I’m going to talk about the process of writing the False Idols mission in the latest version of Starsector, 0.98, though we’ll stray pretty far afield into a bit about the Luddic Church faction missions and the character of Jethro Bornanew in particular. We’ll start with inspiration then move on to implementation, though more from a perspective of designing the narrative than scripting.

Don’t read this post if you haven’t done the False Idols mission. (Or “quest”, fine.) There will be spoilers.

Alright, so we’re all good? Blessings of Ludd are upon you? Great, let’s proceed.

An early, in-progress version of the basic Luddic shrine art

The experience of religion is a sort of alien world to me. I wasn’t raised with it, and don’t recall even attending a proper service until I was the guest at Christian weddings as an adult.

I grew up in Silicon Valley; I was raised on Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, science fiction, and computers. Playing a given videogame, I would always choose the science faction to get all the research bonuses. The Psilons, the University of Planet, whatever – objectively the best, right? And I read tons of science fiction from my mother’s library. It’s a genre which often, though not always, promotes a certain kind of technophilia; a conquer-the-stars attitude that is often, though not always, eager to cast nay-sayers of that particular vision in an uncharitable light. 

So this is a challenge to myself: can I convincingly wrap my head around the idea of a made-up religion which is critical of a positivist vision of science fiction (and scifi videogames) to tell a compelling story in a religious mode?

Can I portray the faithful as more than maniacal anti-technology space-goblins?

(Aside, I can’t say enough about how Brian Reynold’s Alpha Centauri tackled this with a great deal of nuance which may not be apparent upon a superficial reading. Sister Miriam was easy to hate, but she had a point. That game did a brilliant job of portraying its factions – and you, the player – developing increasingly inhuman technologies in order to gain power against ideological enemies. The scifi narrative arc was contained within the mechanics of effective play! Furthermore: obligatory torment nexus.)

* * *

I recall receiving a particular insight: “The Luddic Church is medieval.”

The Church of Galactic Redemption, the Luddic Church, is a place where the boundaries of commerce and politics and ceremony are unlike our own. Religion is an integral a part of everyday life from top to bottom, it is an all-encompassing institution which connects a person not only to the spiritual world but to their community – and the politics, business, scholarship, and war which that entails.

What an interesting perspective to explore! And exploring interesting perspectives? Why, that’s what science fiction is all about, isn’t it?

* * *

So how’s Jethro Bornanew fit in?

Here’s a trick of narrative design: for a given theme, or force, or faction, or any major element in the imagined world – attach a character to that viewpoint. Maybe you need more than one character to give it a bit of range, whatever. Make the characters comment on one another, make them agree, make them fight. Through them, you have tools to explore the world and its themes.

For example: Cotton, Virens, and Sedge are all faces of the Luddic Path. They have feelings about one another, about you, and react differently when you engage with them. Their viewpoints could have been entirely abstracted into planet descriptions, market conditions, and status tooltips (imagine that game!). Attaching these viewpoints to actual people the player can visit and talk to – or drink tea with, imprison, or shoot in the back – makes a huge difference in emotional impact. And besides, it’s more truthful to the human experience that people are the medium through which social forces flow.

Bornanew is a perspective on the Luddic faith. Not all of it, not just the Church, not much of the Path. I think perhaps he’s a take on the faith itself.

* * *

Years ago I outlined plans to build out the narrative around the Luddic factions. I thought it’d be fun for the player to travel around with a sort of monk-detective in the tradition of Brother Cadfael (wait no, this is the one I watched as a kid) but in space. You’d help him solve interesting conundrums as the Luddic Church experienced friction with various science fictional concepts. For instance, what if someone used a nanoforge to create a perfect copy of a holy relic? What are the theological and political implications of such an act? What if an AI core became a believer? Why would a Knight of Ludd join the Luddic Path? Lots of ideas to explore.

But the player needs buy-in with the Luddic Church faction to even begin to care about this stuff. Our problem is the aforementioned concept of maniacal anti-tech space-goblins which needs to be given a bit more depth. Plus we need to set up this monk-detective character. It’d be boring – or worse, a burden – if we just assigned some bland Knight of Ludd to the player: “Here’s your new best friend, Knight Ailanthus. They’re mostly interested in following doctrine and long, quiet prayer sessions. Have fun!”

Instead, how about someone with a dubious past? How about someone who had some sort of crisis of faith? This way they have an underlying cynicism, or at least an understanding of the darker and harder side of the Persean Sector, which means they won’t instantly recoil from the means and methods the player is used to operating within. Then we have a tension both the character and the player can both comment upon.

A very early, unused, and unfinished drawing of a Luddic settlement

* * *

Here are some of my original notes which developed the character of Jethro Bornanew:

Jethro Bornanew 

This is the player’s point of contact into Church politics.

Meets player in .. a bar, I guess? Is slightly uncomfortable with being there. Doesn’t drink (anymore). 

> “Can I call you ‘Jeff’?” 

Bornanew seems thrown a bit out of orbit by the question. “I suppose you may.” he pauses, then adds, “If you would like.”

This character used to be a bit of a low-life but then converted to the church. A new believer is a true believer, right? 

[SECTION REDACTED]

Subcurate Bornanew has a criminal background – he’s both resigned and understanding about being judged based on his past, which he does feel he still must atone for, and perhaps his immorality will serve a good cause. He’s philosophical about the irony of this, and accepts the need to create a moral narrative for himself because he believes it will serve piety.

[SECTION  REDACTED]

He’s got a tiny office somewhere in the institutional complex on CGR PLANET. He’s added to the comms list once he’s ‘activated’. 

Recurring Case structure

Structure this like Bornanew is a detective who has various jobs going on all the time. The player is who he calls in when he needs some big guns or serious interplanetary firepower – the Church, via Jaspis, pays for your services as a matter of course.

(The removed sections were speculation to myself that touched on possible future stories I’d rather not reveal.)

The details changed quite a bit over the three years since I started the document, but I feel like the core concept for Bornanew has remained pretty consistent throughout. And it looks like the “Jeff” joke about his name was among the first details written – sometimes you get it right the first time.

Reading back over more of my notes, I found an exact spot where Jethro’s character clicked for me:

The Church’s Detective

Bornanew becomes Jaspis’ Church’s detective/fixer. She feels he can handle ugly business because of his past, and the more he does, the further from the light he falls as he sees corruption in the Church and in his own ability to do violence (or maybe; be complicit in the player’s violence). He doesn’t want to do this, but he does want to serve his church.

(It’s basically scifi Brother Cadfael or William of Baskerville crossed with hardboiled/noir detective story.)

Edit edit: HE’S A NOVICE OF THE KNIGHTS OF LUDD!

And he’s been “attached” to Jaspis as a test/punishment. (He’s seen as a problem case/potential embarrassment due to his criminal background and his problematic actions during Knight Errant – the Knights like nothing more than to unload him onto Jaspis, who they see as meddlesome and probably contrary to their political aims, despite her militant hatred of the Path.)

William of Baskerville is from the novel The Name of the Rose which I found effectively captures a medieval worldview of totalized religion – and the deadly seriousness of differences in seemingly minor points of theology.

I particularly recall a scene in which the novice assistant to William, Adso, first sees the sculptures around the gate of the monastery chapel and completely freaks out. Imagine a world with no electronics, your experience of media is a handful of books, your experience of art is nearly nil – to come upon an intense, life-like depiction of demons, torment, and Hell itself! Of course it would be a religious experience to simply lay eyes upon it!

(Great book, fascinating movie – starring Sean Connery, a very young Christian Slater, … and Ron Perlman of all people?! I know, I know. It’s wild.)

* * *

Okay, we’ve got our knight-detective-monk.

Given the concept and the character, now he’s got to be fit into some kind of gameplay structure. I’m not writing a book here, we’re making a game. We need an introduction sequence, a hook to get the player into the mission.

Here’s my original flowchart – which contains a helpful note at the top about how this original plan was superseded by the Pilgrim’s Path mission. We’ll get there; the point is that this first-draft plan wasn’t very good:

“The Bornanew Files” is my internal name for Jethro missions. You know, like a detective story.

So three requirements to start The Bornanew Files would be: 1. have a Church-aligned contact, 2. visit some? or all of the Luddic shrines (I think the “did” note refers to how many I had implemented at that point), and then 3. do a mission. I later decided this mission concept would make a good Bornanew File, so I put it into that list of ideas, then I cut from scope as I implemented False Idols. I still might use it, hence the REDACTED.

— Then the player is introduced to Archcurate Jaspis, who would send the player to Jethro Bornanew.

Clearly a first sketch and a rather weak one because it’s a pile of disconnected interactions which are supposed to lead the player to a new character (who hasn’t been mentioned before) to yet another character (who hasn’t been mentioned before). There’s no setup to get the player invested into these new characters, just “here’s someone designated as important, do what they say.” And what’s that Church contact character even doing there if the other characters take over the narrative thread? Just hanging out to trigger an introduction before getting dropped? That’s no good.

Let’s talk about narrative design, because that’s what it’s going to take to make this mess into a decent story.

Narrative Design

Given: we’re telling a story through a video game. The interactive element is key. The player (you) via the player character (your in-game avatar) has to be an active part of the story.

With that said, I actually don’t want the player to be thinking about the mechanics in the same way they do putting together a ship loadout. I want to put your mind into a narrative mode, not a number-crunching mode. A set of integers and booleans bumping into one another don’t compellingly simulate stories about people. Well – perhaps they do, but not if you’re too busy thinking about those numbers and memory flags to imagine yourself in the world. Your brain needs to be tricked into emotionally investing in these little people that live inside your computer.

That’s a lot of fancy talk. What’s it come down to?

1. This type of story is interactive. You’ve got a storyteller (me/the game) and a player (you). I need to have the story change based on your choices. This is not saying the player dictates results. Limitation is necessary for meaning, and making a choice doesn’t mean you should get what you asked for.
2. A story has characters. It’s got to be more than reciting trivia. Characters give us someone to care about. (And “care” can be positive or negative. For example, how do you feel about Reynard?)
3. A story is temporal. Or something like it. A story begins and ends, and by the end something changes. It’s not a list of facts; stuff happens.

The problem with my first iteration on this narrative design is the connections between stages as the plot advances are weak and have no shared characters. Your interactions come down to triggering unrelated memory flags, setting off plot tokens, without anyone coming along for the ride and reacting or changing based on events and/or have your perception of them change as who they are is progressively revealed. Catch 9 space-rats then go talk to the next person.

(I must point out that narrative design obviously varies wildly between games. I’m writing here about how we are choosing to tell stories in Starsector and what seems to work well in this specific application. Other games handle narrative very differently, use different tools, and are often shooting for a greater or lesser scope of interactive storytelling. Starsector is also… I don’t want to say limited, but it is necessarily bounded by being firstly a game about real-time space combat. That’s the #1 design pillar, so the story has to respect that.)

Given those problems with the first draft, what do?

We need to introduce the themes and feeling of the Luddic Church. The Luddic shrine visits, via the Pilgrim’s Path mission, ease the player into the idea of the Luddic faith using art, music, and short interactions which reveal history and beliefs that demonstrate the wide variety of viewpoints held by the Faithful. And these are often contradictory or even in opposition.

An early in-progress view of the Shrine of Volturn illustration, which changed little in composition by the final; sometimes the first draft is good

Nonetheless, there are common themes introduced. As previously mentioned, I use key characters to embody those themes and feelings – and it’s important to introduce them early on and use them throughout! For instance, Gideon Oak and Sophronia Jaspis are encountered during and at the end of the Pilgrim’s Path mission, the first mission in the Luddic Church sequence.

Gideon Oak is a nearly implacably stubborn force of tradition and conservatism. He distrusts the player character and stops them from simply doing what they want. The player can submit to this discipline or find a way around it.

You may meet – or ignore – Sophronia Jaspis at the end of Pilgrim’s Path. She is introduced as an authority within the Church – you’ve met curates and subcurates before, but not an archcurate. She turns out to be rather less conservative and, perhaps, more bloodthirsty than Gideon Oak. As the Pilgrim’s Path sets up the character of Jaspsis (and context for everything to do with the Church), Jaspis in turn sets up the character of our holy detective Jethro Bornanew by introducing the Knight Errant mission.

(Aside, as with basically all of these story missions, I intended Knight Errant to be way shorter than it ended up being. “I just need to get this out of the way before I can get to the real content,” I told myself. And look how it turned out!)

Knight Errant sends the player out to explore various facets of the Luddic Path, the limitations of the Luddic Church, and the conflict (as well as shared ground) between the two. And everyone along the way has something to say about Jethro Bornanew. When you finally meet the man, surely you feel something for having to do all that work to talk to this one guy!

Plus, now the player is ready to understand potential crisis points within the Church and how they tie into the greater Persean Sector and indeed the history of the Human Domain itself via the False Idols mission.

Three missions, each building upon the last. _{(…and in the darkness bind them.)}

* * *

I wrote about the Pilgrim’s Path as an introduction to the Luddic Church here, so there’s no need to repeat myself. On to mission 2.

Knight Errant

I am forced to confess that the major inspiration for this mission comes from fuzzy memories of watching The Last Temptation of Christ over 20 years ago.

I remember the old CRT television, it had dim and dying colour. The movie was on a DVD – not a VHS, I don’t think, though it’s possible – rented from a Blockbuster video which I had to walk something like 10 blocks to get to. I think it was hot; I didn’t have AC in that apartment. Anyway, it’s truly a blur but nonetheless a fascinating blur – I’m a huge fan of Willem Dafoe, who plays Jesus (which is wild), and – I forgot this part until I looked it up just now – David Bowie plays Pontius Pilate??? (What a scene! I sure didn’t remember it, not at all.)

(Nostalgia is a fascinating source of inspiration – I “remember” playing games and watching movies from 20 or 30 years ago as a series of impressions and feelings that inevitably fail to match what I get if I replay the game or re-watch the movie now. Sometimes it’s better, sometimes worse, always very different. I’ve found great value in chasing those unrepeatable, impossible “incorrect” memories as inspiration to create new experiences. You can never go back, but you can try to imagine what it’d feel like if you did.)

Anyway, I’m truly not trying to repeat the story of Jesus or riff directly on the film. Not exactly, not really. It’s about the vibes, the impressions and feelings and half-remembered imagery – that’s what became my starting point for how to introduce the character of Jethro Bornanew.

So what we get from my fuzzy memory is a character who is unsure about his relationship to the holy duty he swore to take on… and lots of dust, and no AC, which is probably why I chose the planet of Mazalot for the ending of the mission.

(Also I just realized that this makes Dardan Kato into the Pontius Pilate figure – the beleaguered imperial administrator in a troubled, far-off land. Didn’t even think about that. Not that he has any particular relationship with Bornanew or his fate (or David Bowie) so the parallel isn’t 100%; nonetheless, vibes. Honestly you’re all just lucky I didn’t choose to riff on Jesus Christ Superstar.)

Anyway, there’s a lot more to Knight Errant, but I’m going to keep this mostly focused on how it develops the character of Jethro, so it’s time to move along.

An early sketch of the illustration for the planet Mazalot; this changed dramatically for the final art

True/False Choices

The narrative climax of the Knight Errant mission leads you to a small grove near Jethro Bornanew’s failing farm. You find him standing over a few graves, the farmers who died before Bornanew took over the abandoned plot.

You may then choose to help Bornanew disappear from the Church, from his duty and oath, forever.

And he would almost certainly be a happier person for it – and probably longer lived, considering what happens next. This is that temptation – turn away from holy duty to simply live as a man. This has to be a real choice. Bornanew has to be able to actually disappear from the plot forever and presumably live out his life away from the space opera going on around him. I felt that to do otherwise, to force one conclusion, would betray the weight of that choice.

However it’s difficult to make this feel appropriately rewarding and interesting in terms of the game. In space opera, a ‘hero’ doesn’t turn away from his duty and disappear, story done, plot dropped.

I did consider how to write it so maybe Bornanew would show up in a slightly unofficial way to continue with the missions, the Bornanew Files, but that would betray the choice that you, and he, made. …Plus it’d require an absolute ton of extra writing and plot hand-waving. So I think it just has to be what it is.

It’s OK to end things, it’s OK to make a massive irreversible decision. A story has change of some kind, remember? Besides, there are enough other missions and stories in the game that letting the player break away from being able to experience chunks of “content” is quite acceptable. This is something I’ve been trying to do more as Starsector is filled out with more stories.

* * *

If that’s an example of a very real choice, how about those “false choices” I sprinkle in? – This is dialog, or a mission, where you end up at the same point no matter what you choose to say.

Let me defend this practice: the point of seemingly arbitrary false vs true choices (without and with in-game effects) is to give you a more naturalistic experience, something more akin to playing a tabletop roleplaying game. In every moment you’re in close conversation with the gamemaster and your fellow players, some decisions may be remembered and used later, some won’t. The point is the whole process is part of playing your character whether you know the decision will “matter” or not. 

(Not so unlike real life- you make choices all day, every day, and can’t be sure when they really matter and when they don’t. It’s what defines who you are, your character and your ethics, isn’t it? And beyond that, sometimes other people, or institutions, have already made a choice for you and whatever you say is not something they’re going to listen to even if they pretend to. Such is life.)

And anyway, I don’t like the idea of always signposting mechanical effects during storytelling eg. marking a choice in blue as Paragon or red as Renegade like in Mass Effect or whatever  – sometimes yes, to a degree, the mechanical effects of a choice need to be stated, but usually in Starsector this is done to represent your in-game character anticipating the implications of a decision (or we just want to make choices that mess with the game too much very clear to you, the player).

Besides, to break it down into something so simple that you don’t need to read the words, just press the red or blue button, feels like a betrayal of the purpose of writing at all!

(Then again, some people just want to press “1” to skip through dialog. They’re allowed to play the game too, see: Starsector game design pillar #1.)

Back to narrative design: we’ve got Bornanew introduced via Knight Errant. We’ve set up the context he’s working in and a bit about why he’s the way he is. Now we can get to the next-

-release of version 0.97 in February, 2024.

 

I need to wait another year and a half for the next release where I can finally get to the original story which all of this was set-up for!

Such is the nature of development on Starsector.

An unused early sketch for the shrine of Hesperus

False Idols

Whew, finally I get to implement the mission this was all set-up for!

To show how it’s done, I’m going to show a couple iterations of my outlines for False Idols. Here’s a first very high-level overview draft:

BFFI – The Case of the False Idols

Overview

A disturbing revelation for Bornanew’s superiors: a fake relic is discovered which matches the real one in the archives of the Cathedral of Holy Exodus on Tartessus.

What’s happening: someone is fabricating nearly-perfect copies using nanotech… and somehow accessed this one to make a copy.)

Goals:

1. 1. bust the fake relic-maker, whoever it is
   2. figure out who on the inside accessed the real relic
   3. how does the Church respond to the crisis

Who’s behind this all? Jeez, hmm. 

1. 1. Pather’s undermining Church legitimacy? <– probably this + a Church insider
   2. A heretical Bishop?
   3. A non-heretical Bishop who just hates idolatry?
   4. AIs?
   5. Tri-tachyon?

The Collector: Menes Yaribay, the administrator of Olinadu in the Kumari Kandam

If PC is involved with Horus Yaribay, can leverage that relationship/interest.

As you can see, I was still figuring out who the culprit was going to be from a “throw all ideas at the wall” list… which shouldn’t be read to imply anything serious elsewhere in the worldbuilding, by the way.

This outline is followed by a list of involved characters with descriptions of their personality, motives, and role in the mission. This doesn’t need to be done for pre-existing characters – I have a separate document containing a list of every character with important facts and a writeup of their personality.

Here’s the section on Menes Yaribay, who is introduced here, and is more-or-less implemented into the mission as described:

Menes Yaribay, the Collector

More than anything, he wants to be respected. He wants to be seen as wealthy and important, powerful and cultured. Especially in the eyes of his cousin Horus (who, in fact, does not respect Menes).

Menes resents being assigned to a backwater like Olinadu. The natives are garish, the social scene non-existent, the work depressing, the Pather presence in the system alarming.

It’s possible to get Menes to fold entirely, which requires getting Horus to put pressure on him and convince Menes that if does this huge favor to the Church… [potent implication here]. This is the angle Bornanew will attempt if the PC doesn’t strongly suggest something else.

I do love terrible aristocrats. (Anyone who has played in one of my D&D games knows this.) They’re so much fun to write because they can be absolutely unhinged due to their immense wealth and privilege. Need to move a plot forward with absurd, contradictory motives? Just have an aristocrat get a stupid idea in their head! Easy.

(I’ll also give props here to the writer Iain M. Banks — there’s a guy who both hated aristocracy and loved writing about aristocrats and their fancy parties. Princess of Persea was partially a tribute to his writing, and of course with Menes we get to have another fancy party scene!)

Here’s the outline for Cedra Keepfaith, the Luddic Church insider who passed a scan of the relic to the Luddic Path:

Cedra Keepfaith, The Corrupt Curate

Sidelined from a path to archcurateship. Somewhat vain, boiling with frustration at the Church’s lack of “progress”. Believes that simple half-truths that convince more people of the rightness of the Faith are acceptable. Motives kinda veer around until they attach to something that brings her … what, respect? power? influence? 

Her self-justification for dealing with the Path is she would be able to manipulate them.

Her specific motivations and reasoning don’t really get spelled out directly in the text of the mission. Instead, you get Bornanew telling the player his impression of her, and then you get to witness her reaction to his accusations.

While the facts in my notes don’t all make it into the game, they do help me write the character respond to a situation in a way that supports a reading where those unstated facts are plausible. Sometimes it’s better for pacing not to lay everything out in great detail, sometimes it’s fun to allow a perceptive player to read between the lines and guess at implied details. (“But I did all this work coming up with lore!” – Well, sometimes you have to shut up for a bit, just hold it in, to make a better story. It’s a terrible sacrifice, I know.)

With all that done, I need to do another pass to write a more specific outline of the mission stating more exactly what’s going to happen.

So here’s a second, more detailed outline for False Idols:

Outline of narrative

A lost relic of Ludd has shown up in the hands of a ‘private collector’, Menes Yaribay.

Only problem is, the relic wasn’t lost: it’s been held semi-secretly in Church archives due to a general anti-Idolatry policy, a shift from a sect in the early years. So it’s kind of an embarrassing secret coming to light.

Ideally [to the Church], the PC recovers the relic and destroys it – or at least discredits it enough that it’s irrelevant.

Goal 0: pick up Bornanew, discuss how to approach the problem.

Goal 1: find the source of the copy relic

Goal 2a: find out how the source got a scan of the original relic

Goal 2b: stop the source of the relic(s)

Goal 3: arrest the mole within the church and bring them to the Knights

(and don’t get merced by the kill-fleet sent to rescue the mole)

Find out the source of the relic

Relic interactions

• • ingratiate self to the Collector
    • Actually pay to take sample of the relic, posing as a buyer (costs credits- PC offers “a deposit”)
      • Can simply buy the relic later “when the tests come back”
    • Take covert sample of the relic via heist, posing as a buyer
    • Steal the relic via elaborate heist
  • Or simply steal the relic via a raid
    • which pisses off the authorities A. Lot. probably.

Without gaining possession of the relic:

• • acquire a scan of the relic
    • with permission of Menes Yaribay
    • with influence of Horus Yaribay
    • covertly
  • find out who the Seller is (It’s a Pather out of Chalcedon!)
    • with influence of Horus Yaribay to force Menes to fess up
    • an extra large bribe?
    • by hacking Menes Yaribay’s comms?
      • … get Gargoyle’s help?
    • maybe Bornanew just Sherlocks it out?
      who gains from this? who has the ability to do it?

Note: PC has been through Chalcedon and met Sedge already, and possibly shot him.

We possibly get to meet Sedge again, yay!

If PC gained possession of the relic:

• • find a nanoforge engineer to analyze the relic. These are not common.
    • requires a trade-tagged contact of reasonably high importance?
    • or maybe high-level access within major faction w/ access to industry (NOT the Church)
    • or PC has a working nanoforge on their own colony

If player has relic/scan: they discover it’s a perfect copy; well, almost perfect. The nanoforge which produced it is… subpar.

Get it tested by a nanofab engineer expert: it’s near-perfect, but subtle signs show it was fabricated.

Q. Who fabricated it?

A. fabricator working out of a Luddic Path base in the fringe; they got their hands on a forge and are using it. (btw: Reward for the mission: faulty autoforge)

Now, what the player knows (if consulting engineer) is that it’s not a major known manufacturer from a major faction – certain black market goods can be matched to this forge, so they must be from some illicit operation on the Fringe.

Q. Who was behind selling it?

A Pather out of Chalcedon supplied it – some lackey of Sedge’s (who might have been shot by the PC; have them react appropriately.)

Who supplied the Pathers with a scan of the original? Ah, that’s the question!

• • Force it out of the Pathers by intel-mining their base via raid or destruction
  • Or convince the Pathers to give up their mole in the Church (… somehow; not sure if this should be possible.)

Which leads to: the Corrupt Curate

Confront the Curate (or whatever): Question raised of the legitimacy and role of relics. Bishop is forcing the issue onto the Church Council.

In any event, Bornanew has to arrest Keepfaith. (which maybe technically breaks some kind of rules?)- let the player choose the approach. HOWEVER, Nemesis Archcurate wants to stop the arrest. “It’ll make the Church look bad” and “She can do private penance, not need to make it public”.

The result: the Archcurate Council is going to have to make a ruling. Mention how this goes later (have player influence tip the scale?)

Also: after the PC busts up the Pather idol-forge, Pathers will bomb the player’s fleet when it’s in-dock, killing crew and damaging a/some random ships. (Code for this somewhere with asteroid strikes IIRC).

 

As you can see, many details were cut or changed.

I’ll make a few comments about how the outline above was changed, or wasn’t, for the final version.

Heist

To start with, I really wanted to write a heist. Maybe it goes with the detective theme? We couldn’t go full Ocean’s 11 with this, but I still had my fun.

Stealing the Relic

All of the quibbles about getting a sample or scan of the relic instead of the relic itself felt like it’d make the story far weaker. Getting the Plot Object is exciting! Why undercut myself with half measures? Sure, a more subtle approach might be more “realistic”, but it’s also more “boring”.

Ulmus Pond

Introducing the perpetrator in the same scene as the reveal is a rather unsatisfying solution to a mystery, so I moved the “Pather out of Chalcedon” (Ulmus Pond) into the earlier Menes’ party scene. That way you actually know who he is before you learn “whodunit”.

Plus, having Ulmus around demonstrates a bit more about Menes’ character and his tendency to pick up social remorae. And further, having Bornanew recognize Ulmus as a Pather in the party scenes shows you Bornanew’s perceptiveness through action. (Remember earlier, in Knight Errant, if you bring stealth-suit marines to your first meeting with Bornanew he knows they’re there? This all serves to reinforce that character trait introduced earlier.)

Wrestling Sedge

I was so happy to be able to bring Sedge into this one (if he wasn’t shot already, that is).

There’s nothing like pulling a real jerk of a character back into the spotlight! And in general, reusing characters when an opportunity presents itself gives greater resonance to everything they touch.

(This can be overdone in a way that makes the world feel smaller. I think we’re good here, because he’s got a legitimate interest in backing this conspiracy.)

Nanoforge Consultation

The nanoforge engineer sequence was cut down to one particular engineer at one particular nanoforge, on Asher, because adding extra options here felt like it could turn into a lot of high development-effort “realism” without any benefit to how the story hits. It’s a talky stage of the mission without much other gameplay, so I wanted to keep it simple and allow it be character-driven. And the more specific the character, the more they can ‘hit’. So instead of GENERIC_ENGINEER we get the jaded, cynical Ayo Tanaica who’s tried of working for these “Luddies”.

Interaction Structure

While playing through False Idols, you’ll notice each key interaction plays out in a similar way:

1. Talk with Bornanew about what you plan to do
2. Do the action
3. Then discuss afterward what happened and what to do next

(Some of these steps may be abbreviated as appropriate.)

There are a couple good reasons to do this.

First, we want to involve Bornanew as much as possible as an active character. The player gets to talk to him, discover his views, and bounce choices off him. This lets us do development of both his and the player’s character! You both make judgments and express views on the world. (Meanwhile I’ll set ethos counters behind the scenes and ambush the player with them later, ha-ha.)

Second, if I – as the designer and mission-scripter – can get the player to commit to a plan before the primary action, this reduces the work I have to do to make sure every action is plausibly available in the moment. Of course all of the time-savings I get out of this structure go back into writing more weird options, so it still takes me a long time to write these out. Oh well.

A counter-example to this structure is The Usurpers mission which ended up being a bit of a development quagmire because I had to bake in a ton of plausible-in-the-moment choices in reaction to previous decisions. If I had to do that one all over again, I might like to force the player to commit to a strategy before letting it play out. But there’s no Bornanew around as an excuse to make the player talk about their next move in The Usurpers! (The player’s bridge officers do serve this purpose from time to time, but they’re vaguely defined, without portraits, and always go along with the player’s decisions. Using them is a weaker narrative move overall, but it can serve.)

The End

The ending sequence was cut down to be way more low key – I cut out the NEMESIS_ARCHCURATE, cut the revenge fleet, cut the dock-bombing. Instead of relying on outside campaign/battle mechanics (a bending of design pillar #1, it’s true), I made the hazard made more personal with the final confrontation between Bornanew and Keepfaith.

This turns the last return to Hesperus into a quiet denouement which lets the themes of the mission, and potentially the death of Bornanew, settle in rather than banging out more space battles, or a chase.

* * *

An illustration encountered when entering the Cathedral of Holy Exodus on Tartessus

An illustration from Darklands, an RPG from 1992 that directly inspired the previous image

(Ah, Darklands again – I’ve written about it before in the context of Starsector writing. This game terrified me as a child. In Darklands, the medieval worldview – the legends, the religion – is very literally real. You had to embrace the logic of the time to prevail – if you don’t tithe a bishop, he might call upon God to curse you and it’s very upsetting. Meanwhile, demons will hunt you down if you destroyed the shrines of too many Devil-worshippers, and saints would answer your prayers for protection. We’re not going quite that far in Starsector.)

Right?

* * *

There’s one additional iteration of an even more detailed outline, which almost writes out direct dialog in places, but I’m not going to paste that here. It mostly matches what got implemented, so if you’ve played the mission you know what it looks like.

Wrong Endings

Yes, the player can miss the final piece of the puzzle and fail to even identify the insider, Cedra Keepfaith, if they go against Bornanew’s advice and blow up the Pather nanoforge station. This is in line with my goal of allowing players more opportunities to screw things up.

My hope, however, is that I can still pay off this ending (even if it is sub-par “from a certain point of view”) without requiring excessive dev time. If you’re engaged with the setting, you can probably guess at the implications of the conspiracy not being fully unravelled – there’s still a traitor in the Church, and the internal tensions suggesting potential schism even less resolved. This would make the Church less steadfast in facing future crises…

It’s a good thing nothing bad that might put pressure on the polities of the Persean Sector is coming from elsewhere.

Right? 😀

Killing Jethro Bornanew

What if Bornanew is killed in the course of the mission?

It’s a bit strange, a bit meta, but I felt (once more) that it would be a betrayal of the character and his themes if there wasn’t some possibility of his death in the line of duty. His confrontation with Keepfaith is not brave for him (or me) if he’s wearing plot armor that stops that bullet.

Plus, I think that Bornanew being killed – martyred, even – for his faith is really interesting. And if it is the way things goes, that implies something slightly different about the future possibilities of the Church and what Bornanew’s sacrifice might mean for the faithful.

* * *

There’s nothing quite so fun as surprising the player by having the game recall one of your decisions, large or small, essential or trivial, during some seemingly unrelated situation later on. These details bring the world to life and help you imagine that it is alive and responding on a level greater than the sum of all all those integers, floats, and bools it’s actually built from.

That is the magic of narrative design.

Comment thread here.

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Games mentioned:

• Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri (1999)
• Darklands (1992)
• Mass Effect (2007)
• Master of Orion (1993) / Master of Orion II (1996)

Films & shows mentioned:

• Cosmos (1980)
• The Last Temptation of Christ (1988)
• Jesus Christ Superstar (1973)
• Mystery!: Cadfael (1994-1998)
• The Name of the Rose (1986)

Books & writers mentioned:

• The Name of the Rose (1980)
• Iain M. Banks (1954-2013)

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Tags: Bornanew Superstar: Jeff visits Westernesse, David Bowie, Luddic Church, luddics, narrative design, writing