While this was initially inspired by Stellaris, imagining what such a world would be like for the people who live in it when the player of such a game gets past the end game and hits "exit game." I know y'all hate fanfiction. This is not that. This is not me making a new Harry Potter house just for me. Stellaris is a toolbox rather than a setting, much like Dungeons and Dragons which has liches and Drow but every version is its own thing even if it has a few things in common. I wanted to make an actual setting.
The premise is a solar punk space opera centering on a group of anarchist space pirates living in the aftermath of a centuries wide galactic dark age who have found their little planet has become a doorway to a new frontier as various powers from the center of a galactic civilization want to exploit the area. The nearby sector was previously closed off because of a reality warping psionic anomaly called "the indigo" but the indigo has since cleared and where this colony of misfits and exiles used to be remote, now they are being targeted from the community they built for removal as squatters so a bunch of sophont trafficking mega corporations can pave over their farms and build a military base there.
For me, Solarpunk is the radical assertion that while we live with a broken world, bearing scars of the poor decisions of the past we don't have to live like this and it's not too late.
“We are solarpunk We and our commune for the wayward Stormtossed is about a radical refusal of galactica dystopia, wrenching the Utopia we build from the hands of ghouls comfortable with allowing their worlds to die for the sake of control and maximizing shareholder value. It's about recognizing that the past is a big turd and while it was full of mistakes, it's not too late.
We will be mud farmers here on Breakwater. Back in the Gateway network, so called civilized space, yeah we could get greasy fried fast food kibble that shortens our lifespan and gets worse every year. We could be slaves paying off debts they conjured for breathing that they gave us for the so called service of being snatched from our homes. We could lose our lives in dark mines and irradiated old foundries building the machines that oppress us. Or we could choose differently. We can rob these tyrants and these oligarchs, snatch back our freedom. We live in the swamp, the barrens, the lands of natural beauty and wonder others turned their nose up at, called “Death World” and fight for every bite and when we get that biofarm built, we don't have to eat kibble anymore.
We will taste the fruits of our own sweat and they will fight back against the patent attorneys and Harmonium pinkertons the corpos send to assert ancient property rights they have no basis for. We can be free. We have heard the call of the ember frequencies, of those for whom living free is piracy. Carry the Ember. Keep the Lantern Lit.”
Captain David Zee, leader of the uprising, first captain of the Stormtossed, 3122.
(model from Northstar Military Figures)
Welcome to 3226. There was once a golden age, followed by a time of constant crisis from extragalactic invasions to, mad scientist bird people rewriting the laws of physics, to an attempt by cultists to delete the galaxy from existence. The United Nations of Earth that became the custodian of the galaxy and led its protectors, being a beacon of freedom an liberty for all sophonts. But then as the various extragalactic invasions and crises happened and compounded, the UNE came under the control of a fascist demagogue when the earth was destroyed by the invaders and transitioned into being “The Galactic Mandate.”
An alliance led by psychic elves called the Isilfar made a pact with a psychic God called The End of Cycles led an uprising against them and succeeded. The Mandate was destroyed. But then the bill from their patron came due. Their territory, people, and worlds were seized by a reality warping fog called The Indigo and the Isilfar using the powers granted by the End of Cycles were claimed and became part of a roving abomination. The galaxy has been in a dark age from the power vacuum for centuries. But recently, The Indigo has cleared.
At the edge of their space has been a solarpunk pirate haven for free peoples called the Stormtossed Commune. It is an anarchist society of rebellious freed slaves and misfits built by principles of shared burdens and do it yourself spirit, living on a swamp world the rest of the galaxy turned their nose up at during the golden century. Now, with the Indigo cleared, fragments of the mandate, megacorporations, cults, and sophont trafficking criminals who eye their world with envy as it sits on a chokepoint into a newly lootable grave of the Isilfar full of tech lost from before the dark age.
Carry the Ember, Keep the Lantern Lit
Lantern Icon made by Octopocto from www.flaticon.com
Sword Icon made by IYIKON from www.flaticon.com
The idea is that every possible awful thing, short of the galaxy being destroyed, that could happen happened and while they were able to fight them off, it wore away galactic civilizations down to the point where they started collapsing and galactic society went into a dark age. The Galaxy is in a dark age and is just beginning to recover.
The protagonists are an egalitarian commune of escaped slaves who do piracy and salvage old stuff from the Galaxy's golden age. The antagonists are a bunch of colonizing corporations that traffic sophonts as slaves. A portion of the Galaxy once terrorized by a psionic demon has opened up and it's a race to claim relics of this past.
For this project, I am illustrating the world by buying and painting models. Here are some of the ones I have completed thusfar.
One such corporation is the Builders of Providence and these are some of the low level goons with lighter armor. These are the grunts of the Builders of Providence, they are a mixture of men and women, and a couple of them are non human. It is a mixture of eisenkern Stormtroopers and Eisenkern Panzerjäger. The alien heads came from the Stargrave Crew sprue. The elite ones are Valkir heavy troopers also from Wargames Atlantic.
Now in this case the grunts do not have the hazard stripes the valkir heavy troopers have. There might be a lore reason for this, but given that I am the lore, and I am writing this I decided while I was painting them that I hated painting hazard stripes on the valkir heavy troopers and I will save those for just the heavy armored ones.
David Zee was a legendary the rebel against Minamar Specialized Industries who turned pirate and turned revolutionary who founded the Stormtossed commune. She and her family were snatched up into space when she was a teenager and separated to pay off debts MSI imposed for completely unasked for services. Her homeworld, the Gaia planet of Cornucopia was former UNE/Mandate territory that lost space travel technology during the dark age. MSI claimed that a plague made the planet unfarmable and the population needed transportation to awaiting jobs. I reality MSI needed to clear the planet for experimental crops and the planetary defense was too scattered to repel the invasion as the culture had given up on space travel and turned inward.
She met Doubt while working in a factory building alloyed parts for MSI’s great work. Even at a young age she was showing potential as a revolutionary. She had smuggled Esperanto texts of historical records about the land of America and the dreams of people who went there and saw the statue of liberty from their ship but also its hypocrisy as some of the people who came to America came on a very different kind of ship, people whose skin and hair looked like hers. They had their cultures and history stripped from them, just like MSI had done to her. The statue which embodied liberty and lit its torch beside the golden door was built as a rejection of that slavery when slavery had been abolished even if they had a long way to go.
She read Esperanto translations of Marx and Kropotkin and Martin Luther King and others. There were no truly good nations and no great men who drove history but revolutionaries who snatched utopia from dystopia. And how one had to be on guard from it being stolen back as happened with the fall of the United States of America and later the fall of the UNE to the Mandate.
She was relentlessly curious and defiant even in the face of torture. While she and others were serving aboard an executive’s personal transport, She was brought to the quarters of an MSI executive. And during a cosmic storm she and doubt executed her plan. They hijacked the ship and used that ship to hijack other ships and formed the first pirate fleet of the Stormtossed. They liberated transports and departed to the distant border of the sector, up to the edge of the reality warping phenomenon known as the indigo. The rebels having gained skills building infrastructure across the cosmos set up camp on Breakwater. As the people were from many worlds they collectively resolved to build a beacon of liberty, like the English language poem of Emma Lazarus. ““Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!””
The first settlement was named Port Lazarus and eventually, they made contact with the local starbase and habitats, meeting with the Ratchet engineers and Salvagers union, merging to form the Stormtossed commune.
With the people coming together to form a democratic society David led by example rather than holding office and put her life on the line as a pirate with Doubt, slowly aiding in the liberation of others, one at a time, making operating as a slaver less profitable. She harvested the looted good of the mega corps for the people. Eventually she became old and her crew went out into the black and never came home.
Eventually she became old and her crew went out into the black and never came home.
David Zee occasionally appears in murals, not so much statues, statues are bourgeois. She doesn't necessarily just appear on murals on breakwater but appears on murals in gateway space by people who know her legend, usually unauthorized murals, and her legend is whispered among people in various kinds of bondage (chattel, debt, carceral, serfdom, company towns). She was the one who got out as a teen, robbed the corpos, she helped people. Maybe she is still out there and we can get out too. But the first thing Doubt teaches when he shows up to mentor them and give them the tools they need is not to wait for a savior. Minamar Specialized Industries paints over the images of the infamous, ungrateful deadbeat when they find her and admonish workers for celebrating a terrorist who robbed them, murdered an executive, and also never existed.
This particular character is the first speaker of an anarchist commune named Nightshade. Also they are a drummer in a punk rock band a starship engineer and a veterinary brain surgeon. There is a reason why they are a polymath. It's hard to see in the picture but I also painted the shoelaces purple since they are nonbinary. The model is a kitbash but the parts came from Wargames Atlantic. The sets were Pulp Adventure Civilians and Survivors women and the head came from Pulp Adventure Agents.
Augmented blue haired androgynous punk wearing aviator shdes. They are a polymath with an absurdly wide swath of skills who always seems to be volunteering everywhere in addition to their duties as elected governor of the Stormtossed Commune.
Their parents were scientists, and they grew up aboard the Ember, a science vessel. When she eight years old the ship surveyed an astral rift but opted not to plunge the rift sphere into the rift as it would have been too time consuming and risky.
Something happeend to Nightshade in particular that changed the course of their whole life and ensured that the child they were would not return.The ship detected, on the other side of the rift, other, almost but not quite identical copies of the science vessel. At first they thought these were reflections but the vessels were all subtly different.That night, Nightshade, and only Nightshade had a dream or a vision. In the dream, they were on one of these other vessels, living a life almost the same as their own. They had a different birth gender assignment and on impulse, that version of them stole the rift sphere and plunged into the rift, boarding Nightshade’s version. Other Nightshades did the same, swapping places with their otherselves. And Nightshade met their duplicates. Nightshade went on to grow up and live a good life. They became a rocker, started a band with their friends, went on tour in the trailing sector but always carried the values of the commune with them. Of the course of their life the conflict between the commune and the corpos of the gate way kept escalating, the corpos spread nonsense about the commune but Nightshade wasn’t interested in politics, their passion was music, they played the drums, Nightshade got old and while living in Port Lazarus, having started a family with Bax, their tomboyish childhood friend who shared the passion for music.
One day, the planet was bombed from orbit with biological weapons. Nightshade, then in their 50s took cover and watched as their family and friends were zip tied and dragged away. The local militia was no match for Harmonium security, and then they saw him, descending down he ramp of a landing vessel, a bearded man clad heavy armor, covered with skulls, gathered the militia and Nightshade’s family who refused to submit to mandatory employment. Barnstormer recognized Nightshade and Bax as members of Spinward Rhapsody. “Communists,” “loincloths” “I am happy to end you all.”Barnstormer chained all of them up in the hydroponics dome, burned Nightshade’s mother’s garden and plants. Chained everyone up, gave them collars of rubber tires, poured volatile internal combustion liquids on them and set them on fire. Barnstormer grinned as the burned.
And then Nightshade woke up in their bunk, and was once again 8 years old. The ship had just moved on from the Astral rift. They achieved adulthood once again. And once again, o death woke up in the same bunk. Sometimes small things would be different. Sometimes she reached puberty with menstruation and breast growth, and sometimes he rached puberty with erections and wet dreams. But binary gender also no longer fit them. They dedicated each life to getting really good at something but each time, it would be ended early. In loops where they survived the destruction of the commune, the biological weapons would kill potato, survivors would be sold on the market. And the historical record would be written to say that the expanding gateway community had finally cleared out an encampment of murderous squatters, allowing harmonium or who ever it was this time to claim their rightful forward base to exploit the frontier. They would describe it as a gain for a free market and thus a free people.
Nightshade has lived the same life hundreds of times, always seeking out the golden path that would allow a universe to exist where he family and community could be safe and free.
Nightshade in this loop is the governor.
This is Captain Bax
She starts off in charge as a mentor figure but the plan is for her to step aside and for the players to take over. Her name is Captain Bax (original character, please steal CC-BY-SA) though I do not actually own the model. I actually painted her a long time ago but I decided today to do a touch up.
The plan is to use these models as art in the setting guide that I was going to get the players.
The model is "Sascha Dubois" from Reaper Miniatures
Anyway this the main villain of the first adventure and possibly the campaign. His name is Barnstormer, a ruthless mercenary who has set up a cult on a desert world inspired by the bad guy from Apocalypse Now. My plan is to paint models and use the portraits of the painted models as art for the home brewed setting book.
The head was a 3D print I got off of Etsy. The armor was from Konflikt 47 Axis Stahltruppen. And then I glued a bunch of skulls to it from games workshop. Games workshop has a set that's just a bunch of skulls. It's just called skulls.
I have other models that are work in process, such as Doubt, the shapeshifter exiled from a gestalt consciousness. Nightshade, the current first speaker of the commune, an enby punk rock drummer with a curious wide spectrum of seemingly unrelated skills who is secretly trapped in a time loop repeating the same life hundreds of times with each loop ending with the destruction of the colony. They have recruited the players to prevent this. Saul Invictus Metzger, the late fascist dictator who converted the UNE to the Mandate and because of the collapse that he caused it led to the dark age in the first place.
(model is from Northstar Military Figures "pirates)
Upon the destruction of Earth from the unbidden, voices within the UNE navy, previously considered crackpots gained momentum and the most charismatic voice of all was Saul "Invictus" Metzger. The galactic community was in a panic as the most powerful empire lost their homeworld in a surprise attack by the Unbidden. Metzger was a demagogue, his voice and image elevated to the top of the polls in a years long election in the core systems, eventually he went from the first among equals to changing the entire government structure of the UNE, claiming a Mandate for the UNE to reorganize from being the galactic custodian to being the Galactic Emperor.
As the time of crisis wore on and Metzger became more unhinged, abusing Zro and listening to voices in the dark of the Eater of Worlds, the Isilfar Republic, previously a close ally with the Mandate rose up in rebellion. The Isilfar made a faustian bargain granting those that took the mark phenomenal power and defeated Saul's Juggernaut, the Schwarze Sonne in a black hole system, the final defeat of the emperor's fleet.
The Mandate experienced a political collapse with the destruction of its fleet and leader. It was then that the Isilfar's faustian bargain with the End of Cycles finally came due. Shortly after, the Aeon Preisthood of Tula complered their grand project, the cosmogenesis before the Reckoning could reach them.
These are but some of the models and stories I have been working on. In coming posts I will show off more models and more stories and work on my maps.
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