Category: Commentary

Back in the day, Eamon, Colin and I did spend some time discussing the concepts a long time ago but it’s clear that we had divergent ideas. Some of these were because we knew too much (when you mix biologists and physicists and try to make a far-future sci-fi setting) and some of it was because we were simply different people. I wasn’t entirely happy with their vision of ‘alien races’ and I feel they were equally dissatisfied with my ‘handwavium’ approach to theoretical physics.

Eamon emailed me with some questions about Frontier development as I see it.

Q: What do you see as the general Frontier missions for PCs?

There’s a reason why the Captain of the Explorer is an AI. He can’t beam down to the planet (Ho ho!) The following scenario threads immediately present themselves:

1. mission ‘statements’ from Kumbu – this can cover trade, surveillance, colonisation
2. SPR – humanitarian ‘rescue’ mission (from Saving Private Ryan)
3. Free exploration (‘boldly going’)
4. Escorts for other vehicles
5. encounters with other vehicles, weird phenomena, unexpected aliens
6. espionage/combat – very special circumstances, political maneuvering

Q: I was wondering if there’s room for freelancing, or at least hiring space on starships. It would give the possibility of being dropped off in a system with a few systemships, do you job and go home (save for Factor X which messes things up and produces Adventure!). Or dropped off at Station X, or on Planet Y, or Asteroid Z.
Of course, you don’t need to be a freelancer for these missions to occur. Modular starships could easily achieve the same effect.

I don’t recognise this as being part of the setting per se, due to the immense cost of running a starship and limited access to Keyhole drives. Another category could be similar to the ‘mission ship’ game we played briefly, the Halo effect…players find some ancient tech which is flippin’ class.

Also – remember that HU is post-scarcity. Trade exists but in a barter system. There is no universal credit, no gold-pressed latinum….

Q: Are starships so expensive to be solely owned by governments? Can conglomerates/individuals ever hope to own them?

There are no comglomerates or super-rich in HU. The USA, probably still the strongest of the non-HU Earth nations, could potentially field something to this effect.

Q: Are there any chances of encountering ‘rogue’ ships.

When you’re MEANT TO BE the only bipedal humanoid species that speaks your anglicised dialect of Swahili (or a Swahili-ised dialect of English) for 200 light years, every other ship is a potential rogue.

Q: Taking a step down, the same question for systemships – everything from tugs to shuttles to asteriod prospectors. Who/what can own them?
“Who moves the cargo around Frontier space?” would be another way of looking at it.

Specialists – single purpose AIs, a hundred times less capable than an Expert AI. Why would you put a short-lived human through months of babysitting a rock?

Q: Do we have spacestations, mining stations, research bases, space colonies…etc in Frontier?

Yes, but again, these are not commercial interests within HU space.

These are not, by any means, the one true way to play Frontier but they represent the feel that I am aiming for. I think the genre I’m aiming for is under-represented in gaming as well as elsewhere. With the recent release of Traveller by Mongoose Publishing and the Thousand Suns rules from Rogue Games, the ‘Imperial Sci-Fi’ genre is well represented. Frontier is, to a degree, post-Imperial, neo-liberal in politics, transhuman in terms of taking what I see as practical and almost renaissance in outlook.

In our BRP-based Runequest game, Michael has asked a few times for rolls on ‘Gloranthan Lore’ and ‘Human Lore’ so that we can remember items from our own cultures. Because we’re all grotesque combat monsters (with the exception of Jim’s character), we’ve all spent maybe 10-20 points on these skills. Pretty feeble really but not surprising due to the way the BRP system works.

In writing for Frontier, I’m aware that there will be people who are on the peripherary of Human Unity, some who are embroiled in society and some who represent the pinnacle of society. My theory is that this takes time and effort and might best be represented in two ways?

1. Skill – the knowledge and time invested by the character in realising their citizenship.
2. Quality – the result of the time invested with applied knowledge.

For instance:

Chera Nyumba was born in a small village in Africa, in an area formerly known as Zambia. She lives with her husband and their three children. While the children are at school, Chera and Enzi work in their fields, collecting their crops. In the evenings, they watch and listen to the news feeds and Enzi tells the children stories until they fall asleep. Chera is interested in the environment around her as much as it affects her family and work. Chera is a Competent Citizen; she is part of her community and a functional, productive member of society.

Kesho has taken the skill “Citizen” at Professional. She grew up in the shadow of Kumbu and after her school years travelled through the Western European Expanses and the Americas. She now works with two Experts and four humans in the Explorer Crew Selection committee. For her leisure time, she enjoys sex and researching Explorer Disruptive Element reports. Kesho contributes to her community less than she contributes to Human Unity as a whole.

A character who has the Quality ‘Citizen’ is likely to belong to a family that has a reputation within Human Unity. By virtue of their heritage, their citizenship is seldom questioned even if they have not shown the character of their forebears.

A character who is within the Explorer Division should have Citizen at Competent or better. If generating an Explorer crew, give them Citizen at Competent for free but permit them to swap it out for any level higher. There is no way a character could be part of the Executive Team of an Explorer without this skill at least at Professional.

Description		Difficulty
Be able to name the metropolitan centres of Earth or rhyme off the first items Traded. This knowledge is typical for school children to memorise.		No dice
Prepare a presentation on Human cultures including those outside of Human Unity or know the likely location of the nearest Expert.		1d
Name all of the Governing Experts or Master Experts that exist or detail the best process for the Kumbu archives.		2d
Recite the laws and customs of Human Unity from memory or remember the primary missions of Explorer vessels in Human space		3d

I feel that with the introduction of ‘free skills’ we start to get a better feeling of the society. It acts like a “general education”, a little like the BRP skills as well as the BRP-based “Know” roll which you find in Call of Cthulhu. The existence of baseline abilities like these (other than the generic 5% Human Lore in Runequest) indicate the presence of established education and, by inference, a more advanced society. In a primitive society, there may be a rich oral tradition but very few games model this particularly well – then again, a ‘shaman’ is going to have this oral tradition and a player character Shaman is more likely to place points into ‘shaman-like’ skills.

Some other games have provided copious amounts of information in an attempt to get the players to use the rulebooks as reference materials. Skyrealms of Jorune, Tekumel and Blue Planet spring to mind here. This has some pros and cons. Some of us, like me, really enjoy reading setting material and are considerably less willing to read rules materials. On the other hand, some people just can’t handle the huge volume of background information that a game can produce (and if you don’t believe me, I’ll give you the metric weight of the material Michael reproduced for our Glorantha game and, yeah, our characters should know this stuff!). How do we strike a happy medium? Provide good detailed background about your setting and also provide a way for the more casual gamer to intercept it – this latter point is made a lot easier by having fiction, audio books, movies, maps and other ‘props’ available.

In 1966, Transhuman was defined by F. M. Esfandiary (later, FM-2030) as:

included physical and mental augmentations including prostheses, reconstructive surgery, intensive use of telecommunications, a cosmopolitan outlook and a globetrotting lifestyle, androgyny, mediated reproduction (such as in vitro fertilisation), absence of religious beliefs, and a rejection of traditional family values. (Source: Wikipedia

The word itself has come to mean “next evolutionary human” when it really means a stage of “Transitory Human”, where we start to notice differences. Of course, nothing in the above quote has anything to do with evolution as we can achieve transhuman status within our own lifetimes. The evolutionary process is described only in successive generations.

(RPG.net has a thread about a new game called Eclipse Phase – “a game of transhuman conspiracy and horror”.

From the thread and web page it seems like a Transhuman space-meets-Traveller-The-New-Era type background especially with:

the driving powers behind the wars—both AI and transhuman—were infected by a mutating virus with multiple infection vectors—biological, information, nano—dubbed the Exsurgent virus. Whatever its source, this virus has been known to sometimes transform its victims into something unexplainable … something monstrous and reality-altering.

…with a dollop of Cthulhu. I will likely buy the book (the same way I bought Sufficiently Advanced) though the blurb doesn’t inspire me. Is it that I want a game filled with some hope for a change? It might be that I’m not looking really for the inexpicable in a game setting (which also belies my general annoyance with Call of Cthulhu – in a world where there are snuff movies, special effects and Tom Savini, is it possible to actually go insane from seeing something horrific? Would the existence of something like that freak me out? I don’t think so!)

Horror and Sci-Fi sometimes works well. Alien would be the most obvious example of a resounding success. It’s more likely that you’ll find a dozen examples of where Sci-Fi didn’t work well with horror – the most obvious one I can think of being Event Horizon. I once ran a somewhat abortive game using the 2300AD system. The players were investigating a space anomaly (which turned out to be a Colour). It put the crew into a torpor and the ship sustained their bodily functions. They arise from their suspended animation nearly a hundred years later and find that Colours, sentient but not sapient, have been harnessed as a energy source and mechanism for ‘jump drive’.

I like Sci-Fi games but a lot of them end up with a resolute “What now?” after character generation is complete. Blue Planet and Transhuman Space have been accused of this at various times. I think it’s less a problem of the game (especially as we see the amount of material available) but more of an imagination issue – whether the GM can put forward a gaming framework. Jorune managed this well with the Drenn trials and SLA Industries with their BPN system.

Of course, Frontier is my transhumanist game set in a far-flung post-apocalyptic future. Of course, in Frontier, Earth still has a major, advanced technological human civilisation and has fully recovered from the apocalypse that overtook most of the West. There is a reliance on technology for science, research, law, democracy and war. There are sapient and sentient artificial intelligences which act as both tool and mentor to humanity. My inspirations for Frontier are many and have departed considerably from the “Star Trek But Better” conversations that Eamon, Colin and I would talk about over a decade ago. We never specifically mentioned Transhumanism (probably because to a greater degree we were already living Transhuman lives.

At the moment I’m working on ‘6’, ‘illusion’ and doing bits and pieces on the other lines. Frontier remains, for the time being, a long distance project.