Spaces in Space
And the truth about abstraction
This Week’s post contrasts fantasy space with sci fi space.
Mythic has a lot of blank spaces left open for improvisation. In my experience, this works well enough, granting many advantages too.
Improvise a castle town? Sure, I’m picturing it now. How many people live here? Oh I dunno, why do you care? Raise an army? The book says it can support a warband or two.
How does society work? Here are the roles most people fall into. You know, it’s kinda like actual medieval society but we don’t need to sweat the details.
What’s this forest we’re walking through? Let me paint you an arboreal masterpiece, I walked through a forest two days ago.
You don’t get the same leeway with sci fi. Alien worlds are unfamiliar, and technology doesn’t get to be as arcane as true magic.
I remember a Mothership actual play where the GM’s in the moment decision about whether a ship had remote airlock control had a huge impact on the course of the game, the GM expressing a little discomfort in that afterwards.
I love it when improvised details become important, but I don’t like it when big outcomes feel arbitrary.
So yeah, this means I’m swallowing the bitter pill that Intergalactic requires a bit more foundational information than Mythic. Don’t think I can pull off the “here’s all your setting information on one page” trick with this one.
On the positive side of things, this is something I’ve rarely been able to indulge in! It’s been fun to consider how the big six factions actually work, their relationships to core elements of the setting, and to each other, rather than leaving that down to the individual referee’s prep.
Wallowing in naval minutia might leave the player characters overwhelmed by jargon, but they’re newly recruited crewmembers! Lean into this at the table, give your players the choice for how much they want to integrate into this unfamiliar culture.
I suppose it all fits with the plan to have a fully detailed library of star systems, rather than the petri dish feel of tossing myths into your realm in Mythic. From the start I said that I didn’t want Intergalactic to just be Mythic with Lasers but I feel like I’m drifting further away with each iteration.
God help me, for a moment I even considered a timeline.
Elsewhere
3d6 Down the Line have just started their Mythic Bastionland campaign with a fantastic session 0 to set expectations and establish the characters
Writeodd documents the ongoing development of an Oddlike game about androids
Murkdice shares a two-axis system for talking about abstraction, and what games are “about”
Coming Soon
Over on Patreon I talk about factions.
Intergalactic is going to be the first game I make that actually has a canonical map.
Not that this is the whole galaxy, of course, but it’s a start.
There are concrete places and people who live there too. Of course we need factions, right?
Expect the full post here and on the blog next week.
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I've been watching a bunch of Mothership (MoSh) playthroughs right now, and this variable calibrations around hand-wavium in sci fi is a recurring thing. Watched several groups sort it out.
On the one hand, the fact that the community isn't locked into specific answers to some questions, or the fact that no one needs to read a novel to start playing is a good thing, a strength. On the other hand, I've seen wildly divergent outcomes from calls on basic tech and sci-fi questions, which might seem like a bad thing to a game designer to have inconsistent results from uncontrolled exterior vectors influencing play. If it makes it any better, it does seem like a surmountable task. Like I think the reason it keeps going on in the MoSh community is because it works fine enough to let each group negotiate this stuff at their own table.
Sci-Fi also winds up with different players having completely different knowledge of the realities of the technology - like if you have a player that works in IT or software Dev, they bring more meta knowledge to the table about hacking and computers than the other players or even the GM. This can make a big difference in arguing for advantage on rolls or what should be possible without a roll. Or if you had someone serve on a submarine in the Navy in the group, they're going to have a lot of pretty sophisticated opinions about the difference between an airlock and a bulkhead that might impact play.
I'm not 100% sure why this doesn't happen in a similar way with medievalism. I could guess. I would guess that it's way less common to have an expert in medievalism at the table, and even if you do, everyone recognizes that as being sort of a separate hobby, and even if it's deemed relevant to play, there's always the fall back on: "Well, a wizard did it."
MoSh in particular leans very much into the "if you're rolling dice you're losing (but losing is fun)" design, so players who aren't ready to panic or die are incentivized to think laterally and make appeals to the Warden to get advantage on rolls or to succeed without a roll. That means they might be even more incentivized to pull from lived experience to mitigate the otherwise punishing dice math in the game. And because of the genre, they're even more likely to have relevant lived experience.