Quick World Creation Speech
I'm going to be giving this speech this weekend, or something like it, and I'm a bit uncertain so if anyone wants to read through it, and give me an opinion, and/or advice, I'd be grateful...
PT
Quick World Creation Speech
Hello everyone, lords and ladies, game masters and players, welcome. My name is Eric Raymond Ashley. I’ve written the world’s first Blogospheric mystery/thriller--Death of a Blogger. And I’m revising the fantasy/SF novel Worldwalker, right now.
Also, I’ve done some collaboration with my writing partner, Edward Carroll. We’ve written Temple of the Dying Sun d20 which is best described as relentless, and likely to create determinedly paranoid players. It has a riddle, I may share later, and a prize if anyone gets the answer.
We also did Countercoup d20 which is very high level, both of these adventures for High Forest Games. I’m also contracted for the 4th Book of Worlds from Valdron Press, the makers of Multiverser. And I’ve written Placeholder Worlds for Desperate GM’s- which leads us into today’s topic. Because Placeholder is about having a list of short bios of world settings you can toss your player in temporarily. That plus this lecture should have leave an extra dimensional GM in good stead.
So the question is …(pause and then speak quickly)
How do you create a world in five minutes; the time it takes to go get some chips and a coke from the fridge?
There are Four W’s of Quick World Creation {hold up hand with four fingers}. None are George W. Bush. They are Why, Wrenches (not wenches, gentlemen), Wherewithal and Worlds. Worlds will include some audience participation as we try to make up some worlds on the spot. But at any time, feel free to ask questions, disagree, tell me to slow down, or speed up. You may have to catch my attention. Jumping up and down and screaming will probably work.
Why do you need to know how to quickly create worlds? As I’m an extra dimensional GM, a Multiverser Ref, this is a no-brainer for me. As in, your good guy verser hero PC is sneaking through the Evil Overlord’s lair, about to kick down the door, and a roll on the General Effects table lets you know that the guards are really alert tonight (it being inspection tomorrow), and another roll, an awareness check, and your fearless and hapless hero only notices the guard sneaking up on him in time to feel the cold steel of the barrel against the base of his skull.
BAM! [clap hands] The hero is dead. Your plans are derailed, the ones that included the hero meeting the dictator’s daughter, and convincing her, by his manly charms of the virtues of democracy, have just been tossed on the rubbish heap of history, and you need a new world since the player is now in a new universe looking for more trouble. And dateless, to boot.
An Amber GM is even more out of luck. You have a great setting, and an interesting plot. And the player, probably motivated by malice, decides “I don’t like this world”, and goes for a Shadowstroll. And then with his eyes gleaming, he asks.
“What do I see?”
If your response is …”UH, uh, you see a tree, yeah, a tree, and uh, um, there’s a river alongside it.”…and then you stop there, you are not going to win this year’s Golden Gygax for the category of Alternate Dimensions.
GURPS has Alternate Universes, and D20 has high level characters that can use clairvoyances and teleport without error to visit cities on the opposite side of the globe. Traveller has hundreds of planets, and so does Star Wars, and I’m afraid saying “Its an ice planet” is not going to warm up the cold cockles of your player’s subartic hearts. Many games have opportunities to suddenly drop into an unexpected setting, even if it’s a little out of the way town off the interstate on the way to the confrontation with the Mythos in the basement of the superstore Thrifty Meyers in Detroit.
Also this will help players who often go on to become GM’s, and they will see a bit more of what is possible instead of the broken-down from overuse standbys. Those banal retreads that were tired out decades ago.. As someone said…”I’m tired of the old clichés, bring me some new clichés.”
How many interstellar flights have ended with “There’s a spaceport with a city beyond it.” And the players floundering egg the GM on to provide a little more detail.
So now you can see why you need to know how to create a setting quickly, even if its only a small town, or a tiny village in the woods.
Well, now I’m opening a tool chest full of the wrenches to do just that.
Another alliterative assignment…Lists, Ladders, Laws, and Loonytoons are the four wrenches. The Four “L’s”, and that’s “L’s”, not elves.
A List helps you break reality apart into discrete elements. Separate out the types that form up a greater whole. And then you can choose to focus on, exaggerate, or delete these parts.
Lists are your friend. Let me say that again. Lists. Lists that break the world down into multiple categories can be your best buddy, a very powerful tool.
One type is genre lists. Everyone is going to know about Science Fiction and Fantasy. But there are quite a few more genres. Mystery like my novel, Death of a Blogger, Western, Thriller, Comic Book Supers, Romance even--don't laugh too hard, Horror, and oh, just to be difficult, Literature which is pronounced Litta-chew with a nasal accent, and is another genre.
Another type is the political list. Feudalism, Crony Capitalism, Laissez Faire Capitalism, Socialism, Libertarianism, Communism, Social Conservatism, Liberalism. That’s enough for now. Ride herd on your lists, don’t let them get too long and unwieldy.
Lists help. They are a good method to help you think outside your box, your trends, your first instincts. All of us have certain ideas that we return to over and over.
Multiverser has four bias areas for skills. Magic, psionic, technological, and body-related skills. That can be another list.
So lets add these four together. You could roll dice, or just pick something you haven't done recently. So Western from the genre list with a governing system of Feudalism. Body related skills are the most common, although since Multiverser allows multiple picks we'll also add psionic skills to this cake we are baking from the box.
So Ranchers with vassal cowboys who ride about stealing land from farmers, and provoking wars with other ranchers...plus most of the combat is hand to hand, and whip to whip. Instead of pistol fighters, we have whip-cracking duels filled with pain, and precision, and still the same sudden pause before lethal combat begins that we expect from cowboys. Toss in the occasional Horseman who can meld his mind with horses he rides and influence other cowboys' horses.
That would definitely throw your wayward dimensions traveller for a loop.
And you can break your lists down a bit finer. One problem SciFi gaming suffers from is that there are so many possible futures that no group gets enthused about just one. But for us, that is a benefit. Probably everyone in this room has read and seen a ton of SciFi worlds. So make another list: It starts with Giant Robots, Secret Alien Invasion, Bold as Brass Alien Invasion...
Imagine telling your player "There's a tree, and a river," Player yawns, "And a giant disc about a mile wide is hovering in the air with flashes of light disintegrating stuff beneath it. Oh, the tree's gone."
I think the player would sit up straight. Going on.
National stereotype lists. I hope I don’t have to say that of course individuals differ from stereotypes, or generalizations. But, it remains that the average Japanese is greatly different from the average Australian. So go back to that City with a spaceport that bored your poor players. Now add in Japanese. Suddenly a bunch of connotations start springing to my mind. The scrapers have pagoda tops, and corporate espionage is handled by cyber-ninjas, and a long line of geisha robots is heading toward the spaceship ready to gracefully off load your cargo. To gracefully do it, mind you.
And if you want to throw your players for a further loop, never mention Japanese, make them all Caucasian with names like Fred, but give them a Japanese culture. Of course that means you have to come up with a new name for graceful, womanly robots than geisha-bots, but the slight extra effort might well be worth it as your baffled players strive to figure out where they’ve heard this before.
This is in fact what the Ninja world in the Third Book of Worlds does. The whole planet is covered with samurai and ninja and priests and downtrodden peasants. In that world, you choose your local race to match the player’s since its really hard to be a stealthy ninja when you’re the only six foot tall, red-head with blue eyes in the country of the skinny, short, blondes with brown eyes.
Lets get more refined on the list of governmental types. Consider the Bill of Rights. Now delete one or two of them, and take the most obvious possibilities. Take away free speech, or the right to keep and bear arms. Or amplify those rights. Put a crimp in them, but only partially…like Britain with its Official Secrets Act which impinges on free speech. Allow the President to jail reporters like FDR did in WWII.
Or, let free speech include anything including the right to plan assassinations, and the Second would allow one to keep and bear howitzers and main battle tanks.
Or add a new right. And realize that changes to fundamental constants can totally alter a society as you consider the good and bad effects of a new change. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that some change is only going to be positive, or its going to solve all problems. Every change has costs. There is no perfect strategy in a finite universe.
Unless, of course, that’s what you decide to do. But be clear with yourself that you are creating a utopia. You are breaking the rules of reality. Don’t break the rules by accident. Make sure you have a good reason to do so.
Make a society with psi, but only one type of psi. Make the exact same society with a different type of psi. Telepaths and Telekinetics. Or even more precisely, Truth-detectors and Earthmovers. This is one of the key lessons of lists. Limit yourself, and then find the beauty as what you have left expands to fill the whole world.
Lets climb on up to Ladders.
The Romantic-Realist Scale. This is not Grace Livingston Hill or Silhouette romance, but more of a literary term. Great heroes on one end, and drab reality on the other end. Of course, that ignores the fact that reality often has great heroes in it. So Realists are to a degree, kidding themselves.
Take a medieval world and an encastled vampire and this is frankly a bit banal. Been there, done that. Greatly lower or raise the Romanticism or Realism, and it gets a lot more interesting. If everyone is beautiful, and angst filled and the moon always fills the sky on cloudless nights where a lady weeps for lost passion by a tree near a river that could be cool. Or, if ninety-nine percent of the population struggles in horrible conditions, with most of them so malnourished as to be bordering on stupidity, is never educated, and then a vampire comes to the castle where the one percent live in something approaching decency although most still have smallpox scars and dead siblings, and the few on top spend most of their time plotting how to knife each other in the back, and the vampire comes and plunges this village into even deeper misery, well I think that would also be interesting. And what happens to the tree by the river? If you take from the tree’s branches, the local lord kills you, and the river is the typhoid tainted source of water for the village.
Dragons are a mainstay of fiction. Every year, many novels come out dealing with dragons. Its been done folks. Fact is, probably every variation I could tell you about has been done to death too, but most people won’t see it that way. And I don’t, not really for there is a fascination to these beasts.
But lets get away from the most obvious choices. We could make the dragons more romantic, part of the basic nature of reality, perhaps your dragon is a courtier at the temple of the Elemental Dragon of Air who with his three kin created the universe. And every time a dragon flies, the universe flexes and breathes.
Or, a dragon is a big scaly bag of hydrogen with small wings to give it some direction, except in strong winds when it simply floats with the breeze, and it occasionally belches hydrogen which if its metallic teeth click together at the right time can cause a fire blast. Of course, sometimes this ends up blowing the dragon up as well when it misjudges things since a dragon is none too bright…
Or a dragon could simply be a dinosaur that survived into the Middle Ages. Which actually is my theory. I know its way out of the mainstream, but I’ve seen the pictures of knights battling dragons, and I don’t think its make believe, not entirely.
And note that this is an example of another scale, another ladder. The size of the thing. The dragons in the famous pictures are actually rather small things, not much larger than a horse. Or you could go the other way, and pull out the Midgard Serpent, or go even larger, and science-fictiony and create some sort of snake formed out of cosmic super string whose birthing pains were a supernova, and who can in casual flight slice a planet in half and hardly slow down.
Are vampires basically rabies victims with super strength from adrenaline, and odd-looking faces, and an appetite for meat? Or Buffyverse demons easily dispatched by a moderately trained hunter? Princes of the night who struggle to control their inner monster a la White Wolf? Hideously strong monsters who have no need to control their inner monster as they are monster through and through as in the Philadelphia 2007 setting for Multiverser? Are they almost unstoppable, and romantic figures of power like Anne Rice would say? Or are they all too stoppable by a woman with a gun and a cool head like Laura K. Hamilton would tell us?
The answer is of course, yes. The previous examples about vampires show us two scales at once. The Romance vs. Realism scale and the Good vs. Evil scale. Anne Rice’s vampires are waaaay Romantic. Multiverser’s are probably the most Realistic even if they are not the weakest. Because power level does not directly translate to the romance vs. realism ladder although they have much in common.
But there is also Good vs. Evil. Buffy’s vamps are demons possessing the original human. Very little sympathy factor there. Not only is it a monster, but its not even the original tenant. I think the Anita Blake--Laura K. Hamilton vamps might be the most noble. They might not have souls, but its seems likely they could go to Heaven. Vampires are just odd aliens, not innately evil, although tempted strongly that way.
Romance vs. Realism; Good vs. Evil; Law vs. Chaos. Our earlier example of whip-wielding cowboys with the occasional merger with horses, a True Rider if you like, was a world slanted toward Evil and Chaos. Lets turn it toward Law and Good. Now instead of raiding and stealing of land, we have visitors attending parties at rancheros, dancing with the pretty ladies, and demonstrating their talents for said ladies by doing whip tricks and by the taming of unmanageable and superb wild stallions.
Now let us turn our attention to the making and unmaking of Law. First we come to a matter of deliberateness. Know the law you’re trying to break, and what type of breakage you’re aiming for. You can just throw reason and logic out the window (perhaps clothed with a bit of pseudo-logic if you feel ambitious) and have hundreds of vampires per every hunter. This used to irritate me, until I realized that it was essential for the type of story White Wolf wanted to tell. It is, to use a high-falutin littachew term, a story conceit. If I understand this correctly.
There is a spaceship. Its impervious to nuclear weapons but human screw drivers can take it apart. So what is happening here? Simple. The GM wants hand to hand combat with vile aliens in the mothership floating over Des Moines, Illinois. Nothing else needs to be said. Logic would be an annoyance.
A few questions do need to be asked? Is this conceit fun? Hand to hand fighting aliens in a mothership? Sure that sounds cool. I just played in a game down the road at Constellation Con where it was understood that you were supposed to leave the bus, and investigate the Southern plantation, in the dark, with rising flood waters. It was a very good game, but without some cooperation it might not have worked. Unfortunately, such conceits also tend to be used by railroaders. That is GM’s who want you to “do exactly such.” I spoof such in my upcoming setting “Gamemastah’s Trap!” a Multiverser setting run by a Mad GM. Its kinda like the old D&D cartoon, but Ralphie the Really, Really Powerful believes in sending his “players” (use quotes) a correct destination, and then if they choose otherwise a thousand orcs show up in the path, and if the persist impassable mountain ranges spring up in the path of the players, and if anyone objects, an explosive cow drops from orbit, on their head, moo-ing all the way, and annihilates them.
--Wait a bit as needed for laugh, and then when it starts to die out…
“Silence! I am the Game-mastah!” Jab a finger out at the crowd, and then release tension with a laugh.
You can flip a law on its head. Never fight a land war in Asia is a “law”.
"Utopia's don't exist"; "Communism doesn't work in the real world"; "Women should have the right to vote"; "sound body, sound mind"; "everything in moderation"; "Vampires are hidden manipulators"; "Santa Claus isn't real".
These are laws. Some have more validity and basis in reality than others.
And so on...flip these around to deliberately make a utopia, or to create a happy Communist world, or a world in which women are the secret puppets of evil aliens, or where a healthy body causes insanity by releasing brain-destroying toxins; or where the moderate and reasonable get slaughtered by the immoderate (I believe one ancient Greek suggested that first the two sides in a conflict ought to do in the equivocators, and then have their battle undisturbed--right now, I'm drawing a blank on why this is a good idea, unless of course you have a Love of Battle religion); and the a partial opposite of the vampires rule in secret is the Anita Blake verse where vamps got the right to vote in the seventies, and Narnia is a good example of Santa Claus is real.
As to landwar in Asia, well in the Starsong Systems backstory, America invades China in the 2020's and wins. Courtesy of targeted viral weaponry that enables a squad to incapacitate millions of enemy troopers for a calibrated time with a monster flu.
The second question you need to ask…is it moral? {Pause, and make a face of shock. } Yes, I said the m-word. Conceits and turning laws on their heads are some of the prime tools of those who seek to persuade, and often of rank propagandists. Just because you make a story that lays out logical reasons for murder doesn’t make it ethical to murder your gamemaster. And in fact, your game may not be ethical. I believe gaming is a good gift, but like anything else in the world, it can be misused. And the bending of laws and such is one of the primary ways that bad ideas get accepted because stories have power to bypass our critical judgment, and convince us even without our being aware of it. So use your power for good, or …at least to enrich yourself.
No seriously. And in this case, for me, good has a simple definition. Is the player a better person after the game than before it? You can have all sorts of chaos and bloodshed and have a good game.
Now, this is a good point for another caution to would-be propagandists. It doesn’t matter the virtue of your cause, but remember you are an entertainer first. The story comes first. Preaching the good news of forgiveness in Christ, or how meat is murder, or how providing welfare is slavery of the rich by the poor, or that Chimpy McHitler started the war to benefit Helliburton is well and good, but the story comes first. If it doesn’t the usual result is an inferior story.
But like most things, you want a balance. No message, and you have fluff. Cotton candy for the mind, and that is immensely forgettable. So stick your message in, but behind the explosions.
Now we head off the mental asylum. Loonytoon time. Yep, its time to get out your tinfoil hat, y’know, the one you use to block out the orbital mind control rays. {smile} Time to make up a plot that is outrageous and unreasonable, and yet appeals to something deep in the irrational part of the human brain. Most story worlds, if logically examined, fall to pieces. Cyberpunk, Vampire, D20, Superheroics--they all are profoundly wrong--yet that is not the point. You need to look inside yourself for that craziness. Come up with some plot that doesn't exactly hold water, and then fling it out on a world, and clothe it a bit better, and go to town!
This is in part about giving yourself permission to think crazy. Some of us don’t need that permission of course, and they’re still adjusting my meds after that attempt to drop the world into a black hole because I couldn’t find a good pastrami on rye, but y’know, a good pastrami is like…essential.
I found that when I started to do extra-dimensional gaming, specifically Multiverser, that my story range expanded. Before then I thought in terms of D20, of Vampires, and of Superheroes. So unshackle your mind, consider all the possible stories, including the really loopy ones. This might give you just the plot you need.
One example. The super villain says that he needs to take over the world so that Earth can be armed to deal with the threat of alien armada’s out there. It sounds half-reasonable, hmmh?
And this craziness may just allow you to leap too a new level of inspired weirdness. You could be the starter of a new literary movement. Like say, Cyberpunk.
Now lets see if you have the Wherewithal to handle this in only five minutes. The short answer is yes, you do.
Again we aspire to alliteration. The three M’s who are all for one, and one for all. Media, Meandering, and Metaphor.
Media. Not the Lamestream Media, although that is part of it, but all the stories, movies, games, news accounts, history books, and tales of your rascally Great Aunt Ruth you’ve heard or seen, or read, or even synopsized in your life is the sea of Media you‘ve swam in. Don’t forget all those games you’ve played too. That is thousands of sources for you to plunder.
Feel free to take that game with the great idea and the poor execution, and make it shine. After all, that’s what Shakespeare, the greatest re-writer in the English language did. And Tolkien, possibly the second best writer, was polishing and reworking his stuff for decades trying to make it sing. I think they both succeeded at their quests. Thus showing that originality is an overrated vice, err, I mean virtue. (smile to show this is a joke.)
Like I ‘ve said before, you just need to consider everything as source material. That is part of the problem. People think of re-using what they have already seen being used for that purpose. Instead, take that How the Irish Saved Civilization, or that Back of the North Wind by Charles Dickens, or Egyptology, and that can be the mainstream version, or it can be Von Danniken's version. Or even Little House on the Prairie.
Take a couple different sources even. Little House on the Prairie and Von Danniken’s Egyptology. Makes one think of a new frontier village up the Nile further than any other Egyptian settlers ever went, and then aliens show up.
We need to get away, to Meander Away, from doing the exact same thing. Not too far away. You can use stuff which is well-known so that your players are familiar with it, but is still just a bit unusual. What I mean, is for alternate histories to stay away from the American Civil War, and the Fall of Rome. But you could pick What if the Brits won the Revolutionary War? Avoid the top two or three choices, but feel happy to choose from the top ten otherwise.
Avoid the castle with the vampire, or the penthouse apartment with the vampire. Instead take the vampire and stick him in the a Jewish delicatessen and have him playing chess on the sidewalk after dark. Or put him aboard a nuclear submarine (as an officer so he has a chance to cover his tracks…) Or have a sub that is supposed to pick up a SEAL, but the SEAL got ambushed by the local vamp in the castle (oops), and costumes got traded, and now the vamp is being brought on board the nuclear sub with the plan to take it over, and unleash a nuclear holocaust on the planet in order to get back to the good old days when technology did not threaten the vampire.
These are somewhat unusual, but not that far out there. Everyone knows that people sit around and play chess on the sidewalk of some New York City streets. Probably everyone has seen at least one “k-razy submarine commander with the nuclear launch codes” story. Take a well known but not blatantly obvious story, and marry it to another one. Do your best with some pre-nuptial counseling to make sure that everything will be happy, and then drive them to Vegas.
That way you avoid the twin perils of Tired Retread Banality and Whatcha' talking about Willis?
You write an alternate history story based on What If Rommel took over Germany after assassinating Hitler, and people can follow you. Write a story about what happens when some fairly obscure event doesn’t happen (and unless this is the sole focus of the piece, a kind of historical mystery) then you’re not going to have time to get people up to speed. They are going to spend most of the game floundering when you want them swimming strongly against the current.
We'll deal with how to reform stuff in Metaphor. But we need to come to a caution now.
First, I want you to move past those first two, and in so doing, you'll be more creative than ninety-nine percent of the people, and probably eighty percent of the SF writers.
But, I don't want you to wander too far. Don't get too creative. Now, I'm liking creative more and more, for my self, but my taste is not everyone's, and I'm happy for that, mostly, but your result if you succeed is likely to be creating something for fellow artists in the same field to enjoy--in other words, you'll impress your fellow high-level gms. I'll be impressed. Your players may well be confused.
There is something called the imagination budget. You only have so much time, for various reasons, for describing your world, and after that most people will turn you off. Besides, this a seminar about Quick World Creation. If you detail an alien society, with odd tech, and with a tricky and clever religion, and biologies that are radically inhuman, and a local astronomy that is mind-bending, and you make all the human characters indepth and involved--you either have a Hugo award winner, or everyone is going to be staring at you with a befuddled expression on their face.
Keep in mind that many games widely noted fall into what I'm describing. Weird West has cowboys and zombies, m'kay. Thats weird, thats creative, but you get the gist of the game quickly, right pardner? <mime a fast draw>
Now you understand meandering.
Metaphor--You take a core conflict from a book, and you strip it of identifying details, and then you give it a new paintjob. Or you can also take a situation in life, or a theme, and clothe it. You don’t have to start with a good story, and debone it. Although sometimes that’s easier. Because then you have a start on your characters, and plot as well.
Oftentimes the easiest way to reclothe a plot is to Set it in Space. Which brings up another list--animal types. Because all these steps can work together, and the more time you have, the more in-depth and intricate you can get. You can flip a law around inside of a setting that doesn’t, except for one small element. You can use lists for a few things, and a ladder for other things.
How many SF writers have used the Feline/Avian/Lizard/Insectoid alien descriptor for an alien? Well, I have, for one, in Worldwalker, a telepathic lizard, a member of a declining nobility who reminisces about the Good Old Days when he was able to keep the whole mansion well-heated. And that book is hopefully coming to you later this fall. A lot, and I do mean, a lot of famous SF authors have used this trick. Take it, and then improve the basic animal type a little bit, and then run with your new creature. So have your intelligent cat race join the many varieties of cat people from David Weber’s Treecats and onward to a list from Wikipedia…
Aslan (Traveller RPG)
Centrans (Christopher Anvil's Pandora's Planet stories)
Cheetah People (Doctor Who From the final story of the original series Survival)
Ctarl-Ctarl (Outlaw Star)
Felinetta or Cat-People (Doctor Who Missing Adventures: Invasion of the Cat-People by Gary Russell)
Fellpool or Hellpool (Star Ocean)
Hani (C. J. Cherryh)
Kilrathi (Wing Commander games)
Kymnar (FTL:2448 RPG)
Kzinti (Larry Niven's Known Space series)
Lyrans (Star Trek)
Moggians (Freighter Tails: The Misadventures of Mzzkiti) Apparently named after their god(dess?) the Great Mogg
Mri (C. J. Cherryh's Faded Sun trilogy)
Tiberians (Buzz Aldrin and John Barnes' Encounter With Tiber)
Tiger Men of Mars Buck Rogers
Tran (Alan Dean Foster's Icerigger)
That makes my point amply. Those famous, mega-creative types the SF writer often use shortcuts just as I’m describing to you now, or at least so it seems to me. And that above is only a partial list, I’m sure. You probably could come up with other cat aliens from novels and TV. Just change a few details of your basic conception of a cat alien to make them innovative, and away you go. Perhaps your cat aliens are obsessed with sleep, social status, and making sure they are dressed well, or perhaps they are malevolently cruel and enjoy letting the human prey almost escape before scooping them back up.
Perhaps they are self-centered like the magical giant cat, bigger than an elephant, in my City-state of Haston setting, who informed the player that his life really did not matter for his life only attained significance where it intersected with the cat’s life, so the cat was doing the player a favor by eating him. No,… the player did not agree.
So again, take your basic structure, say a dog alien, and then imagine a society built on a few of the most exceptional traits of that dog, and a body type that emphasizes those traits. Perhaps your dog aliens are loud, and crude, and react to intrusion by outsiders with a charge forward with weapons bristling? Or they could be mystic hunters, equipped with psi powers, who would track a foe relentlessly, even through a black hole if need be to finally get their job done?
But back to the Town of Metaphor. Stargate: Atlantis has the new alien threat, by the name of (I had to google this), the Wraith. The Wraith are pretty obviously a Vampire Set in Space.
“I vill suck your soul from your body!! OOOWooo!” (Make grandiloquent gesture.)
I did this with my Aurelian Empire setting. You have the Mighty Interstellar Empire of Aurellia, filled with strong, and brave, and rich idiots who sincerely want to help. But they are ham handed idiots. You have the Diplomatic Service of Lascaix which has an bad reputation as a hive of treacherous conmen among certain people. You have a slew of small, independent planets who have occasional difficulties with primitive and not-so primitive aliens. The Aurelian solution is to shoot first, shoot often. The Diplomatic Service, believes in ad hoc and creative problem solving, with an extremely flexible moral sense to guide them. And much of their effort is turned to trying to keep the Aurealians from messing up a delicate situation. Which the Aurelians don’t appreciate. The Aurelians send in a fleet of ships, and squads of power armored infantry. The Lascaix send in one man in a well-equipped shuttle.
Now this setting is ripped from recent headlines. Someone challenged me to make a game setting from the viewpoint of the French. So even while I did not agree with that viewpoint, I was able to comply with a flipping of laws to a new maxim…the French are the good and wise in the modern day…and thus to come up with a new setting. This setting also highlights one of the lesser known SF story types…that is, the quasi-detective story where an alien creature is doing something weird and harmful, and humans, with usually superior tech, although the power level may not be superior, have to figure out what is going on, and act on it to resolve the problem. One famous example is Star Trek and the Horta, the rock worm that was trying to protect its eggs. There are many different types of SF, so you can make a list of types for your Sub-Genre list to guide you.
Now stripping the core conflict out of a book may cause argument if you later tell people your source. Is Lord of the Rings about the defense of the West against the rampaging hordes of the barbarians? Yes. Is it about preserving the natural environment and the beauty of farmland against those who would “pave paradise”…well despite what some people whom I ordinarily agree with say, yes it is. Is it about rejecting absolute power because that corrupts you, and accepting that there is an end to all good things? Yes. Is it about how black people are orcs, and this is really a conflict about racism? Hmm, despite the persuasive arguments of some people, I don’t think so. I note that Tolkien politely insulted the German Nazis when they wanted to translate his book into German, and at a time when he could have used the money. Which is more than I can say for many US corporations who put profit before morality in dealing with the Chicom.
But we have four possible core elements here that we then could dress up, and make a new story about. You could take LOTR, and make it cyberpunk. Aragorn becomes the child of the lead programmer who had worked on World Surveillance Net, a Big Brother type spy camera group, and he has some computer files that may help subvert WSN, and Gandalf becomes a legendary hacker, and the One Ring of Power is the file with the command codes to run WSN. And the Ringwraiths are uploaded individuals who thought uploading would give them immortality, but instead it turned them into monsters. And every time, our hero, the small-time fixer, Fred “the Bagman” uses the command codes to dodge a traffic cop, or get free food, he is tempted to use his power, and give in, and take over the world…for its own good, of course. And the only way to destroy the codes is for the holder of the codes to enter the Command Central, and use the codes to erase all copies of the codes, even the ones buried in deepest memory which the WSN programmers are frantically looking for.
Or, environmentalism…creatures of night and shadow are seeking to extend the rule of the concrete dessert, in order to pave over the nearby State Forest. A band of stalwart heroes, defenders of the Earth, must go forth to fight them in a hopeless battle while a fey child sneaks into the Justice Building with the witnesses to the fanged fiends corrupt dealings. A judge is woken, and quickly writs of arrest are signed for the dozens of bought and paid for politicians, and a midnight raid by human police rips the power interface that the vampires had been using to control the city from their clawed hands.
And that comes from one of the last scenes of LOTR where the Army of the West confronts the Black Gate.
Rampaging barbarians. In space, no one can hear you scream. But not for lack of trying. The aliens are inherently nefarious, and vile, and unwilling to coexist peacefully with the humans and their allies. Choose which of the Seven Deadly Sins you wish to focus on, and then have the aliens represent one, and the traitors in your society also represent that although to a lesser degree.
If its greed, then have the aliens be by nature phenomenally rapacious. Have the insist on gaining as large a domain as the richest of their ancestors. And have them brook no opposition to their aims. Have the traitors be willing to sell out their own species in exchange for a new mansion, and a new ground car.
So, in the end, navies are raised, star troopers are given their power armour, and the defenders of civilization go forth once more, as in olden days, to insist on good behavior.
If you want to do a world based on racial conflict. You could flip black for white, but frankly that’s boring. Jerry Pournelle’s Burning City is a much more interesting examination of racial conflicts, and the city of Los Angeles than some world where blacks are slave masters and whites are slaves. MJ Young has “Orc Rising”, a Multiverser setting, which is also a good examination of this issue…On the one hand, you have orcs who are barbarians, and some worship an evil god, although most don’t. You have elves, humans, and dwarves who comprise the civilized nations, and feel that it is good for the orcs to be enslaved since then they can learn of the love of Gaia, and learn how to read, and to be civilized. Then you drop the player into the setting, and sit back. The latest player in this setting helped the Orcs build a city, and trade routes, and began the process of the creation of the Orc Empire based on worship of Odin. Another player visited with the elves, sympathized with the orcs, and learned elf magic. Both are acceptable answers for your game.
You can also use the Romance/Realism scale to amp things up, and to met aphorize them. Its not your Great Aunt Ruth talking her way out of a traffic ticket by blustering to the cop about how she was his nurse in the nursery, but an ancient and decrepit wizard confronting a young, and earnest town guard. And throw in the Good/Evil scale...shift it toward evil...actually the wizard was up to something nefarious...rather as if Great Aunt Ruth were waiting to drive the getaway car.
One common use of metaphor, which retains a good bit of charm, is the re-imagining of a service provided by technology for magic. Harry Turtledove’s book, The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump is an excellent example of this. Traffic jams with flying rugs on the flyway, the Environmental Perfection Agency regulating the disposal of the side effects of major spells, and Mercury being supported to enable rapid communication.
Take the current conflict in Iraq. Turn jihadi into hashassin who believe they are summoning djinn by cutting their own throat in a form of sacrificial magic, but are actually summoning afrit who then destroy everything and anyone nearby before bearing the foolish hashassin off to Hell. And the opposition force is a bunch of Elvish archers supported by sorcerers who can talk to the spirits of the wind and storm. And the goal of the Elvish archers is to teach the human inhabitants of the land to be as good longbowmen as the Elves so that the locals can defend themselves against the afrit-summoners.
Now we’ve seen Media, Meandering, and Metaphor, and you definitely have the wherewithal to handle things. You know Why, you have a full toolbox of Wrenches, and now let us consider Worlds.
This is the Question section, and the lets create a world on the spot section. So, what elements would you like to see in a world. Toss out a few, and we’ll see if we can come up with something playable and innovative. I think we can.
Or, toss me a question.
