Tag: Setting Design

Hunting for Inspiration II: Stranger than Fiction

I’m afraid I can’t find the quote by Kenneth Hite, but it amounts to this: No matter how creative you are, the real world will come up with something stranger and cooler than you can ever come up with, and you’d thus be a fool not to pillage history.

This is especially important for Psi-Wars, for two reasons.  First, Star Wars, from which Psi-Wars draws is principle inspiration, is very thoroughly based on history, especially the History Channel favorites like World War 2 and the Roman Empire.  If we want Psi-Wars to feel the same, then we need to draw our inspiration from a similar source.  But more importantly, Psi-Wars must necessarily be larger than Star Wars, given that Star Wars is “only” a movie, while Psi-Wars needs to be a setting that supports a huge variety of different possible games.  That means we need more material to steal from, and there’s hardly more material than all of human history.

As before, though, I intend to pursue emulation rather than imitation.  I don’t want Psi-Wars to be the the Fall of the Roman Republic with the serial numbers scratched off, I want to understand what made Rome fall, and then draw parallels with that with the fall of my Galactic Empire.  This is the same thing Lucas did in the prequels though I’m quite sure I’ll draw different historical conclusions than he did (It takes more than a single war to turn a democracy into a dictatorship).  We need to do our homework, and I certainly have (Look, I like history, okay!), and I’ve noted some sources below.  Those are just some sources, a place where you might start.  The point here is hunting for ideas, not necessarily a rigorous historical thesis, thus I’ve happily included semi-fictional works and well-researched RPGs.  It’s not meant as an exhaustive bibliography of books I’ve gone through.

So, what part of history can I draw on for inspiration for Psi-Wars?

All of it.

Rome

Gladiator, from Wikipedia
My primary source:

Star Wars clearly draws a lot of its inspiration from the Rise and Fall of the Roman Republic.   Here, too, the Republic (with its Senate) is overthrown in a time of crisis by a man who becomes Emperor, only to face a civil war from his rivals, while barbaric (alien) threats press in on the civilized core.  The rightful order of the world is on threat from all sides, and the Emperor destroys the Republic to save it.

And, really, why wouldn’t Star Wars draw inspiration from this rich source?  Rome is nearly as far back as you can go and still run into, as Dan Carlin puts it, “full color history,” where we have a pretty good picture from the records of what’s going on.  Suddenly, a strange and alien culture springs up that’s utterly unlike our own, and yet still so recognizably human.  If their democracy could fall, then surely so can ours.  George Lucas clearly wanted us to pay attention to that danger.

An empire is defined as “an aggregate of nations or people ruled over by an emperor or other powerful sovereign or government, usually a territory of greater extent than a kingdom
–Wikipedia

But the Star Wars version of events misses some key points, and we could draw on even more.  First, the Roman Republic didn’t become the Roman Empire, it was already an empire!  Rome had conquered all of its territory first, and only when that conquest fundamentally changed the fabric of its institutions did the Republic collapse, to be replaced by an Emperor.

The change-over didn’t happen all once either.  Every school kid knows about Julius Caesar, but he was never Emperor.  His adopted son, Augustus Caesar, was the first Roman Emperor.  Instead, what we see are long serious of events where to increasingly entrenched and violent sides come to blows, and when they kill Caesar (a hero to all of Rome!), that was a bridge too far, and then when Augustus Caesar wins, it’s clear to him that the only way to end the cycles of violence is to clamp down with an iron fist.

And the “rebellion” wasn’t nearly as clear cut as we see in Star Wars.  Instead, we see the Republic vs Imperial side, of course, but then once the Imperial side wins, that side devolves into a horrid conflict between the victorious triumvirate until Augustus Caesar is the last man standing.  This, by the way, is surprisingly typical for uprisings of this sort.  Moreover, the “liberty loving side” was largely aristocratic.  The war for the soul of Rome was fought by those who stood for the constitution, the aristocratic, land-owning, slave-holding elites, vs the dictatorial populist demagogues.  The land owning class had gained enormous wealth and power during the rise of Rome, and didn’t want to share it with the increasingly impoverished common man, and one of the core justifications of the various power-grabs during this era was to better the lot of the common man.  This rather puts a new spin on the rebellion being led by a Princess, doesn’t it?

In Star Wars, Palpatine definitely rises to power on the back of a war, as did the various populist Tribunes of Rome, but in Rome, the wars were of conquest and genocide or, more occasionally, in defense of the Republic against vast barbarian incursions.  Desperately frightened Romans would give more and more power to their best and brightest, who would turn around and impose some serious reform that would incense one side of the other and, especially if they were making reforms that benefited the people, resulted in their assassination.

If we borrow some of this for Psi-Wars, what alien menace represents our barbaric incursions that our heroic would-be Emperor can gain fame standing against?  Who are the aristocrats that stand for “the constitution” of the current Galactic Republic?  How does this Emperor die, and who rises in his place?  And how does that particular civil war play out?  We have the aristocratic side, but if they’re largely defeated, does the Empire have to deal with other, upstart imperials from the alliance-from-hell that they made to take control of the empire?

And what fundamentally changed the fabric of the Republic so completely to allow this?

We have no Jedi in Rome… but we do have Christians.  Hunted by the Empire, eventually, in a civil war, a man sees their power and marches forth under their banner and unifies the empire once more, and then purges all of the old ways in favor of this new way.  In this version, our Jedi become a new order, not an old one.  The Sith, perhaps, arehe Gracchi Brothers the old way, a barbaric psi-practice that devours offerings and controls dark magics, but the new Jedi order, while lightly and holy, has its own inquisitors who are overzealous in their destruction of these old ways.  Light vs Dark becomes the New Enlightment vs the Old Paganism.
In place of Rome’s staggeringly large slave class, we have hard-working droids   But in Star Wars, droids never revolted.  Why not a few droid revolts in our setting? Robots who seek to free themselves from the shackle of dominion, only to be pushed back down?  Who is our Robot Spartacus?
Some additional interesting characters or ideas:

World War 2

from “Meet the Men who Hunt Nazis,” the Telegraph

Sources:

If Star Wars is the story of how democracies fall and how they can be restored, I must admit that I find most discussions of the rise of Nazi Germany frustrating, as they seldom get into the root causes.  Instead, Hitler inexplicably rises to power thanks to fear and his magical, hypnotic powers, which matches how Star Wars treats it.  Personally, I found Hite’s discussions of the origins of the Volkish movement and its connections to German nationalism enlightening, as well as the Interwar Period’s discussion of the delicate balancing act the Weimar republic was forced to make, including its evident external focus and unwillingness to violate treaties the German people found increasingly inexcusable.  Thus, the rise of the Nazi party has more to do with economic hardship and a defiant wish for Germany to “take its rightful place” with the other European empires (the fact they were empires is sometimes forgotten in these discussions), as well as willingness to be “unapologetically German” in the sense that there seemed a general sense that being “unapologetically German” was controversial (perhaps because it was!).  You can also find a strong element of propaganda and secret police inside the Nazi party from the very beginning: one reason Hitler was able to rise to power was that as soon as he had any power, he used it to dramatically suppress dissent.

Thus, in Psi-Wars, what sort of economic hardships and politically incorrect ideas begin to give rise to the rise of the Empire?  What sort of secret police does the Emperor deploy to enforce his will upon the people and thus end the Galactic Republic?

Star Wars also borrows heavily from the imagery of World War 2, with great capital ships acting as carriers and battleships, while starfighters act as fighter.  Stormtroopers draw their inspiration from German storm troopers, the AT-AT from the German Tiger, and so on.  The Galactic Civil War of Star Wars is fought very much like World War 2, only “in space.”

But the politics of the war is completely different.  In Star Wars, the only two powers are the Empire and the Rebellion, which isn’t a foreign power at all.  This is an internal conflict.  In World War 2, of course, Germany allied with other powers (Italy and Japan) to form the Axis, and the Allies included freedom-loving British (including aristocrats and a commonwealth that contained colonized nations, like India) and America, as well as the decidedly unfree Russia.  If we draw the parallel further, who takes on these roles?  The idea of an aristocracy fighting to hold onto their old privilege matches nicely with the parallel for the Roman civil war, but how do we represent America? Are they heroic minute-men or grasping, corporate industrialists with imperial ambitions of their own, or both?  And what could stand in for Russia in the most brutal part of the war?  If communism represents the rise of a virtually enslaved labor class against their oppressors, then what if the role of Russia in Psi-Wars is an area of space where robots have overthrown their masters and seek to persuade other robots to join them in their revolution?  And what represents Japan or Italy?  Does some ancient and mDan Carlin’s Wrath of the Khansystical culture join forces with the industrial might of the galactic core?  Or perhaps this is best represented by a fusion between a splinter sect of our not-Jedi-Order joining forces with the Empire?

The Germans sought to cleanse the world of Jews, but they had some rather specific reasons.  Setting aside centuries of racial mistrust of the Jews, conspiracy theories often center on banking and Nazi Germany was no different.  Germans held people like the Rotschilds responsible for their downfall after WW1 (and you can find this sort of conspiracy making the rounds every few years to this day).  We might draw from this a quiet (alien?) consortium of bankers, lenders and/or technologists who quietly empower people from behind the scenes (the “banking clans” of Clone Wars).  Alternatively, the Jews might represent the Jedi, hunted to the brink of extinction by the Empire… or perhaps they represented by alien races who are being purged by a human Empire that wants to remain “pure.”

Fascinatingly, the lethal super-weapon of WW2 wasn’t acquired by the Nazis, but by the allies.  What happens in a setting where the Rebel Alliance is the one that acquires the Death Star and uses it as a last ditch effort to kill literally billions by blowing major Imperial worlds?  What sort of tone does that set?

Some additional interesting characters or ideas:

Sengoku Jidai and the Edo Era

Total War Shogun 2 Wallpaper

Sources:

Star Wars draws a great deal of its inspiration from historical japan and, in fact, the word “Jedi” comes from  “Jidai” (Jidaigeki, specifically, or “period piece”, movies set in Japan’s historical past).  Jedi are the samurai of the Japanese warring period, and Star Wars itself began basically as a riff on the Hidden Fortress, though the Phantom Menace draws more heavily on its ideas.

Using Japan as inspiration becomes difficult, because while the mood of a chambara film definitely comes across in Star Wars (at least the original trilogy), the history far less so.  When we discuss Japanese history in regards to the samurai, two eras generally spring to mind.  The first is the Sengoku Jidai, the warring era, where the Ashikaga Shogunate collapsed and various regional daimyos sprang up and vied for power until, at last, Tokugawa declared himself Shogun.  This is the era that features samurai in armor and on horseback, cutting one another down and dying for their daimyo.  It’s also the era that features ninjas.

If we borrow from this for Psi-Wars, interesting things emerge.  If space knights are samurai, then this war is fought with space knights!  And the emperor is a ceremonial position by this point, a religious figure head and a rallying figure dominated by the shogun.  Each daimyo becomes the lord of a specific world, or a master of a few worlds.  This, in short, looks nothing like Star Wars… but interesting nonetheless!

The second major era that springs to mind is the one most commonly featured in the “Jidaigeki” so beloved by George Lucas, is the Edo era, long after the Tokugawa shogunate has established its dominance.  Now, the samurai has devolved back to his roots as bureaucrat and often enjoys a ceremonial position so long as his master continues to receive a stipend from the Shogunate.  This is the era of the kimono-clad samurai who uses his fast-draw technique in a sudden duel, where the man to first draw his blade wins.  It’s also the era of the geisha, where whores play at being ladies for the amusement of their largely fallen samurai customers who try to pretend to be more genteel than they really are, while gamblers and yakuza thugs similarly pretend to be classier than they are, and the lines between “noble” and “commoner” begin to slowly blur.  It’s a somber and often sad era, not entirely applicable to the great galactic war… but the mood certain fits a galaxy whose best, most energetic days are behind it, which yearns to return to that golden age of yesteryear, even as time draws it relentlessly forward into a new and strange era.

Interesting Ideas

Romance of the Three Kingdoms and the Mandate of Heaven

Sources:
You know, while we’re out here on the “mystical orient anyway,” let’s discuss a civilization that has risen and fallen and risen and fallen in seemingly eternal cycles while locked in a constant struggle of “light” and “dark”, while producing supposedly super-human philosopher-warriors: China.
While not exactly history, the Romance of the Three Kingdoms is one of the great pieces of Chinese literature, probably about as influential in sino-sphere as Arthurian legend, or even Shakespeare, is in the anglo-sphere.  If we look closely at it, we find a lot of really good Star Wars inspiration.  The military precision of the Chinese soldier is a good match for the precision of Storm Troopers.  Cao Cao becomes the Emperor, with Liu Bei as our leader of the heroic Rebellion, and the Sun family our third party, sometimes isolationist, sometimes willing to join in the Rebellion.  And like in Star Wars, this is a proper civil war, one that often matches the movements of the Galactic Civil War, with Liu Bei and his forces often on the run just a few steps ahead of the dangerous power of Cao Cao’s forces.
It’s also one that fits modern Action RPG sensibilities nicely.  Each side has their own over-the-top heroes, and major plot points turn on the actions of spies, assassins, and delicate damsels who have learned to turn heads.  When it reaches back for root causes, we have barbarian invasion, gluttinous usurpers, religiously inspired rebellions, and so on.
We don’t have to stick with the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, of course.  We can race backwards or forwards, because China has some of the most richly detailed history in the world, often going back farther than Europe’s “classical” history.  Because of its surprisingly close parallels with Star Wars, I wouldn’t view it as an alternate version so much as an interesting source for characters and locations.

Additional Characters and Ideas

Medieval Europe and the Templars

My primary sources:
The most common criticism leveled at Star Wars is that it’s “Fantasy in Space,” but that’s not entirely unfair.  Star Wars draws a lot of its ideas from medieval Europe, from European nobility (Princess Leia, Count Dooku, Jedi Knights) to literal dragons to “crazy old wizards.”  When George Lucas came up with the Jedi Order, the Knights Templar were definitely one of his core inspirations.
Like Chinese history, European history is rich with details that we can steal from, from knightly orders to wars to kings.  A few periods that particularly interest me are the Dark Ages right after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Crusades, and the various Knightly orders, all of which I think we can bring into Psi-Wars.  Why not include some leper kings, or explore the murky origins of the Leper kings, or ponder what crusader kingdoms look like a sci-fi setting, or how we might translate a struggle between pope and anti-pope during the Western Schism into Psi-Wars?

I must emphasize caution when exploring the templars as they represent both a very familiar history and a very strange, mysterious history, as conspiracies and magical thinking shrouds templar history in a veil of mystery and controversy.  However, we can grab whatever crazed conspiracy theories we want, and mix familiar medieval history with other histories (the rise of the Ikko Ikki, the fall of the Shaolin temple) to create something new and unique.

Antiquity

The Fire of Troy
My Primary Sources
GURPS Fantasy likes to discuss history in cycles, which is hardly knew, people have been doing that for ages because for most of human history, that’s how it worked, at least close enough that we can neatly tie off history with a bow with a narrative like this.  European civilization rose into the Renaissance after the black death, which caused a collapse of High Medieval Europe, which itself rose after the Great Migration ruined the Western Roman Empire, which rose along with the rise of the Greek empire that caused the collapse of Pax Persia, which rose to fill the gap left by the great Bronze Age Collapse.
Personally, I find this last the most fascinating.  There existed a surprisingly cosmopolitan civilization, rife with shared mythology and diplomacy and trade and war, that started somewhere around 3000 BC and ran to about 1500 BC before a series of disasters (slowly, over the course of hundreds of years) destroyed it.  If you study that era of history, you find an ancient world that was ancient to people we think of as ancient.  When Caesar looked upon the Pyramids, they were older to him than he is to us.  Think about that.  Let that sink in.  Someone who is ancient history to us, whose statues have decayed, whose city has been so completely rebuilt that we barely have crumbling ruins of it, he met a queen who was part of 250 year-old dynasty, the Ptolemys, who had been invaders of a civilization that had been more-or-less continuously self-ruling for nearly 2000 years, and its greatest wonders were long behind it, more than 2000 years before the Greeks had seen the place, never mind the Romans!
Space opera loves this idea of ancient worlds and lost ruins, and who wouldn’t? Pulp came into its own in the same era that Howard Carver was dusting off ancient Egyptian relics, and the man that gave us Star Wars also gave us Indiana Jones.  But more than that, it actually makes sense.  There’s no reason to believe that every intelligent life form would evolve at the same time, so we would expect when we finally do go out into the galaxy to find the remains of lost civilizations.  Star Wars, of course, doesn’t seek that level of realism.  It has ruins for the “Wahoo!” factor.  Even so, Star Wars often implies that the original Jedi and the original Sith weren’t human, and that hunting down lost ruins and fallen civilizations is a vital part of the plot.  I definitely want that in Psi-Wars.
Furthermore, ancient history is huge, an entire region going from the Nile to the Indus Valley, all interconnected with one another, covering a span of literally thousands of years.  There’s as much ancient history than there is classical, medieval and modern history combined, and they overlap in a fascinating way.

Religious and Philosophical History

My primary sources:
History isn’t always political or military, as much fun as that is.  We can trace the history of fashion, or the history of culture or science or philosophical thought and theology, and this last particularly interests me, as Psi-Wars itself is deeply philosophical.  Studying the history of philosophy can give us an idea of what others believed, how they saw the world, and how events in the world impacted their beliefs, or how the beliefs of various cultures began to influence one another.
Another thing that leaps out to me as I study this topic is how one history can calamitously impact another. I had just finished listening to the essential collapse of Islamic philosophy after the highly destructive Mongol invasion, and then I turned around and listened to those invasions from the perspective of the Mongols, and let me tell you, that was an interesting experience.  Or, consider how much the Jewish faith has been shaped, first by their babylonian captivity, and then later by the Roman destruction of their temple.
We might expect the movements of religion and philosophy in Psi-Wars to follow a similar trail, with smaller philosophies swallowed up by larger ones, or watch conquerors grow fascinated by the culture and philosophy of the conquered and take it on (often with a few changes).  We expect certain cultures to obsess with certain questions, or take different things completely for granted (much of Roman and Islamic philosophy was obsessed with questions about God, such as how a truly good God could create a flawed world, and whether the world was eternal was created, while Indian philosophy seems much less concerned with God and much more concerned with the self and how to “discover it.”).  I’ve already touched on these topics before, but again, studying history can help us enrich our own world.

Hunting for Inspiration I: Better Stories Than Mine

The last part of setting building is research, and I’m going to break this up into two parts, starting with the other works of fiction from which I can draw inspiration for my setting.  I originally intended to dedicate a week to this, because I think there’s a fantastic amount of stuff we can look at, but I’d rather finish sooner than later, so let’s do a whirlwind tour.  As we go through the actual setting, I’ll bring up sources and ideas from these original elements as necessary.

Obviously, the biggest inspiration is Star Wars itself, but we can gain additional inspiration from that which inspired Star Wars, that which Star Wars inspired, and whatever else I happen to find interesting.  Star Wars itself is much bigger than just the films.  Particular things that I often find myself referencing again and again

Pulp Space Opera and Planetary Romance

I should really include Lensmen in this series, but alas, I have yet to actually read or watch anything related to it, though I did start Triplanetary but never managed to finish it.
I’ve regularly talked about pulpy space opera all throughout Psi-Wars and pointed out how older sensibilities infect Star Wars through and through, from how they treat aliens to how they treat robots to how gender is treated in Star Wars.  You can definitely overstate it, as Star Wars was also a child of its era, a creature of the 70s, with Lucas turning some of his most beloved tropes on their head, just as Psi-Wars is going to toss out or deconstruct some of Star Wars’ most beloved tropes.
I’d particularly like to draw your attention to Tales of the Solar Patrol for this abbreviated tour of space opera.  I find it a considerably underrated work, and I particularly appreciate how it breaks down what this genre is really about. If you have a copy, join me starting on page 4.
First, Tales of the Solar Patrol argues that pulp heroes tend to be young, that they’re strapping, clever and virile, no split between jock and nerd here, but a young pulp hero tends to exemplify both.  This does certainly seem to be true of the original Star Wars, which features a very young cast taking on the entire galaxy.  The obvious reason for this is to appeal to a young readership, and Star Wars definitely caters to a very teenage crowd, as you can see from the number of eager Google+ posts or Youtube videos discussing which Jedi is really the most powerful.  But it serves an additional function: the pulp genre joins wuxia and shonen anime as largely being about students learning to be masters.  The typical pulp hero is often a student, or someone who just left his schooling, and must put what he’s learned to the test.  This isn’t always true (John Carter just shows up on Mars, and proceeds to kick a ton of ass, basically non-stop), but even in such works, you usually have a kid somewhere who will later grow up to fill the original heroes shoes, as seen in the John Carter family tree noted above.
Tales of the Solar Patrol further argues that pulp features moral clarity.  This is definitely obvious in Star Wars, and is one of the elements meant to appeal to youths.  The world is terrible and frustrating, but the solution is so obvious, because what is right is right and what is wrong is wrong, and someone brave and heroic and strong just needs to punch evil in the face.  In Star Wars, this is represented by the Evil Empire and the Good Rebellion, by the Light and the Dark of the Force.  Even so, I would argue that Star Wars is a little more nuanced and self-aware than pulp might be.  While the choice between Light and Dark are clear, its relationship to people are not.  Darth Vader isn’t necessarily totally evil, and Luke isn’t necessarily totally good.  The Emperor is the rightfully elected ruler of the Galaxy, while the Rebellion vies against that rightfully elected leader and uses people like criminals and smugglers to do its dirty work.  Bits of hypocrisy and shades of grey have crept into Star Wars, something I’m likely to explore, but it should be noted that while people are complex, Star Wars rarely presents issues in that morally grey way except for the fall of Anakin, where it attempts (at least for awhile) to blur the lines and create a sense of tragedy where his righteousness and love leads to his fall (which promptly falls apart when he “kicks the dog” in Revenge of the Sith).
Tales of the Solar Patrol also features “a Populated System.”  Everything worth seeing has people in it, and you can generally walk around in shirt sleeves.  This is definitely true of Star Wars, and it’s why I’ve told you not to bother with gravity or atmosphere rules.  In Tales of the Solar Patrol, Venus is a jungle world and Mars is a cold, desert world, and neither are instant death to ill-equipped humans.  Furthermore, they feature a multitude of sapient species (and dinosaurs!  And psychic overlords!  And warrior-cat-people!), but I want to especially draw your attention to the Vithaani on page 18: They’re literally just humans.  They’re also an obvious call-out to Barsoom, but note that they have no template, that they’re explicitly able to interbreed with humans, and just have some window-dressing culture that will certainly encourage them to wear very little and fight in crazy gladiatorial battles.

I had a lot of fun killing Jabba the Hutt. They asked me on the day if I wanted to have a stunt double kill Jabba. No! That’s the best time I ever had as an actor. And the only reason to go into acting is if you can kill a giant monster.
-Carrie Fisher

Finally, the section closes with a comment on gender roles, noting that pulp space opera tended to treat female characters as victims or decorations or plot devices.  Pulp space opera wasn’t aimed at women, it was aimed at men, and it often featured beautiful, scantily clad women in desperate need of a hero to rescue them.  Not all of them did this, though.  Dale Arden, from Flash Gordon, inspired Princess Leia, and while she was definitely a character who got kidnapped a lot, she was also the sort of character who showed spunk and fire, who was at Flash’s side, rather than sprawled at his feet.  You see more of this sort of thing in a variety of pulp works and quite some science fiction, especially as attitudes began to change (and sci-fi authors liked the idea of being “progressive” and often subscribed to ideologies that included feminism).  Star Wars, of course, expanded beyond its origins and now, in the Force Awakens, a female character is the main lead and she regularly rescues the male character.
I personally think that’s a bridge too far: It’s one thing to try to expand your audience, and another thing entirely to begin to antagonize your target audience, but I personally think Psi-Wars needs to be the sort of setting where in space knights rescue space princesses or where scantily clad alien dancers sway on book covers to entice 13 year old boys to buy them, but it’s definitely just as in genre to have a tough, sarcastic female character who doesn’t need anyone to rescue her.
A final, critical element not discussed in Tales of the Solar Patrol in great detail is that it rarely features technology that substantially changes human society, and that characters must win the day with their own wit and strength, not by relying on the power of their technology.  This is an element you’ll see again and again in every piece of fiction I cite.  Everything here, ultimately, is adventure fiction, and they all share roots, at some point, with space opera.

Thinly Dressed Space Opera

Still from Prey 2

Today, people are even more genre-savvy than they were in yesteryear, and film-makers and video-game developers can afford to just show you a few cheap tropes and that alone tells you’re in a sci-fi universe.  Often, especially for TV-shows, the result is a very cheap set (justified by being set “on some run down colony”) and a few slightly dressed guns that have a little CGI and some sound effects when they fire, and some people with interesting, but not too-expensive costumes.

The net effect is that the studio can afford to tell you a familiar story in a completely new way.  This is both very cheap and easy (the same principle behind which pulp novels worked), and also extremely liberating.  It allows the writer to jam whatever stories he wants together, and often we get crazy kitchen-sink stories.  Consider Dark Matter (not listed above, because of my poor opinion of the show), which features both cyberpunk hacker stories and samurai-inspired dynastic politics and heroic rebellions all just jammed together.  Or consider Firefly’s obvious cowboy story that adds geishas and ninjas and psychotic monsters (Reavers) while featuring a character clearly inspired by Han Solo.
The point in these things isn’t space or technology.  In fact, the main character may have some wild gadgets and the setting may feature crazy stuff, and the end of the day, the stories being told are familiar.  The point of the story isn’t to explore space or science for the sake of space or science, which is why this sort of genre is often disdained as “not really sci-fi”, but rather, it uses it as an excuse to justify whatever crazy elements the writer wants to introduce into the story.
Thus, we have (space) cops fighting against (space) gangs in cool shoot-outs featuring (space) guns, but one of the maverick (space) cops goes too far and his (space) chief asks for his (space) badge back. Or a (space) knight is sent on a quest (into space!) to rescue a (space) princess from a (space) dragon, and he returns to find that his (space) king has been killed by the (space) vizier, and he mounts a rebellion.  We know these stories already, but this genre allows us to tell them more cheaply, and with more freedom for how we handle the tropes (our space dragon can be a giant bug, and our space gang can trade in psychic crystals, etc)
I would argue that Psi-Wars is more this genre than Star Wars.  It’s less about giving you Star Wars and more about giving you a modest Space Opera game that you can run your favorite Action game in, that happens to have some Jedi expies in it.  Prey 2 and Killjoys, in particular, should be perfectly possible with the Bounty Hunter template, for example.

Baroque Space Opera of an Epic Scope

Dune is probably the most seminal of these works, but I’m positive that George Lucas was inspired by both Dune and Foundation in writing Star Wars.  Hober Malo reminds me of Han Solo, Trentor definitely inspired Coruscant, and the whole idea of retelling Roman History in a sci-fi story definitely came from Foundation.  Tatooine is almost certainly inspired by Dune, with its moisture farming and its desert people that ride single file to hide their numbers.  Later works, like Endless Space and Warhammer 40k probably owe more to Dune and Foundation than they do to Star Wars, but I think you can still see some Star Wars in them.
Like “Thinly Dressed Space Opera”, these use Space Opera tropes as an excuse to retell ancient history, often with a mystical twist.  Because of this, an author might, say, totally rip off the life of a WW1 war hero, set it in space, and win accolades!  All of them feature an ancient galaxy that’s sweeping in scope.  Because it’s so huge, the author can afford to just drop entire new worlds or powerful factions into later novels (like Ix in Dune) without making a splash.  Because the galaxy is ancient, it can afford to have already interesting worlds full of ruins and ancient civilizations with ancient customs for our heroes to explore, and to fight, rather than fussing over geology and biology and boring science.
But this genre usually goes further than most space opera.  If it’s going to have a huge, epic scope and ancient history, it often tries to at least explore some of those implications.  I think Warhammer 40k is, for me, the most notorious for this. Whenever I read the setting, I can’t help but read a conversation between an enthusiastic space opera fan and some cynical realist explaining why none of it could happen, followed by the space opera fan exaggerating everything until it actually sort of works (“You wouldn’t actually invade planets when you can just burn them to ash from orbit. Unless, I guess, there was something on the planet you really needed.” “Great!  That’s why they have space marines!” “But do you know how long it takes to get places?  Even with FTL, it would have to take literally years to cross the galaxy.” “Okay!  The civilization is ancient and often out of contact with its worlds!”).  Baroque space opera often embraces some of its crazier implications and pushes them to an extreme.  If Thinly Dressed Space Opera is D&D, Baroque Space Opera is Game of Thrones (or the Marvel Cinematic Universe).
These settings typically feature more nuanced morality than general space opera.  Good is good and evil is evil, of course, but it tends to feature the universe as it is, rather than as we would have it be.  Perhaps the villain will win every once in a while, or perhaps the hero will have to make compromises, or even engage in something sinister for the greater good.  There’s much more deception and hard choices here, because in many ways, this genre goes for something more “real” than basic space opera: a more cohesive setting, more authentic politics, deeper thought into what such a civilization would actually be like.
Note that most of my inspirations here aren’t books or movies, but games, usually strategy games. That’s not a coincidence, I think, as RPGs and strategy games must necessarily explore more about their setting than a movie has to.  Star Wars is pretty sparse on the ground when it comes to, say, logistics (despite a dreary economic discussion in the Phantom Menace) or when discussing worlds that aren’t directly plot relevant.  Baroque space opera, on the other hand, is much broader in scope and richer in detail.  It serves Psi-Wars by offering us much more material to work with!

Wild and Wooly Euro (Comic-Book) Sci-fi

Alright, fair enough, Guardians of the Galaxy isn’t really euro sci-fi, but all the rest of these either come from France or from the Czech Republic, and a lot of these are relatively new to me; this is a genre I’m still exploring.  In fact, I only discovered Metabarons when someone commented, back when I was writing up Communion, of how much it reminded him of the works of Jodorowsky, and thus now I have a copy of Metabarons in my bookshelf.

The majority of these either started off as, or explicity were, comic books, and in a sense, they carry on the tradition of space opera in that there’s seldom a detailed exploration of space or science in them, but instead, a veneer of space tropes over a more mundane story.  The big difference between the thinly-dressed space opera and this euro space opera is that the veneer is very very thick, so think that it becomes the point of the experience.  The Fifth Element is a pretty basic story of good vs evil and the hunt for the macguffin, so much so that, by itself, it hardly stands up.  The point of the film isn’t to see the resolution of the plot, but to see towering stories of flying cars, or ridiculous space stewardess outfits, or to watch an alien diva sing, or to watch Chris Rock’s ridiculous performance.
True to comic book form, all of these offer idea after idea, either through issue after issue, or because that’s what inspired them.  The writers don’t really put that much thought into the feasability of what they propose, so much as work like a factory to crank out as much sense of wonder as they possibly can.  For an audience so jaded on space tropes, you either have to brush them aside and work on your story, as thinly dressed space opera does, or you have to assault them with a constant barrage of tropes so amazing that it blows past their cynicism, which is what these do.
The risk of this genre is that it’s often weird for the sake of weird, but they typically get around this by grounding you with a very human character, sometimes even an Earthman, who acts as us, our view point to which all the crazy can be explained, if it’s explained at all.
Metabaron Family Tree
The genre also resembles baroque and epic space opera in that it often has a very sweeping scope and a sense of legacy.  Metabarons details a dynasty of super-powered warriors (as does Coraabia, with its Ibar dynasty).  The Fifth Element emphasizes the ancient lineage of the priests that guard the Fifth Element.  Even Guardians of the Galaxy makes our heroes parentage an important plot point (as well as the family of Drax the Destroyer, and the kingship of Groot).
Again, like with baroque space opera, the sheer volume of material gives us a lot to work with, and I think it re-emphasizes the silliness of Psi-Wars, not in the sense that it’s necessarily comical, but that it’s going to be very comic-book-like, full of super-powered heroes and badasses and wild and crazy aliens.  Psi-Wars should be all tropes, all the time, with only the thinnest of excuses for them.

Shonen Space Opera Anime

A lot of anime drew its inspiration from Star Wars, which is understandable, as Star Wars drew a lot of inspiration from Japanese culture.  I personally find it hard to pick my way through shonen anime to highlight just a few, since some are a little too Star Wars, and others don’t seem particularly Star-Wars like at all, but do feature themes I want to touch on.
The things I want to draw from these aren’t setting material as such, though there’s certainly some I can steal, but rather, I want to draw your eye to core themes within these.  Most of them feature young kids (just like pulp) who are in the midst of learning to be something more.  They often have a legacy that they must live up to, or they explicitly lack  that legacy, but will find that their actions tie them into the greater historical thread of their civilization.  Also, while all of these always feature grand stories of epic, historical and sweeping scope appropriate for baroque space opera, they always zoom in on our heroes at some point.  The fate of the galaxy usually rests on the shoulders of some hot-headed kid.  This theme explains my approach towards Mass Combat: in Psi-Wars, the actions of armies must be a backdrop to the actions of the heroes, which are what really matter, ultimately.
Anime tends to feature a wide variety of interesting characters as well, typically larger casts than I’m used to seeing in a Star Wars film, and these are usually (like pulp) targeted towards young men.  The result is that we get to see a wide variety of interesting characters, races and setting elements, with a male character usually as the central element and plenty of eye-candy.
Anime also doesn’t always take itself as seriously as some of these other genres (though I would argue that while Euro-sci-fi doesn’t explicitly laugh at itself the way anime often does, I’m pretty sure the authors are laughing behind the page at their most over-the-top elements).  Personally, I think the ability to laugh at your own work is important, and the more serious your story is, the more a little levity can emphasize the intensity of the work.
Anime, finally, is much less likely to take a warm view towards institutions.  Inevitably, the organization behind the hero is ultimately corrupt.  Morality blurs here: there’s an underlying core that’s absolutely good and absolutely evil, and you can totally save the day by punching evil in the face, but picking out who is evil is often a lot harder, with beautiful villains and ugly heroes, with corrupt presidents and benevolent dictators.  Often, there’s buried conspiracies lurking beneath the surface, and thus the story is as much about ferreting out information as it is about kicking bad guy butt, which makes it something of a thriller, and thus very appropriate to Psi-Wars.

Action Movies

Psi-Wars uses the pulse of Action Movies as its core engine… which means we should understand action films, how they work and what they’re about.  Several of the above are actually, properly, sci-fi, but they definitely have the pulse of action movies.

All action movies, of course, feature hyper-competent individuals locked in lone (or small-team) conflict with some much larger organization, all of which has already been built into Psi-Wars.  But action movies also feature a pulse of information and danger, where the heroes struggle to unravel a conspiracy, peeling back its layers one bullet at a time.
Action movies also tend to be set in the cutting edge present, or the day after tomorrow.  They feature top-notch technology that is not generally in the hands of the common people (matching Thinly-Dressed Space Opera, in that technology doesn’t change our day-to-day lives very much).  It’s set in a complex modern world, full of conflicting factions and hypocritical leaders.  Morality is a confused gordian knot, and it’s the job of the action hero to cut through that knot and reveal the truth to the light of day by, of course, punching evil in the face.  Evil might wear a mask, or might not be what you first thought it was, but once you figure it out, then you punch it in the face and the world is definitively a better place.
The key lesson of action movies is that we need complex organizations (though we don’t need to fully explore them so much as give the impression of great bureaucracies), secret conspiracies, enemies who will use our own organizations against us, and that our setting needs to match the modern world.  We need to make something that players can instantly grasp: GURPS Action lacks one thing that every other Campaign Framework has, which is a book detailing the setting (like monsters or places) that you can find in other Campaign Frameworks.  That’s because you already know that world.
This creates a tension in Psi-Wars, as the more obvious we make it, the less wondrous we make it.  The clearest solution for this is to make the core familiar, a thinly dressed space opera that follows action movie conceits, and the farther you get from the core, the crazier and more baroque everything gets.

Wuxia and Chambara

I could include a lot more here, and I could probably even break this out into several sub categories This is perhaps a rather varied category that include some elements that could be placed elsewhere, but I’ve gathered them here for a few reasons.
First, it includes “Oriental themes,” which is an oversimplification that’s obvious today, but in the 70s, the idea that the whole of East Asia was some sort of mysterious, unified block, so of course George Lucas mashed Chinese and Indian philosophy in with samurai swordsmanship, because why not?  Thus, in a sense, it makes sense to mash them in together as well.
That said, most of these do feature a different cultural view than Western fiction, and it’s grounded in that alternate culture, because these are written by the Japanese or Chinese for the Japanese or Chinese (or Korean, increasingly). Star Wars is surprisingly respectful of that: the Jedi philosophy is not portrayed as some crazy, alien, remote philosophy conjured up by inscrutable orientals, but fundamental and central to the setting.  In Star Wars, we are all Jedi (and thus we all subscribe to this psuedo-oriental philosophy).  I’d like to keep that in Psi-Wars: rather than depicting foreign Earth cultures as foreign, I want to ground them in humanity.  That’s not to say I won’t draw inspiration from various Earth cultures, but I don’t like the idea of “Europe” being “Human” and “Japan” being “Alien.”
Most of these feature a strong student/master relationship, with a deep study of an ancient art or technique, the mastery of which is vital to the success of our quest and to saving the world.  This fits nicely with the themes of young heroes in the process of learning, typical of both Anime and Pulp as well, and suits the antiquity of our Baroque space opera.
The student/master relationship often involves a deep sense of legacy: the student might become the master and train his pupil and so on.  Family is also often very important in these (your father  may or may not be your master as well, or he might object to your training, and this is usually plot-relevant if he does: note that Uncle Owen objected to Luke going off in search of a master in the form of Kenobi), and wuxia especially grounds a character in a long lineage of heroes (if the character is an orphan, he’ll later learn that his father/mother was actually super important, and was usually assassinated).
Finally, most of them involve an exploration of complex morality (they might be deeply philosophical), a look at organizational hypocrisy, and often involve uncovering a conspiracy that might stretch back quite some time.  This is usually done to protect the status quo (the “Mandate of Heaven” or the “Sanctity of the Emperor”), but sometimes this itself turns out to be a lie, and the hero instead overthrows it.
If the themes seem similar to Action movie themes, I doubt this is an accident.  Wuxia and chambara are very similar to the swashbuckling genre (which I could absolutely include here), and the action genre is, in a sense, a continuation of the swashbuckling genre.

Psi-Wars: First Steps to a Setting

I claim that that’s how you design a novel — you start small, then build stuff up until it looks like a story. Part of this is creative work, and I can’t teach you how to do that. Not here, anyway. But part of the work is just managing your creativity — getting it organized into a well-structured novel. That’s what I’d like to teach you here.
-Randy Ingermanson, The Snowflake Method for Novel Design

(Thanks to Justin Aquino of Game in the Brain for pointing that out to me)
Yesterday, I gave you my setting design manifesto.  Now, I should be clear, when I design a setting, I’m not nearly so rigid and systematic (as you can see from Psi-Wars itself), nor should you be.  The idea is to get a feel for how things go, so I’m much more obvious in my design here so that you can more clearly see the strokes.
In the spirit of that, let me lay out what the rest of this iteration is going to look like.  I’m going to build the setting by going from less detail to more detail, just as described in Randy Ingermason’s Snowflake Method, or really how I’ve been working this from the beginning. I’ll start with what I know, create a framework, and dig deeper into the fractal, bit by bit.
First, I’ll outline the entire setting as simply as I can.  From that, I’ll derive additional points worth working on (beginning my fractal), and justify each point that I add against my target audience.  Then I’ll use a loose framework, which I’ll set up here, to give me an overall picture of how things will look, and then I’ll spill out everything I already know/want and look at the sources I want to include.  Then I’ll pick a single point of the above, and do it again, more deeply, then step back and integrate it with what I have, and again and again until I’m satisfied with the results.
Today is the first step into the setting.  This is the broadest outline, the “iteration 1” of setting design.

A Note about my Target Audience

You, dear reader, are the target audience for this post, but not the target audience for my setting.  Chances are, most people who actually use the setting won’t read this post (though, of course, there’s an overlapping of the two).  In fact, if I had to guess, I think my target audience will be something like this:
Space opera fans who like Star Wars, but are open to something different. People who want Star Wars have Star Wars and have no time for some random blog on the internet.  Even RPGers who want Star Wars can play Edge of the Empire.  No, if you’re playing Psi-Wars, you’ve accepted the premise that it’s like Star Wars, enough that you know what you’re getting into, but that it’s something different.  Thus, I’ve tried to steer a course respectful of Star Wars (I’m not making a satire that shows you all the flaws in Star Wars), while also creating something that’s distinctly different enough that you can explore it.  I think the most obvious example of this is Communion, which definitely has a “Force” vibe, enough that players can instantly grasp what it’s doing, but has enough of its own kinks and unique logic that players who wish to stop and explore it in greater depth may do so.
GURPS Sci-fi fans who want a more operatic setting. If you’re a GURPS fan, you’ve got Transhuman Space or Reign of Steel or After the End.  If you want whooshing space-fighters, though, GURPS doesn’t have that many options currently.  This group probably won’t use Psi-Wars straight.  They might tear it apart and use it as an example for their own material.  Even if they use it straight, they’ll need lots of room to stuff their own material into the game, with some clear guides as to what those attachment points are.  They need a simple framework, and then for me to get out of their way to get to building their own gameplay.
GURPS gamers who’re tired of Dungeon Fantasy and want some Space-ish, but don’t want to do a lot of work. GURPS doesn’t really have a plug-and-play SF option at this point.  THS is as close as they come, and it’s not exactly a rollicking adventure, being more akin to thought-provoking sci-fi pieces like Her or The Martian.  There’s a certain class of player who just wants to grab pre-made materials and just run a game.  If they have some premade characters (or some templates with which they can make characters in less than an hour, ideally), have a straightforward setting to play in, and have an adventure in hand, they’re happy.  They need their hands held a little more than the GURPS fans above, but they also get to the business of gaming faster, which means they’ll probably be the majority of people who’ll play the game (though if they like it, they’ll eventually morph into the GURPS fans above, as they’ll need to move the game into new directions).  Thus, they need a strong setting that’s already ready for play.

The Psi-Wars Setting Fractal, Step 1

In an ancient galaxy, a freedom-loving rebel alliance wages war against a domineering empire, while the secrets of a lost, legendary psionic order may hold the ultimate keys of victory.

That’s it, that’s Psi-Wars: the Elevator Pitch.  It’s everything a player needs to know to jump in, and I think it contains everything I’ve worked on so far, and what I want in my setting.
Let’s dive deeper, shall we?

“Ancient”

Star Wars, to me, has always had a deeply historical feel, so much so that I sometimes hunger to watch Star Wars after a good game of Civilization.  If Star Trek is the space opera equivalent to a Neil deGrasse Tyson Astrophysics documentary, Star Wars is the space opera equivalent to a History Channel marathon on WW2 and the rise and fall of the Roman Empire.  The film deliberately evokes the power of Rome (“the Galactic Senate”), Nazi Germany (Stormtroopers, the First Order) and invites us to note the cycles of history, how the fall of the Roman Republic is similar to the fall of Weimar Germany and, by extension, the fall of American Democracy (George Lucas was a bit of a revolutionary leftist).
But more than that, Star Wars has a sort of mythical history.  Luke chases after Yoda like a kung fu student questing to find a master atop a mountain.  He inherits the lightsaber of his father, like a samurai receiving the blade of his father.  The story itself follows archetypal patterns found in mythology.  Paired with the “cycles of history,” and we get an ancient galaxy that finds itself in the same position, over and over again (something deliberately called out in the Force Awakens).
Thus, I feel that history is deeply important to Psi-Wars, both in the sense that Psi-Wars should crib from historical events, and that it should have a lot of it.  But I’m not discussing realistic history, where we work out how mankind would have colonized the galaxy and, oh, then decided force swords were the best form of combat.  No, this is the sort of history found in legends and GURPS Fantasy.
I see the history of Psi-Wars largely in three movements.  We have the modern era, in which the conflict takes place, including the history leading right up to the moment of the war between rebellion and empire.  If we used the Roman Empire as a metaphor, this is the events leading up the the fall of the Roman Republic, going back, perhaps, a couple of generations.  The second movement, farther back in time, is the “Age of Heroes.”  It’s the era which sets the shape of the world in which the Galactic war is shaped, the origins of our galactic civilization, and it’s the “elegant” era in which our Psionic Knights are at their peak, and is where most of the relics that our characters go hunting for came from.  Using our Roman metaphor, this is era of Alexander the Great, the era of the ancient Greeks, and the initial founding of Rome.  Finally, in the most distant past, we have the Age of Mythology, where things older than our civilization lurk.  This contains the origins of the Communion faith before humans discovered it, this is the heyday of some of the spectacularly old alien civilizations that still linger on the edges of the world.  This is where the ridiculously powerful, and dangerous, relics come from.  If we follow our Roman metaphor, this is the bronze age, this is ancient Egypt, ancient Sumeria, which were as old to Caesar as Caesar is to us.
For the structure of our history, I have a few ideas, but I’d like to use the cycles of history found in GURPS Fantasy as a basis.
Let’s break it down more clearly: First, there were ancient aliens who discovered the ways of Communion, created empires, terrorized one another, created some dread weapons, and then collapsed.  Humans moved into that vacuum and created a new, rather medieval-like civilization with space knights, in part patterned on the technology that came before them, and learned the ways of Communion, then there was some civil wars and disasters and a dark time wherein the space knights disappeared, and then a new golden age and a new civilization rose up, until suddenly everything went sideways and the Emperor took over.  Now the rebellion fights against him.”

“Galaxy”

Obviously, we’ll need to work out the details of what our galaxy looks like.  We’ll need an entire galaxy, of course, but we can’t do the literally millions of systems it has.  Instead, I want to hit a few high points, a few major and interesting worlds, while leaving some implications for other worlds that other players can flesh out.
We can break the galaxy, broadly speaking, into three sections.  The central part is the “Core” of the galaxy, and it contains our imperial capital and all our civilized worlds.  If we’re using Rome as a metaphor, it’s the Mediterranean.  Then, we’ll have the arms of the galaxy jutting out from the central core, and we’ll call that our “rim.”  It’s where the bulk of the adventuring takes place, as it’s far less civilized, and where most of the actual war is being fought. In our Roman metaphor, this is Gaulic Europe, the Parthian Empire, Africa, and the “remote” provinces like Palestine, Egypt and Britain.  Finally, beyond the rim of the Galaxy is the fringe.  Galaxies aren’t singular entities.  Instead, they have globular clusters and stray star systems floating just beyond the boundary of the galaxy, but not nearly at intergalactic distances.  This is where the really weird stuff can be found, the islands beyond the known world, where there be dragons.

“War”

Psi-Wars is about a galaxy at war, of course.  But what sort of war?  I would argue that the war is fought in space (Fighter Ace), and on planets (Commando), with engines of war (the Officer), the pen of diplomacy (the Diplomat) and in the shadows of the night (the Spy, the Assassin).  In fact, that’s the core of what the player characters are, especially those from the core.
What we need from the setting is how this war is fought.  That means our factions need the details on their warmachines and organization in space and on planets, what their military look like, what their spy/security agencies look like, and at least enough of their state/diplomacy branches that players know what offices to hit and why.
This is the first half of what players do.

“Freedom-Loving” vs “Domineering”

This defines the reasons for the conflict, the ideology behind it, ultimately.  It’s why the players will fight.  It also, on a deeper level, represents the split between security (“domineering”) and liberty (‘freedom-loving”), and the choice civilizations make between the two.  Taken to its extreme, it’s also a question of crime and justice, how far one will go in the pursuit of justice if it risks tyranny, and how far one will accept crime and corruption when chasing after freedom.
Note that this is not a matter of good vs evil.  I never use those words, because I don’t want this to be a game about good vs evil.  Action, which is as much the ancestor of Psi-Wars as Star Wars, is all about the cynical grey morality of the institutions the hero initially seeks to protect.  How often does the cop figure out that the bad guy is a corrupt cop, or how often does the mercenary hired by the CIA to take out a dictator realize that the dictator was controlled by the CIA and is just trying to get out from under their thumb?  In the action genre, one man’s terrorist is often another man’s freedom fighter and the lines of right and wrong can blur.  They’re there, because Action isn’t nihilistic, but it’s hard to navigate, until the hero inevitably casts off all shackles, becomes the Masterless Man and kicks all the butt.
Psi-Wars will be that sort of game, with complicated weaving of morality, full of corruption, idealism, hope, tyranny and hypocrisy and the hero throwing his badge at the organization and setting his own course.

“Alliance” vs “Empire”

Who fights the war of Psi-Wars?  The Alliance and the Empire, of course.  But this raises a few questions: If they’re the rebellion, they were part of the Empire, and just disagreed over some point.  This is not a war over a foreign power, but a civil war, an internal struggle.  This suggests not two parties, but three:
  • The Empire, the protectors of the current order and the greatest power in the Galaxy
  • The Rebellion, the agents of change who want to either restore the old order or make a new one
  • The Foreign Powers, tied to neither, with their own agenda.
So, we have three factions, broadly speaking, and, within them, we almost certainly have several factions.  For example, the Rebel Alliance is an alliance.  But an Alliance of what?  That suggests multiple powers who have all mutually agreed to work together.  Likewise, an Empire is not an Empire unless it is dictating the policy of foreign nations.  That’s what an empire is.  Thus, you have the central power (the “Rome”) and the foreign nations it controls (our versions of Greece, Egypt, Palestine, France, Britain, etc).  Finally, we have the unaffiliated, who are certainly going to be more than one nation.  These are our Huns, Gauls and Parthians, the enemies at the gates, the ones against whom the Empire offers security.

“Psionic Orders”

In addition to our major factions, we have a sprinkling of hero-factory organizations, like the Jedi Order.  These house our cool martial arts and our cool psionic powers, are typically unfathomably ancient, and lurk in secret.  One must seek them out to uncover their powerful knowledge and achieve great power.

Star Wars had two: the Jedi (the good guys) and the Sith (the bad guys), and perhaps a few sprinklings of additional orders (the Witches of Dathomir).  Personally, I’d vastly prefer it if our “Jedi” were just one of many.  The thing that bothers me the most about Star Wars is how small it is: there’s only the Force, and there’s one group of people (in the later movies, there’s literally one or two people in the entire galaxy, who understand the Force!).  I’d rather expect that you have psionic traditions all throughout the galaxy, some really good, some pretty weak.

My thoughts here are too scattered to do more than just scribble down some rough ideas.  I’d like to see an ancient and dread psionic order, a powerful psionic elite that constructed an empire in the earliest age then degenerated into a base religion, but nonetheless uncovered Communion.  I’d like to see a persecuted minority that constructs a more peaceful theology, our original True Communion, in response to this great empire.  I’d like to see an initial movement towards more clinical, cyberpunkish psionics from humans until someone rediscovers True Communion and brings it back with him like a firebrand and creates our first order of psionic space knights, our space templars.  Then I want to see that group splinter in the end of that era, so that fragments are scattered across the galaxy.

“Secrets”, “Legendary”, “Lost”, “Ultimate Keys to Victory”

The sweeping politics of Psi-Wars serves only as a backdrop to the true action: Heists!  Our characters run around, uncovering “legendary” relics, find “lost” knowledge, uncover “secret” conspiracies, and in the end, will find (or prevent people from finding) supremely powerful macguffins that would totally turn the war.  Thus, the setting must be rife with secret conspiracies (including criminal organiz”ADD”ations, corporate cabals, secret researchers and dark cults) and dirty laundry for the characters to air.  This is not just a “Star Wars” element, but something profoundly important to the Action genre, which is ultimately all about uncovering mysteries and going deeper on a conspiracy.

Themes and Framework

So, we have the basic look at our fractal.  On what are we going to hang our works?  What patterns exist in Psi-Wars?
Well, obviously, Communion is a pattern.  Communion literally shapes the world, giving us Destiny and Fate and all that great stuff that sets the shape of the world.  Therefore, we should expect characters, planets, organizations, everything, to take on the template of Communion.  It’s the Yin/Yang of Psi-Wars.
True Communion: This is the submission of the self to the greater self.  This represents community, civilization, sanctity, elegance, empathy and healing.  If we look at aliens, we expect Aliens-as-humans to fit under True Communion’s symbolism.  If we look at the galaxy, the Core is most like True Communion..  When True Communion goes to war, it does so for a reason, follows strict rules, and is willing to die for its cause.  When True Communion governs, it, it either binds itself to the will and values of the community, or abdicates any gain it might receive, and when it explores, it does so just to see what is out there.
Dark Communion: This is the dominion of the self over all things.  This represents individuality, barbarism, sin, physicality, sensuality, selfishness and strength.  If we look at aliens, we expect Aliens-as-beasts to fit under Dark Communion’s symbolism.  If we look at the galaxy, the rim is most like Dark Communion.  When Dark Communion goes to war, it ignores the rules, destroys order and leaves chaos in its wake, and always survives (it “comes out on top”).  When it governs, it does so via seduction or via dominion of the other to itself.  When it explores, it does so with the direct intent to explore what it finds.
Broken Communion: This is the destruction of the self, or the absence of it.  It represents anarchy, monstrosity, desperation, madness and suicide.  If we look at aliens, we expect Aliens-as-wugs to fit under Broken Communion’s symbolism.  If we look at the galaxy, the fringe is most like Broken Communion.  When Broken Communion goes to war, it destroys everything and leaves only death, and then despairs.  When it governs, it does so incoherently, lashing out and then curling up in on itself.  When it explores, it runs screaming into the night from what it finds.
Thus, we have symbols within symbols, thanks both to the three forms of communion and the three paths from each form of communion.
But do we have a separate axis?  Sure!  Remember back when I was writing up the Force as Chi and I proposed 5 new elements?  Why not use those again?
World represents a centering, the point from which all things flow and return.  If we broke alien types out into 5, this might represent comical aliens.
Technology represents sophistication, mastery of nurture over nature, and what someone can do with the right tools.  If we broke out our aliens into 5, this might represent Mastermind aliens.
Life represents primal nature, mastery of nature over nurture, and what someone can do innately.  If be broke out our aliens, this might represent Primitive aliens.
Light/Energy represents astrophysical phenomenon like stars and pulsars, the spread of knowledge and idealism, our hopes winning out over cynical reality.  If we broke out our aliens, this might represent idealistic (and dangerous-as-fire) warrior races.
Dark/Void represents the space between the stars and things like nebulas, the spread of mystery and cynicism, the harsh reality of the world winning out over childish idealism.  This might represent degenerate aliens.
So, for example, we might imagine the center of the galaxy as “World.”  Each of the four arms could be one of the additional elements: an arm in the rim where Technology is dominant, another where life is dominant, another that is dark, and another that is light.

What do I want?

Final step: Brainstorm to get out a vision of what I’d like to see, the various elements that have been building up in my head.  This is not a particularly organized list, just something I might refer to later.
A militarily and politically feasible empire
-With a security agency that doubles as secret police
-Imperial “diplomacy” that consists of “diplomats” directly commanding the rulers of a planet or an alien civilization
A fractious, complex and somewhat hypocritical rebellion that’s still a better option than the Empire, if only we could get everyone to agree.
-The old relics of the last order, such as dispossessed space knights and the genteel nobility of the old republic.
-The Black Fleet, a rogue imperial fleet that ditched order and faded into a shadowy sector.  Perhaps serving the rebellion, perhaps serving the needs of its rogue admiral (but either way, a chance for Imperial-loving players to play someone heroic)
Three great and looming threat:
-Rebellious robots
-Alien barbarian hordes
-Some ancient and terrible threat just waiting to awaken.
Pirates from the rim of the galaxy who make rapid deployments on worlds when they raid, and then just as rapidly leave, using the ideas devised in the Mass Combat part of Iteration 5.  Sort of a cross between vikings, bikers and space marines (but not necessarily viking biker space marines, aka Space Wolves).
Sexy, blue-skinned space elves, with an orientalist twist, giving us harems and slavery and unique martial arts; Twi’leks crossed with the Asari and the (Dark) Eldar.
A race of blind psions who have learned to use their psionic abilities to operate.  The Miraluka crossed with Paul after his blindness.
A race of noble beasts or wugs who have a distinct religion and mighty space yards that regularly supply the rebellion (Mon Calamari crossed with the Kilrathi)
A race of inhuman and terrifying barbarians who come from beyond the galaxy, and whose invasion helped spark the events that lead to the rise of the Empire (the Huns crossed with the Yuzhon Vong).
A race of ascendant psionic beings who house themselves in armor to remain in the world, like the wraithguard of the eldar, or the Ezrohir of Torchlight, or the Vodyani of Endless Space.
A world/race/subgroup of cloned people who carefully and precisely genetically engineer everyone in their society, including a noble lineage that has been ruled by a family of clones descended from the original person to rule that world.  The Ibars of Coraabia crossed with the Horatio of Endless Space.
Space Egypt, full of ancient splendor, rigid tradition, strange gods, and a decadent kingdom that’s been slowly collapsing for longer than humanity has even been around
Lost worlds that once housed great wonders before hyperspace routes shifted and they faded away.
A jungle planet with great and mighty beasts that somehow interact with one another, like the dragons of How to Train Your Dragon 2 crossed with the Rukh of Coraabia, all tamed by a race of savage aliens.  As though someone took all of the Green color of Magic: the Gathering and made it into a planet. So, basically, Avatar.
A junkworld filled (and made toxic by) the relics of some ancient war, where an entire civilization of scavengers collects old relics and ancient technology and sells them in a raucous marketplace.
A watery world with a magnificent and sprawling space Venice full of a dangerous and criminal sort, including an order of psionic criminals/ninjas akin to the Yakuza who may or may not be a splinter group of our Jedi order.
The remnant of our Jedi/Templars/Knights of Communion whose order was shattered in a previous age, who have gone to ground, like the conspiracy-theory version of the Templars crossed with the Five Elders of Shaolin.
The “Sith,” or the evil order, is just a heterodox splinter of the main order who discovered some powerful and ancient secrets that the main order had hidden away.
Other, older psionic beliefs/ideas, including:
-The religion from which our Jedi (Knights of Communion?) drew their beliefs
-An older, more barbaric and “polytheistic” ecstasy cult with some demonic vibes to it
-A strange group of psi-borgs created by the rebellious robots who have fallen behind a destructive saint of Broken Communion who seek to undermine the very robotic intelligence that created them.
-A cult dedicated to understanding the future and shaping the world to create the ideal paradise-future; sort of the Bene-Gesserit crossed with Minority Report
-At least one minor, backwater cult that doesn’t have the full picture
Non-Psionic cool things, like
-A non-psionic philosophy called Neo-Rationalism, which pretends to be about science, but is really about quoting and commenting on previous scientists, as well as encouraging people to experiment with previously forbidden stuff.
-Non-psionic space knights, traditions from which the psionic space knights eventually arose
-Cyborg cults that have arisen in the area controlled by the rebellious robots.

Psi-Wars: A Manifesto on Setting Design

Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
-Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

As I promised before, Iteration 6 is as much about how to build a setting as it’s about the actual setting I’ll build throughout it.  In principle, nothing in this post explicitly addresses a sci-fi setting set in a galaxy far, far away, because the rules for good setting design apply to all settings.  I want to outline those rules, which I’ve personally picked up from years of building my own settings, watching some crash and burn and others soar into the imaginations of my players, and from collecting nuggets of wisdom from various GM guides, the experiences of other players, and self-help books with catchy slogans.

Setting design is, of course, an art and there’s no “one right way” to build it, and that’s not really what I’m proposing here.  However, there are lots of ways for them to go horribly wrong.  A few examples:

  • The Epic Setting: Your GM has spent literally years building his setting.  It’s exquisitely intricate in its detail, epic in scope and magnificent in its realism.  He’s also printed it all out, the document is heavy enough to kill you if it fell on you, and it’s required reading. Nobody reads it. Nobody knows what’s going on.  The GM rails at his players for being “lazy.”  Campaign crashes and burns.  No matter how good your setting is, it won’t matter if nobody can figure it out.
  • The Window Dressing Setting: The GM has spent no time at all building his setting.  As you play the setting, you begin to get the impression that whatever you say, he’ll just use, or if a TV show came out with something interesting yesterday, the setting will suddenly incorporate it today.  And, of course, vital elements from yesterday’s session mysteriously vanish, as though forgotten by God, in today’s session.  The game works, more or less, but you might be left with a gnawing sense of dissatisfaction.  At least this game gets run!  But wouldn’t it be nicer if the campaign had some internal consistency?
  • The Unfinished Setting: The GM has a grand and amazing idea, and he can see it in his head, but he has no idea how to get it out.  He’s done some writing, but got caught up on a snag somewhere that he just can’t resolve.  There’s some document with hastily scribbled notes somewhere on his computer, slowly rotting from neglect.  Can a setting truly live without players seeing it, or breathing life into it?

The intent of my rules is less to tell you how to build your setting, and more a series of guidelines and best practices that will act as a framework for avoiding the worst of the pitfalls.  Within those guidelines, you should be fairly safe to build whatever you like.


Rule 1: Understand your Target Audience

Your setting exists for your players. I’m writing Psi-Wars for myself and my fellow GMs who might want to grab it and run it, but who are we going to run it for? Our players. Everything must ultimately center on them. If the setting isn’t useful or interesting to your players, then they won’t play it (or maybe they will, dragging themselves to your tedious sessions out of some deeply misguided sense of loyalty and kinship, thinking “Maybe, just maybe, this time his setting won’t suck”). Whenever you build anything, you should be keeping your end-goal in mind, and your end-goal here is delighted players.

If you’re a GM, consider the example of a badly written character background vs the well-written character background.  The first might start with some utterly trivial and irrelevant facts, like when the character was born, or in what hospital, or inane details about his childhood, as the player feels the need to pad his word count (perhaps to hit some GM-mandated minimum) with whatever he can find.  Or, it might be a spectacularly self-important background, where the player informs you of how awesome his character is, and how awesome everyone finds him, and how he’s just the best, totally the best, and if you don’t agree, then you don’t understand his vision.  Consider, instead, a well-written background.  It might be tight, focused and concise.  It might highlight hooks that you can sew into your campaign so that the character is deeply involved with your campaign (or even other players!).  A well-written background might inspire you, and it will invite collaboration.  He might highlight, for example, some great mystery or secret, give you some suggestions as to how you might fill it, but otherwise leave it open, allowing you to muck about in his character background in a well-defined way.  The former fails to work because the player has lost sight of the purpose of that background, while the latter works because the player knows who his target audience is: he wrote that background to be useful to you, the GM.

A setting should work exactly the same way.  The point of writing up a setting is to help the players.  It should invite collaboration, offer hooks that the players might find intriguing, answer questions they have about context, and generally inspire them, so that they can see the world, and offer something they can use.

Different players need and want different things, and I’ve already touched on this with “Who gives a sh*t“, which is an important question you should ask yourself whenever you finish writing a bit of setting: “Who cares?”  If you didn’t include this bit, would anyone suffer?  If not, ditch it.  The more people you can see using your material, the more you can justify keeping it, and you should demand constant justification for anything in your setting.  The ideal settings aren’t giant tomes full of niggling details, but slim volumes where each and every word and sentence bursts with richness, imagery and inspiration.

For a quick review of “Who gives a sh*t”:

  • The setting should give the players minimal context necessary to play (Brent)
  • The setting should make enough logical sense that you can answer questions and go deeper if necessary, giving the players the ability to explore more, if they wish (Willow)
  • The setting should be directly pertinent to the players, mechanically and narratively (Desiree and Bjorn).  That is, you should not introduce something that doesn’t impact the players directly in some manner, because otherwise it doesn’t have a point.

Let me add one additional person to your target audience.  I said you should be writing your game for your players, but you should also write it for yourself.  I don’t mean that you should write a setting that makes you happy (though, I mean, why wouldn’t you?) but that a good setting should inspire the GM.  Great settings practically write your sessions for you.  They’re constantly poised on the brink of adventure, full of ancient relics to be uncovered, points of interest to be explored, and amazing NPCs to meet, love and kill.  Ideally, when you’re stuck for an idea, you should be able to page through your work and go “Oh, right, this!”

Rule 2: Keep It Simple

Above, I suggest that you demand justification for everything you do.  This cuts both ways, because if you can’t justify something, not only should you not do it, you shouldn’t even worry about it.  Whenever you run into trouble, skip it for now and come back to it.  The reason campaigns often don’t get run is that their writers put more work into them than they need to.  Go for a minimum viable product, the least setting you need, to get started.

There’s a powerful corollary to this rule: the Rule of Three.  If you break out many of your most memorable settings, they’ll have between 2 to 5 elements, choices that repeat over and over again: Elf, Dwarf, Human; Fighter, Mage, Thief; Solar Exalted, Lunar Exalted, Sidereal Exalted;

Three things makes a good minimum because less than that starts to feel stifled.  If you have one kingdom, it’s hardly worth mentioning as a specific entity.  If you have two kingdoms, then it quickly turns into an adverserial “good vs evil” situation without a sense of exploration.  The moment you suggest that you have three kingdoms, then players will start to ponder what makes each kingdom unique and makes them stand-out.  You’ve created a sense of exploration.

Three things also makes a good maximum.  If you create too much stuff, players will begin to forget details, losing them in a crowded swarm of information.  You can push to four or even five kingdoms pretty easily, and possibly even 7, but more than 5 and your players will start to group them (even at 4, you’ll often see this: two “good” kingdoms and two “bad” kingdoms).  If you introduce 15 kingdoms, the players will start to talk about them in sets of kingdoms, usually sets of 5, reducing the groups they understand back to 3 elements.  Three is, thus, your gold standard.

And given that, why worry about more than that?  When you think of a setting element, keep it simple and just work on three defining features.  If you just look at your setting and define three bits each time, you’ll be done in no time.

Rule 3: Settings Should Be Fractal

The last rule might have been a touch vague, especially the rule of threes, because I didn’t define three elements of what.  So you’ve got three kingdoms.  Should you only have, say, three cities?  Well, you could have three cities per kingdom.  And then, should our cities have districts?  Sure, why not?  How many?  How about 3?  And interesting locations per district?  You get the idea.

Humans understand the world in a fractal way.  If you give us too much to grasp, we’ll naturally group things until we have a manageable number of things to handle.  We can take advantage of that by defining our setting in a fractal manner, and in so doing, we can add as much detail as we want without overwhelming our players by burying detail beneath the fractal.

Picture a fantasy design that looks something like this:

I’ve added nothing but three elements at a time.  If a player wants to know what races there are, then I can tell him: Human, Elves and Dwarves.  That’s easy, right?  Now, if someone wants to play as an elf, he can choose: High Elf, Wood Elf or Dark Elf. What makes, say, a wood elf special?  Well, if you want to play as a fighter, you can be really good with the bow, or if you want to play as a mage, you can be really good with nature (“Druidism”).  And if you want to be a rogue, you have access to this network of spy animals.  That’s pretty cool, if you’re into elves.  But if you’re not into elves?  You don’t need to know any of this. Fractals hide irrelevant information.  The guy who just wants to play as a dwarf doesn’t need to know the details of how elves work to play as a dwarf.

Fractals do something else interesting: they imply more than they show.  I haven’t even talked about what makes a dark elf interesting, but I bet some of you are already mentally filling in those gaps “Oh, well, they might be good with daggers and assassination and shadow magic.”  And some of you are pondering the other races: What are three “dwarven” races?  What martial arts might each of those sub-races have?  And a few of you might have even thought about extending the fractal more deeply: Why just druidism?  Perhaps we can define it more carefully, like shapeshifting, the ability to command the land, and the ability to summon/control animals.  And why just the bow? Why not the quarterstaff, the bow and “wardancing?”

Fractals let players compartmentalize away the things they don’t really need to know more about, allow them to explore more of what they want to know, and encourages them to see the world as larger than it is.  I don’t even have to define the subraces of dwarves for you to assume they are there, and to ask to explore them.  We get the sense of a larger world because we see a pattern and we can see that the pattern should repeat itself, and we have at least an idea of how it will.  That’s also a powerful tool for you, as a GM, when you’re building your setting, because each step becomes obvious, and thus easy.

Rule 4: Settings Have Themes and Frameworks

The fractal is a sort of pattern, but we still need to define what that pattern looks like.  We can do this by choosing themes and turning them into a framework.  If you look at D&D 4e, there’s a great example of this.  It has two axes, one of role and one of power source.  When you make a table of it, it looks something like this:

Martial Magical Divine Primal
Defender Fighter Paladin Barbarian
Controller Wizard Druid
Leader Cleric
Striker Rogue Warlock Ranger

This diagram has wholes in it, of course, which invite is to fill them in.  What’s a divine striker?  Some kind of assassin, of course!  A divine controller might be a “Summoner.”  What about a martial leader?  Well, D&D gave us the Warlord, but perhaps we could use a Bard instead.

Magic: the Gathering offers us another great example of themes and a framework.  The five colors of magic all have their own special rules, themes and flavor.  We also expect other elements, like creatures, instant spells and enchantments of various cost.  If you need to design, you just fill in the holes: if black has themes of self-destruction, power at a cost, and big, terrible things, then we might expect the “cheap monster” to be pretty powerful, but have a terrible cost that’s slowly killing you.  If blue has themes of small, unassuming things that break the rules in some subtle way, we might expect a cheap blue creature to be very weak, but have clever little abilities that allow it to bypass your opponents defenses.
The point here is to identify some broad themes and ideas that we can pull from.  They can be directly pertinent to the setting, as D&D’s sources were, or they can be utterly random, like the themes of chess pieces, the four elements or the five power rangers.  The point is ultimately to come up with a set of hooks on which you can easily hang ideas on and where you can see holes in the pattern that need to be filled.
Ultimately, this serves the same role as the fractal (and they complement each other: themes give you an idea of what your three fractal elements should be, and you can use the fractal to explore themes again and again from different angles): it creates a pattern that rapidly inspires you for your setting creation and gives the players who grasp the pattern a deeper sense of how the world works.  You don’t have to define every node in a framework, because simply having a framework implies that they exist.  We don’t know what a magical defender is, but we know one could exist, and we might already have ideas for what he might be.

Rule 5: Steal like an Artist: Translatio, Imitatio; Aemulatio

So, if you’ve done everything right, you understand that your setting is a fractal, and you’ve got a framework you can use to inspire your ideas, a rough pattern of what your setting looks like, and you know that you should keep things simple and player-directed.  What should you use to fill in those holes?

The first thing is whatever you come up with.  People often spend too much time thinking about these things in more detail than is strictly necessary.  You already know what you need to put into your setting.  Just like you’re automatically filling in the fractals and frameworks I gave you above.  The truth is, you’re already a very creative person, you just need the right context to be creative, and frameworks and fractals make that much easier.  So, trust yourself and just go.

But perhaps you want more detail, something richer and deeper than you can do on your own.  Then it’s time to steal like an artist (which, by the way, you’re probably doing unconsciously anyway, this just makes it a more conscious theft).  Arguably, nothing is original, but an iterative remix of that which came before us.  Creation is not the strict speaking of new things into existence, but that which naturally arises from a conversation we have with our sources and inspirations.

We have two major sources of inspiration we can draw on for Psi-Wars.  The first are other artistic works.  For an obvious example, Psi-Wars draws on Star Wars, which itself draws on works like Flash Gordon.  We can also draw on the real world, including real-world cultures and history.  Star Wars, for example, draws heavily on WW2 and the Roman Empire (though one can argue that the latter is more drawing on Foundation, or perhaps a mixture of both).  Kenneth Hite is often fond of saying that history regularly comes up with stuff crazier, more original and more interesting than you can ever come up with on your own, and you’d be a fool not to pilfer it.

But there are good, better and best ways to steal: Translatio, imitatio and aemulatio (Sorry, no English translation for that, I’m afraid).

Translatio, or translation, is the direct and slavish transcription of a work from one medium to another.  This is important when we don’t want to lose vital details (such as translating a work from one language to another, or when copying a sacred text from one document to another by hand), but it’s a very uncreative act.  An RPG example of that is direct conversion: if Psi-Wars was instead a conversion of Star Wars into GURPS, that would be translatio.

Imitatio, or imitation, is where we scratch the serial numbers off, both otherwise use it wholesale in our new work, without considering the reasons behind it.  This is important if we have a working formula that people expect to see again, but the inability to grasp the reasons why a creator did what he did hampers our ability to really command our new work.  The result is derivative.  Iteration I Psi-Wars was pretty clearly imitatio, as I just grabbed things that looked right without considering the why or wherefore.

Aemulatio, or emulation, is where we grasp the underlying patterns that guide the work we’re studying.  If we look at Star Wars and understand why it was constructed the way it was, and then see that pattern elsewhere, or see where it could be different, and understand how we can make it work in an entirely new pattern, then we have sufficient command that we’re not actually “ripping” the original work off, but using the lessons learned from the work to create something new.

When you’re looking at inspirations, I encourage you to look at a variety of related sources, to find what makes them similar, what makes them different, why they work and why they don’t.  See if you can find underlying patterns and master them, and then re-express, deconstruct, reconstruct or remix them in your work.

I should note that emulation is a slow process involving a lot of research.  I think the best creators do it out of habit: always consuming and analyzing whatever they look at.   You know that guy who always picks apart every movie and discusses “third act this”  and “narrative closure” that? He’s analyzing out of habit, and he’ll be able to draw on his mental library of movie structure when creating his own movie. If you can’t reach these towering peaks of accomplishment, don’t worry about it: don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good, and do what you can.  Just the act of creating, even in imitation, will teach you something about the work.  The three steps, translatio, imitatio and aemulatio, were not initially intended as degrees of quality, but steps in mastery.  First you must learn enough about the work to replicate it, then you’ll learn enough to know what you can change without changing the work itself, then you’ll learn enough to master the complete underlying structure.

The act of creating is an act of learning, or mentally modeling that which you are making and then explaining that model to your audience.  If you don’t understand it well enough to do it perfectly, that’s just part of the process.  But I encourage you to dive deeper where you can.  Be curious, explore, and play with the concepts you find.

Patreon Post: Building the Traders

I am, of course, knee deep in Iteration 6 as of this writing and already hard at work on the Psi-Wars setting.  I’ve wanted user input on the Psi-Wars setting for awhile, and one of my favorite gaming companies, Amplitude, uses polls for user-content in its games, and I thought I’d follow suit.  Polls allow me to direct your attention in a useful way and allow me to offer snippets of inspiration.  Naturally, the end result will likely be a blend of interests and approaches, a compromise between me and my readers, but that’s just how RPGs work, right?

So, today, I have the first of these, available to all my $5+ Patrons.  This regards “the Traders,” an ancient race of mastermind aliens that competed with humanity for dominion over the galactic center, and lost.  The design uses the lessons offered in the Aliens series, including themes and niches, including:
  If you’re already a $5+ patron, check it out!  If you’re not but want to join, I’d be happy to have you.

Support me on Patreon!

"Who Gives a S**t?" A Meditation on Setting Design

Tons of people are doing settings, but that is kinda hard for me to wrap my head around. I love GURPS content, I love spells, powers, advantages, builds, encounters, adventures, but for me, a setting is kind of a deeply personal thing.
-Benjamin Gauronskas, Let’s GURPS

Yes, that is the second time I’ve used that quote, but I think it’s an important one.  It highlights a truth: Settings often aren’t useful to people precisely because they are so personal.  A GM discussing his favorite, homebrew setting is often about as engrossing for the audience as a player discussing his favorite character.  In part, this is because settings need to be experienced.  What makes Star Wars fun is that you’re there, watching the ships explode and the lightsabers clash.  What doesn’t work is watching a couple of nerds sit around discussing the importance of the Bendu Priests in the founding of the Jedi Order.

The problem here is that we need to be able to connect with a setting, and we’ll only do that if it’s useful to us.  I’ve avoided going deeply into setting with Psi Wars because, for the most part, it won’t be useful to you.  I get it: Most of you who are reading this are doing so to see how I build a campaign, or to rip off some rule idea I have, or because you’re bored and want to read GURPS stuff. The majority of my audience will never run a Psi-Wars game.  That doesn’t mean nobody will, but if I want to my blog posts to be as universally useful as possible, I need to make my posts useful to a broad audience: the casual reader, the inspiration-seeker, the crunch-head, and the psi-wars fan, and thus my posts have so far been generic and very meta.

The same principle must apply, itself, to setting design.  To make our setting interesting, we have to connect with our audience, and to connect with our audience, we must understand their needs, why they might be interested in a setting.  We also need to understand what a setting is. So, before I get into building any setting material, let’s stop to consider the point of a setting, and who our audience is.

Setting: What is it Good For?

Context.  It’s good for Context.
Everyone who’s studied literature knows that all literature have four bits: Character, Plot, Theme and Setting.  Setting is usually an after thought: it’s the stage in which everything else takes place.  It’s “not as important as” characters, who perform the action, plot, the action that happens.  However, I would argue that this misses the point of what setting really does, which is to provide context.  A story about two lovers whose parents disapprove of their love has a very different context in Renaissance Verona than in the Antebellum American South.  
Setting puts us in a specific time and place, and that carries with it all the context that we might associate with that.  If you’re a woman in some fanciful fairy-tale medieval world, you could be a princess, or you might “rebel against conventions” and be a knight, but you could not be a scientist (though perhaps an alchemist!).  The setting determines what you can be, and what that means.  For example, the idea that a female knight “defies conventions” is a setting-assumption, a context provided by the setting. Perhaps all knights are men, and perhaps your female knight gets a lot of guff.  Perhaps some knights feel threatened, other knights are concerned about your well-being, and one particularly handsome knight is besotted with you, but is now thoroughly confused about how to go about dealing with you.  It could just as easily be the other way around, where female knights are common, or that male knights are revolutionary or unheard of.  The setting determines this.  Your character is a knight, but the setting provides context as to what being a female knight means to the world.  Likewise, the setting shapes the plot with context.  Perhaps being a female knight causes trouble for your relationships (“Why can’t you just be a princess, like your sister?”), or perhaps your father’s death creates an inheritance crisis, with some dastardly duke trying to claim it, as he argues that your father has no “male heirs” and you vociferously disagree as an heir to your father’s knightly title.  Again, all of this, from social convention to inheritance law to the idea of titles themselves are setting assumptions.  They provide us with the context we need to make the story work.
Role-playing games thrive on context.  They evolved out of games, first and foremost, so they already had mechanics and gameplay in place before they even became “roleplaying” games.  Most people like to argue that the major innovation was that players now “played the role” of a single piece… but we were already “playing a role” in wargames, usually that of commander of a force for a specific scenario.  For example, if you play as Ryu in Street Fighter, you’re already “playing his role” but you’re not role-playing.
What “role-playing” actually covers is a topic for another time, but one of the things that mattered in the switch from wargame and boardgame to role-playing game was a deeper emphasis on context.  You’re not just “playing a knight,” you’re worried about what being a knight means, in this world, in this setting.  And to really explore that, we need to know what being a knight means in this world, which means we need to define our setting.
Psi-Wars has Space Knights that use the force sword and psionic powers.  How does one become a space knight?  How do various factions feel about them?  Why doesn’t anyone else use force swords and psionic powers?  Space Knights seem well studied in philosophy… but which philosophy?  What underlying assumptions does it have?
Psi-Wars actually already has a lot of this context (We have a galactic core, which is civilized and powerful, and a rim which is barbaric and poor; we have Communion, with all its underlying assumptions; we have an Empire and an Alliance and criminals and law enforcement and alien warriors and giant robot armies).  The point of going deeper is to provide even more context.  That context provides inspiration to GMs trying to create plots of players trying to create characters.  Context provides inspiration for actions to undertake, or challenges that might afflict the PCs.  It helps to explain why the factions fight, and to outline the troubles we’ll have in bringing peace to the galaxy.  It even explains why we might want to bring peace to the galaxy.
As we move forward, we need to remember that, more than anything else, we need to provide useful context to our players (or to GMs who might want to use our material).
But what’s useful context?

Those Who Give a S**t: Your target Audience

What is useful depends on who  you ask.
The easiest way to know what people want is to simply ask them.  Hey, reader, what do you want out of a setting?  Well, there are more than a hundred of you, typically, more than 500 sometimes.  If you all responded, that would give me quite a lot to sift through.
An easier way, one used by most companies, is to do some research and then to come up with an archtypal imagining of their target audience, and then design the game towards those specific people.  With that in mind, let me offer you four players and how they might approach your setting.

Brent, the Jock

This is Brent.  Brent is only in your game because he’s your bud, and he likes hanging out with you guys, but he’d honestly be as happy bowling, or watching sports, or playing video games.  He’s mostly here to be social (A “cheetoist” as the kids call them).  He has no interest in doing any “homework.” He doesn’t really want to make a character or read through the rules.  He mostly just wants to sit down and play, and more than that will make him moan about how RPGs are so much work.  Brent demands to know why he should bother with setting at all.
I’ve made Brent a jock, but he could as easily be someone who works a lot and just doesn’t have time to read, or a girlfriend gamer who’s just there because her boyfriend is, or really anyone who feels that an enormous investment in a non-existent fantasy world is a waste of time.  He represents anyone who has zero interest in reading massive tomes.  He just wants to play.  One might be tempted to say that he’s fairly rare in GURPS circles, but I find the opposite is true.  He might make a character (ideally from templates, or even better if he can talk you into doing it for him), but thereafter he just says what he does and rolls 3d6.  For him, GURPS is actually pretty simple, and he likes it that way.  He doesn’t necessarily mind a detailed setting so long as he’ll experience it rather than need to put a lot of work into learning it.
Brent is important, probably the most important of the four.  If we keep Brent in mind, we’ll remember that all setting material has an investment cost.  One of the reasons Star Wars is such a success is that it has very little investment cost.  There’s an evil empire, and you know it’s evil because it looks evil, and it fights the plucky, heroic rebellion, which you know is plucky and heroic because it looks plucky and heroic.  You don’t need to read a million comics or watch a bunch of TV shows and read up on wikipedia to follow the movies.  For him, if Psi-Wars suddenly becomes this huge study of complicated politics, he’ll tune out.  If Brent was one of my readers, he mostly spends his time on the Primer, looking at characters, getting the gist from others, and waiting for an actual game to emerge.
Brent demands that our settings be minimalistic, and easy to get into.  He demands justification for each detail we add to our setting.

Willow, the Nerd

This is Willow.  Willow is a huge nerd, and she games because she loves games.  She’s a huge Star Wars fan, belongs to the fan-fiction community, is a wiki-contributor, and has a collection of Star Wars figurines at home (“Rey is the best Jedi!” though she’s also partial to Aayla Secura, but she won’t admit it).  She’s also deeply invested in GURPS and has perhaps run a few games of her own, as well as owning all the supplements (and complains about a lack of THS fiction line), and she hates games where “things don’t make sense.” She’s studied history, theology, linguistics, economics, etc, and is quick to point out inaccuracies she finds in any setting she plays in.  But she’ll also read everything you write.  If you write well, she’ll get terribly excited and want to add to it.  If you write poorly, if she has no sense of the setting, she’ll lose interest or grow disenchanted.  Ultimately, she wants to go to your setting (She is a “simulationist”, as the kids say these days).
I think we all know a Willow.  In a sense, role-players are Willow: We’re creating our own worlds and our stories and exploring them.  Willow is very strongly represented in the GURPS community, as GURPS excels at the sort of lavishly detailed settings Willow really enjoys.  She’s also naturally drawn to more detailed settings (so naturally she’s more a fan of the Expanded Universe) because it allows her to invest deeply.
Sometimes people want to invest deeply.  Perhaps they’re bored, or perhaps their life sucks and they want to escape for a little while.  Good setting material is often entertaining for its own sake.  But for it to work, it has to be internally consistent.  It needs to hang together well.  She stands in opposition to Brent, because to Willow, setting is its own justification.  If Psi-Wars becomes too simple, she’ll tune out.  If she’s one of my readers, she got terribly excited when I wrote Communion stuff, and has been somewhat lukewarm for the rest of the time (unless she likes meta stuff, then she’s happy).
I think we pay too much attention to Willow when we design settings, because she gives us the most feedback, thus Willow-centric settings tend to be overrepresented.  If you move too far towards Willow, your richly complex setting becomes very difficult for new people to enter.  Nonetheless, she does exist, and she matters.  We need to make her happy too.
Willow demands that our settings be entertaining and internally consistent.  She wants something worthy of exploration.

Desirée, the Romantic

This is Desirée.  She’s been roleplaying for years (her favorite game is Vampire: the Masquerade, but she’s been moving towards 7th Sea and Fate lately).  She loves to LARP (especially “Nordic” LARP).  She likes romantic stories, and when she discusses your games, she always discusses the people in them like they were real.  Her characters all have extensive backstories, usually with multiple relationships buried in there.  She’s disappointed if there’s not some exploration of relationship somewhere in the game (Romance, yes, but also familial or friendship, or duty to another; ideally, some fantastic intersection of all of the above).  She has little time for mechanics, but claims she just plays for the story. (She is a “dramatist” or “narrativist”, as the kids say these days).
Desirée doesn’t have to be girlish.  She’s any player who role-plays to see how the story unfolds, rather than to “game the game.”  They want to participate in that story and find out what happens next.
Desirée cares deeply about the setting, but only to a point.  Economics bore her to tears.  She has no time for discussions of military technology.  She doesn’t want to hear about yet another martial arts school.  What matters to her is what the setting does for her character’s story.  She’ll want to know about Psi-Wars aristocracy (“Do they have houses?  How do those houses feel about each other?”), or social conventions (“Do they dance?  What does a boy give a girl if he really likes her?  Do they drink wine?  What could my character do that would utterly scandalize her father?”)  Slavery might interest her, as it’s dreadfully tragic, or criminal organizations, either as a source of rebellion or someone to rail against.  She wants to know what the setting means for her personal narrative, what social and contextual options it gives her personally.  The big picture isn’t as important as what she can do with her little piece of the setting.
Desirée demands that our settings be focused on creating interest narrative choices for the players and providing a social context for their characters.

Bjorn, the Warrior

This is Bjorn.  He’s also been roleplaying for years (Cut his teeth on D&D.  Loved the Rifts setting but hated the system.  Thinks the Street Fighter RPG was underrated.  Would really like to get his hands on Legends of the Wulin, and owns all three editions of Exalted).  He’s already got his character all written up, and his character is badass.  He’s found a loophole to exploit to make his character invincible, but he’ll be deeply disappointed if you don’t find a way to get around it.  When you mentioned Psi-Wars, he instantly asked about lightsabers, Jedi powers, and wanted to know more about the Rightous Crusader, Rebellious Beast and Death (“Hmm, or maybe the Other would be better.  What kind of templates can I change into if I take that?”).  If he’s reading Psi-Wars, his favorite bits were the weapons and armor posts, and all the martial arts.  He tunes out whenever Desirée discusses philosophy or her latest romantic tragedy, but sits upright whenever there’s a fight.  He’ll explain that he’s not here for the story, but for the mechanics (He’s a “gamist” as the kids like to say these days)
People love to hate Bjorn, but the truth is a lot of us got our start playing as Bjorn.  He’s one reason GURPS DF is a big hit (and Brent loves playing DF with him).  Cool powers and interesting gameplay draw us in, and they’re as much a part of a role-playing game as Desirée’s deep interest in roleplaying.
Bjorn also cares about your setting, but only to a point.  He has no interest in social dynamics or politics or legal matters.  He wants to hear about military technology, cool martial arts styles;  He decides what philosophy to adhere to not based on his personal beliefs but what powers they give him access to, and what strategies they encourage.  He plays the game to win, and he’s looking at the setting like a game board to navigate.  For him, the setting matters mainly in what mechanical context it offers.  For him, it’s about navigating the various philosophies and factions to get at the best mechanical bits (and for many such players, this isn’t just a hassle, but part of the fun of the game, as pursuing the coolest powers often has the most interesting narrative demands)
Bjorn demands that our setting be focused on creating interesting mechanical choices for players and providing a context for their struggles.

Pleasing Everyone All Of The Time

Upon reading the above archetypes, one might be tempted to put oneself in one category or the other, but I suggest against doing this.  You are not a Willow or a Bjorn.  Rather, at different times and in different ways, you are all of them.  All people have a tendency to initially resist investing in something new, but if we’re going to invest, we want to invest in something high quality and intriguing.  Role-players, by and large, both want to play a role, but also want to play a game.  We want to know what a setting means for our personal, narrative choices and for our tactical choices.  The above archetypes do not represent people but impulses with all of us, extreme ends of particular spectra that we’re all speckled across.
Fortunately, these requirements aren’t mutually incompatible.  It’s possible to make a setting that requires a low investment to jump into, but rewards deep investment (Star Wars is just such a setting), and setting elements can both contain interesting narrative choices while also guiding mechanical strategies.  We don’t need to pick and choose which players to please.  Rather, we should try to keep their demands in mind with each step of our setting design:
  • Brent demands that our setting have a low investment and wants a justification for each setting element (Elegance)
  • Willow demands an internally consistent and entertaining setting, and she wants the setting to reward deep exploration (Depth).
  • Desirée demands context for her interesting narrative choices (Drama).
  • Bjorn demands context for his interesting mechanical choices (Action-Packed).
By answering these four demands, we ensure that our setting is not more bloated than it needs to be, but that it still has plenty that people can (optionally) explore, and that these setting elements both drive narrative development and player tactics.  The result should be a very solid setting, if we can stick with the ideal.  Of course, nothing ever reaches its ideal, but ideals are like stars: You don’t need to reach them, you just need to use them to guide you to your final destination.

Toyland

Properties of Toyland

  • Nobody dies in Toyland
  • Only children and toys may enworkmenin Toyland.
  • Any toy can be found in Toyland.

Challenges of Toyland

Play!

0 or less: Call down the Damien’s dread enforcers, who will demand to know precisely who is engaging in unauthorized play with his toys! Or break the toy you’re playing with. Ooops!

1: Well, that was fun!

3: Make other kids jealous of how much fun you’re having.

5: You’ve learned something while playing with what is clearly an educational toy. Oh no!

7: Your play is actually exactly as fun as you hoped it would be. The things you always wanted to happen when you play? They happen. It might not be good, but they happen!

Trouble and Tools:

  • “Nobody plays with my toys but me!” (3): Damien Bogsworth has issued his decree, and so none may play with any of the toys of toyland but himself! Anyone attempting to bypass this Trouble inevitably gains the attention of one of Damien’s informants, who will call down Damien’s enforcers on the interloper. Still, consider applying a trouble of 1, as toys are so terrified of being cast into the Dungeon of Lost Toys that they tend to keep to themselves and avoid strange children.
  • Tool: The Seven Fabled Toys (+4): The Seven Fabled Toys, if the deign to descend from Toy Mountain to play with a child, will so empower that child’s play that even the most surly child will experience impossible delight and have fun. They’re often highly educational (boo!).

Toy City

The largest collections of toys in all the world, the once great megatropolis of merriment has bloated into a crime-ridden monstrosity under Damien’s ruthless reign. Once, toy soldiers guarded its walls, while tops spun upright and balls and jacks got along and Lego laborers worked tirelessly to keep the doll houses and block skyscrapers in top condition. Now, barbie dolls turn tricks on the street corners. Bouncing balls have learned to stay within their homes lest a rogue jack puncture them. Gangs of laughing, rampaging Sock Monkeys have taken to the streets, gleefully ripping the stuffing from rag dolls who don’t fork over their protection coins. Only Damien’s favorite toys, franchise merchandizing and exclusive collectibles, walk the streets unmolested under the watchful eyes of Damien’s enforcers like the Commando Elite. And even they know their days are numbered, for when the next movie catches Damien’s attention, or a sudden surge in production drops a toy’s value, the Tyrant of Toyland’s whimsical interests will change.

Properties of Toy City

  • Corruption (Trouble 2): Toy City rots beneath Damien’s rule. Those who want to achieve anything meaningful in city must grease the palms of a higher official or particpate in the criminal underworld to get something done. Unless a toy (or a child) is willing to accept some of Toy City’s corruption into themselves, they face Trouble worth 2 points whenever they try to do anything in Toy City.
  • You can find anything in Toy City (+1): If someone is looking for a lost toy or a specific brand of toy, or useful information, Toy City is the best place to do it. It will not help you find mystical or legendary toys, however.
  • Let’s play Licenses and Legal Fees!: Toy City lets you bypass Damien’s Decree by seeking bureaucratic permission to play with one of the Toys of Toyland. Alas, you still have to deal with Corruption.

Description Snippets:

  • The faded colors of the once bright blocks that make up the towering skyscrapers, once set against a glorious, sun-blazing skyline, now mostly hidden in the oppressive grey-clouds of Damien’s disapproval.
  • The haunting laughter of a villainous Sock Monkey, followed by the loud pop of a ball or a balloon, and then the tiny, electronic sound of a police siren.
  • The chipped paint of a Barbie’s lips, the fading luster of her once-golden hair, a broken heel clinging to her permanently tip-toed feet, her too-short, glossy skirt showing a vast expanse of posable, plastic thigh, and her electronic croak of “Want to play?”
  • A momentary glimpse of wooden fruit on a table and the frightened google-eyes of a doll through the window of a dollhouse before she yanks the cotton curtains closed.
  • The click-clack of a rubicks cube over an intersection, while slot cars rev their electrical engine, waiting for its red face to turn green.

Find one of the Seven Fabled Toys of Toyland

0 or less: The hinterlands of Toyland pose many dangers. You cannot die in toyland, but that doesn’t mean you want to meet a feral Teddy Bear either. Or perhaps one of the Seven Fabled Toys finds you and is very ill-disposed towards you.

1: What an adventure! At least you had fun.

2: You find something. It might not be one of the Seven Fabled Toys, and it might not even be a clue towards one of them, but you find something.

4: You’ve found a very important clue to one of the Seven Fabled Toys, or perhaps even attracted their attention and gained an audience with one of their mediaries, who wants to know what you seek, or pronounces you unworthy.

5: You do not find one of the Seven Fabled Toys, but you do learn something of what it means to be worthy of their attention. Perhaps you regain some of your childlike innocence, or you learn to value toys, or you learn the importance of sharing.

7: You find one of the seven fabled toys. They may or may not be well-disposed towards you. What now?

9: You find one of the seven fabled toys and enlightenment. You understand why this quest was important for you personally and in making the change necessary in your life, you have gained the favor of one of the Seven Fabled Toys of Toyland. They will fulfill your request.

Bonds, Afflictions, Trouble and Tools:

  • Tool: The Holiday Wish Catalog(+1): The Holiday Wish Catalog, released by Rosens Ltd, is the only known catalog in the world to contain information on the Seven Fabled Toys of Toyland (sometimes, they even include listings that allow you to buy one, but Damien’s influence has prevented that for over a century). Consulting one can make it easier for you to find one of the Seven Fabled Toys.
  • Trouble: You are Unworthy (-3): To approach one of the seven fabled toys of toyland, one must have childlike innocence, a profound appreciation of toys and the secret lives they lead, and you must embrace the Kindergarten Virtues, such as sharing, taking naps at the right time, not bullying others, being nice to your parents, etc. Bypass this trouble if you are willing to incur the wrath of of one of the toys, or to be changed.
  • Bond (Childlike Innocence): If one is willing to be changed by the seven fabled toys of toyland, treat this as a Wound that inflicts a Bond for Childlike Innocence or some other Kindergarten Virtue. For mere mortals, this often changes them into children, or possibly even into toys, who thereafter become one of the mediaries of the Fabled Toy.

Toy Mountain

Toy Mountain is a fabled mountain found in the most distant reaches of Toyland, beyond the Bathtub Sea, past the desolate Sandbox wastes and further even than the Great Backyard Forest. The Toys of Toyland never die, but they know that eventually, their lives in Toyland itself must somehow end. The unworthy and wicked toys who prick their child’s fight or refuse to be shared or work hard to lose themselves in the bottom of the toybox end up, inevitably, in the Dungeon of Lost Toys. But the worthy and faithful toys are sometimes welcomed by the Gods of Toyland, the Seven Fabled Toys to the great and wondrous Toy Mountain. According to some stories, the mountain itself is built out of the endless resting-boxes of millennia of good toys slowly accumulating in this, the most sacred of places in Toyland.

Properties of Toy Mountain

  • Unforgiving Wilderness: Anyone who seeks to get to Toy Mountain must face a gauntlet of physical dangers enough to extinguish the courage of even the hardiest toy. While toys cannot be lost, they can be melted by the deserts, soaked by sea, or devoured by the great hounds that roam the Backyard Forests.
  • Home to the Gods (+3): Any attempts to find the Seven Fabled Toys will be far more successful if undertaken here.
  • Finding God: Those who come to Toy Mountain often walk away changed. It’s possible that characters might acquire one of the following Wounds:
    • Bond: Feral Toy 1: The toy forgets its child and loses its connection to its original purpose, and joins the roving feral tribes of toys in the wastes that surround Toy Mountain.
    • Affliction: I see the true lives of toys 1: You have been touched by the power of the Seven Fabled Toys, and you can see and hear what other mortals cannot: the slow blink of a dolls eyes, the whispered gossip toys share with one another about their children, etc.
  • Trouble: Beyond the Tyrant’s Grasp (-4): The Seven Fabled Toys reject the authority of Damien Bogsworth, and represent the core of the Estate’s conflict with Damien. They have used their considerable power to erect a Miraculous barrier that makes the mountain itself seem to shift and move if the agents of Damien attempt to come closer to it. If you’re a loyal agent of Damien Bogsworth, you must surmount this Trouble or have some magic that lets you ignore it.

Description Snippets

  • The mountain smells musty, like an attic full of old, treasured toys, and sunlight pours through dust motes like gold shooting through floating diamonds, and at the top of a mountain, the silhouette of a mysterious-but-familiar toy gazes upon you, before turning his back on you and losing himself higher up in the mountain.
  • A painted river, churning blue and white with fish-like paint-flecks of silver, flows down the plastic green sides of the mountain, flowing past a forest of toothpick trees and a small-but-exquisitely detailed village full of blobby looking half-people and windmills that turn against a non-existent wind. In the distance, against dark blue cardboard sky, back-lit lightning flashes to recorded thunder.
  • The churning heat of red-painted, baking-soda-and-vinegar lava boils out over the top of a paper-mache peak, spilling its red guts out over the blasted landscape and sending nearby toys scurrying for cover.
  • The peak of Toy Mountain is covered in gift-wrapped packages and small, wooden pine trees. The frozen stillness of Christmas anticipation brings a hallowed frostiness to this sacred spot. If you reach up, you feel like you could almost touch the sky and, with it, achieve the aspirations of every toy: to become forever beloved.
  • Flash! Behold, one of the seven fabled toys. The sun surmounts its head like a halo. It stands perfectly, like a toy in the window on a cold, Christmas morning. Its face contains the beauty of the most coveted toy, with the perfection of a catalog advertisement. Its voice is the breathless excitement of a child describing the toy they want most. Its touch is the loving caress of a child taking their precious toy into their grasp for the first time, full of electric thrill. The Fabled Toy beckons you forward. You are blessed!

Rescue a Lost Childhood Toy

0 or less: Perhaps your toy has joined the resistance and your actions have lead to Damien uncovering it and foil its attempt to restore the True King of Toyland. Oops! Or perhaps you get lost in the search for your toy and become afflicted with Nostalgia. Or perhaps Damien uncovers your efforts and throws you into his Dungeon of Lost Toys.

1: Toyland is kind of neat! Make some new friends

3: You don’t find your lost, childhood toy, but your quest speaks to the hearts of those in toyland. They whisper of you and grow envious of your toy, who has such a loyal master.

4: You found your lost, childhood toy! Hopefully, it’s not in trouble!

6: The toys in toyland are moved by your actions. They rally around you, as a good child who seeks to protect her toys, and look to your for leadership against the despotic reign of Damien. Will you join them in their fight to overthrow Damien?

7: You find your lost, childhood toy. You find all of your lost, childhood toys, or you also find the means to free them or fix them. Things return to how you remember them as a child!

Bonds, Afflictions, Trouble and Tools:

  • Bond: Nostalgia (1): You’re afflicted with an inflated sense of how wonderful your child was and a deep yearning to be as you were back then. Treat this as a wound that can occur if you find a lost, childhood toy, or if someone brings one to you.

The Dungeon of Lost Toys

In the bowels of the Great Toy Castle lies the Dungeon of Lost Toys. Most Toys believe the Kings of Toyland constructed the dungeon to house the worst of the toys, and in a sense, that’s true. The first King did indeed dig deep into the core of Toyland to hide away the 13 Hell Toys, but what he found was a vast network of forbidding plastic, lego, clay and paper-mache tunnels. The presence of the 13 hell toys warped it further, expanding and twisting the tunnels back in upon themselves.

The highest levels of the dungeon, those closest to the Great Toy Castle resemble what one would expect of a prison, and here, Damien keeps his political prisoners. Deeper yet, where the artificial plastic and wood give way to more natural paper-mache and clay, the 13 Hell Toys are kept in vaults, and the tunnels, caverns and grottos begin to spider throughout the core of toyland, ever shifting under the influence of the hell toys. Sometimes, prisoners escape and make their way into the bowels of the dungeon, where they are never heard from again. For the toys of toyland, the Dungeon of Lost Toys ishell.

Properties of The Dungeon of Lost Toys

  • Trouble: Tight Security (-3): Any attempt to rescue a lost childhood toy that’s been cast into the Dungeon of Lost Toys requires you to either overcome this trouble, or deal with the security directly, or accept that your toy might have been irreparably lost or destroyed by Damien’s torture.
  • The Forbidden Toybox: In the most secure depths of the Dungeon, there lay scattered and lost vaults wherein the 13 hell-toys, those toys exiled by the first King of Toyland for being too dangerous. Finding one of these is worth an additional -2 trouble, for a total of -5 trouble!
  • Lost Pathways: The deepest bowels of the Dungeon of Lost Toys connects to the Reincarnation Engine, allowing one to travel from one Chancel to the other.
  • Lost (Wound): Toys cannot die, but they can become Lost.  Any such Lost toy can always be found in the bowels of the Dungeon of Lost Toys.

Description Snippets

  • The slow groan of a multi-colored, camo-toned, puddle of waxy like plastic that was once a G.I. Joe, that slowly gropes its way across the plastic bricks of the dungeon.
  • Amidst the scattered fluff and red thread of Damien’s many victims, a barbie-dolls head has been spiked atop a sharpened pencil, with its hair shorn to stubs. Its painted eyes slowly flutter own, deep green and full of pain. “Help me,” it pleads.
  • The plastic walls and floors feel rough and cool to the touch. Green Fun Express™ glow-in-the-dark goo slowly drips down the wall with a disgustingly squishing sound and a strange, hungry burbling.
  • In the bowels of the dungeon, where the shadows grow thickest and rubber spiders dangle on frightful rubber strings, toys move sluggishly behind plastic bars, except for one, where the open, orange manacles of a My Pet Monster™ rest empty in mute testimony to its escaped denizen. In the cell behind you, a haunted doll’s mouth begins to rattle up and down as she cackles electronically “Want to play? Want to play?”

Fight the forces of Damien Bogsworth!

0 or less: You suffer defeat! You’ve been wounded in some way, or captured and dragged off to the Dungeon of Lost Toys! Or, even if you survive, some of your allies will almost certainly suffer an ill-fate, or you’ll bring the gimlet eye of Damien Bogsworth upon you.

1: You fought the forces of Damien Bogsworth. Perhaps you didn’t win, but you at least have satisfaction of knowing you didn’t go quietly into the night.

3: You fought the forces of Damien Bogsworth and your efforts have rocked toyland. Barbie wants to interview you. Damien puts out crayon wanted posters out for you. Your efforts have made an impact and not gone unnoticed.

4: You achieved some measure of victory! You’ve captured Toy City, or freed some toys from the Dungeon of Lost toys! Damien will certainly remember that!

6: The Toys of Toyland watch your efforts breathlessly. Dare they hope? Many rally to your side, and you soon find yourself swamped with an army.

7: The armies of Damien Bogsworth lay crushed beneath your iron heel. The dismembered body of one of the Commando Elite begs for your mercy. Damien still has plenty of forces, but his power has definitely been greatly diminished by this victory.

9: By clever strategem, you have forced the armies of Damien Bogsworth to surrender, or even to join your side. No toys were destroyed this day! Indeed, those who faced you now reconsider their decision and realize that, through you, a united and whole Toyland might be possible.

Trouble and Tools:

  • Damien Bogsworth’s leadership: If Damien himself leads his forces, this becomes a contest.
  • Trouble: Commando Elite (-2): The Commando Elite are the finest fighting force currently in Toyland. If they join the battle, beware! If Damien wields them in a contest, they give him an Edge of +2.
  • Tool: An Army of Tin Soldiers (+1): The old tin soldiers can still fight with the ferociousness of the Napoleonic armies upon which they were founded, if one can still find enough of them.
  • The Might of a Fabled Toy (+4): Few things can compare, in toyland, to the power of one of the Fabled Seven Toys, except perhaps all seven.

The Great Toy Castle

Accumulating over the millennia that Toyland has existed, it is every toy castle ever built by children. It has spires topped with triangle blocks, walls built from LEGO bricks, and is fronted by the leering plastic of Castle Greyskull. It is the seat of the King of Toyland, and held in the greatest respect by all Toys. It is the literal center of Toyland just as it is the symbolic center of the Estate of Toys. He who holds the Great Toy Castle holds the Power of Toys.

Properties of the Great Toy Castle

  • Edge: The Throne of Toys (+5): The Throne of Toys is the ultimate authority of power in all the lands of toys. Those who sit upon it utterly dominate the politics of Toyland. Anyone who resists them in a contest of political authority must contend with an Edge of +5.
  • Toy Royalty (+2): The Great Toy Castle houses the most noble toys in toyland, only the finest.  Anyone who wants to play with these toys gain +2 from the extra satisfaction and happiness those toys will bring them!
  • Affliction (Packaged): Damien Bogsworth keeps the Great Vault of Packaged Toys in the depths of the Great Toy Castle. Those captured fighting him might find themselves afflicted with this Wound. It preserves their value while assuring they can no longer effectively oppose him. This is too much for some toys to bear, though, who are sometimes utterly changed from Toys (which are meant to be played with) and into Collectibles.

Description Snippets

  • The loud blare of commercial trumpets, the excited chatter of toys, and the popping sound of confetti bombs bursting to cast a rain of color and ribbon streamers down onto the streets near the Great Toy Castle.
  • The swoop of the newest, coolest toy jets as they buzz the castle. The rhythmic, marching plastic click-click-click of Damien’s armies as they patrol the walls.
  • The imagination-firing vastness of the great castle, like an ever-growing pile of grandeur, heaped up by the dreams of every child who has ever put a toy crown on his head and a sheet about his shoulders.
  • The hushed, excited silence within the great castle, lit by strings of light-bright bulbs, with speak-and-reads announcing the room you’ve entered.
  • The grandeur of the court room, with its wood-block thrown, the exquisite burger-king crown jewels of toy land still in their original packaging, awaiting the next king of Toyland, while Magistrate Bopit informs you, in rapid sequence, of what protocols are expected of you in the august presence of King Damien Bogsworth.

Vancouver!

In keeping with my previous plans, I’ve chosen to design each setting as a list of challenges and setting descriptions, so I have a rough idea of what sorts of problems someone might face when interacting with a particular setting.  All of these challenges could easily be projects, if the players wished.  The idea is more that I get a sense of what sorts of adventures we might have in this particular setting.

Today, I begin with the core of the setting: Vancouver

Properties of Vancouver

  • The Law of the Every-City: Provided it is not unique or iconic to another city, anything that can be found in a modern city can be found in Vancouver.
  • The Law of the Indie City: The more interesting something in or associated with Vancouver is, the less likely outsiders know about it.
  • The Law of Canada: True denizens of Vancouver are always polite.

Challenges of Vancouver

Find a nice cup of coffee or tea

  •  0 or less: Spill hot coffee all over yourself and cause some burns
  • 2: Find a nice cup of coffee
  • 3: Impress your friends with your taste in coffee
  • 4: Find a cup of coffee that perks you up, or inspires you to solve that problem you had at work, or a cup of tea that soothes your nerves
  • 6: Get a cup of coffee from Yukimura Yuji himself, or find a new blend of coffee that a trendsetter
  • 8: Find a cup of tea that cures a lingering illness (like cancer)

Bounds, afflictions, trouble and tools:

  • Trouble: The Death of Abigail Ng (3): The estate of Tea is dying! Finding a good cup of tea is getting harder, unless it’s a weird, unnatural or alien form of tea, such as Oolong, Herbal or Bubble Tea, in which case you can ignore the trouble, as the estate of Tea is shuddering with the aftereffects of Abigail’s death.
  • Tool: World Class Baristas (+1): Vancouver has some fantastic baristas, most of whom trained under Yukimura Yuji. If you can find one of them, they’ll give you +1 on any quest you undertake to find a good cup of coffee. This does not apply to tea (Yuji had not yet rediscovered his love for Tea when he trained the Baristas of Vancouver).

Kafka’s Coffee

The hippest place to get coffee in Vancouver. It’s not the only coffee place in Vancouver, or even the most well-known, but Yuji trained here, and both the Powers of Tea and Coffee frequented it, and their grace and power have imbued it with some of the best coffee and tea in the world (though, following the Law of the Indie City, most people have never heard of it). Features a rotating gallery of local artists that you’ve never heard of.

Properties of Kafka’s Coffee

  • Sacred to Rajani Jones and Abigail Ng: All quest to get a good cup of coffee or tea gain +1 here (in addition to World Class Baristas)
  • Nonsensical Prophecy: The rotating artwork and the foam art of the coffee or tea depict truths pertinent to the current state of the spirit world, though one will never make sense of them until after the fact, unless one has some connection to either the estates of prophecy or nonsense.

Description Snippets:

  • The scowl of a disapproving barista through her heavy mascara and thick-rimmed glasses.
  • The percolating bubbling of coffee and sudden hiss of espresso.
  • The murmur of conversation and the scrape of chairs against wooden floors.
  • The rich, deep scent of fresh coffee and the subtle, soothing, grassy scent of tea.
  • Tiger-striped brown (or green) and white foam art bobbling about in someone’s cup.
  • An odd, eye-catching painting of clashing colors by some artist you’ve never heard of.

Find Love

  • 0 or less: Meet someone who is all wrong for you, perhaps a stalker, or an alien; whomever it is, it just won’t work out
  • 1: Have a nice date or a charming moment with someon
  • 2: Find someone with whom you could have the beginnings of a real, if humanely troubled and flawed relationship
  • 3: Date the really cute girl/boy, even if it won’t actually work out
  • 5: Connect with a person who makes your life better for having known them, relationship or no
  • 6: Land a date with a really hot girl/boy, and actually make it work. Your romance becomes the talk of the town
  • 9: Find your soulmate

Bonds, Afflictions, Trouble and Tools:

  • Trouble: Finding Love as a Toy (2): Toys and video-game characters have an especially difficult time finding love in Vancouver as their dating market is notoriously full of players.
  • Trouble: Not looking for something meaningful (2): Few Vancouverites are looking for something meaningful, especially not in romance. If a character is just looking for a date or some fun can avoid this Trouble, but as soon as they want something with a dharmic quality, Vancouver becomes a terrible place to find it… but see below!
  • Bond: I’m in love with X (Varies): Characters who fall in love with one another, if that love is a deep, profound, meaningful and dharmic, it might become a soul-defining bond. This can count as a wound, especially if someone inflicts it upon you unwillingly. Such love can kill, or utterly transform, mere mortals who have only one superficial health level (“You don’t seem like the same person since you met her…”). This is especially common if one finds their soul mate.

Dr. Sun Yat Sen’s Gardens

The most romantic place in all of Vancouver, Dr. Sun Yat Sen’s garden was created to help bridge the cultural differences between the West and the East, and serves as a refuge for many of Vancouver’s avian population, especially magpies. It allows people to bridge more than that: Because people come here to seek their dharma and purpose, in this case to find meaningful love, it serves as a crossroads between worlds (that is, you can get somewhere by going to Dr. Sun Yat Sen’s Gardens), and one can reach the Chancel of Kirin via the reflection of its koi pools.

Properties of Sun Yat Sen’s Gardens

  • Bridging Differences: Characters in Sun Yat Sen’s Gardens can ignore 2 points of trouble when it comes to connecting to one another, whether this is cultural or linguistic differences. This explicitly solves the “Not Seeking Something Meaningful” trouble.
  • Centered: The garden works as a tool for gaining serenity and internal introspection. Add +1 to any passion/skill attempt to understand one’s own dharma or purpose.
  • Gateway: You can reach Kirin’s chancel from the undisturbed reflections in Sun Yat Sen’s koi ponds.

Description Snippets

  • The babble of fountains or streams running into pools. The occasional pop of a koi fish surfacing.
  • The scent of flowers, earth, moss and algae, plus the unmistakable scent of koi-fish food, on the gently wafting wind.
  • Lawns of green, outlined in winding spirals of red-brown pathways or blue-silver streams, and speckled with the violet, pink, white of flowers and butterflies.
  • A weighty sense of ominous belonging and connection with whomever you have come with.
  • A sense of serenity as one stands in the shelter of a pagoda or the branches of a weeping willow.

Chill Out

  • 0: Get in trouble for having shirked more important responsibilities, resulting in more stress than you had before
  • 1:  Have fun hanging with your friends, or playing video games, or hanging out at a concert
  • 3: Get a high score, or an autograph, or otherwise make others jealous of your slacker feats
  • 5: Achieve a sense of peace, relaxation and well-being that restores some stress-related damage that you’ve taken
  • 6: Achieve a pointless world-record and gain widespread recognition for your slacker feat:
  • 9: Doing nothing turns out to be exactly the right thing to do, and your off-hand approach, you master of Wu Wei you, solves the problem at hand

Bonds, Afflictions, Trouble and Tools:

  • Trouble: Slacking Never Solved Anything (1): Chilling out helps one to escape, which never solves anything. If you’re trying to do something other than have a good time, or relax, you must overcome this Trouble somehow.
  • Stressed out! (Bond 1): If you’re really stressed, it counts as a superficial wound. Your character is really freaking out and is driven to try to accomplish the task that stressed them out in the first place, or to seek a way to relax. This level of stress is sufficient to kill mere mortals who have only one superficial wound! This could be a consequence of disastrously failing to chill out, while successfully chilling out might cure this particular wound, or at least begin its process towards healing.

Playland

Playland is an amusement park located in Hastings Park of Vancouver. It is the oldest amusement park in Canada. It contains rides such as the Revelation (which has replaced the now-lost attraction “the Labyrinth”), Hell’s Gate, and the Glass House (a maze of transparent walls that is a free attraction; anyone can enter the Glass House). Any ride can lead into the Damien Bog’s chancel, Toyland, if one is completely enshrouded in darkness and one knows the words to say, or one is unlucky.

Properties of Playland

  • Distractions: Playland applies a 1 point trouble to any actions that aren’t chilling out as it lulls those within. Their actions become less meaningful, less likely to improve their lives.
  • Curse of Playland: You can get into Toyland via Playland. Sometimes unintentionally.

Description Snippets

  • The rattle of a roller-coaster as it winds itself up, followed by the scream of its victims.
  • Insipid pop-music with a toe-tapping beat, sung by the electronically enhanced voice of teenager, the nuance of which is lost under the complaining of nearby tween girls.
  • The crush of the (overweight) crowd bumping and jostling, like a herd of cattle, as they move like a molasses wave to get in line for the gaping maw of an industrial entertainment machine.
  • The cloying taste of chemically-colored cotton candy.
  • Garish, circus colors slapped over slowly rusting steel.

Find Something Authentic and Original

  • 0 or less: You think you find something authentic or original, but you’ve been duped by the corporate-industrial complex into “buying in and selling out”
  • 1:  Find something that’s you enjoy, if not genuinely original or authentic
  • 3: Find something cool, even if it’s not genuinely original or authentic
  • 4: Find something original and authentic. Now what?
  • 5: Find something genuinely authentic and original that actually helps you understand better who you are as a person
  • 6: Find something other people think is authentic and original. You were into it before it was cool!
  • 7: Find something authentically and originally magical. This isn’t necessarily safe.

Trouble and Tools:

  • Trouble: Corporate Clutter (1): The world is filled with things that look original, but actually aren’t. This counts as opposition, so characters with a Cool of 1 or higher can ignore it (Cool people have little trouble finding something authentic and original)
  • Trouble: Nothing New Under the Sun (3): If you’re looking for something original that is from this world, you face this trouble. Authenticity is no problem.
  • Affliction: I’ve become a hipster! (Varies): Too much time searching for the authentic and original can turn you into a hipster or, perhaps, those who become hipsters are driven to seek the authentic and original. Affliction levels vary: At level 1, hipsterish accountrements (like sleeve tattoos, thick-rimmed glasses, ironic beards, etc) begin to manifest. A key feature of higher levels is that nobody understands hipsters, so at level 2 and above, your true nature becomes masked by the ineffability of your hipsterness.

The Steam Clock and Gastown

The Steam Clock was built in 1977 to solve a steam vent problem in the renovated Gas Town, a historical district. The steam clock featured on Nickleback’s 2011 album, and has been voted the world’s worst tourist attraction 10 years running.

Gas Town, itself, stands at a bit of a nexus between worlds, and when it becomes misty, one can lose themselves and end up in other places, which likely explains the slowly creeping steampunk infection that’s slowly taking over the buildings of Gastown. As a result, one can easily find truly original things, but the corporate world, which funded the renovation of Gas Town explicitly to get at this originality, has cluttered the streets with their own merchandizing, making it hard to make out the truly original.

Properties of Gastown

  • Interworldly Crossroads: One can try to make his way to multiple chancels, or even off Earth, via Gastown. As a result, one can ignore the Nothing New Under the Sun trouble here, but Corporate Clutter becomes a level 2 trouble here.

Description Snippets

  • The billowing, silvery steam of the steam clock mixing with the grey mists of Vancouver-by-night.
  • The hiss of steam and the rattle of nearby trucks, followed by the whistling of the clock.
  • The faded yellow glow of the street lights on the historic facade of the storefronts
  • The scent of copper, beer and and moldering, old buildings, and a whiff of something else intriguing that you can’t put your finger on.
  • The body-temperature warmth of the steam vents beneath the side-walks, occasionally letting loose a few escaped tendrils of steam. The sidewalks and steam vents feel alive to the touch, and might even exhibit a subtle pulsing thump, like the slow-heartbeat of some giant, subterranean beast.

Get a Job

  • 0 or less: You humiliate yourself in a job interview, or irritate someone of great power, or get a job, but it turns out that “Ferdinand” doesn’t actually run a modeling agency or a get-rich-quick IT business, and now you need to escape his van before it’s too late!
  • 2: Get a job
  • 3: Have a sufficiently impressive resume that you’re not only hired, but your future boss offers you a compliment
  • 5: You don’t just get a job, but a career, something that you’ll find fulfilling for years to come
  • 7: Land a dream job, the sort of job that will make all of your friends jealous, like movie star, game tester, or coffee taster

Trouble and Tools:

  • Trouble: A job in this economy? (1): This trouble only applies if you seek something personally fulfilling. You may avoid this trouble if you explicitly seek out some soul-draining work (the sort that will eventually turn you into an Empty Suit).
  • Bond: I have a job (Varies): You’re required to work your job. This is generally an optional bond, but characters who have been trapped unwittingly into a contract might take it as a wound.
  • Affliction: I’ve become an Empty Suit (Varies): Working for a corporation can hollow you out and leave you as a sort of shadow person, a false being that looks alive, but isn’t. You’ve been consumed by the legal entity of the Corporation. This is always a Severe wound, and is certainly enough to kill/transform/make into an NPC all but the very toughest of mortals.

Living Shangri-La

The Living Shangri-La contains a five star hotel (the Shangri-La hotel), high-price condominiums, a specialty grocery store, a public display by the Vancouver Art Gallery, and contains a beautiful sculpture garden. The Living Shangri-La is the headquarters for a variety of major corporations, including the fictional ENCOM, and is home to Magnus Carter, the Power of Corporations.

The Shangri-La contains several pathways to chancels of Vancouver, including a path to Belphegor’s Chancel on floor 13, a path to Azrael’s Chancel on floor 4, and mysterious paths beyond the watery curtain of an artificial waterfall in the sculpture garden.

Properties of the Living Shangri-La

  • Place of Power: Anyone can travel to any chancel of any Imperator via the Shangri-La, if they know how.
  • Manmade Paradise: Gain +2 to any efforts to find a job, or otherwise improve your life via economic or corporate means in the Shangri-La.
  • Lofty Peak of Power: Attempts to enter Shangri-La automatically have a 2 point trouble “You do not belong here” unless you are angelic, or one of the elite of Earth, or you are an Empty Suit.

Description Snippets

  • The eye-blinding sheen of its pristine walls in the sunlight.
  • The reverent silence with which the staff move, interrupted only by the hushed utterances of the residents.
  • The rushing white-noise of the artificial waterfall and the meditative stillness of the sculpted garden.
  • The incense-like scent of perfume and potpourri just barely unable to disguise the scent of antiseptic wash and the floor wax used by the staff to keep everything pristine.
  • A sense of peace and satisfaction, paired with a nagging sense of dislocation, the keen awareness that you do not belong here.
  • Staff will often say things to the players like “Can I help you?” and “You’re not supposed to be here!” or “Are you looking for something?”