A far-future space setting for Joshua A.C. Newman’sPAX EAST 2010 PREVIEW EDITION:Alone

PAX East 2010 Preview: Alone

This is a special preview edition of Human Contact, made specially for attendees of

PAX East 2010 on the weekend of March 26-28 in Boston, Mass.

Human Contact is a larger project, but you’re holding in

your hands a small, playable piece of that larger whole. The

Academy can encounter all sorts of cultures, dealing with

them in all sorts of ways, but this preview edition concentrates

on the Academic interpretation of covert operations.

So, what you hold here is a tiny scrap of the setting material,

along with several custom rules. These are different from the

rules in the earlier Dreamation Preview Edition that addressed

rules for interpersonal manipulation, but those rules can be

found summarized at glyphpress.com if you need them.

This game started as a response to Star Trek, but wound up

heavily inspired by Ian M. Banks’ books Use of Weapons and Player

of Games; Vernor Vinge’s Deepness in the Sky, Ursula LeGuin’s Left

Hand of Darkness (and other Ekumen stories), and Isaac Asimov’s

Foundation trilogy. If you like this game, you’ll love those books.

And I hope, vice-versa.

Shock:Human Contact

Special Alone edition

©March 2010 Joshua A.C.

Newman of the glyphpress

Polaris cover photo ©2007

Chris Harvey at

flitemedia.com, where he

has lots of other beautiful

pictures of the sky.

Thanks to Vincent Baker

and Soren Roberts, who

have been a fantastic

sounding boards and have

helped a ton with rule

design, Academic policy,

and starship design.

For questions, more rules

and details about the

Academy, suggestions,

and other support, come to

glyphpress.com

Joshua A.C. Newman

March, 2010

The Academy

F or over 800 years, the Academy has been the shining

light of Earth. Its founders pulled civilization from its

last fall, a catastrophic war of tribal and religious conflict,

where diseases and machines were the weapons and most

often the only victors.

The Academy is the beacon of the hominin mind. It has

replaced scarcity of resources with abundance of thought. It is

centered around a powerful, rationalist philosophy to focus the

faculties of the mind to explore, to understand, and to use new

understanding to improve the lives of all those within its reach.

It is a meritocratic democracy, with the career-long, network-

moderated reputation of its members giving weight to their

opinions. Without money, reputation is the sole resource, leaving

Academics free (and encouraged) to pursue the avenue of

exploration and creation to which they are drawn.

Academics — the hominin native to Earth — are the most basic

of the many forms of human in the galaxy. Adults stand between

2 and 2.2 meters tall with skin that ranges from a light brown to

charcoal black and occasional midnight blue, depending on the

requirements of their environment. Their toes are prehensile,

one of a thousand subtle genetic modifications made many

generations ago to enhance the spaceworthiness of the species.

Since almost all Academics spend a good portion of their lives

in space, they tend to not wear loose hair and jewelry. Their

propensity for decoration is typical of all hominins, though.

They tightly braid their hair and dye their skin with moving abstract

patterns. Some pierce or otherwise modify their flesh, but they

are not an ostentatious people and frown on aesthetic excess.

When in formal settings, such as aboard a starship, Academics

wear black and brown uniform skinsuits that double as space

suits.

The ColoniesEarth’s past contains many accounts — some recorded in

deliberately, some only discovered archaeologically — of

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exoduses to the stars precipitated by sociopolitical shifts in the

life of Earth.

For the last three centuries, the Academy has been recording

the bubblings of civilization on distant stars — its scientists

have observed colonies’ reinvention of radio and occasional

encrypted cacophony of information networks. Sometimes the

signal offers no clue to its nature.

The time has come to say hello.

Academy Interstellar TravelAcademic starships are self-organized institutions, usually run

by a chair and board. Every staff member has applied and been

selected to crew the ship and is expected to publish scientific

research — mostly anthropological — as well as perform their

other technical functions on the expedition.

It’s an expedition across vastness beyond any comprehension of

the hominin mind. But for all of recorded time, there has been

suspicion that we’ve been trying to go the long way.

cometary “smart ice” reaction mass 1km diameter at launch

500,000,000,000 kg

vector spike

thrust nozzle and engine module

sensor array radius 2km

radiator array

habitat ring/cable spool .5km diameter

~1rpm .

M e s s e n g e r ship

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Taking a short route requires going around space, rather

than through it. In the last decade, that hyperspace has been

preliminarily mapped and routes plotted.

Wormholes — black holes pointed at each other through

hyperspace — are the shortcut that hominins have sought for

all time. And the Academy has learned how to direct them.

Above and below the ecliptic of nearly every star, just over 60%

the distance to its Oort cloud of comets, lies a particular knot

in spacetime. That knot can be carefully manipulated until it

connects with another such knot, and a small object, such as a

starship, pushed through.

That careful manipulation requires an enormous expenditure

of delicately manipulated mass and energy. A wormhole can be

held open only for the tiniest fraction of a second.

There is, as yet, no way to pull a ship through. The trip is one-

way until the explorers’ wormhole mechanism is constructed

at the other end by an autonomous system, released upon exit.

When the first part of the trip has been completed, the crew,

now traveling at a fifth the speed of light, must choose between

beginning the 2-year braking process to put it in orbit around a

planet, installing a space elevator to facilitate communication

and travel, or continuing on, inserting three agents onto the

Elected envoys Zanele, Xolani, and Simosihle do an inspection of their newly-assembled Messenger craft Senghathibo, just ten days before ignition and their two-month deceleration toward the colony.

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planet’s surface and braking only when past the planet, in order

to obscure their entry into the solar system.

In this case, something is wrong — the crew has predicted

three major catastrophes that the starhip’s arrival could

bring — and the crew is opting for the more subtle, longer,

and more difficult covert method. Three envoys are to be

dropped to the surface in a Messenger craft. It order, their

mandate is to

1: ensure the safety of the starship2: prevent irreparable social environmental, or economic

damage to the colony3: find openings in the society for study and eventual full

contact.

They will have to move quickly — in just seven years, the

starship will return.

Academic technologiesNetworkingAll Academics are implanted with a bioelectrically powered

radio connection to their Net. They are in constant contact

with all other Academics, able to share visual and auditory

information as well as text limited only by distance and the

speed of light. Other sensory information can be logged, though

How long does it take?It takes about 2 years to get to the wormhole above the north or south pole of Earth’s star, and about the same to arrive.

Normally, a starship will brake for the second two years. But this time, something is wrong. The crew has decided to insert three individuals on a Messenger ship. They’ll depart after six months on the small ship, which will decelerate at a constant 1G for two months before it orbits and lands where the envoys deem appropriate. That means that, for those three individuals, the trip will be less than three years total.

The rest of the starship, though, won’t be back for another seven, while it brakes into the Oort cloud of the local system, consumes a small comet, and returns. It will take the spacecraft just over two years to reach the Oort cloud at a full stop, then another five to return.

These times are, of course, approximate and based on assumptions about the geometry of the system that may not prove true.

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it is considered very intimate to share such data. Establishing a

satellite network is one of the first thing an Academic expedition

does.

Embedded information processingMost objects used by Academics are “smart” to some degree.

Tools configure themselves according the requirements of the

user, taking simple voice commands. Clothes tailor themselves,

vehicles drive themselves (or assist the passengers in driving).

Computation is cheap, effective, and ubiquitous. Most Academics

wouldn’t know how to get along without such materials.

MaterialsThe Academy’s material engineering approaches the ideal of

known physical limits. Flying machines are so finely constructed

as to be nearly invisible. Exoskeletons that multiply the strength

of the wearer many times are no heavier than normal clothes.

Many materials change color and opacity at command. Common

clothing works as a short-term space suit, with an invisibly

fine hood pulled over the head to facilitate breathing. Slightly

heavier and more specialized clothing items operate as long-

term space suits, armor, or deep diving gear.

Lindiwe, an Academic anthropologist

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Starships drop a cable centimeters in diameter, but tens of

thousands of kilometers long, onto planet surfaces in order to

facilitate transport to and from the surface and draw power

from the planet’s magnetic field.

Smartglue is kept in small balls that will stick together, hold

whatever form they’re molded into, and release, contract, or

change shape on command. Composed of billions of tiny fibers,

smartglue becomes a fine but fantastically strong web when

stretched to its limits. It is classified as “dangerous” in the

Academy, and will ask for confirmation if given a command that

will hurt a person to whom it is attached.

In addition to smartglue, the Academic toolkit usually includes

several pieces of smartpaper. Weighing only a couple of grams

and only a few cubic centimeters to a side, it will hold any shape

it’s folded into, can be stretched into a meter square, can change

texture from silk smoothness to sandpaper to fluffy insulation,

and has the same information processing and networking

capabilities as most other Academic objects.

Language translationOne criterion for choosing members of the envoy team is their

linguistic training. They’ll be furiously studying the language if

the colony broadcasts radio or other EM, but even months of Aklajaq, a respected potter-engineer of the

Tsenaaq

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intensive study is no comparison to live learning in the immersive

atmosphere of the colony. The envoys’ understanding will start

with hand gestures and body language, but over the next year

or so, they’ll learn all the subtleties of the language, always

adding their understanding to their three-person Net, to share

with the starship when it arrives.

Natural language translation cannot be fully automated, but the

translation system is an extremely effective method of teaching

a language on the fly. Any newcomer armed with only the

translation system and no actual experience with the language

will make embarrassing errors and incorrect assumptions.

Body modificationAcademics can encourage their bodies to grow in subtly different

ways through means both mechanical and genetic. Changes to

bone structure take weeks with proper facilities, and months

without. Changes to skin tone are trivial, and changes to muscle

mass are a matter of the proper hormones, exercise, and time.

These differences are subtle, though: reducing height by a few

centimeters is a matter of the realignment of every organ, and

radical changes in proportion are just not possible. As a result,

it’s very unlikely that Academics will bear close scrutiny if

they’re traveling in disguise, though if the world’s population

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is sufficiently varied, they can probably make themselves look

merely “foreign”.

WeaponsWhen pressed, Academics will use weapons to bring an end to a

conflict gone wrong. Because violence is considered evidence

of failure, the Academy considers precise forensic record

keeping absolutely necessary in order to find out what went

wrong. Tools that are designed to be weapons track and record

tremendous amounts of information about any violent act (if not

temporarily silenced). If queried, the weapon or projectile will

report the hormone levels of the attacker and attacked, as well

a 3D model of the situation from the point of view of the weapon.

The two weapons most used by Academics are the aforementioned

Smartglue (sometimes launched with a compressed gas charge

or just thrown), and the Needle.

Needles vary greatly in form, but tend to be easily concealable,

straight rods. They shoot tiny flechettes that guide themselves in

flight to find the target at which they were aimed, pierce them,

and either drug the target or expand rapidly, exploding flesh. If

they are unable to reach their target, they expand prematurely,

turning into a ball of fluff.

A Needle weapon

Arriving Where One Might Not Be WelcomeUpon emerging from the wormhole, the starship staff

immediately begins a furious survey of the solar system, still

eight light-months away. From this distance, and with very

little information, however, they must make a weighty decision:

whether to begin decelerating toward the planet, in which case

the population of the planet will see the starship as an ever-

brightening star over one pole of the planet until it arrives two

years later; or whether to be more subtle on the matter.

This decision is based on the answer to three questions

developed by the Academy for these situations:

4: Is the society a global society? That is, are they able to trade, communicate, and make war around their world?

5: Are they practically unable to detect the incoming starship? Do they lack the technology? Are they culturally disinclined to look up?

6: Is the sociopolitical situation too dynamic to predict what will happen when the starship arrives?

On this particular expedition, the answer to all these questions

is yes, which means that starship has voted — perhaps

contentiously — to take the more subtle route. There may be

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an ongoing war or perhaps the crew fears a hostile political or

religious situation.

The starship crew has agreed that they will avoid

braking until the ship has passed the colony.

70-80 days before passing the planet, they will

drop a tiny, fast, light Messenger craft carrying

three envoys. The craft will decelerate at 1G

for over two months while the envoys learn

what they can of the society, running virtual

reality simulations, beginning to learn the

languages of the planet if it broadcasts in

electromagnetic frequencies, and deciding

how to approach the society.

When passing through an orbit of the planet, the

craft will drop dozens of tiny communications and

observation satellites around the planet. These allow the envoys

to keep in touch with each other even if they’re on different

regions of the planet, make observations from orbit, and relay

communications to the starship, which will spend much of its

time with a year of one-way communications lag.

An Academic general purpose satellite

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The envoys might act as neutral parties, or they might favor one

side in a conflict. They might form religions, or adopt the ways

of the people.

Whatever they do to ready the colony for the return of the

starship, they must do it carefully and effectively. It won’t return

for seven to eight years, but this time it will have no second

option. It is crewed with a hundred individuals who have been

trapped inside for nine years with a limited diet, social contact,

fed only tantalizing tidbits about the world they passed by.

RulesMaking a cultureThe Shock for the first episode in a colony is the arrival of the

Academy envoys. Issues are determined normally.

When you’re first laying out Minutiæ according to the Issues on

the Grid, consider whether each Issue applies to the starship or

to the colony.

If your Protagonist is a Colonist, make sure at least one Link and/

or your Antagonist is an Academic. If your Protagonist is an envoy,

make at least one link and/or your Antagonist a Colonist. If your

Protagonist is still on the starship, all hir Links and Antagonist

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will be other Academics on the ship, unless there are very

unusual circumstances.

If your Protagonist is an Academic consider how they feel about

the decision to take this difficult route to contact. Do they have

loved ones on the ship or at the colony? Did they go with their

loved ones? How do they feel about going on a further, seven

year journey?

Describe as Minutiæ:

• What the colonists wear• What they eat• What their shelter is like• What their family structure is like• What they look like e.g. color of skin, height and proportions• Five or so syllables on which to base words in each language

represented by a *Tagonist. Add to this last as you go.

If relevant, you might consider

• What they trade• How they travel• If they travel in space, how do they travel? How far do they go?

Risks to the colonyIf the envoys are unsuccessful, there are three Shocks that will

happen when the starship arrives in seven years, all of them

bad for the starship crew, the Academy, or people of the colony.

Choose from this list or devise some of your own:

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• The colonial economy will collapse• Colonials will attack the Academics• Different nations, ethnic groups, or social classes will attack

each other• Colonials will quarantine the starship, disallowing access• Colonials will form a religion deifying the Academy• Academics will be contained within a controlling group class• Segments of the society will quarantine themselves• Large segments of the population will demand asylum

Write one of these on each side of the triangle of the colony sheet.

Inter-Protagonist conflictWhen two Protagonists are in a Conflict, the Antagonist player

of the current Protagonist tells the opposing Protagonist how

many Credits zie is spending. The opposing Protagonist can

divide up those Credits into whatever configuration of dice zie

requires.

The opposing Protagonist does not roll a Minutia die and can not

gain Features.

Changing the worldEnvoys are there to make the colony ready for the starship’s

arrival and prevent the Academy’s three predictions from

coming true.

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In order to prepare the world for the arrival of the starship, the

envoys will try to produce Shifts in the society. While profound,

they’re not as earth-shattering as the shock of the sudden

arrival of an entire new and alien civilization.

When your story has ended, each player, including you, will

decide if your actions mitigated or exacerbated one of the three

Shocks on the colony sheet. Every player who believes you helped

will roll a d10. Every player who believes you didn’t help, or made

things worse, will roll a d4. If the highest d10, minus the highest

d4, is 7 or greater, check off one of the Shift boxes.

When all three Shifts are marked, that problem is at least

sufficiently mitigated that, when the starship arrives, the

predicted Shock predicted won’t immediately impact the society.

Getting ready for the next session

The inevitable• Starting with the second session, roll 1d10 at the beginning of

the session. • If it’s 6 or higher, check off a mark in the starship track. • In future sessions, roll as many dice as there are checkmarks,

then make as many marks as there are dice reading 6 or higher.

• Note the events on the track that take place.

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ProtagonistsWhen your Protagonist’s story is over, make a new Protagonist:

• Choose if you want to play a new character from a player’s Links, someone’s former Antagonist, or the same Protagonist as this time. You may choose to play a Protagonist on the starship even if that is not otherwise available.

• If you’re continuing with your Protagonist, write down your three favorite Features from the old sheet.

• Now copy over your Links. Any Link that was used must be copied over. Any that was not used this episode may be copied over at your discretion.

• Choose someone from those Links to be your Antagonist next time.

• When everyone’s done for the night, share with everyone what changed for your Protagonist and tell the person who will be sitting on your left next week what character they’ll be playing as your Antagonist.

• Write down your new Story Goal and share it with the group.

Play on the starship, tooIf the envoys have failed to bring about substantial change

before the starship arrives, it’s not like the crew is likely to just

go home without ever setting foot on the colony. You’ll need to

know what the starship crew wants to do, and there’s no better

way to do that than by setting a story there. Use a normal Grid,

with Shocks that are appropriate to the limited environment of

the starship.

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The arrival of the starshipWhen the starship arrives, if there have been insufficient Shifts

to cushion the impact, any predicted Shocks to the society will

take place in short order. Academy law is unclear on what to do

in such a situation.

Ending the storyThis might be the end of this story! The Story Goals of the

players might have all been resolved in such a way that there’s

no more to tell here. Ask each other what happens to particular

characters that they played that interested you.

The AcademyWhat happens next has everything to do with the needs of the

players.

• Do you start a new expedition, setting out from Earth? With these same Academics or new ones?

• How is the Academy changed by its interactions with the cultures of the colony? Do its laws change? Its technology? Its exploratory policies?

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The Colony• Do Colonists join the Academy, integrating with the starship

crew? • How have the cultures in the colony changed through contact? • If they’re a spacefaring culture, do they ally themselves with

the Academy? Do they become enemies?

Æsthetic principlesWhat the Academy looks like• Academic technology, on the whole, does not glow. Text and

images look as though they are printed on paper.• The arrival or departure of a starship uses a fantastic amount

of energy. It’s the brightest thing in the sky, visible even during the day when it’s nearby and visible at night anywhere in the solar system if its engine is facing the planet.

• Academic uniforms and spacecraft are dark grey and brown when practicality doesn’t require other colors. As an institution, they dislike ostentation.

• Because of their free movement on Earth, Academics tend to look and think very similarly, belonging to a superculture that covers the planet.

• Sensors are ubiquitous long, straight whiskers that stick out perpendicular to the surface of the spacecraft, clothing, or equipment doing the sensing. Sensors are attached to many objects often used as functional jewelry.

• There are no beam weapons, force fields, artificial intelligences, or antigravity.

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What the Colonies look like• Colonies usually have multiple ethnicities. They will have

tribes, nations, languages, religions, and variations in physiology from area to area and among groups in a given area.

• Colonists want things from the Academy — they might bring legitimacy to a ruler or relief to an afflicted group. But they also want things from each other.

• Every society has an aesthetic. Look at a particular human culture and expand on that. People who live on the ocean may have art that looks like Haïda or Inuit art — bold, gemetric, and expressive. People who live in mountains may make a lot of terra cotta — soft shapes, pottery, and bricks.

• If the people write, what are their writing implements like? That will effect the way their writing looks. Do they write with brushes? By carving in stone? With pens? By pressing shapes into soft clay? Try making writing the way they do to figure out what it looks like.

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Join the AcademyI put together this Preview of Shock:Human Contact to get some

creative input from you! I’d love to hear from you and hear how

your experiences have gone with the game.

xenoglyphThe glyphpress blog can be found at glyphpress.com. There,

you’ll find science/fiction posts, art, and commentary on the

world from the perspective of a science fiction enthusiast.

Xenoglyph also has a forum where you can discuss Shock:,

Human Contact, and game design. I’d love to hear how your

adventures in the expanding Academy have gone, and so would

other players.

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A far-future space setting for Joshua A.C. Newman’sPAX EAST 2010 PREVIEW EDITION:Alone

The starship

deemed this world too dangerous for first contact.

So it moved on to return in the future when things

would be better.

But it left behind three envoys, charged with

making this world safe for the starship’s return.

They must alter the culture of this world to ensure

the safety of the colony — and the starship itself

— when the starship returns.

This special PAX East 2010 preview of Shock:Human

Contact includes material about the Academy, its

envoy missions and limited rules specific to its

mission of exploration.

You need a copy of Shock: to play.