Setting up the Flat Black videoconference game that I mentioned in an earlier thread is proving to require more spadework than I thought. Extensive discussions are going to be required about what exactly the PCs are expected to do, and those must be postponed a while because of health and scheduling constraints. In the mean time I’m back at my keyboard.
Two of the future players have been playing in my Flat Black games since 1988 and 1996. The third has indicated that he does not want to start cold with a skeletal briefing and learn the setting from indirect and piecemeal exposition, but would like a substantial introduction. I have to write one anyway, so that’s no problem. That’s what I’m working on now. I’m writing an introduction to Flat Black with a very specific audience in mind.
The Audience indicated that he would prefer a brief consisting of about 5–10 pages. I hope he means to suggest pages of GURPS layout and typesetting, which come to about 840 words to the page of text, because that gives me a budget of 8,400 words, and I’m one of those writers who feels that anything worth saying takes five thousand words. Back in the day when I had excellent close vision and a very tight printing budget I used to circulate material to my RP gaming mates in closely-set 9.6-point, 8.4-point, and even 7.2-point type. I’ve got a handout here from 1991 that runs to 63 pages at 1,116 worlds per page*. My habit nowadays is to use 12-point Times on a 16-point leading, in two columns ragged right without hyphenation. With 19-mm margins left, right and bottom, and 25 mm for top margin and header, I get about 590 words to the page, and an 8,400-word limit will lay out as fourteen pages. If the Audience comes the ugly I will re-set in 10-point Times on a 14-point leading and turn on automatic hyphenation. 810 worlds to the page! Read them and weep!
So my word-count budget (aiming for twelve pages of 12-point Times) is as follows:
Page 1
Genre, a scant half-column
Astrography, an ample half-column
History, one column
Pp. 2–3
Two pages on Technology
Pp. 4–5
Two pages on The Colonies
Pp. 6–7
One column on interstellar travel.
Three columns on the Empire
Page 8
One column on Other Interstellar Organisations
One column on miscellaneous minutiae—money, languages, religions….
Pp. 9–14
Thumbnail sketches of 24 colonies at four per page.
Excelsior!
* I wrote most of it in four days during a bout of hypomania.
Righto! I have a draft in 14 pages of 12-point type. That’s 8,852 words, and it would pack down to about ten-and-a-half pages if Steve Jackson Games were to lay it out for GURPS. I could probably get it to ten pages with 11-point type and by switching on hyphenation,
I’d like someone to read over it and let me know
Whether it covers everything it needs to cover
What if anything it contains that ought to be cut
Whether there is any point where it doesn’t make sense
Whether there is any point where it is just too boring for words.
the heading “Genre” on the first section ought to be stricken out, leaving a cold open on “Flat Black”.
the section “History” ought to be put before the section “Astrography”
in the section “The Colonies” ¶7 the parenthetical explanation “(in which people participate in social life)” ought to be removed from after the technicalism “social unit”.
there ought to be more example colonies. Four more would add a page to the print, eight would add a leaf.
there ought to be more NGOs.
I ought to add some interstellar corporations.
I ought to abandon PDF for a format that will read better on a small device.
in the thumbnail sketches of colonies, the identifying the stars is not worthwhile
I don’t know about “abandon”. Producing multiple output formats off the same source document is the ideal. If I had a free choice I’d make PDF, HTML and ePUB.
I am perhaps inordinately pleased to have finished that introduction. It’s not very big at 9,300 words, but it is the first thing that I have managed actually to finish in several years, and I did it working through mild to moderate depression.
If anyone read it and was struck by a thought of what I ought to write next, do please tell!
That is pretty good. It raised plenty of questions for me, but answered all of them within a couple of paragraphs of their appearance. The question I have left over is why you call the setting Flat Black?
Back in 1986 I played in Tonio Loewald’s playtest campaign for ForeSight, which was set in his setting ForeScene: the Flawed Utopia. I loved ForeSight, but I very much did not like ForeScene, which was a preachy utopia. Not only did I think that most of Tonio’s utopian ideas were unworkable, but one result of it being a utopia was that there wasn’t enough for player characters to do in the volume of space actually described by the setting document. There was too little conflict, and too often the authorities stepped in to deal with what there was. Tonio took to running adventures &c in the Beyond—which is the area not described in 96 pages of tiny type. (Seriously! There are tables and illustrations and whitespace and so on, but there are about 1,500 words on each full page of text!)
The next year I decided to run my own ForeSight campaign, for which I wrote my own setting. I devised it very much to be not a utopia. I wanted to provide the widest possible range of possibilities for adventures for small groups of PCs, and I wanted them to be in the area described by the setting document, not beyond it. There didn’t seem to be any reason to put any nice bits in at all. Besides, I was 22 and cynical.
So I devised a setting that was unrelieved dystopian: flat black, not even gloss.
I’ve mellowed since then, but there has never seemed to be a compelling alternative to or reason to change the name. Those few people who know of the setting, “Flat Black” is what they know it as.
A reader who was busy until now being two professors got back to me yesterday. She recommends that the Players’ Introduction to Flat Black would benefit from the following:
An early explicit statement that Flat Black does not feature magic, psionics, spiritual phenomena, mind-brain dualism, or scientifically implausible technology.
An explicit statement of the role of AI, with a statement that it is almost always inhuman in its mentality.
An explicit statement that intelligent aliens exist, but that they
are seldom at all humanoid, and in general less like humans biologically than an oak tree is, so that human-alien romance and mixed families are out of the question,
have cognitive processes that are as good as human ones, but different, and that sometimes evolved for solving a quite different problems, and
I’m in favour of explicit author-to-GM statements of this kind, because as a GM they’re the sort of high-level thing I need to know when I’m making up details that aren’t in the book.
Yeah. But I was trying hard to stay within 8,500 words, and thought it best to write about things that exist in the setting rather than about things that don’t exist. I’m not Stanislaw Lem.
… and the thing that induces fusion in air at STP.
I take your point, but even so I’d class things as things that the prospective GM needs to know. I’d probably have them pretty much as you’ve written them, though I might expand on mind-brain dualism to say something like “(personality uploading, etc.)”.
“Except for having FTL, Flat Black is a scientifically and technologically realistic setting based on early twenty-first century science.”
That would seem to cover the great majority of the points you mention. I suppose you might change “What aliens there are are severely disadvantaged” by adding “and not remotely humanoid,” to exclude the rubber-suit option; I don’t think you need to discuss the impossibility of cross-breeding, as that’s covered by “scientifically realistic.”
It seems to me that what you are trying to do is contemporary science fiction, with a lot of its characteristic tropes, and very few of the tropes of post-WWII science fiction that were so prevalent in Star Trek: no time travel, no parallel worlds, no humanoid aliens, no psionics, no mutant superbeings, perhaps no humanoid robots (or does the setting have social interface robots, caregivers, sexbots, and so on?). I don’t think it should be necessary to list a lot of older tropes and anathematize them. If a GM using Flat Black wants to put in a race of psionic humanoid aliens, I don’t think you can stop them and I don’t really think you need to—but I don’t see that the text invites this.
As for the personality uploading that Roger mentions, it looks to me as if you say explicitly that it’s technologically feasible but that there’s insufficient demand to support it. That’s a different case.
Incidentally, I note that you use the term “android,” and it appears to mean synthetic humans or other synthetic biological organisms. That’s the usage I’m accustomed to as well, having read a lot of 1950s and 1960s SF. But it seems to me that recently, perhaps growing out of George Lucas’s references to “droids,” the word has come to mean a human robot, or more generally a motile robot with sensor and effector systems. We have the really ugly portmanteau word “bioroid” for what you are referring to—with “android” cut down to “roid” and prefixed with “bio-”. I don’t really like to recommend such a ghastly coinage, but “android” may cause misunderstanding. Perhaps “A-life,” a term actually used in the scientific literature?
Of course, this kind of confusion of language is endemic in SF. The very term “robot” originally mean a synthetic living organism in human shape; it was Americans like Binder and Asimov who adopted it for “mechanical men.”