58 Eridani: The Game Behind The Story, Part 2
~ by Andrew Robins
To read Part 1 of “The Game Behind The Story”, click here.
.
58 Eridani: The Game Behind The Story, Part 2
My goal in writing the 58 Eridani game log, and in serialising it here on “ …Anything Really”, was to capture the sense of the game we played, while adapting the delivery of the story to a new medium.
58 Eridani turned out to be a game that was heavy on problem solving, and relatively light on action sequences. Also, most of the problems the party faced required social interaction to resolve.
This was mainly driven by the fact that as a games master I made the Vaders way too horrifying. My players quite rightly, would do almost anything to avoid dealing with them face to face. Which meant they tended to spend a lot of time on the bridge of the Mistral talking things through rather than fruitlessly flinging around blaster bolts in the face of an implacable enemy.
This left me with a bit of a problem when it came time to write up the game log: “How do I avoid an endless sequence of talking heads”?
I decided to mix things up by using a variety of different mechanisms. Hence the mix of personal log entries, transcripts, meeting minutes and communications records that make up the online version of the story.
I hoped that the frequent change of perspective and delivery method would allow me to use a mix of direct and indirect storytelling that would move the narrative forward. Much of the actual action in the 58 Eridani game log takes place off camera. I set a situation up in one entry, and then I talk about the outcome in the next. This was a more or less deliberate ploy on my part that was designed to match the flavour of the game we played. In the game itself, much of the actual “action” was more or less incidental once we got to it. The drama tended to be more in deciding what to do, rather than the actual doing of it.
I also have to admit that I did portray some of the characters slightly differently in the game log from the way that they were generally played.
In the case of some characters, chiefly Glandin Frutnok and Lepanto, I took character traits that were present in the game, and strengthened them. Glandin was not quite as much of a stuffed shirt in the game as he is in the game log. For Lepanto , it was a case of using the game log to reveal some of the emotion that was driving the ship’s behaviour. It took a while for the player characters to realise that they were dealing with something much more than just a really smart computer, and given the centrality of the Lepanto / Bringer story arc to the unfolding drama of the game I decided to bring this element in very early in the game log.
In other cases I added in depth and complexity that could have been present in the game but was not.
In the game, the party pretty much ignored the members of the Ramadan collective. In the game log, I felt that the story would be improved if I changed this so I made the choice to use Didi Turner as a narrator, and to have Bob Stark interact with the Ramadans a lot more, in order to add another layer to the story.
And finally there is Bringer. In the game, Bringer only ever got to speak through Lepanto, and the characters did not spend much time digging in to Bringer’s motivations, or trying to understand why Bringer was what it was. I had a bit more story to tell here – and so I brought a bit more of Bringer’s back story out via the log.
All in all I had fun telling the story. I hope you had fun reading it.
—
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.
—
What, You Haven’t Read 58 Eridani Yet?
Fear not, gentle readers — here is the full list of posts, from the introduction through to the 15th and final instalment.
