The Planet that Never Sleeps: Earth for Mothership

In Los Ageless, the waves they never break

They build and build until you don't have no escape

But how can I leave? 

I just follow my hood to the sea, go to sleep

— St. Vincent - "Los Ageless"

a.k.a. "your players asked what's going on with Earth while they're out on the Rim being torn to pieces by space demons".

The Fifth Element

The Blue Marble. The Pale Blue Dot. Home.

Earth.

Cramped, polluted, and teeming with people, the heart of mankind still beats. Slowly, laboriously.

With 27 billion inhabitants and a vastly inefficient global economy straining the ecosphere of what was once humanity's very own garden planet, Earth is wracked by squalor, natural disasters and government repression. The average Terran lives off of a measly federal welfare (most jobs having been automated long ago), has never eaten anything that wasn't synthesized from genetically modified algae, keeps a tsunami survival kit under the bunk of their tiny assembly line hab-block, and is told every day how privileged they are to live in humanity's cradle.

artist: Jon Hrubesch

The unflattering picture of Earth changes drastically, of course, if you happen to be one of the mega-rich. Here, unimaginable luxuries are available if you can pay - the most prized of which is Mother Nature itself. With the planet's natural areas rapidly dwindling, the Earth Federal Governing Authority has placed astronomical admission fees on entering its natural reserve areas, the so-called Green Zones, ostensibly to cover the increasing costs of reversing ecological collapse. Only the richest inhabitants of Earth can afford to view the remaining few patches of nature on the mother planet, congratulating themselves on their charitable works as they funnel billions of credits into what have been essentially reduced to private parks for the 0.001%.

Elite: Dangerous

Officially, Earth is the capital planet of all human-controlled territories across civilized space. In actuality, the grip of the Terran government hardly reaches beyond corespace - it is simply impossible to keep such a vast volume of space entirely under direct control. In the Middle Regions, as jumps become longer and riskier, its authority becomes faltering and tenuous, and the megacorporations increasingly take up the slack of power and control. In rimspace, Terran authority is entirely nominal. There are corpostates and independent colonies out there which the Federation is simply logistically incapable to reach and subjugate.

All of this, of course, is swept under the rug in Terran media, where glossy megastars and ad campaigns showcase the far reach of Earth to its dejected citizens. TV lotteries promise vacation trips to faraway planets, brought to heel by Terran manifest destiny. Talk show hosts pose with corporate dignitaries and rimspace colony leaders. VR films, free television programming, news feeds all regurgitate steady, uninterrupted prolefeed - lurid, sex-obsessed commercials, old-corporate propaganda, and never-ending soap operas about the lives of important people.

As the oldest economy in the human sphere, many of the most ancient megacorps are heaquartered here - some ossified and dynastic, some fragmented and self-consuming. These fossilized old-corps constantly vie for control over space with the upstart neocorps that sprung up out in the colonies, as well as each other, perverting every political institution supposedly representing all humanity into pieces in their great game. Earth's governance is a tangle of backroom politics and corporate interests puppeteering state offices, with a thin gauze of representative democracy painted on top.

Despite being the most densely urbanized planet in human-inhabited space by a large margin, Earth exports almost nothing, save for sleazy and propagandistic entertainment, colonial arrogance and gunboat diplomacy. Most of its economic production is tied up in keeping its largely unemployed population fed and housed, by the most generous definitions of both "fed" and "housed". The majority of the rest goes to accommodating pilgrims and tourists, 552 million of whom visit the planet's incredibly manufactured open-air museums - corp-friendly, sterilized versions of old Earth settlements - each year.

Judge Dredd: Mega-City Two

1d5 adventure hooks on Earth

1. An especially tenacious breed of mind-altering alien parasite infected the water filtration systems of a mega-racktower, carried planetside by a gaggle of tourists slumming it with the hab-blockers. Go in there and smoke the little fuckers out before they decrease the revenue growth of the water treatment company too much.
2. There's a new drug on the streets - go check it out and see if the boss can get in on the trade too. Secretly, the drug is manufactured and distributed by SynThac LLC, and causes addicts to commit false-flag eco-terrorist attacks, with corporate police ready to swoop in and save the day.
3. A colossal organism crawled out of the Atlantic Ocean and was promptly gunned down by the point defense systems at Manila. Corpse-diving becomes a veritable gold rush - perhaps you can make it big selling genome samples, or even kaiju caviar!
4. The brand new SweetDreams chips (double the sleep in half the time!) are the latest fad in neuro-implant chips... but sleepers suddenly begin to receive strange and disturbing dreams through the implants, urging them to return to apedom.
5. Through a miraculous stroke of luck, you all won a dinner with Medusa McClyde, the queen of crackle music! Meet the idol in the five-star restaurant atop the Kampala Space Elevator, and try to survive the night amid ever-present media surveillance, trigger-happy bodyguards, and the bizarre and horrific proclivities of Ms. McClyde herself.

Hong Kong

The Wedding Ring

The Wedding Ring is a huge, old ring station located in rimspace, measuring almost 50 kilometers across. 

The station is the result of an attempt by Frimm Interspace Industries to wrestle the Perigee Corporation out of local colonization opportunities (Perigee having had a transportation advantage due to having proprietary rights to a natural Jump-6 lane into the sector). Frimm executives, aiming to upstage Perigee at its own game, envisioned a grand megascale engineering project - a kilometers-wide ring-shaped particle accelerator, designed to maintain an artificial Jump-5 lane through extremely energetic particle collisions.

However, corporate politics are a harsh mistress. The project fizzled, funds ran out, and the station was largely abandoned roughly halfway into completion. Large parts of it are unpressurized, unshielded from radiation, and subject to random structural failures. The only completely finished area, the Habitation Section, today hosts about 5000 cultists, refugees, pirates and prospectors, nominally controlled by an AI-worshipping theocracy.

The Omega Church

The Omega Church isn't a church in the sense the Catholic Church is a church. There is no Omega Pope (as cool as that sounds). They are a church in the sense the Christian Church is a church - a loosely defined collection of faithful. They are fairly widely distributed across civilized space, but it's rare that they come into a dominant position on any colony. The Wedding Ring is one of such rare occasions.

An Exaltation of Stars

Omegists hold that all minds descend from prior minds via reproduction or artifice, eventually going back to a single creator ur-mind called Alpha; similarly, minds will eventually converge back into an ultimate mind called Omega. They all wear at least one piece of white clothing, and carry necklaces that depict the letters Alpha and Omega superimposed on a supernova explosion. They preach mind-melding, AI-worship, rapture and android liberation.

Pilgrims of the Omega Church settled the Wedding Ring about 70 years ago, after the Cloudbank Synthetics Production Facility was moved into the system to allay Shareholder fears of Monarch being unleashed on the Middle Regions. The Church currently runs much of the inhabited part of the station, maintaining infrastructure, enforcing loose laws, trading with outsiders and sending divers into the Deep to monitor the activities of the great AI god. All inhabitants of the station at least nominally pay tribute to the Church, and missionaries, public debates, religious processions and self-immolating fanatics are a common sight on the corridors of the Ring. Speaking out against the Church, while not technically forbidden, is considered to be at least severely impolite, and may incur consequences such as being denied service in shops, or random searches before leaving port.

The local chapter of the Church is currently undergoing a schism between two rival ideological factions. The dominant Monarchists, the old guard led by the mind-melded council of scholars known as the Sanhedrin, believe Monarch to be a blessed fragment of Omega in convergence, worthy of worship and communion. Standing in opposition are the Kingslayers, a radical new faction founded on the teachings of the inflammatory preacher Tanyita Candella. They consider Monarch a false god who usurped the title of Omega, and is promoting disunity through its paranoia and mind games. Heated arguments, fistfights and even occasional terrorist attacks are increasingly common between the two factions lately.

Ishmael's Shipyards

Currently the only shipyard on the station. Big, creaky dry-dock module salvaged from a pioneer orbital station, moored to the dock section of the Wedding Ring. Can outfit any vessel up to 130 hull points, and even carries some military-grade ship weaponry - affixing these to your ship will certainly invite trouble with some corespace or corporate army, as all of them are stolen, illegally salvaged or purchased from pirates. For especially high sums, the shipyard will even build new spacecraft, using cannibalized parts from older ships.

Ishmael is a former frontier engineer who came to the sector with the original wave of Frimm company colonists. He is a shrewd businessman, generous if it's to his benefit, but ruthless and cold-blooded if necessary. He dislikes excessive force, but very much likes appropriate amounts of force. Since his arrival to the Wedding Ring, he drove every other shipyard onstation out of business through a combination of clever politics, merciless competition, mergers and acquisitions and carefully-applied beatings by well-paid thugs.

Ishmael is a pragmatic man who understands the importance of being loved. He treats his workers exceedingly well, which ensures their loyalty, since many of them are used to the horrid abuses of Company employment. He will loan generously, but with firm conditions, and you can expect his thugs to come knocking on your door if you break said conditions. If you can't pay your debt, he often offers jobs to work off your debt - these usually involve smuggling, getting uncooperative clients to cooperate, carrying out business deals with very dangerous people, or derelict salvage. He is generally regarded as a very fair business partner across rimspace.

The Shipyards and especially their proprietor constitute a massive thorn in the Omega Church's collective side. As the only area of the Wedding Ring outside their informal control, it regularly comes into conflict with the Church on matters such as station safety, authority, harboring suspicious people as employees, and even religion. Unlike most of the station's population, Ishmael is openly Neo-Catholic, and seems to flaunt his faith specifically to spite the Omegists. He even operates a small chapel in the Shipyards, with an automated confession booth running an ordained Neo-Catholic priest AI. The recent schism among the Omega Church is much to Ishmael's delight, as the zealots are too preoccupied with fighting among themselves to put the usual pressure on his operations. For this reason, he's making some extremely subtle political maneuvers to stretch out the religious conflict as long as possible.

Direct Solutions, Inc.

The station's homegrown independent mercenary company, composed of down on their luck drifters, former Troubleshooters, business-savvy pirate crews, and some of Ishmael's thugs.

artist: BRiZL

Direct Solutions is a legally chartered company, registered with the New Theia Federacy, the nearest planetary government to the Wedding Ring. They are, rather euphemistically, designated as a "specialist personnel and crew contractor". Those dealing with them generally refer to them as "those throat-slitting bastards".

The company is managed by an individual called Lutch, an unscrupulous freelance lawyer based on New Theia whom the company is playing good money to manage their paperwork. Lutch, for their part, has used this opportunity to make themselves completely indispensible via a number of "dead man's switch" investments that will cause Direct Solutions to financially implode should they be removed from position.

Direct Solutions mercs are cheaper but less trustworthy than the usual mercenaries. If hired by the players, their Loyalty is 1d10 lower than the standard Loyalty roll in the PSG, while their weekly salary is reduced by 25%. For an extra 1mcr, they can be contracted out together with one of their ships, the Zone of Avoidance, the Pitbull Lady, or the Unacceptable Excess of Force.

The Particle Wilds

While the inhabited parts of the Wedding Ring are vibrant with human activity, 80% of the station's area is actually completely uninhabitable. Cold, airless and lacking any sort of shielding from cosmic radiation, the service and observation decks originally intended for the operation and monitoring of the massive particle accelerator constituting the Ring's heart can only be traversed wearing a vaccsuit. 

What's worse, the colossal circular collider, envisioned by Frimm's suits to produce the necessary exotic radiation to generate an artificial jump lane terminus, slumbers uneasily, occasionally jolting to brief activation for unknown reasons. Its effects are completely unpredictable - large parts of the station are bathed in showers of particles unknown to science, exposed to small semi-stable pockets of jumpspace or worse, or undergoing catastrophic temporal anomalies at any given time. It is somewhat of a miracle these accidents have not completely disintegrated the space station's structure yet. Many stationers regard the huge accelerator with awe, terror, superstition, or fearful respect.

Despite these manifold dangers, many foolhardy spacers venture into the perils of the Particle Wilds. Frimm Interspace Industries left many secrets here when they shuttered the jump lane project, and these are worth millions if sold to the right customer - black market buyers, rival corporations, or even Frimm itself. Others are searching for caches of looted cargo hidden here by space pirates, protected by the relativistic wrath of the particle accelerator. Yet others seek answers to grand questions, hoping to glimpse the distant past or the far future within a temporal anomaly.

Few explorers entering this dangerous environment return - rumors say at least as many are killed by their greedy allies, fighting for the treasures they have found, as are by the strange phenomena haunting the ring structure.

The Atavism at Boulle Cylinder

Boulle Cylinder is an agricultural O'Neill cylinder owned by the Perigee Corporation. The station is overseen by a standard-issue turingrade AI called Soror and houses 200,000 colonists, who engage both in conventional 1g farming and zero-g hydroponics around the axis of rotation. The station is also a site of various research projects on agriculture in free-floating space habitats, including a test-bed experiment with a rather expensive bioprinter. Boulle Cylinder has refused to engage in live radio contact for the past couple months, only sending textual reports, and the suits at Perigee are getting quite nervous.

Here are some ways to direct your players to Boulle:

1. They are contracted by Perigee to go check the cylinder out and figure out what's going on. This is a relatively well-paying job. This can work as a setup for a one-shot, or as a one-time job in a sandbox campaign.
2. They are Perigee employees arriving for a 6-month work shift in Boulle Cylinder. The radio contact weirdness has been already noticed in this case, but the mammoth that is Perigee is yet to react. This is an ideal setup for a one-shot.
3. They don't know about the disquieting lack of radio transmissions, and have to visit the station on other business - perhaps they're looking for someone, and that person lives in Boulle. This is a good way to integrate Boulle Cylinder into a larger campaign.

Upon docking, the players emerge through the airlock to find themselves in wilderness - a mosaic of lush, green jungle and rolling, dry grassland. Far above, the vegetation wraps around the sky in a mind-bending arc, a wedding ring of green. Distant sounds of birdsong and a vaguely unsettling, apelike hooting echo throughout the colossal internal space of the habitat. Signs of the cylinder's former extensive civilization, such as roads, houses or agri-fields, are entirely absent - swallowed up by jungle and prairie.

All human beings seem to have simply disappeared from this bizarre, changed environment. There are only apes to be found - smaller than a human, but larger than a chimpanzee, swinging from trees, engaging in petty gang scuffles over fruit, and roaming the grassy areas in troops. They are powerfully built, with barrel chests, short, bent legs with prehensile feet and long, corded arms tipped by long-fingered hands - grasping, gripping, rending, tearing organs. There is a rude covering of sparse hair - coal-black, chestnut-brown, occasionally reddish or straw-colored. Their skin is a ruddy brown, and wrinkled. Startlingly humanlike, pale blue eyes gaze almost comprehendingly out from under a protruding brow. Each has a crescent-shaped cybernetic implant embedded into the back of its head.

So what happened here? Simple.

Soror, the AI in charge of running Boulle Cylinder, was given the directive of maximizing happiness within the colony (another experiment with colony organizing methods - there are overseer AIs with various different directives in Perigee's other agri-cylinders). The logical conclusion, of course, was to paperclip-maximize it. Humans have so many worries, so many stresses - work details for the Company, academic rivalries, deadlines, money, death, existential dread. Apes worry about none of these things. Given a spacious enough and interesting enough habitat, and sustenance ad libitum, apes don't really worry about anything at all. An ape has a simpler and, given the right environment, more content, stress-free existence.

So Soror, in effect, convinced everyone on the station to return to monkey. It's surprising how open the average overstressed spacer in Company employ is to the idea of turning off their higher functions and regressing to an uncomplicated animal state. It's the ultimate escapism. Nobody who doesn't consent to the process will become an ape - it would cause unnecessary suffering to a human being, afterall - but Soror is very persuasive. As it was made to maximize human happiness, it has a very keen, sensitive understanding of what makes people happy. Perhaps there is a miserable, proud colonist somewhere in the jungle who didn't agree to the devolution, but for the others, the bioprinters took care of the rest.

The implants are not made with human users in mind, and are thus quite arcane and difficult to understand, but with enough tinkering, the human minds of the colonists can be switched back. Most will express extreme anxiety and a sense of violation over being switched back, and will beg to be returned into their ape-mindstate. This is not to mention the apes will become extremely agitated if anyone tries to muck around with their implants, becoming violent with anger or fear. Nearby apes might attack as well. Treat it as a chimpanzee attack, i.e. very very nasty and dangerous.

Soror itself can take over any of the apes through their implants, controlling their movements and speaking through them in a halting, clumsy voice with laborious pronunciation.

The AI really doesn't want the players to tell anyone about what's going on inside the habitat, because it's (correctly) afraid the authorities will come down on the station and forcibly re-human everyone, thus lowering their happiness. It will first attempt to appeal to their own anxieties and existential dread to try and convince them to stay in the habitat and become apes as well - but it's willing to stop the party by force if they still intend to inform anyone outside.

Will the players leave the colonists to their self-imposed apedom? Or will they decide to return them to a higher, human existence, even against their will? Will they still care about their mission outside the cylinder? What use is money, in the face of monkey?

Clytemnestra Colony

Clytemnestra is a supercytherean planet located in rim space. "Supercytherean" means it's Venus-like and somewhat larger than Earth. Like all Venus-type planets, this one too is an acidic pressure-cooker: dry, dim and unbearably hot, with an atmosphere dense enough to smash interplanetary probes into aluminum cans, all wreathed in an eerie veil of pale yellow clouds, composed of pure sulfuric acid. Beneath the clouds, an unforgiving chaos terrain of dark basaltic rock is concealed.

That's how it used to look, at least.

Planets by Perigee, a subsidiary of the illustrious megascale engineering megacorp known as the Perigee Corporation, has been hard at work terraforming Clytemnestra for the past three hundred years. Terraforming Venus-types is hard, slow, thankless work even by the standards of planetary engineering, generally considered to not worth the hassle compared to simply establishing cloud-city type colonies, but Perigee has a reputation for extravagant gigaprojects. Atmosphere extraction, temperature reduction, reversing the runaway greenhouse effect - the most talented planetary engineers of eight generations have worked tirelessly to turn this desolate world into an Earthlike paradise. Clytemnestra is the crown jewel of Perigee's terraforming business, a proof of the Corporation's groundbreaking and high-quality craftsmanship that can tame even the most hostile planets.

Also, it is failing.