Before Star Wars, my modules worked much like a standard Knights of the Dinner Table session. The PCs would be a group of strangers who united under some nebulous pretext. We’d find a dungeon filled with traps and monsters. We’d avoid the traps, kill the monsters and take their stuff. Along the way the PCs would try to outdo each other in carnage. Crits were politely applauded, fumbles would be met with mocking scorn. I’ll admit it was fun and besides, I had no idea there was any other way to play.

The Star Wars game I walked into was a new kind of beast. The GM ran it like a movie. He had a soundtrack, celebrity portraits for NPCS and detailed maps that were drawn to look like something out of  an official supplement. What truly stood out however, was his pacing. He kept the game moving. Our characters ran from one scene to the next at breakneck speed. He didn’t give us time to argue rules. We didn’t measure out 5 foot blocks on dungeon maps in order to calculate the volume of our grenade explosions – we threw and prayed. An action round involved more than move, hit and damage. We had to weave through traffic, leap across rooftops and dodge explosions in the thick of the fight. The GM seemed intent on using the universe to kill our characters. We loved it.

The players in this group were amazing. Something happened with them that I had never seen before. Near the start of the first session our characters had to chase down a rebel leader on a monorail. It was leaving the station when we arrived. Every character but mine succeeded on the roll to jump on the train. My ended up clinging to the side for dear life. In my old group she would have just died. Everyone would laugh and the game would continue while I found a new sheet. This time, without hesitation, a player informed the GM that his character was smashing through the window, grabbing my character, and pulling her in. I was floored by the idea of a party where PCs looked out for each other. Of course, the GM had given us a good in-character reason to work together form the start. We were an Imperial Special Ops team who had worked together for years.

Needless to say, it was one of the best gaming experiences of my life.

This has coloured how I run my games since and it’s also heavily influenced how I’ve written Knights of the Hidden Sun. I want my game to play like a movie. I want Knights to look out for each other, and I’ve designed tools to help other GMs do this:

• I’ve added a Hazard System to the Ready 2 Run core rules (used in Aeternal Legends) so that characters can jump through windows, pull innocent civilians from harm and run through an exploding dreadnought in the midst of combat.
• Characters start the game knowing each other; they’ve trained together for five years before starting their first mission.
• The reward system is designed to encourage teamwork, not  showboating. Of one person does something cool, everyone wins.

If you can easily run this game like a high-octane action flick then I’ll consider this project a success.

Bureau Announcer: This is a thought construct from your Bureau of Records. To receive a balanced, accurate dream of the following report please clear your mind. Thought transmission will commence in 10 seconds.

Bureau Anchor Valdyn Trad emerges from the clouds. His silver robes, finely chiselled, ochre face and double-irised green eyes radiate convey concern, wisdom and trustworthiness.

Valdyn Trad: Galactic harmony suffered a grave challenge today when the pirate Bartholomew Deth’s so-called “Black Fleet” jumped into Tuldekath and severely damaged its orbital defences. Military sources indicate that his fleet consists of 63 heavily modified Second War dreadnoughts, 38 of which were sent for the assault.

You are in the observation deck of an Archonate transport. You slip and catch yourself as the vessel lurches wildly to avoid a golden bolt from a huge basalt vessel. Fade out to clouds and through to the office of General Than. You stand before her.

General Than: They took us by surprise. One moment, it’s Sovereignty Day. The next, disaster – but we rallied to prevent an even worse crisis.  We lost so much in that instant that if we hadn’t responded, Tuldekath would be ashes and stone, nothing more.

The General and her office fade into the bridge of an emergency response ship, soul detection spires extended. Valdyn Trad beside you, right behind the captain.

Valdyn Trad: The pirates’ primary target was the cruise ship Serendipity, where Speaker Alice Chant was attending a charity gala. With orbital defences neutralized, Black Fleet marauders looted the ship at their leisure and scuttled it. The Bureau has confirmed that Deth personally assassinated Speaker Chant before binding her to a think disk.

According to reports, defence fleet fragments appeared to be falling stars from Vindicun City’s ground level. Emergency personnel say the number of ghosts in orbit make it unlikely that the Black Fleet took hostages.

Deth spared one solider to deliver a message via think disk. Forensic examination confirms that the disk is powered by Speaker Chant’s soul.

Bureau Announcer: The following transmission been altered for content.

Bartholomew Deth wipes his blade with the hem of his cloak. A chill wind roars: air coursing through the shattered crystal of the Serendipity’s recreational deck.

Bartholomew Deth: Hail, sheep of Roaa, cowards. You’re fit for domination by a superior force: a predator to thin your ranks and teach you to adapt or abide in misery. I will grant you that which you so richly deserve. Know this: No star can hide you. No army can protect you. No matter what you do or where you go, I shall sup upon your suffering.

The image dissolves into blue clouds and the Bureau sigil.

Bureau Announcer: End transmission. Alteration of this thought construct is a major infraction of Archonate Law. Please report any discrepancies to the nearest Galactic Security office.

*   *   *

I admit it: I’ve been tardy posting progress updates on Chris Challice’s Knights of the Hidden Sun. I actually finished developing Chapter One at the end of October. Chapter One is the history and current affairs section. Chris did some fantastic work here that underlines one of the challenges of developing setting-focused material: taking a cool idea where it demands to go.

In KotHS, people on civilized worlds use strand stones to fully immerse themselves in runecrafted media. This network of dreams allows people to fully experience events on other worlds (subject to editing, of course). Consequently, literacy is uncommon except among the highly educated. You don’t need it to dream, and most other interactions only require spoken words and images.

Chris included several examples of these thought transmissions, so my job was to reconcile them with established facts, (literacy is uncommon) highlight their role as forms of popular media and make it feel like these dreams flow right into your mind. That’s why I expanded the text into a script style, with imagery to immerse the reader in each transmission.

Chris also wrote most of the chapter from an in-universe perspective. I love this technique because GMs can take material right from the book to use as-is. I developed this chapter to cleave to that perspective whenever possible. Chapter Two will have a similar focus as we move into descriptions of daily life, important people and the other information players need to feel like they live in Roaa.

Tonight’s game was special enough to bring to Mobunited.com because it ended in a peculiar triumph: Four of the five PCs committed suicide, and the fifth was murdered due the the machinations of one of those suicides.

It was a matter of principle, you see. The characters were on a mission to either steal or suppress force field technology that belonged to their culture’s rival, the hypercapitalist Universal States. Tough job; the research lab was in an Exthreat Facility, designed to contain experiments that might draw the ire of the Transapient AIs who built the Sphere. The facility was a tetraneutron bottle suspended by virtual particle switching, which made it indestructible and in emergencies, collapsible, whereupon it would release lethal radiation and sink into the Sphere medium.

Our heroes wanted to avoid the deathtrap and steal its data from an overhead dirigible that contained hard storage of the US’ research. They bluffed their way in but were eventually forced to kill a number of surgically engineered warrior “debtors” (the US underclass) and officer-interns, until a chase speckled with brain/network hacking got their asses lasered and stunned.

I woke them up on the USS Manifest Destiny, an local enemy destroyer under the supervision of intelligence officers. Their enhancements were gone and their “brane” neural implants had been hacked to hit them with epileptic seizures if they tried anything violent. Their host Major Yamazaki told them their ship had been captured and that unless they answered her questions now (before their thoughts were converted to data – not an easy thing to do fast in this setting) she’d kill 10 of the crew (a lie – the Antipodean was safely hidden underwater).

Now I expected the PCs to hatch an escape plan by using their common culture and wits, or shift things forward to leave them on a prison colony in US territory, able to escape (or lead a revolt) and deal with the reshaped politics that came about due to their actions.

Instead, they chose to die. They viewed the situation as an abomination, against everything they stood for, and three of the five believed that any future duplicates would be them, even if they were out of date, memory-wise. One more believed she’d die, but her double would be “good enough” for the cause of total liberty.

Let me emphasize one thing: This wasn’t their reluctant last choice. They started killing each other after about three minutes of discussion, and were happy to do it. And another: It wasn’t a fit of pique, an expression of anger on the meta-game level.

Steve’s character Buck thought that was bull, but he didn’t interfere as Kearsley’s Mikhail, our anarcho-Kirk, rapidly broke three of his comrades’ necks and stomped on their skulls to ensure data recovery would be impossible, even as he shuddered through an oncoming seizure.  Major Yamazaki ran in with guards and dragged the three bodies away (Sita, Aviva, Anton – the medic, XO and helm, respectively) in a futile attempt to suck some information out.

Yamazaki was going to salute Mikhail for his iron will, but Mikhail and Buck mocked her (a good thing – it was her gambit to get them to calm down, stun them while making them think she was killing them, and just suck the data out) but they mocked her and with the last of his strength, Mikhail threw her across the room. The insults cut so deep she put the brig in private mode and vaporized them.

They won. Holy fuck.

See, I had a certain vision about their culture and values, but I was gloriously wrong – I couldn’t have been right, because I set up an atmosphere where individuality was sacred and bound in a common hatred of bondage. They saw the debtors. They didn’t want that. After the session they talked to me about influenced ranging from historical anarchism to the Ramayana and were supremely satisfied with their decisions, from giving their necks to barehanded death to the sarcastic barbs they hurled at Yamazaki, where they disarmed even the notion of dignified last words.

Their successors – clones with out of date memories, half-compiled from public records and spun into a fragile algorithm of consciousness – are ordinary crew now, their own legal heirs, preparing as the Antipodean joins the Fifth Battle Collective to answer for the decisions of their forebears.

Freedom. Grim, incredible freedom.

We’re taking a break, watching a movie next week. Then Star Wars to lighten things up, while I figure out how we can possibly top what happened tonight.

Geist: The Sin-Eaters

I wrote the (unfortunately, somewhat version-dated, compared to post-playtest revisions) krewe rules and I hashed out their role in the setting. Previews made some people assume the krewes were all gang-like, but the other half of that section shows that this isn’t the whole story.

One thing I wanted to do in my section is get rid of one of the big barriers to using mythology and the occult in RPGs: the sense of ownership, expertise and authority some folks feel they have over it, which drives people to avoid hacking together things as they see fit. Ironically this makes it more like actual occultist or mythology, which is pretty much cultural Lego anyway. In Geist, people have revelations that don’t make sense, don’t have to make sense, and combine all the chunky debris of pop culture with the cool flow of recurring motifs. Nobody gets to play the expert, and everybody does.

I also wrote some stuff on antagonists.

Eclipse Phase

I didn’t do any writing for this one but Rob Boyle and co. kindly asked me to drop in and participate in initial brainstorming. I helped out with some names for things, (the Exsurgent virus) suggested an embryonic version of the tagline, warned of a terrible Putonghua pun and took a strong AI/digital consciousness stance in discussions about psychosurgery and forking. This wasn’t because I’m a transhumanism geek but because I happen to be familiar with the more extreme end of the stance and thought it should be considered.

Now Eclipse Phase doesn’t entirely adhere to the strong stance and this is a good thing. When people complain about the limits of some version of transhuman technology they often don’t consider the global picture. They want effortless body-swapping and personality apps, but don’t deeply examine the combined effect these things have at “maximum setting” in RPG narratives: They totally trash them. Yes, that even includes your funky nu-game POV nobody’s thought of before, because you’re just not thinking big enough. Egan’s Diaspora is too weak as well, for that matter. The primary issue is the nonexistence of real risk or tension in characters that simply cannot have involuntary experiences in any way, shape or form.

(This kind of reminds me when people didn’t get my work on the old Mage‘s Ascension, because they figured it was “One side wins!” or “We get to ride unicorns!” No, it’s bigger than that. The ultimate potential of idealized, Singularitarian transhumanism is bigger than our narratives too.)

Fan Expo

I’m going to Toronto’s Fan Expo this weekend. I’ll be doing panels and maybe handing out cards but no table – I want to get out there, game a bit and look around. I’ll be co-sponsoring (putting in for snacks) a Meet and Greet at Hoops, a nearby bar. Feel free to drop by and chat! People sometimes seek me out to sign things and I’m always happy to do it. This event is your best bet.

What Else?

This is the first blog entry in a while because I’ve been very busy with an electronic gaming project (not the WoD MMO). I will have more stuff on GMing, more announcements about upcoming games — just not right now.

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.

Things to note:

1) In terms of development, this takes RPGs into where SF was in the 1970s. This is an absolutely accurate description, because the thread feels like, “What if the World of Darkness was a Joanna Russ story from 1976 or so?” That’s not a diss on the woman who started this thread. In fact, it puts her a decade ahead of the conceptual stride.

You may not need or want this implementation, but looking at SF, this wave of strongly essentialist-gender SF ran along really fascinating SF of all stripes. Historically, you can find the roots of this over a split as to whether or not the Vietnam War was a fine, dandy idea. Seeing what each side produced after that gives you a pretty good idea of what kind of politics best suits the creative impulse, but aside from the opportunity to make that quip, that’s a topic for another time.

2) It came from the World of Darkness, a ramshackle collection of tropes that supposed to injure your creativity or something. It didn’t come from the indie games that are supposed to specifically support this kind of exploration. I suppose you could do it with Dogs in the Vineyard, though.

I suspect that creativity like this often come from positing an antithesis or contrasting look at a developed set of ideas. The history of Christianity is kind of interesting for comparison’s sake. All the “indie gaming” movements of Christianity — the back to basics, reconstruct the faith from core principles approach — bombed. Protestantism is founded on complex intellectual structures formed in reaction to orthodoxy. After that, most of the only successful “purist” theologies were really responding to a set of values that postdated the end of Christendom as a viable concept.

So it is with gaming.

Many games look like an excellent start for this kind of project. Shock might handle this kind of thing, but discussion about playing (and playing with) Shock all end up being variants of, “What if some banal special effect existed?” Meh. Being an enemy of humanity or body-jumping are your basic 1950s-60s deal, but without the insufferable infodump twaddle of Robert Heinlein.