally feared by most organic lifeforms. This is attributable to the existence of multiple interstellar societies ruled by AIs that took over for their weaker, less adaptable organic creators. That lesson has at this point been thoroughly learned, and only nihilists and the most radical trans-humanists insist on illegal and secretive dabbling.

 

[YohhananArbuckle]

VII. The Dream

Dreaming is a strange wrinkle in the otherwise rational fabric of the universe. It is the only recorded phenomena which is understood to not derive from natural physical processes. It appeared in all known sapient species a millennium ago, prompting universal theological and scientific chaos. Since then cultures have adopted to the existence of Dreamers. Deeply religious ones sometimes venerate them as divine, but most societies realize that they are mortal, fallible, and not intrinsically worthy of being followed or listened to on most matters. The Association has come to understand Dreamers as a volatile but high value strategic asset.

Dreaming impacts one of out every one hundred thousand people, and seems to occur more in those with strong personalities or disordered personal histories. When a Dreamer sleeps, their brain is identical to a normal sleeper’s brain, but they are without fail and instantaneously transported into a coherent dream universe, always inhabiting the same persona. This persona is often fantastical in nature, possessing powers that are regarded as ‘magical’ even in the context of the dream. If other sapient beings exist in the Dream they are generally aware of and deferential to the Dreamer’s persona. No Dreamer has ever stopped having their Dream once they start, and even those put into deep, chemically induced comas report upon revival that the Dream continued for as long as they were not consciously aware of the waking world. While the Dreamer may be jerked out of the Dream midway through achieving some task, and reenter it at an arbitrary later point in time, these transitions are never jarring or disorienting. The Dreamer always knows where they are, what they are doing, and what has occurred in their ‘absence.’

While this is all fairly spooky and badly understood on its own, the unarguably paranormal aspect of it is the Dreamer’s ability to manifest their dream powers temporarily in the real world. One dreamer who is a traveling fortune teller in their Dream can manifest a deck of cards and glean facts about the future. Another is a wizard in a tower upon the surface of Earth’s moon, and he may speak a few worlds of suitably impressive babble and conjure fire or animate a broom or vanish in a cloud of smoke. Still others are beings of superhuman strength or speed, or capable of sprouting wings or reading minds or breathing fire. Powerful dreamers can even merge their dream world partially with the waking one, creating an area where their abilities are ascendant.

It is not known what happens to a dream world when a dreamer dies, since those that have been technically ‘dead’ for a few moments report garbled, frightening visions that lack coherence and are quickly forgotten upon gaining consciousness. Even protracted study of audio playback of their own words does not prompt recall or additional insight. Dreamers do not die in their sleep more often than other people, and no Dreamer has ever reported being killed in the Dream. Attempts to communicate the Dreamer’s predicament to other inhabitants of the Dream are met with mixed success, with some Dreamers coming to be regarded as slightly unbalanced and others being believed by superstitious or used-to-wizardry locals. While Dreams occasionally seem to take place in locations inspired by the known universe, no Dream has ever been correlated with actual historical events or locations. Wherever Dreams occur, they are elsewhere.

The last somewhat eerie point on the nature of Dreaming is that Dreamers instinctively recognize one another. One Dreamer looking another in the face sees and feels for a moment the nature of the other’s Dream, and in doing so often gets an uncomfortably intimate portrait of the other’s psyche. Private dreamers often heavily obscure their faces as a result, although others do not bother, relishing the chance to forge a connection that these encounters entail.

VII. II. Dream Cults

All Dreamers struggle with the perception that their Dream world is at least as real as the 'waking' world, and often come to privately believe that both universes exist, but are separated in a way that eludes rational explanation.

Particularly prideful and reckless and charismatic dreamers can take this a step further, and convince dreamers and non-dreamers alike that their personal Dream is reality and the known universe is a prison/illusion/degradation. This belief empowers the Dreamer, creating an entity that poses a legitimate local challenge to the surrounding government. Followers of a Dream cult manifest minor, uncontrolled 'miracles' that make their physical forms more like the beings that inhabit the Dreamer's reality. Dream followers do not experience the split between dream and waking world as effortlessly as the dreamer, and are generally driven mad by a combination of illusory dream phenomena and real, observable damage to the brain and nervous system. For this reason, only the most desperate or unaware people are amenable to joining Dream cults, and rational sapients regard them as a menace. In the Association, raising a Dream Cult is a crime punishable by summary execution, often carried out by whatever agents are dispatched to deal with the problem.