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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Aesmael" data-source="post: 1938512" data-attributes="member: 22503">Rhetoric much?<img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":P" title="Stick out tongue    :P"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":P" />I'll hazard a guess that this Aslan race provides the 'lion men' referenced earlier.It seems once again Umbran essentially speaks for me.But to attempt to actually contribute, let's see what throwing out random advice will get me.I recommend that the virtues of not allowing faster-than-light travel be considered, and cite the novels of Alastair Reynolds as recommended reading on that subject. As he says, it opens up as many potential storylines as it closes off. Especially if you are still colonising other systems waiting for advice or orders becomes a matter of years, and decades-to-centuries out of contact allows for whatever wierd (or not) cultures you may want to have develop on outlying colonies (or back home).Then also there was (in these novels) the development of a culture of 'ultras' (ultranauts), people who spent their entire lives travelling from star to star in multi-kilometre long 'lighthuggers'. Time dilation made the planetbound as mayflies to them, while the cultures of each ship steadily became increasingly divergent from 'normal'. If you want something resembling cthulloid horror, try placing the characters as passengers (or even crew) on a vessel such as the Nostalgia for Infinity or the Gnostic Ascension. Can you tell I yearn to run such a campaign myself?Further, I advocate pragmatism. Decide what is allowable and what is not. Do not attempt to design the machinery of the future yourself, unless that is what you enjoy. By this my intended message is along the lines of Umbran's concerning scanning. Unless you want the campaign to play like one of Stephen Baxter's NASA novels some handwaving will almost certainly be required, so don't sweat it if your game is not an accurate vision of things to come. Probably be frightened if it is, not just because you were right, but also because of what the players will likely get up to in their pursuit of entertainment.Here is a list of what I consider to be 'safe' choices with the goal of making the setting 'harder'. Feel free to disregard any or all of these. I assure you some and possibly all will turn out to wrong guesses. A good case can be made for the inverse of any as being acceptable.- No faster than light travel or communication- No aliens. If you do use alien life (term life as opposed to intelligence), making it largely similar to earth life violates no laws of physics, although it may be considered implausible. Again wert cthulloid (anyone want to offer an alternative/better spelling/word) horror, I suspect that greater (surface?) similarity lends itself to greater potential creepiness.- My only advice wert handling alien intelligence is to make them as alien or familiar as suits your purposes. I personally would be inclined (at the time of posting) to use humans, even if no longer recognisable as such, in most positions where an alien would normally be called for.- Make planets as common and of whatever kind best suits you. So long as their arrangement around the parent star is at least reasonably simliar to something we know, your crimes have been committed against plausibility, not physics.- I can not speak to what shape future societies may take, but my impression is that most novelists seem to go the route of either excessive bureaucratisation and regimentisation (often as something to rail against/oppose, with a correspondingly 'free' colonial region) or to drift towards some kind of feudalism. In either case there is often a central government that is stagnant and must be overthrown.- Finally, a lot of purportedly hard science fiction stories boil down to puzzle solving, at their core (the remainder are concerned with social issues, apparently). It may or may not be useful to bear in mind that much of hard sci fi is essentially a riddle phrased and answered in terms of current scientific knowledge. From what I recall of the opening post that may not be a helpful statement.I suspect my list has mutated somewhat as it grew (and isn't that just what you expect in the sci fi arena?), but hope something I have typed will be of use.</blockquote>

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