#the book seems like a mix of Lovecraft/Heart of Darkness atmosphere

[tenrose]

I'm reading Annihilation and this makes me realize that I have a thing for, I don't know how to call it, plant horror? When the nature is so luxurious it's becoming oppressive, when gore is mixed with flowers (Hannibal did this to me), when the nature is becoming a sentient being and it's reclaiming human lives.

It's a different form of creepy and I love it.

[derkastellan]

Musings: Staying on-topic in setting design

I gave myself the time to read some RPG products, and I ended up in the genre of horror science fiction. I have an enormous backlog of products I have bought over the years but haven’t read, and so I simply picked some - Jovian Nightmares (for Call of Cthulhu), Eldritch Skies (for Savage Worlds), and Shadows Over Soul (especially Siren’s Call but also all supplements, for Saga Machine). Let me say I enjoyed the last series of products so much I basically have not found time to delve deeper into Eldritch Skies.

Jovian Nightmares introduces itself as a supplement for Cthulhu Rising, itself a setting supplement for the Call of Cthulhu role-playing game. It focuses on “Circum-Jove”, the Jupiter system. Since Jupiter is a gas giant science fiction settings usually focus on the colonization of its moons, or in rarer cases, interaction with Jupiter’s upper atmospheric layers.

Ever since reading the Buck Rogers XXVc roleplaying game in the early 90s Jupiter (and by extension Saturn) have fascinated me. The excellent material from the game box was evoking and interesting, and the distant world of moons and moonlets have kept drawing me back in over the years. So when I saw this supplement, I simply grabbed it. Also, a book can do worse to get my attention than having a dead astronaut on its cover.

So, this started me on the path to reading a bit of sci-fi. (Spoilers ahead, so ye be warned.)

The Jovian Nightmares setting is well-detailed, and you have to read quite a while to notice how the setting misses the mark. Practically all of the book is simply a science fiction setting supplement - and while interesting enough (more about that in a moment) it lacks one thing: Lovecraftian horror. Given it being advertised as “nightmares” this seems surprising. You might miss it if you’re not inclined to look for it. 

The book contains 5 pages of setting secrets, several of which are repetitive paragraphs. Your mileage may vary, but almost without fail I have ended up being disappointed in products that feature a few pages of setting secrets. Almost invariably these come down to a paragraph or two per setting secret and end up not being very evocative, leaving the job almost entirely to the GM. Jovian Nightmares is a bit better than that, but the reality of it all is that its setting secrets are almost entirely useless.

A setting secret must not be “too secret.” Yet some of the secrets have no impact on gameplay by themselves. Who cares what lies at the heart of Jupiter? Or what is the reason for the Great Red Spot? We all do, but the players won’t care because the way the book establishes things they won’t ever find out. It’s useless information. The book also refuses to innovate in terms of Lovecraftian horrors, either repeating same-ol’-same-ol’ by parading out Mi-Go doing Mi-Go things (yes, they still put brains in jars in the 23rd century... we can only assume it’s a fetish), and some randomly tied-in Fire Vampires, Colors-Out-Of-Space, some Deep Ones, a possible tie-in to R’lyeh...

Boring.

Here is someone capable of writing a whole sci-fi supplement of a decent quality, quite readable, and then forgets to put actual horror in. Horror that lurks and waits for players. Horror that wants to jump at players. Yes, there’s a short story and an adventure in there, but in my opinion a setting has to evoke and convince by itself. It is not enough to give it to a GM and say “Now you come up with what to do in it.” After reading it a GM should be inspired, have hooks and leads, and maybe already the spine of a campaign. Here we are left wondering what’s so horrible about the whole thing. 

Another, minor gripe. Circum-Jove is actually not humanity’s farthest outpost. Instead, it fuels humanity’s exodus to other stars. A new element called “Foscolium” is introduced, considered to be vital for interstellar expansion. But it is not tied into the Mythos. That seemed like a big opportunity passed by, the chance to tie a new door opening for humanity with something more sinister. And as I read the supplement I wondered what cool new things humanity would discover elsewhere. This makes Circum-Jove less interesting. It’s not the final frontier. It’s just a frontier. Space travel within the solar system naturally becomes less interesting if somebody can just hop to Alpha Centauri or Barnard’s Star instead. If stuff becomes too hard there, why bother? New vistas!

The setting tries to tie in mining Jupiter moon Io for the new element as precondition for interstellar expansion. This means that the players are working stiffs doing their job so others can go to new worlds and build new lives. That seems awfully prosaic. And while there is a place for such science fiction one is left to wonder if this was a great choice for the supplement.

Jovian Nightmares, in other words, inspired more reading elsewhere. It is a solid work but it has its limitations.

I don’t want to go too deep into Shadows Over Sol since I still want to play it in the future, and saying too much here might spoil it to players. But general thoughts are valid to share.

By not introducing faster-than-light (FTL) travel SOL actually manages to have a foot in two worlds - the 23rd century where humanity expands into the Jupiter and Saturn systems. And the 27th century when human colonists arrive in Alpha Centauri - a 400 year one-way trip. By separating these settings both have validity. The settlers of Siren’s Call have a different world and different problems than the Martian and Jovian settlers of the core game. Both stories remain engaging. By expanding the game into the interstellar realm this way the original game still stays playable.

SOL does a great job of portraying a hard sci-fi setting with humanity split into cultural instead of national tribes. It does a great job of portraying a world of fading nation states, ascending corporations, a networked, simulated world, a “meatspace” world... It seems a tad to conservative on plotting the progress in AI and Augmented Reality, but if you want to write a sci-fi setting not completely colored and taken over by these issues, this is valid. And reality seems to play odd tricks on sci-fi anyway within precious few years - 2015 is already three years ago...

The setting of SOL doesn’t have horror written in big letters over it, anyway. It’s horror seems more personal, encountered by few. Which is of course appropriate. To be entirely fair one gets a much better feel of the horror inherent in the setting by looking at the released adventure books than the core book, which is a weak point it shares with Jovian Nightmares. Nevertheless the book seems to be willing to create its horror from the fact that humanity is always a step ahead with its ambitions of what it can safely do. While this isn’t per se more interesting than Lovecraftian horror, it allows for unexpected variation more than sticking with somewhat tired Cthulhu tropes. (I’m not trying to piss here on the whole Mythos, I’m just saying that some authors simply recycle stuff up to 80 to 90 years old while others definitely expand on the Mythos in interesting ways.)

You could remove the horror entirely from both settings and you would at the very least get a decent (Jovian Nightmares) or excellent (SOL) sci-fi game. In the end, SOL does several things much better than JN. The game constantly expands on setting seeds, introducing some (and originally with the same limitations mentioned above) but also expanding some in interesting ways. Where JN fails to even remotely give the GM an answer, SOL introduces either an answer or several eventually, giving GMs both concrete ideas and a choice. Not all seeds are gold. But some I simply wanted to know more about many of them. I’m in fact waiting for future supplements to tell me more about this world.

So, staying on-topic, eh? Kinda missed that boat myself. Both settings do a bit, too. Both are science fiction settings first and foremost. But SOL makes room for horror, and its adventures give you a guideline how to do horror here. It doesn’t simply throw you a setting and say “Hey, here are some Lovecraftian horrors, do something.” It stays on-topic much better than the other, if in the end not perfectly. It, on occasion, shamelessly recycles other horror as well. I won’t excuse that but hey, that’s what RPGs often do. 

So, what is staying on topic in setting design? If you want to make a horror game, make space for horror. Expand the Unknown. Your world ideally has a dark underbelly which the characters learn about. Something which changes your conception of the world. Something which turns your ideas about the world on its head - you’re not the apex predator. You’re in danger. You’re not safe. They’re coming for you. Frankly, both settings fail this test. Lovecraft (the original) does them both one better. His time-traveling species invade your mind. His classic Ctulhu invades your dreams and tries to subvert the world. His monsters appear and you can do precious little about them. And many of his successors stuck with that - meaningless victories, invasion, loss of control. These themes have to come to the front and be part of the struggle players face. 

That would be staying on-topic in the horror genre. Each genre or mix of genres has its own way of staying on topic. I still wait to do myself a satisfying version of Fantasy Horror. Given how horrific lots of monsters are, the horror part of the experience is frankly still explored too little.

And now to get back to reading Eldritch Skies... Its approach to Lovecraftian sci-fi seems exciting but I cannot say yet anything about the quality of its execution. Another time...