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Edge-sama — Utopia map
Published: 2015-06-03 18:49:54 +0000 UTC; Views: 140; Favourites: 2; Downloads: 0
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Description
This was sadly the best map I could muster for World Building June.I might revisit this later in the future as this was hastily threwn togheter in an hour for a presentation.
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Comments: 8
You did iiit! Yes! I'm awfully sorry for not replying promptly, I've been busy cleaning and working. I'm glad you liked my tips, and I hope they serve ya well as you continue fleshing out Utopia!
(The WBJ prompts certainly are pretty large for the one day time limit huh? Hahaha!)
This is so awesome though, what a great beginning to an amazing map! I just got done reading the description that goes with this, and loved every bit of it. How cool to see where everybody goes, and who rubs shoulders with who. For some reason I imagined that the Creatans would've been the first to encounter humans, but it looks like it was the Shans. What an interesting conflict that must have been! 
What is space travel like in Utopia? How to Creatans travel to other sectors, or other races vice versa, with no space lanes in-between? Poor babies, out there on their own!
For a quickie, the map looks awesome! It serves its purpose very well, and I like that it looks like a cutout of something much larger. The painterly texture is pretty, too! Whenever you do a more complete version, I'd recommend brightening the titles and making the background darker, so that the font is more legible. Overall, super job! I was so happy to see this, too awesome.
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humans first alien encounter was actually the Nukeloni (or the quuen, but she was a singular being). The first peacefull encounter was with the creatans 
Thing is, the creatans once built gateways (think stargate) across the galaxy, but most gates where lost during "The Humbling" when they where chased back to their homeworld. Humanity and the Creatans first met on Europa (can never remember if that is a moon of Saturn or Jupiter...) when an archeoloical crew unearthed one of their old gates and the creatans came throu it to ask for aid only days later. The creatans was suffering from a plague that their deteriorated science could not cure, but with the help of the tellans they managed to form a cure. And thats how Utopia first came to be.
And yes! There are many stars beyond the named ones here, in Utopia as well as beyond. The most developed reions are probably Xarph and The Frontier where I have more detailed maps lying around for. The Shan homeworld is pretty far away, and I haven't decided much beyond that its a very damp and warm world with vast shallow "marsh oceans". But they're pretty agressive terraformers so most planets in their realm are pretty swamp-y.
Space travel in Utopia works in a number of ways depending on what technology you ave access to. I've allready mentioned the Creatans space-gates, wich there are a few, but most doesn't work any more or have other complications. But the one between the Solar system and Stygia is kept in prime condition, allowing traffic to pass through regularly. The Nukeloni brouht the "jump" mecanic of FTL to Earth and it was long a staple of FTL and are still used by the Matriarchy. Jump FTL works by creating a small pocket dimension to make your effective in-space mass negative, allowing the ship to be launched ahead in a private bubble to its destination. It lacks finesse, and the ship is locked of from the universe while jumping, and if the navigation is of it might turn fatal.
The Utopians developed Warp FTL eventually wich instead depends on bending space in front of and in back of the ship to make relative speeds faster than light. While still technically cut of from the world around in FTL (you can't really navigate if you can not see the universe around you because you are going faster than light), but the technique allows the ship to drop back into relative speeds at will to adjust its coordinates, making travel safer. It is generally more cost effective as well since it does not consume as much fuel as Jump drives.
The Avengers-fleet experimented for a while with alternative FTL drives and made both the Teleporter drives and Dimensional Drives. Teleporter drives are incredibly hard to maintain and navigate, but allows for instantaneous travell, making them good for emergency responce and quick military maneuvers. Ships with Teleporter drives tend to also come with Warp drives for casual travel, saving the Teleporter drives for emergencies. Dimensional drives is considered a failure as diving through hyperspace risks pulling along unwanted debris or stowaways. It is also how the Skulks came into Utopia. Some ships never came out of hyperspace either, or came back wrong, or aged for eons despite travelling for mere minutes.
To be honest I did not come up with all of these myself. They are means of travell that exist in the Traveller system that I'm using for Utopia, but I did put them into contexts whitin the setting.
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Oh how interesting! That's such a refreshing first meeting story, instead of man searching beyond their system they instead bumped into something unexpected--right there next to Jupiter. And how funny that the Creatans needed help, and not vice versa. It's nice to see fresh ideas! 
Awesome breakdown of travel, thanks Bragd! We 2015 humans don't have any space travel of our own, so we've gotta borrow from media or theoretical physicists (or make up our own looney physics), and indeed the "pocket dimension" is one trope I use in my own universe. Haha! How interesting that there's portal technology AND teleportation drives, they do the same job but in a different way and that's pretty neat. I bet the Creatan spacegates are something highly sought after... considering how long the one on Europa lasted, they sound like solid tech!
Space maaaps~!
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Yeah, ancient creatan technology is the stuff you build campaigns around. I did run a game set in Utopia once where things where supposed to develop into a race for an ancient creatan "Weapon". The campaign didn't last long enough but it was still pretty fun.
and yeah, the Matriarchy is meant to be pretty awful. The shan are in no way meant to be inherently evil or nothing but their fascist culture have left its marks, and only because parts of their heritage is toxic doesn't mean its easy to shake of :C Shan also live pretty long and doesn't reproduce all that fast, so there's only about one new generation since the first contact war. And the shans still in the Matriarcy are not very keen on the defectors.
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Uuah yeah, the Matriarchy sounds pretty awful! It's cool to see figures like that, just iron-fisted governmental bullies. I had no idea that the shan had such a social system! But it explains a lot of other things, such as their caste system-- I'd imagine a lot of their lives are dictate. I can't wait to hear more about them, it sounds really fascinating!
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glad you like them c: they started out as just parodying western gender binaries (flipping dominant males/submissive females) but have become a lot more. I'm a little worried they might be problematic though, like, making the only explicit matriarchy a fascist state, or for the way I portray them and stuff. But its not meant like... "Matriarchy would be bad!" but rather "a matriarchy would be as bad as the patriarchy is, also these are aliens and different than us in Many more ways than just gender politics".
sorry for the rant ^^'
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(Guh sorry for the late reply! It's been a long week ;o;)
But yes, I really like this take on gender! It's interesting and not too pushy. A lot of times I see people inverting the m/f gender roles and just going " women are the leaders in this world, the end", which is neither thought-provoking nor fresh. With the Shan we see clearly how the females' Matriarchy is just as iron-fisted as the human Patriarchy, and I think that's good. Nice, solid, and it doesn't feel like a soap box either. 
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that is an idea! I have been playing with an idea for two more friendly alien species, one smallish race of gardeners and revellers, and some tardigrade-ish psychic monks. I have old sketches of the monks but they look to ET ish... But they where supposed to be related to The Queen somehow, like her servants or something.
They could both be matrarchies in their own way. Stuff to sketch at ^^
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