Whoosh, Whir, Hssssshhhh.....

So, once more browsing the Iron Tower Studio forums (a forum on the web filled with intelligent, well-spelt people who have a genuine respect for their fellow posters? How dare they!) and came across this post. It's a post about non-medieval fantasy RPG settings, and there are some absolutely wonderful ideas in there. I was reading it and I came up with my own ideas, one of which I'll post up here for all of you to pull apart and discuss (because I'm just overrun by readers...)

The ideas that I had that I believe had the most merit were of the steampunk genre. Now, I love steampunk, and as a setting for a game, it's simply wonderful. All that romanticism and nobility, combined with all that hissing and wonderfully implausible technology. You mention steampunk to anyone and you'll either be met with blank stares or blank stares again, but the second time induced by the person being lost in the infinite images it conjures. And there are all manner of variations, all manner of sub-genres, an infinite number of settings it could be applied to. Admittedly, it's not for everyone. But I love it, and I might as well get all this gushing fanboi-ism out of the way.

This steampunk universe is rather orthodox - steam, obviously, is the major source of power. There does exist an aether in the universe, allowing ships to propel themselves across the void between worlds using... well, propellers, and sails, and all manner of traditional ship-based propulsion. It takes place in a sort of pseudo-alternative universe where the British Empire never collapses - India is their industrial heart, Africa their agricultural wonderland, and despite a number of pesky uprisings, the American Colonies seem to be finally pacified and reluctantly accept their place in the Empire. The world as they know it under their heel, they decide to turn their attention to the stars and so the various navies of the world begin the construction of their aether-borne starships.

Now, the ideas for games I have in this setting diverge here. They all share a common universe and foundation, so they're all connected in some way. In this way, a few of them may be suited as sequels or prequels to the others, or just alternatives to fill out the rest of the universe. Regardless, they are:

Battlepunk Galactica
This first idea draws heavily upon that most sublime of television shows, the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica. If you haven't seen or at least heard of it, I'm not going to try and convince you to watch it, because you're obviously the sort of person who prefers to sit in a dark cave with their fingers in their ears going 'la la la' instead of giving in and just watching the finest sci-fi of modern television.

Ahem. So, being the weird and perverse person that I am, one of my favourite parts of Galactica was the 'Survivor Count' - a number tacked onto the opening credits that would update depending on the death / birth toll in the previous episodes (usually getting smaller and smaller each episode) This seemed like a great mechanic for a game to me - the precise, cold, calculating horror of watching that number grow smaller each time you play because your actions couldn't halt it.

So, the idea for this game is that you're on a ship - the HMAS Madagascar. A young junior officer from the Colonies, this is your first posting, and it's relatively easy - a simple surveying mission of some far-off stars. The voyage is long, boring, but hard work, and for the most part you're easing in to Naval routine relatively easy. This part of the story is played as a prologue / tutorial - establishing the universe, the controls, the major characters, etcetera. It's not long, however, until the excrement hits the propeller.

Disaster strikes, as it is prone to do. This part of the story is left intentionally ambiguous to the player, allowing them to discover the true horror of their situation by themselves. The ship has been severely damaged and almost torn into pieces, and with the engines non-functional, the aether begins to drag your ship towards the violent yellow sun that you were originally surveying. The various departments begin to sign in - Engineering, two-hundred dead. Gunnery, fifty-seven dead. The casualties come in thick and fast - all apart from the Command, whose silence echoes throughout the ship. You painfully realise that you are the senior ranking officer left alive (or, at least, alive enough to give commands) The ship is tearing apart, fuel and atmosphere venting into space. Fires raging from aft to stern, coolant leaking across the decks. You're drifting closer and closer to the star with each passing minute.

You add it up. You have 382 men left alive out of a crew of more than one thousand. Four, maybe five hours at most, you guess, until the star has you and you're all dead anyway. And it's your responsibility to get as many out alive as possible. The numbers burn harsh in your mind - 382 survivors, four hours left. Get to work.

So, essentially success in this game is measured by how many people you can rescue. The number of survivors is a permanent and major part of the interface, drilling that number deep into your mind. You go about the ship, putting out fires, clearing obstacles, repairing systems and connecting isolated decks, dealing with the crazies (the traumatised and insane), helping the wounded, trying to discover what's going on and what happened to all the Officers, bar you. I'm reluctant to have an actual time-limit on the game, because as a rule I don't really like them, either being far too small for a casual gamer to enjoy, or being so large that they aren't a challenge at all. Perhaps an Iron-Man Challenge Mode that enforces the time limit, and also doesn't display the number of survivors.

The game itself would be engineered as a kind of survivor-horror game. All that death, all the horror. All those survivors counting on you, and only you. Something just beyond perception, something that doesn't sit right in the pit of your stomach. I'm in two minds about using randomly-generated areas in the game. On the one hand, having pre-defined and created levels would help define and refine the theme and mood of the game. Randomly-generating it all, however, would make each play through a new experience, which would add to the tension of trying to save everyone. A careful mix of the two would be nice. (++EDIT++ - perhaps the layout of the ship would be the same each time, but the damage would be randomised? And perhaps a different crew roster each play)

Tax This!
The second idea I had was to retell history, only obviously in this steampunk universe. Most of us know the basic story of the American Revolution, right? Britain sends the Colonists across the pond, exploits resources, and the Americas revolt? Well, this time, the colony in question is Mars. I don't know enough about American history to really give this idea the legs it needs, but I'm sure some of you out there can think of all manner of famous battles that could be played out across not only the Martian soils but the aether as well. Of course, Mars would itself be a fractured place, full of internal conflict and opposing viewpoints on what they'll become when (if) they manage to separate from the Empire. So you could even introduce the American Civil War into the equation, with the Martian equivalents of all those involved sides (even introducing the Germans and French)

A game like this would ideally be one where you play all sides of the conflict - instead of changing levels, you instead change characters. You might start off as a Colonist in the early days of the colonisation, being all oppressed and taxed by the Empire. You could then play a Naval officer on the fleet on-route to quell the rebellion. And then you could play a French spy, helping the Colonists set up their defences and root out subversive Imperial elements. And then back again to a German mercenary, leading the attack on Mars. All those perspectives would really help flesh out the conflict and add some real emotional impact to the game - characters and friends that you nurtured whilst playing on Mars would be brutally cut down as you were playing as the Empire.

Each mode could also become a new game unto itself. The Colonisation Phase could play like a Fortress-Mode Dwarf Fortress. The French Spy part could be a stealth-em-up. Of course, you'd have to be careful to make each part distinct enough to stand on their own, but still have common, underlying ideas - perhaps the interface and most of the controls are the same, but change design (colour, layout, etcetera) for each faction you play.

So there are just two of the ideas that I had. I think both them have merits, and I'd be glad to see any discussion on expanding or implementing them.

Related / Useful Links:
Wikipedia Article on Steampunk. Contains all manner of useful links and distractions.
Yours In A White Wine Sauce! A fantastic steampunk blog, centred mainly around miniature wargames, but covering many general aspects of the genre as well. Contains more links to interesting things than I could ever gather.