Generalized Politics - Domain Management

Quite some time ago, I released a commissioned GURPS work: the Orphans of the Stars (If you’re a patron, check it out. If you’re not, feel free to join us! Of course, this post should tackle most things without you needing that document to follow along, but it's a handy worked-example). The intent behind the design was to create a space opera political system in a rather specific, Dune-inspired setting, with extensive bio-tech and where genetically engineered nobles ruled planets.

Since then, I’ve had several people ask me for a more generalized version of the political system, especially in regards to lower-tech settings, such as fantasy worlds, so I offered it as a General Topic Patreon Poll option for January, and it won quite handily!

Before I dive too deeply into this post, I want to highlight what it is and what it isn’t. First, “politics” can have many meanings. People sometimes use it to mean the manipulation of mass populations to persuade them to your course (covered by the GURPS skill of Propaganda); some people use it to mean drama and the accumulation or destruction of influence in a courtly/governmental setting (covered by the GURPS skill of Politics); and sometimes, we mean the management of a population or a domain (covered by the GURPS skill of Administration). This post is primarily about the last, about administrating a domain. Politics as manipulation of courtly settings is mostly handled by GURPS SocialEngineering, and perhaps I’ll go into it more at a later date. It’s also more of a “player vs player,” social-combat sort of situation, which is fine, but Orphans of the Star was designed for cooperative play, where characters controlled different aspects of the government, sort of like playing Civilization except you each control one arm of the domain, instead of the whole of the domain yourself.

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.

State of the Blog: June

This post is a bit early, though I suppose given my preference for posting on Thursdays, it fits.  I wanted to take a second and talk about what's up, what isn't, and what the blog might look like over the next couple of months.

First and foremost, as anyone will children already knew, my ambition for maintaining my writing after the birth of my son was... ambitious.  I have had entire days where all of my hours were working, eating and taking care of him.  He's honestly not so bad, most of the time, but sometimes, I simply have no time to write, and when I do, I'm so exhausted that it's difficult to find focus.  That doesn't mean I've stopped, of course, but the breakneck pace of 4 posts a week, plus a patreon post, is turning out to be a bit much.  That, paired with losing my lead time to Orphan of the Stars, means I need a break to catch up.

So here's the plan.

Orphans of the Stars

If Orphans is going to slow me down then, by god, it's also going to be what gives me a break.  The fellow who commissioned the work also gave me permission to do with it what I pleased: it's my work, he just commissioned it.  What I have, in addition to the document itself, is my personal design journal, and my thoughts on why it worked when other works haven't.  Over the next two weeks, I'm going to share this material with you, culminating in a Patreon exclusive access to the Orphans of the Stars rules for political gameplay, which will be available to all $5 patrons for June only.

This document breaks down Boardroom and Curia and various City Stat works to create an extremely detailed look at playing a "domain management" campaign.  I've designed it for a sort of "cut down" version of running planets, but in principle I think you could use its lessons for more down-to-earth games.

This will come with a change to my Patreon payment policy: currently, when you pledge, you are not charged.  Only at the beginning of the month do you get charged. Technically, that means you can pledge, access my material, and then delete your pledge, and never pay.  I've only had one person do this in the entire time I've run my Patreon, but I'd rather forestall it happening in the future, and I think you get enough material from my patreon to be worth the jump.  I also think most people don't realize that this is the case, and assume they get charged as soon as they join!  Now, this will actually be true.

I'll make the change on the 31st.  If you want to join, I recommend waiting until the 1st of June!

The Houses of the Alliance

As of this moment, I have got between 10 to 20k words on the Houses alone, and I need even more. What I thought might be simple has turned into something larger than the Empire, because I need to discuss an entire government's worth of organizations plus the very distinct character options that noble houses present.  So it's not that I have nothing, it's just that what I have hasn't been polished off yet.  I think you guys will enjoy them, though they represent a distinct shift in tone from Star Wars.  It looks to be about 2 months worth of posts, at this point, but we'll see.

I will hopefully release this after I finish up with my Orphan of the Stars posts.  It should come as a big chunk to all $3+ patrons, and then the rest of you will see it post-by-post on the blog.

The History of Tech

I know I promised it this month, but the outtakes of my work turned into Tech Week, so hopefully that'll mollify everyone.  I'm still hard and work on this, it's just that it turned out to be more work than I expected!  It also turned out to be very useful to my work on the houses, as they're steeped in ancient tradition.  Hopefully, I can finish it and release it as a series on my Patreon (pricing TBD).

And Beyond!

So that's it.  I've been able to maintain some pacing, but not as much as I would like.  I want to thank everyone for their patience, and I hope to see you next month!

The State of the Patreon: March

Last month, I gave everyone a heads up on what they could expect in February, and I'd like to do the same, now, for March, as well as make an announcement at the end of this post, so stay tuned!

Last month, Psi-Wars doubled its pledges and achieved its first goal! Thank you, my dear patrons, for your support, and for your feedback! The next goalpost means I can afford to fund one piece of art per month.

Next month, I'll be diving into Psi-Wars as a setting, and we'll start, first, with a discussion of how I go about building settings, then with the setting "as a whole" and then we'll dive into history and then, most crucially, the Empire.

For Dreamers ($1+) I have two Patron-Only posts.

First will be Building Grav Cars, where I offer up my notes on my struggles in coming up with vehicles without having access to GURPS Vehicles, and I show the benefits and drawbacks of a few different approaches, and then show you how I used Vehices 3e in GURPS 4e.

Next, I have an all new template, the Security Agent! As I unveil Imperial Security, you'll also recieve a template you can use to play as one.

For Fellow Travellers ($3+), In the beginning of March, you'll receive my first draft material for the Empire of Psi-Wars.

For Companions ($5+), I have a new poll coming up, where we'll decide on the Emperor himself.

For Disciples ($7+), I'm going to extend an offer to add signature characters to the Empire: Your own senators, admirals and ministerss, built right into the setting.

Introducing Orphans of the Stars

The big announcement! Alright, so, it turns out my blog has turned a few heads, and I've been approached to write a treatise on running politics in a setting inspired by Dune, and paid handsomely up front. This means two things.

First, it means I have to slow down Psi-Wars for a bit. I've already wrapped up the Empire, which runs into the middle of April, and after that, we'll have to see when I can get back to it. The rest of my energy has been directed towards collating existing material (the Empire is huge!) and handling feedback/polls. If we get to mid April and I haven't finished my work on Orphan of the Stars, then we'll see less Psi-Wars content for time.

Here's the bright side, though. After setting aside a responsible amount for real-life things, I've saved the rest and I'm going to use it to pick up some artwork for Psi-Wars. You've already enjoyed Michelle Kuster's sketches for the Traders. She's also agreed to help me build a vision for the rest of Psi-Wars, so that as the work continues, I can begin to show you with art as well as with words my vision for Psi-Wars.

This doesn't mean Mailanka's Musings will slow or stop, however. Part of the deal is that my written material is mine, so once we get to April, I'll be posting some of my thoughts and design work for my material for Orphan of the Stars. This should prove interesting to anyone who wants to inject some politics, planetary domain management, organizational infighting or ideological struggle into their games. Psi-Wars may or may not see a slow down, but either way, I'll have plenty of material for you.

See you in March!