Three hundred years after the Eugenicist Wars, the second Mage King of Mars, Michael Alexander, rules humanity from the vast under-mountain complex where the Eugenicists performed the very experiments which unlocked the Magician's Genome.

With the right silver-polymer runes etched into a mage's skin, humanity could finally reach the stars. At first, the Eugenicists bred magicians into a slave class, chained with silver etched Rune Manacles that kept this power chained to the whims of sociopathic scientists. But they were children playing with nuclear reactors, understanding little of what they unleashed upon the universe. When they gracious allowed their prized brood stallion to sit upon The Seat, they thought they were giving Desmond Alexander a tool that could only be used to detect Sleeper Mages within Sol System.

By the time Desmond Alexander united the mages, the first wave of human colonies -- what we now call the Core Worlds -- had descended into anarchy, and inestimable reams of data on magic had turned to ash, mixing with the bodies of the Eugenicists. Uniting the mages under his solar-spanning might, the Core Worlds succumbed to his demands, and a new ruling class took lordship over the galaxy.

A handful of worlds, mostly underdeveloped Mid Worlds, bowed their heads with ill grace, and accepted the ascendency of mages in matters of galactic governance and trade, but refused to let even a single mage step foot on their planets ever again. These "Unarcana Worlds" are polite enough when they discover a child with The Power, but a squad of cybernetic Mage Killers ripping you from the arms of your parents, dragging you silently to the local spaceport and always staring at you with their square pupils....it is not an experience much changed by politeness.

Here, in the Fringe worlds, far from the Mage King's fleets, his politics, and his datavaults, the ruling families of mages grow corrupt and venomous, their courtly games deadlocked for decades, with only the occasional Mage By Right stirring the status quo out of complacency. We are stuck with the technology of the 1990s for any non-Protectorate usage without paying exorbitant usage fees. Legatus, the sole Unarcana Core World, is always willing to help -- at the cost of our exile.

You are junior members of the ruling mage families of a planet on the Fringe, your allegiances, your friendships, and your enemies determined centuries ago by still-living ancestors. Whatever the strength of your magical gifts, your lives are consumed by the internecine politics that have been your real education since your first runic tattoo. You are united by a secret shared which transcends such petty short sightedness. You do not know who to trust, but you must do something about the doom you have foreseen.

And if you can cement your position while you save the galaxy, all the better.
This message was last updated by the GM at 10:33, Mon 09 Dec 2019.

This post is a copy of one the starting players have already read.



I'm thinking a turn will take about 2-3 weeks to complete, and will require about an hour's worth of play from each player spread over that time, but I could be wrong.

1. You're starting off in one solar system, at the fringe of developed/colonized space. Depending on "world gen," you could start with space stations, asteroid mining industries, etc, already in play
   
2. The nearest semi-inhabitable system is colonized, sure, but there is space to expand. That's not really going to be within the scope of the game, though.
   
3. A giant, distant governing body
   
4. There is no foreign to have affairs with, as far as PCs know at game start. The Protectorate Fleets will step in to solve problems between solar states, or if there is local unrest that the planetary government can't handle, but most governments try to avoid letting things get that far. It's unclear to me how much of this will show up in the game, so I'm not sure how much I should bother writing out.
   
5. Mostly, from getting attacked by pirates.
   
6. No legal limits, just economic ones. You could buy as many ships as you wanted from Core World Corporations, but its super expensive. Licensing the technologies to build ships is equally expensive. This question will be rendered moot by The Plot Twist.
   
7. No, they're a distant and blunt tool, that will only show up if there's trouble. There is supposed to be a fleet guarding your system, but the details of that fleet will be determined as a group.

You're playing as junior congressmen in a corrupt government that's achieved a kind of static equilibrium. So, the biggest change is that you're not responsible for the "Federal Budget." The Federal Budget will exist solely as a target to skim money from, and so rather than using it to address problems, it is more like a running list of all the problems that senior senators have been fighting over. Nothing on the Federal Budget is likely to complete, or be effective, because the system is so corrupt and the political factions so entrenched. Players might be able to coordinate enough to design a fix for one or two things over the course of a year, but that probably won't leave them with the political capital to implement it without the funds getting redirected to other pet projects. And you'll have more pressing concerns than keeping the masses happy, anyway.

This means that a) players aren't responsible for addressing a hundred issues concerning the government, only their own actions, and b) the economy isn't going to grow to the point where it is burdensome to manage. I'll be surprised if it grows at all.

The Plot Twist, which I don't want players to know specifics about until after they're finished setting everything up, will introduce a time limit to the game, after which the game either ends or we do a reset.

As for "more involved NPCs," it's more like bonus-providing NPCs and facilities are going to be both a territorial control aspect of the game, and the mechanism by which you get things done -- the strings you pull to perform actions without getting executed for treason.

If anything, this game will feel more like Liberal Crime Squad than other "we're running a government" games. ( http://lcs.wikidot.com/ )