Where did I come from? Where do I go?

Part of the reason I went all in about videogame design and dropped RPGs entire was as always ADHD. But another big part was that I had been having some ambitious goals about what I wanted to do next with RPGs and never actually getting anywhere. As it turned out, after a few weeks of learning a lot about retro-style CRPG and ImSim design, and thinking about what kind of game I could be working on using either my Kaendor or Iridium Moons settings, I found myself back in pretty much the same circular loop.

Which, I think, I finally found a way out off this winter. With the realization that, *gasp*, I don’t actually like High Fantasy storytelling.

That stuff with the big monsters, the demons, and the evil wizards, and the heroes claiming ancient artifacts and casting magic spells. I don’t find the kinds of stories revolving around these things very interesting. I think I used to, 20 or maybe even still 10 years ago. But not anymore. And that’s why I never manged to turn Kaendor into a campaign that was living up to what I wished it could be. And why I could never come up with even a general outline for a Kaendor videogame. What I was still deeply in love with was the aesthetic idea of environments. I could always very clearly imagine what the world looks like, but never what’s actually happening in it. And correspondingly, what player characters would do in it. Resulting in campaigns and adventures that even when they were going really well, always felt rather generic to me.

In contrast, I have all kinds of storytelling ideas for Space Opera. Endless ideas for NPCs, great conflicts, and adventure hooks. But I never felt good about leaving those fantasy environment aesthetics behind.

For a very, very long time, I was always extremely averse to mixing sci-fi elements with fantasy, even though I have of course always been a giant Star Wars fan. But I only worked out recently that my problem really is with adding little pieces of sci-fi tech into an otherwise self-consistent High Fantasy world. An elf-wizard with a laser gun just feels wrong! They don’t fit together. But what I realized is that the reason magic and space tech work perfectly fine together in Star Wars is that this is a world where both are part of a single whole. The sword and the gun are not opposites in Star Wars. They are not the weapons of two normally fully separates worlds. They are part of the same arsenal used throughout the whole setting. Fairy tale princesses have their own space ships. People get out of the saddle of their taun-taun and jump onto a hoverbike. Without having any thought that they are transitioning between their familiar native world and an exotic alien world. This approach has always worked flawlessly for me in Star Wars, and I have realized I am totally fine with this way of mixing fantasy and sci-fi elements in my own work as well.

Funnily enough, I had noticed many years ago that my deeply cherished environmental aesthetic actually comes mostly from works with space settings rather than from High Fantasy Settings. The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, the 80s Dune movie, Albion, and Knights of the Old Republic. These are all works already set in this kind of Space Fantasy, but somehow it never occured to me to pursue worldbuilding in this direction as well.

When I came up with the first draft for Iridium Moons in 2021, my direct inspirations were the new Dune movie, Cyberpunk 2077, and Boardwalk Empire, with the specific worldbuilding guided by the Space Opera RPG standards and conventions of Traveller, Scum and Villainy, and Coriolis. But that original version of Iridium Moons was mostly a world of space ships, factories, big cities, and corporations. In a pen and paper RPGs, wilderness environments are not really that relevant unless the adventure is specifically about navigating natural obstacles. Almost everything important is happening in city streets or indoors. But in a videogame, particularly first person 3D games, elaborate landscapes are something that can really shine and contribute in a major way to setting the tone of the story. Which gave me the idea to slightly retool the Iridium Moons setting to something less Space Opera and more like Planetary Romance, by reducing the presence of space travel and instead put more work in having multiple important locations located on the same planet. With travel between them through the landscape. (Which would be just a two sentence scene transition in a campaign.) Trying to use all the 12 different original planets in a videogame would also have been a major problem, as they would need strong variations in architecture, vegetation, and wildlife. Which is a nonissue for a GM. Instead relocating all the locations and factions to only four planets makes everything much more technically feasible. In the spirit of fully embracing the space fantasy approach, and being a big fan of A Princess of Mars, I also decided to step away from the industrialists and factories theme I originally had in mind, and lean more towards nobles in old-fashioned palaces. But other than that, it’s still largely the same setting I came up with four years ago. Just in a different sector of space. Possibly a few centuries earlier.

My attempts to make an Iridium Moons game in the Godot engine remains my main focus, and further worldbuilding for the setting will continue to be in that context. But with a rules-light game system like Scum and Villainy, that is very much about making things up as you go and doesn’t require preparing any stats for NPCs, loot, and encounters, running a campaign at the side is much more easily done than with other games I’ve run in the past. And since I’m already doing the worldbuilding for my game, Iridium Moons is making for just the right setting to use in a campaign.