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Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Capn Charlie" data-source="post: 6989866" data-attributes="member: 16046">If one wishes to ensure a good reason for spaceships to exist, and move around, eliminate any FTL communications technology.  If "mail ships" have to make a circuit between distant hubs of exploration or colonies, the tech will exist and be developed.  In addition, if patents can exist, well, then there has to be economic activity between worlds, since when some fantastic new (enforceable) patented technology is invented, it will have to be distributed.  In my setting, I upped the ante by requiring biological life to come along for the FTL tech to even function, thus there has to be people going out into the dark if we want to explore, expand and exploit.  I wanted human habitation of alien worlds and an excuse for trade, and found it in the ponzi scheme.  Dissidents want to leave their current world, initially earth, and pay extravagantly for the privilege, colonizing an alien world, and continue to squander their wealth purchasing goods, technology, and machinery from their parent world struggling to become self sufficient, and once they finally are, they want to be able to sell machinery and supplies to other worlds, to cash in on their new status as a thriving independent world.  But you can't sell much to your founding world, they created and established your world, so you need other emerging worlds to sell necessary material and equipment to...  suddenly the rationalization for subsidizing and encouraging colonization makes a lot more sense.  Humanity just grows cancerously, pointlessly, through the stars, scooping up habitable worlds, utilizing useful resources, and just generally...  human-ing.  Now, you throw some aliens into the mix, and all of a sudden you have possible new markets.  Find one less advanced than you are, and you can sell them your stuff, surely they have something we want even if just as a curiosity.  And if they have things we don't, we try to trade for them, or take them.  If we take what they have hard enough we might reduce their society a few steps, then they will want our stuff for sure, since we blew all their old stuff up.  Simplistic, but...   I imagine humanity sailing to the stars a bit like the vikings, trading with people strong enough to fight us and win, demanding tribute from those too weak to offer resistance, and conquering the ones we think we can beat.</blockquote>

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