Altaerra Discovered

The GASA mission to Europa – to mine the rich mineral deposits there – went perfectly until a computer glitch incorrectly fired its retro rockets during its final descent to the moon’s surface.  As a result, the craft began to spiral downward into the atmosphere of Jupiter. Desperately trying to save themselves the crew rigged their main engine reactor to fire. The resulting explosion ripped what has been described as a hole in the space time continuum. The ship crashed through this hole spinning wildly out of control towards the surface of an unknown planet. The pilot, Murray Kilcannon, managed to right the ship enough that it was not completely disintegrated as it enter the planet’s atmosphere. He was even able to guide it to something that could be called a landing – dropping it belly first on a rocky plain.

What happened after this is known only because several of the ship’s instruments, including the voice recorder of the first mate Bai Jun, continued to broadcast for the next 99 hours. Scientists spent years studying these broadcasts trying to determine exactly what happened to the crew. The readings from the instrumentation were puzzling. The voice recordings, ominous. Initial speculation was that Bai Jun had simply been driven mad by the experience or perhaps had suffered some kind of physical trauma that resulted in hallucinations.  It was later shown however that his recordings were a rational, detailed record of mankinds first experiences on Altaerra.

Bai Jun’s recordings documented the following:

• The survivors’ escape from the wreckage of the ship. Their initial searches for additional fellow crew members and their subsequent operations to salvage as much from the ship as possible.
• Discussions with a scientist on the crew – Corentin Casteel – who claimed to be able to see strange currents of light swirling all around the surface of the land they’d crashed on. He further claimed to get “feelings” from these currents – feelings that they were being watched, inklings about impending weather changes, etc. The feelings were most interesting for two reasons – he felt that by concentrating he could glean different specific information and second, the information seemed to be invariably correct…
• Arguments among the survivors about the nature of the creatures that seemed to be materializing out of the darkness to attack them.  Each crew member recognized creatures from their childhood nightmares and cultural myths – vampires, goblins, trolls, etc.
• The frightening death of a crew member who’d been lured from the safety of the encampment by the image of his wife – whose dead body lay buried in the wreckage of the downed ship – and then set upon by some sort of wild beast.
• Complaints about the breakdown and inexplicable failures of equipment that had survived the crash. According to crew members’ reports, items stopped working seemingly for no reason. This frustrated their salvage efforts and their attempts to set up a safe base of operations on the new world.
• Bai Jun’s breakthrough.  Bai rather quickly formed a hypothesis about what was happening – something he called “fears made manifest”.  Just as quickly he leaped to the logical (at least to him) extension of his fevered theories – the idea that sacrifice had power. Bai Jun’s final transmissions recorded his hurried preparations to as he put it, “make the ultimate sacrifice” to save the remainder of the crew

Focus

By which I mean tying things tightly together, rooting game rules being used in the campaign’s environment (i.e., world) and theme and yes limiting the rules being used to those that have been “vetted” and integrated completely into the campaign. Why do this? Well, several reasons:

1. Maintain a cohesive campaign environment.
So, for example (and really – this is simply an example – I haven’t gotten to the point yet where anything like this has been decided…) if no monastic tradition exists on Altaerra then sadly there will be no monk class available. The goal is to make sure things “hang together well”. Nothing should feel shoehorned in just because some cool new feat that the DM liked came out halfway through the campaign.

2. Limit preparation work and complexity.
With limited time to prep for obvious reasons (sorry – cheap excuse to link to a picture of Lila…), I’ll need to focus my preparation time as much as possible. Having a limited number of source books to have to understand during the process will help. Limited options will also make it easier for me to guage the difficulty of encounters I’m preparing and hopefully making them less likely to be overkill or simply complete push overs because I failed to note the single weakness or subtle strength of a new class, feat, or spell.

3. Simplify things at the gaming table.
Mainly for the DM but also for everyone else. How do the new powers rally work? How do they stack? Etc. The core rules typically undego extensive playtesting. I’m not sure the add on’s always do…

Unlike my first campaign – Taera – in which I explicitly stated that “all the variety of DnD could be found just alittle modified” (check quote), Altaerra will have limitations and choices. Hopefully this will make for a better experience.

In future posts I’ll expand upon this topic, explaining and exploring how I plan to apply this concept in the following areas:

Classes
Races
Feats
Spells and magic
Religions
Skills

As always, let me know your thoughts on this. – are limits something you can live with? What makes them palatable? Do they take all the fun out of the game?

The Everret Effect

Also known as the Everret Transfer or Everret Shift.

The Everett Effect refers to the re-tuning of the fundamental vibrations of the building blocks of matter so that it shifts between parallel universes. It is named for the American physicist Hugh Everret III, who first postulated the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics. The effect itself was first observed during an ill fated GASA (Global Aeronautics and Space Administration) mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa. The mission was lost when its ship’s computers malfunctioned sending it spinning out of control and descending towards the surface of the gas giant. In a last ditch attempt to save themselves, the astronauts on board manually fired the craft’s nuclear engines deep in the Jupiter atmosphere. The result was a chain reaction that shifted the crew to a parallel earth – something GASA mission control learned because the crew’s equipment inexplicably continued to transmit data, including voice recordings, for several days. These recordings were never made public but they were purchased by an eccentric billionaire (zillionaire?) inventor whose brother was lost on the mission. He vowed to find out what had happened to his brother.

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately), he didn’t live to see the fruits of his investment. Funded by a large endowment set up by their benefactor, teams of scientists studied the incident for two full decades before they were able to understand what had happened to the crew. Another ten years passed before this understanding was translated into practice and the conditions that had caused the incident were recreated. In all, it was more than a half century before the process and the technology needed to create it was perfected to the point that humans could begin to explore Altaerra. Both the process and technology remain a closely guarded secret of the consortium (now called the Altaerran Cooperative) that created it. What has leaked onto the Web and is known generally is the following:

• the effect allows the “transmission” of matter – both living and non-living – to any parallel world for which the correct quantum mechanical wave functions have been solved.
• So far the only parallel world for which this has been accomplished is Altaerra – a feat possible only because of the recorded data from the lost GASA mission.
• Huge amounts of energy are required to achieve the conditions necessary for a “shift”. Large wind-farms throughout the Arctic circle allegedly power the Cooperative’s operations
• Special “de-tuning” transmitters have been developed that allow those who have “shifted” to send communications back to Earth’s universe. The Altaerran Cooperative has combined this technology with the thought transmission devices developed over the last 5 years, miniaturized it and now implants a small “thought-mitter” in the heads of each of its players. These devices allow it to record and re-broadcast the sensory inputs of its players as well as specific trains of thought in the form of internal monologues or soliloquies.

The Void

Interesting concept on a recently recorded episode of Doctor Who (a show with the concept of parallel worlds): the space between worlds is a void – completely and utterly empty.  “Many people call it hell.”

Seems like an interesting idea for the campaign.  Perhaps its something that players need to worry about – if an Everett Transfer goes wrong they could be lost in the void forever.  Perhaps its something that the natives of Altaerra know about as well – what D&D has long called the ethereal plane…accessible by their spells.

A cool adventure would be to have the player’s rescue a famous former player “lost” in the void by using magic on Altaerra to travel to there and retrieve him or her…

To 4E or not to 4E

That really is the question…as posed by John K. in response to my first post.

I confess I don’t know a whole lot about the plans for 4E, I’ve spent a little time reading about it online, mainly here. There’s a lot for me to catch up on.  From the little I do know there are pro’s and con’s to moving or staying with 3.5.  Here’s my preliminary list:

Moving to 4E:

• New system claims to make it easier to prep and run a game
• Everyone’s on the same page with new rules
• Not as many “optional” rules and things to have to deal with (easier to limit to core books only…)
• Electronic support directly from Wizards (DnD Insider) (not sure how much we’ll have to pay for this though…)
• The excitement of playing a new system may suck us in again…

Staying with 3.5E:

• We already own the books – nothing new to buy
• No need to learn new rules, learn the new pitfalls
• Existing material for adventures, plenty of third-party stuff out there, etc. should make prep easier
• New rules may not support the kind of campaign I’m planning on running (magic rules in particular)

Hmmm…my sticking with 3.5 list isn’t quite as long (nor as convincing in my mind) as the  Moving to 4E list.  Wonder what that says.   Add your thoughts in the comments…

What is Altaerra?

The original thought was that it was marketing guy’s play on “Alternate Terra”. Hence the added tag line “Are you ready to be a player?” – clearly I’ve been spending too much time with those marketing folks…

As you surely noticed, the spelling is also reminiscent of the old Taera campaign (I guess it’s hard to let go…). Let’s just say I like to keep my options open.

But I’m getting ahead of myself and not really answering the question…what is Altaerra. The involvement of a marketing guy (fictional or otherwise) in the naming isn’t coincidental. The core concept behind Altaerra is that of an alternate earth-type planet. Imagine if the world of World of Warcraft were a real place. Imagine if “players” were actually actors (the old definition of player) sent to this world to (as Matthew Woodring Stover, author of Heroes Die, from whom this concept is blatantly ripped off, says), “die in interesting ways”. Now imagine if the thoughts and actions of these players were recorded and broadcast to an eager world as the ultimate form of reality TV – brutal entertainment for a slightly dystopian future Earth. Imagine that a MMORPG based on the alternate world has taken the internet by storm – largely because of a whisper campaign that claims “if you’re good enough, you too can be a player…”. Now imagine that you are such a player…having been selected as a teen, educated in Altaerran history and culture, trained as a fighter or rogue or to access that strange altaerran force known as the fey, and finally transferred to Altaerra through an Everett Shift (to be more fully defined in upcoming posts…) to find yourself at last in a fantastical world of elves, dragons and orcs.

Clearly, there’s lots left to be fleshed out with this core concept but I think this captures the core idea. In future posts I plan to expand on (among other things…)

• the history of Altaerra…
• who lives on Altaerra and how they got there…
• how Altaerran history is intertwined with the future of this world…
• just what the Everett effect is and how it works…
• how and why I think this concept will help manage some of the meta game issues we ran into in the Taera campaign…

That’s just a preliminary list….For now, I welcome your comments – let me know what you think – intrigued? Bored? Think it’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard? Now’s the time to let me know…

Coming Winter, 2009

At least that’s what I’d say if this were a movie trailer…

Here’s the scoop. After a long run as DM of the Taera Campaign (see also here and here) I ended the campaign this fall and took a break for the birth of my daughter, Lila. Well, the itch to DM hasn’t gone away but as many of you know with a <1 year old around the time to really do it well is scarce. So, I’ve come up with a plan…

I’m going to use the next year to craft as much of the campaign as I can – build the campaign world, plan the campaign arc, learn tricks to make my preparation go faster and the sessions run smoother, etc. The goal will be to launch the new campaign after the holidays next winter.

So what’s this all about you ask? Why a blog? Well, since as Christian always describes it, what we will be doing is basically shared story telling I hope to enlist your help in building the campaign world. That means adding your ideas to the world, suggesting house rules, commenting on the world’s history and make up, providing direction for what kind of campaign you’d like to participate in. Making all this public has the added benefit that if I start slipping you can keep me on track.

My goal is to post at least once a week. (Although, preferably that would be 2-3 or more times a week.) I’m hoping the blog posts will become something that you comment on so that I can roll your feedback into what I’m developing. Longer term, the posts will serve as a way to record the campaign design, house rules and timeline (for what we use to use as session recaps, etc.).

So that’s it for now. Let me know what you think in the comments…