What Is Scary?

Exodus concept art by Archetype Entertainment

You'd be forgiven for assuming that I'm posting this because it's Halloween. You'd also be forgiven, if you've been keeping up with my social/travel calendar, for assuming that I'm posting this, belatedly, because I attended the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival last week and have been thinking extra hard about horror movies. But no, I'm posting this because I just watched about half of a YouTube video about some videogame I'd never heard of before today. The brain works in mysterious ways.

See, my reluctant participation in the annual rite of Star Citizen remembrance involved a bunch of YouTube watching, after which the algorithm was like, oh, you like ambitious science fiction videogames with no release date in sight? Check this out! It's called Exodus. It's got a bunch of former BioWare devs at the helm! And some novelist you've never heard of but whom people seem to like is involved! So is Matthew McConaughey, for some reason! In fact, here's Wooderson himself narrating some spooky lore about the game's bad guys. This all seems like it should be more or less up my alley.

But here I am, just a couple minutes in…rolling my eyes?

It's not just that it's not scary. There's a lot going on here that seems lazy. They're called the Mara Yama, for one thing. Big “Just give me Satan, but make it Buddhist” energy. The visual design of the ship in the opening shot is cool, but haven't we seen the rest of this before? A little Giger, a little Doom, a little Halo, a little Firefly. A heaping helping of Warhammer 40k. What if the Dark Eldar were also the Flood? Is that anything?

(Oh, remember how everybody in Star Citizen is some white dude named Ernst or Steve? A cursory survey of the Exodus site and marketing materials turns up characters named Jurgen, Edith, Kendall, Torrance, Evan, Max, and Tom. At least the space monsters are Indian!)

Of course there's nothing new under the sun, and if you can put a fresh, well-crafted spin on some beloved old trope, more power to you. (On the other hand, there's deja vu all over the marketing materials. Haven't I seen these “awakened bears” before? Weren't uplifted bears in StarDrive? And in Starfinder? Haven't we done “disposable workers engineered to thrive in harsh environments” a hundred times now? Haven't I seen this concept art before, in Mass Effect, Interstellar, Prometheus, Destiny?) But if it's not original, it has to be good. If it's supposed to be the scariest thing in the universe, it should be scary. This isn't scary.

Scaring players in videogames is hard. Startling them is easy enough, which is why jumpscares in dimly lit corridors are a staple of horror games. Rattling them requires a little more finesse, but is also reliably achievable, hence effects that impair the player's vision, hearing, or movement likewise being staples. Actually instilling fear in them? That's a tall order.

Fear is the expectation of danger, of pain, of harm. You can't cause (literal) pain to a player via their digital avatar, and your ability to harm that avatar is mechanically constrained. Few games punish a player more severely for failing to avoid or overcome danger than by taking her time (making her start over from a saved game or a checkpoint), and those that do tend to compound that injury only by removing some accumulated reward (money, experience points, items)—which is, at the end of the day, just time transmuted into another form.

Rather than fear of harm, the player is more apt to experience anxiety about avoiding frustration (or, if the stakes are low enough, just sheer frustration). Even when a single-player videogame features what is presented as irreversible harm—the ability to lose irreplaceable items, for instance, or the permanent death of the character—it's usually only an extreme version of the same: you can do the whole thing over. Once again, you've only lost time. There are a few interesting exceptions to this rule, like the infamous art game Lose/Lose, but they're few and far between.

In a tabletop game, of course, everything is different. Not only is the prevailing TTRPG convention to accept loss, change, and character death and incorporate those things into the shared narrative, but it would scarcely be possible to retrace one's steps with perfect fidelity as in a videogame (whether returning to a “checkpoint” or “saved game” or starting the entire narrative over and trying to do everything the exact same way). Thus you can scare a TTRPG player by threatening their character (you can even cause them physical pain, or something close to it, by harming or threatening their character, so…you know, be careful). But you can also scare a player by threatening another player's character, or even (especially!) an NPC.

It's a lot harder to do that in a videogame, which is narratively rigid and usually incapable of reacting or adapting to the player's actions in diverse, believable ways. It's not impossible, though. Videogames can often wrench more emotion out of the lives and deaths of minor, plot-inessential characters (I'm thinking of Paul Denton in the original Deus Ex, poor Miria in Fallout 2, a half-dozen people in Disco Elysium) than they can out of threats to people the player is being railroaded into saving (or trying and failing to save). Part of what makes Disco Elysium so great is that although you, the player, don't really have any control over what happens in “the main plot,” neither does your character. You're not being railroaded into the unearned drama of glorious success or harrowing failure, you're just stumbling through a situation too complex and too far advanced to be resolved by one cop's (or two cops') heroics. Most of what you can do to help or harm is just little stuff around the margins.

All of which is to say that while the Mara Yama would be terrifying if they existed in real life, hard as that is to imagine, and might be terrifying in the hands of a novelist talented enough to bridge that imaginative gap, they can't hope, as videogame adversaries, to be much more than an annoyance. An action-adventure game's avatar is fearless; what harm can fear-eating monsters do to him? They wouldn't even be good TTRPG antagonists; there's something both too circular and not interactive enough about “they're scary because they torture you and consume your fear and pain.” A scary enemy needs to actively threaten the things the players care about: their friends, their reputations, their social status. Maybe their magic swords, once in a while.

And videogames? Permadeath can definitely be scary, especially in dynamic settings—multiplayer survival shooters create some incredibly tense moments. But in single-player games, it's hard to scare players more than you frustrate them. SOMA is probably the scariest narrative game I can think of, and it's scary not because of anything that adversaries do to your avatar, but because it uses the model of the videogame avatar to force you to think about your own mortality, your own ephemerality, your own ontological contingency.

A Future So White, There’s Only One Shade (of Skin)

A digital simulacrum of Mark Hamill stars in Squadron 42

Like many nerds who grew up in the 1990s playing the Wing Commander and X-Wing games, I backed infamous forever-in-development space sim boondoggle Star Citizen ages ago, and I keep up with its development. The rumor mill has it that this October—mere weeks from now!—will bring momentous news about the project, perhaps even a release date for Squadron 42, its single-player component. What better time to check in and see how the multiplayer side of the game’s coming along? My decrepit old potato of a PC can barely run it anymore, but it’s a pretty enough slideshow, and I can tootle around in my ship (and in my ship), marvel at the sights, and daydream about what might someday be. And I can reflect on all that’s gone wrong.

If you’ve never played Star Citizen, you might know it—if you know it at all—as vaporware, a scam, a crowdfunding horror story. It is, in fact, neither vaporware nor an outright scam, but it is an incredible monument to poor planning and mismanagement, and a warning about what can happen when you give a couple of dreamy visionaries a billion dollars with no deadlines or guardrails. The whole thing is like a giant game of exquisite corpse; not only does the left hand not know what the right is doing, neither of them knows where the feet are or whether the kidneys are functioning. Even as the developers strip entire mature systems out of the game to replace them with more sophisticated, more complex iterations, they keep adding new material that’s obsolete on arrival: spaceships that don’t support the new resource-management system, static environments that don’t use the destructible terrain or physicalized scenery they’ve so exhaustively developed, mission content that doesn’t make use of the dynamic simulated economy they’ve been promising for a decade now.

This haphazardness is nowhere more evident than in the writing. The basic premise of the setting is a fun kind of Silver Age science fiction throwback, with human civilization representing, in Asimovian fashion, the Roman Empire in space, and various alien species standing in for the Celts, the Germans, the Arabs, and the Persians. It’s inherently mildly racist, of course, and a bit on the nose besides—the Germanic aliens are literally called the Vanduul, and the plot arc that will see them driven ahead of some as-yet-unrevealed space Huns to sack space Rome (Earth), upon which event the center of human civilization will move to space Byzantium (the confusingly named Terra), has been telegraphed from light-years away—but it’s not a bad setup. They haven’t ever done much with the Roman theme, though, because two stronger influences have strangled it.

One is simple nostalgia for the SF films and shows of the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s. Rather than on-theme sites and institutions drawn from Roman culture and history, most of what we’ve got so far is pure cinematic pastiche. There’s off-brand Coruscant and off-brand Cloud City, a Tatooine and a Hoth, an entire Blade Runner planet, ships modeled heavily on Alien’s Nostromo and its sequel’s dropship, and so forth. And hey, fair enough. People love nostalgia, and they love pastiche. The other influence, though, is the lede I buried all the way down here under four paragraphs of faff.

* * *

Star Citizen and Squadron 42 are the brainchildren of brothers Chris and Erin Roberts, games industry veterans who started out at Origin Systems, where they created the Wing Commander games—a series of story-driven space combat simulators, heavily influenced by Star Wars, and a number of spinoffs, including Wing Commander: Privateer and Privater 2: The Darkening, which brought open-world gameplay to the Wing Commander setting. Electronic Arts purchased Origin, and the brothers Roberts left, with much of their staff, to found a new studio, Digital Anvil, with backing from Microsoft. There, they created the spiritual predecessors of Squadron 42 and Star Citizen: Starlancer and Freelancer, respectively a story-driven space combat simulator in the vein of Wing Commander and a wildly ambitious Privateer-like open-world game set in the same universe. (When Freelancer inevitably went way over budget and way past its due date, Microsoft intervened, slashed the most ambitious elements, and shoved a pared-down but functional game out the door as soon as they could. No such luck, for better and worse, for Star Citizen.)

Starlancer was a prequel to Freelancer, relating how the setting of the latter came to be. It began in the 22nd century, with two Earth-based superpowers struggling for control of the solar system. It was literally East vs. West: the Western Alliance (the United States, Japan, and Western Europe) against the Eastern Coalition (China, the former Soviet Union, and the Arab states). It’s a latter-day Cold War scenario concocted by a bunch of guys who grew up on Red Scare propaganda and Ronald Reagan speeches, so of course the perfidious Easterners kick off the action by launching a brutal surprise attack on the West, obliterating France and Italy. A jolly little space war ensues, but despite the player’s best efforts, the West eventually loses. In defeat, they launch five interstellar colony ships—one American, one Japanese, one British, one German, and one Spanish—on a centuries-long journey to settle the star systems that will become the setting of Freelancer.

Freelancer, then, is a far-future setting in which basically everybody is of American, British, German, or Japanese descent (the Spanish colony ship malfunctions; they end up as a mysterious, piratical minor faction). It’s a little weird, and, again, ever so mildly racist, but the game’s backstory justifies it effectively, and it has some advantages in scene-setting and storytelling. Where it doesn’t work so well is in Star Citizen.

* * *

You see, despite not having a naively reactionary World War Three background to explain away the nonexistence in the setting of much of humanity (although I don’t believe Starlancer or Freelancer ever considered the existence of India, Southeast Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, or Latin America in the first place), Star Citizen and Squadron 42 pick up right where Freelancer left off. In what’s likely meant to be an homage to those older games, American, British, German, and Japanese proper nouns dominate the setting. In-game brands are occasionally Japanese (Musashi, Sakura), occasionally German (Behring, Kruger), and otherwise almost universally Anglo-American. Named historical figures are likewise: Croshaw, Messer, Bishop, Hurston. The cast of Squadron 42? Gillian Anderson, Mark Hamill, Gary Oldman, Mark Strong, Ben Mendelsohn, Liam Cunningham, John Rhys-Davies—obviously a star-studded gesture of affection for the genre movies and shows the developers love, but equally obviously lily-white (and overwhelmingly male). Everybody in this universe speaks English; everybody has an American or British accent.

It’s a microcosm of the whole directionless design process. There’s no overall plan, there’s no vision, there’s no explanation of how anything got anywhere. There have been a whole lot of choices made in isolation: let’s cast this guy we love, let’s have a throwback to Freelancer here, let’s name a character after somebody’s mother-in-law or God knows what. No individual choice is terrible, but a thousand of them add up to something unsettling—a future for humanity in which early 21st-century Anglo-American culture remains hegemonic, in which nearly every person of any importance or consequence is white, in which vast swathes of humanity have apparently vanished without a trace. (And the stand-ins for non-white, non-Anglophone people are literally aliens.)

It’s easy to get lost in the weeds of obsessive, encyclopedic “worldbuilding,” but there’s something to be said for having a thoroughly, holistically developed setting for fiction like this. Star Citizen is by no means alone in fumbling its way to an accidentally white-supremacist future (its sometime rival Elite: Dangerous is much the same, as of course are most of the classic genre films and television shows these games draw from); it’s what happens when a bunch of British and American (and German and Canadian, in Star Citizen’s case) creators, drawing on their own milieu and their favorite media, develop a setting piecemeal without considering the big picture. But a few weeks from now—we can dream!—Squadron 42 might have an official release date, and this wildly ambitious game, which for all its faults features some extraordinary technology and gorgeous art, might be one step closer to reality. A lot of eyes will be on the United Empire of Earth; it’s a shame they won’t be seeing something more thoughtfully imagined and representative of humanity’s rich real-life diversity.

Bookpost #2

Something else I’m way behind on: cataloging and reviewing my reading this year. Here’s a partial account.

Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America’s Empire (Jonathan Katz)

I knew some parts of Smedley Butler’s biography (like the Business Plot, of course), and I knew of the U.S. role in the establishment of banana republics favorable to business all over Latin America (thanks in no small part to Stephen Kinzer’s excellent The True Flag: Theodore Roosevelt, Mark Twain, and the Birth of the American Empire), but I never knew the extent to which Butler was the Forrest Gump of imperial warmongering. Some of these episodes—the Marines holding the Haitian legislature at gunpoint and forcing them to essentially sign away their sovereignty; Congress engineering Panama’s secession from Colombia at the behest of American banks—are so sordid and cartoonishly evil you’d scarcely believe them in fiction.

The Other Wind (Ursula Le Guin)

Like some of the short stories, I’d never read this one before. I think I was at just the wrong age for it when it was published—too old for kids’ fantasy books, in my teenage mind—and then I simply didn’t pick it up as an adult, for whatever reason. I wonder what I would have made it at age 17 or 25; now, on the heels of rereading The Farthest Shore and Tehanu, I found it surprisingly hopeful and youthful in spirit. A beautiful conclusion to the Earthsea saga.

Pattern Recognition (William Gibson)

For a guy who loves Neuromancer as much as I do, I really haven’t read enough of Gibson’s later work. Or maybe I have, because I didn’t love this. Aseptic and lifeless, clever but purposeless. Not nearly as prescient as it was, I gather, hailed for being at the time.

They Will Dream in the Garden (Gabriela Damien Miravete)

I asked a friend for some obscure SFF in translation for a book swap, and she delivered. Short stories, some science fiction, some fantasy, some horror, some hybrids, almost all excellent. “The Synchrony of Touch” and “The End of the Party” were my particular favorites, the former for its elegiac strangeness, the latter for making a hoary old theme fresh and new.

Bliss Montage (Ling Ma)

Another gift from a friend, more genre-bending short stories, another big hit. Here, the hilarious and the surreal keep melting, or crashing, into the deadly serious and the all too real. Lots of troubled, or troubling, relationships; domestic violence features in several stories (including the excellent, and very funny, “Los Angeles”) and haunts others. “Office Hours” is particularly good, a challenging, uneasy, fascinating blend of the cozy and the sinister.

Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2023 (eds. R.F. Kuang and John Joseph Adams)

Having read and enjoyed a bunch of short genre fiction, I thought back on my childhood love and diligent collecting of Gardner Dozois’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction anthologies. I knew Dozois had passed away and the series had ended with him, but had anybody picked up the baton and started something similar? Hey, somebody had, and R.F. Kuang had guest-edited the most recent edition!

It was a bit of a disappointment. Lots of amateurish work, lots of pieces that strain the definition of “short fiction” (and mostly not in fun, experimental ways), lots of shallow treatment of hot-button topics. There are some winners, though; Isabel Kim’s “Termination Stories for the Cyberpunk Dystopia Protagonist” is the absolute hands-down standout. Alix Harrow’s formally (if not thematically) inventive “The Six Deaths of the Saint,” Chris Willrich’s cute Star Trek satire “The Odyssey Problem,” and Maria Dong’s strange, unsettling “In the Beginning of Me, I Was a Bird” are also good.

Zhou Enlai: The Last Perfect Revolutionary (Gao Wenqian)

Imagine how nonplussed everybody in my life was when I spent a couple weeks after finishing this being like, “Okay, I know you already think Mao was bad, but what if I told you he was even worse?!” Zhou’s biographer intended this as a corrective to decades of official hagiography, showing us that the man was, after all, only human, and flawed like all of us. He was human, of course, and he was flawed, but I’m now convinced he was one of the most extraordinary human beings of his time, and very much worthy of praise (if not sainthood).

The Viking Heart: How Scandinavians Conquered the World (Arthur Herman)

You ever read something that covers a bunch of subject matter you don’t know very well, and then gets to a subject you do know quite well, hundreds of pages in, and you realize, wow, this author knows less about this stuff than I do, and he’s made a bunch of elementary mistakes, and what if the whole book has been like this and I just didn’t know? Yeah. Also, the titular thesis is a bit fashy (in spite of Herman’s protests-too-much efforts to distance himself from the far right) and the title itself gets laboriously worked into the text about nine hundred times, which is just annoying.

System Collapse (Martha Wells)

All the Murderbot books are starting to blur together in my memory a bit, which I think is 50% the extremely generic titles and 50% that, well, there’s a bit of a formula at work here. Still enjoyable!

Prophet Song (Paul Lynch)

Gorgeous, harrowing, haunting. Exemplary evidence for the argument that the novel is a powerful, perhaps unique medium for generating true empathy, for conjuring up other lives, other people, letting you walk in their shoes, experience their fears and sorrows, and bring something of them back to your own life—a memory, a feeling, some moral clarity and guidance, a light in the dark. Right up there with Kairos. The best books I’ve read all year.

Station Eleven (Emily St. John Mandel

I read this immediately after Prophet Song, which was a tough act to follow. Had I jumped into it after, say, Murderbot, would the prose have seemed so pedestrian, the characters so thinly developed and undifferentiated, the setting such a lazy pastiche of scenes from filmic zombie apocalypses? Maybe, maybe not. But I still don’t think I’d have loved it. This is very much a conservative, even reactionary, perspective on civilization and crisis—makes the case that some fragile membrane (a thin blue line, one might say) is all that protects us from savage violence, from people turning feral, from the whole human species unlearning centuries of science and engineering. Wrong! All wrong! People aren't feral monsters in waiting. Pandemics don’t work this way (as we all know now thanks to COVID). And you can make penicillin in your kitchen!

Distaste for Talents

Evil Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelley in "Mirror, Mirror"

I buy a lot of TTRPG PDF bundles. They're usually for a good cause, they're often great value, and hey, I just like reading TTRPG rules. I like daydreaming about what system my group might run next; I like having lightweight stuff with which to throw together a novel one-shot on short notice. One of these days I'm going to have to start a series of posts where I poke through the dozens of games I've accumulated over the past few years and…I don't know, review them? Just pick out stuff I like about them? So far, I've only picked, unfairly, on design choices in games I haven't even played yet (spoiler: that's what I'm doing in this post too). Anyway, the ever-growing collection is mostly oddball lightweight indie stuff, but there are some bigger names too—Numenera, Traveller, and, as of last week, thanks to a Humble Bundle offer, Star Trek Adventures.

The rumors about STA 1e are true: These books are not laid out well. I like gonzo graphic design, I love LCARS, I enjoy a rulebook stuffed with lore and fluff…but on every count, this game went too far. It's an absolute mess, with information scattered all over the place and little or no visual distinction between essential rules and fun background material. But there's still a lot to like!

My love of lifepaths is well documented, so you'd better believe that I was especially pleased with the character creation system. It's pretty quick, it's very flavorful, it's super fun for a Trek nerd like me, and it creates characters with a ton of good roleplay direction. It just has one glaring flaw: At four different points during the process, the player is asked to choose a “talent,” which is a catch-all category of bonuses somewhat akin to feats in d20 games, although they also cover things that might elsewhere be skills or magic spells (the Vulcan mind meld, for instance, is a talent, but so is just getting some extra health, or being good with computers).

The problems, or potential problems, with feats have been discussed and debated ad nauseum all over the internet. Redditor Sleeper4 summarized them pretty well in a post on r/osr earlier this year:

1. Slows down character creation - this is a pretty easy problem to fix, you can simply give feats out at levels higher than 1.

2. The presence of feats creates situations where a character is implicitly unable to try something because there's a feat that provides the ability - aka "feat niche protection". I think with careful design, feats can be created that somewhat mitigate this problem.

3. Shifts the focus of the game - every added character power that's put in a list for player to pour over shifts the focus of the game away from "go adventure to discover riches and powerful magic items" to "make sure you pick the best character abilities from this list" - it draws the players thinking into the character building systems and away from the fantastical world they inhabit.

STA mostly avoids #2 (although in its brand new second edition, it seems to be heading the wrong way), and it fully avoids #3 (you generally can't have more talents than the four you start with), but boy does it ever bang its head on the low bar of #1. Even for the kind of dyed-in-the-wool dork who enjoys reading rulebooks (me), having to stop four times during character creation to click through hundreds of pages of material looking for talents that match a character concept is a nuisance. It's also, as ever, an invitation to min-maxers to throw roleplay out the window in favor of mechanical optimization, or, for rules-averse players, an indescribable session-zero headache.

Now, there are lots of games I like, or even love, that use feats or feat-like character building blocks. There are lots of ways to avoid the above problems, or to embrace them and have fun with them.

Stars Without Number makes foci (i.e., feats) the primary vehicle for character construction. There are a very limited number of classes, and those who don't have psychic or magical powers don't gain any class-related powers as they level up. They start with a few simple (and powerful) abilities, but as they level, they mostly just get more health, higher attack bonuses, and more points to spend on skills. Foci are the primary source of mechanical distinctiveness, there are only about two dozen of them, and they mostly just allow characters to do the same things everybody can do, but faster, more reliably, or more powerfully. Robust, flavorful, limited in number. Excellent.

FIST leans even further in this direction. On character creation, you choose (or roll) two traits and a role, and that's it: All of your character's abilities (and nearly all of their stats and starting equipment, too) come from those traits. Character creation takes all of 15 seconds (perfect for the rules-averse) and wrapping your head around your weird and possibly dissonant powers is a great source of character development, fittingly for the game's theme, with kind of an X-Men vibe of angsty mystery. Why am I this way? How does the world respond to my freakish nature? Delightful.

But in Star Trek? Especially in a game that already has a bunch of brilliant avenues for character definition and expression, like values (a way to make a character's motives and beliefs mechanically relevant, without the clumsy rigidity of D&D alignment or the like) and focuses (a very elegant, flexible way to bridge the gap between “not enough skills to articulate a character's abilities in a high-tech setting” and “way too many goddamn skills, most of which we'll never actually use”), it just seems like a half-assed sop to people for whom a character is defined by the interplay of a bunch of minute stat modifiers and not by, you know, their character.

Lore24: June (?)

From "Chasing the Lightship" by Les Edwards

Continuing from May, and yes, I’ve fallen behind a bit! I scrawled a few notes for this project during my summer peregrinations, but haven’t yet gotten around to fleshing most of them out. Will I catch up? Who knows. I’ll try!

* * *

1. Because photonic weapons are one of the only reliable ways to harm someone protected by a deflector array, they are tightly controlled in both the Empire and the Continuum. Commissars of the Continuum almost always have a laser cannon or two at hand; knights of the Empire consider them unseemly and dishonorable, but the emperor’s household infantry are well-equipped with them. A hold full of such weapons is a dangerous and immensely valuable asset for any independent trader.

2. Trokhos is a warm Earth-like world (very much like Earth in its orbital period and its gravity), slightly less than half covered in water, that occupies the innermost orbit around Gamma Chrysantae, a K6 subgiant (2.67x the radius and 1.65x the luminosity of Earth’s sun). Trokhos is home to hundreds of millions of people; the majority are bordars who live at an essentially medieval technological level, fairly evenly distributed in small farming communities spread across the planet’s ample landmass.

3. There’s another terrestrial planet, Kheramos, in the circumstellar habitable zone of Gamma Chrysantae, merely half an AU beyond Trokhos. It is larger, wetter, and much colder than its sister world, and wracked by intense volcanism. About two-thirds of its surface is covered in water-ice. There are some research and manufacturing facilities that benefit from the low temperatures, geothermal power, and abundant water, but the punishing gravity means travel between surface and orbit is prohibitively expensive. Fewer than a million people are counted as permanent inhabitants (although at least they all have access to advanced technology). The atmosphere is thick but breathable, at least for short periods; long exposure is toxic.

4. Beyond Kheramos are an asteroid belt, two dense rocky worlds, and two large ice worlds. An archipelago of ramshackle habitats, prospecting bases, research outposts, asteroid mines, “free ports,” and the like are sprinkled across and among these.

5. In the orbit of the outermost planet is a station known as the Alabaster Citadel, an Anchorite redoubt that, a few centuries ago, suffered an explosion that cracked its seemingly impenetrable skin, allowing wreckers to pry their way inside. They found a vast necropolis: The station’s inhabitants had turned nearly every inch of the interior into a maze of catacombs, the dead carefully stacked along every corridor by the thousands upon thousands. The last had laid themselves to rest centuries earlier, and the station had persisted unchanging until one too many automated systems gave out or malfunctioned and a major accident finally occurred.


6. Trokhos had a fairly sophisticated native ecosystem dominated by bryophyte analogues, but Earth-origin life has generally overtaken (or been imposed over) the indigenous flora and fauna. Areas remote from human activity—undersea, near the poles, in isolated deserts and mountain valleys—are home to the most robust native biomes.

7. The hardiest indigenous lifeforms on Trokhos, or at least the surviving indigenous life most visible in human-dominated areas, are a class of invertebrates called hispids, ranging from the size of a fist to that of a medium-sized dog. They are slow-moving creatures with thick carapaces that, in most species, are covered in fine, stiff spines that grow so densely together they resemble fur.

8. Trokhos has long been a world of rigid social order and Byzantine laws, although a great deal of change has come in the last century, ultimately set in motion by House Essa’s great project: a vast high-speed rail network connecting every major settlement and site of economic activity on the planet’s surface. Six generations of nomarchs down to the present duchess, Halyna Essa, have utilized an endless rolling corvée of bordar labor to undertake this and other great public works.

9. Corvée teams are assigned labor quotas but also recognized and rewarded (as individuals and as small groups) for exemplary service. Many are rewarded by being elevated to vassalage, given license to leave their land and seek employment elsewhere. Many receive positions in the growing civil service (as railworkers, in the militia, etc.); many others embark on new careers in the urban private sector.


10. This long-running and increasingly dramatic growth of a free middle class has led to rapid urbanization, substantial social and political upheaval, and a “Trokhene Renaissance”—a flowering of arts and culture. Ex-bordars bring their handicrafts and folk traditions to the cities; rich old families patronize young artists, trying to outdo one other in appointing their estates and diversifying their social circles.


11. The original planetary capital, Approdo, was built at a site selected for its proximity to the equator, to fresh water, and to a deepwater port; there was no consideration given to the possibility of the urban population swelling into the millions. Neighborhoods and sub-cities clamber up and down cliffs, ridges, gullies, and ravines and along a jagged coast. The old spaceport, a small affair, is near the city center and the seaport; the far larger “new” spaceport (centuries old at this point) is well to the south, near the enormous, ever-growing rail terminus.

12. The Essas have long eschewed the heat, humidity, and chaos of Approdo, preferring their mountain roosts and forest lodges in higher latitudes. The original project for which the corvée was instituted was a railway from the new spaceport to a regional capital in the far south, Bukola, built at the behest of one duchess Cervine, who hated to travel by air; the duchy’s seat was transferred there several generations later. The immediately previous duke, Halyna’s father Robor, officially moved the capital a second time, to a small planned city (Roborea) in the mountains east of Bukola.


13. Even from orbit, it’s plainly visible that there’s a lot of high-intensity activity going on beneath the surface of Kheramos; enormous amounts of waste heat are dumped into the otherwise-frigid oceans in various locations, creating large ice-free patches that are visible for space with the naked eye, at least when the weather is favorable. Rumors abound.

14. Copestone is the one “city,” if you can call it that, on Kheramos. A few hundred thousand people live in a low-rise sprawl of sealed habitats that hive the ice around the planet’s solitary spaceport.


15. The romantic cliche of the wrecker crew has them making a lonely, dangerous, years-long delve into a lost system, but most wrecker activity involves shorter jaunts into abandoned or forbidden regions of inhabited systems. An independent captain with a torchship capable of making safe, relatively swift passage between stars is more likely to position herself as a salvage merchant, doing a circuit of semi-civilized systems where wreckers are picking the bones of lost worlds or derelict stations, bartering for their finds, and then taking those goods to market on richer worlds.

16. Gamma Chrysantae is the rare system from which long wrecker delves are launched on a fairly regular basis; several decivilized systems lie within five or ten light-years, and the outer system is perpetually abuzz with activity as crews head out into the black or return with their hauls. Smuggling, illegal trade, unreported recovery of proscribed artifacts, and other related phenomena are a constant headache for the duchy’s small local fleet. Even the fastest torchship burning at an acceleration difficult for its crew for bear takes days to reach the outer planets.

17. The Trokhene nobility have a strong taboo against eating tubers, bulbs, or corms—anything dug out of the soil—and a consequent prejudice against those who eat such things, whom they disparage as “dirt eaters” or “filth eaters.” Onions, garlic, and potatoes are staple elements of the bordar diet nearly everywhere on Trokhos; their social “betters” make much of the supposed stench of these foodstuffs. Conversely, bordars rarely get the opportunity to eat seeds, nuts, or the flesh of vertebrate animals, which are seen as the province of the high-born.

18. The small but growing Trokhene middle class is at pains to imitate the eating habits of the nobility (and avoid those of the peasantry), although they often struggle to afford a balanced diet. Conversely, progressive-minded elites and the rebellious young scions of the nobility are keen to shock their peers and elders by sampling the vibrant, intoxicatingly aromatic cuisine of the poor.


19. Less ironclad than the taboo against tubers and bulbs, but growing in strength as the nobility seek to distinguish themselves from the burgeoning class of civil servants and from those who live off-world, is a disdain for anything grown in water—paddy rice, certain berries, anything grown hydroponically. A schema associating foods with the classical elements has proliferated: Those associated with the “low” elements, earth and water, are unfit for noble hands, which should touch only those associated with the “high” elements, air (the fruits, nuts, and seeds of trees and upland grasses) and fire (cooked meat).

20. The Condolent Inquiry is a sect that has cultivated and curated an extraordinarily ancient body of knowledge (the Lucubrations) encompassing the thoughts and ideas from all of human history known (or believed) to be most calming and comforting to the human mind. They labor to condense and hone these ideas; perfect their expression in all the languages of the Pale; and promulgate a calming, healing, mantra, now widespread in various forms, which the Inquiry calls the Litany of Solace.

21. The wrecker torchship August Moon is presently on its way back from a delve into Beta Chrysantae. The Essas’ fastest warship, the Apologue, is being prepped to intercept her for a customs inspection upon her return.


22. Unsurprisingly, nowhere on Trokhos is a more fecund hotbed of political activity than the railroad, which now connects nearly all of the planet’s largest settlements and employs, or has employed, a substantial minority of all the planet’s inhabitants. The Order of Railway Employees is the most powerful vassal-dominated organization in the system, and its radical offshoot, the United Railworkers, the only organization of any power or note at all in the system to include bordars. 


23. The crust of Trokhos is rich in metals, and there are particularly large, easily accessible copper deposits near Approdo. Some finished copper products (including artwork and electronics) are exported from the planet, but the supply far outstrips the demand—after all, copper is found, even if not so abundantly or so easily, on every world of the Pale; much can be mined from planetary rings and other objects accessible in microgravity. Trokhos, consequently, has a rich tradition of metalworking for local consumption. Copper and copper alloys are seen in nearly every kitchen on the planet, even in poor bordar households.


24. Copper alloys are also frequently used in construction, particularly in Approdo itself—hence its nickname, “the City of Copper.” Brass lampposts line the streets and bronze statuary dots the parks and squares. Copper domes gleam atop new construction; verdigris gives the ancient manses of the upper classes their characteristic signifier of old-money authenticity.


25. “You were born in a small village on a pleasant backwater world. For most of the year, the hundred other villagers were your universe entire. From time to time—to buy, to sell, for pilgrimage—you went to the nearest proper town and moved among a hundred times a hundred people, and this, already, strained your power to grasp. Perhaps you traveled and found that a hundred such towns made a commonwealth, and a hundred such realms made a whole world—a small word, and insignificant, but a hundred times a hundred times the limit of your comprehension. There are a thousand worlds in the Pale, many much larger than yours. You could live a hundred lives and travel every day and never see them all, even from a distance. It is easy to think of our Sanctuary as an impossibly vast space—yet the space beyond is infinitely vaster, as the Pale is to your village.”


26. Solar and wind supply the vast majority of the electrical power on Trokhos; bordars and some poor vassals in rural areas use local peat for heating and cooking, but the cities are fully electrified. The absence of fossil fuels from the native ecosystem means that liquid hydrocarbons are beyond the budget of nearly all individuals and most organizations. Most vehicles larger than bicycles are battery-powered, including nearly all aircraft not intended to reach orbit. Airships, microlights, and EVOTLs ply the local airways.


27. The lands around its inland seas are fertile and relatively densely settled; the more sparsely peopled Trokhene interior contains vast deserts, rugged mountain ranges, steppes, and enormous stretches of seasonally arid hills and plains, studded with baobabs and other hardy trees.


28. Honey is one of the most important products of the agricultural hinterlands, both because nearly all Trokhene cuisine, regardless of class or geography, makes heavy use of it and because the nobility make extensive use of it for cosmetic purposes, including as a depilatory—a custom that has been enthusiastically adopted by the burgeoning middle class. Flowers, too, are a ubiquitous crop, harvested for pigments, spices, fragrant oils, and more.


29. Before the rail network reached its current extent, most heavy transport across the surface of Trokhos was carried by barges along an extensive system of canals. These still carry a great deal of commerce as a supplement to train traffic, and many of the railbeds follow current or former canal routes. Several major cities, like Moagem and Terzihan, grew up along the canals as regional hubs for the collection and transshipment of honey, spices, perfumes, handicrafts, and other valuable goods.


30. Bukola never became a major center of commerce or industry like Approdo, Moagem, or Terzihan, but many of the most prominent Trokhene families moved their seats there for the sake of proximity to the ducal residence. Now that the planetary capital and its concomitant administrative facilities have moved to Roborea, the city is reclining into genteel irrelevance. The former middle-class districts are half-abandoned and two-thirds overgrown, but the hilltop estates ringing the city center still play host to lively parties, dances, and polo games. The city plan for Roborea does not accommodate rambling country estates, and a Bukola address still has tremendous cachet.