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

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...

Two Years of the Star Guard

 It seems that I missed the two-year anniversary of starting the Star Guard story on 1st July 2023. Not that the anniversary means anything, but it's an excuse to waffle about the Star Guard, and I've been very lax about waffling on this blog. Maybe I've said some of the following before, but if I can't remember then I'm sure my readers can't either, so I'm going to say it again.

I didn't invent the Star Guard. They were introduced in the original Golden Heroes rules, which I talked about in a previous post. The introduction gave a huge amount of detail:

(I've just noticed that somewhere down the line I changed Bolusci to Bolusca, probably because I simply misremembered how it was written in the book. I also just rediscovered that the Meg has a proper name, Torus, which I have never used because I completely forgot about it.)

But this was all the detail I needed to use the group as antagonists in a Strikeforce scenario in 1988. That episode has been written up as chapters 13 and 14 of the Strikeforce story, if you want to see how I used them.

They came back a couple more times in later Strikeforce stories, and I started adding the additional members that the original paragraph hinted at. This was fairly easy, because I could recognise a Legion of Super-Heroes homage when I saw it, and I can homage with the best of them.

But I didn't need to put much effort into fleshing out what the "Emissariate of Bolusca" actually was, or why it had such an unwieldy name. (I eventually figured that last part out: it's a Federal political system, with member planets being semi-autonomous self-governing states and each sending an "Emissary" (like a senator) to represent them on the "Emissariate Council" (Federal government). This works, because the Star Guard can then act like the FBI, with the power to operate across "state lines" and deal with incidents that the Planetary Police in isolation can't or won't. But the politics of this set-up is probably something that needs an entire article to itself.)

So two (and a bit) years ago I had to expand the Star Guard's setting beyond just having a few defined characters to having an entire, detailed, coherent universe for them inhabit. My last two years have been almost exclusively devoted to doing that (which is why documentation of the rest of the Heroes Universe has dwindled to almost nothing). It's nowhere near complete, as all I have time to do is scramble to keep ahead of where the players are travelling next, and to head off any annoying questions they may raise about it. A lot of stuff is in fragmentary notes in my plot book, some of it is only in my head, and a very small portion of it is actually properly documented on the Heroes Universe site. So if you want to read about some of the

• 184 characters (so far) who interact with the on-going Star Guard story, 
• 44 planets in known space,
• 14 sentient species that inhabit those planets,
• or a variety of miscellaneous topics about how the galaxy works,

then you (now) know where to find them.

This week I've just been updating and improving the index pages linked above, but if you want to see what new pages have been added recently it's always listed on the home page.

There's some other stuff I was going to say, but I'll save it for a later post. Hopefully not too much later.

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.

Dave

The whole Game web site is dedicated to David Allan, for reasons I have previously given.

I just want to add that this month, 37 years after the Game began, I am re-using a plot idea Dave gave me on day one. I'm running a story line I literally called "Ten Electrons". 37 years later, Dave is still in the Game.

And I still have the best players in the world.

What Does The Game Look Like?

I was recently asked what the Game looks like when we play it. It's a tough question to answer because it doesn't really look like a game. It looks like seven middle-aged men sitting around a table, talking, and making occasional notes. It looks like a board meeting:

Because 90% of the Game takes place in our heads. We use some visual aids--my terribly drawn maps, or sometimes a plan with counters or models on it (that's what you see in the centre of the image above: my visual representation of the situation the players are in as they figure out how to board an enemy vessel without being overcome by a swarm of killer robots)--but they aren't the Game. The Game is pure imagination.

The Game looks like the week I spend thinking up a new storyline:

The Game looks like the hour I spend after each session updating my records:

The Game looks like the thousands of pages of documentation I've written (small section of it shown here):

The Game looks like the shelf-full of reference books I read to give it the illusion of believability:

The Game looks like the random notes I write in my plot book in the middle of the night, for reasons which escape me but which might get used for something one day:

But what the Game really looks like is entirely in the heads of the six players, because what they think it looks like is more important than all of the above. It looks like their ideas, and plans, and character interactions, and annoying, confounding, frustrating interactions with my plots. That's what the Game looks like to me. I have no idea what it looks like to them...

I love it when a deck plan comes together

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

Haven

[Originally posted 21 May 2017]

Have you read Strikeforce chapter 17? No? Ok, go on. I'll wait.

...

One day many years ago, probably in the pub after a Game session, and possibly under the influence of alcohol, I said to the players:

"Haven is where everything touches but never meets, while the Parallax is where everything meets but never touches."

If I'm honest, I don't think I had any idea what that meant. It just sounded cool. My ideas of multi-universal cosmology were still a work in progress. But from that statement, or rather, from trying to subsequently justify that statement and make it true, came the so-called "Beermat" model of the multiverse, the five demons, and basically everything that underpinned the big concepts of my Game universe and drove stories for the next 25 years (and is still doing it).

I was just reminded of this today when reading some old notes and came across this (reasonably accurate) transcript of a conversation between the players arguing in-character during the course of a Game: 

"Supposing you're right and the Demon itself wasn't destroyed during the Event. What you seem to be implying is that it's fleeing from Earth at the speed of light consuming whatever 'magic' it encounters, growing stronger as it expands. If this is the case it will have the power it needs to achieve criticality and complete its takeover of the universe long before it engulfs the entire galaxy. Considering the situation, we don't see any other choice but to utilise the Doomsday Device against the Event field!"

"You are missing the point! The Demon is the outside of the Event! The Event itself is non-Demon. It is a purging/pushing/repelling field, not an all powerful Demon containment field! Look, the Event MUST survive to progress through the whole universe before the end of Time so that the entirety of the Demon energy is destroyed before the Universe restarts!"

"You possess absolutely no evidence to support that hypothesis! As has been proven by subsequent events the Event field is self contained and has no link to Earth. Besides which, it's not an anti-Demon field! It's an improbability manipulation spell!"

(And there was a lot more of it, it goes on for pages) 

Bear in mind that this isn't me writing the argument, it's two players (speaking in character, based on the characters' knowledge and experiences) with differing interpretation of how the universe -- my universe -- works, each trying to convince the other they are right, without reference to me. I'm just watching them.

This is why I love the Game. It's the player input. They really care about it to the extent that they don't just listen to my explanations of stuff, they think about them in character and have their characters come up with new theories to explain the facts they've been given. 

 And then they argue with each other about them. 

 It's awesome.

 I have the best players.

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.

Creating worlds

 I have about a month until my first Game session set in space. We've briefly ventured into space before, but this will be different. The players will have characters that live in space. This creates a problem for the GM: he needs to make sure they understand the world they come from. One of the main reasons for setting the original Game on 20th-century Earth was so that I didn't need to explain to players how the universe "worked". Everybody knows how fast a car goes, where New York is, and so on. I didn't have to invent the basic world and I didn't have to explain it.

But now we're in space, and the player-characters will be visiting different planets, and they should know what those planets are like in advance as they're in the middle of an established empire where they all grew up, not exploring strange new worlds. So I have a month to create enough planets to make the universe feel real and lived in.

Here's the first one: Plunderers Planet.

There is no apostrophe in the name. This isn't me being illiterate, it's deliberate. Why? I don't know, that's just what it's called.

I've invented a lot of new terminology in this article that I'm not going to bother explaining because I don't need to. Oh ok, I will:

A Boluscanomical Unit is obviously analogous to the human term Astronomical Unit. How big is it? It's not important to the Game. I could work it out if I needed to, using Kepler's laws and so on, but I don't need to.

A Cycle is a Boluscan year. It's slightly longer than an Earth year I think, but the exact length isn't important. If I ever need to work it out, then obviously I will also need to work out the length of a Boluscanomical Unit, but I can't be bothered.

The parsec is the only Earth-centric unit I'm using. I could make up a Boluscan equivalent, but I like the idea that through random chance a parsec from Bolusca is the same as a parsec from Earth (which I can make work if I choose suitable figures for the BU and Cycle).

I have a scale for planet types ranging from "B" (exactly like Bolusca, which basically means exactly like Earth) to "B-" (slightly inhospitable) and so on. Plunderers Planet is a B-. This makes more sense to me than saying "Class M", which might be a more familiar term but doesn't really mean anything.

I think that's everything. But none of that is important for the players, they only need to read the Plunderers Planet article so they know what the expect when they visit. If they visit. This article in no way implies that I'll set a scenario there. Of course I won't. What would be the point, nothing interesting ever happens there. Honest.

Twenty Years Later

[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.

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?

Planning the Game

[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.

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...

The Diogenes Club

 [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...

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...

Golden Heroes

 [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...