Starting From the Planet Up

Some of the best advice that I have gotten from this whole extant blogging community has been to start your campaign planning small. When it comes to setting up a world for characters to explore, I had always assumed that one needed to draw a map of the entire campaign world and populate it with cities and kingdoms before starting. After all, what would happen if one of your players wanted to see the map to expand their travels? (Actual answer: nothing, because this never happened.) Now that I'm back in the campaign planning saddle, I figured that I would put this advice towards my criminal sci-fi sandbox, Assholes in Space. After a week spent watching episodes of Cowboy Bebop and playing the free Steam weekend of Brink, I've been jonesing for a little space western outlaw action.

Back in the April A to Z challenge, I came up with the idea of convict planets as a way of integrating "outer planets" post-apocalyptic action to a presumably cosmopolitan space opera setting. I figure that a single planet where the PCs are forced to explore until they can formulate a way to escape is a perfect starting point for a universe that's built upward. The convict planet has a great framework for faction conflict, environmental hazards and plenty of non-linear thinking on both the player and GM's parts.

My first step is going to be sketching out a general environment overview of the planet. If anyone out there has a good name for a planetary prison colony, let me know.

E is for Equipment

For me, equipment has always been the slowest part of the pre-game character creation ritual. I always seem to have players that agonize over the differences between an Ares Predator and a Browning Ultra-Power, the relative usefulness of a length of rope vs. a bedroll and the eventual kicking of one's self when they realize that they've forgotten something.

Creating the equipment list for Assholes in Space has been an exercise in keeping things simple and modular. I wanted to minimize the equipment bookkeeping and the countless ammunition tracking from which Savage Worlds often suffers. Every piece of equipment that I have created or cherry picked from one Savage Worlds book or another is there because I think that they fit the style of the game in one way or another. Each weapon listing is genericized and ammunition has been completely broken down into action-movie style 'magazines.'

Everything may be generic, but there are incentives for making your weapons your own. If a player comes up with a name for it (say, Black Falcon), they get a +1 to hit with it. If they draw a picture of it, they get a +1 to damage with the same weapon. Since there isn't any more ammunition tracking, these bonuses easily take the place of Double Taps or Burst Fire that appear in the Savage Worlds rulebook and let the players make up some cool stuff about the world. If players aren't really artistically inclined, there's always Pimp My Gun, a Flash website that RPGnet clued me into in the past. Using the old version (since I don't really care about all the finicky bits of guns), it's a blast to do the Hollywood Sci-Fi Retrofit by taking an existing gun...

...mess around with the construction and glue some extra bits on to make a Space Gun!

Now you try it!

C is for Convict Planets

I came up with the idea of convict planets so that I could scratch the Trigun-style space western itch in Assholes in Space without having to seriously redefine the game world. One of the things that I really appreciate about science fiction settings in general is that a completely new environment or set of social rules can be just a planet away, like how Firefly and Cowboy Bebop can switch from gleaming future cities to frontier satellites in between episodes. Plus, the idea of desert planets conquered with jury-rigged technology just tends to appeal to me.

Convict planets are the interstellar equivalent of Australia, where the less scrupulous or financially solvent members of the Federation of Allied Worlds can send their repeat offenders to fend for themselves. These makeshift colonies are generally located on planets where terraforming has failed to meet the specifications of a multi-stellar corporation or whose natural environments are... less than hospitable. Anything from barren wastelands to swamp worlds filled with vicious carnivorous plants could be home to a convict planet, depending upon the severity of the crimes committed. Hopefully.

Criminals being sent to a convict planet are generally launched from Federal prison transports in dropships known as Oneways. Each Oneway is only equipped with stabilizing thrusters and enough fuel to move the ship into an atmospheric entry, where an ample amount of heat shielding and impact-resistant foam should protect every passenger in the crash landing. During the drop, a recorded message will inform the prisoners about the basics of their new home, its environmental hazards and the existing power structures (if any). Once they crash and extricate themselves from the foam-filled mess that was their transport, they're on their own.

Some convict planets have developed far better than their overseers anticipated, creating towns and cities from both the planet's natural resources and the salvaged wrecks of their Oneways. Generally, these more developed planets are either controlled by feudal warlords or else divided into civilized outposts and roving gangs of raiders and thieves. Towns are simultaneously wary and welcoming of new arrivals, like a constant Yojimbo-style struggle for power. Of course, there are plenty of other convict planets that have turned out more like the Most Dangerous Game.

Picture from Greg Martin's super cool guide on how to make planets in Photoshop, which I will totally start doing once I have some free time.

A is for Assholes in Space

As I hope most of my followers remember, I started the month of March off with an idea for a Savage Worlds sci-fi setting called Assholes in Space, my kitchen-sink melange of space western anime, Bioware space opera, cyberpunk attitude and good old fashioned old-school adventuring spirit (which is to say, profit-motivated jackasses who will nevertheless do the right thing when the chips are down. Probably.) Needless to say, I was unfortunately overwhelmed by graduate school work and had relatively little time to put pen to paper and write up world concepts and a cast of characters. Not to mention that my flash drive, which up until recently was my depository for my school work and all things Assholes in Space-related, had a tragic mishap involving an elbow and outstretched arms late at night last week. As a result, my previous files will be inaccessible without the aid of a flash drive recovery company and probably $150.

But honestly, the equipment lists and racial descriptions only go so far in describing what Assholes in Space is really like for me. I'm often afflicted with what's commonly known as 'Gamer ADD,' which means that I am incredibly susceptible to outside influences on my gaming ideas. Assholes in Space is enough of a sci-fi sandbox that it can accommodate just about anything that I want to add. Trigun-esque space western adventures can be found on convict planets or frontier asteroids where the strongest rule with a literal iron fist. Ocean's 11-style heists and capers are commonplace on urban core worlds with mile-high skyscrapers and walkways. There can be giant robots alongside psychics, alien martial arts that take full advantage of having four arms and good old fashioned revolver-slinging exploits.

So this month, I'd like to get a lot more of the crunch and ideas for the setting out there, either in blog post or gazetteer format. I want people to see the cinematic combat rules that I've cooked up for Savage Worlds, the different sci-fi races that I'm having trouble naming and the adventure ideas and locations that potential PCs can tear up.

A New Direction

I realized today that I was spending more time on writing up space opera races and weaponry than I did on assignments and group work for library school. Unfortunately, that's one thing that I can't afford to do right now, so Assholes in Space will probably be riding the backburner for the time being.

However, that's not to say that I'm going to put this month of blog updating on hiatus. I'm just going to take a different approach. A little bit slower with development and brainstorming, since I'm probably not going to get the chance to run this thing until the end of the month anyhow.

Assholes in Space: The Mixtape

Along with my initial concept of the Assholes in Space campaign, I made a mixtape of setting-appropriate soundtrack music that helped me visualize the setting. I tried to find as many of them as I could on YouTube, but there are definitely some important ones missing. It's a pretty potent blend of trad ska and reggae, hip hop, electronics and hardcore/noise.










Minutemen - This Ain't No Picnic (embedding disabled by request)

Assholes in Space: A Brief Introduction

Along with continuing my ideas for the Motherlode D&D campaign and adaptations of S John Ross's Uresia for use with Basic-style D&D, I want to use the month of March to talk about an old campaign idea that has been sitting on my mental backburner for a while now, known colloquially as Assholes in Space. The original idea for the game came from a very interesting combination of influences that created a very specific image of a campaign setting in my mind.

Most science fiction fans have read Neuromancer. It's the book that launched a thousand dark futures and is directly responsible for Cyberpunk 2020, Shadowrun, GURPS Cyberpunk and dozens of other less well known roleplaying games. In my senior year of college, I was listening to a BBC Radio 'play of the week' adaptation of Neuromancer before going to sleep and what really stuck out to me about the story in audio form was the Rastafarian Space Navy. I'd always liked Maelcum in the novel, but hearing the reggae thumping in the background of a slow motion deep space cruise just made me think, "There must be characters like this in every science-fiction setting." Somewhere in the Star Wars universe, there must be a guy who thinks that living in space is just the coolest and spends his days floating around smoking space-weed and listening to space-reggae (there are probably names for these in the Star Wars universe, but my EU knowledge is a bit rusty.) The combination of music with the silent background of space reminded me of Cowboy Bebop's fantastic eclectic soundtrack and the western twang of zero gravity in the Firefly universe.

The other major influence was actually a Wushu play-by-post game on RPGnet that I was involved in called A Million Billion Bastards (right here if you've got an account.) The setting was described as "Take Cowboy Bebop, Outlaw Star, Getbackers, Xenosaga, Ghost in the Shell, and a dozen other influences, toss 'em in a blender, and hit puree." It was a real melange of influences, all decidedly cinematic, and while it lasted, it was really fun. But what I really took away from it was the 'anything goes' idea of worldbuilding. Don't worry about whether or not something in an over-the-top cinematic galaxy is realistic or even plausible. Don't be afraid to just wing it. Cybernetics, psionics, rifles as long as some people are tall, four-armed aliens and genetically altered killing machines are all welcome in this universe. Fun is fun and if the campaign can accommodate everyone's idea of fun, so much the better.