Modules as Path to Cohesive Setting\Game Comprehension

[Lee]

Hello cauldronites!

As some of you may know, we at DieselShot have released ChangedStars. As I put the last books in the mail and arrange the final round of promises for backers I turn my eyes fully t’wards the bread and butter of drawing in a whole sector of game runners:

Modules. Adventure modules, specifically.

All you need to know about CS for the purposes of this discussion are that it’s a hard sci-fi TTRPG with a bespoke setting which conceptualizes multiple different types of play (Frames) based on party concept: squads of marines, teams of expeditionary scientists, random assortment of people on a space flight, etc. These have 1-2 pages of support apiece as the “full Frames” had to be curtailed for time and space even as their need grew more apparent while I wrote.

The problem for some game runners is “what is the story about\who are the party?” In a fantasy adventure roleplaying game, this is a solved problem to such an extreme you must fight back against it if your vision differs in pretty much any way. Even then, deviance from the norm is highly supported in reams of ideas and texts. With sci-fi gaming you fall back heavily on setting or highly generified ideas of a certain type of sci-fi, usually shaped by its technologies.

I think we face for CS a similar problem to early Traveller: what does a Traveller party really get up to, and who are they? At least earliest Traveller was fairly tightly “military\veterans,” which is a jumping off point. We make no such past history presumptions at the mechanical level in ChangedStars. Several modules like “the Traveller Adventure Module” and “Nomads of the World-Ocean” are oft sighted examples that crystallized a lot of ideas about who Traveller PCs were and what they’d get up to. I’ve been looking to them for inspiration, so I support my question/discussion topic is really this:

What makes a module that helps form setting\game comprehension? The ideal point to me is the average DM’s idea of D&D and its implicit setting(s). If you can get people running your game, and get them to have that level of understanding of the game’s “basic setups,” you can essentially just feed people into that engine and witness self-replication.

Are there good examples of modules that did this for earlier games? Are my classic Traveller examples incorrect? What do you think really drives this comprehension, is it modules or something else (outside licensed IP examples like Star Wars\Trek etc)? How does one go about making their “Keep on the Borderlands” style examplar when the mode of play and comprehension is utterly removed from anything analogous to KotB? Is it possible for all types of game, or was this possible because dungeons\wandering and space stations\villages have an inherently transmissible nature as storytelling composition elements?

[hughbongo]

Hmm.

I’ll try to distill your post in an effort to make my answer comprehensible:

• Fantasy by nature provides a simple enough ‘why you’re here’: castle, dungeon, tomb, explore.
• Sci-fi has it a bit harder: spaceship/vast unknown, go forth.
• Are there staple pieces in the sci-fi ttrpg genre that ‘set the tone’ for what a group should be or what a PC is, fundamentally?
• How do you make one if not?—what elements of a module ‘settle’ a PC into an easily-enterable role or occupation that might help them make decisions how to proceed.
• How do you draw boundary lines so that PCs feel comfortable with what is possible within the the field of play?
• What sets the world in the PCs’ mind, whether mechanics or module or ..

I might have some of that wrong. Just trying to limber through your words a bit.

I mean, I keep bumping up against the notion of boundary versus no-boundary. In fantasy settings, I tend to easily assume broader boundaries: sky, ground. In sci-fi settings I tend to think of these as more malleable than not?

There’s something to the ‘this hasn’t happened yet’ in sci-fi settings that makes establishing strong physical rules and group understanding tough: most people have stepped into a hole in the ground or swum in the lake, but not so many have been weightless, as example.

I think I’d ask what Keep on the Borderlands established for you particularly to gain access to a better understanding of what needs be made. To me, the fantasy domain was most easily established because it replicated an alternate mode to a world that has come and gone (medieval, most).

I approach the limitlessness of the science fictional landscape, the ‘unknown’ aspects of it. These may already be mirrored in the unlimited aspects of magic, planar anything, & perhaps psionics which are both plague and possibility in the creation of fantasy realities.

I know for me, I settle down in physical material: the confines of tremendous spacecraft, the comparison of modern, huge operati like corporate headquarters or control rooms a la NASA or whatever, and the fact that walking into a hole on Planet X will be as unnerving as walking into a limestone cave in Kentucky.

I’m reading into what you wrote and extrapolating that the major concern is how do I create a knowable world to PCs in which they grasp risks and rewards with equal intensity; that I don’t have to parlay what ‘out of good breathable air’ might be like, as GM. That the ipsod crystals which pulse intermittent blue lights would gleam the same as a chest of gold.

For me anyway that’s just about admitting that 20,000 years or so in the future, certain aspects of reality just won’t change. That power, health, luxury, knowledge, and the fragile thread of life will still sit under the same sword hanging from the same thread, just drawn with new, more neon colored pencils.