Introducing Airships & Aliens

Introduction

Airships & Aliens is a hybrid setting. The game begins on the planet Sibyl, inspired by the German Expressionism of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, the noir tradition perhaps best embodied in films like The Third Man, Terry Gilliam’s masterpiece Brazil, and the neo-noir Dark City which it inspired (alongside a healthy dose of real history from the early 20th Century). As the game progresses into higher tiers of play, threats from outside this terrestrial idyll begin to manifest, first appearing only at the margins of the story, before becoming the primary engine of conflict. This looming threat is known as the Apocryphon Galaxy, once a thriving interstellar community, now shattered by apocalyptic fascism. It takes its inspiration from films like Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Tarkovsky’s Stalker, and novels like Gene Wolfe’s Solar Cycle.

The pulps and the golden age of science fiction also loom large over the setting, representing a semi-mythic era of the previous generation, where heroism always won out over cynicism and violence could be wielded for moral ends. This was never true, and as such, only the aesthetics of this swashbuckling past survive. The expectations many players have about what constitutes a normal 5th edition game do not apply in Airships & Aliens, no matter how much the people in the setting wish they did. On Sibyl and across the stars, violence cannot be wielded to easily solve problems, NPCs have lives that are not beholden to the whims of characters, and doing the right thing is punished as often as it is rewarded. These grounding elements in the fiction of the setting are meant to remove any sense that player success is inevitable, which not only adds a more authentic feeling of accomplishment when players manage to accomplish their goals, but forces the GM to make failure interesting, rather than an unwanted intrusion on play.

In the service of faithfully and respectfully representing the oppressive systems lurking beneath much of the art and popular history which inspires this setting, Airships & Aliens does not shy away from depicting the evils of capitalism, colonization, and empire. However, while acknowledging these systems is important to not whitewashing the atrocities of the 20th Century, the primary reason for including these systems is not for simulation’s sake, but as a basis for a politics of play. Airships & Aliens explicitly rejects utopianism and the belief that imagining of a better world is the primary locus of a successful revolutionary project. It is above all a game about material conditions not ideas, the ways they limit us, the ways they open up opportunities, and the ways we can force them to change.

While the new millennium has seen the transformation of old orders, they have not disappeared. It is my hope this setting can provide concrete, tools for giving voice to experiences other games would render invisible, making an inventory of the things in the world we must change, and playing through the contradictions that would inevitably emerge from the new society we have decided to create from the ashes of what came before. It is my hope that the experience this setting provides is sufficiently novel and challenging to create a story you didn’t even know you were missing or have been looking for since you started playing games.

Photographed by Steven Meisel, Vogue, May 2007

Core Assumptions

These assumptions shape the Airships & Aliens setting:

The World is Changing. Sibyl is at a crossroads, on one side lies the path of fascism, championed by capitalists, colonizers, and imperialists. On the other side lies revolution, championed by anarchists, communists, and anti-colonial resistance fronts across the globe. Sibyl has been scarred by centuries of war to get here, and the old-world order is becoming untenable, but it is naive to think all those who would replace it have the same interests at heart. The players will have to navigate a world of opportunists, reactionaries, and zealots to find the scattered few willing and able to do right by the world. Or, they can watch it burn.

The World is Dying. Sibyl exists on the precipice of total environmental collapse; its vast natural wealth having been transmogrified into mere commodities; whose sole purpose is to be entombed in the sepulcher of capital itself. Those that fight against this sickness of the world are challenged on two fronts. The first and most obvious threat is the Imperial Core and its agents, but the pre-capitalist world was not some paradise, and there are Great Powers in the Periphery who care less about healing and stewardship of the planet and more about gaining a piece of the power and prestige they’ve been denied by their would-be overlords.

The World is Known. The desire to represent the real-world diversity of people, cultures, and world view sought to be central to any setting, but not all attempts to do so are equal. Often, what we call representation can be a vehicle for misinterpreting, distorting, and even actively mocking cultures from outside of the dominant landscape of the fiction we read and the games we play. The way these settings are crafted has real and tangible negative effects on the way we look at the real world, from 5th edition’s promulgation of racist doctrine as a constant and immutable landmark of its franchise to the constant reintroduction of tired and hackneyed portrayals of real-world cultural simulacra into our own bespoke worlds. Sibyl has no “exotic” locales or lost worlds to discover, no primitive yet noble savages of the frontier or steppe, and no inscrutable yet honorable foreigner from far lands. It merely has people and their homes.

The World is Mundane. Sibyl was once suffused with practitioners of the Uttered Word, whose knowledge of the occult and the world’s hidden virtues could coax forth majesty from mundanity. In this Misnamed Age of Peace and Wonder, the only true wonder is the efficiency by which death has been mechanized, the world of the past was one of Salt and Fire, where kings could conjure dynasties on the sole basis of their sorcerous might. In modernity, what little magic survives is found only on the fringes of the polite society, reduced to the purview of prestidigitators, snake-oil salesmen, and other backwards fools.

“100 Years Hence.” Frank Rudolph Paul, Science and Mechanics, 1931.