In light of [the sheer size of space], and the fact that the solar system contains 8 planets, 5 dwarf planets, 335 moons and millions of asteroids, minor planets, comets, trojans, centaurs and the like, you really have to wonder why science fiction has obsessed for so long about interstellar and intergalactic empires. Isn't the solar system big enough?
It strikes me now that the answer is fairly obvious: aliens. There aren't any in the solar system, or at least not ones we can wage war on/fuck/misunderstand, so SF authors by necessity need to look beyond it if they want Klingons.
But the fact remains: the Solar System is massive. Consider this for a second: the distance between Jupiter and Saturn is from 600 million kilometres to 2 billion kilometres. Jupiter has, at current count, 66 moons. Saturn has 62. Uranus and Neptune have another 40 between them. There have been 1,200 Transneptunian Objects recorded. There is a lot of stuff out there to get lost in. Indeed, the question I am currently considering is not so much "Why bother with what's outside the Solar System?" as "Couldn't you just set a game among the moons of Jupiter or Saturn?"
The moons of Jupiter vary hugely in size - from massive rocky Ganymede, bigger than Mercury, to tiny Cyllene, only 3km in diameter. They also vary in character: Icy Europa may have a great warm ocean beneath its surface which harbours life, while Io is a world of magma and volcanoes. Probably only 4 - the Galilean moons of Ganymede, Europa, Io and Callisto - are "settle-able" in the SF sense, but think of the potential in the 58 others. Secret bases for space pirates. Impossibly ancient and haunted alien monuments. Mines to be warred over. Space stations right and left. Orbital rigs for siphoning gas from Jupiter itself, built on construction bases bigger than cities, that circle elliptically around Callisto.
The thing about the Moons of Jupiter Planetcrawl is that the distances make sense. These moons are generally about 200,000 km apart at their closest (although of course, at the opposite ends of their ellipses, they are a heck of a lot further), which is traversable in a few hours at the speed of, say, Voyager 1. An inter-lunar craft would probably be a lot slower, because Voyager 1 is a big fat cheat and has the benefit of decades of acceleration, but still - it's the sort of travel that is do-able in the Star Trek "set a course for Ganymede and we'll be there by Friday" sense, and is imaginable without too much handwaving if you want your SF hard. And since your scope is somewhat restricted, you can actually flesh out your locations in a lot of detail - you don't end up with Traveller-esque abstraction in which each solar system has a single interesting planet about which there is a single interesting fact and a single culture. You can go deep: what's going on with Callisto? How does that affect what's going on with Io? What's with the planetary war on Europa and will the Jovian orbiters get involved?
I happen to have recently bought Diaspora. Maybe the planets are aligning.
Much as I have never understood the fuss about Firefly, one thing I did like about it was that it was set in one solar system, albeit one far from Earth. As I recall, the entirety of Cowboy Bebop takes place within our solar system, and they never run out of places to go either.
ReplyDeleteDiaspora is a great game. I have been running a campaign for about several months now. We have moved one system into a 6 system cluster since the game began. There is plenty to do in a real solar system.
ReplyDeleteDark Dungeons supports this well with its skyships and rules for sailing between planets if you're interested in doing it as fantasy.
ReplyDeleteAlso, if you set things far enough in the future, you totally can have aliens — it's probably more efficient to genetically engineer people to survive on alien worlds than it is to terraform said worlds.
ReplyDeletePlus that gives you the added benefit of being able to devise alien races that look like humans in a hard SF setting.
True. I think Alastair Reynolds did this in some of his books?
DeleteIt also works really well for John Carter of Mars-style pulpy sci-fi. Or Spelljammer, if you wanted to go in that direction. I could see slaver hideouts littered throughout the asteroid belt, etc.
ReplyDeleteFrom a hard sci-fi perspective, it's the space setting that makes the most sense. Barring FTL travel, it's far more efficient to wring the last possible resources out of our solar system before even contemplating trying to get to another star.
Have you seen the rpg Blue Planet? It's setting is a planet at the other end of a wormhole if I remember right, but you could easily change that and make it one of those Jovian moons.
ReplyDeleteAlso, (on the same wavelink as Kelvin) this makes me think of Cowboy Bebop with it's terraformed cities on otherwise inhospitable planets.
Also, has anyone ever revamped Buck Rogers to a harder form of SF?
I've heard about this Buck Rogers game elsewhere. Is it any good?
DeleteYes yes yes. My big problem though is that although I think it would be great to do a Bill Stoddard sort of game of hard Asimovian mineral-speculation and long-term terraforming, I wouldn't be able to resist having Quauor turn out to be a Swedenborgian angel or putting aliens inside the hollow sun, which would ruin the whole thing.
ReplyDeleteExploring the clouds of Jupiter by titanium dirigible, though, or colony ships where the colonists live in computer memory and download into appropriately-adapted bodies as needed - sign me up!
Well, doing hard SF is always an exercise in self-restraint, isn't it? Reining your creativity in just that little bit. Or perhaps forcing it in a more 'scientific' direction.
DeleteThe pulp RPG 'Danger Patrol' is set almost entirely within the solar system, but it does assume the possibility of life on the other planets. It's far from being hard sci-fi, though. In one of our games we blew up one of the moons of Mars, and prevented a rocketship from crashing onto the planet by towing it to safety with a strong cable.
ReplyDeleteI second Cowboy Bebop. Possibly one of the best pieces of art/cinema ever produced.
ReplyDeleteI still can't watch it without weeping like a little girl.
Love Diaspora and love your concept. I envy your players.
ReplyDeleteWhat an outstanding idea!
ReplyDeleteThis is what I loved about the setting in TSR's Buck Rogers game. Everything happens in our Solar System. The moons and planets were mapped out pretty thoroughly with room to improvise. The politics and motivations of the different colonies allowed for a variety of conflict. The "aliens" were genetically engineered creatures designed for their environments and pure humans held on to very narrow bands of terraformed or artificial habitats throught the system. Plus the mechanics were stripped down 2E basics. Easy to use.
ReplyDeleteHmm. Maybe I'll try and track that down.
DeleteHave you checked out Jovian Nightmares, a M.U. monograph for Cthulhu Rising? It's a nice sketch of what human occupation would be like on Galilean moons. Easily translatable into regular BRPs. Also sets up as a good resource for me to convert Blue Planet into something far closer to home (though I'd have to lose quite a bit of material, naturally).
ReplyDeleteYeah, I always thought the solar system was rather spectacular myself. It's actually one of the things that bugged me about most "hard SF" runs of Mechwarrior and the like. With a solar system chock full of spectacular oddities, why do so many games end up with such banal solar systems? Where's the ice volcanoes of Triton, the backwards rotation of Venus, the thick moon atmosphere of Titan, the essentially binary dwarf orbit of Pluto & Charon, the 'laying down' Uranus planet, etc. With such wonders you could throw just about everything you can imagine into a hard SF solar system and not be unbelievable. Well, there's Discworld, but...
No, I haven't. But I'll give it a look.
DeleteI think Star Trek and Star Wars have a lot to answer for in making the solar system seem too small. If you've got galaxies far far away and new worlds and new civilizations, why bother with Jupiter? Is, I suppose, the subconscious feeling in SF.
If you have a few days to kill, I suggest that you look through Atomic Rocket, which has a ton of useful/interesting/thought provoking information on this sort of thing, including: real drive technologies, transit times using said drives, speculation on weapons and ship size, and specifically related to this topic, a worked out setting called "Ring Raiders" which I think you would find to be interesting.
ReplyDeleteYour musings here have reminded me how much I used to love John Varley. His early "Eight Worlds" stories would offer many ideas to help flesh out a Jovian planetcrawl. His stuff is usually focussed on humans and how they evolve into a space-faring species, but there are the occasional aliens that pop up in some stories (or inscrutable AI). Hell, the entire "Gaean" trilogy would make an ideal backdrop for an entire campaign in the gas-giant moons. (Humans find moon-sized artificial torus orbiting Saturn... and proceed to investigate. It's big enough to take decades to fully explore.)
ReplyDeleteFor excellent, Solar System action, look no further than Jovian Chronicles, the setting/rpg by Dream Pod 9. One of the best hard sci-fi games out there (Silhouette game system,) and the setting is superb.
ReplyDeleteI have also used in the past the Universal Century setting, described in the Mobile Suit Gundam anime (again, run with Silhouette.)
Cyberpunk 2020 with the Deep Space supplement also do a tremendous job of mixing cyberpunk with hard sci-fi tropes. The system to build ships and for space combat is notable for its abstractness and lethality.
Finally, the old TSR Star Frontiers/Knight Hawks game plus the two modules 2001 and 2010, based on the Arthur Clark novels and movies.
I think you said something to me recently about this general idea as well, but with To The Stars it might also be really cool to run something like Dogs In The Vineyard where the Dogs (whatever form they might take) go from settlement to settlement around the Jovian moons and man-made satellites keeping the peace and laying down the law.
ReplyDelete(in my mind I was originally thinking Dogs in the Oort Cloud but when I started to realise how un-utterably vast a region of space that would cover I stepped back a few thousand AU)
Noisms, this is a GREAT idea that really inspired me on a few setting ideas I had, but had become stalled. So a huge THANKS is due you!
ReplyDelete