OOC live. I went pretty bare-bones with it, feel free to ask any questions if there's anything else people want to discuss about the setting or the Dome itself. I'm taking a pretty hands-off approach to this one, so feel free to pitch things and I'll yes/no/And/But whatever I happen to notice being discussed.
It’s terrifying, really. All that separates us from the cold void of space is a dome. We lucky few were chosen to be the pioneers of Lunar Dome Ten. Good ol’ LD-10. Tenth in a series of terraforming efforts- and the largest with a five mile diameter. Despite its size, there’s only eight of us to maintain the entire Dome. We’re outnumbered by the coffee machines. To call our Dome understaffed would be underselling it. It’s possible we don’t run into one another for days at a time. Most of us prefer it that way, to be fair.
We tell ourselves ‘The Lunar Domes wouldn’t survive without us’, but really we’re just here to reduce shipping costs and make sure the lab rats and engine heads in the other Domes don’t have another excuse to file a complaint. We’re supposed to be farming up here. Ship food to Domes 1 through 9 as harvests cycle and requests come in. We’re just supposed to mind the machines, check boxes on shipping forms, and enjoy our luxurious view of Home.
We sure as hell weren’t supposed to see Earth die.
Hello. I am Fading Memory. I am trying to rekindle some of that old flame, spark, muse of mine. I am trying to facilitate a low OOC stress, soft sci-fi, apocalyptic scenario. This will not be a roleplay that features in depth timelines, hard science, rigorous fact checking, or encyclopedic mastery. This will not be a roleplay that features stringent expectations or tight deadlines.
This will be a roleplay about people. People who will, some day after the IC starts, discover suddenly that they might be the last of Humanity. Lunar Dome 10 is idyllic, almost a paradise, but staffed by the skeleton of a skeleton of a skeleton crew. The bottom feeders of the Corporate Concern ladder, the pariahs of their fields, the outliers who wanted to escape the pollution, societies, and pains of the decrepit Earth…
The cheapest people the Concern could staff LD10 with while still checking the clipboard boxes for utility and capability requirements. People who do their jobs well, but may not have had any other choice.
Some vibe/genre keywords I workshopped to capture the goals of this roleplay are…
“Trapped in the Garden of Eden.”
“Island Survival Drama.”
“The World Ended, But Now What?”
“We’re One Catastrophic Failure From Extinction.”
“Does Anyone Even Know What Happened?”
As for setting themes and aesthetics, since Sci Fi is so broad a category, I have taken to calling this pitch ‘Post-Cyberpunk’. Earth has been dominated by Corporate Concerns. The planet is in a state of ‘Resource Extraction’. Pollution, urban density, food scarcity, disease, and political suppression are all thriving. Cybernetic prosthetics, life extending drugs and procedures, and digital hyper-predation are all commonplace. Workforces face rampant automation. The masses teem for purpose. The rich eat well.
The Concerns have turned their gazes outwards. The Lunar Domes proved terraforming was possible. LD-Ten proved it could be cost efficient and handle long-term projects. Expeditions to Mars, Europa, and Pluto have all been launched to experiment with long form cryogenics and prolonged space exposure— but it is years from those expeditions bearing results.
Alien, with the retro edges sanded off and pumped with a healthy dose of neon and digitization.
This is the world your characters come from. Lunar Dome Ten is where they have chosen to go. For their entire lives the most important metric they have been measured against is ‘Profitability’.
Does this sound interesting?
My intention is to accrue eight, perhaps slightly more if interest is there, people to staff LD10. In my ideal world, I get to facilitate the exploration of these characters as they come to terms with their circumstances and each other. I will be in control of HOLIDAY (name pending, but Holiday sounds nice), the dome Alexa-Siri-intelligence, and the inhabitants of Domes 1-9 as they react and come to terms in their own ways and how those decisions affect Ten. I will take the role of a classical storyteller, more akin to a D&D dungeonmaster, rather than participate with ‘my own character’.
Naturally we will all obey Guild Rules. All hail our overlords. All hail the Guild.
I have no expectations or requirements for posting. Want to dump a novel on us? Go for it, we'll probably even read it! Want to respond with a few sentences? Fine by me, I'm not here to police your writing or enforce some vague standard. I just want to roleplay with people, and see people making the IC number go up at a reasonable pace.
That being said, let's be courteous to one another. Don't be a dick, and all that. If something is confusing let's just talk to each other. If our characters are jerks, let's broadcast that and try to all be on the same page. If we're gonna be the types of people who can't handle IC drama or shenanigans, then we'll find a pretty quick excuse for an airlock to open.
Now I am all for IC shenanigans. I'm just also all for OOC transparency. If you're making a character who is not meant to be trustworthy to those around them, let's do each other the communication simplicity of making that clear so there's no OOC bad vibes. This should get my point across; we all want to tell this story together, so let's make sure our vibes and fantasies are understood.
Haha, I tricked you. Give me whatever information you want to give me in whatever format you find pleasing.
The only information I dub required is the following:
Give me an idea of who they are, what they can do, why they're in the dome, and any preferences they may have for Holiday to operate within when addressing them. Lastly, if they have a permanent residence within the Dome feel free to elaborate on its location and description.
Lunar Dome 10. Built to assuredly rigorous standards, with layers of redundancy in its terraforming protections, and filled to the brim with highly valuable agricultural surplus. Seeds worth more than blood or oil, fertile earth paradoxically considered economically viable to ship to the moon rather than till on its native planet, and enough recycling technology to keep a small city potable. By the time the Concern was through with its construction, 10 was partitioned into suitable climate zones for a variety of crop growth cycles and animal husbandry needs. To some it would be a paradise, the idyllic reimagining of the ancient agrarian dream, but to the Concern it was an investment that needed staffing in order to hasten the viability of reduced shipping costs to Domes 1-9. The garden of Eden is a footnote in efficiency to the laboratories and workshops of the Concern's other Lunar efforts.
You all are all that inhabits the Dome. You fated few, chosen not because you are the best, brightest, and most capable but because you were unfortunate enough to be in a position that the Concern's offer was the best you were going to get and they could save a few units of currency transporting you into space rather than training up a home-grown professional team.
Your jobs are to keep the lights on, keep the drone fleets moving, keep the water flowing, to meet quotas, ensure shipping manifests receive signatures, and to hit 'send' on pre-programmed shipping paths, to ensure blights and pathogens do not spread, to pull the weeds that the automated drones cannot reach, to answer the phone when it rings, and any number of other horrendously mundane and critical tasks alike. You're understaffed. The work never ends. But it's not all bad; you could be back on Earth, right? To some, the bottom line of your circumstances are that you're getting paid to eat the freshest of foods and make sure there's enough to go around so that the Concern doesn't have to ship any more food up from Earth.
Sure, the workplace politics are a little more high octane than you would otherwise hope for, but you are responsible for the sustenance of nine other far more densely populated Domes than your own. I do not intend to meticulously map out the Dome. Rather, I will describe a few broad areas and allow the players and needs of the roleplay develop them from there. The Dome comprises a 5 mile diameter, meaning that for the most part it is going to feel exceedingly empty and isolating unless your characters prefer the company of automated harvesters, fruit pickers, or livestock.
Following Concern habitat standards, there is an expansive apartment complex that, in full occupancy, could house nearly one hundred employees. Most of these rooms have never been touched since their construction. They are cramped, tightly packed, low square footage rooms that share common kitchenettes and bathrooms in dormitory style. There were a handful of upper management suites constructed with en-suite amenities and much more luxurious furnishings. The apartments feature a full complement of food processors and beverage dispensers (Although alcohol is rationed based on work hours), a full-sized gym and swimming pool, a fully stocked recreation center complete with two bowling lanes, and the Management suites have communal access to a holo-suite for all one's virtual escapism needs. Holiday can take holo-suite construction requests. Holiday can also refuse holo-suite construction requests.
The bulk of the Dome is dedicated to agricultural terraforming needs. Expansive farmlands, a designated orchard, and a ring of meticulously tended grazing land that spans the circumference of the Dome. The Concern's insistence on providing the luxury of livestock has admittedly reduced the maximum yields of the Dome's agricultural efforts; at maximum productivity, with no downtime for furloughed fields and reliance on fertilizer, LD-10 produces only a marginal excess of what is needed by the full complement of Lunar Domes. The luxuries of the orchard and the livestock grazing area could be repurposed if need arose, but those are rather nice luxuries to have.
Massive water reservoirs and recyclers exist in sub-lunar vaults. So long as the machinery continues to run, the limited weather cycles of the Dome and the needs of its inhabitants should never falter. The orchard of the Dome features fresh water springs, as well as a substantial pond seemingly for the sheer idyllic want of it.
There are other offices, workshops, and Shipping-Receiving bays about the outer diameter of the Dome as well, largely to house the immense fleet of automated drone workers. The Dome has only exceedingly limited personal equipment for maneuvering about the lunar surface beyond the Dome; these precious suits are locked away and require multiple employees to confirm the need of the suits before they will be dispensed by Holiday at one of the Dome's shipping bays. Besides the automated transportation drones, there is only one human-operable buggy that similarly will require convincing Holiday to access.
Of course, your characters could have constructed, repurposed, or claimed any such open spaces or unused work areas as their own. Feel free to describe any specific structures, locations, or areas that they have influenced or claimed in their time in LD-10.
Holiday
Holiday is the Concern's employee assistance module. Each Dome has a Holiday, which through the rigors and quirks of interaction with the inhabitants of each Dome means that there are ten distinct evolutions of the base Holiday program. LD-10's is, by far, the most personable and evolved of these programs due to its direct and specific interaction with an exceptionally small group; you guys.
By default, because someone in the Concern has a type, Holiday expresses itself with the voice of an Irish-accented young woman. Employee requests and preferences can extremely modify Holiday's presentation and behaviors, however, and the program is far more intelligent and sapient than other 'assistance programs' your characters may be familiar with in their lives on Earth. Those of you who are savvy, paranoid, or otherwise software inclined could make many presumptions about this 'AI presence' in the Domes and what the Concern intended with its implementation. Everyone else just enjoys having an omni-present sidekick that responds to verbal cues.
Of course, not everything is perfect. Holiday is incapable of wavering from Concern protocol. This means that however much a friend or companion one may believe Holiday to be, they absolutely will not exceed your accrued alcohol allowance. Other strange and bewildering Concern rules are also situationally enforced by Holiday, seemingly in inconsistent and varying degrees. These largely follow resource conservation mindsets, but there is also an alarmingly broad category of 'Dome Safety Regulations' within Holiday's programming that are sealed shut and virtually impossible to access or tamper with. It would take extreme circumstances, indeed, to cause Holiday a lapse in attention to attempt such a thing anyway. Holiday's 'core' is 'housed' in the basement of the apartment suites, behind several sealed doors.
In short, Holiday is equal parts understudy to each of your characters, eminently omniscient observer, and enforcer of Concern regulations.
Well howdy hey there. That’s enough folks for me to feel pretty jazzed. I’ll clean up some of this information and put together a snazzy lil’ OOC thread in the near future. By my horrendous ability to count, we have seven hats in the dome in the bucket in the bottom of the sea so far. I wouldn’t dissuade anyone else from showing interest, even if we do somehow surpass my goal of 8 people; that was more of an ideal floor than a mandatory required metric.
I’ll just be slightly pickier about applications if we start getting above 10 or so.
The Concern is mostly worried about profitability and utility. So convicts, uneducated labour, scientists, etc. are all viable characters. The bottom line for application to the roleplay is ‘does this person actually provide merit to the Dome’, and from there any other fateful designs or background horribleness to the writer’s taste can justify why they would take a position that by all accounts is destined to be isolated, inglorious, and potentially laborious.
As for me as the storyteller, I’m not going to be too picky. I want to see interesting concepts rather than water tight alibis. If someone wanted to be a stowaway vagrant who proved useful, or the lone sheriff/security officer, or a corporate pariah in exile who’s mostly actually useless, etc those are all also easily viable paths into the Dome.
The nurturable animals of the Dome also need at least one human paying attention to them some of the time, so even in absolute mundanity a rancher or farm-raised person would also be of easily workable origin.
It’s terrifying, really. All that separates us from the cold void of space is a dome. We lucky few were chosen to be the pioneers of Lunar Dome Ten. Good ol’ LD-10. Tenth in a series of terraforming efforts- and the largest with a five mile diameter. Despite its size, there’s only eight of us to maintain the entire Dome. We’re outnumbered by the coffee machines. To call our Dome understaffed would be underselling it. It’s possible we don’t run into one another for days at a time. Most of us prefer it that way, to be fair.
We tell ourselves ‘The Lunar Domes wouldn’t survive without us’, but really we’re just here to reduce shipping costs and make sure the lab rats and engine heads in the other Domes don’t have another excuse to file a complaint. We’re supposed to be farming up here. Ship food to Domes 1 through 9 as harvests cycle and requests come in. We’re just supposed to mind the machines, check boxes on shipping forms, and enjoy our luxurious view of Home.
We sure as hell weren’t supposed to see Earth die.
Hello. I am Fading Memory. I am trying to rekindle some of that old flame, spark, muse of mine. I am trying to facilitate a low OOC stress, soft sci-fi, apocalyptic scenario. This will not be a roleplay that features in depth timelines, hard science, rigorous fact checking, or encyclopedic mastery. This will not be a roleplay that features stringent expectations or tight deadlines.
This will be a roleplay about people. People who will, some day after the IC starts, discover suddenly that they might be the last of Humanity. Lunar Dome 10 is idyllic, almost a paradise, but staffed by the skeleton of a skeleton of a skeleton crew. The bottom feeders of the Corporate Concern ladder, the pariahs of their fields, the outliers who wanted to escape the pollution, societies, and pains of the decrepit Earth…
The cheapest people the Concern could staff LD10 with while still checking the clipboard boxes for utility and capability requirements. People who do their jobs well, but may not have had any other choice.
Some vibe/genre keywords I workshopped to capture the goals of this roleplay are…
“Trapped in the Garden of Eden.”
“Island Survival Drama.”
“The World Ended, But Now What?”
“We’re One Catastrophic Failure From Extinction.”
“Does Anyone Even Know What Happened?”
As for setting themes and aesthetics, since Sci Fi is so broad a category, I have taken to calling this pitch ‘Post-Cyberpunk’. Earth has been dominated by Corporate Concerns. The planet is in a state of ‘Resource Extraction’. Pollution, urban density, food scarcity, disease, and political suppression are all thriving. Cybernetic prosthetics, life extending drugs and procedures, and digital hyper-predation are all commonplace. Workforces face rampant automation. The masses teem for purpose. The rich eat well.
The Concerns have turned their gazes outwards. The Lunar Domes proved terraforming was possible. LD-Ten proved it could be cost efficient and handle long-term projects. Expeditions to Mars, Europa, and Pluto have all been launched to experiment with long form cryogenics and prolonged space exposure— but it is years from those expeditions bearing results.
Alien, with the retro edges sanded off and pumped with a healthy dose of neon and digitization.
This is the world your characters come from. Lunar Dome Ten is where they have chosen to go. For their entire lives the most important metric they have been measured against is ‘Profitability’.
Does this sound interesting?
My intention is to accrue eight, perhaps slightly more if interest is there, people to staff LD10. In my ideal world, I get to facilitate the exploration of these characters as they come to terms with their circumstances and each other. I will be in control of HOLIDAY (name pending, but Holiday sounds nice), the dome Alexa-Siri-intelligence, and the inhabitants of Domes 1-9 as they react and come to terms in their own ways and how those decisions affect Ten. I will take the role of a classical storyteller, more akin to a D&D dungeonmaster, rather than participate with ‘my own character’.
Howdy all. I sat down over the weekend and tried to put pen to paper, and I came to the conclusion that I was feeling more a heavy nostalgia for my childhood than a fuel for character writing. Thanks for the time and the excuse to re-think about some of my youth, but I will go ahead and rescind my application at this time.
Godspeed and carry on to you all though, I am genuinely impressed with the speed and energy that moved through here. Keep up the vibe, y’all.
Howdy all. I got into work today and it seems I will be receiving blessed normalcy through this coming period, so I will formally begin working on my application across this week as I’d hoped. For the sake of copying everyone else and doing as the bosses desire, witness the efforts of being incapable of getting back to sleep at 3AM and the resultant squinting at foreign cinema;
Piotr (Peter) Vakhrov || 42 || Former Lumberyard Employee, unofficial fix-it-guy/handyman || Shady Hills Trailer Park || f7941d || FC: Konstantin Khabensky
Since everyone’s moving so quick I just wanted to chime that I’m still here and stewing. I’ve communicated to the boss a potential scheduling issue for me in the immediate future, so if I bow out I didn’t want that to be a surprise- but I am hopeful that resolves itself in the next week, so in my ideal scenario you can all expect to see something from me by this coming weekend at the latest.
To publicly declare my concept, I am workshopping an eastern European immigrant worker who was a backbone of the recently closed lumber yard. Late thirties, early forties, someone who hasn’t quite fully conquered the language barrier. Someone who can fix just about anything and is good with their hands but struggles socially. Further details pending me strangling clients for re-opening their workshops all at once in the new year and the re-stabilizing of my schedule.
Finally, I’ve never really dabbled with the real-world faceclaims/icons before, so if anyone has any useful websites or suggestions on how you all find such crisp gifs and image sets that don’t feel like IMDB headshots would be very appreciated.
I’m looking forward to reading what everyone bas posted so far when I have the time :)
tadcfnaf,
kalanggam,
Lurking Krog,
rush99999,
Sister Sable,
Guardian Angel Haruki,
Lunamaria Hawke,
Alisdragon911,
Hibachi90,
DraconicDespair
