Donnel tripped halfway back to the wagon. It was a lance, half shattered, cast aside like a broken toy. When he glanced back up, he saw corpses strewn about as if they’d been dashed against the earth by an angry giant.
The captain and his men were dead. In less than a minute the strangers had killed all twenty one. The three still paced the scene, clad in the raiment of their powers.
Donnel heard grinding metal and a hiss; the Sun Bird’s hatch began to close, and the crystal domes beneath its wings glowed red.
“They’re going to fight us in that?” Riann sounded incredulous.
“You want to turn back?” Luin asked dryly.
“No.” Dinnik growled, shaking blood of his sword.
They charged the ship.
* * *
In Knights of the Hidden Sun those guys are you, and the introduction is designed to raise those expectations and help players slip into the role. Developing Chris’ work here meant adding imagery to appeal to the five senses and drilling down into the most fundamental elements of the setting. For imagery, it was a matter of tweaking some of the fiction Chris wrote, adding more sights and sounds for the sake of creating sensory familiarity. When a Sun Bird’s airlock closes we need to hear grinding metal. We want weapons to have a particular glow. As a GM Chris is really good at bringing this to his tabletop games, so I often think about how he would say something.
The sensory important in all games, but especially games with SF elements, since we have such strong associations with particular television and film properties (and video games, too) in the way we conceive of the “soft” SF genre.
It’s also easy to get into the trap of writing about one game in the context of others, but not everyone in your target audience shares. You compare your work t other work in a kind of mental shorthand. It’s natural, but development needs to do without most of that “shorthand.” If most people in your target audience can understand a reference go for it, but err on the side of caution. That’s why I added the following quick points to the introduction. I wanted to provide an at a glance primer about the following:
- Bronze and Stone, Not Steel and Circuits: Without runecrafting Roaan technology would resemble that of Bronze Age Earth – but with it, characters have everything they need to adventure in a classic space opera setting. Swords are made of magically shaped and hardened stone or copper. Spacecraft are sculpted and carved, not riveted and welded.
- Everybody’s Human: The definition of “human” extends to virtually any sapient life form. Your character can look like virtually anything, no matter where she came from or who her parents were.
- The Gods Are Dead: Roaa had true Gods: beings who represented elemental principles, guided the souls of the deceased and accepted worship. As far as the average Roaan knows, the Gods were slain, and are not missed, because people believe they were tyrants.
- There Are Secret Powers: Most people believe the Gods are all dead, but a few belong to conspiracies backed by surviving deities. One of these is the Hidden Sun: the players default organization. Only the servants of secret powers have runes etched into their living souls. These runebearers have incredible powers.
- Souls Power Everything: The soul is immortal, but has no preset destination after death. The wealthy can live forever as golems; everyone else powers runecrafted devices until they’re exhausted. Even then, the soul lives on in a kind of limbo.
I’ll talk about more along these lines as I go, but probably irregularly.