Technology is a dangerous tool.
The Slipdrive has taken us thousands, millions of light years from home with, well, not ease
- but certainly convenience
. It's made interstellar travel, if not simple, then at least possible
. And humanity has certainly benefited immensely from it - at least, here in the Chimera Cluster, anyway. We're not sure about everyone else.
I mean, rationally, we know there must
be others out there, because we're not exactly from
these parts. But there's been two, maybe three Collapses since we got here, so a lot of that stuff we just...don't really know anymore.
Our best guess is that we're descended from people who'd just made a hard burn from Homeworld, wherever that is, to a nearby system and hoped their Slipknots would take them to another cluster than Homeworld's - because wherever the Slip connections go has very little to do with physical proximity. Goldbug and Kensha are just one Slip away - but way out on completely different arms of the galaxy, and each of them links to Hubbard near the galactic core. The problem is, we don't know where they got to first. We don't know which star they might have come from. And even if we figure that out - we don't know if our ancestors Slipped out first from Homeworld, or, hell, did that from a different cluster themselves. Every few years, y'know, you hear of a ship or two just thinking they'll do the same thing, burn out a couple lightyears and hope for a different Slipknot and a whole different Cluster. We never hear from them again. Maybe they did it, who knows.
The rest of us, we just kind of...sit tight. We make do. Maybe one day we'll hear from the rest of the Diaspora. Till then - it's a big universe, but it's a small Cluster.Diaspora is a ruleset based off of Fate Core, which is itself a really flexible ruleset for pretty much any RPG you can dream up.
The core concepts behind it are:
1) Technology is great! Until it's terrible.
Technology is ranked on a scale from -4 to 4, -4 being pretty much neolithic, -1 being where we're at, 0 being 'active exploration of the solar system', 1 being 'active exploitation of the solar system', 2 being 'invention and use of the Slipdrive', allowing for interstellar travel, 3 being 'master of the slipdrive', and 4 being 'imminent Collapse'.
Collapse can come about a lot of ways. 'Transcendance' to a higher state of being. Abuse of nanotechnology leading to a 'grey goo' scenario. Advances in AI leading to a hegemonizing swarm. Eternal life leading to social collapse - or some sort of regressive mentality. Even the discovery of 'true' FTL would constitute collapse, because someone will go out there, find greener pastures, and come back and tell everyone - and they'll all pick up and head over now that it's convenient. But in the Diaspora setting - it's an inevitable consequence of T4. Either you pull back from the brink and revert to T3, or you Collapse - and probably drop down to T0 or lower.
2) It's a small...cluster.
There's a lot of
space, but most of it you simply can't get to. Clusters are generally sort of 6-12 systems, connected by these Slipstream paths - transit along them is instantaneous, but without them you're not really going anywhere. And so you're stuck along these - unless you wanna go full generation ship, or have enough reaction mass for a serious attempt at close-to-C travel.
3) Humans
are from Earth - but that could be thousands of years before, and many Collapses ago.
Earth may not even
exist anymore even - if it's eaten in a grey goo scenario, or blown apart by some kind of T4 gigadeath weapon. But there's still that common thread linking all of humanity together.
4) Aliens are pretty rare.
They might not exist in most clusters. The core assumption is, like in most SF, that humans do most of what's interesting - mostly because as humans, we'll likely find them most interesting.
Now - there are two options for how I would like to run this. Either
1) An RP, set in a Cluster I have prebuilt (which includes those systems mentioned in the 'fluff piece', being Goldbug, Kensha and Hubbard, among others). This would likely be thematically close to Firefly, in the sense of it being a ship of scraping-by crew members who all know each other. This would be run in the way we're all accustomed to, play-by-post here on the forums.
2) An RPG, using the ruleset, and thus using the Cluster generation methods in there. This would also necessitate character creation - and would be much more of an RP
G than an RP (but Fate is more RP-heavy anyway, so that'll be at its heart). This I would prefer to run 'live' through the Discord.
I leave the choice up to you, potential participant.
Admittedly I'm also leaving whether any of this sounds
interesting to you, potential participant. So, uh, decide that first, then the other thing. But if you've read this far in, you're probably interested.
