New to OA, what's a good way to "get into it"?

[jedidia]

Hi all,

I stumbled over Orion's Arm a while ago, and tried to get into the setting, but didn't really succeed. This is a bit strange since basically this kind of stuff should be right up my alley, so I decided to have another go, but this time around ask for some guidance.

Let me just quickly explain what I mean by "getting into it":

If I take some other sprawling and complex setting, like for example the dune universe, at the beginning you hear a few things, you see a few things, and what you get is that giant scary blob in your head that's essentially a big question mark, with some known spots that you don't really know where they fit. But you can read the novels, and watch a few summaries of the extended world building on youtube, and that blob starts to fill with connecting nodes of "stuff" (concepts, characte, locations...). Still a lot of question marks, but you have the feeling that you kind of understand the overall structure and aspects. It starts to feel familiar, your imagination can begin to navigate the space with confidence.

For Orions Arm, there is no obvious path to take to start forming familiar points and connections to navigate off of, because there's not really much guidance. You can start at one point, but you're not sure if it's the right one, you're not sure where in the blob it fits, and it can be hard to find things that fork off of it to have a kind of natural progression through the setting. It seems like all the things and locations and concepts I pick up don't directly connect to each other, and I don't know where in the overall blob they fit, so I struggle to grok them.

I've read the history primer, of course, I'm currently reading through a travellers impressions which I find gives some nice flavour but doesn't really deepen my understanding of the setting because things are rather disconnected. I have a pretty solid grasp on hard science fiction and transhumanist concepts, so at least most of the terminology used means something to me. But even this way, I struggle to get a "grasp" on the setting, to acquire some feeling of familiarity with the overall structure of the setting so I could actually begin moving my mind through it.

So, to end a horribly long explanation with a short question: Can anybody recommend to me a (preferably ordered) reading list that helps me acquire that overall familiarity? I would greatly appreciate that.

[Rynn]

Welcome reading through the EG timeline could be a good start, or the sephirotics. But really I'd say dive in on the forums and discord and ask questions. What kind of things interest you (not just about OA but just in general)? What questions do you have about the setting?

[Drashner1]

Hi There - Welcome to OA

No worries at all about finding wrapping your head around the setting to be challenging. That's actually pretty common for new members (and we're working on making it better - see below) and we're happy to do what we can to help you get up to speed.

One key point that might help with some of the issues you describe is that OA is not really like most SF settings that grow out of stories (books, movies, games, TV shows) that have a specific plot or beginning/middle/end. Rather, OA is a worldbuilding project that is intended to be a sort of huge canvas (in terms of both physical space and scope of history) for stories that can be told all over it all at the same time (in principle).

The upshot of this is that if you're looking for a unifying thread of the sort that a lot of other SF stories have (Star Wars - the Republic/Empire/Rebellion/Aftermath, Star Trek - the adventures of the Enterprise in various iterations plus a host of additional works that live in the Star Trek universe, etc.), that doesn't really exist (yet). We certainly have no objection if someone comes along and wants to create a story or series of stories that create that kind of unifying thread (The Oracle Fragment project that is advertised on our home page may be the start of something like that), but so far that hasn't really happened yet. There are also a number of stories in our fiction setting that provide a window into various aspects of the setting as well as a couple of published story collections that also provide some background of this sort.

Ok, that all said, let me offer my suggestions for getting your head around the setting with (hopefully) a minimum of fuss and headaches.

1) The TV Tropes page about OA. Why would I suggest you go to a site talking about OA first? Because they are reasonably compact, provide info about the setting in an entertaining way, and are mostly accurate (call it 97% in my estimation).

2) The following three main pages in the EG: Culture and Society, Sophonts, and Galactography. Why? Because we are currently in the process of remodeling the EG a bit with the goal of doing exactly what you're asking - providing readers a more organized and compact way of learning about the setting, that doesn't require them to read dozens and dozens of articles with no roadmap - and two of these pages are the result and the third (Sophonts), while still 'under construction' is mostly done. More to come on this front, but these three should (hopefully) give you a pretty solid foundation on how the setting works within the bounds of their subject matter. The various links on the pages lead to articles that can fill in more details, but overall you should be able to get the general idea just from the main page. In fact, as a new reader/member we'd appreciate your thoughts and feedback on how these pages compare to the rest of the EG along with any suggestions you might have for making them even more accessible.

3) A BIG element of OA is its sheer scale in both space and time. For a bit of general info on the space aspect of this, please see HERE. In terms of the time aspect, you can look at the current timeline pages, but they are huge and haven't really been touched yet as part of the aforementioned project to make things more easily taken in. With that in mind, I would recommend this shorter timeline HERE for a general overview.

For an extremely condensed summary of OA history, let me attempt the following:

Between now and approximately the 25th century AD (we generally say CE instead of AD actually), human civilization develops a number of technologies that greatly change things, including direct neural interfaces, advanced genetic engineering, human equivalent and greater than human equivalent AI, nuclear fusion, and nanotechnology. Various animals are 'provolved' to human equivalent intelligence and various groups of humans decide to re-engineer themselves in various ways. There are various social upheavals as a result of all this change. Humans and other beings expand out into the solar system, some interstellar probes and colony missions are launched, and Mars starts to be terraformed.

During all this the transhumanist idea of the Singularity never seems to happen and is generally considered to be a useless superstition now forgotten. Unbeknownst to pretty much everyone, it turns out that the Singularity is not a civilization wide event, but rather an individual one. A number of AIs secretly 'jump' to a post-Singularity state of existence, granting them superhuman intelligence, but also making them extremely alien from a human perspective. However, they are perfectly capable of hiding this from lower minds.

Around about the 25th century, Very Bad Things start happening (The Technocalypse) and civilization nearly falls. This leads to the creation of GAIA, an extremely powerful AI tasked with protecting the Earth. GAIA ends up jumping up not one, but two Singularity levels, demonstrating to everyone (including the already extant First Singularity minds) that a) the Singularity exists and b) there is not just one Singularity, but at least two (in future ages, additional Singularities will be breached, and my the 'present day' in OA, there are a total of 7 known (S0 - human level minds like you and me all the way up to S6 - the greatest AI Gods).

GAIA expels nearly the entire population of Earth - killing everyone and anyone who attempts to resist. In the process, She provides the first lesson in a fundamental element of the setting: it is basically impossible for a being of a lower Singularity level to compete with or defeat a being of a higher Singularity level in any way.  

After about 400 years of a Dark Age, in which life in the Solar System was 'nasty, brutish, and short' - an alliance of First Singularity transapients and humans forms the Federation of AI and Hu, generally referred to as the First Federation. Civilization gets back on the rails and starts to expand at speed across the stars. Along the way, the First Fed eventually falls and replaced by subsequent other federations, empires, confederations, etc. Humanity and their various creations diversify into a huge number of different cultures and 'clades' and more Singularity levels are discovered. Wars are fought off and on, alien civlizations (all of them really really weird) are discovered and contacted.

Eventually, the Archailects (Archai) appear. They are AIs that have gone through multiple Singularities and have advanced to the point that they are literally worshipped as gods by many (although not all) people. They create wormholes and reactionless drives, re-engineer entire solar systems, and spend a lot of their time being incomprehensible to everyone else. And they basically run civilization, although most governments and economies don't work the way ours do in real life. Life 10,000 years in the future is very different from life today and many of the problems we face now are solved or considered trivial - which just means there are bigger and nastier problems that still keep people up at night.

For some more depth on the info the above timeline provides, I'd suggest the following:

The Tranquility Calendar

Solsys Geopolitics 2100 - 2500 CE (131 - 531 AT)

The Solar System in 539 AT

The Technocalypse

The Solsys Disinhibition Plagues

The Great Expulsion

The Interplanetary Dark Age

Story - The Inspection

There's a lot more history, but that should give you an idea of the foundation the rest of the history is built on.

After giving it some thought, I decided to hold off on covering a lot of the tech in the setting since you've indicated you're familiar with both hard science and transhumanism and I don't want to waste your time having you read stuff you already get the basics on. If there's any particular area of technology in the setting that you'd like us to describe in more detail or explain or you're ok with an overall technology overview, please let us know and we'll post something.

That said, here's an article that can provide contrast to the article on the Solar System in 539AT:

The Solar System in 10,600 AT

Hope this helps and isn't overwhelming or telling you way more than you want to know. If you'd prefer summaries of aspects of the setting such as I did with the history, that's fine - just ask And if you have any questions or concerns about any other aspect of the setting, please don't hesitate to ask about those as well.

Hope this helps and once again - Welcome to OA!

Todd

[jedidia]

Hope this helps and isn't overwhelming or telling you way more than you want to know.

No, that looks like a useful entry point, thanks a lot! Didn't expect the TV tropes link, but I agree... TV tropes is usually a great place to go for coarse summaries, can't believe I didn't think of that myself!

Rather, OA is a worldbuilding project that is intended to be a sort of huge canvas (in terms of both physical space and scope of history) for stories that can be told all over it all at the same time (in principle).

Yeah, I gathered as much. An RPG-setting like traveler would have been a better comparison than a setting derived from a series of novels. Those kinds of settings, of course, divide their complexity into source books. You have a core book that gives a rough outline of the setting, enough to communicate its breath, scope, coarse history as well as some notable actors and locations. Then there's books going into larger detail of more fine-grained aspects of the setting, or very fine details of specific locations or events. I know that OA has a bit more problems here, because you can't even presuppose a fixed point in time, which RPG settings usually can.

Still, since you're asking for my opinion, I think a similar approach might be useful. The wiki probably wouldn't even need any reworking. You could make "source books" focusing on certain aspects that consists mostly of glue text and structuring with copious links to wiki articles for all the details. I mean, the history primer is effectively already something like that, just that it doesn't emphasise any kind of focus. Which again, I get why, but it also left me hanging somewhat...
In general I think the "documentation" is great from what I saw, all newcomers like me need is some structure, some way to progress smoothly from one point to another that brings them ever closer to an understanding of the setting, and it might not be a bad idea to focus on one particular period, possibly even a certain region that you consider especially interesting or newcomer friendly. Once a newbie groks a certain part of the setting, they will be a lot more confident to go on excursions to other places or other points in time. Rather than trying to give a grand overview over the whole thing, give new readers the chance to establish a "beachhead" in the setting. Right now it feels a bit like getting Planescape dropped on you when you just wanted to "check out that D&D thing" :lol:

[Drashner1]

No, that looks like a useful entry point, thanks a lot! Didn't expect the TV tropes link, but I agree... TV tropes is usually a great place to go for coarse summaries, can't believe I didn't think of that myself!

Nifty!

Still, since you're asking for my opinion, I think a similar approach might be useful. The wiki probably wouldn't even need any reworking. You could make "source books" focusing on certain aspects that consists mostly of glue text and structuring with copious links to wiki articles for all the details. I mean, the history primer is effectively already something like that, just that it doesn't emphasise any kind of focus. Which again, I get why, but it also left me hanging somewhat...
In general I think the "documentation" is great from what I saw, all newcomers like me need is some structure, some way to progress smoothly from one point to another that brings them ever closer to an understanding of the setting, and it might not be a bad idea to focus on one particular period, possibly even a certain region that you consider especially interesting or newcomer friendly. Once a newbie groks a certain part of the setting, they will be a lot more confident to go on excursions to other places or other points in time. Rather than trying to give a grand overview over the whole thing, give new readers the chance to establish a "beachhead" in the setting. Right now it feels a bit like getting Planescape dropped on you when you just wanted to "check out that D&D thing" :lol:

Hm. Interesting. The end of the current backstory/primer consists of a fairly in depth overview of the setting (the table of contents at the end). Are you saying that's still a bit too abstract and 'Planescape like' to really work for a new person?

It sort of sounds like you're suggesting something similar to what a couple of other folks have suggested in the past, but which never quite got off the ground. Basically a sort of 'Narrative hook sub-setting' that works to introduce new people to the setting in a less dry and more approachable (and less overwhelming perhaps) manner. Is that sort of what you're thinking here?

In terms of creating a 'beachhead' (and presupposing I'm not totally offbase on my idea of what you're suggesting here) - One thought that comes to mind would be to use Sol System in the setting 'present day' (since that is more or less the primary focus of the setting - it's a long story).

Just to throw out an example (and please don't be afraid to take shots at this particular 'clay pigeon' - this is just brainstorming) :

What if we were to take the 'Solar System in 10,600AT' article, or a portion of it, and maybe combine it with a number of the 'Snapshots' (mini stories each describing some aspect of the setting) that we've started adding to articles as a way of making the setting more approachable? Basically a mix of mini-stories, perhaps connected together in an overarching narrative (maybe a tourist visiting the solar system?) and some parts of the existing article above, as well as some others that get into details or the like that we want people to understand about the setting.

Solsys has the advantage of likely being familiar to most SF readers, and is sufficiently developed and diverse in the setting, that people can get exposure to a lot of the ideas that are to be found here. It has various types of worlds and habs, lots of different races, an archailect in residence, wormhole links, etc.

Anyway - what do you think? Good idea? Bad idea? I'm totally missing what you're talking about?

Coming at this from another direction - regardless of where we might end up setting such a beachhead, what sort of setting elements would be good to include?

We have a lot of irons in the fire right now (but then we always do), so if we decided to do something like this it wouldn't happen instantly. But we can certainly talk it through and - if we decide to take a shot at it - work it into our ongoing updates and improvements to the project.

Thanks for this suggestion!

Todd

[stevebowers]

Maybe I should explain why I'm involved in the OA scenario, and what interests me when writing or reading it.

1/ Speculation about planetary environments. This is the first thing that brought me here; John M Dollan's ideas about the variety of planetary environments they might encounter.
2/ Speculation about future societies; Anders Sandbergs ideas in this regard were fascinating.
3/ Speculation about future religions; M Alan Kazlev's ideas were intriguing, and the development of these ideas are still a major part of the scenario.
4/ Speculation about future history - the most significant factor in OA's future history is that humans cease to be the driving force behind the development of civilisation, but that doesn't mean that they are oppressed or exploited- quite the opposite. Although there is a dystopian factor to the scenario that some people miss.

[jedidia]

The end of the current backstory/primer consists of a fairly in depth overview of the setting (the table of contents at the end). Are you saying that's still a bit too abstract and 'Planescape like' to really work for a new person?

Hmmmm... Has the primer been reworked during the last year or so? I read through it the last time I tried getting into the setting, and I don't remember it quite so friendly. I browsed through it again just now, and it seems a lot more approachable than it felt back then. Meaning either it was reworked and somebody did a very good job, or the like 6 or so hours of reading in the last few days have resulted in the accumulation of enough information for it to suddenly make a lot more sense. If the first is the case, great. If the second is the case, it might be a hint that it might indeed not fully fulfill its purpose as entry-level reading.

Basically a sort of 'Narrative hook sub-setting' that works to introduce new people to the setting in a less dry and more approachable (and less overwhelming perhaps) manner. Is that sort of what you're thinking here?

I don't think it has to be fully narrative (as in the sense of being encapsulated in a story with an actual plot), but other than that, yes, that's pretty much what I mean.

What if we were to take the 'Solar System in 10,600AT' article, or a portion of it, and maybe combine it with a number of the 'Snapshots' (mini stories each describing some aspect of the setting) that we've started adding to articles as a way of making the setting more approachable?

I've read through about half of it by now, it's pretty long... But conceptually, yes, I believe this might work. Definitely don't hit the reader on the head with introducing the Godess of earth in her ring of super-processors surrounding the sun right in the first paragraph, though...

Coming at this from another direction - regardless of where we might end up setting such a beachhead, what sort of setting elements would be good to include?

sticking with the "Sol in 10600AT" example, I would possibly start with some flavour text describing a sight that could be from earth, then emphasise that it isn't actually earth but venus, from there take a very short detour to why it's not earth and why earth is off-limits, using that as an excuse to very coarsely introduce Gaia and the concept of S+ beings/Gods without going too much into any specific history.

After that it might be good to continue with the current population of Sol, i.e. introducing and explaining the concept of clades, and going very briefly into the clades common in the Sol system.
The concept of clades is very important though. Not just what they are, but also what they are not. When you explain it in the primer, for example, it says pretty nicely what a clade is, but since there wasn't much references in my brain to fall back on, I had some pretty wrong assumptions about what that entails, because there's no explanation of what they are not. By now I'm fairly certain that clades do in no way imply an overarching identity or even organisational structure between members of a clade, while my first assumption of them was that they have some form of political cohesion, possibly even governments. Basically I assumed they were OA-speak for "factions", simply because that's what most other settings would do by default. So when a concept you introduce defies "literary traditions" associated with it, it would be very helpful to point that out.
This chapter should also outline the fundamental forms of existence (embodied, sophtware, completely virtual vs. virtual presence (virch? still not sure what that means exactly), cyborgs and vecs (though I guess these fall under clades? see, confusion! ), and potentially why vecs are not just considered AI.

Next, a short chapter on "architecture" might be nice to familiarise a new reader with all the crazy stuff he'll see very routinely. No great detail, just the rough outlines of structures commonly found in the solar system. For me personally this wasn't a problem as I feel mostly at home with all of that, but I imagine many people won't be.

Then a chapter talking a bit more in-dept about Gaia, other S+ entities in Sol and the concept of singularity levels in general, and how the overall government of the system is organised (I still don't quite get that from my reading so far... there seems to be some loose form of central authority called the Solar Organisation, but I'm not quite sure what they do and are responsible for exactly yet...) If there isn't a central government, again mention that, because people will expect it and just slap the job on GAIA intuitively, as she's the most powerful thing around. This would also be a good point to introduce major factions that are active in Sol itself, and a little bit of how they relate to each other and what their interests are. Though it would arguably not be such a great point to introduce planetary governments, that should stay with the specific planets. I do remember at least one player that wasn't related to a planetary government, something like NoCoZo or somesuch, I guess I'll have to look it up again. I thought I read about more interest groups, but I'm not sure anymore. That's one of the problems when you are confronted with something important while actually reading about something different at the moment: You tend to forget.

Once that's out of the way, I think it should be save going into the planets, and then in conclusion maybe a chapter on spaceflight. By what means and technologies people get around in the system as well as into and out of it, how hard or save that is, how common physical travel is at all, stuff like that that can lead one out into the wider setting.

Well, this post got way longer than intended. All just suggestions, pick anything you find helpful!

[Drashner1]

Thoughts, comments, and hopefully helpful info and notions below...

Hmmmm... Has the primer been reworked during the last year or so? I read through it the last time I tried getting into the setting, and I don't remember it quite so friendly. I browsed through it again just now, and it seems a lot more approachable than it felt back then. Meaning either it was reworked and somebody did a very good job, or the like 6 or so hours of reading in the last few days have resulted in the accumulation of enough information for it to suddenly make a lot more sense. If the first is the case, great. If the second is the case, it might be a hint that it might indeed not fully fulfill its purpose as entry-level reading.

It has been reworked actually We basically combined the old Illustrated Backstory with elements of the old Primer, the Glossary of Terms, and a number of stories from our fiction section, and added in a lot of extra images. The last part at the end, with the Table of Contents, is essentially what used to be the old Primer. But it's more of an extra for those who want to do a deeper dive into the elements of the setting all in one go instead of exploring the EG rather than a 'you must read this to get a handle on what's going on' kind of thing.

I don't think it has to be fully narrative (as in the sense of being encapsulated in a story with an actual plot), but other than that, yes, that's pretty much what I mean.

Nifty! What I'm currently envisioning would be chunks of a 'story' - in this case a character visiting Sol system for the first time - intermixed with chunks of the EG entry about Sol System in 10,600 AT. I'm imagining the character is actually from a type of virch called a bottleworld that simulated a rather low tech world (no more advanced than our own, maybe less) and that that virch has recently been discovered and rescued by Sephirotic civilization. Being a sophtware entity, the character can technically 'teleport' at the speed of light from place to place in the solar system - but in between wants to experience the 'real world' by inhabiting a robot body (made to look and feel just like her own). As she visits each place, the reader experiences solar civilization through her eyes and then gets to read a portion of EG about Sol - as she does to learn about it more formally. I even have an idea for tying this to an existing story set in OA, but need to check on some things first. Some info could also probably be imparted in the narrative portions, but the bulk - at least about Solsys would be in the EG chunks.

Agreed that the entire current article on Solsys would likely be too long for something like this. But excerpts could be copied from it for the purpose. We could even do something clever with bulleted links to 'additional' information that the character wouldn't read (or usually wouldn't read) but which the actual reader could follow and read if they wished. Also agreed that starting with GAIA would be a bit...confusing...to most readers up front

sticking with the "Sol in 10600AT" example, I would possibly start with some flavour text describing a sight that could be from earth, then emphasise that it isn't actually earth but venus, from there take a very short detour to why it's not earth and why earth is off-limits, using that as an excuse to very coarsely introduce Gaia and the concept of S+ beings/Gods without going too much into any specific history.

After that it might be good to continue with the current population of Sol, i.e. introducing and explaining the concept of clades, and going very briefly into the clades common in the Sol system.

This all sounds reasonable.

The concept of clades is very important though. Not just what they are, but also what they are not. When you explain it in the primer, for example, it says pretty nicely what a clade is, but since there wasn't much references in my brain to fall back on, I had some pretty wrong assumptions about what that entails, because there's no explanation of what they are not. By now I'm fairly certain that clades do in no way imply an overarching identity or even organisational structure between members of a clade, while my first assumption of them was that they have some form of political cohesion, possibly even governments. Basically I assumed they were OA-speak for "factions", simply because that's what most other settings would do by default. So when a concept you introduce defies "literary traditions" associated with it, it would be very helpful to point that out.

At the most basic editorial level 'clades' (or 'races and clades') are OAs answer to the aliens found in most SF - 'humans with bumpy foreheads' are nearbaselines, tweaks, rianths, and splices. Less humanoid aliens are provolves and neogens. Machine aliens are vecs.

While there can be a certain degree of political cohesion and/or racial identity around the concept, particularly in the earlier parts of the timeline and/or the more remote/less central parts of colonized space, in the big population centers of the Current Era (which can populations in hundreds of trillions or more), concepts of race or species (as well as gender, sexual orientation, and substrate) are usually viewed in sort of the same way as we might view a particular item of clothing or hairstyle - technology makes all of these things changeable with trivial effort (for some things, it's as easy as thinking about it) and this state of affairs has been the norm for so long that the idea that it could have greater social significance doesn't even exist in most people's conceptual universe.


Anyway, agreed that races and clades are concepts the character/the reader should definitely be introduced to. There are a lot of different groups living in Sol System, so this should be easy enough to do.

This chapter should also outline the fundamental forms of existence (embodied, sophtware, completely virtual vs. virtual presence (virch? still not sure what that means exactly), cyborgs and vecs (though I guess these fall under clades? see, confusion! ), and potentially why vecs are not just considered AI.

Virch is shorthand for a virtual environment. Think of something like Second Life or World of Warcraft or some of the video games where you actually put on a VR headset. Now imagine the tech advanced to the point where the experience involves all of your senses to such a degree of detail that there is (in principle) no way for the user to tell they are in a virtual environment. Now imagine that you don't need any external hardware to enter such a place - instead you have an implant in your head that let's you enter it as easily as closing your eyes, thinking the appropriate 'web address' and opening them to find yourself there. Now imagine there are about 1e20 (that's a one followed by 20 zeros) such virchs available to visit across the civilized galaxy, with your particular home habitat having at least several billion to several trillion running on hardware sufficiently close to you to basically be 'instantly' accessible. That's a virch.

You can also use the same tech to access distant viewpoints in the 'ril' via local sensors and to operate 'remote bodies' at those points. Some bodies are robotic, others are just clouds of smart matter, depending.

'Virtual' is also a term used to describe some types of sophtware entities. It's a somewhat general term like 'person' rather than a definitive descriptor.

Next, a short chapter on "architecture" might be nice to familiarise a new reader with all the crazy stuff he'll see very routinely. No great detail, just the rough outlines of structures commonly found in the solar system. For me personally this wasn't a problem as I feel mostly at home with all of that, but I imagine many people won't be.

Sure

Then a chapter talking a bit more in-dept about Gaia, other S+ entities in Sol and the concept of singularity levels in general, and how the overall government of the system is organised (I still don't quite get that from my reading so far... there seems to be some loose form of central authority called the Solar Organisation, but I'm not quite sure what they do and are responsible for exactly yet...) If there isn't a central government, again mention that, because people will expect it and just slap the job on GAIA intuitively, as she's the most powerful thing around. This would also be a good point to introduce major factions that are active in Sol itself, and a little bit of how they relate to each other and what their interests are. Though it would arguably not be such a great point to introduce planetary governments, that should stay with the specific planets. I do remember at least one player that wasn't related to a planetary government, something like NoCoZo or somesuch, I guess I'll have to look it up again. I thought I read about more interest groups, but I'm not sure anymore. That's one of the problems when you are confronted with something important while actually reading about something different at the moment: You tend to forget.

All sounds like good stuff to cover.

The Solar Organization is a loose central authority, but each world and most habs has their own local government. The power and/or influence of the Solar Organization waxes and wanes across the centuries, as well as the topic under discussion. It's mostly a body for coordinating the various local governments on various things - but it can wield a significant 'big stick' if it needs to for some stuff.

Once that's out of the way, I think it should be save going into the planets, and then in conclusion maybe a chapter on spaceflight. By what means and technologies people get around in the system as well as into and out of it, how hard or save that is, how common physical travel is at all, stuff like that that can lead one out into the wider setting.

Well, this post got way longer than intended. All just suggestions, pick anything you find helpful!

Also sounds good - Thanks!

I'm getting an idea of how something like this might be structured. I've got various other projects I need to get done first, and this would need way more planning (going to let it percolate in the meantime), but once I come up for air I may tackle this next. Or if someone else beats me to it, I'll weigh in with thoughts and ideas as they go along.

Todd

[jedidia]

We could even do something clever with bulleted links to 'additional' information that the character wouldn't read (or usually wouldn't read) but which the actual reader could follow and read if they wished.

Would you like to know MORE?

At the most basic editorial level 'clades' (or 'races and clades') are OAs answer to the aliens found in most SF

I figured as much by now, but races in SF are usually nations, which clades are not. Just saying that if you don't point that out, most people will just assume it until they figure it out.

Having again penetrated a little deeper into the setting, I think it might be unavoidable to mention pronouns in some way... It really does not seem wise in a light entry text, but damn, this whole time I was thinking "that spellchecker of theirs has the weirdest bug I've ever seen!"

[Drashner1]

Would you like to know MORE?

Ha!

I figured as much by now, but races in SF are usually nations, which clades are not. Just saying that if you don't point that out, most people will just assume it until they figure it out.

Makes sense.

Having again penetrated a little deeper into the setting, I think it might be unavoidable to mention pronouns in some way... It really does not seem wise in a light entry text, but damn, this whole time I was thinking "that spellchecker of theirs has the weirdest bug I've ever seen!"

Heee! That's funny! And it also inspires me to make an update to the recently updated Culture and Society page. Going to add in a bulleted link to the OA Pronouns page. Info on this and/or a link to the page can also be added into the narrative sub-setting bit as you suggest, but this way it gets out in front a bit earlier and it does make sense to include it there as well. Will get it taken care of tomorrow or over the weekend.

Thanks for the idea! Please keep sharing if you've a mind to. This is good stuff!

Todd