In June of 2024 I started working on a TTRPG with the working title Stella by Starlight. I was inspired by Blades in the Dark to make a high-stakes cyberpunk RPG set in space, but the game has gradually become something else. It’s still high-stakes cyberpunk in space, but I don’t think that’s really what the game is about. I think I’d describe Stella by Starlight as a post-cyberpunk game, because it’s not about what the players do as cyberpunks but rather what they are as cyberpunks.
In earlier drafts, this game was really about space: you have a ship, and you travel across the galaxy, risking your life in daring space battles. The other side of the game was dark and gritty: you put your life on the line for money, you fight against incomprehensibly powerful corps, and you kill because you like killing. All these aspects are still afforded to you by the game, but I think they interest me far less now. The main design question I’ve been grappling with recently is “how do I fill in the gaps?”. To answer that question, I have a tangent to go on: I’ve read a lot of games over the last 9 months that have made me realize that some of my favorite TTRPGs are not actually about what they are about.
At PAX Unplugged I managed to get a copy of Slugblaster and it’s such a joy to read (and to look at—gorgeous art and layout). To sum it up, Slugblaster is a game about multidimensional skateboarding (called “slugblasting”). It scratches the itch of roleplaying as teenagers totally out of their element, reminiscent of Kids on Bikes or even Sleepaway but with an added layer of psychedelic dimension-hopping shenanigans. But where I think the game really shines (and, as a disclaimer, the following is just me restating Quinns in his review of the game) is the beat system, a remake of Blades’ downtime rules. Your character doesn’t necessarily “develop” when they’re out exploring other dimensions—they change when they’re at home, processing their adventures and their life as not-quite-adults. With the beat system, you purchase literal character beats during downtime. Each playbook has their own “arc” of beats that must be purchased in order: in each beat of the Grit’s arc, they work towards a goal and repeatedly fail, before finally they persevere and succeed, and it’s cathartic. The narrative tension at the heart of Slugblaster isn’t saving the universe or whatever, it’s growing up. The game would still work without the eponymous slugblasting! It even recognizes this possibility in its “Change the Game” chapter. By this point it should be clear what I mean when I say “RPGs are not about what they are about”. But what does it even mean for a game to be “about” something?
In the first few months I spent writing Stella by Starlight I thought the “selling point” of the game would be the world; that in fact the game and its world were synonymous. I even named it after a place in the world: Stella (formally “the Stele”), the planetary spacecraft at the heart of the solar system the game takes place in. Sam Sorenson’s “In Praise of Legwork” makes the argument that games should provide legwork—it’s not enough to write systems or “play to find out”. Sam argues that RPG writers should be providing content: lists and tables and so on. If you want a city to feel real, you need to make the city. I think this “legwork” approach works well for some games (solo or other prompt-heavy games, or pick-up-and-play dungeon-delves), but Stella by Starlight is not a legwork game. How does one even go about making space feel real? I imagine designing cities is fairly straightforward: they can be represented two-dimensionally, and they have clear-cut boundaries (roads, buildings, and borders). Space is limitless. And so Stella by Starlight cannot really be “about” the world. Even if I could do so, I would not make its cities feel real.
OK, maybe instead of framing games as being “about” things, games “do” things. They provide content, rules, systems, ideas, whatever. What should Stella by Starlight accomplish? It’s a story-focused game, but how does it focus on the story? I can have locations, factions, and NPCs with their own goals, but that’s not the story the players are going to be telling.
I think it comes down to rules. The conventional wisdom might say that rules provide crunch, or to fill in the blanks when our imagination or improv skills need assistance. Brennan Lee Mulligan even says that he plays D&D not because it’s “combat-oriented”, but because it facilitates the parts of the game he’s least interested in simulating through improv, which is combat. For Brennan, rules do the dirty work: we don’t need rules for roleplaying because we can just do that ourselves. That makes sense intuitively. But what about Slugblaster, with its character arcs? Isn’t “railroading” bad? Why would I need rules for something I can do myself? Jay Dragon’s answer: you don’t.
Rules don’t have to do “dirty work”. If I hated simulating combat, I could play a game without combat, or one that “fades to black” when violence situations arise. I can hate combat but still have it as a “narrative possibility” through D&D, and I think that’s why rules exist. Jay says that rules are a cage—they get in the way of our roleplaying (usually by making us fail), and that’s a thing that we want! It’s fun to play with and around the rules, even if we don’t use them. The one rule that Wanderhome is committed to is the rule of no violence. This limits our agency, yes, but it also opens up possibilities when we see how far we can push that one rule. It creates narrative tension, because even if there’s no violence, that doesn’t mean there’s no conflict. The rule is there, taunting us. We could play a campaign of Wanderhome where violence is never even mentioned, or we could play a campaign of Wanderhome with the ghost of violence in every scene.
Slugblaster’s beats are limiting, but they’re also quite broad. They feel like a leash to me: they give you space to roam, but when you buy the last beat you can run wild. I feel similarly about Realis, a game which features a sort of subtractive character development where you start out as larger-than-life archetypes, eventually whittling down to something specific. Characters in Realis wield “Sentences” like “I always kill my foe”. Each class has a list of Sentences to start with. As you progress, your sentences rank up and you must change them to become more specific (e.g. “I always kill my foe when a friend is in trouble”). Realis is all about rules. Progression is literally restriction. We must give something up to become more powerful; we put ourselves in the cage. But there’s still plenty of room to move around, and I think Realis offers a lot of possibilities through its aspects of interpretation and negotiation (what does it mean to “kill” a “foe” when a “friend” is in “trouble”?). The rules limit us, but we decide what they mean.
I want to design rules that challenge players. I want rules that can create problems. I want rules that demand thought. Stella by Starlight is a mess right now. Its themes are all over the place, and the rules themselves are in different states of “completion”. I’ve been satisfied with my playtests but not with how the rules have responded to the narrative. All of this to say that this game needs a center to gravitate towards.
If I want to tell a story, then Stella by Starlight must care deeply about its player characters. In the game, you play as “hawkshaws”: post-cyberpunk freelancers that are some kind of mix between Uber drivers, shadowrunners, and whatever you’ve got going on in Citizen Sleeper. Hawkshaws are highly alienated, not just by the gig economy they work in but by the world as a whole. They are neither organism nor machine nor cyborg. The game never mentions the word “human” either. To get back to the point: hawkshaws are marginal. They may live in the center of the solar system but they never are the center. I’ve struggled to imagine what growing as a hawkshaw would look like. You can become better fighters or get new gear, but that’s not something to struggle over. I’m experimenting with rules that are a mix of Belonging Outside Belonging and Realis right now with the goal of developing characters by changing their beliefs and relationships with each other. We’ll see how those work in playtesting. What I really want are teleological rules of some sort, something that defines the characters not just in their own terms but as hawkshaws.
Part of my inspiration behind hawkshaws was China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station. There’s a character named Yagharek, a garuda (avian humanoid) who had his wings removed as punishment for committing “choice-theft in the second degree”. He commissions the protagonist, Isaac, to craft him new wings at the start of the novel. Perdido Street Station is quite long, and Isaac and his gang get into a lot of shenanigans (an understatement) throughout. Yagharek is nearly always there, tagging along and helping where he can. Eventually, Isaac has the time to make wings for Yagharek, but decides not to when he learns what “choice-theft” is. And so Yag remains wingless. He mutilates himself, pulling out his feathers and becoming bare. A contradiction of sorts, but also something completely different. PSS is a pretty dark and grim novel, and Yag’s ending is not a happy one. But there’s traces of a hawkshaw there, I think:
“I turn and walk into the city my home, not bird or garuda, not miserable crossbreed. I turn and walk into my home, the city, a man.”
Or maybe the hawkshaw is something Yag rejects. Criminals in the world of PSS have their bodies grotesquely altered to better perform whatever indentured labor is needed from them; they’re called the Remade. When Yag is offered a place in the “uncommunity” of the fReemade (escaped Remade), he turns away. Maybe the Remade are closer to hawkshaws. Yag believes himself to be the same as everyone else—a “man”. Perhaps he is delusional, or perhaps he can see that everyone is a paradox, a half-breed, a flightless bird. Is that the hawkshaw?
Postscript: The thing that sets hawkshaws apart from Yagharek is that hawkshaws are never alone. They are not the only ones in the margins. Like all of them, the hawkshaw cannot survive alone. They have a community, however that may manifest—I’m not sure yet. But I think about this moment from a Songs in the Dusk campaign I MCed a while ago. The community-building rules from Songs are excellent; I remember a downtime scene where the characters gathered with an NPC to watch the sun set over their desert community sheltered in the skeleton of some ancient leviathan, and I felt like that was the niche Songs filled. I think that’s pretty close to the life and world of hawkshaws.
