Mention a random quirk of your world

Quirk 16: Aside from the various units and formations that make up the Ordo Explorator's forces there are three major unique formations: Death Company, The Immortals and the Legion of Nine.

• Death Company is the OE's suicide troops. All members have join up voluntarily for a variety of reasons, ranging from those who require a death in battle in order to enter the afterlife or to redeem themselves of a past shame to those who have a genuine death wish. All members of the OE can join and leave the Company at any time no questions asked (save a psych evaluation to make sure they are otherwise fit for combat) save directly before and during deployment. Any who change their minds during deployment are expected to survive through it, which is hard, but not impossible as Death Company is never sent into a mission with a less than 40% survival chance.

Death Company's uniform consists of a red and cream dropsuit, flak armor painted black with a red 'X' on the breastplate and a helmet of the trooper's preference, also they are the most common users of the Mk9 exosuit (think COD exosuit with a titanfall pilot's jetpack) and the M 41 A 2 Pulse Rifle (as a M 41 A but with more available ammo types and possible weapon mods). Death Company troops are expected to fight until the 'X' on their breastplate is no longer visible because of the blood (theirs or the enemy's) and are nicknamed 'Professional Redshirts' for the colour of their uniforms and their low survival rates, much to the annoyance of Starfleet security forces serving alongside the OE.

• 'The Immortals' is the generic nickname for the personal bodyguard/retinue of an Outsider. Usually numbering between 40 and 160 operatives, they provide support for their assigned Outsider. Despite being designated as a pure combat unit, Immortal retinues contain a high percentage of primarily civilian staff such as field scientists, archaeologists and transport pilots. However, all Immortal personnel are expected to be able to fight if necessary.

Immortal retinues are only rarely deployed all at once. This is because the Outsider in command picks and chooses the most suitable team members for the task at hand while the rest stay in reserve as support and reinforcements. It is also because the Outsider in command uses his/her powers to shield retinue members from harm, to the point where they are nigh indestructible, and can only cover a certain number of retinue members at once whilst still being able to access other powers without the risk of overloading. Immortals often wear unique or highly customised uniforms and commonly wield the more unusual weapons in the OE arsenal.

• The Legion of Nine is unique amongst the forces of the OE, as it is the only unit to be made entirely of wraiths and other semi-ethereal sentient undead. The Legion was formed when the Nazgul cut a deal with the OE, that in the event of Sauron's defeat their loyalty and essence would transfer to the OE, for reasons unknown. These Nazgul are not the ringwraiths from the films or books. Their original universe is the Games Workshop War of the Ring tabletop game.

This means that when they are in possession of their rings they are more powerful, take on more individualistic appearances and have more personality than their 'Prime' reality counterparts. Attending each of the Nine are eight lesser, but still mighty, wraiths; each one bound to the OE for whatever reason and selected for their compatibility with their superiors. For example, the eight attendants of the Witch-King of Angmar are otherwise peerless strategists and powerful sorcerers, whilst those under the command of The Tainted are masters of poison and slow, creeping death.

The Nine are rarely deployed together, instead an individual member of the Nine will be summoned by placing its ring upon bare earth and a short chant followed by an OE command phrase. Once the wraith has appeared along with its attendants it will await its orders and then carry them out to the bitter end and then some. Once given, orders cannot be changed nor the wraiths stopped in any meaningful way so OE commanders are leery of handing out orders more complicated than 'Go here, do this, return for further instruction'. That said, the Nine and their attendants are capable of long term operations as well as creative strategic thought, one just has to remember to include the ability to receive new orders when giving instructions.

The Legion of Nine is mostly used for search and retrieval, VIP assassination and psychological warfare. The last time the Legion of Nine was deployed as a single unit was during the evacuation of Reality-GEN-248-WOR-001. The Legion successfully retrieved 90% of the Black Empire's cultural and magical relics from the Alliance of Hope within three days of deployment and slowed down the Alliance's advance for three years with inspired psychological warfare tactics, enabling the entire remaining population of the Black Empire (and their possessions) to be evacuated to Point Five before Protocol Three had to be enacted.

The legacy the Gods left behind has led to quite a few interesting means of communication by the Four Powers of Alesia. For example, the Spider God once used spider webs to communicate to her followers, but with the death of the Gods there was nobody left giving signals. That is, until mancers discovered a microwave signal capable of controlling spiders. Since then, spy agencies started using spider webs as a means of communicating with their agents. Then Altzanland discovered the hidden communication method when a signal from Vostrovia accidentally triggered a sleeper nest of giant spiders that took over a lonely forest town. Altzanland then chose to drug their spider population, thereby ending the use of spiderweb encryption in Altzanland and ensuring endless amusement for biologists. Instead, Vostrovia launched a satellite that pretended to be a star that blinked in Morse code. Oddly enough, nobody noticed until it was shot down by a cyborg moon dragon.

Quirks in my setting:

• The physical universe was created first, spiritual realms like Heaven and Hell was created later.
• The first human was created from the The All-Maker and was captured and used as a template for the rest of the human race by the later gods.
• Humanity rebelled and the gods made every manner of fantastic beasts to kill off humanity out of spite.
• Originally, after humanity rebelled, everyone of them had magic, but the gods created disasters like the flood, to wipe them out. The survivors managed to repopulate, but it resulted in there not being as much mages as there used to be. This reversed itself in my series though, where everybody has the option of utilizing magic, if only in small doses for the general population.

Thanks to the incident that ended with the death of Satan, Hell has had some slight administrative changes in recent years. After Satan's death the Hell fell into chaos (well, into more chaos than usual), the Antichrist, Satan Jr. established a new administration, which each Demonic Prince of Hell now governing their own circles of Hell.

As Satan Jr. (or just "Stan" to his friends) was born in the human world, he has brought a lot of customs and modern ideas from the mortal realm to Hell, effectively turning the place into a supernatural tourist trap.

Manastran soldiers tend to paint their armor black with brightly colored imagery on them. You often see things like a red hawk flying across a breastplate or a green serpent coiling around the spaulders.

Besides the fact that it makes the entire army look like a horde of spirits in dim light, the patterns act as a subtle psychological lure. People attack the brightly colored bits without thinking simply because it catches their attention.

When the Manastrans finally figured it out they started reinforcing the shoulder and torso pieces as they make the best canvases. It's gotten to the point that Manastra's rival Rigoli has had to change their training regimens to ignore the effect and attack the lightly armored limbs.

In a world of ubiquitous surveillance, such silly concepts as privacy are often seen as counter-cultural. Technology ensures that any device is capable of collecting data. Those hand rails on public transit alone are built to recognize hand prints, hand geometry, vein patterns and even heart rhythm. Because of this, counterculture has become the most stable bastion for privacy. Crypto-anarchists in particular take their privacy very seriously, using black market cyberware, open source cryptography and proxy webs to blend in without giving away their identity. The most diligent utilize cyberware to continuously rework every measurable feature to provide as much anonymity as possible. The so-called Nobodies use hardware and software to slowly shift their facial structure, gait, bone density, and even body odor among many other things. Of course, being an amorphous shapeshifter presents its own set of problems in a post-panoptic society.

In the aftermath of World War 3, a small platoon of power-armour operators joined forces with the remains of the US Postal Service. Their mission: to keep trade and communication flowing in the shadow of the new Dark Age.

Neither snow nor rain nor murderous bandits will stop these couriers in their appointed rounds. They are the knights in irradiated armour. They are the last light of civilization.

They are The Bulletproof Postmen.

edited 19th Jul '15 9:55:25 AM by Tungsten74

So, The Courier from Fallout: New Vegas ?

(I guess ? I haven't played this game.)

Uh... no? My idea is nothing like the Courier. If you had played New Vegas, you'd know that.

Why even make that comparison if you haven't played the game?

edited 19th Jul '15 10:34:44 AM by Tungsten74

Well, they live in a Crapsack World, they carry messages at the peril of their lives, and they are badasses because of that. Sounds like what I know (or "know") of the Courier to me.

But you're right, drawing a parallel between two things I know almost nothing about was a bit unthinking.

edited 19th Jul '15 10:43:24 AM by Aetol

I wouldn't say their world is all that Crapsack, given that people like the Postmen exist.

Moreover, the Postmen differ from the Courier in that the Postmen are motivated by a desire to preserve and maintain one of pre-war America's most beneficial public institutions, whereas the Courier just seemed to be in it to pay the bills. Plus there's the fact that the Postmen were originally members of a US Army Powered Infantry platoon, rather than some random nobody with superhuman resistance to brain damage.

Really, the only thing the two characters have in common is that both deliver post in dangerous situations. In all other aspects, they're completely different.

Yes, but in the courier's case it's all we actually know about him\her.

I like the Courier.

Also, thanks to a Alien Invasion, most modern tech has advanced and humanity has joined the Galactic Trade Council. This has placed them on a relatively low ladder.

As of now becoming spacefaring and part of a giant federation, Earth, the home planet to humanity has been declared a protected planet, you can not farm it for resources of any sorts and the consequences aren't a fine.

Isn't that from David Brin's The Postman?

edited 19th Jul '15 11:31:11 PM by SantosLHalper

In other words, agriculture seems to be right out, as would be basic mining or recycling of things already there? Or pausing to refresh your oxygen supply?

Breechloading rifles are a standard weapon, since the nature of air combat means that smoothbores are effectively useless beyond short range. Obturation is a problem when the metallic cartridge hasn't been developed yet, but there have been interesting solutions with disposable gutta-percha seals and movable cylinders. On the other hand, developing reliable obturation for artillery—like the 12pdrs carried by the aerial line-of-battle ships—has been a problem, so much so that most heavy artillery remain muzzleloaders. (Since a 12pdr is considered heavy, most flying craft have much smaller weapons: breechloading rifled jingals capable of launching a one-inch cylindrical bullet with a small percussion fuze and explosive charge are a standard weapon for small boats.)

Magic in my world behaves very similarly to light. In addition to plants being able to photosynthesize it, magic will bounce off of anything the same color as it. So a wooden shield covered in red paint will reflect red-colored magic. Flames made by the red-colored magic after it hits something else will be a different story though.

edited 20th Jul '15 11:13:35 AM by MarkerMage

Due to the inevitable effect of Technology Marches On, spaceborne combat circa 2700 tends to revolve around speed and acceleration.

Often, this turns out out to be the reaction speed - while shields are capable of deflecting most weapons with both combatants stationary (relative to each other), no self-respecting ship commander ever approaches a battle at less than twenty gravities acceleration. Thus, combat generally results in the side with faster reflexes getting the first shot off and puncturing the other side with hypervelocity shells.

As a point of interest, the fastest ships in the setting (Repulse-class destroyers) can, at full power, achieve seventy gravities of acceleration.

How does the crew survive this ?

The fun and excitement of inertial dampening.

Plus, just about every ship uses a microwaordirve; so while exterior acceleration is truly staggering, the gees inside the field are merely impressive.

For my universe there is no inertial dampening. People just deal with the acceleration. For most ships, this means cruising at a steady 1 G. Military crews are trained to maintain normal operations at up to 3 Gs acceleration but not indefinitely. Smaller ships can pull up to 5 Gs in combat since their crews rarely leave their acceleration couches and the command deck is oriented parallel to the direction of travel.

However, engine tech kept getting better and better so in order to break through the 9 g limit engineers turned to liquid G suits. Unfortunately, liquid G suits were bulky, heavy, and required oxygenation gear to function for more than a few minutes.

At one point someone had the idea of just flooding the cockpit with breathable fluid and, after a few hilarious electrical accidents, it worked. The oxygenation gear could be mounted right outside the cockpit and the cockpit could carry the weight of the breathing fluid. Eventually, this evolved into the standard piloting suit.

It is no exaggeration to say that liquid G compensation made the strike ship plausible. Without it there is simply no way to accelerate at 50 gravities or more.

edited 20th Jul '15 8:05:01 PM by Belisaurius

re: inertial damping and all that: If I remember, Larry Niven in The Mote in God's Eye had movable furniture in the rooms: the ships would spin on their long axis when travelling to simulate gravity. If accelerating or decelerating, the crew would move the furniture: what had been the wall is now the floor, et cetera.

That's assuming normal peaceful travel. "Prepare ship for acceleration" involved restraints, if I recall aright.

In the early days of the massive robotics boom in the early 2070s, even before self-aware A.I.s were present there were parameters in place to avoid robotics abuse. robots were programmed to react to abuse in a very lifelike way, often showing pain and fleeing from the abuser. The reason for this reaction is so that impressionable individuals such as children are taught to avoid attacking robots for fun, mainly out of fear that people who abuse lifelike robots would get enough of a stimulus out of it that they might be inclined to move to human targets. Many were afraid that a society that allowed abuse of lifelike entities would be liable for breeding generations of sociopaths.

Telepaths tend to feel a sense of mild nausea around certain sufficiently advanced (modern-level) supercomputers. Your desktop won't bug them, but there's a few university and corporate setups that none will go near without a very good reason.

edited 27th Jul '15 8:10:44 PM by KillerClowns

Out of genuine curiosity, why is that?

The bare flicker of something in the depths of those machines, while nowhere near even rudimentary sentience, can be picked up as a vague, unnatural sort of telepathic static that just doesn't quite fit right to a meat brain. Imagine elevator music, at the bare threshold of perception, played off-key.

edited 27th Jul '15 8:43:35 PM by KillerClowns