Orion's Arm

I just discovered the cool ass awesomess that is Orion's Arm! I found it at boingboing. It is essentially a Creative Commons licensed, hard scifi universe that can be used as backdrop setting for your CC licensed stories, games and rpgs. Basic premise/canon/theme is hard scifi with no FTL travel and no humanoid aliens.

Instead you have godlike AI, genetically modified human species, virtual worlds, nano machines and more. I was browsing that page back and forward all day today, and I still can't believe how cool and detailed this universe is. I absolutely love it.

They already have several stories, and novels using this background. There is a space strategy game, coming out sometime soon, and an pen & paper based RPG game in the works.

And the best thing - this is a community effort. Anyone can contribute to the large body of work. They call it worldbuilding - which is what RPG nuts like me love to do. I was worldbuilding ever since I got into RPG - I just didn't know that it was called this way. I have stacks notebooks full of notes on interesting aspects of fantasy and scifi settings. Several other people I knew did that. Eventually these things had a potential to become a home-grown RPG system.

I did not realize that there was this huge community effort to build a sci fi setting like this one. Freaken awesome!

Tags: orion's arm, oa, worldbuilding, scifi, science fiction