Dark Sky Salvage, part 1. The Italics Chapter

Generally, I'm not much for trying to create a specific "feel" of a world in a game. Even though it's fun to write that intalicized intro text, I tend to pretty much skip over it when reading other people's rulesets. I think this is primarily because there are so few new themes to explore. "Yeah, it's a fantasy world. I get it, I don't need a long explanation of what that's like."

Of course, not that this hasn't stopped me before.

But my concept for Dark Sky Salvage is a little unusual. The quick description of the game is "shipwrecks in hyperspace." I've had this concept for a story for a while. So this let's me type out the concept for TWO reasons, storyline and game plot. In italics even!

DARK SKY SALVAGE

Back in the early halycon days of Hyperdrive travel, many ships were lost in the Hyperspace continuum. Due to it's time and space warping capabilities, the Continuum was a simply an unknown; an uncaring place that was used as the transition from point A to point B in the blink of an eye. None really knew what it was, or cared, just as long as it got them to their final destination. The tech required to truly traverse the Continuum was hardly up to the challenge, and for some captains it was merely luck that jumped them through. Many early Hyperdrive-class ships were lost in the continuum; they never appeared at point B. In a blink of an eye, crews and well-to-do passengers with a sense of exploration to the New Worlds just simply...vanished.

It was the crew of these ships that had given the Continuum it's legendary name, the Dark Sky. It was said to be a dark place, simply a void, with no existance if you became trapped there. Or so it was described by those crew members "who knew of a crewmember who knew of a crewmember" who described the experience of escaping it. Granted, there were no known published reports of anyone lost in the Dark Sky returning; but they made for good stories back then.

Luckily, today we have the tech to visit and stay in the Dark Sky, and explore this alternate reality. And surprisingly enough, it is very much as those old tales tell. But instead of being merely an empty void, old husks of the early Hyperdrive-class ships lost to the Continuum for over a century now list silently in the vacuum. And many of these wrecks still hold items, while mundane back when they were lost, which are to be considered treasured by today's standards. And so, the era of Dark Sky Salvage begins...


Whew, that's a lot of italics!