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A Character Sheet

A Character Sheet

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Making good progress on the proposed Cortex Prime sourcebook for the Human Destiny universe. The character rules, in particular, are pretty much done in a rough draft. To test them out, I worked up a character sheet for my usual protagonist in those stories: Aminata Ndoye, the young woman from Senegal who is destined to be the first human starship captain.

What follows is pretty crude – Cortex Prime normally emphasizes the use of well-designed “character files” and this is just text – but it should get the idea across.

A bit of notation: anywhere I have a number in parentheses, that indicates a character trait that contributes one die of that size to the player’s dice pool. So, for example, “(6)” means that trait contributes a 6-sided die. Cortex Prime builds dice pools out of 4-sided, 6-sided, 8-sided, 10-sided, and 12-sided dice, and the bigger the die the more likely it is to produce a good result.

Aminata Ndoye

Student at the École supérieure de l’astronautique in Toulouse, province of Midi de la France.

Stands 168 centimeters tall, masses about 60 kilograms, age 17 Earth years. Her skin tone is deep brown, her eyes are such a dark brown as to be almost black, and her hair is black and cut very short.

Aminata is invariably cool, collected, and rational. She has already demonstrated courage and decisiveness, even under pressure. It is rare for her to lose her temper or otherwise display uncontrolled emotion, and she deals with others with calm, unshakeable courtesy. Strangers often find it difficult to get to know her, as she is something of a workaholic and appears to have little sense of fun or humor.

Distinctions

(8) Devoted Sunni Muslim

Islam is just as important to me as science when I try to make sense of the world around me.

  • Gain a PP when you switch out this distinction’s (8) for a (4).
  • Spend a PP to step up a Value when you reconnect with your core identity.

(8) Going to the Stars Someday

Nothing and no one will keep me tied down to the Earth.

  • Gain a PP when you switch out this distinction’s (8) for a (4).
  • Spend a PP to reroll your dice when the test or contest is in direct pursuit of your core ambition.

(8) Life is an Equation to be Solved

It’s all about figuring out the unknown variables.

  • Gain a PP when you switch out this distinction’s (8) for a (4).
  • Spend a PP to double your Skill die when you embrace your personal style.

Values

  • (8) Sympátheia
  • (10) Logismós
  • (6) Prónoia
  • (6) Prokopé
  • (6) Andreía
  • (4) Evexía

Relationships

  • (10) The Hegemony (Gold card)
  • (6) Valérie Chauvin
  • (6) Nguyen Thi Mai

Skills

  • (6) Influence
  • (8) Know
    • (6) Astronomy
  • (6) Move
  • (6) Notice
  • (6) Operate
  • (6) Play
  • (6) Survive

Resources

                None

Some commentary, for the Cortex-unaware among my readers:

Distinctions are core pieces of a character’s identity. It’s expected that just about any test or contest the character gets into will involve one of their Distinctions.

Values are kind of like “attributes,” but they measure the character’s commitment to certain ethical or philosophical principles. I’m taking a small risk here by defining six Values for characters and naming them in a language most players won’t know (Classical Greek). I’m hoping to convey the alien-ness of the values system that people in this universe are trying to live under.

In this case, Aminata’s higher Values indicate that she’s good at understanding other sentient beings, empathizing with them, and persuading them. She’s very good at rational thinking and taking an objective viewpoint. On the other hand, her main weakness is evexía, which means something like “hygiene,” “self-awareness,” or “self-care” – she’s a bit of a workaholic, and tends to throw herself into problems without taking proper care of her own needs.

Relationships are ties the character has to other people or institutions. In this case, Aminata has a very strong Relationship with the Hegemony, the alien empire humans live under in this universe. She has an unusual level of privilege under Hegemony law. She also has Relationships with two other students at the “space academy” where she is currently studying.

Skills should be fairly straightforward. Cortex Prime encourages creators to name Skills with simple action verbs, to help make it clear when one of them comes into play. I’ve drawn up a list of Skills that’s a little longer than the default one in the core book, but for a space-opera setting that should work well.

Here, Aminata is just starting out at said “space academy,” where she and her fellow students are going to spend several years going through a grueling schedule of academic study and physical training. It occurs to me that Cortex Prime would have no trouble supporting a series of game sessions based on that situation . . .

The Elevator Pitch

The Elevator Pitch

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Here’s a chunk of the growing draft for the Human Destiny Sourcebook. This is a piece of the Introduction, an “elevator pitch” for the book and the setting it will describe.

In the middle of the Twenty-First Century, the age-old question of “are we alone in the universe?” got a sudden and very emphatic answer.

Earth was in bad shape at the time. Global depression, ecological collapse, runaway climate change, and half a dozen regional wars – one of them nuclear – had thrown the world into chaos. Civilization seemed to be on the brink of total failure, and many wondered whether the human species itself would survive.

Then the khedai came.

The khedai were the overlords of a vast interstellar empire, the Hegemony: tens of thousands of worlds, trillions of sentient beings, all living in relative peace and prosperity. They first became aware of Earth just after the turn of the century. At once, they began planning to intervene before we humans could finish rendering our home world uninhabitable. They sent a fleet to Sol and began building the infrastructure they would need.

Thirty years later, just as a few humans were becoming aware that something strange was happening in the outer solar system, the Hegemony finally made its move. The invasion of Earth began in September of 2044, and it was over in less than six months. The khedai called it the Fifth Rimward Intervention, and they considered it a minor skirmish on the frontiers of their empire. Humans called it simply the Conquest.

The khedai were certainly imperialists, but they turned out to be surprisingly benevolent overlords. The resources of Earth and the solar system were not plundered. In fact, the Hegemony worked to rebuild shattered ecosystems, restoring much of Earth’s natural beauty and health. Humans were not enslaved. In fact, most humans found themselves enjoying a higher standard of living than ever before, without having to work for any of it. The Hegemony enforced a system of laws that most humans found reasonable, and they did so with majestic impartiality.

The khedai have always claimed that they came to Earth only to save humanity from its self-destructive nature. They claim to mean us no harm, and they express a wish to see us someday become mature citizens of the galaxy.

Even so, for two hundred years many humans have resented the Hegemony. They feel that the human species has been forced to give up its freedom and its ambitions in exchange for a false security – the life of animals on exhibit in a zoo. Dissent and passive resistance continue to the present day.

In recent years, however, there are signs that the Hegemony’s policy toward humans may be about to change. More humans have been elevated to positions of authority in the cities of Earth. More humans have been encouraged to move to the colonies on Luna, on Mars, and elsewhere in the solar system. More humans have been permitted to travel to other stars. A few humans have been selected to serve aboard Hegemony starships, as crewmen and even as officers.

It is the middle of the Twenty-Third Century on Conquered Earth, and you are one of those exceptional humans. You stand out in a crowd. You have dreams and aspirations that can’t be denied. Whether it’s a quest for a meaningful life on Earth, a career of hard work in the colonies, or a vision of exploring the stars, you have only to step up to the challenge.

The galaxy doesn’t belong to humans, but that doesn’t mean you can’t earn a place in it.

Game Design Prospectus: The Wars of the Jewels

Game Design Prospectus: The Wars of the Jewels

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Still plugging away at Twice-Crowned, with about 20 kilowords down in rough draft and a little more emerging every day or two. That’s still my primary project, and I plan to keep it that way until I really get stuck on something.

Still, my brain has to stay busy the rest of the day, and one chunk of time that I can’t apply to the novel is my daily commute to and from the office. That’s about 45-60 minutes per day total . . . and there’s a single audio-book that I’ve been listening to during that time, over the past many months. At this point, I’ve been through that audiobook so many times that I think I have a lot of passages nearly memorized.

That would be the Silmarillion, by J. R. R. Tolkien.

I’m going to assume that most of my readers are at least somewhat familiar with the book. Even if you haven’t read it, you probably know more or less what place it has in Tolkien’s overall body of work.

The biggest chunk of the Silmarillion itself is the story titled the Quenta Silmarillion, the “Tale of the Silmarils,” the epic history of Middle-earth’s “First Age” that provides deep background to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. The bulk of the Quenta tells the story of Morgoth, the first Dark Lord of Middle-earth, who stole three great jewels from the Elves of Valinor. This theft provoked many of the Elves to follow Morgoth to Middle-earth and fight a centuries-long series of wars against him, which eventually ended in their utter defeat. Only the intervention of the Valar and the Elves who had remained behind in Valinor saved anything from the rack and ruin.

It’s a beautiful story, and I’m quite content with having spent many hundreds of hours of my life reading and listening to it over and over. But my brain sometimes does odd things with the material it encounters . . . and one thing my brain currently seems to be doing is designing a boardgame simulating the epic action of the Quenta.

So that’s what follows: a high-level prospectus for a tabletop game with the working title of The Wars of the Jewels.

The basic design always assumes two players. One player takes the role of Morgoth, while the other takes the role of the High King of the Noldor Elves, whoever that might be at any given time.

The proposed game comes in two levels of play, essentially a basic and advanced game.

The Battle Game can be played stand-alone, with as many as a dozen or so distinct scenarios portraying the various major military campaigns of the First Age. Each scenario provides a fixed order of battle for both sides, possibly with some special rules to reflect specific situations from the original story. The Battle Game involves very traditional wargame mechanics: small chits representing military units and heroes, moving across a hex-grid map that represents most of the region of Middle-earth called Beleriand. The scale of the Battle Game would be about 20-30 miles per hex and no more than 2-3 days per Battle game-turn; most Battle Game scenarios would be no more than 8-10 game-turns long, and some would be much shorter. I would envision even a long Battle Game scenario as something players could complete in a single afternoon or evening session.

The Epic Game is a grand-strategic simulation, portraying the ebb and flow of the whole series of conflicts. Here, the scale is about 40-50 years per Epic game-turn, so that the whole period of conflict between the Noldor and Morgoth can be played out in 12-15 game-turns.

The Epic Game would be the most challenging to design, I think. Right now I’m leaning toward a card-driven scheme, in which both players draw cards from deck of random events, and can either trigger those events or use point values on the cards to carry out actions. The basic mechanic would probably look a lot like some of the card-driven games published by GMT Games.

The two players wouldn’t be entirely symmetrical in the actions they could take. Both sides could probably do things like build up manpower, settle in empty or uncontrolled provinces, build fortresses, deploy heroes, or play a game of influence among the disparate Elven and allied factions. All of those would play into the possibility of a military campaign to be fought at the end of the Epic game-turn, using the Battle Game to determine the course of a war.

The Elves would also have a set of actions involving sending heroes out on Quests. A Quest would require the Elven player to gather a few heroes (how many would depend on the commitment of action points) and then send them through a series of challenges resolved with die-rolls on a set of tables. Quests could be used to rescue heroes currently captive in Morgoth’s dungeons, to kill dragons or Balrogs, or to attempt to sail to Valinor and persuade the Valar to help. One critical Quest would be to try to steal one of the Silmarils back from Morgoth – very difficult and risky, but probably a necessity if the Elves are not very lucky with their military campaigns.

One mechanic would involve manpower. Almost every faction, on either side, would maintain a Manpower score, indicating its current population. Factions of Men or Elves would have to be able to support their current Manpower with controlled provinces – they need land to supply their armies. Elven factions would replace Manpower lost to combat casualties very slowly, but Men would replace lost Manpower fairly quickly (hence giving the Elven player an incentive to set aside lands for Men). Dwarven factions wouldn’t need provinces under their control since they’re based in big underground cities, but their Manpower would be rather severely capped. Orcs have no limits on their Manpower, but they wouldn’t grow naturally, so Morgoth would have to commit actions to build up his Orc armies.

Available Manpower at the start of a Battle Game war would determine the force pool available for each side. Units lost in the course of the war would result in lost Manpower. The overall effect should be that the Elven player will have to worry about every unit lost in the Battle Game, especially the hard-to-replace Noldor Elves. The Elves and their allies will be crippled if they lose all the rich provinces of Beleriand. Meanwhile, Morgoth’s armies should seem nearly inexhaustible.

Another mechanic in the Epic Game would involve politics among the various factions opposing Morgoth. Half of the tragedy of the Quenta has to do with distrust and outright treachery among various factions of the Elves and Men. So in the game, Morgoth will never have to worry about the loyalty of his own armies, and the High King of the Noldor will always be able to rely on his own faction . . . but every other faction of Elves, Men, or Dwarves will be more or less unreliable.

Each Elven or allied faction would probably have a Loyalty score, indicating its current willingness to actively oppose Morgoth in warfare. Factions with high scores will commit all available forces to a war, and will forward-deploy them so as to come at Morgoth more quickly. Factions with lower scores might hang back, or might refuse to send some or all of their soldiers to fight. In a few cases, a faction might even treacherously go over to Morgoth’s side! Meanwhile, if a Silmaril ever comes into play, Morgoth might be able to this system to trigger outright warfare among his opponents, as they fight for possession of the great jewel.

I envision some “chrome” systems, of course. There should be a system keeping track of who the High King of the Noldor is from one Epic turn to the next – what if Fëanor had survived the first years of the conflict? More generally, if an Elven faction loses its current leader, there has to be some line of succession. There should also be a system to generate heroes from the Elven-allied houses of Men each Epic game-turn, and possibly marry one or more of those heroes into the Elven royal houses if certain conditions are met. That’s likely to be on the critical path to Elven victory if they can’t keep Morgoth’s armies contained.

I think that sums up most of my thinking on the subject so far. I can see the whole game in my head, and I begin to think I could design and test it to completion if I had the time. Of course, it would have to be a complex bit of freeware, since there is no way the Tolkien estate will ever license this particular piece of the legendarium for such an application. Yet another creative project that’s never likely to come to fruition – although man, it would be neat to see.