I've been doing some "design sketches" as it were for Genship Exiles recently, and I've been working fairly hard on it at the expense of Segira and Hwaet (sorry!) but since Genship Exiles is where we've been investing a lot of resources it only feels right to have some stuff prepared.

Genship Exiles is my nod to games like A Quiet Year, some of the Cortex system games, and a whole host of other games whose names escape me right now. I still want the basic core of Hammercalled to be visible underneath the system, but characters are defined entirely through extrinsic values.

Why?

Better Character through Worlds

Genship Exiles doesn't really have a default setting as it were. While the core concept is the same (a group of people leave their home and have no contact with it for generations), you don't technically need to follow our sci-fi aesthetic.

However, I'm really drawn in by science fiction settings like The Expanse, the world of Ender's Game, and Star Wars.

One of the things that The Expanse does really well in particular with its storytelling is to give character through the connections that people have. James Holden is an interesting character, for sure, but it's through his connections: his family, his ties to the crew of the Rocinante, his ability to bumble into the center of political turmoil.

Genship Exiles takes the normal character dynamic and turns it on its head, mostly, to provide an entirely different way of telling stories.

Characters in Relationship

I've mentioned the Affinity system in passing. Each character has a core Affinity with which they are associated.

For instance, a character with Power as their affinity gains a +20 bonus to their associated rolls. If they have a Critical connection to Power, they gain an additional +15, and they can get additional bonuses of decreasing amount as the list goes on.

Connections are drawn between characters and other elements of the setting, which are created by players and the GM in consensus. Only the strongest connections persist when a character is not in direct contact with the person or entity on the other end of that connection.

At the start of the game, the PCs form a society; they may be one of many societies aboard their ship, and societies may change, but at the start of the game their party composition is tied to the affinity they choose. Power, Knowledge, and Growth, for instance, would be the starting affinities of a group with characters of each affinity. Groups can have a maximum of three affinities, and whichever affinities have the most adherents win out.

Each PC also chooses two NPCs to support them, and defines them in terms of an affinity (but this cannot be their own PC's core affinity).

The purpose of this system is that characters function as a group more than as individuals; if you want to go and scout a ruin, for instance, you would take someone with Knowledge and someone with Power along, essentially showing that you need to have both archaeological skill and the ability to fight if things get rough.

Places in Relationship

The core narrative element of Genship Exiles is the ship that everyone is aboard. It can change throughout the course of play, effectively giving out bonuses and penalties as the story unfolds. Characters themselves come and go, both because they may fall from relevance and because the time-span of a story may exceed their individual life-span.

As a result, the ship serves as a living testament to the previous characters who lived there.

When a PC is permanently retired, something happens to the ship. If they are killed in action or part on bad terms, this will be a difficulty, but if they retire successfully or find a new home among the stars then this is a benefit to the ship.

In Hammercalled mechanical terms, the ship itself is like a piece of gear that everyone gets access to. As the ship ages, it will be more difficult to invoke and keep running, but it will also provide more potent benefits.

Societies in Relationship

One of the things that ties into the ship is the societies that form among the exiles. While this is up to the player and GM, each society has a need that must be fulfilled every session. If this need goes unfulfilled, the ship may suffer harm or the players may lose ties to that society.

Since the game is cooperative, these societies aren't necessarily clashing with each other. They could be, for example, hitch-hikers picked up along the way as the generation ship makes its trek across the stars or a special organization within the crew or exiles that offers unique expertise.

Each society is actually most analogous, again, to a piece of gear in Hammercalled. While it is present, it can provide help with things that the players might need help with.

The Flipped Design

One of the things that is interesting about Genship Exiles, and therefore very "experimental" is that the players' characters are relatively disinteresting (they get an Affinity, membership in a Society, and a handful of talents), and it is the world around them that has a lot of mechanical representation.

My goal here is to allow for a number of things. First, you could have players come and go between sessions while maintaining the same overall narrative. Theoretically you could run one game of Genship Exiles with any number of players, and I might actually try to do this on Steem. Second, it encourages players to approach new storytelling modes and styles as they switch between characters. Because characters are relatively low in importance to the mechanical side of the game, they are freed to take any mechanical action necessary.

Leveraging Simple Characters

One of the things that I feel is helpful with simple characters is that it makes Genship Exiles feel a lot lighter. The character sheet for Genship Exiles will be able to be relatively small; the character themselves, a section for their connections, and a space for their talents.

Because of this I think you will be able to copy down all the relevant information for everything without flowing off the front of a single-sided page, which will be nice for so many reasons.

In addition, novice players don't have to do a whole lot of prep to join in. I remember trying to get people into D&D (or Shadowrun, or Vampire the Masquerade, or Eclipse Phase, or...) back in my college days and the challenge was always getting them to keep their interest through character creation.

Here you could literally just say "Hey, I've got this person!" and go. You don't even need to make unique NPC contacts for each PC, so the new-person onboarding could be "Choose what you want your character to be relatively good at, and then we'll help you figure out who their friends are and what specific talents they have."

Managing Shared Elements

One of the nice things about how Genship Exiles is set up is that you can have individual record cards/sheets for NPCs and societies that can be passed around or shared digitally without causing issues. A lot of digital tabletop software supports handouts like this, so it's up to the players and GM to find a solution that works for them.

However, the idea behind this is that most of the data contained by an NPC or society is actually non-mechanical. A player may be interested in checking their ties, but other than that the NPC or society simply provides a potential source of affinity bonds.

This is an unlimited resource, to the extent that a character's ties to NPCs and Societies are purchased by characters with a limited pool of resources per character, but the actual use of these bonds is not.

However, there is an element of the "tragedy of the commons" in the sense that an NPC can be injured or damaged during play. Theoretically this can happen to Societies, but if it does it's likely during cataclysmic events.

Social Play

Because of the fact that characters in Genship Exiles are designed not to be islands in and of themselves, you're going to have a greater focus on player interactions. I don't think that's necessarily something that's lacking in tabletop RPGs, but it's something that's not mechanically modeled in other games.

Likewise, it's not just the mechanical interaction that I'm aiming for, but also the legitimate dramatic and narrative interleaving. As I mentioned in a previous article on cooperative storytelling, there's a lot that goes into this.

The idea is that while mechanical interaction will never really supplant the power of narrative, having those mechanical interactions will kick-start that for players who wouldn't normally consider the role that their characters play socially in their groups (coughguiltyaschargedcough). This pushes toward cooperation, especially since the societies and NPCs have goals set by the GM.

More societies and more NPCs means that the maximum possible bond of those entities falls as goals go unmet, and eventually they fade into the background of the story.

Stimulus-Response Storytelling

The idea of Genship Exiles is that it's very much like an episodic TV series where you would expect to see something come up and then the characters are forced to come up with a solution to the problem.

Because this storytelling is based on stimulus and response, it provides the GM with a lot of resources when telling stories, but the PCs have a lot of room to develop and expand the world.

Think of the spread of responsibilities between the two as the players being responsible for that which is known by the aggregate of their characters, and the GM being responsible for the unknown.

It's not a matter of adversarial or cooperative storytelling between players and GMs (though if one had to label it the final result would fall to the cooperative side), but rather a question of split responsibility. The GM provides a stimulus, and the players' response creates the reaction to it.

Wrapping Up

The idea of Genship Exiles is that it's a roleplaying game that focuses on storytelling first. Hammercalled isn't that far off from that philosophy as a whole, but it's very heavily focused on creating distinct mechanical representations of characters.

In Genship Exiles, as opposed to the core Hammercalled experience, you see a focus more on the world than on individual characters. I think it will be interesting to see how it goes.