Solaris Spectacle mod team (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
dropshipcommand) wrote2013-11-17 07:42 pm
dropshipcommand) wrote2013-11-17 07:42 pm
SOLARIS
SOLARIS
NAVIGATION
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Solaris is known around the galaxy as The Game World. Industry and culture revolve around gladiatorial combats between mechs. Every day, these games make fortunes for many and bankrupt many more. The games also serve as a venting of galactic political tension, with the ritual combat of the game serving as a substitute for warfare.
Solaris is a temperate, Earth-type planet. Because of its importance, it escaped much of the devestation that affected the rest of the galaxy.
GOVERNMENT
Because it is so important for both industry and peacekeeping, Solaris is not the official property of any nation. Instead it's a protectorate of Comstar, the secretive, mystical order that oversees interstellar communication. Standard currency is the C-Bill, equivalent of about two dollars and good for one hour of communication on a Comstar terminal. Defense, anti-terrorism and emergency management are Comstar's responsibility, but everything else is left in the hands of the local government.
SOLARIS CITY
The planet's creatively named capitol, Solaris City's skyline is dominated by mech arenas and skyscrapers. Those contrast with the city's many slums, where social ills are constant headaches for the city's corrupt police force.
The southern edge of the city abuts the also creatively named Solaris River. Wide but not more than ten meters deep at the middle, it's a popular transport artery for mechs. Fans can often be seen thronging certain bridges, chasing rumors that a star's mech will be passing below.
The underground of Solaris City is also honeycombed with huge tunnels for mech transportation, sewage and public transportation, as well as tunnels that have long been abandoned. Sleeping in the mech tunnels will get you rousted out by the police but they're good places to catch mechs coming and going. The other tunnels often have homeless people sleeping in them, and urban rumors of stranger things down there are common.
Solaris City is serviced by an efficient mag-lev public transportation system. Comstar maintains the city’s communications infrastructure, including the bulletin boards and news feeds that are popular with the locals.
Mirroring the galaxy at large, the richest Solarans have apartments downtown, in the gleaming skyscrapers at the center of it all. Poverty increases as you get farther from it, until one gets to the city’s outskirts, where official neglect and settlement by refugees has created shanty towns. The countryside is dotted with small mining and farming villages, villas for vacationers and mansions for the wealthy.
POINTS OF INTEREST
Cy's Mech City: This charmingly sleazy dealer stocks scrapped and rebuilt battlemechs, ranging from servicable machines for novice arena jocks to barely recognizable piles of spare parts.
All Saints Cathedral: A masterpiece of Gothic architecture, with real stained glass windows... although in one scene, David appears to be fighting a House Steiner battlemech. The church offers free counseling to the troubled, many of them prominent mechwarriors.
The Perfumed Garden: An exquisite, high class brothel frequented by House Liao officials and Triad leaders. The entrance fee alone is exorbitant.
The Marauder: This bar, frequented by Yakuza and Triad members, is a favorite spot for hiring individuals of questionable character to carry out criminal activities. Patrons must leave weapons at the door - this rule is ruthlessly enforced by several very large bouncers.
The Otaklub: A large arcade and shopping center popular with gamers, geeks and nerds. It's the best place on Solaris to buy the latest comics and anime goods, track down obscure vintage games, and acquire parts for homebuilt computers.
Hangar 66: This rough-and-tumble joint is a favorite of mech jocks who want to avoid the public eye. Brawls are a common occurrence, but the atmosphere is generally jovial thanks to free-flowing beer taps.
Thor's Shieldhall: Only the exterior of the most exclusive and famous mechwarrior club in Solaris is open to tourists - inside, the Valhalla Club is reserved for elite mechwariors. Competition for a seat at Valhalla's long table is fierce, but legendary champions are forever enshrined in its rarefied halls.
The Grateful Burger: This hole-in-the-wall burger joint serves vegetarian food and obscure microbrews to a clientele of bohemians, artists, gamers, poets, and poseurs.
Larsson Clothiers: The hottest place for designer clothing is also the hottest place for gossip - owner Gunnar Larsson seems to know everybody's business.
The Solaris ThermOp: This Holo-news service is not a part of Comstar's official news service and is thus free from the need to appear respectable. It runs articles on everything from mechwarrior gossip to exposes of the city's corrupt government. Its reporters have a reputation for going the extra mile, risking life and freedom for the best scoops.
THE GAMES
The games are the center of Solaris' culture and industry. Each year, tens of billions of c-bills change hands in these contests. For aspiring gladiators, they're the ticket to fame and fortune. To patriots and politicians, they're war in miniature, a chance to bring glory to their nation through its champions. And for the millions of people who work around the games, from engineers to entertainers to bookies to mechanics, they're a living.
The games themselves are divided into four weight classes: Light (examples: power armor, mobile suits (Gundam), Knighmare Frames (Code Geass), Standard (examples: most battlemechs (Battletech), destroids (Macross), zoids (Zoids)), Heavy (examples: megadeuses (Big O), AT-ATs (Star Wars), mobile armors (Gundam)) and Open. Though these are all ICly ranked (Comstar keeps track of wins and losses and computes from that the rankings), right now we won't be implementing any kind of formal ranking system. It's assumed that player characters are highly ranked in the games, having already worked their way up through many NPCs.
Although it's a rare sight, combat vehicles can be entered to fight against mechs in their appropriate weight classes. Promoters try to avoid mismatches in making matches, but they are possible, especially in the Open class. They are also constantly looking for new ways of doing matches that keep the crowd happy, such as team games, grand melees, king of the hill, etc.
Mechwarriors often seek sponsorship. Wealthy corporations and powerful governments are particularly sought after as sponsors. It's also an open secret that some militaries use the arenas as an informal officer training school, letting promising young candidates gain experience there before sending them to the battlefield. There’s no OOC process for obtaining sponsorship for your character. Just note that they are and who their sponsor is.
ARENAS
Arenas are everywhere on Solaris, from small town roped off pits where workmechs slug it out, to the great arenas that can accomadate a million people. The following are some notable arenas. Feel free to make up your own!
Steiner Colliseum: A giant advertisement to the wealth of the Steiner noble house, this arena is modeled on those of Ancient Rome, with mech-scale Roman architecture scattered around a vast open sand pit and moat. The monotonous style of fights this sometimes results in is broken up by pop-up turrets from the sands.
The Junkyard: Formerly a battlemech factory, "the rubble heap" as it's known to fans is full of rusted, broken machinery, which provides cover and even improvised melee weapons for fighters.
Ishiyama Mountain: An artificially constructed mountain honeycombed with dark, unmapped tunnels. Starting locations are random, and electromagnetic interference from the mountain itself renders most sensor systems useless, making enemy engagements and traps impossible to predict. Many mechwarriors who have fought at Ishiyama have nightmares about the experience for years afterwards.
Atlanta: Named after a semi-mythical drowned city of the League era, Atlanta is Solaris' first underwater arena, complete with gaudy decorations and a tacky stone castle that would look at home in a fish bowl. As if the risk of drowning or your mech flooding from a breach in the armor wasn't exciting enough, large, predatory sea life is sometimes let loose in the arena, leading to more than a few wins by default or sudden runs on the local seafood market.
Boreal Reach: The official House Davion battle arena, Boreal Reach makes use of holographic technology and advanced environmental controls to simulate a variety of combat scenarios. Most popular is an arctic glacier, where the extreme cold allows mechwarriors to push their machines to the limit without overheating. Controversy erupted recently when the arena was set to simulate Tharkad Palace, the seat of the House Steiner government.
Thunderdome: A giant cage for mechs to fight in, Thunderdome is the mech arena equivalent of a sleazy dive bar, complete with cheap drinks and questionable clientelle. The basic environment is livened up in the cheapest way possible: the staff simply uses a hoist to drop something into the cage through a hole in the top when the crowd starts to get bored. That something can be anything from dangerous wildlife, to artillery rounds, to literal tons of slippery fluids.
Side 9: Solaris's first orbital arena, Side 9 is built from the ruins of a destroyed space colony that was transported into orbit from near Earth. Some, especially survivors of the Zeon wars, find the setting in poor taste, but the controversy only makes it more popular. Regular orbital shuttle service ferries ticket holders up to it.