Kardashev is a sci-fi nation-building forum role-playing game hosted on the Speculative Evolution forum by user Flisch. Beginning on March the 18th, 2018, the game's players assume the role of an alien nation of their own design that has recently developed the technology required to open subspace wormholes and, with it, the capacity for Faster-Than-Light Travel.
Kardashev has no absolute goals, but focuses heavily on diplomacy, statecraft, technological advancement, expanding player empires, and simply exploring an open universe from the perspective of an infant interstellar empire. With a cast of very unique aliens with views spanning a great range of ideological perspectives, and a universe filled with alien life and cosmic mysteries, Kardashev's potential remains as vast as its playable map.
This game provides examples of:
- Alien Sky: With Kardashev's nature this is inevitable, but of the inhabited planets seen so far, the Gyk-Zurr-Dahkk homeworld of Ven'Kuph is the most extreme example (as is usual). With life only tenable on a pole-to-pole ring of the Tidally Locked Planet, the world's inhabitants live in a perpetual twilight with a static light level.
- Another contender of this trope is the Arch, homeworld of the Paladins. From an in-universe perspective, the Arch appears as a vast Arch towering above an endless field (owing to its name). Only until the advent of space travel did the Paladins believe It was, as its name suggested, an Arch.
- Secondary mention goes to that of Vlaank, the mlumno-pwat homeworld. The planet's star Bmaalu is one of a pair of binary stars, with its twin Wheishrun showing bright in the sky even when it appears during the day.
- Ascended Meme: Fairly little thought was put into the naming of the home planet of the Blinkers, one of the game's player species; due to their reliance on rapidly-changing patterns of color for communication, their homeworld was named "Twinkworld". The GM found the Double Entendre hilarious, and without objection on behalf of the Blinker player ran away with the idea of a gay-themed naming scheme.
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Ascended Fanon Icthyander is in the game now as the leader of the pride of colours. Icthy exists but he will never be found in game. His existence in game is hypothetically canon, if you will. Schrödinger's Icthy, maybe. - Bizarre Alien Biology: Par for the course in Kardashev, with a complete absence of almost any of the stereotypical common design tropes seen in other sci-fi space settings. Shining examples in the Gyk-Zurr-Dahkk (iron/sulfuric acid, rather than carbon/water, based) and the Paladins (quasi-synthetic lifeforms evolved from a nanobot-based ecology). See the characters page for more in-depth analysis.
- Given that the game is hosted on a forum dedicated to speculative biology, one would expect this to be the case.
- Blue-and-Orange Morality: With most of the aliens in Kardashev operating under completely different biochemical and organismal systems than Earth life, their cultures (while in general understandable to people) are often significantly impacted by differences in instincts or drive compared to those of humans. The best-catalogued example in the game are the Gyk-Zurr-Dahkk, whose systems of social cohesion have led to a society with values quite foreign to any human - and, at several times in the past, has also led to planet-wide catastrophies.
- Camp Straight: The nomenclature system used for the Blinkers in-game is noticeable for containing abundant references to gay culture note ; planet names include Twinkworld and Golden Gaytime, while the ranks of the Blinker nations include the likes of Pride of Colours and Broken Hunks. According to Dr. Nitwhite (the Blinkers' player), while Blinkers can be gay, there is no meaningful connection between the naming convention and the traits of the species itself.
- Death World: Discounting the vast number of uninhabitable planets in the game, two player homeworld fit this bill quite readily: Ven'Kuph, homeworld of the Gyk-Zurr-Dahkk, and The Arch, homeworld of the Paladins.
- Ven'Kuph is a Tidally Locked Planet with life only existent in a thin band along the planet's polar axis; not only this, but the planet's ecology is based in iron and sulfuric acid - making it both hundreds of degrees too hot for and immensely caustic to standard carbon-and-water-based life.
- The Arch is an abandoned ringworld that suffered catastrophic damages to its structure at some point in the distant past, leaving it with holes the size of jovian planets punched clean through its structure. The ringworld's atmosphere and oceans evaporated into space through these holes, and since then the breakdown of the structure's magnetic generators has left large chunks of it bathed in cosmic radiation.
- Mechanical Lifeforms: The Paladins, though in a bit of an odd way - they are the product of evolution, but from an ecology based on microscopic nanomachines rather than cells. Regardless of this, they most certainly look the part, and operate under an entirely different set of physical "rules" than organic lifeforms (such as able to live in the vacuum of space, yet be harmed by magnetic fields of sufficient strength).
- Precursors: One optional trait available during species/nation design causes the homeworld of the player's species to bear relics belonging to a long-vanished spacefaring species, usually in the form of ruins and wrecked spacecraft. These sometimes prove helpful for the player's early-game research, and provide a form of long-term goal in deciphering the identity, purpose, and fate of these precursors.
- Space Station: All Kardashev species possess space presences far beyond those of present-day humans, but the Hwao take this to a new level. With a desertified homeworld scarce in resources and habitable space, certain Hwao nations have taken to building titanic orbital habitation structures to act as habitable regions far larger than those on the homeworld. This has succeeded wildly, with two Hwao stations housing over a hundred million inhabitants apiece.
- Starfish Aliens: The entire cast of player species.
