Flyover Country: Prologue

"Zaku Relic" by Martin Parker

I've been meaning to share an account of my ongoing Stars Without Number campaign for ages now—it was one of the reasons I started this blog!—but I keep putting it off. It's been going for half a year now, and we've been playing every week. You'd think I'd be hopelessly far behind at this point, but happily I've been keeping pretty good notes and my players are incredibly unambitious and spend 70% of each session sampling street food, haggling with merchants, and bullshitting, so there's not that much to catch up on.

I'll start with a bit about the setting I cooked up and where I decided to start my players. This map of the sector (which also includes lots of notes about the setting) might be a handy reference, although if you are a future reader deeply invested in the chronological narrative integrity of the story I'm about to recount (I should be so lucky!), there are technically a bunch of spoilers in there.

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I called the campaign "Flyover Country" because I intended for much of the action to take place on and around several underdeveloped, underpopulated border planets that form a crossroads surrounded by the established and rising interstellar powers. Lots of trade passes through, and offworlders do some resource extraction here, but the natives are poor and have few opportunities.

I started them off on a steamy Earth-like planet called Morrow. It was an agricultural colony long ago, before the Scream—the psychic apocalypse that ended SWN's galaxy-spanning Terran Mandate. The small pre-Scream population of botanists, technicians, and administrators all lived near an equatorial spaceport, Port Mundele. When their advanced technology failed in the wake of the Scream, most scattered to the four corners of the planet, staking out petty kingdoms and principalities among the plantations and the wilderness.

Hundreds of years later, Morrow stands on the doorstep of the Sector's biggest polity, the Commonwealth of Free Worlds. The old spaceport, Port Mundele, now better known simply as Freeport, is home to millions. Its small fortified core is dominated by offworld corporations, and the lawless sprawl around that by organized crime syndicates; the networks of smugglers and traffickers that connect the border worlds and stretch into the more developed systems are all rooted here. Despite being poor, low-tech, and ruled by myriad petty tyrants, Morrow is one of the only planets in the Sector with major forests and an important source of pretty much every botanical luxury good you can think of: coffee, tea, chocolate, vanilla, cinnamon, teak, and so forth.

And things are changing outside Freeport. Much of the southern hemisphere has unified under a single government, and parts of the northern hemisphere are joining too. Several years ago, one of the large northern states, Sylva, cast off its duke, declared a republic, and fomented an insurrection in the neighboring Principality of Konyr. The civil war in Konyr has been raging for ages, but it recently turned decisively in favor of the rebels, who took the capital and declared the People's Republic of Konyr. Rumor has it that Sylva and Konyr will join the unified government and that Morrow will soon be invited to join the Commonwealth.

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Under the hood, Morrow is a TL3 planet (i.e., technology like present-day Earth) with a breathable atmosphere, a temperate-to-warm climate, a human-miscible biosphere, and "several million inhabitants," which after some more dice rolls I determined was about 70 million people. It got the world tags "warlords" and "civil war," which together with the pleasant environment suggested to me a resource-cursed developing nation where a traitorous comprador elite impoverish their fellows and trade away their homeland's natural bounty in exchange for the foreign weapons they need to invade each other and keep their citizens in line.

A bit of iteration and the influence of the faction system added some new layers to this: Morrow, and the big equatorial city of Freeport specifically, is the home of a Sector-wide organized crime network. Some Wikipedia research convinced me that modeling that network after the French mob would be fun, and the whole war-torn, resource-rich paradise thing made me think of the Congo, so I decided that the main cultural flavor of Morrow (and the broader milieu criminel morrovien, aka the Milieu) would be Franco-Congolese. Major bonus: French accents are fun.

Meanwhile, the Sector's biggest power, the Commonwealth, is right next door, and Morrow is an obvious expansion target for them. I decided that the Commonwealth's infamous CIA-/KGB-like spy agency, IRIS, had spent recent decades manipulating Morrovian politics toward a seemingly organic democratic unification which the Commonwealth could recognize, sparing everybody the difficulty and ugliness of an invasion. And of course a CIA-like spy agency has strong ties to organized crime; Milieu-connected agents would be the tip of the IRIS spear.

My friends wanted to play a bunch of criminal or semicriminal lowlifes in the vein of Firefly and Cowboy Bebop, so their their characters had Milieu connections built in. Now I just needed an excuse to give them a ship, and if I could deliver that in the form of a job from IRIS, brokered via a Milieu fixer, I'd immediately get two of the factions' hooks into them.

Next: Cast and Crew.