Sun of Suns 6) Gaming
Would Virga make a good game setting? How would you acclimatise players to the various constraints and opportunities? If you were running the game would you favour a personal, political or military storyline?
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Home › Monthly Book Selections › 130. (February 2024) Sun of Suns, book 1 in the Virga series, by Karl Schroeder
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I am currently running two separate games in a zero gee air filled setting, and just (a week ago) stopped playing in a D&D game set in a zero gee air filled setting. So yeah! I personally am tired of save the world story lines for the nonce, so I would do something a touch more personal.
I had no idea there were so many zero gee air filled settings around! Must be a popular trope
It's not. Both of the games I am running games are using the setting for one of my games, one of which is using the full game, and the D&D game (currently in hiatus) is being run by my son, a co-author of that game, and he has adapted it to D&D. Nothing I have ever done is in any way popular!
Except, no doubt, to a discerning few
Zero G isn't a common trope, but I fell that airships and floating islands (in a gravity environment) are a very common trope. Honestly, I think that Virga would make a very fine gaming setting if the setting details were more concrete. Aside from struggles between nations, there's the whole 'aliens walk amongst us' angle, so there's plenty of scope for big campaign arcs. And of course you can always do personal stories as well. Being a setting of islands, it lends itself to naval type adventures, which means there's a lot of literary material the players an draw from in imagining the setting and it's conventions. When gaming, you want a setting that is 'mostly familiar and only a little exotic' because you can bank on the players never reading the setting book. And Virga delivers on that front.
I once wrote a game where the setting featured steam powered airships and 'sort of' islands. It was set on a planet where the atmosphere contained a lot of argon and the settlers who landed there in improvised gliders could only live on the mountaintops, where the atmospheric pressure was low enough that the argon was not poisonous. Plants could live below that level, especially native plants, but not animals. So the mountain tops were in effect islands in a sea of argon gas.
That was Volant, the post magical apocalypse game with actual floating islands where people rode giant birds and bats. I was talking about Sweet Chariot, which is very much a SF game, as the planet is in a system with other settled, high tech worlds. In Volant, civilizations could not exist on the surface because of the magically mutated monsters, so they existed only on the floating islands.
I write a lot of very strange games - easy to get them mixed up.
The main character surely has to be called Swing Low...
On the one hand, this is somewhere the book could shine: hackneyed settings and plots often make for bad literature but excellent RPG settings, where everyone's improvising stuff and there's no editing.
However, much of this setting is military age-of-sail stuff. There are hints of life outside the navy, and the intrigue with the Aerie resistance could have been more fun to explore. There were a couple of setting bits that would be fun: the ability to "fall" long distances through the air without effort (so long as you don't get lost) and the ever-changing geography moving polities near and far from each other.
There's potential there, but the book was sufficiently dull that I'll wait for someone else to do the work of writing the setting book.
Huh! Who would have thought of that?