Reach for the Stars

Artisanal Mistakes: I've been making Big Lore but for my own tabletop setting.
Wodd Hotard: ah?
Wodd Hotard: this related to the Quiet Shores or one of the other pantheons you wrote up
Artisanal Mistakes: Another one.
Artisanal Mistakes: One moment.
Artisanal Mistakes: Right, so.
Artisanal Mistakes: We might've discussed my previous foray into a mech setting before, I think? The 'real robot setting utterly convinced it's a super robot one' where society just sort of never moved past resolving international disputes with trial by combat/battles between a couple really special champions.
Artisanal Mistakes: I have started something that's a bit more... honest in being a super robot setting. Ran a couple sessions in it already.
Artisanal Mistakes: (Like much of the genre it's a split between very soft sci-fi, and fantasy in denial.)
Wodd Hotard: first I've heard of it, but that's...interesting
Artisanal Mistakes: I'll go into that too another time if you're interested, then.
Artisanal Mistakes: But, yeah. I could dig into the New Thing a bit if you're up for it?
Artisanal Mistakes: As ever, you're not even slightly obliged to indulge me.
Wodd Hotard: oh, no worries
Wodd Hotard: just speak in whatever order makes sense to you
Artisanal Mistakes: The other thing's just a previous foray into the genre (kinda) that I went for many years ago and thought I'd bring up as a previous reference point, is all. But.
Artisanal Mistakes: Presenting Reach For The Stars.
Artisanal Mistakes: The year is (haha, no, if you put a year to sci-fi it will always look dated eventually).
Artisanal Mistakes: Humans have spread quite a ways beyond the solar system, largely with the help of something called the Pyre Drive. This is a nice way of saying 'we harvested a piece of a star and put it in a special container as a power source'. This forms the basis of your giant robots and so on, sure, but also a lot of infrastructure like inter-system FTL. See, it's not just a fusion reaction like you'd expect.
Wodd Hotard: The Dawn Machine is displeased
Artisanal Mistakes: Pyre Drives are really, really weird and poorly understood. There are a lot of rumours flying around about exactly what their deal is, and if the people behind it know what its deal is and are keeping quiet, or are genuinely a bit confused.
Artisanal Mistakes: Dear Dawn Machine: Get in the tiny Dyson sphere.
Artisanal Mistakes: So for instance, a machine containing a Pyre Drive will have an affinity for some stars, seemingly at random. This enables something like a warp that's not quite instant but a whole lot faster than it has any reason to be. Discovering the links is trial and error (but drives from one star always 'link' to the same ones).
Artisanal Mistakes: Pyre Drives repair the machine they are housed in, also. They are... strange. It's not repair so much as regeneration over time. Unfortunately, this is not necessarily according to the original design, nor does it always wait for actual damage. Pyre Drive machines grow and change, at times (there are trends per star on occasion, but every drive is different). They are unique and tend to eventually warp the machine housing them somewhat. Fighting it is an exercise in futility, but sometimes you can trim a bit.
Artisanal Mistakes: This is equal parts handy and kind of a pain.
Artisanal Mistakes: Pyre Drives are... volatile. You popped the containment? Whoops. It's tantamount to a nuclear bomb. The key difference is that the 'fallout' is somehow positive. People are in better health (and usually a little larger and stronger). Everything is more lush and green (or appropriate colour for local flora). Animals flourish. There are reports of some odd dreams at times, or hearing strange sounds, but people say all kinds of weird stuff about these things, you know?
Artisanal Mistakes: Controlled detonation of a Pyre Drive is, since this discovery, the primary means of terraforming, because it tends to just calibrate local environs to 'everyone is going to be just fine'.
Artisanal Mistakes: People are a little confused as to how it works, but hey. It works?
Wodd Hotard: ...I'm just waiting for the "But".
Wodd Hotard: Sam Neill is hiding around the corner with his eyeballs in his hands
Artisanal Mistakes: Operators/pilots, especially in combat situations, often end up claiming that Pyre Drives are alive and sentient. And talk to them, at times. Some even hold that they vary in personality, or try to fight back, or that the drive's output fluctuates with the volatility of the drive's emotional state (and sometimes the pilot's). But, you know. It's a stressful situation and pilots are a crazy and superstitious bunch. They imagine some weird things.
Artisanal Mistakes: By the way, the robot thing caught on (alongside absolutely gigantic battleships) because...
Artisanal Mistakes: Fitting a drive in the most ridiculous machine you possibly can is, past a point, more cost-effective than trying to grab multiple drives.
Wodd Hotard: sorry, I don't quite understand the cost-effectiveness bit
Artisanal Mistakes: Oh, basically.
Artisanal Mistakes: Cost of getting two pyre drives to use in sensible machines > making one absolutely ridiculous and over the top pyre drive-fueled machine.
Artisanal Mistakes: (There must be a flimsy justification for the robots, per genre tradition.)
Wodd Hotard: ahh
Wodd Hotard: right, I was about to ask why wouldn't they just use all the pyre drives in transportation
Wodd Hotard: since harvesting a star is kind of hard
Artisanal Mistakes: Humans are terrible and pick fights a lot.
Artisanal Mistakes: (Also, they've figured it out a bit better these days. It's not easy but they can do it.)
Artisanal Mistakes: Just, you know. Budget is a thing, we're not post-scarcity yet.
Artisanal Mistakes: Another thing: There is some serious strangeness out there. Sentient alien species in a 'like humans but not really' sense? Not yet. Really weird space monsters that seem like they shouldn't even be able to live or function? Yep. Sapient asteroids and moons? Check. The latter has sometimes been cracked open to reveal a small fire inside, almost like embers.
Artisanal Mistakes: And there are rumours to the effect that there are machines out there where the drive took over, leaving a pilotless machine flying about in deep space doing what it pleases, but Obviously They Cover It Up.
Artisanal Mistakes: (This attracts both a following and derision, because it's at that exact level of preposterous conspiracy theory.)
Artisanal Mistakes: The players are all kitted out with Pyre Drive mechs and are mostly on 'deal with space monsters' duty.
Wodd Hotard: presumably named the Libera, the Tuteme and the Ex Inferis
Wodd Hotard: in Battlegroup Liminal Happening
Artisanal Mistakes: ...Hah. Took me a second!
Artisanal Mistakes: (I have not watched a single super robot show, my knowledge comes from Super Robot Wars and cultural osmosis. I am terribly underqualified.)
Artisanal Mistakes: 'What on earth are these things?' is obviously a running theme, or rather, has been thus far.
Artisanal Mistakes: Should you be curious I can dig into exactly what is going on with the setting.
Wodd Hotard: sure, by all means.
Artisanal Mistakes: Right. And now it gets weird.
Wodd Hotard: Oh goody, I'll ready my SAN check dice.
Artisanal Mistakes: Suns are alive and sentient. Furthermore, they are wellsprings of life force. Their own, namely. This can create or sustain life, and can be instead used to fuel creation of various sorts. Left to their own devices they actually produce enough energy to feed themselves. That is to say, they were never meant to shrink or burn out. They're living perpetual motion engines.
Artisanal Mistakes: ...Until other life came along at some point. It's not clear whether the energy they radiated out is somehow being diverted, siphoned off or something else, or if it's 'blocked' in the same way light is, rather than eventually drifting back to some other star, or what. They're not clear on it either. But it does take a toll on them. To us, the difference might seem irrelevant. They live on a grand time scale, and it feels far more significant (not least because anything less than eternity is suddenly a big difference).
Artisanal Mistakes: Basically, the suns are the source of all life in the universe. This is not all, though. They have another 'function'. You're probably familiar with the whole 'if a tree falls in a forest and nobody is there to hear it' thing.
Artisanal Mistakes: The answer is a resounding no with respect not to sound, but time. Time passes if there is something there that can perceive it passing. And that time is taken. Taken from- well, you guessed it.
Artisanal Mistakes: The whole thing is a grand cosmic accident, but essentially: Time and life are both a zero-sum game with only one kind of source.
Artisanal Mistakes: Pyre drives are a tiny piece of a sun, carved off and stuffed in a containment unit. It can usually tell this is not meant to be happening, though its attitude on this may vary. Some are even fine with it and cooperative! Some are violently rebellious. They're discrete entities from the source sun, though. Sort of like a split personality, usually based on the source. Being split off like that and contained does things to them. They're often not quite right in the head or forget what they used to be or something. The truth doesn't often come out, because...
Artisanal Mistakes: 1) The pilot has to listen to them, and the drive be willing to talk.
2) The drive must know exactly what is happening.
3) The pilot must believe them, and people in turn to a crazy raving pilot.
Artisanal Mistakes: (The affinity of one star for another is just down to the other stars the source knows and is close to, and I don't mean in terms of distance.)
Wodd Hotard: ...right, I think I failed that SAN check at "time and life are both a zero-sum game"
Artisanal Mistakes: There are theories, mostly among the stars, that Sol (that is, our sun) did in fact create the first life as a 'what if something not like us existed?' experiment and is therefore responsible for this. It is not available for comment. The solar system is no longer inhabited; as the nearest available source, Sol was harvested extensively, and the unstable remains were packed off into a dyson sphere and warped to another convenient system to be used as one more power source.
Artisanal Mistakes: Imagine a star being strip mined. It's a bit like that.
Artisanal Mistakes: I told you it gets weird and terrible.
Artisanal Mistakes: Unless you mean you need it explained better.
Wodd Hotard: just the bit about time
Wodd Hotard: so time needs someone to observe it in order for time to pass
Wodd Hotard: but how does this relate to the suns and life?
Artisanal Mistakes: Basically: If time 'happens' somewhere, it passes, and it is spent. Time is originally a property of suns, and they have enough that they never wither per se. They're just capable of change and existence as we understand it.
Artisanal Mistakes: If time passes somewhere, again, it's spent. And some unlucky star then has less of it. Any amount less than eternity is, again, a lot.
Artisanal Mistakes: The two effects on suns compound each other.
Wodd Hotard: right
Artisanal Mistakes: Or, to put it another way:
Wodd Hotard: time is always a hard concept for me to grasp, but I think I get it?
Artisanal Mistakes: Life as we know it is a grand accident that happened to invent entropy.
Wodd Hotard: ah, fair enough
Artisanal Mistakes: This should hopefully explain any and all Pyre Drive weirdness, by now. Once you know what they are it kiiind of falls into place. I think?
Artisanal Mistakes: As for whether the inventors of the Pyre Drive know:
Artisanal Mistakes: They know that suns are alive, sapient, and radiate some kind of energy conductive to life. Do they have the full picture? Goodness no.
Artisanal Mistakes: (They still went ahead with something horrible, though.)
Wodd Hotard: who are these inventors?
Wodd Hotard: just regular old John Scientist?
Wodd Hotard: or the Emperor of Mankind wearing a fake moustache?
Wodd Hotard: or Dr Wizards Hafno Senseofwrong
Artisanal Mistakes: Yeah, some particularly sharp scientists way back.
Wodd Hotard: roger that
Wodd Hotard: so what about alien life?
Artisanal Mistakes: Well.
Artisanal Mistakes: None found yet. It's probably out there but we haven't run into it yet, barring the 'weird space monster' category which is, more often than not, essentially just a solar flare that got stuff wrapped around it.
Wodd Hotard: ahh
Wodd Hotard: so ditto asteorids then
Wodd Hotard: asteroids*
Artisanal Mistakes: A machine with a Pyre Drive, meanwhile, is-
Artisanal Mistakes: Basically a brain in a jar sort of deal except the jar changes over time.
Artisanal Mistakes: And yes, exactly.
Wodd Hotard: so I assume the putative/actual players will eventually find a Pyre Drive willing to talk
Wodd Hotard: being a self-deprecating yet pleasant drive or a codgety old fart that goes on at lenght
Artisanal Mistakes: They're at the point of 'uh, hang on, are these things trying to talk to us? How much of this am I imagining?'
Wodd Hotard: now what
Wodd Hotard: right, let's assume SAN checks have been passed, the crew doesn't boot them out the airlock
Wodd Hotard: and they buy the story
Wodd Hotard: what do they do then?
Artisanal Mistakes: Oh, well.
Artisanal Mistakes: First of all the Drives just know something is weird and don't really have a full picture of what's going on.
Wodd Hotard: oh wait the bits in the Drive don't know the full story either, right?
Artisanal Mistakes: Yep.
Artisanal Mistakes: Secondly they're talking to the player characters, who...
Artisanal Mistakes: Are listening or not, to varying degrees, but haven't told a soul.
Artisanal Mistakes: And barely discussed this with each other, because come on, it sounds crazy.
Wodd Hotard: right
Wodd Hotard: let's say the entire party achieves CHIM and acquires the game manuscript
Wodd Hotard: they then read "Pyre Drives are bits of star that may or may not be friendly; also the stars are dying due to sentient life other than stars"
Wodd Hotard: what next?
Artisanal Mistakes: That's up to them, isn't it? What do you DO with that kind of information? It's not really... fixable. Okay, the Pyre Drive thing is particularly heinous, but 'other life existing is the root cause of entropy' is kind of- I mean, any FIX to that is going to be unacceptable.
Artisanal Mistakes: I do, however, have a looming antagonist that they will have to deal with in the fullness of time, who has made one brief appearance thus far. It's, ah. Very super robot in scale, let's say. In that genre tradition of "this would be considered cosmic horror, had we any less agency".
Artisanal Mistakes: Picture the ghost of a star, one of the first to just wither away, before humans got up to anything crazy. One that is very, very angry and sad to see its entire species just siphoned off by some cosmic accident to keep alive something that's not even meant to exist. Because someone basically came along and invented entropy.
Artisanal Mistakes: And it's far too late to fix this. But maybe, just maybe, you can wipe it all away and start over. Or, in astronomical terms: the big crunch/big bang loop. This isn't personal, you understand. It just needs to be done, and started a long time ago. Why isn't it done yet? Same reason (even though it's blisteringly fast by the same standards) that the stars haven't really retaliated. Different timescale (and not being known for their mobility). It's kind of like saying 'what, are you just going to let those locusts eat you? They're tiny!'
Artisanal Mistakes: The Pyre Drive stuff isn't why this is happening. THAT is just why this is going to be as unpleasant as possible for some people.
Artisanal Mistakes: (Because with full perspective, creating a Pyre Drive and then detonating it for terraforming purposes is about a dozen atrocities rolled together.)
Artisanal Mistakes: And here we have our eventual antagonist. Though 'ghost of a sun' is perhaps a fanciful way to put this.
Artisanal Mistakes: Presenting: Mourner-Of-Lights, living black hole. Good luck, everyone.
Wodd Hotard: All will be well and all manner of things will be well.
Artisanal Mistakes: Hah! Something like that.
Wodd Hotard: So that's the Biggest Bad, so who're his agents?
Wodd Hotard: Black Hole cultists?
Wodd Hotard: mercenaries hired by black hole cultists?
Wodd Hotard: Doomsday cults?
Wodd Hotard: asteorids?
Wodd Hotard: asteroids even
Artisanal Mistakes: In large part it works alone. There's equal parts politicking and monster of the week stuff keeping their hands very full already, while it just... slowly creeps closer and extends its influence. It can subvert some Pyre Drives and stars to its cause, with time. It can no longer animate anything, it's no star.
Artisanal Mistakes: The Mourner can appear in distant places as something that's, you know, not a black hole, by what is roughly their equivalent to astral projection, or perhaps creating an avatar.
Artisanal Mistakes: Which is what they've seen so far.
Artisanal Mistakes: "Ending where you get to feel good about this" is probably out of the question, because uh. Whatever they do, and even if they can deal with this...
Artisanal Mistakes: The 'villain': Dead, but still trying to reboot the world to save its friends, family and entire species.

Life as we know it: Invented entropy by existing.

Humans: Knowingly ran with the whole pyre drive thing.
Artisanal Mistakes: Funny thing about that, also.
Artisanal Mistakes: Your best chance of dealing with it, from a raw power perspective, is surely pyre drive tech, but... There's kind of a conflict of interest here that will become apparent to your drive.
Artisanal Mistakes: So, do you go without, or somehow wrestle it into cooperating and hope it can't break your hold, or do you miraculously get it to come around to your point of view?
Artisanal Mistakes: (As for talking the Mourner down... for once I would say you cannot talk your way out of this. At best you can bring it around to 'well, I respect you personally but this is still happening, sorry it has to be this way'. This is not a dialogue challenge.)
Wodd Hotard: wrestling an amnesiac shard of star into fighting a Black Hole
Wodd Hotard: or persuading a Black Hole to not eat everything
Artisanal Mistakes: The whole... 'Bring it around with the power of friendship' narrative kind of falls apart when you realise that most drives are not all there.
Artisanal Mistakes: Or at least don't have a full picture of what's going on, and relatively limited agency besides.
Wodd Hotard: on the other hand, it's a God (or a shard of one)! How can you dominate a God! What a grand and intoxicating innocence!
Wodd Hotard: I mean, how do you intimidate or wrestle it into fighting a Black Hole, I mean
Artisanal Mistakes: Hah! Yes. About that.
Artisanal Mistakes: A pyre drive that actively hates you and is trying to rebel is extremely potent, because in the finest of super robot traditions, the power of these things scales to a degree with the emotional volatility of the drive and pilot.
Artisanal Mistakes: The downside is that you are now performing the giant mech equivalent of rodeo.
Wodd Hotard: ah, riding the tiger
Artisanal Mistakes: Really though, end of the day?
Wodd Hotard: I'm almost certain a minmaxer will find a way
Artisanal Mistakes: This is a creation myth gone horribly awry.
Wodd Hotard: All creation myths must go awry, otherwise how will we live in interestingt times?
Artisanal Mistakes: Of course.
Artisanal Mistakes: Also, the whole power-from-emotions deal?
Artisanal Mistakes: Our chief antagonist is kept alive only by sheer determination (Undertale jokes aside), grief and anger. It transformed into a black hole in 'death' because it wants to draw everything close to it and start over. Its emotional state is such that it has more or less discarded any real name and goes by Mourner-Of-Lights as its title.
Artisanal Mistakes: So, yeah. There's a fair bit of that going on.
Wodd Hotard: ..welp, good luck to the PCs
Artisanal Mistakes: The alternative: Dodge the physical angle completely because come on that will never work, go Extra Symbolic and fight its spirit in astral combat or whatever, because it's both in keeping with the genre, and not a huge stretch considering Pyre Drive stuff.
Artisanal Mistakes: Or: "Punch it in the soul".
Artisanal Mistakes: Last time around, it was the group's first fight against a rogue pyre drive.
Artisanal Mistakes: A fairly large ship, formerly the Tiān Cāng wǔ, now going by the Immaculate Light (a fairly large border defense ship for the Tau Ceti system at one point, hence the original name).
Artisanal Mistakes: Overgrown, now. And by that, I mean trailing asteroids, debris and who knows what with the ship's material springing out in uncomfortably organic patterns, clustering random junk around it in a kind of halo. It's coming apart in places, too. The reactor/drive is leaking.
Artisanal Mistakes: Radiation is everywhere. Things come to life more or less at random.
Artisanal Mistakes: The crew is alive. Not well. A lot of pieces are missing and they're extremely irradiated. But they don't die. Not many things do, near the Immaculate Light. Not by the Drive's choice, either. It's just... leaking constantly, and making the best of that.
Artisanal Mistakes: They have to be very, very careful in dismantling a ship that size even if they can (ongoing plan is to lure it some distance away by means of FTL, into deep space) because otherwise it'll go mini-supernova all over some unsuspecting planets.
Artisanal Mistakes: (If it seems unrealistic that people would use such tech, I will remind you that nuclear submarines exist and this is just scaled up.)
Wodd Hotard: 。。。天藏屋？
Wodd Hotard: oh, the Chinese colonised Tau Ceti?
Artisanal Mistakes: 天倉五. The Chinese name for Tau Ceti, to my knowledge.
Wodd Hotard: ahh
Artisanal Mistakes: (Meanwhile, their mechs are working oddly. Like they're scared.The drives can tell something is very off, but without a target it's  just a vague sense that Everything Is Wrong.)
Artisanal Mistakes: If you have ever wondered how a starship can be the monster of the week, here it is.
Artisanal Mistakes: I deployed some extra ominous music for the special occasion.
Wodd Hotard: well done that, it's quite the challenge
Artisanal Mistakes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WuuCMn80gs4 Stick with it. It has something of a transition about three and a half minutes in.
Wodd Hotard: so you said they fought the Pyre Drive?
Artisanal Mistakes: And thank you.
Artisanal Mistakes: Session finished before they ended the battle, but yeah. Well, it's a full-fledged (mutated? Is that the right word?) major starship and, if not its crew, then something crew-shaped.
Artisanal Mistakes: But there's a rogue Pyre Drive at the heart of it.
Artisanal Mistakes: Honestly it's kind of a Space Ghost Ship.
Wodd Hotard: and instead of a squid-faced Davey Jones, it's a bleeding piece of star that's leaking life all over the place
Wodd Hotard: "What're you gonna do, bleed on me?" "Well, actually..."
Artisanal Mistakes: Oh yes.
Artisanal Mistakes: There is not one, unless they think of one for me, because apart from anything, neither pilot nor drive understands what they're working with NEARLY well enough.
Artisanal Mistakes: If they talk it down, though that's not where they're going so far, then I applaud them. But mostly the goal right now is 'survive, and if you take it down, do it in deep space somehow'.