Encyclopedia Galactica

We picked up this gem for $3 yesterday. It came out in 1979. The entire book is written with an in-setting voice, just the way we like it. Even the author credit is in character. The author, Dr. Bruce Kraus, holds degrees in Galactic History and Human Archaeology from the Tauron Center for Science and the Arts. The author photo is in costume.

No extraneous commentary here about producers, writers, and actors , or behind-the-scenes details on alien make up, props, and special effects, as we see with so many Doctor Who products these days. I remember the strong disappointment I felt as a youth after opening the original Star Wars blueprint set. The blueprint made it clear that what we saw on the big screen were in fact stage sets.

Unacceptable. Give me immersion or step-off.

Fortunately, the Encyclopedia Galactica keeps its focus on descriptions and photos of the characters, ships, and aliens of the original series. (There were a couple of alien races, in addition to the Cylons.)

I got rid of 9 boxes of RPGs yesterday (just not enough space for them all). Finding the Encyclopedia Galactica and reacquainting myself with old friends like Lucifer (the first gay robot?), and the real Baltar, provided some consolation.

The Fist-of-God Campaign

Our Ringworld Reloaded scenario at Con of the North ended with the PCs entering the Ringworld though the enormous "hole" in the structure's outer wall. The hole was created (presumably) by a collision with a rogue planet at some time in the distant past. The hole opens onto the interior surface of the Ringworld, where it takes the form of a 200 KM tall conical mountain, the Fist-of-God.

The PCs took their ship right through the hole, but lost control in the vortex of storms above the mountain's apex. The ship bounce-crashed its way down the Fist-of-God, destroying several mountainside monasteries along the path of their descent. Fortunately, the ship had a General Products hull, which is for all intents and purposes indestructible. Shipboard emergency stasis fields activated, and the next thing the crew knew their ship had landed in the middle of a city at the base of the Fist-of-God. There was a ring of fire around the ship; the city was burning.

Our heroes put the fire out, and were invited by local dignitaries to visit the fallen sky castle that was in the center of the city. This structure was the only area of the city to have an energy signature consistent with high technology. The rest of the city was at a 19th century level of industrialization.

A multi-species ecumenical delegation of priests welcomed the visiting Sky Gods (our PCs) to the sky castle. But the priests were surprisingly unsubmissive, insisting that the PCs stay put in the castle and learn a variety of Ringworld languages, both humanoid and Kzin. Then a discovery: one of the PCs sneaked off to discover the source of the energy emissions within the sky castle. The priests were soon forced to reveal their holy-of-holies: a three-dimensional holographic projection room with a real-time display of the Ringworld.

The scenario ended there. But I plan to use this setting as a home base for an episodic campaign, taking place at successive conventions where I run games. Here are the starting campaign issues:

• Current Issue: A map of the Ringworld that must be explored
• Impending Issue: We're not the only Sky Gods on the Ringworld

Fate Follows Physics

http://www.abandonia.com/en/games/518/
Ringworld+-+Revenge+of+the+Patriarch.html

The title of this post is more or less a funny. It got the Kzinti smiling - but how about you? Yes, today we have a little transverse take on the axiom: "Fate follows fiction".

It occurred to me after GMing my Ringworld Reloaded scenario at Con of the North that if you're running hard SF, you'd better know something about physics. Fate game rules don't simulate it, but if the GM doesn't understand how physics works, it really can break player (and GM) immersion in a hard SF game. Having one or two players who know a little bit of physics can help.

Rachel Kronick's account of the scenario (linked above) briefly mentions the party's "long approach" to the Ringworld. That was because the players discovered an alien starship docked with the Ringworld, as well as a mystery satellite that was orbiting close to the Ringworld's sun, well inside the ring. They knew they weren't alone, and were curious and suspicious. (Really suspicious: they suspected the satellite was some kind of nova bomb.)

The players began a delicate game of cat-and-mouse with drones, attempting to scout out the alien ship and the satellite without being observed themselves. That slowed things down a bit.

But all the players were "in the zone", and immersed in what they were doing.  They were having fun with the game.

Of course, I could have elided all of that if the players had just wanted to decide things through a few skill rolls and declarations. But the players seemed to enjoy working out the physics. They even discovered a decimal placement error in the otherwise superlative players data handout that came with Chaosium's original boxed set.

In this case, Fate followed physics. It was their choice.

People had fun.

The Legions Of The Imperial Sovereign

Spindle by Juan Ochoa

The Empire's armed companies are legion. The greatest of them have endured for centuries. The General of each Legion has a Spindle - one of the ancient, self-aware battle standards that precede the Empire itself. Some have more than one.

The equipment and roles of the Legions vary enormously. Some are essentially standing armies; others are elite guerrilla forces; still others function as assassins or secret police. Weapons vary from ancient (swords, spears) to archaic (gunpowder), from contemporary (blasters) to WMDs. Most Legions also have magical/psychic resources. Legions often have a mix of a few of these.

***

The Chromatic Legions were established at the foundation of the Empire by the greatest of Imperial Sovereigns, Glorious First. The color references in the first twelve Legions' names tie each to one of the various tribes (nations, really) of Comet Barbarians who came together under the banner of Glorious First. Almost all of these Legionaries can trace their clan-lines back for generations; some even have Imperial Gene Markers. Many in the Chromatic Legions are heavily gene-modified; others are cybered almost to the point of the uncanny valley.

• Legio I Green Banner Army: The personal clan-army of Glorious First; this legion is always posted to the zones of conflict where the Empire is actively expanding.

• Legio II Legion of the Red Moon: Honor guards of the Imperial Sibyls' lunar temple above the ancient machine world of Altair IV.

• Legio III Vermillion Eagle Cloud: Orbitally-stationed bounce troops defending the Throne World of Altair III; medium mobile infantry.

• Legio IV Golden Halo: Palace guards stationed to Imperial Throne World facilities on Altair III.

• Legio V Black Coeurl: City-killers.

• Legio VI Pallid Messengers: Marines exclusively used for hyperspace boarding actions. 

• Legio VII  Errant Cobalt Star: Child comet-soldiers led by a ghost.    

• Legio VIII Yellow Turbans: Dispersed across the Empire in very small units; have legal authority to depose any Imperial Sovereign they deem unworthy of the Throne.

• Legio IX Pink Nebula: Escort diplomats into dangerous territories; often tasked with assassinations and covert operations.

• Legio X Black Metallics: Spider mech troops; often assigned to joint operations with the R.U.R. Workers-State. 

• Legio XI Brown Reed: Desert rigged units stationed on Altair III and other arid worlds.

• Legio XII Golden Eagle of Amarna: Personal escort of the Imperial Sovereign.  

First Impressions Of Tianxia

Tianxia: Blood, Silk, & Jade is a new setting and sourcebook for Fate Core, now available in PDF. It's based on the Chinese wuxia genre as well as being inspired by some of the martial classics of Chinese literature, such as the Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Outlaws of the Marsh. I love the game's art which seems spot-on for the genre. Tianxia strikes me as a worthy successor to Weapons of the Gods. 

(And yes, I know about the WOTG successor Legends of the Wulin - and have it in PDF - but if I can't ever get a hard copy in my FLGS, then what good does it do me?)

It's set in an ur-China, which is intended to make it easier for someone who is not an expert on Chinese history to run the game. But you could always pick up Alephtar Games' wonderful Celestial Empire supplement for Basic Role Playing to add more of that interesting and gameable historical detail. Or if you are on a budget, just read author Gianni Vacca's erudite Celestial Empire blog for a regular dose of additional gaming background and inspiration.

For our part, we're trying to persuade a friend to join us in co-creating a shared world province suitable for troupe-style Tianxia play. We're also considering creating a space operatic martial arts Legion for our Empire setting:

The Legion That Flies Into the Face of Death

Sounds good to me.

Ringworld Reloaded Redux

Over at the Blade & Crown blog, Rachel Kronick has written a good summary of the Fate-based Ringworld Reloaded game that I ran at Con of the North in mid-February. I'd encourage you to go over and check it out!

In this post, I'm sharing a few additional details of the set-up of my Ringworld Reloaded game:

• Most of my prep work involved re-reading Chaosium's Ringworld RPG boxed set. It's all the source material I needed, since my setting was an extrapolation from Larry Niven's original Ringworld novel, rather than a faithful extrapolation of numerous successive Ringworld stories.
• Three of the four players were new to Fate. We did character generation on the fly. It went pretty smoothly. I used the character sheet and skills from Sarah Newton's Mindjammer RPG - the new second edition of Mindjammer for Fate Core. The Mindjammer skill set worked well. It has everything you need for a SF space opera game. The Culture aspect is a very welcome addition to Fate Core's standard High Concept and Trouble aspects. Each character was from a different culture/species and world, so their Culture aspects were quite distinct. 
• We went pretty light on Stunts, creating just one or two per character. That worked just fine for a one-shot, on-the-fly game. Mindjammer offers a very robust group of stunts, though, so for an ongoing campaign, I'd consider using some or all of them.
• Characters included "Speaker to Machines" a male Kzin engineer working for the Matriarchy (one of the rival Kzinti states which emerged - coincidentally - at exactly the same time as the Puppeteer Exodus), a human Crashlander, and members of two species borrowed from SPI's Starforce: Alpha Centauri wargame: 
• The itinerant Rame, a race with "multiple, group transferring minds"
• The L'Chal Dah (sp?), a humanoid but highly modified (i.e., "transhuman") race.
• The two SPI species were discovered due to the expansion of Known Space from a diameter of about 60 LY to 80 LY. The humans and L'Chal Dah have a shared contact world called Better Together; Rachel, who played a member of this species, said that was a pretty "Larry Niven" world name. 
• The Mindscape existed in my setting; the standard interface with it was one of Niven's plug-in deep brain stimulation devices called a Droud. In Ringworld Reloaded, the Droud allows for both a direct neural interface with the Mindscape, as well as self-stimulation of the pleasure centers of the brain (Niven's original use of the devices).
• The action started in Krushenko's: the bar - located near the UN, I believe - where the original "PC party" gathered in the novel Ringworld. Krushenko's has become something of a fixture on the local convention scene, as each major Twin Cities science fiction and fantasy convention has a theme room with this name. This is the first time, to my knowledge, that a Krushenko's made an appearance at Con of the North.

Next time, we'll talk about the end of the scenario - and how it sets the stage for an episodic Ringworld campaign!

New Eikones For Weird Adventures!

We're talking about Eikones - just over Bob's shoulder to the left

This post has a small spoiler for the first season finale of HBO's True Detective.

Trey Causey's Weird Adventures RPG setting features several different religious traditions in a D&Dified version of pulp NYC. There's the Old Time Religion (evangelical monotheism), the Oecumenical Heirarchate (Catholic/Orthodox monotheism), Native and Black diasporic religions, and numerous petty gods and spirits. And then there are the Eikones.

Pronounced "icons" (yes, just like 13th Age, although Weird Adventures came first), the Eikones are spiritual personifications of various aspects of human experience. A few of the big ones include:

• Management - representing, government, bureaucracy, law and order
• Phile - the spirit of solidarity, popular in the unions
• Doll - beauty, seductiveness, sexual power (regardless of the faithful's gender)
• Maker - technology, industry, science

Well, in the "The Anagrammatist", the Weird Adventures tale I ran at Con of the North (chronicled here, and here, and here), two new Eikones were introduced: one by the players, and one by me. 

In this post, I'll share both of them and provide some contexts in Fate for how they can be used.

A person devoted to an Eikone (i.e., one who believes in that Eikone; follows it or seeks to emulate it; and takes it as an Aspect/Extra) can invoke the Eikone for help by spending a Fate Point. Similarly, an enemy can offer a Fate Point to compel a person who follows an Eikone . In that situation, the Eikone will exert a negative influence or inflict stress on the target. 

Here are the two Eikones:

The Hand

The player who ran Dr. Haint, stage magician and occult illusionist, created the Eikone of The Hand: a personification of both the luck of the draw, and of the relationships among the cards that create an advantageous opportunity.

The Hand can be invoked by a follower to Create an Advantage when gambling, or to uncover relationships between seemly unrelated things in scene that could be turned to one's advantage; another can compel a follower of The Hand and force them to reveal a secret advantage they've been hiding.

TRAUMA

The Eikone known as Trauma (and sometimes as TRAUMA) is the secret force behind the figure of Nicolai Limrovic - the villain known as The Anagrammatist. This Eikone is very recent; it was instantiated by the encirclement, betrayal, and destruction of the country of Carcossa during the Great War, and of the Carcossan people's subsequent expulsion from their once-bucolic homeland and their new status as exiles who are strangers in a strange land. The Carcossans suffered the ultimate indignity: their homeland no longer appears on any map.

As with the TV series True Detective, the question is not whether there is something supernatural about Carcossa. The question is what is its meaning in the story? What does it stand for?

In "The Anagrammatist", lost Carcossa was a real place, surrounded and destroyed by contending belligerent powers. Thanks to Limrovic's Recapitulations, his people's Trauma is now universalized; personal pain has become hypostatized into an Eikone that stands for loss, death, separation, and fear. A Trauma which breeds a compulsion to reproduce, reenact, recapitulate, and amplify that original pain again and again.

The Eikone of Trauma can be invoked by a follower for use in a mental Attack. The follower either projects their own traumatic emotions and experiences onto a new victim, or forces someone to relive a traumatic experience of their own - their worst experience; a follower of Trauma can be compelled by reminding them of their traumatic experience in some way. Oftentimes such a compel will trigger a trigger catatonia, a dissociative state, or flight in its target.