Forums of the Megaverse®

Warshield73 wrote:

SolCannibal wrote:Way i'm working on it, neither is truly wrong or right. Archie-4 has its strong points and truth be told a good number of its wardens in the moon agree with its policies. It's simply a matter of different perspectives, that in the computer's case involve being active all through the dark ages and being aware of things he's uncertain of revealing (like its rogue sibling and past attempt at surverting it, among other messes) due to how they might affect the human population and drive some people even more paranoid than it.

Just an FYI, in Rifts space the CAN republic is run by ARCHIE 7. ARCHIE 4 was destroyed in or put out of commission during the coming of the rifts. You can assume that they built 5 to replace it and then 6 and finally 7. I am guessing seven is maybe 50 or so years old.

In my game the bunker that housed ARCHIE 4 was heavily damaged and near a nexus point. 4 was not destroyed but he was cut off from all communication with only passive sensor arrays. He sat, watched Earth and the orbitals for almost 200 years. He was then discovered by some adventurers that reconnected him to the outside world and began working with him. He has some connections to CAN but is more of an outside player now.

ARCHIE 1 and 2 were POC, IIRC ARCHIE 3 was supposed to be a prototype demo. ARCHIE was 4 was the Earth production model. ARCHIE 5 & 6 may have never seen the light of day having been further developmental units adding and removing stuff from the ARCHIE 4 to get it to the desired specs, with the final lunar colony model being ARCHIE 7. If KS knew software numbering format there wouldn't be so many numbers. ARCHIE 3 would have been ARCHIE 1.3 maybe some patches and minor fixes ARCHIE 1.0211 then the post prototype maybe a full number upgrade ARCHIE 2.0 and final lunar model ARCHIE 3 OR maybe the lunar model is only some updates on the production model so it is ARCHIE 2.1. Best practice for software is Major.minor.patch with decimals between numbers. Some companies use the position of the number after a single decimal to determine the same. Apparently the company that made ARCHIE determined each physical unit was a separate number so any build in a shell would be a new number. Wonder what it would do if they kept the same shell and changed the insides or changed the outside and kept the insides. Maybe the number is used to identify the "individual" so regardless of the internals or case as long as the "personality" identified as 3 was present after then it was 3. So if ARCHIE 3 somehow replaced his brother on the moon then it would be ARCHIE 3. In which case the numbering is identity rather than advancement of the program. It is the machines personal name and ARCHIE is effectively its surname. Now I'm wondering exactly how closely they were built together.

Warshield73 wrote:I have always said the easiest way to fix Rifts space is:
1) - Move the stations farther away. I moved Freedom to the Earth-Sun L5 where it is more than just a station but a cluster of ship yards, hydroponic facilities and hydrogen farms. Laiko still orbits the moon, Outcast is in the Belt, and Euro is in Earth-Sun L4. If I ever do it again I'm moving Euro to Jupiter.

2) - The effect around Rifts earth is from the ley lines. Even if orbitals want to help ships that try to go down to Earth frequently disappear while trying to land. I also really increase the debris field around earth. These two things put together have an effect of making even communication difficult.

I like your reorganization; moving most of them out of Earth orbit really opens up the setting, and makes Mars more of a concern, especially if Outcast is frequently "near" Mars, and Euro is near Jupiter; Outcast has resources of the Belt, Euro has Europa for water, and Laiko might have an Earth-orbit mining operation (collecting space junk, as distinct from placed debris).

Worth checking out is Eclipse Phases' Panopticon. Justin Kugler (who was around here as Phalanx years ago) is an actual rocket scientist (well, rocket engineer; VP at Made in Space and a friend of mine) wrote a section in there on space habitats and their various pros and cons.

Mark Hall wrote:

Warshield73 wrote:I have always said the easiest way to fix Rifts space is:
1) - Move the stations farther away. I moved Freedom to the Earth-Sun L5 where it is more than just a station but a cluster of ship yards, hydroponic facilities and hydrogen farms. Laiko still orbits the moon, Outcast is in the Belt, and Euro is in Earth-Sun L4. If I ever do it again I'm moving Euro to Jupiter.

2) - The effect around Rifts earth is from the ley lines. Even if orbitals want to help ships that try to go down to Earth frequently disappear while trying to land. I also really increase the debris field around earth. These two things put together have an effect of making even communication difficult.

I like your reorganization; moving most of them out of Earth orbit really opens up the setting, and makes Mars more of a concern, especially if Outcast is frequently "near" Mars, and Euro is near Jupiter; Outcast has resources of the Belt, Euro has Europa for water, and Laiko might have an Earth-orbit mining operation (collecting space junk, as distinct from placed debris).

Worth checking out is Eclipse Phases' Panopticon. Justin Kugler (who was around here as Phalanx years ago) is an actual rocket scientist (well, rocket engineer; VP at Made in Space and a friend of mine) wrote a section in there on space habitats and their various pros and cons.

It's an interesting arrangement indeed and drives home how far human advancement could reach before political idiocy brought everything crashing down. Me, i would be half tempted to have Euro station exploring Europa, what's a cosmetic tweak in relation to Warshield's idea.

Zer0 Kay wrote:ARCHIE 1 and 2 were POC, IIRC ARCHIE 3 was supposed to be a prototype demo. ARCHIE was 4 was the Earth production model. ARCHIE 5 & 6 may have never seen the light of day having been further developmental units adding and removing stuff from the ARCHIE 4 to get it to the desired specs, with the final lunar colony model being ARCHIE 7. If KS knew software numbering format there wouldn't be so many numbers. ARCHIE 3 would have been ARCHIE 1.3 maybe some patches and minor fixes ARCHIE 1.0211 then the post prototype maybe a full number upgrade ARCHIE 2.0 and final lunar model ARCHIE 3 OR maybe the lunar model is only some updates on the production model so it is ARCHIE 2.1. Best practice for software is Major.minor.patch with decimals between numbers. Some companies use the position of the number after a single decimal to determine the same. Apparently the company that made ARCHIE determined each physical unit was a separate number so any build in a shell would be a new number. Wonder what it would do if they kept the same shell and changed the insides or changed the outside and kept the insides. Maybe the number is used to identify the "individual" so regardless of the internals or case as long as the "personality" identified as 3 was present after then it was 3. So if ARCHIE 3 somehow replaced his brother on the moon then it would be ARCHIE 3. In which case the numbering is identity rather than advancement of the program. It is the machines personal name and ARCHIE is effectively its surname. Now I'm wondering exactly how closely they were built together.

Do you have a book reference for any of this? It's not canon but in the Rifter ARCHIE 2 is. IIRC, at NORAD.

As for the difference between ARCHIE 3 and 4 it is more than software the book seems to indicate that 3 is much closer to Organic. Also, ARCHIE can not just upload himself to a different platform hw is dependent on the hardware as well. You have to take the toaster oven and plug it in somewhere.

This being the case I think it is much more the situation you describe were each unit is separate and unique.

As for ARCHIE 4, MiO does say that it was knocked out of commission on Apocalypse day so he had to be replaced. I have always imagined that since these are full AI's that they are still around and online but just retired as newer ones came online.

SolCannibal wrote:

Mark Hall wrote:

Warshield73 wrote:I have always said the easiest way to fix Rifts space is:
1) - Move the stations farther away. I moved Freedom to the Earth-Sun L5 where it is more than just a station but a cluster of ship yards, hydroponic facilities and hydrogen farms. Laiko still orbits the moon, Outcast is in the Belt, and Euro is in Earth-Sun L4. If I ever do it again I'm moving Euro to Jupiter.

2) - The effect around Rifts earth is from the ley lines. Even if orbitals want to help ships that try to go down to Earth frequently disappear while trying to land. I also really increase the debris field around earth. These two things put together have an effect of making even communication difficult.

I like your reorganization; moving most of them out of Earth orbit really opens up the setting, and makes Mars more of a concern, especially if Outcast is frequently "near" Mars, and Euro is near Jupiter; Outcast has resources of the Belt, Euro has Europa for water, and Laiko might have an Earth-orbit mining operation (collecting space junk, as distinct from placed debris).

Worth checking out is Eclipse Phases' Panopticon. Justin Kugler (who was around here as Phalanx years ago) is an actual rocket scientist (well, rocket engineer; VP at Made in Space and a friend of mine) wrote a section in there on space habitats and their various pros and cons.

It's an interesting arrangement indeed and drives home how far human advancement could reach before political idiocy brought everything crashing down. Me, i would be half tempted to have Euro station exploring Europa, what's a cosmetic tweak in relation to Warshield's idea.

Actually, in my setting I really broke Outcast into two parts. One was in a station as described in the belt. Kind of organized crime sort of stuff with miners and rock hoppers. The other part was on Mars in the green zone. Poeple who can't get enough resources for air and water in the orbitals try there luck there. I have sort Rifts like small towns down there and this is where you find most of the native magic users and the like.

Like I said Euro to me is just, well silly. Works for After the Bomb but not so much Rifts. I would have all the Jupiter stations be small and based on the moons and a few orbitals. They would be a mix of corporates, basically ever company ever mentioned in Palladium except Cyberworks and KLS, and then what started out as University and think tank projects. This would give some nice Northern Gun and Lazlo analogues. This is where I would put the rest of the native magic users and any space born D-bees except Arhohns.

I would make Saturn and Uranus the frontier. No or very small stations, small moon colonies, lots of ships, big mess. I would even put the equivalent of a space triangle in the Saturn area. Biggest problem with all of this is population. You really have to assume a large number of humans in space at the time of the Rifts to make this work or that most of the stations and colonies put a focus on reproduction and living space to grow the population to these levels.

But, as I don't run a regular group I will likely never get to use this.

One of those days i might take some time to give MiO a good, serious read. As preparation to actually writing out my homebrewed "Rifts Mars" with a ley line cataclysm in the early to middle 19th century exterminating martian civilization and a crapload of alien sleeping monsters, ghosts & worse awakening when "Chaos Mars" hits again in the late 21st century.

SolCannibal wrote:One of those days i might take some time to give MiO a good, serious read. As preparation to actually writing out my homebrewed "Rifts Mars" with a ley line cataclysm in the early to middle 19th century exterminating martian civilization and a crapload of alien sleeping monsters, ghosts & worse awakening when "Chaos Mars" hits again in the late 21st century.

So Shapirelli really DID see canals?
Another way around the 'vanishing canal builders' puzzle would be to have Mars moving through its own dimensional phases(this presupposed that the solar system as a whole was a lot more extradimensionally-active, while Earth was magically dormant for millennia....
When people were seeing canalli on Mars they were seeing a Mars slightly offset from our own dimensional frame of reference...an inhabitated aMars. Come the late 19th and 20th centuries, and Mars as cycled to present the now-famiiliar dead planet to Earth astronomical instruments....

taalismn wrote:

SolCannibal wrote:One of those days i might take some time to give MiO a good, serious read. As preparation to actually writing out my homebrewed "Rifts Mars" with a ley line cataclysm in the early to middle 19th century exterminating martian civilization and a crapload of alien sleeping monsters, ghosts & worse awakening when "Chaos Mars" hits again in the late 21st century.

So Shapirelli really DID see canals?

Yes, the "martian canals are actually ley lines" conceit that inspired me to rethink Mars as a setting comes STRAIGHT from MiO, actually!

taalismn wrote:Another way around the 'vanishing canal builders' puzzle would be to have Mars moving through its own dimensional phases(this presupposed that the solar system as a whole was a lot more extradimensionally-active, while Earth was magically dormant for millennia....
When people were seeing canalli on Mars they were seeing a Mars slightly offset from our own dimensional frame of reference...an inhabitated aMars. Come the late 19th and 20th centuries, and Mars as cycled to present the now-famiiliar dead planet to Earth astronomical instruments....

Yeah, it's one of a number of possible alternatives, but i decided instead to use the "canals were ley lines visible by telescope in the 19th century" as basis for the idea of a "Chaos Mars" cataclysm being in action at the period and rethink a bunch of stuff about the planet for Rifts from that starting point.

Warshield73 wrote:

Zer0 Kay wrote:ARCHIE 1 and 2 were POC, IIRC ARCHIE 3 was supposed to be a prototype demo. ARCHIE was 4 was the Earth production model. ARCHIE 5 & 6 may have never seen the light of day having been further developmental units adding and removing stuff from the ARCHIE 4 to get it to the desired specs, with the final lunar colony model being ARCHIE 7. If KS knew software numbering format there wouldn't be so many numbers. ARCHIE 3 would have been ARCHIE 1.3 maybe some patches and minor fixes ARCHIE 1.0211 then the post prototype maybe a full number upgrade ARCHIE 2.0 and final lunar model ARCHIE 3 OR maybe the lunar model is only some updates on the production model so it is ARCHIE 2.1. Best practice for software is Major.minor.patch with decimals between numbers. Some companies use the position of the number after a single decimal to determine the same. Apparently the company that made ARCHIE determined each physical unit was a separate number so any build in a shell would be a new number. Wonder what it would do if they kept the same shell and changed the insides or changed the outside and kept the insides. Maybe the number is used to identify the "individual" so regardless of the internals or case as long as the "personality" identified as 3 was present after then it was 3. So if ARCHIE 3 somehow replaced his brother on the moon then it would be ARCHIE 3. In which case the numbering is identity rather than advancement of the program. It is the machines personal name and ARCHIE is effectively its surname. Now I'm wondering exactly how closely they were built together.

Do you have a book reference for any of this? It's not canon but in the Rifter ARCHIE 2 is. IIRC, at NORAD.

As for the difference between ARCHIE 3 and 4 it is more than software the book seems to indicate that 3 is much closer to Organic. Also, ARCHIE can not just upload himself to a different platform hw is dependent on the hardware as well. You have to take the toaster oven and plug it in somewhere.

This being the case I think it is much more the situation you describe were each unit is separate and unique.

As for ARCHIE 4, MiO does say that it was knocked out of commission on Apocalypse day so he had to be replaced. I have always imagined that since these are full AI's that they are still around and online but just retired as newer ones came online.

Nope, no book reference, not house rules, it isn't even head canon. It was just me blathering and should have been prefaced with "I think maybe they should have done...". I think they are less A.I. and more the version between A.I. and transferred intelligence. I can't remember if it was Neural Intelligence or Neural Network. An AI being a program should be able to be transferred from one appropriately powerful system with enough storage space to another equally powerful system with enough storage space. Funny thing is if we wrote it now with stuff we have it would a network of multi-core processors with SSD. KS probably saw it as a micronized version of a bunch of rack servers running HDDs. If we scifi'd it then it would likely be multi-core quantum processors using holographic crystal storage.

So in canon there is nothing saying and we could even assume that ARCHIE 1-4 could have been made simultaneously, each a POC for a different methodology we know that 5-7 came after... then again we don't know that for sure either. Does it say 5 was created after 4 or that 4 broke and had to be replaced? If it is the latter then maybe 5-7 were already built but weren't active.

SolCannibal wrote:

taalismn wrote:

SolCannibal wrote:One of those days i might take some time to give MiO a good, serious read. As preparation to actually writing out my homebrewed "Rifts Mars" with a ley line cataclysm in the early to middle 19th century exterminating martian civilization and a crapload of alien sleeping monsters, ghosts & worse awakening when "Chaos Mars" hits again in the late 21st century.

So Shapirelli really DID see canals?

Yes, the "martian canals are actually ley lines" conceit that inspired me to rethink Mars as a setting comes STRAIGHT from MiO, actually!

taalismn wrote:Another way around the 'vanishing canal builders' puzzle would be to have Mars moving through its own dimensional phases(this presupposed that the solar system as a whole was a lot more extradimensionally-active, while Earth was magically dormant for millennia....
When people were seeing canalli on Mars they were seeing a Mars slightly offset from our own dimensional frame of reference...an inhabitated aMars. Come the late 19th and 20th centuries, and Mars as cycled to present the now-famiiliar dead planet to Earth astronomical instruments....

Yeah, it's one of a number of possible alternatives, but i decided instead to use the "canals were ley lines visible by telescope in the 19th century" as basis for the idea of a "Chaos Mars" cataclysm being in action at the period and rethink a bunch of stuff about the planet for Rifts from that starting point.

So why were they visible then but not "now"? They weren't even visible on Earth before Atlantis disappeared. There return was magnified. The magic used prior to the disappearance was SDC not MDC. If Earth before Atlantis' departure had just as much magic as it has in Rifts in order to produce visible leylines then all the horrors that are now attracted to the massive power would have been present on prehistoric Earth... and it wasn't.

All that to say in order to produce visible leylines on Mars it would have done the same and attracted the horrible evils of the multiverse... and it didn't.

If there are visible leylines on any planets in the system in Rifts they are there because they are part of the same leyline network that contains the Earth. Earth was ground zero for all of the Rift eruptions in the solar system. Did that extend past the solar system? Maybe the PPE leyline network diminishes with distance so the inner planets have clearly visible leylines but as the link goes out and the distance stretched the lines on Jupiter's moons is dimmer and by the time you get to the kuiper belt objects they are only able to be seen because in shadows.

Assuming that
All the leylines are the same brightness within a network (obviously completely ignoring what I just said)
Leylines are indelible
The Asteroid belt is the remnants of Phaeton with other parts blown into the universe (and not just material left over from the systems formation unable to coalesce into a planet due to larger gravity wells)
Then it would be interesting that places of power on Phaeton that leylines used to connect would still be connected to the little bits of land as they float out in the cosmos and there would be lines that go through space and mostly crisscross the sun as the belt orbits but also has a few that stretch out beyond the kuiper belt or ort cloud in the direction of the impact and may eventually link our leyline network with that of another network if the piece that had the place of power ever reaches one.

Zer0 Kay wrote:

Warshield73 wrote:

Zer0 Kay wrote:ARCHIE 1 and 2 were POC, IIRC ARCHIE 3 was supposed to be a prototype demo. ARCHIE was 4 was the Earth production model. ARCHIE 5 & 6 may have never seen the light of day having been further developmental units adding and removing stuff from the ARCHIE 4 to get it to the desired specs, with the final lunar colony model being ARCHIE 7. If KS knew software numbering format there wouldn't be so many numbers. ARCHIE 3 would have been ARCHIE 1.3 maybe some patches and minor fixes ARCHIE 1.0211 then the post prototype maybe a full number upgrade ARCHIE 2.0 and final lunar model ARCHIE 3 OR maybe the lunar model is only some updates on the production model so it is ARCHIE 2.1. Best practice for software is Major.minor.patch with decimals between numbers. Some companies use the position of the number after a single decimal to determine the same. Apparently the company that made ARCHIE determined each physical unit was a separate number so any build in a shell would be a new number. Wonder what it would do if they kept the same shell and changed the insides or changed the outside and kept the insides. Maybe the number is used to identify the "individual" so regardless of the internals or case as long as the "personality" identified as 3 was present after then it was 3. So if ARCHIE 3 somehow replaced his brother on the moon then it would be ARCHIE 3. In which case the numbering is identity rather than advancement of the program. It is the machines personal name and ARCHIE is effectively its surname. Now I'm wondering exactly how closely they were built together.

Do you have a book reference for any of this? It's not canon but in the Rifter ARCHIE 2 is. IIRC, at NORAD.

As for the difference between ARCHIE 3 and 4 it is more than software the book seems to indicate that 3 is much closer to Organic. Also, ARCHIE can not just upload himself to a different platform hw is dependent on the hardware as well. You have to take the toaster oven and plug it in somewhere.

This being the case I think it is much more the situation you describe were each unit is separate and unique.

As for ARCHIE 4, MiO does say that it was knocked out of commission on Apocalypse day so he had to be replaced. I have always imagined that since these are full AI's that they are still around and online but just retired as newer ones came online.

Nope, no book reference, not house rules, it isn't even head canon. It was just me blathering and should have been prefaced with "I think maybe they should have done...". I think they are less A.I. and more the version between A.I. and transferred intelligence. I can't remember if it was Neural Intelligence or Neural Network. An AI being a program should be able to be transferred from one appropriately powerful system with enough storage space to another equally powerful system with enough storage space. Funny thing is if we wrote it now with stuff we have it would a network of multi-core processors with SSD. KS probably saw it as a micronized version of a bunch of rack servers running HDDs. If we scifi'd it then it would likely be multi-core quantum processors using holographic crystal storage.

So in canon there is nothing saying and we could even assume that ARCHIE 1-4 could have been made simultaneously, each a POC for a different methodology we know that 5-7 came after... then again we don't know that for sure either. Does it say 5 was created after 4 or that 4 broke and had to be replaced? If it is the latter then maybe 5-7 were already built but weren't active.

OK, I thought maybe I missed something. We all have to fill in the information in our own ways. I originally assumed 4 was destroyed in the Rifts. 5 was an emergency unit brought online to replace and then 6 replaced it and 7 replaced it when technology improved. Since Halo came out I have heard a few people simply say that 5 and 6 hit the end of there life span and 3 was only able to transcend that due to the effects of the ley-lines.

For me, and this applies to any advanced civilization that uses true Ai's, is what happens to the AI when it gets replaced? I haven't read Australia in a while but I believe they use an actual AI to run there cities as well.

Zer0 Kay wrote:

SolCannibal wrote:

taalismn wrote:

SolCannibal wrote:One of those days i might take some time to give MiO a good, serious read. As preparation to actually writing out my homebrewed "Rifts Mars" with a ley line cataclysm in the early to middle 19th century exterminating martian civilization and a crapload of alien sleeping monsters, ghosts & worse awakening when "Chaos Mars" hits again in the late 21st century.

So Shapirelli really DID see canals?

Yes, the "martian canals are actually ley lines" conceit that inspired me to rethink Mars as a setting comes STRAIGHT from MiO, actually!

taalismn wrote:Another way around the 'vanishing canal builders' puzzle would be to have Mars moving through its own dimensional phases(this presupposed that the solar system as a whole was a lot more extradimensionally-active, while Earth was magically dormant for millennia....
When people were seeing canalli on Mars they were seeing a Mars slightly offset from our own dimensional frame of reference...an inhabitated aMars. Come the late 19th and 20th centuries, and Mars as cycled to present the now-famiiliar dead planet to Earth astronomical instruments....

Yeah, it's one of a number of possible alternatives, but i decided instead to use the "canals were ley lines visible by telescope in the 19th century" as basis for the idea of a "Chaos Mars" cataclysm being in action at the period and rethink a bunch of stuff about the planet for Rifts from that starting point.

So why were they visible then but not "now"? They weren't even visible on Earth before Atlantis disappeared. There return was magnified. The magic used prior to the disappearance was SDC not MDC. If Earth before Atlantis' departure had just as much magic as it has in Rifts in order to produce visible leylines then all the horrors that are now attracted to the massive power would have been present on prehistoric Earth... and it wasn't.

All that to say in order to produce visible leylines on Mars it would have done the same and attracted the horrible evils of the multiverse... and it didn't.

Because the energies ebb and flow. Remember, visible ley lines are not the norm anywhere but Rifts Earth - and it's implied the level of ambient PPE during the first century or two of the "Chaos Earth/Dark Age/Apocalypse Era" was even higher.

My take of the matter, as a sort of explanation and springboard for my "Rifts Mars" homebrew - is that some time in the past the red planet was an inhabitated world with a sapient population and civilizations of its own and little to no magic, much like Earth itself.

Until the martian nations, that in my setting had reached a technology level roughly akin to early 20th century, sparked a world war that lead into the same kind badly timed mass killings that sparked the Time of Rifts on Earth, bringing their civilization to a crashing halt as they had to deal with the devastation of states, ecological fallout (their WMDs being mainly chemical & bacteriologic instead of atomic) and the waves of incoming supernatural horrors.

Main difference is that the "Chaos Mars" period of crazy ley line upsurge wouldn't last as long as the one in Rifts Earth (still going ridiculously strong even 2-3 centuries after the original cataclysm), due to the planetary alignements not being as extensively favorable as that fateful 2098 night. That, and the fact large scale astronomical research and technology was still shaping up were some of the factors behind the "martian canals" being detected and seriously only through mid 19th to early 20th centuries. They were already dying out and when humans could finally send probes or reach Mars, it had been an mostly dead world for at least one century (probably more, but haven't really set a number of years as such), the few survivors being either hibernating monsters or the very few native martians hiding in deep bunkers for safety - when not preyed upon or enslaved by the few still active critters hiding with them.

So, a quite bleak situation overall, until the time of Rifts on Earth brought a second upsurge of ley lines of their own with it, leading to a lot of stuff waking up or coming to the surface - around the human astronauts & researchers already working on terraformation - in reaction to all the ambient energies and lots of change, opportunities or trouble for all parts involved.

SolCannibal wrote:

Zer0 Kay wrote:

SolCannibal wrote:

taalismn wrote:

SolCannibal wrote:One of those days i might take some time to give MiO a good, serious read. As preparation to actually writing out my homebrewed "Rifts Mars" with a ley line cataclysm in the early to middle 19th century exterminating martian civilization and a crapload of alien sleeping monsters, ghosts & worse awakening when "Chaos Mars" hits again in the late 21st century.

So Shapirelli really DID see canals?

Yes, the "martian canals are actually ley lines" conceit that inspired me to rethink Mars as a setting comes STRAIGHT from MiO, actually!

taalismn wrote:Another way around the 'vanishing canal builders' puzzle would be to have Mars moving through its own dimensional phases(this presupposed that the solar system as a whole was a lot more extradimensionally-active, while Earth was magically dormant for millennia....
When people were seeing canalli on Mars they were seeing a Mars slightly offset from our own dimensional frame of reference...an inhabitated aMars. Come the late 19th and 20th centuries, and Mars as cycled to present the now-famiiliar dead planet to Earth astronomical instruments....

Yeah, it's one of a number of possible alternatives, but i decided instead to use the "canals were ley lines visible by telescope in the 19th century" as basis for the idea of a "Chaos Mars" cataclysm being in action at the period and rethink a bunch of stuff about the planet for Rifts from that starting point.

So why were they visible then but not "now"? They weren't even visible on Earth before Atlantis disappeared. There return was magnified. The magic used prior to the disappearance was SDC not MDC. If Earth before Atlantis' departure had just as much magic as it has in Rifts in order to produce visible leylines then all the horrors that are now attracted to the massive power would have been present on prehistoric Earth... and it wasn't.

All that to say in order to produce visible leylines on Mars it would have done the same and attracted the horrible evils of the multiverse... and it didn't.

Because the energies ebb and flow. Remember, visible ley lines are not the norm anywhere but Rifts Earth - and it's implied the level of ambient PPE during the first century or two of the "Chaos Earth/Dark Age/Apocalypse Era" was even higher.

My take of the matter, as a sort of explanation and springboard for my "Rifts Mars" homebrew - is that some time in the past the red planet was an inhabitated world with a sapient population and civilizations of its own and little to no magic, much like Earth itself.

Until the martian nations, that in my setting had reached a technology level roughly akin to early 20th century, sparked a world war that lead into the same kind badly timed mass killings that sparked the Time of Rifts on Earth, bringing their civilization to a crashing halt as they had to deal with the devastation of states, ecological fallout (their WMDs being mainly chemical & bacteriologic instead of atomic) and the waves of incoming supernatural horrors.

Main difference is that the "Chaos Mars" period of crazy ley line upsurge wouldn't last as long as the one in Rifts Earth (still going ridiculously strong even 2-3 centuries after the original cataclysm), due to the planetary alignements not being as extensively favorable as that fateful 2098 night. That, and the fact large scale astronomical research and technology was still shaping up were some of the factors behind the "martian canals" being detected and seriously only through mid 19th to early 20th centuries. They were already dying out and when humans could finally send probes or reach Mars, it had been an mostly dead world for at least one century (probably more, but haven't really set a number of years as such), the few survivors being either hibernating monsters or the very few native martians hiding in deep bunkers for safety - when not preyed upon or enslaved by the few still active critters hiding with them.

So, a quite bleak situation overall, until the time of Rifts on Earth brought a second upsurge of ley lines of their own with it, leading to a lot of stuff waking up or coming to the surface - around the human astronauts & researchers already working on terraformation - in reaction to all the ambient energies and lots of change, opportunities or trouble for all parts involved.

I have to remember this is an idea for a game and not a commentary on canon and chill out. In that light it sounds cool. Maybe a little John Carter.

Zer0 Kay wrote:I have to remember this is an idea for a game and not a commentary on canon and chill out. In that light it sounds cool. Maybe a little John Carter.

Just picked some particular bit of canon that got my attention and run with it to make my own thing. It's rough at parts and definitely has some issues of its own between details that i glossed over for convenience and things that i completely missed, but that's fair and good for a homebrew that i have no intention of publishing or anything.

Yeah, Rice Burroughs is great and tempting, but my tendency to work from existing bits & pieces and just tweaking things here and there lead me in other directions overall. In fact my Mars owes more to the "retro/pulpy" high tech of the Fallout games overall, as my jumping point was "martians started a Rifts event with WWI instead of III", so to speak. That, a mostly dry, polar climate and deciding to use Ogres for my martians, no special reason.

While i do have a Barsoom-esque place in my games, it's somewhere else, that might be a parallel Earth, or just well-hidden region in the middle of Sahara....still open for grabs that one.

My games lean on homebrew to a ridiculous degree, with things like Ghost Worlds (celestial body-sized versions of Fadetowns) out there to add further chaos to the whole "celestial events & planetary alignements" hoopla among other things, might be said.