Annex I. Programació anual del SOC

The universe is huge and if you take into account the possibilities for multiple universes, timelines and other oddities of science fiction that becomes even bigger. The advantage for us in Machinations of the Space Princess is that this means that there’s enough room for everyone’s games to coexist as some sort of amorphous over- game with everyone able to share their war stories, aliens, monsters, empires and dramatic world-changing events without it having to screw up anyone else’s game. With the universe being at least thirty-billion light years across and with faster-than-light travel of all sorts existing in games it should be relatively easy for players to take their characters from game to game and for Games Masters to run games for anyone who has a Machinations character of appropriate level to hand.

A big universes also means that there’s plenty of room for kinds of wild and crazy nonsense and for that wild and crazy nonsense to get lost in forever if it turns out to be too stupid or game-destroying. You’ve got the space, time and scope to do just about anything - no matter how weird and strange - you want to with this game. So go nuts.

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Sexy

Machinations is meant to be sexy. That

doesn’t just mean everyone has their bits flopping out all over the place though the sexy aesthetic for both male and female beings is entirely appropriate and to be encouraged. Hallmarks of the science fiction writing and fantasy art of the sixties, seventies and eighties were relaxed attitudes to nudity, sex and interspecies relationships so of course that forms a part of what Machinations is about, but besides all that it also means:

The technology is sexy and desirable The guns, the shields, the armour, everything is better if it’s cool in some way. I don’t mean everything should look like it’s been made by Apple because that’s all a bit too clean and dainty for the Heavy Metal world of Machinations. Some things are going to be sleek and shiny in that way but when I mean sexy and cool I’m talking about WWII fighter planes, souped-up hot rods, heavy pistols, biker jackets, chrome motorcycles and bling. This is the kind of stuff that never goes out of style, a worn-in aesthetic of the much loved and the time- tested.

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The world is tactile and sensual

When you’re describing things in the game you should, perhaps, be a bit more florid than you usually are. Taste, smell, sound, sight, touch all the senses need to be present whenever they can be to make the players feel the situation that they’re in. It’s a grubby, worn, soft world where the seats are broken in and the favourite spacesuit is patched. Food and drink are worthy of description, as is the lush, musky scent of whatever gods-forsaken weed that alien hippy is smoking and blowing in your face. Encourage the players to experience the world through the senses of their character and build your descriptive vocabulary to cope.

The people (and things) have base motivations

There’s a thing in psychology called ‘Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs’ which is a pyramid divided into layers. The bigger layers at the bottom are the more important and direct things a person needs to live while as you travel up the pyramid the smaller sections are things that are less essential but which we nonetheless want. Physiological needs form the bottom and these are things like air, food, water, shelter and sex.

Safety forms the next rung and constitutes things like maintaining resources, not being attacked, steady employment and so on. Belonging is the next layer. Love, intimacy and friendship.

Esteem is the next one up. Confidence, self- esteem, respect from others.

Actualisation is the very top and smallest section. This consists of things like creative outlets, moral rectitude and acceptance. The baser the need the more essential and important it is and in the world of

Machinations the baser needs are often

the ones that are missing and need to be secured. The universe is one of conflict and difficulty and the kinds of people that characters are - and interact with - are likely to be criminals, mercenaries and others who are still trying to secure the bottom two layers of the pyramid, let alone anything else.

People (and things) in Machinations will tend to have simple and understandable motivations. The desire for food, sex, money and power being being the top four.

Charm and looks are as important as blasters and steel

A silver tongue and tight silver hot-pants should be as powerful in their own way as any number of blaster rifles or starships. A moment of distraction or a little flattery in the right ear can tip the tide of battle or the fate of planets. This needn’t be limited to interactions with living beings (or robots) a whispered plea to a broken hyperdrive might get it going and a kiss to the barrel of a blaster rifle, ‘Clementine’, might tease one last shot out of a flat powercell.

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It’s a world for grown-ups

The universe of Machinations is an adult universe with adult themes of violence, sex, drugs and rock n’roll. The naughty side of human nature is also, most often, the fun side and if you look at what we do with modern technology, computers, advertising, cities, crime, drugs and sex and dial it up to eleven you have a pretty good model for what many worlds and places in

Machinations should be like.

Sleazy

Oh, you know what ‘sleazy’ means, you’ve used the internet. It’s a moralising judgement upon a person, a place, a district. If something is ‘sleazy’ it is shabby, dirty, vulgar; it’s corrupt and disreputable, cheap and shoddy. Sleaze is a certain aesthetic, that of the bar and the strip club, that of biker clubs and bawdy houses, of adult book stores. When it has a certain pretension to class you might call it burlesque, when it doesn’t you might call it whorish.

It’s the back alleys and the frontier worlds that Machinations is typically played. Its where the rich and powerful come to slum it and indulge their peculiar tastes. It’s the prefab town with the molly-house on a hostile world. It’s a place populated by whores, strippers, rent boys, drunks, drug addicts, thugs, loan sharks and dealers. Its gambling dens and casinos, resorts and clubs; it’s the cantina and the palace, Soho and Hooters, it’s a New Jack Space Station, the Hellfire Club and the back alley fumble.

Even if the world itself isn’t dirty, the people who inhabit it are. Very little black and white, many shades of grey.

Swords

A problem with a lot of science-fiction battles is that they end up being everyone behind cover blatting away at each other with lasers. That’s fine and dandy so far as it goes and the temptation is understandable when you’re carrying a weapon that can burn a moon out of the sky on your hip but it does mean you tend to miss out on cool things like sword fights and brawls. That’s not particularly in-genre when you have Malcolm Reynolds kicking a guy into an engine or backflipping Jedi having wire-fu lightsabre battles.

Machinations tries to address this - at least

a little bit - by making people harder to hit and hurt at range (because of shields) and thereby making close combat a bit more desirable, and a bit more possible to get into. The other half of this equation is to play up how cool close combat is, to make it culturally and aesthetically desirable with duels, bar brawls, parried blaster bolts and interesting and cool close combat weapons that make people want to get into a tussle. Face to face combat is more personal and also gives a lot more opportunity for heroes and villains to trade quips and insults without being drowned out by the drumbeat of a heavy assault gun.

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Sci-Fi

Machinations is a science-fiction game, but

not so much a serious and hard-science based game but rather a space opera and science-fantasy game. What this really means is that you replace magic items with technological doodads, magic itself with psionics and ‘A wizard did it’ with ‘SCIENCE!’ Like the ‘big universe’ screed above what this is about is giving you as broad a canvas and as many paints as you need for the players to run wild and your adventures to be big, bold and brassy. Science fiction means infinite new and strange worlds to explore, it means instant travel between different stars, it means gigantic fleet battles and exotic phenomena.

The boundless imagination of science fiction means you can come up with exotic weapons, drives, vehicles, aliens and artefacts on even the flimsiest of justifications and a thin veneer of pseudo- scientific gobbledygook. You want a giant robot that in any feasible world would sink to its knees in the soft dirt? A) Ignore that fact and B) if anyone asks it has some kind of binding-field in its shoes. Also shut up. Also its shooting at you this turn.

The Gant are dedicated to bringing order to the galaxy, cleansing chaotic systems.

The principles of ‘sexy, sleazy, swords and sci-fi’ can, of course, by combined together into one terrible and devastating whole:

Genetically reared gladiators are valued as playthings by rich, aristocratic women just as much as they are valued for their killer instinct.

Robotic geisha worm their way into the confidences of important and wealthy men, only to be turned into killing machines at a pre-determined signal. A disagreement over whose turn it was for a lap dance turns into blaster-fire and stabbings between two lady bounty- hunters.

Mars needs women. Venus needs men.

These mutants have only one thing on their mind.

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Kill Things &