The Gravstrike Galaxy Background, Pt. 1

[jeff]

Here's the first section of the current draft of the Gravstrike world background document I've been working on between playtesting and iterating the rules of the game.

Enjoy, and let us know what you think!

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It’s the far future. Hovertanks battle for sport.

Piloting a turbine is power. In the arena and out of it. No one’s got more pull and no one can do more damage than the greatest pilot in the arena. Why else would I be here?

—Raptor Wills, Megastar Pilot

Hovertank battles — the Sport — take place in every corner of the galaxy. Its pilots are heroes (and villains), its tech is obsessed over, its dramas are watercooler conversation on a thousand worlds.

There's the Sport, and that's all. What else matters?

—Murdock, Megastar Pilot

Organized religion takes a distant back seat to enthusiasm for the Sport, and to the adoration of its megastars, intelligentsia, celebrity commentators, and even the big-name researchers who push its technology forward season after season.

The executives, the board members, and to a certain extent even the shareholders own and run the universe. There can be no doubt that the masses live under the collective thumb of galactic corporate power. But if this mega-commercial oligarchy put an end to the Sport? There'd be an uprising from the Arms of Orion to the Core Worlds.

— Wester J. Mercier, Doctor of Political Science, The Spinward University

If religion was once the opiate of the masses, the Sport is Opiate 2.0, a social nexus that both ties together an interstellar humanity and obscures the social compromises that fueled the galactic expansion.

The Sport’s celebrities are megastars and messiahs, its duels are polestars of popular attention, its technology pushes innovation in every area of human knowledge, its rules are known as the capital-L “Law.”

I love the Sport because of this: Do you see [duelist superstar] McKenna McKnight today? That's me in five years. I'm going to make it in the arena, I'm gonna drive a Falcon IX for Crowne, and everyone in the universe is going to know my name. Watch me.

— “Vapor Trail” Quale, Talented Rookie Duelist

Kids in every corner of the galaxy dream of becoming turbine pilots. Wage-slaves shake off their ennui to watch and re-watch duels and their commentary. Brand managers connive to associate their products and commodities with teams and pilots that will put their logos in front of trillions of eyeballs.

The most popular duelists in a community are its nobility. The most popular duelists in a system are its cultural ambassadors, for good or ill. The most popular duelists in the galaxy are humanity’s deities. And anyone can ascend to god-hood.

[Brainiac4]

Does the Sport serve a purpose other than opiate of the masses? It generates revenue through licensing, which is a big thing. But if it's so much a part of the fabric of society that trying to cancel it would provoke an uprising, is it hooked in to other things?

In Market Forces, Richard K. Morgan has arena dueling being used as the mechanism for settling corporate disputes. Would that work here? The Sport isn't just the thing we obsess over, the outcomes of duels affect things in the outside world.

A couple of nitpicky language things:

• "Megastar Pilot" used as a title/descriptor in advance of the usage of "megastar" in the text left me wondering whether Raptor was piloting a Megastar, and what kind of turbine that might be.
• "The Sport's celelbrities are megastars and messiahs..." and the usage of Megastar twice in titles left me wanting a Messiah reference for completeness.

The "Vapor Trail" quote doesn't feel right to me. The language is too correct, and the timeframe seems really long. I don't know how long it takes to make it to the top, but five years seems like a really long time.

And that make me think... what is the junior circuit like for Gravstrike?

[jeff]

I'm have a concern that trying to make arena dueling the very center of everything hurts verisimilitude. That's the key reason I've stuck to the Sport being a social phenomenon rather than (also), say, a mechanism for political resolution.

I've tried to suggest (less here than in some other internal things) that the Sport is a huge technology driver in the universe. Anything for status, so anything to win.

I picture the Gravstrike "junior circuits" being regional and coming in a million slices. It's not cheap to haul your turbine and your team across the galaxy, and so only a few teams with the highest levels of corporate backing (or their own money) tend to do so.

I think it's like baseball: There's little league, and bar leagues, and workplace softball teams, and four levels of minor leagues that only play against each other in regional configurations, and leagues in different countries, all of which look more or less the same at a casual glance, but which insiders will tell you are totally different because blah-blah-infield-fly-rule-blah-fewer-innings-blah-salary-caps-etc.

I think that leads to lots of interesting variation for possible play. It's one of the reasons cards have costs: So you can (theoretically) play a limited-cost game as opposed to one that's only governed by the mechanical rules of deck construction. However, I worry that I haven't yet hit the right level of complexity for that. Adding up the individual costs of 43 cards is, on the face of it, an awful idea, but that's what I've got at the moment. Mostly because there are higher-priority design problems to solve that get to be in line first.