Fragged Empire: Independent Contractors

Collene Mondrian - Performing a majority of her courier work for Translight System Services, Collene's able to move a wide range of illicit cargo with minimal accidents.  Her semi-romantic relationship with Mako gave her an opportunity with the insular Kaltoran-centric business. When the pair broke up, Translight dumped him and kept her.  Since then she's getting more work than she can handle.  Something she hopes will solve itself with her newest acquisition: the Lupin.  Won in a game of chance, she is proud of the ship's reputation and construction.  Unaware that some of the previous owner's contraband is still in a secret hold and Mako still hasn't gotten even since she left him, Collene's future looks to be interesting.

Mako Useful - It takes a lot to get kicked out of a family business, much less two of them. But Mako somehow managed. Since then he handles low risk, low priority contraband and keeps his ear to the ground gathering information for his current employer - the Integrated Haven Port Authority. A good enough smuggler to be a risk to himself, the arrangement with the Authority means he can pull a heavier load when he wants to. The real danger is the tendency to shoot his mouth of when he does.

Kristopher Riordan -A programmer suffering from "head trauma" and botched experimental surgery to repair the damage, Kristopher shouldn't need the intense personal security that trails him everywhere.  If that's all he was, he wouldn't.  A failed attempt to decant a clone of Paladin Consortium's CEO Maxwell Hyperion, narcissism keeps him from having Kristopher destroyed. Smug and overconfident the surgery did the trick, Kristopher is allowed a wide range of freedom under Dragoon Ventures Unlimited's auspices.  As a copy of Maxwell Hyperion, there are myriad uses for Kris and his biomass - his existence is one of Maxwwell's best kept secrets.

Jana Hyperion - Breaking free from her father's orbit, Jana seeks to burn his conglomerate empire to the ground and build her own from its ashes.  For that she needs two things: Kristopher Riordan's scrambled egg brain and a skilled psion to pull out its secrets.  She knows her father is in deep with nefarious entities and has a dark agenda to match, she needs to prove it though.  Going solo provides a cover to assemble a rolodex of deniable assets and dangerous people, all in service of the larger goal.

Fragged Empire is having their second kickstarter  for the Protagonist Archive, four new species and expanded brain powers abound.  If you're seeing this, then you're probably already part of the Fragged Empire community and you should kick in your $2 if you haven't already.

Fragged Empire: Shadowy Entrepreneurs

 

Atia Vorenus - Operating under the name X!pH0s300, the Legion Hacker and pirate Atia Vorenus treads a dangerous line.  Her online identity is known for her spam operations, mainly search engine optimization and selling reams of valid contact information.  In meatspace she is a member of the 7 Brothers, researching and softening targets for their raids on her electronic clients' warehouses.  If they don't have to manufacture the product then that's a cost they don't have to pay.  Atia knows that this pattern can't keep up before she is found out and is looking for a way out.

Samantha Thirst - Rising aggressively in the field of nanoviral development, Samantha owns a vertical monopoly in their development and manufacture.  Always on the hunt for the next big thing, she is interested in the explosion of fringe faiths established since the Externality's fall.  She accepted a lucrative contract from the Black Key, and her association has spurred her rivals to taking a more aggresssive approach.  Contracts targetting her companies' research labs for exfiltration have been popping up on various job boards.

Arpaio - An independent contracter frequently engaged with Tri Fuel Industries, Arpaio is fiercely loyal to those who earn it.  Rescue from a defunct Nephilim Destroyer by a Tri Fuel salvage crew left a lasting impression, though the implication of ownership that comes with employment chafes him.  Mona Barrister, a Corporate accountant at the company, confided in him that she had noticed aberrant patterns in the financial records. The very suggestion of embezzlement from the company has set him on the trail and he needs a few good operators to help him out.

Pertova -Always hiring and always providing interesting jobs, Pertova has acquired a reputation for danger and excitement.  Recent contracts revolve around "liberating" pre-Externality artifacts and sabotaging Mechonid interests. Whatever her vendetta; she pays well, on time, and you won't be bored.  It's a hold over from her time in the Great War, performing high altitude insertions.  She has trouble envisioning any situation worse than boredom.

Fragged Empire is having their second kickstarter  for the companion volume the Protagonist Archive, where the Twi'far, Remnant, Palantor and Zhou are detailed along with some other great stuff.  Wade Dyer is incredibly passionate about this game and it shows.  Go check it out and kick in $2 if you can spare it.

Meat Pinata

School has me busy and a bit scatterbrained.  Random things keep falling out of my ears, maybe these baubles interest you.  Maybe they don't.

In Fragged Empire news, the Protagonist Archive will be coming along soon-ish with four new races.  One of them is the Palantor are the last true remnants of humanity:, digitized from their meat bodies, uploaded in Minecraft for millenia, and infugees downloaded into robot bodies fleeing the Mechonids.  They are going to have a Japanese naming convention and definitely represent the furthest transhuman edge of the game's technology.  A reddit thread expanding some of it here.

Swords and Stitchery put together a fantastic table detailing what you find inside a vacuum frozen corpse.  My favorite is number 6 - "A classic walk man with a Back To The Future soundtrack tape within."  There should always be weird things floating in the Black, update it to the Guardians of the Galaxy soundtrack if there's younger players.  You can find that here.

Finished Priest, Matthew Colville's first novel, it's equal parts The Big Sleep and the Fisher King in a D&D influenced setting.  Retired priest Heden is charged with an off the books mission by the bishop, redeem an isolated Order of feral knights.  Nothing is what it appears, and everyone is working an angle.  There's several Green Knights, a magical sword, oaths aplenty, one good knight and a Lady of the Lake to boot.  If you enjoy modern crime fiction in other times and places you'll enjoy it.

Picked up the first three issues of Dan Abnett's new cosmic Marvel series Guardians of Infinity.  For $4.99 I'd like to get one whole issue of a single story, rather crippling Abnett's ability to tell a complete story with an obnoxious back up story.  In typical Abnett fashion the story starts small and gets larger.  This time it's a space fortress that cuts across multiple timelines and there are three teams of Guardians, the current team (2000), the classic team (3000), & a team from the distant past (1000).  The writer is known for killing his sweethearts but with the Guardians of the Galaxy riding an all time high of mainstream recognition, the Guardians 2000 & 3000 aren't really in danger. But the Guardians 1000 feel like they are just around to get sacrificed. 

Real world weirdness: digital maps in China are slightly off as a matter of national security.
Find it here.

Finally getting in another session of my monthly lucha libre campaign, Habrá Sangre, and it'll be pretty good.  Last session ended in a cliffhanger with our intrepid heroes facing off against brujas against a stormy backdrop.  What further revelations will they discover as La Hora Cero draws near?

Fragged Empire: Pillars of the Community

Left to right: Nephilim, Corporate, Legion, Kaltoran

Expanding on the NPCs from Help Wanted, fleshing out their place in my upcoming Fragged Empire campaign.  Each character has ties to a larger community and the setting as a whole.  A preview of the Antagonist Archive can be found here.

Debra Omni- Working in OS R&D at Cypher Robotics and Power, few suspect the mild-mannered, four-eared engineer nightlights as the hacker D0mniNator.  Spurning the jury rigged assemblies of her Kaltoran counterparts, Debra will only work with the bleeding edge of soft, firm, and hardware, this extends to most of her criminal contacts.  Across the datacrime forums D0mniNator's tutelage is highly sought after.  She played an instrumental hand gathering complementary criminals together spawning infamous groups like the Republic of Desire and the Nsurgency.  Having established her underground reputation, don't be surprised if she asks you to leave a personnel review, just don't go into too much detail.

Gogmagog - Engaging, delightful, brimming with childlike wonder; these are some of the things you would hear asking about Gogmagog.  A renowned evolutionary biologist, the Nephilim Hybrid's intellect belies his brutish appearance.  He advocates the changes made to planetary biomes from Xion engineered lifeforms such as Living Ammunition and other warbred beasts.  Espousing the ecological changes as necessary and vibrant in an otherwise stagnating biosphere, he often comes under social attack from conservative groups like Topiary. They often hold protests outside his speaking engagements and escalate the media coverage.  Regardless of his detractors, Gogmagog continues to press for widespread use of Xion rooted organisms to repair damaged ecologies.

Twi'far

Agnes Oblige - The Twi'far spend most of their time in transit, sealed up in spaceborn fleets flung across the Wild Night. Cooped up with semi-stagnant populations are ideal breeding grounds for hardy, infectious microorganisms.  What may manifest as a cold in one Twi'far population could be a vicious respiratory infection in another.  The Fleet' maintain a dedicated corps of doctors, virologists, and medical researchers to shore up biological defenses.  Virologist Agnes Oblige is a vocal partisan against further genehacking of Xion based lifeforms.  Citing the difficulty posed to the Twi'far MediCorps to defend against the microbiological remnants of the Great Xion War, rampant genehacking will only further exacerbate the situation.  Her stance has found traction in many circles, particularly among Legion scientific circles.

Dia Steward - Every operator and agent has a few skeletons in their closet, Dia happens to the stack them up like cordwood.  Officially an assistant HR manager with C.U.R.E., she abuses her access to personnel files to run a network of honeypots and blackmail.  Identifying soft targets and assigning the appropriate agents she has accrued an impressive amount of information in a fairly short amount of time.  Pining for a return to field work and escape from her gilded office, she identified Odyssia Pullo as a promising lead and made the approach herself.  Successful beyond her hopes and dreams, Dia fell in love with her mark shortly before Odyssia was transferred to Echidna Station at Ms. Steward's clandestine request.  Regardless of her feelings the op must go on, and Echidna Station holds the keys to Dia's future ascent.

Odyssia Pullo - Employed by Vito Security, Legion security consultant Odyssia Pullo's life used to be extremely simple.  Adhering to comfortable patterns laid out by Legion doctrine: eat, sleep, drill, repeat.  That was before she was assigned to C.U.R.E. and met Dia Steward.  Since then nothing has been simple.  A whirlwind of romance, emotional and physical, tore through the repetitive comforts and left Odyssia dazed and confused.  The transfer to Echidna Station was the escape hatch Odyssia wanted, allowing a return to "normal."  Breaking off her relationship with Dia, citing distance, she now finds the chain of events serendipitous and has opened a private investigation into her former lover.  Perhaps relying too much on Echidna Station's remote locale and blacksite status for protection.

Fragged Empire: For a Nominal Fee

To the private traveler the alphabet soup of planetary foreign ministries can be overwhelming, each with their own foibles and internal hypocrisies.  The bureaucratized smokescreen is purposeful on many levels, a nonlethal deterrent to filter out those who may not be ardent enough in their desire to travel.  If you have pressing business elsewhere, you can hire an agency to act on your behalf cosmographically freeing you. Cutting through the red tape and doublespeak these companies provide the following services: legalizing documents, travel auhorization external and internal, collection of intersystem shipments, expediting customs, immigration legal counsel and more.

These agencies offer nearly all the business utility of a law firm, but without the ethical restrictions or legal protections.  Operating in this gray area gives a greater degree of business mobility and deniability to Corporation and mercantile interests who retain these agencies on contract.  Since systemwide travel has become so prevalent, two of these agencies have expanded their operations aggressively and now vie for control of this gray market.

The largest processor and agency is CGBT, an orphaned acronym that once stood for Corporate Galactic Business Travel.  This company started off as a small travel agency that facilitated arrangements for deniable business assets and operators, since then they have grown due to their close relationship with the Corporations' Board of Directors.  Proving themselves indispensable when certain business initiatives need another layer of deniability and a shell company is too traceable.  The company's rapid rise has drawn both kinds of attention, and find their Datastream sites under perpetual siege from the Galactic Jesters and other hacker groups.  Housing a tremendous amount of transit data, if one of those groups could get in then a host of Corporation secrets would be revealed.  In counterpoint, CGBT regularly replaces the physical servers themselves, placing the retired machines in an anonymous storage facility for a set amount of time before wiping and reselling them on the secondary market.  Their tacit support in operation logistics has piqued the interest of Paladin Consortium. The Consortium has already begun to purchase shares of CGBT, laying the pipe for a takeover soon.

Hook:  A security guard at the CGBT server farm on Alabaster passes on a tip- in light of recent attacks the maintenance schedule has been stepped up and more servers than usual will be transitioned out.  Probably in response to life support failure on several militant, anti-Corporation habitats.  Twice as many trucks will show up, but the security will be the same to save on labor.

CGBT's largest rival is Translight System Services, emerging from a conglomerate of smaller agencies competing with CGBT on the system fringe.  They have made massive inroads with Kaltoran and Legion based planetary governments, functioning as a bureaucratic buffer.  Led by Dvorak, a four eared Nephilim emissary, and his husband, the Kaltoran fixer Jude Filch, TSS continues to expand its operations.  The Filch Clan happens to have far flung members in nearly every spaceport and pirate fleet, forming the seed for TSS satellite offices.  With these intimate criminal ties, the company has a more direct, blue collar approach to their business.  Where CGBT will go through the steps to obtain a legitimate manifest for illicit cargo, TSS will just smuggle in the freight and present forged documentation to the Port Authority if they can't manage that.  In a more extreme example of TSS' practices, they have managed to secure exclusive contracts with some Kaltoran planets so anyone looking to travel there will be required to process their paperwork with a TSS office.  Their greatest coup was contracting Denpasar, a hub of Kaltoran culture past and present.

Hook: Kaltoran planets tend to be leery when it comes to cultural contamination, wanting to retain their own belief structures in place and unchanged.  TSS works in concert and screens applicants, sure to reject would-be prosletizers.  A group of Black Key missionaries has approached the crew, asking for them to obtain leverage on a TSS visa officer so the group can travel to Denpasar and meet with an affluent Kaltoran celebrity, Sal Omni.

Fragged Empire: Papers Please

The Great Xion War has ended for each species in its own time, trust and cooperation have been slow to mend across the Systems.  Isolationist planetary governments (when there are any) have begun to open their orbital aerospace to outside travelers, seduced by the larger intersystem economy.  In order to protect their populations from cultural and biological contagion, it is common for would be visitors to apply for a visa - a document that authorizes temporary entry and residence on a particular planet and/or moon.  Extreme cases may even bar an individual from disembarking to an orbital station.

Each species/culture tends to maintain a particular view in regard to the application process, you can find similarities between two governments' approaches on distant planets if they share bio-cultural roots.  Below are common security practices for each species as well as common loopholes to slip through them.  This does not reflect the travel restrictions and security measures surrounding black sites, military bases, scum hives, etc.
 

The Corporation entered a state of uneasy peace first, and has had the most recovery time.  Their free market ideology has combined with their pivotal role in organizing utilities, constructing orbital stations, providing cheap robotic labor, and distributing the Datastream (an intersystem computing network,) giving them a fairly laissez-faire attitude towards sentient traffic.  When anyone accesses the Datastream an account is created, collating their computer use and tracking their movements, physical and electronic, through algorithmic detection.  The most common requirement to set foot in Corporate habitats is a simple login as anything more involved could discourage tourism, locales with increased security measures may require biometrics and spoor samples.

Loopholes: Simply knowing another person's account information and avoiding Datastream usage afterward.  Biohacking will be necessary to infiltrate higher security installations, in order to imitate a specific individual's spoor, retina, and bio-signatures.

Depending on where you ask, the Legion never ceased the war effort. A short visit to a Cerebus consulate would be persuasive as you would be subject to extensive sensor sweeps and issued an RFID card. Armed security present in the lobby and a fortified submission window complete the besieged aesthetic. Other Legion controlled worlds may not present such bureaucratic bulwarks, but the mentality is shared. Bearing strong resemblance to equipment requisition forms, applicants must be sure to complete the 15 page document  by hand, on premises, without error.  After submission, an interrogation disguised as interview is often requested and shortly after the harangued visitor receives their electronic authorization. Nephilim need not apply.

Loopholes: Less advanced Legion governments often implant the RFID card under the skin & tie travel authorization to that ID, so you could steal it. Monolithic hierarchies, like the Legion's, often fall prey to social engineered co-opting of key functionaries, aka a honey-pot.

Nephilim society without Xion closely resembles a food chain; the weak are meat and the strong must eat. Uninterested in actively courting tourism and its knock-on effects, already assured of their own dominance, planetbound travelers pay a reciprocity fee before exiting orbit.  The fee charged is based on what Nephilim pay when traveling to their respective homeworlds. Entering a veritable jungle, continued survival dirtside is on the visitor.  As the Nephilim don't particularly screen visitors, many Nephilim worlds are havens for foreign criminals and their syndicates. 

Loopholes: Nephilim customs law is often overlooked to merchants' chagrin, each inspector taking a cut of the product itself, according to their place on the food chain, so dissuasive bribery and smuggling are highly demanded.  Also the Customs officials make sure to collect biometrics from all travelers, so biohacking may be necessary to obscure movement.

Kaltoran space, if there's such a unified concept, possesses an underdeveloped presence in the Night. Outside of the asteroid habitats they tend to allow non-Nephilim free access to planets' surface but restrict subterranean traffic to the Hubs. Visitors without local family have to apply on an orbital station, authorized travelers are sedated to inhibit retracing their path through the tunnels. Subterranean approval often hinges on  favors from an Old Boys Network dirtside, a fact that grates on the Corporation's nerves. Particularly because many Kaltoran worlds are beginning to encourage historical tourism, great examples of Externality architecture are otherwise few and far between.

Loopholes: If you're too impatient to wait for a visa you can always hire a coyote, a border runner, to take you across. Traversing the Darkways leading to a Hub is risky, but possible.

All of this is meant to bring forward species' Prejudices without escalating inter-PC agitation, also to differentiate between the Wild Night and "Civilized Space." 

Fragged Empire: Help Wanted

A Kaltoran hacker named Debra Omni needs a team to sabotage a forgotten defense outpost belonging to Swords of Glory. However, the job is a trap - Omni and the Swords have been hired by Derrick Bolt, an assistant HR manager with Dragoon Ventures Unlimited, to force the crew to release the MacGuffin (this could be anything that related back to Human culture and scientific accomplishment.)

A guarded Nephilim science personality named Gogmagog needs a team to recover a genetic synthesis program stolen by a rival, a Twi-Far researcher named Agnes Oblige. However, he fails to show up at the meet afterward.  Further investigation reveals he went to an underground fetish party, but didn't come back.  The "Leather & Lace" just departed, may be a lead worth looking into.

A Corporate agent named Dia Steward needs a team to assassinate Odyssia Pullo, an important security officer of Vito Security. Further, the team will need to acquire some special equipment first, Odyssia manages the security on Echidna Station - a deep penetration research habitat invisible from space.

A secretive Legion hacker named Atia Vorenus needs a team to deliver an antique floppy disk to shadow banker Fabian Gracchus. However, she can only provide alternative compensation.

A Remnant agent named Arpaio needs a team to break into the network of Tri Fuel Industries and steal code for a new fuel synthesis program. However, he tries to eliminate the team after the job.  Turns out the data stolen actually contains traces of embezzlement, and could provide leverage for blackmail.

A would-be Kaltoran mogul named Samantha Thirst needs a team to recover plans for a tailored nanovirus stolen by a rival. In addition, the team is randomly targeted by a mischievous hacker from the Republic of Desire collective.

Nephilim data broker Pertova needs a team to sabotage a secret research facility belonging to Cypher Robotics & Power. Further, the team runs into unexpected security, someone within Cypher has managed to open up channels of communication with the Mechonids. Furnishing the compound with a small unit of Disciples who are perpetually alert to any infiltration.

Twi-Far smuggler Collene Mondrian needs her rival, Mako Useful, to catch a hole in the head after snitching her out to the Port Authority.The crew's association with Mondrian has drawn the attention of an inquisitive media reporter.

Hired to abduct and extract Kristopher Riordan, an important programmer of Dragoon Ventures Unlimited, by data broker Jani Hyperion. The crew encounters an old enemy on the same job, adding an unnecessary level of pressure to what should've been a milk run.

Fragged Empire: Respectable Businessmen

Left to right: Corporate, Legion, Kaltoran, and Nephilim

 Prepping for a Fragged Empire campaign, here are three pillars of the underworld community to navigate and deal with.

Fabian Gracchus -  A Legionnaire with the rare head for numbers, he served as a quartermaster during the tail end of the Great Xion War.  Directing supplies, he and his unit were captured in a Nephilim raid on their lunar supply depot. Imprisoned in Shayol, an infamous Nephilim camp for Legion POWs, he became cadaverous as his Legionnaire values ceased relevancy.  One night, he woke to find another starving prisoner gnawing on his arm.  Fighting off his attacker, Fabian realized that survival was a matter of amoral, predatory arithmetic.  He will not say much else when recounting the rest of his time, but he was one of the few prisoners released retaining some modicum of health.

Free to operate in Corporate culture, he has carved a niche in the black economy.  Fabian has become a banker for individuals and organizations who wish to avoid scrutiny in their business dealings. Whether it's the hyper-elite obscuring their art assets or a slaver who gets paid in rare earth ingots, Fabian accepts all sorts of tender for deposits.  Maintaining a series of vaults in a nearby asteroid belt, his security is top notch and his clients trust it to stay that way. That trust is built upon Fabian's refusal to outsource the deposit and withdrawal of valuables in his care, every transaction is carried out in person with a complement of his Nephilim security staff.  He maintains an index of preferred freelancers when he needs additional muscle, and placement on that list is a coveted prize.

Signature Items - "Pulchra"- a sawed-off boarding shotgun and "Crypta"- a refitted Legion bomber

Hooks - One of Fabian's hyper-elite clients has passed away, and an extremely valuable piece of art was willed to a young family member, a child isolated from society at large.  Per his policy, Fabian will only release the piece directly to the child.  Needing specialized personnel, he hires the characters to help him make the delivery.  He considers this an audition for the crew to get on his Index.

Topiary - Since the Kaltoran Reemergence their children were raised on their parents' tales of Eden's beauty and the lost glory of their fallen society.  All in an effort to downplay the terrible things done for survival beneath Kadash's skin.  Yearning to revisit the glorious past, several of these individuals have grouped together and formed Topiary, an eco-terrorist group that doubles as a secret front for the Kaltoran Militia.  Since the Militia refuses to deal with the Corporation in any capacity, Topiary steps up and fills this space.

Where the Miltia stages terrorist attacks on Corporate industry, Topiary stages protests and capitalizes on the omnipresent news cycle, decrying the Nephilim colonization of their lost home world, the Corporation's defiance of their biological predestination, commodification of biomass and the rampant cannibalization of Kaltoran and Archon material remnants.  Topiary claims that as the last species decanted without an express purpose beyond maturation, Kaltorans are the heirs apparent to the Archons.  Because of their adherence to non-violence and incorporating public stunts into their protests, Topiary is largely seen as a mostly harmless organization starving for attention.  Internally they venerate the Dark Tribesmen of Kadash as an ideal Kaltoran society: unburdened by Corporate materialism, the Legion's failure, and the Nephilim's fleshy blasphemy.  To freelancers Topiary offers an incidental way to keep flying, unwilling to involve non-Kaltorans in their operations, the organization pays well with little outright risk, but what actually earns this pay is seemingly idiosyncratic.

Signature Items - Protest signs, various states of undress, and pamphlets.  So many pamphlets.

Hooks - Because the other species will be unwilling to put the genie back in the bottle and step aside for their betters, Topiary is seeking out lost Archon databases for any clues leading to a Genesis Engine.  These low orbital devices were used by Humanity, and the Archons, to terraform inhospitable planets.  They are willing to pay fairly well for solid leads in this direction.

The Eye of Ahura, a Kaltoran cultural treasure, is on display at a Corporate CEO's fancy soiree.  Topiary wants you to procure an invitation so they will know the party's location and stage an appropriate protest to demand the gem's return.  As always, Topiary has ulterior motives desiring the Eye and the invitation.

Bella & Donna - Heads turn at any space station when "Leather & Lace" pulls in, one of the eminent dens of iniquity in the void. A refitted freighter, "Leather & Lace" may not look like a pleasure palace but it is more discreet and impregnable than any yacht plying the Night. Bella, a Corporate spin doctor, and Donna, a Nephilim emissary, won the ship in a game of cards, making it a place where all sorts of nearly victimless vices are available.  Hired flesh, kinky catharsis, barely legal boutique narcotics, and whispered confessions are advertised, rumors abound that there are darker, stranger indulgences to indulge. Morality parties planetside prevent ventures as large as Bella/Donna's from finding a permanent home outside Nephilim space.

Aside from their public role as proprieters, the couple dip into a number of clandestine activities. Ranging from small time blackmail, minor smuggling, intellectual property infringement, implanting spy ware, and non-consensual gene sampling. a cadre of powerful politicians protect them when these side businesses go awry and hush everything up. Makes you wonder what hangs over their heads. 

Signature Items - "Leather & Lace" - A refitted Corporate Bastion Mass Cargo freighter, and modified UNITY chips networking Bella/Donna together but excludes other chips.

Hooks - Some Corporate research monkeys are eager to get their hands on Bella/Donna's hacked UNITY chips, as well as some of their narcotic wares. Unless the crew has a surgeon to remove it, this will involve kidnapping. 

Inspiracion: Fragged Empire - Moving Pictures

More Fragged Empire brain fodder, this time TV series and film for feeding my muse.  My focus tends to be who and why rather than where and how, so expect these to be on the soft sci-fi  to space opera side of the spectrum. My books finally came in from the Kickstarter and they are beautiful.  Wade Dyer definitely knocked the design and presentation out of the park.

Dark Matter, 1 season. On Netflix. Six unnamed troubleshooters come out of stasis in response to a shipwide alert. Trouble is 5 of them are amnesiacs, the 6th is a repository for all their conflicting memories. Hijinks ensue as they suss out who they were, where they were going, and what they were going to do. Outside of a general job per week structure, the metaplot dwells on identity and memory's role in determining self.

Farscape, 4 seasons. On Netflix. Astronaut John Crichton is launched to the weirder side of the universe after a test launch off his experimental propulsion system. Now he's trying to get home abd avoid capture by the space fascists know as the Peacekeepers. The spaceship is alive, & there's a ton of interesting drugs/biotech present in the show. Creature designs are also fantastic, this was Star Trek: Voyager done better by Henson.  The show got cancelled so it ends on a bit of a cliffhanger. I wonder what other great Australian television we're missing out on in the U.S.A.

The Expanse, currently airing. On Syfy.com.  Based on the James S.A. Corey novels of the same name, this one is very hard sci-fi.  Confined to our solar system, tensions escalate between the United Earth Government and the Democratic Republic of Mars while both polities keeps a collective boot on the throat of the Asteroid Belt, the source of all raw materials that feed the respective war machines. 

Firefly + Serenity 1 season & a film. On Netflix. The little engine that couldn't, this series casts a long shadow. Nothing else encapsulates the synthesis of space western quite like it except maybe Cowboy Bebop. Anything else I have to say about this has been said more eloquently by someone else. 

Cowboy Bebop, 1 season & a film. The other fantastic space western, nearly every episode is strong.  Following a crew of perpetually broke bounty hunters, chasing the next big score or trying to cleanse the sins of the past. Sometimes both.  Ship design, characterization, and world building details all combine to make this show feel lived in and real in a way few others do.

Other influences: Mass Effect 1-3, Dead Space 1-2, Lone Wolf & Cub, Europa Report, Total Recall, Pandorum, Pitch Black, Ghost in the Shell, The Quantum Thief,  & Paprika

Did I miss anything?