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Changelog

What's new and updated in the setting documentation.

2026-02-28

New: Session Three Log — Potato Moon Pt. 1

Added Session Three — the Sagan crew arrives at Phobos Station and walks into a political landscape nobody briefed them for.

New: The Mars Question

Added a major new section to Tensions covering the political dynamics driving Mars colonization — Luna's quiet planning, the UEF's response through Colonial Affairs, the Mars Consortium's corporate angle, and why the situation is volatile.

Updated: Timeline

Expanded Timeline with dated events covering the Mars political situation from ~2365 to present: Luna's planning, UEF intelligence response, Colonial Affairs elevation, Mars Consortium founding, Phobos Station construction, and observer agreements.

Updated: Government

Added the Department of Colonial Affairs to the government structure — a minor bureau elevated to a full Department in response to Mars colonization, and promptly staffed with former Fleet brass.

Updated: Mars

Expanded Mars with Phobos Station population details and staffing breakdown. Updated shuttle section to reflect the named shuttlecraft (Tycho Brahe and Annie Jump Cannon).

Updated: Talent

Added Professional Disclosure in Medicine — the medical profession's formalized ethical framework for Talented practitioners to disclose their abilities to patients. A player-contributed setting addition.

Updated: Session Three Navigation

Session Three log now available in the player navigation.

2026-02-18

New: University of Mare Serenitatis

Added University of Mare Serenitatis — a comprehensive document covering UMS history, campus, governance, academic structure, financial position, and its role as the institutional engine driving the Mars expedition.

Updated Navigation

Reorganized site navigation for clarity:

  • Campaign section: Now includes University of Mare Serenitatis alongside the Carl Sagan
  • NPCs: Moved Mycroft Holmes to PC Connections (Azure relationship)
  • World section: Reorganized into Places (Luna, Mars, Outer System), Factions (Government, Cetaceans, ARC, Venn), and reference topics (Bioengineering, Culture, Talent, Technology)

Updated: NPC Artwork

Updated: Added Clarus to Victoria's Character Page

Updated: Corrections to Session Logs

  • Corrected Session One bullet regarding Victoria's thought process during the first Book Club Lunch.
  • Corrected Session Two to add that Clarus had given Victoria details on Kyle Chen's genetic mods.

2026-02-14

Updated: Advancement System

Redesigned skill advancement to work with our narrative play style. All tracking now happens at session end in a single pass:

  • Rolled skills count toward advancement regardless of obstacle
  • One narrative use test for skills used but not rolled
  • One practice test for any skill (downtime study/reflection)

Replaces the previous system that required obstacle > skill rating, which produced effectively zero advancement over two sessions. Session 3 includes a one-time catch-up option for players.

New: NPC Index and Character Sheets

Added an NPC Index — a single reference document for all named characters in the campaign, organized by location and PC connection. Includes a quick reference table, brief descriptions, and links to full character sheets.

Individual NPC character sheets created for:

Updated: UMS Carl Sagan

Streamlined Sagan by moving full NPC profiles to individual character sheets. The document now focuses on the ship, the mission, and a compact crew roster with links to NPC sheets. Key crew dynamics are summarized in the new Key NPCs section.

Updated: Mars

Streamlined Mars by moving Phobos Station NPC profiles to individual character sheets. Brief descriptions with links replace the full profiles.

2026-01-07

Updated: Kai Le Gerrac

Finalized Kai's character details from player backstory:

  • Beliefs and Instincts: All three of each now established
  • Appearance: Added batwing tattoos on shoulderblades
  • Background: Filled in childhood details, Specter community connection, path to the Sagan

New: Raw Oak

Added Raw Oak as a named Lunar nature band in Culture — the act where Kai met Azure Armstrong before they enlisted together.

2026-01-06

New: Mars

Added Mars covering the mission destination:

  • Phobos Station: Luna's first major territorial claim beyond the Moon — a University of Mare Serenitatis research installation that's new, functional, but still developing its character. Includes political observers from UEF and corporate interests.
  • Surface Presence: Centuries of robotic exploration have left rovers, landers, and automated systems scattered across Mars. A few small crewed research outposts exist, staffed by scientists whose quiet domain is suddenly politically significant.
  • Jezero Crater: The mission site — an ancient river delta with biosignatures discovered in 2024 and anomalous metallic samples from the Expansion Era. Also being evaluated as a potential colony site.
  • Environment: Evocative description of Martian conditions — the sharp light, pervasive dust, muffled silence, and bitter cold.
  • Mission Operations: The Sagan's shuttle, transit patterns between ship/station/surface, and ground base setup procedures.

Expanded: Lunar Culture and the Specter Scene

Reorganized and expanded Luna with a focus on the Specter cosmetic modification subculture:

  • Reordered sections so Lunar Civic Service now follows Lunar Government (both treaty-related), with Lunar Culture as the final major section
  • Added The Specter Scene subsection detailing three prominent venues:
    • Phosphene: A techie rave club where Specter culture and the electronic music scene overlap — reactive walls, Aspect Nights, coordinated luminescent tattoo displays
    • The Warren: A multi-level social institution in an older warren, with four distinct floors: the nostalgic Lobby (embracing the subculture's furry lineage), the Circle (social hub with Purist and Explorer cliques), the Floor (dance club), and the Depths (major event venue for the annual Showcase and Emergence Ceremonies)
    • Chimera: An exclusive club for Specters who've pushed past socially comfortable limits — where grey-market modders network and people with over-the-line modifications can exist openly
  • Added Scene Dynamics covering the progression between venues, friendly rivalries, and legendary modders known across the community

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 Azure Armstrong. 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
  • 2374: 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:

  1. Genomic resilience: Takes to modifications more successfully than average
  2. Seamless integration: Cosmetic mods blend smoothly rather than showing typical seams
  3. 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.