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.
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| 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.
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