So I'm working on a new, "refreshed" edition of the Solar System, as I mentioned in the other thread. I'm saying "refreshed" because updating would imply some kind of need for rpg rules to move with the times, which is not exactly true. The goal here is to make use of extensive personal and communal experience with the game to fiddle with it and see it in a slightly clearer light, perhaps, than before.

I ran a short playtest game with a couple of friends a week and a half ago with the intent of flexing my Solar System muscles (haven't played for a while) and trying out spontaneous setting creation - that's what you do when you don't have a setting prepared for Solar System, you sit down and start the campaign with setting creation. As I'm writing a setting-detached version of the Solar System I want to have some methodological advice for initiating the game like this: some structured steps for what happens before character creation, if you will.

What we made up

Our short campaign stub ended up developing a most intricate setting. It was a weird combination of Legends of Alyria, Mud Planet, South-American history and Dragonriders of Pern. The game was set on this huge, young planet 200 light years out from Earth, almost uninhabitable by humans. Most of the planet was covered by a thick atmosphere of various ill-defined gases that made much of the surface unhabitable for humans, leaving just high mountaintops available for colonization. However, generations on the planet had caused different degrees of mutations on the populace that could adapt to living further down on the surface. Of course the gasses themselves were a big deal, as some possessed narcotic properties (akin to Ammeni herbology) and such; an obvious corollary in the genre of science-fantasy was that most of the atmosphere down below the highest peaks had some potential for being flammable at any given moment, which explained why people preferred swords to guns.

The society of the planet had mutated as well from the egalitarian bureaucracy that the U.N. -led mission brought with it into what amounted to a feudal monarchy. It hadn't been that long since planetfall, however, so people still had all their technology and history, they'd just adapted their society to the conditions. Much of the backwardness would be explained to us the world-designers when it came out that the "dragons" used by the nobility as mounts were both intelligent and telepathic - they had been shaping the society of the humans for quite a while.

So we had a pulpy science fantasy setting with quite some detail going on. Most of that was created by pretty standard brainstorming. The question for the purposes of the Solar System is, is anything else necessary?

Focal point of a campaign

Here's something I wrote in my new Solar System manuscript about starting a new campaign:

Eero's Solar System draft wrote:
Focal points

After the group has found a setting everybody is happy with, it is vitally important to hone in on it in more detail. Almost always a setting is much wider than one particular campaign could hope to encompass in a meaningful manner, so it is important for the group to discuss the general setting and choose some particular focal points therein to focus their campaign on.

For example, in the world of the Shadow of Yesterday, Near, there exist a number of disparate human cultures in conflict. The first step to any campaign in Near is for the players to choose a particular culture, or perhaps an interface between cultures, as the focal point of interest for their game. When they create their characters not all might represent the culture or cultures in the focal point, but every character will have some interest and agenda towards the common point of interest. This is good, as the world of Near is too wide for everything in the setting to be utilized to full extent in the course of one campaign.

Other settings might certainly involve different points of interest. For example, in a scifi game it would be quite reasonable to agree that a particular space station, focal point of a desperate peace effort, might serve as the central point of interest. Another game might be all about the Albigensian heresy in 13th century Aquilonia, even while the setting itself encompasses the whole of Catholic Europe.

The group might want to identify more than one point of interest for a slower and wider-ranging campaign, but beginners at the fine art of dramatic campaigning are probably better off with just one, important and interesting point. And even when points of interest are many, they should all be most pertinent for several characters, not just one. If points are scattered too far and wide in character creation it is better to revise the focus of the campaign to correct.

The points of interest picked for the particular campaign are just a starting point, note, and need not be particularly pursued after character creation. The intent here is to negotiate a starting situation wherein all player characters will be loosely involved. Further on it will be the job of the Story Guide to weave together the stories of the characters in intricate manner.

Some settings, by the way, are genuinely narrow enough to require no further framing. This is often the case for settings made up on the spot, as the players naturally attach their characters to whatever idea was first proposed as the basis of the setting. Sometimes settings based upon literary works are similarly single-minded: for example, it is very likely that a game set in the world of Frank Herbert’s Dune would find a natural point of interest in the eponymous planet itself and the mysterious Spice found therein; players would need to actively avoid the point to succeed in creating disparate characters.

Now, the above was based on my earlier experience in using Solar System for off-Near games, and of course on playing in Near. As folks who've played The Shadow of Yesterday know, it's not really possible to go into character creation without discussing the setting and looking for some common ground among the group - or let's say that it's possible, but the end result is that the Story Guide needs to twist the resulting characters into fitting some common reference frame anyway, so the better tack is to be above-board about finding something in common for the group to focus on. In the case of Near this is almost invariably a given cultural situation (has to do with how the setting is described in terms of cultural spheres), but it could be other things.

The thing in our campaign stub was, however, that I couldn't at first glance really recognize the point of interest. The reason was in what I'd already written earlier: when starting a new setting from ground up it's pretty much a given that the setting will cohere around a very limited number of focal points. When we'd determined the basic situation with dragon-riding mobility living on the mountaintops and mutant underclass living lower down on the surface, that pretty much defined our focal point: the game would be about the class and political interactions of this anomalous society. I don't think we particularly discussed this after noting that we had enough setting material for a focal point to emerge, but the players certainly ran with it: Sipi made his character a high courtier, confidant to the king, while Pyry's character became a mutant rabble-rouser and terrorist.

Determining Setting Crunch

This is a big question mark for me at this point, probably because I haven't yet written the part about it. How do you actually bootstrap a setting efficiently in the Solar System? The complexity of the issue is actually increased by the fact that there are several different scenarios that are relatively common here:

• When a group gets together to play TSOY, it's common that the Story Guide knows the setting and faciliates focusing on some specific point of interest therein. Then the book provides a suitable basic level of crunch.
• When I was in Oulu a month and a half ago at a game convention, we played a one-shot with the Solar System with a couple of good friends after a long weekend of playing Agon and whatnot. We went over some hypothetical settings over dinner (Ocarina of Time was my favourite, due to having recently finished it), but then we settled on Glorantha, partly because Oulu is the Finnish Glorantha capital. There was no prepared crunch, but we were familiar with the setting and I had some vague notions from having thought about the topic earlier.
• Although I don't off-hand remember that this would have happened to me, I imagine that it's pretty common that a Story Guide would arrange for a Solar System campaign and then have off-session time to prepare crunch for it. I seem to end up doing this stuff in-session without fail, but in theory one could always arrange to plan the crunch with time and attention, instead. And I certainly plan stuff in between sessions myself as well.
• This time when we started play, we did not have a setting in mind, and didn't have any crunch either.

A part of the challenge here is that as I'm writing the new rules booklet as an aggressively universal system, some of those scenarios that were strictly marginal for The Shadow of Yesterday are actually the presumed mode of play here. I'm going to actively encourage people to get into the internets and grab a ready-made Solar System setting for their campaign, of course, but I'd still expect that many groups that first encountered Solar System in this form would want to start their own game in some setting that doesn't yet have a Solar System implementation of any kind. So I need to write some serious support for that.

As I mention above, in this particular campaign stub we started with an extremely clear table. One thing I notice about this is that the mechanical landscape ends up being pretty sparse all around - the Secrets are simple and often are not chained into complex subsystems. On the other hand, the fictive ties are paramount for crunch - one of my favourite events in actual play was when we stopped to figure out where the mutant demagogue might spend his Advances, and came up with the notion that the mutant rebels would surely have developed special anti-dragon tactics - so we created a Secret for that and had the character meet with a NPC defined earlier for some advanced schooling. This was very cool in the story context, because the character had earlier managed to get into trouble with the King's Dragoons by killing a dragon and kidnapping a dragoon from a good family. The dragoniers were outright scary when they flapped overhead at night, perched on rooftops and threatened him, so going for some lowlands antidragon kungfu was a most sensible development, which also allowed me to slip in some interesting backstory about the dragons and dragonriders.

But, going back to the beginning, we didn't really create any particular crunch at start, when the characters were created. There were some problems with this, perhaps the most significant being that the characters didn't have a particular mechanical focus at the beginning - I kinda like it if players have some Secrets and Abilities they really want their characters to learn and use, which very much wasn't the case now. Lacking crunch also means that players are very likely to be satisfied with the one mandatory Secret, while players in a game with prepared crunch will probably pick 2-3 of those. This has the effect of slowing down Pool cycles as characters have fever opportunities for spending their Pools. The most overwhelming positive part in doing stuff as it's needed is that all players get to participate in discovering the setting on equal terms; it's pretty nice to get a good idea for crunch solutions in the middle of play.

My initial thinking on this issue of pre-prepared crunch vs. making everything up the fly is that both have their sides, and perhaps a given Story Guide should consider the run of the campaign in dynamic terms: preparing some stuff allows one to have options available and especially allows the NPCs to have and use something more interesting than another iteration of the Secret of Enhancement, while also leaving stuff wide open saves work and allows the group room for dynamic invention.

New rule: Effects

Although I'm overall pretty pleased with the Solar System rules and am not planning any large changes, there's one thing that bugs me a bit, and it's that while the system actually tracks all kinds of temporary resources, it has no name for them. Examples of this are Ammeni herbs and prayer dice pools created by the Secret of Blessing; there are many other rules subsystems both original and later developed that have mechanical significance but don't really have generic names and terminology. This is a bit of a fault for me, as without such terminology I can't write new crunch to reference this class of resources very easily.

Anyway, my own solution for this is to introduce a new rule: a player may opt to "save" a given Ability check result by jotting it down and paying an appropriate Pool point for it. This jotted down result is then called an "Effect" and it can be later spent for bonus dice in a situation pertinent to the original check. So "Effects" are named check results that are written down, simply enough. Some observations:

• An observant reader will note that this effect is nigh identical to how Secret of Blessing works. Effectively, I'm making the Secret a default part of the rules.
• Likewise, it is easily observed that the rules of the game already implicitly support this kind of bonus dice generation in the form of secondary Ability checks. The only difference is that I'm now allowing players to pay with Pool points for the privilege of saving such a support check for vague future need, while the actual support rule requires you to make the support check immediately before the actual check to be supported.
• A primary purpose for this rule is to speed up Pool expenditure for beginning characters, who might not have Secrets that require much Pool. With this option a player will have Pool expenditure options regardless of whether they encounter easy or hard conditions - easy conditions make saving up Effects attractive, while difficult conditions necessiate spending Pool directly for bonus dice.
• Another purpose of the rule, and the original reason for me starting to think about it, was to get a mechanical handle of stuff like Ammeni herbology - now herbs and other Secret-based temporary resources are easy to write down as Effects that have special mechanics by the virtue of Secrets. So a character without the Ammeni secrets might just create normal bonus-die Effects with their herbology ("Picked some healing herbs 3" is a fine normal Effect created with a simple Ability check), while a special Secret related to this could be written with language referring to Effects created with the specific Ability.
• Hoarding Effects is probably not that large a problem, but it's easy to deal with by some general rule. I'm considering simply having players cross off all Effects that are not pertinent to the game anymore at the end of a session, for example, or something equally vague.

We tested the Effect rule in the campaign stub I'm discussing here, and at least based on that it works pretty well. Whether to use the option makes for an interesting question for players and an additional flag for the Story Guide - one of my players made a big deal of the different social conflicts he had with the king and made sure to make Effects out of the results, providing him with an increasingly established hold over the monarch, for example. Effects also allowed players to make some advance preparations when they knew where their characters were going, which was pretty cool - players weren't so much in the hands of fate as usual, and the preparation checks made for interesting fictional detail. Effects were not hoarded and they didn't proliferate for us mostly because they were practically always very temporary by nature - convincing the king of the necessity of a given new law, for example, isn't that useful as an Effect after the whole legal issue becomes old news.

One related issue that came up was whether players could spend an Effect in parts instead of all at once - I ruled that they could on instinct, which is probably the right move, as otherwise the strength of the Effect isn't necessarily that big a deal. Another thing I'm considering is whether there should be some means - a Secret, perhaps - that'd allow the basic Effect to be a bit more persistent. Some of those Effects the players generated were pretty cool and it could be nice to have them stick around and replenish somehow. Now that I think about that, though, it's obviously Secret territory; I can imagine three different ways of implementing something like that with Secrets.

The actual play

Although this isn't the actual point of my post, let it be known that Solar System rocks, as do my teenager contingent of players. The latter are now in the process of moving down south for their studies, so this was probably one of the last times we got to play together for a while. The game was perhaps one of the most intricate we've had, with a very compelling and even realistic picture of Belfast in the '70s. (That was what came to my mind, anyway.) The mutants were all very working class and the nobility were very haughty and out of the loop when the middle class police forces misused their powers in increasingly blatant ways. The court was consumed by news of renewed contact with earth and literally dripping with political irony - Sipi's character was the leader of the "U.N. Party" that supported return to a meritocratic bureaucracy, all the while oblivious to how the "year 130 state charter" (the establishing document for the current monarchy) could be considered by some to conflict with U.N. principles with its legal definition of citizenship dependent on genetic purity and all. A most excellent game in all and it's quite the shame that we probably can't revisit it due to scheduling. I'm almost considering writing this up as a small setting for the game, it was that good.

Eero wrote:
That crunch-improvising thing is tricky, though. If anybody has experiences or ideas they want to share, I'm all ears.

For me it was quite easy, because I knew the setting so well. I kept thinking about the thing you said about if a certain thing in the setting is important enough to have a secret. So in your game we had the Secret of the Horse, that meant that the character had the status and wealth to own a horse. It was a cool thing to have as a crunch in the Heortling game.

Also improvising the crunch in TSoY is a it like coming up with abilities in The Mountain Witch. One of the players in my one-shot wanted to have his character in close contact with the Spirit World and spiritual entities of the landscape. So, I said that he could buy the Secret of Spirit Talking. Now he had this special ability that no-one else could have without that Secret. He felt special.

At one point of the game, I said that if the character prayed a favour from Eurmal the Trickster deity, he could succeed with his swindle. He said that he really wanted help. I asked if he really wanted to let the Trickster deity touch his soul and improvised a Touched by Eurmal secret which allowed you to use unlimited amounts of Instinct when he was lying. The player puchaced it and it was a thematical point too.

We did the same thing with Keys too. They were really easy to improvise, because the two core structural models for Keys are a really good basis to improvise from. So when one of the players wanted his character to be a no-good layabout who was interrested in being initiating to the Knowing God. The latter translated to you basic Key of the Mission (phrased differently) and the first one became the Key of Laziness.

You'd think that a character who wanted to evade responsibility would be dull in a game, but when his key game him experience when it got him or his family into trouble, it transformed into really good gaming! In fact he had such a blast that he was the one that called upon Eurmal. :)

We didn't have any Secrets or Keys written down before we played and we ingnored the book too. (I read it with my computer using WLAN, so it wasn't convenient to pass my laptop around.) So in essence I took what the players thought was cool about their characters and crunched it and gave it back to them, thus reinforcing what made their characters special. They loved it!

So in my opinion the key thing to keep in mind when designing for this crunch thing is to make structures and molds that are easy to fill out and provide examples on how to use them to come up with new Keys and Secrets (and stuff :)