robkelk Wrote:How many of the setting elements are you thinking of playing with?
M Fnord Wrote:All the elements, all of them!Okay, since everything is up for grabs, and since your initial post indicates some humans aren't "baseline" humans any more...
Okay, quick backstory: This whole thing was inspired by a Trek-based setting riff over on RPG.net called "Federal Space" written by a fella named Shadowjack (yeah, that Shadowjack). It's been sitting in the back of my mind for a long while now, and a minor kerfuffle over on spacebattles brought it to the foreground for the moment. So I figured I might as well make hay while the sun shines, yeah?
The main thrust here is everything is up for grabs. It is Star Trek (mostly) so there'll still be vulcans and klingons and bajorans and cardassians etc. But the nature of those peoples will be vastly different in some cases. In others, not so much (klingons might be Preserver seedlings, but they're still klingons. Just not as... bumpy.).
Submitted for your consideration:
In the very early days of Terran interstellar exploration, the USS Atlantis (second spacecraft to bear the name) discovered a habitable world. The planet had one supercontinent, shaped roughly like a five-pointed star; this lead the crew of the Atlantis to call the planet "Númenor" (after the same-shaped continent in Middle Earth, and because the captain had a sense of humour). It was only after they had achieved orbit around Númenor that they detected the radio signals.
Contact was quickly established with the natives of Númenor. (The planetary name given by the crew of Atlantis stuck - the local names for the planet all translated to "earth," as so many humans' homeworlds' names do.) They were still sufficiently close to Terran human that both planets' humanity could breed with the other. They were also sufficiently advanced technologically to have radio communications (AM only) and decent ground-based telescopes, but their chemical sciences were stuck at the "alchemical" stage. Their biological sciences, however, were in advance of even Terra's at the time the Atlantis discovered Númenor - the natives used biotechnology in places where Terrans would use chemical technology, breeding a wide variety of plants and animals to produce useful industrial chemicals and pharmaceuticals. These pharmaceuticals included the first drugs that Terran scientists identified as being useful to unlock metahuman abilities in otherwise-normal humans.
The people of Númenor were first called Númenorians by the people of Terra, but the laziness of a certain fraction of humanity took hold and a shorter name (also from Tolkien's work) quickly gained favour. Nowadays the natives of Númenor are known across the galaxy as Andorians, and have a reputation of being among the galaxy's best biotechnologists.
--
Rob Kelk
"Governments have no right to question the loyalty of those who oppose
them. Adversaries remain citizens of the same state, common subjects of
the same sovereign, servants of the same law."
- Michael Ignatieff, addressing Stanford University in 2012