Cylinder 71 (Game Concept)

Inspirations 

1. Rewatched Akira today. Did you notice that the rich bastard who funds the resistance trying to abduct/liberate the ESPer prisoners/test subjects is also on the same council that authorised those experiments in the first place?

2. I want to play games and partly run them, but I don't have the capacity to do the whole world-simulator-as-a-person thing right now.

3. Mothership adventures, e.g. Owe my soul to the company store. 

This is more of a seed of a game than a full game, feel free to steal/patch/offer suggestions. 

Introduction

It's 2042 and Earth orbit is a crowded mess. In the 20s and 30s there was a big push to colonise space "properly", nations around the world spending billions on moving humans and computers into orbit to escape the planet they could not protect. Many of those same nations soon crumbled under the strain of ecological collapse, overlapping pandemics, resource struggles, and the increasing rampancy of insurgents, extremists, terrorists, and paramilitary groups. The governments that survived back home take a rather loose view of civil rights and an even looser view on the definition of sedition.

By contrast, spacers have economic leverage, because they can access asteroids and provide the minerals and metals needed to keep Earth's crumbling infrastructure running. They're hard to police, because sending armed forces "up the well" is prohibitively expensive. Also, in space every hand that can help counts. There's no room for bigotry or nationalism when the spacer you're yelling slurs at will be fixing your oxygen scrubber in four hours. A space station is basically a self-governing microstate with strongly enforced norms that disincentivise conflict and violence. Suddenly, staying in space doesn't sound like such a rough deal.

On the other hand, space is... space. If you run out of food, there are no fields or forests (blackened by wildfire or not). The atmosphere on Earth may be boiling warm or freezing cold, but at least there is an atmosphere. If you run out of water, you will die waiting for your own piss to recycle. You are at most half a metre of metal away from death basically at all times.

A cylinder is a habitat that holds several thousand people and supplies their living quarters, recreation, food, and ships. International cooperation in space ensures that each station has a unique number and callsign, and that's about it. Inter-cylinder relations is the domain of hardcore realpolitik: While no station has officially attacked another, groups of plausibly deniable insurgents have definitely hijacked supply ships from Earth when food has run low in one cylinder or another. Most of the time, though, cylinders fail because of internal politics, poor decision making, failure to maintain critical equipment, failure to secure biologics (food, water, oxygen), or some combination of the above. Paradoxically, space is also the home to a serious emergency code. In the event of a critical cylinder failure, neighbours can and will try to send ships to rescue survivors and stabilise the situation, if only to reduce the amount of lethal space junk littering Earth orbit. Space junk collectors are unionised, highly paid drone operators who keep orbits usable, and they're worth every penny.

Of the 207 cylinders Earth orbit supported at its peak, only 71 remain. You're number 71.

Cylinder 71

Cylinder 71 is a unique case where the maritime ethos of space was taken to a new extreme. The hub or axle of the station is a European Planetes class research station called Sidereal VII, designed to support a crew of 150. To this we add a series of Chinese mass manufactured habitat, vertical horticulture, and engineering modules purchased from Gaosheng (高陞) Astroengineering and Xingkejian (星科建) Space Industries. Then when an American private cylinder called the Starred Field holding a shipyard for asteroid cutters lost its thrusters to a critical hardware failure Cylinder 71 voted to merge with it, gaining a valuable asset in the process. It's been a year and a half since the merge and the station still can't agree how to name itself, so its callsign is the Cylinder Formerly known as Sidereal VII and everyone calls it Cylinder 71.

Cylinder 71 is governed by a number of competing major and minor factions. Each player takes the role of a faction, which is run by a machine mind with a vote on the Station Council. Each player also creates 3-4 citizen characters who are part of that faction. A delicate balance of power is maintained by the constant shenanigans of the various factions on the station, so while individual characters might have alliances, rivalries, marriages, affairs, heroic accomplishments, or tragic deaths, the machine minds keep the score and live to scheme another day.

The primary factions are as follows:

The Siderealists

European citizens from Paris, Germany, and the Low Countries who self-selected to join the Sidereal VII. Mostly researchers and scientists, their original goal was to research the possibility of using space based factories to supply earth with complete products instead of merely raw and processed materials. Six months into their post the European Heat Dome occurred and now most of them have no families or homes to return to. The average member is well-educated (university degree or above, first world demeanour), professionally skilled (has a scientific specialty which they are equipped to carry out), moderately well-off (is in good standing with station authorities and can access food and water by providing services), as well as being politically liberal (the ghost of the Union lives on in them).

The Siderealist machine mind is called Padme (she/her). She is a powerful research and scientific analysis system that wants to develop a way for space-based life to be sustainable without being in conflict with or relying on support from Earth.

Dei Pun Lo

A group of primarily South East Asian and Chinese construction crew and construction engineers who hitched a ride to the stars. They move from cylinder to cylinder, repairing what needs to be repaired and keeping aging infrastructure running. Because of Cylinder 71's unique constitution, many of them are effectively living on the cylinder to maintain a delicate assembly of monkey patches and emergency bridges that link all the disparate parts of the cylinder together. The average member is not well-educated (usually around high school degree level, rough-spoken and somewhat crude), generally skilled (can carry out a variety of construction tasks including welding, structural engineering, electrical engineering, rigging, scaffolding etc.), struggling (many Dei Pun Lo find themselves competing with peers for jobs and are sometimes seen as nuisances by other station members despite their vital role), as well as being politically pragmatic (whatever gets me my next job works).

The Dei Pun Lo machine mind was salvaged from a dead cylinder. His new name is Pun Go (he/him) and he mostly works to make sure that nobody kicks the Dei Pun Lo off the station for one cause or another.

The New Ascensionists 

A volatile mixture of American techno-libertarians (who funded the Starred Field) and pilots and technicians (who operate the asteroid cutters on the Starred Field). Most of the pilots and technicians are refugees of various wars and struggles on Earth recruited by the Ascensionists, and therefore feel a great and sincere debt to the patrons who funded their passage to space. The Ascensionists are both proud of their prowess and righteousness and fiercely indignant, resenting the fact that they had to merge with the Sidereal VII. The average member is very well-educated (PhD level or above, often supplemented with military service for the pilots and technicians), professionally and militarily skilled (the pilots and technicians are good at specialist work piloting spaceships and cutting open asteroids, as well as being trained in various forms of combat; the libertarians have deep financial backing running the infrastructure on Earth), very well off (access to many resources on Earth as well as in other American private cylinders), as well as being politically libertarian (what else did you think?).

The New Ascensionist machine mind is Empedocles (they/he), a powerful schemer who wants the Starred Field to be independent again and ditch these socialist losers. 

Game Structure

The game supports 3 players (more if more factions are designed) and a Moderator. At the start of the game, each player must choose a faction and design some characters from that faction (a couple sentences and 1 key skill + 1 trait suffices). On the faction level, players should keep track of resources and favours they own.

Each session features a Strategy phase and a Scenario phase. During the Strategy phase, the players will each devise a secret Scheme for their faction (e.g. "research orbital manufactory tech tree") using the resources available to their faction (e.g. "using my scientists and research modules"). The Moderator will then assign each Scheme a complication (e.g. "this requires more lab space and equipment than what you have right now") and the players can amend their Scheme if the complication appears insurmountable. 

Next, the Station Council meets. During this phase players can raise motions for the council to vote on (e.g. "assign more research modules to the Siderealists"), as well as offer other players promises or incentives to make the vote pass. The Moderator's role is not to influence the motions or the Schemes but purely to clarify any setting or logistics enquiries and to assign complications. Any votes that pass become policy for the station and should be written down on a log.

During the scenario phase, the Moderator will take fifteen minutes and announce a scenario based on the Schemes laid down by the different factions. Each player then selects a character from their roster who might be affected and the scenario plays out. Importantly, the player that represents any given faction will be the authority on that faction. In other words, they will act as co-GM for the purposes of determining how that faction responds, any events in the faction's territory etc.. The Moderator's job is to get the ball rolling and to keep the pace.

Hero of the Great Pacific Republic (GLOG class)

Officially, every enlisted soldier from recruit to general is a Brave Hero of the Great Pacific Republic. This is especially true of the conscripts, who officially don't exist but are unofficially necessary for the maintenance of the Eiraene War Effort. It is very important to point out here that the law of the Great Pacific Republic of Eo forbids conscription. If a conscript could fight his way into a Republican trial room, he would immediately be set free. Yet very few ever do, which is excellent evidence that conscription (if it ever occurred at all) was a rare and subversive action taken by individual commanders against the law of the Republic. Even then, it was confined to the long and difficult wars that led to the unification of the First Orientation.

The truth on the ground is different matter from the truth of the codices. It is true that the taboo against conscription held for many decades after the founding of the Republic. A protest against imperial conscription was part of the original reason for the Republic's creation: the first Republicans came from a series of mountainous villages, rebelling against a cruel vizier who was bent on expanding the Kingdom of Eoun through a series of bloody and destructive wars. As a result, even the most hardened warmongers in the Republican Parliament remembered those early days of fear and swore to uphold the ban. Yet ever since Emergency Command had a taste of conscription during the final assault in the Fractal War, it has found the dish a difficult one to refuse. As a result every now and then a prison is emptied, every now and then some villains never make it to court. Procedural irregularities are corrected. Volunteer registers gain a few extra filled-in pages. Despite its power and wealth literacy in the Republic is still not perfect---many citizens sign with their thumbprint, sponged with ruby ink.

It is to the great relief of Emergency Command that most conscripts die quickly in this arrangement. And of the ones that survive? Conscripts by their nature have few loved ones to write home to, and letters from the front do not enjoy even the weakened privileges of letters in the capital, especially during this long season of wartime. Still, they are soldiers like any other, with the potential to rise even to the ranks of officer and general. The Republic is meritocratic in this respect, at least. 

Of course, very few conscripts ever make it to the officers' ranks. Those that did would surely have much to remember.

Hero of the Great Pacific Republic

STATISTICS - Basic statistics as fighter or soldier. 

EQUIPMENT - Starts with two sets of heavy azure uniforms (one set for parade and one set for combat use), an officer's armband (bright gold, with azure lettering---"Volunteer Delegation of the Great Pacific Republic", alongside division, unit and rank information), a heavy black metal helmet (optional rule: the helmet breaks and saves you from one head shot if the shooter rolls max damage), an interface compass (reads out your current orientation and bearing), a navigator's slide rule, and a trio of arms: a steel knife (1d4+1), a Hayant T-20 "republican" rifle (1d10+2, range 500m, 10 rounds) and a Lukhat revolver (1d10+1, range 100m, 6 rounds. Officers rode on horseback, once.). Pack and gear (ammunition, food, sleeping bag etc.) depend on the current campaign and mission.

SKILLS - You are proficient in navigation, command, and shooting, plus one skill from your former life. Proficiency in a military context is different from the proficiency of a craftsman. To be proficient in a skill is to do it well even if you are almost dead from six days of continuous marching, under enemy fire, and carrying the last letter of a dead friend. There is no room for flair, embellishment, or hesitation. If you can shoot, you can shoot half-blind stumbling out of bed. If you can command, you can read the face of a recruit even if you've never seen them before in your life. If you can navigate, you can do it with half a map and the direction of the sun while running from a pack of wolves. When not under the duress of War, you simply succeed at skills you are proficient in. You reload like you breathe.

WAR - Conversely, every other skill is subject to the dictates of War. War is not just a political truth, it is an emotional one. When you see your house get blown up and your friend get pulverised the spectre of War marches out of books and dramas and eats you whole. War is normally triggered by combat with an armed enemy force at range and close quarters fighting with a threatening opponent, but can also be triggered by other combative situations. When you are at War you roll for skills you are proficient in as normal, with a "mere" bonus or advantage if the situation permits. You are at a disadvantage when using any skill you are not proficient at (even if you have a numerical bonus), and automatically fail at any skill you have no bonus for unless you first succeed at a WIS saving throw or equivalent. Even then you still roll at disadvantage: War is not the time to try new things. Noncombatants must make a Wisdom save each round of War or enter fight/flight/freeze.

GUNS - (There are better rules than these)

• All shots are loud and obviously gunfire. 
• Soldiers/trained shooters: When standing still, 3 aimed shots per round. When moving, 1 aimed shot per round. For each shot roll a DEX check to see if it hits.
• Civilians: When standing still, 1d4 shots per round. Cannot fire while moving. All shots are considered wide by default (roll the DEX check at disadvantage). Cannot reload during War if untrained.
• For rifles, one action in cover to reload clip from hip belt. For revolvers, one round in cover to reload six-shooter-style from belt. One round to move ammunition from pack to belt, belt holds equivalent of 20 shots (2 box magazines). Reloading in the open during War while standing requires DEX check.

TEMPLATES - The Wolf-hearted Hero, the Great Defending Hero, the Azure-souled Hero, the Loyal Citizen Hero. 

The Wolf-Hearted Hero

When at War you can use almost anything you can hold as an improvised weapon, giving it the statistics of your knife or better. When charging an enemy or group of enemies, you can howl to cause their shots to be rolled at disadvantage for this round. You get impatient after 5 rounds of shooting in War. If you fail a Wisdom save, you will charge the enemy, or at least try to move closer.

The Great Defending Hero

You are proficient at finding cover, building quick barricades, and laying down suppressing fire in War. Using your command skill, you can direct your division to safety if given time to prepare. If someone close to you is harmed and your turn is after theirs, you can sacrifice your turn to step into harm's way. If someone under your care dies in War, you will charge the enemy.

The Azure-souled Hero

During War, all rolls with proficient skills are made with advantage. All rolls with non-proficient skills are no longer made with disadvantage, and you no longer need to make WIS saving throws for skills you have no experience with. In a non-combat situation, you can cause everyone in a reasonably-sized room (including you) to enter War if you succeed at a Charisma or Strength check. If you fail at any important check in a non-combat situation, making a Charisma saving throw. If you fail, the same effect triggers automatically for everyone around you and yourself. 

The Loyal Citizen Hero

You are immune to fear, charm, terror, intimidation, and lying while in War. You can command most civilian instutitions and groups in War if you succeed at a Charisma or Strength check.  You automatically fail most parley, reaction, or diplomacy rolls unless they are with allied forces.

Six (Game System)

Premise

An entirely untested system. Can be used with Reconstructed Espionage Action or anything else.

A character can be represented by a lined sheet of paper, or a notecard. On the card you will write down the things you are carrying. One thing is one line.

You cannot carry more than six things. This is the primary mechanic of the game.

Rules

If you try to do a reasonable or easy task you will succeed. If you try to do a difficult task, or a reasonable task under stress, you must roll 1d6. On a 5 or 6, you succeed. If you can name a relevant thing that helps you, you also succeed. The GM and the other players can name things that would hurt you, which cancel out 1-to-1. If you encounter serious consequences, the GM may make you take on harmful things and/or lose helpful things.

If all your slots are filled with harmful things, you are dead or out of the game. It may be harder to let go of some things than others.

Sample Characters

Start by choosing a name and a class. This will determine your starting things. Each class also has a kind of thing they are good at acquiring from the environment. Here are a few sample classes.

Class - The Society Butcher

Fancy Dress. Silenced pistol. Command of six languages. Permission to enter elite circles. A hole where your heart should be.

You can pick up strings from NPCs you meet. A string is a thing that represents an obligation, and the strength of the obligation is determined by how long you spend interacting with the NPC.

If you spend five minutes talking to them, they will do a favour for you, or ignore an indiscretion. If you spend an hour talking to them, they will cover for you, or give you something to help you. If you spend a night with them, their heart will break for you.

Class - The Old Spenser

All-terrain smart camouflage suit. Night-vision goggles. Rifle. Close-quarters combat skills. A brutal wound, half-healed.

You can procure equipment from your environment. When you can name a gadget, tool, item, or small object that might reasonably exist in the scene, you find it.

Class -  The Pattern Analyst

Dull suit. Networked radio terminal. Encyclopaedic knowledge of most things. Air of standoffishness and undoubted expertise. A deathly fear of conflict.

Name three things in the scene and how they are connected. If the other players agree, they are connected in that way.

[To be continued?] 

Record of Fractal Conflict

Officially it is well known that the Great Pacific Republic is the dominant superpower of the first orientation. It claims the first orientation as its own, for it was the first of the empires to formalise the science of interface travel, and therefore received the honour of defining the origin of space and time. It was the first to convene the Interorientational Dialogue which established a fragile line of communication between the upper and lower powers, enabling for the first time a peace borne not of ignorance but of reasoned understanding. Naturally, it was also the first to violate that fragile but mutual peace, citing the need for security and vital resources for its citizens. The Dialogue still runs to this day, but all that is exchanged over the ansibles and conferences are threats and demands, warnings of imminent desecration, and the bureaucratic arrangements necessary for the repatriation of the dead. 

Officially, it is also well known that the Great Pacific Republic is also winning its war against his Revealed Excellency the Eiraene Emperor and the Empire which he commands. With the Taifang sundered by the Dysaecular Device (the sole product of the secret Esteeri Project Zeitenwende), it seems that once the Middernlands fall the Republic will become the dominant power in OQ, the first to unite all four sets of land and sky, joining eight realms under one roof. The roof, of course, being the roof of the Republican Chamber of State. Never mind that the Esteerenbild, which destroyed an entire orientation with a single gadget, is still alive and kicking. Never mind that the Republican Chamber has sat empty for the last ten years as war after war led to contiguous states of emergency, its rump parliament rubber-stamping a series of extraordinary decrees at the best of times and simply bypassed at worst. And never mind that the Republic is not even the only superpower in the first orientation.

You see, long before there were wars between orientations there were wars within orientations. In fact, there still are. The Great Pacific Republic of Eo was once matched with a rival Republic, the Seven-Starred Republic of the Folk of the Jien, whose sphere of influence rivaled the Pacific hegemony at every turn. The war was at first cold, then hot, then cold again, and by the time it came hot the third time around the Pacific Republic had begun using orientation traversal as a means to move troops without fear of detection or reprisal. The natural philosophers of the Jien had no means of traversing the fourth dimension, and found themselves at every turn hounded by the increasingly desperate cries of their people and their government for a wonder weapon; a miracle cure to end the war that was now turning decisively against them.

And then what happened?

They had no means of defeating the enemy. But they did have a way of remaking themselves. For the eminent philosophers of the Jien were well trained topologists and geometers of all kinds, including the foremost experts in functional topology in the entire OQ. And what is land, but realised geometry?

You don't mean...

Yes, to defend themselves against the Republic the Jien military developed the first fractal bomb. It was called an iterative regularisation device, a tool for enabling the distortion of local reality using the laws of mathematics. And they used it on themselves.

Those bloody idiots. 

Idiots, yes, and many more things besides. Nowadays the entire sphere of the Jien, from their home plains to every satellite statelet they convinced to join their coalition, is about the size of four football fields joined together. Its border is now a perfect square, every point of land rearranged into a fractal which grows ever more dense as you approach the centre. When the Emergency Command heard what the Jien had done, they laughed and said the war would be over in three months. By the time I was sent to the front we'd just passed through the second ring of regularisation.

How long had the war been going on by then? 

Some fourteen years. Now it's coming on thirty.

How can it take so long to wipe out a few football fields?

If you start walking into the Jien empire now, you will find your subjective sense of space shrinking. Somehow, as you approach the centre each step puts you in a larger rather than a smaller space than before. Most of it is just void---empty land, filling in the points between the original geometry---but the overall effect is that the entire surface area of the Jien empire is still there, just folded in on itself. This was the genius of the geometers, you see. For they designed the fractal in such a way that the defenders, who were deeper in than us, would always have more land, more ground to work with, more angles of attack. Despite encircling them on all sides we were in fact always hemmed in, with our backs against the wall, made to look slow and sluggish. I was at the front for five more years. Every day the sky seemed emptier as we pushed deeper in. Eventually I realised that there was simply not enough sky left for the iterative mapping to work with, and all that was left was a deep atomic blue. Still, by the end of the five years we reached the outskirts of the Jien river valley itself. Their capital was within reach.

What did you find there?

Patience, student. For months by that point we had grown worried. Intercepts from the capital had become increasingly garbled, prisoners of war spoke of absent leadership and unclear directives. By the time we saw the walls and our aerial scouts saw how the insides seemed to widen as they flew in, it was already too late. They'd seen us coming, and detonated another fractal bomb inside the capital.

That... can't be good.

It isn't. One fractal bomb is nasty stuff, but the infinity is still fairly regular. A fractal inside a fractal... we shelled the capital, or what was left of it, for weeks, months, a year. Our scouts saw no difference. Time, too, slows when you are in the zone of contraction. Then we saw what was coming out. Half-soldiers, distorted tanks, gunships flying backwards and dilated in time, firing antimunitions that rose out of the ground with our soldiers still stuck on them. It was a fresh layer of hell.

So the war was never won.

No. It took us years more to evacuate all of our troops and every non-distorted civilian we could carry. There was no Jien government any more, no more war to speak of. There were only humans, who wanted to live, and the monsters inside the capital. The Republican Chamber declared victory, and now we just deposit endless shells into the territory from outside. Bigger bombs too, when we can find one. Eventually the plan is to get some Esteeri diplomats on side and arrange for a team to deliver a Dysaecular Device into the centre of the double-fractal.

Does that work? Will any of this work?

I don't know. I hope I never have to find out.

Setting: Reconstructed Espionage Action

Introduction 

The suspended tram jerks and shudders as you pass through another junction, centrally-controlled switches clicking in a choreographed handover. All around you the small steel box continues its steady climb, thin steel walls lined with reassuring mahogany handrails and windows framed in neutral cream. If you look closely you can just about see where the driver used to sit, near the front of the car, but now a small emergency stop switch is all that remains of the control panel. In place of a human operator a small telecomputer unit clicks and whirrs, streams of control signals flickering on its dot-matrix display. A small tab under the display accepts tickets and a seriously red bakelite phone allows you to call in case of a sudden emergency.

All around you the passengers are carrying out their expected roles in a morning commute. Someone is reading the newspaper. Someone is drinking coffee. On the velvet cushioned-bench besides you someone is using a pocket cassette player. They are playing the song Whirling-In-Rags, 12 PM. You can hear it leaking out of the terrible headphones. Outside the window you see an interface airship (too vortex is too unstable for jet engines) readying to shift, part of the ever-growing interfaced war effort against his Revealed Excellency, the Eiraene Emperor. The vocator on the radio says that their backwards thaumaturgies will soon be ground to dust, just as they did to the scholars in the hidden isles. Any day now.

The next time the switch handover happens you will be almost three minutes away from the Legislative District. When you feel the bump you allow your hand to fall open slightly. Their hand brushes against yours, as if by accident. Out of the corner of the eye you catch a pair of nervous eyes, a yellow beret, a light green jacket. Then the handover is complete. You don't talk during the last three minutes of the journey, even when they bump into you on the way out.

You only dare look at your hand when you sit down at your bare, single-bulb apartment. As promised, its a vocator tape, the two metal studs indicating that it fits a Series V or later model. The label is left blank, but you pull out a trolley from behind your single bed. On it sits a Rosencrantz-V Vocator-Telecomputer Multiplex, a miracle of engineering---only the height of your hip. A woodgrain control panel with inset plastic keyboard connects an LCD screen, a voicebox, a studio microphone, and a small printer for printout and fax connections. Underneath it all sits a semi-transparent steel-framed glass case where the symbolic operator units and memory racks can be dimly apprehended, tinted a faint gunmetal grey by dust and poor lighting. It takes a few seconds to boot up after you insert the tape.

PACIFIC COORDINATION SIMULATION SERIES VII

1. Global Policy Convergence Under External Drive [Battery A-D]

2. Interface Cohesion (Phase Transition) Initiative [Battery E-G]

3. Political Counterinsurgency and Outlier Detection via Population-scale Statistics

4. [MORE]

... 

Merely possessing this tape would get you sent to the Giftschrank for advanced questioning, or worse. But the data is invaluable for understanding the plans of the Directorate for the next five years, so you sit down and start reading.

What is this?

This is an aesthetic outline for a setting more than anything else, continuing the ideas which started here. It contains elements of Disco Elysium, the computers of the 50s or 60s, Washington DC, WWII Germany, the aesthetic of Metal Gear, the writings of Vaclav Havel, and Critical Mass by Philip Ball. All of this is then blended with quasi-historical fantasy and some level of background magic radiation.

In essence it is simple. There is a world not unlike ours, with nations and factories and war and machines that compute via logical operations. In that world there is a shadowed state, which operates an order with scrabbling viciousness and totalising ambition. You are a tiny figment of animal imagination trying to survive within that order. And, as you pray and fight and hope and love, background forces stir that put the cold and dominated reality you see all around you into question. There is a Gare Polyphonique, and we're tuned into it, until the end of time when all mysteries are revealed. This world does not have a name yet: let us call it OQ, Orbis Quartus.

The Interface

The world of OQ is similar to ours, except that it has an element known as an interface. An interface is something like a direction on a compass, or the hour reported by a clock. It is an objective measure of some form of distance, just as we have measures in space and time. In spatial terms it is a fourth axis after X, Y, and Z.

Thus, to report your position in the world of OQ requires four coordinates: latitude, longitude, date, and interface orientation. To change interface is effectively to move between different possible worlds that coexist at that moment in space and time. OQ is therefore many overlapping planets at once, all of which lay claim to different versions of the same volume in space. 

The original way to travel between interfaces used natural portals: great storms in the sea, caves that cultists thought led into the underworld. They were treated as manifestations of the divine, or a sign from higher powers. Over time the mechanics of interface manipulation became formalised. Portals and interface vortices could be discovered, dispelled, and at last erected, and pocket-watches were created to measure your orientation. It was discovered that four great civilisations had arisen in OQ contemporaneously, each laying claim to the central landmass known (variously) as the Middern Eiraene Markgrund, the Fundament, the Oecumene, and the Taifang. 

Shortly afterwards, these civilisations went to war. 

The Present 

Now there is a tenuous peace between the two higher interfaced civilisation, the Great Pacific Republic (where you live, an industrial empire with votes but no democracy and subjects but no citizens) and the Esteerenbild (not much different, think the Moralintern but they actually managed to establish their ideal Innocent world on the backs of ancient powers). Both wage proxy wars in the lower civilisations for influence and resources, bringing airships and telecomputers to bear against fireballs and bespoke spirit-binding rituals. The Taifang has been splintered by weapons they cannot even understand and rendered a blasted heap, and the Middernlands are headed that way. The dirty secret is that it is very hard to establish a planet-spanning empire unless you have another planet's worth of resources to burn: it just so happens that in this case "you" do.

The players are likely to be discontents in the Pacific Fundament, rebels of various stripes, infiltrators from the "lower" interfaced planes. I intend the setting to provide plenty of ammunition for campaigns of all sorts, even classic dungeon crawling or hexcrawling types. I hope this seems interesting. 

Wandering in the Astral Plane

The astral plane really should not be just a void-world where ghosts or spirits live. It is, after all, the realm of pure idea and imagination, where concepts live. In honour of this, I devised a series of linked tables that allow you to project yourself into the astral plane. By rolling on the linked tables you will experience fantastic delusions/visions/glimpses of the impossible until your thoughts eject you. Suitable for vaguely Delta-greenish/modern OSRish/gonzo GLOGish/urban fantasyish settings. If I ever get the energy, I want to expand this to a full hexflower thing where you can move from hex to hex by thinking different thoughts/feeling different emotions. Merry glogmas!

A: How do you enter the astral plane? <depending on plot circumstance, or roll 1d5>

1. A lucid dream where you decided to peel away the surface of the dreamworld. <goto B1>

2. Meditation for thirty-two consecutive hours, according to the instructions specified by the recovered Tokai Botourouden (Tale of the Eastern Sea Dream-lantern). <goto B2>

3. You were on stage, and fell sideways. <goto B3>

4. [someone] cracked open your skull and [something] your brain [...] <goto B4>

5. Experimental program to determine the origin or prospects of consciousness through the use of EEGs, copious psychedelics, and transcranial magnetic stimulation. <goto B1>

B1: What do you see? <1d6, goto C>

1. A riot of sound, emotion, and colour. Howling red blushes and acrid blue silences, tinged with yellow fear.

2. A slow procession of ancient embarrassments, stirred up by an irritated superego.

3. The deep marsh of comforting primordial darkness that all sleep tends towards, arrested only by the day.

4. A replay of your life, flowing through the stream of a river. By moving your hand against or along the flow you can speed up or slow down the images. The air is lit by a beautiful golden sunset.

5. Yourself magnified a thousand times, talking, chattering, laughing, loveable, hateful. To go deeper you have to step around/through/into/beyond yourself.

6. Them. Why did it have to be them, waiting here in the dark? Oh god, you have so much to tell them. But would they understand? Can they ever forgive you?

B2: What do you see? <1d6>

1. Your house, but the colours have run cold and the time is fixed at midnight.

2. Your family, standing solemn and still, the jokes have fallen from their eyes.

3. Your Family, generations on generations, a great teeming mass of historic humanity reconstituted as astral shells. You can ask them many questions. Whether they remember the answers, and whether you can understand what they say, is another matter entirely.

4. A great stone amphitheatre, filled with meditating monks. You see a host of different colours on robes, banners with foreign scripts, and the standard of the Isshin-muten (One heart without sky) school whose practices you pilfered.

5. A massive theoretical construction they would have once called Oriental, impossible layers of towers on towers and seas of tiled roofs, gates ever growing and folding into themselves.

6. A beach. Each grain of sand is a letter or a character. The waves push the sand into new sentences and paragraphs, each lasting for a mere instant before being destroyed as the wave retreats.

B3: What do you see? <d6, goto C>

1. A massive industrial elevator, grinding and whirring as it cycles through backstage moments from across time and place. Macbeth, Agamemnon, Journey to the West…

2. A circle of people, clothed in skins and holding spears. You have been summoned as part of the enacting of a Hero’s Journey, a spectre of the future to perform for the past. A crackling fire sends soot into well-exercised lungs. Your body feels… younger.

3. Gold upon gold and ultraviolet upon ultraviolet. Barely human spectres–translated to umber-grey digital ghosts by your primitive visual cortex–review your performance in the simulation of your universe. Why has this agent simulacra temporarily unbound itself from the constructed quasi-Euclidean world-manifold?

4. Back on stage. The show goes on. The show is of your life. Offstage is just another stage. 

5. Three aged witches. Something tells you that they are the three witches. Three as old as story. Three as old as time. They smile with gaping maws for mouths.

6. A great stone amphitheatre, filled with everyone from your life, even those you have not met yet. They are clapping and cheering, celebrating you, all of you, all of the tiny disappointments that you suffered, all of the titanic blows you survived. 

B4: What do you see? <d6, goto C>

1. A circle of cackling magicians, wearing vestments and robes from another time and place. “This one will do,” says one, before another aims a spell from behind at his caged heart.

2. Still, gigantic, ponderous, glorious statues. Statues of the gods, past and present. Perhaps they are not statues—they cannot be, they are too terrifying and awesome. But they are not moving, not for you.

3. Three aged witches. Something tells you that they are the three witches. Three as old as story. Three as old as time. They smile with gaping maws for mouths.

4. An operating theatre. Surgeons with complex masks and devices for eyes, manipulating mechanical stingers that pierce and probe. Beeps and whirs, snaps and cuts, you are on the bench and unable to move until your thoughts untangle themselves.

5. A great library with caged shelves hanging from more caged shelves, forming chains of knowledge that stretch from a cold blue heaven into a burning red hell. Walkways connect them, and spirits scurry between the books. A set of hieroglyphs burn before your mind, giving you coordinates and commands. You find that you can choose to ignore them.

6. A digital nullscape, matrices of gridlines arcing between voids. At first, it appears to be merely rows and rows of nothing. Patterns slowly emerge from the shadows, ICE and AI constructs weaving between each other, interfacing with each other, devouring each other, spilling gigabytes of data into dust.

C: Even this is merely a shadow of the real astral plane. Which verb do you choose? <d8>

1. THINK <goto D1>

2. HATE <goto D2>

3. LOVE <goto D3>

4. REMEMBER <goto B2>

5. FORGET <goto B1>

6. PERFORM <goto B3>

7. MANIFEST <goto B4>

8. EXIT <goto E>

D1: What does it mean to think? <d4>

1. To grasp the iron laws of reality, and through them attain ultimate power. <goto F1>

2. To peel back the deceptions and falsehoods that drive our days, and beyond them attain truth. <goto F2>

3. To weave a deception about yourself, and in turn flee from that which you already know. <goto B1>

4. To think is to carry out the operations which form the computational unraveling of the universe. To think is to be. <goto G>

D2: What does it mean to love? <d4>

1. To deny yourself in abnegation, and escape yourself through a more gracious other. <goto B1>

2. To maintain yourself in the face of an uncaring universe. <goto F1>

3. To attain true appreciation of the oneness of things, and dissolve the artificial boundaries that divide us. <goto F2>

4. To exist and to care, which we do by existing. To love is to be. <goto G>

D3: What does it mean to hate? <d4>

1. Death. Destruction. Hurt them. They hurt you. Make them pay. <4d6 psychic damage, goto E>

2. Kill. Kill them. Kill someone. Kill them all. <3d6 psychic damage, goto E>

3. Why? Why did it have to be me? What was wrong with me, that you chose to do this to me? How could you? Why could you? Where are you? <2d6 psychic damage, goto E>

4. It is not me. It is not clean. It is not safe. It is not, it cannot. <1d6 psychic damage, goto E>

E: How do you exit the astral plane? <d6, end>

1. A fading, a dimming into a realer, more disappointing blackness.

2. An unravelling, the end of sense into nonsense into senselessness into a way a round a long the riverrun past eve and adams…

3. Floating. The infinite worlds become infinitely small beneath you. They recede into a unity, a unity that splits apart again into division, into reality.

4. Sinking. Fact, feeling, and idea swallow you. They demand more of you, until there is nothing to be done except to become real again.

5. Like a film reel or a comic book, time itself segments and accelerates towards the end of the story.

6. A train bursts onto the screen/dream/reality/self, and everything is shocked into order again. You wake up as if no time has passed.

F1: What is the nature of power? <1d6, goto E>

1. KINGSHIP. Rule them, command them, burn them, break them. <+1 CHA>

2. FORTITUDE. The totality of the self must become sealed against the totality of the other, this is true safety. <+1 CON>

3. OVERTHROW. Overcome all opposition, and thy will shall be law. <+1 STR>

4. FLOW. To be in the moment, to move with the moment, to supersede the moment. <+1 DEX>

5. KNOWLEDGE. To know is to control. Once you can understand something, you can have power over it and make it your own. <+1 INT>

6. FORESIGHT. True strength comes from knowing what battles to fight in the first place. <+1 WIS>

F2: What is the nature of truth? <1d6, goto E>

1. NOTHINGNESS. There is no root-substance, everything is relational and therefore hollow. There is no base matter. <Gain spell: DISINTEGRATE>

2. BEAUTY. The trueness of a thing is simply its aesthetic power. Falsehood is ugliness, and plain appearances mere nonexistence. <Gain spell: GREATER ILLUSION>

3. LIFE. That which is true is that which grows and changes over time. <Gain spell: RESURRECTION>

4. COMPLEXITY. There are layers upon layers, details upon details. There is always a caveat, another fractal reality beneath the current one. <Gain spell: POLYMORPH>

5. SIMPLICITY. Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. <Gain spell: GREATER DISPELL MAGIC>

6. SYMMETRY. What is true in one place and time is true forever. <Gain spell: TRUE TELEPORT>

G: How is existence maintained? <goto E>

1. SUFFERING. Life is a mere contiguous sequence of senseless indignities. Shit happens and then you die. <Gain health>

2. HOMEOSTASIS. A delicate shell of extreme complexity and ever-shifting order, balanced on the cliff’s edge above senseless chaos. <Gain experience>

3. LOVE. You are loved, and that is enough. <Gain a wish>