Phipps23 and Demonstrating Themes in Celestial Bodies

October 18, 2024

I’ve been meaning to try to post more on my blog/site following the death of Cohost, which made it very easy for me to toss design thoughts out. Writing into VScode and pushing to my site via git has no juice at all by comparison. But we press on anyway.

Phipps23 #

On November 27th of 2022 - a little less than 2 years ago as of writing this - Dan Phipps (of Gem Room Games, go check them out, they’re cool folks!) posted a neat approach to worldbuilding based on Gygax 75. I don’t know how long cohost links like the above are going to last so I’m going to reproduce the post here for general preservation’s sake, at least until I’m confident it’s been posted up somewhere else (drop me a line if and when it is):

I made a couple of posts going through this process for Liminal Void through Integration and rediscovered them while porting over my cohost archives.¹ This is obviously not the first time this anticanonicity concept has been outlined - I would point especially to this excellent Mindstorm post. But the structure changing from “world anchors can be anything” to “write Statements That It’s About, then write these varied Icons to embody them” really helped me wrap my head around the more prep-focused version in a direct and actionable way. I want to pick at what makes it work for me - at least as a spark of an idea - and how I’m trying to apply some of its broader concepts.

Demonstration over Direction #

So let’s say that you’re interested in making/developing/running a game that’s about something thematically. (We will presume you don’t think themes are for eighth grade book reports.) What’s going to be the most useful tool for you to facilitate that, and for the designer-minded, to facilitate someone else running something in that ballpark?

Certainly establishing the themes themselves is going to be helpful. But in practice just throwing them out there cold can be a very “draw the rest of the owl” kind of situation - put on the spot to figure out something that relates to a specific theme, a lot of folks (and especially an overworked GM!) are either going to rely on their own standbys and ignore them to come up with something kind of obvious and hamfisted.

Now, I don’t think either of these are strictly bad if everyone’s having fun, to be clear! But again, we’re presuming you (either as the designer or GM) want to engage particular themes. So a great way to do this is to create specific implementations of those - either as GM prep OR as setting details provided for GMs to throw in. My take is to not just direct facilitators or players to engage with a theme, but instead demonstrate the theme by fleshing it out.² Various kinds of spark tables help a lot with this of course, and traditionally that’s the primary way to do it. I’m much more into more mechanical games, though, so in that context this should also reflect in things like mechanics included or omitted, what players are presented with in the game and how they interact with the world around them, and how a setting is expressed. Everything you throw into a game, either as a designer or a GM, is a chance to set a tone, re-establish a theme, etc. There are exceedingly few kinds of writing, mechanics, etc on that front that are incapable of doing so.

This approach also allows a different kind of freedom of further intent at the table: this is where anticanonicity can really come in. If you’ve got these details anchoring themes, it’ll definitely color the proceedings in one way, but ultimately in the context of a TTRPG someone still has to carry it out, and that’s where the anticanon magic happens. Players and a GM (if present) will pick and choose what makes it to the table, what gets breezed over, and what gets proper focus. This then shapes what their game is about more specifically. This also stands in contrast to the “shotgun out whatever comes to mind for your setting and let them sort it out” approach. Ideally you keep it pretty lean as these things go. An overstuffed repository of capital-L Lore³ invites stasis over dynamism, which also isn’t my goal here: a setting made with this in mind is relatively sparse and the focus is narrow to allow room to breathe. It’s a scalpel, not a sledgehammer.

Celestial Bodies Factions #

So in case you don’t know for some reason, I’m one of the authors on Celestial Bodies. It’s going to be (and already is) a big book with a more defined setting than many games I’ve written. Given that Celestial Bodies is a GMless game especially, we only have so much in the way of room to let people “draw the rest of the owl”: there’s no GM to pick up that kind of slack. While we have to trust a table of players is willing to roll with our intended themes if they’re also incidentally interested, it’s also incumbent on us as designers to provide something concrete to latch onto re: those themes. One of the more nailed-down portions of the book, included in Titan Edition so you can read them right now, is Factions: this takes up like 2/5ths of the book and are something you interact with a lot, so making them properly evocative is important. Re-reading the old Phipps23 posts made me think about how much I’ve reflected that base principle here in particular. Each Faction is made up of a couple of things:

• General description and Items of Interest. First, using the general description, we set a general idea of what we’re going for with that Faction. This is the closest you’re getting to a Proper Theme. Then we determine a few things for each. These are the most Phipps23-adjacent items - I was drawing particularly from my unpublished Liminal Void work when thinking about presentation here. Every faction has 3 things listed, be they a person, a place, a home-ship, a Spark, or something else. Unlike the Phipps23 idea of “make this specific list of things connected to a theme” we varied these up a bit, because each faction has more specific areas of focus. So for example, the faction INTREPID is a tiny home-ship with very strict, tight population control - so given that, it made sense to focus on 3 individual people, their particular quirks, and their lack of replaceability. INFINITY, on the other hand, is a sprawling fleet with designs to sprawl further, so their 3 items of interest are a specific home-ship in their fleet, a specific colony, and a specific squad (whose members are pointedly anonymous), intended to paint a picture of them as an unfeeling, uncaring body of projected power. For a more traditional GM’d game I’d probably do more, but given the situation in question, I pointedly limited this section to a single spread: everything after this is directly mechanically involved.
• Signature Feature. These are parts or buildings or features that ideally reflect those themes while also providing a bit of mechanical spice to opposing or befriending them. The hope is that it fits that idea of the Faction’s own self-image, the portrait of the faction as shown to players, and some theme for that faction.⁴ And if you’re friendly with them and use what you’re given in your own mech builds or home-ship, that projected theme is in some way inescapable.
• Builds. Much like the Signature Feature, these are what players are going to run into with regards to those factions in a practical sense, and as such this is more or less the “bestiary” of the book. Obviously you’re going to get some insights in each mech build’s description. But bear in mind that out of necessity, you have 100% transparency into the Build of every mech on the battlefield. Players will be able to see on a per-Build basis what the faction’s priorities are - not only by fitting those signature features in but in priorities like speed vs. offense vs. shielding vs. other protection, diverse Sparks vs. extreme focus on one use case, and so on. If your players want to get through an encounter with a minimum of resource expenditure, they’ll do well to understand what that faction’s deal is - which in turn hopefully makes them engage with that theme at least a little. (These also serve the purpose of giving players ideas for their own builds, which gives them an easy way to riff off of that in-character - maybe it’s a matter of affinity with that faction, or maybe they’ve fought them so much they’ve internalized the same ideas.)
• Spark Composition. Most of what I said above with Builds is also true for Spark composition: which is to say, when you do encounter a group of members of a given Faction, what that group looks like. Factions that mostly have small Sparks of elite enemies could be low-population or incapable of easy manufacture of mechs, or they could just have a very strong martial tradition. Factions that provide more minion-style enemies might not value their lives much, or they could be technologically resourceful enough to employ drone warfare so as to put fewer of their own at risk while emphasizing swarm tactics. Both of these options (and everything in between: for example, some factions have one composition table for peripheral colonies and another for elite squads) not only vary up gameplay but can inform how they come across.

Ideally, if we did our job right, every one of those elements will not only provide gameable content but carry forth the idea of a given Faction. Beyond that, though, they also have to carry a lot of the game as a whole. All of them have to not only portray their own deal, but through that also (hopefully) make you think about things like:

• What kinds of measures will people take to survive in the meager conditions of deep space?
• At what point does attempting to survive give way to attempted dominance?
• What beliefs are people willing to internalize to make sense of a situation that doesn’t otherwise make sense?
• What HASN’T changed through the last five generations?

Or, well, that was the intention. Hopefully it works for you.

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