Calculating World(s)history (Appendix: the Octavian-Constellation 1 Entry – a world for SLA Industries)

Year after year the outrage that is RPGaDay is repeating over and over, so this year, I am going to repeat myself as well, thirty-one times. I am going to post the same article thirty-one times. You have been warned. But please, be my guest, read on.

The repetition is also in line with what grannus and others are going over at kritischer Fehlschlag with their own German anti-RPGaDay campaign “A-Piece-of-History-every-day” – after all, isn’t it said of history to repeat itself as well.

And last but not least, I am going to repeat this article thirty-one times because it really describes the essence of my opposition this year, and will feature, as appendices (and nothing more, really) individual daily manifestations of that essence.

Historical World Calculation

After grannus had sketched out the idea of using a historical event as the inspirational base for gaming content, the question remained how I would want to approach this personally. I did not really want to go freeform with this – that felt too close to what I am doing anyway lots of the time, plus I wanted to make this mine, put some twist of my own on it – and there might be some hubris to it, too, in seeking to increase difficulty by introducing restrictions.

One concrete idea was to go for planets for SLA Industries (which would also have offered a fallback solution by digging into my archives for the SLA Galaxy Project – as said, this whole concept is pretty close to things I am doing anyway).

Another idea was to restrict choice of events based on date (i.e., featuring an event from an 01-August on 01-August).

Together these thoughts formed the poles of the emerging concept: Cybernetic world creation (with a historical component).

As input I took the German language wikipedia. From the wikipedia page for the relevant day of August, a full date (format DDMMYYYY) was generated, by counting off until the n-th historical event listed on the page (with n equal DD) and thus arriving at a year.

A string nnDDMMYYYY is formed.

This string is transformed into a Traveller UWP: first any leading 0 is dropped, then, going left to right, the string is separated into components: 1s followed by 0, 1 or 2 are read as 10, 11 or 12 respectively, any other 1s are dropped, unless they are the last element of the string, digits 2-9 are read as such, 0s are dropped; the resulting series of numbers from 2 to 12 are used as the die rolls in Classic Traveller world creation; if there are less “rolls” than necessary for a full provile, default values are inserted in the following order: Government (9), Law (3), Spaceport (D), and Techlevel (F), these are based on some assumptions about the World of Progress with Government 9 representing a PPP-bound planetary government, Law 3 in line with the broad availability of civilian arms, ubiquity of foldships limiting the importance of port infrastructure, and the extreme biotech capabilities of the company driving the Techlevel up to F.

Finally, a name is manually attached, derived from the input event.

A description is added as a little final exercise.

PS: And as a separate line under the UWP the “image” connected to the world by a fold navigator is added.

Appendix 1

Input event: “30 BC – Octavian (later known as Augustus) enters Alexandria, Egypt, bringing it under the control of the Roman Republic.” (Wikipedia article August 1)

Entry D8B5193-F
a lighthouse, drowning in blood

Entry is less than a shadow of its former self. The success of the Stormer and Nitro Legions on the planet not only marked the local end to the Conflict Wars, but allowed SLA Industries to take over most of the surrounding 30 worlds of the Octavian-Constellation. Entry itself served as a central industrial world for the company, but after its resources were exhausted, the plants were mothballed, and the workforce shifted off-planet. Today, the only population is small teams of operatives and engineers on year-long tours to lift the shrouds off individual complexes, power them up and do test runs.

Meh.