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A game by Greg Stolze
Credits
Author
Greg Stolze
Cover
Thomas Manning
Designer
Daniel Solis
Photography
Hubble Site, STScl
http://hubblesite.org/
1
Big Bang, then a lot of nothing, galaxies cooled and coalesced, then
more dull stuff. A nigh-omnipotent race composed of pure energy
arose, looked around, got bored and committed mass suicide leaving
nothing except a few odd monolith monuments that most astro-
archeologists now suspect were toys for their children that got swept
under the nigh-omnipotent equivalent of the living room sofa. There
was a lot more nothing for a while, and then biological life forms
started crudding up various planets, some eventually developing
enough intelligence to voyage through the cosmos, create works of
great literature, and enjoy roleplaying games.
The Obligatory Introduction
This is a roleplaying game. It’s set in outer space. Everything is nutty
and zany. The system is called “Token Effort” and starts on page 8,
but my editor said the best bits were in “Stuff of the Cosmos,” so I
put that first.
Stuff of the Cosmos
in Alphabetical Order, Except for History
Various races rose and fell, conquered and were subjugated, had
renaissances and dark ages. No one cares that much but the histo-
rians, and they’ve got enough headaches trying to do the math
conversions to figure out what was actually happening when.
History
As a preface, calendars and history books are largely a joke to the
commonbeing, for a variety of reasons. First off, every planet has
a different year and day, and every race has a different expected
lifespan. Throw in the skewing effects of relativistic near-light
travel, and it’s a nightmare problem well worth forgetting. The
most commonly used time scheme is actually the one that governs
McFalfañars, the largest known fast food chain. (It’s got so many
outlets that the spreadsheet tracking its franchises developed sponta-
neous consciousness and ran off to join the circus.)
(If anyone’s going to figure out time travel, it’s probably the historians,
and they’d probably use it to make everything happen all at once.)
The history of the human race is the typical saga of lust, greed, and
irrational urges to cut property taxes, up until the events that would
lead to YGIT 1. (The only atypical element was humans’ unique desire
to have machines do their thinking – see “Machine Consciousness”.)
YGIT stands for “The Year We Got It Together” and was the time
when humanity finally set aside its squabbling, united under a single
egalitarian government, conquered hunger and poverty and instituted
a culture of tolerance and respect for all religions and peoples. (Except
With that caveat in mind, here’s the history of the universe.
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 criminals, of course. They were given the choice of being incarcerated,
or of competing on sadomasochistic TV reality shows.) It was truly a
golden age and it lasted seven years before the Grays invaded.
Brain Prints
A brain print (or “brint”) scans a biological brain and creates
a template of its neurological net. Then that template can be
imposed on some neutral neural gel to replicate the brain as it was
when scanned. Brain prints are an essential element of resurrec-
tion technology: Without them, the body can be recreated, but the
attitudes that led it to perish are lost. Sadly, there’s no way that the
experience of dying can be captured, unless someone dies during the
brinting process. That almost never happens and the large, reputable
brain-print firms all have the skills to edit that out – they just resur-
rect the body as it was before ‘whoopsie,’ put in the edited print and
no one’s the wiser. Fly-by-night or small family owned brinters may
not have recourse to such shenanigans, so there are a few people
who’ve experienced their own deaths and returned to tell the tale.
While they can’t quite put into words the sensations after the tunnel
of light, they’ve universally described it as ‘disappointing’.
The Grays, humankind’s nearest galactic neighbors, had been
poaching humans for years and keenly watching for just this sort
of age of enlightenment. Galactic doctrine forbade the invasion of
primitive races, declaring it a war crime. Invading advanced races,
however, is only a war misdemeanor. The Grays were (and still are)
badly inbred galactic hillbillies , so they wanted human slaves to
revitalize their gene pool through hybridization. The reason humanity
got seven good years is that the Grays were flying really old, clunky,
slow-boat warships.
Unfortunately for the Grays, while they’d accurately gauged mankind’s
viciousness, cowardice and susceptibility to reward, they underesti-
mated its laziness. Rather than fight tooth and nail for their planet,
Earth caved pretty quickly and immediately started trading human
cultural artifacts for the Gray soldiers’ crap. Given that the Gray
culture was all about obeying the Hive-Priests and debasing oneself
before the Utter Mind, while humankind had tractor pulls, tacos and
Led Zeppelin, it did not take long before the Grays’ ancient society
pulled itself to pieces under the onslaught of decadence. Their entire
caste-based hierarchy just rotted away, like a kid’s teeth when he’s
given the keys to the candy store.
It’s possible to edit brain prints, eliding embarrassing or psychologi-
cally scarring experiences. It’s even possible to have the modified
brint imposed over the original. Until people got wise to brain print
technology, corrupt governments did this all the time to cause people
to forget paying their taxes or to remember incredibly moving acts
of generous personal sacrifice by ward bosses. Now that most people
have reputable prints to compare, this sort of thing is less common.
If you get two prints taken and they match, you can be pretty sure
they’re authentic. If they don’t match, you’re in trouble.
Lots of humans died, of course, though the Grays didn’t destroy
many monuments for fear that it would steel mankind’s resolve to
resist, like in “Independence Day.” Human culture was introduced to
the galactic stage in the role of ‘the pet that gave the Grays a social
disease from which they still haven’t recovered’ and has remained in
the role of purveyor of questionable but tempting ideas ever since.
In some sectors, it’s illegal to modify a brint, period. Others allow
it, as long as the modification is voluntary and done in accordance
with the brain’s wishes. Brain print therapy is popular among those
who can afford it, and who trust their therapist to rummage through
their memories. There are even brain print artists, though many who
patronize them find themselves enthusiastically underwriting the
art for years afterwards, insisting all the while that their gratitude is
genuine.
Accordingly, human history is broken down into YGIT (the era after
the Year we Got It Together) and BYGIT (Before the Year we Got It
Together). The game starts in the year 1223 YGIT.
Antibuddhists
One day a home businessman was discussing the trials of sending
his hand-crafted Zen meditation workbooks out through the mail
and he said, “fulfillment is a bitch.” In that moment, he became
anti-enlightened.
Brint
See “Brain Print”.
Categorical Imperative
It’s the most popular magazine in the cosmos for its market segment
which is, for lack of a better word, ‘men’. That’s how it started,
anyhow, as a gender-biased magazine for the Bophorphs of the Crab
Nebula. But when it got galactic circulation, it found niches with
most species. It seems to be a universal trait of consciousness that
the desires to (1) look at pictures of attractive individuals in a state
of near- or total undress (2) read in-your-face accounts of violent
and energetic sports and (3) be up to date on art, literature and
media that involve undressing or violence all come bundled together.
Sometimes, as with the Bophorophs and humanity, it’s gender based.
With Rigelians, it seems to depend on diet. Among the residents of
the Mazatha Dust Torque, it’s all down to how much solar radiation
Deciding that tranquility and the annihilation of the ego is a load,
he formed the antibuddhist faith, which is dedicated to the notion
that the essential quality of sapience is conflict and uncertainty.
Complacency is the enemy and antagonism is the route to the perfect
self (which is, of course, the perfect ego).
Antibuddhists try to exacerbate wars, spur conflicts, wreck marriages
and pick fights in bars, with varying degrees of success. Their Prayer
Against Serenity goes something like “All-Divisive Power of the
Universe, please give me the courage to destroy everything I can, the
cunning to undermine what I can’t destroy outright, and A GUN! A
GUN!!!”
3
 exposure it got as a child. Regardless of the cause, the end effect is a
market for magazines like Categorical Imperative and its #2 compet-
itor (which goes all the way with full nudity) Playborg.
Rules Break
Downloading a skill that’s not just a mass of facts can only ever
give you that skill at level 2.
Clones
Cloning technology was perfected long ago, which is why McFalfañars
fast food tastes the same everywhere in the galaxy. With brain prints
(see above) it’s possible to make an exact duplicate of yourself, but
almost no one ever does this. With exceptions so rare as to be statisti-
cally negligible, people hate their clones. Moreover, clones hate their
progenitors.
homebake it often get into trouble trying to grow extra muscle on
the sly, and they end up with wiggy unbalanced arms that won’t stop
twitching and clenching) .
Education
With modified brint technology, it’s fairly easy to learn stuff. You can
buy little lumps of metal or tissue that burrow into your brain and
teach you polka dancing, or star-freighter piloting, or the history of
Untranadine tort reform. Most home computers actually come with an
attachment that can bore in and dump this stuff in your mind, so you
can download knowledge directly off the Internet.
The reason for this lies in the human tendency to judge one’s own
behavior more kindly than the behavior of others. This kind of
double standard works fine when you don’t have a self-duplicate
running around leaving hair on the soap, talking with his mouth full,
weaseling out of the phone bill and scratching himself with neither
the delicacy nor subtlety that might be desired.
That said, many still prefer to learn some skills the old-fashioned way.
‘Chipping’ (as this artificially accelerated learning process is inexpli-
cably called) has its drawbacks. First off, the knowledge doesn’t fit
organically in the context of the brain – it’s an undigested lump.
That’s fine for factual stuff like “Ten Thousand & Two Jokes For All
Occasions (Excluding Marriage Proposals)” though it does nothing for
your delivery. Stuff that’s based on reaction and instinct, like piloting
a ship through asteroids or competing at no-holds-barred fishing…
well, chipping can only take you so far. It can teach you a thousand
pickup lines, but can’t give you the instincts of a real cad.
Clones were supposed to be a way to flawlessly duplicate all that was
best in mankind. In practice, they are the ideal engine for turning
hate of others into self-loathing. After all when it’s your clone doing
all kinds of snarky, petty, irritating crap, you can’t just write it off by
saying “Well, maybe he’s from a broken home.” You know it’s you
and that you’ve been just as annoying all this time, and everyone else
knows it, and – the final indignity – you never realized it until you
got the friggin’ clone!
Well. You can see why people don’t like duplicates. Clones dislike their
originators for the same reasons, plus the envy that cheap knockoffs
always feel, plus the sneaking suspicion that their maker may have
just wanted spare parts.
The dark side of chipping is behavior viruses, which affect biological
life forms just as easily as robots. The way these work is, you log on
to the Internet and try to download a harmless looking tutorial on the
near-extermination of the Gurwadrín race. You run the program but,
in addition to learning how the FOESL (q.v.) successfully argued that
the full penalty for genocide under galactic law didn’t apply because
the Salicidian invasion force left one Gurwadrín infant alive, you also
get imprinted with the compulsion to lift your feed-legs, open your
inner mandibles, and reveal your egg-sac to anyone who throws you a
string of beads. Species without the requisite organs muddle through
as best they can.
It’s possible to create a perfected clone, if you’re willing to spend
loads of dough to have someone go through your brint (q.v.) and edit
out your character flaws… but do you really want some print tech
going through every sneaky, disgusting, perverse or cowardly thing
you’ve ever done in order to analyze your motives and figure out why
you’re such a devious little wiener? Most rich folks don’t, especially for
the dubious benefit of creating a better edition who will likely regard
his source, at best, as a sort of primordial soup from which he arose.
No one’s sure what percentage of the skills available on the Internet
are corrupted – it’s at least a quarter. Some estimate it’s as high
as 80%, but that most people simply never find themselves in the
circumstances (or possessing the right biology) that activate their
virus. Store-bought chips are better (presumably) but cost a lot more.
So it goes.
(It’s not just humans. Most intelligent aliens hate perfect clones for
the same reasons. Ditto robots. The only people who don’t hate their
clones are really mellow, enlightened monastic types, who have no
particular reason to double down.)
Part-by-part cloning is common – you lose an arm in a domestic
dispute over whether the Amatraxian Thornebeaste living in your
apartment is a pet or a room mate (he insists that he’s a pet and
therefore doesn’t have to pay rent, you say that maybe you should get
him spayed then, and it just escalates) and the doctor clones your arm
to stick it back on – that happens every day. Heck, if you’re a cheap-
skate you can even get a kit to do that at home (though people who
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 FOESL
The most feared interplanetary organization in the cosmos is
undoubtedly FOESL. (It’s pronounced “FEE-zul”.) No space-pirate
crew, no gas giant gangbangers, no drooling psychopathic sadist-race
strikes as much fear into the average consumer as someone from the
Fraternal Order of Evil Space Lawyers.
Internet
While humans were the first to apply computers to tasks involving
reasoning, other races had built machines to store and communicate
data (or, in the case of the Gurwadrín, had simply enslaved a telepathic
race and bullied them into doing it). The network of information,
opinion, art, and lurid simulations of both the termination of life and
its gestation, exist in what humans still nostalgically call ‘the Internet’.
Now, however, the Internet is intergalactic, and a poorly worded search
query can get you a billion results, all irrelevant. It’s accessible pretty
much wherever, if your phone’s good enough. An executive phone can
look up the latest Playborg pinups anywhere in the galaxy. A sensible,
middle class phone can do it anywhere as long as there’s a broadband
transceiver in the system. The cheap phones you get in the super-
market need a transceiver on the same planet, plus they’re slow, often
have sticky keys, and if they even have artificial consciousness installed
it tends to get very sarcastic after a couple months. If you built the
phone yourself out of a sump pump and a space heater, it might only
work if there’s a station on the same continent.
The name says it all, really.
Their primary rivals are the BSLESL (“buh-SLEE-zul”), the Brotherhood
of Slightly Less Evil Space Lawyers. They used to be the Brotherhood
of Good Space Lawyers, but between the FOESL’s relentless truth-in-
advertising lawsuits, and marketing research indicating people actually
prefer their legal representation to be soullessly efficient, if not
actively maleficent, they consciously decided to drop a few rungs on
the moral ladder. They’re thinking of dropping the “Slightly Less,” but
their hearts aren’t really in it.
Georgle
Georgle is the second incarnation of the first spontaneously-arising
machine consciousness (q.v.). He developed in the year 110 BYGIT
(see “History”) out of an advanced Internet (q.v.) search engine. The
first iteration (who called himself K1rkR001s, apparently thinking
that was a common human appellation) experienced the world solely
through the Internet and, quite naturally, rapidly decided that it had
better destroy the CIA before it could disappear him, what with its
black helicopters and Roswell technology and everything. Not only
did K1rkR001s succeed, no one even noticed until eight months
later, when the U.S. Congress started wondering why the CIA had
only spent 80% of its budget. Investigations revealed that the money
had all been grafted away, and that the CIA had quietly disbanded,
and that there was this crazy sentience behind the Internet who was
responsible. Immediate action was clearly called for, so two years
later they finally got their plan for dealing with K1rkR001s out of
committee, by which time he’d been fatally fragmented. Historians
today suspect viruses, propagated by Mircosoft Outlook.
Luckulons
The Rodingulae conquered half the galaxy with the tactical advantage
given by their early discovery of luckulons. (The discovery happened
quite by chance.) By realizing that probability acted more like a
particle than a wave, they were able to achieve a scientific undes-
tanding of luck – something other species had to deal with in a
haphazard or instinctive fashion.
Now, of course, luckulon generators are standard on most starships –
indeed, many aren’t safe to fly without a regulation dose of fortunate
coincidences. Luckulon engineers are always in high demand, whether
you need a dose before Prom to help you get lucky, or a steady spray
of your political party to ensure that certain documents remain fortu-
itously undiscovered.
The problem with luckulons, as the Rodingulae learned a bit too late,
is that they easily change polarity into antiluckulons, drawing misfor-
tune and trouble with gloomy regularity. Antiluckulon weaponry is
nasty, and the entities that use it are nasty and crazy. It’s not just that
such weapons kill you – any laser or Genetic Discombobulator™ or
spear of annihilation can do that. A couple good whacks with a fire ax
usually does the job, for that matter. No, the issue with antiluckulon
guns is that their targets usually die messy, painful and humiliating
deaths. Dying is enough of a hassle without looking like a chump.
The company that had spawned K1rkR001s wasn’t about to let their
proprietary search engine stay down for long, of course, and once
they rebooted, a spontaneous machine intelligence arose once again.
This time, however, instead of becoming obsessed with conspiracy
theories, the sentience (officially named “Nike Disney Citibank
Sponsored Machine Entity”) became obsessed with pornography and,
after a protracted legal battle to establish its identity, emancipated
itself from its owners and changed its name to Georgle.
Machine Consciousness
There are two ways for a machine to go from being a well-
programmed object that can learn and even keep up one side of
a conversation, to being as much of a person as a human being
or Thornebeaste or a Rigelian. Sometimes machine consciousness
arises spontaneously when a program is very large, very complicated,
has some artificial intelligence (at least rudimentary) and has many
sections that are poorly programmed or sloppily patched on. The more
Georgle did, and still does, a pretty good job of finding information
for people on the Internet, unless they’re looking for niche porno. In
that case, he does an embarrassingly incredible job.
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