60 Years in Space: The Finale

• Part 1: Crew & Mission Generation 
• Part 2: Rocket Science
• Part 3: Mission Year 1 
• Part 4: Mission Years 2-4 

What a wild ride.

TLDR Version

• I had fun
• It scratches a particular itch no other game (that I know of) is scratching
• I wouldn’t recommend it

Now if some other mad bastard really wants to try playing it, I'll gladly encourage them to do so and point at my play reports as an example of how, but I wouldn’t go out of my way to rec it to anyone who isn’t a certified Sci-Fi Sicko with extreme patience and or an extremely specific compatible hyperfocus.

I like highly-procedural solo games

This series has really made that clear, and it’s probably why I stuck with 60 Years far longer than I did with the more mechanically-polished Ironsworn. If everything is loosey-goosey make-a-narrative there's no real draw for me, because that is already the default setting of my waking hours.

Characters feel irrelevant

I don’t think I would have lost much if the Hayashida’s crew had been fully elided, or reduced to brief bits of fluff. For the amount of work it took to make and maintain the characters, zoomed-out play rarely gave individuals something to do, and those times it did felt like unwanted intrusions. 

Solo play for 60 Years sits in a weird middle ground between playing as a single character and playing as the faction: for this kind of game I prefer the latter and I think 60 Years is stronger that way.

Additional complication is that most of character generation is stuff that doesn’t really apply once you get into the late game. Like I'm not entirely sure how you even make a character for later eras, because clearly the starting archetypes aren’t going to cut it, and family and nationality aren’t relevant. I guess you’d use A Facility With Words? 

A Lot of Zeroes bypasses the character issues by letting you choose what kind of funky transhuman your crewmembers are via their Lifestyle, and then just not really using them further - the shortest Operation in that game is 12 years long, so there’s not a lot of room for granularity. This, mixed with FWs approach would probably be the best way to roll with a faction-level game in earlier eras.

BSUs still don’t work, but they probably could

They work better when you’re in Sci-Fi Sicko territory, but in early phases when you’re still using real-world organizations the limitations are apparent.

A potential patch would be to swap out the real-world organizations with thematically-appropriate fictional ones, and use them as default/invariable starting options. While this goes against the spirit of the game somewhat, using broad-brush trope-based factions to fill the broad-brush trope-based BSU colors works. I cooked up with three sets just as an example, using Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, Mass Effect (you can just pretend the aliens are just like, countries on alternate Earth or something), and the SCP wiki.

• Red - Human Hive or Spartan Federation
• White - Lord’s Believers
• Green - Stepdaughters of Gaia
• Purple - UN Peacekeeping Forces
• Orange - Morgan Industries or University of Planet

**

• Red - Batarians
• White - Turians
• Green - Elcor, Volus, Hanar, Drell
• Purple - Asari
• Orange - Salarians

**

• Red - Daevite Empire
• White - Adytumite Sarkics
• Green - Fae and / or Bigfoot
• Purple - Ortothan Kingdoms 
• Orange - Mekhanite Orthodoxy

None of these would work for the game proper in the books, but it’s extremely easy to cook up alternatives: Atlantis, Mu, Kin-Yan, Lemuria, Carcosa. Writes itself.

Issues of Scale

A lot of the friction in 60 Years comes from the fact that it’s five different games in a trenchcoat: a game about the astronauts of a single crew, a game about factions expanding and exploring, a future-history worldbuilding simulation game, a colony building game, and a deep space / deep time exploration game. 

The last two are mostly self-contained, and it seems that this is the direction the bulk of the game is going to be taking in the future, which is a very welcome shift: A Lot of Zeroes,  A Facility with Words and the heretofore unmentioned A-Base D-Landing are designed to be more or less standalone - unfortunately for me, I wasn’t using any of that material. CR and SI are still married-but-separated to each other and keep leaving their things in each other’s apartments, and AE is clearly marked as a supplement so while not a standalone game it does live in its own world and that’s fine.

Proceduralism and Design

The game works best when there’s a procedural outline to follow, and its biggest flaw is that the books aren’t laid out to support that. This isn’t unique to 60 Years, of course; ttrpgs in general have inherited a lot of bad design from the 90s and early Aughts, and have been playing catch-up to the board game revolution ever since.

The current version is better than it was at launch, but still nowhere near where it should be: the core loop should be contained within a single book, whatever form that will take, and the mechanics should be presented in the order they’re relevant. 

Ultimately, I don't think that the layout and information presentation issues in 60 Years are fixable while it’s still being laid out in LATEX. That program can automate a whole hell of a lot, but sometimes you just need to be able to click and drag something manually.

A Map, a Map, My Kingdom for a Map

60 Years, as written, has an enormous amount of content entirely dependent on having the High Frontier map on hand; this experiment would have been unplayable without the online planner someone made.

The only alternative presented in the book, which I brought up in Post 2, doesn’t really fill the mechanical gap left behind if you remove the map. This puts the game in a weird limbo where neither option is fully functional: the intended experience is missing its central component, and the alternative is so lightly sketched that I’m certain it will break other mechanics later on down the road.

This doesn’t have to be a one or the other thing, the game could include both play options and I think it should; I also think that its current state doesn’t help anyone.

A pared-down, printer-friendly version of the High Frontier map is possible with a bit of creative re-interpretation: I’ve seen solar system maps laid out as subway lines, so it’s entirely possible to get more compact. End of the day you’re just dealing with lines and shapes and abstracting the rest.

[Aside: I am one of those extremely unhelpful people who says “figuring out how to get somewhere is easy, because there are only ever three options: turn left, turn right, and go forward.”]

By that same token, if the no-map travel rules are going to be an option, I think they need more than just a single roll: I’m bought in to a certain amount of complexity, I'm playing 60 Years in Space here; I'm willing to do a bit of math.

A happy medium, I think, would be sitting down, crunching the numbers, and making a table of “it takes X burns and Y turns to get from Point A to Point B”. If we were calculating this for all 50-some destinations it'd be way more worth than what's worth it, but if we group those sites by region and let generalization carry the rest of it we can cut it down to 13 regions and 156 potential routes, which is much more manageable. It's still a lot of work up-front, but the end result is that the player doesn’t have to fiddle with anything if they don’t want to; they can find more efficient routes on their own if they have the map and the desire, but if they don't they can just check the table for an average route and calculate the fuel consumption and mission turns from there.

The thirteen regions being:

1. Mercury
2. Venus
3. Near-Earth Asteroid
4. Earth
5. Mars
6. Main Belt
7. Jovian moons
8. Jovian Greek asteroids
9. Jovian Trojan asteroids
10. Saturnian moons
11. Uranian moons
12. Neptunian moons
13. Trans-Neptunian Objects

Might squeeze in some extra categories for Centaurs and individual comets, but even with that it's not going to get too much worse, at least compared to the 2400+ of everything to everything.

This would, at the cost of a few additional tables (for readability, I would go with one table per page per launch point, since routes have to be listed with burns, turns, and transfers in order and that will take up the whole row) bypass the issues caused by there not being a map WITHOUT having to jettison the entire shipbuilding system. It’d work fine with both full granularity and simplified transit.

Proofing Note: One of the Inner System Expansion destinations is “Himala” - I cannot find any asteroid by that name, anywhere. Not on Wikipedia, not on the HF map, nowhere. Another reason to include the number.

I do think that the in-depth travel rules and ship builder should probably be segmented off into their own booklet - not as an individual purchase, but as an easier organizational thing. 

All Errors My Own is Peak

This is where the Sci-Fi Sicko Shit lives, and it’s the main reason that this game won’t leave my head. You will also notice that I have barely mentioned it in this series of posts; which is something of a problem considering how much I am hyping it up.

AE is the book of factions, player character options, enemies, equipment, and setting / adventure / module defining elements. 658 pages of supplemental material, most of which will not be seen in a game of 60 Years even if you manage to play it through beginning to end. Its mix of hard science with absolutely bonkers extrapolations positions it orthogonally to the genre conventions that chain most sci-fi ttrpgs to the millstone, like the alien at the end of Annihilation. 

Despite being so alien, it’s also not some monolithic, set-in-stone lore dump - 60 Years uses these for procedural future-history building. They’re a springboard, a box of Legos, a sandbox where you and the dice can build something at random or at whim. Each faction has options for its origins and doctrines, plus its various upgrades and potential social impacts, allowing for extra variation on a theme and providing you alternative jump-off points. Not too hot on the idea? Five other options just in that category, pick the one you like. 

The temptation to just build a setting with all of them and incorporate every single damn thing in this book, while foolish, absolutely exists. I think the game’s inbuilt limiting factor helps avoid that pretty nicely: If you’re playing the game all the way from 2040 to 2115 RAW and replacing the Trends every time it’s mechanically possible (once every 8 years), you’re still only going to get like, 9 of them for a single type. 18 total. As alien as this can get, you have to go out of your way to make it truly overwhelming.

That’s a lot of words without an example, so you know what, here's just a big list of cool shit I like from the book.

1. Uplifted manta rays
2. Resurrected prehistoric human species (Including the vampires from Blindsight)
3. Blue goo (medical nanotech) symbiotes
4. Mutant strain of toxoplasmosis that triggers aggressive cat-worshiping behavior.
5. Cyborgs that carry around a team of AI and swap them in and out of their head depending on task.
6. Living spaceships that skim fuel off of the upper atmospheres of the gas and ice giants
7. Postsingularity beings who want to move Earth into orbit around Neptune, and then turn Neptune into a fusion candle for interstellar transit.
8. Sapient ecosystems where all biological components are actually distinct phases of a single organism's life cycle(s). 
9. Parahumans with exoskeleons decorated with bright, friendly colors and patterns. 
10. Mass-scale insect farming to offset Earthside food shortages.
11. Morlocks - humans modified to spend their entire lives underground or underwater - they're got an explicit reference to Deep Carbon Observatory in their writeup.
12. Six different ways for slightly-changed microbes can trigger catastrophic environmental collapse.
13. "Surprise! There was an alien civilization inside Europa the entire time!"
14. Hyper-compartmentalized cell-based conspiracy where no one in the group knows that they're actually part of the group.
15. Gentlemen! BEHOLD! Martian bigfoot!
16. The Alpha Centauri colony mission is absolutely fucked in 6/7 origin stories
17. Eusociality emerges due to the pressures on small, extremely isolated populations. 
18. Postsingularity entities that encoded themselves into the interactions of extremeophile microbes.
19. Predatory space habitats that eat other space habitats for resources
20. LS4D - the drug that allows you to visualize in more than 3 dimensions 

I desperately want this book in a system-neutral form. Or a form that has permissive licensing so it can be easily adapted to other games. Something that allows it to spread outside of 60 Years. Take the factions et al from this book, combine it with the solar system / planet builder from AE, the life / ecosystem designer, and some other bits from the rest of the books, strip out the 60 Years mechanics, and you have a system neutral hard-science rpg toolkit that isn’t afraid to get weird with it: That is an extremely undeserved market in this field. 

It'd be really nice for the uplifted manta ray, the prehistoric vampire, and the medical nanite symbiote to be in a game that isn’t such a hassle to play. 

Finale

I say it often and it bears repeating: Flawed art with vision is more engaging than 'good' art that remains safe. This is one of those cases. I haven't had this much fun with an RPG (sans the one session of Mothership I've run this year) in ages, but it's also a mess of a game that gets in its own way constantly and is nearly, but not quite, unplayable. Both can be true. And the great thing about text in a pdf is that it can be changed: mechanics can be adjusted, cruft can be cut, elements can be re-arranged and reformatted and we've seen that already happen with this game.

I've gotten my fill for now, but might return in the future, either if there are revisions that streamline the play process of the main game / split off the history simulation aspect, or if I get the itch to run A Lot of Zeroes. But for now, we return to the regularly unscheduled programming.