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Dev Diary 19 - State of the Union Part 1

It’s been a while, cosmonauts, but we’re back at it. This last week has been an incredibly productive one for Torchship, solving a ton of longstanding issues holding up the Alpha, and digging back into the art.

But you’re here for the mechanics, and boy, we have some pretty cool ones for you this Diary. Today we’re going to be talking about the meta-campaign and the core of what drives a multi-episode run of Torchship; playing not just to encounter little morality plays out in the stars, but to find out how the resolution of those issues changes things back home.

To be clear; this is campaign mechanics, and long campaign mechanics at that. You can play short campaigns and one-shots too, but we want to write a game that’ll hold up to truly epic campaigns, or sequential campaigns if you ever wanted to do Torchship: The Next Generation.

Your campaign can take you a great many places, but all of them revolve around one question:

The Star Union & Representative Agents

As we’ve mentioned before, the players are not just playing the crew of their spacecraft as they go trekking around the stars. That crew is the product of a society, and when the players are out making decisions in the stars, we assume that similar choices with similar reasoning are being made by the people back home.

For that reason, players get to have a lot of influence over the direction of the Star Union both through their actions in the actual episodes, and through decisions and votes they hold over what the Star Union does. This isn’t actually their characters deciding what’s happening unilaterally; it’s the assumption that your crew are, in a sense, the median voter. When the players decide to invest the Union’s resources into a certain upgrade path or project, this represents the Union’s population settling on that course of action for all the same reasons the characters would make that decision in their place.

For this reason, while you can be many things in Torchship, you can’t really be a rebel. If you try, you will be part of an enormous rebellious movement that will very quickly become the new authority and now you’re right back to your day job as a government employee, looking wistfully at your old leather jacket as you file a T-18 Use Of Telemat Report.

I can already hear your protests that you want to be a bold iconoclast that strikes out in defiance of the norms of society. I regret to inform you that you want this because it is a norm of your society to be a bold iconoclast striking out in defiance of things.

It’s The Economy, Stupid

The Star Union is mechanically represented with its own character sheet and its own stats; changing that sheet over time is your job. It’s relatively simple, with stats primarily acting as ways of gating your access to the cool upgrades that improve your capabilities, make your rocket better, and get you shiny new toys, but it matters a lot.

At the end of every Episode, you go into a mode of the game called Resupply. This quite literally represents the time passing as your rocket flies from one star to another, usually taking about one week before arriving at the next planet/on the television sets of households across the nation.

Resupply is a portion of the game which can be resolved immediately after the start of one episode or before the start of another, but one of the best ways to do it is during the time between your play sessions; it’s designed to be something easily hashed out over chat programs and the like. We’ll go into more detail about what you do there and how in the future, but the important part is knowing that this is when the Union’s economy starts mattering.

The Union has two sets of Economic stats. The first contains just a single stat, Productivity. This is how many Credits the Star Union generates at the end of each Episode because it has a bunch of factories and farms and stuff. Productivity is difficult and costly to increase; you can do so by starting Projects, with the amount of time and Credits required varying depending on what kind of Project it is.

Getting infrastructure in place to exploit a rich belt of Very High Rotation asteroids for the valuable quark nuggets inside is a relatively quick and cheap project; it just requires you the players to find and secure such a resource. By contrast, building up Production through modernization and expansion of existing industrial capability is slow, hard work that will take multiple episodes to complete.

The second set of stats is the Infrastructure stats, covering all the stuff that production is used to maintain. These are Social, Technological, Military, and Redundant Infrastructure. Respectively, this is the Union’s standard of living, how shiny and new its stuff is, how big Star Force has gotten, and how many warehouses you have. You increase all of the stats by paying into funds for them, investing your Credits when you have a surplus until you’ve paid them off.

For the most part, these are used to gate access to upgrades; if you want that shiny new laser, you need to get Technology and Military Infrastructure to a certain point first. Redundant Infrastructure is the odd-man out; it doesn’t really give you access to many new Upgrades, but it has a vital function we’ll get to in a second.

Every point of Infrastructure costs 1 Credit per Episode to run, and at the start of the Campaign, the Star Union is overextended; it’s trying to take on all the costs and responsibilities of being the leading power of Local Space while simultaneously managing an enormous humanitarian crisis partially of its own making, and integrating a large number of refugees from the aforementioned enormous humanitarian crisis. Infrastructure will be higher than Production, and that means the balance has to be paid by none other than the Star Union’s exploration, diplomacy, and prospecting service.

That’s you.

This difference is called your Union Dues, and it's very important that you pay them. If you fail to pay, you’ll have to roll on the WHOOPS I FORGOT TO PAY THE POWER BILL table. Regrettably, this is not its final name, but it is what’s in the document right now.

You might think that this isn’t too big a threat; you’ll just always make sure to save up enough Credits to pay your Union Dues even if you have a bad Episode. That’s where we smile maliciously and tell you that you can’t. Societies don’t typically like sitting on huge amounts of surplus production and not using it on things that people want and need, so for that reason, the amount of Credits you can store between Episodes is limited by your Redundant Infrastructure. You know, Infrastructure you also have to pay for.

If your Dues aren’t out of control, you aren’t running too many Projects that you don’t want to fail, and you’re not burning your expensive consumables, then yes, you can usually meet your Union Dues no problem using the banked Credits from Redundancy. But a streak of bad episodes or out of control spending can send your campaign into a death spiral. The good news is that eventually, the Star Union will contract until it reaches equilibrium, either voluntarily or through terrible rolls.

The bad news is that the Star Union will contract until it reaches equilibrium, and you live in the Star Union! And so do a great many people who are going to have opinions about that.

Speaking of…

Getting Political

The Star Union is more than just a series of economic stats. All the people those stats represent have hopes and dreams, and more importantly, they have voting power on local councils. Being a direct democracy, the Star Union has a tendency to undergo pretty seismic political shifts very quickly when circumstances change, and any good campaign is going to have a lot of Circumstances.

To represent this, we use a series of Movements. You may remember us talking about these way back, or rather an earlier version of them; we’ve since expanded how they work and set up a system which allows them to exist alongside others.

So… let’s meet a Movement.

The Centralists are the Leading Movement at the start of your Campaign; they’ll be largely unopposed for the moment, but the Civil Anarchists and the Neo-Trotskyites are waiting in the wings and can join them in a coalition fairly easily.

What that means in practical terms is that they have the highest Power Rank at 5. As both a Major Power and the Leading Power, the Centralists give you two passive effects. Their Major Power bonus relates to Stability, which we’ll talk about in a moment, while their Leading Movement Effect is the benefit you get for being at 10-12 Unity on the Unity track. You’ll remember that from Dev Diary 15; that universal rule is actually just the default you get from these guys being in charge!

They also have a Taboo, which represents a value of this Movement, the violation of which discredits their influence; it’s stuff that makes them look hypocritical or disgusts their followers. For the Centralists, that’s failing to keep Promises made to groups in negotiation; their reputation is built around being the trustworthy and reliable ones that follow through on their deals.

Here’s some examples of other Movements’ Major Power Effect, Leading Movement Effect, and Taboo:

Progress Triggers

Movements advance in Power Rank by gaining Progress; that’s what is tracked on that neat little circular dial. At the end of each Episode, you go through the Triggers for all the active Movements and add Progress based on which ones got done. As a Movement rises in Power Rank, the Triggers are reduced in strength proportionally; at Rank 5, the only Trigger which actually gives the Centralists Progress is bringing new Members into the Union. Don’t worry, though; they have another means of keeping power.

You’ll notice that the 4 Progress trigger, Focus on Fundamentals, triggers when you miss Union Dues. A lot of Movements have triggers like this; this is where we put the stuff that the Movement specifically believes they’d do better. So when the Centralists are out of power, they get a boost from the economic mismanagement of whoever is, but once they have influence in government, failing to balance the budget isn’t going to work in their favour.

By extension, lower-value triggers tend to be things that drive or revitalise a weak Movement, while high-value triggers are triumphs or threats that validate them, either mobilizing a weak movement with a victory, or cementing the authority of a strong one.

For another example, here are the Neo-Trot Triggers. You can see how their lower triggers, the first ones to fade, are the relatively small fundamental issues that form the emotional foundation of the Movement; the Neo-Trots won’t be irrelevant so long as we keep finding planets ruled by jerks and evil computers, and their quest for increased military spending grows more pressing every time a Star Patrol rocket limps back full of holes.

The #4 trigger here ceases to help the Neo-Trots once they take power; it’s expected of them. Both the Centralists and Civil Anarchists get this trigger at 5 instead, which creates an interesting contradiction; once they’re in power, winning battles empowers their rivals because, through victory, they are making themselves obsolete. If they keep winning their fights, why do we need to shovel more resources into Star Force?

That’s why their highest triggers are stuff that give them more material power directly instead. Producing and distributing weapons increases the size of those sectors in the Union’s economy and bureaucracy, increasing their influence, while a war breaking out mobilizes the economy and places all their experts in positions of authority. This also, of course, gives them an incentive to keep arming people and fighting wars once they’re in power…

Stability

Each time an Opposition Movement (that’s any Movement which isn’t the Leading Movement) goes up by a Power Rank, it prompts a Stability Check. You also have to roll Stability Checks if you fail to pay your Union Dues. This is pretty simple; Stability is a number from 0-6 representing people’s faith in the current leadership of the Star Union. You roll 1d6 for each Stability Check; if the result is less than your current Stability, the Leading Movement loses 1d6 Progress, potentially sliding back to lower Power Levels. If that happens enough, they’ll be displaced as the Leading Power.

Note that passing Stability Checks has an effect; each test you pass lowers Stability by 1. Fortunately, restoring Stability is pretty easy; every Credit put into the Social Infrastructure fund raises Stability by 1, and incidentally also gives the Leading Movement 3 Progress.

So basically, the Leading Movement can have whatever ideologically it wants, but once it's actually in power, it only stays in power by raising people’s standards of living, though it does benefit from a slow decay of everyone else’s Progress. If the Centralists spend the entire budget on giant golden statues of Yuri Gagarin, then they won’t be in power for very long, and if they really screw it up… well, that’s what Crises are for.

Endgames

Each Movement has a number of Endgames; the five major movements all have a sort of soft ‘win’ condition that cements their power in some way and makes a lasting change on your game. For example, Federation-Builders basically cements the Centralists’ power for the foreseeable future by having them make good on their promises, and in the process gain a new and fiercely loyal following.

Well, I say soft win condition; they aren’t always.

A ‘lose’ condition deactivates or disempowers a Movement, representing the movement breaking apart, being thoroughly discredited, or otherwise losing their ability to carry on. For the Centralists, the only thing that’ll knock them out of the game is the Cybernetic Democrats actually getting their wild experiment off the ground and fully implemented, which is a huge and expensive Project.

How severe these lose conditions are will vary. Some movements will be outright destroyed, either instantly or by fading out, but others are more resilient.

Finally, we have the Crisis. Crises are triggered if Stability hits 0, and they’re bad. The most survivable ones prompt multi-episode arcs in a mad scramble to save the Union; the worst functionally end the campaign. The Centralists being in charge when the state they build fails means that it all comes apart in their scramble to save it; the cordial competition for the future of the Union becomes a shooting war. This might be where you end your campaign, or it might be where you throw in with another Movement and try to win it for them!

Many Crises will be internal…

… but not all of them.

Expanded Movements

The five core movements we mentioned before are all primary Movements, with a full set of triggers, effects, and endgames. Each of them represents a potentially valid direction for the Union that you, as players, can choose to back or suppress.

However, the nature of this system makes it very easy for us to add new Movements to the game. Most of these Movements are Minor Movements, with reduced triggers and rules which are usually single-issue and whose Endgames are simplified and easier to hit. Minor Movements don’t cause Stability hits when they gain Power Ranks and can’t take the Leading Faction slot, they can slot easily into a ruling coalition without breaking things, or fade once their purpose is achieved.

For an example, if you integrate the Nariene into the Star Union (either by defeating its current government or making an alliance that bypasses that; we’ll be talking about them in the next Dev Diary), you get the very pressing Minor Movement “Nariene Green Movement”, which is clamouring, quite reasonably, to have their planet saved from the runaway greenhouse effect they’re under. They’ll gain power quite quickly with triggers firing based on the Union’s economy growing, and once they hit Major they’ll mandate the funding of their Project. Once their homeworld is saved, their endgame is triggered and the Movement fades, leaving you with a nice permanent bonus as everyone in the Star Union gets a bit better at reducing, reusing, and recycling.

Not all late-joining Movements are Minors, though; some of them can very much become the Leading Power and change your game accordingly.

Finally… not all the Movements are intended to be viable paths forward. Movements can emerge in dire circumstances, reflecting adverse pressures, but they can also come out of your actions as Star Patrol, if you feed the worst impulses of the Union and give material power to bad actors.

Which is why you don’t start your campaign with five moments. You start with six.

#awesome...#ttrpg

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