Sandbox Between Stoplights 2: Picking the Game

Sandbox Between Stoplights 2: Picking the Game

Before I jump into the show, I hot some great feedback on the first episode. I'd like to implement one piece of it now: Hi! I'm Josh! Somehow, I didn't mention that yet. That was something of a facepalm moment for me.

Anyways, let's get to it. In the last episode, I talked about creating the broadest of borders and boundaries to start the process of defining my setting. By the end I came up with a commitment against idea creep and this one sentence pitch: A hard sci-fi story set in our solar system, with an alien invasion.

I mentioned that I was going to explain why I decided to go with a story about an alien invasion versus one based more around high-political intrigue. There were a few factors in that. The first was the system, Stars Without Number.

I had competing inspiration. I was genuinely torn between a highly political game and an adventure game with a twist. Had I not already ruled out running yet another fantasy game, I might have looked at homebrewing Houses of the Blooded or A Song of Ice and Fire. Ultimately, I just couldn't find a game that was built for a story of high-tech realpolitik.

I'm sure that game exists, I just didn't find it. After a bit of research, outside my commute, I did however find The Expanse rpg by Green Ronin. I bought the book and read it, but decided the system wasn't for me. Eventually, I found my way to Stars Without Number. I had heard about it before but initially dismissed it out of hand, since it only has 4 classes and one of them is a Space Wizard, called a Psychic.

After poking around a bit on reddit however, I found you could totally scrap the psychic class without damaging the game. I picked up a copy, and I liked how clearly the author, Kevin Crawford, captured the old school feel. As I mentioned in Episode 1, I really wanted to run a sandbox and this game was built for that.

So, I was set on Stars Without Number. I had quite a bit of work ahead of me given my other parameters. A lot of things could just be reskinned, but there would also be some serious rule changes and rule creation ahead too.

I needed to ratchet down the tech level, I needed to come up with new rules for sublight travel and I needed to compensate for the loss of the psychic class. I also knew there would be other effects I couldn't predict because I had never run the base system before, but because of who I am as a person I don't often care about the last part too much.

Any tabletop rpg can be hacked and homebrewed into being any game you want it to be. That's basically the entire design philosophy of GURPS. However, certain systems are good at doing certain things, and Stars Without Number is definitely better for a campaign of adventure than politics.

So, picking the game system also picked which road I was going to go down in for my metaplot. My main idea had to do with an alien invasion, in the Mass Effect or Independence Day style.

In a lot alien invasion sci-fi, one thing is almost always wrong and it really bothers me. If the aliens had the technical and logistical capabilities to travel between stars, we have already lost the war. One book, Battlefield Earth by L. Ron Hubbard, presupposed we wouldn't even last 15 minutes. That's not enough time to make an interesting story at the game table, so humanity in my game would have to last longer than a quarter hour. This defines the lower limit of our technological level just as much as "No FTL" defines the upper limit.

Regardless, I had decided on the main thrust of the setting: Humanity is faced with an unstoppable alien invasion. The aliens only want to exterminate us. They can't be reasoned with, and humanity will lose. But that's not where the story is for my tragic-adventurers.

The story is everything that happens while the war going on. My campaign is going to ask
"What would it be like living through the finals months of our existence?" The end of the campaign is the explicit defeat of the players and the death of the human race. This genocidal attack will become the engine of chaos that incites this sandbox.

I haven't figured out any implications of an invasion on gameplay yet. Also, I'd have to  make sure to determine a tone for the game. Despite the premise, there's a lot of different tones it could take on: from valiant, to tragic, to heroic, or even darkly-comedic.

Of course, once some of these details were set, I would have to be very thorough in my explanation to attract the right players. They'll have to be OK knowing their characters will die from the start, but they also get to choose how we get that point. It would pose some interesting Session Zero discussions, but at this point I'm getting way ahead of myself. I still have quite a bit of work to do!

Now that I had set the boundaries of the campaign and found the metaplot's engine inside them, it was time to start thinking specific themes and specific aesthetics. I'd also have to start brainstorming the aliens, because who they are (and their motivations) would radically alter the way they exterminate us.

But that's is where I'm going to leave it for today. Next time, I'm going to get into the specific themes and final bounds of the universe. I'm also going to talk about how I conceptualized the first scene from the setting I was able to vividly imagine.

Thank you so much for listening, and good luck this week.