I don't even have a one sheet for this.
I am messing around with a few PC/Demon designs, the angel rules, and some ephemera to generate a space opera intrigue feel.
But here is my starting pitch.
Any advice would be welcome.
I am drawing on some old Sorcerer and Playing Cards threads from the way back days.
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I want to set up mechanisms to adapt Sorcerer for telling stories of political space opera. Think of House of Cards meets Dune.
The game depends on the visceral clash of sorcerers and their demons all up in each other's face. Yet I have the feeling that we can tell stories of leaders who toss space fleets and insurgent factions around like so many playing cards. And who get up in each other's face with power swords and nanobot-parasite familiars.
And in true space-opera fashion, mysterious precursors have left powerful guardian intelligences on several planets. Prove yourself a champion of the angel's principles and garner their blessings.
Or burn and twist your underlings as you reach into the void to win mysterious powers from trans-dimensional, tachyonic, or mathematico-noetic intelligences. The 30th century equivalent of necromancy.
I am envisioning a massive Imperial agglomeration above the void, a Forbidden City where the sorcerers keep up appearances as they work their intrigues quietly in the presence of the Throne but violently in the provinces.
No scrappy underdog do-gooders. The power is in your hands. The Empire is about to collapse. Will you be able to stay human while you get your hands dirty? Will we still be human when you are done with us?
Some colour/mechanics decisions
Cover can do a lot to cover the use of proxies and agents, and space fights etc.
Demons allow the sorcerers to break the rules.
So: you are stuck in the void a while while you cruise between worlds. No one can find you or interfere with you. UNLESS THEY USE SORCERY
Intragalatic warships are huge and ungainly transport mechanisms with no real fighting capacity or offensive weaponry: UNLESS THEY WERE SUMMONED BY SORCERY
We can frame conflicts on the face to face level, or at the space ship vs. space ship level, or the planetary grab level, and no mixing. UNLESS YOU USE SORCERY
(a spacecraft that can target and affect an individual, that's sorcery; a personal device that can mess with a ship in nearspace, that's sorcery, a cybernetic enhancement that affects planetary espionage -- sorcery).
A humanity definition still eludes me. For now.
Maybe I'll set up some sort of ideological restraints -- no AI, no genetic engineering, kind of mashing up Frank Herbert and Peter Hamilton -- that the Empire obeys as its definition of human but which sorcerers must blaspheme.
And plenty of aerodynamic shocking blue plastic codpieces.
I meant intergalactic transports
I just want to be in a game where people bust out lines like this one from Sean Williams' story "Inevitable":
The Guild of Great Ships was made of clones and avatars, but love was just a powerful a force to them as it had ever been to any human."
Hey Erik, speaking of a definition of humanity in a far flung future...
I remember a listening to sci-fi short on the radio once. It was dry and tongue-in-cheek and I liked it. The protagonist was a lone space-pilot trader scavenger who was mortally injured dismembered etc. out past the edge of civilized space. The ship's medical bots save his life by replacing most (like 79% by mass or something) of his body with robotic parts.
Flash forward - he's in court facing robbery and murder charges; Victim---himself.
Under the prevailing law in the jurisdiction he's subject to, a 'human' with full rights and responsibility is defined by a minimum organic ratio, say 50% or something. Any entity with more than 50% robotic parts is not a human, and cannot assume a human's identity. The case against him is circumstantial but iron-clad. Ron the human (RtH) is missing presumed dead and Ron the cyborg (RtC) is found in possession of his ship and belongings. The only reasonable inference is that RtC MURDERED RtH.
The punchline is that he avoids the death penalty by binge eating until he enough of his body is organic to qualify as human again. It ends with the furious Judge or prosecutor or perhaps his own cynical heirs swearing to see that he reports for mandatory weigh-ins for the rest of his life with the threat of summary execution looming should he ever slip under the 'human ratio'. He's left facing a life going forward of debilitating obesity.
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Wow!
On BODIES and COLOR
The Shared Imaginative Space in Sorcerer depends on bodies and their range of action and perception. Declaring an intention is not the setting of stakes. Rather, it is putting a body in motion.
You don't declare "I am attacking the Snake Demon because I want to find a way through the crowd to get to the machine and pull the lever so that the enemy ship gets distacted."
You say: "I'm close enought to hit with my fists? OK, I am staying in my solid stance, gripping the floor with my demon-inhanced toe claws, and giving a short, sharp punch the the Snake demon's exposed belly. Shotokan Karate 101, baby."
However the sci-fi machinery in my game goes, it has to involve bodies initiating non-recallable actions and dealing with the consequences. The mechanics, including the demon powers, cannot be implemented unless you think what human bodies are doing and how far they are from each other.
So bodies have to be kept in proximity to each other: and I need a fictional and colour justification.
And I have one. Paul Atreides is close to the people that matter. He does not file memos or send emails. He is not Henry Kissinger with psychic powers.
One reason for that is the needs of narration in an romance tale: The heroic body in action in a fantastic environment doing exciting things is what I am there to read. Not a simulation of feudal politics.
Another is the nature of feudal politics. The body of the sovereign is the locus of activity. You have to be near it. And so much is dependent on the access of courtiers to each others' presences. Safety is always a concern. But even deadly rivals must be amenable to face-to-face interaction. NOT talking to someone or NOT going to the ball NOT going for a walk is a decision with consequences. Try to fob off someone with an excuse, fine. But that is a DECISION with consequences. Ophelia just stops talking to Hamlet at the command of her father. And he freaks. When he stops following courtly protocol and does not interact with she freaks.
If I do not see my clients at my morning levee just as I arise from my bedchambers, they will be distressed. If I miss the king's levee I am going to miss a chance to get him to patronize by projects. I better have a damned good excuse for not showing up at the dance to celebrate his birthday. The king's most trusted advisor was the one who accompanied him to the toilet and helped him to get all of the gear out of the way while the royal business was done. That courtier was the most trusted because he would know the state of the king's health in addition to being near the kind at his most vulnerable.
So hiding in your room and avoiding people is not an option. Even as you are going to take your summer visit to your villa as an opportunity to buy up material for arming your peasants for an upcoming putsch.
The Emperor and the Assassin is my guiding light for this.
And of course, sex:
http://9gag.com/gag/aZP2zgz?ref=fb.s
Family relationships are cool. But sci-fi asks us to imagine radically different kinds of family. So there might be a sci-fi implementation of my ideas.
A little note on our Meetup board. A reflection on playing "Race for the Galaxy"
"People were good [at the meetup]. The game is a little tricky -- the visual symbols have to be grokked before you play quickly. Deep strategy is in there. The "race" game concept -- reaching for a goal behind the scenes -- has RPG implications. But not being able to reach across and mess with other people's setups is a bit frustrating."
Additions to the reading list:
Barlowe's Guide to Extraterrestrials (for visuals, NO anthropomorphic aliens allowed) http://tinyurl.com/mgmglgb
A Short History of Progress by Ronald Wright (note: Sorcerers are in societies already destroying themselves, the rot is the extant society) http://tinyurl.com/cyrtaa2
Guns, Germs, and Steel (the challenge is to compress the millennial scale of bad social decision making into the dramatic actions of individuals, OR to situate dramatic action in the context of a pivotal point)
Sheehan, Neil. A Bright and Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam. (paradigmatic example of an person who knows that the system isn't working but gives his all to make the system work. My sorcerers are those who have admitted to themselves that the system is out of control and that doing ANY authentic action requires breaking the rules. In other words, no Robert Kennedy liberalism for them.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Bright_Shining_Lie
That's my kind of reading list! No "Princess Mononoke + Traveller" talk at all.
Wait a sec: if someone WANTS to go out as a noble self-sacrificing loyal soldier to a system they know cannot word ... fine. That's a kicker resolved and a character arc done.
Are you planing to work up a one-sheet for this setting? I'd love to see what you come up with :-)
The annotations in the Sorcerer text are a help, esp. the injunction to remember
* a sorcerer is a person
* a sorcerer is using demons + rituals already
* then the Kicker comes
I want to use necromancy so I am bringing in Tokens and Demons into character creation. Note: killing means destroying them utterly SOCIALLY in addition to slaying. Think of a Kurosawa character driven to suicide because of some shame, or Charles II/Louis XIV courtier/mistress/client banished to a country estate. So Kurosawa meets Dangerous Liaisons and Restoration. To be cast out of the Royal Presence or the Forbidden City/Kyoto/Versailles/Moscow/Washington/London means you are NOBODY. You are a pale shade haunting the The Eternal City. No dice for you, you help no-one, you do nothing, you are pale tragic colour. Crushed NPCs may float by from time to time but they are no longer agents.
Person: The General
Motive: The Emperor's intelligence is bad and my demon is helping me grab enemies that his forces cannot.
Demon: ?
Token: Vance's Rebuff, a high-speed cutter (3 dice)
- must be flying, or battling in space or on the ground
- standard conditions: killing, staving off death, boost necromancy and ritual
- special conditions: horrific insights when suspect is brought in for interrogation
Kicker: finds Imperial Ward dead, flayed inside of cockpit.
Person: The Pontifex (supervising entrance and egress from the Eternal City)
Motive: The Arks guided by the Arkhans bring threats as well as tribute from the Outworlds -- I need to be able to see into them before they berth.
Demon: ?
Token: Ancient spyglass (3 dice)
- watching a spectacle of killing, shame, or humiliation
- standard conditions: killing, staving off death, boost necromancy and ritual
- special conditions: horrific insights when looking at victimized person, into -izer or -ized
Kicker: an Imperial Ward wishes to get into an Ark bound for one of the worlds overseen by an Angel (leftovers from the Precursor epoch before the Great Forgetting).
Person: The Ambassador
Motive: No-one is understanding or meeting the needs of supplicants. I have had to break with convention: my demon helps be get supplicants through the Bureaucracy.
Demon: ?
Token: Protocol Droid (AI, anthropomorphic are taboo) (3 dice)
- can function only in a situation of debate or argument (think Duel of Wits from Burning Empires)
- standard conditions: killing, staving off death, boost necromancy and ritual
- special conditions: horrific insights into the fears of participants in the duel of wits
Kicker: a supplicant has come who wishes to bring a bomb into the Imperial audience chamber.
Person: The Scholar
Motive: Our survival depends on knowing what caused the Great Forgetting. Demons help me find authentic remnants of pre-Forgetting human civilization.
Demon: ?
Token: Hand-made paper notebook (3 dice)
- can function only when character is proving another's knowledge (Lore) inferior (think Duel of Wits from Burning Empires)
- standard conditions: killing, staving off death, boost necromancy and ritual
- special conditions: horrific insights into the fears of participants in the duel of wits
Kicker: a supplicant has come who wishes to bring a bomb into the Imperial audience chamber.
Scholar's Kicker:
An Arkhan is in your estate's atrium and is holding a small scintillating box. Arkhans normally enforce the Ban on pre-Forgetting tech.
And Humanity?
Faith
-- not an abstract credo, or an ideology that befuddles some but not others
-- commitment to an enduring set of principles which can NOT be transformed into utilitarian pay offs
-- must be more than trust in concrete persons: it is dedication to non-empirical or absurd convictions for which there can be no simple sensory verification
-- it is the sort of conviction that binds together millions of strangers with no genetic ties or immediate instrumental relationships (for food, security, etc.)
-- the Emperor and his "Galactic Mandate" is the unitary faith binding billions of people
-- on a small blue planet around a yellow sun, people fought and died over Faiths with names like "Christendom," "Freedom," "Equal Rights," "Liberation"
-- "I just believe in Yoko and me / and that's reality" won't cut it
-- "We pledge our lives and sacred honor to make sure that in the new republic there will be no distinction between propertied and non-propertied men" cuts it, even if like the resolutions of the Continental Congress, it is far from perfect in formulation or execution.
- As will all sacred values, established or new Faiths depend on costly, memorable, irrevocable, ritualized, corporeal public demonstrations of commitment: a.k.a. sacrifices
Humanity Loss Rolls
- breaking common faith
- defecting from rituals of common faith
- casting aspersion on the faith
- corrupting someone's faith
Humanity Gain
- sacrificing to show common faith
- proving the faith to others
- demonstrating the superiority of the faith
- establishing new rituals
- testing someone's Faith
"Costly" means that even indirect material benefits will NOT outweigh the cost of the sacrifices made.That in the long run, individual or collective acts of sacrifice build up large networks of social trust which ensure the survival of the species is a concept that primates with very limited senses and processing power cannot entertain without a whole lot of supportive technology (books, spreadsheets, universities, podcasts, etc). It sure as heck isn't intuitive or palpable. A finite person has to take it on Faith, even if that concept reflects a real, actual state of affairs knowable in science. You (you in the meat suit) just have to have Faith that a few absurd propositions (like "this society will last forever" or "I can trust the millions of people I have never seen or met to contribute to the endurance of this entity 'Canada,' which has no body or mind but which I count on to protect me and support me") will be enough to keep the whole ensemble from collapsing. [edited here at author's request -RE]
The inhabitants my sci-fi universe are not transhuman and their limited capabilities and situatedness in very small frames of time and space (their facticity, I believe existentialists call it) make them intelligible to us. They need Faith. Even if they have spaceships.
The Empire isn't working. It won't work. And can't work. But Faith in it is what keeps billions of humans human. And away from each other's throats.
I meant "keep the whole ensemble from collapsing"
[Please, Ron, edit out "keep the whole ensemble from working".]
Only had 2 players to run some of my ideas by.
Humanity Checks:
General was a a mass public spectacle celebrating the New Year. He was participating like everyone else, except he was standing near a striking diplomat and the two were trying to catch the Emperor's eye. Normally that wouldn't be a Humanity gain roll. But because a little crystaline/insectile alien was there under the protection of the diplomat, a check was made because Faith in the system was displayed to an outsider. That the General was conniving to get close to the Imperial presence didn't matter. The act cemented a kind of social order and the internal state of the actor did not impede the social significance of the act.
The sheer oddness of the situation made me aware of how deeply wedded I am to notions of authenticity and self-expression.
I like how the game makes you explore Humanity in a way that doesn't boil down to being "humane" or "a good egg." I suppose running Day of the Dupes might convey a similar experience.
The Pontifex had a choice between Humanity gain or loss. "Loss" is threatened when established rituals are profaned or discredited or disparaged. "Gain" comes from instituting a public ritual that could cement a new kind of faith. One of the Arkhans -- the guiding intelligences of the huge Arks that carry humanity through the Void, had manifested itself at a meeting between two sorcerers. A Pontifex's duty is to ensure that only those in the right internal and external state enter or exit the Eternal City. Arkhans NEVER bring ancient relics into the City or share them with ordinary humans. Except this one. The player was offered the choice of conducting a private or public performance of the new ritual that would allow the Arkhan to cross over in a way none had ever done before. The player chose public, and a crowd of people were present at what might be the advent of a new relationship between humanity and the Arkhans. That made is a humanity gain check.
New attention to demon possibilities: demons can do what they want! They are not sluggish zombies waiting for orders from the master. The General's "Right Hand Man" was getting all antsy about the incriminating gore inside the General's private vessel. "Screw this attempt to weasel into the palace, I'm going back to clean up the mess that could get both of us in trouble" he said. The demon had a +3 edge in Binding (!) and the player let him go. I was all "ha, ha, ha Mr. General is afraid of the swaggering demon." Turns out the player WANTED the demon out of the way so the competing sorcerer diplomat would not get hip to the fact that The General was a sorcerer! Well played Mr. Player, well played. He counted on MY overconfidence in the demon's ability to resist Punishes to manipulate me.
The Pontifex's player was surprised when the Linked demon came back without being commanded. I just thought to myself "If the Right Hand Man could storm off to cause trouble, then the mysteriously persistent flowing holy water could squish its way on back to headquarters without being called." The Lustration could always signal that it had become aware of some danger to its master and having, happily for demon and sorcerer, satisfied its Desire by getting new knowledge, would make its way back home.
Much creepy finger licking and spraying of fluid around old Lustration.
Along the way we had a giant Ark bursting into normal space at the edge of a Dyson ring, a super pointy space vessel floating above a celebration at a traditional-looking palace (thank you Ian Banks), multiple monorails (at different heights for different classes), and a terrorist attack blessed by a planetary Angel.
The knowledge, corruption, and disorientation abilities of the demons really assisted the intrigue colour I was going for.
When necromantic Tokens are in play there is a lot of smashing and grabbing.
So, Diamond gives the East-West axis of the Eurasian continent as the major contributor to that biome's success in subjecting the rest of the planet to its progeny: gun-, steel-, and germ-wielding farmer/settlers.
Is there any differential distribution of some resource -- some hydrogen isotope, dark matter, a plethora of white dwarfs -- that might make one region of the Milky Way more fertile for a conqueror culture than another?
Hi Erik,
Maybe I missed it or forgot it, but what is the venue and player-composition for this game? Meaning, are they random people on the internet, old friends of yours in person ... et cetera.
Hi Erik
While wary of "hard-SF", I'm liking your setting quite a bit!
Regarding strategic advantages, I have some half-way supported ideas:
- Gold. It's the shiny thing people have adored for ever, and always will, right? Theory has it that supernovas create elements heavier than hydrogen and helium, but apparently nowhere enough to explain the gold abundance we observe. A plausible explanation seems to be the explosive merger of two neutron stars (https://medium.com/starts-with-a-bang/1dff9b27d587)! Neutron stars are the end-stage of massive stars (but not massive enough to end up as black holes), so you'd need an "old" region of the galaxy. The denser the star population, the less you have to travel to find candidates. So I'd say the inner regions of our galaxy sounds cool.
- Diamonds. There's a possibility of "carbon planets (https://plus.google.com/+BrianKoberlein/posts/YwdMz3atFvn)", which could contain lots of diamonds. A system with such a planet would have to be fairly rich in carbon to start off, so you'd need to form it from a carbon rich cloud, which would be the result of a previous star exploding. So, the older, the better? If you don't get gold, you get diamonds? As above, you'd want to be in an "old" region of the galaxy.
- Dark matter. Very speculative (https://plus.google.com/+BrianKoberlein/posts/Z26p2Guk2PA), but it could be, since it's basically added mass, that it'd help in containing the classic matter in stars, and even make the nuclear reactions more efficient (and rapid). Dark matter is apparently more prevalent as you go to the centre of the galaxy. Combine with the above?
- Tritium (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tritium), a radioactive hydrogen isotope. You fuse it with deuterium (another hydrogen isotope) to get helium, and loads of energy! The half-life of tritium is very short, so it's hard to stock. Plus you need cosmic rays interacting in the Earth's atmosphere, or shoot neutrons at lithium (quite rare itself) to actually get some. I've no idea if there are any regions in the galaxy where this is more abundant than others, but to get a large scale equivalent of cosmic rays interacting with an atmosphere, the best I can think up of would be some large molecular clouds with a star or two in it. Of course, the stars would tend to blow the clouds away or absorb it, so this would rather happen in star nurseries (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_nursery#Stellar_nurseries), on relatively short time spans, in rather "young" (as in: not too many cycles of stars going supernova and generating heavy elements) regions (I'm not sure where these would be). But that's pure speculation on my part.
An easy axiom would be: energy from young regions, complex matter from old ones.
Player composition:
2 medium-length gamer/friend pals -- one who did short Apocalypse World & Sorcerer series, and long Heroquest & Trail of Cthulhu series. The other is a fellow with a game design and research slant who dipped into some of those and ran Do: Pilgrims, AW, and Shock things.
Was looking forward to playing with a friend who dropped off of my radar for a while, but her background includes board game and RPG play testing, and with whom I did some play testing for ToC, and did some fun Donjon and other little bits here and there (a dipped into a Burning Empires game but the arrival of my child scotched a lot of my gaming a few years ago). She was also into the FUDGE community and that's how I learned about that. She didn't make it out.
A small group but one I find cordial for the game.
Christoph, thanks!
The science is there as pretext for conflict. That is the kind of stimulus I need.