Gamemaster History (IF)

What is to Come?

Icarus Fall is a science fiction setting, the solar system in 2330, two decades after the collapse of Dedalus, the solar mining project. Named Icarus Fall, this catastrophic event ruined much infrastructure in the inner system and broke the spirit of progress and optimism that had been dominant for two centuries. What will happen now, can humanity progress peacefully or will we let conflicts destroy what we have built?

Humanity has more resources than they can ever consume and a new generation ready for action - something must happen. This could be a great moment, working more megaprojects like those from before the Fall, or we could invest this in the glories and horrors of war. Which will we choose? Only time will tell.

Pre-Fall and Post-Fall Social Norms

Before the Fall, the Solar System was rich, centralized, and confident. Earthforce and its aligned institutions had the luxury of patience. Large projects were planned years or decades in advance, justified politically, reviewed endlessly, and executed by the book. This was not because people lacked imagination, but because legitimacy mattered more than speed. When you ruled the system, you did not need to gamble. Engineering culture reflected this: reliability, standardization, and scalability were virtues. Human lives were valuable not just morally but symbolically, and altering them in extreme ways was seen as unnecessary, distasteful, or politically radioactive. Posthuman experiments existed, but they were rare, tightly controlled, and usually framed as medical or military exceptions rather than lifestyles. Society expected stability, and stability shaped what kinds of people it allowed to exist.

After the Fall, that world is gone. Power is fractured, oversight is weak, and survival is unevenly distributed. Many communities no longer expect tomorrow to resemble today, let alone next year. In this environment, social norms shift away from legitimacy and toward utility. If something works, even briefly, it can justify itself. If a modification keeps you alive, productive, or free from dependence on failing infrastructure, it becomes acceptable regardless of how it looks or how it would once have been judged. Posthuman bodies and cyborgs reappear not because society has become more enlightened, but because no single authority remains strong enough to forbid them. People accept risk and strangeness because the alternative is fragility.

The key difference is not technological capability, but social tolerance for failure and deviation. The Golden Age could afford to reject extreme solutions because it had safer ones. The post-Fall world cannot. This makes the present era messier, more dangerous, and far less humane in some respects, but also more permissive. Small groups can attempt things that would once have been impossible to approve, not because they are wise, but because no one is in a position to stop them. That is why the post-Fall Solar System is a better setting for stories: people are no longer protected by systems that smooth out risk, and the shape of society is once again determined by desperate choices rather than careful consensus.

On Timeline, Plausibility, and Intent

IB is not trying to predict the future. The history is not a forecast and not an argument about what will really happen. It is a deliberately shaped backstory that exists to justify tone, pressures, and play. The Fall is a narrative device that explains why the present is fragmented, risky, and human again. It is not Asimovian psychohistory, and it does not need to be correct to be effective. It needs to be internally coherent and emotionally legible.

In that sense, the timeline exists to create distance. Enough time for the Golden Age to feel smug and unassailable. Enough time for its engineering norms to ossify into tradition. Enough time for the post-Fall world to inherit the wreckage without inheriting the certainty. That gap is what makes the present era playable. People are no longer acting out a plan set in motion before they were born; they are improvising inside the ruins of someone else’s confidence. That is the real historical engine of IB, and it only works if the past feels slow, heavy, and far away.

The Fall of Dedalus

The event later called the Fall was not a single explosion or a clean break, but a cascading failure centered on Mercury and the Dedalus project itself. Dedalus was the largest and most ambitious industrial system humanity had ever built: a web of solar collectors, orbital yards, power relays, and specialized habitats operating closer to the Sun than anything before or since. It was also a symbol. Dedalus represented the assumption that the Golden Age was permanent, that enough planning, redundancy, and institutional authority could tame even the most hostile environments.

When Dedalus failed, it failed asymmetrically. Solar infrastructure burned out, power routing collapsed, and habitats that depended on centralized generation were forced into emergency modes they had never been designed to sustain. Mercury orbit was hit hardest, becoming a long-term disaster zone of abandoned stations, dead habitats, and partially salvaged wrecks. Losses elsewhere in the inner system were serious but uneven. Cislunar space and Luna suffered disruption, blackouts, and localized die-offs, but most population centers survived through emergency rationing, ship-borne reactors, and outside assistance.

What broke the system was not just loss of life, but loss of authority. Earthforce had built its legitimacy on the promise that this kind of failure was no longer possible. When Jovian fleets, Belt operators, and independent haulers became the primary sources of rescue power, evacuation, and logistics, that promise collapsed. The inner system survived, but it did so by accepting help from those it had long treated as peripheral. In retrospect, this was the real end of the Pax Earthforce. Order did not vanish, but it could no longer claim to be universal or inevitable.

Slow Motion Catastrophe

The Fall was not a sudden annihilation but a disaster that unfolded over weeks and months, and this is why Jovian intervention still makes sense despite the distances involved. When Dedalus failed, most habitats did not die immediately. They entered emergency states: power rationing, partial shutdowns, improvised life-support modes, and desperate attempts to stabilize heat, air circulation, and spin balance. People did not experience the Fall as an explosion, but as a grinding descent — lights dimming, sections sealed off, parks going dark, and routines shrinking day by day.

Transit times mattered, but so did expectations. In the first phase, inner-system authorities assumed recovery was imminent. Earthforce expected systems to come back online, mirrors to be reoriented, relays rebooted, or replacement hardware rushed in-system. Habitats burned through reserves believing help was already on the way. By the time it became clear that Dedalus was not coming back quickly — or at all — much of the easily accessible margin had already been spent.

Aftershocks of the Fall

Fall did not end when the first systems failed. It produced aftershocks — a series of solar eruptions over the years. Habitats and regions that survived the initial collapse often did so by exhausting hidden margins: running reactors beyond service intervals, cannibalizing nonessential systems, drawing down shielding water, or accepting thermal and structural stresses that would once have been unthinkable. These choices bought time, not safety.

As weeks turned into months, secondary failures appeared. Improvised power-sharing arrangements broke down. Emergency repairs failed under continuous load. Skilled personnel were lost to evacuation, death, or simple exhaustion. Some habitats that had seemed stable during the first phase succumbed later to cascading problems: air circulation finally failing, spin control drifting out of tolerance, or thermal balance tipping past recovery. To those living through it, this was the most terrifying phase — the realization that survival so far did not guarantee survival tomorrow.

These delayed collapses spread the disaster unevenly. Areas once considered safe became vulnerable without warning, while other stations endured far longer than expected through discipline, luck, or outside support. The unpredictability destroyed confidence in centralized assessments and official assurances. No authority could reliably say which habitats would fail next, or when. This uncertainty forced populations to live in a constant state of contingency, accelerating social breakdown even where physical systems still functioned.

In historical memory, these aftershocks blur the boundaries of the Fall itself. There is no single end date, only a tapering-off of failures as the weakest systems were exhausted and the survivors stabilized. This prolonged tail is why the Fall is remembered not as a moment, but as an era — a time when safety became provisional and every quiet day felt borrowed.

Jupiter to the Rescue

Jovian ships did not arrive in time to prevent the crisis. They arrived in time to determine who survived it. Heavy haulers, reactor-tugs, and long-range patrol ships began reaching the inner system after long, hard transits, often months after the initial failure. Their value was not speed but endurance: mobile reactors, spare mass, trained crews, and the ability to export power and logistics to habitats that were still barely holding on. Stations that could not last until that point were lost. Those that could were saved by outsiders.

This delay is precisely what reshaped politics. Jovians were not seen as emergency responders, but as rescuers who showed up when the system’s own guarantees had failed. Their arrival marked the transition from crisis to survival. The slow-motion nature of the catastrophe forced inner-system populations to endure uncertainty, triage, and abandonment before relief appeared, ensuring that gratitude was mixed with resentment and humiliation.

In hindsight, historians describe the Fall as inevitable not because it was instantaneous, but because it was prolonged. The long transit times turned distance into a filter. Only habitats with discipline, luck, or external aid survived long enough to be helped. The rest faded out quietly, leaving behind dark volumes of air, frozen machinery, and records that stop mid-sentence. This drawn-out collapse is why the Fall remains psychologically dominant long after its material damage was repaired.

In the decades that followed, Jovian commentators began speaking openly of a “Pax Juvianus,” a claim that stability is maintained by Jovian power and should remain under Jovian influence. The phrase was never an official doctrine, but it stuck. It was a reminder that peace in the Solar System was now regional, negotiated, and contingent, not enforced from a single center.

The State of Humanity

By 2330, humanity is neither united nor on the brink of extinction. It is unevenly distributed, politically fragmented, and culturally divergent in ways that would have been unthinkable during the Golden Age. Earth remains the single largest population center, but it is no longer the unquestioned heart of human affairs. Its politics are cautious, its institutions inward-looking, and its influence exercised more through inertia than command. Earth leans toward Earthforce, but does not control it.

Cislunar space and Earthforce remain powerful, wealthy, and technologically advanced, yet marked by a permanent loss of confidence. They still build large systems and enforce rules, but they do so defensively, aware that their authority can be challenged and, in extremis, bypassed. The Jovians, by contrast, have emerged from the Fall with disproportionate prestige. Fewer in number but richer in hard experience, they are seen as resilient, pragmatic, and indispensable. Their influence is strongest beyond Jupiter, but their ships and expertise are now welcome almost everywhere.

The Belt occupies a different role. It is populous, mobile, and economically vital, but too divided to act as a single power. Belt communities matter locally and operationally, often deciding the fate of individual stations, convoys, or projects, but they do not set system-wide agendas. Mercury remains a scar: a warning zone of salvage, memorials, and unfinished arguments about responsibility. Venus and Mars persist as secondary theaters, important to those who live there but no longer decisive to the balance of power.

Humanity has more resources than it can easily exhaust, and more people willing to take risks than any central authority can fully control. What it lacks is consensus. There is no longer a dominant power capable of declaring a universal peace, only overlapping spheres of influence and competing visions of what stability should mean. This is the condition of the Solar System in IB: not ruin, not utopia, but a tense equilibrium shaped by memory, resentment, and opportunity.

Timeline of the Icarus Fall Setting

20XX — Balkanization of Russia into multiple separate states. Nuclear weapons coming onto the market leads to global nuclear proliferation.

20XX — USA weaponizes its debt, destabilizing China by refusing to service debt to "unfriendly nations". Global recession follows.

ca 2050 — Thorium breeder reactors spread worldwide, fossil fuels never recover in price.

20XX — Collapse of the dollar as a reserve currency. States leave the union to avoid having to assume a share of the federal debt. Other currencies try to replace the dollar but fail. Global monetary crisis; recession deepens.

20XX — The beginning of "nuclear populism". China puts pressure on smaller indebted states that try to follow the the example of the USA. These smaller states uses nuclear blackmail to enforce their interests.

20XX — Nuclear populism gradually expands to provinces exerting nuclear blackmail on their central government. China loses control of peripheral areas and client states, consolidating on Mandarin-speaking areas.

2041 — First successful Near-Earth Asteroid (NEA) mining missions. Initial operations focus on steel for cislunar infrastructure, followed by water and carbonaceous materials.

2050-2100 — Global warming causes repeated ecological and economic disasters.

2055 — Middle East meltdown, a nuclear war in the Middle East halves the population. Its mainly urban populations of the dominant social groups that suffer. The total number of strikes is limited, this is not a nuclear apocalypse.

2056 — Life extension practical on a large scale, Earth population decrease slows. Money even more focused in a hands of the few as rich people live longer.

2058 — Nuclear populism breaks down as threats have to be put into action or lose credibility. A small number of nuclear attacks on random small and medium cities. Rebuilding stricken cities proves faster than expected, just over a decade in most cases. Nuclear populist states that actually use their nukes are invaded in police actions and cease to exist.

2060-2070 — Global trade collapse due to lack of a reserve currency and no-one enforcing freedom of navigation. Each area needs to be as self-sufficent as possible. Widespread famine. Collapse of trade traps refugees to starve in disaster areas.

2060-2070 — Cislunar economy has grown into an economic resource with global impact, dominated by developed nations and industrialists on Earth.

2060-2090 — Most of Earth is heavily balkanized, with the European Union, China, and India as the remaining great powers, but none of them dominant. The economies of many countries with populist or repressive governments collapses and are either reformed under more moderate government, balkanized, or absorbed by neighbors.

2066 — The Bern Space Accord establishes a framework of space law based on naval precedent. Intended as a temporary measure, the Accord remains in force centuries later. Its many amendments have made it internally contradictory, producing a patchwork of customs, interpretations, and precedents resembling a common-law system.

2070-2080 — Boom in the cislunar economy. The Moon dominates resource extraction, but reliance on NEAs continues, especially for carbon and phosphorus. Power generation in space is mostly solar.

2078 — American Commerce Accord (ACA) established, a lose trade framework to regulate and enable trade. Gradually spreads to cover both the Americas over the next 50 years.

2086 — Formation of Eartforce, a union of interests in cislunar space focused on combatting famine and preserve the Earth. Bounties for carbon capture. New currency introduced, the Lunar Credit, secured by cislunar resources. Emigration from Earth to cislunar space becomes significant.

2091 — Human population stops declining and begins to grow again, bottoming out at around four billion. The recovery is uneven and brutal; many regions never rebound, but global food security stabilizes as population pressure eases and offworld resources begin to matter.

2100–2310 — A Golden Age of rapid advancement and largely peaceful expansion in space. Building on hard-won stability, the era emerges from a mature cislunar economy. Orbital industry expands dramatically. For the first time since the collapse of global trade, humanity plans long-term.

2130 — First operational space elevator completed on Waigeo in Indonesia, spearheaded by international cooperation led by Japan. Enables vastly cheaper and more efficient access to cislunar space but soon proves too small and too remote.

2138 — Invention of the first practical long-duration ion drive. Drastically increases potential for slow but efficient interplanetary travel. Risks, mainly from radiation, makes adaptation slow.

2143 — Commercially viable large-scale fusion power. Thorium fission breeders remain dominant for many decades on Earth.

2145 — American Commerce Accord completes its own space elevator on Jarvis Island, focusing on bulk transport to and from orbit.

2155 — China and European Union finish space elevators on Hainan and São Tomé and Príncipe respectively, expanding global access to orbit and solidifying their roles in the emerging cislunar economy. China begins slow, large scale colonization by ion ship, others strive to catch up.

2170 — Chaotic wave of exploration and early colonization across the solar system. Many ventures fail or are absorbed by larger players.

2187 — Chinese colonies off-world show a strong bent for independence. Other nations on Earth step in as sponsors for Chinese colonies, and China supports non-Chinese colonial independence.

2210 — Launch of the Mars Terraforming Initiative. Massive investment from Earth. A symbolic vanity project, but clearly affordable and doable on a long time scale.

2214 — Second-generation colonization begins when cislunar habitat Usagi builds a copy of itself and sends one-third of the population on a multi-year trip to Jupiter. These are launched from successful early colonies rather than from Earth.

2225 — Mercury Industrial Boom begins. Polar settlements extract rare metals and lift them using magnetic accelerators. Heavy investment from solar power harvesting firms.

2245 — Solar Alchemy Project Dedalus officially launched. An ambitious attempt to manipulate solar fusion processes and harvest exotic particles and elements from the solar corona using mega-mirrors and orbital infrastructure. Also promises to extend the sun's lifetime.

2265 — First small-scale practical fusion reactors come online. These installations require exotic materials, including those produced by the Solar Alchemy Project.

2270 — Climate stabilization efforts on Earth complete. Massive orbital mirrors and solar shades contribute, in coordination with carbon capture. Emigration from Earth slows down.

2285 — Solar Alchemy Project achieves breakthrough in exotic matter synthesis. These are strategic materials for fusion power and other specialized uses.

2290 — Fusion reactor designs now small enough to fit personal vehicles. Batteries still dominate, but small-scale, high-performance, long duration fusion power is now possible.

2310–2315 — Disaster years - all energies focused on saving lives and rebuilding things that have been lost.

2310 — Icarus Fall: Catastrophic failure of the Solar Alchemy Project ends the Golden Age. Solar instability increases dramatically. Solar storms wreak havoc from Mercury to the Asteroid Belt. Massive losses in orbital infrastructure across the inner system, including the loss of all except the small Japanese space elevator. Earthforce prestige plummets.

2311 — Many refuge habitats were built on standard plans, gathering disparate refugees together.

2313 — The building of refugee habs is replaced with apolicy of using tugs to power exitising habitats while fusion reactors are built to replace lost solar power..

2315–2330 — Widespread fragmentation of political and economic control. Colonies become de facto independent. Earth remains population center but loses coercive power. Apocalyptic cults and radical ideologies common.

2430 — "Now" (Setting Present Day) — Earth is very heavily balkanized but still holds about three billion people, with one billion in space, 400 million each in Cislunar space and in the Jovian system, 100 million in the Belt, and about 25 million each on Mercury, Venus, Mars, and in deep space.

Adventure Seeds

Abandoned mining base at an NEA. Small, rapidly rotating cylinder with high gravity gradient. Survivors abandoned in evacuation, xenophobic and radiation-scarred.
Old base on Mercury’s dark side. Searching for data on surviving parts of Solar Alchemy project. Hazards: static electric charges in metals, seismic fissures, over-pressured living quarters holding plasma from Icarus Fall.
Using telemetry from previous mission to chase down a part of Solar Alchemy harvesting array and its exotic matter.
Various space habitats governed by exotic dogma.
Linear accelerator launching post-human pilots at very high velocities.
The Ghost That Burns — Long-range telescopes detect a faint gamma-ray source on a hyperbolic path through the system. Spectral anomalies suggest the object may be composed entirely of antimatter, annihilating in flashes when struck by cosmic dust. It will pass through the Belt in weeks before vanishing into deep space. Multiple factions want a sample, proof, or its destruction. Interception is extraordinarily dangerous: any dust from a ship could trigger surface explosions, altering its trajectory unpredictably — or shattering it into a lethal cloud of antimatter particles. Even more perilous, a ship’s own engine plume could cause annihilation on contact, making direct braking approaches suicidal. To match trajectories without disaster, the crew must execute a long, fuel-hungry offset approach, coasting in on minimal thrust while expert systems track its erratic motion.