Vibrant

[LordVreeg]

The Lockdown Hunters seem to need a combined government or combined military that they might have come from.  They seem like they would be expensive to maintain and equip, not to mention where the command structure or housing comes from.  Right now, this looks like a 'writer throw-in' idea.  Can we make it work?  

[FREAKIN' AWESOME HORSE]

[blockquote=Jaerc]The Other Side gives the entire setting a melancholic Romance feel similar to George Martin's old sci-fi epics.[/blockquote]

;D

The concept of 0D as equivalent to Enlightenment is tempting to ponder. But what in-world evidence suggest Perfection lies there? Or does anyone even believe that?

The main proponents of reality that suggest it are really just everyday images. Some people basically say that a 2D caricature has a lot less to worry about than a 3D one, a 3D one less than a 4D one, etc. That tied with how the closer you get to 0D the less work there is to describe something put the theory together - and it's definitely believed. There are things from The Other Side that exist in lower dimensions only that have made them believe, in some cases.

The Tragedy of Neptune isn't very tragic. Before ripping away the beauty, proove it to me.

Fair enough, I should elaborate more. Neptune was at one time the pride of the Industrial Heartland, and more of a stellar park than a resource ground. Between its appearance and scientific importance (at least during the 23rd-26th centuries), it became something of a planet celebrity compared to the other planets. Then governments and their contracted corporations decided that they could harvest the planet for power and resources, and all of a sudden no one cares - a few years go by and the whole orbit of the planet is swamped with various space platforms. Now all you can see of Neptune unless you're right there in orbit looking down on it (and even here it's kind of dark now) is a silvery glow.

SLIDE manages to be sinister enough to prevent me from overdosing on the WALL*E vibe, but only just barely. I'd love to see you elaborate on it.

Will do. I might draw up an example schematic.

What inherent dangers created the Lockdown Hunters? Are they a faction that any Wraz, Human or Gray can join or are they are species created through their joint efforts?

They're a joint special force created by the three races that receives applications left and right, but they're very selective on their chosen members. The Lockdown Hunters were created during a quick succession of multiple civil wars in each races' homeworld region. Because of current technology, someone who wants to sabotage a region's infrastructure needs only a fast ship (darkspeed does wonders where it can be used) and a clever crew. After any initial attack, a hardcore lockdown and communications blackout will begin if it's clear there's a serious issue. The Lockdown Hunters are the only individuals with authority to act and move in and out of primary systems during a lockdown period - even major political figures such as a president, king, governor, high-ranking general, etc. can and will be obliterated under the regulations of the Protocol if they so much as power up a cruiser's engines.

I like pseudoscience, tell me more about darkspace.

There's actually not a whole lot more to tell. The technology was discovered (read: pieced together by a human-Gray research project from bits and pieces discovered by various races sometimes centuries and millenia earlier) when a few scientists decided to invert equations for the development of lightspeed travel. While it's incredibly fast, it has received mixed reviews on the galactic stage - many species favor wormhole travel, standard hyperspace/warp speed FTL travel, etc. over it, mostly because of how incredibly expensive it is. The energy and additions required to make a ship darkspeed capable are tremendous, and in most cases engineering firms will want to place dimming devices at chosen intervals to allow ships with a weaker LUSUV to travel to more areas (and this is most darkspeed ships, only the most colossal warships and city-ships possess LUSUV values of greater than 5. Some labs now are working on improving darkspeed capabilities, mostly by making it more efficient, but in some cases they're trying to abandon it entirely in favor of other more efficient methods (and it's only been around for about a century).

What is the purpose of the UDN in the narrative?

The UDN and other military/paramilitary forces are arguably the biggest movers and shakers in Vibrant. It doesn't matter which species' military is being mentioned, they all are significant. There was a revolution of sorts on Earth and Mars shortly after first contact with the Reptilians that adopted a lot of their governmental structure, and despite various opposition it's been the standard for the last 800 years. It basically unified all government agencies (and a lot of civilian ones) into a single command structure - so even desk clerks at the driving examiner's office, or park rangers will have a military rank and some degree of military training. Instead of actual separate departments as are found today, everything is just a different Office or Division - regardless if even the term "department" is used in a branch's title, it's still under the same structure. And a political leader is almost always someone who's had prior UDN experience.

Military forces are also one of the primary sources for characters to come from when playing.

(I don't know how I managed to ramble on about the government structure when it was only half-relevant :P)

When I hit ECHELON & SPECTR the acronyms began seemed to be stretching.

Fair enough, but I didn't really want to leave any acronyms out just because they'd been done before several times. That's actually an element I wanted to toy with in Vibrant - how some acronyms have been used so many times over by so many different entities that when you type one into a database, a few hundred entries come up.

Zextesselus rolls well of the tongue.

The first of many. :D

Tell me about the Red Anvil.

Red Anvil was a short-lived Illuminati-type group that rose to limited power in the Sirius Union. They did well in that region, taking hold of significant offices and positions with the clever placement of operatives. However, lacking the large-scale resources to expand their control, they were actually sabotaged first by another similar group, and then their presence revealed to Martian Orbital Force (which was at the time looking for an excuse to blast the shit out of anything Sirian), who went to war and in the process purged most of the Red Anvil members. Those who weren't were still caught and tried, while a few escaped to other regions.

Would you be comfortable tell us more about the rise of Aveloranity and perhaps how widespread it is?

Will do. I'll try and do a spotlight on it along with some other stuff fairly soon.

Thanks for the response.

[FREAKIN' AWESOME HORSE]

[blockquote=Vreeg's Coachwhip]The Lockdown Hunters seem to need a combined government or combined military that they might have come from. They seem like they would be expensive to maintain and equip, not to mention where the command structure or housing comes from. Right now, this looks like a 'writer throw-in' idea. Can we make it work?[/blockquote]

They are very expensive and difficult to maintain. Generally they're high-ranking military officers or decorated non-coms that serve in a standard military position, but are always on light duties, so they can be deployed at a moment's notice. They tend to also serve on the same joint installation or base, which is moved every decade or so. It was very much a throw-in, but something I wanted to include as an interesting option for both allies and antagonists for players. I might eventually have to remove them but right now they don't seem to be conflicting too much.

[FREAKIN' AWESOME HORSE]

Added the Coraxen to the Aliens section, and a couple of personalities to that section near the top of the thread. Going to do some histories, architecture across the species, and some spotlight on all of the weird artifacts lying around that no one seems to know the origins of, soon...

[Matt Larkin (author)]

I was going to send you a private message, but you said you'd gone back to your old account, and I couldn't find WitchHunt, Joker, or Wicked Troll in the PM list. So.

I've been over your first post and Unreality post pretty thoroughly. You told me you no longer felt the intro reflects the setting you're going for, so I don't know how helpful this will be, be I'll give it a go.

Your first post has a strong voice that draws you in, with a kind of wry humor at Seattle's situation. But...The fact that no speaker is clear makes that feel out of place. It's like the speaker is conscious that the readers are 21st century citizens, knows all about that, but is explaining his home century.

Your blurb and our IRC talk indicated that you expect the heroes/PCs to be agents basically at the FBI, doing the Mulder thing. Have you considered that the setting should be presented to the reader as it would have been presented to them in training? They presumably attended some kind of academy that would have covered everything from the latest technologies to the general social structure of the planet/galaxy, known alien races, and so forth.

I think the second post, about the Unreality and so forth, goes much further in capturing what I believe the feel of your setting is supposed to be. It explains a little, and leaves a lot more mysterious. This tells me you may be better off leading with something like.

As to the specifics:

Intro
The speaker mentions making contact. I assume you mean first contact with aliens, but I think you might clarify. There is a mention of science as a monster, but it felt like an empty metaphor for most of the first post, since it seemed like the good of science vastly exceeded its risks.

The Tower and Earthside sound like interesting concepts that I hope you develop more further down your posts. The drug use adds a grit to the otherwise neat society, which I like. You might even make it more rampant, perhaps so epidemic the government washes its hands of it.

What's the Niven quote you mention?

In theory evolution is continual, although some say it is liable to be most noticeable in sudden leaps. It is possible that humans might develop psionic abilities in the next thousand years, but this is definitely not hard science. And it's unlikely, for different reasons, that evolution would so change the entire species as to be unrecognizable (or indistinguishable from magic, anyway) in the next thousand years, when it hasn't made very large changes in the last million.

Please don't mistake me, I think psionics can be a very fun aspect of the setting. But your purposes may be better served by not presenting it as a given, and not as an automatically accepted change in the entire species.


The Unreality
If you haven't read it already, I strongly recommend Stephen Hawking's "Brief History of Time" and maybe "The Universe in a Nutshell." Some bookstores (B&N?) sell omnibuses containing both. He talks a lot about dimensions and wormholes.

I felt like you tried to use the word dimension in two ways: one as a physical dimension in the scientific sense, and one as an alternate reality/parallel universe, or possible alternate plane of existence. While this is not uncommon in science fiction, it is sometimes seen as slightly sloppy science. The idea is usually that one passes to an alternate universe via a connecting non-spatial or extra-spatial dimension (basically the idea behind a wormhole). In either case, there would be a fixed and comparatively small number of dimensions, while there could be a theoretically infinite number of planes or alternate realities.

In speaking of creatures from other realities, another reality, plane, or universe is liable to make more sense than another dimension.

However, your mention of zero dimensionality is very much in line with traditional dharmic and especially gnostic ideas that each successive plane is more physical than the last, and consequently less real (I use this exact idea in Eschaton).

And the idea that each creature is drawn in each dimension, while complex and possibly in need of refinement from a better scientist than myself, is very intriguing. And this does seem more line with the idea of dimensions.

The Infinite is awesome.

Your wormholes appear to connect only to other universes, not to other space within this one? In which case, how is FTL possible within this universe?

I think the short fiction excerpts were intended to be confusing, so I don't know that that is a criticism against them. However, at the very least, I might consider IC tags for them. You might consider unifying them into a single story. Either way, I feel you need someway to set them aside from the rest of the text. A new heading wasn't enough for me--I was jarred to find myself in a surreal story after so many pseudo-scientific entries.

(I think that they can help convey the mood your going for better than a complex explanation, though.)

The last few entries in this post kind of lost me, but maybe it was information overload.

Edit: The "universe is a mirror" idea is really interesting. You can go far with that.