StarCluster 4 - Wavefront Empire

by clash bowley, Klaxon Bowley, snd Albert Bailey

StarCluster 4 - Wavefront Empire A game set in the far, far future, in an enormous stellar empire. FTL is faked, using STL sleeper ships and timetravel, so the ships and their robot crews age enormously, and thus are able to do only one or a very few trips. Travel to other star systems is so expensive that it's mostly ignored. so the game focuses on a single system, and mostly a single world in that system. Temporal manipulation is possible using precise amounts and colors of light shining through dark matter crystals, which are mined from the oort cloud or rogue planets with very little light, as light dissipates the temporal effects. There are eight major species, all descended from humans, and all claiming to BE human, but not cross-fertile. Your Clan is the allied families of your family. Your Guild is what your business is, from your teens to your death. Your Club is where you hang out and what you do for fun. There is a single all-encompassing syncretic religion, Manism, long ago having absorbed all the others. It is very open to interpretation, being a 'Big Tent' religion, so it is almost impossible to be an apostate and also be religious. Marriages is a clan-brokered alliance to have children, and usually does not result in love, though who knows? Love is usually found with your Bindings - long term sexual relationships that *cannot* result in children, so you can Bind with your own sex only within your species, and with members of any other species, usually but not always members of your Clan. I wont bother to try to explain Twinings. As for the Empire, it grew very fast, on the dispersion of humanity across the galaxy. Because of the time travel twist, no one sees the incoming fleet before it entera a system. so no one could resist. Along with the state sponsored single religion, it expanded in a wavefront that overwhelmed opposition before it could resist. Eventually that wavefront hit the limits of human settlement some time ago and stopped expanding. or rather slowed expansion to a crawl. The shocks of that event are fracturing the empire. There are rebellions going on, but the Empire is so vast that these rebellions almost never find out about each other and link up. It will probably dissolve into some big chunks some centuries in the future. People in the Wavefront Empire duel, using temporal shields that are impenetrable to missile and energy weapons. You can push hand held weapons through the shield, but it is like pushing a stick through tar. Shields can be flanked, so they are less effective - but still used - in group-based fighting. So create your world, chose to create your PC's association - Clan, Guild, or Club - and have fun. Click on the picture above to purchase the PDF from Precis Intermedia. Click on the picture above to purchase the Print version from Lulu. Click on the above picture to download a zip file with the Clan Construction sheet, Character Relations Record, Associations Worksheet, My Character sheet, and the character sheet so they will be easy to find.