Lit By Another Sun Playtest/Design
Lit By Another Sun is the working title for a megagame that I intend to run in Scotland in 2025. It’s based on an early draft of a novel (titled Duke of Piraxis) and then worked up a bit with some mechanics based on ordinary playing cards.
I’ve had one playtest with some of the people involved in True North Megagames in Dundee. It was an interesting evening and quite different from what I would have expected if I’d run the same session at CLWG. There’s definitely a lot less interest in real world politics and history than we have. The feedback has made me start the game a little later than I had originally planned, I’ve renamed and rewritten all the factions to hide the real world derivations, and I’ve also concentrated the factions so that they are competing teams rather than hidden roles within the teams.
Lit By Another Sun take two
My aims in testing Lit By Another Sun at the CLWG Conference 2024 are two fold
- Get some more ideas on how to run an exploration game combined with science and extraction
- If enough players melding an online with an in person session so they interact and both ends work as satisfactory games
Scenario overview
A habitat made from shipping containers in Dundee (photo: James Kemp)
The players are the crew commanders or the hierarchy of the colony. It is 50 days since the Starship left the first 100 colonisers with the start-up kit. It’ll be back on Day 100 (give or take a few days) with a second group of colonists, more flat packed facilities, and expecting a valuable cargo to take back to Earth to show the investors that it was worth their money.
The start-up kit has all been assembled without difficulty, and the colony now needs to explore the planet, find interesting things to send back, and get the sources of raw materials it needs to bootstrap itself into a rapid growth phase ready for the follow-on waves of colonists that are sure to come to the paradise of plenty that you’ll make Piraxis into.
Exploring Piraxis
I’ve got some ideas for a core mechanic for exploring the planet. There’s a very large scale map of the planet, above. My idea is that the players will lead their crews to survey and name areas of the planet with a legacy style process of writing names for things on the map (using post-it arrow markers). The way this works is that players will collect playing cards, and use them to form tricks. Each trick of 14-21 allows them to successfully survey an area, and the card values will determine what sort of thing that they find.
Scientists will be looking for samples they can analyse. Successful analysis leads to naming rights and recognition in their field. Possibly also monetary reward.
Miners will be looking for raw materials that they can extract and use. They might also name places, but their primary concern is making useful materials that can either be exported for profit or used to build the colony further.
Other Aspects
As well as the scientists and miners exploring the planet more widely there is a farming and colony management game to be played. The sooner the colony becomes able to make it’s own food the better. There’s also development planning and dealing with all the inevitable issues that will crop up. I’ve got a bit of a pick list for prompting those, although I expect that several will emerge through game play.
Factions
As originally designed there were seven factions, most of which were happy to cooperate with a couple of others and diametrically opposed to one of the others. I also had it so that the faction was a hidden role, and players had to co-operate to run mechanics. However this was both unpopular with the original playtest and slower than I’d hoped for.
In this test each player will have a set of objectives determined by their faction loyalty. With only a small number of players it’s almost impossible to replicate the factional jostling. This is something I’d be keen to have a wider conversation about, perhaps on our discord server?
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Hi James. Yes, I gathered recently that True North aren’t keen on historical / real world games I think I’d find that a difficult environment for gaming given my deep attachment to the rich gaming environment provides. Years go Jim and I converted my 1494 to fit his Yendor universe but it was a lot of work to pose the same problem – a group of states with their own problems with each other invaded by a large power – in ‘disguise’. I’ve a revolution game in mind which has a fictional setting for what is an historical inspiration but I’m only doing that to avoid the players having the benefit of hindsight.
50 days doesn’t sound long to come with the goodies! Those bastards sitting in their comfy billets don’t relaise what it’s like out here at the front line, up to our necks in muck and bullets! I’d have thought starting the game half way through would take a number of choices out of the hands of the players, possibly giving them little option but to build on the foundations of existing projects with limited time to head off in new directions?
Exploring for minerals – I’m not clear what level of technology the colonists have for detection or extraction but you could influence what they find based on the local terrain (some elemnts aremore likely found in mountains).
Did the players not liek being divided into factions or that there were pre-existing relationships between them? You could always leave them with a blank slate in which factions may form as they disagree on a course of action or they divide up the tasks.
I’m not sure if it’s relevant but I’m enjoying an SF novel ‘The Children of Time’ by Adrian Tchaikovski. An attempt at planty a colony of primates on a planet and boosting them gentically goes wrong and the local spiders benefit instead. You can recognise some of the problems they face within what I think is a carefully worked out environment. Unfortunately I don’t find the other strand of the novel, about human colonists isn’t as interesting.