Diaspora After Play Report: Aspera

12 February 2010, DunDraCon, San Ramon, CA

Friday night, I ran a game of Diaspora at DunDraCon 34. In preparation for the game, I put together a very basic setting framework at http://persaspera.pbworks.com. The conceit behind the setting was this, modern earth +150 years, after the world has had another century-and-a-half of growth and conflict, a physicist has proposed a possible method of interstellar space travel. After checking out his math, and preliminary tests with probes seem to show the concept works, several corporations, and some national governments banded together to underwrite the human mission. The only catch, although the probes each seemed to work while translating away from the slip point, no probe ever returned.

It was up to the crew of the Far Venture to find out why, and return home to explain how to make interstellar travel viable. The players comprised that crew. In order to give the players the right balance between control over their characters and time spent roleplaying, I provided a modified character creation process. This process was mapped on the back of the wonderful VSCA convention character sheet. Alongside a list of possible skills, and a truncated skill pyramid, I compiled a set of questions designed to evoke characters that could, in theory, find themselves aboard the first human mission to interstellar space. Each question was phrased like an employment questionnaire with space to fill in a story, and space for two aspects. The questions were like so:



In order to expedite the application process, please being by answering the following questionnaire:

The final question was run in such a way so that each character wrote an aspect based on (or inspired by) their relationship with the person on either side of them at the table, to represent the year of training together before the mission, and the travel time between earth, and the Event Point. While this was happening I wrote their names and apex skills on the table, alongside representations of both the earth, and the solar system. Next to the drawing of Terra, I wrote stats and aspects describing the planet in 2160: T1 E1 R1, “Ubiquitous Microprocessors”, “Fractured Phoenix”, and “This Lonely Island”, which I copied over from the Aspera wiki.

Additionally, I let the players “design” the ship itself while they created their characters. I asked them to talk about what sorts of things they would want to have aboard while I added the information to a drawing of the ship (with stats and aspects). Without the players' request, they never would have had an interface vehicle. This would come in handy later.

I encouraged the players to create any types of characters they wanted for the mission, provided the rest of the table was OK with the concept. The crew for Friday Night's game, was like so, with selected sample aspects (pulled from my leaky memory, because I didn't write them all down, alas):

We put the crew into position at the “Event Point” five AU above the ecliptic. After the chase ship (carrying Dr. Ozaki and several media types) sent a probe through, the Chief Engineer pushed the button on the Ozaki Device. For the folk in the Mission Module portion of the ship, nothing immediately happened, but for the two in the Command Module, the windows lit up with a tremendous light. The Pilot was fast enough to slap a visor over his eyes, but the Navigator suffered some eye damage. They closed impact shields over the ports, just as the windows cracked from the heat, venting atmo. The Pilot and Navigator sealed their suit helmets, and the Pilot worked to address the tumble registered on the ship's inertials.

In the Mission Module, the rest of the crew noticed that external temperature sensors spiked and went dead, along with all the other externally mounted sensors. The Engineer started to see rising internal temperatures as well, as well as increasing pressure and temperature from the ship's reaction mass tanks. In an attempt to diagnose the source of the heat, the crew rolled the ship in a controlled manner, searching for clues as to where the heat source was. The Engineer sought to control the ever rising internal temperatures by cycling and expelling re-mass to refrigerate the hull and release tank pressure.

Meanwhile, the Physicist and Computer Guy tried to determine what information they could find about what was going on. They hacked a connection to the attached Interface Vehicle to see if the heat-shielded sensors from the small craft could give them any data. They determined the exterior temperature of the ship, and hacked a camera view from the cockpit of the mini-shuttle to run a spectroscopic analysis of the light and heat outside the shuttle's windows. Upon analyzing the data, they found that the spectrometry showed the light matched the frequency of the hull exterior. Whatever caused the heat was boiling off the hull of the Far Venture, one tiny bit at a time. Oops.

Fortunately, the crew was able to patch the portholes in the non-heat-shielded ship, and refrigerate the ship by cycling and venting re-mass. While they waited for the ship exterior to become cool enough to risk an EVA, they rigged up a multi-sensor package from spares and parts to place on the exterior of the ship. When the Astronomer and Engineer ventured out of the ship, they found a colorful nebula awaiting them, filling nearly half the sky. They took readings, and transmitted a radar pulse to discover whether they could find the probe that had transitted before they did. Also, the Astronomer set a program up to process information about what stars were where, in order to determine their location. Within a few minutes they found the probe spinning away into space. A few minutes later, they also got a radar contact from another source. This contact source appeared to be a ship, decelerating toward an apparent zero-zero intercept near their location.

They sent the Voyager Plaque via radio and received a handshake message back. Then the two ships negotiated a rudimentary communication by sending their dictionaries in bits. Then the players were astounded when the first images came in, because the images they received were images of humans. While the alien ship decelerated to their location, they continued to exchange information. The Computer Guy noted a secondary frequency with another low-bit data signal, an alien IP-style handshake. The Computer Guy noted that this handshake was very rudimentary, and (after a couple of compels on "Elite Hacker") determined that the computer on the alien craft was wide open to external interrogation (I felt I had to do something with Ubiquitous Microprocessors!).

After a surreptitious look at the alien ship's log, wherein they saw that the ship had been in several shooting encounters within the last 20 days, the crew began to suspect that the alien craft was up to no good. They proceeded to hack further into the alien computers, and read the peripherals on the ship to find that there were other crews in cells on the ship. Finally, the Computer Guy installed a root kit in pirate's computers to cut out the system when they wanted to. After the alien threatened them, they flipped the switch, and cut the pirate's computer controls. Once the ship was locked down, they simulated a major systems failure to confuse the alien crew, convincing them through computer alarms to abandon ship, and then jumped via EVA from the Far Venture to the pirate.

The crew of Far Venture managed to sneak aboard, free the captives and secure the ship, before retrieving the lifepods and negotiating with the captives to bring them home to Terra before repatriating them. Then they worked the math, and prepared to jump both ships back to Terra. When the Chief Engineer pushed The Button to return home, we ended the game.

My only regret is that I didn't try any of the mini-games, but until I have had a chance to work through the mini-games with some friends, I didn't want to lay 'em on con players. Everyone said they had a good time, nonetheless.

Yesterday (Monday), when I talked to the guys at the Endgame booth at DunDraCon, they thanked me for selling all their copies of Diaspora for them. Apparently, after the game, they sold all the copies they had on-site before the end of Saturday, and then sold the final copy retrieved from the store on Sunday morning. I was just happy to see the game getting a little more exposure. Speaking of exposure, I was pleased to learn during the game, that one of the players, Kris (founder of Celesti-Con), was the guy who turned Endgame onto VSCA and Diaspora in the first place. So really, he deserves the credit. I just ran the game. Thanks to the folks at Endgame, to my players and friends, to Messrs Murray, Kerr, Marshall and Dyke (the crew at VSCA who created this fine game), and to the contributors to the various mailing lists and forums I've been sifting through to read Diaspora material. I had a great time with a great game, and it's because of all of you.

I also want to thank anyone who read all the way to the end of this. If there's anyone who would like the character generation framing documents for the game, just let me know. I'm happy to share. Also, in case you missed it, the character sheet and chargen document are linked above.

Best,

~B