I don’t think the issue was exoticism to us, it’s exoticism in game. The Suite is highly integrated in addition to being highly diverse. From a game design perspective, I’m not sure if adding "this is weird to your PC AND High DL adds a lot to the experience, since few players will ever get blase about the weird that their PCs find normal.
At an abstract level I like it because it is texture, but too much texture is grit. It’s your call where the line is.
I’m way out of date on FB and never knew it that well. I’m sure you have plenty of variation between worlds. Still, there are probably stories that benefit from having worlds that are more or less accessible to interstellar travel, without there needing to be a political reason for it. It might not be necessary but it feels to me worthwhile. If there’s a well-connected backbone of worlds (“The Concourse”, perhaps? :-)) that might be an interesting feature in itself. Worlds that are hard to get to become Imperial nightmares: if one gets out of control what will the empire do? Worlds that are well-connected become an entirely different kind of problem, because there’s so much traffic and it’s in a hurry.
Nicely put.
I’m not really devoted to the proposition that all ships travel at exactly the same speed. I’d actually like to have expensive and uncomfortable fast couriers and slow, cheap large carriers for low-VOT cargoes. I’d even really like to have an indefinite coma of Bofinger colonies lost or hiding in the deep Beyond.
The problem is that detail attracts attention. I definitely have players who will differentiate the GC function of travel to work out whether the liners are travelling at optimal speed, and will compare the population and development levels of the Bofinger colonies with the population and development of the Core worlds and ask hard questions about their initial population and unusual success. Not to draw players’ attention to places where I don’t want it to go, I have learned (not quickly) to shut up about the space-opera stuff.
The empire is not only a transport specialist, it also provides some defence and police functions. It’s unusual in that its monopoly is legally enforced rather than a consequence of a more or less free market.
Are there ex-members of the suite? Worlds that got left behind or out-competed or found their control of the buggy whip industry grew gradually less lucrative?
I see Tau Ceti is listed as a “world”. In what sense is this true?
“Legally” in the sense that the people who win the wars write the laws.
Not exactly. New Rome was one of the half-dozen richest economies in 532, and it’s only one of the dozen richest now, not advancing any more, and not counted in the Suite. And that’s what you mean in a way. But the Suite is not defined as being one of the richest colonies, it is defined by being more advanced than Old Earth, and until about forty years ago there was no Suite.
The criterion is qualitative and subject to judgement: the Suite is Tau Ceti, Aeneas, Iter, Simanta, Seeonee, and Todos Santos, but there are another six worlds at DL 8.0 who protest they they ought to be counted or complain that they are unfairly excluded: Ladon, Barutanah, New Rome, New Earth, Stockhausen, and Svarga.
The Tau Ceti that you remember was one of two* profusely habitable systems thrown up by the ForeSight star system generator. Helped by the easy-going terraformation rules in ForeScene it had two habitable planets and five habitable moons, with a total of nine colonies. It had a couple of problems with the planetary science, and these did not go unremarked-upon.
The revised version of “Tau Ceti” is a solitary inhabited planet, the third of the star τ Ceti, which has eight colonies on it. These eight colonies are in in theory independent sovereign states: they insist on the privileges of independent colonies and refuse to concede the existence of any union, league, confederation or any such higher state that they are all parts of. On the other hand they are so tightly co-ordinated by policy harmonisation agreements and sub-ministerial co-ordination committees that it’s really quite impossible to say in what regard any of them is independent of the others: when it suits them, the colonies of Tau Ceti also insist on the privileges of a united world. Similarly, the cultures and accents of the eight colonies have been homogenised by eight centuries of high-tech intercourse, and only a local can tell them apart. Avalon, New Sunrise, San Pietro, Ys, Gogmagog, Hell, Zinfandel, and Alcuin are independent, honest! Except when it suits them not to be. And there is nothing to call them collectively except “Tau Ceti”.
* The other was Lambda Aurigae.
I thought FB generally was way ahead of Old Earth. Clearly their FTL drives have left it in the dust. Maybe you mean something by “advanced” that has more to do with scale of organisation.
FB seems to have a fairly bland recent history. There aren’t worlds that were great powers, and then the Chavistas took over, and now they’re a hole in the ground. Or that just went to pieces in the Formation Wars. Maybe the empire is stopping this sort of thing from happening with great efficiency. I’m contrasting here with, say, A Deepness in the Sky, where the STL/JAFAL trading fleets accepted that planets would develop, become good trading destinations, become so optimised-vulnerable/ossified/inward-looking that they ceased to be anywhere you’d want to visit, and then collapse, rebuild and repeat. Maybe this is the future of the empire as a whole.
I mean that Old Earth was ForeSight tech level 8.0, limited by the extent of its markets, and died when someone built and activated a TL8 faster-than light drive. The worlds that are at DL 8.0 can practically manufacture anything that was in commercial manufacture on Old Earth; Flat Black has TL 8.5 stuff because the critical bits and pieces are made in the Suite. Further development will rely on actual innovation. It’s not way ahead: it caught up forty-odd years ago and is half a DL (practically, that means half a TL in commercially available technology) ahead.
The Eichberger device is one of those things that is not as technically demanding to make as its late invention would suggest. Whomever-it-was who invented it in Buenos Aires in 2353 did so in a TL 8.0 economy, but Tomitomo Eichberger was able to re-invent it in a DL7 economy. Because even though Mayflower was only development level 7 it was technology level 8.
I’m glad you noticed. It is a design feature that the setting as a whole doesn’t have much going on on a wide scope. I don’t want grand-strategic issues casting PCs into the shade.
There are no worlds that are great powers either. The setting has been carefully crafted to have no great-power-like conflict on the interstellar stage, because I don’t want to do space opera. I’m trying to emulate Vance’s Oikumene, Gaean Reach and Alastor Cluster material. They didn’t have any history, and they were better off without it.
There might very well be worlds that were wealthy and highly developed until fairly recently and are now holes in the ground. The steady trickle of Imperial interventions suggests that there are some, and the adventure 9,401 (which I ran at Phenomenon in '05) was set on one where it was happening. I’ve only said that none of the richest and best-run 1% of colonies has had such a catastrophe in the last seventy years.
Remember that there are a thousand worlds. The collapse of one of them is just local history, it is not global history. Fighting does not spread across borders. Refugees do not stream in their hundreds of thousands. Great powers do not send huge armies to intervene. The Korean War does not end up with Americans and Turks fighting against Chinese.
Oh, there are certainly places that went to pieces in the Formation Wars! You asked about collapse of members of the Suite, and there was no Suite until eighty years after the Formation Wars.
Nope.
The Empire is too young to have seen the life cycle of civilisation play out on any planet. It is only 120 years old. It has certainly seen several worlds go through economic miracles of recovery. It sees several collapse every year. Civil wars break out. It gets intervention acts. It sends in marines. Quite often it borrows and Imperialises armies of peacekeepers lent by other colonies. It’s just that something that happens several times every year is news but not history.
You asked whether any member of the Suite had collapsed. That’s a group of the 0.6% most highly-developed worlds, and has been in existence for about forty years.
There are 200-odd nations in the UN. The richest 0.6% is the USA. The fact that no region of the USA has been taken over by the Chavistas and brought to ruin in the last forty years does not tell you that there has been peace and prosperity in Venezuela.
So what history has there been?
Meanwhile, 625–1,000 worlds had worlds full of history that seemed to them far more important than the stuff they heard about from outer space. But the view from on high is that it was all just grit.
I would’t actually call that unusual. Even in the United States, there have been lots of cases of monopolies being legally enforced, from petty local things like taxi companies and sewer systems to the decades-long AT&T telephone monopoly. And often enough you will find businesses encouraging legislation that hinders potential new competition, even if it doesn’t actually ban it. If I recall correctly, Mancur Olson had a lot to say about this in The Logic of Collective Action.
I meant it was unusual amongst the Suite. The other members, as far as I know, are selling their special products and services to willing buyers.
I could posit such economies of scale in the manufacture of the Eichberger drive cores that the Eichberger Foundation would have a natural monopoly on those as Simanta has on ecosystem designs, but I don’t particularly want to make the Empire out as an especially virtuous economic agent.
Aha, I suddenly realise one of the pieces that’s been missing in my conception of the setting. You have the possibility of the van Rijn type of planet-puzzle story (something is weird about this planet, and we have to work out what it is in order to survive and get away), but not the Flandry type that’s more of a personal/political puzzle (we have to understand the weirdness, either local or from the opposition, so that this planet will join our Empire rather than the other one).
Yep. I love the Flandry stories, but they were not my model for Flat Black. Jack Vance and Cordwainer Smith, with a dash of Ursula Le Guin.
…
I’m trying to not sound snarky here. Forgive me if I fail, or lay into me if you prefer.
You spend a lot of time and effort documenting the Empire. That documentation is going to draw player attention.
You clearly want your games to focus on the colonies. There is not much documentation of those. This thread is itself about colonial tech levels but here we are talking about Imperial things. Again.
I understand the desire to have a solid and realistic big picture foundation to build on, but maybe you should be writing up colonies and leaving the Empire as an impressive matte-painted backdrop. You have been painting it for a long time and it will never be perfect.
And if a PC up to his elbows in colonial-alligator-beasts insists on turning conversation around to FTL travel … well maybe the beasts eat him.
It’s a good point,
The first version of the Flat Black handout for players described the Empire and left the colonies largely to be detailed by the ForeSight star system and planet generators. And the vast bulk of material that I have produced since then (apart from a sheaf of obsolete star system and planet briefs) has been in response to players’ and readers’ questions; you lot have asked mostly about global history, Imperial organisation and finance, technology, trade economics etc.
In the version that I am working on now — or rather, that I have been neglecting for the last two weeks — I am resolved to say much less about history and much less about the Empire. The plan is to describe the enabling technology first, then the colonies, and include 200-word thumbnail sketches of at least eighteen colonies before I describe the Empire. And the description of the Empire is going to be brief, omitting reams of accumulated lore. I have grave doubts that I ought to mention the Mink, and perhaps not even the raising of the Imperial Family.
There are going to be a lot of dead darlings. I steel myself with the hope that they might be going to a better place, a Guide to the Empire that might one day be.
Given that you have decided to say “this is a setting specifically for this sort of adventure” rather than a generic SF setting, it seems to me that one might usefully lead off with some examples of “this sort of adventure” - as it might be, the executive summary of the intervention report. Not so much adventure seeds, though they would be interesting too, but more “here was the situation, the PCs did this, that was the result”.
Yes. Folks ask questions about the Empire because it is interesting, and your answers add more interesting bits to gnaw on. Lot of interesting things have accumulated, but they are not the interesting things you want to play with.
I’ve no doubt you can write interesting things you do want to play with, and look forward to reading them.
One thing that I do plan to include is a list of example campaign frames, of “X who do Y” specifications. With all the “Imperial servants who…” ones at the end.
A useful principle that I’ve followed in more than one fantasy campaign is the one Tolkien used in his novels: Having a culture that is in some sense “modern” that the heroes, or PCs, can be from, to help the reader or player identify with their adventures without needing to get into the head of someone from an exotic culture. Such characters don’t have to be, as psychologists are starting to say, WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic), but they should be people who make sense to a WEIRD player.
If you have a culture like that, it makes sense to give a quick sense of “twelve things everybody knows in my village.”
That seems to be a plausible model for a future setting as well. You can have exotic cultures up the wazoo, but it’s best if one of them feels somewhat like home.
I agree here. One particularly handy possibility here is that there are quite a few colonies with economies and cultures that are backwards enough in FB terms to seem familiar. I get the impression that a lot of FB PCs are traditionally Imperials or from the Suite, but a deliberate “Planet Australia” analog for PCs might be very handy GMing wise.
I have followed up a couple of tangents from this thread in threads of their own: