Using the actual moon of Saturn

[Von]

I'm considering a U-turn of dramatic scale and actually setting the game on Titan, as in the actual moon of actual Saturn. It's a thorny choice and so, like a good fanboy, I have made a List.

Con:

• It's been done. Extensively. By people like Philip K. Dick. And Moorcock, admittedly, who has done most of what I want to do before I've done it. Still, treading old ground is not what I want to be doing at my time of life.
  
• I would lose the disc-shaped world with the mountain at its centre (although that could be retained as a conception of things - not everyone has to believe the world is round and if the poles are uninhabitable gaseous wastelands I don't exactly see swarms of people going to check).
• High-tech civilisation sliding into neo-feudalism is a stock trope of exactly the sort that I am leery towards. Colonial outpost of the lost Earth is a stock trope of exactly the sort that I am leery towards. In essence, the door is left open for all manner of convenient, lazy non-thinking to slither in.
  
• If there is magic in a setting that is explicitly on another planet in our Solar System which has been colonised, it will be poked and prodded and explanations will be sought. People will spend time fretting over the physics of dragons instead of the cultural value of dragons, arguing about 'psychic powers' instead of accepting 'magic'. What I want to promote here is a sense of mythic and aesthetic resonance and I'm concerned about losing that to players of scientific minds (i.e. darn near all of them).
  
• I am similarly concerned about the overall genre of play sliding from the early modern adventure/romance into pulp SF. Can a balance be struck without descending into World of Warcraft schizo-tech insanity where nobody feels comfortable occupying their genre? How much do I care about comfortable occupation of genre anyway?
  

Pro:

• Aesthetics. One side of the sky blazes with the light of a dying sun; the other is cold and dark with Saturn locked and leering overhead at a singular point, the oft-mentioned Worlds' End. Dormant or dead cryovolcanoes have become the foundations of the great cities, between which hiss cold, gaseous deserts. Even after the bulk of the methane and nitrogen have burned off and rendered the place inhabitable, the surface is still colder than the mountaintops. I described this to C. who needed to be excused for "having a Boris Vallejo moment".
• It's easy to incorporate the "humans came from another world and burned the sky" legend into the existing set of myths; it sounds at least as valid as a demiurge on top of a mountain who physically slaps down any attempts to leave and a primal spirit of chaos seething through the inhabiting race. (I would be rocking human, half-elf and half-orc as the primary racial options in this case, indicating a degree to which the humans have gone native and been affected by... stuff.) (Also, I would get to croak "beware the burning sky" in my best arakkoa voice. Bird-people are fun.)
• A planet where the atmosphere is more flammable than on Earth is a planet where firearms are ill-advised, which - I think - justifies a continued allegiance to the sword and crossbow rather than the unreliable boom-stick. "Someone tried one of those harquebus things in Texel Facula once. They only found one of her shoes."
• I've already used the map and people are bound to think it anyway. Should I be going with the flow and fighting player assumptions on the ground that I want to be fighting them, i.e. genre expectations and the kind of logic that should be employed to make sense of the setting?
• Some of the cons might be manageable if I open the scale of the world still further and allow for the full SF/F spectrum at different points in its history/development. Why not? The point is to devise a world on which the majority of my gaming might be done.

'Tis aw a muddle, and it has me asking questions, second and third and fourth guessing myself. I am resolved to do less of this MUKKIN' ABAHT, as the Orks have it, so I open the floor to you; lend a machete to my intellectual thicket and guide me toward a definitive choice.

[finarvyn]

I wouldn't worry about the fact that others have used Titan as a setting. If I did, I'd never run a King Arthur campaign, Middle-earth, Lankhmar, or many other worlds because the original authors did it better than I ever could. Take your vision and run with it. :-)

[Admin Pete]

Mar 30, 2015 1:31:21 GMT -5 Von said:

• If there is magic in a setting that is explicitly on another planet in our Solar System which has been colonised, it will be poked and prodded and explanations will be sought. People will spend time fretting over the physics of dragons instead of the cultural value of dragons, arguing about 'psychic powers' instead of accepting 'magic'. What I want to promote here is a sense of mythic and aesthetic resonance and I'm concerned about losing that to players of scientific minds (i.e. darn near all of them).
  

If I were a player in your game and other players wanted to poke and prod and wanted explanations, as a fellow player I would be thinking "what is your problem?" "Either buy in or go start your own game". As with the second part, as a player my thoughts are "What is wrong with you? Your job as a player is not to play Jerk the Critic, it is to buy in and play the game."

I would hope that your players would not go there. I have never had player pull that kind of garbage in a game. That kind of thing should not be on a list of concerns. You could run a game on present day earth, throw in some current events, but include magic in our present day world and I would buy in. That is part of being a good player.

[Von]

Mar 30, 2015 7:35:28 GMT -5 Admin Pete said:

Mar 30, 2015 1:31:21 GMT -5 Von said:

• If there is magic in a setting that is explicitly on another planet in our Solar System which has been colonised, it will be poked and prodded and explanations will be sought. People will spend time fretting over the physics of dragons instead of the cultural value of dragons, arguing about 'psychic powers' instead of accepting 'magic'. What I want to promote here is a sense of mythic and aesthetic resonance and I'm concerned about losing that to players of scientific minds (i.e. darn near all of them).
  

If I were a player in your game and other players wanted to poke and prod and wanted explanations, as a fellow player I would be thinking "what is your problem?" "Either buy in or go start your own game". As with the second part, as a player my thoughts are "What is wrong with you? Your job as a player is not to play Jerk the Critic, it is to buy in and play the game."

I would hope that your players would not go there. I have never had player pull that kind of garbage in a game. That kind of thing should not be on a list of concerns. You could run a game on present day earth, throw in some current events, but include magic in our present day world and I would buy in. That is part of being a good player.

Perhaps I am being imprecise here.

I am not suggesting that my players "pull garbage" and actively seek to thwart and insult me. I am suggesting more that I have clever and inquisitive players who are of a modern, i.e. scientific, turn of mind, and that if they are presented with something that has the trappings and tropes of science fiction they will treat it accordingly. They have an expectation of that genre and a way of decoding it and relating to it and it's not necessarily my job to teach them how to 'read the text properly', nor to tell them not to think. I am generally opposed to telling people "it is the way it is because it is the way it is" because that's not logic that I think anyone should accept; I am interested in presenting an alternative "way it is" that operates on a different (but internally consistent) sort of logic.

finarvyn - apart from King Arthur neither would I, and I would only do Arthur because of the openness of authorship there. Arthuriana is owned and authored by a whole culture and tradition, unlike Lankhmar or Middle-Earth or whatever. On the other hand the number of people who have written on Titan should, by the same logic, encourage me to set work there.

A further thought is that Eddison - prince among men - got away with it with Mercury.

[Admin Pete]

Mar 30, 2015 12:28:35 GMT -5 Von said:

Mar 30, 2015 7:35:28 GMT -5 Admin Pete said:

If I were a player in your game and other players wanted to poke and prod and wanted explanations, as a fellow player I would be thinking "what is your problem?" "Either buy in or go start your own game". As with the second part, as a player my thoughts are "What is wrong with you? Your job as a player is not to play Jerk the Critic, it is to buy in and play the game."

I would hope that your players would not go there. I have never had player pull that kind of garbage in a game. That kind of thing should not be on a list of concerns. You could run a game on present day earth, throw in some current events, but include magic in our present day world and I would buy in. That is part of being a good player.

Perhaps I am being imprecise here.

I am not suggesting that my players "pull garbage" and actively seek to thwart and insult me. I am suggesting more that I have clever and inquisitive players who are of a modern, i.e. scientific, turn of mind, and that if they are presented with something that has the trappings and tropes of science fiction they will treat it accordingly. They have an expectation of that genre and a way of decoding it and relating to it and it's not necessarily my job to teach them how to 'read the text properly', nor to tell them not to think. I am generally opposed to telling people "it is the way it is because it is the way it is" because that's not logic that I think anyone should accept; I am interested in presenting an alternative "way it is" that operates on a different (but internally consistent) sort of logic.

Hmm, well let us see. If you came to me and said: here is the game I want run, its going to be set on Titan and have these trappings and tropes of science fiction; however it will also have magic and these trappings and tropes of fantasy fiction, are you in? IMO a yes would be an agreement to buy in and not spend time debating why there is magic, I would accept that there is, the question would be - what are the norms of this society and how do the fantasy and science fiction elements relate to one another - the vast majority of that would be covered before the game play started. I am not suggesting that you teach them to "'read the text properly', nor to tell them not to think." I am suggesting that if you tell them up front: " I am interested in presenting an alternative "way it is" that operates on a different (but internally consistent) sort of logic.", then saying yes I want to play implies an agreement not to debate how you designed your world, but instead to buy in and go with the flow.

Is this closer?

[Von]

Mar 30, 2015 13:44:16 GMT -5 Admin Pete said:

Mar 30, 2015 12:28:35 GMT -5 Von said:

Perhaps I am being imprecise here.

I am not suggesting that my players "pull garbage" and actively seek to thwart and insult me. I am suggesting more that I have clever and inquisitive players who are of a modern, i.e. scientific, turn of mind, and that if they are presented with something that has the trappings and tropes of science fiction they will treat it accordingly. They have an expectation of that genre and a way of decoding it and relating to it and it's not necessarily my job to teach them how to 'read the text properly', nor to tell them not to think. I am generally opposed to telling people "it is the way it is because it is the way it is" because that's not logic that I think anyone should accept; I am interested in presenting an alternative "way it is" that operates on a different (but internally consistent) sort of logic.

Hmm, well let us see. If you came to me and said: here is the game I want run, its going to be set on Titan and have these trappings and tropes of science fiction; however it will also have magic and these trappings and tropes of fantasy fiction, are you in? IMO a yes would be an agreement to buy in and not spend time debating why there is magic, I would accept that there is, the question would be - what are the norms of this society and how do the fantasy and science fiction elements relate to one another - the vast majority of that would be covered before the game play started. I am not suggesting that you teach them to "'read the text properly', nor to tell them not to think." I am suggesting that if you tell them up front: " I am interested in presenting an alternative "way it is" that operates on a different (but internally consistent) sort of logic.", then saying yes I want to play implies an agreement not to debate how you designed your world, but instead to buy in and go with the flow.

Is this closer?

Getting there. I don't want to butt heads with you for the sake of it - I am interested in clearly articulating an aspect of campaign creation and a potential pitfall, rather than in 'winning' or 'losing' an 'argument'. Likewise, I'm not breaking it down to the extent that I am because I think you're thick - it's for the sake of clarity and precision. So long as that's clear, let's go forward:


It's less "why there is magic" and more "how there is magic". Science fiction, or at least hard science fiction, implicitly asks how things work.

If the game looks like science fiction, it will be assumed that "buying in and going with the flow" means asking questions about the physical/biological/chemical/geological properties of the world and establishing a set of scientific assumptions about them.

If the game looks like fantasy, it will be assumed that such questions are pointless because the answer is "magic". Ergo, "buying in and going with the flow" means refraining from asking how dragons can fly, because there isn't an answer that means anything or is important.

I am interested in developing fantasy in a direction that goes beyond "magic" as an answer - "this works the way it does because it has this or that symbolic/cultural/magical/aesthetic significance".

What concerns me is that the trappings of science fiction will mislead people into treating the game and setting (remember, I'm using this for fiction too) as science fiction. They will engage in good faith with that - "buy in and go with the flow" - but they will have bought in to something I'm not actually trying to sell them.

It's not about bad faith and challenging my design - it's about good faith being misdirected because the world does not make its generic codes and conventions clear.

[Von]

At this stage I should add that I am almost certainly going to use actual Titan and this thread is more about working out how to do it without experiencing a slide into a genre that is not desired. I suspect that my style of writing and gamesmastery will do most of the legwork but I am anxious that the built world does not mislead people as to its generic allegiances. I also want to avoid the pick-and-mix undiscipline of gonzo worlds where everything goes - there should be some craftsmanship at work here.

It may well be that the solution is to provide distinct periods of play in which the generic codes and conventions are also distinct. Titan of Future Past for the science fiction stuff? Alternatively it might be fitting to take a big old dose of the "It Worked for Lovecraft" pills and have 'spells' and 'aliens' co-exist in a Clarke's Law kind of way.

Whatever happens I must have a clear direction and no regrets about my choices in order to proceed - but procession is tied by analysis paralysis.

I might conceivably decide that all this is MUKKIN' ABAHT and that playing a sodding game is more important than my pretensions of craft and that these Gordian knots are best cut by the act of actual play. We shall see.

[finarvyn]

Burroughs got away with using actual Mars, only one with living beings that were mildly psionic and had unusual technology that only makes sense in some Victorian wannabe age. I think that if you present your Titan and say "here's the way things work here" that your players ought to accept it.

It might be different if you start them out in a scifi setting, perhaps as astronauts leaving the Earth and travelling to Titan, where they might expect certain technology to function and certain laws of physics to be followed. On the other hand, sometimes the wonder of a fantasy world is that you expect one thing and then BAM! hit them with something else.

[Admin Pete]

Mar 31, 2015 3:24:11 GMT -5 Von said:

Getting there. I don't want to butt heads with you for the sake of it - I am interested in clearly articulating an aspect of campaign creation and a potential pitfall, rather than in 'winning' or 'losing' an 'argument'. Likewise, I'm not breaking it down to the extent that I am because I think you're thick - it's for the sake of clarity and precision. So long as that's clear, let's go forward:


It's less "why there is magic" and more "how there is magic". Science fiction, or at least hard science fiction, implicitly asks how things work.

If the game looks like science fiction, it will be assumed that "buying in and going with the flow" means asking questions about the physical/biological/chemical/geological properties of the world and establishing a set of scientific assumptions about them.

If the game looks like fantasy, it will be assumed that such questions are pointless because the answer is "magic". Ergo, "buying in and going with the flow" means refraining from asking how dragons can fly, because there isn't an answer that means anything or is important.

I am interested in developing fantasy in a direction that goes beyond "magic" as an answer - "this works the way it does because it has this or that symbolic/cultural/magical/aesthetic significance".

What concerns me is that the trappings of science fiction will mislead people into treating the game and setting (remember, I'm using this for fiction too) as science fiction. They will engage in good faith with that - "buy in and go with the flow" - but they will have bought in to something I'm not actually trying to sell them.

It's not about bad faith and challenging my design - it's about good faith being misdirected because the world does not make its generic codes and conventions clear.

I would suggest involving your players in the process and let them help you help them get to the buy in that is not misdirected.  I think what you are doing is really cool and I think I now get where you are coming from and I see no way around bringing your players in now so that they can help you generate the worlds "generic codes and conventions" in a way that puts all of you on the same page. I think just running some of these things by your players will help put them on the same page. The caveat here is that I have always found getting feedback from players that are not DMs or potential DMs is like pulling teeth. Your group sounds like you will not have that issue.

[Admin Pete]

Mar 31, 2015 3:32:44 GMT -5 Von said:

At this stage I should add that I am almost certainly going to use actual Titan and this thread is more about working out how to do it without experiencing a slide into a genre that is not desired. I suspect that my style of writing and gamesmastery will do most of the legwork but I am anxious that the built world does not mislead people as to its generic allegiances. I also want to avoid the pick-and-mix undiscipline of gonzo worlds where everything goes - there should be some craftsmanship at work here.

It may well be that the solution is to provide distinct periods of play in which the generic codes and conventions are also distinct. Titan of Future Past for the science fiction stuff? Alternatively it might be fitting to take a big old dose of the "It Worked for Lovecraft" pills and have 'spells' and 'aliens' co-exist in a Clarke's Law kind of way.

Whatever happens I must have a clear direction and no regrets about my choices in order to proceed - but procession is tied by analysis paralysis.

I might conceivably decide that all this is MUKKIN' ABAHT and that playing a sodding game is more important than my pretensions of craft and that these Gordian knots are best cut by the act of actual play. We shall see.

I think discussing this with one or more of your players - you likely know which one(s) can give you the best input. IMO some Gordian knots can only be cut in the act of actual play. I never hesitate to change during play something that is not working. Sometimes during play a player will say did you consider this and I will say that is a great idea, and make the change.

[Von]

Mar 31, 2015 10:23:47 GMT -5 Admin Pete said:

I think discussing this with one or more of your players - you likely know which one(s) can give you the best input. IMO some Gordian knots can only be cut in the act of actual play. I never hesitate to change during play something that is not working. Sometimes during play a player will say did you consider this and I will say that is a great idea, and make the change.

I will very seldom make changes to a world of my own devising on the spot. I still have to live there, as it were, for future games and fiction, and spur of the moment changes are like impulse purchases; remorse awaits around the corner. Again, if players understand that what happened this time may not happen next time, it's fine - but that feels like an irresponsible thing for a referee to suggest.

Too much thinking, not enough gaming. Can I lock this thread until I've had the chance to play something?

[Admin Pete]

Locked until you request it be unlocked.