G2P - ...IN SPAAACE!

G2P (“Games 2 Play”) is a semi-regular editorial segment from GM Chris, and is devoted to showcasing the rare, the unusual, the crazy, the Indie, and (only very occasionally) the wildly popular in the tabletop RPG world. Games that you either didn’t know existed, games that you should try out as soon as you can, games that will make you laugh or hang your jaw in wonder at their amazeballs glory. In other words: games to play. This episode…

I have heroes in my fandom. So do you. But for many people (perhaps, most people) in our little slice of the GamerNation, these heroes don’t often exist in our all-too-real world. Perhaps they’re comic book icons, film protagonists, or literary giants. These heroes, unreal as they often are, still embody a personality or ideal that we aspire to in our increasingly-way-too-real world. You might identify with Sturm Brightblade, R2-D2, Bobby Drake, Captain Jack Sparrow, Captain America, Captain Marvel, Captain… Morgan… I don’t know. Look, the point is that we nerdkind often spend so much time identifying with our heroes of make-believe, that we forgo the heroes of our now-insufferably-too-real world. I’m talking about real people in our please-Lord-turn-it-off-now-real world who dip their toes into the world of make-believe. The designers, the authors, and the builders of these crazy games that I am utterly addicted to. Giants in the industry, or revolutionaries that are paving the way for the future of RPGs.

D. Vincent Baker. Ann Dupuis. Monte Cook. Robin D. Laws. Margaret Weis. Luke Crane. Sandy Petersen. Ken Hite. Jay Little. John Harper. Shane Hensley. Greg Stolze.

Assuming you are even aware of who these people are, there is no doubt a name or seven I’ve left off that list – a name that you’re silently screaming at me for not including. And I’ll scream at myself, later, for not including them, as well. Whatever. The point is that these amazing men (and women) are professionals that make my life better. They devote themselves to creating games; games that I (as I’ve said) am hopelessly an addict of. And the more Indie it gets… the better. Like some back-alley gamer fervently seeking his next fix, I troll the dank byways of message boards and FLGS back-room tables (yes, they still exist), in my continued search for the odd, the amazing, and the unexpected in the RPG world. Kickstarter is like, the Dispensary. But there are still online dealers opening their jackets wide to provide my fix from the confines of their humble websites. Sometimes, a luminary – a Walter White of the RPG world (to continue this increasingly disturbing and mildly offensive analogy that I’m just rolling with, at this point) – will come down from the heights and provide us with something amazing. A free hit. A taste of something new and exciting. And the aforementioned hero of mine, Greg Stolze, continues to do this in spades.

This article, I’d like to showcase an older, free RPG created by the amazing Greg Stolze, …IN SPAAACE!, created back in 2012 after his loving fans crowdfunded it. It led to a much larger and more fleshed out version of the system (Dinosaurs…in Spaaace!) which I wrote about a lifetime ago. But you can’t knock free content, much less a free RPG of this stature and magnitude. Grandiose in it’s simplicity, stupendous in its humor and Stolze-esque vibe and content, it’s something that everyone should be aware of.

…IN SPAAACE! is a game with fun at its heart, and is about as “Stolze” as you can get. For those not familiar with Greg’s groundbreaking work, in addition to being an acclaimed novelist, he has developed for Usagi Yojimbo, Godlike, Wild Talents, Reign, and the wildly popular Kickstarter success – Better Angels – to name a few. …IN SPAAACE! is clearly Greg’s tribute to unabashed space opera, with silly futurism and Douglas Adams style humor thrown in for good measure. Coming in at a slim 15 pages, the …IN SPAAACE! PDF devotes half of its word count to a simple and highly entertaining “history” for a far-future after Earth was temporarily enslaved by The Greys, at least until we irreparably “corrupted” their society with the decadence of reality television, fast food, internet porn, and sheer laziness. Now, Earthlings have taken to the stars (where we’re privately regarded as the backwater hicks who gave The Greys a social disease they still haven’t recovered from) and joined a larger galaxy filled with space pirates, brain prints, robots, pimp-monks, cloning, telepathy, AI, luckulons, more strange alien races than can be imagined, Antibuddhists, graduate school dropouts, and – of course – the Fraternal Order of Evil Space Lawyers (the name says it all, really…).

The hilarious (and often NSFW) history of …IN SPAAACE! gives players and GMs a huge playground to stomp in, but thankfully doesn’t go so far as to define any hard and fast rules for the universe. A game group is free to invent entire books’ worth of content, and it won’t do anything to diminish the narrative. In fact, if you’re spending a lot of time thinking about the true history of galactic conquest and the detailed stats of Rigelians and Septurians–you’re just doing it wrong. Explanation isn’t needed, nor are the physics behind Faster Than Light Travel, or why cloning and telepathy work. They just work, and the GM and players are free to explore the universe without worrying about it.

The mechanics of …IN SPAAACE! are extremely narrative and quite simple. …IN SPAAACE! is a dice-less system that still contains a concrete resolution mechanic (crazily enough), which Stolze calls the “Token Effort System.” As he’s quick to point out, this name has no bearing on the amount of work he did. Token Effort is a resource economy system based around plot intrusion. It involves each player and the GM starting the game with a set number of tokens (poker chips, glass beads, crystallized mole poop, whatever). As the game goes on, tokens can be spent by players to edit the narrative – they can literally Ante a number of their tokens (depending on how wild and crazy the suggestion is) and just make certain events “come to pass.” You tell the GM what you want to have happen, they calculate how implausible it is, and tell you your Ante cost. You can choose to pay it from your store of tokens and *POOF*, it happened that way. But you pay your Ante to the GM, thus increasing her own store of tokens. Why is this important?

Because things aren’t always as easy as a simple Ante plot intrusion. Whenever the GM disagrees with your plot intrusion, she can turn the Ante into a wager, bidding from her own store of tokens to counter the plot development. Both parties wager in secret, then reveal their bids. After the secret bid, the person who bid the most “wins” and gets to narrate their version of events, paying an additional 1 token to the losing party. (So if the player wins, they pay their Ante plus 1 Token to the GM. If the GM wins, they slide 1 token to the player, and the player keeps their Ante.) But tokens are also spent by players to respond to the plot, perhaps secretly bidding to overcome a viscous attack by a rogue Lounge Singer Assassin. (The mechanics work the same, but there’s no Ante – since this is the GM’s narrative, not some plot intrusion by the player.) It’s all well explained in humorous fashion with examples aplenty.

Making characters is an equally simple affair. You develop a high concept for your far-future space-opera silly-fun PC, and have 4 points to distribute among any number of Traits. No Trait can start higher than 3, or ever go higher than 5. What are Traits? They’re concepts attached to your PC that describe how well you do the stuff you do; and they can be anything you dream up. STRONG. HIVE INTELLIGENCE ALIEN. GREAT SHOT. POORLY-PROGRAMMED ROBOT SUPERVILLAIN. CABIN BOY. SHANKS SQUEALERS IN THE PRISON SHOWER. Anything – as long as it’s in a cool all-caps font. Traits basically give you “free tokens” for a bid, reducing Ante/Wager costs appropriately. So Thangvar with RIGELIAN BELLY DANCER 3 can Ante 5 tokens to make his latest dance move be the secret body language of the long-awaited divine messenger for the AllHive Antulons of Raxon Seven – but only lose 2 tokens for the effort. There’s also interesting rules around improving a Trait as the game goes one (which involves narratively enforcing a scene involving it, then having it work against you); but the bottom line is that this is as complex as the game gets.

Oh – and then there’s …IN SPAAACE!‘s “Rule Zero.” Whenever anyone playing at the table makes you laugh out loud, you owe that person (player or GM) a token. And this should really tell you all you need to know about …IN SPAAACE!

Like most resource economy systems, the worse off the players are, the more “ammo” they will be given by the GM to be awesome later – and vice-versa. So players should know what to expect here: a fun romp in a future that never was, with a highly narrative system that has one goal – make people laugh. This game is prime for a fast throw-down pick-up at the table or at a Con, requires nothing to play beyond some scratch paper or sticky notes, and a stash of some kind of tokens. And can you do any better than that? Only if you’re Greg Stolze – but that is another article!

You can download and enjoy …IN SPAAACE! for FREE from Greg Stolze’s website. So go do so!

Peace, Love, and Good Gaming – GMC

(All names, references, and pictures presented in this article are publicly available at http://gregstolze.com. …IN SPAAAC! is Copyrighted to Greg Stolze, 2012, all rights reserved by their respective owners. This article is a media work of review and publicity, and is in no way intended to share intellectual property or copyrighted material outside the scope of media review.)