Astra

I wrote this some years ago, but wasn't sure I wanted to include it here. But a conversation yesterday reminded me of it, and I think that if it was important enough for me to write then it's worth sharing. So here it is.

Writing is hard 

Today's game was emotionally hard for me to run. When I plotted the current story line some months ago, I knew I had to play out one scene that, well, every time I rehearsed the dialogue to myself I just broke down.

I'm not sure if people who don't play RPGs realise how attached you can get to a character.

One of the very first characters I created for the original Strikeforce game was Astra. Originally a villain, then as I developed her background I realised she worked better as a hero, and eventually she joined Strikeforce and grew into a better person than I ever could have planned for. Grew from a timid and unsure teenage girl coerced into crime, into a strong, confident, and capable woman.

Maybe it sounds stupid to talk like this about a fictional character—particularly one that I had created myself—but I was so proud of her. And I guess I loved her, as much as you can love a fictional character.

And the players reinforced that. They took the character to their hearts, and literally enabled, even pushed through, the story arc that saw her transition to a hero. Their characters completely embraced Astra as a friend and comrade. As usual, it's the players who are responsible for making the game work, not me. When I ran a scenario that was literally Astra's 18th birthday party, everyone put effort into picking the perfect gifts. When her boyfriend cheated on her, one of the players sat in the kitchen with me and in-character we ate ice cream together. (And I'm going to completely gloss over how weird it is for a grown man to act the part of a teenage girl having a birthday party; that's just how games work.)

When I moved the game "Twenty Years Later", Astra returned as an adult, and everyone knew that was the right thing to happen.

Then, when I started filling in the historical eras of the story, a big part of that was filling in Astra's genealogy. (See if you can spot her ancestor in the Atlantis story. Your clue is that "Setara" means "Star" in Persian, and as we all know, Persian is one of the languages rooted in ancient Atlantean.)

Ok, if you're still here, I'm getting to the point now.

The current phase of the game is set in 1975, and is a prequel story set 12 years before the original Strikeforce story.

So the current crop of player-run heroes are gathered at Wang's shop in San Francisco's Chinatown, in 1975, to discuss their plan to take down the local crime boss (which is the main plot of the current game). The characters don't know Wang, even though the players do. Wang is a minor character in the Strikeforce story, and I hope the players think that I've introduced the younger version of him here to tell his background story as an "easter egg" for them, irrelevant to the actual plot. But I'm not telling Wang's story. I'm telling Astra's.

Wang sells cheap souvenirs to tourists. There are three of them in the shop right now: a young couple and their four-year-old daughter. While the player-characters watch (but don't intervene, because it's nothing to do with their plot, it's just a side scene I'm playing out for their benefit), the girl asks her father to buy her a colourful paper lantern for $5. Her father tells her it's over-priced rubbish and refuses. The girl is upset.

And then Wang, who I've spent the last couple of weeks establishing as a short-tempered, self-absorbed, money-grabbing con-man, inexplicably kneels down and hands the girl a lantern. And says—and this is the dialogue that kills me, and you won't understand it unless you know the history of Strikeforce, and Wang, and especially Astra, and I think I hold it together so my friends don't notice, I think I say it without my voice cracking—

"For you, little girl, it will never cost five dollars."

And Astra leaves the shop with her parents, and minutes later there's huge smashing noise outside, and the heroes rush out to find both parents dead in a car crash.

I've just orphaned my favourite character.

Because that's already part of her history, it was established when I first introduced her all those years ago. But knowing it has happened is different from describing it happening.

It's so different.

It's so hard.

What I Did on my Holidays

As mentioned, I took a break from the Star Guard to give myself time to get ahead of plotting the Krai war which is supposed to dominate the story for the foreseeable future.

I told the players I needed about a month, and I would fill the month with a different game. I wanted something that wouldn't take much mental effort or preparation time from me, so that I could concentrate on plotting for the Star Guard. So I picked a setting I had already put a lot of thought into: Earth, in the year 2075, the dystopian future of the post-Strikeforce era. I had the setting worked out in reasonable detail, I had the flow of the campaign worked out, and I had picked a rules system to use. Literally, I had been thinking about this since almost the start of the "historical" game sequences, over ten years ago. It should have run itself.

You know there's going to be a "but"...

But this was the rules system I wanted to use:

 

Car Wars, published by Steve Jackson Games in the early 1980s (and still available in an updated edition).

The problem here is that it's not a role-playing game. It's a table-top wargame in which players move armed cars around a map and try to blow each other up. There are very rudimentary "character generation" rules to let you personalise your car's driver, but it's very much an afterthought.

Did I let this obstacle stop me? (Obviously not, or I wouldn't be bothering to write this essay now.)

My theory of RPGs is that the rules are the least important part of them. If you're creating a character, the personality you put into the character is the most important--actually, the only important--thing, and that comes entirely, 100%, from the mind of the player, not from a set of rules.

And I have the best players in the world. I was confident that with a starting point as ridiculous as "you're the driver of a car and your job is to shoot other cars", I would get a set of diverse, interesting, and fully-formed characters. And I did. 

I'll go into that later. First, here's the world of 2075. As with all games, it starts with the background and a reason for the characters to engage with it:

• The world of 2025
• The Winkernickle Foundation
• Swan Technology Strategies
• Rookie Night in Pittsburgh
• Road Quad Cargo Carrier
• Truck Stops

Updates

 I was going to put another map here in the journal, then I realised I just ought to add it to the main site. So the Planetary Index now has a diagram of all known worlds' distance and bearing from Bolusca.

Well, almost all known worlds. While preparing it to put on line, I noticed I had missed a few worlds:

• Fe-Rall
• Krell
• Plunderers Planet
• Rufus

I think that's all. I'll add them at some future point, but for at least two of them I have no idea where they are located!

Mapping Space 2: The Frontier

 (Part 2 of a series on how to fight an interstellar war.)

As described in part 1, I had a usable map of the Emissariate of Bolusca, which included every star system so far identified in the game but had plenty of space to add more. With this, I could plot consistent travel times. I could have stopped there.

Except... it was on a square grid. And gamers like hexagonal grids for our maps. Why? I don't know, we just do. So for no reason other than "just because", I decided it was worth spending an entire day converting the map to a hex grid. This first step was easy, just trace the original map on to hex paper (you can click on any of these images to make them bigger, by the way):

To be honest, this was a bit rubbish. The main reason being the scale: 450 parsecs to a hex. On graph paper, I could use a ruler and measure down to the millimetre to get fairly exact distances. As soon as it's on hex paper, all I can easily say is, "It's in that hex," which means, "Somewhere within a 450 parsec area," which is next to useless for calculating accurate travel times. I needed a better scale. Which meant my map of known space wouldn't fit on a single sheet of paper. So I expanded just a small section of the border, and got this:

I'm at 100 parsecs per hex here, so this whole map covers an area about five hexes across on the previous one. I might need to drill down even more at some point, but this is a good working map for plotting grand strategy, and lets me map everything I need (so far) on just nine sheets of paper.

You can see I've already added several additional features to the map, because at this scale I can figure out how things will work:

• The simple line of the border has become a "neutral zone" between the empires, 100 parsecs across.
• I've added the border stations (the small x symbols on the Boluscan side of the neutral zone) that are supposed to warn of an invasion.
• Because I've previously defined how hyperspace detection works, I know how far these stations need to "see" into enemy space, so I know the detection area around them (also marked on this map) and therefore how many stations I need to get full coverage of the border.

Just having this map has allowed me to set the strategy for the Krai invasion. I know where the Krai fleets need to start, and what their destinations should be. Those border stations are immediately obvious targets. Because although Krai fleets could jump right past them in hyperspace, the stations are going to be detecting their every move and relaying it back to the Boluscan fleets. Any sensible invasion has to start with preemptive strikes on all those stations. Knock them out on Day 1 of the war, and the Emissariate is blind; they can't know where you will strike next, so they can't intercept you with their own fleets. The Krai have total control of the war.

(Yes, I've read Sun Tsu and Clausewitz, and this is totally how they would fight if they had hyperspace drives.)

As a GM running a game, knocking out the border stations gives me a secondary (and much more important to me, though irrelevant to the Krai) advantage: I don't need to tell the players how the war is going. Each game session is now starting with some variation of "Psi Girl has called in from headquarters, we still don't have a clue where the Krai are."

I'm pretty happy with the map and (so far) with the war. The only slight problem I have is that I may have made the Krai strategy too good, because at the moment I can't see how the Emissariate will survive this.

But luckily for the Emissariate, they have the Star Guard...

Mapping Space

 I started the Star Guard campaign without a map, which is an extremely bad way to start a game (or a story), because without a map you can't tell how long it takes to get to places, and that leads to sloppy and inconsistent plotting. You basically end up with Star Wars, where a journey takes exactly as long as the plot needs it to take, and usually you don't even mention how long that is. It's ok in a blockbuster fantasy movie, but pretty terrible in a game (or any kind of hard-ish SF story).

Well, there was a kind of map of Known Space. At the start, this is all I needed. It showed me how much space I had to move around in, which let me work out how fast starships could sensibly travel (this was covered in an earlier journal post, Measuring Space). 

But as I said at the conclusion that earlier post, "This is where it could all go horribly wrong."

And it did go horribly wrong. I should have started constructing a map as soon as I had two planetary systems, so I knew exactly how far apart things were. Instead, I kept adding new systems and separating them by how far I needed them to be for story purposes. After two years of play, I had this:

Pairs of star systems with the travel time between them. It should be immediately obvious why this is doomed to fail. Pick any three systems. I know the distance from A to B and B to C. What's the distance from A to C? It's literally impossible to calculate. You can construct infinite triangles made up of those three vertices, with infinite variations of length AC.

So I started slowly and painfully putting these systems into a spatial relationship to each other, maintaining the distances I had already established between each pair. It took a lot of trial and error, adding systems to a map and then erasing them and moving them somewhere else when the numbers didn't add up. I was convinced it would actually be impossible. But after a lot of work, I got this:

(This is just a small portion from the middle of the page.)

And, miraculously it worked. Everything is the right distance from everything else, matching every distance I had recorded.

This is pure luck. There's no way it should have worked. 

But now I had a map, with consistent spatial relationships that supported every piece of travel time data currently established in the game. Now, I could fight a proper interstellar war...

One more point: my map is on a flat piece of paper, and space is of course three dimensional. Making a 3D map would have been an order of magnitude harder, and for story purposes it's not necessary. Because due to the nature of hyperspace, travel distances between stars map to a two-dimensional galactic plane. Why? Because they do. It's my hyperspace, and it works however I decide. Make your own game if you don't like it!

Coming soon: hex maps!

Plotting a War

I mentioned last time that I've spent four months plotting a war. The timing of the war is critical, as the date of the invasion of Earth is a fixed point in Strikeforce history. I had to start the war on a specific date to give the Krai time to get to Earth by the established invasion date (don't worry if this isn't making sense, I hope I'll clear it all up in future posts).

As that critical date approached in the Star Guard campaign, I was completely unprepared to run a war. To give myself the breathing space I needed to do it, I put the Star Guard on hold and switched to a different campaign (more on that later, too) for four months.

Four months later, I've got the strategic thrust of the war mapped out, and a number of potential scenarios planned. The idea is that the Star Guard (the player characters) will be sent on missions to worlds threatened by the Krai invasion—which is why I need to know where that invasion is on any particular date, which I why i needed to "play" the war in advance.

One week in and it's already gone wrong, as an event I wanted to happen didn't happen, thanks to player activity, so I've got to tweak my war strategy slightly. But I've got two or three scenarios lined up that can happen regardless of where the Krai front line is, so I think I'm ok.

I feel like I'm not explaining this very coherently.

Let's try this instead: this handout was given to the players to show them what their characters knew on the eve of the war (and refresh their memories after four months of not playing these characters). Now you know everything they know. I don't yet have an established place to put this file on the main site, so consider this a sneak preview of a new storyline coming soon.

Priorites

 When I started this project, I had some vague idea that I could document everything from 39 (now) years of the Game.

It's not going to happen. I fall further and further behind.

Given a choice between writing something that I need to run the current Game now, or something that documents past history, I'm going to write the current piece, and I'm not often going to write it in a way that's publishable. I have a duty to run a new Game scenario every week of the year (almost), and that takes time to plot.

The only way this site will ever be complete, with all the Game documented in full, is if I stop the Game. And they won't let me do that. I've tried. Twice. And they keep dragging me back.

But I've spent the bulk of the last four months plotting out the current Game months into the future (more on this later), which should reduce my general planning burden and let me write more here. Maybe. Let's see...