Space colonies again, this time with magic gates

I started out bored and thinking idly of making a me in GURPS again (stopped as always by the depressing reality that I am an unplayable character)
and now I've wandered through rules until I have at least a dozen pdfs open and am considering How To Start A Planet (or demiplane, as applicable.)

Because if I'm going to get up to playable with my disadvantages
I have to balance it out with something
and while high levels of Magery are always fun
they also need me to, like, do stuff? Regularly? To be useful?

So I started thinking about Allies
and a half dozen rulebooks later
I have GURPS Space open and I'm wondering how to get a hundred million people to live on one colony planet.

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So I can imagine a story that goes from one person with The Dream to two hundred people stepping through the gate to... I don't know, a few thousand? I can imagine scaling up to a city if they take their time. But from there to a country seems like a generations thing.

Except how much of the world would need to want to go? Like one or two percent?

And they'd have a huge variety of reasons.

So I guess maybe?

But combining wanting to go with resources needed to do it???

That is a really large scale story.


And it's like colonising Mars? Where at first they have a huge injection of resources from the habitable end but eventually they'll have to sort out a new relationship with home?

Except if there's a permanent gate then the cost to get to the new world is a whole lot lower, and it's habitable there if I say so, so people can just stroll in with a tent and... well, starve, but a lorry could bring a lot of setup, and many people could fill a lorry with something.

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... so a space colony story is just liek me imagining making like a million friends?
... and getting stuck imagining like a dozen?

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The problem is the basic story of space colonies is
we came out here because people suck
but it turns out we are people
and we suck.

Like, you bring your conflict with you, even if you have an actual blank slate to draw it on.



And if that's going to happen to your group at whatever scale
you need to do some very big thinking to make it attract a hundred million people
without collapsing in on itself.

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Anyway. That is what I have been doing, rather than sleeping, as might also have been helpful.



Thinking on how you would play through from 'hey this gate goes Somewhere' to 'and now we have a self sustaining high tech world'.


It kind of rewuires understanding, like, society as a whole.
So.
Bit tricky.