58 Eridani: The Game Behind the Story, Part 1
~ by Andrew Robins
58 Eridani: The Game Behind the Story
I have always been a fan of the game Traveller. It probably dates me, but when I was first getting in to role playing games, Traveller was the only real option if you wanted to play a serious role playing game in a science fiction milieu.
I loved Traveller mainly because of its rich setting. There were so many different worlds to explore, and the game came with a rich backstory. Plus zipping around in spaceships was cool – and if those spaceships tended to be a weird extrapolation of 1960s technology that didn’t really allow for things like computers (smaller than a house), then that was fine with me.
It wasn’t until I started to run games that I came to see a fundamental flaw in the basic premise of the game.
If you give players a space ship, and lots of worlds to explore – then pretty much you are encouraging them to explore those worlds. This means that if you put a problem in front of your players, then it is very easy for them to choose just to jump in their ship and fly off somewhere completely different – and ignore your carefully constructed storyline.
This problem is not unique to Traveller but Traveller campaigns tend to suffer from it more than others, in my experience.
For 58 Eridani, I wanted to tell a single story with a tight ARC. I wasn’t interested in running a sprawling multiworld campaign.
I had the basic idea of a small ship carrying a group of refugees, in hostile territory, as the core of the story that I wanted to tell. I also had the basic idea of the Vaders (freely borrowed and ultimately adapted from Peter F Hamilton’s Commonwealth Saga).
I also knew that I needed to find a way to make the players interact with the Vaders rather than just making the purely rational decision to jump to literally ANYWHERE else, rather than deal with them.
Enter Bringer – and then Lepanto.
I wanted a story that worked. I considered a lot of options, some of them tried and true favourites of campaigns from my past:
- You could escape from the Vaders, if only you had some fuel! What a pity that the only source of fuel in the system is …. (Rejected for the same reason that Independence Day, V, Battle for Los Angeles etc all sucked. Water is really common, and in Traveller, water is fuel. To the writers of those stories- please get a science advisor – and LISTEN.)
- You could escape but for this weird facility on the Vader planet which seems to have the power to block your jump drive. (Rejected for the reason “Rocks are common, and dropping them is easy”.)
- You could escape from the Vaders but unfortunately your jump drive is broken. Actually I did go for this – but I did not stop there because I wanted the party to have an engineering capability on their ship, and ultimately speaking given raw materials and energy they could have used that to build a working jump drive.
What I settled on was the idea of a vast construct, and an artificial system. This had lots of advantages. Firstly it was an idea that introduced intriguing, story enhancing puzzles. Secondly it led to whole slew of new ideas that I could develop throughout the game. When I initially conceived the story for 58 Eridani, there was no Bringer, and no Lepanto. I got as far as running the first two sessions of the game before I fully decided that “Bringer” was going to be a conscious entity, and possible ally for the party.
And yet the romance between Bringer and Lepanto turned out to be one of the story elements which worked best in the campaign.
The best advice any gamesmaster can get is “let the story be the story”. In the end what worked for the players and the story was to make the relationship between Bringer and Lepanto the key to solving the puzzles at the heart of the campaign.
So – next week I am going to have a go at putting together a post which describes the process of taking my game log, and turning it into the story that has been serialised here on “…Anything, Really”. I hope you enjoy it.
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Andrew Robins is a long time reader – and sometime reviewer – of science fiction, fantasy and history. People pay him to test stuff, which most of the time is more fun than it has any right to be.
To check out Andrew’s book reviews, see “Book Reviews for ‘on Anything, Really’” in the right-hand side bar.
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What, You Haven’t Read 58 Eridani Yet?
Fear not, your problems are over — here is the full list of posts, from the introduction through to the 15th and final instalment.