Changelog¶

What's new and updated in the setting documentation.

2026-01-04¶

New: Cetacean Naming Conventions¶

Added a section to Culture explaining how cetaceans choose names for use with humans:

Dolphins favor playful, kinetic names with sound-play and onomatopoeia — "Splishy Splashy," "Flitter Flap," "Orange Dream"
Whales take a philosophical approach with flowing, multi-part names evoking cosmic imagery and deep time — "Cerulean Dreams of the Wild Dark"
Orcas acknowledge their apex predator nature with shorter, more direct names referencing patience, precision, and the hunt — "Silence Before Dawn," "Cold Patience Below," "What Surfaces"

New: Silence Before Dawn¶

Added Silence Before Dawn to the UMS Carl Sagan documentation as a connected NPC. She is an orca researcher at the University of Mare Serenitatis' Center for Talent Research, specializing in telepathic trauma response and the psychology of Talent manifestation.

Silence serves as mentor and colleague to the Pilot PC. Together they developed and published a therapeutic technique drawing on Goetic symbolic frameworks — treating trauma responses and psychological complexes as externalized entities to be named, evoked, negotiated with, and integrated through telepathic/empathic work.

Expanded: Talent Ethics¶

Major expansion of the ethics sections in Talent, covering the internal ethical frameworks emerging from practitioners themselves:

Empathic Ethics:

The "receptive empathy as natural perception" consensus — sensing emotions treated as morally equivalent to reading body language, with ethical weight on what you do with the information rather than the perception itself
Projective empathy distinctions: soothing in distress (accepted), emotional support with implicit consent (contextual), manipulation for personal benefit (condemned)
The ongoing tension between this self-serving framing and critics both inside and outside the empathic community

Kinetic Ethics:

The "face of Talent" responsibility — kinetics as the most visible discipline, representing Talent to the public for better and worse
Emergency response as internal obligation, and the political tension around "duty to act" proposals (opposed by emergency services organizations)
Controlled public behavior and the private relief of natural Talent use at home
The bright line against internal manipulation — near-absolute prohibition with medical exceptions
Professional certification through engineering boards, insurance implications
Mentorship obligations to find latent kinetics before fatal Talent explosions
The honesty of exhaustion — kinetics can't hide major exertion
Worker vs. professional tensions (union model vs. guild model)

Telepathic Ethics:

Deception dynamics — telepaths cannot lie to each other; non-telepaths find deception difficult but not impossible
Telepaths as uniquely sensitive to detecting Talent use, making them the de facto internal affairs function of the Talent community
The emerging norm of telepathic assessment — when serious allegations arise, refusal to submit is treated as tantamount to admission within Talent circles
Layers of access from surface reading to psychic surgery, each with different consent requirements
Telepathic intimacy — deep sharing as profound connection, the non-telepath partner problem, and offering mind-access as a gesture of trust
The honesty burden and its effects on telepaths' social patterns

2025-12-30¶

New: Campaign Timeline¶

Added Campaign Timeline to track character backstory events and campaign milestones. Pre-campaign events include Fleet Basic Training, the boarding incident, the Ceres period (where multiple PCs overlapped), and Rin's coursework at UMS Luna. The campaign events section will be updated as play proceeds.

New: Session Logs¶

Added a Sessions section for campaign session logs. The first entry is Session Zero, which outlines the plan for establishing campaign expectations, creating characters, and building the foundation for play.

Timeline Expansion¶

Added dated events to Timeline that were documented elsewhere but missing from the chronology:

2329: Murder of Serafina Galloway, the first confirmed Talent
2340s: First corporate He-3 extraction facilities come online at Saturn
2361: Chen v. Commonwealth of Luna — landmark case establishing telepathic assault as a crime
2368: In re: Okonkwo Estate — landmark case on Talent-based undue influence
2371: UMS Carl Sagan commissioned by the University of Mare Serenitatis

Major Expansion: Culture¶

Added substantial new sections to Culture:

Population: Approximate population figures across human space — Earth (~11-12 billion, crowding pressure), Luna (80-120 million, genuine density), orbital stations (5-10 million), Belt (2-3 million scattered), outer system (50-100k transient), and cetaceans (only dolphins and orcas counted)
Life Extension and Society: How 200-year lifespans have reshaped culture — delayed childbearing ("youth is for yourself"), multi-generation siblings as distant relatives, the 100% inheritance tax, marriage as contract with defined terms, career phases, identity drift, and the Right to Death in context
Exomemory: External memory stored in personal agents, backed up aggressively, becoming an extension of the self over decades — and the trauma of losing it
Memorial Art: A recognized genre where artists compose works from the exomemory of the deceased; the Right to Death covers exomemory disposition, making deletion requests legally binding even when it compounds grief

2025-12-29¶

New: Culture¶

Added Culture covering cross-cutting cultural elements:

Interlin: The UEF's constructed lingua franca, with Mandarin and Indian subcontinent influences, now heavily augmented with natural language slang
Regional dialects: Lunar (Russian/Chinese influences, warren terminology), Belter (Korean influences, mining/habitat jargon, favor economy vocabulary), Spacer (indigenous influences, ship-focused), and emerging outer system patterns
Indigenous language revival: The Lost Years killed languages, but also sparked preservation movements — Ojibwe as the celebrated example
Professional language: The death of medical Latin and legal jargon as democratization and personal agents made gatekeeping impractical
Translation: Ubiquitous real-time translation paradoxically preserves linguistic diversity, though nuance is lost
Cetacean communication: Telepathic speech experienced as direct mental communication, with distinctive non-human affect
Art: The post-UBI artistic explosion, holographic art revolution, regional traditions, and generative AI regulation — featuring Wayland Bimibatoo Ma'iingan's celebrated Roots in the Void installation at Ceres Spaceport
Music: Cetacean influences and new genres, spatial audio, long-form composition, and regional sounds — featuring the whale/human opera collaboration When Stars Sang Back by Cerulean Dreams of the Wild Dark and Mercury Frederico

Major Expansion: Technology¶

Comprehensive rewrite of Technology covering the technological foundations of daily life in 2375. New sections include:

Overview: The near-post-scarcity economy, UBI, and the search for meaning in an age of abundance
Power and Energy: He-3 fusion, solar power gradients, solid-state batteries, and power distribution
Manufacturing: Automated fabrication, feedstock economics, and the blur between printing and traditional manufacturing
Intellectual Property: Tiered access (open source, licensed, restricted), enforcement gradients, and the maker subculture
Socialized Designs: UEF intervention to make essential technologies freely available, and the ongoing political battles over what qualifies
Economy and Currency: UEF credits, decentralized finance for light-speed-delayed commerce, corporate scrip in outer system company towns
The Reputation Economy: The lune/favor system — formalized mutual aid originating on Luna, adopted (and renamed) by Belters, explicitly excluding corporate participation
Human/Computer Interface: Holographic haptic displays, personal agents that manage your digital life, and the ongoing brain-plug taboo
Habitats and Life Support: Environmental systems, food production, habitat types from spacecraft to arcologies, radiation protection
Medical Technology: 200-year lifespans, regenerative medicine, diagnostics, mental health care, and the Talent misdiagnosis reckoning
Materials and Construction: Advanced composites, self-healing materials, thermal management, and the revolution in kinetic-assisted construction
Robotics and Automation: Ubiquitous robotics, drones, expert systems, and the human-in-the-loop design philosophy
Sensors and Detection: Passive and active sensing, materials analysis, and the surveillance/privacy tradeoffs across different cultures

Existing sections on Spacecraft, Weapons, and Communications preserved and integrated.

2025-12-27¶

Updated: Talent History and Society¶

Expanded the History section of Talent with:

The Religious Landscape: How major faiths fared through the global conflicts and into 2375 — weakened Catholicism, enduring Judaism, transformed Islam, collapsed American Evangelicalism, resurgent Buddhism/Hinduism, indigenous revival, and secular rationalism
The Confirmation Event: Serafina Galloway, the NICU nurse whose projective empathy was accidentally captured on monitoring equipment in 2319 — the first confirmed Talent
David Mercer: The hospital administrator who leaked the confirmation, believing it would turn humanity back toward faith
Religious and Philosophical Responses: How different traditions processed Talent confirmation
The Murder of Serafina Galloway: Her death in 2329, its aftermath, and the memorials
Traditional Techniques: Buddhist, Hindu, and indigenous practices that demonstrably improve Talent training — vipassanā filtering, zazen stillness, prāṇāyāma cycling, Amazonian grounding, and more

New: Cetacean First Contact and Integration¶

Added a major new section to Cetaceans covering:

Dr. Benedict Marlowe: The child prodigy marine biologist who first made contact with cetaceans through his "whale dreams" — and staged the public demonstration that proved it
The Communication Barrier Falls: How cetaceans learned to speak to non-telepathic humans
Human Responses: Religious reactions, the reckoning with humanity's treatment of cetaceans, and economic consequences of cetacean sovereignty over the deep oceans
The Treaty and UEF Membership: President Animikii Deschamps and the three Dolphin Ambassadors (Flitter Flap, Orange Dream, and Patches) who proposed cetacean membership in 2336
Ongoing Tensions: Reparationists, resentful communities, and the suspicious fringe

New: The Outer System¶

Added The Outer System — comprehensive documentation of humanity's presence beyond the Belt, including:

Helium-3 operations: The UEF monopoly, why it matters, and the crack forming at Saturn
Jupiter system: Callisto Station (the largest outer system settlement), He-3 extraction infrastructure, and Fleet presence
Saturn system: Titan Station, and three corporate extraction operations (ARC, Cronus Energy, Titan Extraction) representing the first challenge to UEF fuel control
Beyond Saturn: Research outposts, the disappearances, and the deep black
Life in the outer system: Isolation, work, and emerging culture

New: Communications¶

Added a Communications section to Technology covering:

The Stellar Network: How the experience varies from real-time (inner system) to island-like isolation (Saturn and beyond)
Signal types: Radio for broadcast/emergency, optical/laser for high-bandwidth point-to-point
Communication delays: Full table of one-way and round-trip delays for major routes
Relay infrastructure: Fleet-operated backbone from Earth to Saturn, corporate supplements, and the coverage gradient that leaves the outer system isolated
Practical implications: How delays shape governance, commerce, emergency response, piracy, and information asymmetry

Updated: Story¶

Added reference to the He-3 monopoly crack and linked to the new Outer System documentation.

Updated: Tensions¶

Added "The He-3 Monopoly Crack" as a new tension — the Saturn corporate licensing experiment and its implications for UEF power, corporate ambitions, and Belter independence aspirations.

Updated: Engineer PC — Kai Le Gerrac¶

Named the Engineer PC and expanded the Le Gerrac genetic anomaly with three characteristics from hybrid lineage:

Genomic resilience: Takes to modifications more successfully than average
Seamless integration: Cosmetic mods blend smoothly rather than showing typical seams
Kinetic predisposition: Genetic markers favor kinetic Talent specifically

Updated UMS Carl Sagan crew roster and Venn Life Sciences research files accordingly.

Updated: Belter Culture¶

Added a Belter Culture section to Government covering:

Asymmetry and individuality: Belters favor asymmetrical styles as a cultural statement
Jewelry and adornment: Wood, bone, amber, and natural materials are precious; metals are common
The scarcity ethic: Radical reuse as both practical necessity and cultural value
Zero-G silk: The Kovacs Collective and their micro-gravity silk-producing organism

New: Key Political Figures¶

Added named leadership to Government:

President Adaora Oyelaran — Cautious diplomat, consensus-builder
Fleet Commander Dmitri Volkov — Outer system veteran, politically savvy
Commander In Chief Elena Vasquez — Beloved humanitarian, quietly ambitious
Inspector General Yusuf Abara — Incorruptible former judge, relentless investigator
Governor Marek Svoboda — Overwhelmed Ceres administrator, knows about ARC but lacks courage to act

2025-12-25¶

New: Venn Life Sciences¶

Added Venn Life Sciences — a Lunar biotech corporation that serves as a contrasting corporate presence to ARC. Venn built its reputation on ethical practice during the post-Boom cleanup era and now specializes in longevity treatments and genetic medicine, including publicly acknowledged Talent genetics research.

New: Corporate Logos¶

Added logo images to ARC and Venn Life Sciences.

Updated: UMS Carl Sagan¶

Added ship image
Expanded the Engineer PC entry with background details: hybrid ancestry, connection to Venn's longitudinal studies, and relationships with other crew members

Updated: Mysteries¶

Added "Corporate Talent Research" as a new mystery — rumors that corporations have been quietly studying Talent genetics for decades.

2025-12-23¶

New: UMS Carl Sagan¶

Added UMS Carl Sagan — the ship, crew, and mission documentation for the Mars Archaeological Survey. This is the starting point for the campaign.

Highlights:

The Carl Sagan is a Beta-class research vessel owned by the University of Mare Serenitatis
Mission objectives: investigate Professor Leonidas's claims of pre-human artifacts on Mars, plus colonization site assessment
Full crew roster including key NPCs: Captain Pravitha Iyer, Professor Leonidas, Captain Splishy Splashy (dolphin pilot), and others

Updated: UMS Carl Sagan NPCs¶

Added Beliefs and Instincts for the five key NPCs: Leonidas, Captain Iyer, Splishy, Kyle Chen, and Noor Hadid. These provide mechanical hooks for play and clearer dramatic purpose.

Updated: Aether Resource Collective (ARC)¶

Expanded the Mispahk children section with individual character writeups for Cristina Lorelli, Sion Jeong, Michael Lorelli, and Kirsten Jarvii. Added details on the Long Jeong (the Jeong family mining vessel) and the Moliwa siblings' current status.

Updated: Technology¶

Added crew size ranges to ship class definitions (Delta through Alpha).

Updated: Story¶

Added link to the Sagan mission from the starting hook.