Greetings,
Things are slowly getting back to normal out here in the Bay
Area. A different form of normal, perhaps, than prevailed nine
days ago, but normal nonetheless.
So far, my informal poll shows that the entire population of
Silicon Valley was on an editor at 5:04 last Tuesday. About half
of them made a frantic effort to save their files and before they
took cover. There's a lesson here about the the effects of training
and force of habit. There's also a lesson about different forms of
reality. One envisions a hapless starcrew frantically consulting a
manual as his vessel disintigrates around him: "No, wait! I did
not mean to dodge into the flightpath of that missile! Perhaps I
can recall an earlier version of my files in which the ship has not
yet been destroyed!"
The large-scale structural test which we conducted on our
buildings last week raises an interesting question? How many of
you folk incorporate random large-scale disasters in your game?
What form do these disasters take? Galactic core explosions?
Supernovae? Asteroid impacts? Earthquakes? Perhaps even local
school board elections? What are the effects of these disasters?
On the hapless player characters? On the unsung cast of millions
(or billions) of NPCs who suffer and die to provide the necessary
background? Is it possible for player characters to influence the
course of events? Do they? For good or for ill?
The last such event I recall in The Eight Worlds was the Great
Allanlok Spaceport Fire. This was an entirely accidental event for
which the PCs actually bore some responsibility:
A vessel they were escorting lost power on liftoff from Mor,
the major (in fact the only) city on Allanlok. The hapless pilot
lost control and crashed. A random roll for location placed the
crash site in the middle of the spaceport fuel depot which, alas,
lacked the sophisticated safety devices such as might be found on
a more advanced world. The liguid hydrogen tanks storage ruptured,
vented their contents, and exploded one by one in a cataclysmic chain
reaction. The resulting fires spread through the warehouse district
and the surrounding slums and shanties to reach the city itself.
The fires raged for three days. One third of the city was
destroyed. More than 20,000 people lost thier lives.
The PCs were extremely active in the relief effort. They helped
to evacuate the city, they helped to build firebreaks, and they flew
water-bombing missions. Several PCs lost their lives, including three
engineers who were aboard the doomed merchant ship (they knew the ship
had problems with its drives so they came on board to help with the
liftoff, hence the responsibilty) when it performed its fatal
demonstration of Newtonian mechanics.
Disasters provide an excellent (if somewhat macabre) source of
scenarios. Consider the following example:
The Imperial Naval Station on Decus VII receives word that the
entire planet of Vanderleigh suffered a local school board election.
The Imperial task force is not available: Every ship is out of
commision (excuse me... the ships are at Readiness Level Charlie) until
necessary repairs can be conducted on their tomato peelers. Vanderleigh
is on its own... unless... a free trader can be pressed into service.
As fate and the GM would have it, the only suitable vessel belongs to a
set of player characters. Over their protests, they are comissioned as
members of the Imperial Auxiliary Transport Reserve and forced to fly a
relief mission. They have many adventures, humor, drama, and pathos
abound, but last they are all consumed by local politics and die. The
players all abandon the game in anger. Alone, forlorn, friendless, the
luckless GM decides upon a scheme of world conquest. He draws upon his
expertise as a TRAVELLER GM to build a working time transport which he
uses to travel to Post WWII Japan. Working behind the scenes, he
rebuilds the shattered nation into a major world economic power under
his hidden but absolute control. Soon he will be ready to implement
the second phase of his sinister plan. The only threat to his scheme
for world domination come from a brave space physicist who attempts to
conceal a warning in a humorous message regarding Role Playing Games.
But before he can finish this warning he is bgjhvk;rqenblbl............
Paul R. Gazis
[email removed] or
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