The Million Year Man

You arrive, as planned, to the base of Mount Everest with your friend.  After a brief interaction with the locals and settling your mountaineering plans, the two of you begin your long trek higher up the mountain. Higher and higher you climb into the chilly heights with your friend until the wind picks up and threatens a dangerous storm.  Night falls, but mist and swirling snow hide the stars.  Between the failing light and the rising winds, the two of you seek shelter in a cavern.  After stepping within, you notice that it goes far into the mountain, and a strange light beckons from within.  The two of you explore, and find strange artifacts of seeming alien origin.  You stand on a curious platform to play with a control panel and your friend suddenly calls out when a light flashes and then...

A million years pass. You are, of course, trapped in a Stasis Field, but you don't know it. To you, an eyeblink has passed.  What happened in that million years?

Because ten billions years' time is so fragile, so ephemeral... it arouses such a bittersweet, almost heartbreaking fondness. -- Now and Then, Here and There

Scale fascinates me, mostly in how little I understand it, whether it be size, distance or time. I watched a rather depressing anime quoted above and noted the desire to explore such remote deep time, and I understand it: the creator wanted to explore the expansion of the sun and its desolate imagery on the world. Of course, such an expanse of time has some issues, namely life will likely cease on this planet within a billion years. Numenara does it too, putting the setting many billions of years in the future with a handwave about something extending the life of the sun (plausible!). But I wanted to narrow my scope down from such a gargantuan number, and I had already explored millennia. I wanted to explore what a million years looked like. I figured that was more than enough deep time to explore some interesting concepts. 

I've explored specific concepts of deep time, such as some exploration of geology or evolution, but I wanted to bundle it together to get a sense of what that world would look like, what the totality of the change would be. Now, I'm not an expert, and this post is the result of the most superficial exploration: I ask myself a question and then try to answer it. So don't expect high level analysis of geology of biology. Most of this is just a quick read of Wikipedia and some basic internet searches.

So, what happens in a million years?

On the Importance of Factions

 

I've recently dropped a poll for the first of the Westerly Clan (and it might be a mistake, as I seem to have triggered analysis paralysis among my backers, but if you're a backer, go check it out. In the very least, it should offer a lot of ideas for the design of a clan or faction!), and as I worked on this, I found myself reflecting on the importance of factions.

I noticed it in a different context too. I have a problem with Warhammer 40k at the moment. In part, it's because I don't agree with some of the direction Games Workshop has been taking lately, but a lot of it is a drive to explore lesser known works, both to cultivate variety and to support the efforts of less famous creators.  But I've noticed that I keep being drawn back into the gravity of 40k.  I keep thinking of armies I'd like to try, or concepts I'd like to explore.  In particular, I've thought about building a Xenos army from one of the less well-known races (Rak'Gols or Khrave and man, that second name is great) because I think it would be fun to let someone's Space Marine army beat up on one of these groups out of legend and lore.  I noticed that I was trying to fall back into 40k, and reoriented towards one of my newer games: Rogue Stars.  Rogue Stars is a generic minis wargame that will let you design anything, so of course I could design an alien army of any type I wanted. But who cares? It lacks that particular context that gives it its verge and zing.  I would have to create and invent that context and get the other player invested in it before they would enjoy it.

Thoughs on the Undercity Noir Playtest after 2 sessions

I apologize for the lack of posting.  I've been a bit paralyzed by Undercity Noir's nature.  Whenever I run a playtest, I find it dominates my time, because I'm busy fixing the bits that the game is missing, but I can usually make that up by talking about the playtest.  Now, though, I can't do that, because I intend to run it twice, which means I would spoil things if I ran it twice.  So what can I talk about?  Well, I can talk about how particular systems worked and what my experience with them was. So let's hit a few high points.