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Added Core Lore Guidelines - #682
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Hitlinemoss
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Hitlinemoss
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My thoughts. I broadly agree with what this document outlines, other than the fact that I personally think the baseline for how "specific" the lore can be should be a bit higher.
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| In canon, each of the main, playable species in Space Station 14 is known and familiar to all player characters. Racial conflict and xenophobia are not components of Space Station lore. Likewise, there are no "good" or "evil" races - the ranks of all main factions, including antagonists, are filled with members of every species. | ||
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| In addition, as part of the ambiguity pillar, species "lore" like homeworlds, traditions, etc. should be left largely unstated, with the notable exception of suggested naming schemes. Each species has an associated naming scheme assigned to it, which outside of graphical and audio design is one of the only means that designers have to suggest how players might choose to roleplay a given species. For example, the plantlike Diona have flowery names like "The Meadows of Excellence" or "The Apiary of Distraught." While individual players have no obligation to adhere to their species' naming scheme, players can and will still use it to make inferences about what their species' broader culture might be like and, thus, how their character might behave. No newline at end of file |
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While I don't strictly disagree with this paragraph, I think that there's room for species lore outside of just the naming schemes. For instance, I think an established homeworld is fine, since the environment of said homeworld likely informs aspects of a species' biology. Likewise, I think establishing a "mainstream culture" for that species is also fine, since it provides players who are interested in the species' lore a jumping-off point to make their character feel distinct from how a human might typically act.
I think the more important thing to emphasize is that, while these homeworlds and mainstream cultures are "canon", they should never be something that a character is required to be part of. These species have existed for thousands of years and have been in contact with each other for hundreds, and therefore many members of these species have immigrated to each others' planets, formed new colonies of their own, etc. While it might be canon that most vox live on a fleet of spaceships, it's also equally valid for a vox character to live on a planetside colony, or in an underground city on Earth, or in Space New Orleans.
| Space Station's storytelling should not beat around the bush. Our zombies are called zombies, our dragons are called dragons, our wizards use magic - basically, present things in the most straightforward and direct way possible. If your idea was borrowed from an existing work, name it after the original. If a concept does not neatly map onto any existing trope, try to give it a name that's direct and descriptive, and avoid using unfamiliar proper nouns for key parts of the game world unless absolutely necessary. | ||
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| ## Ambiguity | ||
| An important element of the Space Station setting is ambiguity. As a canvas for roleplay, the game should avoid dictating any details of the setting which aren't directly related to in-game mechanics or factions. Answers to questions like "Why is the Syndicate attacking the station?" or "What happened to Earth?" should remain unstated and left to players to ivent as they go along. Likewise, proper nouns like faction and place names should be used sparingly. |
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I do think that some level of specificity is nice as a way to give background to the setting and provide players with a jumping-off point for roleplay. For instance, old SS13 lore briefly describes Syndicate corporations' businesses, their motivation to attack Nanotrasen, and how they contribute to the Syndicate, which I think is more interesting than just being a list of names with no elaboration. The main thing to avoid in that context would be _over_specifying information in a way that restricts player roleplay (e.g, "All members of the Syndicate working for CyberSun have been legally blackmailed into doing so" would be bad, because many players want to play their traitors as enthusiastically evil).
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I honestly have a big bone to pick with the syndicate corporations, but from a gameplay standpoint rather than a lore one. They often gave instructions and details that players would just outright ignore, which in my mind is anti-content.
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Maybe we have the corporations exist in the lore (with their fields and motivations and whatnot), but ditch the idea of traitors being "assigned" one? That way players can opt into the lore for them if they like (e.g, "My Cargo Technician traitor works for Donk. Co logistics and has helped with their weapon-smuggling operations"), but a player with zero knowledge of the Syndicate's constituent members isn't doing anything "wrong" by just being John Antag, Evilman for Hire.
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I doubt that kind of roleplay would actually happen on wizden, but there's no harm in supporting it. The angle I'd want to work is that each company actually manufactures different types of items on the uplink. Like one company is the arms manufacturer that makes all your guns, one is responsible for your hacking gadgets, etc.
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That's basically what I'm picturing, yeah. This company does X, which means they're the reason why the Syndicate has Y, and they're sponsoring the Syndicate because Z.
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No no, you have it backwards. The existence of the corporations should be apparent only through what they actually do in the setting - you as a player don't get their side of the story, you can only reverse engineer in your head how things might work by combing through the discounts in your blood red Sears catalog. It's fine for them to leave a maker's mark on their products or try to aggressively police their trademark, but it should feel a bit distant.
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I'm not necessarily saying to give each corporation a massive public manifesto for players to read ingame, moreso just that their domains and motivations should be outlined in very broad terms so that contributors who want to add X thing to the uplink can know that Y corporation generally handles items of that variety.
Most of these companies are, in-setting, publically known (I think the only exception is, like, MI6, which is also the one which purposefully has little to no information about it other than "shadowy information-brokers"), so I think it's reasonable to explicitly state information like "Interdyne is a pharmaceutics and bio-research company" and allow players to infer information like "Interdyne sponsors the Syndicate because Nanotrasen have out-competed them in their fields of research".
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This is nitpicky and entirely off-topic, but if we can filter MI6 out now - the name for me feels a bit too governmental and insufficiently corporate. I know it's one of the classic 13-era companies, but I've always found it a bit of a black sheep. It doesn't have even a fraction of Donk Co.'s swag.
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I mean, I'm not necessarily committed to keeping it, but MI6 isn't really a "company" per se so much as just an information-brokering organization with unclear motives. I think it's good flavor that not all members of the Syndicate are necessarily just rival corporations that just want to outcompete NT (e.g S.E.L.F. and the Animal Right Consortium being activist groups, or the Tiger Collective being a changeling cult).
| ## Ambiguity | ||
| An important element of the Space Station setting is ambiguity. As a canvas for roleplay, the game should avoid dictating any details of the setting which aren't directly related to in-game mechanics or factions. Answers to questions like "Why is the Syndicate attacking the station?" or "What happened to Earth?" should remain unstated and left to players to ivent as they go along. Likewise, proper nouns like faction and place names should be used sparingly. | ||
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| As a subrule, Space Station does not generally have named "famous people" in its setting. While there is room for incidental celebrities or urban legends, there is no roster of named characters like generals or presidents which are important to the setting - anything remotely interesting should be reserved for the players to do themselves. |
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I think there's room for "faction leaders" to be named (e.g, the CEO of Nanotrasen), but I do agree that there shouldn't be a massive list of fleshed-out NPCs.
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Faction leaders should usually be unknown and unavailable, to fit the cog in a machine feeling, but an occasional exception is okay. Nanotrasen in specific should be kept pretty enigmatic, but a contextless portrait on the wall is probably fine.
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Yeah, when I speak of faction members being named, it's definitely more in the sense of "I know the NT CEO's name from reading the news or whatever", rather than having names for, e.g, every single commanding officer on CentComm.
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Rewrote the corresponding section.
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I'd really like to get feedback from more of the team before I make any further adjustments. |
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Listed some design pillars for the Space Station setting and included basic lore guidelines for species in particular.