GAWAIN KICKSTARTER TAKE TWO

We are doing the same thing again, but for less money!  - KICKSTARTER LINK AT THE BOTTOM AND ON THE RIGHT.

But first, fresh content!

This might belong to the Sci-Fi universe conglomeration of thoughts I was considering here;

Exo-Suits of the Hot Girls
Hackships of the Cryogenic Rats
The Omnistructure in Decay
A Hoard of Ice, a Throne of Gold
Science Fiction Fortifications

I guess these are all part of the same developing paracosm? Now mixed with Uud, and mixed with Gawain?





Pilgrims of the Green Moon

Uud-Space is sometimes patrolled by Alpha-Class Genarchs of the Instrumentality piloting ritual Destrier-Class  Fade-Ships sheathed in Mayltrix fields and managed by quasi-sophontic A.I's.

Fractured and crypt-locked engrams records recovered from an Eon-sealed and somnolent artificial archivist indicated that, beginning in the year 22,593 one such Genarch embarked on a solitary search for loc/vector relative-point-stable biome codenamed only "Green Moon".

The following are recovered data fragments showing encounter file headings only, with one-line orthodescriptors.

Sadly, the file locations are scrambles and it is impossible to tell which locators, descriptors and actions apply to which.

LOCATORS

1. Tomb World orbit.
2. Unused LaGrange for a system quarantined as Paperclip-class nano-disaster.
3. Trailing in the exhaust-shadow of a migrating Yg-Fleet.
4. Orbital array of the Ice-World Indigo-Phi.
5. Sim-Space injection beyond the orthogonal zone.
6. Penumbra of a militarised Glass Cage Exoworld.
7. Unmarked and stagnant move-route in the Wir-Heal nebulae.
8. Rad-wrecked starless dockyard with deleted ident tags.
9. Roguespace conglomeration.
10. In the orbit of the Green Moon.


ENCOUNTERS.

1. Sun-Happy detrivores worshipping the Slump-God.
2. Thane-Engined Biocruiser Womb-Ship holding hyper-deep faunocogitators engaged in dense reality algorithms.
3. Megalith-Ship crowned with viridian war-maser Agon-Corona.
4. Chrono-Shadowed entropy-pulse. Assumed wake of a deep-reality mover, but moaning through the E.M. spetra with auto-responding thought shades.
5. School of Ex-Empire Lupenised hackcraft psycho-redacted from the noosphere, cognitively linked with cycling predatory stim-jacks.
6. Burbling vagueplague colony pods lancing through a re-transmitted hashcloud of their own upcycled sophonticidic apocalypse sims. Ultradrives quavering and bursting out screaming EM radiospheres.
7. Tumbling Nightminds held in iron-asteroid reality magnets. Sensorblack bodies pulse with subconscious reply dreams keyed to subtly override neocortical governance.
8. Rad-blasted auto-scow captained by self-uplifted engram-A.I. combo, way outside Exo-World bulterian lexosphere. pulses personalised xenopop from engrams copy-paste light cone. Seems unarmed.
9.Filement drive iridium spike ship coasting on half-surge with engines muffled and weapon-bays dark. Ident tags read infinite zero and vox replies in simulated Assyrian.
10. Unknown Fadeship, coursier class or above, viridian mayltrix and engine pluming Cherenkov energy while eco-spheres return sub-zero deathstate or flat recursive gamma-sign.


EMERGENCE

1. Tumbling, No clear vector.
2. On collision or attack course.
3. matching vector for boarding or mass-exchange.
4. Crossing vector/no other response.
5. Accelerating past LaGrange position.
6. Incoherent course changes.
7. Engines flickering, possible distress.
8. Flat burn for system edge.
9. Course is parallel.
10. In flight from your destination.

NOW LINKS - HIT THE IMAGE OR CLICK HERE FOR THE KICKSTARTER

Well, we failed last time so whats different this time?

- Cut the profits from any backer books out.
- Displaced postage onto the BigCartel store to be paid separately.
- Reduced the number of books.

Total to hit is waay lower. Postage has been removed from that total so it may still be a challenge to get there BUT we will have longer and the fact that the total is potentially achievable will hopefully raise our spirits and yours and keep the whole thing feeling like a real possibility.

(Also, I now have a marketing twitter, https://twitter.com/pjamesstuart, we will see how long I can keep that up).

The Omnistructure in Decay

An Omnistructure because it is not just a structure filling reality, but a structure that is reality. A reality that can only exist as structure, in the same way that ours is expressed as space and form.

Here are worlds the size of Nebulae, grown, not in tight massed spheres and gravity wells, but like ferns or fractal fungi infiltrating a mass. Storm-wrapped tendril worlds with neutronium cores. Worlds as slender as mycelium, all linked, receiving their light from the transient civilisation of intelligent nomadic suns. Primary trunks of world with surfaces like gas giants and storms as large as small galaxies.

Entire world-equivalent biospheres spending their existence transiting and slowly evolving. Sometimes running into each other, resulting in titanic conflicts and strange syntheses.

Gravatically balanced structures of form. Vast tendrils of world.

Some worlds with hollow cores like old trees, some wormed within by passages and cells, some carrying lightless life inside.

Some oceanic, like branches of water. Some carrying vast globular oceans at their tips. Sometimes these oceans have frozen surfaces and pressure-ice cores. Sometimes they break free and drift, are caught and smeared through the Lagrange zones causing disaster and opportunity.

Sadly, all the world curls have fallen into decay. They are blackened and dying, though the diamond highways sing.

The highways are cylinders the thickness of stars, transparent, flexible diamond lattice environments, home to their own intelligence yet transmitting a blood supply of light.

At the nexus-points of the intersecting highways, like the cores of neural cells, are the Photo-Arcologies , gigantic hives of living suns that take on strange insectoid forms. Between the worlds the suns are harmonies of light like freight trains spiralling round the helices inside the diamond highways.

Yet without the responsive song of life from the the world fronds, the arcologies themselves grow silent, the highways are failing, slowly but inevitably being cut off. Eventually the culture of the Omnistructure will retreat, becoming only a memory. In the star-cemeteries deep in the centres of the Photo-Arcologies, black-hole tendrils and white dwarf root-stubs animate and attempt escape.

The space between the highways and the mycellium of world is divided into cells of void, like the cells of a leaf, each similar but distinct. At the border of each cause/effect lipid layer, time hesitates for a moment to confirm.

Lagrange points within the cellular voids play host to their own strange zero-g civilisations. High altitude web cities grow like gigantic highway shacks along the easy-to-transport zero-g lines between the world-roots and the suns.

Lagrange points generally lie at the borders of void cells and have slightly different realities depending on which side you are on. Multi-cell Lagrange strands are complex, with many realities involved. They say if you agree something there  you must agree it four times, once between all possible combination of yourself and the other party.

HackShips of the Cryogenic Rats

Click to build a HackShip

(Made with Logans Generator

This isn't weighted to produce a true 3d6 result

there are probably ways to do that with

I'm a writer Jim, not a mathmagician!)

Or roll 3d6 six times

Ships Hull

3 Shards of a shattered comet, held together by flickering fields.
4 Bash-compacted pseudo-plastic old escapee drone boats.
5 Origami mass-made monocarbon, crackling silver at the seams.
6 A ring of light-ceramic tubes sprayed in ray-resistant foam.
7 Half an attack-blasted light destroyer, built strong but riddled with unsightly wounds.
8 Polymer shard, light, plasticated and sharp.
9 Keel of ancient iron, cankered with re-upped cargo containers.
10 Mech-assembled zero-g steel, strung with extruded carbon-fibre webs.
11 Standard mass-made enviro-tube in a carbon lattice sandwich.
12 Hacked-together high-end modular-pods in an atomic grid.
13 Steel and nuke-hardened black carbon. Attack-torpedo refit, Leviathan class.
14 Organized-diamond dash-pod of assassinated system-lord, upgraded and re-fit.
15 Pseudo-cuboid hyper-structure engine block with irregular interior voids.
16 Giga-droplet of void-forged steel with bubbles tunnel-linked inside.
17 Black-hole backwash-warped helix of titan-iron.
18 Star-core cooled neutronium flange, interior carved by antimatter torch.

Ships Drive

3 Puttering Ionic Breeze-Machine, brownouts at LaGrange.
4 Terrestrial reactor, hacked half-open and strapped on, pointing out.
5 Ruined sensor-beak of an alien 'crow machine', its fields converged.
6 'Matchead' hydrogen drive, well kept, impellers upgraded gold.
7 Collapsed hot-rod tokomak, shielding frittered, ignition dark.
8 Downactioned 'Lightning' class Go-Box. 1000 years old. Entrails unknown.
9 Dumble-Pulsing ultra-photonic fans, the reliable 'Bee' drive.
10 Fusion-grumbler, geysering magnetic fields.
11 Nuke-pooping kill-engine. Brutal. Dumb. Never breaks.
12 Semi-self-replicating blackbody sloaric engine-swarms.
13 'Lalelith' silent-light drive, runs inertialess and cold.
14 Razor-spec stealth-banked fusion spike, operating on the edge.
15 Vogue-vectored magnetopods, ex-military, off the books.
16 Gold-Chromium DarkMatter furnace-turbine.
17 Laser-pinioned rift-engine glinting like a wolfs eye.
18 Ravening coronal shard lensed by antimatter latticework.

Ships weapons

3 Juiced-up construction droids strapped onto the hull. Rivet guns firing DPU.
4 'Tidal' class magneto-ballista launching 'monkey-puzzle' ice flechettes.
5 Allegedly-effective psychic scrambler-pulse. Only hurts organic thoughts.
6 Overcharged pyramidal phase-taser E.M. interference ray.
7 'Rolling Thunder' low-tech high-velocity minigun stacks up-jacked for zero-g.
8 Cheap knockoff polymer-sheath 'Raptors-Eye' railgun array. (Looks like real thing.)
9 Brute-mass macrocannons with dum-dum ferric rounds.
10 Platinum heat-exchanged rapid-firing maser-banks.
11 Low-yield 'Hiroshima' class torpedo tubes.
12 'Lottery Cannon' liquid-hydro-cooled ultra-rapid laser-spatter-banks.
13 'Thuggee' monofilament laser-guided strangle-cannons.
14 A real 'Raptors Eye' railgun array with babysitting sniper-specific AI.
15 Semi-intelligent self-assembling 'Gravity Knife' torpedo swarm.
16 'Jester' class Chance-Cannon, can ignite cascading fails.
17 'Godhammer' triple-barrelled neutron-bomb shotgun. Long reload time.
18 'Kali' class antimatter lens, ringed by moaning stabilising drives.

Ships Sensors

3 Scattered glitch-eyes mosaicked by a dumb-core.
4 Robots-at-a-telescope, plus am/fm listening sphere.
5 Strobing navigation lasers disco-balling local zone.
6 Cybernetic spiderleg dish-orbs circulate the hull on everscan.
7 Faceted-eye cyberfly swarms bleeping composited waves to a video hive.
8 Deep-field lens arrays analysed by photographic brains.
9 Active E.M. interference-shell upsets and traces local sines.
10 Perma-scan optico-radiodromes plus active E.M. 'ping' for search.
11 Hull networked with frozen stingray-cells to subtly interpenetrate immediate energy-sphere.
12 Omni-valent semi-cetacean deep-wave passive scans, slow but range is long.
13 Slaved and disarmed ex-materiel hunter-killer missile cone umbilicaled to ship.
14 Nano-derived 'dementia' lenses track anti-spectrography of seemingly empty space.
15 Rippling warp wave frets space for pseudo-seismic pan-Geiger eye.
16 Deep-gravitational skein illuminates all shifts in local mass.
17 Darkmatter-responsive Nano-antennae, black and unblindable.
18 Planck-length quantum-obscura shows total mass/energy state for immediate AU.

Ships AI

3 Free-download 'Ship Ops' app running on a phone.
4 Recycled city sewer-sys maintenance-mind, sometimes tries to flush the ship.
5 Cheap black market gaol-brain predictive E.M.I. jacked to compute.
6 Defeated military simulation set sold off by winning side. Purposeless and vague.
7 Obsolete friend-connection-network stripped and sold off in-one.
8 Terrestrial S.E.T.I.-Analysis code. Good listener, glitches when it moves.
9 Stack of chips yanked from a submarine, silent, wary, likes to light the emergency bulb.
10 Robust-smuggling code. Competent, always tries to steal.
11 Extra-real singularity-fugee hypermind Alzheimer-virused to comprehensible smarts. Seems sad.
12 Hyper-competitive ex-financial hack. Gold with probabilities, poor impulse control.
13 Super-computer wrapped in ultra-cryo coolant bath, staggeringly calm, yet fast.
14 Bio-molecular gene-computing clock, starts slow but adapts relentlessly to any threat.
15 Photonic brain encoded on the spin of held electrons in a grid. Perceptive.
16 Holographic thought-engine, can fissure tiny perfect selves for special tasks.
17 Samizdat dead-genius last-minute deathmask-mind recording, illuminating turbulence.
18 Dimension-folded hyperpalace burning as a point of light. Startling, intuitive and precise.


Ships Flair

3 Unlikely fastness of a doom-perv cult. Troubled child-ghosts haunt the halls. Odd stains.
4 Glitched eject-recyke sys means ship shits itself in times of stress.
5 Ship dandruffs space with drive-plate shards, leaks E.M. moans, annoys all near.
6 Ship greebled to a dark degree, nothing added on ever removed. Hull a maze of functionless stuff.
7 Unnecessary plating stripped. Visible bits a nasty coagulated sight.
8 Interiors are brown.
9 Odd-proportioned micro-meteorite pattern scars look something like a human face.
10 Former owner liked Feng-Shui, crew compartments neatly calm.
11 Remains of a first-class paint job still barely visible.
12 Voice programmed with reassuring tones like a chummy Shakespearian thesp.
13 Severed grapple-hands from waxed piracy try dot the hull; look kind of cool.
14 Assembled by an aesthete engineer, looks like sweet kinetic art.
15 Chiaroscuro hull-angled floods make ship look massy, dark, like wearing shades.
16 Angular black stealth-carapace, non-functional but still looks good.
17 Zorro-scar laserlance battle damage, just short of disfiguring, looks cool as heck.
18 Last crew died heroes in superfly species-wide redemption-adventure, ship literally gilded.




This is kind-of based on Nathans star-ship creation ideas he hacked from Into The Odd. The ships are broken down into six 'stats' or qualities. Each roll gives you a number showing the quality or power of the thing, like in D&D, higher is better. each roll also gives you a specific thing about that ship.

It doesn't really work for a variety of interesting reasons. Ships having stats is ok but these don't match up with the most-necessary ones. There should be shields and drives and engines should be separate things.

Its too oddly-specific for generating a really wide range of ships, but the use of the 3d6 method and the way it creates its probability curve kind of suggests that there is a 'normal' or a likely arrangement of parts.

The d20 decision / 3d6 stat thing doesn't really match up that way with technology or the way technology works. Or perhaps its simply that the way technology works just doesn't match up that well with the need for adventure.

After a certain point, differences in technology make advanced versions just _better_ than what came before. Tanks kill cavalry, helicopter gunships kill tanks. Breach-loading rifles kill bows and automatic rifles kill breach-loaders. The main source of adventure is in staying the fuck away from anyone with massively better tech than you.

Hence, I suppose the technologically incoherent 'deep-futures' of 40k, Gene Wolfe etc in which any fucking thing can turn up and a super energy knife can beat an AK47, because you can tell a more dramatic story that way. Technology erodes and makes irrelevant personal qualities and the d20 die does quite well with those intermeshing personal qualities that are the key engine of both drama and adventure fiction.

Anyway, I'm rambling.

This is for a kind of Quasi-Setting / Game which I think I'm calling 'Cryogenic Rats'

This is the setting that would incorporate the Exo-Suits of the Hot Girls and the masks of the creatures from before time.

Groups of punk girls from an anemic climax future (like Ian Banks 'Culture' if, instead of being a place to fulfill the highest human dreams, was just a bit shit. Like De Tocqueville's nightmare of democracy. People can do whatever they want and everyone is dull as shit) make off the the LaGrange points where drifting technology from a million years of culture hangs about not being used. They hack together ships and mechs and go off to explore the only part of the galaxy so-far ignored by all, the starless exo-worlds that drift between systems.

There's no hyperdrive so they just have to cryo their way there over a thousand years or so.

And on these worlds are various terrible things that they have to fight in giant mechs, and strange treasures and impossible technologies which they can steal, and strap onto their mechs.

Exo-Suits of the Hot Girls.

Sometimes it’s hard to hear the signals of a parallel world.

 

It’s been a while since I received any news of my parallel self and his R.P.G ‘River ofShadows’. It looks like in the intervening time some kind of science fiction expansion has come out.

In the future mankind has colonised every available star system with slower-than-light colony ships. Civilisations communicate with each other continually but slowly. Everything is hyper-civilised, overdeveloped and boring. No-one is allowed to do anything interesting or dangerous as they live in a perfect climax civilisation.

If anyone wants to be original or take a risk the only thing to do is try to explore one of the cold worlds. These are exo-planets lost in the lifeless voids between stars. Dark, ancient and cold. Many terrible things are buried there by timeless dead races beyond the comprehension of man.

Because governments are boring only radicals will explore the dead spheres. They scrape together scrap-tech with private capital, jury-rig a disused colony ship and head off in cryo sleep to the space between the stars. There is nothing out there so they have to take all the energy they will need with them. They know they will return in a thousand years-plus, relative to when they left, everything will be different. They don’t care. If they come back, they will change everything. 

No-one makes tech to survive the alien weather systems and awful mysteries of the cold spheres, so they have to build or cludge it themselves. 

The odd thing about this game is that all of the explorers are assumed to be hot punk girls. No explanation is given for this. 

Suits the girls are riding.

1.      Gas giant turboliner luxury evac suit re-fitted by pirate ice merchants after mass-disaster. Some bloodstains, wood-panelled interior, nice drinks selection, internal anti-personnel weapons for use against the poor, perfect credit history.

2.      Ex-Mil ice-moon halo-jump assault-suit prepped for low atmosphere high-angle entry and rapid heat exchange displacement vanes for high-velocity melt-through of tectonic pack ice and undersea deep-pressure assault. Disposable. Un-used.

3.      Post-nuke search and rescue suit with active Kirlian-Faraday defences against necrotising cryptowraiths. Ablative crystallising radiation slough-skin bleeds industrial-diamond-substitute.

4.      Antique trans-sanity Culverin MEGGIDO-class apocalypse suit. Confirmed three reality breeches closed. No fails. Discharged with full honours and multi-faith blessing. Sold as surplus during government shutdown over complex tax issue.

5.      Experimental Tomb-Analysis jacket. Produced as marketing test-prototype by futurist clade for predicted market of sunless explorers. Market failed to arise. Suit highly modified by billionaire performance artist as commentary on the creative tension between visions of the future and the now.

6.      Half-torched coronal-rider cybernetic array for maintenance of heliosphere vampire-satellites feeding endless thaum-hunger of core world climax Civ. Vaporised scarwounds in packed-ceramic overlays have little effect on survival in ultracold tomb-world environments.

7.      Active nuke-engine exhaust repair bot with scooped braincore and botch-job suit-within-a-suit life support pocket scavenged from crashed hydroponics resort. Chassis made to cludge fixe the Ex-Jets of near-lightspeed colony ships on journey between stars, without de-stepping the torch.

8.      ‘Naked Space’ field rainbow suit riding ultra-compressed electromagnetic kill-waves of original weapon mounting. Formerly trans-orbital ‘silencer’ for city-killing stealth-ship energy weapon. Weapon core and mounting removed. House-sized EM silencer re-fitted with auto-motile tractomorph claws. Drags counter-rotating tach-rifled gun barrel like a crippled tail.

9.      Stygio-abyssal armed wanderer. Tracked for ultra-slow transit of subducting tecto-murder zone. Full translation and appeasement AI for intended treaty-comms with ultra-violent Squidlikes below the dark photosphere. Semi-flexible syntactical tentacles added for reasons of Peace. Accidentally transported rare human bacteriophage on chassis that wiped out Squidlike ecology. Effective genocide. Mothballed in shame.

10.  Scratch-built kropotkinite ultra-savantic PunkSuit developed by briefly existent anti-authoritarian AI crystallised by Noospheric flashmob. Suit designs spat out before violent dispersal by thought police. Built vengefully of re-purposed corporate Lux-Tech with brandnames inverted and replaced.

But you can still totally tell they’re hot because…

1.      Impact-jinxed medical-array holo-field accidentally spits out glimpsed bodyslices like a fucked projector. Images hang like a halo in the O2 exhaust around exit vents and pipe fractures.

2.      Punk pilot made naked figurehead of idealised self for sensor prow of own exo suit for easy identification and political statement. Carved from adulterated chem-ice perma-frozen in tomb-world chill. Apparent ‘sweat’ on own naked form shows melting, indicates dangerous temp change if sensors non-functional. Figurehead melts at end of each mission, re-carved again for next insertion.

3.      Pilot is dancer from full-bodylanguage Logo-culture. Speaks with limbs as well as voice. Convinced no-one can understand her without seeing her. All flat outer surfaces masked with cheap paper-thin LED screens showing endlessly gesticulating body of pilot from every possible angle. Screens persistently glitch and madden.

4.      Self-named exo-suit painted with bomber-style glamour portraits of pilot-owner as branding exercise and good-luck charm.

5.      Pilot has own face projected on front of mech-head so partners and following cyber-dogs can see facial expressions during radio chat. Emotional valancy adds to cognitive bandwidth during key communications. Dogs and colleagues can follow eye movement and trace line of sight for non-verbal instructions and to spot attention patterns. Has taught mech to shrug

6.      Self-designed knight-style heraldry on suit-front and projected holo-pennants updated with relief of pilots achievements, notable actions, sexual conquests.

7.      Pilot either Positivist Neo-Hindu or aping mores of same. Own figure embossed onto suit-hull in endless tessellated patterns. Takes part of numerous gods in divine story-cycle, violent, sexual, numinous, hermetic. Mech effectively temple to self.

8.      Pilot ripped out sensor dome and replaced with zorb-ball of nano-active smart water. Defends against cold, heat, all EM frequencies, exudes and compresses to defeat physical attacks. Pilot floats naked or semi naked in centre of clear blue sphere like the pupil of a giant cyclopic eye.

9.      Sensor tentacle-tips implanted in the heads of human-scale android sculpts of pilot dressed either in radical fashions, or not at all. Android dummy sculpts either swoop through air carried by extended pseudopodia in back of head, or walk across cryo-blasted zero-plains on apparently naked feet, or in heels. Spy arms puppeting move-style of creator.

10.  Main comms vane, heat exchange or primary gun turret massively re-modelled as sculpture of pilot. Beautiful impassive archeotectic features pass pack and forth endlessly scanning dead landscape. Lips open to vomit heat or high-velocity rounds.

A Horde of Ice a Throne of Gold

This is cribbed from a email to a friend about a poential game of Diaspora that never quite went down. Put here because it may be useful to someone else.

I made this chart to see if it would be possible to combine the Disapora rules for generating clusters and the actual moons of Jupiter to create a playing space that seemed real but could still be improvised at the table.

This is only some of the estimated 66 moons but the names are real. The small inner moons are the ones next to Jupiter. The large Gallilean moons are arranged around them and there are three groupings of six moons each, the Carme group, the Ananke group and the Pasiphae group.. The positions on the chart aren't meant to represent their actual positions in space but to show the ease of moving between the moons. We can use the random Diaspora rules to find out how easy it is to get from moon to moon within a group. Assume you can move around the inner worlds quite easily.

The tiny moons are really tiny, like a few k's long, but thats enough for a settlement or even a conflict, if there's one set of miners on one end and another on the opposite side.

If you print off the chart and re-do the transport routes with each game then it should present an energetic simulation of a moving orbital system, but one abstract enough that you can actaully make sense of it (or that I can actaully make sense of, I found actual orbital mechanics too hard).

This fits in well with the idea of reation mass, or fuel, being quite expensive and diffucult to get. So you have to conserve your mass and think carefully about when you are going to use it and where you are going to get more.

The simplest kind of reaction mass is water. Water is also valuable to us because we can use it to make air and to fill hydroponic systems to make food. It seems that for a bunch of relativly poor (in mass) Jovian moon settlers would use water as the basis for currency.

(Europa has loads of Ice of course but it's at the bottom of a gravity well and we could assume that having access to loads of water has turned the rulers of Europa into decadent Oligarchic Ice Kings lording it over everyone else, imprisoning ice pirates in the deep oceans, trapped by the very thing they sought to steal, which seems like the kind of thing dickhead rich people would do.)

So I turned the environment chart from Disaporia into this:- 

4	This rock is pure ice, nothing else.
3	A thin skin of rock over ice, or a rock of dirty impure ice with some fragements of other stuff locked inside.
2	Large amounts of easy to find Ice, some hard to find metals.
1	Lare amounts of Ice, somewhere, if you can get to it. Rumours of other stuff deep beneath.
0	An average rock, some ice and some metals beneath the surface.
-1	Enough Ice here to export very small amounts at a very steep price. High concentrations of metals somewhere beneath the surface.
-2	Not much Ice, or very hard to get. Lare amounts of metals if you mine for them.
-3	Precious metals easily accesable. Ice locked deep beneath in very small amounts.
-4	This rock is made of almost pure gold, or some other precious heavy metal. No ice at all.

The idea is that places can have Ice, which is really valuable in the moons but almost worthless elsewhere, or rare heavy metals, which are worthless in the moons but can make you a millionare back in 'The Wells' (or The Deeps? However low-g settlers would refer to the planet bound.)

This way there is a kind of market and politics inferred by the world creation and an interesting dichotomy of choice. Do you go to the moon-of-gold where starving miner kings rule from thrones cut from pure shining gold and barter kilos of platinum for chipsof ice? If you do, will you have the ice to get back?

I made this after watching some of the Sagan Series on youtube. Anothe chart-hack for the mining cultures of the Jovian Moons.

Optimism

4	"Militarily, we succeeded in Vietnam. We won every engagement we were involved in out there."- William Westmoreland.
3	"There can be no boundry set to rational hope." Sagan/Rodenberry level optimism. As optimistic as you can be without being nuts.
2	"Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces,I would still plant my apple tree." -Martin Luther
1	"Have a great day!" Standard American level optimism.
0	"Eh"
-1	"Typical" Standard British-level pessimism.
-2	"Some people say my work is often depressing and pessimistic, with the emphasis on death, blood, overcrowding, strange beings and so on, but I don't really think it is. "- H.R Giger
-3	"Memories and possibilities are ever more hideous than realities." Lovecraft
-4	"Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species—including man—crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue." Herzog