Artful Vaguness in Setting Design

 Earlier this month, 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 brilliant case study of the technique of Artful Vagueness. 

Artful Vaguness:

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, but it is not guaranteed to. Even if the client understood what was frustrating him, the question might only make them feel more frustrated. Even if they are able to name all of their problems, they have only presented a list problems.

While I get to know my clients pretty well after awhile, I'm still just a voice on the phone for an hour every week. I can't have all the context to even start helping them approach frustrations if all I have is a list.

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

This lets us imagine a goal. The answer the client would give me can be compared to the days they are usually having and we can figure out what needs to change. Which is something I can get them to start doing immediately by following up with another 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. The game provides enough of a starting point to start planning and coming up with character concepts, but because it is both sparse and mysterious in its details it encourages (perhaps forces) the GM and players to bring their own imagination to bear.

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 room 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,pretty much 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.

After polling my players, I gathered that they wanted a campaign where they were attempting to build a spaceship to get off of a planet on which they were stranded. Which made it a perfect site for such a campaign.

Make this possible, I decided that The Block has a complex that sprawls underground as deep below the sands as the inhabited floors rise above them. These 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 adventures, 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. It also required that I explain why the ship hasn't already been claimed. I decided that this was because of dark legends surrounding the hulk.

This seemed like plenty to start planning a few adventures.

In order to flesh this campaign 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 ship's 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.

Voila! From the two paragraph entry on 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, which I shared in my previous entry.

Of course, filling in the tables required me to come up with even more ideas. And, by the end, I had a pretty setting that fit into The Tenebris System, while also being uniquely my own. 

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, the Eternal Ronin

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 character's 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 conflict 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 the Empire, they are put back in cryo-stasis until the next engagement. An eternity of servitude to a people they would no longer recognize.

He also got by random chance, a very Japanese sounding name: Ichiro Nori. Making this legionnaire a sort of wandering space Samurai sounded appropriate. 

He randomly rolled the personality trait too old for this shit, which suggested the compelling idea that he has actually seen all those aeons 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?

Inspired, 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. 

Putting it all together, 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 not only is the Empire gone, but long since consumed by a black hole. The character is now a Warrior without a cause: the latest in a long line of clones who have been thawed out served the Empire, with the collected memories of all the previous clones in his line implanted into him.

Out of curiosity we rolled a d666 to determine how many iterations of the same clone were passed down through the aeons to the PC. We ended up rolling 621!

From a few rolls this we ended up with a whole chunk of history of a distant Galaxy! We ended up with a tragic soldier who spent hundreds of millions of years serving a remote empire, and experiencing death hundreds of times... and 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 previous versions of him.

I have given a very small chance anytime he interacts with people on 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, looking at the random character backgrounds in the Death in Space corebook found the idea of a character who is a "moon outlaw" fascinating. However, "moon outlaw" 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. 

• he tinkered with the idea of an outlaw who comes from the wastelands of the Moon Inauro. [An Outlaw from the Moon.]
  
• We considered the idea of exiles who were not permitted to live on the Iron Ring or in orbit of Inauro due to some ancient crime in their history -  a generational punishment. [Outlaws on and around the Moon.]
• We had the idea of an entire culture of outlaws who have lived for centuries outside of polite society.  [A Moon that breeds Outlaws.]
• 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. [Outlaws who illegally destroy the Moon.]

All perfectly legitimate ways of reading the elegantly vague prompt.

The Key

A third 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, 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.

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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 front-loaded tons of ideas for me without my needing to prompt them very much at all.