My main purpose as a publisher and member of the esteemed creative community is to illicit creative reactions from my material. In other words, I hope to inspire people to discover and create their own stories, some of which may go on to impact society as a whole. This impact might even engender an invention or provide insight into a potential future avenue that humanity may traverse. To this aim, I don’t desire any credit, I merely wish to progress society in a way I feel is fun and harmless.
If my motive is to create inspiration and incite others to experience or create something new, the “universe” of OMEN should be indelibly recognizable; easy to visualize and empathize with; even easier to imagine that it could in fact one day become reality. Therefore, I decided to use Earth, Sol, and the surrounding stellar systems to serve as the milieu of OMEN. This would make it easily recognizable, and grounded in enough fact to remain potentially a piece of foresight from fiction.
This would serve as a traditionally smaller scope for a science fiction universe, but I found that an advantage rather than a detriment. It would allow all of the laws of physics and space travel that we know to remain intact, with only the slightest hand-wavery. I personally believe that faster than light travel is impossible (despite some intriguing theories) and therefore posited the question of how fast a highly advanced ship would be able to travel without the use of warp drives, portals, or wormholes. This encouraged incorporating relativistic speeds and differences in the universe itself, which eventually began to coalesce into how such an environment would behave. How would humanity and other sentient species spread across space?
It would be very comparable to the colonization and exploration of Earth hundreds of years ago. Travel was dangerous, extremely time-consuming, and typically one-way. I felt that describing space travel and exploration in this vein would be not only physically consistent with reality, but it would appeal to those looking to create personal and interesting stories. It would be tremendously costly and difficult to have system-spanning organizations, and so colonies would be formed as understood representatives of the species, given charters to go and spread and alleviate the population burden of terrestrial people.
Controlling the distances between the systems would be essential to the survival of the species and the long term control of resources. In order to control space, large fleets of ships would be built, supported by thousands of reconnaissance drones and satellites to track incoming enemy vessels. These fleets would need support bases for resupply and rearmament, therefore individuals would need to inhabit these large stations in order to man and operate the facilities. They would in essence be cities and forward operating bases that would allow more permanent control of space. This continued development of space eventually evolved into the concept of the Cosmo Grid: a network of thousands of stations built in all directions from the different systems toward the empty zone, called “The Void”, in the center of the star cluster.
If my motive is to create inspiration and incite others to experience or create something new, the “universe” of OMEN should be indelibly recognizable; easy to visualize and empathize with; even easier to imagine that it could in fact one day become reality. Therefore, I decided to use Earth, Sol, and the surrounding stellar systems to serve as the milieu of OMEN. This would make it easily recognizable, and grounded in enough fact to remain potentially a piece of foresight from fiction.
This would serve as a traditionally smaller scope for a science fiction universe, but I found that an advantage rather than a detriment. It would allow all of the laws of physics and space travel that we know to remain intact, with only the slightest hand-wavery. I personally believe that faster than light travel is impossible (despite some intriguing theories) and therefore posited the question of how fast a highly advanced ship would be able to travel without the use of warp drives, portals, or wormholes. This encouraged incorporating relativistic speeds and differences in the universe itself, which eventually began to coalesce into how such an environment would behave. How would humanity and other sentient species spread across space?
It would be very comparable to the colonization and exploration of Earth hundreds of years ago. Travel was dangerous, extremely time-consuming, and typically one-way. I felt that describing space travel and exploration in this vein would be not only physically consistent with reality, but it would appeal to those looking to create personal and interesting stories. It would be tremendously costly and difficult to have system-spanning organizations, and so colonies would be formed as understood representatives of the species, given charters to go and spread and alleviate the population burden of terrestrial people.
Controlling the distances between the systems would be essential to the survival of the species and the long term control of resources. In order to control space, large fleets of ships would be built, supported by thousands of reconnaissance drones and satellites to track incoming enemy vessels. These fleets would need support bases for resupply and rearmament, therefore individuals would need to inhabit these large stations in order to man and operate the facilities. They would in essence be cities and forward operating bases that would allow more permanent control of space. This continued development of space eventually evolved into the concept of the Cosmo Grid: a network of thousands of stations built in all directions from the different systems toward the empty zone, called “The Void”, in the center of the star cluster.
After the exorbitantly expensive Cosmo Grid was built and maintained for centuries, the struggle for resources would eventually be too much for the home systems, and thus the reaction would be to pull back all of the necessary forces back home, literally abandoning those at the stations out in forward positions. Billions of people would be cut off from their supply lines, and would need to cannibalize all of the old vehicles and mechanisms of war. These orphans would resort to aggressive conquering of nearby stations, and power struggles even within a single station would become predominant. Thousands of fractured clans would evolve independently from the homeworlds from which they came.
After five generations, the mixture of different species amongst each station would create a new melting pot of culture. A culture oriented around survival and cooperation, but also harsh violence and immediate brutality. This would create an environment for GMs and players to play within literally limitless setting options, as there would be thousands of stations and ships, seven systems with homeworlds, and dozens of lunar or terrestrial colonies to occupy.
I wanted the tone of OMEN to be one of loss tempered by hope; one of a past golden era; one with strong and resilient people willing to do whatever necessary to survive; I wanted to demonstrate the infinite endurance and courage and willpower of humanity and its evolutionary companions. I felt that this dichotomy between the stations, with their rough and pragmatic people, and the whimsy of the past gargantuan empires would create a rich and diverse world to play within. I wanted the universe to be organic and constantly changing, and I felt that this design helped accomplish this goal.
The lack of faster than light travel would also help generate a tone that I felt was essential to the success of OMEN as a role-playing game. I wanted one of the core themes to build upon personal relationships. The connection between a player and his character was very important, and the notion that a character could not simply escape to a far away safe place, and was for the most part typically in danger, would elevate that amount of dedication to the character and the storyline. I wanted to make OMEN more personable and intimate. I wanted characters to be on an individual relationship level. I didn’t want the emotional connections of characters to be obfuscated by galaxy-spanning problems; I wanted the problems of a family or a group of friends to really matter to the players. The local communities built within the ships and the stations out on the Grid, supported only by one another, would generate those relationships that I felt were so endemic to the universe.
Due to the primary focus of the setting to be upon the Grid, with its mixture of cultures and species and histories, I had to develop those foundational and fundamental cultures and histories. I wanted a good amount of species, and I delved heavily into astronomy to learn all I could about the nearest star systems to Sol, some of which are only a couple of lightyears away, and how sentient creatures could have evolved in those systems beneath the warmth of those stars.
I decided that despite many modern astrobiologists proclamations that any alien discovered would be so entirely, well, alien, that we could not even discern any reasonable similarities with it and ourselves, I wanted aliens to be easily empathized with. I wanted them to be immediately recognizable as sentient creatures, not blobs of goo or wisps of energy. I studied the concepts of parallel evolution; the idea that many creatures assemble similarly from base organisms that may have differed based on their environment. Since I wanted all of the different planets to be relatively similar to Earth, I could deduce by this logic that aliens could also have evolved from similar base organisms that humans did.
Now, part of the fun (or the majority, for some people) of a science fiction universe is the aliens. I wanted to placate those people, and also develop reasonable and complex cultures and societies that people would have a genuine interest in. I wanted to stay away from human analogues with a twist, like adding blue skin or pointy ears or a wrinkly thing on their forehead, and instead wanted to create a creature that could walk and talk and eat and maintain an intelligent conversation with a human, but remain different enough to where they could rarely if ever be confused for one another.
I originally settled on the number of the species for a strictly mechanical reason, as the amount of core attributes in the first version of the system was the standard d20 six, and I wanted each race to sort of “specialize” in an attribute. But more importantly, seven total species (six aliens and humans), was a nice sounding number, and there just so happened to be about thirty-five star systems all within a handful of lightyears away from Sol, meaning that it was reasonable to suspect that every five systems or so could support life within a given area. This sounded perfectly plausible to me, and I didn’t think too much more on it. The culture for each species began to grow outward from the basic assumption of which attribute they were most focused upon; the reasonable and intelligent Kraezoch, the tough and stubborn Burshdett, and so on.
I will dedicate another post to discussing the brief development history of each of the seven species in their current form, as this one borders on being dangerously verbose as it is. Thanks for sticking through it with me, any and all questions or comments are appreciated.
I wanted the tone of OMEN to be one of loss tempered by hope; one of a past golden era; one with strong and resilient people willing to do whatever necessary to survive; I wanted to demonstrate the infinite endurance and courage and willpower of humanity and its evolutionary companions. I felt that this dichotomy between the stations, with their rough and pragmatic people, and the whimsy of the past gargantuan empires would create a rich and diverse world to play within. I wanted the universe to be organic and constantly changing, and I felt that this design helped accomplish this goal.
The lack of faster than light travel would also help generate a tone that I felt was essential to the success of OMEN as a role-playing game. I wanted one of the core themes to build upon personal relationships. The connection between a player and his character was very important, and the notion that a character could not simply escape to a far away safe place, and was for the most part typically in danger, would elevate that amount of dedication to the character and the storyline. I wanted to make OMEN more personable and intimate. I wanted characters to be on an individual relationship level. I didn’t want the emotional connections of characters to be obfuscated by galaxy-spanning problems; I wanted the problems of a family or a group of friends to really matter to the players. The local communities built within the ships and the stations out on the Grid, supported only by one another, would generate those relationships that I felt were so endemic to the universe.
Due to the primary focus of the setting to be upon the Grid, with its mixture of cultures and species and histories, I had to develop those foundational and fundamental cultures and histories. I wanted a good amount of species, and I delved heavily into astronomy to learn all I could about the nearest star systems to Sol, some of which are only a couple of lightyears away, and how sentient creatures could have evolved in those systems beneath the warmth of those stars.
I decided that despite many modern astrobiologists proclamations that any alien discovered would be so entirely, well, alien, that we could not even discern any reasonable similarities with it and ourselves, I wanted aliens to be easily empathized with. I wanted them to be immediately recognizable as sentient creatures, not blobs of goo or wisps of energy. I studied the concepts of parallel evolution; the idea that many creatures assemble similarly from base organisms that may have differed based on their environment. Since I wanted all of the different planets to be relatively similar to Earth, I could deduce by this logic that aliens could also have evolved from similar base organisms that humans did.
Now, part of the fun (or the majority, for some people) of a science fiction universe is the aliens. I wanted to placate those people, and also develop reasonable and complex cultures and societies that people would have a genuine interest in. I wanted to stay away from human analogues with a twist, like adding blue skin or pointy ears or a wrinkly thing on their forehead, and instead wanted to create a creature that could walk and talk and eat and maintain an intelligent conversation with a human, but remain different enough to where they could rarely if ever be confused for one another.
I originally settled on the number of the species for a strictly mechanical reason, as the amount of core attributes in the first version of the system was the standard d20 six, and I wanted each race to sort of “specialize” in an attribute. But more importantly, seven total species (six aliens and humans), was a nice sounding number, and there just so happened to be about thirty-five star systems all within a handful of lightyears away from Sol, meaning that it was reasonable to suspect that every five systems or so could support life within a given area. This sounded perfectly plausible to me, and I didn’t think too much more on it. The culture for each species began to grow outward from the basic assumption of which attribute they were most focused upon; the reasonable and intelligent Kraezoch, the tough and stubborn Burshdett, and so on.
I will dedicate another post to discussing the brief development history of each of the seven species in their current form, as this one borders on being dangerously verbose as it is. Thanks for sticking through it with me, any and all questions or comments are appreciated.
