The weekend gaming group had a few nibbles on games to play. I like to rotate the games to keep them fresh for the players and myself. There was fairly unanimous agreement to do a 1930s pulp game, which turned into Gorilla Ace!, there’s a modern espionage game in the works, and a Serenity game.
The Firefly ‘Verse is an interesting setting, partly because it was so open to interpretation and exploration. 13 episodes and a movie barely cracked the surface of what the Alliance was about, how the society worked, but the 19th Century vibe coupled with spaceships worked for every one of us. I’ve run a few campaigns already, and have found that (for me) a few tweaks to the on-screen setting are needed to make the ‘Verse fly…
1. More tech. The Rim and Border worlds are more primitive than the Core, but they still have their share of high technology — from flimsy news sheets with moving visuals, to lasers, to holographics — which we have seen on screen. The addition of other high tech devices will spice the setting up and not get it too bogged down by the Western feel. Lack of technology should be due to legal restrictions and the newness of settlements on the Rim. (Although the American West saw heavy use of new technologies, in mining and agriculture, in steam power and weapons…)
2. Show the dichotomy of life between the haves and have-nots. We only see the Core once in the series in the episode Ariel, and the sky-island condos of the rich on Bellerophon in another. The suggestion is that there is magic-levels of technology in the Core. To really drive this home, it’s necessary to get your characters out and about the ‘Verse, so they can see the hand-to-mouth existence on the Rim, juxtaposed against the comfort, wealth, and health of the Core.
A combination of these idea would be an early episode I had in our first campaign where the characters traveled to Osiris to steal a priceless Monet — one of the few left from Earth-That-Was. The policing on Osiris was high-tech: aerial surveillance, think tanks for the police (a la the Tachikomas from Ghost in the Shell, but much less kawaii…), some evidence of cybernetics (which the game designers included in their Six-Shooters & Spaceships sourcebook.) Guns that were less home-made local knock-offs of Colt Peacemakers, and more like Glocks or the FN FiveSeven. Jet-powered hoverbikes (’cause there’s no way that can go wrong!)
The show never really got a chance to shake it up, and the Big Damn Movie got to play a bit more with the level of toys in the ‘Verse with love-bots and ubiquitous surveillance that could be monitored from anywhere on the Cortex.
3. Decide why the Alliance is bad/good. This is frequently a problem with sci-fi series. In Star Trek, the Federation is simply wonderful. Life is good because people are fed, clothed and housed. But there’s not real exploration of what makes the UFP so damned peachy. I envisioned 150 worlds of people attending adult education classes and doing execrable art, while the people motivated to excel wound up in Starfleet. It was the technology utopian paradise…and it would be utter, stifling and boring, with little incentive to get off your ass to do something. (That’s my take, at least…) In Battlestar Galactica, we don’t really get a look at the Colonies and society until the last few episodes…what is it, exactly, that the characters have lost? Families and friends, sure; but how about all those places and things that make life worth living?
Flesh out the setting. You don’t have much of a choice with 13 episodes and a movie. The trappings are out there: Quantum Mechanix did a fantastic poster-sized map of the ‘Verse as a star cluster, showing distances that is easily used by a GM to flesh out transit times and give you an idea of the real estate. However the main issue is, like the Federation, what makes the Alliance good or bad. The Alliance is portrayed in the show and movie, not unsurprisingly, as an evil empire; the characters are the Confederates of this Western parable and the Alliance is the big, bad Union, come to take away their states’ and personal rights.
I’m taking the approach in the upcoming campaign that it’s simply a meddlesome, well-meaning bureaucracy that — as well-meaning, meddlesome bureaucracy do (think the EU, and if they had acutal [shudder!] power, the UN) — thinks it knows best for you. There’s rarely malice, save to those that would stop them from making the policies that they wish, or those that would deny those bureaucrats the positions they feel they so richly deserve…and often do not! (Does this sound vaguely familiar today?)
The ‘Verse, for me, is a setting I can sink my teeth into because the politics of it are so close to the big battle I see coming in the 21st Century (but Charles Stross seems to discount in a recent post on his blog): the push and pull between libertarian/individualist types who just want to be left alone to live their lives…and the statist/technocrat/progressive types who feel they know better how to live your life than you do.
With that meta-conflict in the back of the mind, every slight can seem part of a plot to remove your personal sovereignty. Just look at some of the rhetoric coming out right now about the current administration. If you are an Alliance supporter, every bit of opposition looks like treason, or at the very least, idiocy on the part of those that would be “helped” by the imposition of Alliance technocratic bureaucracy. The politics can always leak into the character’s lives, no matter what scale of campaign you are running.
The Black Campbell 