’Ullo, ’ullo, ’ullo! What’s all this, then?
—Sir Robert Peel
This is Flat Black, a science fiction (SF) setting for role-playing games. SF is a diverse genre, and Flat Black makes no attempt to encompass all of it. There are already perfectly good RPGs covering the most popular SF franchises, so Flat Black does not try to duplicate the appeal of Star Wars, Traveller, Star Trek, or Serenity. I don’t claim any startling originality: Flat Black was certainly influenced by much of my favourite SF. I have borrowed, but my setting of the borrowings gives them a new significance. I hope that you will find that Flat Black offers a style and substance different from those of other SF RPGs, and that it takes a place beside your existing SF favourites. Flat Black does not try to outdo these 'rivals' at their own game: it plays a game of its own.
Not space opera
In particular, Flat Black leaves most elements of space opera to others. There are no titanic struggles between star-spanning civilisations. Humanity faces no alien menaces. Struggles within societies are far more prominent than struggles between societies. Space battles figure peripherally if at all, and player characters will never have their own spaceship.
Instead the setting is like that in Jack Vance’s Alastor Cluster and Gaean Reach novels: a disparate array of quirky, even bizarre, but predominantly human cultures occupy a multitude of worlds and localities over a broad swathe of space. Player characters come usually as outsiders, and find local quirks at first quaint and then troublesome, but learn to work with them and eventually turn them to advantage. Conflicts range from personal issues up to the fate of a single planetary culture. Adventures occur on planets and within social strictures, and they turn usually on individual mettle rather than the might of armies and fleets. If the player characters meet either with triumph or with disaster a single society may be radically transformed, perhaps even made too dismal or too idyllic to be suitable for further adventures. But if so there is always another planet or locality, another society, another set of grotesque quirks, another macabre conflict at the far end of a liner route.
Dark and cynical tone
Within the category of such kaleidoscopic settings, Flat Black is distinguished by its cynicism. There are no societies that are happy, just, and stable. Most are pretty dismal, and the rest clearly contain the seeds of their inevitable declines. The few that approach Utopia do so like Huxley’s Brave New World: by over-writing human nature to the point that their denizens seem hardly human. Every-one in such societies may be happy, or at least content, but their conditions hardly seem attractive to outsiders. As for the bulk of Mankind, they are plagued by inequality, class conflict, religious and ethnic hatred, the tyranny of majorities or actual despots, feudalism, anarchy, banditry, corrupt and divisive politics, corrupt and inefficient bureaucracies and courts, shortage of public services and infrastructure, burdensome and ruinous taxation, vacillating or over-rigid public policy, outdated or inconstant laws, harsh and repressive police, feuds, poverty, idleness, crowding, social decay, gang culture, endemic violence, monopolies, crony capitalism, peonage, slavery, and every other social, political, or economic ill that has beset any portion of Mankind on Earth. Some are even subject to plagues and chronic and endemic disease. In short, faster-than-light travel and the plenty of habitable planets have chiefly allowed Mankind to paint the tragedies of Earth on a larger canvas.
Not hard science fiction
Flat Black’s plots and themes turn on people, their relationships and feelings, and the societies they live in, not on physical laws and the details of hardware. Adventures are rarely about scientists and engineers doing science and engineering. In that way, it meets the definition of soft science fiction. But in some ways Flat Black follows more of a hard SF standard. There are no psionics or mystical powers in Flat Black, no immaterial souls, no force-fields or light-sabres, no teleportation, precious little nanotechnology, no artificial gravity or anti-gravity, no reactionless drives (though there is faster-than-light travel), no instantaneous interstellar communications, and a restricted role for artificial intelligence. In fact you could say that Flat Black features lower technology than seems plausible, and that these deficits are not always well rationalised. There are several reasons for this decision.
In the first place Flat Black is supposed to have a gritty feel, with difficult choices to make and actions having unintended consequences. It would be out of place for technology to perform neatly and without ramifications. But describing the operations, side effects, failure modes, and unwanted behaviours of a fantastical technology would take up both pages and time, and would make the setting harder to grasp and learn, without adding much. In the second place, Flat Black is cynical rather than romantic, and it would not be in keeping with its tone to play up to romantic conventions, as say by inserting spacecraft that behave like aircraft, weapons that behave like swords, or mystical powers that behave like magic. In the third place Flat Black is supposed to focus more on people and societies than on science and technology. A mystery in Flat Black ought to be explained by an unexpected motivation rather than by an unexpected ability. Magical technology, and particularly technology that would replace people with robots, or transform societies beyond recognition, would be an unwelcome distraction.
Features
The colonies
People live on about 1,100 planets within about 180 light-years of where Earth once was. Some of these colonies were purposely established to set up non-mainstream societies. They've all been developing independently for centuries: several centuries in total isolation, and for the last 200 years with only narrow channels of contact. And the societies have developed in diverse physical environments. The colonies are consequently very diverse. Yet the inhabitants of each society thinks that the ways of his or her people are natural and unremarkable, and that everyone else is strange.
The Empire
The one feature of Flat Black that pervades, or rather hangs over, all the disparate worlds is the so-called Empire. This is something distinctly less than a supreme government. On the other hand it is a great deal more than a space-travel monopoly. It developed out of a philanthropic trust that was established by the man who invented the FTL drive. But after a turbulent history it has ended up as a combination of the Nobel Estate or the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (but with a navy), the United Nations (but with resolve and revenue), and a titanic mega-corporation. The Empire garners colossal revenues from a monopoly on interstellar transport, from developing new worlds as real estate, and from a range of other interests. It dedicates these revenues to two causes: restraining the ill effects of interstellar travel, and preventing anything that kills people in large numbers. The Empire spends trillions averting famine, pestilence, and war, and on promoting public health, public order, and education.
So far so good: but there is a dark side. First, the Empire is pretty much unconcerned about any sort of evil that doesn’t actually kill lots of people. It is prepared to condone, even to assist, a repressive world government or a stultifying social order if the alternative would be a bloody rebellion. Its officials, although more-or-less incorruptible and virtually untrammelled by bureaucracy, tend to be high-handed and uncompromising. They sweep aside ‘lesser’ concerns in their quests to save lives, and anyone who gets in the way of their work learns to appreciate corruption and bureaucracy. Worse, the Empire considers threats to its existence, revenues, and powers to be threats to all the lives it might save in future. The Empire is prepared to take drastic measure indeed to avert such threat.
The destruction of Earth
Three planets have been rendered instantly uninhabitable, and all the people on them killed, by catalytic thermonuclear weapons. The first was Earth, in AD 2385; the second Mayflower, 431 years later; the third Orinoco, two years after that. The fear of this happening again is a big part of what makes the Empire so fanatical.
Copyright 1988–2009 by Brett Evill. All rights reserved.
