Don't Ask me, I'm Just the Writer

After slaving away for hours to perfect my latest piece of writing, I had about two days of self-satisfaction after publishing it before people started telling me what I'd got wrong.

As I've explained previously, the Heroes Universe is a piece of collaborative fiction. I'm the one putting the words down on the web site, but there's a whole team behind me generating ideas for me to use. And they wasted no time in telling me I'd misrepresented several of their ideas in Room XIII.

So: Charlie Haversham wasn't 16 in 1940, he was 14. Yvette D'Evreux wasn't trying to steal a Spitfire when arrested, she was trying to steal a Hurricane. And a couple more minor points were of questionable interpretation.

My first thought was to rewrite the text and quietly republish the corrected version.

Then I realised, I'm writing in the persona of Sir Royston Thomas, and I wasn't mistaken, he was. So in my persona as his editor, all I needed to do was add some extra footnotes explaining that he was mistaken, but leave his "mistaken" text intact. Problem solved!

So that's what the "second edition" of Room XIII now contains. If you've already read the story, there's no need to read it again because nothing important has changed. If you haven't yet read it, you can read the "correct" version here.

I'm going to follow the same approach for subsequent chapters of Room XIII. It doesn't work for the other stories on the site, but it's appropriate for how I've chosen to write this one.

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.

Measuring Space

How fast does a starship have to move? This is a question that took me a long time to answer. Because the answer dictates the whole feel of the world I'm trying to portray. Is travel between worlds slow and leisurely, like ocean liners, or fast like air travel? Whichever I choose, I'm either allowing or disallowing a whole set of story types.

Slow travel makes it impossible to react to an immediate crisis on other worlds. You can't save people from a natural disaster or stop a crime in progress if you're getting there a month after the news reaches you.

Fast travel doesn't give you leisure time to do anything _except_ react to immediate problems. You can't practice with your lightsaber if the jump to Alderaan only takes 10 minutes.

When thinking about speed, I started with a map and a history of the Emissariate of Bolusca and worked backwards. And to draw a map, I had a few pre-established facts from earlier stories that I had to accommodate. My chain of reasoning went as follows:

1. The Emissariate could only occupy a small part of the galaxy because I had other aliens defined as coming from the far side of the galaxy.
2. The black hole Cygnus X-1 is a real-world object about 2.2 kiloparsecs from Earth, and I had a plot arising from the original Strikeforce story that I wanted to use. This means it had to fall within Emissariate space.
3. But I didn't want it deep in Emissariate space; somewhere near one border would be better.
4. Let's put Bolusca about 2.3 kiloparsecs from Earth, then, and have its borders extend roughly 2.3 kiloparsecs in all directions, putting Cygnus X-1 somewhere out near, but not right at, the Krai border.

Now I had a key distance: 2.3 kiloparsecs. And because I had a history outline with "fixed points" that had to happen to coincide with known events on Earth, I knew that a fast ship had to go from Bolusca to Earth in approximately 40 days. So that sets a speed for the fastest ships of 2.3 kiloparsecs in 40 days, or almost 60 parsecs per day. Let's say it's 60 parsecs, because it's a round number, and because it allows a margin of the journey for course correction, engine maintenance, and other such things I can imagine a long journey needing. It's a little over 71,000 times the speed of light.

Journeying for 40 days in a cramped ship is a lot. Columbus only took 33 days to reach the Americas. But Bolusca to Earth is an exceptional journey. Most journeys between worlds in the Emissariate would be a lot shorter. But how short?

The average separation between stars in the milky way is about 1.5 parsecs. We know that a lot of stars have planets, but not all of the are suitable for life colonization, so let's say there's an average separation between inhabited worlds of six parsecs, a fairly arbitrary number but it will do. So the travel time for a fast ship between two planets could be as short as two and a half hours. Is that workable?

Yes, it actually is. It means you can really respond to emergencies on the next world over, but long journeys take days and weeks. It gives me a world that feels like the 1920s or 30s in terms of travel: easy to get between cities by car, train, or airplane; days or weeks to cross oceans by ship. And as I'm quite happy with reflecting the pulp era of science fiction, that works for me.

I can look at the extremes of the distance scale, too: the other side of the galactic core is around 16 kiloparsecs, which is around 270 days. So you could do it, but it's a really significant effort. The andromeda galaxy is 778 kiloparsecs, or around 35 years, and you'd have to be insane to try it. Within a single solar system, you can jump between planets almost instantaneously. I'm happy with those outcomes for plot reasons.

So now I have a pretty solid time and distance scale. Next I need to flesh out my map, placing key systems and making sure they are in the right places to allow the travel time I've already arbitrarily picked to make certain plots work. This is where it could all go horribly wrong...

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 ... 

Annotations: Strikeforce Chapter 1

[Originally posted 16 March 2017]

Some general insights into how my mind works when I plot a Game and when I turn that game into the purple prose of the Strikeforce story. You might want to read the first chapter of Strikeforce again, so you know what this is all talking about...

Time Is 

The titles of the first three chapters are quotes from the story of Friar Bacon and the head of brass (an Elizabethan-era play by Robert Greene, though I'm pretty sure I must have read a modern retelling (possibly James Baldwin's, I'm not sure, it was a long time ago). The story itself pre-dates Greene's version. The head of brass says three things to Bacon's witless apprentice:

"Time is,"

"Time was,"

"Time is past"

The moral of the story is about not having the wit to see something before it's too late. I'm not saying the moral applies to Strikeforce, I just like the story and the quote, and it fitted these chapters.

Model GM-1

This name is a bit of conceit: GM, or "Games Master" is what I'm called when I run the Game. So the narrator here is me. In the Game, I play the Computer as a "non-player character". It gives me a useful in-game voice to answer player's questions.

The decision to make the Computer both a character and an omniscient narrator seemed like a good one when I started writing out the story, but became hard to sustain in the writing, so as times goes on the narrator tends to say less and less.

Characters

When I started the Game, I planned to run short "solo" adventures for each player individually, to get them used to their characters and the rules. Electron's was the only one I did in the end, and that one's reproduced here pretty much verbatim. The others are made up for the sake of the story, but I think are reasonably close to what we would have done.

The five players played Nightflyer, Scorpio, Avatar, Electron, and Black Swan. Everybody else in the story is "me".

Nightflyer

 I have nothing to say about Nightflyer that isn't already shown in the story. He was the simplest character in terms of what he could do and also of knowing what he wanted to be right from the start. While I'm not supposed to have favourites, Nightflyer is the character I would have wanted to play if I was a player rather than the GM.

Scorpio

 Probably the most problematic character. Scorpio's player decided almost from the start that he hadn't actually created the character he wanted to play, and almost immediately began changing it. He had a set of powers he very soon stopped using, and I have ignored some of these completely to make the story make more sense. He also started a deliberate change in the character's personality and motivations, which I have tried to reflect in the narrative.

Avatar

The idea that Avatar's spells were spoken in Atlantean was a much later addition to the character. Originally he just did "magic words". At the start, I hadn't fully worked out how and why magic worked in my universe, and I certainly had no thoughts about Atlantis and how it might be important. I'll get more into that as the story progresses, but I'm going to be assuming I had all these ideas right at the start in order to make the narrative more consistent. Also it makes it look more like I knew what I was doing.

Electron

Electron's player wanted the character to be light-hearted, always ready with a pun. The problem is, the player wasn't very good at on-the-spot puns! So that aspect of the character sort of vanished. I've tried to keep it in the story, but it isn't always easy.

Black Swan

I almost re-named this character to be just "Swan" for purposes of the narrative when somebody (years later) pointed out to me that it's a bit uncomfortable to have the team's sole black member have a name that includes the word "Black". But it's a comics tradition dating back at least to the 60s, when writers were a lot less politically correct: Black Panther, Black Racer, Black Goliath ... all I'll say is that Black Swan's player was following a comics tradition, and leave it at that.

Black Swan's player missed the first Game session, which is why the character is absent from the fight with the villains. This sometimes happens in a game. If you're lucky, you can work the plot around the missing character (as here: because we were just staring out it was easy to just exclude her). If we stopped the last session at a point where the character has to be present, I can play the character, keeping it in the background as much as possible and hopefully being true to what the player would have wanted to do, but I really don't like doing that. Worst case scenario, we abandoned that week's Game and played Star Fleet Battles (or something) instead.

Villains

The four villains weren't particularly well fleshed out, as they were really only there to introduce the players to the combat rules and I never expected to use them again (as I knew I would move the action to the 20th century). The most notable thing about them was the name "Killervolt", which I really liked. I have a thing about names that are puns.

Chief Kadnez

This is a deliberate homage to Chief Zendak, the head of the Science Police in the Legion of Super-Heroes (DC Comics).

Carl Zod

Confession time: Zod, probably the most hated name in the whole Game, was a slip of the tongue. I wanted to call him "Professor Z" as a joke version of the X-men's "Professor X". But on the day of the Game, when I introduced him, for some unfathomable reason I said "Zod" instead of "Zed". I let it stick, and the rest is history. It had nothing to so with Superman's Zod, as some people have assumed.

1987

If you think about it, the whole plot of vanishing time is ridiculous. Going back in time to stop ... something nebulous that's erasing the timeline. I actually had a whole physics of time travel worked out, explaining how alternate and vanishing timelines worked, and why you have a week of "your time" before you need to go back 400 years to stop it. But even so, I still can't understand why nobody (no player) ever asked "What if it's our intervention which causes it?" Luckily, suspension of disbelief won, otherwise there may never have been a Game.

From Game to Story

[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?

Hyperspace

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...