This is a SF setting for an Alien First Contact role-playing game for the Multiverser alt-dimensional game. It is of the sub-genre where the aliens met are better than the Humans, although not hugely so. The point of this sub-genre is generally the depiction of the Other who is of a superior morality and culture to the current Human. So it is a deliberate attempt at sociological commentary. This has a long and honorable tradition in writings of philosophy and in science fiction, but it can be easily used for propaganda as the key point is to make the aliens close enough like the humans that the humans think they could be like that if they just followed the moral prescriptions of the author. Sometimes such is possible, but frequently its a bit of impossibility and implausibility wrapped up in a nice package.

I’ve somewhat turned this on its head. I took on the task, when challenged, of creating a world whose premises I disagreed with. This was an attempt to enlighten me, but unfortunately that failed as I already knew a great deal about those I disagree with already. I’m THAT annoying person, the one who understands the other’s side very well, and still disagrees.

I shall first describe the setting, and then attempt to explain how and why it was built. This should enable you to do a similar task of creating worlds you disagree with deeply (after all, in Multiverser, all stories, including the ones we despise, are true somewhere.) It should also help you know how to isolate some premises you agree with, turn them into metaphors, help them grow up with lots of feedings of logic, and extrapolation, and imagination, and then one day you’ll have a frisky little world ready to leave its cage, and go run in the wild on its own.

Eden’s Planet
By Eric R. Ashley

The Near-Earth Confederation, a twenty billion strong grouping that represents 99.99% of Humanity which is spread from Earth to Orbitia (Earth orbit) to Luna to the Lagrange Points and has far-flung bases on Mars and in orbit of the steaming Venus grew from the United Nations, but the fault lines represented by national and racial groupings and seen in ancient paranoias still live on in the Starship Overtherainbow.

FTL or Faster-than-light drive is possible after the Marchand-duMaurier experiments financed by the European Union built the largest super-collider, a beast well over two hundred miles long and the sheer size of this lovely machine enabled experiments to be done at even higher temperatures. At the highest temperatures, it enabled the construction of miniature universerses with their own Big Bang. Another ten years of government financed research as no corporation could begin to afford the huge sums invested led to the creation of manipulable universes and gaining energy from the deliberate collapse of unsuitable universes.

If done properly, one created a universe with a huge surge of energy, and then collapsed it yielding more than ten percent more energy after all inefficiencies were dealt with than one started with. Repeat this process seven times and you had twice the energy you started with.

Energy worries on earth which had been becoming acute due to Peak Oil were alleviated. Also, this vast new energy source with no theoretical limits that were understood short of melting the batteries made interstellar travel possible.

One ramped up a Verser Engine by creating and destroying mini-bubble universes until enough power was stored, and then one precise bubble was created, and allowed to expand to cover the ship. Inside that bubble, detached from the regular universe, the constants that ruled reality could be very different. The key alteration was lightspeed was able to be pushed, when the universe was created, up to a hundred times faster than lightspeed in our universe.

Add in inertial constants being cut by nine-tenths and the truly vast amount of power that a Verser Engine could produce…and the starship would soon be under way at 1.1 Terran gravities Apparent, or twenty Terran gravities back in the base universe. At this tremendous acceleration it did not take very long before the starship was past the speed of light and heading still upwards.

Gamemaster’s Note: A normal spaceship accelerating at one g would reach the light barrier, if it could, in just under one year. Since this craft is going twenty times as fast….365/20=18.25. So lets round that down to ‘every eighteen days, the spaceship attains one c.’. In the span of a year, it would reach twenty c, and get a lot further than twenty lightyears. Of course, one factor is that you have to flip over at midpoint and slow down. So measure your duration to midpoint, and then double it to find the true trip duration.

The giant curved dart of Overtherainbow is a hundred fifty yards long of which forty yards is the engine compartment and engine. The diameter is forty yards at its widest point which is a hundred yards up from the tail.

Permanent Crew is twenty-five, but everyone else has a job as well (as much to keep people occupied and out of trouble as anything else.) The total number on the starship is seventy-five which works out to twenty-five on duty, twenty-five relaxing or working on private projects, and twenty-five sleeping in any eight hour duty slot in the twenty-four hour cycle kept on the starship.

Fifteen of the non-permanent crew are military. This is generally opposed by the scientists who feel that the miliarization of space led to some tragedies in the last century which could have been resolved peacefully. Also, the last minute loss of a number of gifted scientists and research assistants has damaged the probable success of the Mission.

The Mission: Undecipherable radio transmissions have been coming from Tau Sugular, a white dwarf twenty-four lightyears away. Overtherainbow, captained by the distinguished Mark Eden, is on its way to investigate and make First Contact.