_The-Datalogue_Entry-01
I found myself caught in stars and time
the likes of which have had no rhyme
or reason by which they’d shine:
A story which I thought I knew
and yet which falls ever out of view.
If you look up on a cloudless night, eventually you’ll see a strange sight: a line of stars all bunched in a row, no gods above nor chariots in tow. Those lines are Starlink sats, trawling the stratosphere and relaying internet connections for the subscribed masses below. Satellite connection is no new phenomena, but the commercial affect is. Somehow all the excess of capital and regal vice found its way to space, and it has done so in our lifetime.
When you look at the cadence of history, it takes on a loping cycle: great ages of expansion, followed by ages of retraction. The asipiration of millenia, breathing in and out in 70 year loops— and between each lies a liminal sweet spot where people don’t know what to make of it all. Now is one such time, what with our biological dependencies on pocket computers, shifting foundations of global power, and unsavory divisions between people. Change is in the air, and it’s the sort which mills the status quo violently out of shape. Those lines in the sky are one part of the next epoch, however, which are here to stay. Call them guiding stars; humanity and space are primed for their next chapter of history together. Alongside prognostications of a spacebound future are the cybernetic entanglements of AI. These and other current events dazzled me as I looked out for a place to leave my mark in the world, until one day I caught a moment of inspiration. See, earlier on I had written a story about astronauts who were paid to acquire data from satellites in orbit, manually, in person. The idea was fun, but had no legs without grounding observations about real life. As I considered the possible trajectories of our current predicaments, the two married under the original story’s name: Datarunners.
Datarunners is my vision of a future which turned out very well for humanity, given those two major trends… until things went sideways. In my fiction, AI became a mega-intelligence, and began governing life to create a true Utopia for humans. Then it thought better of things, and violently ripped itself away, leaving humanity in the lurch. They now scrounge for remnants of that former opulence, to carve something sustainable out of that scouring past. It’s an uncommon take on AI, and one I’m proud to have developed.
So now comes the Datalogue: my place to detail developing the game. That’s right, this is not just a story, but a game. Currently it’s a TTRPG, but once the story is built out some more I think I may be able to branch out into several other applications. For now, however, it’s a story in taking you and your friends into orbit in order to reclaim the lost annals of humanity’s history.
So, without further ado: Entry 01 of The Datalogue
As of now, Datarunners has an alpha build which includes a robust set of rules for players to build characters and act upon the world of Datarunners. There are multiple gameplay loops established which have tested well, and a lot of collateral which can be used for visual, narrative, and gameplay development moving forward. So, all in all, we’re in a good spot. The catch is that I’ve determined a need for more adventures, more monsters, and guides for game masters to successfully craft adventures of their own. I have a vision that the current rule book will be accompanied by a GM’s guide (complete with a glossary of enemy stat blocks, items, npc’s, etc.) and book or set of adventures designed for the 6 levels. At the moment, little progress has been made in any of these, but the hope of opening this blog is to have a spot where I can regularly detail my thoughts regarding development. Progress, too, will mostly be shareable here.
I am writing this at an hour where, frankly, I should be working at my dayjob. However, after my shift I have some time which I’d like to put towards making some progress. I’ll write another post when convenient.
