Far Beyond Humanity Weekly Update #1
Hello all! It’s been a long while since my last official post.
What I’ve been up to: Shipping a game in the triple-a video game industry kinda leaves you squeezed dry afterwards, which chained beautifully into a bout of emotional… stuff (don’t ask, it was Not Fun), followed through with a holiday season full of travel, and stuck the landing with a cold/flu that hit the entire family hard, especially the (now very cranky and bewildered) toddler.
I appreciate that many of you kept the conversation going while I was on brain-burned hiatus, sharing your experiences and questions and thoughts. It made me super happy, and I’d love for that to continue, even if it’s just “here’s a cool skill combo I’d like to try” or “how would I re-create this archetype from my favorite book/movie/anime”.
(Hope you folks had a wonderful, safe, and peaceful holiday season, by the way. And all the very best for 2017.)
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What’s next: Enough excuses! I feel terrible for having stumbled in producing FBH, and more importantly, in communicating with all of you. So I’m officially starting a once-a-week FBH Update, and re-committing myself to provide new updates to the book every week. The Weekly update will cover the work I’ve done on the book that week, talk about design decisions, playtests, issues and questions. I can’t guarantee a new Chapter every week, but I’ll try to have a few new pages written, or a section revisited and tweaked, or playtest-driven changes implemented, etc.
Also, I’m going to post a link to the FBH Preview Drop Box at the end of each of these posts, because that little community link up in the upper right is hard for folks to find. I’ll be putting each new chapter there, and any further changes to that chapter will be made live there.
(I’ll still be checking in regularly during the week, and will strive to be more active in the community.)
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New to FBH this Week
– I uploaded (unfinished) Chapter 1: Intro. The chapter covers how to integrate the various components of FBH into a new or existing UW game, and offers a bunch of alternate stat and Move uses.
– Minor changes to Chapter 2: Assets and Chapter 6: Characters. Looking to do a second pass on them, but it might wait until I have more concrete stuff to show for the Technology and Arcana chapters, since those will provide me with more inspiration/reveal holes i nthe design.
As usual, I’d greatly appreciate any feedback, comments, questions, suggestions, etc. Especially about Chapter 1 so far. Is it useful? Interesting? Pointless? Inquiring minds want to know!
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/atd0ygpwhur5yp6/AAB140jz3usjE3imwUkkCTLia?dl=0
Happiness: “In a Colony setting each character designs a personalized Class 1 Land Vehicle to race around the sand-dunes and be witnessed.”
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You will of course need to add a “Chrome” tag to the Assets chapter.
Great stuff! Can’t wait to see the final product.
Thanks for the update Sean Gomes. Hopefully things will get better for you in the weeks to come. The weather is not helping I know… and yes everyone seems to be sick lately.
I dig the idea of Group Assets. Nice.
I have a hard time understanding the idea of having a list of market types. How am I supposed to use it in play? It seems strange to say “oh this is a xeno market” or whatever.
As the page says: “Many of the Assets and services introduced by Far Beyond Humanity aren’t available in common galactic marketplaces.”
If you want weird-ass alien shit, you can’t just go to the normal Market — you have to find a xenomarket. Similarly, specialized info comes from the SectorNet market, cybernetics/mechs/robots are your Techmarket, biomods from your fleshmarket.
So in play, a player loses their arm in an explosion, and they need to fix it. Cool, if you find a doctor, he’ll be patched up with either no arm or a shitty robot one if you go straight to the hospital. If the player wants to regrow the one they had, or get a weird tentacle appendage or a bitchin chrome-gun-awesome arm, then you need to hunt down a specialized market.
Alfred Rudzki I mean, I get that different markets offer different goods, but I can’t see how a list of specific market types matters in play any more than “you need a specific market to get X”.
Like, if Protag lost her arm, she’s not going to say “ugh we need to find a Class 3 techmarket to replace this”, she’d say something like “we need to replace this… I need to find someone who will do it”.
I guess my issue is – there are long lists of markets and market types, with more e-ink spent on it than describing vehicle types, but I can’t see that mattering in play. I don’t know if I’m missing something (and using markets wrong), or not.
So to rephrase: why are vehicle or weapon tags, which impact play a lot, provided in a table with short descriptions, while market types are given much more description but matter in play less?
Probably because assets are just tools, and their effects are as simple as single line descriptions, but markets are role-playing opportunities and can generate tons of plot? Probably owing to Uncharted World’s Traveler-style roots?
EDIT: Also, I think a lot of e-ink is being spent on these markets because, as you probably noticed (but is worth reiterating), they all come with specific assumptions about how they function. This can be used as guidelines for how MCs can flesh out markets in their own games — and considering cargo, acquisition, and trade all have their own moves in the Core, further guidance on handling of Markets is fairly integral to default, out-of-the-box UW.
Regarding the sub-Markets:
I can see Aaron Griffin’s point, in that it’s 2 fairly dense pages that are essentially “fluff”. The section doesn’t have any hard mechanics, just soft suggestions that helps world-building and plot generation.
With the expanded, exotic and often thematically opposed Assets introduced in FBH, I felt that I needed to revisit the concept of Markets. UW’s Markets were based purely on level of technology, while FBH would need another axis: Type/style of technology.
It started as a fairly small section on unique markets, and how they can be made to tie in to several other aspects of the overall FBH experience, and to provide more variety and depth to the Markets in general (a market that focuses on machinery and cybernetics will offer different narrative tools and opportunities, compared to am alien zoo/slave market).
I suppose I got caught up in the narrative aspects of the new Markets and went too verbose. Maybe I can go back to the drawing board and make something more… neutral? Less fluffy?
Actually. Hm. What if the GM designed Markets the same way we design an Asset. Class 0, 1 and 2 Markets, and pick upgrades/simple descriptors like “Secret” or “Cybernetic” or “Elitist”. It would still hint at the narrative options/limitations of the Market, and richer (higher class) Markets would have more foibles than simple, lower-class ones.
What do you guys think?
I may be in the minority, but I didn’t find the Market descriptions “fluffy;” they got me thinking about ways I could define my own Markets with greater nuance. I dunno about ‘designing’ Markets in an asset-style. Might be an idea. I think I would need to play with the idea, see how it felt.
I like tables, myself, and the Markets DO look like they’d fall into some sort of table of markets. Market tags seem to fall in line with the rest of the game, and I think it’s easy to see how this would play out like so:
Epsilon Combinatrics Sales District (Major Tech Market)
vs
Epsilon Combinatrics Sales District (Market: Major, Tech, Clean)
Fluff is definitely important, though! I wasn’t trying to say “there’s so much fluff here” but that “the fluff is not on the same level as other fluff”.
I think having mechanics for market tags sounds super rad.
It would give me a mechanical basis for decisions about market-contents instead of my choice being arbitrary.
It also sounds helpful as a useful cypher for describing the markets; if I know a market is “Secret” and “Elitist” I will be able to describe it much better and give it meaningful differences from a market that’s “Cybernetic” and “Corporate.”
I like to see the fiction backed up by some sort of rules, and your idea sounds interesting and helpful.
Interestingly, this starts to cleave close to DW’s idea of steading tags
That’s right! Similar to the Steading rules more concrete Market rules could lead to interesting adventures. A Faction asks the crew to pick up some sort of tech so they can add a new tag to their Market. A Faction orchestrates an offensive against an opposing market to remove one of their tags or to add a negative tag. This market is tagged with “Corporate” and “Alien;” how did this corporation get this alien tech OR how are alien corporations different from human corporations?
Yep, I’ll probably go revisit the Steadings in DW. After all, the Asset tags themselves were inspired by the weapon tags of the Gunlugger, so I may need to go back to the well for further inspiration.
Also! This plays really well with the Commercial career’s Marketing skill, since the Commercial character basically adds a tag to the current Market.
I love it when a plan comes together. 🙂
“What if the GM designed Markets the same way we design an Asset. Class 0, 1 and 2 Markets, and pick upgrades/simple descriptors like “Secret” or “Cybernetic” or “Elitist”. It would still hint at the narrative options/limitations of the Market, and richer (higher class) Markets would have more foibles than simple, lower-class ones.”
I recall suggesting that a while ago during our discussion on Flesh Markets. All for it.