NuBase: Chartered Entity

A Chartered Entity (CE) is a corporation that is recognized across the entire Cordium (and in some cases beyond the Cordium in the CTG and Newmarket) rather than being limited to a single territory. Chartered Entities are extremely rare — each one is created individually by a treaty, called its “charter”. Though they are not typically subject to the normal rules governing corporations, they may have other restrictions built into their charters based on their purposes.

Chartered Entities are generally either very old (some have allegedly existed since The Passage), or relatively new — created in response to some issue that has grown to Territorial borders. The former are not particularly active in everyday life and most people will never run across them, but the latter are some of the most powerful megacorps on the planet.

OOC Background: Cities And Territories

• This post contains Out Of Character information. Details here.

Like all of the cities (except Newmarket, on which more later) Axia is surrounded by a territory, also called Axia, which is governed by a territorial government based in the city. By common agreement among the territorial governments, the territory surrounding each city encompasses everything within a 1,000 km radius of the centerpoint of the city. That distance was chosen because no two of the original two cities landed less than 2,000 km apart (or for that matter less than 3,000 km apart, but the distance was chosen to be conservative) even where two cities landed on the same landmass. This is one of the few things on which all of the territorial governments have unanimously agreed, and even Newmarket (which was overthrown after the agreement and became an essentially anarchist free port) has done nothing to indicate disagreement with the rule. Land and resources not within the so-called “M-line” (the 1,000 km boarder) are available to whomever can take and hold them. Most of the planet has been mapped (there are satellites) but huge chunks of it have not been directly explored by humans, and the satellite data and images certainly are not available to average citizens or even very wealthy citizens. Information is perhaps the most jealously guarded commodity on Nuvel. Those who have it are typically in command, and they usually intend to stay that way by keeping it to themselves. In any event, most people never leave the city complexes and almost no one ever ventures outside the M-line except to travel (by air) from city to city. There are rumors of settlements, communities and perhaps even small cities, unaffiliated with any territory, existing outside the M-lines. There is no way to know if these rumors are true or not.

OOC Background: Axia And Environs

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Axia is geographically very similar to New York City. It sits on a coastline in an area geologically and environmentally similar to the Northeastern United States. Thus the surrounding area includes, among other things, large forested areas, farmland, mountains (though not major peaks), mining resources, grasslands, beaches, wetlands, and an enormous amount of native and imported biodiversity, with the latter being far more common than the former, probably due to terraforming, though information about this is scarce. The M-line (1,000 km territorial boundary) also includes a large chunk of ocean and numerous offshore islands.

OOC Background: Daily Life In Axia

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At least for the first part of the game, most of the action takes place in and around Axia, one of the nine cities. The characters come from (or now live in) the Axia Undercity which is essentially a slum in the core of Axia described in more detail below.

The atmosphere in the Undercity is similar to that depicted in Blade Runner or, to a lesser extent, Brazil or Dark City. If you haven’t seen any of these movies, shame on you. Go rent Blade Runner. The Undercity is dark and damp. There is little sun, little or no open space, little or no greenery. The economic and social structure is very similar to that of a poverty-line existence in cold-war Moscow (or at least, how that existence was depicted in the U.S. during the cold war). Lines for bread, fuel, jobs — everything necessary to life — or at least a good life — is scarce. Buildings and infrastructure are in disrepair or are patched in unrecognizable ways. Services such as garbage collection and medical care are spotty at best, though some effort is made by the city government to make sure the entire Undercity doesn’t collapse into ruin. This is in part because the phyiscal infrastructure is required for the “topside” towers, and in part because the city needs the Undercity’s people to do the jobs the middle class doesn’t want.

NuBase: The Alliances

Nuvel’s territories are organized into two alliances and one independent city-state.

The Cordium is a loose trade and military alliance of five territories: Axia, Traice, Oba, River and Casmi. Generally, travel and trade among citizens of Cordium territories is permitted, or less heavily regulated than trade with other territories. Cordium territories also generally avoid military confrontations and support one another if external confrontations arise. The Cordium alliances are fairly informal, however, and it is generally understood that, under the right circumstances, the Cordium could easily fall apart. Even now the members are not entirely peaceful and may compete aggressively to take and hold extra-territorial resources. Similarly, territorial alliances are in no way binding on the megacorps, which can and do engage in all-out corporate warfare between and within allied territories. Notwithstanding these “small wars”, the general outline of the Cordium alliance has held for at least 250 years.

OOC Background: Planetfall

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By the time Ouroboros finally reached Nuvel a substantial portion of the population either no longer believed that it was ever going to arrive at its destination or had forgotten that the purpose of their world and culture was to arrive at and colonize a new planet. A small but significant minority cult rejected the idea that Ouroboros was a spacecraft at all. As described in OOC Background: The Passage, the state of the Ouroboros society at the time it reached Nuvel was similar to that of a large city in the 21st Century U.S., but with somewhat more widespread poverty, somewhat fewer resources and slightly more advanced technology. The society was marked by a constant undercurrent of conflict, if not outright war, over territory and wealth among the cities and various corporations.

OOC Background: The Passage

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Axia, the city where the players live, is one of the Twelve Cities originally loaded into the spacecraft Ouroboros for the journey to Nuvel. Only Nine of those cities actually exist on Nuvel: two fell into ruin on the trip from Old Earth to Nuvel and one was lost in the landing process. Ouroborus is the size and approximate shape of a small moon and was built in orbit around Old Earth. It remains in orbit around Nuvel as one of Nuvel’s two moons, Ouro. The two dead cities are still docked in it.

It Begins

It’s hardly surprising that, when the shit hit the fan, a lot of it got sprayed on Larkspur. The summer of 1187 was a hot one, even by Axia standards, and the storm stalled out over the Gulf of Kanro wasn’t getting any smaller. By the time it came up the coast, the cold water from the North Etolian was going to make it a real bastard. So they cranked the Atmos all the way up, and turned on the air conditioning in the towers to wait it out. Of course you don’t pull that kind of power without feeling it somewhere, and where the grid wasn’t so good, well, that’s where they felt it.

NuBase: Sophonts

The term “Sophonts” generally refers to the machine intelligences believed to have been an integral part of the economy, culture and government of life on Old Earth at the time of the Expansion. Little is know about the precise role or function of the Sophonts in the day-to-day life of Old Earth, nor is it known how many such intelligences there were or what precise capabilities they may have had. It is understood that, by the time of the Expansion, humanity had developed and deployed artificial intelligences sufficiently advanced to be indistinguishable from human intelligence. It is further understood that such intelligences had, by the time of the Expansion, attained self-awareness and sapience. None of the obvious theoretical questions arising from this can be answered with certainty from available sources, however: It is not known what rights, privileges or positions the Sophonts enjoyed in society, what forms they took or what limitations were placed on them, either technologically, legally or otherwise. It is understood that the Sophonts were integrated into the culture on a level similar to that of humanity, however, and that they may have been responsible for some form of governance, either civil or corporate. This has been offered as an explanation for the presence in Old Earth culture of extremely long time-scale projects, including those leading to and comprising the Expansion.

History and Fairy Tales, Part I

A Short History of Nuvel: The Colonization

Adapted from Materials In Early Colonial History, C. Bishins (Educo, 1181)

Bullshit detection by RocketScience – When it is rocket science, trust RocketScience!

The colonization period was a golden age of technology and prosperity for Old Earth. Humanity had left the cradle and expanded into the Sol system, colonizing the nearby moons and planets. This enormous expansion of resources, and the self-catalyzing, exponential growth of scientific knowledge, led to the creation of technologies unimaginable to us today. Guided by the sophisticated machine intelligences known as Sophonts, humanity settled into a relatively peaceful, stable economy, unmarred by the global conflicts that had characterized its earlier history.