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Planetcrafting
18 Plays2 days ago
In this episode, Mark and Ben seek out the lore of how to create and use strange new worlds in a variety of different science fiction genres. Whether it's hard science fiction focused on the science of the setting, soft science fiction focused dramatic alien encounters, or the science fantasy settings where planets exist to serve high adventure, we cover ideas and examples that will help you bring alien worlds to life in your next campaign.
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Transcript
Guild Secrets and Planetary Threats
00:00:03
Speaker
A secret report within the Guild. Four planets have come to our attention regarding a plot which could jeopardize spice production. Planet Arrakis, source of the spice.
00:00:18
Speaker
Planet Kaladin, home of House Atreides. Planet Gidi Prime, home of House Harkonnen. Planet Kytane, home of the Emperor of the Known Universe.
00:00:33
Speaker
Send a third stage guild navigated to Kaiteng to demand details from the Emperor. The spice must flow.
Introductions and Dune Fandom
00:01:08
Speaker
Welcome back to Tabletop Tune Up. My name is Mark. I'm here with my friend, my host, my co-host, Ben Dyer. How are you doing? I'm well. hey everybody. Good to be back.
00:01:21
Speaker
Yeah, the the dice must flow, Ben. the A good paraphrase. The dice must flow. Yes, they must. we That was a kind of a neat intro ah from one
Dune Adaptations: Villeneuve vs. Lynch
00:01:32
Speaker
of my... you know Before we get into this, Ben, let's talk about Dune for just a second.
00:01:37
Speaker
Oh my gosh. We're we're fans of we're fans pans of Dune. I've read all the books. I've watched the movies. What are your thoughts on the newer movies? they've theyve been a How do you pronounce his name?
00:01:48
Speaker
Denis Villeneuve? Yeah. What do you think of these movies? ah They're amazing. I mean, visually, great cast, ah thrilling, just amazing movie class visuals, right? Like sometimes you go to movies and people walk out and they go, ah, that could have been a TV show.
00:02:06
Speaker
Not these, man. These are amazing cinematic experiences. i I have a real odd take in this. I really like the David Lynch movie. Yeah.
00:02:18
Speaker
Because I feel like it captures much of the the weird vibe of the books. Now, it doesn't capture the story like the other one, the new ones do. The story, these ones captured the story.
00:02:29
Speaker
But my God, David Lynch capture captures the strangeness of those books and i i so i kind of appreciate them both for different things i watched the original david lynch one for years loved it i like the new ones too love them i'm still kind of working my way through the dune books and i think it's fascinating i think you know what's funny what book are you on right right about now like i'm on the one they're making the next movie out of honestly i picked it up and then put it down you haven't got to the weird stuff yet no
00:03:04
Speaker
No, it's great. I'm so excited to see where where to go with this because just, yeah.
Planet Building in Sci-Fi
00:03:10
Speaker
Anyway, today, guys, um we're going to be talking about planets and science fiction, planet building. You know, we've talked about like fantasy games and we've built magic items, and but we feel like we've kind of neglected sci-fi, haven't we been? I think we've got some work to do here. And the thing is, this isn't going to just be hard science fiction, all that kind of stuff. I mean, fantasy has its own version of science fiction too. You can find science fantasy. ah
00:03:38
Speaker
you know We'll talk more about that, but there's ah there's a lot of room here for planet crafting as a topic. So let's let's kind of jump into this because we're to talking about like, we're going to be going to a planet and we want to talk about what makes these planets like interesting,
00:03:55
Speaker
good of what we're designing the planet. What do we want? How do we want it to serve our story? So um let's get into it Ben, why don't you start us off a little bit? Because i'm I'm going to just be out there, folks. Ben's going to drive this episode because like I'm not the big scythe. I love science fiction, but I'm also like I don't like running these types of games.
00:04:16
Speaker
um But Ben does. And I like playing in them. That's good. Tell us little bit about what your thoughts are when you start thinking about planets. Yeah. So here's the thing about planets. Planets are kind of like the unit of storytelling in a science fiction game, right? Think about, for example, like Star Trek. Every week, come to a new planet, have a new adventure. Every planet you visit, it's a chance to kind of reset the...
00:04:43
Speaker
circumstances of the game, of the context that you're in new world, new cultures, ah new problems, right? All kinds of things can change every time you enter a new solar system and you investigate the planets that are there.
00:04:56
Speaker
You kind of break it down by what kind of game you're in. right? That tells you a bit about how you're going to use these
Categorizing Sci-Fi Planets
00:05:02
Speaker
planets. So that's kind of what I got prepared for today in terms of our notes is let's kind of think about planets in three different categories. Number one, hard science fiction. Here you could think about like the expanse or you could think about like traveler.
00:05:16
Speaker
And one thing I'll say real quick about that hard sci-fi too, you're going to find that these planets might be like further out in systems because we all know that the universe is kind of expansive or the expanse, you know?
00:05:29
Speaker
Um, so these plants that would actually be habitable would be, would probably be pretty far out there in distance. And that's, you're going to see a lot of that in hard science fiction is, is the way to get to these plants is part of that, part of that story.
00:05:44
Speaker
Yeah. So hard science fiction, soft science fiction, right? That would be the opposite hard science fiction. If hard science fiction really focuses on the science and the kind of the grounded reality, soft science fiction says, let's not pay as much attention to that because what we're interested in is the interesting social, political, dramatic elements, right? And so these are the kind of episodes you'd see in Star Trek where they go visit some culture that maybe, you know, they've got to think about the prime directive and all that kind of stuff.
00:06:14
Speaker
Yeah, they always complete these kind of wacky ideas, particularly old Star Trek. They would land it on planets. They're like, oh, we're all kids here, you know? Yeah. or there's ah there's ah a civilization here that's governed by a computer. Do we break the computer so they can set their own destiny? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, yeah.
00:06:31
Speaker
The third category would be like fantasy, though, right? So think here about like Spelljammer and maybe some of the like the pulp retro sci-fi, like John Carter kind of stuff like that. Yeah, we kind of treat a lot, you know, i have always kind of treated my planes of existence almost like planets.
00:06:48
Speaker
They're places you go to visit. These are interesting places. Yeah. So like in the D and D multiverse, right? Like, I think there's kind of a, it's almost like a ah sort of a local science fiction, the
Hard Sci-Fi Exploration
00:07:01
Speaker
solar system of, of different planes that you could literally kind of travel to, but you're traveling through like the astral sea and you're moving through limbo or something like that. Right. Yeah.
00:07:10
Speaker
Oh, I'm in Raven long, you know, well, we're not to talk about D and D now we're going to talk about science fiction. So, um, You were just mentioning something about what you were just saying, though, how these are places you can go to kind of like reset, so to speak.
00:07:27
Speaker
Don't all planets kind of do that in a certain sense? It's not just soft sci-fi anything. Oh yeah, definitely. I think that's true of all these different planets. So, you know, in a certain sense, we're familiar with this when we do kind of globetrotting adventures in normal fantasy games, right? You go to a different continent, you go to a different, you know, part of the map, you're going to find different kinds of, you know, environments and biomes. You're going to find different kinds of monsters. You're going to find different kinds of like tribes and peoples and stuff like that. And the science fiction version of that is when you go to different planets. So any of those
Soft Sci-Fi and Planetary Narratives
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science fiction types we talked about, this would be relevant.
00:08:03
Speaker
So what kind of games, obviously we've played Traveler. We've discussed that in one of our past episodes. Please folks, go back and look at our review of Traveler. Enjoy it. um What other games kind of use planets a lot?
00:08:18
Speaker
There are adapted versions of Star Trek and Star Wars. Traveler, of course, as we've said. For those that like generic ah systems, Hero System and GURPS both have a whole host of science fiction supplements that will let you do that. And actually, one of the things i was going to mention is I think there's a lot of really great stuff to mine out of these game books. Even if you're not playing, let's say, GURPS, or hero, you might find in those books a really useful random table to roll up that will help you build a planet if you want. you know Yeah, and GURPS is not a game I played a whole lot of, but I tell you what, back in the day, had a pretty good collection of GURPS books because they had such good like random tables and rules for GMs.
00:09:02
Speaker
it was It was a good place to mine. And you could also pick them up real cheap at the used bookstore. either hang gun Yeah. No, i this is worth taking a moment to shout out the the Steve Jackson games guys, right? Like GURPS is a system that I think had some of the best research and some of the best supplements of any game I've ever seen.
00:09:20
Speaker
Yeah, they had this column. I always remember they had kind of these like ah thin columns on the sides of the books that would have little breakdowns that the GM could, you you know, they would speak to you as a GM and they'd write stuff in there. And i was like, that stuff was so valuable valuable to me as a new GM.
00:09:39
Speaker
All the little tips that Steve Jackson and his publisher, you know, his people would write in there. God, it was so good. And I wish more games did that. But that's, I'm sidetracking. Yeah. Well, I think the idea here, right, is that there's a lot of really great science fiction content out there. And frankly, sometimes it's not even game books. You can actually go find stuff on astrophysics for kids.
Designing Game Planets
00:10:00
Speaker
You know, i mean, there's all that kind of NASA educational material. And heck, after you read a couple like Arthur C. Clarke books, you're probably going to start feeling pretty, pretty confident about how to tell that story.
00:10:10
Speaker
Let's jump into that the first of the three that you mentioned. You said hard sci-fi. And you were talking about that a little bit. Let's get a little deeper. um What are some of the kind of interesting places and things that you would imagine hard sci-fi?
00:10:25
Speaker
excited by Yeah, so in hard science fiction, remember the idea here is this is about real science and and things that are very grounded in the realistic kinds of experiences. So the the thing you want to do with planets in this context is you want to actually try to draw from real things to generate the hazards and the phenomena and the interesting things about whatever that planet is. Maybe you've got a planet that has multiple moons and so there's weird gravity effects, or maybe you've got a planet that always rotates at the you know at the same rate as it revolves around its star so that there's always one side facing the sun.
Aliens in Sci-Fi Genres
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you know
00:11:03
Speaker
These are things that happen in reality. These are things you can imagine happening. um And so when you do that, of course, it creates these amazing sort of opportunities for you as a storyteller.
00:11:13
Speaker
um Do you remember the Vin Diesel, Riddick movies? Don't even talk to me about pri Crematoria. Don't even get, I'll tell you what, let's let's save that one for our last section, which is the fantasy section. Because that planet was ridiculous. And I remember watching it thinking, God, it looks really cool on screen.
00:11:36
Speaker
But this planet would never work, ever. I see.
00:11:41
Speaker
we'll We'll come back to that one. we'll come back Okay. So the key idea is there's all kinds of interesting things you can do. Take a little time to like you know study what happens if if a planet's a little bit bigger or a little bit smaller, what that does to gravity. There's all kinds of references out there for what would happen if you actually like lived on a high gravity or low gravity world. what What does that do to physiology? How does that make things work? So fascinating stuff you can do and and, and hard science fiction players will love that stuff. They'll eat it up.
00:12:11
Speaker
Yeah. And they really do. i mean, but you have, I mean, this, this is probably why I don't like running science fiction games is because I don't have that kind of knowledge. And, you know, that's, that's part of why I i don't enjoy it as much. Um, but so I will run more of like the soft sci-fi, which we'll get into just a bit, but give Ben, give me an example of a,
00:12:35
Speaker
a setting that you feel does hard sci-fi really well. The Expanse, I think, is these days like the gold standard for hard sci-fi. But Interstellar. Interstellar had some interesting things where they- Interstellar.
00:12:47
Speaker
Oh yeah, the Nolan movie. That's great. Yeah, I think that was amazing. but One thing they they they talked about is that they they, on these shows, they really kind of explore like what this would do to you if you were on this kind of planet. And you would see people wearing suits because the environment is not safe. It's not, even if there's oxygen, it's still not safe. There's things out there.
00:13:10
Speaker
Well, and you were talking about interstellar. Like one of the amazing things about that is just this idea of them placing a planet like near the gravity well of a black hole so that then there's you know time dilation. If you get into the planet and you come back and there's years that have passed, that is a premier hard science fiction challenge, problem, concern. You know what I Yeah. Yeah, it would break my brain as a GM, but it's awesome. I love it as a player. I'd be just like, oh my God, this is amazing. Best game ever.
Memorable Sci-Fi Planets
00:13:40
Speaker
ah So ah in that regard, when you think about those hard sci-fi, you're thinking about those environmental hazards, you know the the phenomenon that would be caused, that you were just mentioning in Interstellar how the the black hole is interacting. um That's where that hard science fiction comes in. You have to know your stuff.
00:14:01
Speaker
i I think that's true, but I also think like you don't have to know everything, right? Like if you know just enough to kind of seriously get you in trouble. You're saying you could fake it till you make it on this? I'm thinking there's hope for you, Mark. That's what I'm saying.
00:14:14
Speaker
I like it. Hey, one other thing before we leave the hard sci-fi thing. Let's actually talk about the aliens on a hard science fiction planet. Yeah, I just going to mention I wanted to get into the aliens. So what would that look like? So I think the thing about aliens in a hard science fiction setting is that people, I think, don't really believe that in some alien planet you're gonna find humans with prosthetic noses. You know I mean? Like with with Star Trek style forehead appliances and stuff like that. um As satisfying as that is, as great as it helps you out with all kinds of different storytelling things,
00:14:45
Speaker
You do that, you're kind of in soft sci-fi land generally. So, you know, when you go to an alien world in a hard sci-fi setting, you're probably going to find very divergent alien life. the arrival alien life kind of life. Yeah,
00:14:58
Speaker
Where you're just not able to communicate any sort of way that you would normally communicate with. Yeah. and And a lot of the problems you're going to have sort of interacting with them are going to be things like you might've seen in that movie, right? Like they they don't have the same kind of body that you do. They don't have the same way of thinking about language that you do. And so again, hard science fiction players are going to eat up this idea of a challenge that's really grounded in reality. ah But, you know, again, this is very dependent. The success of that game is very dependent on those kinds of players. So Yeah, folks, sorry if we're talking about movies that you maybe haven't seen, but that's your fault.
00:15:34
Speaker
i don't say that Go see The Arrival. Go see Interstellar. Great movies. Great movies. And for God's sake, watch The Expanse. Yeah. um So let's let's kind of
Balancing Narrative with Details
00:15:45
Speaker
make our way into it soft sci-fi, which I think is what most people kind of play, I would say, in an RPG-type setting.
00:15:52
Speaker
This would be food like Star Wars, right? Star Wars, Star Trek. Science is still present, right? Like you're still going to asphyxiate if you go out into hard vacuum in Star Trek, but they're not really trying to tell a whole lot of stories with that. I mean, there's, it's not irrelevant, right? But so one thing I noticed with,
00:16:13
Speaker
Well, I would say more, maybe this is more of a Star Wars problem, but I see this a lot in soft science fiction, is the one climate planet thing.
00:16:23
Speaker
Oh, i was hoping we'd get to this, yeah. You got Hoth, you got Tatooine, Coruscant, Mustafar, all these planets in Star Wars. They're all just like, they're one trick ponies.
00:16:34
Speaker
You got your volcano planet, you got your sand planet. Yeah. um here's Here's what I'll say about that though, right? Is that in In science fiction, that can make sense because you think about what they call the, I think they call it the Goldilocks zone. It's basically that kind of range within which um we think that life as we understand it could start, right? It's this kind of how far away from the sun are you, right? And if you're a certain amount of time away, then parts of the planet are going to be, it's going us, right? Parts of the planet will be frozen. Parts of it will be liquid water. Maybe parts of it can have plants and things like that, but like a little bit closer and yeah, it is going to be desert all the time. going like Venus. It's going to be like Mercury. It's going one of these places where nothing lives and it's just stone or desert. It still doesn't make sense. Like, I mean,
00:17:23
Speaker
There might be some, i mind you, there might be some star Star Wars fan who's going to call up and, Mark, you're wrong. Tatooine does have plants, but there's just not enough to sustain life. Where are they getting their oxygen from? Come on, people.
00:17:36
Speaker
Oh, I see.
00:17:39
Speaker
Well, yeah. So, so I, I think there's something right about that. Is it, is it, think about it this way is what kind of story do i want to tell in the soft sci-fi thing? It's really the narrative leading the science.
00:17:49
Speaker
And so you want to think about like, well, what's the idea on this planet? Like, what's the story I want to tell here? um You could have, a planet that did have all one biome and that's fine.
00:18:02
Speaker
But then the question becomes, is it, what kind of story you're going to tell there? Is it about, is it about scarce resources on this planet and people in the concentrated urban centers on the planet or are kind of living well, but then people in the outlands are kind of getting set to rebel against them and stuff. Is it like Dune where we've got a resource on this planet and it's being extracted and the people on the planet that are sort of native to the planet are yeah getting ready to overthrow them. Like there's so many things you can do.
00:18:29
Speaker
And the planet is really playing a role in that kind of story because if you think about like how
Favorite Planetary Settings
00:18:36
Speaker
Star Wars kind of starts out with with Luke's story, he's on Tatooine.
00:18:41
Speaker
It's obviously this desolate kind of ass end of space, so to speak. And there's that shot of him and there's that vast loneliness and emptiness of the the desert.
00:18:54
Speaker
And he just feels like he's destined to greatness. But you look around. You can't reach your destiny there. yeah You know what I mean? think about Think about how different that would have been if he was on Alderaan, as we've been later introduced to it. He's in a lush, life-giving planet with lots of wonderful waterfalls and forests and natural resources. And ah he's surrounded by a living family in a suburban tract development or something like that, right?
00:19:20
Speaker
I mean, yeah, it just makes a lot more sense. He like basically grew up in Spokane, Washington. I mean, he's like looking out.
00:19:29
Speaker
Oh, goodness. Well, friends, we've we've outed ourselves. This is, by the way, I met Mark. I grew up in Spokane and I met Mark there. So yeah our our memories of of that city are ah this tattooy guys decidedly mixed.
00:19:45
Speaker
ah But you know what, Adat, it really does, it's part of that story is basically what I'm saying. Yeah, Very good. um I think in in a sci-fi setting that's kind of more of a soft sci-fi setting, if you think about aliens there, it actually does make a lot more sense to make them a little more human because the stories you want to tell are really kind of human-style narratives, right? And the whole yeah planet is a stage for that.
00:20:08
Speaker
so having them be a little bit different, but not a lot different actually helps you. And it lets you put the stuff in the foreground that you're trying to put in the foreground.
Engaging Players with Planetary Mysteries
00:20:17
Speaker
And, and um what was that last category you had? Fantasy, right? Yeah. Science fantasy. I think of this as kind of like the spell jammer, pulp sci-fi. It's stuff that really has it um no grounding in science, right? Yeah. We're talking about like ego, the living planet, you know?
00:20:33
Speaker
um And here's where we're going to put in, let's bring it back, crematoria. Oh, yeah. movie. Yeah. Which, Ben, tell us what this this planet is. And because it's so, it was so awesome on screen, but it was so just like, there's no way they could breathe this air.
00:20:52
Speaker
Oh, so I haven't seen the movie for a years. So you're going to have to keep me honest here. But this is a planet where the, I think it rotates on a certain ah you know, but slowly and then the sun kind of cooks it too
Listener Interaction and Feedback
00:21:05
Speaker
much. Yeah. It was like, it was like super cold on one side. That was, the sun was not facing.
00:21:10
Speaker
Like it got like ridiculously cold. And then on the other side where the sun was facing, it was just, everything was burning. Like, and it literally just rotated around and burned a, in a circle. And course, he had to race.
00:21:25
Speaker
He had to race against the oncoming yeah sun horizon. And you're, the whole time I'm watching this, Gwen, There's where would there ever be oxygen on this planet?
00:21:36
Speaker
Like it it all burned off. It would all have been burned off long ago. It was just the silliest concept, but good on screen though. But it made a good movie. I mean, good movie. It made a movie. It made a movie.
00:21:49
Speaker
It was, it' was not too bad, but we're spicy today. Folks, what we're we're saying them with this is that it, it was a really cool set piece. for what the storyteller wanted to do.
00:21:59
Speaker
And he wanted to have this action scene where he was racing across against the sun with fire and frost. and And you know what? That would have made a great action sequence in the game.
00:22:13
Speaker
You cannot tell me that would be fun. yeah Yeah. Look, science fantasy is not at all concerned with science. Science fantasy is entirely concerned with spectacle, story, drama. And all it's doing is it's exchanging the technology and the kind of realistic grounding for magic, blasters for swords. And I think in most other respects, the kind of stories you're going to tell are like the kind of ones you're going to use in the soft sci-fi setting, but you're going to basically go all the way to the spectacle, magical, ah sword wielding end of of the spectrum. And this is where you're going to get into stuff like, like EO, of the living planet. He was in the guardians of the galaxy. Yeah. One in Marvel comics too, as well.
00:22:57
Speaker
Yeah. But I'm just, I mean, these are where you're going to get into some really wacky ideas, but I got to tell you, these are fun places to be in an RPG table for, for people who like that kind of stuff.
00:23:10
Speaker
Yeah. Some of these other places like planets in science fiction, then what are some of the ones you like that you've ah seen over the years? Oh, favorite planets in science fiction. What a great question. It doesn't be just planets, but it could be like movies that kind of had that experience with a relationship with a planet.
00:23:28
Speaker
Mm-hmm. So apparently the Chinese version of this is different and some people think it's better and that's fine. But Netflix actually not long ago did a three body problem show. Okay. I thought it was really interesting.
00:23:40
Speaker
ah Have you happened to have seen this? No, I've never, I've never watched it. I would say check it out. It is going to draw you in and it's got some big ideas. mean I'm okay with a one body problem. maybe Maybe a two, but like three, I'm out. Well, it it's actually, apparently, i didn't know this before seeing this thing, but apparently it's ah it's a real challenge and ah you can't really calculate how... three body problem three body physics things are going to work if you have three like stars in a solar system or whatever like stuff like that or or two stars on a planet or whatever it's it's going to be unpredictable in some way um that does play into the story by the way so uh check it out but i think it's a real interesting it's a really interesting story that is built out of that problem so i think that's kind of a really fun hard sci-fi kind of
00:24:30
Speaker
take um also i mean let's be clear the og hard sci-fi planet experiences europa from the 2001 yeah 2010 movies very good i mean even a more modern one that is really planet-centric is the avatar series yeah like you gotta you gotta kind of ah think of that as like i felt like james cameron just built a planet and he just wanted to show it off And he wrote a movie around it. so Yeah.
00:24:57
Speaker
Well, and and they do a really good job in that movie, I think, too, in the Avatar movies, of really making you feel the alienness of that world and the the sort of the all the different kinds of life that's there. um They're definitely not humans with with weird noses.
00:25:13
Speaker
Yeah. And while he may not go into lot of details of how some that ah that stuff works, you do get a sense that there's thought behind it. There's a cohesiveness to... the alienness of it. and you know So you get the feeling that whether or not you are told how it works You get the feeling that somebody's thought about it. Yeah. I will say that's, interestingly though, that's a story that looks like hard science fiction because the way they treat the technology, which has always been definitely not one of james James Cameron's things. But yeah, like it's, it's definitely kind of like a, you know, kind of an eco tale. It's got a little, you know, yeah kind of indigenous people narrative and stuff like that. soft science fiction yeah at times might even get into the little more ridiculous. Yeah. aspect but again um a very in-depth idea about world building but I also think ah Guardians of the Galaxy is another they have a lot of really like there's no place they land that didn't look interesting
00:26:14
Speaker
Yeah. Well, the idea of taking like a celestial's head and having it be kind of carved out that place they call nowhere in the movies um and having that be a place you could land. Hey guys, don't forget. It doesn't have to be planets. It could be an asteroid moving through space. It could be a rogue planet that is no longer in the solar system that it started in. wait to speak That's not a, that's not a moon.
00:26:35
Speaker
Yeah, it could be a big space station. It could be like that towering epic of, I think 1997 Armageddon by Michael Bay. You could send some drill guys up to put a bomb inside a comet until it epic tell it blows up.
00:26:52
Speaker
Oh my gosh. I still weep when I see that movie. i I weep that was ever made. All right. So let's say what kind of things that we're designing a planet. We're trying to think about what we're going to, we're going to send our hapless players to.
00:27:10
Speaker
What do you try to avoid then? Yeah. Two quick things. Number one, don't try to become an astrophysicist, a planetologist, a geologist, a meteorologist, a chemist, like all the other kinds of things.
00:27:22
Speaker
Not necessary. You don't have to be Neil deGrasse Tyson? No, happily not. um All you have to do, I don't even think Neil deGrasse Tyson would have all the different like disciplines you would need to fully describe this thing. You can really go down the rabbit hole.
00:27:35
Speaker
He would be the worst GM anyway. but ah You know, let's let's stay open-minded. If he calls and he wants to GM a game, I'll play it. Let's find out, you know? Okay. Neil deGrasse Tyson, if you're out there listening, never mind.
00:27:49
Speaker
He's not... dessert he's not listening but you know what our invitation's open hey so yeah don't try to like do all of the stuff you could get mired and all that and it could keep you from getting to the story you want to tell find one or two things that will sell the reality of that for the kind of game you're playing if it's a hard sci-fi thing find something sciencey if it's a soft sci-fi thing or science fantasy thing find the nature of the cultures and the life on that planet that you want to interact with and do something interesting with Second point, don't overwhelm your players with your homework. Let's say you do go down that rabbit hole or even part of the way down that rabbit hole, you are going to feel like you want to tell them everything about how much gravity this world has, whether it's got a spaceport, what the different political blah, blah, blah, blah. And all of the players are going to just disengage. You're going to see all the phones come out as they sort of look to see if something else is going on tonight. It's too you guys.
00:28:45
Speaker
As a player, like ah particularly in a science fiction game, you're usually having a lot of new ideas thrown at you. You got your books, you got your tech, and you have to like all this stuff you got to keep track of.
00:28:58
Speaker
Now you got your GMs giving you a five page document on this stupid planet. um Let me, let me, let me caveat that though. One thing you can do is if you do have a lot of that really cool background information, two things, one, see how it could fit into your story or develop your story because that's what makes it useful.
00:29:15
Speaker
And then, yeah, that's the other thing Like let it be skill roles or let it be things they discover. Let it be stuff that gets revealed over time. And then that'll create depth. We don't need to know the whole – we just need to know what it's like where you land.
00:29:27
Speaker
And then you start exploring outwards as you as you grow into this planet. And then yeah at at moments, the GM can start dropping bigger bigger bits as you are digesting.
00:29:38
Speaker
with you on that one. i'm with you on that one I know we're getting short on time. I'm just going to add like one other quick little complaint. And this is about Star Trek. And this kind of relates to this, right? is Careful, Ben.
00:29:49
Speaker
Very careful. We don't want to alienate our Star Trek base. Well, that's true. One of the things I didn't really like so much about later Star Trek, sort of next gen forward kind of thing was like, they could do all the work they needed to do to learn about that planet from orbit.
00:30:04
Speaker
You know, they'd be like, I'm scanning the planet down to like three millimeters. Oh, it looks like there's a microbe there. Like you shouldn't be able to know that kind of stuff from orbit, right? I kind of love the original series for that. If you want to know about a planet, you've got to go take a shuttlecraft or beam down there or whatever and like go check it out yourself.
00:30:21
Speaker
Yeah, that that's true. We found that out with Traveler. It's more fun when you're actually on the ship. Let's get into our tune-up take segment.
00:30:35
Speaker
All right, Mark, this week I'm turning the tables on you. It's your turn to answer. And I think this is a little bit connected to some of our previous discussion here. We have a tune-up question from one of our listeners.
00:30:46
Speaker
How do you create on your geographies, your maps or or your descriptions of the world, how do you create the kind of larger-than-life environment geographical anomalies, things that probably shouldn't exist in the real world, things that draw attention and create mystery and invite players to think about the lore that might have occurred in that place.
00:31:06
Speaker
Let's bring it to our science fiction ah world building since we can kind of like segue that back into our our topic here. Cool. I want to give you an example of something I was really intrigued by. everybody Everybody who saw this movie was intrigued by.
00:31:25
Speaker
You land on LV-426. Oh, no. Yeah. And you see that giant, mysterious ship that's crashed there.
00:31:36
Speaker
Who knows how long? You don't know. It's been there for a long time. It looks like it's part of the ah environment almost. Yeah. And um so you that's that right there is I'm not going to say that's a geographical anomaly, but it is an anomaly. Yeah.
00:31:52
Speaker
And ah in in any game, it doesn't doesn't have to be geographical. It could be. It's located there. So as long as it's got a place. And that mystery drove those players, you know, or the characters in the movie to go explore that ship.
00:32:09
Speaker
And it became, of course, the movie Alien, which we all love. It created a franchise. If that was a game at the table, that that game would still be played to this day.
00:32:21
Speaker
ah Well, they do have an alien RPG. I haven't tried it, but, uh, you know, i hear it's good. But that folks is a geographical anomaly in a sci-fi game, but it could be in a fantasy game. It could be some great, something somebody built from some civilization a long time ago that maybe hasn't been discovered in a long time. Um, Cataclysms, actually you, you have an example of this in the game we're currently playing where we have like a, a glass desert of some kind. Can you talk about the glass reach?
00:32:53
Speaker
Yeah, we just kind of keep up with this idea of this ah this this desert where there's wild pockets of magic that create this almost like glass out of the desert. And the glass can you know absorb different types of magics. They're dangerous to go through.
00:33:10
Speaker
um we haven't really explored it too much in the game. We've kind of talked about it. But here's the thing, folks. You build up mystery. You build up lore about these places.
00:33:21
Speaker
And that's what's going to make them interesting. And as ah as a person who's designing this stuff, if it makes you question it, if it makes you curious, you're on the right path.
00:33:33
Speaker
yeah You can sometimes just leave it really like, I don't know what it is, but it's got me intrigued. One of the things that makes this really fun is if you're using like map software or you're using other things where maybe they have like a catalog of different symbols you can drop onto the map. And so you're like, I'm going to put a whirlpool there.
00:33:51
Speaker
What's that all about? Why is there a whirl whirlpool there? I don't know, but that's something you can drop in there and answer that question later with something really interesting. Yeah. interesting thing about that is that I mean, you could drop that on there and players will be intrigued by it.
00:34:06
Speaker
And if, you know, obviously you put it on there because it was intriguing to you, you really get a sense of what the players are actually interested in when they start looking at these maps and go, okay, I want to go check that place out.
00:34:18
Speaker
That looks interesting. And you've kind of done a little bit of the work of like, part of the Part of the job is as GM is get people interested in your places, your events, and sometimes it's just dropping little bits about, like, say, the glass reach and describe just a little bit of it makes them intrigued.
00:34:38
Speaker
So LV426 is kind of a good example of that. Like, I probably would have checked out. If I was on that planet, I probably would have gone and checked it out, too.
00:34:49
Speaker
And I probably would have died. Yeah. Yeah. Find the thing that looks different from everything else or make something that looks like it shouldn't belong there. And I think people are going to start asking questions.
00:35:00
Speaker
All right. Thanks guys. um We will return. I'm not, we don't have our topic for next, our next tabletop tune-up, but we'll, we'll figure it out by next game. or I think we have a few good candidates here, so we'll, we'll make some choices and ah yeah, we'll see in a few weeks. Hey, remember you can always reach out to us at tabletop tune-up at gmail.com. Give us your ideas, thoughts. You can also drop a comment on YouTube.
00:35:24
Speaker
Yeah, that'd be great. We'll read those. We'll check them out. We'll ah bring you into the conversation. And that conversation will resume in a couple of weeks. But until then, keep those dice rolling.
00:36:03
Speaker
Oh
00:36:35
Speaker
Get your tune up. It's time for your tune up. Your game needs a tune up. Come get your tune up.
00:36:47
Speaker
It's time for your tune up. Your game needs a tune up.