Campaign Journal 2013: Prospecti, Part I

Originally published May 1, 2013

It's that time again, time to launch a new campaign and that means a new set of campaign prospecti. While my Hunter: the Vigil game (the subject of the earlier series) still has a few more sessions before it is complete, my online group will be starting their new game in a few months.

This time around I had two very different ideas of what game I wanted to play. I was torn between two genres: a hard science fiction setting and a spin on Changeling the Lost. Because of this I have broken the prospectus process into two stages. First stage was picking the genre while the second stage will focus on the choice of themes (much like my Hunter prospectus process was). So here are the prospecti:

The Lost

This would be a Changeling: the Lost game but with the characters beginning as normal mortals who discover a hidden world next to their own. For those unfamiliar with Changeling, this is a game about faeries and magic, fantasy and madness, where human beings are turned into strange otherworldly Changelings. They have access to the Hedge, an alien realm of thorns. It is a labyrinth of narrow passageways where goblins and other magical creatures lurk.

The major themes I am interested in exploring:

• Fantasy vs. Delusion. Your character can see things others cannot. Things others think are imaginary. Are you crazy or is this real?
• Magic is Change. Magic twists things, mutates them, turning animals into hobgoblins and people into something else. The price of power is change. There is no going back.

The mood of the game would definitely be horror. The Hedge is not a realm conducive to remaining whole in mind or body. It encroaches on the real world, opening doorways to pull the unwary into it.

I have a couple frameworks in mind depending on which themes we want to emphasize. A few examples are researchers in the field of dreams who discover impossible things in humanity’s subconscious (Fantasy vs. Delusion), school age children who find a hidden world, or mortals who encounter an encroaching spread of toxic magic (Magic is Change).

Mechanically this would be the World of Darkness. The main difference from Changeling: the Lost, is you would start as mortals and gradually gain the aspects of changelings as you interact with the Hedge and are corrupted by it (in-game terms buying up Wyrd, the power stat). I’ve also considered using some of Innocents (which models children) if people are interested. There is also supposed to be an update to the core rules sometime in the next couple months (in the God-Machine Chronicle) so we may use some of that (depending on what that looks like).

Inspirations: Spirited Away, Pan’s Labyrinth, Recycle, Paprika

To Boldly Go

This a science fiction game set in the distant future of mankind. You can think of it as Star Trek but with a much more hard science fiction bent. No transporters, humanoid aliens, or otherwise miraculous technology. The main exception is faster than light drive.

The history of the setting is that two centuries ago the solar system suffered a terrible civil war. Many space colonies, faced with possible destruction, fled the system with (then) newly developed FTL technology. Now a solitary government rules over the solar system and seeks to reconnect to those lost colonies. The game would focus on the crew of an exploratory ship interacting with these lost colonies whose societies and technology has developed in strange and alien ways.

Major themes are:

• Exploration: there are strange worlds to find, (non-intelligent) alien life, and millions of humans (and their uplifted animals, AIs, and bioengineered drones) to meet.
• Diplomacy: You are trying to make friends and must navigate the strange societies that have developed over the past two centuries.

The mood of the game is one of culture shock. The PCs come from a culture that has repressed many technologies that would greatly alter the human experience. The colonies have not. Thus they have developed strange alien civilizations based on human level AI, extreme genetic engineering, mind emulation, nanotechnology, and similar technologies.

I can see a few different frameworks for this game. The characters might be the command crew (or perhaps key diplomatic team) of a ship serving the new Federation. Or perhaps they serve corporate masters and are searching the universe for new markets and new resources. Alternatively perhaps the game could focus on one world with a new colony being settled.

The system would be Fate. Probably a tweaked version of Diaspora (which has the virtue of an SRD: http://www.vsca.ca/Diaspora/diaspora-srd.html).

Inspirations: I’m hesitant to list any as so many science fiction books and movies have bad science. But the TV shows Star Trek and Farscape, the books Altered Carbon and Heart of the Comet probably form the basis of my own inspiration, plus the GURPS series Transhuman Space.

Feedback

The results were interesting and unfortunately not very decisive. My players were interested in both settings at roughly equal levels. This was especially hard for me as both of these ideas have been germinating in my mind for a long time. To Boldly Go has been on my mind on and off for over 12 years while The Lost was born of the failure of my previous Changeling game and a series of ideas I had 2 years ago. Indeed in some ways this is the second time these games have gone head to head as my previous Changeling game beat a less polished version of To Boldly Go.

In the end it came down to familiarity. I have not played enough of the Fate system to be entirely comfortable running it yet. Plus while Diaspora is a probably sufficient as a system, I am curious about Fate 3.0 which will likely not be out until at least July, which is when I would be running the game.

So next time we will look at the expanded themes for The Lost and find out what type of game I will be running.