Starting Up a New Project

Klaxon and I started work on a new project this week. It's called _The Necklace_, which I have talked about before, and it's a setting for StarCluster 3. It may include a ruleset - very little overhead, and people can use it without buying the main book - but it definitely with have specialized chargen.

_The Necklace_ is a gas torus around a neutron star, conceptually based on Larry Niven's Smoke Ring, but containing lots of differences. We came up with three separate settlings of slowboats from Earth, which will result in three major options for Humans. The first humans to settle the Necklace - about 450 years ago - went in for genetic engineering their offspring to survive quite well in the vast zero/microG torus. They are now called Altisherpas, and they settle all sorts of places in the Necklace. The second group of settlers came in about 250 years ago, and were the victim of shoddy construction. Their slowboat's society disintegrated, and they were flown to the Necklace by the ship's AI and released before the ship fell apart. Their society remains scattered and rather primitive. The third wave of settlement came in about 100 years ago, and settled on various asteroids along The River, in autonomous towns.

Some of the asteroids were set with grav plates by The Seeders, who built The River long ago, and the natives have grav-paved more since. There is an earth sized world in the torus, the core of the gas giant that provided the gas for the torus, as well as substantial agglomerations of asteroids at the leading and trailing trojans - L4 and L5. There are former moons stripped from the gas giant in the torus, as well large asteroids. And uniting it all is The River.