Sandbox Between Stoplights 1: Creating Borders

Sandbox Between Stoplights 1: Creating Borders

Stars Without Number presented a new GMing horizon for me. Instead of creating a plot, the system needs someone to create a setting. This really appeals to me. I immediately saw with SWN that I can create a rich metaplot that’s insulated from player actions, but can change the landscape of choices presented to the party. Put another way, I can tell my story on a different level than the players are operating, so the party can't thwart it, but they also won't be railroaded by it.

For example, my party may be starting off as a misfit crew of space-tropes on a barely-flyable ship. I can tell them a story about a multi-trillion credit space station, constructed by dozens of governments, while they tell me *their* story about thriving with that happening around them.

To be clear, I love creating stories together, but I also really dislike having the essential themes of my campaign derailed. It's even happened where I've had an individual player tank an entire campaign in more narratively driven systems. Most GMs experience that at some point, and it sucks. So, without belaboring a "philosophy of GMing" discussion, I decided I would present my players with a "take and bake" sandbox (I’ll explain what I mean by that in a later episode, because it’s not really relevant right now).

In our campaign, there will be massive events the party has zero ability to control, and little capacity to influence, because it's happening at echelons above their heads. They'll be misfits, and they will be swimming in a tide of historical events.

OK, so, that right there is the broadest inception of my homebrew setting but I am still a long way away from anything usable. I know I’m burned out on fantasy at the moment. I don't dislike it at all. After taking a two and a half year break from gaming, the first game I came back to was high fantasy 5e. No, I adore fantasy, I'm just tired of mucking about in it for now so I know that the campaign is going to be pure scifi.

But what kind of scifi? Well, not Star Wars, because no fantasy also means no space wizards. No fantasy also means we won't be as futuristic as Arthur C. Clarke imagined with his 3rd law.

Now, that immediately increases the workload in Stars Without Number, because a huge part of that game universe specifically involves technology that is so advanced that it's indistinguishable from magic. It's called pretech, and it's a concept that is going to have to go (at least mostly) out the door if I want to keep the symmetry of the game world.

I still have to create physical bounds, and there's a bunch of different ways to create some really vague ones to work with. The one I’m going to use is travel speed. If humanity doesn't have FTL, that basically limits us to our own solar system. I like that a lot, because it sets a maximum scale for the sandbox and a hard technological boundary too. I think that also definitively determines that this is going to take place in our own solar system too.

I imagine that this pins us right around not quite Type II on the Kardishev Scale. Sustained mass warfare in space doesn’t seem very realistic to me at this level, but stable environments don't tend to tell riviting stories. So, it kind of makes sense to me that the "big events" destabilizing the situation would have to be epoch-defining political moments or something occurring outside human control.

For a variety of reasons I'll get into in a near future episode, I decided to go with the "outside human control" route.  This whole line of thought took about 30 minutes of driving. I was able to come up with the broadest strokes of my sandbox. I knew my initial one sentence pitch:

- A hard sci-fi story set in our solar system, with an alien invasion. (I also have my second sentence, which is: It is independent of the Stars Without Number universe)

Over the rest of my day, I’d get a few more chances to refine these bullet points and develop a mental picture of the aesthetic. Since this is going to be a setting of my own invention, and not based on a commonly known intellectual property, I'm going to have to lean into commonly known tropes instead. Essentially, I need to borrow a lot of style from existing media so I don't need to spend valuable game time explaining “new concepts” for ultimately trivial details.

This creates another broad boundary, and helps me further define things. It also means I need to be rather picky about the "unique" concepts I introduce, because if I come up with too many quote-unquote "cool ideas," it'll defeat the purpose and muddy the universe. More importantly though, if I have to stop and explain too many different things, it'll really interrupt the flow of gameplay.

Right now, this should all feel very nebulous. I don’t have a setting yet, and certainly not a well detailed homebrew. But I do have enough to get started.

That’s is where I'm going to leave it for today. I have a few ideas and a couple of kernels to start building from. Next time, I’m going to start crystalizing these ideas by creating more boundaries and working inward. Thanks for listening, and good luck this week.