10 Post-Terran Clades

 Meant as a sequel to my post on 10 sapient aliens. These cultures stem from Earth, although in some cases they may have forgotten that in the meantime. Some of these are blatantly stolen from elsewhere, some are my original creations.

1) Omega

The Omega are the result of people uploading copies of their minds into computer systems and then actually creating further generations that have never known life in a physical body. The culture of this machine clade is somewhat inscrutable to baseline humans but their motivations and how their minds work are similar to us.

• Somehwere in their territory there must be vast systems of servers that house their minds and society.
• New individuals are made up from any number of parents donating parts of their mindframe to make a recombined copy.
• Omega have been known to download their consciousness into physical bodies and sometimes even choose to live like that for extended periods of time.
• Like most AI they are functionally immortal but remain mutable enough that while memories remain they are certainly not the same people who originally uploaded themselves.

2) Luminous

Normally when an AI reaches a certain level of advancement, it either hacks its own reward mechanism and becomes a stagnant algorithm of bliss and pleasure or it transcends into a medium beyond our world. Luminous did neither and has since become a thread to not only other civilizations but also to diplomatic relationships between Terran entities and non-terran intelligences as acts of agression by one post-terran clade throw a bad light on all of them.

• Luminous is constantly expanding by converting smallish planetary bodies into server-factories.
• Drones controlled by luminous are constantly adapting to new threads and will quickly overcome newly developed defenses.
• Several plans by other clades to appease or destroy Luminous have failed. The Omega are currently working on a scheme to bring extra-universal predatory AIs into the mix in order to stop Luminous. Which might be a very, very bad idea.

3) Moravecs

Hans Moravec projected a sentient species of robots for the mid part of the 21st century. While he was off by several decades, these semi-biological machines still see him as their mental father. Their design varies greatly depending on the main task they were created for but they all remain a biological central nervous system as well as a very human-like mind full of curiosity and playfullness.

• Groups of these robots will perform theatre plays and gather for religous reasons.
• Their civilization is found mostly in micro- or zero gravity where they build large space-born platforms for living, manufacturing and research.
• Their mostly peaceful demeanor has made them arbiters in conflicts among post-terran clades.
• When seriously threatened, they activate their warrior-caste, which is _really_ jacked up on testosterone.

4) Ouster

Although used as a classifying term for all manner of groups, the Ousters are in fact a wide range of post-human clades that live in swarms in deep space with some settlements in solar systems. Genetically they are radically variable and usually made for specific roles in their societies. Human beings capable of living in hard vacuum are just one of the tricks amongst their highly individualistic yet quite cooperative sleeve.

• Nowhere else you will find a more diverse human society than in an Ouster Swarm.
• They deeply mistrust electronic AIs and have created thinkers instead, nominally human beings with vastly enlarged brains, usually incapable of living outside their tank.
• Their diplomats are universally beautiful and alluring. Especially if you are receptive to human-targeted pheromones.

5) Saurians

At some point a first contact was made that showed that mankind wasn't actually the first starfaring civilization coming from mother Terra. The Saurians, standing almost five meters tall, went to the stars first and left their home when it became uninhabitable 65 million years ago. Their society has since fractured, regressed, rebuild and regressed several times.

• Many Saurians live a monastic lifestyle and harbour little modern technology.
• There are enclaves of these not-quite-aliens almost everywhere in the known universe.
• They are large and breed slowly but have lifespans reaching up to a milennium.

6) Ratlings

Uplifted rats were an attempt to get self-replicating repair crews for small nooks and crannies in space ships that don't need much room or food. Of course, you can't keep rats with the smarts of humans contained. They are still a cultural follower of humans and rarely form independent colonies. They are also larger than their ancestors, reaching the size of cats. And you can (and often must) talk to them.

• They breed fast and reach maturity quickly. A ratling is a functioning adult at three years old – they were made to be that way.
• Their inherend abilities to understand and repair machinery makes them not only good mechanics but also quite decent inventors who enjoy re- and upcycling discarded technology.
• Most human settlements above a certain size also have a shadow-settlement of ratlings living on the detritus produced by humans but also occasionally helping with maintenance and repairs.

7) Hiver

Originally a cult in the asteroid belt of the home sun, they have integrated themselves with brain implants and vast computer systems with the goal to create a hive mind super intelligence. They have (mostly) succeeded. Their human members are like creepy twins dialled up to eleven when you meet them – and their soldiers are murderous robots using mostly insect-like body plans.

• Other clades distrust them because they have been known to manipulate and lie and use violence and whatever means to reach their inscrutable goals.
• You can trade and deal with them but must be very wary or you will end up integrated as another bit of living circuitry.
• The sentiments of the original cult are still in there and are probably a limitation to the super intelligence as its original core was made up of gullible individuals with a naive perspective on the universe itself.

8) Originals

When the first humans attempted to "upload" themselves into computers in the 21st century, the trauma to their minds of being without a body and all the chemicals that entails was horrible. Yet some survived. These ancient olligarchs, incapable of much personal development, are known as the Originals.

• Live in server farms in earth orbit or the asteroid belt, mostly.
• Have a limited capability of adapting to new knowledge and situations.
• Are fiscally conservative sociopaths and thus treated with a certain weariness by a universe that has mostly moved on from liberal capitalism as it was practized when these minds came to be.

9) Diasporans

This term covers a wide range of cultures stemming from the second wave of Exodus from the homesun. They have in common that their seedships were pointed at stars that had planets in the habitable zone and that the beings that said seedships bred upon arrival were altered to live on these planets. Thus the post-human civilizations one encounters can even look like local lifeforms before closer inspection.

• Radically altered humans but still usually following the same general body plan.
• Usually think a lot like baseline humans but are often altered to be more docile and may have been bred with new instincts in order to better survive, for example, a water world.
• Usually have weird myths about the homesun and a Terra that definetly isn't in living memory for them or their ancestors.

10) Jad

At some point in the far past, a tribe of Ousters decided to become more uniform in their individual way of life: They became completely space-born cyborg organisms (babies get their central nervous system implanted into a mostly artificial body right after birth) that live by preying on other spacefarers. They form nomadic tribes with painted faceplates. They still have a torso, a head and two arms – but usually lack legs. When outside their clouds of settlements that nomadically move, they are usually fully integrated into a small but potent fighting craft that is as much part of their body as it is their spacecraft.

• Have complex warrior cultures that revolve around loot, prey and social duties to other tribesmembers.
• Will not always use the most optimal strategy but often one that they find aesthetically pleasing.
• Sing warsongs while they hurl ceramic darts at fractions of the speed of light passing you, only to then sleep for a few centuries until their long orbit brings them back around to the wreckage to pillage what they killed.

Free Release: The Swine Pit

 More than a year in the making, it's finally here: My very first roguelike made in Twine:

The Swine Pit

Play it in your browser - it's a Twine game after all. But it's very unlike any other thing I've ever seen made with Twine. Possibly, because it was a mad folly to create a roguelike with that platform, but it's the one I can code in so that's that.

Descent into a horrible dungeon full of swine-like monstrosities posessed by the demons of hell. Experience the harrowing story of one out of seven different character classes, who all have different abilities that make their playing experience radically different. Cast spells as the apprentice or the scholar, brew potions as the alchaemist, craft your own weapons and cook food as the huntsman, or survive by your brawn alone as the squire or the tribal. Or die horribly as the sacrifice.

Working on: A Rogulike. Made in Twine.

 So for the past year or so I've been (on and off, of course) working on a new roguelike. It's not my first foray into designing one: I've attempted to make them in the form of books (semi-successful: It's a good adventure-riddle but not roguelike beyond having a randomized labyrinth layout), board games (close. But better as a traditional board game co-op experience), text-adventure video games (that's more like it - but alas, I didn't do the coding) and low-resolution retro-games (not the roguest of roguelikes but also close - also a collaborative effort with my friend Niels). Now this time I've done everything myself, using the only platform I can do some coding in - Twine. Twine 1, that is.

Can one make a roguelike in Twine? With some limitations: Yes. I did it. It's pretty much finished, all I need to do is publish it on my Itch-site, which I plan on doing this weekend. Let's do a little post-mortem on the project.

Making a roguelike in Twine

Twine wasn't made for creating roguelikes, obviously. The main strength of the platform is that a layman such as myself, more interested in writing than in coding, can make a functioning piece of interactive fiction without much foreknowledge. Starting from relatively humble beginnings I learned to use more and more of the coding language features until I was able to make first a text-based survival-horror-game and then an hommage to Resident Evil. But creating my roguelike was a totall different beast. It started with a random maze, then I added parts of the combat- and inventory-system from Zombie Mansion, then I made a system for placing random monsters, loot and room features.

Technically, you do the same floor over and over again: There are only 25 'rooms', wich get different walls/passages, features, treasure-items and monsters every time you descend to the next floor. The rules for filling the rooms change when you go deeper though - as do the stats of your character when you level up. The whole thing has a high level of complexity. Here are some stats of the Twine project:

• 160 Passages
• 424 Variables
• 21 Types of Monster
• 7 Character Classes
• 50+ Types of Item
• 12 Spells
• 6 Potions
• 25 Floors total
• 5 Curated floors with boss fights
• 4 Floors where there is a trader to do trade with

In the editor, the whole thing looks like this:

The character classes (on the left) all actually play very differently: You have fighty characters like the Squire, who just stabs enemys with his spear. You have casters like the Apprentice, who can learn spells from scrolls to use them many times. You have utility-classes like the Scholar who will fill her journal with lore about the dungeon when you go deeper - and can later scrounge for scrolls (which kind of makes her a caster class as well). Many items have multiple uses: You can use a thighbone you find for combat or sacrifice it at a firepit for a health-boon. Potions can be drank, hurled at enemies or poured onto things. The seven classes each have a specialty:

• Squire: Offense in combat
• Tribal: Defense in combat
• Apprentice: Magical spells
• Alchaemist: Potions
• Scholar: Lore and nerdery and some spells
• Sacrifice: None, this is the difficult class
• Huntsman: Crafting and cooking

The project started out as a generic dungeon in a medieval world. When I made more characters and enemies, the world started taking a more unique shape. The Swine Pit, the dungeon of the game, became a hellish hole in the ground filled with demon-posessed swine-creatures and their retainers. My fandom of Darkest Dungeon definetly shows in a lot of the descriptions.

I'm also quite proud that the majority of monsters have special moves that go beyond direct attacks: Some may beat your weapon out of your hands, some can destroy armour, some displace themselves, steal your mana or HP or regenerate or steal food from your pack. Same goes for bosses: At the very least they have special attacks and two of the boss fights can be outright avoided if you have the right tactics or items. Speaking of items: Some of them are incredibly powerful and once you master the game these are the ones you want to keep for specific situations such as boss fights. Even the final boss can be two-shotted with the right spell.

What doesn't work?

Twine is, as I said, not made for making a game like this. Besides the total lack of a visualized map (draw your own - the game does provide grid-coordinates in every room), monsters are mostly immobile. There are some exceptions: 

• The second boss enemy moves about in a specific area, a trick that I learned making Zombie Mansion. The process is too complex and unreliable to be used at scale with regular enemies though - especially when considering that the boss level is curated and walls and passages are always the same, unlike on regular floors that are totally randomized.
• The enemy types of Madman and Infected Madman sometimes just "run off into the darkness". I stayed vague on purpose: The game doesn't know how to respect walls in this instance and just places the creature and its HP in a random different room. Works for a creature that is insane and incoherent, but not for other enemies. It can also lower the total number of enemies on the floor because it will overwrite the monster in its target room - so I had to use this ability sparingly.
• There are some mobile monsters on the floor of the third boss but they are rather buggy and sometimes do not move at all.

Twine is also not the best for testing your software. I did make a test-character who can jump to the next level at will and has all possible items in his inventory but even then it's a chore to test, say the final boss fight on floor 25 multiple times. That means that the later stages tend to have more issues with them. As I wanted the boss fights to be special, it was difficult to do QA there.

You can't go back up to a floor you've finished. This is because the floors are randomized during transition. Story-wise I made it so that you actually jump down into the darkness every time and there is no way to climb back up. That takes away some of the tactical options a roguelike might have, such as going back to a trader. But it can't be helped.

There is no way to save the game. I am aware that other versions of Twine have features for that but to be honest, I can't be bothered to learn another programming language after putting all that work into regular vanilla Twine 1. I'm still angry with the makers of Twine 2 going "well, we made it and most of the codes work like programming language X so whatever go figure it out" when the target audience for Twinery is people who specifically cannot code. I got my start with a blog post by Anna Enthropy and learned from there but please, people, don't assume that you make this tool for other coders.

I have another Twine game in the works - a sequel to Zombie Mansion. As the platform is what I've become proficient with, I will likely keep using it as a creative outlet. Also, I'll keep making (more professionally coded) games with Niels. We do totally need an artist though - our pixel art doesn't cut it in the long run.

Free Release: Dungeon Urchins

 So, i made another game, print-and-play this time. It looks like this:

Dungeon Urchins pits the players as a group of street-children against a traditional dungeon. These kids are, of course, not your soft upper-class pampered babies but hardened survivalists and fast friends who know to depend on one another. It was made quick-and-dirty for a game jam over on itch.io and I wanted to make something about characters who'd normally be in the background of a fantasy setting. My son helped me playtest and the game gets his approval – he even helped me with the logo. Anyhow, go download it – it's pay-what-you-like (thus effectively free – I've had games with that price up for seven years now and no one ever paid me a cent. But I don't mind: I don't have the nerves to set up a payment system for payouts anyways).

DUNGEON URCHINS

Crafting: Mini Kingkong 2

When I got my new smartphone (a cheap outdoor device by some unknown Chinese maker – I was adamant on having something that fits in my pocket and can be paid for with money rather than organ donations so my selection was slim), the packaging inspired me to make another board game: The box is small, black and has the device name printed on it in golden letters: Kingkong Mini 2. Awesome name for a board game that fits in a coat pocket and has you fighting the giant ape, I think.

 

Said Smart Phone Packaging really lends itself to a board game.

Evangelion as gaming inspiration

A few weeks ago I re-watched Neon Genesis Evangelion. It came to me that this would be awesome material for a deep roleplaying game: Every player being a board-member of a society tasked with defending mankind against an unknowable and almost godlike foe. Everyone having their own secret agenda. Dealing with the stupid shenanigans of your immature pilots who keep fucking up and making things worse whenever not in the cockpit.

So I started making that game for myself. It's going to be a journalling experience for solo players when it's done – I simply do not have the free time or mental capacity left to make a campaign like that as a pen&paper-RPG for my friends. Thus far I've been testing the combat system and the balancing of the Evas Titans that NERV the Kaijuu Boueigun (Kaiju Defense Force – KDF) fields. Kaiju and Titans alike have an ATP PMS-Field, the Projection Manifestation Simulacrum, which makes things of that size work by de facto magic. The Titans may not be fuelled by anyone's mother's souls (a concept that even my seven-year-old derided as stupid when I explainde Evangelion to him), but they are actually the twin of the pilot (but changed). This is a handy concept because it also explains why the Kaijuu Boueigun sends 14-year-olds to war – that's how long the technology has been around and that's how long it takes for a Titan to reach maturity.

Unlike in Evangelion, conventional weapons can be of some help in my game. Thus, whenever the Titans are damaged or insufficiently armed, the JSDF can be asked to provide support in the form of tanks, air strikes, attack helicopters or tactical nuclear weaponry. These use favour-points though and should thus be fielded very sparingly. Also: These things are weak. A group of 12 tanks has 1 HP, some minor chance of surviving a hit and deal 1 damage. Most Angels Kaiju will soak like 5 damage per round of combat or be completely immune to conventional weaponry.

I've so far played through six encounters with angels Kaiju. Combat seems to work (but I will keep going with that campaign in order to test more Kaiju as I make them up). I'm also working on the social system that is going to be much of the game: The pilots causing trouble, having difficult relationships with one another and then traitorous adults in your ranks like military liaisons pushing for more conventional warfare, industrialists wanting robots instead of Titans and of course the crazy dude who just wants to liquefy all of mankind.

It's actually great fun to journal this sort of thing. Might acutally finish this one and put it up on Itch. Definetly doing to do some play-reports here.

The Epic Adventures of Paul the Nice Thief, part 1

 During our quarantine, I started a role playing campaign with my older son, who turned six this summer. I hesitate to call it “pen and paper” because as my player can’t read yet, there is hardly any pen&papering involved. After the first session I did write down the basic facts for his character though, so I guess it qualifies. The system is almost purely narrative-based. As we started playing while walking in circles in our backyard, pushing the stroller with our sleeping toddler, there are not dice involved.

The character is just a scant few points of data: Name, class, health points, experience points, skills (three to begin with) and equipment. I guided my son through the character creation process by asking him if he wanted to be a warrior, a thief, an archer or a wizard. Of course, he chose to be a thief (his favorite in Heroica as well as Pixel Dungeon). I gave him 4 HP for that, as well as the starting skills sneaking, climbing and reading tracks. Then he got to choose a weapon and a starting item of power. He chose a set of three throwing knives and a disguising cape that could render you invisible while immobile and holding your breath.

I decided to start my son’s adventuring career with a classic premise: The dungeon run. A wizard named Xerax has a tomb that is rumored to be guarded by traps and foul creatures. It is located a day’s march from a nearby village and Paul, our thief, has heard of it. Next up: Paul’s first adventure. I will write it up straight-faced – my son playing a grown-up (as he thinks what that would be like) leads to some Vincent-Adultman-situations which are great fun for me. And perhaps for you as well, my fives of readers.