The Hoard Potato on Games: Complete Stranger Theory

[athelind]

Back in 1993, I ran a GURPS Space game for my local gaming group. A local BBS -- remember those? -- was the organizing center of our social activities in those days, and it was common practice to use it to schedule games and distribute material.

I came up with a simple premise for a setting, wrote up a quick history to give everyone the basics, and set it up so that the players themselves could create the planet and the culture from which their characters hailed.

When we sat down to play, I found that most of the players hadn't bothered to read the background post.

These are people who would memorize setting information in stacks of published material.

normanrafferty calls this "Complete Stranger Theory": players are more willing to accept the work of a complete stranger than they are that of the person sitting in the same room.

(Since Rafferty designs tabletop games and uses his local group as playtesters, you can imagine how frustrating this must get for him.)

This came to mind because, yesterday evening, I leafed through the Russian Doll file structure of my hard drive and found, nested in Archive folders two or three deep, the files from that time-lost game.

Both normanrafferty and rodant_kapoor asserted that they would have read it -- so let's test that, shall we?

This is just a rough outline of the Future History of the Troubleshooters campaign. Further detail will be fleshed out on an ad-lib basis as it becomes important to the game. This is actually going to be a little =more= knowledge than most 20th century Americans have about =real= history, so if your character didn't pick up the History skill, you have no cause to bitch.

It should first be noted that the campaign is set in the year 2443. This 450-year time frame is =very= different from the original "millennia of isolation" idea that I'd initially proposed. There =are= many human-colonized worlds, and there =are= a few variant human races, but the role of deliberate genetic engineering is now far more important than that of genetic drift.


=THE HISTORY OF THE GALAXY (part 1)=

Humans in the 25th century look upon the Industrial Age in much the same way that humans of the Victorian Era looked upon the "Dark Ages." The 20th Century, for the most part, is looked upon as being the ultimate, catastrophic manifestation of this period. At the same time, however, the 20th Century is the source of many important literary and artistic classics, as literature moved away from simple text and art moved away from simple static depictions. Still, the general impression is much like that of the last days of Rome: a decadent and self-destructive society capable nonetheless of producing magnificent art.

The 21st Century is the era of "cleaning up the mess." Many long-term projects designed to reverse the damage of the Industrial Period commenced, and toward the end of the century, had progressed fairly well. There was still quite a lot to be done, however. Global Warming was still increasing at the turn of the century, and the ozone layer was still fragile and prone to gaps. Broad hats, sunglasses and sunblock were de rigeur. Nonetheless, sufficient progress had been made that attention was once again turned outward.

The 22nd Century was the era of expansion into the Solar System. Self-sustaining colonies were established on the Moon, on Mars, and, in the latter half of the century, in the Asteroid belts and on the moons of the outer planets. Colony clusters at the Lagrange points provided stable, artificial biospheres to shelter species that were too fragile to survive on the Earth's still-damaged ecosystem, yet still needed some degree of "free range" to thrive.

In the 2060s, an intense push was made to construct a colony ship, stocked with frozen embryos of various Earth species, to a group of potentially-habitable worlds that had been discovered orbiting a nearby star. On July 21st, 2169, this first vessel was launched.

On September 13, 2178, a massive Solar Flare tore across the Solar System.

=AFTER THE FLARE=

In the course of a few blazing hours, several long-standing debates were resolved. The source of the periodic mass extinctions recorded in the fossil record (including that of the dinosaurs) and of the regular reversal of the Earth's magnetic field had been found.

Not that anyone was paying much attention to the implications at the time.

The flare ravaged the Earth's already-unstable ecosystem. Countless species were lost. Earth's human population was decimated. Even worse, the Lagrange colonies were overwhelmed. If Luna City had not been built largely underground, it would have been destroyed as well--as many smaller Lunar settlements were. Across the Solar System, Humanity watched helplessly as the Mother Planet was seared.

Twelve years later, the first workable prototype of the Gravity Drive cracked the lightspeed barrier.

The 23d Century marked Humanity's expension to other stars. The "k-level" gravity drive offered far greater speeds that were possible in ordinary, "c-level" space, but these speeds were only a few time the speed of light--enough to make interstellar travel possible, but not to make interstellar commerce practical. For roughly two centuries, Humanity sent out colony expeditions to the surprising number of habitable worlds found by automated probes--colonies that were then left to develop in relative isolation.

In the middle of the 25th Century, the "q-level" gravity drive was perfected. Suddenly, vessels could leap across the void at thousands of times the speed of light, covering parsecs in days. The twenty-parsec sphere of Human Space, which had once taken decades to span, could now be crossed in the matter of a month or two. Worlds which had long been independent and isolated were now part of a Galactic Village.

They did =not= all get along.

Within a decade of the discovery of q-level drives, an exploratory mission of the fledgling Star League of Unified Worlds made First Contact with Galactic Culture. Galactic Culture views the species as the significant level of organization--the internal politics of a species were its own affair.

Suddenly, the Unification became vital. The Star League was transformed from a loose affiliation of a few worlds into the ruling body of human space.

With member worlds ranging from the feudal and the corporate to the democratic and the outright anarchic, this is far from a simple task...

I've said "four pages" in relating this story over the years; it actually comes out to less than a page and a half, as originally formatted.

It's evident what I was reading at the time; there are bits in there obviously cribbed from Phil Foglio's Buck Godot: Zap Gun for Hire, and some obvious influence from David Brin's work, especially Earth.

The general framework, however, is pretty good: Humanity colonizes worlds using "slow FTL", develops dozens of cultures in comparative isolation, and then, poof, the discovery of "fast FTL" drops everyone in each other's back yard -- and First Contact.

There, okay, I just summed it up in one run-on sentence. But really, was a page and a half that onerous?

---

Comments

[normanrafferty.livejournal.com]

Dude, I'm already jonesing to play it. It sounds like Jack Vance's Gaean Reach, which assumes that outer space has been colonized by nutballs who hate Earth and went to make a "better" planet somewhere else.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

Play it? You could PUBLISH it!

And, yeah, the "dozens of competing and contradictory utopias" element is part of the premise.

Honestly, though, Charlie Stross did the "Widespread Human Cultures Slammed Back Together" thing even better in Singularity Sky.

[cpxbrex.livejournal.com]

And here you go, doing it to yourself. Charlie Stross has legitimacy due to the fact of his publication. You don't. It effects even artists. ;)

[athelind.livejournal.com]

No, Charlie threw in a twist that REALLY made for a wide range of bizarre and wildly divergent cultures. I loved it, but as Daffy Duck once said, "It'th a great trick, but you can only do it ONTHE."

[iridium-wolf.livejournal.com]

Perhaps the reason why people didn't read it is the opening lines, " This is actually going to be a little =more= knowledge than most 20th century Americans have about =real= history, so if your character didn't pick up the History skill, you have no cause to bitch." That'd be a bit insulting as a player for me to read and I'd come at the game with a bit of irritation and snarkiness. You already expect your players to be dumb, why work at it to be otherwise? Just my two cents, your premise is intriguing.

[cpxbrex.livejournal.com]

My feeling is that it isn't that they were complete strangers, it's that being published lends legitimacy to the writer.

You're just Athelind, Our Obedient Serpent, they're *glee* published writers! SJG, or whomever, is able to confer legitimacy on those writers in a way that you don't have. It isn't that they know you, it's that you don't know Steve Jackson.

Or, at least, that's my take in that kind of situation, which I've been in not only as a GM but also as a writer, being mystified why my friends seem so eager to read utter crap but I have to engage in emotional manipulation to get them to read even brief pieces I've written.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

...my friends seem so eager to read utter crap but I have to engage in emotional manipulation to get them to read even brief pieces I've written.

[[The dragon tries to look innocent, but fails miserably.]]

[cpxbrex.livejournal.com]

*snickers* It used to bug me a whole lot but it does less so, now. It's happened everywhere I've been with everyone I've known. It's just really rare to have a friend who wants to read the things I've written, even tho' I'd gladly send it to them.

So, because it happens so damn often, I have concluded that it's not me. Which is why I developed the "confers legitimacy" hypothesis. I mean, if people read my stuff and didn't like it, well, that'd stink for me on a personal level because I would like validation from my friends and loved ones, of course, but I'd deal with it. The weird thing is that they just avoid it altogether (I suspect in part because, y'know, it must be hard for them, too; they'd be stuck saying, "Golly, Chris, your writing stinks" and that'd be difficult for them, too). And more broadly, I think that most people have trouble having artists as friends at all.

But at least for the written word, I really think there's a lot of validation that goes on through publishing, because I've just seen it in too many places. A person has written something as good as published material and offered it to be read by a group, like a gaming group, and the writer's material has been rejected in favor of more poorly written material. It's just baffling to me except if I take into account the power of accredentialization. Publication is a form of accredentialization, I feel, that invests the work with significance. I could babble about how it stems from the aristocratic patronage of writers which is the foundation of the modern publishing system, but that might be tedious. But I think it's very real. Writers don't get taken seriously until they're accredentialized through publication.

[drakegrey.livejournal.com]

Certainly a quick and very clear read,and a good framework. I like the idea that our century is like the Victorian is, to us - a contradiction of beauty and reason, versus visciousness and grotesqe.

I could never get my players to read anything, even though that came up rarely...

My games predating home computers, and all. :)

Interesting you have The Days of the Flare and the Great Disaster element. Most if not all GMs have something like that, I guess to explain why Then is so different a place from Now. I certainly did; the Terran Confederation was built out of the ashes of (nuclear) World Wars III and IV -

But I later retconned them away; WWIII turned into a conventional war against rogue states. I realized that even without a cataclysm, it's just simply true that things and times change - tomorrows going to be another, foreign country, atom bombs or not.

And I feel fine!

[athelind.livejournal.com]

The Flare was one thing I stole directly and shamelessly from Buck Godot. It was there, in part, as a "good thing we spread out, nyah nyah nyah Senator Proxmire" element; knowing my fondness for disaster novels and post-apocalyptic scenarios, I might have set it up to let me run adventures on a post-apoc Earth without invoking the depressimistic cliche of The Great Big War.

If I ever do dust this off and write it up for publication as an SF-RPG, I'd probably leave the Flare out. Shoot, I can get enough happy post-apoc weirdness just from environmental degradation.

I'm not sure I'd use this as my first choice for a published setting, though -- If I have mechanics that can handle nonhumans well, I'll want more possibilities for alien PCs.

[silussa.livejournal.com]

That does make for a pretty neat background. And a more then surely confusing one....how many settled planets aren't even on the map?

[theweaselking.livejournal.com]

You specify Sept 13 2178.

I haven't looked it up.

PLEASE tell me that's a Friday.

Because that would be awesome.

[athelind.livejournal.com]

Sorry. I don't know why it's NOT; that seems a no-brainer. I'm sure I wouldn't have specified the date if I HADN'T had something like that in mind.

Maybe I was using an erroneous calendar calculator.