Sitting on my porch, now that it’s kinda warm outside, looking up at the sky, my first and best inspiration for this game.

Justin’s probably going to be buried in Tokyo Rain for the near future, but that’s totally fine. This project is definitely of the slow-brewing kind. The current OGL/GSL debacle also doesn’t really matter, though it does mean that this is definitely going to be an “old school” OGL product, so we can freely mix True20 and Spirit of the Century and Passages and whatever else we end up pulling from.

ON THE FRONTIER

One thing I’ve been considering lately is having the setting of Fingers on the Firmament be more customizable, based on the desires of individual play groups. The setting I’ve been describing so far is one in which humanity is fairly well established among the stars, but I also think it would be really exciting to play a game in which space-based civilization was just beginning to come together. Something like this…

Our Story Begins…

…a thousand years ago, maybe more. A lone cartographer works alone on a tiny, rocky planet hundreds of parsecs away from earth, the planet of her birth. Over the past few decades, the cartographer has developed a set of sophisticated stone tools with which she leaves her mark on the landscape around her, crafting a record of her own travels among the stars. Though she regularly makes journeys out into uncharted territory, mapping pieces of the sky only to return and carve them into the canyon walls of her makeshift home, she will never meet another human being as long as she lives.

A thousand years later, maybe more, a lone traveler — because all travelers are alone, until this moment — seeks a place to sleep in the canyon home of the long-dead cartographer. He awakes to find himself amidst a web of diagrams carved into the cliffside and marked with the deep red-brown of the cartographer’s de-oxygenated blood. It takes him a while — weeks, months, years, maybe even decades — to decipher her star catalogue, but he does and, following her maps, he encounters a few other people, for the heavens are more crowded than in the cartographer’s time. Some have been wandering alone for several decades and no longer have a firm grasp of their faculties. One he even is forced to kill in self defense. But two others he brings back to help him study the cartographer’s work, some of which has been rendered incomplete or undecipherable due to meteorite impacts and the cartographer’s own gradual loss of sanity.

This was the beginning of human civilization among the stars, the beginning of history, all due to the efforts of one lonely soul struggling amidst the void and starlight.

One Hundred Years Later…

…there are now a series of a half-dozen known human outposts in the heavens, set up along the routes recorded by the cartographer and those who have taken up her mantle and continued her work, slowly mapping more and more of the stars. The first and strongest is still based out of the cartographer’s canyons, where they continue to gain a deeper understanding of the cartographer’s legacy and struggle to recreate the parts of her work that have been lost or obscured. Other outposts, out on the edges of mapped space, are less stable and prone to disasters, such as an entire crew of people being lost amidst the void, never to return, or a lone madman arriving and slaying a crewmember or two before being dispatched.

The player characters are a group of newcomers, people rescued from madness and an eternity alone by the fate of being caught in this tiny network of outposts amidst a sea of stars and blackness. They have gathered together to create a new outpost and hopefully build it up to prominence and stability, colonizing another tiny section of space for humanity. In order for the young outpost to succeed, everyone has to do their part.

Cartographers…

1. …learn new dances from experienced people or ancient records.
2. …try to re-create missing portions of the cartographer’s lost dances.
3. …create their own dances, mapping new discoveries.

Astronomers…

1. …build relationships with and learn from stars.
2. …discover and master the various uses of stardust.
3. …track and recover other people who are lost.

Anthropologists…

1. …search for and decipher other records of human pre-history among the stars.
2. …struggle to re-invent human culture and technology in this alien environment.
3. …try to keep everyone else from going totally insane.