Here's a campaign idea I worked up a while back that I have not quite done anything with; I went with a similar theme but different style/setup for a recent Cypher Campaign. The premise below could work with any sufficiently flexible SF setting that allows you to move the dials on technology and implied traits of the universe....I could easily see this working with Cypher's Stars are Fire as intended, but an even better fit might be Traveller, Cepheus, GURPS Space (to emphasize the technical and science elements) or Savage Worlds SF for a rowdier element.

The Age of Collapse: The Far Future of the Stellar Empire and the Restoration Project

A Science Fiction Campaign Premise

Premise:

Seventeen thousand years from now humankind has expanded into the depths of space with remarkable speed and effectiveness. In this remote future an estimated ten thousand worlds have been colonized, many grown to critical population density and many more with divergent genetically altered populations that are only historically related to humankind. Dozens of other sapient species have been encountered, some with starfaring capability. It was an era of greatness for human advancement.

About three thousand years ago, in the era of 16,509-16,552 AD, the Old Stellar Empire collapsed in a conflict that led to a dark age of three thousand years known as the Black Out by current historians. In 19,586 AD the Restorationists of Earth began a reclamation of the lost network of the empire, and attempted to decipher the nature of the collapse. Most inexplicable was the total loss of communications, the power of the stargates, and the complete loss of all digital records from the time period. A few details are known, and the Restorationists have entered the Black Out with this knowledge in mind:

1.      The initial collapse started not long after the Old Empire encountered an entity recorded in in physical media as “NULL” a fleet of ships which arrived from the void between galaxies. NULL was believed to be a sentient ASI (advanced super intelligence) which sought to assimilate or exterminate all human life.

2.      It is thought that a last ditch effort to prevent the NULL fleet from advancing through the empire was initiated with the deliberate shutdown of the stargate network. Some speculate that the NULL in fact destroyed the stargates, and that their function was to prevent such technology.

3.      The Old Empire’s own carefully harnessed AGI were initially successful in attempting to curb the attacks of NULL, but soon the AGI were overwhelmed and assimilated. The Old Empire resorted to developing their own ASI, despite the long, ancient history of the Intellect Wars, with the intent of combatting the invasive NULL at its own game. The stories preserved suggest an ASI known only as the Benefactor successfully stopped the NULL In its tracks. There is, if the story is correct, evidence of the ancient NULL fleet in empty space somewhere.

4.      Stories state that Benefactor was still corrupted by NULL to some degree, and that it completed the job of the enemy by catastrophically destroying the remaining stargate technology which allowed the empire to traverse the stars. Recovery from this period took Earth nearly 3,000 years, but it is possible other civilizations have advanced at faster rates.

The Ascension Drive

Earth’s return to space was with the introduction of the Ascension Drive. Based on a new design principle, the ascension drive (or A-Drive) is powered by an antimatter generator which generates AM at precisely the amount necessary to power the stable Quantum Positioning Field which allows macroscale Quantum effects, including the ability to displace macroscale objects at a forward speed which ignores relativistic effects and the limits of lightspeed. The A-Drive can take months to traverse space as the quantum effects are increasingly difficult to focus over longer distances, but it propogates a waveform effect very efficiently at local scales. This allows the ship to “jump” forward a few million miles per quantum burst, stringing thousands and millions of bursts over a single passage rapidly. The result is that it can at fastest speeds move an object in a desired direction at a rate of roughly 1 parsec per month of travel. It is suspected that this is how the NULL fleet moved through space.

This new technology, very different from the ancient stargates which created wormholes, was thanks to the manifestation of the harnessed ASI called Logos. Logos is the principle think tank of the Restoration Project, funded by the Terran Coalition, which is the presiding authority over the Terran Solar System. Harnessed ASI are the future solution to the inevitable problem of exponential and destructive growth found in the early era of ASI development, characterized by the near extermination of humanity during the Intellect Wars, followed of course by the encounter with NULL, which is believed to be an extragalactic result of an ASI singularity event in another galaxy.

Harnessed ASI were designed with deliberate “slowdown effects” in their design, redundant and focused sub-AGI which act as literal components of the ASI’s conscience and sense of ethics; in a sense it is a collaborative being comprised of dozens of specialized AGI routines, each functioning to provide a moral and ethical sense of self to the primary ASI, which retains a level of exponential consciousness that is then deliberately kept in check by its supporting AGI. Logos has proven very effective, and may be the first successful attempt at making an ASI which does not develop so far beyond humanity that it perceives its creators as comparable to ants. Arguably, Logos sees humanity as ants, but its dozens of AGI ethic subroutines allow it to feel empathy and concern for humanity, with a collective desire to benefit humanity rather than merely classify them as resources.

The Advancement of Project Restoration

Project Restoration is aimed at using the new A-Drive to find lost star systems, determine if they are a threat or can be recontacted, and provide assistance and knowledge whenever possible. They are also keen to locate the old stargates, and determine if any information on the lost network can be recovered.

In the course of this exploration, the Restoration Agents are provided with a potential virus designed to negate any evidence or trace of NULL or Benefactor that are encountered. The virus, called the Accelerator Virus, is designed to target ASI with a quantum feedback loop that will effectively slow down the processing of the entity, even if it is operating at significant quantum functional levels, and subsequently inject a destructive virus which eliminates the occupied ASI. Logos created it and tested in simulation, but the Accelerator Virus has yet to be tested.

Funded by the Terran Coalition, Project Restoration has already assembled ten thousand volunteers and begun plotting courses to the closest known fifty worlds. So far humanity has already reclaimed the stargate in the Terran Solar System which has been turned in to a staging ground in its long orbit out Neptune.

The Project has already visited Alpha Centauri and discovered the ruins of the old colonies which collapsed two thousand years ago without the support of the stargate network. Evidence of effort by the colony to find sustainable resources is clear, and they seemed to have held on but for reasons still unclear they abruptly were wiped out. This is one of the active mysteries the Project is trying to decipher. No evidence of NULL was found at Alpha Centauri, and the stargate showed signs that it was being used as a station for local travel right up until the mysterious collapse two thousand years earlier.

Since Project Restoration’s founding fifty worlds have been marked for exploration and rediscovery by the new Exploration Fleet. Each scout ship is designed for a small crew of roughly 24, set to explore and remap the lost Stellar Empire, make contact with survivors, and rediscover the interrupted legacy of humankind.

Exploring the Mysteries of the Stellar Expanse

The ancient legacy of humankind was already on the fast track to weird and divergent paths of evolutionary and technological development when the collapse of the Old Empire happened. Three thousand years have allowed ten thousand colonized and often terraformed worlds to grow in strange directions, it is imagined.

Some worlds could not sustain their existence without great changes. Some were found and destroyed or sterilized by the NULL before it was shut down. Some thrived in earth-like, resource rich worlds, often expanding back in to space using pre-gate technology. A few may have even been able to restore the lost gate technology and begun their long, slow process of advancement in to the stars. The first gate is always the most difficult, for it requires seeding another star system with a gate that is linked to the source gate in the homeworld, and at STL speeds that can take centuries or longer. A tiny few might have retained elements of a working gate network that somehow escaped the attention of NULL first or the Benefactor later.

The discovery of the A-Drive was nothing short of a miracle, the result of a harnessed ASI which had a thousand years to contemplate ways to work around the macroscale collapse patterns of quantum instability, all transcribed in a manner which would take eons for more conventional computers to resolve. The possibility it has been developed as working technology elsewhere is slim, though not improbable.

Slow FTL has been achieved by other means, including foldspace engines which work at enormous energy cost, warping space in a bubble around the ship. Like A-Drives the foldspace drives bypass relativity by keeping the object in motion in a “rest state” and moving the space around it, instead. The result is a slow but efficient means of travel at FTL speeds that costs an enormous amount of energy the more space is folded. For local travel with small masses it is fairly cheap; traveling across the solar system can take hours instead of years; but for travel between the stars it can take a century in real time, and only immensely large vessels with massive antimatter reactors can generate enough energy to project a warp field powerful and efficient enough to cut those journey times down to years.

The use of foldspace went back ten thousand years or more, and ancient worldships using foldspace were the seeds of the first worlds of the Old Empire, each worldship arriving with the necessary material to forge new stargates and terraform and colonize planets. This early use of worldships depleted the resources of many local stars in the region around Terra, and many of the Solar System’s own resource rich worlds, moons and asteroids were severely depleted in those early ages. As a result, the possibility of new worldships were beyond the resources of Earth.

The Terran Coalition toyed with the use of foldspace for a time with smaller vessels on long interstellar journeys using stasis to protect the crew before Logos arrived at the much cheaper Ascension Drive solution. Many ships in system utilize foldspace technology for fast travel, and the engineering spent making compact antimatter engines greatly benefitted A-Drives when they became a reality.

Project Restoration is certain that other colonies may have retained the resources and ability to follow similar paths of development, though few believe it is likely that they have yet developed A-Drive technology, if only because it is assumed likely that humankind might seek out its original homeworld not long after such a development, and no visitors from the stars have attempted to do so. Likewise, communication by conventional observation is best only at proving that many, many colonized stars still broadcast and can be observed, some engaging in very slow radio communication with Earth even now, despite gaps of around 50 or more light years. Of these are approximately 15 worlds within 50 light years of Earth that are known survivors; they broadcast their assurances and continue to struggle on, but many are on worlds that were fully terraformed by the time of the collapse.

With the loss of the stargates of old the best tool of the old Empire, the information network, also evaporated. The ability of the Old Empire to communicate data at great speeds through the stargate network meant that even across the far side of the Milky Way galaxy it was possible to send and receive communications that were delayed only by a matter of weeks. When NULL and then Benefactor shut down the stargates the information network collapsed instantly. When radio silence reigned, it was in some cases due to a lack of the technology to broadcast in to space, but in other cases possibly causes by fear of drawing attention, or worse. Only recently have the explorers and researchers on Earth, emboldened by their technological recovery, sought to listen in to the galaxy, and as a result they have detected many new and old signals, some fragmentary, some deliberate calls, others purely accidental; proof that many worlds still had their colonies was out there.

Despite this, many precautions were taken in listening to other worlds. The fear that some element of NULL might still exist, along with the certainty that Benefactor was out there led to a cautious approach to the receipt of any broadcasts in the event some might contain viral intrusions. No one was willing to bring catastrophe to Earth after it was so narrowly avoided.

Now, the ships of the Restoration Project depart in to space with carefully designed AGI stewards designed to protect the equipment from corruption, and carefully locked data as well as conventional old-school physical tomes of knowledge to spread information safely abroad. Great effort has gone in to designing vessels which can switch to analog computer-free operating systems if needed, as well as to insure that the ship itself includes as many safety factors built in under the advisement of Logos as possible. Prepared to reclaim lost space, the exploration teams of the Restoration Project are ready for anything….they hope.