Flat Black is a setting for science fiction role-playing games. Within that gamut it is specialised for planetary adventure¹, which is to say for adventures in the vein of Jack Vance’s Oikumene, Gaean Reach, and Alastor Cluster stories, Poul Anderson’s Polesotechnic League material, Ursula Le Guin’s Hainish cycle…. In the typical campaign or adventure the player characters will be comparatively cosmopolitan people who come with a thing to do to an isolated planet that has a strange, quirky, or even bizarre society and culture. The planet’s social oddities will be at first an enigma and an obstacle to the PCs’ goals: to achieve their objective they will have to engage with the locals, learn about their customs, and figure out how to circumvent or even exploit them.
Parties of PCs in Flat Black may be explorers, adventure journalists, charity workers, spies, clandestine operators, private effectuators, field researchers for Lonely Universe Tourist Guide, antiques dealers, art thieves, corporate troubleshooters, travelling salesfolk, mercenary cadre, revolutionary agitators, or even Imperial agents: whomever they are, where-ever they go, whatever it is their job to do, nothing ever goes smooth.
This page is a site from which to download the latest versions of the background material in PDF and EPUB formats. The rest of the wiki in which it is embedded is incomplete, out of date, and full of weirdly specific minutiae. I don't recommend that you bother with it.
Players’ Introduction to Flat Black (2022 version)
A brief overview of the setting in 10,000 words, including thumbnail sketches of twenty colonies.
- A4 letter-sized PDF for printout or large screens
- A5 digest-sized PDF for tablets and smartphones
- EPUB format
Future products
- Forty Exotic Worlds
- Succinct descriptions of forty worlds in under 2,000 words each. (Coming soon. View a sample, the draft description of Tau Ceti.)
- Effectives' Handbook
- A guide to the interstellar non-profit sector in Flat Black, for campaigns in which the player characters are clandestine "effectives" working for non-profit organisations, or are investigative journalists etc. (Someday.)
- Imperial Servants' Handbook
- A description of the Empire, its operations, and life in its service, for campaigns in which the player characters are Imperial law-enforcement officers, aid workers, military personnel, and clandestine operators. (Someday later.)
- Kit & Caboodle
- A catalogue of products and processes available in Flat Black, with an appropriate emphasis on the kit and equipment of player-character types. (Some day, some day.)
Proleptic notes
Because it is specialised for technologically-rationalised planetary adventure, Flat Black was designed with no effort to be other things that are more usual and that you might be expecting:
Flat Black is not space opera
- Most adventures in Flat Black take place on planets, a few in orbital habitats; those that do occur in ships seldom involve commanding them in combat. The adventures usually involve conflict on a personal scale and for modest stakes, not the grand stakes, huge scale, and interstellar scope of space opera.
Flat Black is not hard SF
- This is for SF adventure, not scientific idea stories; technical details will seldom be important. Apart form the faster-than-light Eichberger drive and the planet-wrecking CT bomb the technology is all pretty realistic (as far as I know), but that’s not a matter of hard SF purity: it’s so that the technology will be limited.
Flat Black is not soft SF
- In one sense “soft SF” means sociological idea stories and implies realistic psychology and sociology, like hard SF of the soft sciences. Flat Black is for SF adventure, and it doesn’t matter if the bizarre societies are based on dodgy economics and sociology, so long as they aren’t unfathomable.
- In the other sense “soft SF” implies transporters, replicators, force fields, body sleeving, psionics, time travel, “scanners”, “stunners” and so on, and is the opposite of “hard SF”. Flat Black omits those things, not because they are unrealistic but because they tend to overwhelm everything else. Flat Black should be about sneaking around, fighting, verbal fencing, and trying to figure out what the crazy locals are up to — not using a replicator and a transporter to circumvent difficulties.
Flat Black is not futurism
- In no way is Flat Black meant to be a projection of trends or a prediction of developments. It’s not likely at all. It’s a contrived set-up for planetary romance adventures.
Flat Black is not a utopia
- The land of adventure is turbulent, uncomfortable, and unjust, leaving much for the player characters to do. In particular, the Empire is not the good guys. They aren’t the bad guys either, but the Empire is is undemocratic and decidedly illiberal, harsh and high-handed, smug and culturally insensitive, and it is simply not interested in a lot of issues that the PCs might care about. It keeps the spaceways open and conquerors in their pens, but even PCs who work for the Empire won’t want to leave everything to the Empire.
Copyright © 2021 by Brett Evill
