Step 4: Setting
The Verse
Several of the design points suggest that meaningful authority above the station of the self-determined characters should be elsewhere, absent, incompetent or nasty
Others design points suggest that the obvious setting is a meaningfully isolated and/or frontier environment, where the encroachment of “civilisation” is inevitable but could be delayed by a generation with concerted effort.
This gives room for the lawful to be lawful and the chaotics to be unlawful, and the evils to be unpleasant with minimal comeuppance, and the good to be good but with not much in the way of backup.
But in order for the lawfuls and goods to not feel like they’ve been abandoned, they need contact with The Establishment - bounties (hmm, another mook-crew problem), messages from the President, legitimate authority (even with no power to back it up), aims that will improve their lives, the lives of those around them, and the march of the arrival of the establishment.
So, there needs to be contact with the Establishment, but a good reason why they can’t just call in backup. Solution: Travel time from there to here is massive, with capacity for faster (close enough to instant) communication. And because it can be speeded up or slowed down by meaningful player action, it’s gotta be an infra-structure project. A stargate/mass relay type thing.
Design Decision:
An area in space that is connected enough to have it’s own name, with more than one planet/solar system - enough livable space to get meaningfully lost in. Enough space for people to live out their lives in and feel like it’s a good idea. Enough space for mysteries and secrets (because otherwise what is even the point).
But short enough travel time between each end that it would make sense to treat it as a single polity, and that it’s not ridiculous for the characters to keep running into each other.
On a frontier - the edge of the expansion of known space into (truely) unoccupied space. Travel distance/time to get to this space is very far/long, but communication moves much faster. The infrastructure to properly connect the space to the rest of the galaxy is in progress, but can be meaningfully hastened or shortened by a significant margin with concerted effort.
The place is not lawless, but similar to the Golden Age of Piracy or The Old West (or at least the myths thereof), the law struggles in the face of well organised crime. Much like other crime-focused fiction, the criminals provide a kind of order of their own, because they need other people to work to make money so that they can steal it, but they’re motivated to keep the actual law far away.
Are we alone out here?
Pro’s for everyone being human
- Everyone having the same skillsets makes more sense
- Removes a bunch of balancing challenges
- Takes species-ism off the table as a plot point
- Reduces lore and costuming barriers to entry
Pros for NOT everyone being human
- Differences can be super fun RP
- What if an alien species reacts to chocolate like humans do to cocaine?
- More ways to be a person
- It’s objectively more interesting
- Can justify some skills that are far enough outside of human norm to be fun
- Balance still important! Being a normal human should still be as much fun as anything else
Design Decision:
Yes to Aliens. Then when I’m playing around with Skills then I can figure out what that looks like. But a small number of species, not an infinite set of options.
Weird Space Stuff
Considering that Weird Space Stuff is one of the reasons I wanted to play around in Space, yes there is definitely going to be Weird Space Stuff
Out
- Space wizards - including the Doctor, Jedi, Jedi-with-the-serial-numbers-filed-off
In
- Wormholes
- Fun and Games with Non-Linear Time
- Space monsters, some of whom might be bound by the rules of physics
- The Thing
- Digital people
- Medium-level transhumanism and cyberpunk elements
- Though the frontier means we’ve reverted to early stage capitalism!
Maybes
- Brain/Brawn combos (brain could work well for distance players?)
Next up: First stab at skills. Much excite!