Villeins of Tomorrow 2026-03-29
I'm back on this, and I've been thinking about a few issues I was having with the design:
- What kind of tone should I aim for?
- What sorts of things should the player characters be able to do?
- What sorts of things should the player characters be doing over the course of a campaign?
I initially wanted to have a "serious" tone, with "realistic" portrayals of "the enemy factions think it's like that, but actually it's like this", and I didn't even have that clear of an idea for the other two questions.
After having a few months for this to bounce around in my head, I concluded that a more irreverent tone should fit my rhetorical goals just as well, and should make the setting easier to work with. I'm thinking The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy as a major source of inspiration here, and some further inspiration from something like Poor Superman.
And thinking about The Hitchhiker's Guide reminded me of a particular quote from it: "[...] and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri". Although I definitely want to be open to human characters, I thought it would make sense to focus on the role of puppetry in science fiction. And that gave me an idea that let me offload a lot of my questions onto a pre-existing game: instead of trying to design everything from scratch, I can try to put together a playset for Eat God. Here are the tweaks that I think are needed, offhand:
- Need rules for playing as a human.
- Need to have some way of representing the four character backgrounds I want.
- Need alternative forms of names for players to choose.
- Need to at least consider an alternative framing to "eating god"; on the other hand, space opera does often have lots of gods out there, so perhaps it's not really a stretch.
From there, I can then hopefully put together some generic or specific scenarios; I ideally want at least one focusing on each of the three branches of the Complex.
My plan is to properly read over everything, take notes as I go, and then start putting something together. For now, though, I need to get to bed.
Good night.