Lamentations Of The Dogs In The Vineyard

G+ is on life support, so a few weeks back I trawled through every post I'd made in my 6+ years using it to see if there was anything that I wanted to archive.

I found about a dozen posts that were effectively blog posts I'd misplaced. One was an idea I'd loved but done nothing with. I think over the coming weeks/months/however-long-I-maintain-a-regular-writing-habit I'll expand on this concept and flesh it out as much as I can.

From a November 6th 2014 G+ post:

Prequel to Dogs in the Vineyard; early 1800s sandbox campaign in a largely unsettled counter-Utah; party are not-quite-Dogs; sent off by the church to convert isolated communities, make contact with the Mountain Folk and look into those odd reports of weird caves in the Border Hills.
BUT play with LotFP as base system (plus guns). Clerics are true believers, magic-users are the church's investigators into other stuff who are now a bit tainted, fighters and specialists are the useful novices.
And the weird caves are filled with things out of Lovecraft.

I'm a fan of the setting for Dogs In The Vineyard, and in the G+ circles that I used to read and the blogs I currently read I see barely a mention of it. I LOVE what the game is about, I love the idea of the Watchdogs and I think that Dogs is possibly Vincent Baker's best game - at least out of everything of his I've read. The game-setting-making process he leads the reader/GM through is magical. Going from simple prompts it steers your creativity without being prohibitive.

But while I like the basic stats and skills setup for Dogs, I found it really bothersome to keep on top of the dice pools. The rolls and re-rolls, the escalation. It could be tense sometimes, but at others it was just eight or nine dice on each side clattering and trying to find an exception as no-one backs down.

So why not mix a little Old School goodness in to the blend to simplify some of the mechanics? Why not use D&Dish stats? And since LOTFP has a system that uses equipment and assumptions about a similar background period of history, why not "simply" perform an RPG transplant operation?

Why not write about this in bits and pieces over the coming however-long-I-maintain-this-blog-yadda-yadda-yadda?

Why not.

An Odd Idea: Mechsuit O.D.D.

On top of working on A Random Encounter I have an on-again/off-again relationship with a hack of Into The Odd set in a semi-hard sci-fi setting at the edge of the solar system. Into The Oort, if it ever gets finished, will have spaceships, zero-gravity derring-do, exploration of ancient human megastructures and centaurs. (really)

Despite having only so many hours in the day and enough creative pursuits already, my brain keeps saying, "Nathan! Hey Nathan, think about this..." I blame Chris McDowall: he wrote a game with a very easily hacked set of mechanics. This post is the latest "odd idea" that I've had... It has some blanks and some spaces which are currently boxed out with [] square brackets because I haven't got that far yet. But I think I will, sooner or later...

Mech suit by flyingdebris

Some Notes on Setting

Last night the baby slept quite well; we did get woken, but it didn't seem long enough for my brain to start to process something. It was carrying around half an idea from yesterday about luxuries in the Oort Cloud (what would be really valuable, or what would people treat as really valuable) but it is still only a half-formed thought.

And everything that is coming together related to that idea just reminds of things that Patrick has already said before about moving valuables in the Veins of the Earth.

So instead of writing about that, I thought I would share some of the thoughts and ideas about the more general space that the campaign I'm looking to run will sit in.

It started with the idea of running Dogs in the Vineyard in Space and then as I thought about it more I realised that the kernel of that was that I wanted to run something with humans - not aliens, although they might be in the background somehow - and I wanted to run something that was a harder science-fiction than other things I had seen or heard of. Not grim, but just with some thought about how and why things might work.

Then I got Machinations of the Space Princess, which right on the back cover says that it isn't any of that "hard sci-fi mularkey". That said, reading through I could see that for the most part it had a good OSR feel to it (as much as I can tell something is OSRish) - which at the very least means that it would be familiar and not require too much in the way of explanation to get people playing it (Dogs is great, but it takes some getting used to).

So, having read Machinations I started to think about what a campaign in the Oort Cloud would need. It would need places to go and people to see; it would need some general background hooks for why humans would be there. It would need some means of travel, and to be realistic would need an eye on just how fast people would get around. I thought about the species traits that the book uses for chargen and NPC gen (which then made me realise that I would need some tables for quick NPC gen perhaps!) and I realised that many of these traits would still work as human adaptations or traits - humans either having their natural talents or genetic enhancements.

But I wanted to remove the Psion and psi powers, and also the cybernetics - these didn't feel like a good fit. At the same time, the ships and the way they are handled felt like it needed tweaking (hence my noodling with "popomatic" ships in previous posts). Removing and tweaking these parts meant that the setting started to focus, but it also removed some of the moving parts - if I didn't have to think about these things then I was free to start thinking about the other aspects of the setting and the game.

(Aside: a recent thought has had me think that ships might have just seven stats/attributes, to mirror the seven stats of PCs. Just a thought, not fully thought through)

If I am going to play this Oort Cloud hard sci-fi hack of Machinations with people though, I'm going to have to do some more writing. The book is pretty well written I would say, but it gives people a lot of options: a base weapon doing x damage costs 5gp, but then multiply by this or that for these options like such and such... Which is nice in a sci-fantasy setting, and maybe something that you would really go town with, but in a hard sci-fi setting it feels like too much. I think what customisation options are presented need to be done cleanly, almost as tick-boxes? I was also thinking of creating character sheets that show off the skills-lists (which are extensive actually), rather than have little boxes for people to write in. That way they can see what they can do at a glance.

Anyway! This has been helpful to me to get some ideas out of my head - and to realise connections I didn't know where there previously. I hope at least it has been interesting to you the reader - and if you are interested in playing (maybe that's playtesting?) this in August or early September then drop me a line!

In space no-one can hear you drink your own urine

And thankfully people don't pay too much attention.

It must be true, when you really think about it, that atoms in the water that you drink, have been through the digestive systems of other humans - and other living things. They've gone in one end and come out the other. I have an inkling that xkcd has even run a strip or a What If about it... But in space, in the Oort Cloud, needs really must, and out of necessity, people drink their own pee.

Recycling of basic, rather than processed resources, must be an absolute societal basic at the very edge of interstellar space. With the exception (probably) of cometary mining, there's no more water around unless you have alchemical processors - and those things don't run cheap.

I guess most places wouldn't begrudge thrillseekers and travellers some basic water rations (apart from despotic asteroids or criminal waystations); they might not include showers or baths as part of basic accommodation though. Going a step further, a simple bath might be considered a luxury - a spa retreat might be half a day just having a good soak.

If you have the rights or the firepower to defend a cometary ice body - or some other source of water - then you might be on to a winner economically... Or you might have painted a big target on yourself.