GARM part two - brainstorming

So.  the Day after Ragnarok - the sequel

ROCKET TO GARM

A tale of the British Royal Rocket Patrol!

So, to carry the thought exercise forward, were I to develop this enough to pitch or run this, I think ultimately the list of sources (posted, so prospective players would have some notion where I’m coming from) would look something like this

Dan Dare & the Day After Ragnarok of course

the Ministry of Space
Triplanetary

UFO Belter

Space 1999

2001 A Space Odyssey

Robert Heinlein, Tom Corbett, Space Cadet, a lot of early Philip K. Dick, and the Jetsons

So with all of this, and an eye toward all of the “Rocket Patrol” era of SF , I’d populate the inner and outer solar system, pepper the colonial powers out by extrapolating forward from DAR (which leaves off in summer 1947 I think).  

On that last I would need, at least for my own purposes, something like a post 49 timeline (again heavily inspired by ministry of space).

I’ve pro’lly got a bit of the Expanse in here but that’s because

a) I've got it on the brain a little

b( the Expanse is genius and

c) the Expanse incorporates a metric grinth load old golden and early silver age ideas about the Dawn of the Solar System Age.  

Go read your Heinlein juveniles  It’s in there.  This sort of thing used to be hard coded into Classic Traveller back in the day. I own a copy of GDW’s Belter. )   Either way we’re talking about what is on the surface a game of “Plucky engineers, everyone has a slide rule, and torch ships are just now a thing.”  

Of no great surprise to anyone who knows me, I would be drawing a fair bit of inspiration from Ellis’ Ministry of Space.  Maybe all of it.  I’m sure I could work out some vague timeline.  

Also! one of the awesome things that Hite does in DAR is seed the book with references to other works of thematically or period related media or fiction.  Dan Dare gets checked, so does UNIT, so does a LOT of things.  This trend would persist with this project to some degree.   

The big question would be for me What does the Title pertain to?  Rocket to Garm?

Since Garm, mythologically eats the world, and since we’re allowed to incorporate other media, I’m just going to suggest that right now, the whole ministry of space timeline gets interrupted by Garm, eating the moon AKA a colossal atomic explosion on the far side of the moon on September 10, 1999.   If the command staff happen to resemble Martin Landau and Barbara Bain you can only blame me so much.  

Next, I shall hash out that timeline and figue out what thee is to do in this Rocket Age solar Darestopia

Wherein I blather more about my aforementioned project

Galaxy Black is a setting that I began working on maybe a year ago, but the elements therein have been assembling themselves in the background all my life.  GB is a bunch of different urges and design directives (re: things I wanted) and no too few contradictions - Over the last 18 months Galaxy Black has been a setting for both Stars Without Number and Traveller but I’ve decided it stands best as it’s own thing. At heart it’s a kitchen sink space opera/SF setting that tries to do for SF what D&D did for fantasy - here meaning a creative space wherein any kind of F or SF could be found to have room.  In a universe billions of light years across, I figure any type of SF has to fit in there somewhere. I like to think of it as a universe large enough to encompass any kind of SF somehow without seeming forced.   Kitchen sink here is not meant in a pejorative sense. Not at all.

Mentally speaking it’s what I’m thinking of when I am thinking “science fiction” (though the overall result is probably closer to "Science Fantasy" in the same sense that most Supers games tend to be generic in that you can dump anything in there but it is still a Supers game) in much the same way that Jaldapor (link to kind of lame wikia opens in new window) is kind of my take on sword & sorcery/sword & planet*. I do tend to get my genre conventions all mashed together because 90% of the time, I really don't care about genre emulation or whatever.  Much like in my brain, all the food on the plate touches here in a glorious mess.

Anyway I’m blathering.  Let’s talk a bit about one of the focal points of the project, the world of Maleth Noir.

Noir started life as a classic 70s ecumenopolis turned MegaCityOne style shitworld for the Drune’s absolutely brilliant Humanspace Empires that I could never quite get together. Only later on did I realize it fit perfectly into the (early and very primitive) Galaxy Black setting.   The initial pretentious

idea for the world was basically Francis Ford Coppola’s Star Wars Episode One;, a very golden age retro Big Ass Galactic Empire ™ as a backdrop to some Orson Wells-in-Vienna action (the Third Man, go see it!).  I gave a LOT of thought to how to set up the world and how to do a world city as something that would be maybe a fresh take on the thing, and hopefully have a recognizable signature of my own to the idea.  Ultimately though the goal is playability and FUN.  

And a world custom made for black and white tales of betrayal?  I’m sure it’ll degenerate into Space Opera Shadowrun with Plasma Rifles and Full Conversion Cyborg Alien insect Uplift Super Soldiers real soon now, but hey that’s half the fun.  Lock and load detectives….

Noir is an old, old world, in a future variation of the galaxy called Via Lactae. In the larger, Galaxy Black, setting in which the world exists (in my home game any way, should I ever do something with this)  a very progressive yet dystopian galactic empire has a (non-civillian) super-science tech base allowing for full grand high space opera world wrecker type stuff. Each star system in the empire is linked by a single central ansible  ala leguin which is under military control. Consequently, each world only gets what news it needs to.  Indeed, some worlds are deliberately maintained in artificial states of cultural or technological stasis (Through massed behavioral modification via memetic engineering, pharmaceutical or psionic manipulation or the like) where it benefits the Empire. 

(Besides, it never hurts to provide the rationale for the existence of a worlds known to the empire where it’s to their advantage to keep the locals mired in at best pseudo medievalism. I've run Swords & Wizardry Complete and Dungeon Crawl Classics RPG games on such worlds Speaking of which, magic - frequently alien - exists in the setting but is dangerous in a very DCC way.) 

So that's a very broad stroke introduction, mostly to Noir but also in part to the larger setting. (Damnit I am prone to ramble....)  I’m been slowly wrapping my head around the notion of making some sort of first make  shift and now more refined rules to support play in this environment and hopefully posting them here, with the ultimate aim of compiling   I’m no great shakes as a game designer but if there’s interest I’ll share.  In the meantime I’ll be throwing little snippets out, like this.  Hopefully semi regularly but we’ll see how that goes. 
More later.