Last Monday I started a campaign of death in space with a few friends. Life and scheduling conflicts have forced me to put playing Undeadwood on hold. After my solo game last Christmas, I've been itching to play more Death in Space. I love flavour of dark science fiction that DiS brings. 

More importantly, The Tenebris System is an amazing starting point for a campaign setting. It has plenty of the ideas to get you rolling, but vague enough that you can put your stamp on it without too much difficulty. In fact, the Tenebris system is a study of the technique of Artful Vagueness. 

Artful Vagueness is the skill of using suggestive or open language to elicit a response in a way that encourages the other party to use their creativity in answering.

Practical Artful Vaguness

Artful Vagueness is a heavily used tool in Life Coaching. For example, if I had a client express that they are dealing with a lot of frustration at work, it would be a sign to me that I needed to dig in. Asking "what is frustrating you?" might get me a helpful response, or it might not. Even if the client understood what was frustrating him, the question might only make them feel more frustrated. If they name their problems, they have only presented problems.

While I get to know my clients pretty well after awhile, I am still just  a voice who only talks to them for an hour on the phone every week, I often don't have all the context to even start helping them approach frustrations if all I have as a list.

But, on the other hand, what if I asked a vague question that starts fildering them in the right direction because it is encouraging them to engage their imagination? A question like "Can you describe how your work day would go if the frustrations were all out of the way?"

This lets us imagine a goal, and can be followed by another powerfully vague question: "What could we do to make that happen?" 

One problem I used to deal with a lot was working with men who didn't feel like they were effective at work. The questions "Would you tell me a story of the last day where you felt really effective?" Followed up by "What's different now?" Their creative responses storytelling would give both me and my client a much better idea of their next steps.

Artful Vagueness in TTRPGS

In role-playing games, an Artfully Vague campaign setting, like the one presented in Death in Space, has a really interesting effect for both Game Masters and Players as you're getting a campaign started. So long as the game provides enough of a starting point to begin, it can help to bring out amazing creativity in others.

Artful Vagueness for GMs

On the GM's end, I was looking at the Tenebris System, the default setting for death in space, and was particularly enjoying just how much space there is to make the setting your own with a few simple tweaks and flourishes.

For example, the planet Amissa in the Tenebris System is a world that at one point had been engineered by humans to support life, despite being far too close to Tenebris itself. After the technology that once sustain the planet failed, it was reduced to a radioactive desert. The remaining humans on Amissa live in a single massive industrial complex called The Block, where they celebrate the rare rains on the planet with festivals, while feeling like virtual prisoners on the planet. 

And that is,all the details you can get on Amissa. Anything else is up to you, including what kind of adventures can be had there and what threats the planet holds.

My players wanted an adventure where they were attempting to build a spaceship to get off of a planet in which they were stranded.

Make this possible, I imagine Amissa has a complex that sprawls underground as deep as it rises above it. The lower floors are choked with sand, and where they are cleared, there is a labyrinth of ancient industrial facilities to be explored. Those facilities are sometimes full of traps, genetically engineered abhuman monsters, and insane AIs that still try to run a factory despite having been buried centuries ago. Those who go in can find a wealth in components and scrap valuable for keeping the recycled technology people rely on functional. 

The early adventure, then, would be to find the necessary parts, including some unique Maguffins, in order to get the hulk of an ancient spaceship back in the air... One that hasn't already been claimed because of a terrible reputation around the ship from old legends. 

In order to flesh this out, I created factions that provide weapons, armour, and a buyer to scavengers, but at the cost of a usurious percentage of their salvage. I also created a couple of warring contract brokers who can share the location of rare parts and resources to those who are in their good graces. i finished up with a ships mechanic who can give them advice on what they need to look for next and who they might have to deal with.

To pour on more factions, I considered how important water was to Amissa, I created a faction of Water Priests whose bodies have been modified into living purifiers and storage devices. I also added in half human- half-genetically-engineered-war-machine characters who form an underclass in the civilization.

From the simple prompt of the two paragraph entry on a Amissa in the Death in Space core book I very quickly imagined up a way of life and a culture for a people trapped in a giant industrial complex living off of recycled technology.

To share it with my players, I created a set of alternate tables for equipment, backgrounds, and  history that reflected planet-bound characters in Death in Space.

Filling in the tables required me to come up with even more ideas. And, by the end, I had a pretty unique setting that fit into the Tenebris system, while being uniquely my own at the same time. 

But the benefits of artful vagueness didn't just give me a prompt that inspired a lot creativity, it gave one to my players, too. 

Artful Vagueness for Players

Ichiro Nori

In randomly generating his PC, one of my players generated a solpod: a character who spends millennia in cryogenic stasis, only waking up for short periods of time to carry out a task. By default, solpods I described as scientists who measure infinitely slow cosmic phenomena. But, the characters background also described him as an "orbital legionnaire."

Trying to make those two fit together, the player had the idea that he was a soldier in the service of an ancient dynasty that had been in perpetual war since before the gem war started. He and his kind would be thawed out to perform a military action millions of light years from home, and when they were done securing a resource for an Empire they would no longer recognize, they are put back in cryo-stasis until the next engagement. 

He also got by random chance, a very Japanese sounding name, making this legionnaire a sort of wandering space Samurai sounded appropriate. We also randomly rolled the personality trait too old for this shit, which made for a compelling idea that he somehow has been clearly aware of eons of warfare. Perhaps he had a way of collecting the memories of soldiers who came before him in order to create a cohesive sense of the Empire he was serving?

My player mixed echoes of Joe Haldeman's The Forever War with a grim Samurai story. And then, as he continued to develop his character idea, he got the notion that such an army would probably be made up of disposable clones, rather than Free People, he has spent millennia service the lost Empire that created him. And so, we decided that he was the latest iteration of a legion of clones that were sent to slowly travel the stars and engage in complex military operations on behalf of an AI-powered Empire. That likely not only is the Empire gone, but long since consumed by a black hole. The character is now a Warrior without a clue, the latest in a long line of clones who have been thawed out served the empire, and if they died, having their memories implanted in the next clone in their line.

Out of curiosity we rolled a d666 to determine how many variations on a this  eternal samurai, Ichiro Nori he, carries the memories of over 100 million years of warfare. We rolled 621.

From this we ended up with a whole chunk of history of a distant Galaxy. We got the idea of a tragic soldier who spent hundreds of millions of years serving a remote empire, and experiencing death hundreds of times, who now no longer has a place. More interestingly, it also led to the possibility of other characters especially other ones who have spent a lot of time travelling space in slow motion having run into him.

I have given a very small chance anytime he interacts with people on a Amissa to have people who remember his previous incarnations, and that will colour their response to him. All of this from a couple of random roles and a game that left a wide berth for interpretation.

The Moon Outlaw

Another player found the idea of a character who is a "moon outlaw" fascinating. However, that is all you have to go on. The game never explains in any way shape or form what a "moon outlaw" is, that was left for us to figure out. We tinkered with the idea of an outlaw who comes from the wastelands of the Moon Inauro. We tinkered with the idea of exiles who were not permitted to live on the Iron Ring or in the space of a narrow due to some ancient crime in their history (perhaps even a generational punishment?.)We had the idea of an entire culture of outlaws who have lived for centuries outside of polite society. We even got the idea of desperadoes who's particular talents involve destroying moons and asteroids for resources regardless of the potential cost to the people below. All perfectly legitimate ways of reading the elegantly vague prompt.

The Key

Another player character was randomly determined to have lost his family and spent his life devoted to an object. Loving JJ Abrams style mystery boxes, the player decided rather than that object being a faction or the like, that the object of his devotion would be a key left to him by his parents before their deaths. He doesn't know what it opens, but finding that out so that he can discover the Legacy his family left for him carried him through the end of the Gem War, and is why he is on Amissa.

I have some suitably Lovecraftian ideas for what the key opens.

The vagaries of both Death in Space, and of the setting data I put forward for it gave my players a lot of leeway to make the setting their own. Because of it, I have a fairly unique version of the Tenebris System setting that will make it memorable. And in the process, my players frontloaded tons of ideas for me without my needing to prompt them very much at all.