A Setting of One's Own

I think part of what I really enjoyed about the whole process of making a setting from scratch is the feeling that you can make it be exactly what interests you. Of course we were aware of just how much we were standing on the shoulders of all the settings we love--be they fiction, film, or RPG--but there's a great feeling of freedom to sit down to one of our regular coffee sessions and throw around ideas:

“Okay, so let's talk about the way that this alliance government works with the mega-corporations that fuel the exploration and colonization of these systems—how did that come about?”

"… And, how did first contact happen in this setting? Why are the races that are allies, allies?”

Man … it's that seriously geeky, profoundly exuberant stuff that is so damn fun to talk out. And right in the middle of this process I also stumbled across (thanks Pandora) a great recording of Thomas Tallis choral music. So I'd listen to that and think about this stuff driving home (seriously—give a listen to “Agnes Dei”). The music is that super epic/tragic choral that makes you hear that movie trailer guy's voice in your head:

“In the final moments …. of the final hours ... the strength of Terra has waned in the relentless siege … when humanity's last, best hope lay dying in the rubble … the black skies parted and ... and ” ... oh, man--soo much geeky goodness--it's RPG foreplay. Seriously.

And Dangerfish was right, from a story-mechanics perspective, having the content orbit (so to speak) a Central corporate survey ship gives our venture crews in their smaller ships great opportunities for episodic content—we can implement a revolving DM and a stable crew of characters that we can muster as we need, depending on the dossier that you receive from corporate.

Skill check, isle 4 ...
I also loved the skills portion of the whole thing—I mean, there we were—our hacker was trying to access the facilities network of a rival corporation's planet-side operations center. This planet had been classified as dead, and the whole facility was down. We got everything back online and slowly learned that they had been trying to investigate some Promethean alien crash site when it all went to hell. So the hacker was perched over the system interface with the engineer giving him an “aid another” on navigating the network and he pulls up the live video feed from the security cameras just in time to see what must be the last of the station's survivors getting gutted by some Mechanical Aberration … Shit! Game on, my friends … gaaame on!

What's next?
Of course, ultimately, this doesn't mean we'll drop our Pathfinder game, or our Eberron, or prune the first budding tendrils of playing 4e, it just means that for now, the answer to the question of “Hey what game do you wanna to play?” is firmly “Let's work on ours.” … and we're free to cut loose, get tremendously geeky and not even worry about the publishers setting/canon breaking a story that's developed in the the home game.

So—anyway, you can see just how stoked I am about this whole thing I'm sure we'll be yammering about it and the next phases of the build out for some time to come.