Blurb
Alicorn described it as Deep Space 9: Fantasy Edition. It's something like that! There's magic IN SPACE, as well as fantasy races and stuff. The setting was invented for a tabletop RPG campaign, so lots of the details were left purposefully vague to be filled in by the players and the GM as the game went on, and lots of other details were invented by the players at character creation so their characters would make sense. Maybe the best way to think of this setting then is sort of as a family of settings, Sunshine-style.
The Races
Each race is the sole sapient species on their planet. There was a lot of work on this, even though most of the game was supposed to be in space, involving multi-species organisations, after some colonisation has been going on, so most of these details don't really matter. One interesting thing is that all but one of the races are "biochemically compatible," i.e. breathe the same air, think in pretty much the same way, etc. They all also seem to have some religion or other that posits an absent Creator that left the seeds of their species and then disappeared.
- Humans: Garden-variety, nothing special. Discovered magical space travel at around their Renaissance-equivalent.
- Elves: Mostly genderless, very long-lived (like ~400 years), reproduce only very rarely, are very sexually free, descended more from deer-like herbivores. Never really got beyond a vaguely medieval society, and then space travel.
- Orcs: Descended from rhino-like herbivores, have a very strongly gendered society where the females used to be the intellectuals. There are no good ways to translate their society to a human's. Males have started becoming more intellectual after space travel.
- Dwarves: Descended from mole-like creatures, bald all over, very blind without magic, but use Perception magic in very unvisionlike ways.
- Sirens: At the start of the campaign they were a race that had just been discovered. They possess natural magic that causes aggression to lower and causes people to want to befriend everyone else.
- Mindflayers: The non-biochemically-compatible species, their physical form is jellyfish-like, but floating, and they perceive the world in a very different way. They're not exactly individuals but not exactly a hivemind either. They exchange information by merging and then separating, basically becoming clones of a union of the previous individuals to be merged. They have a low-level collective consciousness that they can access, though. Their system is a binary system and is stuck in a Perception barrier that makes the inside undetectable from the outside and vice-versa, no one knows where it comes from.
Every skill has a magical component. The more you practice a given skill, the stronger the magic you can do related to it. For example, someone who spends their life farming will have skills like making their crops healthier or making it thrive in otherwise uncooperative soil. Drawback: magic actively resist multi-wielding, so the more magic you know, the harder it is to learn new magic; you forget new knowledge more easily, it takes more practice to do things, etc. Magic usually expands its user's senses in the relevant areas. There are examples of it being used in the threads mentioned above. Some types of magic we worked out are:
- Gravity: Folding and stretching space in order to affect/create gravitational fields. Typically space folded and stretched by active use of gravity magic smooths over back to its original shape fairly quickly, though consistent folding can leave wrinkles.
- Elements: Control of the four elements, plus senses related to them. ATLA-level control requires many years of study, though. Isra's airist skills are a good show of this.
- Perception: Magic related to light and sound and any other kind of reception of information.
- Projection: Similar to Perception, but related to the transmission of information
- Space: Awareness of space itself, ability to move in it, ability to teleport. In the above continuity, no one has yet discovered this as a separate thing from gravity.
- Metamagic: Magic related to magic. Can be theoretical or practical, and involves doing things to magic without necessarily knowing much about magic itself. Magic doesn't like being used this way, though, so it's a very difficult field.
- Life: This kind of magic is related to biology, picked up by people who work with living things, such as farmers, doctors, biologists, etc.
- Time: Time-travel is impossible as of right now, but prophecy isn't, though very very rare and typically limited to cultural magic and very vague stuff.
- Empathy: Magic related to detecting emotional states of other people. When well-developed, tends to give people very good intuition.
- Influence: Magic related to affecting both other people's and one's own emotional state, or its appearance otherwise. Branches between active and passive: affecting others and resisting being affected.
Magic has infinite potential speed, but its actual speed depends on the skill of whoever's using it, as well as other factors such as cooperation and the difficulty of the task at hand. When using magic, there is a tradeoff between breadth and depth: the more detailed the use, the less it encompasses, and vice-versa.
The Universe
The physics of this universe is Newtonian, kinda. There's no hard limit for the speed of light, you can just go arbitrarily faster without running into any relativistic troubles. Physics and magic aren't exactly separate things, both run on each other. The magic creates fantastic landscapes and otherwise impossible things, not all terribly friendly.
Society
There are two major players:
- The Interplanetary Federation: The governmental organisation built up from the governments of the societies that first developed space travel in their respective planets. They're a pretty hands-off government, their function is mostly collecting taxes to maintain communication and travel (and to not shoot you down if you travel within its borders).
- The Trade Guild: A smaller and decentralised organisation focused on securing trade between systems. Is at times a thorn in the Federation's side and its lap dog, but has an air of legitimacy that the Federation lacks.
Here's a list of some of the terms that appear a lot.
- Prop: Short for Propulsor, someone who works on a spaceship and uses gravity magic to move it around, folding and stretching space to do that. Given that to be sensibly good at gravity magic you need to specialise much more than at other more intuitive kinds, most Props are actually not that good, and it's only as a group that they manage to properly lift and push a ship.
- Nav: Short for Navigator, someone who uses Perception magic to map out the course and detect the best paths and routes between stops. They work in tandem with the Props for the ship to go where it needs to go. Due to the lack of a hard speed limit for magic, theoretically a Nav working for long enough could map out arbitrary expanses of space.
- Link: The simultaneous use of Perception and Projection magic to talk telepathically with someone. The complexity of the information sent depends on the combined skill all of its members have on this sort of magic; the maximum distance between targets for a Link to be created depends on the initiator; and the maximum distance between members of an already existing Link also depends on the combined skill of all members.
- Focus: Someone who specialises in both Perception and Projection magic to create Links between the various members of a crew. They're responsible for the sharing of information and skill between Navs and Props, for sending announcements to everyone, and for assorted communication between people on the ship.
- Elementalist: Airist, earthist, etc are people who are very good at elemental magic of a given type, with skills usually near ATLA benders in level and flexibility.
- Suit: Everyone in a TG ship that's not part of the crew. Typically someone who actually performs the trading for the Trade Guild, more white collar, uses knowledge and/or skills to build rapports and secure transactions, as well as serving the interests of other parties.
- Several people choose to work temporarily as Props or Navs in a TG ship in order to explore the galaxy and see new things.
