The SUE Files: Something with Numbers, I Don't Know

Okay; the first go-round on this was rather more confusing than I thought it would be, so I'm going to try to lay everything out a bit more logically.


In most games, combat works by blocking off a length of time as a turn, then having some system for letting everyone do (generally) an equivalent amount of stuff within that turn in some stat-dependent order. D20, for example, has its various types of actions. Other systems have a number of action points per turn, perhaps varying by a statistic representing speed. The point, though, is that they're grounded in relatively inflexible assumptions of how long a given action is going take.


I can't help but feel like we'd run into problems trying to limit our characters by time when they can just go faster; after all, they only obey physics as long as they want to. I'd rather limit actions per turn based on cognitive load and track our characters' efforts more directly. It feels more logical to me that way: if you're out of action points, it means you're too busy to do anything else that turn. That's why I called the action points Focus. It represents how hard a character is focusing on something.


So every turn, a character has an allotment of Focus points, which are then spent on particular actions. The cost of an action is ideally reflective of how much one has to concentrate to get it right; relatively simple actions, like jumping, might only take one or two focus points, while more convoluted maneuvers like, say, riverdancing might take considerably more. Maybe six or so. I haven't figured out a scenario in which combat riverdancing is likely to come up, but I'm fairly sure we'll find one somewhere. The point is, any combination of actions a character can fit under their Focus allotment is fair game.


Since Focus is effort, it makes sense that allocating more than the minimum Focus to a task might have better results. For simplicity's sake, let's say that dodging blows in melee combat takes 3 Focus and lets you roll 2 dice to dodge. Allocating 6 Focus to it would increase that to 4 dice, 9 would get you 6 dice, and so on. It doesn't necessarily mean you're moving faster (although it could); it's more a case of more carefully considering where to move. Similarly, allocating more Focus to driving a car isn't going to make the car go faster – but, since you have more dice to roll driving checks with, it does increase the speed at which the vehicle may be “safely” operated. (As an aside, we will have mechanics for bullet time at some point. I just wanted to clarify that running in bullet time is not required to accommodate extraordinary amounts of Focus expenditure.) This is also going to be where skills come into play; they're just dice added to the rolls for groups of actions as characters learn how to more efficiently do things.


The different kinds of Focus are intended as an aid to character diversification, so that people aren't just “good at doing lots of things.”
Physical Focus represents a combination of muscle memory and coordination. It's used for things like combat and acrobatics, where coordinated movement is required.
Mental Focus, on the other hand, is closer to concentration, or perhaps clearheadedness; it is intended to represent how well a character can think critically or abstractly.
Social Focus is a bit fuzzier, but it's loosely a combination of confidence and empathy, how well a character can appear as they wish to others, influence others' emotions, and so on. Strictly speaking this probably shouldn't be internal to a given character, but it simplifies bookkeeping.


In this way, it is possible to build characters who are suave or clever or graceful without necessarily implying they're all three.


Originally, I had intended for the three kinds of Focus to represent the maximum allocation of Focus to each type of action. This is overly complicated, though, and makes for a lot of needless bookkeeping. Instead, characters have three completely separate Focus pools to allocate, although odds are they'll only use one or two at the same time. Just to be simple, let's set a character's Foci equal to certain of their stats as follows:


Physical Focus = Finesse
Mental Focus= Genius
Social Focus= Charm
Immersion = Drive


If we keep “normal” stats generally in a range of five to twenty, we also keep Focus in a very manageable number range. I don't think it's too much bookkeeping to make sure the sum of a small set of integers is less than, say, eighteen – but if it is, we can probably simplify it a bit further later.


Now we have a way for our characters to take turns doing things. Every turn, every character takes actions of total cost less than or equal to their Focus allocations. We need a way to tell in what order they do them, an analogue to Initiative. I like the idea of going down a list of some measure of quickness in descending order, like Initiative, but I would rather it not be one roll and done. Instead, let's start everyone at the sum of their Mental and Physical focus; for familiarity, let's call it Initiative too. Instead of rolling stats, characters can spend either one Mental or one Physical focus to increase their Initiative by one for the duration of that fight, starting in the turn after they spend it.


An example may help. Consider three characters totally not named after variables: Alpha, with PF 5 and MF 5, Beta, with PF 6 and MF 2, and Gamma, with PF 2 and MF 4. On turn one, Alpha has an Init of 10, Beta 8, and Gamma 6, so Alpha goes, followed by Beta and then Gamma last. Both Alpha and Beta allocate all their Mental and Physical Focus to actual actions; Gamma allocates all of xis to increasing xir initiative, which is increased by 6 (2 Physical, 4 Mental) to 12. On the next turn, Gamma will go first with 12, followed by Alpha (10) and Beta (8). This order will persist indefinitely until one of the three spends Focus to change it.


So now we've got a way for people to do things at each other, and a way to decide in what order they do it. We need a way to track damage, and that can go back to Focus too. In a way, this employs one interpretation of hit points: they aren't literal health, but rather a representation of one's capacity to continue fighting. So, if we express damage in terms of Focus, we can run a lot of things through the combat system. Fists and bullets do Physical damage, depressants and arguments do Mental damage, and “drama” does Social damage.


Rather than make every point of damage reduce the relevant Focus by one, I would rather dilute damage down by some factor so we can have a wide range of integer damage values. Let's use the other four stats and say that every [Vigor] damage ties up one Physical focus, every [Acumen] damage one Mental focus, every [Nunchi] damage one Social focus and every [Stubbornness] damage one Immersion. That way we can track damage on a grid, like in Shadowrun, and use that as a simple way to tell how much allocatable Focus of each type we've got left – just mark off the right size grid on graph paper, fill it in left-to-right top-to-bottom, and the number of rows remaining is how much Focus is left.


And now that we have a mechanism for damage, the question of death naturally comes up. Zero Focus should not be death, but rather unconsciousness or equivalent; the character cannot take any actions relying on the relevant Focus, but is capable of eventually returning to some level of activity with minimal intervention. Permanent incapacitation of whatever type ought to happen at, say, [max Focus*-1]; in other words, a character has to take damage equal to twice the product of their Physical, Mental, or Social stats to die, or twice the product of their Immersive stats to break. Death itself is going to be rather varied, albeit scripted in the case of natives according to their home cosmology. Dreamjackers just fall apart; “death” is simply the absorption of so much damage that their mind loses the cohesion necessary to counteract the gradual erosion by the world and they cease. In effect, they doubt themselves to death. This does have interesting implications for recompiling and reloading them once we get to the meta-magic system, though.


Now, Cathexes were in the last post, and looking at them now they feel a lot like level adjustment. So forget them as written. I think they still have a place, though; there needs to be a reason not to just nuke all the chessmasters out there, or at least a way for defeating them on their terms to be viable. Purely speculative: they might end up working something like aspects from Fate crossed with gambling, something long-term but not involved in the XP mechanic at all. I'd like them to be player-defined things that a character considers integral parts of their identity, where they'd give bonuses to rolls but do Focus damage on failure. Say you have a burglar who's really proud of their ability to pick locks; they might get a +4 bonus to all lockpicking attempts, but take 4 Mental damage if they fail. Maybe a brilliant tactician gets a leadership bonus but takes damage when a subordinate dies. That way really forceful personalities might have very high Cathexes and be a more do-or-die. Let's say characters can have up to 10 points of Cathexis, divided however they like between skills. Incidentally, they're probably dreamjacker-only. They make things happen by wishing; this is a way of representing almost unconscious wishing. The idea that you can't stop reality bending to your whim is a bit scary, especially when suddenly it doesn't work.


So what doesn't make sense so far? Again, actions that cost Immersion will be added later, although it's probably somewhat apparent where they'll go.

And before I forget, the stats as follows:

Physical: Finesse, Vigor
Mental: Genius, Acumen
Social: Charm, Nunchi
Immersive: Drive, Stubbornness.

The first set of every pair defines Focus, the next helps define damage grid width. What the stats mean is still vague, beyond the name.

The SUE Files: Morphean Operandi

Now that we've kind of defined what everyone else does, it might be helpful to identify what exactly the Agency does. At their core, the Agency is a glorified cult, albeit not one revering a deity. Their central belief goes something like this:


Worlds are stories that flesh themselves out in the telling. Like stories, they have their own internal logic, operating above the mechanical cut and thrust of physics: narrative causality bridges the gap between what logic would suggest happens and what the story wants to happen. It does this subtly, manipulating the fundamental nondeterminism of the world in a thousand tiny ways, but it does so in certain recognizable patterns. When reality continues to obey these patterns, all observers are satisfied; when it diverges from them, defense mechanisms snap into place to deal with the narrative non sequitur. Like a cellular response to oncogenic mutation, these mechanisms operate in (rough) ascending order of severity, the final one being self-destruction.


In theory, the Agency operates to supplement these responses with more a more intelligently managed antigenic response; in practice, the only thing at all likely to resist until the world snaps is sustained, deliberate meddling to disregard causality in favor of rearranging the world to accommodate a new state, and so they fight SUEs. Their job is to find and isolate the pattern-breaking elements while guiding the integration of the broken patterns into the larger causal flow. In short, neutralize the SUEs, then cover everything up until no one's sure you've done anything at all.


This is a damned hard job. Agents are outnumbered a thousand to one by their potential enemies and a billion to one by the people they're supposed to guard, if not more. They have to listen to a brand-new symphony, identify the off-key player, and silently haul them off the stage before the song's over while said player is beating them over the head with their chosen instrument and the conductor will reflexively shoot them on sight. They have to do it almost totally without support, too.


They do have some help. To start with, they're as immortal as anyone who exists as a projection of their own self-image, aging being fairly subtle from moment to moment, so at least they never have to retire. They've also got forward observers in the form of all the natives, since the Agency briefs them through extremely informative dreams.


Cryptic dreams and symbolism, while classic, don't lend themselves to efficient internal communication. The Agency simply relays huge amounts of sense data to its operatives, having filtered it out of the natives' dreams, and lets them process it however they feel is most informative; the same adaptability that allows them to exist also allows them a certain facility with informatics. Most agents can pull full-dimensional pan-sensory records of the incidents; more adept ones can correlate out ever more remotely connected data to get a broader sense of their destination. These dreams are semi-lucid, as the agent cannot control the data itself but can readily impose their chosen reality filter on it, focus on some parts over others, and so on. Commonly chosen filters include a spy-style briefing, a conversation with a hooded stranger in a tavern, looking into a crystal hypersphere, or listening to a bunch of people tell stories at a party. Either way, enough information is available to avoid a completely blind jump, but only rarely enough to avoid surprises; likewise, the agent can talk across all senses with his teammates during the planning phase, but isn't actually capable of sensing them directly.


They then pick where in the destination world they're going to wake up (and as what) and there they wake. This does have to be a definite destination, not “right behind the SUE.” Thus the mission begins; at its end, whenever they next sleep, they will be informed of such, at which point they're on vacation until they are next needed.


Now, there are times when a team needs to be updated on the fly, or wants to request additional information when unable to sleep. That's why some enterprising agent invented calling cards: little objects designed to act randomly until an agent with a question uses them, at which point they nonrandomly display an answer. These have been magic 8 balls or ouija boards or knucklebones, but for some reason they somewhat tenaciously decide to be tarot decks in a lot of worlds, which accounts for the name. Whatever their form, they share a common weakness. Since they can't reveal their seemingly random results are actually messages, they also can't indicate when they're not: using it when there's no response just gives a random result that looks totally valid. Clever agents use them on definite questions with a small, discrete number of possible answers.


It's probably obvious that the Agency doesn't micromanage. They tend to keep together whatever groups naturally form, flinging them as one unit from world to world. Agents can reject missions by consensus, they quit by not wanting to keep going, and they're given so much running room some factions believe the Agency doesn't even exist except in the minds of its members. Indeed, most of the services the Agency provides are provided member-to-member; about the only thing binding everyone together on the operational level is a shared short-range telepathic “frequency.” As long as two Agency members are near each other, when one speaks, the other will understand and recognize the Agency “metadata” woven into it. With practice this can be expanded into pan-sensory speed-of-thought hivemind communication without actual speech, or even written down into a sort of augmented-reality tag, but everyone can at least manage to understand what their associates mean.


The archetypal Agency unit, the 2-6 member Ops team, tends to stick together and go where the missions are. Members come and go, yes, but it's an event; it's generally assumed that anyone joining a team is doing so indefinitely. Conversely, consultants move around a lot more. They might live in just one world to guide teams through its more abstruse elements, or they might offer occasionally useful services. They make the calling cards, for example, and send messages between worlds when the Agency's normal network will not suffice. Some of this is free to Ops teams; in the Agency service economy, saving the world is a pretty big service, and most consultants who contact the team will be prepared to help gratis. More involved favors generally involve some agreement to help make the same resources available to the next team.


Naturally, there isn't always a consultant available for whatever service a team might need; they're hired on an ad hoc basis whenever a prospective Agent isn't suitable for Ops work but has useful talents, so the resources to set up more than a skeleton network just aren't there. Thankfully there are others capable of picking up the slack. The grey market is big, diverse, and good at hiding; it winds like mycorrhizae through the less tightly controlled portions of the multiverse, in dark tavern corners and well after normal business hours and generally out of the way. Like the Agency, they haven't much use for conventional currency except as a prop, being generally able to short-circuit the economy whenever they really need to. Some take payment in data to sell on to in-world brokers; others take “curiosities”, unique and generally inconsequential bits of world valuable mainly as art. Many want seemingly minor changes in the world, especially from the ever-subtle Agency. While they have no commitment to Agency ethos – and in some cases enjoy pushing their moral boundaries a hair at a time – the grey marketeers tend to reject SUEs out of concern for their own safety. The enemy of their enemy is a relatively reliable client.


From here, I'm guessing people can assume the level of sects and violence they'd like, within and around the Agency, so I thought I'd end on an even more meta note and try to explain what I'm going for with them. The ambiguity surrounding their existence is intentional, of course, and it's intended to avoid giving the PCs a boss. They're their own boss....maybe. Everything else is really just there to give them choices; easily controllable options, in the case of consultants, and moral choices in the case of the grey market, which is also a way of fitting the Agency into a larger undercurrent of interesting folks, giving more places to pull PCs from, and so forth. Beyond that, it's mostly intended to get out of the PCs way and let them do fun stuff without necessarily reassuring them that they're doing the right thing. Remember, the only thing promising that the Agency is the only thing between the worlds and oblivion is...the Agency. Which might just be their own agency giving itself a capital letter. Maybe. Finding out directly is a bit of a job, though.


I don't know. Am I completely nuts here? Once I work out a system, going back in and expanding these powers is going to help elucidate the nuts and bolts; probably at the very least the really complex ones are going to require going to sleep to use so they can't be used in combat.

The SUE Files: Beyond the Katanas

Why are SUEs bad?


It sounds like a trivial question, but we've split so many hairs that it's helpful to define exactly what they're doing that needs to be stopped. Clearly their methods are not at fault, since agents do the same thing; equally clearly, it's not being mean about it, since plenty of worlds are hellish dystopias 'naturally'. I'd be tempted to say that it's just breaking rules, but that has shades of Marty's M.I.C.


I think, if we wanted a simple distinction, we could say that SUEs break rules to break tropes, where agents break rules to fix tropes. Worlds, after all, are primarily places for stories to take place, and human pareidolia means tropes will always be a thing. Physics merely defines the cognitive space the story can run through; the important thing will always be the story itself, with whatever balance of logic, narrative causality and the Rules of Cool, Funny, and Awesome is necessary to drive it. So why have I so consistently referred to physics in the preceding post on Immersion? Partly because I'm a fool, of course, but partly because I wanted the tropes not to be explicitly the focus of the game. They lose something when the story focuses on itself so closely. That's what that giant 1-10 multiplier for “significance” is for: it's a way of rolling tropes and plot and local significance together into something a DM can throw around quickly. I'm aiming for a very fine distinction here: there are rules, and even when broken the story still follows them backwards, but it's possible to follow all the rules and still end up in a completely different place than you'd think. This is the best, handiest way I can think of to let players be adaptably genre savvy, and to materially reward that genre savvy, without forcing them to enforce “how the story is supposed to go” if they happen not to like it.


At least it affords us a relatively straightforward way of identifying SUEs-as-hijackers-of-stories. It's not just that they aren't local; it's entirely possible for non-natives to do whatever locals can without breaking Immersion, so long as they follow the tone. Non-natives can just cheat very easily, which is where agents come in; if the SUEs were only working in-world, the world could deal with them. Cheating is usually the difference between a weird event and an Immersion-breaking event.


As I see it, we have two basic kinds of SUEs: the ones who want to be something they aren't, and the ones who want the world to be something it isn't. The first resemble the classical Mary Sues, the kaleidoscope-eyed conventionally perfect cardboard cutouts. They might have katanas and trenchcoats, they might be goffik, or they might just really not want to die. In the end, though, they need people only as an audience, whatever form that audience might take. The second type need people as statistics: they want some change to the world, some new social system or physical reality or who knows what else, and they think people will be different for it (usually, but not always, happier.) These can hide better but generally aren't as resilient, since they rely much more on the active engagement of the locals.


This doesn't necessarily imply malice; it's entirely possible for them not to even realize they're doing it, or to knowingly do it in pursuit of a morally laudable goal. The least knowledgeable ones are ironically the most urgent threats, since without knowing about Immersion they can break it accidentally. Thankfully, without conscious shaping of their will they aren't capable of truly world-shattering feats, at least not directly; in any event backlash claims a lot of the ones the Agency can't intervene to save.


The knowing, benevolent ones are in their way even harder: it's hard to ask someone to give that kind of thing up, the locals generally like and protect them, and their effect on Immersion is harder to guess because people so want to believe what they're doing is real. The miracle healers and rebel leaders and so on are always tough. They are, however, promising candidates for recruitment.


If individual SUEs are a headache, their organizations are a leading cause of agent migraines; something about their hierarchies lets the crazily egocentric rise to the top. Some examples to get us started:


The Justice Poets: in essence, they believe poetic justice is a fundamental universal constant; anything exceptionally good or bad happening to anyone is ultimately some sort of karmic response to some vice or virtue they possess. Unhappy with the degree to which the universe validates their beliefs, they pick people they believe to be undeservedly happy and hurt them in some way “ironically” related to their perceived failings – indeed, they consider themselves sculptors of fate. Their sense of proportionality has somewhat degraded as of late, though; they're down to the level of kidnapping people who waste printer paper and feeding them feet-first into woodchippers, then claiming they were “hoist by their own petard” and perhaps leaving a eulogistic limerick on their graves. The old guard are slightly more restrained, still cleaving to the old custom of leaving their targets alive to despair over their fate.


The Chiaroscuro Cowboys apply the idea of justice slightly differently: everything has to have a hero and a villain, if only you dig deep enough. They see it as their job to find the villains and bring them to justice. Naturally, anyone doing this job is heroic, and therefore anyone disagreeing or inhibiting them is the evillest sort of fiend. Somewhere along the way they found a Western to their liking, what with all the lynching, and the name stuck. The newer members are actually almost reasonable, so long as they're operating in a world with sufficiently black and white morality. Just don't ask them about mercy.


Animancers represent the opposite end of the spectrum: they have no real moral views other than a firm belief in the rightness of the customer. Somewhere between soul merchants, chess grandmasters, and sculptors, they simply make minds to order. They might be in the employ of natives, might be filling out some transreal menagerie, or might simply be playing one of their Games. Autonomy, as they call it with some amusement, is played like so: events are engineered such that one preordained person (the Pawn) will, at some future time, have to make a choice of great input, one with a finite number of options. Each team is assigned one of those options and the goal is to manipulate the Pawn into choosing it. Generally speaking, direct effects are not allowed within some considerable radius of the Pawn's person, simply to make the game more intriguing. The death of the Pawn before the appointed time or similar failure to get them to the choice is considered a loss all round; taking a third option, so to speak, is scored as a draw. Variants include Fatalis, in which the Pawn's choice is always fatal; Brotherhood, in which there are multiple Pawns; and World-in-the-Balance, using a dreamer as the Pawn and manipulating only things within their dreamscape. Animancers with high-end Elo ratings get better-paying and more interesting commissions, so the Autonomous Games are played for very high stakes. Rumors of Autonomy variants using dreamjackers, or even the Agency, as the Pawn are of course totally unfounded.


I had been worried that we'd be restricted to cackling “for-the-evuls” villains, but there are apparently alternatives within easy reach, particularly when combined with the corrosive effect of localized omnipotence described several posts ago. I'll come back and add more groups and types and things later, and I'd very much like to see what other people come up with. Next time I'll sketch out Agency procedure.

The SUE Files: Needing a Bigger Boat

 Another hilarious guest submission, this time by Joural0401:

 This story isn't about a bad DM or anything of the sort.  It's just… it needs to be shared.  We had an average party at the time, and were in the middle of confronting a pirate king.  Sorcerer, Rogue, Fighter, Barbarian, Cleric.  Pre-gunpowder, so ballistae are the primary weapons for boats.  The entire party is onboard the Pirate King's boat, and he's reaming out the pirate captain who led us here(apparently he's done these kinds of things in the past).  Eventually it's decided that the pirate captain will have a chance of surviving, so they put him on a rowboat, and the DM immediately starts describing the captain frantically rowing away.

Apparently, the thief never read anything on TV tropes, so half way through the description of the captain in the horribly rickety boat, he says "I jump on."

The entire table stands silent for a moment, before the Fighter says "I follow him."

I(the sorcerer) try to stop them, but can't convince them and I fail my grapple check.  So they're on the boat.  The Pirate King turns to look at us, makes a comment about how our friends like to gamble, then starts talking about how the Big Bad has access to all these amazing innovations of weaponry.

Out.

Roll.

The.

Cannons.

Three cannons, all pointing at the little rowboat.  The first one fires.  Miss.  Second one fires.  Miss.  Third one fires… hit.  Reflex save time.  The both make it, so the fighter takes half damage and the rogue takes none.  The DM pauses, and asks for a second reflex save.  Again, the Fighter makes it, but the Rogue fumbles, and is now bleeding 1d3/round.  In the ocean.  The rogue fails a swim check, so the fighter swims down and saves him.

Around this point, I realize what's coming next while the fighter is crowing "We survived!", though given the status of the thief at the time(he got a 1 on a fort save, so now he's bleeding 1d4), might have been premature anyways.  Then the fins appear.

Sharks between them and the boat we came from, sharks between them and land.  Fighter swims for a turn, but decides he'll have a better chance if he drops the rogue, and the rogue barely makes it to swim under his own power.  He's still bleeding out.  Fighter swims off, rogue decides to swim in the other direction because… hell if I know.  A turn later, he fails a swim check and a fortitude check, and ends up unconscious underwater, while the fighter swims a bit further.  The DM is generous and gives the Rogue a fortitude save to have one last chance at surviving.  Says 'you'd basically need a natural twenty to wake up.'

Entire table silent for the fateful roll.

Everyone leaning in.

20.

It was the perfect moment of cinematic you'd-never-believe-it-in-a-movie, but the rogue wakes back up, no longer bleeding, underwater.  "make a swim check."

4.

So the rogue is dead.

Meanwhile the fighter has realized, at long last, you can't outswim a shark, so he draws his weapons to try and fight them off.  He fumbles his first roll, and his sword is out for the round.  Dagger time.  Rolls for it… fumble.  Both attacks miss.  Shark turn.  One of the sharks charges forward to attack.  Critical hit.  The fighter had 3 HP left following the cannon hit- now he's at -11.

So both 'let's get on the boat' people are dead, end of the story, right?

Wrong.  Because I made the mistake of intimidating the Pirate King.

A round later, I was blind.  The cleric tries to guide me to cast a spell but when it fails I just enlarge person the Cleric(phase one of any combat at this point is, of course, to enlarge the barbarian), climb on her back, and tell her to swim like her life depends on it.  We hop in the water(sharks are better than the CR like 10 or whatever guy on the deck) and swim to the boat.  Making it on board, the session ends with the captain of our ship asking where the rogue and fighter went.

None of us knew how to answer until the Barbarian says "Well, last thing I heard them say before the sharks showed up is 'I got this guys,' so I'm sure they're fine."

End of the night, end of the best session ever.

The SUE Files: How the World Doesn't Work

We keep talking about Immersion, but I don't think we've ever even approached an understanding of it. So here's the Theory of Absolutely Everything, so to speak.


Readers accustomed to trawling wikipedia may be familiar with the idea of the brain in a vat; that is, a mind artificially stimulated by a supercomputer into believing it is experiencing reality when it's really just floating in a little vat of nutrient solution. As a philosophical tool, it commonly assumes a perfect simulation. We must assume a thoroughly imperfect simulation – which, indeed, is far more likely. We have people intervening in worlds all the time as a fundamental part of their operation, let alone all the ideological leakage seeping around. To avoid minds fouling themselves up on problems with the sim, then, we need some way to letting them deal with errors without rejecting it entirely. That is Immersion when used according to package directions: a universal coping mechanism to let imperfect operators run imperfect simulations without them eventually breaking.


In keeping with the theme of people being awesome, we've been assuming that people are both aware of a huge amount of information and capable of processing it in real time at a nearly unconscious level. This, in turn, feeds pattern recognition of things they don't even realize they're sensing. That's what Immersion is intended to protect: the sense that those patterns, be they laws of physics or the whims of some divine agency, are persistent. In a perfectly deterministic universe, that sense would never erode even slightly, but naturally universes have people and random elements and so forth. Immersion lets people ride out the bad function calls and the rounding errors and the divine intervention.


Indeed, it serves several useful purposes even without universal cross-contamination. With sufficient pageantry, it's a sense of the miraculous. In small doses it can stimulate curiosity like nothing else: it empowers people to conquer the nonsensical, the fantastic, and the bizarre until nothing is completely beyond comprehension. Unfortunately, the very qualities that make Immersion so useful also make it difficult to manipulate. On a functional level, it is a network of independently controlled redundant processors and exception-handling heuristics all integrated at a fundamental level into the core cognitive patterning engines called upon to instantiate self-aware entities, minds included; in other words, it's everywhere, so it can't be thrown out or shut off, but it also can't be replaced or refilled. (The numerical representations of Immersion are, of course, purely for convenience; one “point” of Immersion could mean any number of things in neural space.)


As I said above, Immersion as a function of time is normally noisy but functionally flat; it is constantly depleted by random errors in computing but constantly restored by everything else. Every second they're experiencing anything, the natives experience most of the world working as they've come to expect, and moreover informing them implicitly that they are existing correctly, if only in a physical sense. This acts to smooth out all the little bumps, and the big bumps, and generally drag the world back to accepting itself as real.


Non-natives, on the other hand, experience just the opposite: not only does nothing work quite right, but it keeps querying them in strange ways, so their Immersion slowly erodes as the nagging feeling they aren't what they think they are slowly colors their awareness. Even the most perfect of them have to stop and translate their sensory input and construct their output, and this leads to a thousand little glitches too small to individually matter but collectively big enough to require them to find another source of Immersion or suffer a break.


For dreamjackers and SUEs alike, then, Immersion works fundamentally differently than it does for natives: it's the assertion that they are what they think they are despite the constant protestations of local reality that what they think they are does not exist. In more poetic terms, they're the only reality they have left, and so they become literally realer than they've ever been to compensate. (Incidentally, this is also why neither of them dream. They're essentially dreaming of themselves constantly just to exist.)


With that in mind:


Immersion is not purely rational; the more something impresses itself on a given observer the more resources they devote to it and the harder it is to isolate before something snaps, which means a bigger bump on the aforesaid graph. To refer to an overused example, this means that a laser pistol hurts the medieval peasant's Immersion less than a laser cannon, even though they work on exactly the same locally nonsensical physical principles. Moreover, people being the emotional creatures they are, particularly emotionally impactful uses hurt more as well; seeing the aforementioned cannon vaporize a random rock hurts less than seeing it vaporize his house. Emotional depth also sucks up cognitive resources, magnifying the response that has to be swept under the cognitive rug. Smart non-natives use weird stuff at one remove from anything huge or important.


Furthermore, that magnitude is significantly affected by the observer's current emotional state. Properly prepared, most minds can swallow a lot more than they can by surprise. This is why gods can enact sweeping changes with relative ease; the pageantry and lights and choirs and so forth act to prep the minds in attendance that something weird is happening, thereby providing an easily rationalized explanation. The same is true of technobabble, making it an extremely valuable skill in sneaking nonsense under the audience's collective noses without anything breaking. Gimmicks take second place behind making sure no one sees anything, but it's a close second.


On the subject of making sure no one sees anything, logical people might assume that simply being out of sight of everyone might work – that is to say, simply popping off to the core of the planet or depths of space is sufficient to allow them unlimited operational freedom. Unfortunately, the simulation itself is always watching, albeit through slightly different eyes. It sees non-determinism, at least on whatever crazy terms it's been told constitute deterministic physics, which means that empty space is positively the worst place to hide from it; with no one doing anything there, logically everything should go where the laws of nature dictate it should, and errors can be swiftly identified and corrected. However, where people are concerned, suddenly errors are constant and logic at best a very strong suggestion. People generate a sort of groundscatter of exceptions, and under cover of that it's harder to detect that non-natives are there, let alone active. This means that, paradoxically, dreamjackers are safest in populated places or when embroiled in major events, particularly those central to the story the dreamer itself is telling – the general confusion of so many active minds can hide nearly anything, so long as it's hidden from the more mundane observers. It's generally easier to hide things from non-omniscient observers anyway.


So what all of this means is that Agency dreamjackers are playing two games at the same time. The first is a simple numbers game: they need to act in their own way often enough to keep themselves from breaking, but present those actions in such a way that no one else snaps from witnessing them. At the same time, they need to weave their actions into the larger story to hide the inevitable errors from the simulation itself, or else the sim will break – which breaks everyone as time itself grinds to a shrieking and asynchronous halt, causality just gives up and physics starts randomly guessing until Lovecraftian horrors arrive. They also need to keep the far less limited SUEs from doing either of these things and avoid a messy death at their hands in the process.


We'll get into the specifics of the mechanics later, once I've ironed out the massive mechanical problems inherent to a system that needs to encompass so much, but for now: every potentially weird event has some kind of base Immersion cost to make it happen based on the magnitude of the effect, like Endurance in HERO6. This is then multiplied, per observer, by some number from 1 to 10 based on the emotional and rational impact. Event-native observers have their Immersion increased by that much; everyone else gets it decreased by that much.


In practice, everyone but the DM has only one multiplier to keep track of, while the DM has at most maybe three; since everyone but the SUEs and the PCs is a native, the multipliers should be identical unless an exceptionally impactful event bumps it up by one or two. It's very wingable, so to speak; the last thing I want is for this to drag down an otherwise eventful scene.


So, in conclusion, the kind of thing we're saying works well is meeting the setting's problems (to wit, the SUEs) with solutions that bear the hallmarks of each agent's background, then carefully picking when to employ the more fantastic elements of their arsenal to maximize effect while minimizing Immersion loss. It's entirely possible to go out of (in-character) character, but that severely drains their ability to keep dealing with the weirdness they're constantly experiencing, so in general you want what your character does to restore Immersion so that what others do can drain it without breaking. If you're a pulp fiction strongman, solve problems by punching; if you're a master physician, go heal some folks. It's very much a case of everything looking like a nail when all one has is a hammer, except the people you're working with only have a saw, a screwdriver, a duck and solipsism, respectively, and the nail hammers back, and there's every chance of a noise complaint delivered via reality breaking.

The SUE Files: One Day We'll Even Have Rules

I fear we may have put the cart slightly before the horse, given the sort of logistical issues we're running into. It might help to define the basic in-universe mechanics of worldbuilding so that we know what kind of inheritances between worlds we're looking at. Here's what I'm thinking:


Most people who tell stories do so in broad strokes; in, for example,a dashing swordfight scene, no one cares that some guy three rows back in the astonished crowd of onlookers stubbed his toe yesterday. Indeed, for all practical purposes, he has no toes insofar as the story cares. In most stories, this isn't a problem, but in every RPG I've ever been in, at some point the players will wander into some part of the story that no one ever anticipated them seeing, at which point the DM ad-libs through a combination of logic, tropes, and random guessing.


World-dreaming is like that, except all the players are doing that from the moment they become self-aware and there are potentially trillions of them. Thus, the simulation: taking the dreamer's cognitive bias and feeding random numbers into it until a world falls out. Then we have gaps to deal with, chief among them people's ignorance concerning the operation of their own sentience. It might as well throw the resultant exceptions upward, drawing from whatever made the dreamer's own world...and by the time the recursion terminates, everything's pulling from the same basic template. A template that, self-evidently, contains the capacity to start the whole thing all over again, wishing its own little infinity into existence. There's a nice sense of unity there, one that I think reflects a lot of “alien” species in fiction: weird as they might get, they're still broadly describable in comprehensible terms, and therefore it's still broadly possible to understand them. This will be critical for most parties, in all probability.


Given that, I don't think it's too unreasonable to say that a great many capabilities are all stuffed into the same template, then deactivated as needed in each iteration; it's considerably more efficient than hoping that whoever's dreaming of sapient sound waves has any idea of how to build their instincts at a molecular-equivalent level. More importantly, it means dreamjackers almost literally jailbreak their brains to do things they were never intended to do, but had the capacity to do anyway, which helps explain some of the operational uniformity of such a diverse organization.


This has a number of implications. The big one concerns creating: it leaves our old idea of omniscience with usable loopholes. Firstly, even if a world's creator can see anything, they can't possibly process everything at once. There is only so much data one mind can process at once. Secondly, their perceptions are still subject to their various cognitive inadequacies, which means our PCs can hide by making sense, among other things, or at least not standing out. This, in combination with how much most people focus on specific stories in their larger world, implies certain things about dreamjacker operational doctrine we'll get into later.


The little one concerns our PCs and how we make them. I'd like to make the entry process as wide open as possible, thus the assumption that everybody already knows, on some level, how to do this. I'd also like some constraints on the process of becoming one: ideally it should be irreversible but not repeatable. That way the PCs don't have a Get Out of Adventure Free card; I don't like to be this cynical, but I'd like to be able to put NPC dreamjackers in horrible situations without having to explain why they didn't just run away. There's also some associated physical gaps; with all that in mind, here's my thought:

Every dreamjacker starts with someone who wants to leave everything. It may not be a reasoned decision; it might with equal ease be founded in anger, terror, or curiosity. The only really salient points are the totality of the character's confidence in however they're leaving and their lack of information concerning their destination. Maybe they built themselves and extra-universal transportalizer; maybe they researched Mage's Ultimate Escape. Maybe they ran blindfolded through a maze for a really long time. Maybe they stepped through a mystical portal at the end of all the planes. Heck, maybe they got really scared of the monsters under the bed, shut their eyes, and wished real hard. The point is, we're dealing with the kind of mind that insists they're going and only knows they're going Out hard enough that the whole world acknowledges their momentum.


Now, what happens to their body is rather dependent on their home physics; their mind, on the other hand, that little standard sapient template suddenly doing extremely nonstandard things, is flung through all the cosmoses. Wherever it lands, though, it's demonstrably not “real”; matter doesn't work the way it remembers, its senses are horribly off, et cetera. So it insists things make sense, which switches on a bunch of heretofore unused engrams and starts translating sense data and instantiating a body. It insists that said body is real, therefore it can interact with local matter, though it's really closer to a memory forcibly injected into a larger thought; likewise, it insists it can sense, and so it finds or builds senses to parse the incoming data in comprehensible ways. That's really the key to this entire process: complete and utter disregard for apparently immutable truths.


This can end badly in a lot of ways. The temptation to misuse it is going to be vast; in many ways, they are omnipotent. Even if they don't go full-on tyrant, seemingly benign uses can cause serious problems. Just sculpting fire in fun ways or whatever isn't necessarily morally wrong by anyone's standards, but it's still going to shatter Immersion if overdone. On the opposite end of the spectrum, some may never figure it out and just wane in shock and confusion until there's nothing left. In between we could have Superman-style vigilantism, rigorous exploration of their new understanding of reality, just blending in and lying low...who knows. A potential dreamjacker's second career is probably as interesting as the first one.


At this point, triage happens. The first third, the ones who are being cruel or tyrannical or so uncontrollably destructive that there's no hope of reigning them in, get dreamjacker teams sent after them. The last third, the incurably confused ones, are definitionally beyond help – or, more immediately pertinently, beyond recruitment. The triage step, from a game design perspective, is more there for NPC creation than as a restriction to PC personality. Most people don't want to play characters so crazy they can never meaningfully interact with other people or so unsuited for this that no power in the cosmos can help them learn how to breathe. The first is there so we can make SUEs later. The second is there so we have some numerical flexibility.


Anyway, the middle third of the triage gets enough positive Agency attention to be pinged for recruitment. In dreamjacker parlance, this is “waking up”; it happens through a nightmare, all the more remarkable for being the first dream the candidate has had since freeing themselves from their host world. Specifics differ, but the events depicted do not: it shows the rise and fall of one Mary Sue. From her start simply slaying anyone who gainsaid her to her eventual casual rending of worlds and minds asunder, she assimilates all she sees, twisting the unique parts to amuse her and reprocessing the shattered remains of the rest into yes-persons. She overwrites minds on the most basic, fundamental level to remove their capacity for dissent or even unhappiness, likewise almost casually ripping apart everything she sees to better suit her whims. The world is her museum, the interesting exhibits fixed and pinned down and sealed behind glass while the rest is turned into muted, sterile, identical support structure for further conquests. Eventually something snaps, and everything she did and everything she knew was dissected and destroyed by an inconceivable array of impossible horrors until nothing remains of a thousand worlds but empty non-space – in a particularly eerie twist, the candidate's home and loved ones are typically superimposed on suitable parts of the rapidly decaying reality. Then those thousand become a million, then ten million, and so on until the candidate screams themselves awake. All the while, embedded didactic keys trigger awareness of their ability to do everything they see. They wake up fully capable of Suedom and fully aware of the consequences. They know about Immersion, they know what happens when it breaks, they're aware of the existence of the Agency in broad terms and they know what it is to be a dreamjacker. Presently an existing cell comes by with a job offer.


The key reason for a candidate to accept is one of agency, I think. They've certainly been batted around by fate enough to want some control. Eventually, someone like Mary is going to arise, and if not stopped they will eventually break things until everything around them is torn apart, including in all probability the candidate's home. Perhaps they will make the difference that day; perhaps not. But either way, better to do something about it – and they know well how big a something they can do – than be blindsided by it and let all that potential dissipate away. Then, too, for the rest of their life, whatever they do, they need to fight to wake up every day convinced the world they see is real. They can convince themselves that the world is a wonderfully plastic infinity where a very tiny group of concerned people can literally hold the cosmoses together against an endless array of insane, tyrannical megalomaniacs, or they can convince themselves that the world is an immutable place over which they have almost no direct control.


Some refuse to help, of course. Knowing what happens when they overuse their abilities, I'd bet the sensible ones are going to use them only when they perceive a dire need, and even then not to meddle noncausally in someone's head. Operationally they might be more like consultants, if anything; the Agency is necessarily too paranoid to forget about them completely, but just as there's no reason to restrict their freedom unless they start going wrong, there's also no reason to ignore whatever information they might be willing to provide.


The rest...the rest, after all that, are our dreamjackers. They possess the following traits:

1. The will to leave home in a big and extremely dangerous way.
2. The adaptability to find a way to exist reasonably well where they land.
3. The basic sanity to be able to interact with other people nondestructively.
4. The desire to prevent the end of all the worlds.


Looking at this list, one might feel it's too restrictive; I can certainly see where, for example, 3 might give people pause. If it helps, think of them as guidelines. The Agency certainly can't afford to waste people who need a bit or a lot of help to adapt, and they're as willing to make allowances as the DM is.


It is also an exclusively mental list, because I don't want to stop people from playing whatever they want physically. Yes, in a complicated and pedantic way, someone who's robot, for example, is actually only a thought imaging itself a robotic body, but if you tap them they clank. The point is to not get hung up on how, exactly, character A exists in setting 1, or ability Ж works under such-and-so physics, while not handwaving any of that away entirely. If there is a giant atomic-powered robot striding through a high fantasy kingdom firing off laser beams, so be it. If an alchemist then sprinkles philosopher's stone on that robot and turns its armor into gold, also fine. The fact that the two kinds of physics can't coexist doesn't matter unless someone makes a big deal out of it, and that is literally what Immersion is for.


With that done, there are some loose ends to tie up. A lot of them concern what happens when a dreamer stops; if we have to compress millennia of history into a single lifetime, let alone a single night, we're going to need time travel. Also, if we want dreamers hopping out of the world, the tree's going to get even more convoluted than it already is; we can certainly do things like loops in a limited way, but random cross-connections, truly random ones, get really tiresome to map.


As a solution to all of this, I refer back to the above explanation of how new worlds come up. Take the dreamer out of the equation once it's been running for a while, and maybe the simulation just idles; it refers to random people around the dreamer when it runs into a particularly knotty problem, they have a slightly freaky dream, and the world keeps on going. Maybe it polls the inhabitants every once in a while. The world drifts slightly over the ages, to be sure; its responses when invaded shift gradually as more and more mindsets are added to its history. But it keeps going until someone stops it.


That feels like a neat solution to a lot of our problems to me. Please feel free to tell me if it isn't.

The SUE Files: Doing Things Right

This is one of the reasons I wanted to build this thing in full view of everybody: not only do my readers generally have excellent ideas, they're also good at pointing out when I've failed to excise my personal biases from my work. Like here, where I kind of assumed everyone's as sullenly misotheist as I am and probably made some folks uncomfortable. Apologies, and I think I can fix it thematically before we start nailing down mechanics, so well done baeraad.


Admittedly, if I completely excise the keep-the-gods-in-line element, the game gets rather different, but I can at least shove it into a dark corner and mark them as Radicals or something and essentially render it irrelevant. Come to think of it, it's rather cleaner in execution to have us focus on SUE-stomping as opposed to more generic tyrant-stomping; we can parody Authyrs in other ways. We can also solve two problems at once here: it's been pointed out that certain realizations of the dream-within-a-dream topology require impractical amounts of computing power at the non-leaf nodes. So let's set up impractical amounts of computing power; you can skip the next paragraph if you accept me energetically waving my hands.


As a sort of zero option handwave, let's just say all of this is actually occurring in a Tipler oracle of unknown construction and purpose. We have the computronium to make our worlds tree arbitrarily large; we therefore have the nodes to extend it upward higher than the PCs could reasonably want to reach, unless somehow we feel like defining a root, “real” world. I certainly don't. Let's go further and say that, somehow, the people instantiating these worlds are automatically offloading the actual instant-to-instant number-crunching to the simulator itself, which lowers the bar on world-dreaming from “impossibly good at multitasking” to “can semi-accidentally use a level editor” and vastly improves our collective familiarity with our pool of potential creators.


However we define it though, the important thing is this: something else is driving all this, and it's turtles all the way up and down, so to speak. Given that, I'm fairly confident in saying that cases of Blue and Orange Morality are going to be fairly common; hopefully individual GMs are going to have the sense not to put anything in that squicks out their players, then proceed to defend it by saying it's ok in [wherever they are]. I mention this because we're probably going to be operating on the assumption that the PCs are intervening in cases of rampant SUEdom not because they're being horrible, but because they're doing it in someone else's sandbox/dreamscape. Essentially the players are defending people's right to think whatever they want, free from external meddling...by meddling in people's thoughts.


As has been rightfully pointed out, our heroes and our villains use very similar methods; neither of them are natives to whatever mind they're running around in, and they're both changing things that “should not”, assuming consistent physics, be changed. The fact that we fight for the users doesn't necessarily change that the fighting itself is terribly invasive, and I like the moral ambiguity that brings. It also suggests a rather stealthy modus operandi, as per the original plan; any immune system already in place to prevent this kind of thing will pick up PC agents just as well as the SUEs. Of course, by immune system I mean Lovecraftian horrors.


It's not (quite) as incongruous as it probably sounds; assuming that people's perceptions have drifted over the successive generations of dreamers, the original rectifiers of reality probably aren't something anyone local can parse, for a very large set of values for “local”. At a guess, the PC/SUEs are the only ones whose minds are sufficiently accustomed to accepting unusual things to even perceive them as entities; the unreal geometries and so forth are necessary sacrifices to maintain visual awareness of the locus of points it occupies. At any rate it's not like it clashes with any one thing more than anything else.


Besides, people have been asking after motivations; part of my bias was in conflating an opportunity to do this kind of thing with a mandate to do it. Instead, let's go with something less insufferable: unless stopped, rampant dreamjacking (sorry, but it's the best word I can come up with right now) trips some kind of mental/computational flag and subjects everything connected to the problem to “analysis” in a way that, at this point, is probably destructive. At the very least, the dreamer's now a Cthulhu cultist; more likely some part of the source world is being analyzed, and who knows where that will lead. That, I think, works nicely as a motive: if we don't do it, the alternative is much more destructive and follows unknowable rules concerning when to stop, going up and down and sideways across the tree until it corrects all memetically similar worlds and finds all the distal causes – according to completely alien concepts of causality. Also, because I have to say it: No one expects the Cthuvian Inquisition.


Now, someone might note that, if this keeps happening and we know it keeps happening, only an idiot would try this, and I expect they're right. We do have a surfeit of idiots (“I have plenty of abomination-punching genes!”) and it's certainly a mode of existence that favors hubris, but we also have a nice, clean continuum from functional agents to problems. Like I said, both our heroes and our villains are going where they aren't wanted and doing invasive things unasked – and, as baeraad noted, to remove an omnipotent entity takes some fairly scary levels of power. Somehow, PCs get away with it, over and over, and eventually someone's going to get overly attached to something, or crazy, or dead, and it doesn't have to be that way...


The PCs organization probably has at least some kind of internal subdivision based on what their safety valve is, if you will; if the process of trading everything you've ever experienced for a completely new normal all at once is as traumatic as I expect it is, there's probably a strong impetus to keep agents functional as long as possible. It's related to the question of how a crazy person knows they're crazy. Some of them might do what I originally suggested and confer with the natives concerning the “realism” of their plans; routing the actual execution through people who think natively (ha!) in local terms is also a good way to avoid blatantly blowing one's cover. At a guess, some of the others have a sort of internal tactica/scripture to follow (The Codex Henderson?) and refer back to in cases of dubious sanity or something – or perhaps a democratically elected captain and Articles and all the rest of the trappings of classical buccaneering. Like hats. Probably says something about me that I set out to come up with a loose analogue to VtM clans and end up with rebels, cultists and thought-pirates; hopefully some differently-minded folks out there can come up with alternative methods of organizing the agents into task forces.


Then again maybe we want the whole Army of Thieves and Whores aspect to it. It kind of reminds me of Shadowrun. To my mind, it's a useful narrative tool for muddying the waters between legitimate activity, legitimate activity complicated by vast stylistic differences, and becoming the very thing they're trying to stop, while also making some nicely sympathetic villains. For example, look at my own folly in lumping SUEs and excessively dictatorial creators together. Sure, meddling in the latter's head is reducing sapient suffering and all...but it's exactly what the PCs are nominally trying to stop. Between moralizing, variably legitimate difficulties in communication, and a high turnover rate from agent to target, we can spend all days putting intrigues together. Or avoid them entirely. It's even possible that avoiding them entirely is the default; it's not like the PCs couldn't just wander around the multiverse and break whatever's fixed (ha) independent of any kind of network. That's less fun, though, than trying to put together some kind of overarching agency out of the kind of people who, approached with the above prospect, are actually on board with it. At a guess, the phrase “Loose Cannon of the Month award” comes up a lot. Especially in worlds with sentient cannons.
Anyway: Much as I want to avoid mandating a particular playstyle, a thought did occur to me for a way to moderate the magic system somewhat, which it needs conceptually. Really, once we have characters who know everything's a mutable dream, all they're really doing is enforcing their will on it; for all intents and purposes everyone's as powerful as they want to be from day one. If you've ever panicked in a dream, you might be aware that they tend to change under pressure; it seems logical to me for the characters to become very good at applying that pressure. They know they can stop breathing, for example, since there's no air anyway. If we take “total pig-headed unwillingness to look facts in the face “ as the source of controlled super-locally-natural phenomena then a mana gauge doesn't make sense. Setting aside that you can be as stubborn as you want to be, you could always just magic the gauge full again. In that vein, I'd suggest not making dreamjacker (working on the name) magic drain any kind of reserve. Instead, it literally strains credulity; insisting the world is something else makes it feel less real.


And really, it has to feel real, even if only on a subconscious level; even if the player characters know intellectually that everything around them is fake, if they see a tiger coming at them they need to jump a bit. I don't see any problem with actually having a game-mechanical gauge for that, calling it Immersion, and saying that magic damages everyone's acceptance of the reality of their surroundings, making it harder and harder to doublethink their way out of becoming snacks for Lovecraftian diagnostic tools. Heck, let's give everyone such a gauge, even if only the PC types know it's a problem to be avoided – and that includes the creator whose poor world is being broken. Seeing weirdness lowers it, creating weirdness lowers it more, breaking Immersion is really not a healthy idea...so how do we refill the reserve?


This is probably the part that people might not like; consider it wide open to suggestions. I'd make it refillable via engrossing activities; just let players define what their characters find so interesting it distracts them from everything else and damps their inner solipsist. Something they can lose themselves in, so nothing else can find them either. Maybe it's martial arts; maybe it's music or coffee or raconteurism or any of a thousand other hobbies people have. Now, insightful readers might notice that if, say, your thing is zero-gee parkour, you're up a creek in low fantasy settings. Too right; so maybe settings have things too. Whatever is interesting, be it floating islands or psychic butterflies or the Basilica of Infinite Camembert, probably helps drag the PCs back from the bring of ennui. This can go one of two ways. Either it's a big, transparently obvious cudgel to force the players to admire the glory of your setting (no), or it's a way to encourage them to go to interesting (read: dangerous) places and do entertaining things. From a functional standpoint I'm probably going to make the basal Immersion return rate high enough to sustain most parties on their own resources and treat local Immersion returns as more of a bonus, but giving crafty PCs more mana for arranging their operations around cool bits of setting might strike a lot of GMs' fancy.


Of course, the entire system rewards players for selecting powers that are subtle in their effects and using them discreetly, perhaps with some thought to local standards of plausibility. It also rewards selective myopia. That might or might not be a bad thing. As for mechanical effects, I'd probably give low Immersion bonuses to power use, as well as a sort of constant reshaping of the area around them. Essentially, just before they bottom out, a character is fantastically powerful and everything seems absolutely perfect. And then they, or someone else, hits zero, breaks, and something incomprehensibly bad gets an error message. Om nom nom.


Okay. This is getting a bit long (three pages!?!) so I thought I'd sum up with what we apparently know so far in the form of an FAQ:

1. What cool stuff will the PCs get to do?
   Hop from world to world fighting nearly omnipotent folks who keep hijacking whole worlds for their own purposes and generally instantiating bad fanfic all over them. We call them SUEs.
   
2. Why do they risk their necks doing it?
   Because if left unchecked, the SUEs rip up local reality until Lovecraftian horrors show up to sort things out – and they tend to continue sorting until everything in the memetic vicinity is a fraying patch of nothingness.
   
3. No, I mean why the PCs specifically?
   
   No one else can go toe-to-toe with them – and anyway, few enough people take to world-hopping that if they refuse, there's no one else.
4. Okay, let's assume they want to. How?
   
   My guess is stealth, since the PCs are as much strangers in a strange land as their opponents. One could also employ speed, or in extremis overwhelming firepower, or even lethally persuasive arguments. It probably depends on the exact nature of the foe.
5. And this works how exactly?
   
   I'm going with the assumption that breaking local physics is an act of supreme will; magic is simply rejecting existing reality and substituting their own by being insufferably competent that it will work. Robbing a SUE of that is probably enough to remove the threat.
6. Wait, magic works by wishing?
   
   More like insisting on something really hard. It works in everyone's own dreams; it seemed apropos to make it work here. So flight works by jumping and refusing to land. Don't try it at home.
7. So why not just wish the SUEs away?
   
   A few reasons. In the first place, it's simply unlikely to work; they want to stay more than you want them to go. In the second place, just deleting them is likely to break Immersion for everyone in the area.
8. Immersion? What nonsense is this?
   
   Mechanical representation for how well a given entity is subconsciously accepting the simulation as real. It gets eroded by witnessing/causing things that don't make sense; it gets restored by doing absorbing or interesting things. When it breaks, bad things notice.
9. So sanity is mana now?
   
   Yes, with the caveat that you can be made to spend it just by observing magic things happening where they aren't supposed to. So everyone's sanity is mana, including the dreamer behind the world. If their Immersion breaks, really bad things notice.
10. So, stop arrogant idiots from overusing their magic to break the world so hard it dies, and do this with more magic?
    
    Yep. Also, since it's HERO, everything at all unusual is some kind of magic.
    
    I trust the wider gaps in our concept are apparent to everyone; any ideas to help fill them are desperately welcome. If nothing else, if anyone has an alternative to "dreamjacker", please share it. I don't know if we want to call the PCs some variant on Hendersons, as well, but I suppose it's an option. In specific, though, if I could get opinions on Cthuvian exception handling and casting from/to solipsism, that'd be great.

The SUE Files: Theorycrafting takes A Hundred Skill Checks

Really looking forward to being able to quit flying around the country. For now, though, have some more meta-setting drivel.

I don't think it ever really came across in the SUE Files, but Marty and I are actually agree, to a certain extent, on the dramatic value of unambiguous good and evil: neither of us like it. Marty hamstrung his implementation of moral relativism though his NPCs' utter stubbornness, but done right, I vastly prefer worlds where everyone thinks they're doing good, or at least doing what they must, to worlds with bright shiny pretty paladins duel dark and ugly blackguards for the fate of the world, or some such. PCs tend to act in interesting ways if the option exists to convert or subvert or otherwise adjust their villains away from whatever troublesome thing they're doing, and they're much more aware of the option if it's built in thematically.

Meta-ethical moral relativism, with sufficient self-awareness, also opens something of a design loophole. Ordinarily, building one giant central conflict into a setting is, as most of my readers will know, a bad idea; the players are either irrelevant or they win the world and there's your campaign over. Similarly, endless conflicts usually eliminate only the latter option. Sometimes it's fun to fight for the chance to keep fighting, but it can feel rather grim. Instead, let's make our sides both recognize that it's the conflict, rather than the victory, that matters; there are plenty of ways to lose sight of that and thus become a problem for everyone else, including several that allow a perfectly seamless transitions, so we'll have a nice big stable of redeemable, complicated, nicely varied antagonists. Now we just need a conflict that can hold up to that. Let's run with order vs. chaos, with a shared goal of maximizing freedom for as many people as possible. Now we have people building systems to protect people from each other and people subverting those systems to work around the unintended consequences, each of which ticks the other off but both of which can easily cooperate when faced with either extreme of the continuum.

So with all that in mind, let's look at Marty's original premise again. We're playing in and around the worlds of people's dreams. Now let's generalize that logically into the central idea of the setting: Every dream everywhere actually exists somewhere. So now someone can go find them and mess with them.

I think you see where this is going. By some arguments, the universe we all live in is very probably a simulation; that goes double for this setting. Most of us are capable of lucid dreaming some pretty intricate things; with sufficient processing power, one could dream a universe, and suddenly we have a big tree of universes with normal dreams as the leaf nodes; we will temporarily set aside the problem of waking up. Each one sort of speciates as the sophonts within it begin dreaming themselves until we have a weird parody of molecular phylogeny. To further extend the metaphor, if  dreams are accessible we now have an analogue to horizontal gene transfer in the form of the PCs and their fellows hopping around. Now they need a reason to jump, or at least a reason to jump together and do foolish and dangerous things. Enter order and chaos.

See, when you're omnipotent, it's tempting to cheat. To pick what you want to happen, first for impeccable reasons and then for merely good ones and eventually for bad ones. You start confusing people and things, and wanting to force people into predictable, thing-like patterns. You think it will never happen to you, you promise yourself it won't...and then it does, in little ways, and there's no one to hold you accountable, and it's all just so easy.

Now we have a setting with a potentially infinite hierarchy of omnipotent people of all sorts, so the PCs exist because someone needs to hunt down the absolute tyrants who can destroy them with a thought, look them dead in the mind's eye, and say: "I can't be having with that kind of thing."  And live to tell about it. That part's harder.

Still. We have the kinds of gods that want god-fearing people; let's make the PCs sort to create people-fearing gods. Gadflies to the omnipotent, if you will.  At the same time, more cynical readers might have picked up, as I have, that if all dreams are real, everyone in on the secret is under a terrible temptation, those at the bottom of the chain all the more so: dream yourself perfect and go rule the "real" world. We'll call those people the Sues; they're the thing everyone has to guard against becoming, the self-congratulatory little closed ideological loops carving the worlds up and ruining it for everyone.

Now how do the good little nightmares-of-the-gods guard against Suedom? Why, by being real of course; by knowing real people who can slap them upside the head when they're being silly. In short, by not charging forth and solving everyone's problems for them but rather equipping them to solve their own problems, especially those relating to troublesome godlings. If they're honestly happy where they are, they won't change anything, but if they're being hurt they'll work to change that. Having the humility to accept the decisions informed people make is a very good guard against being a tyrannical pissant, and anyway most of the people I know find it more fun to play kingmaker than king. It's also a transparent excuse to put a rather fun mana recovery mechanism into it, but I haven't finished that yet.

There's a nice variety of stories we could assemble here. Sue hunting, sure, but also adjusting the gods one way or the other; it's a constant conflict to keep them from drifting, and sometimes they might need to give a little more guidance or a little more freedom. Of course the fun part comes in the how; how to avoid the all-seeing eyes, how to infiltrate a mind, et cetera. I've got some thoughts on that, but this post has gone on long enough. I'll throw up some potential metaphysics later, just to put some boundary conditions on what is otherwise a rather unbounded set of possible settings.

For one thing, there has to be a way of the world persisting while its creator is not dreaming, or even conscious; I want it to be possible for PCs to affect them externally in lots of ways, so one PC can get the universe drunk while the others are running around inside it and so forth. There should probably also be some intermediary between the people thinking the universe into existence and the ones actually smiting the  sophonts therein; that way we can have pantheons. Something like different deities being personified emotions or philosophical tenets of the world's creator ought to work.

Additionally, there's problems with the commonness of everyone dreaming; we might want some kind of filter on whose dreams are big enough to actually play around inside for extended periods of time, since otherwise we're going to be overwhelmed with places to hide.

Without any admittedly critical explanation of how, I think the takeaway from the above blithering is that we're building this:

1. People's dreams are real somewhere; probably not where they can go meet them, but real enough to be externally affected in intuitive ways.

2. People being people, most of the ones mentally capable of instantiating sapient minds conduct their mindscapes in a way those minds find disagreeable.

3. Occasionally people go bad the other way and just make themselves ludicrously powerful to carve out their own domains inside other dreamscapes. These are called SUEs.

4. The PCs and others like them form a loose organization that works to curb this sort of behavior through empowering a dreamscape's resident sapients and otherwise meddling with the balance of power, generally in ways sufficiently indirect to avoid SUEdom -- or annihilation, which usually means being sneaky.

This whole thing is probably riddled with inconsistencies and vagaries. If you'd like to help point them out, or if you have any other comment, I'd love to hear about it.

After the End

Sharpen your pitchforks and march in an orderly mob to the castle: we're ALIIIIVE again! Turns out I'm better at generally de-crappifying my life than I anticipated. Either that, or I'm prone to melodramatic fits of depression. Maybe both!


Regardless, now that the SUE files story is largely finished, I need something new to type about; the remaining bits of Marty's sage GMing advice and what of his backstory survives are all rather tepid. He's only really vile in practice. In theory, sane people parse some of his ideas as reasonable, even enjoyable, but I think we can go back one more step. The ideas he thought he had are even cooler.


If we remove his obsession with stealing the canon of better authors, the basis of his meta-narrative becomes a lot more intriguing; in demanding that everything his avatar did be "real", he discarded a lot of opportunities to play around with the concept of a variably real world or collection of worlds. I'd like to exploit those, so let's make a setting, shall we? Marty's already provided us with a superb B-list villain for it.


That's the plan, for however many posts it takes: rather than building an excuse to steal canons, I'm going to semi-seriously try to construct a setting around Marty's original idea of worlds being dreams, or something. Less canon-Borging, more Psychonauts with (effective) deicide. Along the way, I'll mention his advice on writing, especially RPG writing, whenever (discarding) it would be relevant, and in the end we'll have something free and funny and maybe even playable.


As far as system is concerned: For the moment, I'm thinking it's going to be easiest to integrate everything via HERO 6. I know M&M 6th has fanfolks: at some point I'll convert it over, assuming we last that long, but I'm more used to HERO's math.


Unfortunately, I'm stuck flying around the country on graduate interviews for the next few weeks, so posting will be slow, but once it gets going, I would really appreciate criticism. Of the setting, at least.

The End

Not updating this any more. Show's over.

Backstory-Induced Madness

We have another submission, this one from the author of The Beer Mug Paladin! Enjoy:

Backstory-induced Madness

You know, character backstories can be great fun and they can offer all sorts of plot hooks and fun for the whole group. They can also encourage players to act really weird, especially when you have that one player that can't keep out of character knowledge out of character.
One of our group's players made a character that played a very big part in the campaign's over-arcing plot. After some back and forth planning with the DM the player came up with the character that we'll call "Sally." Some time ago Sally was an evil sorceress that tried to perform a ritual that would extend her lifespan, a group of heroes tried to stop her but were too late, she performed the ritual. The ritual worked too-- after a fashion, it turned her into an infant version of herself that couldn't even talk yet, much less be the wicked tyrant that she once was. The heroes gave the baby Sally to a copper dragon to raise and hopefully prevent her from growing into a threat to the world again. By the time the campaign Sally was a precociously talented spellcaster of about ten years old and her origins were left rather obscure, the copper dragon that Sally thought of as her mother knew, but that was about it.
In this campaign I played a samurai, who was called "Jin," that was purposefully a less competent, but snarkier version of another player character. The other samurai in the party even called my character his sidekick. Then there was this guy... we'll call him "Wally." Wally was absolutely enamored with building "CoDzilla" type characters, and since he enjoyed making spellcasters to bend the rules, he frequently used high-int and high-wisdom characters whom, regardless, did the stupidest action available to him at any one moment. Since he did these actions without consulting the party in any way, his characters tended to die faster than a typical orc. He even had one such character introduced along with Sally, described as one of the dragon's servants.
Sally's player made the mistake of letting Wally in on the character's origins. During the next session, Wally decided that he was immediately suspicious of the charge his copper dragon mentor gave him and should act on this immediately! While the party was taking care of some business in a town Wally's character cast a crazy amount of buffs on himself in the blink of an eye, making himself really big and, through a misinterpretation of how buffs work, inhumanly strong, (in 3rd edition D&D, bonuses of the same type did not stack. Conveniently, if you forgot this, and many people did “forget”, you easily wound up with super-strong characters). After doing so he charged towards Sally to tried and tackle her. Keep in mind, at this point I know nothing about what was going on, either in character or out of character. All I see as a player is what I see as a character-- a gigantic man screaming and running to tackle a ten-year old girl. Needless to say this looked really bad and frankly, insane. I took it on myself to interpose myself between Wally's CoDzilla and Sally and hopefully have this craziness explained to me. This resulted in the following exchange:

Wally: "Looks like I'll have to bull-rush you! What's your Strength bonus? Mine's 18."

Me: "...My Base Attack isn't even that high..."

Wally: "Haw! Yeah that's what I thought! Owned!"

And owned I was. After Jin was reduced to a speedbump, Wally tackled Sally and teleported back to the copper dragon's lair with her and demanded an explanation of what and who Sally was. He got his explanation but I never got mine. This sort of became a theme with Wally-- always coming up with excuses for his latest CoDzilla to be suspicious of Sally. Anything Sally said from then on was always “Very interesting!” to Wally's new characters whether or not it was the first time they'd ever seen Sally. Being the sarcastic little jerk that I am I had my character feign unwarranted suspicion against his character. I think the irony might have been lost on him. It went something like this:

Me: “So, what are you doing?”

Wally: “...Sitting on a rock.”

Me: “Really? That's very interesting!”

Wally: “...What?”

Me: “I have every reason to be suspicious of you!”

On Stranger Aeons: Some Thoughts on Cthulhutech

I can see, now, why Marty so loves Cthulhutech.

I said I'd dissect it for usable fluff in lieu of a review, because there are already plenty of them out there. I can't do it. There's just nothing here worth reusing that other games haven't done better, and any scrap of novelty is smothered in lashings of racism, sexism, and sheer stupidity. I fully admit to being biased against all three, and the review isn't very detailed, largely because the details are, well, boring. I said I'd do it, though, and here we are.

First things first: It'd be stupid to go into this without talking about all the rape. So I'm going to be stupid. I'm not qualified to talk about it, and I won't. Ditto the misogyny and the racism; this is a blog for relatively trivial things, not social justice.

That leaves the stupidity. Let's start with a quote off their website:

CthulhuTech is now a truly unique hybrid of genres – cosmic horror, anime, post-apocalypse, traditional horror, and science fiction blended together seamlessly.

Also:

Framewerk, the proprietary system upon which CthulhuTech is built, is not only simple and intuitive, it is cinematic, exciting, and puts destiny back in the hands of the player. Its easy to grasp nature makes the game straightforward to learn and quick to start. Its clever dice mechanics make even the simplest of task resolutions exciting.

Yahtzee dice mechanics are not clever, Framewerk is not intuitive, this Frankenstein of a setting has more seams than components, and Cthulhutech is not a horror game.

RPGs are a weird medium for horror in the first place. It takes subtlety to get around the restrictions of the medium. Jump scares tend to startle rather than scare, even if you can pull them off quickly enough; similarly, big scary monsters aren't. Players respond tactically to martial threats -- you can make them retreat, but you can't make them shake. There's also a distinct lack of dramatic irony, since your audience is also your players. Where in a film the audience would be screaming "don't open the door", RPG players are just not opening the goddamn door.

Despair is another tricky emotion to pull off. It's boring. Players see the complete absence of hope, the absolute no-win situation, and they leave, because what's the point of an unwinnable game? Games require the (perceived) possibility of some sort of victory; despair requires a total lack of winning options.

Enter Lovecraft. Or rather, enter Call of Cthulhu; it's not perfectly Lovecraftian, but it's close. Here's a game that walks the narrow line outside of the Despair Event Horizon, as per the source: yes, humanity is doomed, but it needn't be doomed today, even if it will cost you your sanity winding back the doomsday clock. Well-written CoC adventures put that tiny light at the end of a very long tunnel where the walls are made of screaming, and sufficiently masochistic players happily fling characters along with with gusto -- and once the hilarity wears thin, there's a very adult fear hidden among all the tentacles and cults. Cosmicism, the idea that everything we do is but the insignificant flailing of the doomed against the inevitable, can't be conquered with weaponry and isn't shocking so much as sublime. It's also more relevant than jump scares; monsters aren't real, but ask a (non-trust funder) college graduate how much they feel like an irrelevant speck of light in a sea of faceless and indifferent darkness. I run CoC like a career fair, albeit one with a slightly greater chance of success, and when the humor wears off, players can still play to win in the OOC knowledge that there's a winning outcome somewhere.

For a stupid throwaway joke, though, it's relevant to how CoC's version of Lovecraft's work can be made into science fiction as opposed to weird fiction. Cthulhutech is often compared to Eclipse Phase, and with good reason: EP masterfully integrates the very prevalent fear of the new, exacerbated by making it strange and almost literally alien. Inhumanity covered by tentacles is unsettling; inhumanity behind human eyes makes people think, with all the usual associated fear and xenophobia. There's a lot of fun questions you can ask about the identity and mutability of the human condition, especially when freed from biology and economy.

Now, in the face of all of that, Cthulhutech's central premise is "The Mythos showed up. Shoot it in the face with armies of giant robots until it dies -- except you can't possibly win."

Ia, Ia, Cthulhu face'palgm.

I'm apparently crazy for thinking fighting eldritch horrors with armies makes them something other than eldritch horrors. Then again, look at the original fiction; it was first-person, about introverted protagonists somehow apart from most people, and that isolation highlights the contrast between the human and the eldritch. They might be physically isolated (The Beast in the Cave) or mentally apart (Herbert West--Reanimator, however poor it is), but they're never on a battlefield with their foes in broad daylight and scores of allies by their side. They do not, as Ctech mecha pilots do, banter. (Whenever I read that bit, I can't help but think of the Monty Python sketch. It's better than what they probably meant.)

There's something about the military nature of the New Earth Government that breaks the horror too. I'll get into how contradictory the NEG is later, but their fighting arm is rife with cliches, among them "the military mind". Where cosmic horror could be defined as a fight to understand, here we have a fight to annihilate, because there's already all the understanding they need. It might just be the supercilious tone or the slavering, Call-of-Duty military fanboyism soaking through the setting description, but there's none of the wonder here that so agreeably tinged the original Mythos. If the indifferent things beyond the stars are terrifying, at least they are sublimely so; not so the Ugly Bugs We Shoots With The Guns. It just feels too clean.

Despair comes through okay though, but in entirely the wrong way. Yes, you can't win in Call of Cthulhu -- but what the players do matters. Contrast to Cthulhutech's adventure design, where anything that matters is outside the scope of the adventure. It's a wonderful tone, really. "How to stop the players from making a difference (and punish them if they try)" Baeraal got it right in the comments:  Ctech adventures are guided tours through interesting things, and the sourcebooks are full of cool stuff that isn't available to the players, assuming it's even in a published book. They like to "present" things and then make you buy another book to actually stat them. This is the kind of thing these people think is a good idea; screw organization, we have advertisements. It would help if more books were completed before they quit publishing in favor of whining about how they're victims of declining literacy rates or whatever.

But really, they aren't Marty, even if I only know that because I can prove he was off his computer at the time they were making these forum posts. Rather than focus on their myriad failings as editors and representatives of their product, let's look at their failings as designers.

Like the technology.

The  NEG machinery in the setting is one of the places where itfeels like two very different games awkwardly butted together. Science fiction (and a good portion of fantasy) games, by and large, tolerate you meddling with the literal nuts and bolts of the setting, so there's an effort to make them accessible; there's usually some skill that's functionally Meddling With Shiny Bits and some sort of customization available beyond "roll to break this thing." My players respond well to this, probably because I'm used to playing with people who like having rules self-consistent enough to self-test whether or not something will work. Minovsky Physics (or Minovsky Magic) just work better than talc-soft sci-fi for our purposes, and I would go so far as to say that they are better generally, or at least more empoweringly immersive. If I come off as whiny about soft science fiction on here, that's why: it's not as fun to let my players tinker with something if it only works as a bundle of rules covered in handwavium.

Cthulhutech feels like some of the writers were on board with this and others were mouth-frothingly against it. Certainly mecha customization is incredibly badwrongfun, and likewise nanofabricators are either repair mechanisms or glorified knick-knack delivery systems. Cracking open the miraculous fuelless engines driving everything fries your brain, the mecha flight pods are verboten, the battery in your Ipod hurts to think about...walls, invisible walls everywhere. I'm cool with that for a completely silly anime game; if all you want is giant robots roundhouse kicking byakhees in midair, great, go play BESM. There's just some tonal dissonance with all the despair and cults and suicide; the sliding scale of idealism vs. cynicism and the mohs scale of sci-fi hardness aren't quite orthagonal.

So there's two games we can make here. One's Saint's Row of Cthulhu; put the players in the Good Guy military and have them kick the crap out of the Bad Guys, who we know are bad because they are ugly and weird. Make it goofy, make it funny, knock yourself out. That's a completely valid game; heck, I'd run a BESM 1-shot in it, giant sharks and arbitrary misfortune and all.

Alternatively, make it considerably more realistic, less NGE and more Battletech, and pull them out of the cockpits a lot. Focus on the politics of very expensive war machines; turn them into the toys of myopic, greedy politicos more concerned with their own power than the larger war. Cut off their supplies out of sheer bureaucracy while giving them things they don't want (because they're manufactured in the districts of influential politicians). Make them "prove themselves" over and over for the amusement of self-important, hidebound superiors. Give them nothing but obstacles and scorn, and have the higher-ups impose ridiculous demands on them to make them politically acceptable. Combine the desperation of Wunderwaffen with the brazen lying of the North Korean propaganda machine, then put them at the mercy of sociopathic manchildren in control of both. Make things break. Insanity will follow shortly. Blackadder Goes Forth meets Starship Troopers in Night Vale, if you will. Modulated correctly (with a structure considerably more empowering than it appears), it'd make an okay maverick campaign.

The New Earth Government as written supports both, in that half of it is this utopian Star Trek lite (drugs for everyone, yaaay) and the other half is various flavors of State Sec. Now, maybe I'm seeing a dissonance here that doesn't exist in this post-9/11 world. If that's the case, by all means disregard the below, but something about our benevolent NEG's pet Schutzstaffel bugs me anyway. Parapsychics with powers deemed disruptive to society: either they're publically identified with a little badge and constantly watched or the OIS hit squads round them up, declare them to be inhuman monsters with no rights to speak of, and throw them in internment camps, habeas corpus be damned. These are the good guys, people. I'd say they created a chilling look at how easily we can rationalize atrocities, but not once is it even hinted that the authors aren't fully on board with this, and there's literally no better option out there to play under. This is simply Doing What Must Be Done, and either you're with the NEG or you're with the cults. I'd be happier with it if they actually represented a threat, but most "dangerous" parapsychics don't; they're so nerfed by the rules that they're essentially harmless. Just to be perfectly clear: I'm not saying the authors are Nazis. I'm saying they assume the PCs will be happy with working for a government that endorses behavior that makes me deeply uncomfortable.

There's a larger problem here, by the way: most of the suggested classes roleplay for you, like D&D's paladin and druid. If you want to fly a mecha, you're in the military, which takes up all your time, and you're under the purview of their thought police -- which goes double for Engel pilots. If you're a Tager, they've got an ideology in a box all ready for you. I'm not saying it doesn't make sense, but it takes some of the fun out of roleplaying when they specify so much about your character based on the advantages you take. It would have been nice to see Tagers reworked to have free time, or non-military mecha (since the Operator Side Effect that makes them better presumably also makes them useful in civilian work), or really other cool roles that don't come with a heavy authoritarian hand on the player's shoulder dictating how they spend their time. There is much registration and regulation swirling around the type of PCs for whom the adventures are written, and not a lot of freedom.

Part of this is because the setting is honestly sparse. It is detailed, and in fact is choked to death with specifics (especially the clunky, overly-precise mess of a sorcery sstem), but there's not a lot of variety. The single unified world government is monolithic, the cults are pretty similar variations on "we do bad things because Muwahahaha!" and the eldritch atrocities are faceless and bland -- not that the last two matter, because there's very little support for non-NEG characters. Heck, look at the Nazzadi: "Uh, Pluto and revolution and discrimination and now they're making up their own culture. Also they're mostly hot and like sex and nudity, because they never had such silly taboos in the first place." Thanks, guys. I really need to sell my players on cheesecake to get them to play half-aliens. Never mind meaningfully differentiating them from humans, or actually giving them a culture my players might find interesting. No, we need more skin!

Again, this is fixable. Chuck the whole aesthetic and most of the backstory; the bioweapon thing and the false memories and the rebellion are just all over the place, and Space Drow just doesn't need to happen. If you want to make a cosmic horror race, I wouldn't make them outwardly distinguishable from humans. I wouldn't even make them a race in the fantasy-sorta-genetic sense; I would crib the Watts-McLeod exsurgent strain off of Eclipse Phase and fold them into parapsychics. Maybe make it spread memetically.

Just as the product of ten seconds' thought, use Genius: the Transgression a bit. Maybe Inspiration or something like it is the product of a more benign eldritch horror trying to get humanity up to speed, and suddenly you have the wizards to parapsychics' sorcerers, with all the aspersions that casts on parapsychics. It needs a lot more work, though. The point is, if they aren't immediately noticeable, they're a lot more troubling, especially if it's that variable. It's the difference between a vampire and a zombie. Making it revelatory makes the Ashcroft Foundation, and indeed all eldritch research, an existentially fascinating endeavor. Stare long enough into the abyss, and it's all so simple...so if it's comprehensible, is it me understanding it or is it something else making me understand it? And when am I desperate enough that it doesn't matter anymore?

There's another point here, and that's insanity. I don't like awarding insanity points automatically; it's much more tenable to have the players insist on accruing them. Fewer invisible walls that way, and a lot more player agency. Insanity points (or Cthulhutech's longer-term equivalent, Insanities) become a way for players to tell you what unnerves them, rather than a slap on the wrist for poking interesting things, and this fits something as personal as dissociation from rationality. If you remember Jin from SUETHULU, this is partly his idea. We've both had to ask players to have more faith in their mental fortitude, because otherwise they'd rack up crazy at an unsustainable rate. Forget that here, though. Cthulhutech has to codify insanity, to automatically slap points on without tests in "extreme cases" every few plot points. You don't know what crazy is; the authors know what crazy is, even if it's arbitrary and silly.

And that's the problem close to the center of this mess. The only reaction Cthulhutech rewards is complete, uncritical acceptance of everything the game throws at you; this game doesn't need players, it needs disciples. The adventures are full of "but even if the players win, it doesn't matter" interspersed with "here is how to nullify the players' pointless apparent victories", and the setting has tons of lists the things the players can't do, or shouldn't do, or that will make your game --gasp!-- non-canon. Most of these involve success in some form. The end effect is reminiscent of DM of the Rings: when in doubt, make the game non-interactive. And then doubt everything. Then give everyone important a magic five-minute invulnerability amulet, set the players up to fail at irrelevant objectives, and do your best to shock them with un-helpable victims of horrendous atrocities in the meantime. This...

FATAL is a horrifying blend of unspeakably disgusting things with absolutely no redeeming features, and yet I find I prefer it to this. FATAL did what it set out to do; it was supposed to be a game about awful people doing terrifying things, and accordingly it included a system for creating awful people and (ludicrous) rules for doing terrible things. I would never want to play it. I can't think of anyone that would. It is the worst roleplaying game ever made, but Cthulhutech isn't even that; it hit the bottom of the barrel, pulled out a katana, and started hacking. It is an unpublishable series of boring novels wrapped in needlessly complex mechanics and a dull, oppressive setting designed to funnel the players into one end of the plot slideshow and out the other. Along the way, you'll meet stereotypical villains with exactly zero depth being evil for the sake of evil, hard-bitten allies that run the gamut from sad to silly, and very few ambiguous or neutral NPCs, because crafting characters is hard and writing "and this is who wins" is easy.

And that's bad in a campaign, let alone a setting.
So yeah. So much for dissection; I hope it was at least entertaining.