Fuck the King of Space: Post Mortem

We played the last session of Fuck the King of Space on December 29th, 2018. The game ran for about a year, with a total of 23 sessions played.

I decided to end the campaign for a few reasons. The biggest of which was just my available energy. I said during my original campaign pitch that it was a stupid idea for me to agree to run a second campaign, and I was right. I already struggle to find enough time to make ORWA a good game. I never managed to devote much at all to FKOS, and play suffered because of that. Within just a few months the game went from weekly to biweekly. That helped a lot–and thanks are due to Chris H. for offering to run during my off weeks!–but even with that help I wasn’t keeping up.

There were other factors as well. My intent had been for FKOS to be vastly different from ORWA. I wanted some variety on my end. In practice my work wound up being pretty much the same. Not because ORWA’s back end systems were a good fit for FKOS, but because I never worked out what FKOS’s own back end systems should look like. There were also interpersonal conflicts, personal tragedies, and lots of folks being seriously overworked, which made it difficult to get enough people together for a session during the latter half of 2018.

That’s not to say it was a bad campaign; all good things must end. We enjoyed 23 entertaining sessions which I was mostly pretty happy with. That said; campaigns never end because of what did work about them. So now is as good a time as there will ever bo to look back over what didn’t work so it can be improved if I ever attempt the game again.

There’s Too Much Space in Space. I never realized before running FKOS how much of a blessing ORWA’s intensely confined spaces are. When the entire game takes place within a 6-mile dome it makes sense to run the world like a megadungeon. Of course there’s some weird new thing lurking around every corner, behind every door, and beneath every manhole cover. The world is built on that kind of density, and I’ve come to rely on it for how I run my game.

That doesn’t work in space, but I did it anyway. Players constantly stumbled across lost planets, weird phenomena, other starships, and it always felt hacky. I failed to leverage the gameplay to communicate the setting. Space shouldn’t be empty–we are playing an adventure game after all–but it shouldn’t feel crowded either.

When the players have an interstellar space ship with an advanced FTL drive, it makes it difficult to:

Communicate the scale of the distances traveled.
Have them encounter the unexpected.

The first point can be mitigated somewhat with fuel consumption, but “You expend 30 fuel getting there” still feels like hand waving. Perhaps ships should need to refuel more often, thus forcing the players to interact with environments along the way. Alternately, “Travel Turns” might be added as a sort of limited version of the Haven Turn. The players have a lot of downtime, but their resources are limited to whatever is with them on the ship.

Encountering the unexpected during travel might be something I need to mostly give up on. It could still happen now and again, but I don’t think it ought to be a primary driver of play. Instead of using random encounters as a way of hooking players into adventures, I could use similar tables to generate rumors and job offers at various ports. It’s less interesting to hear “there’s a dragon over that hill” than it is to simply bump into a dragon while you’re in the hills, but it’s probably a better fit for space.

Even with my later revisions, Space Ships did not work. As I always do I started out with something that was way more complicated than it needed to be, and over the last year have learned how unnecessary most of it was. It’s a habit I need to break myself of. Writing complicated rules I’ll never use is not an efficient use of my time.

Turning “Space” and “Power” into resources was more trouble than it was worth, and I could never figure out how to make either into an effective limit on the player’s desires. Hull points offered too much protection between the party and any real danger to their ship. The codified modules were just…too much. I really should have known better.

If I were to redesign the system there’d be no hull points. Each hit in combat would reduce the ship’s functionality in some way. Many of the things on the modules list would become assumed parts of the ship (cockpits, engines, crew quarters), and modifications like adding a science lab would be handled in a more ad-hoc manner.

Weapons didn’t work in kinda the same way Space Ships didn’t. I had an over-complicated approach. Unlike Space Ships, the downfall of the system is that I never codified fukkin’ anything. The players were walking around with weapons that supposedly had quirks and special purposes, but neither they nor I had any idea what those were. Like I said above, I just never had the energy to give this game the attention it deserved. I still think the idea of restricting all weapons to d6 damage is a good one. I’ve certainly seen it work. I also still like the idea of differentiating weapons through their secondary properties, but like space ship modules I think that ought to be handled as an ad-hoc consideration. Your axe doesn’t have the “Also chops trees” special ability. It’s just an axe, and you know how axes work, so if there’s a tree to be chopped down you can say “Hey, I have an axe, can I get a bonus?”

I wonder if part of the issue here is that I tend to work through my problems by writing about them, and I have certain expectations for how long a piece of writing should be, which leads me to over-solve my problems. Something for me to think about.

Magic Words oddly enough, did not work well in this game. It’s a system I’ve used successfully for years, but FKOS put it to a whole new kind of stress test with two highly skilled and efficient players both running as magic users. My sketchy draft for Magic Words 2 was partially written in response to this problem, and I have yet newer ideas I hope to discuss soon.

Finally, The Setting didn’t work, which is again a matter of how little time I was able to spend on it. I’ve got notes somewhere about how the universe breaks down into several factions that all nominally work for the King, but are at odds with each other. There was going to be a powerful university structure called “The League of Distinguished Academics.” “The King’s Loyal Soldiers” were going to be this monstrous military machine without enough enemies to fight. The fact that I can’t remember all six (six?) factions off the top of my head is testament to how poorly they were communicated through he actual play of the game.

This is real disappointing for me. Figuring out how these factions worked with and against one another was what made me most excited about the campaign, and now they may well never be put to any use.

I hope one of these days I have the opportunity to give Fuck the King of Space the attention it really deserved. C’est la vie.

20 Tidbits About My Games

A little bit ago, I was looking for sources on a post I was writing, and I stumbled on this challenge issued by Kiel back in 2015. Essentially, it’s a call for referees to revel in self-indulgence by writing up a bunch of details for their setting that players probably won’t care about. I never saw this at the time, but after 3 years I think we’re long past due to try for it again.

And since this is one of those dumb “tag three people” things, I have chosen Red Flanagan, Chris H. and Tore Nielson to follow my bad example and post their own self-indulgent campaign world exposition. I’ll turn each of those names into a link when the associated person answers the call.

Since I have two big active campaigns–On a Red World Alone and Fuck the King of Space–it only seems appropriate to perform this exercise for both of them. But I will not punish you by spreading this out over two posts. Below are 20 random facts about my campaign worlds, 10 from each active campaign.

On a Red World Alone

1 – Penelope the Seleucid is older than anyone realizes. Old enough that her name is an accurate and literal description of her. She was one of the few magicians who had mastered the craft prior to humanity’s transplantation to the red world. She predicted that mars would bring about a revolution in wizardry, and even encouraged some of her contemporaries to join her in emigrating, but only she was will to abandon her existing power structures on the dubious promise of increased access to magic. By the time anyone realized just how profoundly mars impacted the abilities of magicians, Earth was a field of rubble in space.

Penelope has fostered generations of apprentices in the dome, and guided the magic community into its current form. She is well known and respected by the highest class of wizards, but rarely spoken of since she retreated from public life some 150 years ago.

2 – Most working technology is due to the efforts of Techno Priests. This strange sect have a series of rituals based on tech support manuals. Acolytes first learn to check if a thing is plugged in, and to turn it off, then back on again. The most learned priests carry soldering irons like scepters, and can perform rudimentary circuit board repairs with them. Even the highest ranking among them, however, don’t actually understand why what they’re doing works. It’s just rote ritual to them.

3 – Occasionally, a form of mutated human will become consistent enough that it could be called a species unto itself. Morthuks were one such mutation. Slime-skinned things, with soft bones, and overall too sensitive harm–physical and emotional. They were deeply distrusted due to their moderate ability to plant suggestions in people’s minds. Sixty years ago, after a rash of suicides were blamed on them, they were subject to a series of pogroms which were thought to have wiped them out.

When the Internet came into existence, they made a point to gather up every specimen still extant; those living in the depths of the sewers, or in the private menageries of various Wizards and Redstone Lords. They managed to collect a breeding population of 12 of the things, but were never able to make use of them in any meaningful way. The creatures were eventually forgotten about and–recently–escaped.

Using their ability to make suggestions, as well as by espousing a platform of Mutant Supremacy, they were quickly able to establish a sizable little territory for themselves, which they dubbed New Morthuka.

4 – When Mongrel the Magician was killed by The Breakfast Club, the many ape-men he had created to be his servants didn’t have anywhere to go, but knew they wanted to stick together. They made their way out of Comet Caller territory (where they would doubtless be dissected by someone eager to learn Mongrel’s secrets), towards the edges of Outsider territory. There they constructed a barricade wall for themselves, turning the center of a 5-way intersection into a private encampment they dubbed “Ape City.” The locals hate them for their travel-disrupting walls, but the Outsiders themselves are loathe to get involved. It is really on the outer edges of their concern, after all. Besides, they have a certain respect for the ape men’s resolve. The Highlander actually quite interested in how the Ape Men might be put to use to serve Outsider interests.

5 – The sewers beneath the dome are bizarrely labyrinthine. The Dome is, after all, a planned settlement. The first brick was not laid until the whole thing had been thoroughly diagrammed in every aspect. Why, then, do its sewers snake back and forth in maddening patterns?

The truth is, the ‘sewers’ were already present when the surveyors first arrived on Mars to scout out a suitable location to build. Everyone who knew about this considered it fortuitous. Think of all the money they’d save! For unknown reasons, it never occurred to anyone who knew this fact to consider how strange it was for these sewers to be there. But it did seem obvious that their presence should be kept secret. I mean, right? Finding mysterious structures on an uninhabited world just seems like the sort of thing you don’t share with people.

6 – There are a number of space stations in orbit above Mars. One was meant to serve as port for ships to come and go from, to limit the number of vessels that had to do the expensive work of dropping down onto, and coming up from, the Martian surface. Others housed communication, observation, and operation facilities. With no ready source to replenish their fuel, these were abandoned within a few years of the catastrophe that destroyed earth, with only robots left up there to man them.

The signal codes meant to command those robots have long since been discovered and used by the Internet, to no avail whatsoever. If the machines are still operating up there, they’re no longer listening.

7 – The Internet, as an official organization, has existed for roughly 15 years. It was originally founded as a sort of non-aggression pact between rival wizards. Among those working to understand technology and become Techno-Wizards, the _Brain Drain_ spell became an endemic problem. Every year, promising researchers were found with their minds drained of all knowledge by some rival.

When the constitution of the Internet was signed, there were only two immutable laws put down. First, _Brain Drain_ was banned completely, regardless of subject. Even having the spell inscribed in your library was forbidden. Second, it was decided that no one outside the Internet’s control should be permitted to understand technology.

Unbeknownst to the Techno Priests, Internet conspirators have worked to inject several doctrines into their faith. Most notably, it is heresy to try and understand technology without strict adherence to the rote memorizations of the support manuals.

8 – Legally, the Dukes of the Dome are not a single territory. They’re a confederation, united by a mutual defense pact against the larger territories that surround them. In practice, only the Dukes themselves care about their individual microterritories anymore, some of which are little more than a single building. The common people tire of the squabbling between dukes that occurs whenever there is no external threat. They have a strong shared culture, and a unification movement is growing in strength. Particularly now, after so much territory was lost in wars against The Redstone Lords, Technotopia, and New Morthuka in the last two years.

Some of the more powerful dukes are quietly courting the movement, believing their own power might be increased. The weaker dukes are fiercely opposed, believing that unification for them will be no different from outright conquest.

9 – In the last days of Earth, retro technology was all the rage. Everybody had an old Apple ][ or IBM 486 to play with. (All retrofitted with modern cold microfusion power sources, of course). As a result, technology in the post apocalyptic dome is wildly anachronistic. USB Flash Drives exist, and they’re great, but sometimes all a person is going to be able to find to store their data on is a CD, or floppy disk. And with no new computers being manufactured, sometimes that’s got to be good enough.

10 – Nearly everyone in the dome was raised “Beneath the Black.” It’s the dominant religion, though there are a number of others (including the TechnoFaith).

Preachers Beneath the Black tell us that the black sky above is a benevolent blanket of protection, holding back the white hot fires of destruction that wish to destroy all life. What we call “stars,” are holes pierced that have been pierced through this protective curtain by the sins of man.

Fuck the King of Space

1 – Distant Tumon is the god worshiped by The Most Reverent Faithful. The church wields significant power in the Kingdom Galactic, with an entire bureaucracy existing alongside the King’s. Only the lowliest priests are not members of the 36,000 families, and those who aren’t see an instantaneous leap in their status within the Kingdom.

For millennia, the King was also the Ur Flamen of the Church. However, “independence for the priesthood” was the pretense under which Kulga “Bloodfist” Osbert waged the wars which brought the current Osbert dynasty to power. Thus, the Most Reverent Faithful have a vested interest in maintaining the legitimacy of the crown–though they are aware that if the crown is ever too discredited, some future warlord might start a war to “return the office of the King to its traditional religious dignity,” or some such thing.

Given how terrible a King Bassiana Osbert is turning out to be, the Church has been forced to walk a political tightrope these last few years.

2 – A few hundred years back, some schismatic nobles lost their bid to establish some change that nobody remembers, and went into a self-imposed exile. They made a big to-do of finding the first world–Earth–and building their castles there. No one much cared at the time, and after so many years, the only ones who even know about it are those descendants still living in the castles of earth.

3 – The King is a classic Tiberius figure. She’s checked out of the day-to-days of her kingdom, indulging her own hedonism and leaving the busywork of rulership to more interested men and women. As such, the de facto highest authority in the Kingdom Galactic is the Table of Invested Citizens, a group of the 11 wealthiest Nobles alive.

4 – Every unit of the King’s Loyal Soldiers (KLS) has one former criminal in it. These criminals have had parts of their brain surgically removed, and replaced with lab-grown grey matter, which makes them unfaltering loyal to the King. The idea is that this will ensure no unit can easily turn traitor, since any which tries will have a strong core of loyalty either to dissuade them, or report on their plans.

In reality, these hyperloyals are easy to spot, easy to avoid, and even easier to fool. Soldiers learn how to manage their local nark quickly, just to facilitate the normal lapses in discipline common to any military unit. The program is thus completely ineffective, but it plays well with conservative, out-of-touch nobles.

5 – It’s something of a popular myth that the 36,000 families or an organization of merit. It’s the Great Galactic Dream: if you work hard, fight hard, and make hard sacrifices, someday your family may be elevated to join their ranks. It’s a myth that’s easy to perpetrate, as there are too many families for most people to keep track of.

In truth, nearly all 36,000 families derive their position from ancient bloodlines, meticulously traced back further than most reliable histories are able to go. Only the lowest 300 ranks of the nobility are any kind of meritocracy, and those are not granted for hard work, great sacrifice, or heroism in war. They are sold to the highest bidder, and held for only so long as a family remains prosperous enough to afford them.

6 – Bluesidian is a teal mineral. It’s brittle like stone, but can be melted down and forged like a metal. It has little practical purpose, and thus is used almost entirely to create artistic displays of ostentatious wealth. It is also occasionally used in transactions where Darics are too trivial a currency to bother with. A loaf of bread or a space ship can be purchased with Darics. If you want to buy or sell whole worlds, you deal in bluesidian.

7 – The galaxy is full of countless alien species. Unfortunately for them, none managed to develop space travel before they were discovered by the rapidly expanding human race. Or, if they did have space travel, they were too peaceful, or too weak to put up much of a fight when Humanity decided to show them who was boss.

At first, humanity dominated these ‘rivals’ with superior technology. The implemented one absolute law for non-humans, which stands to this day: they can never settle off their world of origin, save by the explicit permission of the king. The punishment for disobedience is genocide.

In modern times, the difference in technology between humans and non-humans is much less pronounced. Though, aliens are legally barred from access to the most modern high technologies. However, millennia of the One-World policy has led to a different sort of imbalance. Humanity as an inconceivably overwhelming advantage in numbers. If every non-human were counted together, they would amount to less than one third of the galaxy’s human population. The KLS alone outnumber the entire population of any dozen races taken together.

8 – “Magic” is the word used to describe anything that completely defies the scientific method. Magic cannot be repeated. Each time a spell is cast, it has to be done slightly differently. It’s not really accurate to describe a magician as “knowing” a spell. Rather, a magician becomes familiar enough with the feel of a spell, that they gain an intuition about it. In a given moment, at a given galactic position, they can work out what needs to be done to make that spell work. But what they did could never produce the same result again, no matter how identical the material conditions were replicated.

9 – The CommNet is so heavily regulated and censored, that it can’t really be used for much of interest or import. Much more useful is the RatNet, (short for Pirate Network), maintained by a dedicated contingent of relay ship operators. They’re forced to constantly move about to stay ahead of the KLS, and CommNet Men, without ever leaving the sector their relay ship serves. It’s the closest thing that exists to an organized resistance to the established order on a galactic scale. Though, few running the RatNet has any such grandiose ambitions.

It’s always tricky to access the RatNet. A hacking check is required just to log in. And you never know how strong your connection will be, since your local relay ship might be close by, or it might be on the other side of the sector.

10 – A few centuries back, the Guild of Robot Craftspeople successfully lobbied to outlaw human slavery. Limited indenture is still a common punishment for many crimes, but only where a clear and feasible path out of indenture exists.

This is a great source of frustration to the Union of Sapient Machines, which doesn’t see why low-class humans deserve a special dispensation not afforded to low-class robots.

The Infallible Garrr

In the dorsal half of the Kingdom Galactic’s fourth spiral, there is a planetary system officially designated “Sugarplum 6”. Modern records of the system begin about 500 years ago, when it was surveyed by one Grig Sullat; a somewhat notorious figure in the history of galactic cartography. The dozens of celestial objects he named after his granddaughter (both literally and euphemistically) led directly to major revisions in the Naming Rights code. Colloquially, the planet has come to be known as Sugar6.

Few will have heard of this remote system, but it is well known to butchers and eccentric gourmands across the galaxy as the only source of Green Steaks. It is a delicacy even the poorest will have heard of, though in their entire lives most people will never handle enough money to afford even a single bite.

The meat is harvested from Nogrols, a kind of bird native to the Sugar6 system. They’re massive things. An adult can grow to be as large as a starship, with a wingspan to match. They spend most of their lives sunbathing in the space between Sugar6, and its moon, though they migrate down to the planet to mate, and to die; and they migrate to the moon to lay their eggs. How the creatures create thrust in a vacuum is something of a mystery, which sciences seems unlikely to solve anytime soon. No lab in the galaxy has budget enough to purchase even a single Nogrol for dissection.

Norgol beaks are purely defensive adaptations. Any digestive tract the creatures may have had, has long since been discarded by evolution. Norgols subsist entirely on nutrients gathered from the sunlight. Even with the massive surface area of their wings to aid in the process, it is a relatively small amount of energy for such a large creature. This makes Norgols singularly indolent, which in turn leads to meat so tender it practically falls apart in the mouth. Their chlorophyll-infused blood gives the meat the green color and grassy flavor that has made it so renowned.

Hunting Norgols is strictly regulated. Their population is so low, and demand for their meat so high, that they could be made extinct within a month if conservation efforts are not carefully maintained. Hunting licenses are given out one kill at a time by a bureaucratic office stationed in geosyncronous orbit between the planet and its moon. Poaching is exceedingly rare. Anyone discovered to have purchased Green Steak from an unlicensed vendor is sentenced to be cooked alive, and their meat served to discerning cannibals while they still live. Green Steak is said to be among The King’s favorite dishes, and her government takes the crime of endangering the King’s pleasure very seriously.

If anyone were able to figure out how to breed the Norgols in captivity, they’d have fortune enough to join the 36,000 families.

Regarding the pre-industrial cultures developing on the surface of Sugar6, the most substantive record comes from Grig Sullat’s survey.

Human-like, of apparently recent vintage. Sugarplum 6 may have been seeded as part of a forgotten scientific endeavor.

Briefly, the Norgol Office of Preservation and Hunting Association (NOPHA) entertained a proposal to relocate or eradicate the human populace of Sugar6, to prevent any potential threat they may pose to the Norgol population. But, given that the two species utilized completely separate continents, it was deemed an inefficient use of funds at that time, and the project was shelved.

On the 24th of Fructidor, 31,612 YK, a post-coital herd of Norgol was coming up from the planet. One of these was lagging behind, and appeared to be injured. A bidding war began for the hunting license, which was won by an independent butcher named Andru. As she maneuvered her ship into a position where her bolt lancer could spike the animal’s brain, the Norgol unexpectedly lurched forward. It struck Andru’s ship with its beak, and sent the little ship careening off course.

By the time Andru had righted her vessel, the Norgol’s belly had opened up, and human figures were leaping out. Each was wrapped in furs, and encased in a translucent bit of Norgol intestine. Andru and her crew were so baffled by what they were seeing, it never occurred to them that they were in danger until the figures had latched themselves to the canopy of the butcher’s vessel, and started pounding their primitive picks into the hull.

A few minutes of video record exist of this attack. Once she realized the danger, Captain Andru opened a vidcomm channel to NOPHA station to request help. In this video, it is apparent that the men from the planet below are frighteningly strong. Despite the primitive nature of their weapons, they were able to breach the cockpit, and eventually, make a large enough hole to climb their way inside. They lashed their prize to the corpse of the Norgol they had somehow flown up on, and towed it back down to the planet below.

NOPHA station put out an emergency call to the nearest garrison of the King’s Loyal Soldiers. They did their best to emphasize the urgency of the situation, but the KLS are busy, and how much of a threat could some pre-industrial locals with a rancher’s vessel really pose? It was a few days before a pair of ships were dispatched; one enforcer, and one light troop transport.

They arrived on the 4th of Vendemiaire, and hailed the NOPHA station to receive an update on the situation. When the station didn’t respond, the KLS ships performed a thorough scan of the area, and realized that it was swarming with two dozen Norgol corpse-ships, each one of which had a bolt lancer mounted to it. Presumably salvaged from some of the destroyed butcher vessels that littered the area.

The transport held back and comm’d for help, while the enforcer moved in show the primitives what an armed and armored vessel could do. It blasted through the corpse ships with ruthless efficiency, but the primitive pilots were fearless. They swarmed both of the KLS vessels, piercing their hulls with the bolt lancers. More than half the primitive force was destroyed, but in the end they were victorious. The intruders were slain, ever more corpse ships were being prepared on the surface, and now they could salvage some real weapons. Moreover, they could salvage a pair of hyperlight star drives.

And so, the Kingdom Galactic came to know the scourge of the Garrr.

Men say they climb mountains ‘because they are there,’ but it’s not true. Men climb mountains for profit or glory, not simply because the existence of an obstacle is intolerable to them.

The Garrr do abhor obstacles to that inhuman degree. They do not experience fear or avarice in the same way we do, but there is something about impossibility which motivates them like a mix of the two. If it seems as though something is beyond the grasp of a Garrr, they are compelled to prove that it is not.

Because of this biological quirk, the Garr do not understand failure. They will almost never make statements of intent, because they do not believe they can truly know their intent until they witness the results of their actions. If they strike their thumb with a hammer, or break a vase, or die in battle, then those must have been the actions they were pursuing.

To humans, it may seem like a childish attempt to protect one’s pride. “I meant to do that.” But this is narrow thinking. The Garrr are hardwired with a consequentialist epistemology. They have no concept of “bad deed,” or “incorrect choice.” Whatever happens is the right thing to happen.

Six years ago, the Garrr defeated the sky, and conquered the weaklings who lived beyond the sky. They have since spread to several nearby planets. All who have faced them have fallen, save for those lucky enough to face Garrr who had decided it was time to die. The KLS has proven powerless to stop them so far, but the King’s supply of Green Steak is running low.