Welcome to Radio Free Deimos, episode 19, A History of the Future! Deimos: Every day is a new month! (That one’s a thinker…)
What’s new from HSD – the creative contest
General outline of show (assuming no-one takes things in a different directions)
- Introduce Kaelgren
- Challenges of accurate dating of HSD (dates are vague, this may be intentional)
- Brief tour of history (no more than 15 minutes)
- Talk about ages or periods of history
- What would you say the most pivotal moments in Vector history are? (Excluding some big obvious ones, the end of life on Terra, Gen 1’s creation)
- What would we want to add to the official timeline? (me: some official downtime, a clear date for Marsco cracking down on the other corporations, the time that Marsco’s CEO declared themselves god…)
Problems with getting an accurate timetable of vector history: there’s no clear beginning or ending, and some dates are murky or “pop” history anyway. Big Brother wrote the histories.
Building the timeline: A lot of guesswork, here’s some chronological scaffolding:
Present day – 700: the Geomat
We’ve got an ORDER of things in the earth-terra-mars conflict period, if not solid years.
MArsco’s Founding (estimated)
Generation 1 (estimated)
Generation 3 (50 years after Gen 1)
ASR/Creation of COGs – 70 years after Gen 1
Luna, Pale Men, and etc – 110-150 years after end of all life on earth
Second return to earth, ~300 years after end of earth, p. 22 “a bunker that hadn’t seen daylight in over three centuries”
Venus Terraforming begins – around 400 years after Mars Colonization (page 23)
Whisper Ship Launched – 500 years after Gen One – 26
Wisperwerk, The Spire, “over the past 100 years” (page 70)
Major Epochs:
The history of the Vector civilization can be broken up into more or less the following epochs:
– The Age of Terra (either the period leading up to Marsco’s establishment, or the point at which Marsco breaks contact with earth, unsure.)
– The Age of Mars (the period of terraforming Mars, the creation of the three generations of vectors, development of Pulse and ASR)
– The Boom Period (150-300 years of unregulated weirdness)
– The High Age of Expansion (The period marked broadly by the consolidation of IRPF, clear trade lanes, and the Rule of the Ledger which helped build some consistent rules among the Megacorps). A level of accountability develops: the ledger system provides a mechanism for corporations to take over abusive corporations by buying out indebted shareholders. In effect, the vector itself becomes a share.
Meltdown?
– The Transcendent Age (arguably where we are now, though this feels subject to change: the period initiated by the Whispers.)
The transcendent age represents the Vector’s first encounter with the deep unknown: a hostile, alien race. Transcendent Technology, itself as much religion as science, spins off a number of cults as vectors wrestle for the first time with the entirely unknowable
– I’m also speculating on a few periods – a sort of dark age after the Whisper invasion, where civilization goes into a slump. This is mostly because there’s like a 100 year gap where nothing seems to happen except the Rabbit Race War.
Are we in a new age? The Age of Lumen? The combination of dread and discovery of the Transcendent Era is still present, but becoming commonplace. No stand-out event marks the end of this period. The growing interest in reclaiming Terra and destroying the spire may mark the transition into the next big tomorrow…third time’s the charm! It seems like the chronology is entering a period that maybe 100 years down the road will be looked at as the dawn of a bright new age…
Absolutely pivotal events:
- Creation of the Geomat and Geomat II
- Destruction of Terra
- Gen 1, Gen 2, Gen 3
- Terraforming Venus
- Discovery of the Monolith
- Whisper Crash
- First Whisper Captured
Historical gaming:
What was the vector mood like? What informed these periods? What challenges are created by a campaign set in this period?
Unanswered historical questions
-protovector period
-origin story of IRPF
-the crazy growth period of Boom Time