I must learn to do that,
- I ought to describe the division of the Empire into Sectors and what there is at an SHQ.
The latest tranche of suggestions is that I should
- Number the pages
- Make the chapters more distinct to the reader
- Make the chapter headings easier to read
- Make the logical structure more obvious
- Switch from left-aligned to justified text
- Insert pictures to break up the walls of text
- Give an idea of what to do with the setting
- Explain what genre Flat Black is designed for, what stories it supports, and what stories won’t work.
- Address typical tropes, describe a clichéd Flat Black adventure, set some common expectations.
- Compare the setting to some movies or reference TV Tropes.
- Explain whether the setting is rules-agnostic or intended for use with GURPS.
I’m a little bit puzzled by some of those.
Okey-dokey then. New draft. It’s 9,400 words and I really ought to stop, though technically it does fit into ten pages of ten-point type.
—
Edited to remove obsolete links. The current files can be downloaded from the On Line Texts page of the otherwise-defunct Flat Black wiki at Wikidot.
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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!
(I need something better than Dropbox hosting.)
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?
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Well.
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.
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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
- are disadvantaged and not numerous.
Has anyone a comment or suggestion about that?
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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.
except for the FTL drives.
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.)”.
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“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.
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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.”
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My friend the double-barrelled professor is a fan of Star Trek and familiar with that fandom. She opines that unless the possibilities are clearly ruled out players will want to play half-aliens and Pinocchio-bots, and to have their characters fuck or marry aliens. She knows that that is ruled out by “scientifically realistic”. You know it, I know it, Roger knows it. Myriads, perhaps lakhs, of SF-fans know it. But millions of sci-fi fans whose main exposure is to Star Trek can’t be expected to. Such things happen in the sci-fi they are used to, and of course they don’t know what doesn’t happen in the SF they don’t read.
When my first paper¹ came back from the publishers Reviewer #2 had written some typically foolish comment about a certain passage not being clear. I complained to my supervisor that the passage was clear and that the problem was the Reviewer #2 is an idiot, but he told me something that I have treasured ever since: “If anyone says that your writing is not clear, then by definition it is not clear enough.” I re-wrote the passage.
Someone — I think it was @davidbofinger — commented once that Flat Black is not modern² science fiction, that it is essentially 70s SF with conservatively updated technology. I think that is essentially right. Perceptive chap, David.
¹ Evill, B. 1995 “Population, Urban Density, and Fuel Use: eliminating spurious correlation” in Urban Policy and Research Vol. 13 number 1, pp.29–36
² He made the comment about 1990 I think, certainly no later than 1995, but it remains true.
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My use of “android technology” is a holdover from ForeSight (the RPG ruleset that I used to run most of my Flat Black campaigns) and its author’s published setting ForeScene: the Flawed Utopia. In those, “androids” were directly inspired by the replicants in Blade Runner. But Dick was long ago, and now our inspiration is in the Star Trek of a Soong. I ought to revise the reference.
It rather seems as if I have inspired you to clarify your position by offering a vigorous argument against it. I’m not sure I agree; I’ve long sympathized with William Blake’s maxim that “That which can be made explicit to the idiot is not worth my care.” But you must judge your intended audience.
However—is this the only document players will read before they create characters? Or are you going to hand them a guide to character creation? I wonder if it might be more effective, if so, to say there that “characters can’t be aliens, because X; or half-alien hybrids, because they’re biologically impossible; or AIs/androids/robots/whatever you call them, because Y.” Put the advisory right in players faces when they start designing character, not in an overview that they may forget, or not read closely, perhaps skipping over the parts that they would rather not be limited by? You could even start the document I’m envisioning by saying, “Characters in Flat Black must be either human beings or members of genetically modified parahuman races.”
Many of my friends¹ are generous in providing that service. I have to resist the temptation to regard those clarifications as anything that anyone is actually interested in reading in setting material.
I’m not sure I agree; I’ve long sympathized with William Blake’s maxim that “That which can be made explicit to the idiot is not worth my care.” But you must judge your intended audience.
I think the difference between clarifying and simplifying is relevant here. I believe very much that anything worth saying has a certain real complexity, and that trying to explain it in terms simpler than that results in a statement that may be simple enough for an idiot but that is useless because it is wrong. Oversimplification results not in the idiot understanding, but in the idiot and all other readers and students being fooled by an irresponsible writer or teacher into confidently believing a misleading falsehood. But writing even more clearly than is necessary is no disservice to anyone. The reader of superior acumen, the one who might treasure unnecessary detail and who could puzzle out obscurity, might deplore simplification but will appreciate clarity as making the experience of reading easier and more pleasant.
However—is this the only document players will read before they create characters? Or are you going to hand them a guide to character creation?
My usual approach would be to offer this introduction in conjunction with a campaign prospectus, and then to hold “session zero” round-table discussions of the campaign specification, prototype adventure (“campaign ethos”), party template, and characters before allowing players to go on to character creation. But I might also make this introduction available with pre-generated characters.
I have run Flat Black games using several RPG systems such as ForeSight, HERO System, and GURPS, and I am contemplating Fudge. I suppose that in the unlikely event of anyone else wanting to run a Flat Black campaign they might want to use Traveller, Universe, Space Opera, Diaspora, modified Starblazers, Big Eyes, Small Mouth, modified Hollow Earth Expedition, their own home-brew, etc., so no guide to character generation could be as universal as this general introduction.
¹ We must comprehend this as “a large proportion of my friends”, to avoid being distracted by the question as to whether I have many friends.
That is true, but I have to say that were I planning to run a campaign of X in system Q rather than the intended system P, I would first read the character creation material for system P to get an idea of what I was trying to do in system Q.
And if the other GM does the equivalent of running Transhuman Space with FTL and alien invaders, or quantum thaumaturgy, or something else alien to the setting, well, it’s their campaign, n’est-ce pas?
Still, if you’re trying to help players decide whether an FB campaign is exactly the thing or not so much, it does make sense to tell them that this is not an oldstyle sci-fi campaign with a promiscuous mix of Astounding Science Fiction tropes.
All these perceptive things I say and forget until someone reminds me. I’m glad someone remembers.
If someone wants to play Spock in Flat Black they can: he’s a genetically modified colonist from a culture with unusual social features.
If they want to play a genuine alien, like the Horta, then I might allow it if they were keen but it seems a lot of work for GM and player.
If they want to play Data then I think they should be out of luck. Nothing in Flat Black is so bespoke, and IMO non-biological AI should not exist in the setting.
Asides:
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Planets in Star Trek are always being destroyed, over time scales short with planetary formation. My theory is that the Star Trek universe is regularly trashed and reconstructed, in the manner of Pratchett’s Strata. Our fossil record is fiction. Our entire ecosystem’s age is measured in thousands of years, not billions.
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Matthew Doulgeris used to say that the Auronar in Blake’s Seven were descended from mutant or genetically engineered human colonists. In a parallel universe in which Terry Nation cared about anything in Blake’s Seven having internal consistency I think he’d be right.
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Terry never really worked out the difference between a solar system and a galaxy.
@Agemegos, am I right in thinking that these documents assume no canonical game system? And that therefore the package delivered to the potential GM doesn’t really contain a character generation guide in the sense in which we’d normally understand it?
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