The next phase of the Game will take place in space. I'm intending to start in June, so for the next couple of months I'll be planning it, which mainly means documenting the background so the players (or just me, if it's secret) have something to refer to.
So that includes things such as a detailed explanation of how hyperspace works.
[Originally posted 27 November 2016]
(Number 8 in an occasional series. See sidebar for full series.)
As already described, this story started life as a game. The original protagonists were Strikeforce, and their initial adventures were set in 1987. That story is being serialised on the site.
After about seven years, and 300 "chapters" (playing sessions), I decided the Game was much too unwieldy, too big and complicated to manage any longer, with too much weight of storyline and character history to keep track of. I decided to end it in a big, dramatic fashion. I created a storyline I later called the Event, in which all Earth's heroes sacrificed themselves to save the Earth. End of the heroes, end of the Game. I was out of the superhero-GMing-business.
For a couple of weeks. Then I realized I couldn't leave the Game behind. It was too much a part of my life. I needed to resurrect it. But how?
After a couple of false starts and bad ideas, I hit on it: a new storyline, called Twenty Years Later. Which would literally be that. The same universe, twenty years later, with the players playing completely new characters. Twenty years after the Event, a new generation of heroes was emerging. Their story is being serialised on the site as Heroes. The players had full knowledge of the pre-Event world, of course, but the idea was that their characters didn't.
Throughout the new Game, I used as much of the old history as I could as background. There's James, saying that he's the son of an old hero (the player had my permission to put that link in James's background--in fact, it might have been my suggestion to him, because I wanted the storytelling opportunities that link would bring). There's Sara, the daughter of an old villain. Don, a pivotal character who was directly involved with Strikeforce 20 years earlier.
In some cases I deliberately hid crucial bits of information to keep the players guessing--the identity of Sara's mother, for example. And in fact, the exact details of Sara's power. Her catchphrase in the early Heroes issues, "I'm good at finding things", was a catchphrase I had her use in the Game. It clearly pointed towards a particular--wrong--character as her mother, misdirecting the players. When the true nature of the power slowly became obvious, the identity of her mother (who once had the same power) became obvious--to the players, not their characters, of course. (For clarification: Sara wasn't a player's character, she was one of mine.)
In other cases, I made the nod to the past more obvious. When they met Franklin Marks, the players all knew it was Electron, twenty years older and without powers. But being good players, they played their characters as if they were completely in the dark. Because that's the essence of role-playing: you make your character act within the bounds of the character's knowledge, not your own knowledge.
Incidentally, the player who originally played Electron in Strikeforce played Fred in the Heroes era. When Fred met Franklin Marks (Heroes issue 6), I played Frank, the player played Fred, and the conversations the two had are fairly faithfully reproduced. Read that issue again, bearing in mind that Fred's player once played Frank, and think about how beautifully he played "in character", not letting his player knowledge colour his actions. In fact, read it keeping all of the players in mind: James, Fred, Harry, Chi-Yun, all of their players walked into the Marks's house knowing exactly who they were. Not a single player "broke character" to let any of that knowledge influence them.
The same pattern was repeated over and over throughout the Game. History crept in and became important. Sometimes it crept in merely for background colour, to amuse the players. Sometimes it was a mystery posed for the players' benefit, something that had no bearing "in game" but the players could amuse themselves figuring out who or what a particular call-back referred to. But every time, the characters behaved exactly as they should with the information they, the characters, had.
That's really satisfying to see, as a GM.
But when it comes to translating the Game to the story you read on the web site, this time jump (or at least the way I have chosen to deal with it) has caused a whole set of problems. That's going to need a lot more explanation, so I'll talk about it in the next of this series.
[Originally posted 9 November 2016]
(Number 7 in an occasional series. See sidebar for the others.)
I've described how this story started life as a game, and the steps I went through to create that game. But how does the Game then become a story?
The game generates a lot of paperwork. Everything I plan to happen has to be documented, and that then has to be re-written to reflect what actually happened after the plan meets the players. At some point, I thought it would be fun to re-write it in story form rather than a dry history of "X went to Y and met Z", and that's how the Heroes Universe web site came into being.
There are a few problems in making a role-playing game session into a work of prose fiction. For a start, game sessions aren't neat and tidy the way stories are. Players don't always follow my plots, either through pig-headedness or because they've missed some vital clue that I thought would be more obvious than it was. They go in the wrong direction. They explore the wrong things, say stupid things to the wrong people, and generally just act like a force of chaos blundering through my plots.
Fiction writers talk about things called "story beats", which are the key moments that logically advance the story: X happens then Y happens then Z happens ... if these things don't happen in the right order (and with the right amount of dramatic pacing between them) then the story either makes no sense or feels flat.
Naturally, players excel at doing X followed by P, Q, F, skipping Y entirely, and blundering on to Z by accident. It's just ... not dramatically satisfying. Oh, it's satisfying to play, but that's because the players are actively involved. It's terrible to read afterwards. Even if it makes sense, the pacing is terrible.
So when I write the story I ... "adapt" it. Think about a Hollywood movie "based on a true story". There's no way the true story was as neat as the story shown in the film, but the screenwriter has "tidied it up" to make it feel dramatic while (hopefully) keeping the key factual elements intact. That's exactly what I do in going from game to story.
Go right back to Chapter 1 of Strikeforce. The big fight at the Institute for Temporal Studies? Didn't happen quite like that. It happened mostly like that, but it wasn't as streamlined, it was more dragged out. Electron's player tried numerous futile tactics against Killervolt, for example, and I don't think there was a moment of epiphany when he and Avatar switched targets, he just won through a lucky dice roll. I took liberties to change the fight from a challenging game to an interesting story.
I am also writing scenes that never actually occurred during the Game. In a gaming session, the only events we play out are the ones that players' characters directly interact with. So when Strikeforce chapter 9 opens with two pages of various villains and other non-player characters interacting in the ballroom of the Haley Hotel, none of that happened "in play". The gameplay started when Strikeforce heard of the raid and reacted to it. But in my plan for the game, I had the villains doing those things. I had to plan their actions, even if the players wouldn't see those actions, because the players would see the results of those actions and it all needed to make sense for them. So I have all these extra non-game events documented because they are actually a vital part of the plot, and I am writing them out when I think they will make the story more clear or more interesting for the reader.
The other thing to bear in mind is that I'm writing Strikeforce chapters nearly 30 years after we played those Game sessions. I have notes of what happened, but I didn't record what words the players put into the mouths of their characters (it would be an impossible task). Even if I had, players improvising dialogue on the spot will rarely come out with the sort of carefully-planned, polished prose that a novel needs to have.
So I am completely inventing the dialogue when I write the story now. But I'm inventing it based on years spent with those players and those characters. I know the characters so well, I know how they speak. The characters probably didn't say those specific words at those specific times, but they could have and probably should have. I am confident that everyone in my story is speaking "in character", as far as my writing skills allow. This also extends to characters' thoughts, which would almost never be expressed in a playing session but I can extrapolate from my knowledge of how a player portrays his character's personality and motivations. So where a character's thoughts would add to the story, I'll make them up.
So, that's it really. What you're reading is not a 100% accurate transcript of what actually happened in the game. You're reading a "dramatization" based on a "true story". And I hope it's suitably entertaining. If it isn't, that's my failure as a writer, because I know the Game sessions are entertaining. Well, if they weren't the players wouldn't have been coming back every week for 30 years.
Would they?
[Originally posted 30 September 2016]
(Number 6 in an occasional series. See sidebar for others.)
I had a set of rules for a super-hero role-playing game: Golden Heroes. And I had a group of players I hoped would play a super-hero game. All I had to do was make a game that they would like playing.
The first thing you do with new rules is try them out by yourself before letting the players anywhere near them. Starting at the beginng, you create a set of characters in exactly the same way that the players will have to.
I decided I needed a super-hero team of five characters. I created Gemini, Hammer, Image, Lotus and Littlejohn. (Observant readers will have noticed them name-checked in Strikeforce Chapter 2 as an in-joke to myself. Persistent readers will actually encounter them in the story, eventually.) As I created each one, I gave them background stories, explained how and where they got their powers, and decided they would be police officers in the 24th century.
(One of the great things about Golden Heroes is that the rules actively required players to create a background, or in comic terms a "secret origin", for their characters, to explain where their powers came from. At the time, this was a pretty innovative concept in RPGs. And it's one of the key things I credit to the Game's longevity. Because when I told the players, "Now give your character a secret origin," they really put their imaginations to work, and gave me story ideas that I could run with for years. Much of the Game's story arose from the characters. Which is what stories are supposed to do, of course. But I'll get to that in time.)
I wanted a heavy SF flavour to my game, which is why I decided to set it in the future. And I didn't want the players' characters to be randomly thrown together as a team. That works in a one-off game, but in a long-running game you start to look at this collection of mismatched, type-A personalities who probably hate each other and ask, "Why are these guys even in the same room, let alone on the same team?" And the worse question, "Why are these characters doing this crazy thing the GM has placed in front of them?" The answer to both questions is often, "To make the game work," but that's a terrible answer. You need an answer that makes sense within the story, not just one that's convenient to make the game work. And unless your players are going to work together when they create their characters and build in their own relationships between the characters (never happens; even when they try, it doesn't work), the GM needs to impose a reason.
So, that was my reason: the characters are police officers. They're a team because that's their job.
So far, so good. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I didn't want to set my game in the future. I wanted to start it in the future, but I would send the characters back in time and strand them there. Of course, I wouldn't tell them that. As far as they would know, I was running a futuristic game. I was sabotaging my stay-together-because-of-duty idea by moving the story to the past, but I hoped that it would be replaced by the mutual need to stay together because of the strangers-in-a-strange-land thing. Plus the sense of heroic duty would still be there because the characters would have been created as selfless police officers, so they would happily do the crazy things I placed in front of them.
With that established, I had to create a number of threats for the characters to encounter in the 20th century. I had the "Warscout" concept as the reason for going back in time, but you need more than one threat. That's good for a single gaming session. What comes next?
So I created a team of villains: Neutron, The Dragon, Cosmos, Skyrider, Greywolf, Astra, Siren, Silver Streak, Hellfire. Each one had his or her own background, origin story, motivation, and personality. This was stuff that the players wouldn't necessarily ever find out, but I needed to know. Because if I don't know where a character comes from, how can I decide how he will act at any given point in a game session?
Now I had my second game storyline covered. But I needed more. I added in the Department of Intelligence and Counter-Espionage (pinched from an example in the Golden Heroes rules) and spent some time working out how the organization worked, where their secret headquarters was, who the key agents were, and so on. I also needed other super-hero teams, to act as either friends or rivals to the players. The Defense League of America was a group I used to make up stories about as a child, so I dredged them out of my memory and worked out game statistics for them. I started to put together a history in which the DLA had been around for about five years, DICE had been set up to deal with the Anarchist threat at about the same time, and the world of 1987 was quite used to costumed heroes and villains running around.
It was enough to start. I understood enough about the world to answer any "What about...?" questions the players asked. The big short cut to this was that I was setting it in our own world, in our own time period. This gave me a huge advantage over running a pure science-fiction game. I didn't need to invent all the little trivial details such as how people cooked their dinner in this world, and the players didn't need to ask me. And of course that's exactly why I decided to time travel back to 1987 instead of setting the whole thing in the future.
But I still had a lot of inventing to do. To sustain a long game, I would need dozens of characters for the players to interact with. And I would need long-running, recurring plotlines. If an antagonist keeps coming back, or is a constant background worry, players get a lot more invested in how to overcome him. I had some ideas (the Warscout and the Anarchists were both intended to be long-term threats) but I was soon to get a lot more, and from an unexpected source: the players' characters, who would breath life into the game into ways I couldn't foresee.
I'm in the preparation phase of the next part of the Game. I've set a start date of July 1st, and most of the background I've already got worked out, so there's no rush, but I'm always looking at the next thing (when I should be concentrating on the current thing).
The thing that's bothering me at the moment is hyperspace.
I need to decide how starships will travel between worlds, and as I've set a previous precedent for using hyperspace in the Heroes Universe, I really ought to stick with that.
It's a pretty standard concept in space-opera type science fiction: the ship enters hyperspace (we don't care about the physics), and then cruises along for days or weeks until it emerges near another star entirely. It's neat, it's simple, it avoids lots of awkward questions about relativity, and nothing can touch the ship in hyperspace so it moves the emphasis of the story away from the journey and on to the destination.
The problem is, when you want to design a set of warring space empires, hyperspace blows all "normal" practice out the window. War using hyperspace is nothing like any known war in human history. Every way you think warfare "should" happen makes no sense because of hyperspace.
What's a border in hyperspace? Ships can "jump" past it unopposed, untouchable, and undetected (according to most popular visions of hyperspace). So what's the function of a border? It's not something you can, or need to, defend. Should war break out, the enemy will leap past the border via hyperspace and emerge right above your capital world.
The concept of "front lines" in warfare now makes no sense. Military campaigns don't crawl across a map, they erupt at completely random points across it via hyperspace shortcuts. There's some analogy to a strategic bombing campaign, where your aircraft can strike targets deep inside your opponent's territory, except that's still not an equivalent situation. You can station anti-aircraft guns on the border to stop bombers before they reach your cities, but we've already said that hyperspace ships are jumping untouched over your border.
So is it more analogous to a submarine campaign? Your killer U-boats range undetected through hyperspace, striking your convoys when and where they will. Well, no. They can't raid your shipping lanes, because your shipping lanes don't exist. Your merchant shipping is travelling through hyperspace, undetected and untouchable until it arrives at its destination.
The problems continue to mount up.
There are solutions, of course. I've already identified several. My job now is to pick one that makes logical sense (within the established Game universe) while still providing game balance and, most importantly, allowing interesting and challenging storylines.
Luckily I've still got 10 weeks...
[Originally posted 23 September 2016]
If you haven't read the encyclopaedia page The Diogenes Club yet, go and read it, then come back for the waffle.
First, you're quite possibly aware that I didn't invent the Diogenes Club. I freely admit that stole it. I do that a lot actually (remind me to write a post owning up to all of it one day).
But I probably didn't steal it from where you think I did. I came across it about 20 years ago in Kim Newman's book Anno Dracula, which I highly recommend as an excellent example of alternate history with a lot of literary name-dropping:
Newman's book, set in Victorian England, had one character who was a member of "The Diogenes Club", a mysterious group who are into shady spy games.
When I later needed just such an organization to play a minor role in the Game, I used the name, because I thought it sounded cool and I thought, well, Kim Newman's not going to know or care.
What I didn't know was that Newman didn't invent the club. He used a lot of public domain characters in the novel (so I'm in good company) and the Diogenes Club was no exception. But it was more than 10 years later that I found out the origin, when I got this book for Christmas:
Which of course everyone should read at some point in their lives (I would suggest sooner than I did).
It's first mentioned in "The Greek Interpreter", I think, which is also the story that introduces Sherlock's brother, Mycroft Holmes, and it crops up a few more times after that. Oddly, Doyle never hints that it's anything other than a normal gentleman's club. It's later writers (such as Newman) who have run with the name and made it into a secret-service type organization.
Anyway, that's the background. My Diogenes Club shares nothing in common with Doyle's original (other than I listed Mycroft Holmes as a member, because why not). It shared more in common with Newman's version, but by now is its own thing (it's been so long that I would have to read Newman's book again to remind myself how much I did take from him; I think nothing but the name (not his anyway) and basic concept (also not his idea originally)).
Where does The Diogenes Club fit into the Heroes Universe? It still exists in 1987 but Strikeforce will never encounter it. It still exists in 2014, and the Heroes might encounter it, but not for a long time yet and only in a minor way.
But as I've said before, there's a lot of background history in the Game universe, and the "Notable Members" listed for the Club are all people who have played roles in the Game's history.
Alfred Cutler was a key member of Strikeforce: 1777, where he served as First Lieutenant on His Majesty's Frigate Atlantis.
Bertram Wellington was a member of Strikeforce: 1865, where he was part of the ill-fated Abyssinian expedition.
Charles West is a character with a long history that ties into a plethora of important events, and you will meet him very soon in the Strikeforce story.
Edward Gillifray is a new character (as in, I just created him this week) whose story is yet to be told, as is Hudson, the club steward.
Edward Playfair is a character I actually played in a different game, a game of Call of Cthulu a friend ran some years ago. I enjoyed playing the character so much that I transplanted him to my universe and wrapped him into Charles West's history.
Peter Flint is another stolen character (anyone recognize where from?) who I borrowed to flesh out some more of the history of Charles West.
Patrick Muldoon is a character you might encounter in a (far-)future issue of Heroes, and a (even-further-)future chapter of Strikeforce. He's a massively important character in the history of the universe, but I won't say much more as I need to keep some things up my sleeve for now.
So now you know more than you ever needed to know about my Diogenes Club. The only other thing you might need to know is that I'll be running the Strikeforce: Edwardian Times game starting in about two weeks, and the Diogenes Club is key to the setting. So now you know why I needed to write this article now...
I have a gap in my history in the 1950s, where I felt that I ought to fit a game but didn't have anything that comfortably fitted.
Until I had an idea while in the shower, and by the end of the shower had planned a setting, a scenario, and a rough idea of the rules I will need.
The players will be Famous children (and their dog) who will pluckily thwart the plans of enemy agents, art thieves, and smugglers in the English countryside.
It basically writes itself...
[Originally posted 11 September 2016]
Number five in an intermittent series on how this thing came to be. (See the sidebar for the others.)
Role-playing games (RPGs) became a thing around the mid-70s. Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) was the first one published, rapidly followed by a horde of imitators. I first encountered them around 1980, and D&D was the first one I played.
As I explained in a previous post, an RPG has a "games master" (GM) who devises the world and the plotlines, and "players" who take the part of characters in that world and move through the plots the GM creates for them. I started as a "player", which is probably how everybody should start. But although I loved being a player, I knew that all the real creativity came from the GM, and that's what I wanted to be. But there was no point in me being the GM for D&D, when our group already had one who was very good at it, so I needed something different. Almost randomly, I bought a second-hand game called Traveller. Unlike D&D, which was about heroes going on quests to slay fantasy monsters (the clue is pretty much there in the name), Traveller was a science fiction game. Which was good, because science fiction was what I really loved.
In a lot of ways, the Traveller rules were ridiculously primitive: both overly-simplistic and overly-complex at the same time. And a lot of things in them didn't really make any sense. But as I've already discussed, the rules are the least part of an RPG; the world is everything. The trouble was, In the first game session I ran I hadn't really figured that out. So I had a simple plot that didn't make much sense, set on a planet that didn't have any thought behind it. And the players created "cardboard" characters with no thought behind them; no personality, no goals or motivations, just playing pieces to solve the GM's puzzle. It didn't really work, and I almost stopped being a GM right then. But I went away, and thought about it, and realized what an RPG really was. It was a story. And I was good at making up stories (I thought). So I needed to stop thinking about a game, and start thinking about how to tell a story that my players could be part of.
I went to them and said, "I want to run Traveller again. What kind of stuff do you want to do?"
"We want to hijack a starship and explore space in it. Like Blake's 7."
Huh.
Well, ok. That's my premise. Now write a story that satisfies that. I'll need a universe for them to explore... well, ok, a corner of the universe... a few planets... a political background... conflicts and potential conflicts... interesting things to discover in different corners of different planets... ok... I can do this...
Several hours of work and pages of background notes later, I got the players back together and we tried again.
We played that game weekly (and in summer holidays, almost daily) for a couple of years. We pretty much stopped playing D&D. The players just kept asking for Traveller. And I kept making up new plots, and growing the universe more and more...
And something weird happened. Instead of mechanically plodding though my plot like it was a game of chess, the players had told me what they wanted to do within the game's world, and suddenly the world was as important to them as it was to me. They wanted to understand it. They wanted to work within it. And they did unexpected things that made me go away, re-evaluate my ideas, and come back with a better idea of what my world was like and how the players fitted into it. I had designed a world that would be there and make sense and keep working even if the players were not in it. But once they were in it, they affected the world. It reacted to them; it had to because they kept pushing at it. And they reacted to it in turn, as it pushed back at them, and their characters became more developed, well-rounded personalities, who felt like real people even as I tried to give them a real-feeling world to inhabit. It was still my world, but it was more than that. It was collaborative.
That's what all RPGs should be like, of course, and I know I'm not the only person to discover it. But from that point on I stopped creating "games" and started creating "worlds". Start with the world, and the plots for the games should become obvious, because you just have to look at what's happening in your world and ask, "How can the players interact with this?" I don't think I could run a game any other way now. I know some people play "one-off" games: short scenarios that don't need a detailed background, they stand alone, the players solve the puzzle, then they're over, finished. (Games designed to be run at conventions work like this, for example; they are never intended to continue for a second session, so why do you need a world beyond what the players will see in that one session?) And there's nothing wrong with that style of game, it's just that I don't think I could do that. With me, I need a world.
Over the next few years I ran several different games with various sets of rules. And always starting by creating a world.
And then sometime in 1987, I saw this in a Games Workshop sale. The game that changed my life:
It was the first super-hero RPG I had seen, though I had known such things existed. And I loved super-heroes. I wasn't sure if I could convince my playing group to try such a game, but Games Workshop were only asking £1.99 for it. I couldn't not buy it.
I bought it, and it was the most elegant set of RPG rules I had ever read. Even today, with rules generally more detailed and "sophisticated" than they were in the early days of the hobby, and even though I've bought and read dozens of sets of rules in all genres, I've never found anything with core mechanics that simulated the action of comic-book heroes as well as Golden Heroes does. I had to convince my players to try this.
But first, I had to create a world for my players to explore.
And that's another story...
During a general discussion after a recent game, I was talking about what was "out there" in space. I've put some thought into this over the years (as Strikeforce has interacted with a number of alien visitors) but never actually documented what the universe looks like. So I grabbed my plot book and drew the following to illustrate what I was saying.
Of course this isn't detailed enough for actual play purposes (and after a bit more thought I realized it was also wrong in a couple of ways), so I had to make a proper map.
The proper map: Known Space.