An Introduction and Statement of Purpose

 Welcome to my blog!

This is a bit new to me. If you're reading this, I appreciate you showing up and bearing with me. I'll try to make it worth your while.

I'm starting this blog for a couple reasons:

1. An excuse to talk to myself. I find the ideas flow better when I write them out, and this will give me a good excuse to write while I reflect on my sessions.
2. As a way to flirt with the idea that others might read my thoughts and peruse my content. 

More on the second point: I've long been inspired by the authors of the OSR space (Luka Rejec, Gavin Norman, Luke Gearing, and Patrick Stuart, to name a few). For some years I've thought about attempting to join their ranks. However, as a man with no real writing experience, the idea has always felt like a far-flung fantasy. Some writers I am fortunate to have in my life have repeatedly told me that the best ways to gain writing experience are to write anything and to let others read and comment on the things I write. Thus, an attempt at both.

What will I write about? I have some plans and ideas, but I suspect that I'll find the true answer to that question as this blog continues. At least to start I will focus on my currently ongoing Mothership campaign. I'll post a mix of after-action reports from my sessions and setting details. If you read, please share your thoughts. It's the best way for me to figure out what works with my writing.

For the rest of this post, let me wax on a little about my campaign. I'm about 11 sessions in now. So far I am quite fond of it.

Periphery

That's what I'm calling it in my head - in this context the word refers to the far reaches of explored space. My campaign is leaving the periphery, but I think I'll keep the title for now.

I'm running this game in Mothership. I've chosen to make some house rules around stress and advancement, but mostly it's still Mothership. I think the system is great (hot take, I know) and it really works for the corporate-grind-down I've been putting the PCs through.

My campaign started on a moon called Furano. It's tiny and forested, and far far far away from Terra (humanity's homeworld in my setting). There's one thing that makes Furano extra special - an exotic material called Bragg Crystal. It's the "core mystery" of my campaign.

Bragg Crystal is a recently discovered resource - first it was artificially made in high-tech labs in the Sol system, then it was discovered under the surface of Furano. It also naturally occurs in tiny amounts in the human brain, even if the scientists haven't figured that out yet. You can think of it as a source of psychic power. It connects things to the noosphere. That's not how people in the setting think of it (yet) but that's what it ultimately is. The corporations of the Sol system all want it because they discovered that it can be used to allow for near-instantaneous communication between computers and AI that are equipped with Bragg arrays. Due to the small scale of their experiments they haven't figured out how this will impact humans and their tiny minds, but they will learn in time.

Back to the campaign, the things that are actually going on. My PCs all work for Beltek Exomining (BE), a mining subsidiary of the corporation (Beltek) that ran the first experiments with Bragg Crystal. At the beginning of my campaign, BE established the first Bragg mining operation on Furano. The PCs were the first miners. In our first bunch of sessions they dug up a bunch of kilos of Bragg Crystal and encountered a bunch of problems, like disgruntled locals, hallucinations, pale white nightmare creatures, and corporate mistreatment.

I won't go into all the details, at least not in this post, but I'll fill you in on the important bits.

1. The locals know more about Bragg Crystal than Beltek does. Their understanding is wrapped in religious mysticism, making it hard for the very rational corporate workers to believe everything they say, but through repeated interactions that PCs have been able piece together some of the puzzle. They understand that Bragg crystal is affecting their minds and their perception somehow.
2. Furano itself is a giant living being (the locals call it Carcoshta). A large part of it is Bragg Crystal. The massive amount of Bragg Crystal makes living creatures extra susceptible to noospheric influence, and every thought and dream on Furano passes through Carcoshta's sleeping mind. Sometimes little bits of Carcoshta split off from its main body and wander the caves and the surface, taking the form of nightmares that Carcoshta has seen.
3. Ingesting Bragg crystal heightens an individual's noospheric connectedness. This allows them to use some psychic abilities, but it also makes them more susceptible influence from outside entities. A local religious faction, loving called "witches", has acutely honed their psychic abilities in this way. These guys have been a bit of a thorn in Beltek's side, particularly due to their protective attitude toward Carcoshta.
4. Beltek, by way of the PCs, has broken some important Terran laws and is in danger of losing the mining rights to Furano. As a result, the PCs are being taken back to Terra to go to court and testify. This will give them an opportunity to see the impact the first large shipment of Bragg Crystal has had in core space.

So what's on the docket for Monday? This is going to be the first session to take place entirely off-moon. The PCs will begin their multiweek journey back to Terra, and they'll pick up some understanding of the broader universe while they're at it. I plan to take this opportunity to sprinkle some tidbits in about how Beltek is using their Bragg supply - a massive networked AI.

I bet you can already see where I'm going with this. I think it will be fun.

Thank you so much for reading! I'll update y'all on Tuesday with an intro to the PCs, an after action report, and a bit of detail on how I've house ruled advancement for this sort of longer-term game with limited opportunities for shore leave.

- Hank