I've been kicking around an idea for an RPG done mostly in play-by-post format with some amount of video/voice chat between the characters for flavor and events that have to be reacted to and handled in real-time rather than by creative writing.

It's a mid-far future setting, humanity has colonies dotting the solar system, working on making Mars liveable, AND we found a system nearby-ish that has a few potentially habitable planets. We sent a flyby probe that was promising, and then the first colony fleet. Eventually, we lost contact with them. The players of my game would be part of the second expedition to colonize the system and locate the missing first expedition, or discover their fate.

Posted below is a little bit of flavor-text I'm calling Martian Dreams, for no particular reason. I plan on posting all the bits of flavor text that I write to hubski, along with links to the in-game wiki and posts I make to start the game. Constructive critique always welcome. I'm planning on going back through this later and making it all in the same voice and tense, so don't get at me about that.

Martian Dreams

Nobody had expected to need archaeologists on Mars. There were endlessly long lists of mining contracts, colonist-wanted postings, job openings for everything from hydroponic agriculture technicians and rover mechanics to micro-gravity rated janitorial staff. But archaeologists? Xenobiologists? The idea was laughable.

And then a mining rig operator crashed through into a tunnel that connected to an underground complex that occupies most of the subsurface of the Red Planet. Shielded from our probes, gravimetric readings, tectonic sensor readings, shielded from everything except the laser-hot tip of a drill man’s rig.

So now we need archaeologists on Mars. And xeno-archaeologists, and xeno-linguists, and xeno-biologists, and just about xeno-everything else. The roughnecks mining ore and exocit hydrogen soon found a flood of academics crowding microgravity waystation bars and housing projects in the blossoming Martian cities. A central authority was established to regulate the expeditions that disappear for weeks at a time down the tunnels in specially constructed explorer vehicles, hauled down from the surface a piece at a time and assembled at an administrative waypoint located in a Builder supply depot, nine hundred meters below the Martian surface.

It was clear from the beginning that the ruins were ancient beyond human reckoning. Radiometric dating of dust accumulation in some of the older vaults and workshops estimated that whoever had built the vast warren of civilization beneath the Martian surface had been operating when the earth was still covered in primordial slime that was just starting to self-assemble into living things. The Builders, as they came to be known, shared some similarities with humankind based on the layout and materials of their construction. The spaces dedicated to habitation and work were carved deep into the rock as protection from radiation. Their analogues for space suits would accommodate a roughly horizontal frame with two arms, two legs, a head located in the top portion of the trunk, and had more than four times the amount of radiation shielding as a human suit as well as a powered exoskeleton. Their eyes were adapted to a dimmer sun than ours and all of their lighting was similarly low powered. The ruins beneath Mars have spaces dedicated to food cultivation and processing (Some kind of fungus that fed on radioactive isotopes as well as a wheat correspondent that was processed into something similar to bread in appearance that was more like a stiff pudding in consistency), something like a combination between a medical suite and maintenance bay for drone constructor units. So they ate something carbon-based, so they were probably carbon-based. They used light to see and communicate, although there wasn’t any indication that they used or even had a concept of sound except as just another form of vibration to be accounted for in engineering of say, air handling systems.

The explorers came back with maps of the vast hive network of tunnels, cities, towns, industrial facilities and more. They returned with cargo crawlers full of technological marvels in various stages of operational function, disrepair, or partial destruction. Their computers, data processing and transfer systems were advanced to the point of arcane at times, defying human understanding of material science, and even entropy. Finally, a breakthrough came when a team of xeno-archaeologists managed to break open a secured, but damaged bunker near the collapsed end of a main transit tunnel. The bunker, approximately the size of a small warehouse contained something that had been speculated about, but never confirmed until that moment. Weapons. Weapons, and their operator, a single, partially destroyed robot who would have stood a head or two higher than a large man. ‘Otto’ as he came to be known (A play on ‘Avtomat Kalashnikova’) was a bipedal figure with two arms ending in smooth nubs and a large smooth protrusion that melded into where a head and shoulders would be on a man. From the middle-abdomen down, his otherwise flowing skin hangs ripped and jagged, revealing a partially crushed endoskeleton of gleaming ceramics suspended in sparkling gel. After only a few minutes of exposure to the Russian language he began to attempt to communicate with the team that retrieved him from the collapsed command nodule in the bunker. In stilted, grating Russian that was still somehow tinged with the dialectic peculiarities of the Kamchatkan expedition leader, Otto attempted to interrogate his would-be rescuers. As the partially crushed sought to determine the motivations of the expedition he revealed much about the end of The Builder’s time on Mars. Upon being convinced of the benign intent of the exploration team he switched abruptly from defensive and guarded to almost pleading. He was insistent upon the assertion that ‘The Enemy’ must not be allowed to penetrate into the tunnel complex. When asked to provide further information about this ‘Enemy’ he appeared to suffer some form of cascading memory failure and shut down. After years of detailed analysis only partial functionality was able to be restored to the unit. It was able to take in power, analyze and repeat chunks of whatever language was spoken in its proximity but never produced new sentences or divulged data again.

The weapons that Otto was entombed beside remain somewhat of a secret to all but the highest echelons of Solar Naval Intelligence and the United Solar Congress Committee on Extraterrestrial Technologies and Protocol. Well, them and the teams responsible for cataloguing and ‘disarming’ the things. I led a team of three hundred and fifty xenoarchaeologists, Explosive Ordnance technicians, plus a security detachment of a hundred Solar Naval Marines on the project. After Otto got shorted out and shipped to Mars for study, that section of the tunnel was cordoned off and a logistics train established. My guys, in conjunction with the EOD techs and whatever Marine muscle was free were tasked with removing armaments from the bunker where they would be tagged and bagged according to where it had been found, each sealed in a stasis-locked transit crate that would only open upon the touch of the appropriate cyborg quartermaster back in a far-side Lunar weapons lab somewhere.

Attached to this narrative is a link to request the full report of the weapons capabilities of what we found down there. The bunker contained everything that an ancient xeno general could conceivably need to wage a decently sized war. Storage lockers near the only door contained small arms the size of squad operated machine guns from the twenty-first century shaped from some kind of dark glass or crystal. Further back in recessed, darkened niches stood a legion of inactive power armor shaped almost like Otto the robot, each with a status window gently pulsing like vital signs in a hospice ward. Larger constructs populated raised plinths as we worked our way farther back into the bunker, each one a unique vehicle or suit of powered armor more fearsome than the last. Other assorted bits of military hardware were arranged throughout the bunker, some of which are still of unknown function or purpose. At the very back though was the discovery that that got the entire dig turned into a classified SNI black site. The discovery that probably cost our videographer and expedition remembrancer their lives.

A thousand suits of powered armor, perfectly shaped and fitted for human beings.