¶ Lore Primer and Character Creation
Doppler Shift is a lore-heavy and roleplay focused server. This means that we expect characters and players to comply with the officially stated lore, and to create believable, reasonable characters. Doppler Shift allows players a great deal of freedom in creating characters and backstories, and holds that characters can be unrealistic (eccentric, zany, strange, or silly) while still being reasonable. (acting in a consistent manner in line with their character) However, administration retains the right to tell people to tweak, adjust, or even re-create a character if they are completely non-compliant with the setting or universe. If you need help creating a character or worry that your character is out of line with what is judged as reasonable, please use the character creation aide at the bottom of this page (also accessible through the sidebar) or ask for help in the discord's #help-with-roleplay channel.
As a crew member on the Nine Lives Promenade, you are in the star system “Crusoe's Last Stand”, working to provide logistics support to a government-ran colonization effort to the worlds below. This government, the Fourth Celestial Alignment, is a by-and-large “good” government comprised of multiple (but not all!) sapient species on equal footing, pushing for a utopian post-scarcity society for its citizenry. You work for the Port Authority, a company jointly ran by the 4CA and the employees of the Nine Lives Promenade, meaning that there's sufficient employee-led representation in this operation. At the same time, there are expectations for employees (such as performance and behavior) that do not get simply thrown away like on other lorebases' Nanotrasen-ran “nobody cares” stations.
Your character will know, regardless of origin or background, the following bits of trivia (though this is not an exhaustive list.)
- The year is 500 + Current IRL Year. Crusoe's Last Stand's colonization started about twenty years ago through the efforts of autonomous, non-sapient drone platforms, but has slowly picked up pace to include the help of both government and non-government workers as infrastructure develops. The star system now supports a population in the very low millions, as both Truth and New Gibraltar are predicted to have seed populations in the hundreds of thousands.
- This star system has seven planets around a G4 main sequence star. (similar to the Sun) The two habitable worlds are New Gibraltar, a hot, mediterranean world, and Truth, a cold, tundra world. The other worlds in-system include Crag, the first planet to the star, Kitzol and Catron, the two gas giants, and then Hollow and Hallow as two balls of ice and rock out past the gas giants.
- You are here for a reason. It is usually to do work to get paid, but you may be here for other reasons- regardless, you have to have a reason why you're here. You know this reason innately, and should both value it enough to not lose it immediately and also play your character around that reason. Travelling all the way out to the edge of colonized space to work on a logistics vessel is not something most people do purely “on a whim”, and those who do should be characterized as particularly eccentric.
If you're particularly inclined, read on to the section below. Alternatively, skip the deep dive and use the sidebar on the right side of your screen to go down to Character Creation, which will guide you through the process of creating a lore-friendly character.
¶ Lore, what it means, and how it matters:
Doppler Shift has a large focus on creating a lore-rich world, and this lore covers many aspects outside of “the ship” or “the station”- some lore components will never be able to be interacted with in meaningful ways, but they exist within the universe to flesh out its characterization. Likewise, due to the fact that the 4CA spans the Orion Spur of the Milky Way, there's a lot of player-created lore that both exists in the universe and will never show up in a lore document like this. Player-created lore is valid and canonical, (unless it's wildly divergent from the official lore) and should be discovered and interacted with at your own pace to be able to interact with other players and their own stories.
“Official” or first-party lore will mainly cover topics that are relevant to the gameplay experience or topics that should generally be understood by a large amount of characters. Player-led lore does not need to comply with this expectation, and you are generally free to define worlds, corporations, people, and minor powers as you see fit, so long as you make an effort to fit them in to the larger lorebase.
- The government that Crusoe's is under is called the 4CA. They're a large, multicultural and multispecies federation that governs hundreds of stars with a loose series of laws that apply to all star systems under their control, leaving the majority of regulations to system-specific or species-specific governments. Sol and Sirius have slightly different legal systems, for example, but both of them have to comply with 4CA regulations on personal rights and freedoms. The 4CA is a good government aiming to create a utopia, and as a result all forms of sapient life, carbon or silicon, underneath them have certain freedoms afforded to them- these tend to be related to freedoms from slavery, unlawful imprisonment, freedom of movement, and freedom to work. The 4CA is not without flaws, and certain systems get away with debt-based entrapments of individuals, but systems that enslave sapient minds from birth or without any input from the enslaved at all are quickly brought in line with regulation through economic, diplomatic, or military force.
- The 4CA is not universally well-liked, and not all sapient species in the Orion Spur are a part of its federation. Some believe the 4CA to be too ineffective, restrained by the power of megacorporations and the influential to truly propel itself into a post-scarcity utopia, and others take a more regressive view, believing that it goes too far in dictating what can and cannot be done to other people, seeing the weak as the property of the strong. Others just don't want to be affiliated with the politics and conflict. For the most part, the 4CA leaves them well enough alone- it's politically unfavorable to try and absorb other species into itself by force, with most citizens of the 4CA continuously voting for pacifistic and friendly relations with the rest of the galactic arm.
- As Crusoe's is not a fully-colonized system, it is currently governed by the 4CA directly. When its colonies pass several metrics for sustainable continuous growth, governance will be ceded to a system-level organization. Rights are preserved, but outside of some basic legal systems, it's a little more loosely-regulated than you might find in a core or highly-developed system.
- The planets in Crusoe's are, in order:
- Crag, a rocky, metallic planet similar to Mercury. Uninhabitable, but high in the common metals and viable for resource extraction. It is pockmarked with crashed independent mining vessels from miners trying to get rich decades or even centuries before the 4CA was able to set up supply chains to colonize Crusoe's last stand, and is one of the common suspected hiding spots for legendary pirate Hank Crusoe's lost treasures, said to contain unimaginable riches and priceless artifacts of ancient civilizations.
- New Gibraltar, a warm mediterranean world filled with islands, peninsulas, and one large continent covered in deserts and jungles that fade to plains, mountains, and mesas towards its center. It features a beautiful, planet-spanning ocean that is shallow, clear, lightly salted, and exceptionally arable for algae and fish farming- so much so that there's currently food surpluses. However, due to its heat and high percentage of surface water, it also has massive week-long tropical megastorms during its wet season, which can be up to eight months long. Largely seen as a “gaia-world”, needing little terraforming outside of weather control, with its titular city containing over 600,000 people spanning out from a landed and converted colonial megaship. Tens of millions of people are on immigration lists to get a chance to live here.
- Truth, a cold, tundra world. It's habitable, but only just. During its winters, the planet is beyond frigid, with temperatures dropping to -50 Celsius or below, but it warms up to +10 during summers, revealing beautiful mountains, deep glacier lakes, and fields of blooming, hardy shrubbery making the most out of the sunlight. Its northern and southern poles stay permanently locked at well below freezing, with the coldest regions able to sustain liquid plasma lakes. The Plasmamen have made significant lobbying efforts in the 4CA's senate to prevent terraforming efforts to warm up Truth, protesting that habitable worlds with plasma lakes are exceptionally rare and the only worlds they can live on without expensive and bulky life support equipment. Of particular interest, Truth contains a small already-existing civilization of independent miners who crash-landed several hundred years ago and survived through extensive genetic modification to adapt to their environment. Their population numbers in the low thousands, but the 4CA has already dispatched a significant retinue of diplomats and sociologists to work on a positive resolution to any potential conflicts.
- Kitzol, a beige hydrogen and helium gas giant reminiscent of Sol's Saturn, with significant infrastructure around it to siphon off vast quantities of hydrogen for starship fusion engines. Many tens of thousands of people live on these, with a small “city” built around its largest fuel extraction, refinement, and storage port. Fueljack culture carries with it a heavy nightlife and many Mothic inspirations from the massive engineering corps required to sustain the installations, leading to truly impressive light shows and surprisingly good zero-g cheesemaking in its eclectic party scene. Kitzol also features a very restricted-access installation that uses its intense magnetic field to harvest small quantities of antimatter for military starship drives. Its workers are heavily screened, constantly scanned, and very, very frequently wishing to spend their paychecks on the pleasures offered by hydrogen fueling stations.
- Catron, a neptune-blue ice giant with an economically-viable quantity of plasma in its atmosphere for extraction. It features mainly autonomous gas extraction stations as opposed to Kitzol, but those that are manned get to enjoy the intense aurora caused by latent plasma reactions in its atmosphere causing visible emissions year-round near its poles.
- Hollow, a rocky ball of gravel past Catron. It is near absolute zero, lacks an atmosphere, and serves of no value or purpose to anyone outside of long-distance radio operations. Despite this, many people believe it to be a possible hiding spot for Hank Crusoe's treasure.
- Hallow, another dwarf planet similar to Hollow. However, Hallow contains large amounts of water ice, which in combination with its very low gravity and lack of atmosphere has allowed some development on the world for the purpose of easily-accessible ice mining when moving water up New Gibraltar's space elevator isn't economically viable. Massive, skyscraper-sized mass drivers hurl comet-sized chunks of ice into predetermined orbits in-system for easy recapture and delivery to Kitzol's populace, and are under constant watch by an autonomous defensive network with implanted nuclear scuttling charges to prevent a hostile takeover of what could be very, very dangerous ground-to-orbit guns if misused.
- The 4CA offers a very generous bonus to all contractors and employees working on the development or supporting the development of the star system- every five standard years, every employee from janitors to captains may choose to receive either a flat bonus equivalent to ten years' worth of minimum wage salary, or points to be spent on buying land parcels on New Gibraltar or Truth, on top of whatever salary they naturally earn. This has led to many people joining the colonization effort as a way to get out of debt or to start a new life away from the hassle of more centralized systems. The land parcels are generally acknowledged to be more valuable than the cash, but this is intentionally done so that the 4CA can ensure workers become colonists themselves.
WIP
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