Novarion Sector Vibes

30 Oct, 2025

This is the most important post. This is my attempt to communicate the heart of the setting, what draws me in personally, and hopefully what draws in players as well. Everything else is just spackle and scaffolding.

Somewhere, Everywhere

A starship blinks into existence in the furthermost orbit of a distant blue star. The hull is scraped and pitted by dust and micrometeors, but it still bears the vibrant colors of its merchant company. Her crew and the company are the five people aboard the ship, just now changing shifts after a long jump outside the universe. They are hardy folk, few born spacers among them, but all spacers made. Each came from a different planet, lured to the void by promises of treasure, glory, and freedom. They sing as they steady the grav-rudder and fire the maneuver drives. They sing to lift their spirits. They sing to thank the gods and saints who sheltered their ship through the darkness.

They slip silently through the night, keeping a careful watch for hunting raiders. They tell tales of lost treasure-moons, shore leave misadventures, and things on the scanners that no scientist could explain.

When they arrive to their planet, a green and red cloud-wrapped bauble in a night sky, they disembark aboard an orbital starport and take a shuttle down below. The lowport is a hive of scum and villainy, but far more accommodating than the claustrophobic starport above. The merchant-captain cuts a swaggering figure, especially in her fine blue jacket, wearing her filigreed monoblade longsword (looted off of a dead Gallican officer) and holding a customized mag pistol (maintained as a hobby by her engineer.) She and her crew - a rough and tumble crowd with stained jumpsuits and a riot of fashions - disperse into the open-air market just outside of the lowport proper, rubbing shoulders with a dozen cultures.

The market is wooden stalls (the planet has an abundance of trees) reinforced and capped with iron plating. Other materials are rare. Everyone here is trying to find something: supplies, fuel, weapons. The locals are only too happy to oblige, and hefty bribes to local enforcers let less savory goods travel uninterrupted. The captain easily strikes a deal for her machine tools and rare alloys with a local merchant. A handshake, a handful of credits, and few bottles of alien liquors secure the deal.

She moves into the main square to gather her crew, and that's where she spots him. He's got a bearded chin, an arm that glistens with chrome, and a wide-brimmed hat. He's wearing a cloak of the local style, draped over his shoulders for camouflage. He's a bounty hunter, and a violent one. She's got a price on her head, set by the bank who gave her the ship years ago. He catches the captain's eye, tosses his cig, and gives the captain one courteous nod.

Then the shooting starts. The captain dives into cover as the bounty hunter whips out his two laser pistols. He pumps her hiding spot full of laser fire. Their distinctive hiss-cracks ripple across the square. The crowd flees from the gunfight, and the crew are carried away in the struggle.

The captain is pinned down and bleeding. The bounty hunter stalker her, scanning the market until he reaches the stall wreckage she is hiding in. The captain knows the minute she pops out and tries to shoot, she's dead. He's just too fast. She would draw her sword to ambush the scoundrel, but a cauterized gash now runs down her sword arm. There's one last trick up her sleeve. On a distant moon, hiding from pirates, the captain and her crew discovered a cavern dug long ago. Inside was jewelry, gold, silver, ancient books - enough treasure to keep them flying a few more months. Amidst the alcoves, the captain also discovered a small device, incongruous among the tomb riches. She draws it out from her coat pocket. It's a fist-sized cylinder made of black metal, with two sections of glowing purple lights run along its side, and a single button between them.

It's pretech, for certain. That much the captain can tell. She can't fully determine what it does, but she figures it's some kind of grenade, on account of how it looks like a grenade, and how she would really like it to be some kind of grenade. It could probably fetch her six months of spare parts, but right now, huddled behind the fallen table, she figures out her life is worth more than tens of thousands of credits. She has no idea what this thing will do, if anything, but she is running out of time. The footsteps get closer. The captain presses the button. With a prayer, a curse, and a sharp breath, she tosses it overhead.

Elsewhere in the Universe

• Ducking and diving, avoiding laser fire, the revolutionary shoots his way out of a cantina full of colonial soldiers. If he can just make it to the edge of town, he'll be safe.
• A good whack gets the computer system restarted and working properly.
• Tapes whir and spin in a great vault of computers. At the center of this information temple, the agent reads the terminal screen, watching for what is there that should not be, and what should be there that is not.
• The comet jockey prays to God, Allah, Buddha, Jesus, Krishna, Mother Mary, Jamie Dawson, Ahura Mazda, Lao Tzu, and every semi-divinity he's heard of even once as he connects the severed ends of the two power lines. The bandits are on his tail and his ship isn't rated for enough g's to escape, but he's resolved to push the old girl beyond her limits. It's a good haul, one worth dying for. If he lives, he'll be out of debt for sure.
• A hundred tons of pretech technology, vials of impossible-to-produce biological compounds, and computers to calculate military logistics are traded in a handshake deal, between two people whose only shared language is money.
• Under guttering lights the worker sprints down the antiseptic hallway. The thing behind her is the precision of a machine merged with the bloodlust of the flesh. It's not faster than a human, so she entertains hope of escape. She isn't aware it's already passing her, gliding silently through the vents.
• The constable shakes her head at the scene. A bar destroyed, patrons assaulted, and the county's biggest cube pig rancher humiliated. It's been nothing but trouble since those space vagrants rode into town, ranting about buried treasure.
• Through the red-brown atmosphere of a gas giant, manta-like animals dive and swoop as they feed.
• The mercenary hacks through another batch of leaves, while the scientist waves her bioscanner over a shoot. Above them both, invisible, a native predator slowly descends.
• The driver swears and curses as the engine of the bike gives out. She hits it, pulls it apart, talks sweetly to it, but no dice. It's fifty-seven kilometers to the safe zone, and all she has left is half a liter of water and two decent boots. In the distance, the rattling sound of the killing winds.
• The lieutenant, so new his colonial commission is still pressed in his pocket, orders his soldiers into a square. Bereft of artillery, air power, or motorized transport, they all die together and forgotten under the enveloping assault of the resistance fighters.
• The analyst looks again at the data, then back out on the tiny moon. None of the readings are right, and the equipment has been replaced three times. There's something anomalous on the surface. Every time she looks away, she can't shake her conviction that the moon is laughing at her.
• The pilot jerks her controls and yanks the plane into a tight turn. The bottom of her jet scraps mountainside. Her pursuer is less agile and smashes into it at full speed. She breathes hard, her vision swimming after pulling nine gees. She takes down the invader's fighters one after another, but more keep coming.
• The soldier casts their helmet aside. They stare up around them. Trees, trees, thousands of trees for miles around, just like in the stories. It is the most beautiful thing they have ever seen.
• A robotic figure, only vaguely humanoid, wanders a pure white beach. Each grain of sand is actually coarse bone. It is looking for something buried here, something that was part of it, but in this limited body and diminished mind, it can't remember.
• When the skymen arrived the first time, people simply froze, unable to responds as they absconded with friends and family. When the skymen arrived the second time, the people fled, abandoning baskets, animals, and garments to escape. The third time, the champion and his fellow warriors were ready. They tracked the skymen's chariot across the sky and ambushed them as they disembarked. The sorcerous skymen armor resisted atl-atls and obsidian blades, but did little against rope bindings a heavy rock. The living warriors tore the skymen to pieces and snatched their sorcerous devices. The champion himself left one terrified skyman bound and alive to help them operate their chariot. The champion and the warriors of the twelve nations soared through the sky, determined assault the demon star that had no doubt birthed this evil.

"Leaf on the Wind," by Wayne Peters

#lore #novarion-sector #rpg #swn #worldbuilding