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Futuristic (Looking for Players) Chasing the Morningstar (High-Concept Fantastical Scifi Adventure)

Nebulous Stars

A Convincing Mirage
The Pitch
You are a small crew of scavs in the outer edges of known space, drawn together by chance, choice, and dreams. Aboard the decommissioned military mindship X37C-33, usually shortened to just X3, you use long range scanners to find the remnants of ancient wars and lost ghost ships. Success is rare, and true success is rarer, but right of salvage means that you usually get enough from each find to keep the ship running and everyone alive.

This find is different though, a centuries old warship, half wrecked, clearly a life support bleed out in the far reaches of space. A command ship from the Empire of Eden, long out of date, it is still an incredibly valuable find. That, however, is not what sets it apart. That honor belongs to the records found by X3 aboard, claiming to show the location of the colony ship the Morningstar. Reactivation of the ship’s systems unfortunately also drew distant attention, but that discovery still shakes the foundations.

The Morningstar is a millennia old myth, a rumor of freedom, of choice, of escape, told to aspiring young pilots. You and the rest of the crew now know it is entirely real, an Edenite Lieutenant and explorer having found it just beyond rimspace. From the records he returned to Eden space after decades away, ready to report incredible success, only to stare into the abyss of bureaucratic theocracy. At the last minute he turned and fled, pursued heavily by the military. Their ship was mortally wounded, but they were designed to hare through rimspace in a way the military vessels were not, and they escaped.

So what is the Morningstar, for anyone too young or unweathered in the crew? It is a colony ship, built at a long ago peak of technology. More than that though, it is a rebellion, an entire mining superplanet’s resources dedicated to this one singular construction. It’s weapons and shield systems are incomparable, and more than that it has enough life support and food production automated to feed millions aboard, billions even in fleet with other ships to carry the rest.

Possession alone would make one nearly the equal of most military fleets, with enough support for an entire civilization out in the deep dark of space. So why isn’t it in active use? Millennia ago, the rebels set it to complete setup automatically and tucked it somewhere far outside of known space at the time, preparing to go to it as soon as it was done. Unfortunately their overlords noticed the unbalanced books and the missing resources at the last minute. No rebel made it out to the ship and the planet was destroyed, the Morningstar consigned to rumor and legend.

Now you know about how to find it, the crew the inheritors of a vast legacy. Unfortunately, so does the Empire of Eden, automated ships protocols having dumped the records back to base on what would once have been encrypted signals. Long cracked by now, they have instead alerted an array of corporate interests, and perhaps even the traces of that ancient rebellion to the secret. Whoever gets there first takes all, the automated systems ready to receive it’s crew, and no modern military capable of taking it from you without destroying it and sustaining at least 80% losses.

So are you ready to chase the Morningstar?

The Nitty-Gritty
So who are you, and why are you here? This bit is fairly open-ended, with a few guidelines. You are of any of a near-infinite variety of alien races, go wild with high-concept sci-fi. The only catch is that whoever you are, you have a good reason to be far from populated space and most creature comforts, a scavenger in the outer rim. On the run, exiled, bored, spoiled, entirely mad, all that matters is that you are crewing an ancient military mindship as it scavenges and gets by. You only see ports every few weeks at best, often going months alone with the crew. The work isn’t truly safe, but injuries are generally rare as long as people are careful, and this is a better crew than most, with a better ship. Even there though, its apparent that the ship is a military grade mindship from the Empire, where mindships are very rare, and the military is not known for it’s retirement plans.

Crew roles are mostly as expected, engineers, spacewalkers, gunners, a medic or two, a cook. Being clear, ship is taken. The engine room itself is only entered by an eccentric head engineer who has been on the ship as long as anyone can remember, a role already filled. Most roles can go filled or unfilled, although if they are unfilled they may put more stress on the ship and be less efficient. In particular medical and culinary are roles X3 theoretically can automate, but you might not want that. Claim and discuss roles in the discord, but generally most roles can be at least doubled up. You are scavengers in rimspace, you might have to make do without sometimes, but if you can, redundancy is your god.

Additionally there is some room for flexibility here, for the most part most people aboard should be contributing crew, but the ship itself is a bit of an old softie. Most crew onboarding might have something or other to do with that, various strays picked up in various places throughout space. Some might have hired on, but if a fully qualified reasonable professional wanted a job, there would likely be reasons. Many might have been rescues that never left, with any number of reasons or even methods for coming aboard in the first place.

As it stands most likely the ship will function as the captain, but it is technically an open role. This will however require fairly extensive conversations and some working hand in hand, ic and ooc. This will also be held to a higher standard generally, due to ic complications. To put it simply, it’s a more involved role, even moreso than you might expect, so it necessitates more involvement. Again though, it is a purely optional role.

Additionally, while the focus of the rp is sci-fi, think more star wars, not hard sci-fi. There isn’t a force by any means, but its a big universe with many entirely anomalous species, plenty of psychics, and more than a few oddities. It is a difficult thing to state precisely, but that’s what conversation is for. In short, think sci-fi with fantastical elements, but not simply fantasy. The laws of physics and reality are in a sense perhaps more guidelines than rules.

Lastly, this isn’t a storied past where tech was better world, despite the Morningstar. It’s just that there are peaks and troughs of technology as war and disaster comes and goes. Additionally, levels of technology vary by spatial region, and the Empire’s theocratic nature has caused lower levels of advancement in the region. The Morningstar was a rare feat of united effort, time, resources, and expertise, boosted in part by a highly educated political prisoner population, and the wealth of knowledge of the permanent miner population. It consumed years of most of the resources from an entire massive planet, and was only managed due to revolutionary fervor and truly spectacular bureaucratic corruption.

Rules and Details
Zero tolerance for;
1: Bigotry
2: AI "art" or "writing"(for clarity, writing about ai is fine, tis scifi, using modern glorified plagarism models, is not.)
3: Fashy Behavior
General rules;
1: Try to stay in communication, look shit happens and I'm willing to make allowances, but I will keep this going if I can.
2: Typos and errors happen, but there is going to be a base expectation of literacy and detail necessary to participate, this is not purely first come first serve. This doesn't mean you need to go super indepth about everything, but in cs writing and posts you should be telling us something, and doing so fully.
3: Arguments will happen, but don't be cruel to eachother, and try to be mindful about what you are actually arguing about.
4: Hopefully this is self-evident, but obey RPN's rules.
5: See #1, but while this will be quality over quantity, I do want to keep things going, so skipping may happen after a week or two. As long as rule one is going strong there won't be kicking or consequences though, and I will try to keep people included, even via gm post asides if need be.

Anyway, if all that sounds tolerable, join the discord below, and make sure to grab your roles. If there is sufficient interest, I will post a cs thread this week and spin up everything else in short order.


The Empire of Eden is an aggressively militaristic theocracy, operating on a large scale doctrine of prosperity gospel and iconoclasm. Politically they currently exist in an unusual peace. This is because they have taken as much of their local space as they can, and are now sharing border with corpo power systems. All neighbors that they can take with acceptable losses have been devoured, and now they are relegated to posturing and border skirmishes. This began 25 years ago and has turned into a stasis of sorts

See they have immense fleets and investment in war materials and infantry, but their actual technology level is leagues behind. Their primacy in their region of space was largely enabled by a heavy reliance on psykers and war crimes, but now they are butting borders with actual hyper-tech oligopolies, and coming up short. Simultaneously their emperor cannot back down, the man’s image holds the whole thing together after all, but if they make a move the war would be catastrophic. For them, the Morningstar will break that stasis.

There is a corporate belt more or less around the Empire of Eden, which ironically was in some ways created by it. The Empire of Eden’s expansionism and zealotry tended to drive people away, and they had a strict policy of interfering with neighbors. So as they expanded more and more people left, and real governments fell to sabotage, a corporate sector grew, eventually taking shape around the empire itself and solidifying their own power. The border is untenable, but has yet to erupt.

While the region isn’t a tourist hotspot, there are still travelers from other regions. It is a place ripe for arms dealing, well placed for hiding out, and decent for taking little zones of your own. There is even a tourism industry, although the current fraught situation and theocracy cut down on it a fair bit. There isn’t a prevailing revolutionary movement or thread at the moment, but there are plentiful pockets of resistance or simply separation. The Empire tries to keep a tight hold, but it can’t control every station, nor even every planet. There are also some independents out in the rim.
Basics

Name: X37C-33 Type-B

Alias: X3, Sarge

Age: 30-70

Gender: Female

Species: Ship-person

Sexuality: Complicated(Species/History

Role Aboard: The ship, and the Captain(probably)

Appearance

Description/Image(No AI):


Weapons: To be determined once gunners are involved.


Armor: Her hull is fully plated in cutting edge military grade ablative armor. As of 70 years ago that is. Still it’s enough to shrug off most civilians grade weaponry, and be reasonably effective against lower grade military weaponry. The ship is also, unusually lucky, shall we say.


Eyes: Besides camera’s if you were to look a ship in the eye, would it be the engines, or the lights.


Height: She is a sizable military vessel, made to be a support battleship and a boarding ship, thereby holding up to a fire fight and a decent crew capacity.


Clothing Style: Externally there hasn’t been much paint in a long time, armored "skin" thoroughly marked. Inside is the finest cozy junker kitsch in rimspace. A wide collection of blankets, sofa’s pillows and the like, with a variety of furniture, all practical but as comfortable as can be found. Many are handmade, hand-me–down, unique, etcetera. They aren’t the product of an interior designer, but instead the interests of a ship that has spent quite a while bouncing around rimspace. Relatedly, many are cheap or shabby with time and wear, made from strange materials, or put together oddly.

Hair: N/A

Combat Details

Species Traits/Description: Baseline Edenite Human, Generally Physically Unimpressive.

Cyberbiotic Modifications: She has been integrated into the ship, her skin it’s hull, it’s engine her heart, her mind it’s onboard computer. She is in every part of the ship, with audiovideo feeds everywhere but bathrooms, showers and private quarters, although she can be “called” in private quarters and will then respond. As to exactly how all this is done, what it entails? Nobody but the head engineer knows, as only he has seen her engine room, the most secure room on the ship.

Skills: She is a master of controlling her “body”, with many years of experience holding it to the highest standard.


Strengths: She is a jack of all trades, capable of handling all aspects of the ship in turn, backed by years of experience and cleverness.


Weaknesses: While she can technically handle all aspects of the ship in combat, she cannot do so all at once, and the degree of split focus or power necessary reduces engine and mobility efficiency. Additionally, she truly is a jack of all trades, and that includes being a master of none. This is why she prefers to have gunners and pilots, so she can assist them, with her working best with a full crew she can instead augment. In shipboard combat she is mostly useless, completely so if disconnected.


Personal Details

Likes: Likes: Above all she likes to be talked to and engaged with, having spent a lot of her career treated as essentially just a fancy engine. The nature of her existence is such that a lot of simple human pleasures are difficult to enjoy, but she likes to seek what humanity she can within her nature spread over the ship.

Dislikes: Dislikes: Being treated as inanimate, anyone but ____ going near her engine room, dealing with psychic resonators and nullifiers. Damage to her hull or systems.

Bio: In general, nobody really knows. She has been active in the general region and in the scavenger communities for a couple decades, developing connections with many of the local planetary settlements and space stations. The general consensus is that she left the Empire some decades ago, and by the time anyone knew much about her she had only one crew member. As time went by she picked up and lost strays in turn, stowaways, researchers, voyagers, later even proper employees to work as crew. Still her crew has ever remained an eccentric rotating cast of characters, with nobody but the first knowing any of her true past.

Personality: X3 is a quiet presence throughout most of the ship, ever-aware, ever quick to respond, at least outside of blind-zones. She has been aboard the ship longer than anyone else, and has been a part of it to every passenger. She is friendly when addressed, helpful, and has played a role in the onboarding of most passengers. Further, while she tries to be as noninvasive as she can, she tries to keep an eye on people and help them along. She is anomalously kind.

Fears: Being left alone, being disconnected without freedom, loneliness.

Misc

Relationships: Head Engineer: ???

Inventory: All the ship’s supplies more or less.

Nierak-Ti Shardworld​
6YnQcZ9XEk88-I7Jeb0aqTzIwfuWRSPpdC8gQuhuF2u5PCeSfruYI1jIiMIylPcvJqH1YsOOktaxTX-XQYM8-VnSrH_rBqgn7hgdTVJkijXXXhxn4J3ffkmkgpVYDX5hI6v6mIBL7YqrLZNxDmynLw

Population: Unknown due to the somewhat ephemeral nature of the beginning and ends of their lifespans.
Intelligence Level: Nierak-Ti are at a baseline incredibly intelligent. They vary somewhat, and their intelligence is notably alien, from humans of course, but also in some ways that are alien to organics generally. It is worth noting that while Nierak-Ti can die, and some seem to die of old age, death does not actually seem to be an inevitability to them.
Climate: There's planets you need spacesuits to go on. There's planets you need to stay shipboard on. There are planets you need to only go into with thick hulls and strong shields. There are planets that you should only go to with hyper specialized ships designed solely to survive that environment. Then there are planets where you need a specialized ship, luck, and a very short trip. The Nierak-Ti Shard World, referred to by the few diplomat’s that interact with them as The Cradle, and by people who have seen it as Hell, is a step beyond. If you aren’t a Nierak-Ti, Don’t get anywhere near orbit of the planet. For organic’s there are a mix of extremely powerful and extremely nasty radiations that will melt your body, while the energy fluctuations will tear apart your ship. Computer systems and Androids without massive protections will be fried, and those protections will be corroded very fast.
Orbiting Bodies: If there was ever a more notable moon, it is now gone. There are a number of pieces of the planet stuck in lockstep with it, and a few that managed to break into an orbit.
Capital: The Nierak-Ti live throughout the energy ocean that flows throughout the Shards. There are gathering points on some of the larger pieces, which over time developed into a variety of almost cities, the civilization of a people born from an ocean of wild energy.
A key point to understanding the Nierak-Ti, is understanding what we can of what they refer to their homeworld as. Translating from a language that is a mix of sounds, hair gestures, body gestures, color shifting, spoken by Empaths who still hew close to their wild origin is at best a challenge. The closest approximation we have reached is trifold, The Crucible, The Cradle, and The Great Sea, and each of these is a wild over-simplification of each of the concepts tied into the singular idea of the Nierak-Ti home world. Despite the way they were born from incredible destruction to a world that would kill, the foundation of their culture is music and art first. The Nierak-Ti are a wild people, born from a vast ocean of energy caught in constant maelstrom. The first humans to survive meeting the Nierak-Ti compared them to the old legends of the fae, not without merit.
The Nierak-Ti worship something that is translated roughly as the Heart, the Home, the Gestalt. It is what they are born from, and what they return to. Further details are not shared with outsiders, although we do know that the ocean of energy is venerated and referred to as the LyrShuul.
Before you learn how the Nierak-Ti live you have to understand what the concept of surf/flight/art/dance mean to the Nierak-Ti. Again a single concept that must be translated into several to contain it’s full meaning. They move along immense waves and shifts in the ocean of energy that is their home. The clinical description doesn’t really encapsulate the experience of seeing an immense pattern of impossibly bright lights moving through the charged darkness of their world, and realizing that every little tracer is a Nierak-Ti. This is important at every stage of their lives. When a Nierak-Ti is born they are a wild, impossible being, almost more guided energy than individual entity. As they chase stars they find their patterns and find their rhythms, eventually maturing into a corporeal Nierak-Ti. This stage of their life is extremely important, and also responsible for the ridiculous variance in the ways that they are shaped, as they build themselves while they develop. Even when they become corporeal they may remain out in the Lyrshuul. Eventually as their minds develop most eventually hunger for contact and language. Even when a Nierak-Ti does seek out one of the “cities” they never truly leave the LyrShuul. It is home, bed, the open road, and ultimately the end as well. When a Nierak-Ti begins to fade, whether due to boredom or some other reason they go back out and instead of dancing intact upon the awful power of the LyrShuul, they begin to return to their wilder natures, eventually fading away entirely.
The Nierak-Ti fundamentally keep to themselves, preferring to remain on their Shard world. They are largely neutral, but maintain a presence and connections in the larger political system. They have only very rarely been roused to true action, and the general consensus is that everybody would really prefer if they never did that again. They are incredibly dangerous, with deceptively advanced technology, but they have no interest in controlling other world’s or their resources. They do find other people and cultures deeply fascinating but they generally have no interest in altering or controlling them.

As far as what made their Shard World, and thereby the Nierak-Ti themselves, nobody really knows. It has been in it’s current state since before anyone but perhaps the Nierak-Ti themselves knew it existed. From what we know, whatever happened isn’t something that anyone knows how to produce in the modern era. The planet seems to have imploded under the stress of an impossible amount of energy, but something in it’s makeup refused to blow apart or unleash that energy into open space. Instead exerting a field that keeps the planet together, wrapped around and through a vast, impossibly dense ocean of energy. Most scientists that learn about it want to study it, but by it’s very nature it is impossible to really examine. The only known species able to survive the planet’s immediate vicinity are the Nierak-Ti themselves. The only reason the safe travel recommendations around it were able to be built is that the Nierak-Ti themselves noticed the destroyed ghost ships drifting into the LyrShuul. They flew out to the next ship to approach and prevented it’s approach. That was the beginning of their interactions with open space, centuries ago.

Practical breakdown:
Spacefaring, lightly empathic, pseudo-mermaids, with very mild empathy and more notable energy manipulation abilities. Armored and with a varying limb count, they are capable of minor shapeshifting. They are an energy-based species, technically more crystalline than organic.
Visual Breakdown:
Their heads are semi-spherical prisms that narrow down into a sort of neck, meeting their shoulders. There are other sound and scent receptors on their bodies, but on their faces there are two very short patches of dark gray pseudo-hairs that take in soundwaves. Their hair is how they scent, but they do actually also have a tongue of sorts, along with a sense of taste, but it is, odd, to say the least. More akin to an extra limb, seated behind a narrow line on her face similar to how their closed eyes appear. It is hyper-flexible, and can split into two or three points. The Nierak-Ti sense of taste is developed very differently to humans, as they have no need of it to eat. Instead it allows them to very accurately identify what it tastes, down to a molecular level. Nierak-Ti tongues are generally iridescent rainbows composed of many miniscule scales, and feel similar to a snake’s scales, but much more fine and smooth. Nierak-Ti arms don’t really have joints, instead being made of an odd flexible crystal. The number and type of limbs vary between individuals. Down from the arms, their torso kinda just, continues down. There are grooves here and there, the largest being the ones that their larger arms sit in when retracted, but with smaller more mysterious ones scattered here and there. Besides those shallow grooves their skin is entirely smooth until it reaches their lower body proper. There it shifts into overlapping scales. their normal body is highly durable, but the scales on their tail are extremely durable, spreading out and minimizing impacts across very hard scales. If you are curious, their tail do shed, but only when healing significant damage and it takes a great deal of time and energy. There are long markings down the side of their tails, that very few people have ever seen the reasons for. These are very thin, well protected flaps that protect their fins, which serve two purposes. They allow them to much more directly absorb energy from their environments, and also allow them to propel themselves much more freely and much faster, with no need for an atmosphere. However they are also fairly vulnerable and any damage to them is incomprehensibly agonizing along with being very slow to heal. They are brightly glowing, thin crystalline arrays that are lit in the color of their energy. Their tails have a longer and a shorter form. When slithering the longer tail is more useful and easier to move on, along with being more useful in a fight, while the shorter tail is mostly for relaxation. When flying their shorter tail is much more agile, but the longer tail is much, much faster.

Nierak-Ti hair is the most human part of their body, looking almost entirely like human hair, down to size and shape, but rather than thin hairs grown from their body, their hair is thin crystal filaments. Flexible and soft, but nigh-unbreakable. It also tends to float and shift even in a vacuum, and Nierak-Ti use their hair to gesticulate quite frequently, the movements often reflecting their temperament. It is particularly worth noting that Nierak-Ti hair is solely seated at the top of their heads, although it can fall over the rest. It can also taste and identify particulates in the air, which is how they “smell”. Nierak-Ti hair usually has some throughpoint, but often shifts colors completely free from their control, reflecting their emotions.

Nierak-Ti eyes, like the rest of their faces, are somewhat unsettling. Due to their energy based nature they have no traditional mouths, and their senses of smell and hearing are only partially based on their head. Their “eyes” are technically a band around their head. They can raise their hair and fully open their eye ring, but that makes it hard to focus and is uncomfortable. When their eyes are open normally they open two focus points that resemble eyes except for being around two inches in diameter, and that they can move around their head completely independently of each other. These eyes generally match color to the Nierak-Ti’s own individual energy.
 
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I'm interested! A fun space adventure is very much what I'm feeling at the moment.
 
Bump, still looking for a couple people, only properly filled role is engineers. medic and gunner are both empty, but not required, so come on down if you want to join up and we can talk about roles
 
(soft reopening due to a series of unfortunate unexpected mishaps, late joiners will be folded into the story naturally in a variety of ways, with actually physically showing up later only an option)
still room for spacewalkers(combat/offship crew), and gunners. pilot is fully unoccupied, and technically so is captain but that would be a more complicated role to take up.
 

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