Cosmic Era Progress Log

#1

So that Aramax and Moonlake's weekly progress log isn't alone, I am going to start documenting my progress in the Cosmic Era. This will a sort of directors commentary for the submissions as I complete them.

Inspirations
What I hoped to achieve with the piece
Why I wrote it
What I was drinking when I wrote it
Progress updates and relations to the novel (In macro-edit phase)

Re: Cosmic Era Progress Log

#2

New sub
https://strolen.com/viewing/7_Futurists_Predict_the_Cosmic_Era

Original article that inspired this submission:
http://futurism.com/images/heres-what-todays-experts-think-the-future-will-be-like/?src=home

A little thing that popped up in my Facebook feed, I read through the ideas of the scientists, futurists, and frequent commentators on science shows and found that their projections for the future meshed up well with the things that I had written thus far about the Cosmic Era as well as pointing out a few things that are missing. One of the next things to come from this is going to be a look into the currency and economic models of the Cosmic Era, with emphasis on a post-scarcity, post-capitalist, pro-state, pro-evironment, AI controlled economy and regulated currency.

Re: Cosmic Era Progress Log

#3

New Sub
https://strolen.com/viewing/Kakugram

A quick one off generated from Dr. Kaku of the futurist submission. Most sci-fi and dystopian setting have some sort of electronic drug, and most are stupid because it seems like none of the writers has ever had any sort of drug or substance abuse problem. Which is kind of odd considering the legacy or traditional of alcoholism in writers. Heck, most of Stephen King's early works were covered in a fine patina of cocaine dust.

I smoked, I quit smoking, I think I have a bit of an understanding on addiction and substance abuse.

freaking BTL chips are stupid Shadowrun
Slo-Mo is stupid Judge Dredd

Re: Cosmic Era Progress Log

#4

New Sub
https://strolen.com/viewing/Archery_in_the_Cosmic_Era

Freetext Friday sub, but missed it by a few days.

Archery is cool, and in the comic book universe, the bow is the next most powerful weapon compared to the bare fist. Guns are only slightly more useless than WMDs. If Rambo can shoot down gunships with a compound bow, and Hawkeye can drop helicarriers with a bow, they have a place in the Cosmic Era, even if it is a very small niche

Re: Cosmic Era Progress Log

#5

New Sub:
https://strolen.com/viewing/Polyforge

The nanoforge, the replicator, and all of those other sci-fi instamatic devices are coming true with 3D printing technology. The future isn't swirling lights and there it is, it is extruded and heat/UV set, in quick and easy to assemble pieces. I have some first hand experience with 3D printers, the new thing in prop and replica making is to create a digital master file, from computer designed art, print the first piece out, clean it up, and use it to make traditional silicon molds for resin and plaster casting.

It's some pretty impressive stuff. Makes really cool toys.

Re: Cosmic Era Progress Log

#6

New Sub:
https://strolen.com/viewing/Memetic_Measurement

Another quickie from the hip submission. There's not much to it, other than establishing a metric to measure the sharing of information. In the CE that's important because data is the new default backing for financial systems.

Re: Cosmic Era Progress Log

#7

New Sub:
https://strolen.com/viewing/Gesund_Auf

One of the trends I have started running with is taking what are functionally generic sci-fi items, that have traditionally generic and boring names and giving them a CE write up and a German based name. Why German? Because the highly technical, industrious, and precise Germans are a major industrial force behind the Atlantic Federation.

Another thing is that generic names are boring as shit yo. Real world items tend to have names drawn from ethnic sources, corporate sources, or colloquial sources.

Tissue? Nope, it's a kleenex.
Cotton swab? Nope, hand me a Q-tip
MP3 player, That's what you buy at the Dollar Mart, you have an iPod, whatever make and manufacture it is.

Re: Cosmic Era Progress Log

#8

New sub:
https://strolen.com/viewing/Identity_Theft_in_the_Cosmic_Era

This was a topic I had rolling around in my head for a while, and there are some potential short stories that can be written from it. What if someone could steal you, make duplicates of you, and the whole pulp aspect comes into a play. You go to the salon for a dream vacation, and wake up in a slave freighter heading to an asteroid mining colony. Do you know you've been duplicated, do you think the simulation has gone bad, do you have special corporate training to deal with this sort of data breach?

Re: Cosmic Era Progress Log

#9

New Sub:
https://strolen.com/viewing/Phenocladistics

Pheno comes from phenotype, or a specific form. Clade comes from classification systems. A clade is sort of like a species but not quite. The organisms inside a clade can all point to a single specific ancestor for a specific trait. Phenocladistics is the tech term for the creation of artificial variations of humanity. This differs from basic one off genetic modding because a phenoclade will breed true.

Re: Cosmic Era Progress Log

#10

New Sub:
https://strolen.com/viewing/Goldenrod_Autonics

Inspired by the Host from Dr. Who, and named for a common insult for C-3PO, Goldenrod Autonics (auton robotics)is a conspicuous consumption provider of shiny gold robots. If people are willing to chrome wrap their cars, there is no reason that in the future they won't chrome wrap their robots, their cybernetics, and hell George Lucas chrome wrapped his ships from Naboo.

Nothing deep or introspective here

Re: Cosmic Era Progress Log

#11

New Sub:
https://strolen.com/viewing/Alethia_Goodchild

My 30 Amazons sub has withered on the vine, being in work for creeping up on two years now, and I'm not happy about it. The basic intent was to take 30 female comic, movie, and TV show characters, convert them over to the Cosmic Era setting and go from there. Each entry that I completed was a mini-sub unto itself and my list ended up being more than I wanted to deal with. I think that the biggest issue was that I wanted to keep the core of the character, but threw too much effort into changing them away from the source material. Had I stuck with the Cosmic Era playing with all the toys theme that Axle mentioned it might have been more successful.

Alethia Goodchild is Aeon from the self titled Aeon Flux. Not from the ok Charlize Theron movie, but from my original exposure to the character on MTV's liquid television. It was quirky and weird, Aeon dying in every short, and the stories only made sense in surrealist perspectives and then it was still head scratching and guessing.

It was a source material for the setting, with the augmentation and the blase attitude towards even the most extreme modifications, general strangeness, and the sex being less erotic and more insectile in perspective

Re: Cosmic Era Progress Log

#12

New Sub:
https://strolen.com/viewing/7_Post_Apocalyptic_Locations_in_the_Cosmic_Era

I banged out a seven point outline and started working on this submission, I think the inspiration was a link to creepy and haunted abandoned places and I rolled from there. It was never finished because I realized that there was no real reason to push to finish all seven entries, the wastelands of the Cosmic Era don't really need to be fleshed out that much, and thus this sub was left to sit in the in work folder. During a stint of 'cleaning house' I decided to push it out rather than delete it. After the apoc-punk section and the first two entries, the others are just meh.

I was going for an Outer Limits vibe on Derenkuyu, with everything being built on top of lies.

The Dubai Highway let me mix supercars, Mad Max, and plug the Silk Road

Re: Cosmic Era Progress Log

#13

New Sub:
https://strolen.com/viewing/Ocaslan_Planning

So this kid spent a couple years, a bunch of math, and some Buddhism to 'win' Sim City. He created a city with a population of 6 million with short lifespans, brutal law enforcement, unemployment, poor education and health services, and basically engineered dystopia. What is remarkable about this system is that it was stable. If you've ever played Simcity you know that your city is either growing, broke, shrinking, and otherwise fluctuating. In Vincent's Magnisanti, every building is in use, there are no abandoned areas, and that stability, his model city is stable for tens of thousands of years.

That's just scary.

This is where the Petroleum Era is heading, that is where WE are heading now. Those in power will remain in power, while the rest crowd into high density urban structures, with only public transit, afraid of the police, too dumb to protest, unable to resist or rebel. It is almost a blessing that the fuel runs out and this stability seeking world view dies on it's own blades.

The Cosmic Era is not stable, it is experiencing explosive growth, and for all the horrors that can be found, and all the terrible ways there are to die, it is not what I would consider the most hellish thing, it's not a smog choked urban blightmare

Re: Cosmic Era Progress Log

#14

New Sub:
https://strolen.com/viewing/Baxter_Unit_01

I am going to make a confession here: I love terrible things. I don't love them for what they are, but for the challenge of making them not suck. What is almost guaranteed to fail? Movies about Mars, Aquaman, and the Fantastic Four. The Baxter unit is the Cosmic Era treatment for the Fantastic Four. No cosmic radiation to turn them into superheroes (seriously, if this was a thing, the world government would have hero factories in orbit deliberately going through the Van Allen belts. It doesn't matter how many volunteers are killed or mutated, the chance of creating armies of supers is going to be worth the risk, especially if you get to pick who goes up.

If their name is Doom, or Doom appears anywhere in their name, application denied.

So the re-skinned FF are a Cosmic Era strike team, parapsychics and genetic mods. Nothing new is added, but this is how you could convert an existing property into the setting and use it for a campaign. The PC heroes have to fight cosmic horrors, a defector turned desolate one, and then basic mercenary and PR stuff.

Re: Cosmic Era Progress Log

#15

New Sub:
https://strolen.com/viewing/Morepolozhinye

There has been a good deal of underwater stuff in the inspiration section, but no one deals with underwater, and even in the novel, no one goes underwater. But it struck me, the Russians in the Cosmic Era. They blend arcanotech with tried and true things. The Russians are fantastic with tanks, submarines, and patriotism.

The Russians are the people who realize that despite borders and such, Earth is a water world, and the oceans can be claimed, colonized, and developed. The morepolozhinye are Russian Aquastats, underwater floating stations. The vibe is similar to space, but underwater and under pressure.

Re: Cosmic Era Progress Log

#16

New Sub:
https://strolen.com/viewing/Morskoilyudi

This sub came quick on the heels of the Morepolozhinye sub, recognizing the Russian dominance of the oceans. The original name, morskoiludi is Google Russian for Water People, and was a mouthful. Another Google search gave Rusalka as the Russian translation for mermaid. Rusalkas are Russians who have been turned into an amphibious aquatic plenoclade.

Re: Cosmic Era Progress Log

#17

New Sub:
https://strolen.com/viewing/Homo_Sapiens_Xenus

There is a new generation of genetically enhanced humanity coming, but they are in the beta process right now. The inspirations behind homo xenus include the Clans from Battletech, Neo-Sapiens from Exo-Squad, and the ubermensch.

The Clans from Battletech had a culture build around pureborn warriors birthed by machines, looking down on those born from dirty swapping of fluids. They were concerned with their role in their society, and the condition of their genetic legacy. Those who were shamed, those who did not excel were doomed to see their genes shelved, or in some cases, destroyed to ensure that there would not be another like them.

The blue skinned neo-sapiens from Exo-Squad had attitude, and were in almost every way superior to humans. A handful were friendly to humans, and fought along side of them, but the majority took up arms and fought for their masters. They were completely fine with genetic manipulation, even as they created super-intelligent neos, and even animal hybrid neos for hand to hand fighting.

The ubermensch, the superman, is a common theme in transhumanity, with them being better, stronger, smarter, better looking, etc. The great realization for the geneticists was that there was not one specific race or strain of humanity that was innately superior to another, that superior expression of mankind had to be created, and created from scratch. Thus,homo xenus is an entirely new creation.

Re: Cosmic Era Progress Log

#18

This was a topic I had rolling around in my head for a while, and there are some potential short stories that can be written from it. What if someone could steal you, make duplicates of you, and the whole pulp aspect comes into a play. You go to the salon for a dream vacation, and wake up in a slave freighter heading to an asteroid mining colony. Do you know you've been duplicated, do you think the simulation has gone bad, do you have special corporate training to deal with this sort of data breach?

Maybe it's because I've been reading a bunch of ePub short stories lately, but can definitely see a tale in this.

You know, something like..

"Hunting Myself"

Two down. Eight more to go. Exo-suicide is what Lacy called it. The first "me" I killed was hard on the psyche, I won't lie. The second, I found myself already detached emotionally. Like regular murder, I suppose. "Me" number two had it coming anyway. This guy was an utter *******.

:)

Re: Cosmic Era Progress Log

#19

New Sub:
https://strolen.com/viewing/Ocaslan_Planning

So this kid spent a couple years, a bunch of math, and some Buddhism to 'win' Sim City. He created a city with a population of 6 million with short lifespans, brutal law enforcement, unemployment, poor education and health services, and basically engineered dystopia. What is remarkable about this system is that it was stable. If you've ever played Simcity you know that your city is either growing, broke, shrinking, and otherwise fluctuating. In Vincent's Magnisanti, every building is in use, there are no abandoned areas, and that stability, his model city is stable for tens of thousands of years.

That's just scary.

This is where the Petroleum Era is heading, that is where WE are heading now. Those in power will remain in power, while the rest crowd into high density urban structures, with only public transit, afraid of the police, too dumb to protest, unable to resist or rebel. It is almost a blessing that the fuel runs out and this stability seeking world view dies on it's own blades.

The Cosmic Era is not stable, it is experiencing explosive growth, and for all the horrors that can be found, and all the terrible ways there are to die, it is not what I would consider the most hellish thing, it's not a smog choked urban blightmare

Did a big update on this, adding Zola and Loki quotes, as well as a 1984/Petroleum Era glossary section.

It's a longer article, and it's a bit tinfoil hat, a bit conspiracy theory, bit personal rant.

Re: Cosmic Era Progress Log

#20

I keep finding myself coming back around to the space elevator. In the Galactic Clicker game the Space Elevator technology is a boundary tech, when you buy it, you transition from a planetary level to a solar system level. I guess it makes sense that it is going to be seriously hard to do major work in space when everything that comes up is taking literal tons of fuel to get into orbit.

There are plenty of works dealing with space elevators, and plenty of artwork too. It is interesting, daunting, and I'm not sure how it would fit into the mythos of the Cosmic Era. There are still rockets and mass drivers, so getting into orbit is cheaper, and with A-pods and launching from an aerostat is easier than launching from the ground.

I do keep coming back around to something I wrote earlier, the tether-vator. Rather than a true space elevator, the tether-vator is a space escalator, lifting goods and people from the surface to a floating aerostat complex. The complex is tethered to the ground, and very likely a superstructure like an industrial acroplex. Goods are zipped up the tether to the aerostat. There is a second tether, this one connected to a space station in a locked orbit, where it stays in the same place relative to the ground. It's tether is connected to the aerostat, and the 'stat sends it's goods and passengers up the space tether to the station. Once in orbit, the hard part is over, and small craft and other ships can move the goods from the station to wherever they need to go.

[img width=400 height=179]http://www.forgetfoo.me/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/space-elevator-001m.jpg

In a few decades or centuries a network of tethers would eventually grow, and a Niven Ring could start to form around the planet. Goods go up the now true aerostat-less elevators to the ring, where a transit system moves the good to another node in the ring, where they are either loaded onto a ship, ferried to a mass driver, or go down another elevator to a different point on the planet.

[img width=400 height=171]http://conceptartworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Jupiter_Ascending_Concept_Art_Olivier_Pron_09.png

This is all well down the road and would very likely be the transition from the Cosmic Era to something like a Stellar Era, or Universal Era.

Does it fit the guidelines of the Cosmic era?
http://strolen.com/viewing/7_Things_About_Writing_for_the_Cosmic_Era[/url

Is it for sale? - yes. Using the tether-vator is a for profit operation. You don't buy the system, you lease a spot on it, or you buy a ticket. Also, with the size and function of the system, it is easy to attach antenna for broadcasting, or a cable for secure data and hardline communications, all of which come at a premium cost.

Life is cheap? - probably quite a few people died during it's construction, and there are certainly accidents, but they do not stop the operation of the system

Sex is everything? - phallic image?

Frantic Pace? - the tether-vator doesn't stop. There is always a steady flow of goods and passengers going back and forth. Cue the Futurama and Jetson's pneumatic transit tubes

Antique Values? - not sure about this one

Nothing is Real? - the tether-vator looks like a solid thing, but it is a number of flexible components. It looks solid, but it can move, it can move a lot. It's all dangling bits hanging from things, it's a rope hanging from the gym roof.

Everything is terrible - The tether-vator is an eyesore, it is horrible to ride on, like a swaying roller coaster that constantly feels like it's about to go off the tracks, if there is a problem, you could suffocate before help arrives. EM radiation from the magnets driving it, the disturbing socio-economic power of the Tethervator operating corp or govt agency

Thoughts?

Re: Cosmic Era Progress Log

#21

Space Oriented phenoclade

Bones are not that important, since you don't have to deal with gravity. Who needs arms and legs if tentacles are superior? Also, lacking gravity to pack everything together, the spine decompresses, and going back to gravity can cause spinal injuries as everything pulls back together. The alternative, cartilaginous spines? bionics that resist separation, moving to a body shape that doesn't require bones to hold it's shape. The alternate form could more resemble something from the ocean than anything that walks on land. The downside is that this clade would likely be unable to survive in a high gravity environment, or would require an exoskeleton suit to do so (while still finding it very uncomfortable)

(astronauts lose 1-2% bone mass a month in space)

Space on a space ship is a commodity, smaller people require less space and less resources to support. A neotenic phenoclade could retain a child like size and mass while attaining a full level of mental and emotional development. With automation and robots, the need for brute strength goes away. Also, with the decreased need for bones, tentacles can be very strong while being small compared to a normal human limb

One large strong heart isn't going to cut it. The circulatory system is based on gravity and muscular resistance. In space, a heart loses mass and blood pressure drops. The phenoclade would need an augmented circulatory system. This could be having a multi-heart system like some nematodes and shellfish, or adopting full on cybernetics, and having a bionic heart to maintain the needed level of blood pressure.

The immune system functions less in space, and would need to augmented. The options would include either a higher powered system, or a bionically supplemented one.

Cosmic radiation damages the retina of the eye, and prolonged exposure can cause blindness. Alternatives? bionic eyes, cellular regeneration, move to a non-optic sense?

The blood pressure thing again, no erections in space, plus embryos don't develop correctly in zero g. While the multiple heart or cybernetic heart can deal with the blood pressure issue, it doesn't do anything for the embryo issue. Well, this might be the part where Homo Xenus, gestated in a machine (which could possibly just spin the embryos to generate centrifugal force) would thrive while man does not.

Re: Cosmic Era Progress Log

#22

New submission up

https://strolen.com/viewing/Freemium_Economy

The economy of the Atlantic Federation is a mix of universal basic income, free to play/pay2win gaming, and post-scarcity digital abundance.

I don't expect this sub to get a lot of attention, it's economic in nature, and the evil within isn't the tentacle dripping sanity shredding kind, just the callous pragmatic kind that we are all too used to.

I've been thinking about this piece for a while, tandem currencies like in the freemium games, and what sort of economy would exist after Capitalism, after America, post scarcity.

And it's kinda frightening.

Re: Cosmic Era Progress Log

#23

New Submission Up:

7 Things About Food in the Cosmic Era
https://strolen.com/viewing/8386

One of the things I have to admit about myself is that I am a foodie, down to growing the heirloom and GMO free plants in my backyard garden. For a variety of mostly health related reasons I started educating myself about what I was eating and why it was making me functionally sick (gall bladder and hypertension).

This lead me to learn more about our food chain, and how and what we eat and frankly our food today can be horrific. Chicken nuggets are gross, pink slime is straight out of a horror movie, and what is done to fruits and vegetables is a travesty.

You think that's actually orange juice your drinking? It's not. Sorry dude.

Throw this in with some things I've read on the future of food, and it's looking grim. A few of the things in the article are drawn from sci-fi sources, such as the Judge Dredd referenced recycled food. The rest is straight out of the supermarket.

Re: Cosmic Era Progress Log

#24

Will definitely be checking this out. Do you recommend having an empty or full belly, prior to reading? :)

Re: Cosmic Era Progress Log

#25

Will definitely be checking this out. Do you recommend having an ebabies mpty or full belly, prior to reading? :)

Doesn't matter, it's more cerebral in it's horror than visceral. It's manufactured food and cultivated tumors rather than soylent green or babies in blenders

Re: Cosmic Era Progress Log

#26

That ebabies typo makes my question and your answer, somewhat disturbing. Lol

Re: Cosmic Era Progress Log

#27

I didn't even know there was a typo cos no idea what an ebaby is till I looked it up on Google now (it's actually the title of an Australian play? but no idea whether that's same thing as what Scras's using the term for) and I jest not but then you all know I'm a serious-minded person. I just chalked down the reference as Scras saying there won't be graphically horrific scenes that people can conjure in their own minds.

Re: Cosmic Era Progress Log

#28

That was my bad, i think my cursor jumped around when I hit the quote button. My phone will do that

Re: Cosmic Era Progress Log

#29

I find lists of random trivia, and these provide some interesting ideas, some of which are just background information for the CE, others grow into deeper more profound aspects.

Factoid: Blind people experience 4X more nightmares than sighted people, 25% versus 6%

CE: the more extensive a person uses the CogNet, their propensity for having nightmares increases. Casual use only ticks the gauge up to 10%, while habitual use rises to 20%. Regular exposure to unsanitized feeds, deviant feeds, and otherwise off the mainstream can see their level rise to 33-50%, often facilitating the need for sleep therapy, anti-psychotic meds, and so forth. Hackers often develop a fear of sleep. Like Jhonen Vasquez, the creator of Invader Zim

Comic Book Character: Ruby Thursday, typical cheesecake supervillain, but has a shiny red ball for a head. Easy to draw, no funny ethical qualms about a sexploitation body with no human face.

Organic circuitry? Nah. How about Ruby's 'head' is a small S2 Core ala Evangelion. Ruby is a human/angel hybrid.

There are only 13 active blimps in the world

In the CE, no longer bound by large terrestrial infrastructures (power grids and highway systems) makes routine use of zeppelins as heavy freight haulers. They are clean, efficient, and stable. Tethering to arcos, docking with aerostats, hooking to flying ships, zeppelins and smaller blimps are common sights in the CE, and they are likely numbered in the thousands.

in China the word censorship has been censored

in the CE, this is the application of stopthink, or whatever Orwell called it. Things that those in power do not want are culturally edited out of society. once you force something into the realm of euphemisms, it is undermined and starts to fall apart.

Re: Cosmic Era Progress Log

#30

New post up

https://strolen.com/viewing/Trojan_Corp

Re: Cosmic Era Progress Log

#31

Wife decided to take and afternoon nap. I decided to do a bunch of wrapping up on stuff and kicking it out the door.

Started with this:

https://strolen.com/viewing/Vince_Appelhof

Resurrected as a cyborg, Appelhof is an agent for the shadowy Neogenecists. Inspired by the rather turgid Babylon A.D. starring Vin Diesel. In a game role, he is a tank, geared towards combat. Outside of combat, he is an introvert who would rather spend time around children than around adults.

Followed with this:

https://strolen.com/viewing/Luciana_Holt

Luciana was a lowlife smuggler until a ruptured cargo turns her from mule into parapsychic. Inspired by the somewhat disjointed Lucy, staring ScarJo. It was awesome until she started dissolving, and it jumped the shark when she started time traveling. Luciana is Lucy when she is at about 30% brain capacity.

Then there was this:

https://strolen.com/viewing/Kizzie

Kizzie is a variation on the Frankenstein story, inspired by the purple nipple zombie boob filled Frankenhooker, a B-movie from the 80s. Kizzie is reanimated by her bf, she wreaks havoc before killing him, and then getting her just revenge. This sub has been in works for a while, I caught the movie months ago, and it took a while to get around to finishing her.

And finally:

https://strolen.com/viewing/The_Petroleum_Era

The Petroleum Era is frequently cited in the Cosmic Era timeline. It's set in our not quite distant future, and features a burgeoning global population, frightening levels of waste and a lust for war and government manipulation. I think the Petroleum Era would look better if it didn't look so much like today.

Peace out

Re: Cosmic Era Progress Log

#32

Who are the Neogenecists?

At the moment, I don't know. I am planning on drawing on elements of the Progenitors from Mage: the Ascencion. They are technomancers and geneticists who are designing and building their own spec ops and human elites. Most all of their assets are in various ways highly flawed, and unsuitable for player characters. I can spin stories off of them, such as Appelhof and Holt frequently working together, along with other more generic augments.

The Neogenecists are also the sort of a-holes who would cook up something like Khan and the rest of his eugenic augments from Star Trek infamy

Re: Cosmic Era Progress Log

#33

I have been thinking about the cosmic era stuff again. I think you have stated in the in the past that there two main goals to the setting. The idea is to have a world that has the opportunity to mix genres and setting but is centered around a “apple-slick post-consumer ” dystopian world in which people are dehumanized but the masses (like ourselves) don’t realize it. The theme of this central setting (aside from technology and structure that provide ultraconvenient satisfaction of basic needs that leads a strong disconnect of the individual from reality) is that reality is horrible. Thus a conceit of the setting is that if somebody unplugged from their enhanced reality games long enough to look around they would realize how vapid they are and how the technology they are using is bringing about their own destruction.

(lets leave the alien invasion and the puppet master AIs on the shelf for the time being)

The second major engine of the setting seems to be to drawnin all the wish fulfillment concepts and stories of 80s and 90s media directed to your typical male pre and post adolescent (transformers, battletech, robotech, video games such as street fighter, GI Joe and many more). This second point has the potential to directly conflict and negate the horror and dystopian themes of the cosmic era. It is not really dystopia or horror if our hero gets to fly around with a super cool jet backs and use their superpowers for moral purposes that they ultimately find uplifting. I think your attempts to fuse almost all media characters into the cosmic era is ultimately damaging to the setting.

Lets take for examples something you fused with cosmic era that I think did work really well: GI Joe. With GI Joe you turned Cobra into Amerika Command (a pro-classic United States rogue state) and you reboot the GI Joe characters as limited personality clones. I found this to be brilliantly subversive, speaking directly to the corruption of the setting and retaining the rule-of-cool fetishizing of pseudo-military technology and fashion that was fun about GI Joe.

Other stuff you have dropped in was done almost whole cloth without respect to the setting. (Yuna Aoki, cosmic era avengers, Agamemnon Spengler, Tekken Characters, Mortal Combat characters) Where is the horror? All these characters seemed self-possessed and very much in possession of their own fate. That is when the character’s place in the world is described at al. The characters are often just given new “cosmic era” technobabble to describe them. Don’t get me wrong the cosmic era technobabble always refers to the horror just beneath the surface, but the end result is fun wish fulfillment characters. Maybe in your head there is horror, but often in the write ups it is just high kicks, hot chicks and cool weapons. Yuna Aoki is the best new example of this. If New Themiscyra exists and there is a haven for the morally upright types such as Yuna Aoki are we leaving the horror behind in favor of a good versus evil morality stories? Did Yuna Aoki escape the horror of the cosmic era except for when she gambles with martyr style for a good cause?

Don’t get me wrong either, if you tone down the dystopian aspects in favor of the rule-of-cool fun stuff, it doesn’t undercut the setting-it just changes it.

I believe you have spent more time on the uplifting parts of the cosmic era and less on the dystopian parts. I also feel like you haven’t pushed the “human experience” in the cosmic era to something that merits a horror setting. Are you trying to create a feeling of frailty, smallness and paranoia like Lovecraft, embracing the dehumanizing vapidness of Huxley’s world (there you have come closet), the vicious ignorance of Raybradury’s future, or the ruthless, cynical, sadistic pragmatism of 1984.

Can you give us a cosmic era yarn that takes something people loved (i.e. Teddy Ruxbin, A-team, the care bears, Zelda or Megaman) and use it a tell us a story that is both subversive, a little disturbing but still pretty cool.

Re: Cosmic Era Progress Log

#34

I see your point axle but not sure if I agree with it. The NPCs you site are the exceptions to the rule and are diametrically opposed to the dystopian setting, yet help define it. The tales so far have deeply dealt with the horror of the setting, the NPCs have escaped this. It's not a setting where you are going to play a prole. Things (my 80 yr old mother just completely put me off track on this, lol)

Re: Cosmic Era Progress Log

#35

Okay so the NPCs are heroes and they represent a type of rebellion against the cosmic era and if the story line of the NPCs and (similar PCs) are followed to conclusion they will transcend the horror of the cosmic era and reform society? So Max, do you see the cosmic era setting is a pallet into highlight the outlines of moral righteous characters?

Re: Cosmic Era Progress Log

#36

First I would want to cover the difference between horror and terror as I understand them. Terror is a visceral response, a reflexive action tied to the fight or flight mechanism. Gore, violence, and other traumatic events trigger the terror response. Horror is cerebral, and intellectual response that comes from the inability to change or accept something that is going to happen.

Terror is the zombie surging at you, teeth snapping and tearing at your flesh. Horror is sitting afterwards looking at the bite on your arm and knowing that in a few hours you are going to die a painful and horrible death and will become a mindless monster very likely to attack the people you care about, and the only way around that is to commit suicide in a fashion sufficient enough to prevent your reanimation.

Lovecraft

Smallness and Indifference

Despite the great accomplishments of the Cosmic Era, the Earth is a ghost of what it once was, and there are reminders all around. Empty cities, crumbling structures built to house billions now reduced to millions. All the epic level characters written up won't matter in the face of the enemies of the Era. Star Whales would pass through the massive and powerful Federation warships, stripping them of their crews, leaving the ships filled with only corpses. A strain of teratomorphic influenza, a dimensional fatigue event, the appearance of a cosmic horror, and it's all gone. The heroes who stand against the monsters aren't going to win. At best they can force a draw. The Liu Kangs, Ryus, General Dukes, and sundry anime characters aren't going to win. They are likely going to die, go insane, become corrupted, or otherwise fall or fail.

Huxley

Dehumanization

I agree, I think this is the point I have made the strongest, and it is the one I think I am the most familiar with. It is also drawing more strongly from my personal experiences, and observations on technology and culture. In my opinion, this is also tapping into my own personal projections and thoughts on what has happened to us as a society and culture.

Bradbury

Vicious Ignorance

Bradbury is a writer that I haven't drawn a lot of lines to, Fahrenheit 451 would fit solidly into my vision of the Cosmic Era, but not so much all the Mars stuff. I like the terms vicious ignorance, and it fits. Despite the advances in tech, the general population is dumb, complacent, and accepting. That being said, compared to our previous generations, while we may act and feel smarter, we are generally less capable than they were. As the tech grows more sophisticated, the number of people who understands it dwindles. As it becomes more ubiquitous, the more people become addicted to it and complacent to how it manipulates their lives, until we reach a point where we struggle to remember basic passwords and only retain the most vital of phone numbers when I can recall having quite a few phone numbers once memorized.

The cult of ignorance, believing celebrities over professionals and experts, etc

Arcanotech is a disaster, it rips holes in reality, releases anomalies, diseases, distortions, monsters, aliens, and other horrific stuff. After Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, there was a moratorium placed on nuclear power plants and we still haven't moved past it. Tens to hundreds of thousands of people have been killed, maimed, mutated, or otherwise disfigured by failures of this technology, the Cosmic Era is insane for still using it.

DFEs are lethal, and the majority of reflex teams and first responders who arrive at one are among the first to suffer it's effects.

Orwell

Brutal pragmatism

The Cosmic Era is brutally pragmatic. It sacrifices population centers to keep it's arcanotech infrastructure running. Clones are created for exploitation and experimentation in a manner that would leave the Tuskeegee researchers sick to their stomachs, on par with the acts perpetuated by the Nazis or the Japanese medical researchers. Dissidents are nerve stapled, the media is a leash on public opinion, and so forth. I think this ties in with Huxley's dehumanization, as I see a lot of this going on now, with media spin, and data mining.

Where's the HORROR

The horror is on the other side of the DM's screen. The players, the protagonists should build their kick ass characters, the sort that are broken out of the CE mold and are aware of the vicious stupidity, the conspiracies and manipulations, the scale and vastness of the setting, and their ultimate unimportance to it, and then try to be big damn heroes.

The DM/storyteller then drives them insane (followed by psychotherapy, asylums, and medication) maims them (and replaces their broken bodies with cyborg parts, or grafted body parts, and more body horror) kills them (resurrecting them as clones, or robot copies) and eventually, they might succeed.

They close the DFE, but they haven't and cannot address the underlying cause, they cannot vanquish arcanotech anymore than the Amish can vanquish electricity. They defeated the conspiracy, but only a single layer of it, there are more.

Re: Cosmic Era Progress Log

#37

Re: The Whole Cloth stuff.

I've said this more than once, and hopefully I won't have to keep saying it.

I write a lot of the Cosmic Era stuff for the purpose of getting it out of my head. If I don't write things like the mortal kombat dossier, or the Harold Ramis tribute piece, it keeps tumbling around in my head. That means I don't sleep, it means I get distracted, and it takes up space for other ideas. So, I write it down.

For a while I went through the effort of filing off the serial numbers, but that took more time than it was worth. (the longer it takes to get out, the less likely it is to be finished). Once I switched over to 'whole cloth', the stuff gets out faster, the neat tidbit or cool idea is extracted, and I go on.

Let me give a specific example: two characters from the Gundam SEED section of the Character File submission are functionally broken and only continue on because they have teams of therapists, handlers, and so forth. That is the part that I found while I was writing, that the Federation will do horrific things like creating a duplicate of a person killed in battle, then keep them mentally stitched together because they are too valuable of a pilot to leave dead. The Neon Genesis Evangelion section let me vent some of my adoration for that series, as well as stumbling into the notion that that is what a reflex unit would look like, sortieing out on missions to stop monsters and breaches, and the clashes of personalities in an area full of bleeding edge tech and horrific slaughter.

Re: Cosmic Era Progress Log

#38

I have decided to leave the aliens on the shelf, and you can consider the Perpetual War and the Cosmic Era to no longer be canon.

Re: Cosmic Era Progress Log

#39

Okay so the NPCs are heroes and they represent a type of rebellion against the cosmic era and if the story line of the NPCs and (similar PCs) are followed to conclusion they will transcend the horror of the cosmic era and reform society? So Max, do you see the cosmic era setting is a pallet into highlight the outlines of moral righteous characters?

I think I see it as Scras does(?).The heros fight is very lovecrftian, minor victorys but no real change. The struggles of the hero's are heroic for heroic sake, not that they could do anything other than maybe find an out of the way Place(Figi?, Beleze?, New Themisacra?) and retire after a minor victory or two.

Re: Cosmic Era Progress Log

#40

Alright Max so the basic arc of stories in the CE will be stalwart moral characters who maintain their heroic personas and eventually find a way to personally escape the horrors of the by retiring to places like Fiji or New Themysicara.