I DM for my TTRPG group. One of the things I’m most proud of was a years long, multi-arc universe chock full off world building. (We were using the star drifter ruleset, though everything else was homebrewed.)
One of the the limiting factors for interstellar civilization is “luminium”; a faintly glowing semi-metal that’s a superconductor at room temperature and technobables its way to some kind of exotic energy source (I think I went with quantum tunneling from another universe or something.)
The problem with the stuff is that if it starts corroding it becomes unstable and explodes if conditions are right. The other problem is that the only known way to synthesize the stuff is lost to the Terranogene sphere. The only FTL is through wormholes that jump an enclosed spheres
That same society that figured out luminium also built “port ships” that were large dormant autonomous ships that had the portal generators on board.
Any how. Luminium’s atomic number is 1869 to honor this guy.
It was one of my favorite Easter eggs And they’ve still not noticed even though they now short hand it as “1869” (they didn’t know what it was called and that’s how they started identifying the stuff.)
Though im kinda proud of that campaign. I may have gone a little stir crazy during covid.
Even in the realm of fantasy, that is absurdly high. Like, that is insane. That’s like putting an artifact in your campaign and claiming it can heat up to 150 zillion kelvin. Even if you ignore how impossible it would be for something like that to exist, physics would have some strong words about how catastrophic that would be for everything around it. And by everything around it, I mean the entire fucking planet and probably a few neighboring ones.
I’m usually fine with hand waving away pesky things like physics and the laws of thermodynamics when it comes to fictional worlds, but holy shit there is a limit.
Yes. I know it’s absurd. (The island of stability is only predicted to go out to what? 120 something? And then isn’t really stable in a practical sense.)
That’s like putting an artifact in your campaign and claiming it can heat up to 150 zillion kelvin.
This gives me…. Ideas. I know the math breaks down before the big bang, but if anything could get that hot…I would imagine pre-expansion universe. Now how to stuff them in one?
it was a blast. it was flexible enough that they could derail to their hearts content without me running out of material, the back story to the history was that eventually the first large and successful colonization effort started with “Solarians” who were basically pacifist-adjacent scientists and academics tired of our bullshit and settled places starting with the moon, then going to mars, then to Jupiter’s orbit, then finally off to Alpha Centauri (from where they launched the first batch of forty-some portships that they’d pop off to to check on thinks and then go back to Centauri.)
meanwhile the people left on earth went the way things go, and it turned into a cesspit, eventually some dumbass using antimatter as a bomb, leading to the second waive of human colonization and Earth sterilized. (They eventually take over the portships they could find, and built the Stellarian Empire. AKA the badguys.
the Empire and Solarian Diaspora eventually start drifting apart with still-basically-human abilties, but some are furies and some are scalies and some have somekinda weird symbiotic relationship with algae in their brains that allows them to retain the memories of their parents and everyone the algae has been in.
meanwhile back on earth, it turns out Earth was returned to a more primordial state and is a stuborn little planet doing the whole life-thing again. Certain asshole-solarians decide to flee the empire, and created a world-religion that saw Solarians as divine messengers and Stellarians as demons, etc, shaping Itrayan society; starting from around their bronze age. the whole point was to unleash the Itrayans as some sort of hyper-zealot warriors. (the solarians kept cloning themselves and used synthetically-created algae for memory transfer.)
Eventually we get to a relatively modern age (slightly ahead of today, with neural implants and a few other odds and ends.) when Stellarians show up on a portship, setting off a war that sees the empire fracture into a dozen fiefdoms and several more political alliances. that war was fought with Augments who were genetically engineered and implanted with cybernetic whosewhats. These augments from bothsides were, when the war was finally ended, stuffed into cryo (under false pretenses) and launched off into the deep of space.
My players wake up, refurbish the broken down and basically derlict ship, find a planet and get resources before they die and all that for the first campaign arc. I still laugh that their engineer guy who had an entire manual for the ship in his starting gear, sold the manual for a little extra energy. Then he kept fighting with the ships automated repair system that kept putting bulkheads that were located in really inconvenient places back in. (Yes. I know how to screw with my party, lol. the manual’s instructions were basically “tell the AI to update the blueprints.” which was also how they were meant to discover the ship had an AI to handle some very annoying tasks like life support.)
You know, i always wonder why sci-fi/fantasy writers always makes some of these fictional “elements”.
Like if you want to add physics to the story but not really, why don’t they make it so it’s another matter entirely. It doesn’t have to be only made of proton, neutron, and electron y’know?
Also part of it is, we don’t want to get too complicated here, the stuff only really exists to bypass things and maybe give some interesting abilities (for example, the energy output of the “corroded” stuff is unstable. It could be used to provide pulsed power for things like railguns, or as a sort of electrically-fired fuel for missiles.)
So we stick to things people are familiar with. It doesn’t matter if it’s a superconductive wire composed of nonbarionic matter or not- it’s still going to behave a certain way, and sometimes you can get lost in the weeds explaining it, when really it’s just a handwaive away.
I also don’t like introducing power supplies that my party can exploit for really big booms. They may have, for example, opened a portal inside a neutron star (the portals swap a spherical volume of space. So suddenly they created an unstable mass of neutronium roughly 30m in diameter in some douches fleet yards.)
(In their defense the douchenozzle lost control of a sentient grey goo and it was the only way to keep it from spreading.)(but they did blow up half a solar system. And rendered it unnavigable past its Oort Cloud.)
Yeah I dunno if a year is enough to connect this singular dot.
1869 is also the year the US intercontinental resolution was completed, which would seem to be a much bigger connection to an element allowing travel than the guy who made the periodic table.
It’s kinda sad.
I DM for my TTRPG group. One of the things I’m most proud of was a years long, multi-arc universe chock full off world building. (We were using the star drifter ruleset, though everything else was homebrewed.)
One of the the limiting factors for interstellar civilization is “luminium”; a faintly glowing semi-metal that’s a superconductor at room temperature and technobables its way to some kind of exotic energy source (I think I went with quantum tunneling from another universe or something.)
The problem with the stuff is that if it starts corroding it becomes unstable and explodes if conditions are right. The other problem is that the only known way to synthesize the stuff is lost to the Terranogene sphere. The only FTL is through wormholes that jump an enclosed spheres
That same society that figured out luminium also built “port ships” that were large dormant autonomous ships that had the portal generators on board.
Any how. Luminium’s atomic number is 1869 to honor this guy.
It was one of my favorite Easter eggs And they’ve still not noticed even though they now short hand it as “1869” (they didn’t know what it was called and that’s how they started identifying the stuff.)
Though im kinda proud of that campaign. I may have gone a little stir crazy during covid.
Even in the realm of fantasy, that is absurdly high. Like, that is insane. That’s like putting an artifact in your campaign and claiming it can heat up to 150 zillion kelvin. Even if you ignore how impossible it would be for something like that to exist, physics would have some strong words about how catastrophic that would be for everything around it. And by everything around it, I mean the entire fucking planet and probably a few neighboring ones.
I’m usually fine with hand waving away pesky things like physics and the laws of thermodynamics when it comes to fictional worlds, but holy shit there is a limit.
(Chuckles in evil DM)
Yes. I know it’s absurd. (The island of stability is only predicted to go out to what? 120 something? And then isn’t really stable in a practical sense.)
This gives me…. Ideas. I know the math breaks down before the big bang, but if anything could get that hot…I would imagine pre-expansion universe. Now how to stuff them in one?
Sir this is a Wendy’s.
…
And that was really cool so your meal is free, please go on this sounds like a super fun campaign.
it was a blast. it was flexible enough that they could derail to their hearts content without me running out of material, the back story to the history was that eventually the first large and successful colonization effort started with “Solarians” who were basically pacifist-adjacent scientists and academics tired of our bullshit and settled places starting with the moon, then going to mars, then to Jupiter’s orbit, then finally off to Alpha Centauri (from where they launched the first batch of forty-some portships that they’d pop off to to check on thinks and then go back to Centauri.)
meanwhile the people left on earth went the way things go, and it turned into a cesspit, eventually some dumbass using antimatter as a bomb, leading to the second waive of human colonization and Earth sterilized. (They eventually take over the portships they could find, and built the Stellarian Empire. AKA the badguys.
the Empire and Solarian Diaspora eventually start drifting apart with still-basically-human abilties, but some are furies and some are scalies and some have somekinda weird symbiotic relationship with algae in their brains that allows them to retain the memories of their parents and everyone the algae has been in.
meanwhile back on earth, it turns out Earth was returned to a more primordial state and is a stuborn little planet doing the whole life-thing again. Certain asshole-solarians decide to flee the empire, and created a world-religion that saw Solarians as divine messengers and Stellarians as demons, etc, shaping Itrayan society; starting from around their bronze age. the whole point was to unleash the Itrayans as some sort of hyper-zealot warriors. (the solarians kept cloning themselves and used synthetically-created algae for memory transfer.)
Eventually we get to a relatively modern age (slightly ahead of today, with neural implants and a few other odds and ends.) when Stellarians show up on a portship, setting off a war that sees the empire fracture into a dozen fiefdoms and several more political alliances. that war was fought with Augments who were genetically engineered and implanted with cybernetic whosewhats. These augments from bothsides were, when the war was finally ended, stuffed into cryo (under false pretenses) and launched off into the deep of space.
My players wake up, refurbish the broken down and basically derlict ship, find a planet and get resources before they die and all that for the first campaign arc. I still laugh that their engineer guy who had an entire manual for the ship in his starting gear, sold the manual for a little extra energy. Then he kept fighting with the ships automated repair system that kept putting bulkheads that were located in really inconvenient places back in. (Yes. I know how to screw with my party, lol. the manual’s instructions were basically “tell the AI to update the blueprints.” which was also how they were meant to discover the ship had an AI to handle some very annoying tasks like life support.)
You know, i always wonder why sci-fi/fantasy writers always makes some of these fictional “elements”.
Like if you want to add physics to the story but not really, why don’t they make it so it’s another matter entirely. It doesn’t have to be only made of proton, neutron, and electron y’know?
Because we like our unobtainium, okay?
Also part of it is, we don’t want to get too complicated here, the stuff only really exists to bypass things and maybe give some interesting abilities (for example, the energy output of the “corroded” stuff is unstable. It could be used to provide pulsed power for things like railguns, or as a sort of electrically-fired fuel for missiles.)
So we stick to things people are familiar with. It doesn’t matter if it’s a superconductive wire composed of nonbarionic matter or not- it’s still going to behave a certain way, and sometimes you can get lost in the weeds explaining it, when really it’s just a handwaive away.
I also don’t like introducing power supplies that my party can exploit for really big booms. They may have, for example, opened a portal inside a neutron star (the portals swap a spherical volume of space. So suddenly they created an unstable mass of neutronium roughly 30m in diameter in some douches fleet yards.)
(In their defense the douchenozzle lost control of a sentient grey goo and it was the only way to keep it from spreading.)(but they did blow up half a solar system. And rendered it unnavigable past its Oort Cloud.)
“Fuck you”
starbombs your entire system
Yeah I dunno if a year is enough to connect this singular dot.
1869 is also the year the US intercontinental resolution was completed, which would seem to be a much bigger connection to an element allowing travel than the guy who made the periodic table.
Well said.
You may be Crack’d.`