Time: 11 April 580 post destructio Terrae (2933 AD)
Place: Segrave and Tether: a lost colony 93 light-years from Sol
A war rages on the moon Tether. The Blue loyalists call it a rebellion. The Green separatists call it a war of independence. The Red Flag rebels call it a revolution. The intelligent autochthones call it a prize piece of bald-faced hypocrisy.
Then a survey vessel arrives from the distant Empire: the Imperials are ardent for peace, but their only leverage is overwhelming firepower.
Uninvited Guests is a freeform role-playing event that will be run at SydCon '98. It is a systemless science-fiction freeform for 18-25 players, designed to run for one three-hour session. If there is enough interest to justify it, Uninvited Guests may be run more than once during the convention.
The premise of the scenario is that the players are political leaders of various warring factions, summoned to a summit conference aboard a small but powerful spaceship. The hosts are representatives of a powerful but distant empire, of vastly greater technological capacity, intent on imposing a peace: the uninvited guests.
Return to the table of contents.Flat Black is a setting for science fiction RPGs that I have been using since 1987. I sometimes call it 'a dystopia with bright spots', or 'The Thousand-Year Raj'.
The basic premise is that weapons have become so powerful as to be able to destroy whole planets by single acts; that FTL space travel potentially allows warfare on an astronomical scale, and gives criminals room to flee beyond the hope of even a planetary government ever bringing them to justice.
Fortunately (perhaps), the inventor of the FTL drive vested his patent rights in a perpetual foundation dedicated to abating the evil consequences of his invention. Through a course of historical vicissitudes this has become a powerful empire, funded by the monopoly on interstellar trade. The Empire is benevolent, but rather ruthless, and prone to act as though the needs of the many outweighed the needs of the few, or of the one. Imperial servants are thinking, capable, social, philanthropic monomaniacs, but monomaniacs none the less.
Colonies in Flat Black (the term now means any human community other than an Imperial base) are very diverse. They had very different geneses, being settled by different peoples, for different reasons, at different times, and with different resources. They have had centuries of divergent history, only rarely susceptible to summarisation. Their physical habitats are very different, and have sometimes forced remarkable adaptations on the cultures of their occupants. One can make only cautious generalisations: the colonists are still human (technically), and nearly all speak English (of a sort).
Population varies wildly around an average of 800,000,000. Technical capacity ranges from the neolithic to the magical. Wealth, from the sybaritic to abject poverty. Social order varies from an anarchic state that would astonish Hobbes with its violence, to doctrinaire utopias that would stultify the inhabitants of Huxley's Brave New World. Physical settings range from paradise to a hundred different kinds of hell. In Flat Black you can find every condition except contentment.
More info about the setting Flat Black will appear soon.
A series of comic books set in Flat Black will soon be published by the Dreamriders Workshop. Details are available on the Web.
Return to the table of contents.Segrave is a colony world, inhabited by Blues. Tether is its moon, inhabited by Greens mostly, with a number of Blues, and some autochthones. The Red Flag rebels are Greens. The war is being fought on Tether, and the chief issue is the subjection of Tether to Segrave.
More info about Segrave and Tether will appear soon.
Return to the table of contents.The freeform itself will represent a summit conference held in the wardroom of a small spaceship. Those present will be the political leaders of three warring factions and a vanishing race of aliens, plus diplomats and naval officers from the Empire. The Imperials are comparative newcomers on the scene. But they own the ship.
Return to the table of contents.I'm Brett Evill, designer of Flat Black and author of Uninvited Guests. You can best contact me by e-mail at the addresses and 'phone numbers given on my home page
My design credits include Escape from Fortress Fohgidon, the AD&D module at the very first Uni of NSW Role-Players' Association con, which was run at Easter 1983. I also did some work on some of the ForeSight flexiforms at CanCon up to about 1989. And I co-wrote Canberra by Night at CanCon '92.
I have only done one freeform before: Mircea, at CanCon '93. But I am counting on some help from more-experienced friends.
Much material about my fantasy setting, Gehennum, is on the Web, in case you are interested.
Return to the table of contents.Flat Black, its settings and characters, are copyright 1998, Brett Evill, used under licence by the Dreamriders Workshop. The Flat Black logo is a trademark of the Dreamriders Workshop, 1998. All rights reserved.
Brett Evill