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Things you should know up front about this game:
* No fighters or mines (satellites allowed however)
* No Stellar Manipulation
* No ancient race characteristic allowed
* No religious race characteristic allowed.
* No temporal race characteristic allowed.
* No Intelligence. This is a no-intel game.
* Unique map
Empires were created using PvK's Balance Mod using with 2000 point empires
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Background
It is unclear to your people what has happened. Fifty years ago your society exerted all its energies into building a fleet that would travel to the distant Zeta Quadrant in order to find and, if possible, settle the Sphereworld there. That Sphereworld, was some sort of Ancient object, and presented your race with the only possible haven from an approaching wave of deadly radiation from the center of the Galaxy. This radiation was, inevitably, so powerful that all life in the galaxy was going to be extinguished.
(The background above is from the Zeta 1 game, the full text of which is posted at the end of this text)
So, your people watched their expedition set sail for the Zeta quadrant carrying with it the last hope for your people and their entire civilization, and awaited the coming of the blast that would destroy those left behind.
Or so you thought...
...and, indeed, the last thing you remember is watching the bright flash of the radiation as it entered the atmosphere of your homeworld...
...and then waking up on a strange land, with many other members of your race. The "Awakening" as many began to call it, was a time of wonder and chaos. Many starved, or went mad, but hundreds of millions did not. Partly this was due to the extreme wealth of resources, and the ideal conditions on this new world. As your people reveled in, somehow, surviving certain death, many turned to religion to explain this ocurrence. But all set about trying to understand where they were and rebuild their society given this second chance.
Not all members of your race survived. Your civilization spanned many planets, and many billions of people. There appeared to be no discernible pattern as to why some were "reborn" and others were not. Families were broken up, and planetary populations were mixed up apparently randomly.
The planet your people found themselves on was extremely rich in resources, giving them a fighting chance to rebuild their civilization. But that's not all. Everywhere on the planet were the countless signs and ruins of other, prior civilizations. And not just one, but many built upon the ruins of the former. When your archaelogists and miners dig into the planet, they find unending layers upon layers of ancient ruins, each totally different from the one upon which it was built, and some dating from as far back as the postulated beginning of the universe. Some of these extinct civilizations had flourishing cultures with high forms of art and beauty, others were rigidly ordered societies, and so on...but none, apparently, survived. A sobering thought for your people on this new world, lending an air of Ozymandias-ness to your rebuilding efforts.
Furthermore, the remains of this planet's prior inhabitants were none you had encoutnered before. Your race spanned many systems, and had an advanced knowledge of the Galaxy and its history. But the remains you have found have never exactly resembled any race your people have ever been familiar with or even heard of. Some are
similar to races your people have known, but many exhibit, in fact, characteristics that are not only completely alien but also completely incompatible with the planet you are now on. For example, you might have found the remains of fragile, winged creatures, but the atmosphere and gravity of the planet you are on would crush such life. Other lifeforms found are often incompatible with the planet in other ways: giant creatures that clearly resided in the atmosphere of gas giants, but your world is rocky - and your instruments indicate that it has always been so.
The mysteries beneath your tentacles are matched by the mysteries above: the sky from your planet is brightened by the glow of a great nebula above...and no more than a hundred or so stars. For some of you, the sky is filled with stars that shift, and move, and orbit each other in a constant dance of intricacy and hypnotic allure. For others, the sky is rigid and unchanging, and the stars are arranged in a patter of like distance from each other in grid like fashion.
In both cases, your conventional understanding of physics informed your people that the sky above was impossible given the laws of physics. This mystery, and the absence of the rest of the stars in the galaxy, eventually led your people to the inevitable conclusion that they now resided in that portion of the galaxy known as The Great Sign.
Before the "awakening" your people had observed the Great Sign from afar. At that time it had great sigifnicance for your people, in some cases extremely religious significance. The Great Sign itself appeared to lie at the edge of the observable universe, looking, like two clusters of stars separated from each other by a strange, radiating nebula. One of the clusters is globular, and the stars orbit and shift patterns in no discernible pattern. The second cluster is, for lack of a better word, cubic: a stable collection of hundreds of stars, unchanging in their positions relative to each other, and arranged, simply as points in a grid across a three dimensional cube. Between these two clusters is what some call “the Singularity” - a stellar phenomenon emitting bizarre radiations equivalent to the output of the entire galactic core at one single point. Seen from the inhabited galaxy, the Great Sign appears to be a grand globe and a cube, both composed of stars and between them a bright outflowing of energy.
The Great Sign has played a critical, and often religious, role in the development of many starfaring. This significance might have been simply interesting were it not for the “Faith Effect” that developed in those races that adopted the Great Sign as an integral part of their beliefs. The “Faith Effect” was a verifiable and reproducible effect that the religious races have achieved: it is the ability of the most pious and best trained of these races to meditate upon the Great Sign and, in so doing, unerringly achieve some physical goal of theirs. The most common manifestation of the “Faith Effect” is that of the weapons crews of religious races starships. The most typical way they achieve this onboard their starships is through intense trance-like meditations within temple-like chambers on their starships (these rooms are colloquially called “Talisman” rooms, but the exact description varies greatly by race). When certain members, usually of preist-castes, reach the highest level of trance during their meditations on the Great Sign, they can somehow channel their concentrations into the ships systems - resulting in unerring success by those systems. For example, in so doing, they can focus the weapon targeting systems of their ships to hit their targets - all the time, every time. It goes without saying this is an astonishing feat.
Because of this faith effect, the religious races adopted their primordial religions to accommodate the Great Sign as a center of their faith.
Now, on this alien world, the Faith Effect is no longer evident. This has had, as expected, cataclysmic repercussions for those religious races...and theories abound as to why it has happened. None has been proven yet.
There are other differences between here and "before." It is unclear why, but the Great Sign appears to be either "outside" of time, or perhaps at the beginning or end of time. The experiments and engineering of Temporal researchers have not 'worked' since being recovered. No temporal-based technologies have had any measure of sucess. The nature of time itself appears to have changed here.
One final point of interest is that, on this new world, your people have had occasional sightings of the phenomenon known "The Last Man."
This is the name given to a phenomenon that has appeared to many a wide variety of starship crews over the centuries, seemingly at random and always in out-of-the-way and desolate locales. In the past the Last Man has been a rock structure with a stationary statue-like member of the observing race. If a human crew, this "last man" will appear as an old decrepit human male, if it is a Drushocka, it will appear as a older Dru, and so forth. Generally, it appears as an older male representative of their race, but for some races it is an older female. Multi-racial crews see their own individual race represented. Often, but not always, on the rock structure surrounding the last man are an intricate series of inscriptions and hieroglyphic type writings. None of these have ever been successfully translated, and they have something in common with *all* known languages.
While in the past the Last Man has appeared to be an immobile statue of simple stone, now, on this world, your people have seen "visions" of it, accompanied by intricate and vast images of strange languages filling the sky and etched into the ground. Many of your people who have seen the last man have the undeniable beleif that it is trying to communicate in some way.
Because of these puzzles, as your race rebuilt, it explored the ruins beneath its pseudopod, it examined the skies, and theorized and researched at great length - but found no answers to these mysteries.
Your people, over the years since awakening on this world have rebuilt much of their prior civilizations. It took over a hundred years, but the prior knowledge of your people remained from before, allowing a rapid reclamation of what was lost. Further assisted by the great resources on the world, your peole have fundamentally rebuilt their civilization on this world.
Now, as your people have once again forged the governments, arts, cities, universities, and industries that help comprise their civilization, they are ready to look once again towards the stars and explore the their surroundings...
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Game settings:
Starting resources: 100000
Starting planets: 1
Home planet value: Very Good
Score display: Allied
Technology level: Medium
Racial points: 2000 - Empires created with Pvk Balance Mod
Quadrant type: The Great Sign ("unique")
Quadrant size: Large/Unique - approximately 255 systems
Event frequency: Low
Event severity: Catastrophic
Technology cost: High
Victory conditions: By general agreement, and player determined based on in-game discoveries. One, two or many empire victories possible.
Maximum units: maximum (but no fighters or mines)
Maximum ships: maximum
Computer players: none
Computer difficulty: High
Computer player bonus: No AIs at start, otherwise High
Neutral empires: No
Other game settings:
No tech trades/gifts
Due to the unique energies in the Great Sign and their effects, there are a few changes to the stock settings:
* Smaller craft or devices such as fighters and mines are not viable. Satellites are viable however (I can't turn them off anyways...<g>)
* Stellar Manipulation is disallowed ("turned off")
There are other effects of the origin and nature of the Great Sign:
* No ancient race characteristic allowed
* No religious race characteristic allowed.
* No temporal race characteristic allowed.
* Intelligence is disallowed. This is a no-intel game.
A note to players of the Zeta 1 game: this game will be "higher-powered" than that one, and will have a much more even and richer spread of resources. In that one, there were some systems that were, apparenly, pretty darn resource poor. That is not the case in this game. So to speak. Heh.
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Notes on playmanship:
I try to be pretty relaxed about players in PBW games, and endeavour to make playing the game as easy and hassle-free as possible. I have set the turnaround time to 52 hours. I believe this is a good time because it allows people who work full time and return home late to have two chances to do their turns after work. Fact of life is, every now and then, something comes up and someone can't do their turn. This turnaround time gets around that problem I beleive.
Having said that, I am convinced that the game will go as quick as players wish it to. Especially in the beginning, it should go fast: so get those orders in as fast as you can. Your fellow players will thank you for it.
Missed turns: If you are going to miss a turn let me know in advance. I intend to be very lenient in putting the game on ALPU, unless widespread complaints from other players arise. However, I won't let players abuse this - so please, don't ask for the game to be put on ALPU for any reason other than you are just not able to have access to your computer due to a trip, vacation, etc... the reason I fell ok in saying this is because with a 52 hour turnaround, people shouldn't be too rushed to get their turns in.
Furthermore, I, and everyone who plays PBW, hates it when players stop turning in orders and thereby extend the game to the longest possible turnaround time. Therefore, if a player misses three turns
without making prior arrangements or notifying me beforehand I will kick them out unless they have a good excuse to tell me.
Really, all I am asking is that you keep me informed if you're going to miss a turn so that we can work something out.
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All the information below dates from the first Zeta game and is not applicable to this game. It is provided for background information only...
Zeta 1 game background text in full:
This is the first Zeta Quadrant game. It is my intention that the Zeta Quadrant game be part of an epic storyline (whether I succeed in this or not, of course, depends on whether people have fun playing the games!)
The background to this storyline will become more and more apparent as the game goes on. While the background won’t matter for game play per se, it is my intention that the “shape” and “feel” and special effects of each successive Zeta Quadrant game be partly affected by the actions of the players in the previous game.
With that in mind, I’ll post various tidbits on the background of the Zeta Quadrant universe as I get them down on paper. And, although the larger story and metaphysics of the Zeta Quadrant game are known (at least to me) and have shaped this - the first Zeta Quadrant game - the future of the storyline is not fixed, and is to a certain extent determined by the players.
With that in mind, below is the first background document.
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Summary of the Proceedings on the Ancients and their Machine Guardians, circa 2350. (from before the Exodus to the Zeta Quadrant)
In the year 2350, the Galactic Geospatial Society, a foundation for the study of ancient cultures and galactic phenomenon, held a ten week conference to summarize and present the accumulated knowledge of the species of the galaxy regarding the Ancients and their Machine Guardians. Below are some of the more notable excerpts from those meetings.
Over the past two hundred years, the various species of the galaxy have observed, discovered and dealt with a wide variety of Ancient phenomenon as well as the Machine Guardians that are ever-present at said sites. There are some constants in these observations and discoveries that might be relevant as many of the Galactic species now attempt to overcome the threat of Galactic Sterilisation facing them.
This discussion is organized into the following parts:
I. Definitions & General Discussion: what is an Ancient site? What are the Ancients? What are the Machine Guardians? Etc.
II. Some of the more notable Ancient sites and their characteristics
Part One: Definitions & General Discussion
First, we must define the terms we are discussing here. Over the past hundreds of years, a consensus has largely been reached by the Cooperative races on definitions of Ancient sites and related issues. It must be notes at the outset that this is a consensus more on what we do not know rather than what we do know. The study of the Ancients is the study, largely, of unknowns and hypotheses, not hard facts.
So, what are “Ancient Sites”? First and foremost, they are not ancient artifacts or ruins. The galaxy is old, and before we came along there were clearly a wide variety of other star faring races. These prior races left behind remnants of their technology and civilizations, and these sites have yielded up much archaeological and technological knowledge over the millennia. Such sites are typically ancient cities, underground ruins, derelict star craft, and other similar manufactured items. And, they are from at least, by last count, over a hundred different long-dead races.
Ancient Sites, per se, are instead something very different. First and foremost they have never been mechanical or decrepit in nature. There have never been found “Ancient” cities, star craft, or the like. Sites of the “Ancients” are, instead of a qualitatively different nature. They are sites at which the very stuff of the universe appears to have been “molded” or changed in some way on a scale unimaginable. For example, the Stellar Clouds of Hyperion, the Rifts, the Abyss, The Ten Sisters, and the Last Man are all undeniable examples of Ancient Sites. The most well known hypothesized Ancient site is, of course, the Great Sign. We do not yet have proof that the Great Sign is an Ancient Site, due to the fact that it is, of course, unreachable with our star craft. However, the data from observations and readings of the Great Sign correlate with other Ancient sites and display the same unique energy signatures. And, while of great topical interest, we have not yet proven to ourselves that the Sphereworld that we believe lies in the Zeta Quadrant is an Ancient Site. We will discuss these in greater detail below.
In each of these cases, what sets them apart from other stellar phenomenon is that they are stellar manipulation on a vast scale. The Clouds of Hyperion, for example, stretch across tens of parsecs and in a manner that is clearly not natural. The Great Sign is the most stunning example. We won’t get into the religious debates that surround the Sign, but suffice it to say that the power and ability required to actually mold and shape multiple galaxies together, so that the Sign is observable across the entire measured universe, is beyond our fathoming.
There are a few other characteristics of Ancient Sites that bear mentioning here.
All Ancient sites have the same unique energy readings. And no known measurement device has been able to effectively tell us what matter or energy yields up those readings. For example, the first human contact with Ancient Sites occurred (luckily for the human race) at a rather minor site at what is known as the Painting of the Gods. In this case, observations from many light years away showed what we are all familiar with: an extremely beautiful and enthralling, almost hypnotic, arrangement of stars and planets in ways that astrophysics could not explain. Gravity dictated that such an arrangement could not exist; yet it appeared to be stable. When human vessels came close their scanners detected a source of energy in the center of the planets and stars that they could not identify with any available means (spectroscopy or otherwise). To date, even after numerous Ancient Sites have been explored, this energy source has remained both constant and totally unexplained.
And, of course, Ancient Sites are characterized by one other constant: the spontaneous presence of “machine entities.” In contrast to the Ancient Sites themselves, the Machine entities have very different characteristics and are, largely, much less mysterious. At the same time they are quite deadly.
The Machine Entities are unexplained in at least one aspect however: we still, after countless investigations and efforts by multiple civilizations to understand the Machines so as to survive their onslaughts, we still do not know how they appear spontaneously at Ancient Sites.
The general pattern is this: a vessel will arrive at an Ancient Site. If by accident, then they are probably doomed. If they arrived intentionally, then they will be prepared for combat, as most races have learned by now to send well armed task forces when exploring Ancient Sites. Soon after the arrival of the vessels into the vicinity of the Ancient Site, machine entities will coalesce around whatever matter is present and take the form of the race that discovered the Ancient Site. The Machine entities will then begin a process of rapidly evolving taking as a starting point the technological and knowledge base of the race that they are patterned after.
One of the most puzzling and intriguing aspects of all this become known when the Aether government recently de-classified the report of one of its exploration vessels and made the results open to public study. In brief, the story is this: an Aether task force approached the Ancient Site known as The Lords of the Stars. One ship, due to the failure of it propulsion systems, had to make an emergency planet fall on of the planets surrounding the phenomenon. As it’s crew secured the vessels perimeter, some of them noticed a strange coalescing of dust in the air. Acting quickly, the Aether ship tractored and then put into stasis the dust motes that had already begun to form into the shape of a standard Aether male. The ship successfully escaped the area with the proto-machine entity in an isolated stasis box. After years of study in an undisclosed location (during which every scan known to the Cooperative races was employed) the Aether Lords scientists came to the unmistakable conclusion that all they had was dust. Standard, unimpressive, silicate dust. This point bears repeating: the dust that was coalescing into a machine entity was nothing more than that: dust. This means that either something external was making the dust coalesce into some form of machine entity which would somehow become a single minded guardian of the Ancient site OR our sensors have no way of understanding how the dust was different. Current thinking leans toward the latter explanation, but it remains unsolved to this day.
There are four more important aspects of the machine entities that deserve mentioning: First, as mentioned above, there has never been an Ancient Site that has not had Machine Entities guarding it. Second, the machine entities “play by the same rules” - they emerge after the discovery of the Ancient Site, they begin their existence at a roughly equivalent technological level as those that discovered them, and they evolve from that point. Third, the Machine Entities are geospatially limited - they do not travel beyond a certain, unknown, distance from the Ancient Site. This appears to be due to some inherent characteristic of theirs. Such a conclusion is based on the logs of the Kor Task Force 62 five years ago in which they came under attack by a Machine Entity craft, and successfully disabled its maneuver thrusters as they were fleeing it. The Machine Entity craft, unable to turn around, did something very peculiar as it drifted farther and farther from the Ancient Site: it slowly dissolved from metal components into dust until it was just another part of the stellar gasses. The vessel, which had been a mass of particle beams, missile launchers, and machine drones, became, literally, nothing more than stellar gas. Lastly, the Machine Guardians stand in stark contrast to the Ancient Sites in one other way: while it is hard to classify the Ancient sites along any pattern or predictability, the Machine entities are the opposite: they are orderly, regimented, and patterned despite. Their vessels are usually composed of interlocking geometric shapes, their battle formations are highly ordered, and their cities and planets are molded and crafted by them in highly organized ways. They do evolved and grow, but they do so in almost predictable ways.
All of these characteristics of the Machine Guardians have meant that, by and large, most races in the galaxy have long ago stopped exploring Ancient sites since it is known that the Machine Entities will be there to fight them off.
So, what is NOT characteristic of Ancient Sites? Age for one thing. In those cases where the stellar age of Ancient Sites have been measured, there is no pattern nor is there any definable age. Some ancient sites appear to be, literally, as old as the universe itself. Some are only a few hundred thousand years old. Elementary level Astrophysics tells us that the Great Sign must be as old as the Big Bang that created the Universe itself. Yet, the Deep Space array spectroscopy scans indicate it is much younger. We cannot explain this. Most believe such anomalies are related somehow to the mysterious and un-measurable energy source present in all Ancient Sites.
And we feel obliged to mention another aspect of Ancient sites around which consensus is admittedly lacking: their “usefulness.” There has NEVER been a major technological discovery based on Ancient Sites. In the early days of space travel for most races, one of the primary goals was to investigate a “nearby” Ancient site. For some species, the hope was that they could plumb the secrets of a long gone race of god-like beings that could manipulate the very stars to do their bidding. It is almost universally agreed that while Ancient sites display amazing powers of stellar manipulation on a grand scale, and are incredibly beautiful and enthralling, they have yet to yield up any secrets to those who plumb their depths.
Part Two: Notable Ancient sites and their impact
In the history of the Galaxy, as many races came to observe and then explore their surrounding regions of space, almost invariably two things happened: First, they eventually came across other sentient and, often, star faring species. Second, they discovered bizarre stellar phenomenon that could only be described as “artificial” on a scale before then unimaginable.
The first event almost inevitably had a great impact on the social and cultural history of these fledgling races. Wars were fought and lost, races destroyed or enslaved, alliances forged and broken, and the history of the galaxy was written. These topics are for another time, but it is important to note here that the discovery of other races in the galaxy was of prime significance for each and every fledgling race. But, it was NOT unimagined, untheorized, or dealt with in ways that any student of politics could not have understood beforehand.
The second seminal event in every race’s history, however, was almost universally untheorized beforehand and almost always had great impact on each race. We refer here, of course, to the discovery of Ancient sites. Let’s state again: so-called Ancient sites are not ruins amenable to archaelogical digs, or long-abandoned spacehulks, or in any other way reminiscent of ancient technology or races. They are, instead, stellar phenomenon that can only be described as “shaped” or “moulded” in ways that cannot be considered random, or even explainable by the laws of physics as known.
The import of this cannot be understated, but it is perhaps best to use the most famous of the Ancient sites to illustrate just this point. We address, briefly, the nine most important ancient sites and then a tenth “effect” that all our tests indicate as being integrally related to these sites. These are: Stellar Clouds of Hyperion, the Rifts, the Abyss, the Ten Sisters, the Last Man, the Great Sign, the Painting of the Gods, the Lords of the Stars, the Sphereworld, and the “Faith Effect.”
1. Stellar Clouds of Hyperion
a. The Clouds of Hyperion stretch across tens of parsecs and in a manner that is clearly not natural - multiparsec plumes of gasses intermingling with regions of “null-space” and all culminating in one of the largest black holes ever observed. Neither gravity nor any known technology can account for the patterns of the plumes: clearly ordered and patterned at one end, and chaotic, unpredictable, and constantly shifting at the other. Expeditions to the Stellar Clouds have been met with a high concentration of Machine Entities, and have generally met with disaster. Those who have returned have reported strange events and structures at both ends of the clouds, and at the points where the meet.
2. The Rifts
a. The Rifts are wide regions of null-space, interspersed with bizarre nebulae and star systems. Within each region of null-space are singularities emitting the same unique Ancient radiation that other Ancient sites do. Long-range probes to the Rifts, which lie far above the galactic disk, have reported the presence of hostile machine entities and have generally not returned.
3. The Abyss
a. At the core of the visible universe lay a confluence of massive black holes so concentrated that the very nature of space and time appears unknowable. Even the most powerful instruments cannot penetrate the mysteries of the center of this cluster of singularities - it appears, instead, as a massive void at the center of the black hole clusters. It is not know what, if anything composes or is within this area, known as “The Abyss”. Of course, its vast distance from civilization means that no one will ever know…
4. The Ten Sisters
a. They look like some form of shifting energy nebulae that fills many parsecs, with plumes and emissions stretching over parsecs. Universally regarded as one of the most beautiful sights in the galaxy (although some races find them repulsive), the most amazing thing about them is that their shifts and changes occur immediately. For example, observing one of the "sisters" through a telescope one day will yield a very different sight then the previous days' observation of the same "sister. As they are multiple light-years in scope, this present physicists with a serious anomaly, as the sisters appear to be fundamental changing and shifting faster than the speed of light would allow. Expeditions to the Sisters found no evidence of warp holes, and they appeared to change their locations and forms as rapidly in some cases as every few minutes. Coming close to the sisters seriously endangered any vessels that attempted it, meaning that they remain, for the most part, unexplored. Furthermore, in the approaches to the sisters, machine entities have been encountered, making exploration even more dangerous. They are called the "Ten sisters" becuase the first observations of them indicated ten such objects. Later observations show that they appear and disappear on occasion, meaning that they range in number from five to well over twenty on occasion.
5. The Last Man
a. The Last Man is the name given to a phenomenon that has appeared to a wide variety of starship crews over the centuries, seemingly at random and always in out-of-the-way and desolate locales. The Last Man has been encountered over a hundred times, by a wide variety of races and ships, and always accidentally. Typically, a lone ship on a long range mission, mining expedition, or exploratory mission will detect unusual emissions from a rogue asteroid, or uninhabited planet. After some effort, the crew tracks down the source of the emissions, and finds it to be a rock structure with a stationary statue-like member of their race. If a human crew, this "last man" will appear as an old decrepit human male, if it is a Drushocka, it will appear as a older Dru, and so forth. Generally, it appears as an older male representative of their race, but for some races it is an older female. Mixed crewmembers see their own race represented.
b. Often, but not always, on the rock structure surrounding the last man are an intricate series of inscriptions and hieroglyphic type writings. None of these have ever been successfully translated, and they have something in common with *all* known languages. For example, they might have have a sentence structure that bears similarities to the Elisenor language, their hieroglyphics might look like some of the more common ideographic langauges, and so forth. Furthermore, the different encounters have yielded different inscriptions. None of these have been successfully translated, and this has been complicated in part by the fact that the "last man" is never present in the same place after ships return to it. The "last man" himself appears to be immobile statue of simple stone. Generally it is quite fragile, but earlier accounts of last man encounters seem to indicate that they were composed of almost indestrucible material.
6. The Great Sign.
a. This is the single most important cultural object for the major religious races. Simply put, the Great Sign has played a critical role in the development of many starfaring civilizations due to the fact that in their development of space-based telescopes and interstellar observation techniques, when certain races discovered the Great Sign for the first time, it took on great religious significance. This significance might have been simply interesting were it not for the “Faith Effect” the developed in those races that adopted the Great Sign as an integral part of their beliefs.
b. The Great Sign itself appears to lie at the edge of the observable universe, visible only at this distance because of its size. When observed, it looks, simply enough, like two clusters of stars separated from each other by a strange, emitting phenomenon. One of the clusters is globular, and the stars orbit and shift patterns in no discernible pattern. The second cluster is, for lack of a better word, cubic: a stable collection of hundreds of stars, unchanging in their positions relative to each other, and arranged, simply as points in a grid across a three dimensional cube. Between these two clusters is what some call “the Singularity” - a stellar phenomenon emitting bizarre radiations equivalent to the output of the entire galactic core at one single point. Seen from the inhabited galaxy, the Great Sign appears to be a grand globe and a cube, both composed of stars and between them a bright outflowing of energy.
7. Painting of the Gods
b. An extremely beautiful and enthralling, almost hypnotic, arrangement of planets, absent stars, that orbit in a vast cloud like cluster and in ways that astrophysics can not explain. Gravity dictates that such an arrangement could not exist; yet it appears to be stable. It is called the Painting of the Gods due to its extreme beauty when viewed in the visible or radio spectrum. Expeditions to the Painting have met with large numbers of machine entities.
8. The Lords of the Stars
a. Simply put, a collection of gargantuan cubic structures in deep space. Called the “Lords of the Stars” due to their imposing presence that often strikes fear into many. They are actually just perfect cubes, made of an apparently solid yet impenetrable and, so far indesctructible material resistant to all scans. Solid, because gravity is exerted by them to an extent that their density is extremely high. The most amazing aspect of these giant cubes is their size: ranging from a single parsec to ten parsecs on a side! They do not radiate any energy, so most instruments cannot detect them, but those that can paint an intimidating picture of things that should not exist. Gravity alone should collapse these objects into neutron stars at the least, yet still they remain.
b. It is unknown how many exist. Up to twelve have been observed at one time, orbiting each other in some strange pattern, and observations from one time to the next give widely varying readings regharding the number of the cubes. Furthermore, the size of each cube appears to change - or there are great number of cubes appearing and disappearing constantly.
c. Expeditions to these structures have met with extensive machine entity attackers, usually fatal.
9. The Sphereworld
a. The Sphereworld is an anomaly that is believed to be a distant Ancient site because it radiates the same unidentifiable energies other sites do. It is well-known primarily because it represents the last hope for the civilized galaxy to survive the onrush of deadly core radiation that threatens all life. It is theorized that the Sphereworld, if it is able to sustain life, will be able to resist these radiations to provide a safe haven for the sentient races of the galaxy.
10. The “Faith Effect”
a. This is the name given to the verifiable and reproducible effect that the religious races have achieved. The “faith effect” is the ability of the most pious and best trained of these races to meditate upon the Great Sign and, in so doing, unerringly achieve some physical goal of theirs. The most common manifestation of the “Faith Effect” is that of the weapons crews of religious races starships. The most typical way they achieve this onboard their starships is through intense trance-like meditations within temple-like chambers on their starships (these rooms are colloquially called “Talisman” rooms, but the exact description varies greatly by race). When certain members, usually of preist-castes, reach the highest level of trance during their meditations on the Great Sign, they can somehow channel their concentrations into the ships systems - resulting in unerring success by those systems. For example, in so doing, they can focus the weapon targeting systems of their ships to hit their targets - all the time, every time. It goes without saying this is an astonishing feat.
b. It is this “Faith Effect” - which can extend beyond simply ships systems - that has led to the importance of the Great Sign amongst religious races, as well as the great power that the religious races weild in comparison to the other civilizations.
c. The “Faith effect” is unerring when the adherents meditate on the Great Sign. There are lesser, imperfect, faith effects when other Ancient sites are meditated upon.
d. Because of the faith effect, the religious races have largely adopted their primordial religions to accommodate the Ancient site, especially the Great Sign. Although it might be a stretch to say that they “worship” the “Ancients” as God or gods, it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch. And, they often take the study or exploitation of Ancient sites to be heretical. This has caused many wars throughout the history of the galaxy.
****************************UPDATE**************** ***************
UPDATE: Below is an intercepted transmission from the captain of one of the advance elements of the Silesian fleet when it entered the region of space containing the Ancient Sphereworld (thereafter to be known as the “Ancient Nexus”
I. The Machine Entities, their sats, their craft:
The Machine entities are as we were led to believe: some sort of rapidly evolving lifeform that is patterned off of the first explorer to stumble across them. In this case, it appears to have been a human female lifeform. Their craft, as you can see in the attached vidgram, display technology that is not particularly advanced. The only other strange thing is that our sensors indicate that their satellites that orbit the Ancient Nexus Sphereworld appear to be decaying at a very rapid rate. It might be due to the strange energies radiating from the Nexus sphere, or the strange perturbations on its surface. It remains a mystery at the moment.
II. The Six Planets:
There are six gigantic planets orbiting the Ancient Nexus Sphereworld. They do not rotate, and so the side that faces the Nexus Sphere is always the same (“Sphereside”
and the side that faces away from the sphere is also always the same (“Outside”
.
Moments after taking basic scans of these planets, our engineers noticed a number of extremely peculiar things.
First, the six planets are spaced exactly equidistant from the Nexus Sphere and each other. Exactly. Down to as many significant digits as our instruments can measure. And, their orbits display no indications of shifting, degrading, or changing in any way. This means, that across many light-minutes of distance, these six planets somehow are spaced so precisely that your instrument can’t even detect any difference among their locations without external reference points. It is not only uncanny and disturbing to our crews and scientists, but it is, frankly, impossible without some astoundingly high level of technology. Our scientists are unanimous in believing that it is not natural that such planets could exist in such an unchanging formation.
This is bolstered by the second curiosity: the planets are all almost identical in size and composition, with one exception. Except for the planet dubbed “the Machine World” all five others are, at their foundations, perfectly spherical and of the exact same mass as each other. And they are each practically solid resource mines - although our crews haven’t been to the surface of any of them (for obvious reasons) our scans indicate that they are veritable gold mines of heavy metals, radioactives of all sorts, and pools of organics ready for processing. It is almost as if they were planted there to be used by any who came along. These are all impossible given what we know about the laws of nature.
The planet our crews dubbed “the Machine World” is the only anomaly in this pattern. It is anomalous because not only is it the site of massive amounts of machine entities but also because it is not as resource intensive as the other planets.
A third strangeness is related to the fact that each planet is the site of a large amount of Machine Entities. The “Machine World” is clearly their “home world” and across the “Outside” of it is sprawled a massive and orderly transportation grid connecting to a giant machine city that houses billions of these non-living entities. In fact, if one was to draw a straight line directly from the Nexus Sphere towards the Machine World and through it to it’s farside, the terminus of that line would be the exact geometric center of the Machine City. In other words, the Machine City is at the farthest distance from the Nexus as possible on the Machine World. This peculiarity is replicated on each of the other six planets: on them (dubbed the “Shrine,” the “Red Center,” etc… by our crews) there is a rapidly growing Machine City exactly opposite the Nexus Sphere.
And the strangeness does not end there. Out from each of these six Machine Cities on the Six Planets is the massive Grid of the Machines. It is difficult to tell at this distance what these grids are composed of, but they are built around massive transportation or power lines that extend out from the Machine City and creep around the planet towards its Sphereside. The distance between grid lines is, of course, exactly equal on all the six planets and, as the gridlines stretch towards the Sphereside, they do not waver or turn, but maintain absolute straightness. But…as they approach that point on each planet which could be called the “equator” between the Outside and the Sphereside, they seem to disappear and break down, disintegrating. All other machine entity structures on the six planets display the same phenomenon: the Outside (the side of the planet facing away from the Nexus Sphere) is highly populated by an extremely orderly set of machine structures and entities, but the Sphereside, which faces the Nexus Sphere, is barren of all machine entities as far as our instruments can tell. It’s almost as if each of the six planets were composed of two halves - one machine, one barren and empty.
III. The Ancient Nexus
And then there is the Nexus Sphere. What our race has desperately been searching for all these years. Whereas the Machine Worlds give an overwhelming sense of relentless order and control, the readings from the Sphereworld immediately struck our crewmembers as…Beautiful. In fact, after warping into the Nexus system and bringing up the Sphere on the vis-screen, our crew was, practically, stunned by the sight of it. They were shaken from their trance only by the frantic warning klaxons signaling incoming hostile machine entity craft.
After further readings and the launch of a probe-drone which made it through the Machine defenses to actually make contact with the Sphere, our people learned a lot more about the Nexus Sphere…and discovered even more mysteries:
First, of course, it is a Sphereworld. Gigantic, a vast construct that is immeasurably beyond our technicians to even comprehend. Huge. Awe-inspiring. And made of a material entirely unknown to our people. And it is, well, hypnotically beautiful. That is perhaps the only way to describe it: its surface visuals and scans show shifting whorls, curves, energy beams and fractals that move and change constantly. It is not only the surface of the Sphere that displays this “art” but the sphere itself is non-constant in terms of its mass, radius and emissions. It seems to constantly be changing in all physical ways. These motions follow no pattern that our computers can predict, and the especially religious among our crew are awe-struck and take them to be the language of god or gods, they are so enthralling. In fact, I (the captain of this vessel) ordered the sight of the Sphere to be cut out from all vis-screens so as to not distract the crew in its efforts.
Second, there is, within the Sphere, a source of radiated energy that is entirely unexplained. It bears the same characteristics as the strange radiation found at other Ancient sites, and so it is not entirely unexpected, but it is coming from within the Sphere itself. Perhaps it comes from the Star that the Sphere encircles? Perhaps this is the actual home of the Ancients? We do not (yet) know.
Third, our crew was able to launch a probe drone to the sphere’s surface to confirm a few other readings and look for entrances to the interior of the sphere. As the probe approached the surface of the sphere (after evading machine entities hunter sats), it’s sensors almost overwhelmed by the strange radiations, it landed on the sphere, and was…absorbed into it. But not destroyed - for a few brief moments we got readings from inside the sphere itself before contact was lost with the probe. Among other things, these readings told our crew that it is not entirely accurate to say that the sphere has “no” atmosphere. More accurately, the interior of the sphere contains what our scientists have described as a proto-mutagenic-atmosphere. That is, it appears to be an atmosphere that is shifting and changing and can be easily modified to provide a breathable environment for our people. In fact, the more radical of our scientists believe that this proto-mutagenic-atmosphere may adapt to any life forms in the sphere. Unfortunately, the probe did not last long enough to take any visual or other readings from inside the sphere.
We are encouraged by all this, for it appears that colonizing the Sphere is not only possible, but could be easier than believed (if the machine entities can be destroyed).
Zeta 2 game thread
Turin
), so PBW is a welcome distraction.
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