Tag: Culture

Wiki Week: June 2024

I’m behind, yes, I know. Chivare. The Chivare style and the final review of all the various spell has swallowed up all of my time. I’ve been doing nothing else. I’m nearly finished, but if you’ve wondered where I’ve gone, that’s where.

So here are the month of June updates

House Mistral

So, I goofed. Last month, I released Harrow and mentioned the SubscribeStar poll as the reason for it. Then I checked the polls again this month. Guess what had been the ONE HOUSE SubscribeStar hadn’t voted on? That’s right, House Harrow. So I gave them a freebie and released house Mistral. You can find it here.

House Mistral was an idea I’d had for a long time. We were missing a PK house, and I needed round out my Dune Houses: Harrow is our Harkonnen, Sabine is our Bene Gesserit, so where is our House Atreides? Not in the sense of the foresight that defined it in later books, but the original “heroic” house of the first book. Finally, I talk about how the Empire killed all the aristocrats of the Galactic Core, but in practice all the Houses that we managed to weaken was Elegans. Who did they actually defeat? Presumably lots of houses that don’t get mentioned, so I wanted to include at least one.

Ravok and Korai are the creations of another Discord member. When they’re ready, they’ll be released, but I haven’t heard from them for quite awhile.

This will be the last Maradonian House option for awhile.

The Phoenix Cluster

The Westerly Tribes was one of the winners on SubscribeStar, and I thought “We should just talk about the Phoenix Cluster.” The Phoenix Cluster, has been around longer than Mistral, longer than many “modern” setting elements. All the way back in early Iteration 6, I wanted to make the galaxy more comparable to the situation in Europe in WW2, with the Empire representing Germany fighting a 2-front war; the Union some sort of exaggerated, monstrous version of the Soviet Union, the Alliance representing Europe, and I needed some rough and tumble, relatively remote fringe galaxy that was an industrial power house that could fund the Alliance’s war against the Empire: Space America. A lot of the design of the Alliance is actually based on the Cluster being somewhere beyond the Glorian Rim, hence the locations of Exile and Harrow. The Fourth Templar Chapter poll offered the Phoenix Cluster as an option, and it was chosen. But I never got around to talking about the Cluster, because I figured I’d do the Fringe “Later.”

Later kept getting pushed back further and further. People asked for more Westerly options. The Tribal, divided nature of the Westerly were well known by deep insiders, but not by new Psi-Wars fans, or even the existence of the Cluster. So I put it up to a series of polls, and then slammed headfirst into how to write up a proper tribe, and it got parked, which is a shame. We should get back to it again now. The poll changes a lot of things, such as shoving it under the galaxy, but also binding it to both the Sylvan and the Glorian… somehow? That suggests it connects to the Scattering rather than the Rogue Stars, which is a bit of a shame, but it’s fine.

So when I saw the poll result come up, I thought “Look, let’s just talk all the notes I have and write them all up. How hard will it be?” It was hard, but not too hard. I sometimes struggle with releasing “unfinished” things because there’s a lot of weight of expectation on them, and if I change my mind later, it can upset delicate game balances of fan sensibilities. I should be less cautious, though, because I’m letting the enemy be the perfect of the good, and I think it’s better that people now more about the Westerly Clans than less.

I also took the opportunity to reference the Fourth Templar Chapter poll results, the Ashkeepers. That poll result was… a mess. I’m tempted to redo it, but I don’t want to get in the habit of telling my poll takers to take polls until they get results that I like, but I think now that we have an actual context their opinions might change on some things.

I keep referencing “weird biology” in Xanados. If it’s not clear, back when I did the Generic Space Bestiary, people loves my radial space animals, wheel bears and star dogs and Spider-Trees, so I thought it would be nice to have at least one world with all of those crazy critters. That world is Xanados.

Relics

I ran the next Relic Popularity Contest, and released Relics based on that, and Kain has the next set of relics, of course, so I released those. This nearly rounds out the Serial Killers of Kronos relic set (we’re just missing Lafthalaira’s locket). The Fangs of Mockmaw were convenient, as I released the Venetim just last month, and we get Ancestral Minzu Cookware, which means you guys share my love of that weird Xanados-settled Westerly Clan.

Technically, Sins of the Shadow House won handily. I beg your patience with them. I want to get their signet and their signature force sword finished, and then I’ll release the full set.

But Sorcery Won?

So, the winning result for this month’s Wiki poll as a new Sorcery Set. So why didn’t I release one? Well, if I had run a poll, it would either be Eye Sorcery, which needs some work, or one of the Chivare sorcery sets (probably Blood Sorcery), which definitely has lots of work done on it, but if I’m about to release all of Chivare, does it make sense to put it on the wiki? Well, I’ll run that as a poll option next month, we’ll see. But I promise it’ll be worth the wait.

Wiki Highlight: Federation Remnant Culture (Galactic Culture)

 The winner of this month’s “Release the Balloon People” poll was Federation Remnant Culture, a lengthy document detailing the “standard” Galactic Culture of Psi-Wars.

I wanted to write it for a few reasons.  First, whenever I read up on a sci-fi game, I find myself at a loss as to how the world works.  With a fantasy setting, I assume it works like every fantasy novel ever written unless told otherwise (for example, I do not need to be told that taverns exist or how they work). For games set in the modern world, I can draw on real world experiences and cultures (and likewise, I can research historical settings).  But when it comes to sci-fi settings, I need to be grounded in how the day-to-day life works. Do kids go to school in Trinity: Aeon? What’s a day of work look like in Transhuman Space? What does romance look like in Eclipse Phase? How do people dress in Sufficiently Advanced? And so on.

The answer to these questions in Psi-Wars are “pretty much just like you’d expect,” and I wanted to emphasize that, to set the reader’s mind at ease. Psi-Wars is to space opera what D&D is to fantasy, after-all, but I find it helps to be told that explicitly, so I don’t have to worry.

That said, there are almost certainly in-universe things that tend to be very specific that players would like the option of name-dropping.  What TV shows do people watch in Psi-Wars? What drink does Space James Bond what shaken, rather than stirred? What game does a smuggler get caught cheating at? In principle, these don’t matter: the character likes some TV show, the spy likes some drink, and the smuggler plays some game, and we can abstract this away (Current Affairs (Pop Culture), Connoisseur (Alcohol) or Gambling) but players often like to name-drop.  So the last section of culture mostly references these things and consists of a variety of names and simple concepts and some traits that a player might tie into them.

I released it as a draft to my backers rather than on the wiki because the real reason I wrote it was to settle on a baseline before I started writing Lithian culture, which is the next big project (and likely most important non-standard culture in the setting), and I wanted to know what I was contrasting it with, and what topics I should cover.  So I wanted that written up, and then once I had Lithian culture written up, I could compare, contrast and edit them to work better.  But once my backers overwhelmingly chose this as an option, I realized they’re probably right: I can always go back in and edit Federation Remnant culture, it’s extremely useful already, and it’s going to serve as inspiration and a foundation for Lithian culture anyway.

So, I hope you enjoy it.  You can read it here.