Room XIII

 The newest section on the site is the story of super-heroes in World War 2, which I've called Room XIII. Why that title? You'll have to read it to find out.

When I started developing the Heroes universe, I knew there had to be super-heroes in World War 2. Because that's when super-hero comics started. (Technically shortly before the war, but in practice the big boom came in the war years.) My biggest inspiration for this was Roy Thomas, whose writing for Marvel Comics in the 1970s made liberal use of actual 1940s' comic characters to add a depth of history to the contemporary universe he was helping to create. (He wasn't the first: Stan and Jack had begun it when they re-introduced the war-time character Captain America into their modern stories.)

So, inspired by this approach, I had a handful of characters in the Heroes universe of the 1980s whose backgrounds stretched back to those years, and although it never had a big impact on Strikeforce, it was still an important part of the mythology for me.

When I began setting stories in the universe's past, then, I obviously wanted to include World War 2 as one of the eras I covered. I had pre-established characters and concepts that I could use, but characters alone don't make a story. I needed a narrative setting that I could place those characters into.

My initial ideas didn't include super-heroes at all, which was a bit silly considering that was my whole inspiration for doing it. I started by imagining a group of French resistance fighters. My players vetoed that idea immediately, possibly anticipating it degenerating into a hunt for the painting of the fallen madonna with the big boobies (and, honestly, it probably would have). My next idea was having a group of ex-criminals recruited for commando missions (an obvious rip-off of The Dirty Dozen). I felt this had potential, but it didn't completely come together until I stopped resisting the idea of super-heroes ... or, more correctly in this case, super-villains.

So that's how Room XIII came into being. There were a few tweaks to the format, mainly driven by players' ideas, but the basic concept was strong enough to allow a range of different character types and a variety of different plot lines. And, most importantly, the narrative let me pick up plot threads that reached forward from previous eras and backward from the original Strikeforce stories.

There are a lot of chapters in this story, and I'm not going to be adding them quickly. But hopefully I've made the introduction intriguing enough to make people come back for them when they're written.

Encyclopaedia Galactica

 It's been almost a year since my Game switched its focus to the galaxy beyond our planet. A year of really hard work.

As I explained some time ago, when I began the Game in 1987 I initially wanted a science fiction setting, but soon realised that setting it on Earth in, well, 1987, made my job so much easier: 

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.

Well, now we're in outer space, adventuring around a galactic empire spanning multiple worlds, species, and technologies.

Half the hard work comes in preparation. I need to create a constant stream of new planets to visit. Not quite one a week, but not far off. No planet needs to be as detailed as Earth is. I don't need complete maps and detailed histories, because the players will only interact with a small part of it before moving on. I need about as much detail as, say, a Star Trek planet has. Physical characteristics, population, technology, politics, a history outline, key personalities ... actually, it's a lot of detail, some of which I need to share with my players, some of which I can, or even must, keep to myself.

The rest of the hard work comes in the Game itself, where I have to constantly answer questions about the environment on the fly, and naturally I haven't thought through every minute detail. It's just not possible.

There are short cuts, of course. I can always fall back on my standard approach of stealing stuff, then making sure the players can figure out where I've stolen it from and can fill in the details themselves. If I rip off Forbidden Planet, for example (and yes, I have), then I don't need to explain too much about monsters from the id because the players all know what they are.

But it's still pretty much a full-time job, that I'm barely keeping on top of.

Now excuse me, I have to go and plot an interplanetary war (two very different planets, politics, spaceships, weapon technology, orbital mechanics, and I'm sure I've forgotten something ...).

I've put a small part of my documentation on the web site, organised into the Encyclopaedia Galactica. I'll try to continue to expand it over the next few weeks. But, honestly, typing up my notes and making them pretty isn't my top priority at the moment.

Changing the Guard

I just spent several minutes with a player, debating whether to put the teleport platform on the bridge deck or somewhere else. Actually, I was really just debating it with myself, thinking through the arguments out loud, while he waited for me to decide so he could update the deck plans.

Hold on, let me back up a step.

I was going to base the players' star ship on a Gazelle class close escort from an old Traveller game supplement. One of my players spent hours scanning the published deck plans, cleaning them up, and changing them according to my random whims. Then, last week, with around ten days to go before the new Game, I changed my mind. A close escort is too small, I needed to use the Broadsword class mercenary cruiser from a different Traveller supplement. The same player has spent hours scanning and cleaning up the deck plans, and of course I am making sweeping changes as things occur to me. So far, out of eight decks, I'm happy with our redesigned layout of just two of them. Five days to go before the Game...

Hold on, we're still in the middle of the story. Let me back up another step.

The Game that began with Strikeforce all those years ago has spent the last several years leaping between different time periods as I fill in the history of the entire universe. I have been slowly wrapping up the last six months of adventures set in World War Two, with the plan of setting the next six-month (or so) segment in outer space.

This was supposed to be easy, for three reasons.

(1) Every new era I play, I use a different set of rules; something that is appropriate to the era and style of Game I'm running. For the space era, I was going to go back to the Golden Heroes rules, which I used for the very first Game session thirty-odd years ago. The rules are simple, beautifully suit the super-hero genre (whether on Earth or in space), and we had spent so long playing them the first time round that it shouldn't take any effort to re-learn them.

(2) I also have to do a certain amount of research for each era (some more than others, depending on how "real" I want the Game to be), and this is a pretty big time sink (not to mention all the books I end up buying). By using a space-based science fiction setting, I don't need research. I can just make it all up.

(3) Finally, I have to actually create the setting: build the world, create characters to be friends and antagonists for the players, and seed enough plots to keep the Game running for six months. This should also have been easy this time around, as a lot of the work had already been done when Strikeforce encountered alien invaders (see for example the Crossfire storyline). So I was just going to re-use a lot of that.

So, not much work to do, right? I just need to throw together some simple plotlines.

And maybe create some planets.

Ok, lots of planets.

And new villains.

And make the political situation more nuanced.

Spreadsheet of travel time between planets, with a complicated algorithm for how warp speed works.

Don't forget the deck plans for the players' starship.

I've just read a scientific report on Betelgeuse going supernova, and I'm sure I can work that into a plot.

Collect character backgrounds from the players, and make notes on how to use or abuse those backgrounds for future story threads.

Have mental breakdown while reading some of the ridiculous ideas the players have come up with.

Spend several hours reading a submission from one player who is writing an entire novel to explain his character's background.

Ok, everything is done.

No, I just thought of a new set of villains. I'll need extra plot threads to tie them into.

Hold on, I hate these deck plans. Can we use a Broadsword class cruiser instead? Only change this, and this, and this. Invent a completely new scale for the deck plans because it's the wrong size. And add the teleport booth here. Wait, just leave it with me, I'll draw the new layout on graph paper. It will be fine, I've got five days and everything else is done.

OH MY GOD I'VE ONLY GOT FIVE DAYS AND NOTHING IS READY

Don

 [Originally posted 9 April 2017]

Don wasn't supposed to be an important character. When I introduced the DICE organization to the Game, the main and only important character was supposed to be Major Eastwood, its leader (a thinly disguised Nick Fury, as I'm sure everybody figured out). But I needed other agents, so Don started as a generic background extra, and then got a name probably around the time Scorpio saved his life [chapter  15 of the Strikeforce story]. 

He could still have faded into the background, but now he had a reason to be remembered. Scorpio had saved his life, so there was a bond there, and when I needed more DICE agents to appear in a plot it just made sense to say it was Don. So now he needed a personality, and a background, and a skill set beyond being "generic secret agent #1".

Huey, Dewey and Luey were quickly added to DICE because Don needed a team and, well, I love names that are puns and/or have meta-textual meaning. Ed ("the duck") Mallard was also an inevitable addition by this point.

Don was never a major character, because the Game had to be exclusively about Strikeforce, and he didn't really appear very often, but his appearances were remembered. 

When I ended Strikeforce and moved the story "twenty years later", the main characters would be young super-humans on the run. I needed an older mentor for them, someone who could lead them into the stories I wanted to tell. From the moment I conceived the idea, there could only be one choice: Don.

When we started that next phase of the Game, I introduced Don and the players accepted it with a smile, because they knew it was exactly right. As players they knew and trusted Don, and so it made it easy for them to believe that their characters would trust and follow him. It wasn't something forced on them to make the story work, it was something that made sense within the world and felt right.

In the Strikeforce story, I introduced Don by name earlier than I did in the Game, and I gave him and his squad larger supporting roles. Whenever I've needed a generic DICE agent, I've made it Don or one of his team. Because it probably was, except I hadn't given them names at that point. And because I knew Scorpio had to be with Don at a certain point in order to save his life and for them to become friends, so why not begin the association a little sooner? I think it works.

Don went from un-named to cardboard character to trusted friend to key participant to one of my favourite characters over years of play, and I like to think it all grew organically. I hope it looks that way from the outside. But you've still got lots of his story to read ... 

Preparing a Game

[Originally posted 14 January 2017]

Last week I was blindsided by the players voting to return to a segment of the Game I had never expected to re-visit -- the "Crusades" era we played about three years ago. I could remember the premise and the direction I wanted the plot to go, but I was very vague on details. So pretty much everything else this week was put on hold while I desperately tried to cram everything I needed to know.

First, I re-read the game rules, something called Chronica Feudalis:

It's 120 pages long, but I only needed to read the parts that were actually rule mechanics, so I could skip all the preamble and background material.

The main reason I thought we would never play this again is that I know the players hated the rules, but I'm not actually sure why. I think they have a really innovative and clever mechanism, and I actually remember them being very quick and streamlined in play. Oh well...

Next I read my notes from when I originally planned the game. In the process I discovered a lot of things I'd forgotten I had, such as this interesting map of Nicaea:

And the Game calendar:

I knew that to make the game work (because it was left with the characters split up and, honestly, in a hopeless position), I would need to move events on, narrate where the characters are "now", and pick up a new plot direction. 

But to do this would mean advancing the game calendar beyond what I had originally planned. So ... more planning. Back to my original reference texts, Runciman's A History of the Crusades:

and Frankopan's The First Crusade:

Thankfully not the whole books, just the chapters dealing with events around Nicaea in 1096/1097, as I'd decided to pick up with the characters stuck in the besieged city. This meant advancing to April/May 1097, a longer gap than I wanted but I can cope:

I already have the characters worked out (both player and non-player), and I have the non-player motivations worked out so I have a goal and a way to drag in the characters, so that's it really, the rest of the plot writes itself. 

Preparation finished early, with plenty of time to write this blog and have lunch before the Game.

I'm pretty sure I haven't forgotten anything...

A Famous New Idea

 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...

Known Space

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.