MOSH: Environmental Scenario Design Framework

Via NASA

Planet generation is a topic I keep coming back to, trying to develop the perfect formula. This post has been percolating for well over a year at this point, long enough that I had actually forgotten the contents of my prior attempts (see here, here, here and here)

I have been fiddling around with this idea for a very long while now (I think this is a year+ draft?), and in doing so I have come to a revelation of sorts.

The revelation is this: In terms of making a functional component of a tabletop game, most planet generation tables are mostly useless.

They're certainly fun if you want to indulge your inner sci-fi writer for a while, and they are a useful tool in establishing the flavor and character of a location, but as a functional component of game prep? Not very useful.

(Stars Without Number's tag tables are of course very good - because they're about providing you with points of interaction.)

We can reduce all those tables of atmosphere and temperature and mass down to a binary: if you take off your helmet, either the planet kills you instantly or it doesn't.

If the planet is the sort that kills you instantly, your adventuring is either going to be inside a habitat or out in a suit. (For our purposes, gas giants and deep space are also included here.) If the planet is not the kind that kills you instantly, that's Basically Just Earth. This gives us three functional location-based adventure types:

• Habitat - An enclosed environment, ranging from the equivalent of a single building to that of a small country. There are nice thick walls and layers of safeguards between you and enough radiation to fry your progeny to the seventh generation.
• Out in a Suit - Outside of the habitat, you are both vulnerable to the elements and at significantly increased risk of finding yourself out of range of help or support.
• Basically Just Earth - You already know what this one is like, you live here. Basically Just Earth is not beholden to the clean kills you / does not kill you dichotomy. It can certainly still kill you, but not as fast as the others (usually).

I'm leading this all to the point that if we're going to be generating planets for Mothership, we should be generating them with a focus on one of these three adventure location roles.

Habitat

95% of the human population lives here, in the Iterative City and similar settlements. Monkeys in tin cans, in dome cities, in walled-off fragments of Earth.

Scale

1. Facility
2. Town
3. City
4. Metropole
5. Country

Type (Orbital)

1. Bernal Sphere - Rotating sphere.
2. O'Neill Cylinder - Rotating cylinder.
3. Stanford Torus - Rotating ring.
4. Beehive - Asteroid or iceteroid that has been burrowed into.
5. Tin Can - Little more than a pressurized can with thrusters and solar panels attached.
6. Gravity Balloon - A comparatively thin shell filled with enough atmosphere to keep it from collapsing in on itself.
7. Dyson Tree - An enormous, genetically modified plant fed on icy bodies and sustaining an enclosed atmosphere.
8. Freefall - Any type of large habitat with no spin-gravity components.
9. Decommissioned Ship - A spaceship that is no longer serviceable for interplanetary or interstellar travel, but can still serve as living space.
10. Modular - A collection of connected habitats, often of different types. Roll d3 for # of additional modules.
    

Type (Planetside)

1. Dome - The classic. Can't go wrong with a good dome.
2. Burrow - Underground is sometimes the safest place to be.
3. Lava Tube - Saves on digging costs.
4. Aerostat - Suspended in a dense atmosphere.
5. Hydrostat - Suspended on or underneath liquid.
6. Worldhouse - A crater or canyon is domed over, sealed, and terraformed in-miniature; kin to an enormous greenhouse.

Habitats will always be accompanied by some manner of support infrastructure (power generation, resource extraction and reclamation, food production, etc), though self-sufficiency is not a given and many habitats could be easily crippled or killed outright if cut off from the necessary imports,

The biggest hazard in a habitat is the enclosed environment.

• Your options for escaping or avoiding the threat are limited.
• You will be in close quarters with other people (if other people are present).
• You are more likely to be in a surveilled environment.
• Instant or near-instant death lurks on the other side of the wall.

Out in a Suit

Going out in a suit means that your number one priority is getting back to somewhere you can take the suit off. No one wants to go out in a suit, but sometimes circumstances will force your hand.

Why Are You Out In A Suit?

1) You need to travel between habitats.
2) External equipment needs repair or maintenance.
3) You are trying to reach a location.
4) You are trying to find a person.
5) You are investigating an event.

Environmental Hazards

The Rimspace Planet Generator from the Hull Breach folks has us covered here, and I'll be copying their tables mostly wholesale. I've added a fourth table for radiation and magnetic field just to even the horrible space dangers out, and I've added mechanical bits where the original tables implied them.

Temperature

1. Frigid - Extreme thermal protection required
2. Cold - Thermal protection required
3. Temperate - You don't need any special protection from the temperature
4. Hot - Thermal protection required
5. Burning - Extreme thermal protection required

Gravity

1. Minimal - 0-G training required
2. Low - Move with caution
3. Standard - You don't need any special adaptation to the gravity
4. High - Habituation required
5. Crushing - Strength training or exoskeleton required

Atmosphere

1. Negligible - Pressure suit required
2. Thin - Hazard suit recommended
   
3. Moderate - You don't need any special protection against pressure
4. Thick - Extreme winds and precipitation; Hazard suit recommended
   
5. Dense - Pressure suit required

Thin / Moderate / Thick could all technically be breathable, but that's for Basically Just Earth.

Rads & Mags

1. Extreme radiation - Surface exploration lethal
2. High radiation - Hazard suit required
3. Tolerable - You don't need any special protection
4. High magnetism - High electromagnetic interference
5. Extreme magnetism - Wireless devices useless

The biggest hazards while Out in a Suit is running out of resources

• Air supply will be limited
• Suit integrity is critical to your safety.
• Communication is more likely to be unreliable.
• You are more likely to be far away from help.

Basically Just Earth

You will neither freeze nor fry instantly here, and neither the gravity nor the atmosphere will crush you flat. It might not look like Earth, but the fact that you can stand there and say "It doesn't look much like Earth" is a miracle. This doesn't mean that the environment is safe, only that it will not immediately kill you. It is functionally Basically Just Earth, which means you might still need specialized survival equipment, genetic modification, or something else of that nature.

Basically Just Earth has the widest array of hazards to choose from, to the point where you can choose what you like from the lists above and elsewhere. But the biggest ones will be:

• Availability of open space means its easier to find yourself isolated.
• Earthlike worlds can support more factions (and faction conflicts)
• Spaceship escapes are a lot less practical
• We all know you want to put weird aliens here, go right on ahead.

 

Final Thoughts

So there you have it. Not particularly complex, but I think it's a good framework to bolt additional complexity on top of. MoSh works best when it is scenario-focused, so sketching the boundaries that will shape a scenario is the obvious first step.

Hopefully clearing this article (which had been sitting at like, 90% done for that year+) will get the others flowing along to completion. Damn my perfectionism - when it flares up, it flares up bad.

Bookpost 17

Previous installments found here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 , 7, 8, 9, 10 , 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16

Story of Your Life and Others, Ted Chiang

A solid collection overall. Some weak ones, but mostly good. Tower of Babylon is an absolute banger and I am surprised that they chose Story of Your Life for the movie adaptation over it. Seventy-Two Names is my favorite and the one problem with it is that it is a short story and not a novel, because it is paced like a novel and I want more of this bizarro “what if outmoded Victorian scientific theories were actually true and also practical Kabbalah is involved”. Hell is the Absence of God really manages to hone in on the horror of the total arbitrariness of miracles. The only one that really flopped for me was the one about the guy who suddenly became superhumanly smart, that one was pretty dull except for the part where he invents not-Ithkuil.

 

Flatland, Edwin A. Abbot

When reading a suitably old book, you’re bound to run into some yikes moments. Flatland hits well above its weight class by delivered with some truly brutal satire that, as an anomaly in the genre, still works well over a century later. Our narrator the square does indeed praise the virtues of his iron-fisted eugenecist caste-system theofascist state with all the sexism, classism, and undifferentiated blind cruelty one would expect from a Victorian gentleman…and the book’s entire point is how he and the society he lives in are blind to greater reality and all of their oppression and repression is based on shit that doesn’t matter one bit in the grand scheme of things. It’s a short book, so saying more will dilute the effect, but I definitely recommend it. Easy read. Certainly telling that it was by book of choice while on 8-hour layover in Philly.

 

The Madman, Kahlil Gibran

This is a book that I do not have the ability, currently, to adequately describe in a shotgun review. I enjoyed it, it’s public domain, it’s 40-odd pages of prose-poetry, go read it.

 

The Northern Caves, nostagabraist

A wild bit of web fiction: a small cadre of nerds in the early 00s attempt to decipher the incomprehensible mysteries of a children’s fantasy series of questionable quality. Not an actual children’s fantasy series of questionable quality, a fictional one that contains some traits of extant children’s fantasy of questionable quality but is entirely its own thing.

Anyway, this contains both an incredibly accurate depiction of early 00s forums as well as one of the best examples of characters gaining Insight this side of Bloodborne. I recommend it if you want something with a very specific vision of weirdness that manages to deliver on it, though be warned that the ebook version I download borked the forum post interstitial chapters and didn’t display everything correctly.

The Book of Japanese Folklore, Thersa Matsuura

The Uncanny Japan podcast in book form. Definitely geared for a younger / more general audience, so it’s not a perfect fit for me personally, but the art is nice and it’s a breezy read. Good gift material.

The Complete Poems of Enheduana, the World’s First Author, trans. Sophus Helle

Last year, I read a terrible book about the writings of Enheduana and wrote at length about how bad it was. This book is the polar opposite of that one, and I couldn’t be happier with it. 

The translation is snappy and an easy read, and Helle does a very striking bit of design by limiting the lines to how they appear in the tablets: the lines are all in a narrow column, with about 2/3rds of a page left blank. Missing lines are represented with a row of asterisks (one of the poems is almost entirely dots because of this). 

This is all accompanied by a very thorough exploration of the historical context of Enheduana herself, the Babylonians who inherited her texts and used them as part of their classics curriculum, and how those texts were re-discovered in the 20th century. Every time there is a blank spot where we simply don’t have enough data, Helle will present the possibilities but never settle on one as definitive (an extremely welcome attribute). There are footnotes and endnotes galore, most of which are illuminated and several of which are very funny (To paraphrase some of the highlights -“We can translate this line but can’t figure out what it means, it’s probably a pun”; “This is probably a dick joke”; and “This is definitely a dick joke.”

 

Native Tongue, Suzette Haden Elgin

DNF 40/301

A book of feminist science fiction about linguistics, which has the unfortunate timing of being written in 1984 and thus aged like milk in the sun on all three accounts. This is on top of just stodgy, clunky prose, minimal plot, briefest whiffs of characterization, and no real care for the setting beyond what is necessary to justify the bunk linguistics (hard Sapir-Worf is apparently the only linguistics thing sci-fi authors have ever heard of, which is baffling in Elgin’s case because she was apparently an actual linguist. Come on, you’ve studied Navajo and you can’t think of anything better than “your language determines what thoughts you have”?)

The only reason this series is remembered is because there is a conlang attached, which is the only reason I picked it up. The conlang does not, in fact, actually occur in the book, despite the book being mostly about its creation and about how impossibly miraculous it is for someone to make up new words to describe concepts that don’t have dedicated terms (please note the sarcasm: this is the process that all languages are doing all the time, forever.)

 

House of Rust, Khadija Abdalla Bajaber

DNF 18/252

There is something about the prose in this one that just doesn’t work for me. It’s dense and obtuse, but not in a way that invites engagement. Weird tense shifts, pronouns with unclear antecedents, and other assorted rocky writing methods made it difficult from jump.

Burning Roses, S.L. Huang

A novella that is very well written and has some great character work about guilt, forgiveness, and generational trauma, which then undermines all of that in the last 20 pages by committing the cardinal sin of mixing “story about wrestling with familial drama” with “this guy committed some fucking war crimes”. This keeps happening, and I would like it to stop. But sure. Reward them with peaches of immortality because mother and son have forgiven each other and come to terms with their mutual failings. I’m sure the charred corpses of the hundreds of people killed by the giant magical firebirds will take great solace in the afterlife knowing that the little shit who gave the order finally got over his issues with his mother. Sure. Fucking wonderful. Fucking redemption arcs, not even once. Forgiveness is not a gatcha machine you can just put tokens in until you win the prize you want.

A Court of Thorns and Roses (+sequels), Sarah J. Maas

Didn’t actually read these, but my partner has been listening to the audiobooks and telling me about them. Everything I have is second hand summaries of the first 5 books. 

It’s kinda like observing antimatter from a safe distance, or an encounter with a logic wholly alien and orthogonal to the one I know.

I don’t know how my partner puts up with my constant “this all sounds miserable, why do they not simply destroy the aristocracy, when does the plot about destroying the aristocracy happen, why has no one hit Tamlin in the head with a heavy object, so is there an actual government with like, roads and taxes or something, would it be possible to just invent a gun, what do you mean they can’t do a C-section they have resurrected the dead twice” and so on. 

The one actually meaningful critique thing I can say is “fated mates and weird age gaps and magical bloodlines and the weird and kinda dehumanizing insistence on using male/female instead of man/woman make me want to crawl out of my skin and flee the premises, what the fuck.”

 Also I don’t understand how a series that keeps bringing up fantasy politics consistently doesn’t seem to care one bit about fantasy politics. (Actually, I do understand this: Maas is not a political materialist; the fantasy politics she writes about are not beholden to the logistical calculus of the flows of food, information, transit and violence.)

Gyo, Junji Ito

It’s Junji Ito; you’re going to get gross shit, horrible, absurd things happening, and a steady escalation in terrible horrible no good very bad shit. I sat down and binged it in a single day, and while I don’t like it as much as Uzumaki, it was effective with the creepiness and the grossout factor. Unfortunately the characters are paper-thin, which means that it is also pretty dang misogynist out of genre convention. It’s rough. I was hooked by “how is this going to escalate”, but if that’s not enough to keep you going, you’re probably not going to have a great time. 

Golden Kamuy, Satoru Noda

LET’S FUCKING GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Primo combination of Things I Love to See. Certified freaks: check. Dudes getting in over-the-top fights: check. In-depth asides about anthropology: there’s a fucking works cited at the back of every volume we are checked and ready for launch. By volume six we have seen at least three dudes get absolutely wrecked by bears. 

Sugimoto gets a surprising amount of surprisingly subtle characterization as a young man aged beyond his years by trauma, and that’s something you don’t see often in this conceptual space - especially not with as light a touch as you get here. And major props for nimbly dodging the magical indigenous person trope - Noda’s research into Ainu culture really shows, because he will take every opportunity he can to go “here is how the Ainu live in their environment and how their culture is materially informed by that environment.”