Campaign Mode: Colonization

The recent release of a Colonization update to the game Starbound, plus having been playing some of the Civilization games, prompted me to think about reasons why you might want to play a game about founding a colony. This was followed up by someone complaining that Starbound had dared to use the word 'colonization' for the update, and the rest followed from my bafflement.

So here's my take on why you might want to try playing a colonization or nation-building campaign.

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It's a new kind of challenge

Even stepping away from the standard adventure model where a group of would-be heroes undertake quests and looking at the wider spectrum of game types, this kind of game is unusual. You're not dealing with a villain or villain group. You're not interacting with an existing civilization (well, you might be, but more about that later) or relying on the support of a pre-existing industrial base. The player group is going into a wilderness area - possibly just untamed wilderness, in a fantasy game, but with a sci-fi game we might be talking the colonization of an entire new world. They won't have anything more than limited and infrequent support from 'back home' in the best of circumstances.

The GM should allow a larger-than-usual starting budget for players in this kind of game, with the exception of exile-style games (more on that below). This allows everyone to feel satisfied that they've prepared for things as best they can, and can let the GM see what kind of challenges they're expecting to face. For most games, groups should have at least a rough idea of what's in wait for them - climate and terrain, possibly a map of some level of detail. A fantasy game is more likely to just have a rough lay of the land than a sci-fi game, since with sci-fi the settlers can dispatch probes that travel just a little faster across the interstellar distances and get to collect years of information on climate, large-scale maps, and so on.

Everyone should get to have a hand in creating the colonists; players get to have a tie to at least some of the NPCs, linking them together with the PCs and other NPCs and giving themselves a sense of investment in the game from the get-go. At the same time, this is where the biggest challenges are going to come from. There will be unforeseen personality conflicts, challenges to authority, illnesses, and more. What will the PCs do when the settlement's only blacksmith or medic cracks under the stress and runs off into the wilderness? What about when two of the most charismatic members of the colony break off their relationship and try to rally everyone against the other, threatening to tear the settlement apart?

The land is unknown and dangerous

Even in a far-future setting, there's a limit to how much information can be gathered and how detailed it can be. Short of seeding the world with nanotechnology that effectively builds a civilization before the colonists arrive, there are going to be threats and risks from the environment of the new land. Everything from unfamiliar terrain to aggressive wildlife that doesn't fear humans can threaten people. Even if the PCs enact curfews and defensive perimeters, people will get drunk or bored and decide to go sneaking out, leaving the characters with a choice of risking the wilderness to save the missing or being accused of abandoning them to the wilds.

Even just attempting to explore and settle the area right around the initial base camp has the risk of numerous dangers - discovering that the woods that were going to be a source of raw materials for building have a cave entrance that's home to some big, hungry predator demands a quick response. The discovery that the base camp is right in the middle of a migration route for a species of large herd animals that think 'walls' are just things to be pushed through can make it necessary to quickly pack up and move, or else make an effort to drive the creatures to the side of the settlement.

Native plants can wreak havoc among attempts at farming crops. A rash of weeds with a foul odor and oil that causes an itching rash at the slightest touch can make life hell for everyone, requiring characters to think creatively to come up with solutions, and the insects that feed on those weeds may carry some unknown and nasty illness that healing magic or modern medicine doesn't have the ability to treat without spending a lot of time and effort on research - time and effort that has to be diverted away from other tasks.

Every player can find something to do

People on the Method Actor end of the scale can indulge in the interactions and politics of the settlement, from simply settling disputes and arguments to running campaigns about issues to handling setting up a government and running an election campaign. Those on the Tactician end of things can enjoy planning the layout of the settlement, arranging the defenses, organizing scouting parties, and handling the more violent disputes that crop up. Explorers have everything from an isolated wilderness to an entire planet or star system to dig into the mysteries of.

Combat hounds can find themselves in the role of law enforcement, dealing with everything from belligerent drunks to hostile wildlife - or possibly even hostile locals or later colonization efforts. The roguish types can put their inclinations to use scouting, hunting wild animals to feed everyone, and keeping tabs on malcontents around the settlement. Those who prefer to delve into lore can dig into their surroundings, either via magic or science, assembling information to help the colony out - and giving the player a chance to help build some of the lore of the area, if the GM asks them beforehand what they're looking to find, and building the answer on what their skill checks produce.

Potential conflicts on a new level

There's the chance that the colony might not be the first into an area - or not the last to arrive. If there are others there ahead of them, there's a question of whether they're natives to the area, or perhaps an earlier colony that might be better developed. There's a chance that peaceful contact might be established, arranging trade and aid between the groups, but also the distinct chance - particularly if the cultures differ - for hostilities to commence.

If the group is indigenous, there's the question of how they measure up technologically and resource-wise against the new arrivals - and which side has the deadlier diseases in their systems against the others. A sudden illness seizing the PC settlement after first contact, threatening the death of many unless the players can either devise a treatment or make peaceful contact with the natives and get a treatment from them to help minimize the impact and damage.

If they're earlier arrivals, there's a chance that they might be wildcat colonists - people who went to settle their own land illicitly, without any support or writ from the original civilization. They might even be settlers from a nation hostile to the one that the PC colony comes from - so what do the players do when disaster strikes in the form of a massive earthquake, torrential downpour that causes flooding, or even something like a meteor impact or volcanic eruption, leaving both colonies in shambles and likely to die unless they work together?

And what do they do when a later colony effort shows up, outraged to discover someone here ahead of them and more than willing to initiate hostilities with the PC colony over what they see as 'their' rightful land? Do they try to make peace and relocate, fight to the last to defend their new homes, or resort to more nefarious means to secure their safety?

A reason to be central without being heroes

If the PCs are the organizers or the chosen authority of the colony, they have a reason to be at the center of the action without the story needing to revolve directly around them. The individual stories of the other colonists can be woven around the PCs, making them central to everything that happens without any of it actually being about them.

Two families come to them to ask them to settle who has a claim to a particularly fertile stretch of land. A child goes missing, run off into the woods, and someone has to organize the search effort and go looking for them. A pack of hungry predators show up and menace outlying farms, and someone needs to go drive them off or kill them. The list goes on - once things are settled, those who relied on the PCs early on start to agitate to displace them, or talk a portion of the other colonists into abandoning the settlement and going into the wilds to make their own encampment where they can enact rules that the PCs have been denying.

Mysterious mysteries

Perhaps there are secrets hidden beneath the pristine wilderness. Someone exploring finds a crevice in a hill that leads to a building buried completely underground, the interior suggesting a whole new civilization that no one has ever heard of before. A scout finds an ancient machine of unknown purpose, which has been laying still for so long a tree has grown up through it. A lake turns out to have unnaturally regular lines, and one side turns out to be an artificially crafted dam.

Or perhaps the PCs decide to create things themselves that will one day be the mysteries of the past - a temple to the gods they left civilization to be free to worship, hidden in the deep forest, or a statue in their own honor raised in the middle of their town. The colonists who split off to do their own thing are found - or the ruins of their attempted settlement is, with no trace of the colonists who founded it.

Building a new campaign world

Finally, after a colonization campaign comes to a close, the group has created a new place to play in during later games, seeing how things play out in the future. The small town they painstakingly built becomes a metropolis, the quarry they set up becomes a lake when it runs out, or the temple they built becomes the center of a kingdom's faith. The wilderness falls back, and they can come back to the other, more familiar game types, but now they find streets named after their old characters, monuments they built still standing - or standing in neglect, in need of a new generation to revitalize them.

All of the familiar pieces of gameplay, but now every bit has had their hands involved shaping it, making the world that much more real for them as they build their next character to fit into it.

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So consider giving a colonization game a try; it might just be worth the effort!

The Godless World

In the core assumptions of pretty much every fantasy system that isn't brutally low-fantasy, there tends to be a premise that there's at least one god, or perhaps a full pantheon of gods, who are behind the world as movers and shakers on a level that mortals can only hold a vague hope of one day brushing the lower echelons of. A few have usurped this to some degree - in the D20 system, the settings of Eberron and Dark Sun both did away with provable active gods - but this tends to be the default state of fantasy games.

There's nothing wrong with it in general, and quite a lot of exciting stories can be told where such being are either the source (an ancient evil god seeks to return, a new evil god is going to be born, a good god or alliance of good gods deputizes some mortals to go fight the minions of some evil gods or other horrors, and so on) or only involved as much as the player with a priestly character calls the god's name when calling on the god's power.

Still - there's something to be said for worlds where there's absolutely no divinity; not even the vague "Well, maybe, because these priests are getting power from somewhere, right?" of Eberron. There are almost certainly going to still be religions, but there's nothing to back them up. If the setting has things like angels and demons, they're just another kind of life - possibly from another universe, possibly lurking in unusual places and using the beliefs of mortals to their advantage.

This premise opens up a whole host of new possible stories. If there are no gods, and the players all know it even though faith and religion are still things in the world, how do they react when two different priests of the same faith beg them to help deal with the other as a blasphemer and traitor (possibly over some minute difference of belief that seems absurd to anyone outside the faith)? What about if they come across a village that worships the statue in their shrine as the avatar of a god, and it seems to grant them miracles (perhaps a restless ghost, seeking to incite the villagers to finish what  tasks it had, is behind it. Perhaps an angel or demon has decided to 'prove' the god is real by working miraculous effects in the name of it. Perhaps the villagers themselves are unwittingly possessed of some unusual power that collectively lets them bend reality together, and this is how it manifests.)?

It also opens up the question of players deciding to take advantage of the situation. Charlatans and miracle-peddlers who intend to never come back could easily have a campaign built around their misadventures, with angry former customers hunting after them as they go from town to town, leaving emptied coffers and broken dreams behind, along with the occasional genuine bit of good. Perhaps the players are the charlatans, always trying to stay a step ahead of their vengeful former customers, or perhaps they're a band of people cheated by charlatans hunting after them.

All in all, a godless world poses quite a lot of unusual ideas and plot hooks that could provide a wide range of fodder for stories and plots. One-shots can be built around scenarios like the ghost in the statue or two competing bands of false priests arriving in a town, while a more complete camapign can build on any number of ideas, including a 'war in heaven' between angels and devils, with some renegade factions trying to reveal the truth to the mortals.

Certainly seems like something worth giving a try.

Game Seeds: Celestial Events

(This post should have been posted on Friday, but extreme exhaustion delayed it until today.)

In a fantasy world with active gods, celestial events can have tremendous impact; the amount of story that can be dragged out of a simple event like a stellar conjunction or eclipse is large for a relatively small amount of effort on the part of the GM. Some are harder than others, depending on the shape of the world in your setting. Worlds where celestial bodies literally represent the gods make it easy, but even in ones that mimic the familiar solar system can have important results for interventionist deities.

A simple stellar conjunction is most typical of interest for gods of the night, the stars, or for the things that lurk in the darkness between the stars. Cultists will mark the progression of the stars and events related to whatever comparatively minor forces they serve. Sacrifices to demons or forgotten outer gods can take place when certain conjunctions occur, and that sort of thing is most likely of interest to heroic adventurers looking for a reason to save people from a terrible fate.

Stellar conjunctions can also mark esoteric events like planar conjunctions and gateways to strange places opening. Creatures from other worlds might sneak into the mortal world on such nights, terrain from other lands might overlay the regular terrain, and taking the wrong turn might lead the unwary to places unknown. They can make a great way to inject some strangeness into your game, either temporarily (ending as the conjunction closes) or permanently (the group finds themselves transposed to a new world when they take a wrong turn or have their home territory transposed forever with some other world).

Eclipses are more dramatic and powerful events; a lunar eclipse can be an omen from the gods, a sign of some great celestial struggle, or an intrusion by some outside force as the moons darkens and turns a bloody shade of red. Lunar gods and their priesthoods are the most likely to be involved; seeking omens and casting divinations to seek knowledge during the event, attempting great sacrifices to strengthen their god against the devouring dark, or undertaking a mission to a sacred place where the eclipse will open a way to the god's domain - or to the domain that the god otherwise keeps sealed and warded away, to keep the world safe.

Solar eclipses, brief and dramatic like nothing else, are the star of the show for celestial fireworks. Sun gods and their dark and jealous siblings go to war briefly, the righteous sun god always winning - until they don't, and the eclipse lingers as the sibling takes over, forcing heroes into action to save the world from eternal twilight gloom. Eclipses can also be times when creatures of the night become active for a short while - vampires grabbing victims in the gloom , shapeshifters like werewolves unexpectedly forced to transform by the power of the eclipse, and so on. Omens, portents, prophecies, and childrens with dramatic destinies can also result from solar eclipses, some with a stronger impact than others on a campaign world.

Other events - supernova explosions in the sky that leave a remnant bright enough to see in the day, comets, and shooting stars - can all also have an impact on the world while they linger. Falling stars are often seen as a source of exotic metals like mithral and adamantine, comets are seen as harbingers of disaster, and the flash of a supernova can mean many things - the death or birth of a god, the end of an age, the shift of the balance of the world, or the escape of an ancient evil.

GMs looking to inject a little awesome wonder into their game could certainly do worse than using a few of these in their games to signify events to come.

Seeds - Eclipse Phase: The Mime Cult

The setting of Eclipse Phase is full of all kinds of things, both wondrous and horrible. Earth is essentially gone, the old way of doing things is collapsing, and humanity, despite being 99% wiped out, is still fighting with one another over the Right Way of doing things. Small surprise that some people turn their backs on being human - or transhuman - entirely, then. The Mime Cult is one such group, a small collection of exhumans who use high-bandwidth mesh links, tactical network software, and some rather hazardous psychosurgery to remove their need to communicate.

Operating in Venusian space, the Mime Cult appears, on the surface, to be an old-fashioned group of entertainers who get by on a mix of credits and rep score, performing skits in public without ever saying a word. On all public-access feeds, the members - each one with their skin pigmented to perfectly match mime face paint - appear to stay in character as harmless performers who simply want to bring some levity into the world.

In the hidden spaces of the habitats where they're active, the Mime Cult carries out the other part of their plans. Darkcasting rigs and desktop cornucopia machines crammed into disused maintenance areas where only service bots go allow the members of the group to ply their trade and add to their ranks - invisibility cloaks and cheaply made synths with chameleon skin allow them to abduct the poor, the destitute, and the unwanted from areas with spotty coverage, dragging them to the darkcasting rigs to send their minds to a small tin can hab swinging at the very edge of Venusian space.

This habitat, which appears derelict from the outside, is crammed with simulspace servers. New arrivals are quickly fed into extreme psychosurgical modification programs, carving and molding the original ego into a twisted mockery of itself. For most, it takes only a few days of real time before they emerge with their minds radically altered to accept the dictates of the Mime Cult; by the time they're sent back to the original habitat to be loaded into their newly-pigmented old morph, little remains of the original ego.

Other than the kidnapping, the group might be only a modest threat were it not for the fact that the original Mime Cultists are a trio of exsurgents, their minds spliced by the TITANs to unify them. In constant contact via their mesh inserts, they're a three-faced god to the cult, and they include a subtle strain of the exsurgent virus in the indoctrination procedure. Mime Cultists are driven to spread like a slow cancer, disguising their predations behind a facade of harmless entertainment, until they reach a critical mass in a given habitat.

At that point, the Mime Cult metastasizes, going from a benign-seeming intrusion to a nightmarish vector of destruction. A memetic trigger sweeps through the group, causing them to trigger dormant nanite hives installed while the egos were being modified; in a matter of hours, the modified morphs grow heavy armor, still pigmented to look like mimes. Their fingers give way to lengthy claws, reinforced to let them tear through body armor, while their muscles and nerves are rebuilt to make them stronger and faster.

Once a Mime Cult cell metastasizes, the members sweep through the population of a habitat, slaughtering anyone they encounter and harvesting their cortical stacks to be sent for modification. Once a habitat has been emptied of inhabitants, the cultists upload themselves, leaving delta forks behind that quickly compromise the habitat and upset its orbit to send it tumbling into the atmosphere of Venus, hiding their tracks with distress calls and emergency messages about system failures.

The Mime Cult so far has evaded notice by Firewall, but the destruction of three habitats has started to draw attention; the group is the only thing that the three events have in common, and sentinel teams have been tasked with researching the situation.