Uranium Butterflies - Seacat 0.80

(1,600 words, reading time 7 weeks)

Dear heroes,

Welcome to the future of 2022! Shockingly, it is already week 3. I hope this year has welcomed you well enough.

This first post of the year comes with some quite big news. But first, the biggest.

Seacat 0.80

The biggest and most obvious change is that the book is splitting into two. One for making heroes, Uranium Butterflies*, the other for making worlds, Synthetic Dreams Wholesale**.

The following sections have moved to SDW:

• Monsters and creatures. This will be combined with the generator from ZOA and go into Making the World (below).
• Factions.
• Running the Game, including example scenes.
• Understanding the Game, including axioms, modding, etc.
• Making the World - this will get a lot of tables similar to the ones in UVG for historic periods. I'm planning tables for generating fast and slow stars, ancient god-like creatures, locations, discoveries, etc.
• Running the World - this will get rules for adjusting scenes, setting up caravans and tribes and things, encounters, treasures, rewards, etc.

I haven't shared the SDW yet because it still requires a lot of cleaning. All the missing content is still available in Seacat 0.79.

As a rule, these were all primarily TC (referee) facing sections, and the ones that were least complete. At the same time, Seacat was reaching 300 pages. The spells are going to add ~50 more pages, and I decided that a tome of 400 pages was right out. Also, I want at least one book finished this year! 

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Ok, so ... the player's handbook. Why call the Seacat player's handbook Uranium Butterflies? Well, there are three reasons.

1. I like how it sounds.

2. I don't like how technical player's handbook sounds.

3. It's derived from psychedelic heavy metal. The greek psyche meant both soul and butterfly, hence butterflies (and the imagery of butterflies as psychopomps transporting dead souls across the rainbow bridge into Hades). And uranium is a heavy metal. And so there you go.

The subtitles of the two books also match quite nicely. The title pages still need to get some art. I'll figure that out in time.

Ok, what's new in Uranium Butterflies (Seacat 0.80) then? Well, there are quite a few additions and changes.

• The chapters were reorganized into: 1) making a hero, 2) playing a hero, 3) promoting a hero, 4) retiring a hero, i) gear, ii) magic, iii) sidekicks, iv) mutations, v) burdens, and -) appendices.
• Added an expanded and revised d100 version of the "who is this hero" from the start of the UVG. The first 40 entries are similar, but different. The others are new (though some echo Red Sky).
• Damage and recovery were consolidated and tightened up a bit.
• Promoting and advancing heroes was cleaned up and revised greatly. New layout saves space and the default promotion system is the one that was previously optional. The advancements are given as an option for players who want more stories for their characters.
• Advancement was simplified. 6 advancement achievements added for pulp heroes and epic legends.
• Burdens got expanded and got their own section.
• Retirement section got content, including slightly revised mechanics for retiring heroes and extras, a revised version of the "instead of dead" table from the UVG, expanded hakaba, and tables for heroes returning from death.
• Tags have been removed. They were inconsistent and taking away space. They will be redesigned for the digital SRDCAT app.
• The indented italic style was changed, dropping the space after it. This makes blocks more compact.
• New art: burdens, skill (tactician), tree of life (retirement), golem armour hero (promotions), 4 other pieces among skills and traits, new art to advancement pages.

These were all quite large changes. What do they mean?

• Uranium Butterflies (Seacat 0.80) is suddenly much more focussed (on the heroes and their sidekicks) and closer to completion. The major gaps remaining are: gear>adventuring gear, gear>rides, and magic+related skills. The structures for all these parts of the book are all set, so there are no major design tasks left. Let's see how soon we get to the end of this book!
• Synthetic Dreams Wholesale (Seacat 0.80) now also gets a clearer focus: the world the players create together and how to run it. It is further from completion, but it will be easier to do because it makes a lot more sense.
• In both cases, the flow of the text should also be much more comprehensible now.
• I am going to stay focussed on finishing Uranium Butterflies, but Synthetic Dreams Wholesale is going to be a secondary focus. I'll explain why in the next section.

Under the Red Sky

Working primarily on rules-style content for the last few months has been a bit tiring--I love creating worlds, and I trust you like exploring them with me.

Well, the week I took off over the New Year, and the first week of this year, were useful for figuring out where to take Red Sky / Dead City. Since I began that project back in ... umm ... 2017 I guess? I've come to a very different place. Every work is a reflection of its author, even a work such as a roleplaying game module (which is close to a piece of theatre play than a game like Catan). Back then I felt very dark, and writing about Ebét being overrun and crushed by the Iksans in a dark satire of war and occupation, felt like a release.

Yet, with time, that approach started to feel too grimdark. After all, one can play tomb-robbing buffoons only so long before that starts to pale. So I tried to marry that experience with a slice of life approach that presented how all the different factions experienced the aftermath of invasion and conquest.

This was interesting, but in the end impracticable. I realized that I had two orthogonal story paths. One diving deep into the culture, the other into the ruins. Neither meshing quite correctly.

Then I wrote and published Let Us In and realized this was the perfect format for exploring the slice of life stories in Ebét. Not a massive tome, but short adventures set in that grand ruined city.

And towards the end of last year I also teased UVG2 a few times. More and more weird locations and ideas came to me, got sketched, noted down, demanding a place to go. More and more I realized that Iks, Ebet, the Circle Sea and the Rainbowlands certainly worked as though they were the same world.

So over the holidays I figured out how to do it. And then I laid out the skeleton and sketched out the first couple of locations. And tomorrow I'm running the first session of Under the Red Sky.

It's going to be different from the UVG in some ways and familiar in others.

• It will have just locations and discoveries, with almost no rules or mechanics. The mechatext (e.g. level 5, grumbling) will float in a sidebar, while the main column will have just words. Similar to the layout of Seacat.
• One end starts in the Decapolis of the Circle Sea, in the Yellow Lands. The other starts in Ebet. The book will have two different voyages, different characters, different key challenges and slightly different mechanics, depending on which side the players will start from. One group will be summoners from the Decapolis, themselves called by an angel to witness / save / attend the arrival of a new god. The other group will be fleeing Ebeteen radicals who have stolen away the last scion of the Living Flesh God (now deceased) before the destruction of Ebet.
• Each location will be more structured, with a fixed number of pages. This will also make it much easier to extract a player-facing book ...
• And I'm going to set up a journey log zine for the players to use as they travel from one side or another, with space for them to note their discoveries, adventures, and troubles.
• Finally, the player's decisions through the journey will craft the personality of the awakening sleeper, the last scion as it ascends (or doesn't) into divinity out in the Infrared Deserts, near the White Horizon.

Anyway, you can see the current state of it in the attachments. Just a skeleton. But ... I think it's going to be pretty cool. I'll start tooling it up in earnest once seacat is done.

Other News

Discussions about an Italian translation of UVG and a Russian translation of Witchburner.

Discussions about a quarterly UVG zine with third-party submissions. I want to call it Anti-Kanon, but who can say.

After someone asked, I made a package of about 10,000 words that didn't make the final cut for Holy Mountain Shaker. Mostly events around the town of Plish and the effects of earthquakes.

The second deck of cards (creatures) is nearly done. I think we have 3 left. I'll have to share those soon ... but I keep feeling like unless I have a solid update of seacat, I should be quiet (that's probably an oops, but oh well).

Okay, that's all that happened these three weeks

Not much new here, you see. Just a bit of writing. And mock humility.

No, honestly, it was a lot of work figuring out the structure of Seacat and URS. I'm quite proud of both results, and I hope you will enjoy them too.

And, if you want to see more behind the scenes notes and updates, you're welcome to drop by the stratometaship cafe, where the robot bartenders are all amoebas.

https://discord.gg/6krdX5ME3Q

Thank you as always for your support, dear heroes, and thank you for your willingness to read my ridiculous walls of text.

Here's hoping there weren't too many typos this time :)

Cheers,

—Luka

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*Nod to Heavy Metal and Iron Butterfly.

**Nod to PKD.