I can't find a good run-down of the fiasco surrounding this particular game, but I'll try to and be concise (please correct me if I forgot something).
1. WEG loses Star Wars licence and goes belly-up.
2. Eric Gibson buys WEG, announces hot new SF RPG by Bill Coffin (fresh out of Palladium) and starts taking preorders.
3. A lot of time goes by and no product. People start demanding refunds. Eric cites personal problems, complçete with entirely too much personal information, and finally admits that the money's gone and he can't pay them back.
4. Septimus is officially cancelled and Eric slowly but surely pays everyone back.
5. Eric declares WEG dead (again) and as a final act of [strike]sorry I fucked up, have free stuff[/strike] releases all extant D6 RPG books as freeware, complete with an Open Licence. Precis buys Bloodshadows, some German guys buy Torg and sit on it to this day, and last but not least, Septimjus gets a free release.
Septimus is still up and free to download (http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product/63991/Bill-Coffin%27s-Septimus) over at DriveThruRPG.
Perhaps because of the clusterfuck which centered around the game and Mr. Gibson's mismanagement, or maybe because the release of the game happened six years after its announcement and three years after the quickstart, and the élan was gone, I don't know, but the fact is, I've never read about anyone, anywhere on the Internet running or playing or even reading the game.
It's a good game, too. It's balls-out space-opera with plenty of transhuman elements. The setting is really out there; spacetime is coming apart at the seams because excessive use of hyperdrives, and FTL is growing increasingly unreliable, and as the obligatory monolithic spacefaring empire fast approaches a Dark Age, they discover a real, honest-to-God Dyson Sphere, and it gets settled New World-like by all sorts of people.
If you don't like the system, you can use bits and pieces of the richly developed setting to spice up your SF game.
If you don't like the setting, you can cannibalize the mechanical bits (like genemods and nanomods) to make your D6 Space (or Space Opera, or Metabarons, or God have mercy on your soul, Star Wars) game more interesting. For example, I considered using the transhuman stuff for a D6-powered Revelation Space-like game of cybered-up, immortal free traders in humongous STL ships plying their trades between stars, each visit centuries apart from the next -- mere decades to them, thanks to relativistic time dilation.
Best of all, it's free.
Who's got it? Who's read it? Who's (gasp) played or ran it?
I had never heard of it, but I just downloaded it. I'm looking forward to reading it.
I had heard of it, probably on this forum, in the past but didn't know it was available for free. About to download it.
I like Coffin's work in Palladium Fantasy and Heroes Unlimited.
I was given an obligatory free copy by WEG in regards to my pre-order of which I never received my refund and that was all. Then the damn thing goes free to download anyhow, geeze.
But as far as the game is concerned, yeah it was a great piece of work and all, just wish it would have went into print as promised, it deserved that much at least.
I only have the quickstart pdf, I didn't know the full products had been released at all, let alone free. To be honest the setting seemed a little intimidating. I'm not really one for intricate settings. I prefer something that is instantly accessible without a whole lot of exposition.
In that category there is the other forgotten D6 Space setting, Fires of Amatsumara which actually did make it to print and which I still have. It's basically a space western in the vein of Firefly. The main twist being the default campaign sees the characters as law-enforcement, an isolated corp of Rangers trying to keep the lid on a wild, lawless frontier.
The layout of the book is terrible, and I'm not usually fussy about that sort of thing, but even so I can see myself running it someday.
Honestly, transhumanist stuff has a tendency to make me eyeroll anyway and having never really interacted much with the Palladisphere (that weird bubble of gamers and designers around Palladium Games who seem to never interact that much with the rest of the industry) I'd never heard of Bill Coffin so I was never enormously interested in Septimus from the start. Then the controversy happened and that kind of doomed it for me - there's no way the game could be as awesome or dramatic or heartbreaking as the fiasco surrounding it.
I got screwed by the pre-order and lost all interest.
at one point before it was cancelled and during wonky print issues he was having he ordered a few print versions from another print house specifically for Gencon.
I think it was Gencon 3 years ago but I may be wrong as to witch.
They were softcover and I bought one. He gave a cd with the pdf burned onto them with the purchase.
I even offered to take WEG merchandise instead of cash for the refund (a good deal for him) and he said he would ship it out.
Never happened.
Pic of the book in case anyone was interested in seeing it
No apostrophe on "Bill Coffin's Septimus" on the spine? Ew.
I had no interest in this in the first place.
RPGPundit
Got it, read it, but felt the setting was very meh.
Don't get me wrong, I like Bill's narrative/voice throughout the work, but it still felt fairly formulaic to me. Which may be a case of a corebook that had 10 supplements sitting in the writer's mind, that due to circumstances, never got to see print. Septimus does feel like a lot of "missed opportunities", to me at least.
heard the name, but didn't know the game. will download it later tonight.
Just read the setting material in the core book and I was not impressed. The 7th empire, that's lasted 7 centuries, and fought a 7 front war... blegh.
I didn't feel any of the excitement or energy in the text that previous Coffin stuff had. It actually made me sad.
Of course, I hate reading pdfs, so maybe I would think differently if I had a physical book to flip through. I couldn't even make it to the mechanical aspects of the game, and I'm unfamiliar with the D6 system (last played Star Wars 15 years ago)
I'll have to take a look, while I don't know that I was still buying Pal. books while he was there, I used to enjoy his writing/conversation on a Pal. Fantasy email list way back when.
Quote from: everloss;639553Just read the setting material in the core book and I was not impressed. The 7th empire, that's lasted 7 centuries, and fought a 7 front war... blegh.
Seriously?!
RPGPundit
Quote from: RPGPundit;640015Seriously?!
RPGPundit
Yup. There is possibly more things related to the number 7, but I stopped reading.
I like D6, but this game never clicked with me, I think because, despite having looked it up several times, I just can't comprehend exactly what a Dyson Sphere is.
Quote from: Technomancer;640086despite having looked it up several times, I just can't comprehend exactly what a Dyson Sphere is.
Something to do with vacuum cleaners? :D
Quote from: Technomancer;640086I like D6, but this game never clicked with me, I think because, despite having looked it up several times, I just can't comprehend exactly what a Dyson Sphere is.
Theoretically, it's a giant sphere encircling a star, with the inner plane a habitable zone.
To give an idea of size differences, the total surface area of the Earth is about 510,072,000 km^2. The total surface area of a Dyson Sphere in rough Earth orbit is 271x10^15 km^2, or roughly 500 million Earths.
There's also problems with "eternal sunlight" and radiation buildup, in my opinion, but it's sci-fi, so we can engage in Handwavium, to fix those problems.
But there-in lies the problem with Dyson Spheres, in my opinion; they're a scale the human mind cannot logically follow, where the only geographical features are completely man-made and artificial, with a great deal of problems enveloping a star within its' hull.
There was a Star Trek: TNG episode involving a Dyson Sphere. It also had the return of Scotty, I believe.
The novel series, The Death Gate Cycle also has a Dyson Sphere; the world of Pryan.
Basically a hallow earth except nobody lives on the outside.
And it's all artificial.
And it's a real star on the inside.
And it probably has fewer dinosaurs and mole-people.
It seems like a ridiculous concept. A giant man-made sphere several orders of magnitude larger than a star?
Quote from: Technomancer;640151It seems like a ridiculous concept. A giant man-made sphere several orders of magnitude larger than a star?
Yup. The upshot is that you get to collect 100% of the energy from the star.
Quote from: Piestrio;640159Yup. The upshot is that you get to collect 100% of the energy from the star.
The downside? You get 100% of the energy from a star, including flare activity. ;)
Technically, a real Dyson sphere, as proposed by Freeman Dyson, is a vast swarm of solar collectors orbiting a star, so many of them (assumably arranged in layers) that virtually 100% of the star's light is captured.
The sci-fi Dyson sphere, which would more accurately be called a Dyson Shell, is the rigid megastructure described by others. I don't mind when sci-fi authors or fans borrow concepts from real science and modify it for their own purposes, but than they should also change the name.
There is also the ring world version, same concept (more or less) as a sphere, but easier to manage.
Quote from: Technomancer;640151It seems like a ridiculous concept. A giant man-made sphere several orders of magnitude larger than a star?
It presumes a vastly advanced civilization, that could know how to deal with all of the problems inherent in the engineering that people have described.
RPGPundit
Quote from: RPGPundit;640467It presumes a vastly advanced civilization, that could know how to deal with all of the problems inherent in the engineering that people have described.
and at least in Niven's take on it, in the case building one in our solar system, it would be assumed that the entire asteroid belt, along with at least a couple of planets, would be destroyed and used to build the whole thing... :)
IIRC, if ALL of the matter in our solar system was used to create a Dyson Shell 1 AU from the sun, it would create a shell only 8cm thick.
Forgive my possible ignorance of the laws of physics, but if you lived on the inner surface of a Dyson Sphere (or Shell, I guess), what would stop you from being pulled off and into the sun? Or is the assumption being made that any civilization advanced enough to build one of these things would have also solved the problem of gravity?
(I understand why we aren't pulled off the earth, the earth's gravity, while much weaker than the sun's, is much closer to us. But where is the opposing gravitational force acting against the sun's in a Dyson thingy?)
Quote from: everloss;640079Yup. There is possibly more things related to the number 7, but I stopped reading.
I wonder if it's supposed to be drawing from Revelations.
Quote from: Premier;640175Technically, a real Dyson sphere, as proposed by Freeman Dyson, is a vast swarm of solar collectors orbiting a star, so many of them (assumably arranged in layers) that virtually 100% of the star's light is captured.
The sci-fi Dyson sphere, which would more accurately be called a Dyson Shell, is the rigid megastructure described by others. I don't mind when sci-fi authors or fans borrow concepts from real science and modify it for their own purposes, but than they should also change the name.
One of these megastructures is featured in an Alistair Reynolds novel... pretty good story too.
Easier to link to the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyson_sphere), than try to answer questions piecemeal. ;) :D
Quote from: cnath.rm;640483and at least in Niven's take on it, in the case building one in our solar system, it would be assumed that the entire asteroid belt, along with at least a couple of planets, would be destroyed and used to build the whole thing... :)
That makes some sense, though really what would make more sense is if said advanced society had the technology to create solid matter out of basically nothing, out of hydrodgen atoms in space or something like that.
RPGPundit
Quote from: RPGPundit;640955That makes some sense, though really what would make more sense is if said advanced society had the technology to create solid matter out of basically nothing, out of hydrodgen atoms in space or something like that.
RPGPundit
The majority of mass in our solar system is actually in the core of our systems outer gas giants. All the hydrogen is the system and asteroids in the belt, are barely a blip compared to the core mass in the 4 gas giants (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune).
Getting to said mass, is the trick, though...
Quote from: Novastar;641051The majority of mass in our solar system is actually in the core of our systems outer gas giants. All the hydrogen is the system and asteroids in the belt, are barely a blip compared to the core mass in the 4 gas giants (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune).
Getting to said mass, is the trick, though...
Well, again, super-advanced-society-beyond-our-imagining and all...
Quote from: Technomancer;640622Forgive my possible ignorance of the laws of physics, but if you lived on the inner surface of a Dyson Sphere (or Shell, I guess), what would stop you from being pulled off and into the sun? Or is the assumption being made that any civilization advanced enough to build one of these things would have also solved the problem of gravity?
(I understand why we aren't pulled off the earth, the earth's gravity, while much weaker than the sun's, is much closer to us. But where is the opposing gravitational force acting against the sun's in a Dyson thingy?)
People would be living inside buildings, either hanging "down" (towards the Sun) from the shell's inner surface, being a part of the shell itself or built on the outside.
If you have the technology and resources to build a bloody Dyson shell, constructing structures large enough that you feel like you're outdoors shouldn't be a problem.
Quote from: Premier;641446People would be living inside buildings, either hanging "down" (towards the Sun) from the shell's inner surface, being a part of the shell itself or built on the outside.
If you have the technology and resources to build a bloody Dyson shell, constructing structures large enough that you feel like you're outdoors shouldn't be a problem.
If I remember right, the whole thing is supposed to spin or something to give outward force and keep the oxy from all leaving, though it's been a good few years so I don't remember for sure.
Spinning would also only give a Dyson Shell a "habitable zone" near the axis of rotation. The further "north" and "south" of that axis, simulated gravity would decrease (reaching nill, at the poles, IIRC; I believe the decrease also rises sharply the further from the axis you go, due to a sphere's geometry)
I like the mystery potential it brings. Someone used multiple solar systems' worth of material to build the shell. As a player I would really like to discover the reason why...
Is it their centre of civiliasation? A refuge or place or safety? A zoo? Or a roach motel?
Quote from: fellowhoodlum;641863I like the mystery potential it brings. Someone used multiple solar systems' worth of material to build the shell. As a player I would really like to discover the reason why...
Is it their centre of civiliasation? A refuge or place or safety? A zoo? Or a roach motel?
I read on story where a dyson sphere was more or less placed where humans would find it, figuring that with that much space that humans would never need/want to go further.