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It is the year 2375. Humanity still exists but only because mysterious gates opened access to a huge number of new worlds. Our home the solar system is experiencing agony since the attack of Marcos Inaros’ Free Navy. After they threw their stones onto Earth, our homeworld is not even able to supply its own inhabitants.
It was the belt and former leaders of the OPA, the outer planets alliance, that saved humankind. They fought Marcos Icarus and his allies and organized food transport as well as the Diaspora that then began. In the years after the stones fall the newly founded “Transport Union” created a vast logistics network that enabled humanity to colonize the space now open and to distribute food from already established colonies. Although highly efficent the diaspora soon ceased and transformed to a phase of stabilitation.
But now the time has come to fire up that drive for exploration again and fill the white spots in our cosmic map. Come and join “Cat and Canary”to man our spacecrafts.
Cat & Canary is a cooperative of space-faring people. Its mission and goal is to collectively acquire and negotiate missions for its members representing them with one conjoint voice. Cat & Canary represents people of different origins and, hence, counters the trends of the past where a coalition of rich and powerful Mars and Earth dominate politics, trade and wealth distribution within the solar system.
We value Earth as the cradle of humankind and Mars as humanity’s first colony. It is, thus, a declared political goal of Cat & Canary to work towards a state where no human being on solid ground is threatened by rocks falling from the skies.
Earth’s and Mars’ emergency can, however, not be solved by a new system of slavery in colonies far away which send their precious goods back into the “first world”. Instead we want to do our best in supporting those colonies to become self-sufficient and autonomous. They must become attractive for people to shift their lifes there!
Associates of Cat & Canary pay a on-time stake to gain membership and obtain certain priviliges for that: collective negotiation, access to ships and crew, dormitories and food at reduced costs. The height and mode of payment of the stake is regularly controlled and adjusted by Cat & Canary’s steering comitee.
Cat & Canary represents the interests of its members. Its administrative staff negotiates missions for the operative personnel. Members are asked to agree on performing these missions in order to provide stable income for Cat & Canary. In turn they are paid a regular income plus occasional boni. All member can access Cat & Canary’s fleet.
All members of Cat & Canary either fulfill operative of administrative duties. The central administration is location on Medina station in Hub space.
Corollary:
Only the administration is responsible for external representation. Operative members provide mission logs for billing and accounting.
Cat and Canary - besides being a company operating from Medina station - is planned as a long running pen’n paper campaign. To enable users to participate easily it is planned as a West Marches Campaign with an Open Table. This principles mean:
Each session is a complete mission. Open ends have to be followed during another session.
Players do not need to be the same in each session. Actually, the player pool is larger than the maximum number of participants in one session.
In combination these principles allow players to participate when and only when they want to participate. This is a concession to the fact that the majority of the players has only limited spare time (aka we are getting older). With the chosen rules ability spread will not be too large to prevent us from being in one group.
Communication and planning happens digitally. There is a matrix chat group that you will be invited to. It is meant for the loose communication between the players. The content of the chat group will also be relayed to a signal group.
A wiki page as well as this page collects information so you can easily catch up if you missed a couple of sessions. The actual planning of the sessions relies on a so called Kanban board. Explaining how this works happens during session 0. But basically it just consists of dragging rectangles in the correct list.
We typically play on tuesdays. Sessions take place every 3 weeks. Sessions will be held online and start at 7pm central european time. In the case all players are at the some place we play in person.