Such Difficult Times

A Campaign Setting for Science Fiction Role Playing

THESE PAGES ARE STILL

PLEASE BE PATIENT. THANK YOU.

Beginnings are such difficult times. - Frank Herbert

It is the near future. After the terrible twentieth century and the horrific convulsions of the early twenty-first, humanity is beginning to recover. The Earth is overpopulated, and scarred by war and disease. But these have been the birthing pains of a new civilization. Humanity has colonized Earth orbit and the Moon, and the first steps are being taken on the road to Mars.

In these pages:

The World as we Know it

Campaigns

The Mars Colonization Mission
Whispers from the Ice

Hardware

Vehicles
Technology
Medical Technology
CINN Newsfeed: Bringing the world to your feet every day

This role-playing setting was designed for GURPS, the Generic Universal Role Playing System, by Steve Jackson Games, but with a little adjustment here and there, it should be adaptable to other systems as well. That being said, it's my firm belief that (at least for science fiction games) GURPS is the most playable and at the same time the most realistic system of rules available.

Other sites of interest:

The Mars Society is a non-profit organization dedicated to furthering the exploration and settlement of Mars. Their site has information about Mars, news of the Society's current efforts, links to images and articles concerning Mars missions, and an online bookstore (where I'd like to spend far too much money).

Mars Global Surveyor is NASA's spectacularly successful Mars mapping spacecraft. It's been orbiting Mars for three years now, and this page contains hundreds of high-resolution images of the surface of Mars.

The Mars Academy is an online mission control centre where you can learn about Mars, orbital mechanics, space psychology and more. You can even design your own virtual mission. It had its origins in a science class project in an Argentinian school.

The Whole Mars Catalog has a large selection of resources concerning Mars, and numerous links to other Mars sites.

Asteroids has a wealth of information about asteroids of all sorts.

These space agencies all have interesting sites full of useful information:

CSA, the Canadian Space Agency
NASA, the American National Aeronautics and Space Administration
ESA, the European Space Agency
RKA, the Russian Space Agency (a US-based English-language mirror site)
NASDA, the Japanese National Space Development Agency
UNOOSA, the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs
CNSA, the Chinese National Space Agency *NEW* 2001 10 01

Acknowledgements and Bibliography

My main inspiration for this site came from Kim Stanley Robinson's outstanding trilogy of novels: Red Mars, Green Mars and Blue Mars. They are, in my opinion, among the best hard-sf novels ever written, especially the first one. If I've departed from hard science fiction in one or two areas of my setting - and I have - it's because my imagination and my scientific rigour are sadly inferior to Mr. Robinson's.

I designed this site primarily with Netscape Composer. I used PaintShopPro, Cybermotion and Terragen to create the images. The last is an incredibly useful and powerful landscape generating program that (at the moment) is freeware.

For the vehicle designs included in this site, I used Michael P. Josephs's GURPS Vehicle Designer, a really handy little piece of shareware.