Orphans of the Stars Political Document

meeting_the_emperor by klausmasterflex

First, I want to thank my fans for their patience.  This project has led to a startling drop in views, no doubt because the Psi-Wars fans aren't, you know, seeing Psi-Wars, and Orphans hasn't built up as much of a base, and also, the documents are a bit dry.  I've taken the time to rebuild some lead time on Psi-Wars, and I'm pleased to announce that we'll return to it starting next week, with a look at the Alliance, the beating heart of the rebellion against the Empire.

For those of you who are here for Orphans of the Stars, the draft is available on Patreon.  It's not particularly thoroughly edited (you'll get it "as is"), but I would appreciate your feedback.  It's 20k words on running political games for a sweeping space opera, but I'm sure you can alter it to fit other genres.  It's $5; if you're already a $5+ subscriber, you can just get it.  If you're not, just subscribe and you'll have it. You can immediately delete your pledge there after if this is all you want (you should be charged immediately and then never again), but while you're there, check out some other material, see if you like what I'm doing.  Some especially interesting posts might be:

• Modelling Grav Cars, which includes a document that discusses how to use Vehicles 3e with GURPS 4e, provided you have access to works like GURPS Spaceships and several pyramid articles.  It's the best I've managed to cobble together, and it works pretty well until Vehicles 4e comes out.
• Dirty Ultra-Tech, which borrows from GURPS High-Tech's Dirty Tech sidebars and applies them to Blasters
• The Recent Tech Week has some general material, including a look at Weapons, and a discussion of Armor

If you're a psi-wars fan, dig back over the polls and some of the material that have come out of it!

Orphans of the Stars: Political Conflict

This will be my last "design notes" post for Orphans of the Stars.  I'm going to post the actual draft next week at this time and place, giving me a little extra time to work on Psi-Wars (the Alliance is coming along nicely, though it'll be a very different beast than what we see in Star Wars.  Stay tuned, my Psi-Wars faithful!).  It'll be available on Patreon for $5, as stated before.

Today, I look into the most important element of political gameplay, conflict, which allows you to defeat your opponents through war, espionage, subversion and economic sanction, which is just what everyone seems to really want when they talk about "political gameplay."  Most of this made it into the final cut, and more!  And even if you don't want sweeping, interstellar political contests, the ideas presented herein might still prove useful inspiration for your own political games.

Orphans of the Stars: Organizational Gameplay

We know what the overall themes of gameplay are now, but we need to know what the PCs, themselves, do with it.  The ruling noble might decree that the planet is to wage war upon a rival while also changing the ideology of the people, but what organizations wage war? Who changes the ideology of the people?  And how and when do the PCs improve their organizations?  How does all of this translate into, you know, something fun like an action scene or a dramatic seduction or a cunning infiltration?

Eventually, less of this material made it into the final draft because it turned out to be more complicated than necessary, but I present the whole thing for your consideration.

Orphan of the Stars: the Gameplay of Politics

After I had laid out my plans for the pieces of the game, I found it necessary to think my whow the game would play.  This turned into a three-part discussion, starting with high level politics, and I hoped to turn the game from a look at a bunch of stats and into a dynamic series of interesting choices that impacted the players and was impacted by them in turn (you know, gameplay).

Orphan of the Stars: Ideology as Will

One core element I wanted for Psi-Wars was ideology.  I wanted religion, culture and the flow of ideas to be a major element of gameplay, both in trying to create it, and trying to manage it.  Dune had its faith, yes, but it also had the cultural differences between the "soft" nobility, the originally "hard" sarduakar and the legitimately "hard" fremen.  In many ways, Dune turns on what it takes to make great men, or the upsides and downsides of certain ideological leanings.

This also assists us with our desire to have multiple genetic lines, as we can use different ethnicities as receptacles for ideological differences. Thus, not only can our Not-Fremen have "wild" genetic differences from our local House, but it can have ideological differences, and when managing both the nobility of the House and the wild not-Fremen, one must be aware of the clashes in their ideologies and carefully navigate them.

Thus, I wrote up a proposal for how to treat the last of our three central elements: Ideology, which has no rulebook in GURPS (THS's memetics come closest, but those tend to be shorter lived than what I have in mind)

Orphans of the Stars: Boardroom and Curia as Organizations

The Imperial Court by Pictsy

The next of our triumverate is organizations, the people who actually build, maintain and attack the capital nobles use to enhance their power.  For this, the obvious choice is to tackle GURPS Boardroom and Curia, which was designed for running organizations.

So, today, I take a look at what these organizations can do for us, and how PCs will maintain them (as that's the core premise of Orphan of the Stars: You run one of your lord's major organizations to enact his will).

Orphan of the Stars: City Stats as Capital

In my previous post, I noted that physical capital can provide a basis for political power.  To represent this, I settled on Bill Stoddard's GURPS City Stats.

This represents the planetary lord maintaining his planet's infrastructure and expanding his power by expanding his industrial, commercial or population base.  Naturally, City Stats focus on cities, while I'm focusing on planets, but while this abstracts the gargantuan nature of planets a bit, it works well enough for my purposes.

Naturally, you can reversen engineer my material to work with actual cities (You'll have to adjust some of the costs, though)

Orphans of the Stars: Meditations on Politics

The first thing we chose to focus on, and what this series will devote all of its attention to, is politics.  I wrote the following post as a way of explaining the directions we could go, and how I saw politics. Eventually, it should be noted, that my client chose for extreme political systems, which means politics-as-wargame, which is what the final document looks at.

Orphan of the Stars: Iteration 1 Notes

This week I take a break from Psi-Wars to present: Orphan of the Stars

At the year's end (in the heart of Iteration 5 for Psi-Wars), someone approached me to write up some setting material for them, one inspired by a mixture of Dune, GURPS Biotech and, especially, a deep political gameplay.  That last is the focus of my work on Orphan of the Stars, and today, I present the Iteration 1 notes that I cobbled together based on his request, an outline of where I saw development going.

Like Psi-Wars, Iteration 1 for Orphan of the Stars, which wasn't even called Orphan of the Stars at the time, is a basic outline of how to make it work with as little work as possible, though in this case it was more of a discussion of my thoughts and where my patron could go in his own direction if he chose not to retain my services.  Thus, you can see it as a sort of guiding document.