orcs and evil

I recently was involved in a twitter discussion in which I concluded that a rational and natural evil was nonsensical. The path to there is a little convoluted, but it hinges on motivation: what is the objective of evil? Most rational objectives I can think of are pretty bad but not really what we think of as Evil. Maybe evil but not Evil if you follow.

Say, for example, orcs really hate humans. They kill all humans and destroy all human things. But if they are natural and rational, then they have an end-game, a perfect world. They have an agenda that is not just external to them (kill everything) but internal: something they want and strive for. Clearly this is just a world without humans but otherwise kind of nice — everyone rational wants things to be kind of nice, at least for them. This is extreme and aggressive but, depending on the backstory for their hatred, not necessarily evil and not innate so certainly not Evil. Maybe their human-free world is awesome. Too bad for us but more power to them.

But if evil is rational and supernatural we can kind of get our teeth into something meaty. Perhaps our Evil is a deity that despises this reality and wants to destroy it to replace it with their own (whatever that looks like doesn’t matter since it doesn’t have us in it). A kind of failed god like Morgoth in The Silmarillion — they hate the existing reality and are jealous of the power of creation. Their dedication to the destruction of everything is rational but supernatural: they want their own vision realised. That’s their rational end game.

There we go, a hate elemental maybe. Or a failed god.

Or perhaps it’s supernatural but irrational — it’s just a kind of hate elemental, a realization of pure nihilism that only destroys. Maybe that’s not even Evil but it’s a neighbour. It is interesting however simple its agenda is. It will be content in its end-game to rule over ashes. But it has to be irrational: there is no constructive agenda, no genuine plan for the future. Just wreckage and horror.

But where do orcs go? It seems to me there are few places for orcs and evil. One is that they are an autonomous species with their own culture and a complex agenda (not Evil intrinsically) but they are unwillingly or unwittingly under the command of our hate elemental or jealous near-deity. They will ultimately be consumed as well. These orcs have a complex relationship with the world and are, to my mind, very interesting now. They can be saved or, much better, save themselves. They don’t really need a variation in shape, though — they could as easily be humans. Again, their evil is situational and not innate. They can and would likely prefer to find a different path.

Another way to read them would be as beings that do not have a culture, that do not exist as normal biological organisms do. That is, they bear no children and have no relationships but are fabricated by our Evil entity with only enough autonomy to serve as soldiers. Not even that, but really as just appendages of this Evil entity. These orcs cannot be saved because they are just semi-detached tentacles of the Evil. They are not “like” people beyond the fact that they sort of look like people. They are the best our hateful and destructive demigod of the ashes can do as far as creation goes and they will be expended in the end. Since they are basically automatons they can’t really be Evil themselves — they are an expression of our hate monster’s evil.

But I don’t see a way that rational, natural beings can be intrinsically evil (or Evil really) because there’s no end game to a philosophy of pure hate and destruction. They have no agenda that makes any sense. Anything you try to make them want requires either supernatural power (re-create the world as something functional for them), lack of rationality (a pure hate for everything), or not being actually evil (a complex and destructive relationship with the status quo).

Thanks Levi, I didn’t need to sleep anyway.

…in space!

I remember my wife bought me a copy of Space Usagi in the distant past and I was very excited — after all, I love science fiction and I love Usagi Yojimbo! And I read it and I was bitterly disappointed.

You see, what they did was just paint the science fiction on. They had ray guns and fought aliens on alien planets, but the tropes were largely the same as the non-sf version and the imagery was the same but with space-bits glued on. Japanese fortresses hovered in space. Space armour looks remarkably like samurai armour. They have laser katanas.

This felt like, well I want to say “betrayal” but that’s pretty harsh, but I did feel betrayed. We have a masterful storyteller and artist and it feels like they just didn’t put the work in to really adopt an alternate genre. They just painted the old one a new colour. There is no attention to how technology changes things. There’s no effort to understand the differences between Edo era Japan and some distant future. And so the stories are completely transplantable: there is nothing new or exciting here other than amusing new space art.

This lack of intentionality happened a lot in early popularized science fiction as well — surely we all recall mentions of technologies like “space pills” and “space wrenches”. This just lacks effort and it’s kind of insulting.

So anyway, what I never ever want is for my science fiction gaming to be that. When I choose science fiction for play I am not choosing it because I want space ships and lasers. I am choosing it because I want to explore a world impacted by the fact of space ships and lasers. It’s not enough to say you can easily change your physical body, growing a penis or a vagina at will. You have to address how this makes the place different from where we are now. And, at least as importantly, how it’s the same. Or at least how it’s relatable, how it’s an extension of where we are now. An important question I want to ask is “how did we get from here to there?”. And what were the costs?

This is why the cluster generation system of Diaspora (and the upcoming Diaspora Anabasis) is what it is: we create random solar systems with various technologies, resources, and environments and we ask at least these questions of you: what does this society look like given its attributes? How did it come to this? How does this affect its relationship with its neighbours?

My thinking was that if you start with making sense of these things — and likely making sense of apparent impossibilities like very low technology and very low environments — then your stories would necessarily start in a place that is not just a paint job over a place you know already. It might wind up caricatured that way (we all get a little lazy) but it doesn’t start that way and you are not invited to imagine it this way. You have all the cues you need to wonder about how technology affects a world (and not our world) and how it creates power imbalances and how those gradients affect every other system.

And I think this is the heart of the paint job problem: when the setting begins as something totally familiar but with lasers, there is nothing to grab on to and wonder about. If you’re even slightly lazy then you are stuck at the bottom of a false minimum, a place that’s easy to get to but not nearly the best you can do.

And since — oh! shiny! — we’re on to false minima…. A false minimum is a low spot on a curve that is not the lowest spot but is surrounded by increasing values, so if you are using a simplistic algorithm to try and find the minimum point on the graph, you can get stuck there. Sometimes they are stable (there is no easy way out) and sometimes they are unstable (a minimal effort would need to be put in to find a lower minimum. So you have points that are “metastable” (in thermodynamics, anyway) which are false minima — you need a lot of energy applied in a direction you don’t want in order to get free. You have points that are unstable (curvature around them slopes flat or down) and require only a small amount of energy to go one way or another. And you have stable points where there is no lower to go no matter how much energy you spend.

We think of low as bad but low here is good.

The reason this gave me an oh shiny moment is because it might be the case that our universe is in a metastable vacuum state — that is, the vacuum of space might be at a very low energy state but not at the lowest possible energy state. We call this a false vacuum because the real one is at the lowest energy state. If this is the case, that we are in a metastable universe, then it is possible for changes in local energy to push us out of that trough to plummet down to a lower energy state — possibly a stable one but also possibly just another false minimum. If this happens then we get “bubble nucleation” and the laws of physics may change (a little or a lot) in a bubble that expands from that point at the speed of light. And at the speed of light means there’s nothing you can do about it — you will literally only know about it when it happens to you.

The effects of a shift from a low vacuum energy to an even lower vacuum energy are speculated to vary between unnoticeable (which may have happened before) to survivable (which also may have happened before) to catastrophic. A bubble nucleation could end not only life, but the very form matter takes.

Now that’s exciting!

aerobraking

Okay let’s look at aerobraking. This is a way to get free ∆v for deceleration We’ll look at the principle and then talk about its utility. First recall our gravity example but I’ll add an atmosphere to the planet.

Now the atmosphere is a source of friction and friction reduces your velocity. As you bang into gas molecules, you slow down. We can treat this as a third vector in the system, opposing our direction of travel (our initial velocity vector).

Back when we were first talking about vectors, we said that you add vectors by arranging them head to tail and finding the hypotenuse. This was a lie, of course, as all science education advances by correcting the lies told in earlier lectures. In fact you just connect the last head with the first tail, like so:

Oops. I crafted this example without figuring out ahead of time what it would do and it looks like this atmosphere is too dense for our maneuver! When science fiction stories talk about a “degrading orbit” this is what they mean if we’re being charitable: eventually atmosphere will drag you in if you’re too low.

However, that doesn’t have to be a crash! That could be a landing! In which case we saved the atmospheric vector from our ∆v resources. We totally meant to do that! Of course that’s not what that diagram represents since that enormous vector is our velocity and it does not look like a safe landing speed. Or angle. But that’s the principle and however much additional ∆v we have to spend to land safely, it’s reduced by the amount of drag provided by the atmosphere.

So let’s consider a hypothetical interception scenario — you are fleeing through space and the cops are after you. You have, let’s say, 7 units of ∆v and spend 2 planning a course to a safe planet. It’s months away and you’re committed and you now have only 5 units of ∆v. You’re saving some for slowing down at the far end — you need 3∆v to make orbit at your destination.

You: 5∆v

The cops spot you and match your course with 2 ∆v of their own. They have fast interceptors (high thrust for tactical corrections) but less reserves so let’s say they start with 5∆v. Now they have 3.

You: 5∆v

Cops: 3∆v

You spot the cops on your infrared telescope and track them for a couple of days, identifying their planned intercept point. You have a bunch of options. You have more total ∆v and if you know this you could burn more than they can afford to to change your course and correct back. If they spend any more than they have they won’t have the ∆v to slow down and stop somewhere to refuel. But if they aren’t tricked and don’t burn, then when you correct back they will still be on target.

You could also fake a course to a totally different location, spending maybe 3 more ∆v leaving you with 2. If the police correct for that they will be totally committed (they won’t be able to slow down so they are clearly going to try to kill you in a flyby and then count on other cops to save them from leaving the solar system) but you have some spare.

You: 2∆v

Cops: 0∆v

Maybe it’s not enough to make orbit around your original destination — you’ll be going too fast. But if you’re equipped with heat shields for aerobraking, you can steal 1∆v from the atmosphere and get the 3 you need to make orbit despite going way too fast!

Or maybe you won’t slow down! Maybe you’ll steal 1 ∆v from slingshotting your destination on order to head somewhere completely else!

You: 3∆v

Cops: 0∆v

Finding spare ∆v in the system geography is how you exceed your space craft’s specifications, and it’s a skill your character might have. Yes, we’re almost talking games now.

Since this is science fiction, what other sources of ∆v might be lying around a high tech industrialized star system?

∆v

Okay so now we can talk about delta-v (∆v from now on because it looks cool) in a larger context. We can see from the last post that the thing that really matters in space travel is how much you can change your velocity before you run out of gas. And I’ve talked previously about orbital mechanics. Let’s tie these together. First a diagram I have lifted from a much more detailed article about the topic at Wikipedia:

This is a map of the solar system from Earth to Mars assuming you are travelling using orbital transfers — that is, you don’t care how long it takes and your plan is to burn just enough to enter the orbit of your target eventually. Exactly which way you point and how long you travel depends on many factors that are largely out of your control — at a given time with a given rocket you have essentially one choice.

The numbers on that map are not distances but rather costs in ∆v. And this is why ∆v is the critical resource both tactically and strategically in Diaspora Anabasis: it’s the only resource that matters for planning. Everything else is roughly fixed. Everything you might do to influence travel is going to boil down to changing your ∆v resource or cost.

So to get from the surface of the earth to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) you need to go 9.3 kilometers per second faster than when you started. Soak that in. Notice that almost every other transfer is somewhere between cheaper and vastly cheaper. This is why starting your trip on a planet is so incredibly expensive and why space and low-gravity-planetoid bases are essential to industrialized (and certainly private) space travel: this is an unnecessary expense that dominates everything.

If you have a space craft with 11km/s ∆v in resources, you can reach orbit and sit there. If you built the same ship in orbit, however, you could go to Mars with resources to spare. LEO is 2km away. Mars at its closest is 56,000,000km away. It’s 20 million times more efficient to travel with orbital transfers from Earth orbit than it is to orbit the Earth. When people talk about how hard it is to go to Mars and how we so handily went to the moon remember that: those Mercury and Gemini project orbits were actually the very hardest part of the whole endeavour. Everything after that is vastly simpler.

Now what if you don’t use orbital transfers? What if you want to spend less than 18 months to go to Mars? Well, you spend more ∆v. You can speed up any orbital transfer by burning harder at the start and burning again at the end to slow down. It changes the path of the transfer substantially — you’ll get there faster because you’re going faster but also because you’ll take a physically shorter path — your lazy elliptical arc will straighten as you dump reaction mass into the fire. But it costs twice as much because you have to slow down at the end.

You can think of an orbital transfer as basically matching courses with your destination (since planets are moving too). Imagine you want to catch up with a skier further down the slope than you. You can dig in the poles a little so you’re going faster and take an arcing path down the hill so that you slowly catch up, with friction equalizing your speed at intercept. It’s a lot of calculation and might need a little correction and it’s not the fastest path but it takes very little energy. That’s the orbital intercept.

Or you can drive on your snowmobile straight at your target. You’ll have to correct continuously as they move but you will arrive much sooner. You’ll also have to figure out how to slow down or you won’t be matching courses at all. That’s a “hyperbolic” intercept.

The other interesting thing on that map is the “aerobrake”. This is a way to steal ∆v from planets with an atmosphere: you can use that friction to slow down. We know that slowing down is just ∆v spent pointing backwards. So friction is free ∆v for slowing down! In the last post we talked about slingshotting, which steals ∆v from planets for speeding up. So the natural universe provides a landscape that can lighten the load and this is where strategic play will happen: we have a determination problem in that the math tightly constrains exactly how much ∆v a maneuver costs and you ship defines how much you have — so where are the player choices? What knobs can you turn to defy (rely manipulate) the math? The natural environment provides two.

We’ll talk about how the artificial environment can help next time.

soft horizon style guide

Back when the VSCA was a business I thought I’d like to offer other writers the opportunity to make their own Soft Horizon games. New planes with their own themes that use the same rules, but interpreted through the lens of someone other than me. I really think the intrinsic diversity of Soft Horizon themes would be well served by a diversity of authors. Now, since I didn’t really take the business end seriously enough this never came to fruition (though it came close and there is at least one brilliant near-built plane out there).

Now that this isn’t a business I’d like to offer up the style guide. This was a kind of contract but of course that’s no longer necessary, so all the shalls should be read as shoulds. And I won’t publish or lay out or illustrate with you unless it seems like huge fun. If you do choose to make a Soft Horizon game and follow the spirit of the style guide here, we’ll have an anthology of wildly diverse but linked game, a psychedelia of shared space generators. And that would thrill me. I would love it if you at least POD produced it (which is damned near free to do — no risk at all) so I can have a shelf of books in this vein one day. And maybe I’d string them all together, with your permission, into a fat crazy book we can all wonder at.

guide

Keep tone conversational and idiomatic: let your authorial voice out.

Provide illustration notes as comments in your submission in case we get around to finding an illustrator. Better yet, illustrate it yourself. Your artistic talent isn’t relevant.

You should recommend or produce at least five illustrations.

Use gender neutral pronouns or sentence structure unless the setting demands distinction.

Whenever considering sexuality, write in diversity.

Whenever considering gender, write in diversity.

Whenever considering “race”, write in diversity.

Whenever considering disability/ability, write in diversity.

Be political; don’t be shy. These planes can be metaphors. Should be.

If swearing moves your narrative along, swear like a motherfucker.

Write as much as you need to develop your idea: there is no word minimum nor maximum.

Providing a map may indicate that your text is too specific. Providing a way to create maps indicates that your text is supplying the table with tools to create rapidly and in context.

That is a general statement disguised as a specific one.

INTRODUCTION

Write a custom introduction

SYSTEM

Re-write SYSTEM section in your voice keeping the system materially identical but replacing examples with setting specific examples.

Do not change the METHODS list as characters need to be portable.

Do not change the RISKS list though absolutely change examples to mate with your setting.

Do not change how wounds and debt works unless the change is ADDITIVE (adds new options and does not change or delete old ones) and CONTEXTUAL (clearly adapts the material to the new setting).

Do not change how progression works unless the change is ADDITIVE and CONTEXTUAL
Do not change the ref’s role (especially the GM moves) unless the change is ADDITIVE and CONTEXTUAL.

Whatever you add to the system:

• The ref NEVER rolls in a resolution process
• There are NEVER flat modifiers (+1, +2, whatever) to the rolls

Be aware that failure and risk realization are an engine that makes this game easy to ref. If you reduce the failure rate too much the game will stall. And it has to survive progression as well.

SETTING

Organize and explore your setting any way you like. It is not necessary to keep the organizational structure of the setting section in any other SH book.

Ensure that there are ways to develop places and people with a minimum of referee effort.

Lean on ORACLES, simple short text open to interpretation. Give the player something to create from rather than creating for them.

Sell your theme not you details. The players will bring the detail.

Ensure that the SETTING section ends with a note on the Soft Horizon and how your setting links to it.

CHARACTERS

Re-write to suit your setting.

Try to keep to the power scale established in THE KING MACHINE but you do not need to be strict about it.

The DENIAL mechanism needs to be retained.

Ensure that you have developed a way to start the game with the player characters together and working towards a shared goal or mission.

Re-use the association rules if you like; modify as needed.

Find a novel element of your setting to bake into character creation. For KING MACHINE it’s simply that racial differences are real: different apes are distinct and visibly different species and have mechanically distinct features. This is only interesting if that’s not the case everywhere. It’s especially nice if it’s ONLY the case there. In SAND DOGS the distinction will be a sort of life path system a la Traveller. Find another way to alter character creation such that you get the same basic end result (number and type of dice to distribute) but get there another way, delivering some new feature to character background or play or both.

RUNNING THE GAME

Re-write to suit your setting.

Keep the note on fronts and preparation but tune to you setting and voice.

Add any sections necessary to guide a ref in your setting (such as the “dealing with inconsistency” section in King Machine).

Modify the ref’s cheat sheet to meet your needs.

INSPIRATIONS

Entirely your space.

 

stress

One of the core components of Diaspora Anabasis is stress. When you want to improve a rolled result, including helping someone else improve theirs, you take stress. But stress is not an inert hit points track you run out of. Stress is intended to minimally model, well, stress. This turns out to have pitfalls I hadn’t anticipated.

Your first point of stress leaves you agitated. It’s easy to get rid of. You work out, talk out your problems, take a vacation, and so on. All the things your friends tell you to do when you’re freaking out actually work because you’re not all that stressed. Being agitated doesn’t even warrant a FACT on your character sheet. No problems here.

Gnoll is agitated but has a process.

Your second point of stress gives you a compulsion. You write this in as a FACT on your character sheet: this is a true thing about your character that you are expected to incorporate into play. Your character keeps coming back to the topic related to their stress, even when it’s not appropriate to the scene. You are worrying something over and your compulsion is a signal that you are in distress. Getting rid of it requires getting away from the thing causing you stress. That can be hard in a space ship a million miles from actual air.

Your third gives you bad judgement. Again embodied by a FACT, your character is now bad at making choices about or related to something. Maybe you are becoming too careful. Maybe too daring. But your choices relating to your FACT are not the best choices. They instead are focused on whatever you’re stressed about. Clearing this one requires that you make a substantive change to your situation. In our game the captain of the vessel gave up their captaincy. So it has to be a big change.

Your last step of stress is withdrawal and at this point all of the other characters should be worrying. You need professional help and the support of your allies to clear this.

What I didn’t anticipate is how much this impacts the players. It can actually be quite upsetting.

One reason, of course, is because someone is telling you how to change how to play your character. Players rightfully buck at this. It’s one thing to be asked to narrate a limp because your leg is broken, but for some reason (and I say that not to diminish it but to express that I don’t fully understand it) it is way harder to take on a real-seeming psychological change. I suspect this is because of the way the human brain handles pretending things: when you pretend an emotion, your brain probably simulates the emotion just by running the mechanisms that actually evoke the emotion with with a little simulation flag set so you don’t forget you’re pretending. Bottom line is that pretend pain doesn’t hurt but pretend emotions do, to an extent depending on the person, cause you to genuinely feel.

That up there is two reasons of course: we don’t like being told to play our pretend personalities differently, and feeling real bad feelings can really feel bad.

The other thing that gets in the way is that you are basically asked to play your character sub-optimally. You’re expected to deliberately make bad decisions. Since we’re playing a game, there is a desire to solve problems correctly and bask in the glory of victory. Deliberately failing is genuinely hard for a lot of people. I put myself in that camp.

When this last came up we talked it out and found a way forward that addressed as much of these as possible by making sure the player still felt like they had authority (but were handed some creative parameters) and agency and also that they wouldn’t be made to feel badly in a way that they didn’t want to feel bad. Talking it through was a big deal for me both to identify just how much of a minefield this thing is and also to resolve it or at least set us up for success in the next session.

Anyway here’s a draft of my rules text relating to this issue:

Stress can be very onerous on players. It asks you to play suboptimally and at the same time engage the game material in a way that is designed to emulate the real effects of stress on humans. At the extreme end of the track it asks you to act in ways that may upset yourself and others: your character will be withdrawn, upset, and making bad choices. Here are some ways to handle it. Please use these in addition to your preferred safety tools (X-Card, Script Change, and so on).

• • Don’t do it. Skip the facts. The stress system is not as powerful this way, which would be the point of not using it. If it upsets you, just don’t use it. It’s not more important than your fun.
  • Discuss it. When a character gets into the deep end of stress, take some time offline to discuss how to engage the new facts in ways that are not too upsetting. Part of what’s upsetting is that the rules are telling you how to play your character which most people are resistant to, but if you discuss how you want to play it, you can make it your own.
  • Help the stressed. If everyone pulls together to help the stressed character it can relieve the difficulties that this brings. It also makes great scenes and clears the stress! Everyone wins.

rules fluidity in an imagined space

Role-playing games are notorious for rules fluidity: players modify the rules to suit their immediate needs to such an extent that there is often a special rule granting this authority. It may even be a sufficient (though not necessary) feature to categorize something as a role-playing game. I won’t try to sell that point here, but think about it.

So why? Many bemoan this, wanting rules that satisfy all table needs. Many celebrate it, pointing out that this is where the fun is (where the game becomes a game about designing the game you’re playing, which does sound fun).

In general an RPG explores an imaginary space. A space the size of the world or larger sometimes. And the behaviour of this world, no matter how weird, is intuitively understood. We might all understand it slightly differently, but we do have a private understanding. We can easily imagine the way things that are not described in the text would or could work. So the private world of the RPG is effectively as complex as the real world, but it gets explored piecemeal — it doesn’t exist somewhere in whole cloth but rather as you imagine a new part of the space you easily imagine how it must operate.

So now you want rules to govern how this space is explored.

Let’s call the imagined space a BARN.

Let’s call the rules a PAINT BRUSH.

You want to paint the barn. You need to pick a paint brush, The brush, however oddly, must also be fun.

Okay, so you love detail work (a fiddly combat simulator, say, with lots of kinds of polearms meaningfully differentiated). You want to use a double-ought brush. A tiny brush. You can never paint the whole barn with this. That’s fine, you just give permission to the end user to paint whatever bit you left blank however they want. If they enjoy painting, everyone wins. Well everyone who likes detail painting anyway.

But let’s say your goal is to cover the barn. You don’t want to leave any space for the end user to paint. But your imagined space is huge and complex. What are your choices?

You can broaden your brush — abstract your system to the point that you get enough coverage to credibly cover your barn. It might be a little sloppy in places, but you can have a reasonable expectation of coverage. Now your detail painters are still going to get in there with their fine brushes and elaborate and touch up the moulding and so on, but you can’t stop them. You achieved your goal of delivering a painted barn. And depending on how much work you can do you can go anywhere from a 3” brush (pick a system that suits that!) to a paint roller (again I invite you to imagine what game I’m thinking of) to a spray gun. I bet there’s even an experimental explosive painting device out there that paints not only the barn but much of the surrounding countryside.

You can also constrain your barn. This happens a lot in some design spaces: declare we are not going to even think about the barn. We are only interested in the door. Anything outside the door is not part of this project. And then pick a relatively fine brush and paint a perfect door. There are lots of games in this category.

When we say “why are RPGs like this” we aren’t really talking about RPGs. We’re talking about some category of RPG or even some category of player talking about RPGs. And consequently we’re talking about a fairly specific barn/brush case or expectation. But in reality there are many ways to paint that barn, with and without requiring the rules-creative input of the end user. We have to think of handing the end user the brush as an option any RPG should consider — and then accept or reject.

The important thing about game design to me is not doing it one way or another. It’s doing whatever you do deliberately. Everything should be intentional in your text. There may be unanticipated (emergent) properties to the game, but everything you write down should have a goal. Including, possibly, the goal of offering design space to the user.

 

players making shit up

The further your game world drifts from the real, modern world the more you have to let players make shit up.

Here’s my logic.

Universes are crazy big. Douglas Adams tried to tell us how big and didn’t come remotely close. Universes, however, that obey our physical laws at least have a set of truths that you can draw on. A set of premises. How gravity works, how fast light goes, what’s in the periodic table of elements, and stuff like that. And so, as a player, there is a significant fraction of the universe that you can manipulate safely (game-safe I mean). If I see a plausible orbital maneuver in the way the ref has laid out a space, well, I can probably do it. There are touchstones and they are myriad.

I think sometimes we forget just how much shared knowledge we have.

I used to play a lot of games set in my home town of Vancouver. One of the chief advantages to this was the touchstones — you could hide in that place you know, the culvert under the highway up near Kelly’s place — and you weren’t making that up as a player: that place exists. Most of us knew it. Many of us secretly drank there on Friday nights. So most of the play space is known and does not require mediation. It’s just real.

Science, if it works in your game, is like that contextual touchstone but writ large. We all know (and can expect and therefore manipulate) how gravity works, what air pressure does, how things behave at very low or very high temperatures. I don’t need the ref to fabricate any of it and imagine the burden if I did!

Now as you drift from real places in a real universe the amount of information needed to manipulate the environment increases and very very rapidly. There are millions of pages of material written about how this world works. Maybe billions. Your fantasy world, however, has only the tiniest fraction of that content: a practically non-existent amount of material. Frankly no one, even the originator of the fantasy world, knows much of anything about it compared to the content available from the real world.

But you should know. Your character lives in this world and is aware of a similar volume of data that you have by living in the real world. Your character knows about the equivalent of that culvert under the highway and thousands of other truths that know one has every thought to write down or map out. It would be an impossible task.

We mediate this by putting a ref in the hot seat. The fewer the touchstones, however, the more of a burden this becomes on the ref. And the less reasonable it is for them to mediate it — they don’t know either, we’ve just given them the authority to invent it.

I’ll suggest then, that the more your world deviates from reality the more benefit you’ll get from letting players make up their own details. As ref just nod and follow along. If you can’t pre-fabricate all of the details of the world then this will give you two significant advantages: you’ll get a world that’s the product of four or five peoples’ creativity rather than one (it’s nowhere near what went into the real world but it’s five times better than investing the whole problem in one person) and your players will be able to smoothly “recall” facts and even manipulate them without the awkward “was there some place we used to hide as children maybe” — useless roll — “yup there was a culvert under the highway” exchange.

Once you get used to that you can let them manipulate. For example, games rarely if ever examine exactly how magic works (mostly because it always results in contradictions in detail and so it’s best glossed over — magic basically can’t work so don’t look too close). If I’m playing an ancient wizard who’s researched it forever, though, then I expect to have some detailed hypotheses about the underpinnings of magic and a good deal of experimental evidence for it. And I will want to bring that to bear.

When I do, I want to imply vast knowledge I don’t actually have. Consequently it’s probably best if I just make it up. “I’ve studied fire magic all my life and I am certain that it is not simply brought into being as that would violate the third law of thaumaturgodynamics. Magical fire must therefore come from somewhere. I postulate that it comes from the plane of Elemental Fire and that therefore it must create a path. I think we should try to track this Efreet by trying to identify this path.” Now I’m not narrating my success, but I am saying a lot of facts about the world that no one ever ever wrote down in advance. Those facts should not be subject to mediation. The ref should greedily note them and start crafting complicated implications. And yet there is resistance to this kind of player participation in world building.

The map of your fantasy world is basically completely empty other than the gross geography. I highly recommend inviting anyone who’s found a blank spot to fill it the fuck out.

formalizing the art of invention

A lot of my refereeing is intuitional. I ad lib. I come up with one idea or image and then follow it around. When this happens in a game it works for me, but one of the things I need to do to make a game work for someone else is formalize these processes. Reveal them to others so they can reproduce them.

The problem is, of course, that I just do it. I don’t have a system.

But this is nonsense — I do it the same way every time. There must be a system. I just haven’t looked at it closely enough. So I’m going to go through a premise and lay out my thought patterns as a hierarchical choice tree. Someone else can use this as a jumping off point for their own exploration of the same premise. For a lot of game design this is the heart of it (for me): watching myself ad lib and then formalizing that.

Premise: you have a space that has not been explored (a slipstream that connects an unknown or forgotten system). You might not be familiar with Diaspora: a slipstream is a wormhole that connects two systems. There aren’t a lot of them — clusters in Diaspora are only a handful of connected systems.

So in this cluster we have a link from Cando to…what? It starts out unknown! At some point the players are going to want to go there though, so…what’s there? Quick! There’s a session in twenty minutes?

Here’s what I would go through. At the top level, I explore the big questions.

• Why did no one know about the route before?
• Who’s there?
• What’s there?

And then I cascade. For each I ask more questions. And then again. Until I get to some answers. And I might ask more questions.

• Why did no one know about the route before?
  • It’s new
  • It has been deliberately hidden
  • It recurs
  • It was destroyed but has re-emerged

Once I have a nice set of possibilities, like say:

• Why did no one know about the route before
  • It’s new
    • Why did it suddenly show up?
      • Local astronomical change
      • Change in the astronomy of the new side
      • New technology reveals it
      • Technology on the other side has suddenly allowed them to visit us
  • It has been deliberately hidden
    • Who hid it?
    • Why?
    • How was it revealed?
  • It recurs
    • When was it last here
    • How do we know that?
    • What causes it to oscillate?
      • Astronomy? Maybe a distant binary?
      • Technology? Did someone or something do this deliberately?
  • It was destroyed but has re-emerged
    • Who destroyed it?
    • How?
    • Why is it back?
    • Is it stable now?

I pick a path. That’s the plan. Here’s the whole tree:

• Why did no one know about the route before
  • It’s new
    • Why did it suddenly show up?
      • Local astronomical change
      • Change in the astronomy of the new side
      • New technology reveals it
      • Technology on the other side has suddenly allowed them to visit us
  • It has been deliberately hidden
    • Who hid it?
    • Why?
    • How was it revealed?
  • It recurs
    • When was it last here
    • How do we know that?
    • What causes it to oscillate?
      • Astronomy? Maybe a distant binary?
      • Technology? Did someone or something do this deliberately?
  • It was destroyed but has re-emerged
    • Who destroyed it?
    • How?
    • Why is it back?
    • Is it stable now?
• Who’s there?
  • Are there humans there?
    • Yes: may connect a whole other cluster, different colonist cultures
    • No: did there used to be?
      • Yes: dead failed colony
        • What killed it
        • How long ago
        • Is it still here?
  • No: new territory
    • Intelligence?
      • Yes: aliens, alien cultures
      • No: used to be but no longer
        • Dead civilization
        • Reclaimed by nature or ruined?
      • No: example of pristine location, no penetration by intelligence. What’s awesome? What’s horrible? It has to be DIFFERENT. No one has EVER been here.
• What’s there
  • Nothing. What the hell? How is there a slipknot to nothing?
  • A normal system
  • A normal system with something anomalous
    • Black hole
    • Neutron star
    • Giant artifact
    • Evidence of ancient civilization
  • A very not normal system
    • Impossible orbital arrangements
    • Planet sized artificial structures
      • Bigger?
    • An artificial star
      • How do we know it’s artificial?

This can be used at two levels. At one level, it’s a thought process you can adopt in its most general form: ask a few big questions, answer them, and let the answers raise more questions. That’s one kind of mind’s tool.

If you are not comfortable with something so unbounded, at least in the context of this game, you can literally use this tree. I only used a fraction of it and even if you pick the same things I did, you probably won’t present them the same way I did. And your players won’t be arriving with the same baggage mine did. It will be different.

And of course this could be further formalized into a randomized oracle.

With the process laid bare, you can choose the level at which you want to ad lib and still benefit from someone having blazed a path for you. Happy trails.

pelagia et al

Some time ago I was really intrigued with oceanic adventure. I tinkered with two games around that time, neither of which really sang but both of which still, I think, have some promise in their premise.

The first was Navigator.

The second was Pelagia.

There might be a third — there’s a way in which Polyp fits in there too.

Navigator was about modern (ish) pirates and criminals making a living on the ocean around Thailand, smuggling and otherwise getting into trouble between exotic and poorly policed coastal cities and villages. It’s obviously a rip-off of Black Lagoon but no one has ripped that off very well yet, so it’s still viable.

Maybe it’s not obvious, but the matrix I built it on is Traveller. Or bits of Traveller. It’s very much, I realized, a Traveller premise — you have a ship, there are places on a map to visit, you use your ship, the law is relatively weak. You do crimes, make ends meet, keep the ship running.

I don’t think I have anything written for it any more — my recollection of it is that I was using paper notes exclusively and so they are gone. But it’s a kernel of an idea and I don’t think the actual game was all the interesting. Just the idea. So that could easily happen again.

It definitely had a life path system because I did find this:

Choose: NATIONALITY

Choose NATURE: HUGE, FAST, SMART, or CONNECTED

• • • Huge: Unarmed Hold, Armed Heavy Weapon or Melee, Finesse Intimidate
    • Fast: Unarmed Karate (or whatever), Armed light weapon, Finesse Evade
    • Smart: Unarmed Hide, Armed Thrown weapon, Finesse Hack
    • Connected: Unarmed Talk, Armed Found weapon, Finesse Negotiate

Choose PLAN: CAREFUL, LUCKY, BRAZEN, or CALCULATING

• • • Careful: when unprepared you have a HIDING SPOT
    • Lucky: when unprepared you have a WEAPON
    • Brazen: when unprepared you have NO WEAPON
    • Calculating: when unprepared you have SOMEONE ELSE’S WEAPON

Write a paragraph about yourself that integrates these. Don’t talk history, talk personality.

Choose first career path, COLLEGE, MILITARY, BUSINESS or CRIMINAL. Roll 1d6 on the appropriate chart. Write a bit about that. Write your skill as an aspect but make it clear.

So yeah, pretty much what you’d expect though certainly there are some novel ideas in there. I’m pretty sure it was asymmetric too — player character simulation is not the same as environment simulation. I think it’s also one where the ref never rolls (since that goes hand-in-hand with that kind of asymmetry).

Pelagia I have even fewer notes on. From what I can find it looks like it dates from a period where I was still mostly hacking Fate. It’s also related to Deluge, perhaps a less or at least very differently apocalyptic. You would be people who live in these oceanic cities or villages, mostly underwater, after some event flooded all of the land masses of the world — everything you need you have to find in the ocean.

Since it’s something you bolt onto Fate, it’s mostly about the world and the technology. I never really figured out what you do. Just where you are.

I still think it’s pretty cool. If I ever figure out what characters do here I might restart work on it. If I know what you do, I can find a system for it.

Finally there is the very strange Polyp. In Polyp you are the strange unspecified animal avatars of a god that lives in the middle of a world composed entirely of water. Yeah, not a waterworld in the sense of being covered in water, but in the sense of being only water. This meant I could piss away hundreds of hours researching the states of water at various extraordinary pressures (which is really cool, go do that a little) even though that had little to do with the game. The important part of the game as that your cute little larval gods spent their time (your time at the table) sculpting a civilization out of the permanent ocean.

Now this game had a whole system but I don’t think it was really playable. I’m not sure I can ever find out because the only content I have is in an InDesign file and I cancelled my Adobe subscription ages ago. Maybe it was playable. You know what, since we will never know for sure, let’s just say it was awesome.

What I can recover (and this is not easy since it is also stored in software I am know longer allowed to use, but for different reasons) has this in it:

Yshtra. The water-engine of the world. She is both being and monster, machine and mind. Her name is also the name of this world composed only of water.

The history of Yshtra is one of oscillations, of waves. Over the tens of thousands of years recorded in her memory the world has been many things — civilization, wilderness, heaven, hell, destination and origin. Today it is a wasteland — the last cycle left the world deeply damaged. But you will change that. As the Polyps of Yshtra, you are designed to bring about the next great cycle though it is up to you to decide how. You are empowered with her authority: what you decide will not only be supported by Ysthra, but it will become her doctrine in the next cycle: you will start the world on a course of reconstruction and you will decide what that will be at its peak. You may also find you have sown the seeds for its inevitable decline. This is as it should be.

Of course since I was (and am) always thinking harder about the setting than the system, there is a way to generate the apocalyptic (hmm, that’s happening again too; I wonder why) starting form of the world that you will fix.

The state of life

The current state of life on Yshtra determines what your early conflicts will be about. As you progress through the oracles and tell the story of the world as it is now, codify the degree of fantasy in this reality — are you playing a science fiction game? A fantasy with relatively strict physics? A pure fantasy where physics are subservient to magic? Or will you be causing the physics to take shape as you go? When you know which you want to play, speak it out loud and write it on the map.

1. None. Whatever happened here, even if it was just entropy, it ended all life processes. The chemistry is still possible but there is nothing in the water that swims or eats or metabolizes in any way. Draw your DEATH symbol near Yshtra. Your FIRST CONFLICT could be fixing things so life can start already. Pick a new roller and roll again:

1. It’s dead cold. Solid ice. To kickstart this place again you’re going to need to start from outside the ice.
2. It’s cold. Everything has halted because the world is ice. Some warmth flows in myriad tiny crevices between the bulk of the ice, but not enough for life to sustain itself. Enough to kickstart something, maybe, though.
3. It’s warm. It’s fine. Just that nothing is running.
4. It’s hot. The upper part of the globe is water vapour and the parts that are low enough pressure to be useful are way too hot. Why’s it so hot?
5. It’s so damned hot. The world is vastly larger than it should be because of the heat. Something keeps it so hot that it’s almost entirely water vapour. Again, you might have to go outside the world to solve this one.

2. Some. There is some protozoic life here and so all of the necessary components to sustain life exist. But it can’t yet evolve and it’s not clear what it will become if it does. Draw your SIMPLICITY symbol near Yshtra. Your FIRST CONFLICT can be the jump-starting of life on a correct path. Pick a new roller and roll again:

1. It’s dark. Even the upper layers are too dark for photosynthesis and so the core life forms must do without. They live on some other energy source entirely — some heat source perhaps? An abundance of an active chemical compound? Radioactivity?
2. It’s bright. A sterilizing radiation from the sun penetrates the upper regions of the world forcing life to operate in the low-energy depths. Is something wrong with the sun? Or just the atmosphere?
3. Monoculture. There’s some life here but it’s all the same and lives in a relative equilibrium meaning there is no competition — no trigger to evolve. This world needs some change.
4. Simple. It’s just not complex enough — it’s a chemical dead-end for life. No amount of competition is going to trigger any interesting complexity. It would make a great food source for something that did, though!
5. Climactic chaos. Something external — weather, asteroid storms, solar instability, something — causes vast periodic extinctions before anything can take hold.

It just goes on like that. There is actually a ton of material here and I might reconsider it. Maybe I have enough tools now to make this one work. There’s an example of play that implies we’re working with some Hollowpoint variant here. This might be a branch of an early Soft Horizon game then.

For example, let’s say we’ve just come out of the Preparation session with the following world:

(Rolled 2 and 2): There is some simple life in the sphere of Yshtra, but the upper reaches of the water are savaged by harsh ultraviolet and worse from the sun.

(Rolled 3): The last cycle ended in disaster — a flourishing civilization damaged the atmosphere of the world (something they thought they didn’t need) and ruined the protection it provided. The sun flares at regular intervals and when it last flared, the habitable areas of the world were sterilized.

The group considers the problem and decides they can either fix the sun, fix the air, change the water so that it acts as its own radiation filter, or change the life so that it is impervious. They decide that they will bend their efforts to changing the water. As this is the opening action and there are four players, the referee rolls 8 dice: 6 6 6 1 1 4 4 3

A daunting opposition!

The players have rolled as follows:

Diisha, a Convert prime, rolls her Observe (3). She is whirling throughout the globe attempting to find more information about the water’s mineral contents and see if there is some way to use it to create a chemical cascade that will make a shield. She rolls: 5 3 4

Amal, a Deceive prime, rolls her Edit (4). She is moving through the past to find times when the water was more resilient and she will nudge some reactions to make them persistent. She rolls: 6 5 4 3

Benek, an Edit prim, rolls her Edit (5). She is moving through the past to find asteroids that were near misses that can be diverted into hits to alter the chemistry of the water. She rolls: 5 5 2 2 3

Since Diisha has rolled no sets, Amal asks to borrow her 4 since it will all make a set for her! Diisha agrees and the agree on the narration: in her travels Diisha has discovered a molecule with extra-physical properties that can be polymerized to create a floating shield on the surface of the water. It would require the presence of some magic in the distant past though. Amal now has: 4 4 6 5 3

Benek would also like a die, the 5, and suggests the narration that Diisha has discovered evidence of a huge asteroid storm in the past that grazed the planet. It would be a rich time period to mine for impacts. Benek now has: 5 5 5 2 2 3

Diisha’s remaining dice are irrelevant as she cannot be attacked since Observe was used to increase team resources.

We begin! The Widest, highest set is the Oppositions’s 6 6 6. The referee narrates: The problem is a crushing one. Time is vast and the things you seek may not even exist. She decides to apply her 6 6 6 to Amal. Amal can choose to take her hit on a 4, ruining a set, or be damaged by the attack. She chooses to take the hit and now has an Immediacy of Sticky — she is finding it hard to move in time. The sets are now:

Diisha: 3
Amal: 5 4 4 3
Benek: 5 5 5 2 2 3
Opposition: 4 4 1 1 3

Benek is next with her trio of 5s. She narrates: But in the depths of time, in that long void between then and now, there is a hope, a shower of asteroids that nearly missed. They contain elements critical to the creation of the Barrier Layer and I change the chances in time so subtly as to cause them to impact instead of miss. She chooses to take out one of the Opposition’s 4s:

Diisha: 3
Amal: 5 4 4 3
Benek: 2 2 3
Opposition: 1 1 3

Amal has the next move with the pair of 4s. She realizes she is vulnerable here and so starts by burning a trait (Justice — a facet of Yshtra that she now no longer believes in) and adds a die rolling a 6 — no help at all). She narrates: There are now minerals in the deep past with the mystical properties needed to form the shield. I nudge them together, trigger the cascade and it begins but will it hold? She takes a 1 from the opposition to protect herself.

Diisha: 3
Amal: 6 5 3
Benek: 2 2 3
Opposition: 3

Finally Benek acts with her pair of 2s. The ancient asteroids mingle with the new reaction and parts of the world are covered for some time. But it isn’t complete and might not be permanent. The job is not yet done. She damages the opposition with a hit from her Edit: it now has an Amenable Past.

It seems this tactic will not work, but neither has it entirely failed. The polyps will need to come up with something new.

This is obviously a game that puts an enormous creative burden on the players.

Lots of apocalyptic water in there.