Death to the d20 Skill Check

 

There are a couple great bundles on itch.io right now:

Palestinian Relief Bundle

TTRPGs for Trans Rights - West Virginia

On the off chance that somebody reading this post in the next few weeks isn't already aware of these, well, now you know! Get in there! These are both great causes and they're asking incredibly low prices for a ton of cool stuff; both bundles contain, and either bundle is worth it just for, FIST (an immaculate work of genius, reading which is akin to touching the face of God). Highly recommended!

The second bundle also contains Songbirds 3e, which I'm reading through right now. Beautiful design, lovely writing, lots of fascinating ideas. I was, however, brought up short by this:

It's my bête noire: the d20 skill check. A completely average, untrained person can accomplish the impossible 15% of the time? And the highest bonus you can get on a check (at least from stats and skills) appears to be +9, so even the world's greatest expert at something is going to fall at a task of normal difficulty 10% of the time?

This isn't to pick on Songbirds, which is better equipped than most D&D-derived games to ameliorate the weird badness of d20 skill checks (with complications instead of outright failure, and multi-check challenges to squash the variance a bit). Songbirds just happens to be in front of me (and to have made some infelicitous choices in describing the DCs). These systems are everywhere, a crummy bit of received unwisdom that we can't seem to quit even though Traveller's beautiful 2d6 checks are right there.

In a 2d6 system, even one that has fairly small modifiers, it's possible to have a DC that's literally impossible for an average, untrained person (say, DC 12 in Stars Without Number, where an untrained character gets a -1) that a highly competent character (with, say, +3 from the relevant skill and +2 from an attribute) will succeed at more often than not. A particularly specialized character (with the Expert class ability, the Specialist focus, etc.) can do the impossible regularly even at lower levels, and at higher levels can do it almost routinely. That's cool! It gives players satisfying character definition just from a few +1s, without demanding loads of crazy bespoke special abilities.

SWN, true to its Traveller roots, is a little fussy—much more granular with skills than most OSR games. But 2d6 is still great even with a minimalist system. Look at FIST! Apart from some very narrow trait-based specialization, you've basically just got a -4 to +4 range of modifiers from attributes. An unspecialized character is only rarely going to get a full success on anything, but a specialist will usually succeed, and almost never outright fail, in their wheelhouse. Every point counts for a lot; finding time for a smoke break so you get a +2 on your next RFX roll makes a huge difference. It's all satisfying and rewarding for the player, but with plenty of room remaining for things to go horribly, unpredictably wrong (especially when you push the characters to do stuff they're not good at).

Marketing Song

I used to work in advertising (shame, shame) and would collect wretched fragments of slide decks and reports to the board and whatnot and turn them into silly little poems. Was poking through some of my files just now and was like, oh, these. I should put these up on the ol' blog. Et voilà:

 

SEARCH DOES NOT LIVE IN A SILO

Search
does not live in a silo.
Search is a human behavior
that is embedded in the customer journey.

Crawl, walk, run:
Minimum viable product.
Desired consumer behavior.
Desired future state.
System of the future,
become relevant.
Drive desire.
Convert.

 

OPERATIONALIZING THE LIFECYCLE

Do we need to change the way we work?
Does our structure set us up for success?

Thank you.

NEXT STEPS

We'd like to align
on moving forward
with reaching out
to all of the recommended subcontractors
for availability.

 

SHORTFALLS

address shortfalls
in practice-area capabilities

continue network rationalization

begin disposal process

 

AN UNPRECEDENTED APPROACH TO BRAND MANAGEMENT

design-driven brands
are future-focused
agile systems
in a deliberate state
of constant evolution

an agency
that is machine-driven
but human-led

Flyover Country: Chapter 3

"City Gate" by Hector Ortiz

Continued from Chapter 2.

At this point, the crew are right back where they started (meeting Elias Bensaïd at the Café Cosmopol about a job) and right where I want them: beholden to both the Milieu (who provided them a ship and expect it to be put at their disposal from time to time) and the Commonwealth spy agency, IRIS (who essentially swiped the ship via some legal skulduggery and also expect to be able to call on the crew for odd jobs). The new job, however, involves neither of them directly.

Elias explains (French accent, remember): "A businessman in the Collines, Manny Saleh, finds, in the foundation pit his people are digging for a new building, something old is there, underground. He wants help getting in, he shares a percentage. Now, Manny is not such a bad guy, for a slumlord. But Manny is, how you say, a big wheel on a small…bicycle? He is the king in his quartier; he cannot imagine he would be betrayed, does not understand how small he is in the big picture. Manny believes he has kept his find a secret, but he has not. He thinks he calls me, I send a locksmith"—he gestures at the crew—"we help him fence his treasure, fastoche. A little cut for you, a little cut for me. We must convince him things are not so simple. Not only because we want a bigger cut, but because they are not. Others want what Manny has found."

He starts counting out advice on his fingers. "One, Manny doesn't speak Mandate well, so use l'argot; he will be better disposed. And don't be rude about his height. Two, right away, he will say, bon sang, why does Elias send so many people, I will not pay for all this! You must convince him, this is a bigger job than he comprehends. You will not only open his treasure box, you will find out who else is snooping around, you will conceal what you find, you will contrive to remove whatever treasure is there without these snoopers perceiving you, you will protect the operation with force if necessary. Three, don't let him name a price yet. He will try; it will be low. I tell him, my people must assess the situation. Tell him the same. Gather evidence, build a case for us. And four, be subtle. You don't show up all at once, you don't come with flashy vehicles, with high-tech gear. Manny is being watched already. Questions?"

They ask a few, and learn that Manny has ties to two Milieu syndicates active in his area: the Najeebs and the Bautistas. Both will expect a cut if something valuable comes from his dig, whereas Elias wants to carry this all off as quietly as possible and keep the biggest cut for the crew and himself. After a bit of haggling, everybody agrees on a 60/40 split of the take (i.e., 40% for Elias and 10% for each PC).

* * *

Getting to Manny's construction site involves either flying (extremely indiscreet) or hoofing it. The trip is a bit of a schlep: almost 10 kilometers, mostly uphill, through the Collines du Sud, the ramshackle favelas that climb the ridge east of Sainte-Odile. Leaving Sainte-Odile and entering the Collines on foot, the players have to pass through a checkpoint (manned by Tefera Personal Defense, the private-security firm contracted by the city to police the wealthier disticts). The cops try to shake them down a bit—six armed individuals, including one with a sniper rifle (Batias picked it up while shopping at the spaceport) and one with a spear, are surely up to no good. Sarai manages to sweet-talk their way through without them having to cough up a bribe, though.

There aren't many major roads, mostly just crooked alleys and lanes between tightly packed buildings, shaded from the oppressive suns by awnings and canopies. The crew stops partway up for a late breakfast at a market stall, enjoying some poulet à la moambe and fresh fruit (Roman abstains, of course). Then they decide to split up: Batias, BQ, and Krissa will head straight to Manny's construction site while Mustang, Roman, and Sarai check in with some of their underworld contacts to see what they can learn about Manny, the Najeebs and Bautistas, and whether there's any buzz about the find yet.

* * *

The direct path turns out not to be. After encountering a vendor selling pineapple-and-goat kebabs and helping themselves to second breakfast, Batias, BQ, and Krissa come around a corner into a small open area where three lanes meet, where they find a large and growing crowd. The collinaires are banging on a door, waving weapons, shouting—and throwing rocks at a gravcar (think a spinner from Blade Runner) that's hovering above the scene. Unfortunately, the mob is yelling in l'argot morrovien (i.e., French), and Mustang and Sarai are the only two PCs who speak it. Should they try to find a Mandate speaker? Backtrack and find a different way up?

Before they can decide, Krissa finds her compad buzzing—the pilot of the gravcar, having spotted three armed outsiders enter the picture, is trying to contact them. Krissa picks up, and the pilot explains the situation: Her client is in the building below that the mob is trying to force their way into, afraid to come out on the roof for a pickup. Could they disperse the mob, or at least make sure the roof is clear? (A few collinaires have managed to climb up there already.) The pilot loops the client, one Simon Katib, in; he's willing to cough up a solid 500 credits for the PCs' assistance. Sure, they say!

…but they're still willing to hear what the mob has to say, if they can find a collinaire who speaks Mandate. As they push their way through the crowd, they do find one, and he asks for their help: Apparently the building the mob's trying to break into is some kind of brothel where a few gangsters have lured local teenagers with promises of easy money and are now holding them at the pleasure of some offworlder pervert who flies over from the Green Zone a couple times a week. The collinaires want their kids back and they want the pervert dead, but they can't scrape together more than a couple hundred credits to pay for assistance.

The PCs put their heads together. Simon, it seems, is bad news. Simon's money, however, is pretty good. Maybe there's an opportunity here to get paid…twice? In his spaceport shopping spree, we learn, Batias didn't just get that sniper rifle; he also picked up a demo charge, some glowbugs, some thermal flares, and a grapnel launcher (He's basically broke now. This will be a recurring theme.) He takes aim at the brothel roof, fires, and clocks a collinaire in the head. Whoops. He tries again, sticks the landing, and secures the rope. Our heroes ascend.

On the roof, one collinaire is trying to batter the door down, one is shouting to the crowd, and one is now sitting on his ass, clutching his concussed, bleeding head. The PCs shoo the uninjured pair off the roof at gunpoint, then herd the injured guy into the corner farthest from the door. Batias boldly steps to the edge of the roof, dodges a couple rocks—the crowd's mood has turned decidedly against the PCs—and then gesticulates for them all to back off, waving his rifle menacingly. In spite of the language barrier and the fact that he's wildly outnumbered, Batias manages to cow the mob.

The pilot eases the gravcar down toward the roof, and Krissa tells Simon to come on out. He emerges, makes a run for his vehicle—and gets tackled by BQ. Chaos ensues. Simon panics, the pilot starts hollering over the comms, and a couple of the gangsters from the brothel comes up the stairs to see what's going on. After a brief standoff with the better-armed Batias, the gangsters simply close and lock the rooftop door and retreat. The PCs insist they're still going to put Simon on the gravcar; they just want to be sure he doesn't fly off without paying them. The coax the pilot down.

Now covered by Krissa's laser pistol, Simon is bundled into the back seat. To the pilot's dismay, BQ clambers into the front passenger seat and jams a stun baton (another recent spaceport purchase) into her ribs. Krissa and Batias squeeze aboard. They get Simon to unlock his compad, then wrestle it away from him and drain his accounts, netting 2,000-odd credits. They start debating what to do next—should they just dump Simon straight into the mob? He wets himself. Now the pilot cuts in.

"Listen," she says, "I don't give a shit what you do with him at this point"—Simon wails miserably—"I just want to get out of this in one piece myself. If I shut down the flight recorder and get you out of here, will you cut me part of the take and help me make it look like a kidnapping?" Sounds good to them: They transfer her a couple hundred credits, throw Simon to his grisly fate, and speed away. The pilot puts them down up at the top of the Collines, not far from Manny's construction site, hands over her laser pistol, lets them bind her hands, and then slips away to await "rescue."

Krissa stands watch while BQ tries to wipe the gravcar's computer system and Batias sets a demo charge in the cockpit as Plan B. BQ's a smart guy, but he has no background in computer science and struggles to make heads or tails of the system. When Krissa's precognitive powers tell her that an armed corporate-security gravflyer is about to swoop down on them, they rip what electronic components they can out of the dashboard, disappear into the nearest alley just in time to avoid detection, and then set off the demo charge, blowing the gravcar to smithereens.

* * *

The whole Simon Katib misadventure occurred in a single short-handed session, with half the group unable to attend, and started with one sentence in a random-encounter table I slapped together for the trip up through the Collines: "Some kind of street gathering is being broken up as a grav vehicle comes in to land, or a mob is gathering to attack the grav vehicle." I rolled up a slimy little NPC for it to revolve around, extrapolated from there, and then watched my players make a delightful mess out of it.

A precognitive psychic makes her own luck, to some extent, but we also established here that the group is just naturally lucky. So many things could've gone wrong for them but didn't, particularly when it came to bullying NPCs into backing off without a fight. Batias facing off against an entire mob, in particular, could easily have ended with him being ripped to shreds; the collinaires mostly had rocks and clubs for weapons, but a good number of them had zip guns or pipe rifles, and there were several dozen of them!

Flyover County: Chapter 2

"Spaceship Cabin Interior" by Simon Murton

Continued from Factions & Faction Turn 1 (and more directly from Chapter 1).

Once the crew are up in space, an encrypted signal arrives, directing them to break orbit and head out to the far side of Betharan III. The voyage will take 48 hours, so they have plenty of time to decompress, get to know each other, follow the developing news from Penrose, and chat up Commander Vasia—or, as it turns out, Lieutenant Colonel Mira Kaji, of IRIS's Special Reconnaissance division. Deciding that she's in good hands with the crew, she drops the "Vasia" alias, although she doesn't tell them much about herself or the specifics of her mission.

Mustang gives Kaji one of the Konyri revolvers she looted from a dead royalist—Mustang is already proving to be a bit of a gun hoarder—as a souvenir of her time on Morrow. She's touched. Sarai digs around in the ship's mess and whips up an astonishingly tasty tiramisu from ersatz ingredients. Turns out she's a culinary genius! Roman declines to eat any, creating what will turn out to be an unreasonably long-lived suspicion among certain of his crewmates that he's secretly an android.

In orbit of Betharan III, the crew finds…nothing. They wait a bit, and a stealthy warship of unfamiliar design—the IRIS cruiser Alekhine's Gun—swims up out of the planet's sensor shadow, alarmingly close to their ship, and extends an umbilical to dock with them. After some trepidatious debate, they board the Gun, with Kaji in the lead. A motley group is arrayed to meet them: two officers in unmarked black uniforms, one of whom soon escorts Kaji away; three espatiers in armored vacuum suits, with void carbines; a half-dozen personnel in loose-fitting jumpsuits of several different colors, some carrying toolkits and others dataslabs; and one guy in a short-sleeved button-up, slacks, and a tie. One of the espatiers remains by the umbilical, one goes aboard the PCs' ship with all the jumpsuit-wearers and the tie guy, and one accompanies the second officer as he leads the crew to a wardroom.

The officer politely, nervously, but firmly informs the crew that techs need to sweep the ship and invites them to relax in the Gun's wardroom, where they can chat with him; an aide serves bhujia and the best chai they've had in a long time. The crew don't get much out of the officer, but one of the jumpsuit-wearers eventually comes back and quietly confers with him, and Mustang surreptitiously records the audio of their conversation.

The officer apologizes (in a stuffy British accent): The techs, he says, accidentally “overloaded the axionic confinement conduit, sent a quantum surge through all the starboard collector brackets, and zapped the central computer,” and parts of the computer database were lost. They've managed to restore most of them, he explains, but—and he's terribly sorry—there are a few items they'll need to input manually. He gets a compad from the tie guy, then passes it to Sarai, who has presented herself as the crew's leader.

Their transponder and registry documentation have all been changed. It's obviously still referring to the same ship—same dimensions, same fittings, same maintenance problems—and the crew manifest is the same as before, but the ship is now shown as being owned by some company in the Commonwealth they've never heard of, Lambda ValuDyne; its home port is now registered as Satu Mare, on Rustam (the nearest Commonwealth planet); and it's leased indefinitely to…well, that's one of the blank fields they now need to fill in. Its registration number is different, too, and the “name of vehicle” field is also blank.

The officer prompts the PCs to name their company and rename the ship (which they'd initially named after Sarai's player's trusty old Acura—RIP to a car that carried us all over the Pacific Northwest!). When Sarai tries to just give it the same name, he gently suggests otherwise, noting that, “Unfortunately, there is another ship, physically remarkably similar to, but legally distinct from, this one, which I believe has a registration code ending in those letters, and which goes by that name."

He assures them that if they'll simply “remind” him what the names of the ship and the company are, he can “tidy up all of the details.” He recalls that the players' enterprise, whatever it was called, was a licensed and bonded transport company registered in the Commonwealth, and that if they have any questions, he believes he has the name of their solicitor around here somewhere—she's the same one who represents Lambda ValuDyne. (Is that unusual? No, of course not. Perfectly above-board!) “Ah, yes, here it is, Leila Pak. Do contact her at your earliest convenience.”

Eventually, the players settle on (silly) names: Their ship will henceforth be known as Quora, and their licensed and bonded transport company is Yahoo$.com (with a dollar sign instead of an “s”—write that down). And with that, it's time for the Gun to be on its way. The crew are herded back aboard Quora, and off they go. Payment will process when they're back in Morrow's orbit and can sync with other network nodes. (Commonwealth credits are some kind of crypto-ish digital currency; transactions require at least one third party to verify them—these hazy details are things I promised, back in September or October or whenever this was, to hash out in greater detail. Have I yet? No, of course not.)

Kaji has repaid Mustang's gift generously: she finds an IRIS-issue laser carbine packed up in a neat little case on her bunk (rules-wise, a regular laser rifle, but Enc 1 instead of 2). The rest of the crew wanders around poking at everything on the ship with knives and broomsticks, trying to figure out whether, and where, IRIS bugged them. They find no bugs, but by Quora's reactor manifold, they find that one of the techs left a bottle of aguardiente and a pack of cigarettes in a chalk circle. Batias, BQ, and Krissa drink most of the booze, but add a cookie and a slice of cheesecake to the circle to compensate.

The trip back to Morrow takes only a day; BQ's really getting the hang of piloting this thing (i.e., I've been generous with XP and he's got both ranks of the Starfarer focus now). Roman and Sarai send a message to Leila Pak introducing themselves, asking whether the crew could be of assistance, and inquiring about the status of the lease from Lambda ValuDyne. Everybody listens to Mustang's recording of the conversation between the IRIS officer and tech: Turns out the tech was just telling the officer that their work was done, and the officer was trying to workshop some made-up technobabble about axionic this and quantum that. “Just tell them we wiped the system, changed the registry, and pulled the Milieu's bugs. It's spy shit, they'll understand,” said the bewildered tech. The officer was undeterred.

Elias has a new job lined up for them when they return. He gives them coordinates for a secure landing pad at the Havre; they spend the evening exploring the spaceport a bit: shopping, lining up commodity deals, gambling—Batias and Krissa use the latter's precognitive powers to rip off an operation too small to have a metapsion for a bouncer—and keeping an eye out for potential henchpeople for Sarai, who has taken the Henchkeeper focus. In the morning, Elias sends a vehicle to return them to the Cosmopol, where he'll brief them on this next job.

* * *

I've handled XP as a mix of party progress (everybody gets one XP at the end of every session) and individual goals (everybody sets a short-term and a medium-term goal; one XP for accomplishing the former, two or more for the latter). The steady drip of session-based XP meant that everybody got to level 3 in very short order in terms of in-universe time spent (they've only just completed their first-ever job here, after all).

I might be a little stingier with the XP if I did it over again, but on the other hand, these characters are supposed to be veteran criminals, and I don't mind them heading into their next job being a little tougher and more capable. The default XP curve in SWN also gets very steep fairly quickly; it'll take them a while to get into the middle levels, and then a long time to gain each level past 6 or so.

I realized somewhere in here that I hadn't done enough to give the PCs a shared history or connections with each other, so I started encouraging them to interact with each other, including by having each player come up with five rumors about their character (some true, some not) and then distributing these among the crew. I haven't always leaned on the rumors enough, but they did result in some good character development, they got a few conversations going, and they launched the still-unfolding "Roman is a secret android" theory. (He's not. It's very obvious.)

Next: Chapter 3.

On Reviewing and Rating Things

John Fleck as Trent in Dead Mail

Last weekend, my girlfriend and I went to New Orleans for the Overlook Festival, our second horror film festival in the past eight months or so (she's a huge horror fan and film blogger). Saw nine films in four days, which is always fun, and got in a lot of good eating and drinking (despite me having fractured a premolar the day before leaving, whoops).

Highlights included Cuckoo, Dead Mail, and I Saw the TV Glow—each quite different from the others, but with one big strength in common: outstanding vibes. Fantastic sound and music, wonderful evocations of time and place. Moody, beautiful, and all quite moving. Each anchored by fantastic performances, too (Hunter Schafer and Dan Stevens in Cuckoo; Justice Smith and Brigette Lundy-Paine in I Saw the TV Glow; pretty much everybody in Dead Mail, although John Fleck really stands out—maybe the best of the whole festival).

At the other end of the scale, after having watched seven variously low-budget indie films, most of them foreign, Abigail was a shock to the system, and not in a good way. It took all of thirty seconds to register that it was going to be a very Hollywood experience, and not much longer than that for me to know that I wasn't going to like it. The film has problems, starting with the fact that its one good twist isn't; the entire marketing campaign has been built around the fact that Abigail is a vampire, something the characters don't learn until halfway through. The pacing isn't good. The kid is more annoying than scary. But there are some strong performances (including Dan Stevens again) and the effects are pretty great. It's not a good movie, but its most serious crime is just being a kind of movie, and particularly a school of character and dialogue writing (the Joss Whedon Marvel Cinematic Universe school, to be precise), that I can't stand.

How do I rate this stuff?

* * *

I got very into Letterboxd last year. I had started back in 2022, but at the beginning of 2023, in a resolute New Year's spirit, I decided that I wanted to write more—more of everything. A poem every day! A novel! Short stories! Essays! Book reviews! Film reviews! Most of this fell by the wayside; I wrote a few poems, made some haphazard progress on a couple different novels I've been drafting forever, and wrote a dozen short book reviews. Mostly I just wrote TTRPG stuff…and silly little movie reviews. Letterboxd stuck. I've written 136 reviews now—every film I've seen since January, 2023. (Most are short, and some just a single line, but a few are proper essays.)

So I've had to think a lot about how to rate films. Or really, I've just rated a lot of films, and of the course of the past fifteen months, I've had plenty of time to try to understand what my ratings meant, rationalize them a bit, try to develop some kind of consistent rubric going forward.

Letterboxd gives us two options: We can just “like” films or not, or we can give them star ratings. And of course we can use the star ratings however we want (only giving between one and three, for instance), but the fact that the vast majority of users employ the full range, from half a star to five, compels me to do the same.

It is interesting to think about the less-granular options, though. Heart or no heart is as simple as it gets. Thumbs up, thumbs down. Liked it, didn't. Add one more option, and we have, perhaps, “loved it, liked it, didn't like it,” or, if we're thinking less about our own simple enjoyment and more as critics of some sort—trying to predict whether others will like the work we're evaluating—we have a traffic light: go ahead, caution, and stop. Of course, “caution” contains multitudes. Is it flawed but enjoyable? Expertly made but soulless? Great only for fans of a particular subject or particular genre?

Maybe we add another option: Good, good but not for everybody, bad but some people might like it, bad. We could probably analyze the hell out of that approach, but we know we're going to end up with a ten-point, five-star system, so let's just jump ahead. Going to five options brings to mind an academic grading scale: A, B, C, D, and F. Excellent, good, average, poor, failure. And the fact that Letterboxd has a ten-point scale (from 0.5 to 5.0) but presents it as a five-point one is interesting. Five points: good. The ability to tweak them up and down a bit: fussy, maybe, but definitely tempting. We can still map them onto letter grades; we just fudge it a bit and say everything is either plus or minus. A+, A-, B+, B-, C+, C-, D+, D-, and two different shades of F: “just missed a D-” at one star and “may God have mercy on your soul” at half a star.

This feels pretty good to me. It does mean that reviews will tend to bunch up in the 3–4 range, but that's fine; thanks to word of mouth and our ability to guess what we're going to like from trailers and by drawing conclusions from directors' and actors' past work, we usually don't see a lot of stuff that we hate. Giving an enjoyable film one or two stars seems brutal. I admire Osita Nwanevu, boldly going out there and slapping three stars on everybody's sacred cows, but I don't think I can do it.

3.5 stars is a good movie. Can't complain. Didn't connect with me on a profound, personal level, but I enjoyed it all the way through. A notch or two below that, 3.0 and 2.5 are the middle of the scale, even if they won't be the middle of anybody's histogram (except Osita's). 3.0 is enjoyable but seriously flawed. Worth watching, on the whole, but missing something, or messed something up. Didn't stick the landing. 2.5 is just on the either side of that razor's edge: has a bunch of good qualities, but has enough flaws, or serious enough flaws, to just not be enjoyable in the end. Two stars was probably doomed from the jump, though it might have some charms: a terrible screenplay, an inept director, a stupid concept. Below two, we're in “I might walk out of the theater” territory (but for the fact that I stubbornly never do).

4.0 is really good. Unambitious but perfectly executed, or ambitious and flawed in fairly minor ways. Add an extra half star, and that's about as good as it gets. A masterpiece. Practically flawless. And then if I watch it again and, at the end of the second viewing, I'm thinking, “Yeah, I'm gonna watch that a third time (and a fourth, and a tenth),” that's our five-star gold standard. I'm trying to limit the number of five-star films, but it turns out I'm a pretty soft touch. I love movies! 4.0 is my most common rating; I've given more 4.5s than 3.0s (although if I go to enough festivals, that's bound to change).

So where did I land on my most recent festival faves? Four stars all around! And Abigail? Fuck it: 1.5 stars, which is probably half a star harsher than my rubric demands, but whatever, I get to call audibles sometimes, and I'm sick to death of “She's right behind me, isn't she?”-ass dialogue.

Flyover Country: Factions & Faction Turn 1

"They Found Me…" by Pablo Dominguez

Continued from Chapter 1.

I actually played out the first faction turn before we had our first proper session, but the first news of any of this didn't reach the crew until they were up in space after their exfiltration action. I had, with typical overzealousness, cooked up a whopping seven factions, but I had sense enough to realize, before we even started, that at least one of them was basically redundant; I cut it. (Four or five would probably work just as well, as it turns out, but I'm happy enough with six.)

Again, the map will probably be useful.

* * *

The faction roster includes three interstellar empires and three influential non-governmental organizations (albeit two of those three have enough influence on one planet each to function as a proxy for that planet's government). In approximate order from most to least powerful, these are the Commonwealth of Free Worlds, the Kyran Directory, the New Terran Empire, Seneschal Systems, the Aureus Meridian, and the Milieu. (I tried to give them all super distinct names but then changed the Milieu's name at the eleventh hour and ended up with two M-word abstract noun factions. Oops.)

The Commonwealth is our Sector superpower, with four heavily populated core worlds (the largest, Opis, homeworld of Mustang and Sarai, got the Regional Hegemon tag) and significant influence in another four neighboring systems. They control pre-Scream shipyards, vast resources, more than a billion citizens, and the Sector's biggest navy. Their political structure is somewhere in between Switzerland and socialist Yugoslavia; their general attitude is something like American exceptionalism crossed with East German paranoia. It's more or less a democracy, albeit a warlike one that thinks it has the right to police everybody else's space and is up to its eyeballs in panoptic surveillance. Their spy agency, IRIS, is omnipresent in the Sector and one of the crew's two main faction contacts, at least to start.

The Kyran Directory is the upstart challenger, a corporatist union between the nobility of the desert world Alzuhr (Rising Hegemon) and the floating zaibatsu city-states of the gas giant Magonia (Roman's homeworld). They've colonized the neighboring system, Koyash (including BQ's homeworld, Ayaz), and are pushing farther into the border worlds (aka the Spinward Bridge). They're phenomenally rich, and their companies' products are widely consumed beyond their borders, even by their economic rivals on Khabara (like Seneschal) and their political rivals in the Commonwealth.

The New Terran Empire is the result of a charismatic leader binding a bunch of squabbling pirate clans together, conquering the Earth-like planet, Munda, that neighbors the gas giant whose moons they (including Krissa) call home, and declaring it Terra Nova, the capital of a Mandate successor state. They're still struggling to establish a stable, functional planetary government, but that hasn't stopped them, too, from pushing toward the Spinward Bridge and claiming a colony of their own: Oriflamme, in the Arktos system. They may be a wobbly military dictatorship, but they have the Sector's second-biggest fleet and substantial resources.

Seneschal Systems is the biggest, most powerful megacorporation on cyberpunk dystopia world Khabara. They're principally known as the Sector's leading producer of expert systems, virtual intelligences, androids, and robotics in general, but they have subsidiaries in every product line imaginable. In the faction game, they function half as their own entity, half as a proxy for the entire Khabaran Corporate Council.

The Aureus Meridian, the least defined of the factions to start with, is a new religious movement founded in the former territory of the Sector's first would-be hegemon, a polity called the Fourfold League that was defeated by the Commonwealth a century ago. Central to their teaching is the notion that every being contains a spark of the divine and has an unrealized but (at least in humans) attainable potential for apotheosis. They too function as a proxy for their home planet—Tobal, in this case.

The Milieu, of course, is a loose criminal network based on Morrow (homeworld of Batias, starting location for the whole crew) but spread throughout the Spinward Bridge and beyond. They're responsible for smuggling, the production and procurement of widely banned commodities, protection rackets, illegal salvage from lost ships and ancient ruins, and so forth; they also control plenty of legitimate business ventures. They're the crew's other main introduction, alongside IRIS, to the factions.

* * *

I rolled some dice, and they decreed that the NTE would act first, followed, in order, by the Commonwealth, the Directory, Seneschal, the Milieu, and finally the Meridian.

The NTE have an Extended Theater and Postech Industry in Tovuz and Blockade Fleets and Saboteurs in Arktos. They kick things off by Using Asset Abilities: Their Postech Industry hits, gaining them an extra FacCred; their Blockade Fleets move to Penrose, and with a FacCred paid for the use of Extended Theater, their Saboteurs follow. There's a whole pile of other factions' assets in Penrose, which is home to two major populated worlds, Delphi and Temenos. The Empire might as well try to thin them out, and perhaps make a profit while they do.

I whipped up a news report:

PMG reports a massive uptick in ship traffic from Arktos, including approximately two dozen Imperial warships, among them the fleet cruisers Alkonost, Basilisk, and Gizo. Citing security concerns in Arktos and the need to identify and detain smugglers and terrorists operating from Temenos, the fleet has assumed blockade positions in orbit and is carrying out inspections of civilian traffic throughout the system; caution is advised for any ships traveling to Penrose. NTE security forces have also landed on Temenos itself. Representatives from the Kyran Directory have lodged a complaint with local Imperial representatives regarding this violation of an independent planet's sovereignty, and Kyran lobbyists have prevailed upon the Delphean regime to formally forbid the Imperial fleet from taking such actions in its space.

Next, the mighty Commonwealth. They've got assets all over the place: Capital Fleets and Space Marines in Volos; an Extended Theater, Party Machines, and Planetary Defenses in Usil; a Medical Center in Karyatis; Tripwire Cells in Marquez; and Popular Movements in Betharan. Right off the bat, they're using those Popular Movements—the coalition on Morrow covertly supported and guided by IRIS—to Seize Planet, formally declaring their intention to annex Morrow. The Milieu, the only other faction with assets in Betharan, can't afford to openly oppose the seizure. At the end of the third faction turn, the Commonwealth will become the official planetary government of Morrow (unless somebody rushes down and manages to bump off the Popular Movements—unlikely).

Momentous news from Opis: IPBC reports that, after years of lobbying by representatives of the Provisional Pan-Morrovian Government and months of debate, the Commonwealth Popular Assembly has voted in favor of, and the Executive Committee has ratified, a treaty of annexation. Morrow will, within a matter of months, join Opis, Marjan, Rustam, and Gombad as the fifth signatory of the Commonwealth Charter, and the fifth full member of the federation.

The Directory have Lobbyists in Penrose, Strike Fleets in Koyash, and Venture Capital and a Shipping Combine at home in Kyre. They Use Asset Abilities: the Strike Fleets move themselves to Istanu, the Venture Capital gains a FacCred, and the Shipping Combine, for two FacCreds, moves itself and the Venture Capital to Istanu. Seneschal has a Base of Influence in Istanu—they control a bunch of mines and other operations on Salafai—but have no other assets there to defend it. Makes sense for the Directory to try to push them out while they're defenseless.

AKN has broadcast a special report on Kyran investment in the Istanu system, which continues at a rapid pace. The success of Cloud Nine's Salafai-based subsidiary Ibis Brands has led to a flood of venture-capital activity in the system; meanwhile, Mariner Minerals has launched nearly a dozen new exploratory mining operations on Salafai's seafloor, and Kashgar Starlines has announced that the scope of their renovation and expansion project at Seven Miracles Station will be expanded yet again to accommodate projected increases in traffic. There was no mention of whether the substantial elements of the Allied Kyran Armada active in Istanu are part of a long-term increase in security for the system or merely staging for further moves.

Seneschal has Commodities Brokers in Penrose and Counterintel Units, Covert Shipping, and R&D Departments at home in Sanasar. They could move the Brokers to defend Istanu, but they'd risk losing them for no gain whatsoever if they act after the Directory again on the next faction turn. Instead, they elect to strike first, attacking the Directory's Lobbyists in Penrose. The attack fails. Whoops.

Commercial interests in the Penrose system linked to Khabaran megacorporation Seneschal Systems have joined the conversation regarding the recent Imperial police action around Temenos, weighing in on behalf of the Imperial fleet and accusing Kyran lobbyists of providing political cover for criminals and terrorists. Their efforts to expel Kyran representatives from Temenos and Delphi have thus far fallen on deaf ears, however; the Guild Council is divided, and the Delphean regime, in spite of its close ties to Seneschal, is firmly opposed to any Imperial presence in Penrose. Rumors swirl around the Imperial security forces recently established on Temenos, including unsubstantiated claims that Temenoans have been abducted to Imperial “black sites” and even that Imperial forces are planning a campaign of sabotage to prepare an invasion of the planet.

The Milieu, the smallest faction, start with only a Freighter Contract and Seditionists, although their weakness is substantially offset by the powerful faction tag Secretive, which gives all of their assets stealth. (As long as they don't antagonize the Commonwealth, locating all those stealthy assets probably just isn't worth the trouble.) They opt to start off by just buying a Harvester unit in Betharan.

It's business as usual in Freeport, even with reports that the Commonwealth's long-expected annexation of Morrow is imminent. PMG reporters spoke with confidential sources in several different syndicates, and there appears to be a near-total consensus that a symbiotic relationship with the new government will be possible and that, in fact, this development may offer the Milieu a back door into markets that have long been closed to it. At least two major Milieu-linked enterprises, Chauhan Farms and Radiant Services, have recently announced major new investments on Morrow, and observers have seen no obvious efforts by the syndicates to spirit personnel, assets, or infrastructure away from Betharan.

Finally, the Meridian acts. They have Demagogues and Lawyers at work in Penrose and a Covert Transit Net and Psychic Assassins in their home system, Mondrian. Demagogues are strong and Penrose is a target-rich environment; they opt to attack the NTE, whose expansion through Arktos seems to be the most immediate threat to their operations. Because the Demagogues will likely do enough damage to outright destroy either Imperial asset if they score a hit, the NTE opts to defend with the weaker, cheaper Saboteurs and preserve their Blockade Fleets. The attack is successful, and the massive damage is far more than enough to wipe out the poor Saboteurs. The Meridian's Lawyers attack next, with the Blockade Fleets defending; this time, only a max damage roll would be enough for a kill, and as it happens, the Lawyers' attack fails anyway.

PMG has received reports from Penrose that the ongoing crisis there has boiled over into violence, with a mob on Temenos overrunning a recently established Imperial security outpost in search of Temenoans allegedly kidnapped and tortured there; several dozen casualties are confirmed, and the toll is expected to rise. Imperial authorities have withdrawn their security forces from the surface of Temenos and issued a system-wide alert warning their citizens to avoid travel to or within Penrose; they have also stepped up their patrols of system space, blaming the violence on anti-Imperial demagogues and religious extremists backed by the Meridian and vowing to root out these “antisocial elements.” Lawyers representing the Meridian have accused Imperial forces of piracy and appealed to the Commonwealth for redress, but the CMN has not responded.

* * *

Fun stuff, but I did quickly recognize that I needed to make a few changes. For starters, the pace I'd set (with each faction's turn taking place on consecutive days, and the whole thing done in the course of a week) was ridiculous. Things were happening too fast to make sense in game terms (TL4 ships don't go fast enough to be jumping three hexes every seven days, at least not without giving their captains PC abilities) and too fast for the players to process the flood of news beyond picking up on the fact that Penrose was probably dangerous (still overzealous in all things, I had also introduced a bunch of non-faction news into the feed, including reports about the PCs' in-game actions and some pure scene-setting fluff). I resolved to slow it down and to randomize the intervals between actions in order to create a more interesting rhythm than "something happens every X days."

Next: Chapter 2.

Flyover Country: Chapter 1

Sketch by Kunrong Yap

Continued from Cast and Crew.

The crew gamely accepts their mission, heads to the spaceport in the company of a couple of beaux voyous, and rockets their way north toward the Konyr–Sylva border. They set down, as instructed, at the forward base, a sprawl of tents and prefab structures on the edge of a Sylvan town; the landing pad is just a revetment thrown up around the margins of a soccer field.

Unfortunately but predictably, Vasia is nowhere to be found. The base is swarming with civilian refugees from Konyr, PFFK guerrillas, and Sylvan military advisors, though, so there are plenty of folks to talk to. The crew asks around, and shortly learn that Vasia was here recently: She rounded up a small group of volunteers and went back across the border to settle one last piece of business before the anticipated armistice. She left behind a number of soldiers from her unit; most are happy to be out of harm's way and killing time until the war officially ends, but Sarai finds a couple of teenage guerillas who, dismayed at having been left behind and worried about their beloved commander, are willing to lead these assuredly friendly strangers to her.

These child soldiers, Sangeeta and Alain, indicate on a map where they expect Vasia to be. Taking them in tow, the crew boards the ship again and flies east, into Konyr. Roman tinkers with the sensors and calibrates them to pick up human life signs at short range. When they reach the village Sangeeta and Alain directed them to, the sensors indicate several people on the ground floor of the village's one multistory apartment building, so BQ sets the ship down nearby and the crew cautiously approach the burned-out structure.

Turns out the Vasia clashed here with the target of her vendetta, one Suman Dawson, a turncoat royalist colonel who is raiding his former allies along the frontier. He's trying to burnish his eleventh-hour reputation as a rebel in hopes of currying influence in postwar politics, but the PFFK guerillas explain that he's a cunning, ruthless monster responsible for heinous atrocities earlier in the war. Vasia is determined to bury him before the armistice—or after it, if she must.

She and her troops carried the day in the village earlier and pursued Dawson and his surviving fighters north, leaving three badly wounded guerillas in the care of a medic. Krissa offers to spell the PFFK medic and surreptitiously stabilizes the wounded with her biopsionic powers. The crew loots the dead royalists and then takes to the skies again; the rival groups marched north hours ago, but the distance is trivial for a spaceship, and the crew quickly finds Vasia and her troops, who have only just cornered Dawson and his in an abandoned mineshaft. They land and parley with the rebel commander, who insists that time is of the essence and wants the crew's help making a frontal assault. They demur.

Sarai, with some engine-revving help from BQ, half-bluffs, half-threatens to bury Dawson and his troops alive with the ship—it's unarmed, but the enemy doesn't know that, and of course starship engines are potentially dangerous all by themselves. Roman, meanwhile, finds some ventilation shafts for the mine and chucks an improvised thermite bomb down into the tunnel. The crew issues an ultimatum: They just want Dawson; if his erstwhile soldiers will turn him and their weapons over, they'll be let go.

Shots ring out from the mine. A long minute or two later, a few royalists, one wounded, stagger out, hands up. Dawson and a couple others resisted them, they say; they think he's dead, but it's a smoky mess inside. A few of the crew head in, with Mustang taking point. When she sees something moving in the hazy darkness ahead, she fires immediately, killing the last royalist holdout. The job—or at least the first, hardest part of the job—is done.

Krissa patches up the wounded, the crew bids goodbye to Sangeeta and Alain, and Vasia makes a dramatic farewell speech to her most loyal companions, explaining that she's been tapped to represent Sylva in the secret negotiations between Morrow's provisional planetary government and the Commonwealth. Tears, hugs, some "I shall return" promises, and the crew's off to the stars with Vasia to receive further instructions.

* * *

I overprepared a little for this first job—there were a bunch of characters at the forward base the players never talked to, and some possible random encounters they entirely circumvented—but all in all, I did a pretty good job sketching out the big picture, complete with a rough timeline of events, and then just improvising when the players defied my expectations. Which they did right away: I was expecting them to follow Sangeeta and Alain on foot, spend a day or two marching into the Konyri interior, and not catch up with Vasia until at least one more battle had taken place. But why not just fly? Even their junker of a spaceship is TL4 and can't be scratched by the primitive TL3 antiaircraft guns and surface-to-air missiles of the royalist army. Can't argue with that!

Of the various little tools I put together for the campaign, a random name generator I whipped up with Perchance immediately proved to be invaluable and has, from the very first session on, continued to be my MVP. (We have that generator to thank for Sangeeta and Alain; José the medic; their wounded PFFK comrades Parvati, Jay, and Laura; and Suman Dawson himself, not to mention dozens of subsequent NPCs major and minor.) I originally planned to make it super complicated and weight it differently for the different ethnic makeups of all the different planets, but after inputting a couple thousand names, I lost my zeal for that plan. And it turns out that with that many names, and a few Sector-wide weights, I'm getting an enjoyably eclectic mix and don't feel the need to fine-tune.

Next: Factions & Faction Turn 1.

Lore24: March

"Research Station" by László Szabados

Continuing from February. A little late because I was slacking and, when the month ended, some of these entries just said things like "uplifted cats?" or "oxygen tax."

1. The planet Cipactli’s extremely eccentric orbit means that winters are brutal and exceptionally long. Much of the population spends the warmer seasons storehousing food and supplies; nearly all shelter underground through the cold.

2. The margins of the empire, decades away from Aaru, are in a condition of perpetual uncertainty. From Spire, one never knows whether a given peripheral system is loyal, restive, or entirely independent of the empire. Confusion abounds as knights arrive from different directions simultaneously with warrants to reclaim a lost system in the name of a new Marcher House or an old one thought extirpated.

3. It would be beneath the dignity of the imperial nobility to put their lives in the hands of inscrutable alien intelligences; they do not not travel by the River, or if they do, they do so in the utmost secrecy, courting disgrace. The emperor rarely leaves Spire and almost never leaves Aaru. Marriage arrangements between houses in far-flung systems begin at, or sometimes even before, conception. Consorts-to-be frequently spend their teenage years aboard a torchship, speeding toward nuptials arranged in their infancy.

4. Most clippers (placeholder name?) carry at least three shuttle-type craft suitable for moving personnel and materiel between the ship and a planet’s surface, and capable of operating in various atmospheric and gravitational conditions. Some also carry a complement of smaller, heavily armed vessels purpose-built for space combat.

5. The union strictly enforces gender and sexual equality. In the empire, gender dynamics vary from system to system; among the nobility, cognatic inheritance is the norm, but a gendered division of labor is common in which a male (whether the ruler or the ruler’s consort) goes abroad as a knight and his female counterpart hands civil administration at home. The emperor surpasses gender and is always referred to by plural pronouns (the royal we, in first person, “Their Imperial Majesties” in third person). For anybody else to claim nonbinary gender is considered an affront to the emperor, and interaction with nonbinary functionaries of the union is a regular source of diplomatic friction.

6. Because the two halves of a ruling dyad will usually spend most of their adult lives apart, the preference is for siblings to jointly rule imperial fiefs. Twins are highly favored. In some realms, an only child is likely to be passed over in the line of succession; in others, it is accessible for such an heir to take a cousin or even an unrelated noble from a different family as consort.

7. Heralds of the Imperial College travel the empire auditing heraldry, sigils, records of ancestry, and so forth, often with a retinue of knights. A herald will establish a temporary court upon arriving a system and expect to be visited by all the local aristocracy—an event called a Visitation. [h/t Tristan Zimmerman]

8. In the union, mail deemed valuable and permissible by the Ministries of Memory and Information goes from planet to planet in the care of commissars; in the empire it is sometimes entrusted to knights but more often to imperial heralds. Everywhere, and particularly on the River, much mail is carried by independent couriers.

9. The Treaty Worlds are the counterpart to the Recusant Worlds: planets and systems that do not recognize imperial rule but have signed treaties or other agreements with the empire respecting imperial rule in the emperor's own current or historical territory.

10. Among the Recusant Worlds, a thousand-year Cold War between inner and outer planets in one system has led to divergent societies that barely recognize one another as human.

11. In one imperial system, in the orbit of a vast gas giant, the most Earth-like moon comprises the private preserves of various nobles—it started out as an entire private world but has been subdivided a thousand times over by inheritance. Season by season, light snow or cherry blossoms or golden sunlight drifts quietly down on the tidy hedge mazes, gardens, Gothic cloisters of beautiful estates. The entire subject population lives on other, less hospitable moons, crowded in underground warrens, sheltering from inimical atmospheres, oppressive radiation, and unbearable temperatures.

12. The maphteah is a quasi-mythical artifact of uncertain form and function associated with a whole family of prophecies and sought by questing knights, cultists, adventurers, and others.

13. The Outer Rim Company is among the oldest OASEs, and is by far the most massive and influential. Chartered to terraform, colonize, or reclaim non-Treaty worlds within the Pale and to extract valuable resources therefrom, the Company operates on an almost geological timescale, its schemes and machinations stretching beyond the limit of any but the most exotically enhanced human lifespan. A law unto itself on the colony worlds it administers and in the trade lanes among them, the Company has ancient structures, rituals, and traditions to rival those of the imperial court.

14. Arafel, the fog, the cloud-darkness: a poetic name for the infinite volume beyond the Pale.

15. A cogitor lattice is essentially a primitive (but authorized) computer network composed of human minds. Cogitors operate in a pharmaceutically induced trance, receiving information from screens and  headphones and sending on to one another a flurry of signals in response.

16. The Company is rumored to have one or more planets in the farthest reaches of the rim where a carefully calibrated hostile environment is meant to produce, by selective pressure across countless generations, one or more perfect races of hardened, fearless, deadly warriors.

17. Sophisticated analog sound recording devices are ubiquitous; many people keep records or send messages by voice memo. There are also analog machines that can rapidly record written information on a filament scroll with a series of rapid rotating and counterrotating movements. These are difficult for even educated people to use skillfully without extensive training.

18. Belief in keramat—signs and wonders, supernatural mental and physical abilities—is almost ubiquitous in the empire and common in the more remote parts of the union.

19. Imperial coins have a number of unique qualities to prevent counterfeiting, including a radiological signature that can only be replicated by the Imperial Mint on Spire—all legal tender, everywhere in the empire, was once minted in the capital.

20. The deflector array is the sine qua non of knighthood in the empire: a linked group of arcane devices that transfer kinetic energy to incoming projectiles to alter their trajectory, defending the wearer against missile weapons. They are best defeated by luminal weapons or by heavy melee weapons, but can be overwhelmed by very large or very fast projectiles. Usage is tightly controlled; the internal calculator that recognizes incoming trajectories and communicates with the deflection projectors would almost certainly be considered a violation of the Rule in any other context. Production in the empire is tightly controlled by the imperial household; it is not clear whether the union retains the capacity to manufacture them at all, or whether they simply have a stockpile. Commissars on assignment sometimes carry them, but they are not seen as the essential mark of the vocation as they are for imperial knights.

21. The earliest time of the Pale’s history, the Settlement, is recalled in myth and legend as one of hardship and earnest labor. The imperial era, beginning with the Great Conjugation and the Founding, ended the chaotic Age of Strife. That time of war and destruction was preceded by a little-known era when the lords of the Pale attained heights of technology not seen since—and likely violated the Rule as a matter of course. Artifacts of this Middle Period (or Missing Period) are highly sought after, whether to be destroyed, sequestered, used, or abused.

22. The ancients of deepest history and the lords of the Age of Strife experimented with all manner of strange and wondrous technologies. Many attempts were made to impart wisdom, reason, and speech to man’s brother creatures from Old Earth; some relicts of these experiments survive in various corners of the Pale.

23. Space combat is fought at such distances that relativity presents challenges. The most effective weapons fill a large conical volume with small, extremely high-velocity projectiles; the object is to maneuver just close enough to be able to enclose the enemy in a cone such that no possible maneuver could, in the seconds or minutes it takes the missiles to travel, bring their ship beyond the field of fire.

24. Though the Lords Director of the Outer Rim Company are notionally nobles (albeit their titles are not heritable), the myriad captains, secretaries, factors, and other agents who represent the Company are not. Nevertheless, they seem always to observe the imperial nobility's taboo against travel by River. In fact, although the Company does possess some torchdriven clippers, much of its traffic is carried by sailcraft. Rumors persist about the beings that crew the great ships on their sometimes centuries-long voyages: Are they entirely unmanned ghost ships? Staffed by long-lived epihumans? Operated, perhaps, by forbidden machines?

25. One common legacy of now-forbidden genetic engineering is scramblejack, a fast-growing vine that can be trained up simple bamboo trellises. The plant pulls minerals from the soil with extraordinary alacrity and efficiency, quickly forming a tough, rigid, skeleton onto which other materials can be daubed or bound to create great large, complex, durable buildings. The sinuous organic forms of such buildings are ubiquitous in younger colonies and impoverished rural areas.

26. Child labor is forbidden in the union, but it is a fact of life in much of the empire, particularly in agricultural societies. To escape a life of toil and drudgery, young people are often quick to volunteer for military adventures, and recruiters are happy to take them very young, given that it sometimes takes years to move an army to a combat zone. In the union and in many single-star independent polities, the empire is characterized as being sustained by child soldiers.

27. Not all who leave their dreary homes seeking adventure among the stars end up in soldiery; many find themselves bound in indentured servitude, owing insupportable debts for the journeys they took away from their homeworld and sinking ever deeper into debt as they are charged for everything they need and don't own, including breathable air in the hostile environments where they are often taken to work.

28. Combat aboard starships and space stations tends to take place at very close quarters, under disorienting conditions; firearms can be blinding, deafening, and apt to send users flying. Automatic weapons are certainly used, especially for area denial by defenders who can brace against the recoil, but the hallmarks of zero-g combat are more “primitive”: daggers, bolos, nets, and the like, intended to entangle or disable enemies, or to decisively puncture their critical suit systems. EVA combat relies more, at least when they are available, on sophisticated luminal weapons and micromissiles.

29. Lasers and micromissiles rub shoulders with swords and bolos in specialized combat, but mass engagements downwell revolve around simple millennia-old chemical explosives: artillery, slug throwers, and rocket launchers.

30. Although autonomous drones operated by machine intelligence are most strictly forbidden—they are the very image of the horrors banned by the Rule—sophisticated machines operated by remote control (known variously as poppets, effigies, and ectypes) are used (and sometimes accused of being automatons or other abominations).

31. Cults and secret societies abound throughout the Pale. In the union, the Ministries of Coordination are endlessly diligent in rooting out these threats to concord; in the empire, they are generally left alone, even if they are responsible for the most odious blasphemies against the empire and the imperial rite, so long as they do not disturb or seek to disturb the Rule. Those groups that do attempt to subvert the Rule are hunted by imperial inquisitors and commissars of the union alike; they will even join forces, on operations beyond the borders of the empire and union, to bring justice to such malefactors.

Flyover Country: Cast & Crew

Sketch by Kunrong Yap

Continued from the Prologue.

I had a setting, a starting planet, and a rough idea of the first adventure I would send my plucky band of misfits on. I also had a whopping six players: four veterans of my previous several years of D&D 5e campaigns, including the two previous DMs, and two complete neophytes. They rolled up one warrior, one psychic, and four experts, bless their hearts. The crew:

Batias: A musclebound Protestant pastor with a silver tongue, a shaky commitment to New Testament values, chronic intestinal problems, and, we would eventually learn, a disastrous gambling habit. A native of Morrow, but not from anywhere near Freeport—he hails from New New Greenland, way down south. Jack-of-all-trades handyman and reliably intimidating presence.

BQ: A young barbarian from the planet Ayaz, a frozen hellhole stuck at a medieval level of technology, who shipped out with the crew of a visiting tramp freighter and never looked back. Has a remarkable knack for piloting, a deep devotion to a mysterious alien religion, and a stubborn insistence on wearing fur armor and carrying a spear and shield everywhere. Ace pilot and autodidact expert in ancient technology and alien cultures.

Krissa: Hailing from the far-off moons of the gas giant Juma, she grew up among the space pirates there during the tumultuous era when Valentina Gurov bound the pirate clans together, conquered the planet Munda, and declared it the seat of a New Terran Empire. Trained in biopsionics at the Empire's expense, she went AWOL and now makes her way in the criminal underworld as a medic. Extremely low-key psychic medic and clairvoyant.

Mustang: A child film star from the Commonwealth's primary world, Opis, she saw her career go down in flames before she even reached age 20 when a scandal about her ostentatious lifestyle saw her blacklisted by all the studios. She lit out for the territories, where she's made a living operating a traveling Wild West show and doing crimes for hire. Sharpshooter and entertainer.

Roman: Unable to keep up with the ritzy lifestyles of his upper-crusty university classmates, he took to cooking drugs in the chemistry lab. Caught and kicked out of school, he turned his talents to black-market purposes. Brilliant chemist and occasional pedantic know-it-all. Working toward a revolutionary scientific breakthrough. Suspected by his comrades of being a secret android.

Sarai: Born into the Opisian elite, she enjoyed a gilded childhood as the daughter of high-ranking members of the Commonwealth's diplomatic corps. When her parents were implicated in a vast scheme of graft and influence peddling, she was disgraced and turned her back on the Commonwealth. The youngest member of the crew. Grifter extraordinaire and leader of (hench)men.

The mission? A spy exfiltration inspired by Heart of Darkness / Apocalypse Now. (Imagine all the bits in quotation marks in the next section delivered with a hearty, over-the-top French accent.)

* * *

We lay our scene in Freeport, in the Café Cosmopol on Avenue Saint-Odile, not far from the offworlders' Green Zone. The cavernous dining room is lit only indirectly, through louvers and skylights, and dozens of ceiling fans whirl away. Thanks to clever architecture and good ventilation, the temperature is bearable, if quite humid; out on the street it's a good 50 degrees centigrade.

Six freelancers have been gathered by Elias Bensaïd, an influential fixer with deep Milieu connections. He's an avuncular man in late middle age—in appearance one part Santa Claus, two parts Saddam Hussein.

Elias explains the mission: "It’s a simple job, in principle. But it needs to be done quickly and you have to follow your orders to a T, understood? No dicking around, no going off-script."

He pauses for emphasis, then goes on. "You are going to crew a ship from the Havre here, pick up one passenger near the Sylva–Konyr frontier, and take her off-world. She should be at the coordinates given—a forward base for Konyri rebels, just inside Sylva. She should be alive and cooperative."

He shows them her file; it's been hurriedly but thoroughly redacted of most of her personal history, the details of her career, and even her name; they get only the nom de guerre "Commander Vasia."and the basic facts. She's an attractive woman in her mid-forties—extremely tall, with an athletic build. She's highly intelligent, a trained pilot, skilled with electronics, proficient with firearms, fluent in multiple languages, trained in first aid, and more.

"Complications are possible, obviously," Elias allows. "If any arise, just keep things as simple as possible. You need to get her on the ship and off Morrow. That’s the whole job. If she’s unconscious, fine. If she’s dead…look, I don’t want you to kill her. I really don't want her dead, and I doubt you six could do the job anyway. No offense. Just don’t try. But if she winds up dead, we need the body. When you get her up to orbit, dead or alive, you'll be contacted with next steps." He hands over a thumb drive with a copy of her file and a set of encryption keys and handshake protocols for arranging the hand-off.

* * *

The Commonwealth's spy agency, IRIS, has long been working covertly to unify Morrow under an ostensibly democratic government. Some of their highly trained operatives have, for years, been helping lead the People's Front for a Free Konyr in its war to overturn the Konyri monarchy. Now the war is all but won and IRIS is pulling its people out in preparation for the peace, but one particular highly placed operative—Commander Vasia—is nowhere to be found. It'll be the player characters' job to find her; they represent deniable assets who can't be linked to IRIS if anything goes wrong and aren't associated with any one Milieu syndicate.

The concept was supposed to accomplish a whole lot at once:

1. Bring all the player characters together and give them a reason to work with each other.
2. Put a ship at their disposal without just handing them an asset worth the equivalent of millions of dollars (the ship is owned by some Milieu shell company, and the crew is expected to take on further work on the Milieu's behalf; it's also kind of a junker, way behind on maintenance).
3. Give them a pretty open-ended task, one that they could tackle in various different ways—combat is a distinct possibility, but not a necessity.
4. Get them involved in the setting's current events, both at a local level and at the interstellar level: the civil war in Konyr is a low-tech, low-intensity conflict that six crooks in a spaceship won't get completely swallowed up by, but it's also part of much grander factional machinations.

Did it work? Well, the first point was kind of a failure: The classes my players chose didn't fit neatly with the fiction; it made sense that Elias would recruit a sharpshooter, a medic, and a pilot for this mission, but why a chemist, a pastor, and a con artist? I did have a plan to keep them flying and working together after the job, but it was a surprise I aimed to spring on the players later, so there was also a moment of them wondering, "Why are we going to keep hanging out with these strangers?"

If I were to do it over, I'd spend more time building interconnected backstories for the player characters and have them already be a dedicated crew from the jump. (Watch this space for a link to the blog post I'll inevitably write trying to design Beyond the Wall–style playbooks for sci-fi characters.) But other than that, you know what? It worked like a charm

Next: Chapter 1.

Flyover Country: Prologue

"Zaku Relic" by Martin Parker

I've been meaning to share an account of my ongoing Stars Without Number campaign for ages now—it was one of the reasons I started this blog!—but I keep putting it off. It's been going for half a year now, and we've been playing every week. You'd think I'd be hopelessly far behind at this point, but happily I've been keeping pretty good notes and my players are incredibly unambitious and spend 70% of each session sampling street food, haggling with merchants, and bullshitting, so there's not that much to catch up on.

I'll start with a bit about the setting I cooked up and where I decided to start my players. This map of the sector (which also includes lots of notes about the setting) might be a handy reference, although if you are a future reader deeply invested in the chronological narrative integrity of the story I'm about to recount (I should be so lucky!), there are technically a bunch of spoilers in there.

* * *

I called the campaign "Flyover Country" because I intended for much of the action to take place on and around several underdeveloped, underpopulated border planets that form a crossroads surrounded by the established and rising interstellar powers. Lots of trade passes through, and offworlders do some resource extraction here, but the natives are poor and have few opportunities.

I started them off on a steamy Earth-like planet called Morrow. It was an agricultural colony long ago, before the Scream—the psychic apocalypse that ended SWN's galaxy-spanning Terran Mandate. The small pre-Scream population of botanists, technicians, and administrators all lived near an equatorial spaceport, Port Mundele. When their advanced technology failed in the wake of the Scream, most scattered to the four corners of the planet, staking out petty kingdoms and principalities among the plantations and the wilderness.

Hundreds of years later, Morrow stands on the doorstep of the Sector's biggest polity, the Commonwealth of Free Worlds. The old spaceport, Port Mundele, now better known simply as Freeport, is home to millions. Its small fortified core is dominated by offworld corporations, and the lawless sprawl around that by organized crime syndicates; the networks of smugglers and traffickers that connect the border worlds and stretch into the more developed systems are all rooted here. Despite being poor, low-tech, and ruled by myriad petty tyrants, Morrow is one of the only planets in the Sector with major forests and an important source of pretty much every botanical luxury good you can think of: coffee, tea, chocolate, vanilla, cinnamon, teak, and so forth.

And things are changing outside Freeport. Much of the southern hemisphere has unified under a single government, and parts of the northern hemisphere are joining too. Several years ago, one of the large northern states, Sylva, cast off its duke, declared a republic, and fomented an insurrection in the neighboring Principality of Konyr. The civil war in Konyr has been raging for ages, but it recently turned decisively in favor of the rebels, who took the capital and declared the People's Republic of Konyr. Rumor has it that Sylva and Konyr will join the unified government and that Morrow will soon be invited to join the Commonwealth.

* * * 

Under the hood, Morrow is a TL3 planet (i.e., technology like present-day Earth) with a breathable atmosphere, a temperate-to-warm climate, a human-miscible biosphere, and "several million inhabitants," which after some more dice rolls I determined was about 70 million people. It got the world tags "warlords" and "civil war," which together with the pleasant environment suggested to me a resource-cursed developing nation where a traitorous comprador elite impoverish their fellows and trade away their homeland's natural bounty in exchange for the foreign weapons they need to invade each other and keep their citizens in line.

A bit of iteration and the influence of the faction system added some new layers to this: Morrow, and the big equatorial city of Freeport specifically, is the home of a Sector-wide organized crime network. Some Wikipedia research convinced me that modeling that network after the French mob would be fun, and the whole war-torn, resource-rich paradise thing made me think of the Congo, so I decided that the main cultural flavor of Morrow (and the broader milieu criminel morrovien, aka the Milieu) would be Franco-Congolese. Major bonus: French accents are fun.

Meanwhile, the Sector's biggest power, the Commonwealth, is right next door, and Morrow is an obvious expansion target for them. I decided that the Commonwealth's infamous CIA-/KGB-like spy agency, IRIS, had spent recent decades manipulating Morrovian politics toward a seemingly organic democratic unification which the Commonwealth could recognize, sparing everybody the difficulty and ugliness of an invasion. And of course a CIA-like spy agency has strong ties to organized crime; Milieu-connected agents would be the tip of the IRIS spear.

My friends wanted to play a bunch of criminal or semicriminal lowlifes in the vein of Firefly and Cowboy Bebop, so their their characters had Milieu connections built in. Now I just needed an excuse to give them a ship, and if I could deliver that in the form of a job from IRIS, brokered via a Milieu fixer, I'd immediately get two of the factions' hooks into them.

Next: Cast and Crew.