So for the past few weeks I've been
working on rewriting the history for Dawning Star while noodling
around various bits and pieces of Fate Core to see where I want to go
with it. When I say rewriting I don't mean making huge changes; the
core story is the same, I'm tweaking some things here and there to
make the setting make more sense. I made contact with the velin
happen earlier, changed the nature of what kept the settlers on Eos
close to the planet, etc. For the most part minor stuff. The big
new stuff has been additions to the setting as we're moving the
timeline ahead five years and introducing a whole bucket of new stuff
to the setting; stuff that takes Dawning Star in new directions that
that I think are much more interesting than the previous version. I
think I've actually ended up putting political allegory into my game
about humans trying to survive on another planet.
So some background with those not
familiar with Dawning Star, it originally was a d20 Future setting
about a cold sleep evacuation ship from 23rd century Earth
ending up on a distant planet, Eos, after getting separated from the
rest of an evacuation fleet fleeing the destruction of Earth by a
comet. The fleet was separated by an alien stargate type device
built by a long dead alien civilization that threw the fleet across
the galaxy, and the Dawning Star ended up near the capital planet of
that dead civilization. The game was sort of a pulp mashup of
Firefly and D&D; mixed high tech and frontier tech, riding horses
with laser guns, and exploring ancient ruins looking for
hyper-advanced tech from the previous inhabitants of the planet. The
sound track would be a mixture of Johnny Cash and Afro-Celt Sound
System. It was a pretty morally clear game; there were good guys,
there were bad guys, all pretty black and white. As an example it
turns out there was a group of human-ish aliens on Eos called the
velin that were pretty much stone age tech, and instead of abusing
them as usually happens with indigenous people, the colonists of
Dawning Star were fair with them all the away around. I guess you
could say humans learned something in the centuries between now and
then, but a Western scifi game with a Native American analog that
pretty much plays into a lot of Native American stereotypes...well,
not exactly the best plan in hindsight. I don't know if it counts as
cultural appropriation since they're purple skinned humanoids who
ride lizards, but if you look at the setting their place in it is
pretty clear. They're about two steps from Tonto-ing it up.
As the setting expanded through the
second sourcebook, Helios Rising about the other planets in the
system, this mashup nature was maintained and every planet sort of
had it's own genre + science fiction mashup. If Eos was Western
scifi, C'thalk was Samurai scifi and Thres was Fantasy scifi, etc.
Dawning Star was very much a product of where I was at the time and
the influences present in my life, which was almost ten years ago
now. I had just started working freelance full time and had big
plans for it being awesome. I was writing for realsies now. I was
elated to have moved out of New York City after three years (did not
like the city, dearly loved and miss the friends though). But now
I'm working on Dawning Star and its coming out very different.
Everyone's motivations are more suspect. No one's totally a good
guy. Self interest is everywhere. This is explicitly spelled out by
characters in in-play writings, such as admitting the evacuation
fleet brought nukes in case they had to take a new home world by
force and wipe out some other species. That sort of hard edged
realism and pragmatism has crept into a lot of the game; the idea
that people in the setting sleep better at night thinking they're the
good guys, but are totally ready to do terrible things if they have
to in order to survive. It's a game about numerous species on the
edge of extinction, so this seems apt. The faction-camps in original
Dawning Star were human settlements that were nebulously up to no
good and plotted against the Dawning Star Republic, the main human
settlement on Eos, because...they were bad. Pretty much. Their
motivations were terrible. Okay, one is being mind controlled by an
alien relic, but the rest had no real motivation. So they've become
sort of self interested libertarians who are motivated by a desire to
escape the government of the Dawning Star Republic and its growing
and corrupt bureaucracy. They're right in that the Republic is
flawed, but theire alternative may be no better.
As I said, original Dawning Star was
pretty much Firefly plus D&D; this version is becoming more
District 9, BSG, and Mass Effect. One of the big events in the
moving of the time line is the introduction of a second human
evacuation ship to Eos along with an alien ship carrying millions of
refugees from dozens of alien species, the two ships having spent the
last five decades together fighting their way through hostile alien
space to get to Eos. Now a colony that could barely feed it's own
people has millions more to worry about, some of which they can't
communicate with and don't even breathe the same air. The tension
meter has been cranked way up as the Republic gives the newcomers
citizenship, but the newcomers will be able to completely dominate
the upcoming election through sheer numbers. Political parties have
formed on both sides of that question. All of the aliens are the
last of their people, so there's a moral imperative to save them, but
when there's just not enough food and resources to go around what do
you do? Who can you trust out of all these aliens and their strange
religions, philosophies, etc? Especially since many of these new
human colonists are actually more loyal to the aliens they've been
fighting alongside for fifty years then the humans who were just
chilling on Eos during that time. That's a big question in the new
Dawning Star. The Dawning Star Republic is not just some settled,
high tech place the players can go back to after raiding an alien
dungeon; it's a overcrowded, dirty city surrounded by ghettos and
camps with every variety of inhuman creatures lurking in the corners
just looking for some organic material they can actually digest or
another methane capsule before their breather dies out.
Sure, there's still ancient alien
threats to face, strange intelligences from other dimensions, and all
the other fun stuff that was in Dawning Star, but there's a lot more
weight to it now. I'm hoping I can stretch this out through all the
setting, though I do think the other planets had more complicated
societies to begin with. It feels like now I'm writing from a very
different place than I was on original Dawning Star. I've moved
several times, almost gone bankrupt, become a father, seen more of
the conflicts that are part of human nature. Have vs have nots.
Racism. Never ending war. Government surveillance vs privacy. All
those have much more part in Dawning Star, in addition to changes to
reflect how science fiction has changed in ten years (the lack of any
real transhumanism elements in the original game is sort of shameful
now). Hopefully it makes it better.
Not sure why I felt the need to write
all this, but it's been nagging on me since I got started on the
revisions. I guess I just wanted to warn people that Dawning Star is
going to be different, but hopefully better.
The Velin kind of bothered me, so I am glad they are getting a bit of a change. Most of the other additions to the setting sound welcome as well. The faction camps always felt a bit odd - most human societies, even colonies in hostile lands, aren't really organized that way. Just having them be space libertarians doesn't add much either (and I apologize if this sounds super-critical; that is not my intent).
ReplyDeleteIt sounds like where you may be going with the faction-camps is in a different direction: maybe these are the proto-parties formed by the different peoples from the two incoming evacuation ships. Some might be entirely alien (for those aliens who can live on the planet) but I imagine a number might be species-mixed. So you'd have a core city with the original settlers, and then rings of camps/ghettos with different newcomer groups. I imagine that some Velin might settle in these ring suburbs too, at least in small numbers.
good blog. nice to visit.
ReplyDelete