Simulacra

I'm part of a regular tabletop RPG game group. I started running games early in college, and have usually been the game master (GM) / "dungeon master" (DM) - an older term - ever since, though the members of the group itself change with time and circumstance. Most campaigns (sets of game sessions with a common story arc) have used the current (5th) edition of Dungeons & Dragons, though I've tinkered with custom rulesets since I began.

For the past several months I've had the pleasure of being a regular player, rather than the DM, as one of my friends picked up a campaign he started in college but never finished. We play via Discord voice chat. Five people, each living in a different city, playing a cooperative game together each week, watching their characters learn and grow. I suppose it is a special thing. (If you ever get the chance to play Dungeons & Dragons or the like, go for it.)

Well, the DM and one of the players (brought in after college, as they were dating) just got married on Sunday, so that campaign will be going on hiatus again as they figure out life together. There should be time after the honeymoon and the last of the moving for them to at least be players, though, so I offered to run something until we are ready to finish that game up. (It's been on hiatus before, haha, so I'm fairly confident it'll come back once more.)

An impromptu poll indicated that a science fiction game would be exciting.

I haven't run a sci-fi campaign before, but I've wanted to try for quite a while, and I have some ideas. I'm not sure if I will used a free published system, or just bang one of my homebrew rulesets into shape.

I need to do a lot of research, though. Both for ideas, and simple knowledge, so I can fulfill the DM's main job in an adventure game: adjudicate player actions. I need context, and a solid understanding of how the elements of play interact.

So, alongside hours of Wikipedia research, I'm spending some of my ample free time reading sci-fi. Some Poul Anderson, so far, with The Martian ongoing and Huxley's Brave New World up next. Thankfully my middle school years were just as nerdy (more so?) than my current ones, so I blazed through a ton of Star Wars and Star Trek novels back in the day. Other books lending influence to my thoughts (not all sci-fi): Blindsight (Watts), Foucault's Pendulum (Eco), Dune (Herbert), Simulacra and Simulation (Baudrillard), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Verne), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche), Asimov.

I'm aiming for a hard sci-fi direction, though. No lightsabers or teleporters. Fairly dark and nihilistic, too (as much as a group of jovial friends having fun together allows, haha).

Blindsight by Peter Watts sticks in my mind as the most important inspiration of anything I've read. I recommend it highly, if you want something thoughtful, philosophical, but still a speculative fiction novel. Very highly.

Musical influences to a sci-fi campaign would be too many to list. Maybe I'll make a playlist sometime. For today, I leave you with Oh Hiroshima's latest, "Oscillation," because I listened to it for the first time today while writing this. Suitable for lulling you to sleep in the cramped quarters that protect you from the endless interstellar vacuum, where there can be no sound.


Tuesday the 24th of September, 2019

Pain: 30
Struggle: 40
Success: 70