GILTs in Spaaaace
Mar. 27th, 2006 10:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robotnik2004"Pathological monsters! cried the terrified mathematician
Every one of them is a splinter in my eye
I hate the Peano Space and the Koch Curve
I fear the Cantor Ternary Set
And the Sierpinski Gasket makes me want to cry..."
—"Mandelbrot Set"
"It was just a colour out of space—a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes."
—"The Colour Out of Space"
Before he started kicking six kinds of Kryptonian ass this week with a series of Superman mythos posts,![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ezrael wrote something about "The Endless Black," a sci-fi horror game he'd like to run, in which humanity takes its first faltering steps into the endless dark of Lovecraftian outer space. princeofcairo floated a similar idea in an old ST column a few years back (I know ezrael loves it when I lump him together with princeofcairo, but hey, there's worse company to be lumped with): "Ships disappear, pilots go mad, colonies fall into dark worship on distant planets ... As the Earth's ossified systems splinter under madness and anarchy, the human colonies see themselves left alone in the dark." I dug Ken's take from the start, but Matt, who strikes me as just the fellow to GM a game where the universe is cruel and bleak and cold, added the crucial Catch-22: the very tools humankind must use to navigate the extra-cosmic gulfs of space—eldritch mathematics, Dune-like mentats and spice addicts, strange eons of cryogenic sleep—ineluctably corrode our humanity. Yeah, that's the stuff.
There's only one thing I need to make this G a G that I would truly LT, and that's comedy.
Seriously. Becauseezrael's post put me in mind of Spaceship Zero, an odd little RPG that came and (I think) went a few years ago. bryant lent me a copy, and while the system did little for me (your basic percentile skill rolls, with a kind of drama point mechanic; you could call it a Call of Cthulhu heartbreaker if you weren't as nice a guy as I am) the setting and the presentation burrowed right under my skin like an Insect from Shaggai.
The guys behind Spaceship Zero are the beloved Chilliwackian-Canadian Lovecraft-loving rock bandChilliwack Loverboy The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets. Beloved by me, at least. I have a copy of their seminal 1993 debut, Cthulhu Strikes Back, emblazoned with a big yellow sticker that says "Property of Trent University Radio. DO NOT REMOVE." Wonder how that got on there. Anyway, the Thickets did two clever things with the presentation of Spaceship Zero. One was fairly obvious, and one was pretty subtle, and I guess it's the combination of the two that got me. The fairly obvious thing is that SSZ is presented as if it is a licensed adaptation of a genuine pulp serial (a German radio show from the 1950s, I think, revived as a cult TV series in the 1970s, with a big-screen movie version "coming soon"), with a cast list and episode guide and all the requisite licensed-RPG assurances that "you can play the original cast or create your own crew!" But it isn't. There was no Spaceship Zero TV or radio show, and there is no movie. So that's cute, even if it's perhaps the sort of cuteness that's more fun to read about than to actually play.
The more subtle thing is that SSZ is, or at least could be, a game of genuine Lovecraftian horror, but the text of the game, the advice to the GM, all of that, is written as if it isn't a horror game, but just a campy retro sci-fi romp. "Rocket off to adventure!" "Prepare your players for pulse-pounding thrills and chills!" That sort of thing. There are no tips on running a horror game, because it doesn't cop to being a horror game. There's no GM section that spills the beans. There's nothing anywhere in Spaceship Zero that says "yes, this is a Lovecraft-inspired horror game dressed in the flayed skin of a sci-fi pulp." It's only when you get into the setting details, or stare too long at some of the more unsettling illustrations, that you realize how damn creepy the game could be, if you let it. One example, probably not the best, is the game's equivalent of hyperspace: when Spaceship Zero's "BTL drive" is activated it actually causes the entire universe to implode, eradicating all life everywhere. The crew must then wait uncounted billions of years for a new universe to form. They survive the wait by using a kind of cryo-sleep that entails being boiled down to "essential saltes" a la The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. But when the new universe forms they find that it's an inexact copy of the old one: humanity has been enslaved by alien fish-men. And so on. Stated baldly like that it sounds a little goofy. But as you digest the setting chapters and the bestiary and the episode guide for the mythical "Raumschiff Null," it all has a cumulative effect. Spaceship Zero looks like a campy retro sci-fi romp. It acts like a campy retro sci-fi romp. But there's something deeply rotten in Spacemark.
I admire the conceit of making a horror game and then pretending it isn't. For a long time, though, I didn't know how you would play it. Most GMs have probably toyed with the idea of starting a game that seems to be in one genre, and then twisting it into something else. It's usually not such a great idea. Getting your players to buy in to the tone and premise of a new game is such a crucial step, and that kind of switcheroo risks sacrificing all your player investment for the sake of some dubious surprise. But if I'm reading it right (and I remain open to the alternative possibility that SSZ is just a workaday pulp sci-fi game and it's me who has projected all this diabolical meta-coolness onto it), Spaceship Zero is a bait-and-switch game that doesn't even let the GM in on the secret. (I guess you could say it's likememento_mori's Lacuna in that way. Although in the case of Lacuna I'm not convinced even the game designer could tell you the secret.)
So it remained a game I was more interested in thinking about than playing, until the cliche occurred to me: When in doubt, use PTA.
And Primetime Adventures solves all the problems I had with the premise. You don't play in the world of the creepy-weird forgotten pulp serial, you create the creepy-weird pulp serial yourselves. You don't spring the switcheroo on the players, you enlist them in pulling it off, again and again, every episode. The cognitive dissonance between character and player that PTA demands? That's where the black genius of this game lives. That sliding between actor-stance and director-stance that distresses pure immersionists? In this game, it's a sick slide between pulp heroics and bleak horror. You don't blend the pulp and the horror—you push them in opposite directions as far as they can go. The contrast accentuates both, and creates black humor in the spaces in between. (Remember how funny the darkest episodes of Unknown USA were?) This is the kind of show where the away team kills and eats their red-shirt crewman, but all agree never to speak of it again. Where the lantern-jawed captain is driven to unspeakable sexual depravities by the colony of sentient grubs nesting in his brain. Where the gee-whiz cabin boy somehow stays conscious during cryo-sleep, and awakes twelve billion years later with a preteen body and a mind as vast and ancient and malevolent as the cosmos itself. Yet each episode ends with backslapping on the bridge, a corny joke and a peppy catchphrase. In most PTA games, the goal is to have everyone say "I wish this was a real show. I would watch this." In this case, the goal is to have everyone say "Who would make this fucking show?" in mingled horror, glee, and disbelief.
Battlestar Zero:
Is that too goofy for you? The right players would be key. Not everybody likes the frisson of crossed genre wires as much as I do. But if you didn't think you could take the retro pulp serial seriously, it would be the work of a moment to plunge today's favorite sci-fi serial into Lovecraftian horror space:
The Shoggoths were created by Man.*
There are many copies.
They evolved.**
They rebelled.***
And they have a Plan.****
Don't Answer Yet:
I have, some may recall, already run a space pulp game with Lovecraftian elements—my Boston GMing debut, The Red Madness. And yeah, there ought to be a sequel. But that's a different beast. The Cthulhu stuff in Red Madness was just window dressing, fun rassling opponents for the Bug Eyed Monsters and Robot Apes. To the (limited) extent that it went deeper than that, the frisson of the Red Madness setting comes from overlaying the pulp cliches onto the compromised human morality of the Cold War. That's why it's set in "1963 as imagined in 1936." The Nazis take orders from a brain in a jar (Hitler's), but so does the USA (Einstein's). CIA "advisors" train blue-skinned death squads in the jungles of Venus. The House Committee on Un-Earthly Activities peeps under rocks for "greenos" and "Martie-lovers" while the Committee to Re-Animate the President packs JPK in ice. Von Daniken was right: the Elder Things are us.
* OK, not actually. I think they were created by the Elder Things.
** Evolved? Not so much. Though they did learn to say "Tekeli-li," and hey, that's gotta come in handy if you're a giant scary-ass blob.
*** That part's true!
**** It mostly involves oozing around digesting stuff. Maybe catch a movie if there's time.
Every one of them is a splinter in my eye
I hate the Peano Space and the Koch Curve
I fear the Cantor Ternary Set
And the Sierpinski Gasket makes me want to cry..."
—"Mandelbrot Set"
"It was just a colour out of space—a frightful messenger from unformed realms of infinity beyond all Nature as we know it; from realms whose mere existence stuns the brain and numbs us with the black extra-cosmic gulfs it throws open before our frenzied eyes."
—"The Colour Out of Space"
Before he started kicking six kinds of Kryptonian ass this week with a series of Superman mythos posts,
ezrael wrote something about "The Endless Black," a sci-fi horror game he'd like to run, in which humanity takes its first faltering steps into the endless dark of Lovecraftian outer space. princeofcairo floated a similar idea in an old ST column a few years back (I know ezrael loves it when I lump him together with princeofcairo, but hey, there's worse company to be lumped with): "Ships disappear, pilots go mad, colonies fall into dark worship on distant planets ... As the Earth's ossified systems splinter under madness and anarchy, the human colonies see themselves left alone in the dark." I dug Ken's take from the start, but Matt, who strikes me as just the fellow to GM a game where the universe is cruel and bleak and cold, added the crucial Catch-22: the very tools humankind must use to navigate the extra-cosmic gulfs of space—eldritch mathematics, Dune-like mentats and spice addicts, strange eons of cryogenic sleep—ineluctably corrode our humanity. Yeah, that's the stuff.There's only one thing I need to make this G a G that I would truly LT, and that's comedy.
Seriously. Because
ezrael's post put me in mind of Spaceship Zero, an odd little RPG that came and (I think) went a few years ago. bryant lent me a copy, and while the system did little for me (your basic percentile skill rolls, with a kind of drama point mechanic; you could call it a Call of Cthulhu heartbreaker if you weren't as nice a guy as I am) the setting and the presentation burrowed right under my skin like an Insect from Shaggai. The guys behind Spaceship Zero are the beloved Chilliwackian-Canadian Lovecraft-loving rock band
The more subtle thing is that SSZ is, or at least could be, a game of genuine Lovecraftian horror, but the text of the game, the advice to the GM, all of that, is written as if it isn't a horror game, but just a campy retro sci-fi romp. "Rocket off to adventure!" "Prepare your players for pulse-pounding thrills and chills!" That sort of thing. There are no tips on running a horror game, because it doesn't cop to being a horror game. There's no GM section that spills the beans. There's nothing anywhere in Spaceship Zero that says "yes, this is a Lovecraft-inspired horror game dressed in the flayed skin of a sci-fi pulp." It's only when you get into the setting details, or stare too long at some of the more unsettling illustrations, that you realize how damn creepy the game could be, if you let it. One example, probably not the best, is the game's equivalent of hyperspace: when Spaceship Zero's "BTL drive" is activated it actually causes the entire universe to implode, eradicating all life everywhere. The crew must then wait uncounted billions of years for a new universe to form. They survive the wait by using a kind of cryo-sleep that entails being boiled down to "essential saltes" a la The Case of Charles Dexter Ward. But when the new universe forms they find that it's an inexact copy of the old one: humanity has been enslaved by alien fish-men. And so on. Stated baldly like that it sounds a little goofy. But as you digest the setting chapters and the bestiary and the episode guide for the mythical "Raumschiff Null," it all has a cumulative effect. Spaceship Zero looks like a campy retro sci-fi romp. It acts like a campy retro sci-fi romp. But there's something deeply rotten in Spacemark.
I admire the conceit of making a horror game and then pretending it isn't. For a long time, though, I didn't know how you would play it. Most GMs have probably toyed with the idea of starting a game that seems to be in one genre, and then twisting it into something else. It's usually not such a great idea. Getting your players to buy in to the tone and premise of a new game is such a crucial step, and that kind of switcheroo risks sacrificing all your player investment for the sake of some dubious surprise. But if I'm reading it right (and I remain open to the alternative possibility that SSZ is just a workaday pulp sci-fi game and it's me who has projected all this diabolical meta-coolness onto it), Spaceship Zero is a bait-and-switch game that doesn't even let the GM in on the secret. (I guess you could say it's like
memento_mori's Lacuna in that way. Although in the case of Lacuna I'm not convinced even the game designer could tell you the secret.)So it remained a game I was more interested in thinking about than playing, until the cliche occurred to me: When in doubt, use PTA.
And Primetime Adventures solves all the problems I had with the premise. You don't play in the world of the creepy-weird forgotten pulp serial, you create the creepy-weird pulp serial yourselves. You don't spring the switcheroo on the players, you enlist them in pulling it off, again and again, every episode. The cognitive dissonance between character and player that PTA demands? That's where the black genius of this game lives. That sliding between actor-stance and director-stance that distresses pure immersionists? In this game, it's a sick slide between pulp heroics and bleak horror. You don't blend the pulp and the horror—you push them in opposite directions as far as they can go. The contrast accentuates both, and creates black humor in the spaces in between. (Remember how funny the darkest episodes of Unknown USA were?) This is the kind of show where the away team kills and eats their red-shirt crewman, but all agree never to speak of it again. Where the lantern-jawed captain is driven to unspeakable sexual depravities by the colony of sentient grubs nesting in his brain. Where the gee-whiz cabin boy somehow stays conscious during cryo-sleep, and awakes twelve billion years later with a preteen body and a mind as vast and ancient and malevolent as the cosmos itself. Yet each episode ends with backslapping on the bridge, a corny joke and a peppy catchphrase. In most PTA games, the goal is to have everyone say "I wish this was a real show. I would watch this." In this case, the goal is to have everyone say "Who would make this fucking show?" in mingled horror, glee, and disbelief.
Battlestar Zero:
Is that too goofy for you? The right players would be key. Not everybody likes the frisson of crossed genre wires as much as I do. But if you didn't think you could take the retro pulp serial seriously, it would be the work of a moment to plunge today's favorite sci-fi serial into Lovecraftian horror space:
The Shoggoths were created by Man.*
There are many copies.
They evolved.**
They rebelled.***
And they have a Plan.****
Don't Answer Yet:
I have, some may recall, already run a space pulp game with Lovecraftian elements—my Boston GMing debut, The Red Madness. And yeah, there ought to be a sequel. But that's a different beast. The Cthulhu stuff in Red Madness was just window dressing, fun rassling opponents for the Bug Eyed Monsters and Robot Apes. To the (limited) extent that it went deeper than that, the frisson of the Red Madness setting comes from overlaying the pulp cliches onto the compromised human morality of the Cold War. That's why it's set in "1963 as imagined in 1936." The Nazis take orders from a brain in a jar (Hitler's), but so does the USA (Einstein's). CIA "advisors" train blue-skinned death squads in the jungles of Venus. The House Committee on Un-Earthly Activities peeps under rocks for "greenos" and "Martie-lovers" while the Committee to Re-Animate the President packs JPK in ice. Von Daniken was right: the Elder Things are us.
* OK, not actually. I think they were created by the Elder Things.
** Evolved? Not so much. Though they did learn to say "Tekeli-li," and hey, that's gotta come in handy if you're a giant scary-ass blob.
*** That part's true!
**** It mostly involves oozing around digesting stuff. Maybe catch a movie if there's time.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-03-30 04:22 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-30 04:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-30 02:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-30 04:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-30 02:29 pm (UTC)Formless terror
Date: 2006-03-30 05:42 am (UTC)Bonus points if you can guest star the Herculoids. Gloop and Gleep, the formless fearless wonders == Neotonous Shoggoths imprinted on humans!
Re: Formless terror
Date: 2006-03-30 02:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-30 06:03 am (UTC)That's what The District Sleeps Tonight is going to be: a mashup of political thriller and Lovecraft. Slammin'.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-30 02:50 pm (UTC)I'm not saying a big switcheroo can never work, I'm just saying that it's risky.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-30 02:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-30 10:08 am (UTC)The idea of the entire universe imploding every time you fire up the drive, though? Awesome. I'd totally use that to make some kind of Sliders-in-space.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-30 02:50 pm (UTC)You ask why? In some ways, you and I are very different people.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-30 03:03 pm (UTC)So yeah, we're different. I like you anyway :)
no subject
Date: 2006-03-30 01:31 pm (UTC)That said, I'd play this game in a heartbeat!
no subject
Date: 2006-03-30 02:41 pm (UTC)True horror is awful hard to pull off, it's true. I'd settle for "everybody laughing hysterically then going home and feeling really really bad about themselves for a week."
no subject
Date: 2006-03-30 01:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-30 01:54 pm (UTC)Careful! Canadian TV is only up to the middle of BSG Season 2
Date: 2006-03-30 02:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-30 04:20 pm (UTC)Also, I don't say things like 'my response upon reaching the end'.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-30 04:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-30 10:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-30 01:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-30 03:12 pm (UTC)I think SSZ is still alive, one of the members of DotHT is currently working for Kerberos (http://www.kerberos-productions.com/sots.shtml), a computer game company who's 1st release (Sword of the Stars, a 4x that looks like it'll be what MOOIII should have been) coming out in June.
20 Minutes of Oxygen is used as the music in one of their preview videos.
no subject
Date: 2006-03-30 08:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-30 05:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-03-30 05:42 pm (UTC)And, a la Ren and Stimpy, I am totally ready to rocket off to the amazing year five hundred billion! I totally get the idea of running it as Pulp Men in a Universe of Horror. After all, don't you have to have that kind of 50's male ego/blindside to even consider hurtling yourself into the cosmos? I think you could easily have player characters with a pulp, bordering on comedic edge, in a background universe of insanity. Just don't have them be stupid.
Ironjawed Men and Horrific Aliens, oh boy!
no subject
Date: 2006-03-30 08:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-04-18 09:03 am (UTC)They fill in the empty places.
yrs--
--Ben
no subject
Date: 2006-04-18 04:43 pm (UTC)If I ran this, I would LOVE to have an episode where a PC was floating in a space suit, stranded all alone in the dark, for like the whole episode... and NOTHING finds him. But could that work?
I think a lot of the Lovecraftian beasties are actually meant to be embodiments/symbols of the bigness, coldness, and emptiness of the universe. But of course their familiarity to gamers and their more than occasional silliness works against this.
no subject
Date: 2006-04-19 05:10 am (UTC)yrs--
--Ben