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Rethinking the “Human Destiny” RPG

Rethinking the “Human Destiny” RPG

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Art by Rick Guidice

It’s about time for me to swing back to working on the Human Destiny setting bible and RPG sourcebook, and that project is going to get a new approach this time around.

I submitted a partial draft of the setting to the Chaosium design challenge last year, and it didn’t do well. Didn’t even make the short-list, in fact. Which honestly doesn’t surprise me too much. I suspect they were looking for material that was narrowly focused on a working RPG, not the fragmentary setting bible I handed them. Lesson learned.

(Ironically, this is the same problem we ran into on a previous RPG design project I was involved with: Transhuman Space. Our team produced what I still consider a brilliant piece of world-building, but we didn’t develop a clear concept of what the “canonical adventure” would be in the setting. As a result, for too many readers it wasn’t clear what player characters were supposed to do in that universe. Later designers had to come back and provide that kind of on-ramp into the setting, so potential players had something to work with.)

So the project has been simmering in the back of my brain for a while now, while I’ve been working on the Atlas of the Human Protectorate. That project in turn has been causing me to do some more world-building in the setting. I think I have a high concept for that narrow focus:

Adventurers in the Human Destiny universe will be human agents of the Hegemony, charged with promoting human maturity and participation in the interstellar community. This will usually involve supporting human exploration of the galaxy, colonization of new worlds, and enforcement of the Hegemony’s guiding principles (the Praxis).

So human characters will usually be members of the Hegemony’s core services, such as the Ecological Service (planetary exploration and biosphere protection), the Guard (enforcement of the Praxis), or the Interstellar Service (interstellar exploration and colonial support). Most missions will involve trouble-shooting and problem-solving.

Missions will usually be set away from Earth. Earth is too “civilized,” too sedate. Humans on Earth are in a post-scarcity environment and subject to constant surveillance, so there’s little room for “adventure.” By moving the focus of the RPG away from Earth, I can set aside many pages of world-building detail that aren’t germane to the adventuring life.

Meanwhile, out on the frontier, resources are more limited, space and untamed wilderness are dangerous environments, there are worlds to explore and mysteries to solve, and human colonists are more likely to find ways to bend or break the Praxis. More problems to solve, more room for conflict, more adventure to be had.

The assumption will be that adventurers are loyal to the Hegemony and the Praxis, although the right way to interpret the Praxis won’t always be obvious. As adventurers develop their capabilities and successfully solve problems, they’ll earn social capital within the Hegemony, providing a reward structure.

If I were to come up with an elevator pitch for this RPG, I would probably say something like “Star Trek meets David Brin’s Uplift stories.” Adventurers will resemble Starfleet officers in some ways: competent, motivated, idealistic people, working in a loose chain of command but with a great deal of independence. The Hegemony and its Praxis would fill a dramatic role similar to the Federation and its Prime Directive. On the other hand, the details will be very different, especially since humans are very much not in charge in the Hegemony as a whole, and human independence has strict limits.

At this point, I’m not sure if I’m going to stick with the Chaosium BRP system for this project. I’m tired of being a game-system nomad with it. BRP is something like the fourth or fifth rules system I’ve considered for Human Destiny, and I really need to settle on one and push forward with it.

On the other hand, lately I’ve been messing with the Modiphius 2d20 system, current home for the Dune, John Carter, Space: 1999, and Star Trek RPGs. That system has a lot of features that I like, and it’s also under a very third-party-friendly licensing scheme, so there’s that.

More to come.

Rethinking the Human Destiny

Rethinking the Human Destiny

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A big part of my creative process involves all the work that happens entirely in my head, usually while the “active” work is happening on a completely different project. Some of that has been happening over the past couple of months, while the bulk of my time was devoted to Architect of Worlds. The target has been my Human Destiny universe.

The Human Destiny is an extended meditation on what our future might look like in a universe that is very much not designed for human pre-eminence. Humans reach the stars, but only as clients of a far older, far larger, and far more powerful extraterrestrial society. Stories written so far in this setting seem to fall into two categories:

  • Stories set right around “the Conquest,” the time (currently set about twenty years from now) when the aliens arrive and very quickly reduce Earth to a client state. Published stories in this set include “Guanahani” and “Roanoke.”
  • Stories set about two hundred years after the Conquest, at a time when human beings are first being permitted to explore and settle worlds outside our own planetary system. Most of these center around the character of Aminata Ndoye, a young woman from what we now know as Senegal, who is one of the first humans to earn an officer’s position in the alien “interstellar service.” If and when I write a Human Destiny game sourcebook, it will probably be set in this era. Published stories in this set include “Pilgrimage” and In the House of War.

So far, the Human Destiny setting has been best described as “Star Trek meets David Brin’s Uplift novels.” The “Hegemony” that conquers Earth is non-human and rather paternalistic, but it’s also generally benign. Kind of like a Trek Federation that means well to its citizens but decidedly does not have a non-interference directive.

What I’ve been wrestling with is the technological assumptions of the setting.

To put the problem shortly: I think the technologies I’ve assumed so far have turned out to be at odds with the core themes of the setting, and I’m moving toward the decision to re-think that technological base from scratch. Which may mean rewriting a lot of the existing fiction, but may also give me good hooks for new stories in the future, so on that basis it may be a wash.

The executive summary is that I’ve been assuming a very Star Trek-like technological base. Magical normal-space and FTL drives, technical control of gravitational forces, the sort of tech that allows for cheap and easy space travel. Yet the themes I want to build into the setting are that the universe is vast, that intelligent beings on the human scale can easily get lost in it, that thriving on that stage requires a mindset that thinks into the distance in both space and time. Star Trek, for all its virtues, rarely offered that kind of perspective. It’s the Age of Sail in space, with exotic but fundamentally human cultures in every port. Jim Kirk needed to be cosmopolitan, but he rarely had to think far above the human level to succeed.

One oeuvre that I really appreciate, that I think hits some of the same themes I’m looking for, can be found in the late works of Poul Anderson. I’m thinking here of some of the novels he wrote in the last decade of his life, starting with The Boat of a Million Years, moving through his Harvest of Stars tetralogy, and ending with the magnificent Starfarers.

All these novels lean toward “hard” SF, mostly sticking to space travel that’s still tied to the rocket equation even if the engines are really advanced, avoiding FTL travel entirely. The stars are hard to reach in these stories, and it’s never clear that human beings are at all suited for life on that stage. Some humans decide not to try, huddling at home on Earth and rarely looking up. Others worry that humans are going to be eclipsed by other forms of life – mechanical or alien – that can thrive on the cosmic scale. Yet in these stories, some humans do manage to keep themselves relevant, finding ways to seek out free and worthwhile lives even out among the stars.

Yeah. I don’t know if it’s the undeniable influence that Anderson has had on my creative work all along, but those are very nearly the same themes I want to build into the Human Destiny. So the worldbuilding needs to match.

So I’ve been thinking about turning the “hard SF” dial up quite a bit, and working out what the implications might be for the setting as a whole. In particular, what will the vast, old, alien Hegemony look like if they don’t fly Star Trek-style starships? What will their conquest of Earth look like? How will Aminata Ndoye’s career be different, if she can’t fly a few hundred parsecs and back and still find her family and her home town more or less as she left them?

Lots to think about here, and I don’t pretend to have everything worked out yet, but once Architect of Worlds is out the door this may be where I’ll be spending some worldbuilding time.