This is a continuation of this post here.
For the structure of posts on this topic going forward, I'm planning on following the resistance toolbox by Grant Howitt & Chris Taylor. The first question it asks is: who are the player characters?
The player characters are posthuman - they exist in a world where, in the distant past, many of the assumptions of the mech genre (and SFF more broadly) held sway and humans explored the stars and staged warfare with colossal human-shaped vehicles. That was a long, long time ago. At this stage, they have co-evolved with the cybernetic, often bio-organic life they created, as well as non-terrestrial life they encountered, often blurring the line between species, individual, and living/nonliving itself.
Ok so, that's who they are in a physical sense. What are they actually going to be doing in the game?
The media I draw inspiration from begins with a small ensemble of core cast members that work together to overcome obstacles. Each possess distinct advantages, not dissimilar from a ttrpg party (I suspect because it is easy for kids to keep track of and collect the whole set). The broader context for their existence is absent at first, as this has traditionally been viewed as is an obstacle to selling merch. Where long running narrative is a component, this aspect is filled in or gradually pieced together by the writers, and depending on the degree of editorial oversight this can result in some truly wild and contradictory continuity - The transformers? Actually a slave species created by tyranical robo-cephalopods with five faces who rose up against their masters. No wait, they're actually creations of a God Planet that exists simultaneously in all realities, and have tangible Souls. Bionicle, similarly, is about the tiny components of a planet-sized robot that worship it as a deity.
In several memorable instances, it can feel as if the characters are piecing together a larger ontological mystery as they discover more and more about their world and circumstances for the conflict that must needs continue as long as there are more toys to sell. I want to lean into that with this project - the PCs start out atomized, unsure of their exact orientation to the world around them and their relationship to its history, but nevertheless deeply embedded in that history and its conflicts. The sprawling setting i'm invisioning tries to avoid specifics right out the bat.
Along with individual character progression, I want to design a system for the slow knitting together of disparate elements that form a wider picture of how things relate to one another, mechanically, biologically, politically. I want to allow room for both players and their characters to make discoveries about the world and their place in it, without an all-knowing GM sitting on the answers and revealing them piecemeal.
There are some "adventure hooks" knocking around in my head that might either be fleshed out or remain as hooks for the players to develop for themselves
- The characters are workers in a massive plant that extracts vitreous liquid from the core of a planet. When it starts to break down, they must venture into the depths of the world to find out why.
- The characters are ancient warriors that have been dormant for millennia, siezed by a revolutionary faction to give them an edge in a desperate conflict.
- The characters are synthetically pieced together by a generation ship as defense against an infection that has been eating away at the ship's self-contained ecosystem.
- The characters are amnesiacs marooned on a world after breaking apart in its atmosphere. They must repair not only their ship's systems but their own bodies.
- The characters are religious pilgrims to a dead planet-god. They must learn how to bring it back to life, or face annihilation as the energies sustaining them break down.
I hope that these will be adequate starting points to situate the players in a strange, spiraling universe, and allow them to ask questions about their position in it, and explore the ways in which mechanical and bioligical life has radiated and adapted throughout it.