Please Sir, Can I Have Some More Star Systems?

One of the major issues I've run into while developing this setting is there are far too many stars out there. There's about 50 star-systems within 15 LY of Earth; a fine number of locations for an RPG setting. Particularly given that some are going to have full-fledge histories and some will be unremarkable and barren. For a number of gameplay reasons I want players to be able to travel a few lightyears in a day or so (i.e. interstellar commerce wouldn't be feasible if it took years). That said, if we can travel from one end of known-space to the other in a mere 10 days (30 LY / rating 3 SLIPP-drive = 10 days out-ship time) one would assume we'd have explored further in the 25 years we've had FTL technology.


So I really need a good reason to keep humanity relatively contained to the aforementioned 15 LY sphere around Earth. I decided to simply make it expensive and dangerous: SLIPP-travel requires extremely careful mapping of gravity-wells and tracking of any moving objects, even in deep-space. That work is done by scouts who expect to be well-paid for risking their lives for months at a time out in deep-space. The Trans-War also helps this explanation - as new exploration usually takes a backseat to making war on one's enemies.


On top of this, of course the 50 given system are just those with publicly available astronav data - there's plenty of story-hooks that can start with 'corporation XYZ has some unpublished nav data on a valuable new system....' Or the players themselves can venture-out to the unknown. It should add some possible story-hooks for GMs.


Hopefully this explains a bit more of WHY the slight plot-hole exists.

The Blockade at Whiterock Station

You and your crew are a little down-on-your-luck lately - cargo runs just haven't been as profitable as they should have been.  A run-in with the law around some illegal trade deals with New Eden means there’s a big outstanding fine that needs to be paid-off. Much more cash than the crew could come-up with on short notice. In response, the crew is laying-low in a bar in Gliese 1061 - a mining system that’s off the beaten path.

That’s when the news hits the datasphere - the nearby Whiterock station is under attack by Pirates! While pirate attacks certainly common around these parts, it’s a little odd that they’re actually attacking an entire station - something doesn't quite add-up here. You don’t have much time to ponder this new development when Vix - a cargo-broker you've done business with calls you on your comm-terminal.


Here’s the run-down on Whiterock Station:


Kapteyn's Star and Whiterock Station

Kapteyn’s Star is an otherwise unremarkable red-dwarf star roughly 13 LY from Sol. Initial surveys of the system showed little to no mineral resources, but more recent scans found a small number of asteroids very rich in valuable metals. This has lead to a mini-gold-rush, culminating with the construction of Whiterock station by StarTram Inc.

Whiterock, a large asteroid in the middle of Kapteyn’s asteroid belt, presumably gets its name from the chalky-white calcium-ore deposits that cover it’s surface. The rock itself has no atmosphere, little gravity (0.09 g's) and is quite cold. This does make moving cargo a bit easier to deal with.

A modest-size commodities and docking base has been built on the dark-side of Whiterock, including a drydock for extended repairs. In addition to the usual metals, Kapteyn’s large calcium-oxide deposits make for plenty of Duracrete exports. The station is well-defended with a defensive missile array, a railgun emplacement, and a pair of fighters in case the stationary guns don't solve the problem.

Whiterock station is unfortunately within Kapten's gravity-well minimum-SLIPP-distance, ships must accelerate a significant distance away from the star before jumping out-system. However, this does give local security forces a bit more time to prepare in the case of pirate incursions.

The station itself is very small, something like a big truck-stop from the late 20th century. They cater to the miners in the system, and the cargo-haulers who bring their goods to off-system markets. There’s food and fuel, a couple of beds if you’re tired of sleeping on your ship’s bunk, and a bar to either celebrate a big strike, or to drown your sorrows.

>>>>> Kapteyn DOES have serious potential for long-term mining - just not quite enough to attract the attention of the big-three, as a result, plenty of independents have claimed the bulk of the rocks. <<<<
~Starfisherman

>>>>> The tonnages are there, yes, but you’d be stupid to believe that it’s going to last more than 5 years. The operators of WhiteRock are probably hoping the price of Duracrete stays high, ‘cause that’s the only thing they’re going to be exporting by 70 IE. <<<<<
~Dr.Cash

>>>>> Another ghost-town for sure. Big booms mean big crashes. <<<<<<
~TheSmilingBandit

Please, No Aliens

I decided early on that the Interstellar Profiteer universe would have No Intelligent Alien Races. 

• No warlike yet honorable empire of humanoids constantly on the edge of invading the peaceful humans
• No enigmatic mysterious ancient race that occasionally divulges some mystery of the universe yet is beguiled by our human spirit.
• No all-consuming insectoid race driven by a hivemind for us to overcome with our individually.
• And above all else, no fucking space-elves.

Why? Not only am I bored to tears with the existing alien-race tropes, I'm perpetually underwhelmed by the lack of 'alien-ness' (for lack of a better word) of the stuff that's out there. Klingons, Narn? Based on the Japanese. Warlike, honor-based society? Sounds suspiciously like imperial Japan of the WWII era.  Vulcans, Eldar, Protoss, Silfen, Minbari? Yep, all of 'em are basically Space-Elves. 

Another reason is to stay in-sync with the Fermi Paradox - given that in the present-day real world we haven't been contacted, there's little reason to believe there's aliens in the local stellar neighborhood.

Either way, I'm taking another page out of Joss Whedon's book and putting a hard-line on No Aliens. Alien life is a definite - I'm going for a panspermia vibe, where we find single-celled life (or the remnants of it) on a handful of likely planets. But it is of little consequence to most of the game. 

Perhaps if I extended the timeline out a hundred years or so and we explored the whole Milky Way there might be a couple intelligent races out there (many Drake Equation estimates put the number of intelligent races at a dozen or so in our galaxy) or maybe some interesting artifacts of a long-dead race.

Artificial Gravity and the Importance of Worldbuilding Consistency

I was thinking about artificial gravity. Certainly most of the sci-fi of IP is dependant on gravity manipulation (SLIPP-drives are artificial wormholes, fusion-power is ignited by gravity-generators) - so for consistency's sake, artificial-gravity really does need to exist. 

So the plan is to leave artificial-gravity as a semi-luxury item. The rationalization being that while the technology is certainly available, the equipment needed to install small gravity-generators every 2 meters of ship-floorspace would be a big expense, and one that 'true spacers' would shun. Not to mention the extra weight and power-requirements. This also picks-up on the rule-of-cool. Freefall fighting would be kinda awesome, as would character aspects that liked/disliked normal gravity. Characters would still encounter gravity regularly - on planets, 'fancy' places, and anywhere that newbies would frequent. At the same time, if any GM wants their universe to have artificial grav commonplace, there's not much suspension of disbelief needed.

As a bonus, with the rationale built this way, it's easy to bend the rules just a bit for the inevitable film-option-deal - most scenes could happen in regular gravity, allowing easier filming. We can add drama to a few sequences by putting them in zero-g. E.g. the power goes out and the team must rely on their freefall combat training to fight-off the pirate boarding party!

I think it's good to plan ahead.

Why RPG Designers Love or Hate Artificial Intelligence

In our modern society, artificial intelligence is creeping into everyday life - automated music/movie recommendations - Google's self-driving car, everything from the Roomba automatic vacuum to the Mars rovers. It's a part of basic life these days - thus it makes sense that they would be included in any sort of Sci-Fi story. That said, widespread high-grade AI tends to be detrimental to the usual goals of RPG - if computers can be better than humans, why are we even here? One of the classic themes in literature is the triumph of the human spirit - it goes against some of our basic drives when machines are better than us.

So how to reconcile the seemingly inevitable march of AI that we see all around us? 

1.) An easy answer is just make AI's optional player-characters - Androids or PC's that live entirely within computers - Shadowrun has options for this, as do a number of other RPGs. Usually this means you need to put some sort of limitations on them, otherwise things get overpowered. How awesome would the Enterprise be if the whole crew was made of Data-like androids? (I'm assuming post 1st season Data, after he was a bit more human-like.)  In this context, we're allowing AI's to BECOME human-like, and thus it's OK that Data is waaay stronger and smarter than the rest of us, since now he's human after going through a spiritual journey to have human emotions and feelings. 

2.) War with the AI-driven machines that now necessitates laws against AI. For example, Eclipse-Phase, Dune, and Battlestar Galactica universes all had cataclysmic battles with AI-gone-rogue. There's probably dozens of other examples from the Sci-Fi world. However, I wanted to avoid any kind of post-apocalyptic world - it's been done many times before, and done better than I could ever do it. 

3.) Practical limits to AI - In Shadowrun, a Rigger's drones have smart-dog level intelligence  They can be given simple commands like 'Guard this place' or 'Attack this target' - but cannot do much more than that. Autopilot has a similar limit - usually the rules are designed so that the best autopilots can only approach the competency level of a 'real' player-character. Within Interstellar Profiteer, I've very intentionally ruled that computers CANNOT make SLIPP-drive jumps, thus preventing automated shipments from dominating the market. As it turns-out, this isn't as an original idea as I thought. Andromeda - the sci-fi show developed from Gene Roddenberry's notes has a similar limitation, as does Diaspora (embarrassingly enough, both universes call their FTL a slip-stream. A little close for comfort to SLIPP-drive). This is the option I'm going with for my universe. 

Other examples of dealing with the AI problem? Throw a comment in there! 

Wait, WHY on Earth are you developing this?

This might be an opportune time to explain a little bit about the game I'm intending to make, and WHY I think it's relevant and worth your time.

Since I was a kid watching Star Wars, I've always liked Han Solo a bit more than Luke. Don't get me wrong, Luke's character arc is great, but the transition from ruffian smuggler just barely escaping the long arm of the law always appealed to me. When I was in middle-school, a little PC game know as "Wing Commander: Privateer" was the hot new thing, I was rather taken with it, and I've played through the game and it's expansion several times since then. The fact that there's a thriving community that has made an open-source, modern version of the game tells me I'm not alone. Privateer wasn't even the first game out, "Elite" was made back in 1984 for PC, and has since spawned a couple of sequels, and a recent Kickstarter campaign massed over 1 million BPS, solidly over it's goal amount. There's the infamous Freelancer game from Microsoft game studios as well. In short, there's plenty of fan-interest in this vein of video-game, and I think that a pen-and-paper RPG version would be well-received. 

A tabletop version of that gameplay style opens-up a whole host of options for storytelling - many players have lamented that these type of PC games have 1 'storyline' that concludes, and they're left sorta feeling empty. A tabletop campaign doesn't need to end. Deeper characterization can happen within various factions - no longer are Pirates simply 'Friendly' or 'Hostile' to the PCs. The players can have reputations of varying qualities - good, bad, not-to-be-messed-with, law-abiding, former-pirate, different pirate gangs or syndicates have differing opinions on a PC, etc.  Add a little bit more nuance to the Privateer gameplay, and I think we've got a winning recipe. 

You can play the legitimate trader pushed to the edge and eventually  'Breaks-Bad' to become a criminal
You can play the bounty-hunter with a heart of gold
You can play the space-pirate who turns into a rebel against oppressive governments

And a whole bunch of other scenarios. Space trading simply provides a nice platform from which to launch stories from. Just like a "Mr. Johnson" in Shadowrun hiring the PCs to do something, or a "old man in a tavern" telling the PC's about a dungeon full of treasure, a simple cargo mission lets the GM ship the PCs in a particular direction, and the plots can go from there.



Now, one can certainly say that Interstellar Profiteer is really no different than the vaunted 'Serenity' RPG (which is soon to be revised for a second edition! Horray!), however, the intention is for IP to be a much harder variety of sci-fi, along with having interstellar travel, and a bit more focus on space-combat. I'd also like to say that Interstellar Profiteer's setting has a bit more depth than Firefly's. All due respect to Joss Wedon, Firefly is a wonderful bit of character-driven fiction, not a playground for GMs and players to create new stories. I'm trying to make sure it plays-out as a vibrant and interesting world.  

Musings on Rulesets

It stands to reason that if I'm building a standalone RPG, I probably need some sort of rules. Given that I'm just one guy doing this in my spare-time, I'm generally leaning towards using a pre-published generic ruleset. As if by magic, there are 2 recently-completed Kickstarter campaigns with just such beasts:

• Cortex Plus
• http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1116133034/margaret-weis-productions-cortex-plus-hackers-guid
• FATE Core
• http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/evilhat/fate-core

The various quandaries I now face are thus:

I know little about these systems

Neither are published yet

Lastly, I DO know that another space-based RPG of high critical acclaim is based on FATE - Diaspora, so that makes me lean strongly towards FATE at the moment, particularly as Diaspora is a distant-future, sorta-dystopian thing going for it. Thus I don't feel like I'm just re-inventing the wheel. 

At any rate, at this point I really, really need to settle on a ruleset, as that unknown is getting rather hard to work-around.

Development Status - March 23rd 2013

So far, I've got the basic history, the metaplot, and the overall vibe of the game down. I've got roughly 26000 words so far, so I'm feeling pretty good about that. I still need to find someone to photoshop me a couple of logos for the fake companies I'm inventing, and I really, really should get someone to review the 'science' behind everything, as I'd rather deal with any adjustments now, rather than after things have settled in my brain more.

Trade-goods are coming along as well - just about ready to load them in the database. Next up: start placing the rest various locations-of-interests within the many star-systems in range. This is the part where I realize why most sci-fi settings go far away from Earth - as the Sun's neighbors are pretty well known at this point, and I can't just make-up whatever I want for story purposes. We'll see how this goes.

Trying Something a Little Bit Different

I've been playing tabletop RPGs for quite some time now, and I've always wanted to play an RPG that involved interstellar commodities trading. I wanted to play Han Solo (Or Chewie - he's cool too.) and wiz around the universe buying and selling, getting into adventures, dodging the authorities, keeping the pirates at bay. All that good stuff. If you've played "Wing Commander: Privateer" or any of the "Elite" games, you know just what I'm talking about.

The trick is that most of the published RPGs I've seen don't really support this kind of play-style - most space-based RPGs pay it a bit of lip-service, throwing a quick paragraph or two saying "and if you really wanted to, you could make a campaign out of delivering cargo" and then drops it like a hot potato.

To the GM in me, moving a shipment of stuff from one planet to another seems like a grand plot-hook. You get the PC's to go to a particular place at a particular time - allowing for a wealth of story options. You can throw complications in their way, or just allow them to make the delivery. They can load-up on other commodities and make some side-trips for more profit, or just get it there quick. Throw-in the option of doing bounty-hunting, or perhaps scouting missions, and we've got ourselves a nice little game with plenty of options.

At least that's what I'm trying to make. I've been dutifully churning-out content and debating a plethora of options in my head for the past couple months, and I think what I've got so far is pretty good. I'll be throwing various musings here as I come-up with them, and this will probably turn into a rough "developer's log" of what's new, why I did things, and other stuff I feel like writing.

Thanks for reading this far!
~MikeJ