A lot of my concerns about the length and complexity of 60 Years in Space could simply be addressed by looking at the 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons Players Handbook and seeing how many rules players would be willing to put up with just for character generation. But there's two clear differences: there is an incentive to learn about what your character can do, which is cleverly partitioned by class so that - for instance - a barbarian never has to read about mage spells; and that a lot of the invented or borrowed Dungeons & Dragons lexicon has entered general language usage over the 49 years it has been played.
Science fiction has a similar challenge, except each science fiction
world invents its own terms and adopts its own definitions for more
general terms such as robot. In a fictional world, the author has
control over the pacing and scope of the new language, using this to
teach the reader at a pace they are comfortable with. By procedurally
generating the world I could do something similar: have a massive list
of all possible science fiction futures, but only have a limited number
come up with each possible play through. I could even let the players
win the game or have the world or the universe end - whereas most
science fiction TTRPGs consist of a string of subgenre sand boxes which
let players play in their favourite without spilling over into another.
This still doesn't solve the language problem. If I wrote the
supplements using invisible ink and used a magic marker pen to reveal it
as you play, I might be able to avoid you worrying about the names of
every possible type of human-robot-animal-alien hybrid mix. But I have
to be consistent in defining what a theriomorph, for instance, is so
that when you see that word in the rules you know it means a human who
has changed themselves to have an animal-inspired form. It helps, of
course, if you are a classical scholar or speak Greek, but in the end I
ended up using a lot of words that fall outside normal vocabulary. And
as a result, much of the five books consists of the definitions of
things.
I also coined some new words while doing this - apologies in advance
if one of these is your band name or user handle. This is not an
exhaustive list, but the most interesting.
- amorcracy - rule by a group of people who sleep with each other
- beginling - the first member of a species (from endling)
- bisentient - intelligent being consisting of one body and two minds
- fandemic - a behavioural modifying pathogen which makes infected both moderately addicted to a pleasurable activity and driven to infect people around them to get them addicted to the same activity
- posterhuman - human who has completely replaced their body with a robotic body, but retains a humanoid form for aesthetic reasons
- skototropolis - a city that hangs underneath an aerostat
- simgularity - a singularity that has occurred in a simulated environment and is therefore not transferable to the real world
storgearchy - rule by people who have children
Theseuvian - either a robot who has replaced themselves with human parts or a human who has replaced themselves with robot parts
- tunafication - increasing proportion of fast twitch muscle fibers in meat
- xenonaut - someone who explores digital environments looking for naturally evolved life
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