Just Say Yes philosophy

A few things.  First, read this post: http://ragingowlbear.blogspot.com/2017/05/dnd-just-say-yes-for-fck-sake.html

Then watch this video rebuttal of it.



The Complex Game Apologist makes, and obviously I'm going to paraphrase them below, five counter arguments.  All of them are garbage.  Let me explain.  I recognize that by paraphrasing, I'm opening myself up to accusations of attacking strawman arguments.  I'm not interested in debating this with people stupid enough to say that—but the spergy, nitpicky, pedantic kind of personality that would believe this level of bullshit in this video response is the kind most likely to make that accusation.  Fair warning up front: I'm not interested.

1. Slippery slope of crazy options.  If you allow someone to tweak the bonuses of the elf, then next week, you'll have to tell another player that no, he can't play as a bear.
   
   I very consistently see RAW and rulesy folks, and gamers who prefer a lot of structure fall back on their inherent mistrust of their fellow gamers as the rationale for why they must have more structure and why it must be strictly enforced.  I wonder: why can these people not find better people to game with?  Why do they consistently have social problems that they try to solve with the rules?  Antisocial misanthropes who can't be reasonable with their friends are not welcome at my table.
   
   
2. It invalidates tough choices that other players have made.
   
   I very consistently see RAW and rulesy folks, and gamers who prefer a lot of structure express a great deal of bitterness and resentment that other players can have the same +1 that they do easily, because they're reasonable, sensible people who just talk to their GM instead of autistically adhering to every exacting detail of how the rules are presented in the book.  Purity spiral spergs are not welcome at my table.
   
   
3. It "hurts" the hypothetical forest gnome player who now doesn't get to be a unique, special snowflake, because now the elf player has the same suite of +1s and +2s that his race has.
   
   Fer cryin' out loud—you do know that the forest gnome having the same stats was a throwaway coincidence pointed out by the Raging Owlbear, right?  I'm not even sure I can rebut this argument.  I'm not even sure that it's an argument.  It's just... spergy whining.  I think the only appropriate rebuttal is a smack across the face with the thickest rulebook in your collection.  Whiny special snowflakes are not welcome at my table.
   
   
4. The rules as written inform an implied setting, and changing even small details of them upsets the game as a simulationist construct.
   
   This is also spergy, because swapping which stats get the +1 vs. the +2 does not, as described here, compare to the incoherence of a hit of acid.  The sense of scale there, that anyone could seriously propose such a thing, just boggles my mind.  I really don't get spergs, and do not enjoy spending much time talking to them.
   
   That said, this is at least a coherent argument, even if it's ridiculously exaggerated to the point of stupidity.  That said; well, that really only matters if you are a simulationist gamer, right? Again: Gaming is a social activity, and largely will only be successful if you game with people that you are on the same page with.  If you are philosophically unable to compromise with people at your table who do not share your particular esoteric desires out of the hobby, then they're well advised to steer clear of gaming with you, you dick.
   
   
5. It's bad business to shame people who disagree with you.
   
   On second thought, I'll give you that one in theory.  You can disagree—strongly even—without trying to shame people.  On the other hand, if you're susceptible to shaming attacks in the first place, grow up already.  And frankly, if you're so rigid and antisocial and such a totalitarian control-freak that if burns you up that someone else has a completely imaginary benefit that isn't really a benefit so much as it is just a slight reskinning for flavor, that has no impact whatsoever on your own enjoyment of the game, but you are slavishly and autistically bound to deny it to someone else who is supposed to be your friend, then maybe you could use a little shaming, since clearly you never actually learned how psychologically healthy, functional human relationships work.

Now, I recognize that there is one more element here that I'm blowing off, but it might be significant. CGA makes an offhand remark early on that his gaming environment is usually in a gaming store with walk-ins and new players, not with established friends who are attempting to run "a thing" that will last beyond the session itself. While I agree that that would certainly change my willingness to entertain a lot of house-ruling, it makes the context so different that there wasn't even really a point to him responding to the post in the first place, because his situation is too different to be relevant to the point that Raging Owlbear was making, which it is very clear from context is referring to a more "standard" context of playing a long-term game with your friends. It's a little bit like watching a recipe on a cooking show that uses cheese, and writing in to complain that nobody should ever use cheese in any recipe with anyone because you're lactose intolerant. Yeah, OK. So what? Don't eat cheese then, but the rest of us who aren't will probably enjoy it, because cheese is awesome. His response seems like a response, but in reality it's a non sequitur because the context makes it completely unrelated to the situation that he's responding to. 

And who has to respond to stuff to say that you disagree because of some weird outlier corner case, which needs to be considered or addressed in what is otherwise obviously a conversation about generalities? Spergs or narcissisists, that's who.

More and more and more space opera

I find that I may be in danger of losing my focus.  After discovering White Star by serendipity, I'm investigating all kinds of other sci-fi (especially space opera) games.  Some of them I've heard of but never investigated (like Thousand Suns and Star Without Number while others are just old and hoary but kind of beyond my experience (like d6 Space or Shatterzone which were "leftovers" if you will of West End's run on Star Wars) and others are ones that I did know but have lost touch with or never really fully explored as much as I should have (like Traveller, Star*Drive, Rogue Trader or Star Frontiers.)  And some that I've heard of, I'm not even investigating at all, although I would like to (Fading Suns, for instance.)  And I might even pull out my old DragonStar book and have a look at Starfinder material as it becomes available.

In a way, this feels a bit like George Lucas' own experience before embarking on writing Star Wars—he bought up and read as much as he could of old comic books, every space opera novel he could get his hands on, etc.—he really steeped himself in the stuff so that no good idea that might have been in print would pass unseen by his eyes before coming up with Star Wars itself.  And I'm only talking about secondary products; I've also got, of course, lots and lots of actual novels and whatnot to read as well, video games to play, even comic books to read, and movies and TV shows to watch—if I had unlimited time to do all that, which of course I don't.  And in many of them, I find stuff that's easy to love.  But I'm also finding that 1) this space is really quite saturated.  Nearly as much so, in fact, as the fantasy RPG market.  No wonder so many of these have come and gone over the years, most without making too much of a splash.  And 2) It's easy to get distracted and lose sight of the fact that I'm trying to emulate Star Wars and then have my off-brand Star Wars evolve on its own organically, not fuse it with something else necessarily.  Also, 3) This may be more true for genres other than fantasy (maybe) but I see little of mechanical innovation either happening, or being celebrated either one.  Rather, what people seem to be looking for is a toolkit approach that is simple, elegant, flexible and easy to use.  Toolkits like hexcrawl populators are nice—Stars Without Number may well have trumped Traveller as the go-to world generator system, but not necessarily because it was so innovative as opposed to it simply being easier to use and its ability to generate output that is more immediately useful than Traveller's rather esoteric, jargony output.  Finally, 4) with so many options available, many of them toolkits that service potentially multiple uses and settings, one has to ask why (at least in the RPG realm) one would wish to adventure in an imitation Star Wars when one can use the real thing?

Of course, when not talking about personal gaming—writing fiction, for instance, or writing an actual game that I might wish to present to someone beyond my friends—the answer to that last question is quite simple, and similar to the impetus for Lucas to create Star Wars in the first place: he couldn't get the Flash Gordon license.  The second reason is to clean out all of the junk that Star Wars has accreted.  I tried this with STAR WARS REMIXED—i.e., do what Knights of the Old Republic did and separate myself sufficiently from the canonical stories that I had plenty of space to do my own thing, but go the opposite direction.  Instead of 3,000 or so years before the prequels, it was 1,000+ years after the end of the Empire.  But I'm finding in some ways that the junk has become so ingrained that it's almost easier just to reboot and start over the way I want it to really look.  And, of course, I like tinkering for its own sake.  It's actively hard for me to do anything "by the book", especially hobbyist endeavors.

With regards to the first point, the saturation means a couple of things, one of which is that the genre really kind of has a "lingo" if you want to call it that—stuff that you can just simply include and not bother explaining, because so many others have done so already.  This is a great short-hand, and makes things like some magic powers (often with a pseudo-science label like psionics or something like that, FTL, humanoid aliens, space empires, swordfighting on starships, etc.) all feel like something that we already know and accept "just because."  It also means that innovation isn't really what we're looking for, is it?  Execution is what matters.

This kind of goes back to Vox Day's concept of "forking"—when beloved applications like Wikipedia or Twitter get SJW-converged, you "fork" it—you create a new one that offers the same experience without the SJWism.  What if that happens to your favorite fiction franchise that once was cool, but now has serious problems?  Like Star Wars?

Well, I'm not the only one to think that forking is a good idea.  Faraway Wars and Galaxy's Edge are fiction forks of Star Wars—still in ebook form only—and White Star is an RPG fork of Star Wars (although that wasn't really its promise; it was just meant to be Star Wars with the serial numbers filed off so nobody gets sued).  We won't really be cooking with gas until we get some visual medium—animation, or blockbuster live-action movies, or video games, etc.—that are basically "forked Star Wars."  But it will be inevitable.  Star Wars has lots of cachet, and people want more of it.  But it's really lost its way.  It isn't sustainable without being good and it's more often not good than it is anymore.

So what does that have to do with AD ASTRA?  Well, it's mostly developed as an informal RPG system.  It's got a couple of holes left, and a few things that will no doubt get tweaked, but mostly I need to keep going on the setting development.  I was enjoying that, but I've been sidetracked a bit lately and haven't done a new planet in at least a week.  Other than that, rules and mechanics—I'm mostly done.  The rules aren't really anything all that special anyway; I took a similar approach to White Star in adopting a rules-lite, familiar, and easy to use core into a specific genre.  He did it with S&W Whitebox, while I did it with m20, but let's be honest here—those aren't really dramatically different in execution from each other.  Nobody's going to be looking at either of them as a font of incredibly innovative and exciting rules, although they can be seen as similar in the sense that they are an easy to use toolkit that takes the focus off of the rules anyway.  If I can say so without sounding boastful, I think my race and class builder options are relatively cool (although I'm hardly the first person to think of them, and the race-builder rules should specifically be credited to somebody else's m20 variant (nomad4life, whoever he is, although he may well have borrowed them from somebody else too for all I know.)  White Star is very innovative with its complete tear-down and the rebuild of the Traveller chargen minigame in a native rules-lite environment (and with a significantly different feel, as befits something that's more Star Wars and less Poul Anderson or Larry Niven, etc.)

But ultimately, I have no idea what I'll do with the game.  Run it for some players someday, no doubt, but I'd love to write something in the setting, really—and publish it as an ebook.

Space character backgrounds

I recently read White Star, a space opera game heavily based on (and completely compatible with) Sword & Wizardry Whitebox which postulates a space opera implied setting that is largely an ersatz Star Wars (as AD ASTRA itself has become) with a few popular space opera tropes from other sources thrown in to make it slightly less overtly Star Wars.  One thing that it did that I really liked was the character serials—an odd name that actually refers to what is essentially a chargen minigame not unlike what Traveller used to have in concept.  Now, the execution of if is quite different, but the concept is very similar.

I really liked it, and I liked that it was quite a bit simpler than what Traveller had done (as befits a rules-lite game based on S&W) but I couldn't quite use it as is for AD ASTRA for a few simple reasons: 1) I can rarely use anything as is without resisting the urge to tinker, and 2) m20 is just different enough that some changes are necessary to make it work.

This system uses a few simple tables to randomize some background elements for player characters (or even important NPCs, if desired.)  These cannot be picked as desired (unless, of course, the GM specifically allows it) this is meant to be a small minigame in its own right as part of chargen, and not all of these options are created equal.  There is an element of risk/reward in even doing this at all, and utilizing these tables as part of character generation should always be considered optional.  However, if you opt to do it, the results are binding—this is the risk reward.  It is possible (although unlikely) that your character may actually die from this, but more likely if you somehow get an unfavorable result, it'll just be weird; like an Arcturan hulk that's from a low-gravity homeworld and therefore cancels out much of his racial STR bonus or something like that.  All results stack with both other results on these tables as well as any other racial or class abilities.  If you end up with the same affinity more than once, that means you can reroll it as many times as you possess the affinity.  Using these optional tables should only be done at the end of character generation, after everything else has already been done.  If you really get results that don't make much sense work with your GM to find solutions, but mostly you can just stack those results together and still get a playable (albeit occasionally odd) result.

There are six elements to the character backgrounds approach.  You need to roll a d6 for each of the six elements, and then consult the table.  This is best done one at a time, so you don't mix up which roll belongs to which table.  The six elements are:

1. Homeworld
2. Childhood
3. First Adventure
4. Allies
5. Nemesis
6. Critical Event

A quick note: these are certainly meant to be highly optional, and maybe even unusual BETA rules; not the default for any AD ASTRA game.  While I think there's some fun in coming up with these backgrounds, I don't necessarily recommend them.  Not only can the results be very strange and hard to process, meaning that you may end up tossing out plenty of characters that just don't make any sense or even don't really work, but some of these benefits and penalties are written to specifically ignore any hint of balance.  For the most part, if a character gets any of these benefits, I'd prefer that they earn them through play rather than through a funky chargen minigame.  That said, here it is anyway, for those GMs and players who might occasionally want to gamble with some rules that might make your game more fun—or might blow it up.

1. Homeworld.  Everyone had to be born somewhere.  This chart doesn't try to assign a specific planet from the setting, but it does tell you something about where you were born and what effect that had on your development as a youngster.

Roll	World Type	Description	Modifiers
1	Low Gravity	Your homeworld has a lighter than standard gravity. As a result, you are quicker and more agile, but your muscles are underdeveloped.	+1 DEX, -1 STR
2	High Gravity	Your homeworld had a stronger than standard gravity, so your muscles are overdeveloped, and you are a borderline Hulk. However, this leads to a certain slowness and caution in your movement as you have to be more careful operating in a standard gravitational setting.	+1 STR, -1 DEX
3	Between the Stars	Your "homeworld" is actually a space ship, space station, fleet, or other non-planetary body, with a small, high trust population.  You are poor at dealing with subterfuge, but are used to being surrounded by technology.	-2 to Subterfuge skill, but pick one affinity from the following: Vehicle Piloting, Vehicle Repair, Computers.
4	Cosmopolitan	You were raised on a wealthy planet where politicians, wealthy businessmen and nobles rubbed shoulders. You know how to turn on the charm and get what you want, but easy living has made you soft.	-2 Physical skill, but pick one affinity from the following: Nobility, Deception.
5	Primitive	You come from a world where technology is either infrequently encountered, or even entirely absent. You learned to endure the wilderness, but had little time for academic pursuits.	-2 to Knowledge Skill, but gain access to either the Wilderness Survival or Perception affinities.
6	Dangerous	Your homeworld is a hostile environment, dominated by natural dangers such as lava flows, radiation clouds or extremely dangerous wildlife. You had to be keen and alert to survive, but had little time for social niceties.	You gain the Perception affinity, but take a -1 penalty on all social interaction rolls.

2. Childhood
Everyone has formative experiences that influence their lives well into adulthood, and may even provide skills or knowledge that others do not necessarily have.

Roll	Experience	Modifier
1	Delinquent	+2 to Subterfuge skill
2	Refugee	You gain Wilderness Survival affinity
3	Hunted	You gain the Stealth affinity
4	Swept into Adventure	You can add +1 to any attribute
5	Military School	You gain a +1 to Hit with either firearms or radium weapons (choose one)
6	Psionic Academy	You gain a +2 to your Psionics skill

3. First Adventure
You aren't out here among the stars as a wet-behind-the-ears farmboy.  Something brought you here, and as a result, your experiences have taught you something.

Roll	Event	Benefit
1	Kidnapped by slavers	+2 to Subterfuge skill
2	Stowed away on a ship	You gain Stealth affinity
3	Home planet destroyed	You gain a +2 bonus to any mind-affecting condition
4	Space battle with pirates	You gain the Vehicle Piloting affinity
5	Marooned on an abandoned planet	You gain +1 Hit Point per level
6	Solved a murder mystery	You gain the Investigation affinity

4. Allies
You aren't an island in the stars unto yourself.  Scattered throughout known space, you have contacts, friends, family, associates, old flames, etc. that can be called on in a pinch to provide modest assistance.  Usually, doing so costs Heroism points, with the GM determining how likely your ally is to be available to help you; if it's relatively likely, only 1, if not, up to 3 Heroism points to call in a favor.

This is rarely the kind of favor that can be called in in tense situations or combat, with the exception of the loyal robot.

Roll	Ally	Description	Benefit
1	Hot Shot Pilot	You know a skilled pilot who is both reckless and brave	You can call on the aid of a pilot one level higher than you (max 7th).
2	Loyal Robot	You own a robot who is loyal to you	You own a 1st level Robot. This robot does not advance in levels like a PC, but will advance when you hit 4th level, and will always remain 2 levels behind you.
3	Street Rat	You have spent considerable time in the criminal underworld, and know how to get the attention of the eyes and ears of local criminals.	You can automatically find and identify (in broad strokes) what kind of criminal activity is common on a planet, and find out how to get into contact with criminals if you desire to.
4	Old Wizard	A wise and weary retired psionic knight or warlock (any order, or none at all as you choose) looks on you with kind eyes, occasionally offering you his wisdom and experience.	A retired Psionic Knight or Warlock of 7th level serves as your instructor of ally, but you must keep his location a secret.
5	Disgruntled Mercenary	A grizzled old mercenary or pirate can sometimes be called on for aid in matters of tactics or combat.	You can call on the aid of an old warrior one level higher than you (max 7th).
6	Corporate Benefactor	You have a mysterious corporate benefactor with deep pockets and mysterious motives.	You can call on the aid of your benefactor once per level. If successful, you receive resources up to 10,000 credits worth, but will owe your mysterious benefactor a serious favor (each time utilized) that he will call in eventually.

5. Nemesis
Sadly, your experiences have not just granted you friends and allies, but have also brought you to the attention of forces that either you have impeded, irked, or angered, who will turn up from time to time to thwart you in turn or destroy you if he can.  It is up to the GM to utilize these nemeses, although when he does, he should grant the player who's nemesis has arrived a bonus Heroism point for the session.

Roll	Nemesis	Details
1	Mercenary Captain	You are hunted by a veteran mercenary captain and the soldiers of his company.
2	Jilted Lover	An old flame that you left is out for revenge.
3	Intelligence Commander	A spy-lord or criminal mastermind believes you know too much about his activities and is out to silence you forever.
4	Hostile Alien Hunter	A dangerous non-human hunter of some kind has decided he wants you as a trophy or captive.
5	Insane A.I.	You have come into contact with a fault Artificial Intelligence that now hunts you and wishes you dissect you. He may have other robotic "henchmen" or allies to aid in his hunt.
6	Psionic Knight	A dark and terrible psionic knight is searching known space for you.

6. Critical Event
Everyone is the sum total of their experiences, but some experiences loom much larger and more important in our past than others.  These events often grant benefits that are rather significant, and your GM will need to make specific note of them and account for them in his adventure design.

Roll	Critical Event	Details
1	Won a ship in a game of chance	You own a used but serviceable Large sized starship.
2	Suffered a critical injury, rebuild with cybernetic implants	You start with up to 10,000 credits worth of cybernetic equipment for free.
3	Located a previously undiscovered hideout, known only to you	You now have a secret base that no one else knows about, such as an abandoned space station or undiscovered and uncharted planet.
4	According to an alien mystic, you have a great destiny	You gain two extra Heroism points every session.
5	You saved the life of an alien who now serves as your bodyguard	You have the loyal service of a physically powerful alien who is one level lower than you (if you are first level, he is too, but will not advance to second until you advance to third.) He cannot be made to betray through any mundane means.
6	You died! Roll a new character!	You suffered a horrible tragedy somewhere along the way and are dead. Roll up a new character.

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Open Game License v 1.0 Copyright 2000, Wizards of the Coast, Inc. System Reference Document Copyright 2000-2003, Wizards of the Coast, Inc.; Authors Jonathan Tweet, Monte Cook, Skip Williams, Rich Baker, Andy Collins, David Noonan, Rich Redman, Bruce R. Cordell, John D. Rateliff, Thomas Reid, James Wyatt, based on original material by E. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson.
Microlite20 © 2006, Robin V. Stacey (robin@greywulf.net)
M20 Hard Core Rules © 2008, Alex Shroder
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Microlite74 Extended 3.0 © 2011, Randall S. Stukey
Swords & Wizardry © 2008. Matthew J. Finch
Swords & Wizardry: Whitebox © 2008. Matthew J. Finch Authors Matt Finch and Marv Breig
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White Star

I serendipitously discovered White Star just recently, another ersatz Star Wars game, based more closely on Swords & Wizardry white box, converted to space opera.  If you're at all familiar with Swords & Wizardry, then you already know what to expect almost exactly in terms of how it plays (it is 100% compatible), so the real question is; what is the setting implied by the rules?  As it says in the introduction, "When I was a boy my first love was not fantasy—it was science fiction. I dreamed of flying a starship faster than light across the galaxy, wielding a Star Sword in an epic duel against an evil warlord, firing a ray gun at space pirates, and a thousand other adventures."  It makes specific reference to Flash Gordon, Star Wars and the Barsoom books, but based on the rules, it's Star Wars with some other stuff thrown in, more than anything else.

As usual, I'm behind the 8-ball; White Star appears to be the leading contender, possibly, of an OSR space opera game in the way that (I believe) Swords & Wizardry is the leading OSR D&D clone.  Let's do a really quick review:

Classes
There are four core and three "optional" classes in White Star.  The four core classes are more traditional "professions" as D&D and most other RPGs tend to do, while the optional ones are "race as classes" options, as we know from the B/X elf and dwarf, etc.  The aristocrat is a silver-tongued support role, with high charisma and personal skills, and grants buffs to other characters.  The mercenary is the space version of the fighting-man or fighter, and more than most relies on equipment.  The pilot specializes in vehicle (rather than personal) combat and ship maintenance and repairs, while the star knight is the space jedi, a kind of cleric-like role.  The optional classes are alien brute which is a large, physically powerful, warlike alien (of any kind), the alien mystic is kind of an alien space wizard and the robot is... obviously...  a robot.  As in B/X, the basic classes go to 10 levels but the "race as class" levels have caps lower than that.  Robots in particular are often meant to be cohorts that can be bought by characters rather than possibly PCs, and have a level cap of only 4th.

Aliens
While not meant to represent PC races, there are a number of alien races that are listed as antagonists (yes, I do realize that my AD ASTRA rules are lacking this.  I've already thought of that, I just haven't (yet) addressed it.)  Among the aliens, we have

• Assimilants (ersatz borg)
• Cannicks (ersatz daleks)
• Cyborg, metallic—just regular cyborgs
• Cyborg, replica—terminators
• Falcon-men (well, Flash Gordon had hawkmen, right?)
• Felinoids (what space opera doesn't have some kind of cat people?)
• Greys (as in the anal-probe aliens who kidnap people from their beds)
• Mindoids: large headed psychic people
• Odays (Yoda)
• Procyon (if you know anything about biological taxonomy, it's obvious just from the name that these are raccoon people modeled after Rocket)
• Qinlons: ridge-foreheaded imitation klingons
• Soldier (not really an alien; just included for comparison and because they're important to have base-line stormtrooper-like characters)
• Space Savages (Firefly style Reavers)
• Uttins (probably because they say Uttin nee! these are faux Jawas)
• Void Knight—imitation Sith, but not "Rule of Two" Sith; these Sith are more like Lucas' first incarnation of them as merely the opposite of Jedi, and there were at least 100.
• Wolflings (dog people, Vargr, whatever)
• Yabnabs (I guess Yubnubs was a little bit too on the nose.  Fake ewoks)

There's also a list of "creatures"—space animals of various types, basically.  Most of these are pretty predictable, but there are some real gems, like the Living Asteroids that look like asteroids, but then attack and bite space ships.  There's also face-huggers (without the rest of the alien life-cycle), insectus hives (without acid blood, thankfully), little worms like the ones Khan put in Chekov's ear in Wrath of Khan, understated ersatz Dune sandworms, and space dragons.

There's also a Companion volume, which adds a fair bit more in terms of implied setting stuff; including more classes and aliens, which tend to have the greatest impact on implied setting (which is why I focused on them instead of, say, equipment or spaceships.)

Classes

There's a bounty hunter which is kind of like a space version of the ranger class, in many ways, similar to (yet different) the mercenary, obviously based on Boba Fett.  The deep space explorer has all kinds of survivalist skills that make him useful in a game focused on exploring of frontiers, moreso than fighting the evil Consortium, or whatever.  The freed assimilant is a race-as-class option for an assimilant who somehow broke with its programming and is now independent.  The man of tomorrow is a swashbuckler of sorts who depends on class abilities that focus on luck and pluck and destiny more than more tangible benefits.  The novomachina is an ogre-sized race-as-class Transformer (so still obviously much smaller than Optimus Prime) while the plucky sidekick is an interesting jack of all trades that works quite well in an ensemble setting (but who curiously, doesn't have to take the role-playing role of a sidekick.)  Finally, the two-fisted technician is a kind of adventuring technical wizard from the old pulp and comic book tropes who can figure out how to do just about anything with technology, while the yabnab is... honestly, probably a mistake, just like the ewoks were ultimately a mistake in Jedi.  The companion book also features rules for multi-classing.

The Companion also offers skills (a limited set; only about 7-8 skills) and serials.  Serials is a great idea.  Conceptually, it's similar to the old Traveller chargen method where you described your career before becoming an adventurer, and gambled a bit with the dice to get benefits that outweighed the cost (including possible character death before you even started playing.)  Mechanically it looks quite different, but it is conceptually quite similar.  In fact, I like this idea so much, that I am seriously considering porting it into m20 to work with AD ASTRA, and will probably, in fact, do so with my next post later today or tomorrow.

Aliens  

More aliens further define the implied setting of White Star.  For the most part, these too are easily recognizable from their prior source.

• Alurians (green-skinned space hotties with pheromone charm person effects)
• Bio-symbiotes (black blobs that probably make Spider-man look a lot cooler, but tend to turn into Venoms)
• Crocodila—multifaceted reptile aliens, that come in three types:
• Crocs (big, toothy reptile brutes)
• Mecistops (smaller, patient and more intelligent reptile people)
• Ickes (as the name implies, these are the real masterminds, who can disguise themselves as humans.  Like the aliens from V)
• Frostines (crystalline cold creatures)
• Paragons (psuedo Kryptonians, without the crazy overpowered element; although they're still hella tough)
• Rawrarrs (imitation wookies)
• Simians (sapient gorillas)
• Space ducks (sadly, yes.  Ersatz Howard the Duck race)
• Thronks (big, leaping lizard people.  I presume that this refers to some fictional antecedent, but I don't recognize it.  Maybe it doesn't, maybe they're just leaping lizards as a pun on the expression.)
• Wellsians (very alien-like aliens not unlike the Martians from War of the Worlds as the name implies)

The creatures section is also expanded, and includes stuff as pulpy and strange as laser-rexes and shark bats.  I presume the author is a fan of Kung Fury.

Now, I'm not going to switch from AD ASTRA to White Star but I can certainly recognize and appreciate a kindred product.  It does come with a small setting, not unlike B/X's Duchy of Karameikos, which is expanded upon more in the Companion, which has a very Star Wars like feel (unsurprisingly) but it also highlights some campaign models that can be used, some of which are less Star Wars like than others.

• Rebels Against the Regime is a model that, on the other hand, is pretty exactly Star Wars.
• Explorers Among the Stars is more like Star Trek, and is more focused no a benevolent government, and has little in the way of black evil, really.  Much more utopian (and therefore I find it less compelling) and as described, the good guys are often too flawed to be truly considered good, and the bad guys are sympathetic.  The typical SJW convergence of space opera, the same as Star Trek was, in other words.
• Invasion! play the role of La Résistance in a Vichy world of your creation.  Either that, or it's Battlefield Earth.  It even specifically calls out the option that you are the noble aliens and humans are the invaders (I'm sorry.  I didn't write this, I just read it.)
• Brothers in Arms is a more mission-based, railroad model; a kind of Starship Troopers maybe.  It's unlikely to be a useful one if you want your PCs to actually take the bull by the horns and drive the game forward, because they're reporting to some superior authority by definition.
• Just Keep Flying is the classic Traveller or Firefly inspired free trader approach.

Another gem from the Secret History

In December 1975, as documented in Making of Star Wars, pg. 107, George Lucas wrote some notes for Alan Dean Foster describing the books that were to follow the novelization of the first film to keep fan interest up after the movie and to potentially be adapted as low budget sequels to Star Wars (only one of these novels was actually ever written, Splinter of the Mind's Eye and it wasn't ever turned into a movie.  There were three unrelated Han Solo and Chewie spin-off novels that also followed the movie, but there was never any intention that they could be movies per se.  But it shows exactly where Lucas' head was on the eve of making the first movie—he started principle photography only two or three months after this was written.)

"I want to have Luke kiss the princess in the second book.  The second book will be Gone With the Wind In Outer Space.  She likes Luke, but Han is Clark Gable. Well, she may appear to get Luke, because in the end I want Han to leave. Han splits at the end of the second book and we learn who Darth Vader is... In the third book, I want the story to be just the soap opera of the Skywalker family, which ends with the destruction of the Empire. Then someday I want to do the backstory of Kenobi as a young man—a story of the Jedi and how the Emperor eventually takes over and turns the whole thing from a Republic into an Empire, and tricks all the Jedi and kills them. The whole battle where Luke's father gets killed. That would be impossible to do, but it's great to dream about."

A few curious things to note here.  First, if you've ever read Splinter (and if you haven't, then you should) it's got all kinds of sexual tension between Luke and Leia.  It's very clear that at this stage Lucas had absolutely no inkling of Luke and Leia being twins (in fact, in the script, which is somewhere between the third and fourth (final) draft at this point, Luke is said to be 20 and Leia 16.

In retrospect, this looks like it could almost be a hint of the Vader = Annikin Starkiller (he didn't change the name until the last minute as a reaction to the Charles Manson affair, and Anakin was spelled differently then) but clearly it's not, because he also makes explicit reference to Luke's father's death.  In fact, at this point in the script, it wasn't even Darth Vader who had killed Pappy Skywalker—there's no hint of him having been tracked down and murdered, merely the implicit assumption that he was killed in battle.

That's kind of the theme of The Secret History of Star Wars; proving that it was originally conceived as the story of Luke Skywalker, and that Leia was his love interest and Vader was just a bad guy; not even necessary, the bad guy of the series.  The whole business about Vader being Pops Skywalker and Leia being the unknown, hidden twin sister were much later developments; even the early two or three drafts of the Empire script didn't have any hint of the former, and even the first few drafts of the Jedi script didn't have the latter.

But what's maybe a bit more interesting is that with Splinter and with Daley's Han Solo trilogy, published in the late 70s and very early 80s (I think the third book came out in 1980, in fact) we get a very different view of what the Star Wars universe was meant to look like; before it had a drastic and dramatic evolution during the scripting of The Empire Strikes Back.  Again; I'm a big fan of Empire, but at the same time, that's the movie that irrevocably changed the series.  While the change was great for Empire as a movie, it seems to have been considerably less so for the series overall.  Turning everything in the history of the galaxy into a Skywalker family drama strains credulity.  Turning Obi Wan and Yoda into lying, manipulative people who are disloyal and perfectly happy sacrificing their friends to pragmatism significantly undercuts the prime attraction of the series; the overt heroism, which was sadly lacking from other contemporary movies of the 70s.  And Luke's whole experience on Dagobah is mercifully short, because it's incoherent, bizarre and too foreign to make any sense from a Western storytelling point of view.  That was always the part of the movie where my eyes kind of glazed over and my attention wandered—foreshadowing of pacing and exposition problems of the prequels, had I been smart enough to extrapolate that back in the 80s, or even the 90s.  Mercifully, those parts are brief.  Empire really did upset the tone of the series completely and turn it into something that it previously had not actually been.

Of course, it's hard to watch Star Wars now without thinking of what we know from watching Empire and Jedi and the prequels and everything else.  But reading Splinter and the Han Solo novels, and rewatching Star Wars with an eye towards trying to perceive it only for what it is, and not for what came later, gives a fascinating glimpse into what Star Wars might have been.

Now... another thought that occurs to me; the pulp tradition is not the Hero's Journey.  Pulp characters tend to be capable, competent, confident, and experienced.  Pulp characters are characters like Flash Gordon, The Shadow, Doc Savage, John Carter, Conan, Solomon Kane, Eric John Starke, Northwest Smith, etc.  In light of that, it's interesting that in the third draft of the Star Wars script, Luke is actually an archaeologist (although not a two-fisted adventuring archaeologist; his problem is that he's kinda studious and caught up in his profession and needs to be coaxed into heeding the "call to adventure.")  And if you read Splinter, it has a number of parallels to Raiders of the Lost Ark.  I wonder sometimes how the story would be different also if Luke weren't a callow, wet-behind-the-ears farmboy yearning for an escape; a kind of beta-male projection of Lucas' own teenaged years in Modesto when it was a small town and he didn't get along with his dad, etc. (A friend of mine's mother grew up in Modesto and is only a couple of years older than Lucas. She doesn't claim to have known him well, but she knew who he was.  He was the nerdy, quiet, awkward beta male that he always kind of appears to be even now—which is part of the problem.  He doesn't really understand the alpha male psychology all that well.  He probably got lucky with the scripts—as much as 30% minimum of the dialogue of the Star Wars scripts is unofficially credited to friends of his from film school Gloria Katz and Will Huyk.  Lawrence Kasdan and Irvin Kershner probably are as much to be credited with Empire's success as Lucas.)  The earlier drafts are wooden, stilted, and cold—they added the charisma, the humor, the zip—something that the actors could use to create some chemistry.  Without them, we get... the prequel screenplays.

Some more quotes; from Lucas in 1977: "It was one of the original ideas of doing a sequel that if I put enough people in it and it was designed carefully enough I could make a sequel about anything.  Or if any of the actors gave me a lot of trouble or didn't want to do it, or didn't want to be in the sequel, I could always make a sequel without one."

Gary Kurtz added to this thought in a 1977 television special: "We've had a lot of speculation about the sequels to Star Wars, and we are working on story material that will develop into potentially one or more motion pictures that will use the same characters. I like to consider them different adventures rather than direct sequels."

Mark Hamill, in 1978: "They always wanted to set up their own little James Bond series—taking the environment George has set up but keeping it limitless in terms of what the characters can do. For the sequel, he's going to add new characters.  It won't be a direct sequel to the first story; it'll be a series of adventures, you know, in that galaxy.  If the Star Wars series runs as long as I think they're going to run, I'll be Ben Kenobi's age when I do the last one!"

Alan Arnold in 1978: "[Gary Kurtz] described [Star Wars] as 'a new chapter in the Star Wars saga,' because the intention is never to refer to it as a sequel for the simple reason that future George Lucas stories do not have a chronological sequence."

Lucas again, in 1977: "I think the sequels will be much, much better.  What I want to do is direct the last sequel. I could do the first one and the last one and let everyone else do the ones in between... I would try to get some good directors, and see what their interpretation of the theme is.  I think it will be interesting, it is like taking a theme in film school, say, okay, everybody do their interpretation of this theme. It's an interesting idea to see how people interpret the genre.  It is a fun genre to play with... I've put up the concrete slab of the walls and now everybody can have fun drawing the pictures and putting on the little gargoyles and doing all the really fun stuff.  And it's a competition.  I'm hoping if I get friends of mine they will want to do a much better film, like, 'I'll show George that I can do a film twice that good,' and I think they can, but then I want to do the last one, so I can do one twice as good as everybody else."

Time Magazine, in 1978 reported: "Lucas has set up four corporations: Star Wars Corp. will make Star Wars II, and then, count them, ten other planned sequels. [emphasis added]"

Later in the same article, in reports that Lucas was planning on 23 years of constant filming with 2001 as the projected finish date—"but with no real concepts or stories in mind, beyond some generic speculation."  Notably, twelve was the number of episodes that the classic Republic serials had had.  This twelve episode plan was officially announced in the Star Wars fanzine Bantha Tracks.

As Kaminski says: "Unlike the contemporary view of Star Wars, the series was not planned as an elaborate, self-contained story divided into six chapters—it was to be in the vein of Adventure Theater, with different 'adventure of the week' type of films, and even the time periods of the films could differ and be presented in a non-linear fashion."

In a way, you could say that that's what the Expanded Universe was—but as Star Wars put out more and more roots, and more and more constraints, and as the writers and artists who worked in the medium were more (or less) on the same page as Lucas' original vision, the Expanded Universe was often less than one would hope—more an extended fan fiction hagiography of increasingly esoteric characters that appeared only briefly on screen than real exploration of stuff that was original but in the Star Wars context—with a few exceptions.  Some of the Old Republic stuff is a good exception, maybe the Clone Wars cartoon (in spite of its semi-official stance and the fact that the creators consulted frequently directly with Lucas) and some other novels, video games and comic books here and there.  The original Timothy Zahn trilogy probably qualifies.  But that's it.

Keep in mind that even during principle photography, the "series", if it were ever to become one, was called The Adventures of Luke Skywalker and the specific chapter was called "Star Wars."  Only later did the chapter title become the series title (after the movie was a huge success and it would have been brand confusion to call it anything else) and, as noted, it was only ever really supposed to have been about Luke Skywalker and his adventurers—with the exception of possible spin-offs to explore other characters here and there.  I don't think Han was supposed to have been as popular as he ended up being, and it's obvious that Lucas didn't envision that Darth (his name, back in those days rather than a title as can plainly be seen based on how other characters address him) would capture the public's interest as much as he did—he really only has less than ten minutes of screen time, and that is a major expansion of his role from earlier drafts.  It appears McQuarrie's brilliant concept art, written somewhere between the second and third draft of the scripts, of Darth Vader fighting Luke's brother Deak Starkiller (the original "damsel in distress" that needed to be rescued) inspired him to promote Darth Vader from being merely a somewhat generic Imperial henchman to someone of more prominence.

But if you watch Vader's interaction with Imperial officers in Star Wars (as opposed to Empire) it's obvious that he got yet another promotion after Lucas saw how popular he really was, and he became the Emperor's literal right-hand man and among the most important figures in the Empire period.

The helmet and mask was McQuarrie's own invention; McQuarrie decided that if he had literally just crossed the vacuum of outer space while boarding the ship that obviously he's need it, and Lucas agreed.  It wasn't intended back then that he wear it all the time; it was a situational thing.  Lucas had him taking a drink from a flask, for instance, in the third draft of the script.  But the look was just so cool, that he ended up keeping it and not removing it—it made him more menacing as well as more mysterious. It wasn't actually clear that Vader was even human under that mask, and much of the early commentary on the film focused on calling him "robotic."

Also; note the holstered blaster on his hip.  This image right here was pivotal in the transition of the Sith from a tribe of force-using pirates co-opted by the Emperor to fairy-tale, Arthurian style "black knights"—although still vestiges of the past remained.

A Rehashed Hope

Heh.  Jew Jew Binks.  I've been calling him Jar Jar Abrams, but... that may be even better.





"There now exist more bad Star Wars movies than good or OK ones, and I have no reason to believe this trend will reverse."

Yeah.  Sadly.

This is exactly why ersatz Star Wars seem to be all the rage now, isn't it?

More on the development of Star Wars

To continue my exposition on AD ASTRA as an attempt to recapture what Star Wars was when it was new, before it got bogged down in pretentiousness and weird mysticism, as well as the early hint of SJW convergence that kind of already messed up Jedi and only got much worse as time went on, I thought it maybe nice to look at what Lucas' true immediate sources were as the draft script of Star Wars was developing.

This is meant to be a very short post.

• Lucas wanted to remake Flash Gordon; when he failed to get the rights, he determined to make his own pastiche in the same "capes and swords and rayguns and space-ships" oeuvre.
• As a big fan of Kurosawa's period pieces, his very first plot treatment for Star Wars is basically a remake of The Hidden Fortress with the Jedi playing the role of samurai, not yet with much in the way of super powers.  Kurosawa's films are famous both in and out of Japan in imitating Western movie traditions, of course, with a Japanese veneer on top of them.  He's adopted plots directly from Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, and others that were patently not Japanese.  Kurosawa was in fact frequently criticized, especially in Japan, for being way too Western.
• Dune is an obvious early influence in many elements of both setting and plot: the idea of a feudal empire, of spice, of the desert planet Luke lives on and psychic powers not unlike the Bene Gesserit start to make their way in in a big way.  While it's true that many of these elements are not unique to Dune, it seems outrageous to think that Lucas wasn't influenced by them, although from a plot perspective, Anakin as the Muad'dib doesn't really play a direct role until the prequels.  And even that isn't unique.
• The Jedi actually became the Jedi first by migrating out of being space samurai or "Templers" [sic=Lucas' use] into being Lensmen (complete with needing to use a kiber crystal, or lens, to focus their powers) and only after that got toned down a bit into being a kind of hybrid of the Lensmen and the Bene Gesserit.
• The plot itself gradually became considerably less like The Hidden Fortress, specifically by grafting a Where Eagles Dare infiltration of an enemy fortress into it, the grafting of plot elements from the third Lensmen book (secret plans to an enemy super-weapon, tractor beams, a single-fighter attack on the super-weapon to destroy it.
• While the idea of small fighters destroying the super weapon was probably influenced by Galactic Patrol, the more specific inspiration seems to be The Dam Busters + 633 Squadron; the whole Death Star attack has almost every detail from its plot derived from 633 Squadron in particular, and Lucas made no secret of the fact that he really wanted to have WW2 dogfights in space (he used footage from both of those two films to show his special effects department what he wanted the space ship dogfights to look like.)
• Many elements of the cantina scene in particular and Han Solo in general are a call-back to the Westerns that Lucas admits to watching a ton of growing up in the 50s and early 60s and seeing as an important "mythology" for his generation that he wanted to recreate for the next one; although he doesn't seem to pinpoint any one of them in particular.  Although some commentators have noted a number of resemblances to The Searchers that they think is probably subconsciously important.

For AD ASTRA I'd probably substitute the Kurosawa stuff—not that I don't like it, but still—with some swashbuckling and Medieval influences: stuff that's certainly in the canon of Western civilization.  Ivanhoe, The Black Arrow, Rafael Sabatini and Alexandre Dumas, etc.  Rather than the psionic knights being like samurai who gradually grew Lensmen-like superpowers and a somewhat Bene Gesserit-like organization and approach, they are elite warriors not unlike Medieval knights, with more modest psionic powers.

Here's a curious aside; one of the earlier drafts had not only an opening crawl, but also a closing one, telling people to be on the lookout for the sequel.  The text of this closing crawl is

...And a thousand new systems joined the rebellion, causing a significant crack in the great wall of the powerful Galactic Empire.  The Starkiller would once again spark fear in the hearts of the Sith Knights, but not before his sons were put to many tests... the most daring of which was the kidnapping of the Lars family, and the perilous search for:
"The Princess of Ondos."

The Secret History of Star Wars

Many years ago, I stumbled across the free ebook The Secret History of Star Wars by Michael Kaminski.  Third edition, published 2007.  I grabbed it as a pdf, and I'm glad I did, because shortly after that point, he repackaged it as an actual book that he now sells on Amazon and elsewhere for a fairly hefty sum.  I managed to find it at the very end of its trajectory as a free, pdf ebook of original research on the creative process behind the "Star Wars Saga" and how we've been largely led to believe a myth about how it was conceived.  But if you don't mind the cost, or are able to find a copy of the old pdf still floating around somewhere, it's well worth the read.  It's meticulously detailed, and has tons and tons of quotes from all kinds of people directly involved in the making of Star Wars (and its subsequent sequels and prequels and other spin-off products), making his case quite definitively that much of the narrative that George Lucas himself has told, in commentary, featurettes, documentaries, etc. is actually wrong.  The original Star Wars is something quite a bit different than what Star Wars eventually became, both in terms of many details, but also in quite broad questions of tone and theme.  Let me selectively quote a small portion of the first chapter:

Now, I want to take you back to the beginning.  May 25th, 1977.  Star Wars has been released.  No, there is no "Episode IV," there is no "A New Hope"—those are additions in the years to come.  For now, there is only Star Wars, a magical fairy tale about a young farm boy who fights an evil Empire and rescues a beautiful princess, along with the help of his wizard mentor, loyal droid servants, pirate friend and a gentle giant [ed. Chewbacca isn't exactly gentle...]  A mysterious power known as "The Force" aids the hero with the strength to vanquish the forces of evil and destroy the battle station Death Star, while the menacing black knight of the Empire, Darth Vader, survives the battle; the conflict between the Rebels and the Empire will continue another day.  Ending the tale, the heroes are bestowed medals of honor in light of their heroic deeds which stand to "restore freedom to the galaxy," just as the opening scroll promises. 

Do you remember that movie?  It is hard to nowadays imagine Star Wars as simply "Star Wars, the movie."  While today, Star Wars has become an epic saga, filled with melodrama and a scope which spans the forty-year rise and fall of Anakin Skywalker, it is surprising to look back on the magical simplicity of that first film way back in 1977. ... Audiences today are largely unaware of how differently the first Star Wars film was perceived—and most importantly, presented—way back then.  A swashbuckling fairy tale, filled with humor, adventure and simple mythology, with good guys on one side and bad guys on the other.  It was a romantic story in its idealised and heroic depiction of chivalry and adventure, a perfect fusion of old-fashioned storytelling and modern technology, all told with the most sophisticated cinematic technique. It was pure and simple, and anyone could watch it, young or old, man or woman. 

When one looks back at that film, it is surprising to find how much things have changed.  George Lucas has said the prequels will change our perception of the original trilogy, and indeed they have, but before that the sequels alone changed the original film as well.  The Emperor was not a wicked sorcerer but a crooked politician, modeled after Richard Nixon.  Yoda did not train Ben Kenobi, because we didn't know Yoda existed (and neither did Lucas, as we will discover).  Darth Vader was not Luke's father and Princess Leia was not Luke's sister.  Part of the charm was the tradition of storytelling which Star Wars re-popularized—Luke was the naive peasant who rises to the status of hero and proves his worth by rescuing the royal princess from the clutches of the black knight. 

Living on Tatooine, a virtually uninhabited backwater planet with only the frontier bordertown of Mos Eisley as a link to the outside world, Luke was the idealistic young dreamer, awkward, unpopular, and confined to dull farm life.  Obi Wan Kenobi was the wise wizard; regarded as a senile old fool, he was once a powerful warrior and friend of Luke's noble Jedi father, and he teaches Luke the mysterious ways of the Force, unlocking its secret magical powers as Luke is swept away into an exciting world of romance and heroism.  It is a movie that has become buried under years of expansion and elaboration, and one that comes back to us from time to time, a distant and faded memory. 

The plot thickens with the mere mention of an iconic name: Darth Vader.  Remember, Anakin Skywalker does not exist, so far as the audience is concerned.  Darth Vader is the name of a man, a seemingly robotic henchman of the Empire, who was once a student of Obi Wan's but betrayed him long ago and murdered Luke's father.  He was labelled in the publicity materials and novels as a "Dark Lord of the Sith"—but without any further elaboration of what a "Sith" was.  For all audiences of the time knew, "Sith" could have been a race or an Imperial rank; in fact he is stated as a Sith Lord, presumably one of many, who also serve the Emperor, and it was not clear that Darth was even human.  In fact, the concepts of the Force and the Jedi were very different than what we now know them as. 

The Jedi were portrayed as a specialized mystical police force rather than a religious organization; anyone who is eager and wiling can sign up and be trained—only whose pure in heart and deed will succeed and be able to use the Force.  Han Solo can't be a Jedi because he is a cynic, he doesn't believe—but Luke is innocent and he does believe, and so he will train to become a Jedi like his father.... 

Yes, it was a very different galaxy

Anyway, there's obviously a great deal more—over 500 pages of it, in fact—but this is really in some ways one of the big money takeaways: Star Wars was once something fairly different than what it later became, and the original conception of what Star Wars was to be is, in most respects, a more compelling vision than what we actually got.  It was more simple, true, but more importantly, it was more straightforward, and it more accurately reflected classical storytelling traditions, much of which was reflected in the pulp stories on which Star Wars was originally based.  Lucas initially made few (if any) bones about the fact that he was writing a pastiche of Flash Gordon*; only later did it accrete a bunch of nonsense about moral grayness, politics, the real weird semi-Zen Buddhist anti-heroic and lying nature of the Jedi, with their weird little puppet mystic and his fortune cookie pronouncements.  And I say that as a big fan of The Empire Strikes Back, but as great a movie as it was, in many ways, it laid the seeds for the "fall" of Star Wars into something often seen as bigger, yet somehow feeling curiously lesser than it was originally.

And this is in some ways what I really hope to do with AD ASTRA as an ersatz Star Wars—not Star Wars as it is, but Star Wars as it was, and Star Wars as it promised to be.  Before it became something else.  If you read more of The Secret History of Star Wars, it talks a bit about George Lucas' original conception of the series as being much more like the Republic serials of which it was a pastiche, rather than what it became.

To aid in this, hey—check out these pieces of art by Timothy Anderson, where he whipped up old-fashioned pulp novel style covers for the three movies of the original trilogy.  That's more the tone that we're going for here.

* Well, among a few other elements.  It was Flash Gordon that he initially wanted to remake, but it also borrows a lot of obvious elements from the Lensmen and even more from Dune.  And the plot started out as borrowed from The Hidden Fortress, which is a fairly well-known aside—although many commentators fail to point out how much it ended up deviating from it, even as it migrated from it's early summary treatment to an actual first draft, to say nothing of further evolution as it underwent the second, third, and fourth drafts, etc.  The Hidden Fortress knock-off features Luke Skywalker, but he's a character more like "General Kenobi" than he is like the Luke Skywalker we now know, and there wasn't any element of the Force or Jedi in the treatment that really follows the Hidden Fortress carefully.  Nor is there a Death Star, or Darth Vader.  I'm surprised to see that chestnut repeated even today that Star Wars is a remake of The Hidden Fortress.  If you've ever actually watched both movies, that becomes obviously a ridiculous thing to claim.  The only thing that remains is that, yes, there is a Princess on the run, the two droids as kind of the two peasants from Kurosawa's treatment, and the fact that the Jedi ended up being broadly modeled on the samurai from that and Kurosawa's other films.  Much of the rest of the elements that are sometimes attributed to The Hidden Fortress are so common to any kind of swashbuckling adventure story that they're more fairly treated as scènes à faire rather than attributions to a specific source.

Space Opera Heartbreaker

Yesterday I made a some-what tongue in cheek reference to AD ASTRA as a space opera heartbreaker.  Maybe I should explore that theme just a little bit...

Ron Edwards coined the term fantasy heartbreaker a while ago, which now has some currency (although broader than he initially intended it) among fans.  His initial conception of it is one of the many games that is like D&D in almost all of its fundamental assumptions, made some superficial changes, and may have a truly innovative idea or two, but which gets lost in the crowd because ultimately it doesn't offer enough to anyone other than the True Believers™ to play it instead of just sticking with D&D.  This is a somewhat nuanced definition, and because it's probably a little too nuanced to be useful, it has evolved such that most people who now say it mean it to be almost identical to the notion of pastiche as used in the fiction and art world.  Fantasy heartbreakers are, therefore, D&D pastiches.  There's not enough to really set aside, say, Palladium Fantasy from D&D for it to really be a completely different kind of game.  It's just a minor variation on the concept of D&D.

Pastiche isn't necessarily bad.  I don't dislike, for example, Flash Gordon, which was deliberately created to compete with Buck Rogers.  When King Features Syndicate was unable to purchase the rights to make a John Carter of Mars strip to compete with Buck Rogers, Alex Raymond just pastiched it.  And Flash Gordon is a wonderful thing in its own right, in spite of the fact that it's clearly (and even admittedly) a pastiche of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Star Wars is itself also a pastiche, with very similar (albeit somewhat ironic) origins.  George Lucas was a fan of the old Republic serials based on Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers starring Buster Crabbe (which by this time resembled each other even more strongly than their older comic strip versions did—which was already quite a lot).  He couldn't secure the rights to Flash Gordon, which is what he really wanted to remake, because Dino de Laurentiis held them.  So, like Alex Raymond before him, he created his own pastiche version of it.  Instead of focusing the action on a single planet, Mongo, he had galaxy-hopping space ships, added WW2 style dogfights, and a weird Zen fantasy wizard element in the Jedi (which were admittedly considerably less weird in the first movie than they later evolved into.)  But even this was little more than coopting ideas from Frank Herbert's Dune, probably the Lensmen, and other, older sci-fi pulp stories about psionic powers and whatnot (as an aside, the Green Lantern Corps is often considered to be a pastiche of the Lensmen, although they've overtaken it by an order of magnitude in terms of recognizability to today's audience—just as Star Wars has done to its own sources.)

So, I suppose what I'm saying is that I think the evolution of the term Fantasy Heartbreaker to mean little more than D&D pastiche isn't necessarily a bad thing, because I don't see pastiches to be necessarily a bad thing, although Ron Edwards meant Fantasy Heartbreaker as, if not an insult, at least an expression of disappointment.  Then again, Ron Edwards always was kind of a pretentious blowhard, if you read enough of his discussion on the industry.  In fact, he's rather famous for it, as are the rest of the commentators over at The Forge, although taking their reputation at face value without checking it out yourself is always a bad idea.  In my case, I thought the reputation was more or less warranted.

On a whim, after typing "space opera heartbreaker" into my post yesterday, I did a search to see if anyone else had ever used the term, and what they meant by it.  I found a couple of discussions, some from rpgnet, which often (especially in the time period of these posts) mimicked a lot the same attitude common at The Forge.  However, they did make an interesting point; Edwards' conception of fantasy heartbreaker requires the big juggernaut that everyone is attempting to pastiche.  In the case of much of swashbuckling science fiction, ultimately the juggernaut is John Carter of Mars, at least until people start doing pastiches of what are themselves pastiches—a la, Star Wars as a kind of pastiche of Flash Gordon which is in turn a pastiche of John Carter.  In fantasy RPG terms, it's clearly D&D.  In the science fiction RPG world... there really isn't a comparable juggernaut, so there's nobody to pastiche.

Now, this doesn't work exactly as I'm describing it.  For one thing, RPGs are not (at least they weren't; sometimes they are now) about creating truly original content; they are all pastiches of some existing thing, translated into another medium.  D&D could be seen as a pastiche of a bunch of similarly themed pulp sword & sorcery stories, overlaid with some superficial Tolkienisms, and then translated into the medium of the RPG.  Therefore, any space opera heartbreaker would be a pastiche of a translated pastiche, if you will.  But still; there isn't the same level of there being a single juggernaut in the industry that one can write a pastiche of.

The oldest, and probably best known sci-fi RPG is Traveller, but it hardly compares to D&D in terms of its size or prominence; in fact, it's gone in and out of print numerous times, having to be licensed and rebooted, often into drastically different systems.  The first edition was published in 1977; the same year Star Wars was released, and seemingly showing little overt influence from it (I can't find a release month for Traveller, so it may have even come out before Star Wars.  If not, it's unlikely that Star Wars played a significant role, however—there simply isn't really enough time.  And anyway, the setting that ended up developing for the game is highly suggestive of being a pastiche of Larry Niven's Known Space stories or Poul Anderson's Technic History stories much moreso than Star Wars, although the MegaTraveller update, complete with a Rebellion and Civil War seem to acknowledge that Star Wars was the only space opera setting that many of its customers still cared about.  But if Classic Traveller had an Appendix N, Star Wars wouldn't be on it.)  TSR was the RPG publishing juggernaut, but their space opera game didn't come out until 1982—Star Frontiers—and while it has a loyal following, it was never really big, and it didn't last in print all that long.

Rogue Trader was another important player, although not until the later 80s, and it turned into Warhammer 40,000; more of a war-game than an RPG (although in its first iteration, it was less so.)  40k is interesting in that it also doesn't overtly pastiche Star Wars, but rather does so to Dune, Lovecraft, Aliens, and Judge Dredd and it bounces back and forth between a kind of Lovecraftian grimness and sly tongue-in-cheek unseriousness.  Plus, it picked up a bunch of superficial Tolkienisms—orcs, dwarfs and elfs in space, in particular.  Although it's not exactly in the same wheelhouse as RPGs, 40k probably can't be completely ignored just based on its massive size—very popular games, spin-off computer games, and massive collection of novels and other stories.  The briefly popular Fading Suns mined a lot of this same territory; perhaps being more overtly Dune and Lovecraft influenced, without the Britishisms of Judge Dredd, for instance.  Star*Drive for the Alternity system and is similar in many respects to a Traveller without a Third Imperium.

And finally (and by this, I don't mean to suggest that this brief survey is complete because obviously there were other games as well—these are the ones I was most aware of, so according to my perception, they were the most prominent and/or important), of course, there is West End Games' own Star Wars game.  Although I don't know that it was really so popular as to threaten Traveller's place at the putative top of the heap, it's curious that much of what was first developed for the RPG later found its way into the Expanded Universe and became canonical—heck, even after the reboot of the Expanded Universe, much of it remains canonical.  Names like Rodian, Twi'lek and others originated here.

Outside of tabletop RPGs, space opera dominates computer games; RPGs, shooters, strategy, all of it.  From StarCraft, to EVE Online, to Destiny, to the Mass Effect series, to the old Wing Commander—they're pretty much all space opera if they're sci-fi (unless they're cyberpunk.)

I guess the point of all this is that there isn't really anything that a space opera heartbreaker could be deliberately imitating.  You can from a setting perspective be overtly "pastichey" of one or more existing space opera settings, but you can't really do so at a game level with regards to a specific juggernaut that you are unable to get out from the shadow of, as it were.  Either every space opera game is a heartbreaker or none of them are.

Of course, in the more expanded definition of fantasy heartbreaker, as it's evolved (where it's more or less equivalent to pastiche) then sure; AD ASTRA is a space opera heartbreaker.  It started off overtly as an ersatz Star Wars, with space mapping conventions borrowed and modified from Traveller, and the more I develop, the more I start incorporating stuff that is common to other works in the same general genre; Dune-like elements, 40k-like elements, Known Space or Technic History-like elements, and heck, maybe some cyberpunk or even Stainless Steel Rat elements here and there.  A pastiche not necessarily of one particular thing, although Star Wars stands proud as the first and most important element, but its still a pastiche of all kinds of things.

Much the same way D&D itself was, I suppose.

So, what do I really mean by space opera heartbreaker, if I've deconstructed the term to uselessness?  Basically, only that I'm unapologetic about the elements that are pastiches, and I don't care if anything in it is particularly unique or innovative.  It's about execution, hopefully, not originality.

This month in Star Wars fandom

While AD ASTRA being a kind of ersatz Star Wars indicates that I'm unhappy with some aspects of Star Wars as is and want to create my own "Space Opera Heartbreaker", it also indicates that I'm a big fan of the franchise and am happy to admit as much. I wish it were perfect, but it's still good enough to be very compelling to me. This Thursday is Star Wars day, an annual self-declared holiday (May the Fourth be with you.)  Four weeks from then is May 25, the 40th Anniversary of the release of the first Star Wars movie.  Both come up every year, but 40 years is a pretty big deal.  Assuming we aren't in the throes of a Great(er) Depression or ugly Yugoslavia style Civil War in ten years, I presume that 2027's 50th anniversary will be an even bigger deal.

But not so big a deal that I can afford to really do anything extraordinary.  I'm not going to take any time off to watch a marathon of the Original Trilogy, laserdisc version, or anything (maybe for the 50th anniversary I will.)  In fact, I don't anticipate that I'll be able to do much at all, other than put a temporary Facebook profile image up for a few days, maybe watch a single movie or stream a few episodes of Clone Wars and/or maybe play a few hours of The Old Republic—for the upcoming "holiday" I may even finally spring for a subscription.  For at least this month, but possibly for more (even a one month subscription boosts me permanently into "Preferred" status from "Free to Play" status and opens up all of the expansion pack worlds, and many of their missions, as well as providing a few other modest benefits.

If I do Clone Wars, I'm almost finished (three episodes left) of my rewatch of Season 2, which means—that crap, I've still got three and a half seasons to go.  Lots of time needs to be spent there, but I doubt I'll do more than watch the three episodes this week, if that.  Those episodes are; what, 22-23 minutes each, so watching 3-4 is equivalent to watching one regular movie, for the most part.  That'll finish off season 2 for me, though—so that's a nice want for this week.

I've also recently (finally) gotten a ship for my bounty hunter in Old Republic and traveled to Balmorra, where I've done a few of the minor side quests and all of the stuff that needs to be done in the main city where you first land, and immediately outside on the plains.  Plenty more to do on Balmorra, and that's only the first planet of the regular story after you get your ship.  Assuming that I do get a subscription and unlock the higher levels and additional content that means that the You Are Here sign only looks like this, so far:

Hutta

Dromand Kaas
Balmorra <<<===
Nar Shaddaa
Tatooine
Alderaan
Taris
Quesh
Hoth
Belsavis
Voss
Corellia
Ilum
CZ-198
Makeb
Manaan
Oricon
Rishi
Yavin 4
Ziost
Darvannis
Odessen
Zakuul
Iokath

Yikes.  Lots more to do.  I think there's even more if you count Flashpoints and stuff.  And that's only for the Bounty Hunter class (although, admittedly, most of those same planets apply to every other class, and the only ones that I'm missing as a bounty hunter is Korriban, Tython, and Coruscant.

Of course, the other thing I can do this month to celebrate is continue cranking out planets at a furious pace, so that I've got enough material to really work with to start writing my own ersatz Star Wars books and stories.  And finally, on Friday, I'll be seeing the decidedly not-Star Wars, but very similarly vibed space opera Guardians of the Galaxy sequel.  So, there's also that.

Gesium

System: Gesium
Hex Location: 2129
Star Type: Triple G1 V, D (close), B4 V (distant)
Number of Worlds: 14
Gas Giants: 4
Planetoid Belt: Comet and 2 asteroid belts

Starport Type: B
World Size: Earth-sized
Atmosphere Type: Dangerous (effects are immediate, but not life-threatening—operating without a filter makes you sick, -3 to all d20 rolls)
Surface Water: 20%
Population: Medium sized population (40 million)
Political Affiliation: Bern Monarchy, Carrick Grand Marches
Notes: Gesium is a world shrouded in thick clouds and constant low light.  Part of a rare triple star system, the yellow star and the white dwarf make up a close pair around which the planets circle, but the blue star is a more distant companion, and has its own gas giant and other small, related planetary system.  Thick forests of strange, fungoid plants lined with bio-luminescent cells cover much of the surface, and present an edible—if not always incredibly palatable—feast for the colonists.

Typical Gesian forest

Gesium is famous for its high tech medical research as well, and they are a leading developer of cybernetic implants.  It's also famous for other high tech items as well.  Real military-grade stuff, I mean—one of the biggest challenges the people of Gesium face is the constant threat of espionage and smuggling.  Because of this, they have the full support of the Arch Duke in developing top of the line security as well.  Gesium is also infamous as being a difficult place to visit casually—although their security is certainly not completely air-tight.

Gesium also is a world of archaeological interest.  It was once a world of the Death Sages, and some of their older buildings, cities and other items of archaeological interest remain.  In fact, there are at least a few actual Death Sages that remain, and there has been cordial contact between them and the colonists, although they mostly ignore one another.  They are reticent about their reasons for abandoning Gesium, however, as it's clear that the hold-outs are just that and that the Death Sages otherwise retreated from Gesium in the past.  Persistent rumors of there being something hidden on Gesium that frightened away even the Death Sages remain, although no hint of it has been found so far.

The colonists are Carrick-normal; Bernese people for the most part, but there were also small populations of Idacharians who, undergoing a technological dark age, lost the ability to leave their world.  Their culture had evolved somewhat, and they no longer followed the Old Ones cult—in fact, since the coming of the colonists, they've heartily embraced the Bernese churches, and most follow a Christian confessional tradition.  They've also heartily embraced the technical acumen that the colonists brought with them, and added to it some of their own know-how—although the lost the ability to make jump drives, they had thoroughly explored their system using traditional drives, and had otherwise developed many other technical wonders of various types.

NOTE: With the publication of these details for Gesium, I've finished the Carrick Grand Marches.  The next step, which I think is obvious, is to detail the four or five systems that are contiguous to the Grand Marches and mostly allied with it, to complete the little area completely.  The Carthen Colony, culturally similar, but part of the Revanchists politically, seems like it would be the next obvious target for mapping.  After that... we'll see where I decide to bounce next.