Ooof. Words words words. Lots of text is being written. And not fun playtestable stuff, but rather necessary clarifications and fleshing out.
Have a few pages about cross-species societies, and how they affect the frequency and severity of Cramped Quarters checks. If Uncharted Worlds didn’t already clue people in to my own personal bleeding-heartedness, then this section surely will.
I’ve got a tenuous, nebulous mentally-written section about emotional trauma as a Major debility, and I keep backing away from it to approach from a different angle, because I don’t want to be disrespectful of real mental issues. Like, as part of the eldritch/Olde Gods set of content, the threat of mind-breaking terror needs to be addressed. But I need to be very mindful.
Right now, my design has “Trauma” as a general Major Debility that technically doesn’t impede a character. Instead it constantly spawns Minor mental and emotional Debilities; headaches, nightmares, compulsions, revulsion, stutters, restlessness, lethargy. The Minor Debilities can be treated, but that’s just attacking the symptoms. Treating the Major Debility will require significant therapy and treatments (with certain civilizations offering experimental and/or barbaric alternate ‘cures’).
This will likely change and evolve, but I would need to chat up someone who is more educated than I on the topic of how to handle this stuff respectfully.
And lets not get started on the unintentionally ableist verbal landmines when writing about cybernetics. Whuff.
Just don’t be like Evil Hat Inc. When I said that there shouldn’t be people in wheelchairs functioning in cramped submarines (with no reference to their wheelchair status as an Aspect at all) in the world book DEEP DARK BLUE, Robert Hicks called me a “privileged able White male” and banned me from Fate Core Google Community. He’s around the bend, especially since he’s the one condemning people to wheelchairs even for hundreds of years into the future, for the sake of faux diversity. There is no “Wheelchair Pride”, no one actually WANTS to be in that chair if technology can help it. Give them some powered legs, like Ricardo Montalban in SPY KIDS 3.
Plus, he didn’t present any firefighters in wheelchairs in “Fight Fire”. Why not there too? Because it would be bleeding ridiculous, that’s why. Those wheelchairs better have steel rims to power through falling burning beams and such.
It is okay to touch on mental trauma, and mental illness, but you don’t need to go into detail.
Good on you, Shawn.
Let your bleeding heart sing 🙂 sounds like you’ve got the right ideas, Sean.
Pierre Savoie there will always be wheelchairs, even in the far future, as long as there are people who do not have access to more advanced technology (poverty, distance).
Since I’m also working under the assumption that various species move around very differently, so the challenges of the differently mobile in foreign spaces will have to be tackled, again in a respectful manner because it applies to real people.
Sean Gomes on topic of differently mobile and differently able, in the cybernetics section of FBH can we expect any veiled references to the plethora of Star Trek characters who do their jobs despite otherwise career-ending conditions? That seems like a good place to point, so I’m just curious 🙂
Absolutely, though that brings up a completely different issue: explicitly referencing copyrighted materials in the body of the text. In UW I did it very sparingly (in the “inspirations” paragraph and name-dropping in the Campaign setting section.)
Side note: I was always taken aback by Captain Pike’s condition. The design of his… life support? was clunky and garish and not in keeping with the aesthetics of Trek (everything else in the Federation has curved lines, soft contours and white, grey or beige surfaces). His support device looked like a Dalek as envisioned by a Cylon.
Yeah, Pike got the short end of the stick :/ but then you’ve got things like Picard with his cyberheart, Geordi’s visor, Bashir’s genetically-modified mind… And that character I’m forgetting, a scientist from DS9, who needed an apparatus to move around in anything other than weightlessness. A bunch of neat characters.
Yep, Melora Pazlar. She’s specifically what I was thinking of when talking about the mobility demands of different species.
Being from a low-gravity species, her impediment and prosthesis was only a disability in the context of Cardassian architecture and design, which she laments.
Even Federation architecture is more convenient for people with reduced mobility, with curving halls, carpeted and flat floors and ramps rather than stairs. (Seriously, I hadn’t noticed at first, but there’s a big shift in design from Original Startrek to Next Gen; all the stairs, hard corners and awkward lower door lips are gone, replaced by a more ergonomic and reduced-mobility-friendly design)
If you want any insights on autism or bi-polar disorder you can hit me up.
Capt. Pike’s limited communication was introduced dramatically with the phrase, “Two beeps means no.”
They couldn’t imagine the stuff used for Stephen Hawking. They could have tracked Pike’s eye-movements or something to give him a virtual HUD selection-board or something.