Recently in Writing Category

It's been almost two weeks since the last installment of the Caldari Dialogues, and I apologize for the delay.  This is the last installment of the original batch I had planned, so any further installments will probably be spun off of discussions about these articles and not from that original conversation with Yoshito and Kai (by the way, if you haven't seen Kai's new site yet, The Zion Chronicles, you should check it out).

In this part, I'll be talking about the other 10-20% of the Caldari population -- the people who, either by choice or by circumstance, have found themselves on the outside of the corporate system.  These are the people that have conventionally been the heroes (or antiheroes) of cyberpunk literature and RPGs.  They live in the shadows of the rest of society, living on their crumbs and cast offs, or trying to scramble back into the system that has left them behind.  So, without further adieu, let's get to the main event.

So a while back I said I wanted to have a discussion of what I thought about the concepts of background, metaplot, and narrative as it pertains to game writing, and why I think that CCP dropped the ball a bit when it comes to establishing those three things, and so here it is.  While I realize that this may seem a little pretentious -- let's face it, I am not exactly a "real" game writer (yet) and there's many other people out there far more qualified to articulate this kind of thing -- I'd like to think that I have a pretty good grasp of the concepts and that, at least to me, these aren't just the purview of published authors, but really everyone who's ever run an RPG.

....now is the time to do it.  I got mail from John Ossoway, the Cthulhu Rising head honcho, announcing the new version of the Cthulhu Rising monograph from Chaosium (which, incidentally, I have a credit in now -- woohoo!).  In addition to everything that was in the last version, this new one has:

• New cover art by Ben Thornley
• Updated timeline and background information
• Expanded information on colony worlds
• Expanded information on weapons and equipment
• Updated rules for psychic powers
• New character sheets
• New layout

But even better news, according to John, if sales of the monograph are good enough, Cthulhu Rising may actually be published as a real distributed title, which would be pretty awesome for everyone who's worked on Cthulhu Rising over the last bunch of years.  So if you have any interest at all, I'd like to make an appeal to all three of you who read this blog to pick it up.  You can get it in print or in PDF form from the Chaosium website.

My apologies for this bit of shameless self-promotion, I will now return you to your regularly scheduled programming.

The third article in this series will examine the lives of the average Caldari, the 80-90% of the population that makes up the wheels and gears of the Caldari State and its corporations.  This chapter is going to pull from many of the same sources as the previous one, as well as a few other books that highlight the situation on the ground, as it were.  The biggest example is the Sprawl Survival Guide, another excellent Shadowrun soucebook.  While most of that focuses more on the specifics of that universe, it also includes a great many good examples of how corporations stay in control over the populace.

The biggest thing to take from this chapter will be that for most people in the State, life is fairly good, at least to them.  This is not because the corporations are particularly generous, or even care that much about the people that work for them, but because the corporations have conducted a centuries-long marketing campaign to promote themselves as the friend of the average man or woman and maintain the level of discontent at a minimum.  After all, workers that despise their jobs or, at an extreme, believe that they have nothing to lose from a violent strike, do not do good jobs and cost companies millions or billions of ISK in lost productivity (or even deliberate sabotage).

So with that summary, let's move on to the real meat of the article.

For the second installment of the Caldari Dialogues, I'm going to be taking a look at the corporations of the Caldari State: where they came from, how they operate and compete, their objectives and how they work to accomplish them.  From here on out, we'll be talking about the modern Caldari State, at least as it was prior to May of this year; the events with Tibus Heth have been, in my opinion, rather contradictory to everything that came before, so I'm going to avoid talking about them.  This article series is, to be quite honest, intended to explain my problems with those events in terms of plausibility, so that shouldn't be too huge a surprise for anyone.

I'll be relying on a couple of sources for a lot of my references in this chapter.  The primary one is going to be Corporate Shadowfiles, the superb Shadowrun sourcebook written by the late Nigel Findley, one of my role models as a game designer and fiction writer.  This book includes a number of things that people interested in the State will find supremely useful, including a discussion how modern corporations are structured and operate, various methods of corporate competition, and a number of Shadowrun-specific notes on various incidents between megacorporations that can give a great deal of insight on what probably happens in a similar cyberpunk setting like we find in the State.  This book is an excellent primer on corporate capitalism that is not only extremely well-researched and informative, but an excellent and interesting read.

Other references and influences include the Mekong Dominion Leaguebook for Heavy Gear, a well written sourcebook about a society on Terra Nova structured very much like the Caldari State, Blade Runner, Max Headroom, the collected works of William Gibson (especially the Sprawl Trilogy and the Bridge Trilogy), and I'm sure a zillion other things I can't remember right now.  Basically, my ideas about the State are very rooted in the cyberpunk genre, which is something that I think CCP definitely had in mind when they were developing the State.

So without further adieu, let's move on.  The body of the article continues behind the cut.