Lore and Legends of the Dezzyverse

Tag: science fiction

  • Only Human

    Only Human

    Electric Head, Cannibal Core, the Television Said..

    Most Tabletop Roleplaying Games feature humans as the dominant species in the setting. The reasoning is straightforward, Players, being humans themselves, can most easily identify with their characters when they are human as well. It also saves on lore-overload. With humans, whether they’re from Earth, Corellia, Rigel IV, or Vland do not require an essay explaining what they are. Roll up a character, and get playing, no need to wonder about why your Vulcan has green blood, or your Wookie looks suspiciously like Bigfoot. Also, with a human-centric setting, all the gear is easily designed and described. No trying to explain the kinesthetics of a laser rifle made for Hivers when your lasgun looks pretty much like the rifles and carbines that exist today on the real world.

    A group of Hivers suited up and packin’ Hiver-heat!

    Impact of a Human Universe

    Human centered universes are scaled and designed to be convenient for humans. If Humans are the default species, the habitats and furnishings are familiar. Even if it’s a “space-chair” that floats it’s a chair that is designed for bipedal mammals with arms, legs, feet and hands. No need to slow the game down describing it and making the player describe how their character takes a seat. Buildings and vehicles are scaled for 1.75 meter tall 68 kg operators and passengers. Computers are designed with keyboards for manipulative digits and the ability to communicate through voice. Doorknobs are made for people with opposable thumbs.

    It’s why most of the aliens in Star Trek and Star Wars are near-human. Even Wookies, at 2.2 meters tall are human enough to pilot a YT-1300 Stock Light Freighter. All of the bumpy headed aliens of the Star Trek Universe are compatible enough that a member of one species can be disguised as a member of one of the other species. Of course, the practical reason for this is that the actors are themselves humans and it’s cheaper and more practical to throw a rubber mask on and spirit-gum some extra hair and be an alien on screen. Just look at what was needed in Return of the Jedi to operate and act Jabba the Hutt. Poor guy only got to leave his couch of perpetual indulgence after the Special Editions were released and computer graphics could be used to let the big ‘ol slug slither around Mos Eisley.

    It’s fun to speculate what a Hutt civilization, or a Tholian civilization would be like. It’s a nice place to visit as a role-player. Stepping out of the familiar into the alien, is a fun exercise, but not something many players would want to deal with week in and week out for the length of a long campaign. Being unable to pass through a door because it’s scaled for a Jawa is a challenge, Not being able to pass through ALL the doors in the city because it’s all scaled for Jawas is just tedious.

    There is Infinite Diversity in the Human Condition

    The danger of the default-human setting is that everyone starts to look, sound and act like the culture the players and game masters live in. Even a setting that presents itself as highly diverse, like Star Trek is mostly causation, especially in The Original Series. If the game master isn’t careful, the distant world of Efate can start to feel like Los Angeles, or Dallas or Tampa Bay.

    The contrasting issue is also a danger. It’s all to easy to lean on stereotypes of “exotic” human cultures. Every desert planet starts to feel like Algeria or Egypt. The primitive worlds start to look a lot like aboriginal and tribal cultures as portrayed in the pulps. As GMs I’m not saying that every world needs to have a unique culture with roots going back centuries. But if you’re designing the next world the PCs are visiting, recognize when you’re shortcutting the humans that live there as someone else’s real culture. If you spend the time to look at your setting elements, you’ll also find it really easy to change the people of the place enough to make them unique without diving into worn out stereotypes.

    Humans are highly adaptable, and as a species, we can make tools to survive in every climate imaginable, including space. Over the course of generations, populations of humans living in different climates will evolve physical characteristics that help them survive in the climate where they live. Furthermore, the humans that have evolved in one climate are able to have children with other humans from other climates and the genetic mix gives humanity a near infinite variety. You can use this for your player characters and your npcs in a campaign. It’s easy for a band of eight characters to be visually and culturally unique from one character to the next.

    More Human Than Human

    with apologies to Rob Zombie

    There has been an unfortunate standard set in tabletop role playing games over the decades of making humans the “default” species, and as such not giving them bonus or disadvantageous abilities or modifiers. Humans are characters that were played as rolled. Which, while balanced, didn’t excite players. Especially when other species could see in low light, or have superhuman agility or strength or inherent weapons like claws or fangs.

    But this really doesn’t need to be true. Humans have adapted several exceptional abilities based on their environments. People from high altitudes have developed expanded lung capacities and efficient oxygen consumption, people from cold climates have evolved heavy bodily hair, people from climates that experience excessive exposure to sunlight develop elevated melanin deposits in their skin. The list goes on and on.

    Game balance is a bit over-rated. Character abilities do not need to be a zero-sum balance. Depending on a character’s origins, it could be justifiable for human characters to have resistance to environmental toxins, or radiation, or prehensile lower extremities. Even tails. Just look at science fiction. Humans have a broad variety of almost superhuman abilities and crippling vulnerabilities. A people who evolve in orbital freefall might have exceptionally long limbs, flexibility and dexterity, but suffer incredibly under 1G pressures. People who evolve on distant dark worlds may develop the ability to see deeper into the infrared spectrum but become colorblind.

    Cat-Girls and Dog-Faced Boys

    Body modification is commonplace in several science fiction settings, for that matter, body modification is pretty common in the modern world. Human characters can begin game play modified to present as aliens, anthropomorphic animals, or any other unique combination. With enough cyberware, aesthetic surgeries, or biochemical therapies, a character’s identity can have infinite diversity.

    Again, most of this is cosmetic, but in some cases, being a modified human character can come with some abilities or modifiers, as mentioned above. Players and GMs can use some of the alien species from published settings. Aslan and Vargr from Traveller, Lyrans, Kzinti and Gorn from Star Trek, and the Lepi from Star Wars as guidance for what benefits or modifiers a character might employ on their character sheet.

    Jaxxon, the Green Space Bunny and acquaintance of Han Solo

    Humaniti in Traveller

    In the 3rd Imperium of Traveller, humans are the majority species. Humaniti is so widespread in Traveller that there are 3 branches of humans that would be conisdered “Major Species”. Two of these species, the Vilani and the Zhodani are humans originally from Earth. 300,000 years earlier an advanced alien empire, the Ancients abducted groups of humans from Earth and brought those humans with them as they traveled among the stars. They seeded two human colonies in systems favorable to human development, Vland (where the Vilani evolved) and Zhodane (where the Zhodani evolved). The Ancients had also taken other species from Earth (and other planets, the Ancients were not shy about seeding forms of life on different planets just to see what happens) which in the case of Terran wolves, is where the Vargr originated). The humans who were left on Earth, evolved into the Solomani.

    In the current era of My Traveller Universe (3i 1125, the beginning of the Hard Times) the 3rd Imperium has Solomani populations towards the rimward sectors, Vilani populations towards the coreward sectors, and the majority of the Imperium is populated by people of mixed Vilani-Solomani ancestry. The Zhodani, being the people of a rival Empire are rare as Imperial Citizens, but in the spinward and coreward sectors (“behind the claw”) Vilani-Solomani-Zhodani ancestries are uncommon, but not unheard of.

    What does this mean? In this case this is an clear indication that humans are one species with several sub-species. The distinctions of Vilani, Solomani, Zhodani, and any of the hundreds of minor sub-species of humaniti are cultural and ethnic at best. For most characters, “human imperial citizen” commonly refers to the Solomani-Vilani ancestry, but there is nothing stopping a player from describing their human character having an ancestry that is regionally distinctive.

    As mentioned, several ancestries of the human species have developed interstellar empires, and have distinctive cultures and subcultures. The Traveller source material, especially the Alien Modules can provide deep dives into the three major cultures, Solomani, Vilani, and Zhodani. Vilani and Solomani cultures have blended over centuries into the society that is described in the 3rd Imperium. At the Rimward border of the Imperium, the Solomani have carved out what could be described as a Solomani ethno-state.

    The Solomani Sphere

    In the long history of Traveller, one of the pivotal events was the Solomani Rim War (3i 990 – 1002). In this conflict, the 3rd Imperium attempted to reassert authority over the worlds of the “Solomani Autonomous Region”. The war resulted in a contested victory for the 3rd Imperium when the Sol system was conquered. The Solomani Confederaion was unable to retake the homeworld of humaniti, and the 3rd Imperium was eager to bring an end to the war by 3i 1002. For the next 114 years, the occupied worlds of Diabei, Diaspora, the Old Expanses and the Solomani Rim were a powder-keg of ethnic conflict.

    The Solomani Confederation, previously the Solomani Sphere is distinct from the 3rd Imperium. Like most interstellar empires, the Solomani Confederation does not have a single cultural expression, but it does have a common, shared mythology. The Solomani Hypothesis, that theorises (with strong evidence in support) humaniti developed and evolved on Terra (Earth) first, and was spread into the stars first by the Ancients and then by their own technology.

    The term”Solomani” gets overused in the Confederation. One major reason stems from the Solomani Hypothesis; because humaniti originated on Earth, the Solomani are the original humans and are thus superior to all other branched species of humaniti. The Solomani Party is the political organization that governs the Confederation. The Solomani Cause is the political strategy that promotes Solomani humans outside of the Confederation. The Solomani Cause has also been the rallying point surrounding the “liberation” of Terra from the 3rd Imperium and further restoring the Solomani Sphere to it’s pre-3i 990 extents. The Solomani Movement is the Cause as a factor in politics outside the Confederation.

    Aren’t the Solomani the Bad Guys?

    It’s somewhat of a debate in the Traveller community as to whether or not the Solomani Confederation are the “bad guys” of the Rim. The veneration of the Solomani Hypothesis and the Solomani Cause gives some “supremacist” overtones, or at the very least a classist society with Solomani Humans in the position of privilege. The Solomani Party being the dominant political faction (indeed, the only legal faction) within the Solomani Confederation leans hard towards authoritarian govenrments with some really bad associations throughout history.

    It’s been pointed out that the Solomani Confederation isn’t monolithic, in the same way as the Emperor isn’t a monolith in the Third Imperium, the Hive Federation, or the 29 Clans in the Aslan Hierate are monolithic for those empire. The Solomani Confederation covers about six sectors, and contains about 2,000 inhabited systems. If you think about the current diversity of cultures, ethnicities and governmental bodies in our one star system, the idea that the Solomani Party holds and iron-fisted grip on society throughout the Solomani Confederation is farcical. Even if a given Traveller campaign portrays the Solomani Party as oppressive, it’s not the Empire from Star Wars, or the Mirror Universe Terran Empire of Star Trek. Remember the distances involved and times to send communications from one system to another that we explored in this blog.

    The Solomani of the Confederation aren’t jackbooted thugs checking for “genetic purity” at ubiquitous checkpoints. The Solomani Confederation, like all the major empires of Traveller is best described as a “tribe”. It’s a nationalistic tribe that promotes the Solomani Cause, but that’s not much different than the 3rd Imperium promotion the Emperor, or the Zhodani Consulate promoting Zhodani Psionic Society. They’re not “supremacist” but their cultures promote their own Empires.

    In My Traveller Universe, the Solomani Confederation are antagonists, at least in the rimward areas of Diaspora sector. In the Rebellion War, the Solomani Confederation launched the “Second War of Solomani Liberation” to liberate the Sol system, and reclaim the systems of the Solomani Sphere. The Imperial Occupied Region covers the four rimward subsectors of Diaspora sector, ,as well as the majority of the Solomani Rim sector. The further rimward in Diaspora one goes, the more Solomani Confederation operations one will encounter.

    During the Hard Times, in Diaspora, the Occupied Subsectors are aligning much closer to the Solomani Confederation. The vision of a re-established Solomani Sphere is clearer than it’s been in a century. The Solomani Confederation has not suffered nearly as badly as Lucan’s 3rd Imperium and the stability offered by the Confederation Navy has helped these systems weather the Black War and the Imperial Decline. It’s not an example of the Evil Empire winning, it’s an example of how a portion of the vast 3rd Imperium is keeping back a second Long Night.

  • A Fist Full of C-Bills

    A Fist Full of C-Bills

    ..and A Pocket-full of Credits

    Science Fiction money takes many forms. From primitive cultures trading precious baubles to vast financial networks that process electronic and digital transactions through subspace and hyperspace communications. For adventurers with bills to pay, the way they access their money can be a challenge as they jump from one star system to the next. This article relates to some ideas posted in O God, Thy Sea is so Great and Money Makes the World Go ‘Round.

    Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff

    In our real world, budgets and finance can get detailed. Most of us have had the experience of scraping every corner and couch cushion for loose change to go down to the corner store with. Some of the reasons we play role-playing games is to take a break from worrying about if we can afford that extra box of mac-and-cheese or not.

    The “small stuff” can all be abstracted into lifestyle. In Traveller, lifestyle is related to the Social Standing characteristic (at least in the Third Imperium setting). Adventurers with a low lifestyle, sleep in a fleabag flat and eat kibble from a grey box labeled “food”, those with a high lifestyle, stay in luxury apartments and eat fresh, or exotic meals. Don’t dwell too much on the details though, lifestyle is a player choice for their adventurers, there might be a regular cost, or not. Keep the action focused on the adventure and not the downtime.

    Sometimes, the Small Stuff is the Adventure

    This is different from looking over character sheets and noticing if a character has enough centi-credits to live well during the adventure. These are adventures where the characters have lost access to their normal resources. The bank fails, they’re robbed, a new government won’t accept their money (the classic “we don’t accept Federation Credits, only Gold Pressed Latinum”). The objective on these adventures is to survive without money until they recover their means to rejoin the markets.

    Speaking of Gold Pressed Latinum

    In the main cultures of most sci-fi settings, currency is electronic. (Think cryptocurrency, but hyper-efficient). In cultures where technology is advanced enough to manage an interstellar society, this form of currency is practical and mostly efficient. It also reduces incidents of fraud, the possibility of devaluation because some explorer discovers a colossal source of precious metal, or a technology like the Star Trek replicator is developed. Data as currency is extremely efficient to use. Anyone who has made a purchase with a card over the internet has experienced this convenience.

    While efficient and convenient, even at highly technically advanced cultures, there remains a need for a more physical currency. In Star Trek, that’s “Gold Pressed Latinum” which is made from a unreplicatable, rare, element suspended in gold. Other settings use similar things, though in places like the Inner Sphere, or the 3rd Imperium, that sort of hard currency is tied to the electronic economy and minted by the governmental authority.

    Hard currency has another benefit. Cold, hard, cash is difficult to trace. Especially over interstellar distances. Tracing technology can be defeated, and unlike bills, or proxy currency, as any Ferengi can tell you “Latinum is Latinum everywhere in the galaxy”. For crews and companies that don’t want to leave a trail of money behind them as they operate, sometimes across hostile borders, having a valuable, difficult to track currency is a must.

    From an adventuring perspective, hard currency gives a fun æsthetic for heist or treasure-seeking adventures. Think about the old World War 2 Movie “Kelly’s Heroes”, that would work so well in the Battletech Universe. A group of mercs learning about a cache of hard currency, like a bank in occupied territory and taking an “unauthorized expedition” to grab the vault before it gets moved somewhere “safe”. Most of the ideas presented in, Money Makes the World Go Round, can be applied, especially with regards to what happens after your holds are filled with pallets of currency.

    Battlemechs, Tanks, Space Fighters, and Starships

    Big ticket items are common in Science Fiction settings. What would Star Wars be without the Millenium Falcon? Hammer’s Slamers without Grav Tanks? Gundam without Mobile Suits? In most settings, the characters belong to organizations that assign them to their war machines or ships. Maintenance for these big ticket items is covered by the organization.

    But in settings where the characters are the crew of a Free Trader, or the pilots of a mercenary company of Battlemechs, these costs are a foundation of the campaign. We see this in Firefly, “Find a crew, find a job, keep flying”. Star Wars Episode IV also shows this off. Han Solo is charging 10,000 to take Ben and Luke to Alderran. He’s in debt to Jabba who is threatening his ship. Point being, everything involved with these big ticket items are expensive. From purchasing them to maintaining them to repairing or improving them. Costs run into the millions of credits, and they’re recurring. Ships need fuel, weapons eat ammunition, crew need food, water and air on long space journeys.

    When designing adventures, the Game Master needs to take the costs into account when they’re adding rewards. The adventurers need to make enough money to cover their expenses while turning a profit. This pushes this style of campaign into a higher scale of economy. While a group of scoundrels may well be able to retire from adventuring and “go legit” if they score a million C-bills, in a campaign that revolves around a company of Big Stompy Robots, that same million C-bills might cover two or three months of maintenance. For the owners of a starship a single Megacredit will run out quick, fast, and in a hurry.

    Filling Contracts

    Especially in Mercenary campaigns, contracts are common. These are great for Game Masters and Players Alike. Contracts outline what the adventure is expected to be. Where to go. What to do, and how much the compensation is going to be at the end. Longer term contracts can also include covering maintenance, repair, and fuel, relieving the players from that accounting for a time.

    Contracts are not only applicable to the mercenary campaign. Worlds can contract free traders to deliver mail to them, or maintain trade with nearby systems, free traders can serve as a temporary solution to these systems until they build their own fleets and infrastructures. Still, it’s an opportunity for characters to go places, do things, and have adventures.

    Many settings have an independent authority to mediate contracts and enforce their terms. The Mercenary Review Board in Battletech, merchant guilds, megacorporate syndicates, Imperial ministries, serve these roles as arbiter, and holds payment in escrow until the terms of a contract are fulfilled. But some science-fiction settings do not. Crews need to negotiate guarantees and protections for themselves, as do the parties they are contracting with. For a GM, this can lead to double-crosses, backstabs and other creative ways to introduce twists in an adventure that threatens to become boring.

    Outrunning Your Mortgage

    Especially in settings like Traveller, where interstellar communications travel at the speeds of the fastest courier as described in O God, Thy Sea is so Great. A group of adventurers can skip their bank note on their big ticket item. Jumping out to the fringe of “civilized” space and joining the pirates and nomads and homesteaders out past the perimeter. Or, in a setting where wars rage between empires, hiding from their lien-holder in one empire by escaping into it’s rival.

    This is in essence, stealing the things that are mortgaged. Considering star ships, battlemechs, tanks and space fighters are really really expensive the finances won’t just write off the loss. After all, the characters just ran off with tens of millions of C-Bills (or Megacredits) of their money. Collection agents, Repo men, Skip-tracers and Bounty Hunters will follow the ship, and the characters everywhere they go. Running them down, even out on the periphery to drag them and their ship back to face consequences.

    Characters can run, they can even run fast, but they’ll never run far enough to ever be comfortable not looking over their shoulder. Even Han Solo ended up in carbonite, hanging as a trophy in Jabba the Hutt’s palace.