The Hidden Suns

One of my main goals for the campaign was to have a self-contained sandbox as the setting. A frontier wilderness ripe for exploration, discovering ancient secrets and plundering them. I could have used some of the star systems presented in the Starfinder sourcebooks for that, but I wanted to do my own thing, with Starfinder serving as solid footing in the background. Some of the main points I wanted to hit were the following:

• Isolated from the rest of the universe.
• A dangerous, mysterious frontier only recently discovered by the Pact Worlds.
• Facilitates exploration, including interesting space travel.
• Littered with the remains of ancient civilisations, both space-based, overland and underground.
• A beacon for adventurers and frontiersmen, yet difficult or unattractive for corporations or governments to exploit en-masse.
• An up and coming favorite of nefarious types to hide from do-gooders and just perform their grotesque experiments in peace
• Contains a “town” acting as home base between expeditions.

The entirety of the campaign will happen within this sandbox. The only times the characters should leave it would be to go to Absalom for major resupplies, or if the fancy strikes us for one-time journey to one of the Pact Worlds in order to retrieve some resource or similar.

But let’s cut to the chase. I present to you my notes on the Hidden Suns!

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A cluster of stars concealed from the rest of the galaxy by a nebula disrupting outside communications and sensors. In the middle of the nebula there lies an artificial construct, a dyson sphere. Four other star systems were discovered in its vicinity, their suns forming a perfect tetrahedron with the sphere at the center, all revolving around it in perfect sync. Not suspicious at all. A dozen other stars have so far been discovered within the nebula, with thousands more still to be found.

The nebula is a part of the Vast for the purposes of Drift travel (the setting hyperspace-equivalent), 5d days to reach, but the Drift itself is very anomalous within it:

• Drift travel from anywhere within the nebula to the dyson system takes only 1d/2 days.
• Travel between the solar systems lasts as long as within a single system normally (1d days)
• Travel time within the nebula, or from inside the nebula to the outside, isn’t affected by higher rating drift engines.
• Drift geography is uncommonly rich, making it equally attractive to explorers as realspace (but more dangerous).
• Small regions of the Drift sometimes temporarily planeshift to realspace, only to return after anywhere between a day and several weeks.
• Drift matter is sometimes permanently ejected into realspace in “drift geysers”. This never takes the form of objects larger than an asteroid, but often includes creatures from the Drift.
• Drift storms, theorized to be an advanced form of Drift geysers, sometimes appear in the solar systems as localized “weather” or even cover whole planets. They make all drift travel extremely perilous, wreaking havoc with comms and sensors, while the more intense ones also tear rifts between the planes resulting in discharges of planar energies and crossing over of hostile creatures (most of which get shifted back to their home planes after the storm ends). They are relatively common but thankfully don’t last long, usually anywhere from less than an hour to several days. Longer ones have been observed rarely, with the longest recorded one lasting several months.
• Those traveling from outside into the nebula always arrive in the dyson sphere system, unless they have good knowledge of the local Drift anomalies and “weather” which allows them to plot their course into other systems.
• Large masses exiting the drift within the nebula cause short but extremely volatile Drift storms. This can be caused even by lone capital starships, and the effect is worse for whole fleets entering the nebula as a group. Lone ships can sometimes survive, but fleets are decimated.
• As a theorized sideeffect of these Drift anomalies, there are a lot of planetary and realspace sites where the boundaries between the planes are thin, enabling easy planar travel.

I have focused so much and so early on Drift travel because it strongly sets the stage for exploring the setting. I feel the above points enable and encourage the exploration of both realspace and the Drift in a similar manner as with terrestrial wilderness exploration, without shortcuts that completely safe “hyperspacing” at will between points of interest would enable.

These notes, by the way, are still a work in progress, and are my actual campaign prep notes and thoughts, without much preparation for publishing beyond the very basics. That’s why, for example, neither the nebula nor the five solar systems which are intended as the core of the setting have names yet. I will present most of my material in this manner.