Lonesome Robot Press :: Science Fiction

Every truly hardcore RPG gamemaster I know has a shelf, box, or other receptacle full of games they never play and never will play. In a lot of cases, they’re great games, or at least games that would be fun for a one shot, but there are three barriers to actually dusting them off and getting your group to play them:

1. Your players don’t know the rules and don’t wan to invest the time in learning them.
2. Your players also don’t want to build characters for a one shot.
3. You (the potential GM) don’t have the tools to overcome problems 1 & 2.

I’m thinking about this problem right now because last night, my girlfriend & I consumed several glasses of wine each while watching the David Eccleston Dr. Who episode where they chase the alien disguised as a fat lady in Cardiff. Afterward, we got to talking about gaming, had more wine, and somehow ended up on the subject of Bunnies & Burrows, an RPG from 1976 where you play a rabbit. While still a tad snoggered, I ended up on the Fantasy Games Unlimited web site (yes, they still exist, and yes, they have an online store, and no, you should under no circumstances go there after sharing two bottles of wine with your gaming-enabler girlfriend egging you on).

The result? I am now the proud owner of a copy of the Bunnies & Burrows PDF, and apparently I’ll be getting copies of Bushido and Tyrannosaurus Wrecks (thanks for that last one, Melody) in the mail soon. Drunk while I bought them or not, I’ll be damned if I don’t get some use out of these games.

But how do I get anyone to play them?

Proposal: Retro RPG Quick Start Guides

What if you could hand your players a party of pre-generated character sheets along with a rules cheat sheet that explained the character sheet well enough for anyone who’d gamed before to jump into plaing then & there?

I would like to work with others on coming up with a format for this.

My main insights on building a cheat sheet usable by any gamer are these:

1. If you write a good short guide on a system that tells players only what they need to interpret the info on their character sheet, this ought to be enough for any player who’s played more than one RPG in their time as a gamer to jump in and play any system thus described. They’re not going to have total rules mastery over the system. But they’ll be able to sit down and play, given a pre-gen character and a GM who does know the intricacies of the rules.
2. Since the 1970s and ’80s, when most games falling into the retro category were written, RPGs have undergone some standardization. Gamers expect rules that break things down and present them in a certain way, and the better and more intuitively a game conforms to these standards, the faster players learn them. But retro games pre-date this neat standardization of how to present rules, making them harder to learn. A good quick start guide for a retro game would do an end run around this problem by giving players a cheat sheet on the game’s rules organized per the (relatively standardized) logic of contemporary RPG systems.

What do you think? What is the best format for standardizing discovery of retro RPG systems for the typical gamer? In my next post, I’m going to take a crack at the problem, using Bunnies & Burrows as my model. Feedback is welcome!

The Eclipse Phase Gamemaster Screen is now available as a PDF release. I’m pretty excited about this, because the adventure included with it, Glory, is my first solo RPG publication. The scenario is designed as a solid intro to the Eclipse Phase world. The characters, as agents of Firewall, are sent looking for another Firewall agent who’s gone missing. The adventure combines intrigue and investigation with a high-tech dungeon crawl on a deep space station and some good ol’ blood & guts horror. One reviewer compared it favorably to legendary sci-fi/horror computer RPG System Shock 2.

You can…

• Get the PDF version from DriveThru RPG/JDR Rapide.
• Get the PDF version with Hack Pack (designer’s original files for your mash-upping pleasure).
• Or, pre-order the print version from Amazon.com.

As with the Core rulebook, the GM screen is released under a Creative Commons non-commercial attribution sharealike license.

Where’s my Permanent Undercaste of Developmentally Limited Slave Workers?
(And Other Failed Predictions from the Annals of Science Fiction)

Science fiction is littered with the failures of writers who should have known better to accurately predict the future… But it’s even more littered with the failure of reality to keep up with their warped ideas. Here I shall consider a few of my favorites.

 
Permanent Undercaste of Developmentally Limited Slave Workers
Brave New World

A knowledge work job for life, constant lusty adulation from lower caste members of the opposite sex, after work orgies, free drugs, and a workforce of fetal alcohol syndrome hobbit monkeys at one’s beck and call… Who wouldn’t want to live in Huxley’s world?

Moralizing neo-cons, that’s who!

As someone who’s devoted a lot of thought to transhumanism lately, I have to say that this book remains a challenging one. In some ways, Huxley’s argument in Brave New World looks like the sine qua non for people like Francis Fukuyama freaking out about the H+ movement. While we don’t have the technology to do some of the things described in this book yet, perhaps the intention is there? I do hope so, because it would be a vast improvement over the Epsilons-Shopping-at-Walmart stories people on the Eclipse Phase Facebook page came back with as soon as I took up this line of thought.

 
Pretty People Forced to Wear Hideous Masks to Make Them Average
Harrison Bergerand

Leaving the most recent Lady Gaga video aside, Vonnegut’s parable of an average American Übermensch forced to wear myopia-inducing goggles, a racoon coat made of metal racoons, and a grotesque mask hasn’t played out as advertised. As anyone in human resources will tell you, above average people are valuable. Your best approach is to put them in offices where all the C students don’t have to look at them, stack their workload so high that their brains don’t work much better than Harrison Bergerand’s Dad’s at the end of the day, and pay them enough to behave. After just a decade of this treatment, the combination of repetitive stress injuries, office chair-related back pain, and fat rolls sprouted from years of drinking and poor diet normally add up to the same handicaps forced upon Bergerand… no mask required!

Really, Kurt, you were over-thinking the problem.

 
Soviets on Jupiter (or Luna, or Mars, or Anyplace, Really)
2010: A Space Odyssey

Mr. Clarke, get real. The Soviets’ played-out, oppressive social regime and internal instability meant that they couldn’t get to the friggin’ Moon, let alone building a space ship capable of travel to the Jovian system.  Oh, wait… Americans can’t, either.

How embarrassing.

 
Reduction to the Status of Chattel for Women (May Substitute White People, Academics, Gun Lovers, Mormons, or Whatever Freaked the Author Out Most)
The Handmaid’s Tale

Although I actually think LDS paranoia about being oppressed for wanting to have lots of babies a la Ender’s Game is more entertaining, I’m including Margaret Atwood here because she’s such an ivory tower Henny Penny about being described as a science fiction author. Get over it, Margaret; no one’s going to force you to show up at Worldcon. It’s almost as silly as Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry freaking out about being called a goth band. Also, Ken MacLeod wrote a novel about talking squids in space, and it was fucking awesome, so you shut up.

I was going to write something about alarmist, overwrought narratives posing as plausibly framed social commentary, but look, I just ended up going off on Margaret Atwood for a whole paragraph instead. Whatever, moving on…

 
Food Pills
The Jetsons

I tried to make these when I was a kid by taking white bread and squishing it into the densest little dough bullets I could. When you added peanut butter and jelly, it didn’t work so well, but I’m sure modern food technology could do better than an eight year old with a rolling pin and time on his hands. Never mind that compressing a full meal into a pill would result in a pill that weighed about half a pound. The demand is out there. “But the Jetsons was a cartoon,” you protest. Pish tosh! Serious sci-fi writers kicked this idea around, too. Of course, if they had kicked an actual food pill they would have probably stubbed their toes badly and discarded this idea right quick.

 
Absurdist Totalitarianism
Brazil

The failure to appear of a preposterously Kafkaesque state where interrogators wear weird baby masks and dissidents get hung in garment bags aboard mobile armored hall closets would mark Terry Gilliam as one of sci-fi’s dimmest lights in the art of prediction, if not for the abject lack of imagination it displays on the part of the oppressive regimes we already have. Really, if glue-huffing African child soldiers could work out that neon wigs and women’s clothing would freak the fuck out of their opponents, you’d think the meatheads at Abu-Gharaib could have come up with something better than scaring people with dogs and making them form naked human pyramids. They could have been using, I don’t know, creepy octopus masks or something. Were I an Iraqi detainee, I’d pretty much poo myself instantly if some crazy white man dressed like a cephalopod came at me with a list of questions.

 
Unreliable Experimental Medical Procedures That Make Mice and Retarded People Smarter
Flowers for Algernon

Sadly, this is not a widely explored trope, but that’s okay, because Keyes had it in the pocket.  The key implication of his idea, though, has not inspired the type of vigorous exploration that, say,  virtual reality did. Which is too bad, because if you could perform an operation to make mentally retarded people more functional, just think of how you could improve all of the people who are technically of average intelligence but do stupid, stupid things all of the damned time.

And think of all the incidental spin offs you’d glean from the massive amount of human experimentation along the critical path to reach this outcome! It’s clearly a winner.

 
So There You Have It
Quit snoozing, reality, and try to keep up.

Saturday I went to Maker Faire Rhode Island and liveblogged the event from my jeejah. Here’s a hashtag search that brings up most of my tweets. For some reason, search cuts off some of my tweets (and I forgot to hashtag the first few), so here they are:

• fuel cell hotrod
• Nazo robots 2
• Nazo robots 1
• touch screen Arduino
• tandem recumbent bike
• junk built skateboards
• SCUL ship (by Skunk, natch)
• and the rest…

This was a great start for a first Maker Faire, and with all the wonderfully innovative minds out here, it was high time the Northeast threw one. I haven’t been to Maker Faire Austin, but this was a very different affair from the San Francisco event. The most noticeable difference was the scale of the inventions on display. The San Francisco Faire is notable for the presence of a lot of big Burning Man art. Out here, far from Black Rock City, the gadgets on display were no less cool but tended to be smaller (and fewer seemed designed to amuse tripping burners — although the REM inducer on display by the soldering tables looked straight off the Playa).

Whoever figured out how to coordinate the Faire with one of Providence’s Waterfire weekends was a genius. Unlike the San Francisco event, which is ensconced off in the San Mateo fairgrounds, the Rhode Island Faire took over an entire square and the streets radiating out from it in downtown Providence, meaning that thousands of casual passers by got to wander into the event, learn, and participate. The weather cooperated nicely, too. Of course, the SF Faire is big enough that it needs its own space and doesn’t need as much publicity, but the point is that it would have been very unfortunate if the first northeast Faire had been tucked away in a building out of the public eye.

All in all, this was a great time, and I even had a few minutes to stop for tacos at AS220 (an awesome & more permanent feature of Providence) before getting back on the train for Boston.

I did try to credit all of the Makers when photographing projects. If I shot your project and didn’t include your name, please let me know, and I’ll make sure to update this post to give credit.

Finally, I’ll pass on some information I picked up:

• For info on building open source 3D printers, visit MakerBot.
• To download and share digital designs for fabricating physical objects, check out the Thingiverse community (and get your reputation economy on).

Photos (top to bottom): Yellow Submarine by Sean Bagge, DIY 3D printer by Makerbot Industries, Huge Foam Skeletal Robot Costume by Big Nazo. (All taken by me).

This is very belated, as I just gave myself about a month off to regain some sanity, but here’s my roundup of this year’s Gen Con.

The big news from where I sit is obviously Eclipse Phase. It’s finally out, and it’s a beautiful baby. At 400 pages, it’s a big baby, too. Catalyst had only a limited number of copies to sell at the con, so the people doing retail in the exhibit hall booth were cracking open one box each morning and selling out as fast as they could run the cash registers. I’m pretty sure we could have beaten some records for units sold at Gen Con if we’d had more copies, but trans-Pacific shipping (from Thailand, specifically) cuts deep into your margins if you airlift in too many advance copies.

Despite the dearth of actual books to sell, we had full tables for every demo we ran over in the Catalyst room at the Hyatt, and I was running demos more or less nonstop in the exhibit hall. I’m thankful to everyone who spent some of their time trying the game out. After all, there’s a lot to see at Gen Con. I even got to play in a demo run by Sprite (or “Rob Boyle,” as they call him there in Gondor). It was great getting to just be a player after writing and GMing a playtest group for two years. But this gets to the heart of what I told one blogger who stopped by to talk: we made Eclipse Phase because it was the sci-fi game that we all wanted to play.

Games for Which I Want to Write

The Gen Con exhibit hall is a non-stop assault of amazing new stuff, much of which a true gamer wants to buy and take home. One unexpected (and lucky, maybe) side effect of having moved to Massachusetts is that I can’t bring back much stuff due to airline weight restrictions. If I bring ten pounds worth of chapbooks with me to the con and get rid of all of them, I’ve got ten pounds of swag and purchases, max. This year I took a an approach to shopping I’d never tried before. I took my mandatory swing through the Indie Revolution booth and picked up a board game there (Andre Monserrat’s intriguing House of Whack). I eyed a really neat-looking storytelling game set in Asian antiquity whose mechanics apparently call for serving tea and stabbing other players’ character sheets with a knife (whose name I forgot, damn it!).

I then spent most of my time in the hall looking for games on which I’d want to work as a writer. I love running games, so for me, the litmus test of whether I’m going to love a new RPG is whether it immediately gets the creative gears turning in my head. There were some clear standouts. Some of these won’t be news, but having spent the last two years completely absorbed in making our game (and barely having gotten to leave our booth last Gen Con), I’d missed a few things.

Desolation (Greymalkin Designs)

When I saw this game’s tagline, “post-apocalyptic fantasy,” I was immediately intrigued. Take your typical happy high fantasy world. You’ve got lots of self-satisfied elves, dragons soaring over mountaintops, happy halflings at work in their barley fields — in other words, a wellspring of boredom as old as the Silmarillion. Really, your only option is to destroy it and set your game in the ashes. Now the halflings are resorting to cannibalism and the elves are wearing cloaks of elvenkind that haven’t been washed in eighteen months. Suddenly things are interesting! I wasn’t able to bring this one home, but I’m definitely giving it a read when I can grab a copy.

Geist (White Wolf)

I’ll admit: I’ve been known to beat up on White Wolf a little when I discuss RPGs with my friends. I love Exalted, but there are times when I’ve talked about them as if they were the Quentin Tarantino of the RPG industry (”I’m not into Kill Bill, and other than that, what has he done for me lately?”). Maybe I was bored with the formula for World of Darkness game titles (parodied by White Wolf themselves in the card game Pimp: The Backhanding). Maybe it was petulance at their killing Wraith (was I the only person who ever loved this game?). And to be fair, they’ve put out some products that I just didn’t like (Hunter: The Reckoning comes to mind).

Geist is not one such product. The people at the White Wolf booth were very quick (defensively so, it seemed) to tell me that the game is not a reworking of Wraith. That said, it retains in some form what I think was one of the most powerful aspects of Wraith: the shadow. Instead of playing ghosts with an evil twin, though, this game tells the story of living humans, recently returned from near-death experiences, who’ve bonded to an entity called a Geist. The Geist is a former person whose death was so emotionally charged that it transforms them into a near-archetypal persona whose drives and desires thereafter pull constantly at the Sin Eater, the mortal to which it bonds. Less brutal in its disempowerment of the PC than Wraith, yet no less spooky, Geist looks like a nice addition to the WoD franchise.

Alpha Omega (Mindstorm Labs)

And here I confidently thought we were going to be the prettiest game at Gen Con. Damn. We’ll have to settle for prettiest new game, since this one’s been out since 2007. Mindstorm had their core book and a book of monsters on sale, both gorgeously produced at an appealingly unusual aspect ratio. Post-apocalyptic occult horror games aren’t exactly new ground in the industry, but this one boasts a solid combination of compelling writing, innovative mechanics, and totally eye-popping art. The added presence of angels and demons (with halfbreeds as playable characters) introduces some interesting storytelling possibilities to a world that’s already gone through some over the top transformations by fire, flood, and comet.

Song of Ice & Fire RPG (Green Ronin)

The history of RPGs is littered with failures, a surprising number of which are games licensed off of properties that probably seemed to their developers like a sure thing due to the built-in fan base. Some failed due to poor design (Aliens), others due to weird restrictions imposed by licensors who didn’t understand the RPG industry and developers who agreed to their terms when they should’ve just walked away (Indiana Jones, Star Trek). These failures have become no less common over the years; they’ve just gotten more expensive (witness Buffy, a property that no RPG company in its right mind will ever touch again). So after the rather spectacular failure of Guardians of Order’s Song of Ice & Fire RPG, it’s heartening to see a good company like Green Ronin taking a whack.

It looks like they’re off to a good start. Rather than producing a door stopper of a core book full of material that’s only marginally useful (did anyone really need stats for every single knight in Westeros?), Green Ronin’s core book comes in at a slimmer, saner page count while maintaining great production values. Need setting material? GRRM’s notoriously incomplete series has what you need. Need a game for it? It’s right here. The fact that Green Ronin’s web site is currently offering it on sale makes it even more tempting. Oh, and in case you still haven’t heard: George R. R. Martin is not your bitch.

Pathfinder (Paizo)

One of the big pieces of news this year was Paizo’s release of Pathfinder. The running joke on the con floor was that Pathfinder is what D&D 4th Edition should have been. Maybe this is a little unfair to WotC, who, let’s face it, weren’t going to make anyone happy by releasing a new edition of a game whose last edition only came out five years ago. D&D 4th Edition was clearly intended to bring new players into the hobby by producing a product that would be friendlier to massmorg players, and in this it will perhaps succeed. Whatever the case, I don’t need to be miffed that the game I’ve played for 26 years has suddenly gone from semi-realism to a much more video game-like experience, because Pathfinder is there to keep D&D 3.5 in print.

The execution is great, and the price is right. Lest you think from the last section that I don’t like big, beefy core rulebooks, think again. I just don’t like them when they’re full of useless NPC stats or other filler that any good GM could generate themself while in a vegetative coma… which this book is not. At 576 pages, Pathfinder may knock a few vertebrae out of alignment when carried in your messenger bag, but the MSRP (only $50) is right, especially when the book contains everything you need to play. Contrast with D&D 4th Edition, where just the two players’ books will set you back $70, and this is a steal (although WotC was offering a very nice deal on Player’s Handbook I at the con this year — which I took). The anime-inspired art is phenomenal, and the fact that the Pathfinder setting book won an ENnie last year doesn’t hurt in piquing my interest, either.

Cthulhutech (Catalyst Game Labs)

Last but not least, there’s Cthulhutech, not a new product this year but one I didn’t get my hands on until Matt Grau handed me a signed copy at this year’s Con. Despite sharing a booth with them last year, I hadn’t gotten a chance to check out their product. I’m now devouring the book and enjoying it immensely.

The first lesson I’ve learned from this game (in combination with working on Eclipse Phase) is that if you’re doing an RPG and want the art to be effin’ slick, hire Mike Vaillancourt as your art director. This is a damned pretty book, with a very consistent visual style throughout. Is there a little bit of fan servicing thrown in there with the giant robots and unspeakable horrors? Well, yeah, there is… but it’s largely pretty classy.

Second lesson: it’s possible to design a fun, playable vehicle combat system without resorting to everything-but-the-kitchen-fabricator Star Fleet Battles-esque rules. I was initially a little skeptical about this game because I didn’t see how the designers could cram workable mecha combat into such a slim core book along with everything else this game covers. But Cthulhutech’s mecha rules build elegantly off of the personal combat system without adding more than a handful of special rules for handling vehicles.

Final observation: the writing is bang on. This isn’t just some silly “Cthulhu versus Battle Mechs” genre mixing mess. The writers have successfully envisioned a world transformed by contact with cosmic horrors, and they’ve followed through on all of the implications. I haven’t yet gotten a look at Vade Mecum, the first major rules expansion for the game, but I’m now pretty psyched for it.

Dear Law Enforcement Personnel,

I’m not sure why you expect an honest, man to man answer about the Gates incident from a guy whose car or luggage you may or may not be about to search. Yet every time you see I live in Cambridge, you ask… as if I’m really going to tell you what I think while you’re inspecting my passport at the border or checking my boarding pass. And if you’re not looking for an honest answer, then you can go jump in a lake. Either way: please stop asking.

I’ll be at Gen Con 2009 in Indianapolis, Indiana from August 12-16. Mostly, I’ll be at the Catalyst Gamelabs booth delivering my elevator pitch on Eclipse Phase to anyone who stands to close to me. I’ll also be running some demos of the game and will be on the panel for a Q&A seminar. I posted a full schedule of these events on the Eclipse Phase Facebook page if you’re interested in stopping by.

The scheduled demo games are ticketed events. I have no idea how sold out they are, but odds are usually good of getting a seat if you show up with a generic ticket, as we’ll frequently have two tables running simultaneously in the same room. I believe anyone can show up for the seminar. And we’ll be doing booth demos, for which you just need to show up at the Catalyst booth. They’ll have a schedule posted.

Finally, I’ll have handmade chapbooks of my stories Caribou and Chat Perdu available. They’re free if you play in a demo, buy a copy of Eclipse Phase, or just really want to have one. Donations are most welcome, though, as my chapbooks can best be described as a loss leader.

And now, back to packing and making aforementioned chapbooks. Hope to see some of you in Indy!

(This was mostly written last night.)

In an hour I’m heading to the Hugo Awards, then driving home to Cambridge immediately afterward. (Holy gonna be cracked the frak out at work tomorrow). I’m excited to be going to sci-fi’s version of the Academy Awards; hooray for being in a field where this kind of stuff is accessible to anybody who wants to show up! My head’s spinning with all I’ve taken in during the last few days, so this post is an attempt to assimilate some of it.

First off, I’m incredibly happy I came and feel very fortunate Worldcon happened to be nearby in one of my favorite cities this year. It made traveling up and giving it a shot with no real idea what to expect a much easier leap to make. My entire experience of cons to date had been with gaming conventions (Gen Con, Origins, and a few minor ones), and while there are similarities, Worldcon is a very different animal (and I gather the same is true of SF cons generally). Sci-fi fandom is a more cohesive, close-knit subculture than gamers, with a lot of traditions and odd little rituals. (Example: They have a thing for collecting as many stick-on ribbons as possible and hanging them from the bottom of their con badges, which are kind of huge to begin with. At Gen Con, you get to be awesome if you have an exhibitor’s badge, and that’s about it).

This was a working trip for me, but it was fun work. I went to a lot of panels, took voluminous notes, gave away a lot of chapbooks, visited all of the publishers in the dealer’s room, schmoozed, and listened to what a lot of sci-fi editors had to say. So. Much. Information. As far as the writing and editorial panels, the one person I didn’t get to listen to that I regret missing was Gordon van Gelder from Fantasy & Science Fiction. I also didn’t go to any of Tom Doherty’s panels, but I’m not trying to sell novels yet, so I can live with having missed that. I was hoping to see more workshops about electronic publishing, but the one I did sit through was excellent. Bottom line: if you’re a writer, go to a Worldcon or another major SF con that has all the wheels doing panels. I feel like my knowledge of what’s really going on in the field is parsecs ahead of where it was five days ago.

The science and culture panels I went to were uniformly outstanding, and I wish I’d been able to go to more of them. Too often, though, they either conflicted with each other or with editorial panels I needed to attend. Get a bunch of sci-fi writers and fans with the appropriate real world credentials talking, and, well, how can it not be awesome? I’m going to devote another post to the panels (hopefully later this week, although Gen Con preparations might contravene that).

Finally, I met some really excellent people (which I figured I would, I mean, they’re SF fans, they’ve gotta be cool, right?). I finally got to meet Jacob Weisberg of Tachyon, whose web site I redesigned several years back, although his awesome managing editor, Jill, wasn’t there. My roommate, David O’Neill, who I met on the internet at the very last minute, turned out to be an excellent fellow. He’s doing a cell phone startup out in Seattle; if I were a rich investor, I’d trust him to do good things with my money. I met James Bacon, a charming Irishman who seems to be something of a mover in British fandom. And I got shnoggered Saturday night with the absolutely delightful Camille Alexa, who edits flash fiction for Abyss &  Apex. I haven’t gotten to read her writing or anything she’s edited yet, but I’m now very eager to do so. I’m going to take a risk and say that you should go out and buy anything with her name on it, anyway, because after hearing her talk in panels, I highly doubt it sucks.

I met a zillion other nice, awesome people, too, and if I yammered on about all of them, this post would get really long, so I’m going to stop now.

In summation, yay Worldcon! Now I just have to figure out where the hell I’m going to get the energy to make it through Gen Con next week. Ha. Who am I kidding? I’m already vibrating with excitement for Gen Con, which is good, because I need to stay awake for a five hour drive after the Hugos.

Aujourd’hui Montreal, Demain la Système Solaire!

I Twittered the Hugo results as they came out. If you haven’t seen them yet, they should be visible on my Twitter feed if you’re reading this within a few days of posting.

Fire, flood, plague, famine, inbreeding, mass extinction events, infertility, supernovas, celestial cataclysms, germ warfare, nuclear holocaust, mass habitat destruction, voluntary omnicide, killer robots, hyperevolution, hard take-off singularities, apathy. The universe offers an impressive array of ways for a species to kick the bucket, and, not content to torment individual characters, I’ll be inflicting every single one that I can think of on humanity in this ball of yarns. For a taste (the first extinction is always free), I invite you to Extinction 1: Genetics.

Photo (pre-manipulation) by Lasse Czeloth (Robotnok) via Stock.Xchng.

Lonesome Robot Press is pleased to announce Empyrean, a pen & paper science fiction role-playing game set in posthumanity’s distant future. Inspired by influences as diverse as Cowboy Bebop; the original Traveller RPG; and the writings of Vernor Vinge, Peter Hamilton, Bruce Sterling, and Alastair Reynolds, Empyrean uses a richly developed Milky Way galaxy as backdrop for the meeting and clash of humanity and numerous alien races. Players can choose to portray characters from one of humanity’s many cultures and subspecies, AGIs, or aliens designed to be culturally distinct yet playable.

Although the possibilities for an Empyrean campaign are nearly limitless, the default campaign casts the player characters as the crew of an FTL (faster-than-light) ship. The rules and setting material focus on the challenges and opportunities for such characters, whether they choose to seek hire as mercenaries, ply the galactic trade lanes as merchants, or pursue more obscure goals. An elegant system of rules for modeling the technology levels and available resources in various star systems helps to determine the challenges and potential rewards of the missions upon which characters embark.

Player character roles are designed to encourage a cohesive “adventuring party” style of play, with some or all of the following possibly present within a PC group:

• Starship command crew: commanders, navigators, and helms
• Groundside ops personnel: drop ship pilots, groundpounders, infiltrators, and even bounty hunters
• Spacing professions: salvage crew, fighter pilots, and fleet ops specialists
• Social & sciences professions: biologists, linguists, astrophysicists, infobrokers, and trade negotiators
• Sentient starships whose robotic avatars can accompany the rest of a PC group groundside

A range of races and human subtypes are available as playable characters:

• Humans from planetary cultures, including the Normans, Aztlánistas, and Vegans.
• Humans from spacefaring cultures, including the technology-trading Ming Lu and the awesome mercenary fleets of Kombine Mercantile Marine.
• Lynn’Ryn, a race of tradition-bound blue skinned humanoids whose ancient culture teaches the discipline of manipulating physical reality at the quantum level.
• Al-Mogur, entrepreneurs and merchants who grow their ships from organic matter and whose science appears weirdly mystical to outsiders.
• Sovizen, humanoids descended from arboreal amphibians. Their aptitude for macro-scale building is unparalleled, extending to the planetary scale.
• Bagduarh, a race descended from flightless avian carrion eaters. They are new to the stars, having rapidly assimilated new technology gained from other races.
• Dholi Ghat, the children of the Mold, a race of rudimentary humanoids connected by slime mold implants in their bodies to the Bloom, a self-aware information network that is the only known method of faster-than-light communication.

In addition to unique PC races and a variety of interesting antagonists, Empyrean will eventually include spaceship combat rules at two scales: micro, for GMs wanting to include small craft and fighter combat in their games, and macro, for star system-spanning battles between capital ships. This and other features of the game setting and rules allow GMs to decide on what balance of hard sci-fi versus space opera elements they wish to include in their game.

Empyrean was co-authored by Jack Graham and Derek Swirsky between 2003 and 2009. The core Empyrean book will be released in two sections: a setting book detailing the game universe, and a separate rules book. The rules book uses the Eclipse Phase game mechanics published by Catalyst Gamelabs and developed by Rob Boyle and Brian Cross of Posthuman Studios. In accordance with the Eclipse Phase Creative Commons license, the Empyrean rules book will also be distributed under a CC license. Wherever possible, rules for Empyrean material will be made backwards-compatible with Eclipse Phase, allowing EP gamemasters to borrow from Empyrean.

Empyrean material will be released online starting in Autumn of 2009.