#RPGaDay2024 - 13 - Evocative Environments

This year's RPGaDay (full text list here)

Q. Evocative Environments?

A. Traveller.

Well, that isn’t really a question, is it? 

A quick look at my iPad’s built in dictionary links gives me this.

EVOCATIVE
adjective
bringing strong images, memories, or feelings to mind: powerfully evocative lyrics / the building's cramped interiors are highly evocative of past centuries.

ORIGIN
mid 17th century: from Latin evocativus, from evocat- 'called forth', from the verb evocare.

Usually, I find that the setting itself has an impact on how evocative a roleplaying game is, but the prompt is calling out environments. I think that this really knocks out most of the games that are tied to third party IPs, because they are as much the settings and the plots that you’ve seen there. So that means games like Pelgrane Press’ The Dying Earth Roleplaying Game (which I’m re-reading at the moment), Star Wars, and most of Modiphius’ output are really not an option here. I also think that a lot of the Powered by the Apocalypse games are out, as the environment itself is usually a weak layer built on interaction prompts in playbooks.

Traveller always screamed ‘space’ at me, as it very well represented the kind of science fiction that I grew up with. The environments described by Arthur C Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Andre Norton and CJ Cherryh all called out to me from the game’s writing and made me believe that you could play all those kinds of stories.

Twilight 2000 is another; there was a realistic feel to the environment that it described even though the truth of even a limited nuclear exchange was likely to me far more catastrophic; I was always interested in seeing how people would respond to that situation (although a lot of the follow on material printed seemed to veer of in different directions). The flavour it evoked for me was a reminder of the British Apocalypse type story, JG Ballard, John Wyndham and more. However, Hot War came along later and absolutely nailed this kind of feeling for me.

Blue Planet and some of the 2300AD planetary supplements like the Aurore Sourcebook evoked feeling of very different and alien worlds, but anchored in enough of our world’s environment to feel real and strange at the same time.

A|State gives this wonderfully evocatively strange city in some kind of weird setting but then completely ignores that to focus on a tiny corner and the struggles of a neighbourhood. I love the way that this is done, but sometimes I wonder if it’s missing something.

Some games seem to miss this; my initial skim read through the two newish Numenera core books (Discovery and Destiny) has left me excited by the characters, the way that they are described and the simplicity of the game engine, but I find some of the world building descriptions of the environments just a bit plain and mundane, almost a bit traditional D&D. I’m curious whether my view of this will change as I read them.

I’ve found books like The Ultraviolet Grasslands and The Vaults of Vaarn very evocative; they are very much about the setting (in both cases a post-apocalyptic feel world of plains and deserts). Acid Death Fantasy does this really well in the spaces between the character information. They all have the same vibe  and are adjacent to the feel of the Dying Earth.

So where do I end up? Ultimately, the answer I’ll give is Traveller, because if in doubt Traveller is always my answer. My first and enduring love as a roleplaying game, something that is definitive and evocative due to the science-fiction of my youth.

The truth is, the way Traveller is constructed, it has sub-systems that allow you to create an evocative setting which you’re invested it. You can design all the starships you want. You can create sectors of space to explore, and detail the star systems therein. You can dive deeper and create the creatures and environs that you explore. Traveller gives you procedural generation for your space adventures, with scaleable detail; you can gave a star-system described in a string of text by its UWP or dive into more detail with world maps and more. 

Traveller lets you build evocative environments with ease. One of my earliest writing projects that failed to see the light of day (as Marc Miller’s Traveller T4 ended) was taking a subsector in space with a list of UWPs and some of the future background material (as the original setting was a thousand years in the future) and then describing the star systems for a player to explore. It made me realise the flexibility of the game engine and how much you could draw from a simple set of data points created from the mechanics.

So Traveller it is.

13 August 2024

Playing catch up here due to work and preparing to go away for a few days.