Building the Psi-Wars Technological Frameworks

“I understand why you’re revisiting this technological stuff, I just miss working on the setting” - Maverick (I think; and paraphrased, because it was ages ago, which illustrates how much of a problem it is)

“I think its time for a new playtest.” – The Secret Council, ominously

I am unhappy. I had wanted to round out a final playtest and a new version of the Dreadnought, but in the latter case, it felt redundant based on what I knew was coming up, and the former felt unfinishable, because I would have to use “Generic everything.” In fact, the reason I came up with the Generic Fleet was to do a playtest, but even as I found myself sitting down to write it, the words wouldn’t come, and I think I know why: it’s because I’m unhappy. I am unhappy because Maverick is right, and that sort of thing is way more fun. I am unhappy because my mind swims with alternate races and lost houses and Alexian secrets. I am unhappy because I know you want to see those things and I watch interest dwindle on my discord and my patreon.

It is very important that a writer be happy. Sure, he can be stressed, push to his limits and freaking out, but he should be enjoying what he’s doing, or the words will stop flowing. Creativity requires an element of play, as they are deeply bound to one another! If it feels like homework, then, perhaps you shouldn’t do it! Yes, eventually you need to get it done, but pain (and boredom, etc) are indicators of a problem, and perhaps we can solve that problem.

There’s a reason I’ve done Iteration 7 the way I have, and it boils down to dissatisfaction with GURPS Spaceships as a catchall for vehicles. We don’t have Vehicles 4e, and I must say, this journey has showed me a lot, and provided a great deal of useful assets I need to move forward with this, and now that we have them, let’s move forward, shall we?

I want to make December my “Framework” month, not in the bland “Let’s talk about technology in an abstract way” but concrete material that you, as a Psi-Wars player, can use, and I want it to reflect the setting, so we’ll kill two birds with one stone: we’ll build a gear catalog and develop our setting at the same time! Though let’s be honest, this will take more than a month, but let’s see where this takes us!

The Roadmap

As for how to build a framework, I invite you to check out the following posts:

• A Setting Design Manifesto
  
• The Ultratech Framework Series
  

Most of our core elements in the Ultra-Tech Framework have been set up, and so we don’t need to revisit them. Now, we need to tackle the task of coming up with like 50 ships and 50 guns and 50 bits of personal gear and a mess of robots, which seems like a daunting task, but my setting manifesto explains how to break it up into smaller pieces. I wish to draw your attention to rules 2, 3, 4 and 5.

Rule 3: The Setting Fractal

Rule 3 is probably the most critical: the easiest way to break this down is to look at the fractal pattern of the setting, and we already know what that is. We have our core conflict between the Alliance and the Empire, and then we have the rest of Alien Kind. For our first, core run, we’re going to stop and focus in on the Alliance and the Empire, on humanity itself, because we haven’t yet discussed aliens, and when we do, that seems a good time to bring up alien technological frameworks.

However, we can dive deeper into the Alliance and the Empire. The Empire itself is fairly uniform, but we might break it up into periods: the Old “Leto Daijin” period, when the Empire was still the military arm of the old Federation and fighting a war against the Great Galactic Threat, the current era of war against the Alliance, and the “future era,” the experimental tech that’s just around the corner, which emphasizes the Empire as innovator.

For the Alliance, we could look at each House, but I would argue that this is a step too deep already, and assumes something, which is to say that the Alliance is the Aristocracy and it is not. The Alliance is all the varied factions arrayed against the Empire. That is, we’re talking about humanity in terms of “the Empire” vs “Everyone else,” at least when it comes to technological frameworks.

One thing that irritates me in sci-fi settings is when all Aliens are alike (“All Klingons are honorable warriors”) and, worse, when humans are this way (“All humans are charismatic, heroic and liberal-minded!”). One easy way to get around that is to break down a race (humanity, in this case) into sub-groups, to expand their part of the fractal. We in the modern world already do this, thinking in terms of ethnic groups, but I want to break up modern ethnic understanding and push the reader to lump the humanity of the setting into different sorts of “thematic buckets” to give us several different ways to picture what humans might be like and, thus, several different ways to picture their technology.

Maradon: These are the heirs to the galaxy, the rulers of the defeated Galactic Federation and the would-be rulers of the Alliance. They are humanity-as-space-fantasy, with elegant nobles, space princesses, space knights, great orbital fortresses, Dune-inspired houses that once bowed to a feminine order of “witches” called the Akashic order. I think when the average reader thinks of the Psi-Wars alliance, they picture the Maradon. In Star Wars, Leia Organa, Mon Mothma and probably Lando Calrissian would have been of Maradon extraction.

Shinjurai: The technologists of the setting, whose Neo-Rationalism ostensibly serves as the ideological foundations of the modern Empire, they once ruled pockets of the Galaxy and the foundations of their civilization gave rise to the Cybernetic Union. They are humanity-as-cyberpunk, with cyborg punks and strange robotic religions and devoted logicians. There are few such characters in Star Wars, though Lobot might fight the bill, as might General Greivous; instead, they represent a mashing of other genres into Star Wars, and include characters like John Preston from Equilibrium, Clara from Killjoys, and Kanjiklub from the Force Awakens.

Westerly: The common man of the setting, they can be found scattered across the stars, living simple lives and primarily wishes to be left alone; they are the most diverse of the forms of humanity, and worry about survival more than galactic politics. They are humanity as space-Western, with varied and simple religions (from Shepherdism to shamanism to True Communion) and simple and effective technologies. They are asteroid miners, farmers, survivalists, smugglers and gunslingers. In Star Wars, the Skywalker line is probably Westerly, as is Han Solo; outside of Star Wars, we have most of the crew of the Serenity, and we have the Fremen of Dune.

I find it easier to come up with some corporations, give them some fluff and assign them equipment modifiers that they give most of their gear. I then use these corporations kinda like character lens to differentiate my gear to be easier and quicker then doing it case by case (though don't be afraid to mix methods). In effect they become Corporate Lens. -The Ryujin, Brand Loyalty

We can break down our gear first by human ethnic group/theme: what does Maradonian spaceships look like; what does Westerly spaceships look like, etc. I would propose further do to this along the lines of manufacturing corporations. Each ethnic group and the design philosophies they stand for can be exemplified by a handful of corporations, each with their own specific themes. We can design the equipment around those themes, but we can also arbitrarily give them benefits, as described in GURB’s Brand Loyalty article, or the “Gun Cult” sidebar on page 39 of GURPS Gun Fu (“The blasters and vehicles of Not-Kalashnikov are just more robust, with +1 to HT or Malf, just because. Everyone knows that!”). By having a few corporations, we also give the GM and players a few names to toss around and more setting elements to play with.

We can, and maybe should, dive into other frameworks and lost pieces of technology, such as alien frameworks, or the equipment of True Communion, but we might save that for a later time, as the gear here, for these factions, is the most foundational gear of the setting.

Rule 4: Themes

So, we have the rough fractal breakdown: we want some gear for each Ethnicity and the themes they represent. We’ll need to think of those themes, of course, but we can break down our material even further by creating another axis on which we think of our gear.

Of course, we already have several subsets of gear:

• Spaceships
  
• Vehicles
  
• Personal Gear
  
• Robots
  
• Enhancements
  
• Infrastructure
  

The first three are self-explanatory. Robots are something easily lost in the shuffle, but someone somewhere has to be making these robots, and it’s thus part of the technological framework. Enhancements represent things like Cybernetics or other purchasable upgrades, and I would argue that these tend to be setting concerns more than something we need to design: we might want to know who creates what particular set of cybernetics so we can put a name in front of it, but beyond that it’s not a major concern. Infrastructure fills a similar niche: we need to have hospitals and weather satellites and power plants and factories, but we worry about them more as setting elements than something the players will directly use.

We also have several broader themes to concern ourselves with:

• Military: what the wars are fought with
  
• Security and Infiltration gear: what special ops, criminals and cops use
  
• Civilian: what the guy on the street uses
  
• Special/Magical: the gear a faction uses to power its psychic abilities and other secret conspiracies.
  

These sort of fall into what various characters will do, or what the main conflicts of the setting are. Military and Security and probably the most important, while civilian will mix the two and serve as a backdrop for the first two: a criminal might use a civilian car, or a rebel in a military conflict might use a civilian blaster. The special/magical is like Enhancements: it tends to be unique and special and likely not worth an entire discussion on its own, but is worth remembering.

So, for example we might start with the (Military) (Spaceships) of the (Maradon). Each of these elements will have their own subsets: Capital Ships (which might be broken down into Carriers, Battleships, etc), Corvettes (which might be broken down into escort corvettes, torpedo corvettes, etc), and so on. Once you’ve got the whole complex map built out, it’s not especially difficult to just start plugging ships in, though you needn’t fill every gap.

Rule 2: Keep it Simple

Now that we have our fractal and themes (and fractals of themes), we must endeavor to keep it simple. I think it’s obvious that when looking at just one thematic group (Maradon) with just one aspect (military spaceships) that you can dive deeper and deeper into each set. I would suggest that we limit ourselves: given that the patterns here are sufficiently obvious that a GM can easily see where he can insert his own, we only need to draw in broad lines. So, if we’re talking the military spaceships of each group, I would argue we need:

• 0-3 Capital ships per group
• 0-3 corvettes per group
• 0-3 fighters per group

And then we stop. That’s up to 9 military ships per ethnic group plus 9 military ships for the empire, plus up to 9 “spy/security” ships per ethnic group and 9 “spy/security” ships for the empire, and 9 civilian ships per ethnic group and 9 civilian ships for the Empire. That’s already 108 potential spaceships, which is a big design space, and thus we shouldn’t try to fill in every little gap. 50 human ships would already be plenty, and that means we’re almost certainly not going to have 3 in every category (do we need 3 different Westerly capital ships? Probably not!)

I would like to add one additional thing into the mix as a call-out to Rule 1: We need to know our target audience, and one thing I’ve noticed with my target audience is that you guys like specifics. You like named characters, which probably means you like named ships, so we’ll come up with a handful of signature ships per faction, no more than 2-3.

Rule 5: Steal Like an Artist

Where do we get our ships? We’ll look in two major places. The first, obviously, is that we’ll steal from existing material. Obviously we’ll use Star Wars, but we have other sources as well, from the real world to other sci-fi (like the fighters of Cowboy Bebop or the corvettes of Firefly or the capital ships of Battlefleet Gothic). The second is that we’ll stop and think about the reasons behind our fighters.

When I created the Military Doctrines of the Empire, I set off something of a firestorm, as well as when I discussed the tactics of rebellion. I’d like to revisit each of these before I dive into the infrastructure of each. Why does the Empire have dreadnoughts? Why don’t the Westerly? The answer lies in how each faction views war, or security and stealth, or their civilian concerns. As we stop and contemplate the circumstances of each group, their technology will naturally flow from this. Personally, this isn’t the sort of setting material that needs to be outright stated, though I do find people reference it a lot (my rebel tactics gets a lot of views), but it’s definitely the sort of work you should do, even if you choose not to “show” it in the end, so we’ll definitely stop to think about it.

Heat the Forge!

And that’s it! I think this lays out a roadmap of how to go about building our technology nicely, and I think we have most of the tools we need to do this. We are missing some pieces, but better to stop and build those pieces as we need them than to set up everything in a slow, boring manner in advance, because we’re often engaging in “premature optimization” which is one of the greatest creative sins one can commit!

So, where to next? Clearly I think Military concerns interest us the most currently. We need to tackle the rest, absolutely, but we’ll start here, because it’s what people talk about the most, and it’ll serve as the basis for my playtest the best. What aspect of the military? Well, we need to hit everything, but I think the most obvious sequence is:

• Personal Gear
• Vehicles
• Spaceships
• Miscellaneous

We need to know what gear soldiers carry to know what vehicles support them to know how much space a spaceship needs to carry said soldiers and vehicles; things like factories, fortifications, starports, medical facilities, can come later, as they can be fairly easily abstracted away; I don’t think you’d even miss them if we forgot them.

Which faction? While I’m sure everyone would like to start with the Empire, I want to start with Maradon, because I have a pretty good sense of what they look like and they predate the Empire, so the Empire has adapted a lot of its technology to defeat the Maradon-led Alliance. After that, and this is subject to change, I’d like to do: Westerly (as they make up the bulk of rebellions), the Shinjurai (they straddle the line between Empire and Alliance) and then the Empire.

Before I do each, I’ll stop and talk about the doctrine that drives them and their preferred tactics.

Once I’ve finished the militaries of each, we’ll see if we can get a playtest up and running, and I’ll turn my attention to spycraft and civilian elements.