Red Moon: Cadre Backgrounds

An earlier inspo mockup by Emmy, using a screenshot from a DOS game adaptation of Traveller.

Red Moon is a sci-fi setting that Emmy Verte of Spooky Action at a Distance and I have been floating for maybe like a year at this point. The basic premise is that you’re a spaceship crew from a moon that has just revolted against a big space republic. The details have shifted over time, but lately we’ve been talking about the goal being to seek aid from a socialist system before being annihilated by the republic (a possibility in the characters’ minds, but already underway unbeknownst to them). It’s giving Cuban missile crisis. Et cetera.

To this end, I’ve written a d66 background table to try to suss out the vibes of how the world works. I was going to say “It’s inspired by this and that”, but maybe it’s more interesting to leave that unsaid?

Backgrounds & Language

Roll d6 for a background category, and then roll d6 for that category’s own table. The initial d6 also equals how many kilocredits your character brings to the table; e.g., a prison laborer contributes 1 kcr.

d6	Background
1	Prison Laborer
2	Indentured Servant
3	Day Laborer
4	Steady Worker
5	Student Activist
6	Professional

Roll another d6 and add the value of the original roll, e.g. a prison laborer adds +1. This will determine the secondary language of your character, besides the common tongue which is a pidgin of all three options below. Everyone can speak common, but in doing so one reveals their dialect. After all, language is not just speech but identity, and the manner in which you speak betrays your origin (and social standing and material interests and so on) just as well as the color of your skin.

d6+	Language
2-5	Diasporic
6-9	Imperial
10-12	Universal

The diasporic tongue belongs mostly to the prisoners and servants, being the only thing they took with them on the lonely liner to the moon. The imperial tongue is a language once imposed by a spacefaring empire, now a birthmark of a bygone time and spoken even by commoners. Finally, the universal language asserts itself as such by the power of assault rifles and bureaucratic nonsense; it colors everyday speech like blood does water, but everyone knows a carpetbagger when they hear (or see) one.

You may also flip a coin or roll a die for your character’s gender, however seems fit. It should be out of your hands in any case. Inasmuch as class society still exists, one cannot expect gendered oppression to have gone away either, especially since the economy has latched onto it as a means of securing labor as well as a consumer base. At the same time, the gendered division of labor and consumption is somewhat less prominent (or expresses itself differently) in the lower classes where women are not afforded the same opportunities as their higher class counterparts, nor can they afford the same products yet marketed to them.

1. Prison Laborer

Petty criminals arrested, not uncommonly under bogus charges, and condemned to forced labor for pennies. Sometimes they work to clean their prisons and serve food to fellow inmates, but more often they are ‘employed’ in the same mass industries as indentured servants and day laborers. Most come from various, faraway worlds and were imprisoned on the moon precisely to disperse them from their original communities (or, on paper, to send them to where bodies were needed the most).

d6	Charges Pressed
1	Aggravated assault
2	Drug distribution
3	Drug possession
4	Murder
5	Theft
6	Unlawful assembly

2. Indentured Servant

Hopeful souls that had sold years of their life as contractors in exchange for a new livelihood on the moon, often having been dispossessed of a lesser livelihood on their home world. They most often work for big firms that could afford to fulfill such lofty promises – albeit only for those who don’t break their contract, the rest working elsewhere to pay back the remainder thereof.

d6	Contracting Industry
1	Agriculture
2	Arms manufacture
3	Mining
4	Pharmaceuticals
5	Semiconductors
6	Textiles

3. Day Laborer

Nominally free citizens yet to break out into a longer term career, having to work odd jobs to make ends meet. Often ex-indentured servants who were blacklisted from working at major firms as retribution for breaking their contract; as it were, if one is only as good as their word, then even their word is worthless. The same goes for ex-convicts and undocumented immigrants.

d6	Typical Job
1	Cargo handling
2	Cleaning
3	Construction
4	Gig delivery
5	Landscaping
6	Performing

4. Steady Worker

These ones are lucky enough to work at someplace for up to forty hours a week, sometimes taking shifts at multiple places to have more than enough to pay rent. Occasionally they will take the same jobs usually outsourced to convicts and servants, but they at least have the ‘freedom’ of working retail and other consumer-facing jobs if they so choose.

d6	Line of Work
1	Cooking
2	Handiwork
3	Nursing
4	Retail
5	Teaching
6	Transport

5. Student Activist

The adult children of the middle and upper classes, sent to school in pursuit of the virtue of education. Emboldened by mastery of knowledge, they enlist themselves in the struggle for social justice, on one hand out of pity for those facing injustice, and on the other hand for fear that they too will become the pitiful object of society’s gaze.

d6	Area of Study
1	Arts
2	History
3	Literature
4	Natural science
5	Philosophy
6	Politics

6. Professional

Members of the middle class who offer monetary (and practical, one would hope) support to the cause. There’s little to say.

d6	Career
1	Accountant
2	Artist
3	Doctor
4	Engineer
5	Lecturer
6	Merchant