Wednesday, July 1, 2020

Sol Survivors

The terms "OSR" and "Hard Sci-FI" may not seem especially congruent at first glance, but they combine like peanut butter and chocolate in Termination Shock, a nascent setting from Niklas Wistedt, aka Paths Peculiar.


Set in the early 22nd century, Termination Shock is the story of the recovery of Earth's space infrastructure after a passing particle wave put all the ships and stations on the fritz. It's a constrained setting in some ways - mankind has yet to leave the solar system - and yet there's enough planets, moons, asteroids, and stranded ships to keep a group of space adventurers busy, and that's before they inevitably land on Orcus.


Although he hasn't yet written a lot for the setting - just the initial pitch and a description of a typical outpost - was is there is very evocative. It helps when the premise can be illustrated with such cool maps as this one, and there are several like it on the original post. Not to mention the occasional spaceship:

It'll definitely be worth keeping an eye on the Paths Peculiar blog to see how this setting develops. I'm especially keen to see what's on Orcus . . .