Well met and greetings, Agemegos. I'm just a bit north of you in Brisbane.
Ah yes, a little way north. I'll drop in for a coffee, shall I?
Though I am new here, I'm sure everyone will make you feel welcome.
Thank you.
I'd be keen to maybe hear a bit more of your offerings, and some of the stuff you've done.
Well, I wrote my SF setting
Flat Black almost exactly twenty years ago: the first session was at the beginning of Second Semester 1988, when I was at ANU. The first campaign followed the careers of a small group of criminal investigation agents in the Imperial Department of Justice. The second campaign, dubbed "Thirtysomething" concerned a group of friends in the
Demimonde (ie. that lass of colonial (ie. planetary) society that frequently travels on interstellar liners, but which is not involved with the Imperial Mission). Then there was a mercenaries campaign (which didn't work very well), then a Survey (≈Scouts, in
Traveller terms) campaign. And then a "Colonial Office, covert/wet" campaign. Since then I have run another four Survey campaign, four Department of Justice campaigns, an Imperial Secret Service campaign, and another two mercenaries campaigns, besides several one-off adventures. And I have played in two Secret Service campaigns run by friends, and one
Flat Black meets the
Planet of Adventure campaign.
Flat Black's first outing at the cons was Sydcon '98, if I recall correctly. I ran two iterations of a political/diplomatic freeform with an Imperial party, three warring factions in a newly-discovered colonial society, and a party of oppressed alien indigenes. I seem to recall that it went pretty well, though not perfectly. And its second outing was at Phenomenon '05, where I ran six iterations of a thriller for agents of the Imperial Department of Justice. To, if I recall, considerable acclaim. There are scraps of material for
Uninvited Guests (the freeform) and
Après Moi, L'Enfer (the thriller) on the 'Net, besides which I made an abortive attempt to re-run the thriller as a play-by-messageboard-posting game on teh SJGames forums, under the more appropriate title
9,401.
I conceived
Flat Black partly in reaction against
ForeScene, the flagship setting for
ForeSight, the RPG I was playing at the time.
ForeScene was supposed to be a Utopia, albeit a flawed one. Quite aside from the fact that I thought that a lot of the author's utopian ideas were ill-considered,
ForeScene had the problem that the Federation it described was dull, safe, and boring, so adventures tended to take place in the Beyond, which wasn't described. Correspondingly,
Flat Black was very much not a utopia.
You could I suppose see
Flat Black as a highly divergent Alternative Traveller Universe. The history is nothing like that in the OTU, and the government is not at all feudal, space is three-dimensional and local (based at first on the original Gliese star catalogue and now on Gliese 3.0), and technology is rather different. There are no Vargr or Aslans or Vilani other space-faring rivals to Terran Man. There are no psionics. There is no countergrav, and the jump drive works differently, and in detail nothing is the same, but. . . .
In
Flat Black as in
Traveller there is an Empire that rules space and interstellar trade is its life-blood. Space is beset with inhabited planets, which are self-governing and have divergent cultures. Because of slow communications, the Empire must delegate authority to local officials who perforce have a high degree of autonomy, and it depends on the ironclad honour of its people to keep those delegates honest. Adventures are principally about player characters encountering strange societies, finding their peculiarities at first quaint, and then bizarre and vexatious; and then learning to cope with these social features, perhaps even exploiting them to their own advantage. That's the extent to which
Flat Black is like the OTU.
As for differences: the Empire in
Flat Black happens to be smaller, though it wouldn't matter if it, too, had 11,000 planets. The supreme executive authority in the Empire is a Board of Trustees, self-perpetuating by co-optation: the Emperor is merely its chief executive, rather like the managing director of a company. The Empire is supervised by a Senate of colonial representatives with the power to impeach its officers. The Senate is also a legislative chamber, and has control of taxation, The colonies have a constitutional guarantee of independence from Imperial meddling without legal authorisation from the Senate, and the Senate, being deeply suspicious of IMperial tyranny, is very sparing with its authorisations. On the other hand, the Empire has a monopoly on interstellar travel, so it is independent of tax revenue (the development of new worlds for settlement turned out to be much more lucrative than the framers of the Treaty of Luna allowed for, and the Imperial Realty Corporation pulls down two planets per year in real estate.
Earth was destroyed in
Flat Black. So were Mayflower (the colony that the institutions that were fore-runners of the Empire came from) and Orinoco (the forerunners of the Empire actually did that). As a result, the Empire has developed a fanatical horror of mass death, and is completely obsessed by terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, and the use of spaceships as weapons. (Yes, I know, it's trite. But I wrote this in 1988. I actually had to cancel a running
Flat Black campaign in September '01.)
In
Flat Black psychology has developed into a working engineering discipline. One result is that the Empire can be pretty sure that anyone it recruits has a genuine calling to its ideals, and is not inclined to become corrupt. Another is that ways of raising children can be designed to turn out the sort of adults you want, within constraints and with known uncertainties. Such techniques are used in the schools that the Empire provides for the children of its employees, guaranteeing a steady succession of fresh generations of incorruptible Imperial loyalist fanatics.
That's
Flat Black, pretty much. I also have a fantasy setting that was designed as a reaction against vanilla fantasy, and which is correspondingly tropical rather than cool-temperate, oceanic rather than continental, and inhabited by people of a non-European racial type with a non-Western culture:
Gehennum. But no stretch of the imagination could make it even the most discrepant ATU, so I wont describe it here.
Is there anything else you would like to know?
Otherwise, Flat Black looks interesting.
