Why Space?

 A good chunk of Intergalactic Bastionland's current iteration focuses on the element of living and working on a starship, managing relationships, negotiating the hierarchy, and trying to keep your job or maybe even get ahead.

There's a lot of fun in that, but that could just as easily take place in Electric Bastionland, in some vast factory, office block, or prison.

But that's missing the other half of the game.

Space holds a special allure. Rolling out a star map and saying "yeah, each of these is a whole solar system. Where do you want to go?"

It's an utterly different scale to the realms of Mythic Bastionland. I wanted those to feel big, but they're grounded enough that you can generally plan out what exists where. Those "empty hexes" are easy enough to handwave with some vague descriptions like... Trees? Squirrels? Yeah, it's just some woods.

This is trickier when you suddenly need to improvise an entire world. Yeah you've got your zero-atmosphere dusty rocks, but what about when you've got a planet with a population of a billion and an exotic atmosphere you don't fully understand? That's where your improv skills are really put to the test.

I found this to be a challenge when running a Traveller sandbox. Look, I enjoy the Universal World Profile codes, but it rarely gave me enough of a hook to improvise, instead relying on a good bit of prep between sessions.

So the plan for Intergalactic is to have twelve star systems, each with six "worlds" which could be planets, moons, stations, or weirder things. Each of these gets a two-page spread, which still isn't enough to document an entire planet, but hopefully gives the Referee what's needed to run things on the fly.

But what about the places that aren't included?

If you asked the same about Mythic, asking what happens if the players wander out of the Realm, I'd give some advice about pounding your fist on the giant map in the middle of the table and reminding them of their oath. In essence, I don't expect the Knights of Mythic Bastionland to go and wander off the map just for the fun of it.

Put those players in a spaceship? Now there isn't really an end of the map. Sure, players don't start the game with much control over where the ship goes, but rest assured they'll find a way, or one day throw it all out and go it alone.

The stars extend beyond the home cluster, and even within each of those systems there must be planets and moons that aren't written up aaaaand even in the detailed worlds there's an entire globe of locations that could be explored.

The referee inside me is shaking, but I want to encourage this feeling within the players.

It goes back to why I'm drawn into space at all. It's being 9 years old and unfolding this map.

Image from www.abandonwaredos.com

Frontier: Elite 2 was my first space sandbox, which I've written about in passing before. It's a relatively pure sandbox in that you can go anywhere, and you aren't really given any goal or story to follow. Generally you want to make money, improve your reputation, buy a better ship.

Each of those stars on the map is a system, which will hopefully have orbital stations and planetary ports you can land on, do some trading, pick up some odd jobs, then move on. There isn't much worth sticking around for. You can't leave your ship to wander the station or visit the cities looming on the horizon. While impressive for the time, the settlements themselves look suspiciously small, especially when visiting earth.

Still, the experience of a journey made it feel real. You seamlessly take off from one planet (after requesting docking clearance, of course), take the ship into orbit, set a destination in a neighbouring system, jump through hyperspace, cruise over to your target planet, request docking permission, and drop down into the atmosphere to set the ship down on a new world. The docking doors slide open and you're transported over to one of the bays before being met with the familiar screen showing your renewed options for trading etc.

It's kind of mundane, but it feels like travelling through a real place, and the option was always there to just go and land on a random patch on Mars, or load up on fuel and see how far into unoccupied space you can go. There usually wasn't anything interesting to see out there, but the feeling of being able to fly there was key to Frontier's appeal for me.

Something is lost when space games land the ship for you (No Man's Sky at launch) limit themselves to orbital bases (Elite Dangerous), or lack any real mundane spaceflight altogether (Starfield).

Okay, back to TTRPGs. How to create this feeling in Intergalactic Bastionland without melting the Referee's improv-node? That's the tricky part, but I have plans. More on that another time.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

This post was originally sent as a reward to all Patreon supporters, and is released freely on this site the week after its original publication.

If you want to support my blog, podcasts, and video content then head over to my Patreon.