Writing My Stories
The fanfiction process
This last week just gone, two roleplaying books launched: a Space: 1999 Quickstart (Modiphius), and SoulMuppet’s Paint The Town Red, a roleplaying game about vampires.
Space: 1999 Roleplaying Game
The year is 1999 and humankind is poised to take its first steps into the universe. Having established a base on the Moon, teams of scientists are developing new deep space exploration vessels to take humanity to the stars. ‘Moonbase Alpha’ has been in development since 1989 and after several expansions now covers four kilometres, with numerous sub levels under the Moon’s surface and some of the surface buildings rising as high as three storeys. It has over three hundred inhabitants including scientists, medics and pilots plus an array of security, technical and logistical staff. While it receives supplies from Earth, Moonbase Alpha is completely self sufficient, powered by huge nuclear generators and able to grow its own food as well as fabricate most things from a screwdriver to a spaceship.
Paint The Town Red
Something very bad happened to you a very long time ago: you died and it fucking hurt.
You’re cursed. You’re still here and you couldn’t just stay dead. You’re definitely not in heaven, but there’s a pretty good chance this could be hell.
Your heart has basically stopped. You don’t need to eat. Your skin is clammy. Your touch is cold as ice. You have to remember to breathe, to blink, to smile. Those are things people do? Right?
It’ll be alright. Everything will be okay. You can get it together. You just have to find the right place and the right people and it will all work out. There are other dead people just like you. They’re suffering in just the same way you are.
Both these games are about the same thing. You have been permanently severed from the life you lived. You can never go back. All you can do is find a new level of survival that you can accept, and learn to adapt while looking for a new home.
Or make one yourselves.
The Entrancing Spiral
This is where I talk about my work.
This week, I’ve been writing new material for a Destined player character, The Entrancing Spiral. So first, I want to talk about Destined.
The Design Mechanism’s superhero genre tabletop roleplaying game, Destined enters territory opened by Mutants & Masterminds and Champions decades ago, joining the likes of Stellagama’s Superpowered!, Onyx Path’s Aberrant and Autarch’s Ascendant. In this setting, heroes and villains are alike transformed when a genetic anomaly known as a God-Strand awakens. Heroes find they can do the usual things comic book heroes can do - run like hell, throw cars, project eye beams, read minds.
The Entrancing Spiral is a hero I’ve created for an ongoing fan series for Destined. Dr Arran Golding, a non-binary person who holds Doctorates in multiple subjects, slips on a hero costume with a distinctive spiral motif at night, chasing down criminals on the street. Their signature power is an almost irresistible hypnosis.
Compared with other heroes in Destined, and many villains, Spiral’s abilities seem decidedly underpowered. They have no innate flight abilities, super strength, or any form of energy projectile powers. They do make up for this by having a wide range of skills, enabling them to overcome perils through sheer wits and gumption.
The intent behind Spiral has been to humanise them: by presenting them as being forced to be more methodical, a little cooler, not so hot headed, and somewhat more empathetic towards the victims, and even some of the menacing villains lurking around the setting, such as Nocturne - a villain whose powers are all themed around music and song.
Common Theme
I think the common theme with these three games is humanity. In Space: 1999, your character is usually forced to find a human solution to weird situations, or to face all too human frailties - such as the “future ghost” of “The Troubled Spirit,” or the heat-draining entity which possesses Anton Zoref, turning him into a kind of space vampire.
In Paint The Town Red, your characters realise that there are no ways out of the horrid unlife they are suffering, and the best way to keep the misery away is to do all the sad, wretched, fun, painful, hot, sexy, addictive things humans do - only in this case, where humans indulge their habits to stop feeling human, the vampires indulge in order to try to feel human.
And in Destined, Spiral is exploring what makes a person into even an ordinary hero, let alone a superhero. And the key is empathy. To be a hero means to stand up for the little guy against the bully. Which means you have to feel for the little guy, and have the strength to stand up, and the wisdom not to become the bully.
All three settings are based on the love humans need to cultivate for their peers. And we’ve had enough people telling us that empathy is a sin and a weakness already. Time to show that it is, in fact, a source of infinite strength.
A superpower. A very human superpower.