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.
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):
Liminal Void's quickstart has been around a little more than a year now. It's the first Total//Effect thing I put out and it's...fine. It's fine. Total//Effect is a strong backbone, the vibe carries it pretty far in my opinion, and again in my humble opinion, my two quickstart scenarios are decent. (Read it yourself and see if you agree. It's free. Click that little liminal void tag at the bottom if you want to see me everything I've written about it here, which is quite a lot.)
So I'm thinking about what I'm doing with Professions in Liminal Void. A Profession is like...a class, kind of/sort of? It's got a starting skillset (basically a broad Skill category), a little passive ability that differentiates it, a few changes to being able to recover/reload/recharge in combat, and a starting equipment package (which includes an outfit, a capital-T Tool, and two consumables).
Advancement in a game is tough. Or rather, like all things in game design, you can kind of just do whatever with it but it'll have long-ranging implications as to player behavior. As much as we don't like to admit it sometimes, numbers going up very frequently provide a throughline and driving force for campaign-length games, but how those numbers go up matters. If you give XP for gold, guess what, your game is now at least partially about making money. If you give XP for killing things, guess what, you're going to see a lot of killing. If you don't have XP but just give out character levels when important milestones get finished, they'll frequently beeline to those milestones. And so on.
Thinking out loud about Liminal Void ship stuff because that's on my docket alongside Valiant Horizon and VH is mostly in the "the thing's constructed, just gotta tweak it around the edges" stage. (If you're not familiar from previous posts, basically it's a space game with an Expanse-ish level of hard-sci-fi-ness, give or take a bit, but more centered on survival in shit space capitalism than interplanetary politics as such. I have a free quickstart here! for ground-level, Level 0 rules if that sounds like your thing!)
Ok. This is the part where I talk more firmly about the scenario. (See the map above.)
The goal of this scenario, as repeated from above, is the same goals as Level 0 in general:
Establish some "starting points" for characters, and give some playstyle options.
Figure out, through play, what kind of people your characters were and are. (The Background mechanic is the obvious version of this, but even more subtle decisions inform a character.)
Make sure the party is a persona non grata in some way.
Get the party a spaceship. That's a major part of the game going forward.
I had more to do here than just present a fun adventure. I was tasked to present a jumping-off point for the rest of a campaign! And I think it worked.
I'm in a posting mood because I'm putting off finishing writing a press release/kit so I figured I'd ruminate a little bit about how I put the Liminal Void Quickstart rules and scenario, Escape from CICP-1, together. Mild spoilers for the scenario under the fold if you care about that sort of thing, but most of the big scenario stuff is going to be in a follow-up post, but also it's just long and this seems polite.
Your Icons and Inspirations should help a lot here. Be explicit about how your icons relate to these larger organizations or areas. You don't have to use all of them.
Given that this isn’t really a fantasy thing as such, “Dungeon” and “Season” are going to have liberties taken with them. And Factions are going to be very loose because I’m actively trying to avoid faction tech for this game: as fun as a more explicit Expanse-like game of Great Powers would be, the biggest players are mostly intended to be out of reach, these will be mostly groups of broad-strokes similar corporations.
Part 2d: Icons for “The wildly disruptive nature of independent ship ownership”
Event: In the early days of the Jovian colonies declaring independence from Mars, Mars had shut off all wormhole beacons in an attempt to starve them out. One lone sympathetic freighter, however, brought enough supplies via off-network beacons to keep them supplied so they could maintain their resistance. That ship is long since gone, but is celebrated yearly on the Jovian Independence Day on June 1st.
Landmark: The Deimos Travel Consortium’s logo which still emblazons that tiny moon. The Consortium collapsed after independent investigators with their own ship used it to uncover evidence that a mass transit disaster due to improper maintenance was covered up. Rumor has it they were paid handsomely by a competitor to look into it.
Person: Josiah Flake, the current CEO of Translunar Water, was once declared legally dead. It turned out that he had faked his death and, with the help of a ship’s crew, used the opportunity to turn the tables on a would-be assassin - and the only other person in line for the executive position once his boss retired.
Peril: If you’re supplying workers with the means to secure a better deal with themselves, watch your back. Businesses watch closely for pro-labor ship captains and find ways to make them disappear.
Treasure: It’s said that there are still the husks of ill-fated stations in orbit around Venus, but no company in their right mind would take the chance to salvage them. Which means they’re ripe for the picking if you’ve got enough thermal shielding.
Secret: A Terran shipyard has made a prototype of a nearly self-sustainable ship: it has a new kind of engine that requires no fuel and its air and water recyclers run at an absurdly efficient rate. It could change the limits of the galaxy forever if made at scale.
2c: Icons for "Being thrust suddenly onto the fringes of society and having to figure out how to deal with that."
Event: When the Terran and Martian beacon networks were merged, a lot of stations became redundant. Everyone manning those stations were fired and reactors were deactivated as soon as the merger went through. The stations who had suitable engineering knowledge to restart them did so for the sake of everyone on the station, but for their trouble, they were blacklisted from all future corporate work.
Landmark: Adrastea station was the source of one corp’s experimental “study” into worker efficiency in high gravity conditions. When the study ended in a drastic failure, workers there were all forced to sign non-disclosure and non-compete agreements before receiving medical care. After receiving the bare minimum, they were all promptly fired.
Person: Barnaby Russell was a pilot who got fired from ferry duty due to having a management inefficiency pinned on him. On his way out, he stole a security patrol fighter and used it to hijack several freighters. He’s still at large, along with a few old friends he managed to recruit, and occasionally his crew will disrupt an ore shipment leaving the colonies.
Peril: Every once in awhile, someone decided to give a little too much control to an automated system. When that happens (and when it goes wrong), it’s quite standard for everyone involved in programming or maintenance to be let go and the mark put on their permanent record in spite of whoever made it happen.
Treasure: If your station gets attacked or cut loose, strip the place clean, then hide it well. What are they going to do, fire you twice? Just make sure you don’t take anything traceable…
Secret: A lot of corporations cut people loose or mark them as falsely dead on purpose. There’s a lot of things you can hire someone who doesn’t exist for.
