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

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

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

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

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.

OOC Background: Planetfall

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

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

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

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.