The Matter Wars: Superstructures

 

Art by Karl Beiler

There are two things we can't make more of: Time¹, and Matter. 

Even the energy of Sol will die out in a few billion years, because it'll eat up all its light Matter into heavier elements it can no longer use as fuel for nuclear fusion. For stars larger than ours, they go supernova and spread out all that delicious star-crafted matter that then eventually reforms as stellar disks, and eventually star(s) and planets.

In science fiction stories, the emphasis on elemental or mineral rarity often focuses on some sort of unobtanium usually related to high-output energy technology. In post-scarcity sf, this need for specific resources is obviated. With a fancy-schmancy matter recombinator, you can make anything and everything, given a big enough printer or builder. Add in some exotic energy manipulation, and you've got shields and a warp drive (two bits).

Art by Lee Draws Stuff

What is The Matter Wars anyway?

I know it's hard to imagine (sarcasm), but think what it might be like if there's no nascent utopia emerging from the rise of post-scarcity technology. For me, this is the origin of the Matter Wars.

The Matter Wars begins as a cold war race to claim as much Matter as possible.² The amount of ludicrous hubris necessary to even begin to think could or should own and control a solar disk's worth of of Matter is a sociopathic megalomania that I find unfortunately "logical" in a space-age continuation of late-stage capitalism.  

This philosophy is the basis for Electorenzo Resources, a megacorporation featured in several of my Mothership modules. In the low-tech science fictional non-canon universe of Mothership, these E/R bozos lay claim on anything they can get their hands on. E/R makes individuals ridiculously wealthy, if they can install resource extraction operations that are capable of exploiting generations of spacers. The player characters are either victims of this predation or are somehow implicated in the fight against the corpos.

Outside of shithead landlord behavior economic space horror, the thing is, you can build lots of crazy things with lots of Matter in space games.

1d20 Superstructures Built during the Matter Wars

From Neil Blevins' Megastructures

1. Identical spaceship refueling stations in nearly every star system. 
2. "A Space Elevator For Every World!" (Don't mind the fallen ones, looped around their worlds like horrid chains.)
   
3. The "City Seed" which implants itself into a world's crust and replicates giant dome colonies before replicating humans. (No, they don't check to see if the world is already inhabited.)
4. Dismantling worlds to build a Dyson Sphere for free energy!
   
5. Dismantling worlds to build a Shell World because holy shit, how do we stop it??³
6. Good ol' dependable Torus space station.
7. The classic O'Neil Cylinder space station. 
8. A Ladder-Loop: joining two massive Torus space stations along both sides of a long series of traditional O'Neil Cylinder's axle like a giant ferris wheel of enclosed space stations, orbiting from Langrange 1 and 2 of a world pour la classe.
   
9. Hollowing out a moon along melt pumps up into an Earth-sized cast for a Bernal Sphere mega space station. ("That's not a moon...")
   
10. A Cylinder-Sphere: O'Neil Cylinders joined to "knuckle" Bernal Spheres in a complex pseudo-spherical configuration. Especially useful for creating a megalopolis well-fitted for people who require different planetary conditions simulated for them.
    
11. Solar energy harvesting Computronium Clouds hosting several worlds' worth of simulated realities.
    
12. Nearly-as-fast-as-light (NAFAL) probes loaded with Von Neumann machines that build [Re-Roll] in every system they can get to.
    
13. Stellar Candle to "drive" a star system somewhere else (probably away from potential gamma ray bursts, supernovae, black holes, etc.).
    
14. Terrarium Swarms (i.e. hollowed out asteroids made into nature reserves) with engines attached that form a sort of star system mass transit system between worlds.
15. Using those Terrarium Swarms (no. 11) to "herd" planets into different orbits, e.g. into the habitable zone of a star.
    
16. A massive Orbital Ring in within the habitable zone (but it's not a big gun, sorry).
    
17. A ring built atop transorbital space-scraper buildings that rise from the world into space, with stalactite cities hanging over top. (You don't want to be a mechanic here.)
    
18. An enclosed, transparent "worldroof" around a planet (for heating or aircon, /half-joke).
    
19. Stellar Laser. Think Death Star, but it's a Gamma Ray Burst instead, which is limited by the speed of light because it's not stupid.
    
20. A massive ring that orbits the entire sun, but it's not Ringworld, it's actually a maglev train engine that's approaching NAFAL speeds because the people who got on it 100 ka thought it'd be cool to experience time dilation, but now they can't figure out how to get it to stop.
    

Sidenote: Since I lost my ttrpg notebook with ~8 months of #galaxy24 entries in it last year (and other stuff), all these wild space things have only lived in my head, so it feels good to get it out. 5MW RPG is basically the vessel for me getting to enjoy making all of these entries and other weird stuff into space ttrpg playgrounds.

Post-Script

This post in my first to join the Blog Bandwagon, February 2025 on the topic "Elements." When all of them have been posted, Prismatic Wasteland is going to gather them all together in one spot, and I'll put a link for that here.

 Footnotes

¹ Well, OK, who knows how other spatial and temporal dimensions interact with our universe. Maybe causal laws of reality can in fact be broken (see: This is How You Win the Time War), but somehow I doubt humanity as we know it could figure that out.

² The end game for the Matter Wars is linked to a faction of Serpents (superintelligences) and their quest to exist until the end of time. But that's a whole other story.

³ See the manga series BLAME! by Tsutomu Nihei for a visually stunning and unhinged take on this concept.

Hatespawn, an NSR baddie

Art by Chaoclypse (Brandon Yu)

Hatespawn are humanoid creatures spawned by the hate of sentient beings. 

No, you can’t kill them with love, but you can harm their reproduction by healing social wounds in nearby communities.

Hatespawn are of the most evil, demonic variety. Malicious, man-eating imps. In regions of especially strong hatred between dominions, where brutal, dishonorable wars are often waged, Hatespawn thrive in the Mythic Underworld. They emerge to provoke further spats and violence, as this feed the reproductive cysts that spurt them into this reality. Even the hatred of humanity against their own kind empowers their ranks. The older rotten Hatespawn colonies raid the most innocent of villages first for their livestock, then pillage their specialized tools, and finally attack to openly feast upon what's left of the village elders. Leaving the young alive breeds more hate.

The physical aspect of the Hatespawn varies from manifestation to manifestation. They typically begin life as a hunched white bundle of wiretight muscle. Completely hairless, earless, and noseless and exuding a thin sweat of sticky slime. Long-fingered hands end in spade-like claws. Needle teeth chatter. As they grow, which for small Spawnholes is an unlikely event for such vicious creatures, their shape becomes more human, more upright. A bump for a nose. Their jaws unhinge and new sharkteeth grow. Their eyes never stop growing. They are all asexual. They all look like bone white men.

Art by Chaoclypse (Brandon Yu)

Killing them in wrath only makes them stronger. A cold, nearly sociopathic distance or self-righteous fervor is required to effectively exterminate Hatespawn. This has led to the foundation of a few mercenary groups who pride themselves on their "dispassionate training." Scholars of Hatespawn find these merc groups to be a catch-22, and more dangerous than helpful, as the tensions between competing creeds capable of great physical violence co-habitating within a region tend feed Spawnholes. A notable exception is The Hypnotic Order, those trained in the ways of "dispassionate violence" via hypnotic techniques. The live plain lives until their service is called upon. Then the temporary Order disbands, and their members must disperse to other settlements of their region, or further. 

Of course, other methods of effectively eliminating the Spawnhole’s offspring have been implemented in the past. Before castles were left to ruin, they were filled with traps; resident magic-users invoked a temple's dangerous environments to keep Hatespawn within their pits. Volcanoes have even been forged under the fleshy growths which spew the foul creatures, born for seconds as they drop into molten rock. (Though this technique also resulted in The Cursed Volcano of the Olpheds, and such extreme measures are frowned upon.) Other times, abundant Hatespawn attract other monsters to their nests, which feed on the young Hatespawn, and grow fat and strong and bold.

The best technique, however, is prevention. Dominions familiar with Hatespawn quickly dismantle warmonger dominions. Another tactic is to keep limited diplomatic contact between dominions in tentative peace. As a surplus of and lust for wealth tends to be the key ingredient in inter-polity conflict, several Anti-Avarice cults have taken power in areas that have managed to survive prolonged Hatespawn infestations.  

 

Art by Chaoclypse (Brandon Yu)

Such Anti-Avarice cults, like The Followers of Auntie Mabel, hire Adventurers to investigate Hatespawn outbreaks. Their goal being to eliminate the problem at its source: The Spawnhole. These are incursions into reality from a despicable plane of existence, and while a dark magic-user can conjure one, they are more often created from acts of hate within a nearby community. Once the Spawnhole's location has been discovered, a magic-user must close this psychically-generated birthing orifice with a ritual involving a member (or affected descendant) who was involved in the acts of hate that allowed the Hatespawn to tear into this reality.

But more often, folks won't have the guiding principles of Auntie Mabel or the Hypnotic Order around. And unless the PCs are from a very cosmopolitan high fantasy-leaning city, or scholars of the cacodemonic planes, they are unlikely to know the intricacies of the Hatespawn's psycho-reproductive cycles.

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I dunno, I had a thought and followed through with it a bit. I'm not much of a fantasy game writer, so I thought a blog post would be a good place for this.