Cthulhu Rising - An Introduction
It is the year 2271. The future is a dark and dangerous place. Outer space is the new frontier, and humanity has left Earth to exploit the galaxy for its own ends. It is over a century and a half since the United Earth Federation (UEF) first began to colonise the solar system and beyond.
The conquest of space was never an easy undertaking. Indeed, the first tentative steps into space by humanity were difficult and often costly. Despite the many obstacles and deterrents, Humanity gradually edged off Earth into space. The colonisation of space and with it the struggle to survive in often strange and hostile surroundings challenged the determination and ingenuity of human civilisation, but three hundred years since Neil Armstrong first set foot on Earth’s lunar companion there are millions of people who call planets beneath alien skies home, many of whom have never set foot on the planet which will always be their spiritual birthplace.
Space is vast. Just how vast is hard for us humans to visualize intuitively. An interstellar society like that in Cthulhu Rising exists under many unique restrictions as a direct result of this vastness. The most notable restriction is that this interstellar community consists of many island-planets scattered across an ocean of deep space, separated by unavoidable communication and travel delays. Even with technological marvels like the Foscolo Interstellar Drive and FTL communications, travel between these star systems takes weeks, if not months, and communications suffer delays of days if not weeks. Interplanetary and interstellar travel is still an expensive business. Most people who travel are either company employees, military personnel or government staff.
Because of these restrictions, the UEF is a remote, centralised government. Like the ocean-going civilisations of old, humanity has had to readjust, taking what some regard as a social step backwards. In-system communications remains near-instantaneous, but communications with extra-solar colonies is as difficult as it once was to get messages from one side of an ocean to another on pre-20th Century Earth. Though the UEF would deny it in the strongest terms, it is to all intents and purposes an imperial power, with regional governors administering colonial assets.
The maintenance of order in an interstellar civilisation requires a degree of control which to many is in itself undesirable, and the nearer one approaches the administrative centre of such a society, the more rigid its constraints. Despite Sol being little more than another star in the night sky to many colonists, the majority are still tax-paying citizens of the UEF. Of course there are the minority of worlds who rebelled against this control, and whom even now live outside the Federated Colonies.
Life is not unique to Earth. It thrives in the oceans of Europa, and on planets orbiting stars other than our own. Intelligent life is another matter though. As humanity pushes further and further out into space, contact with another intelligent space-faring civilisation has not yet occurred, yet still seems inevitable. It is only a matter of time before one of these craft stumbles upon some remote, alien edifice, a cosmic mausoleum of the Great Old Ones. But who is to say this has not already taken place..?
Players take the roles of the Investigators of the future. Those enlightened and oft unlucky individuals who know something of the true nature of the universe. Be they fools or heroes, they take the fight against the Great Old Ones to the stars themselves.
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