Boom! Biosionics! - Star Master Log: Does the World Need This Yet?

Star Master Log

Jun 16

START HERE·EPISODE·SWN RULES EXPLAINED

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Jeff breaks down the design decision behind the Biosionics reveal in episode 24 — why he pulled psychics from the campaign before session one, and the discipline of withholding explanations until the world is ready for them. The Auction arc closes. Two years of slow-rolled strangeness finally lands.

He covers:

(00:05) Introduction: "Boom! Biosionics!"
(01:10) Why Psionics Got Pulled
(03:00) Does the World Need This Yet?
(11:14) The Force Problem
(13:15) Next Episode Preview

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Star Master Log 24 — Episode 24: Boom! Biosionics!
Host: Star Master Jeff
Runtime: 14:27
[00:00:05] Star Master Jeff: Hey everyone, Star Master Jeff here, and welcome back to the Star Master Log. So Haleyy is pressing gauze into Thorne's chest and back, on both sides of his body, because he was shot clean through just moments before by Rynn Kade, and the blood's coming up through his clothes, between her fingers, and she has nothing left to do. And then something shifts. Heat builds in her hands. Something long, dormant pushes through. And that's how the episode ends. And it's a payoff that required 24 episodes of setup, though probably not the way that you or most other people would expect. I wasn't writing towards this moment. I was just making sure that the world stayed [unprepared?] for it. [Note: transcription says "prepared" — likely mishear of "unprepared." Jeff to verify.] This is the Star Master Log for episode 24, Boom! Biosionics, the auction finale. If you haven't heard the main episode yet, go do that first. If you're into GMing, worldbuilding, or just curious about how the story takes shape, the Star Master Log welcomes you with open arms. So Stars Without Number has full mechanics for psychics. It's a full character class. You can roll a psychic at character creation, pick your disciplines, build around telekinesis or telepathy or precognition right from session one. Most Stars Without Number campaigns probably include a psychic on their team. They're sort of the magic user, the cleric. They are the ones that can bend reality. In fact, by not having them, people often ask me, what's going on with your game? Why am I listening to a game with essentially no space magic? Well, that's because I removed them. Before we even started the game, I took them out as a character option. I made a short list before session one of things I wanted off the table for now. Things that would, to me, feel cheap or overly familiar if they were available from the jump. Psychics were on it, along with a couple other things that I won't mention quite yet because they might become relevant later, but I kept that list short because I didn't want to box myself in and I didn't want to make the game unrecognizable to Stars Without Number enthusiasts. Anyways, the decision was made. Nobody in the entire sector has psychic abilities. Easy, clean cut. The SWN rulebook treats them as commonplace, I treat them as extremely rare to don't exist at all. So when Haleyy's hands start to glow and Thorne's wound closes, that moment for me lands the way that it does because nobody in this setting has ever seen anything like it before. Nobody has a category or a box to put Haleyy in for what she just did. For example, if we had two characters on the team that were psychic, they had rolled them up at character creation, then this moment would just be another psychic doing psychic things. Whenever somebody gets hurt, we'd be like, Haleyy can fix them. But instead of just a class feature activating, we have Haleyy discovering her psychic ability and not really having full control over it. Nobody has these abilities. Nobody really knows what to expect. Will she be able to use them again on call? Or is this just simply a glimmer of her future power that came about because her friend was in danger? But that's just psionics, and removing it was just one piece of a larger thing that I've been doing every session for 24 episodes now. And I want to be specific about what that thing actually is, because it goes far beyond me removing the psionics class. The question I ask every session, when I'm looking at the Stars Without Number book, at the short list of things I've removed, at the huge list of ideas I have for where this campaign could go, is, does the story need this yet? Take the fork. The crew's been aware of it since episode 8. That means for 16 episodes, nobody knew exactly what it did. It was clearly alien technology, clearly significant. Nobody had a framework for what it actually was or what it could actually do. But as we went on and on, we started to get hints. But the mechanics of it, the meat of it, was never fully explained. And I've had a choice, multiple times now to fully explain everything about the fork and fully lock in all of its powers. Have we even seen all of its powers yet? You don't know. And the crew certainly doesn't know either. Because in the dozen episodes between episode eight and now, I got to slowly reveal it and drip feed information and let it sit in the universe so that both the audience and the crew could understand and internalize what the fork means. So now in this episode, we have Rynn Kade, and she's extremely forthcoming. And she's very happy to explain what the fork is. And she gives them a lot more information than they ever had before.
[00:04:53] Star Master Jeff: And it's not because I was hiding the answer. It's because the answer is there waiting to be discovered. And through the mechanisms of the crew interacting with the sector at large, they were learning fragments of that information. They were piecing together the mystery in a very holistic and organic way. And the same thing was happening with Haleyy's latent psionic powers. But I'm always leaning on the side of mystery because once you understand something, it stops being strange. I don't want to say, psionics exist from session one. Okay, now we just have space magic. Great. That can be entertaining in some ways, but it turns something that could be an interesting character hook and a huge story beat into simply another mechanic in the game. The fork becomes comprehensible in episode 24 when Rynn Kade explains it. So three human minds are merging into a single entity by an alien process. We already know you can communicate across the sector with it. And all this other stuff the fork can do, I guess, depending on whether it's a void cultist fork or like an official fork from the alien civilization. And as we get more and more explanation, we remove more and more of the mystery. But if we just came right out and explained all of that, the moment the first fork came on screen, it wouldn't really hit the same. The explanation needs to earn its place because the mystery had time to build into something else first. People came up to me, both crew and audience, with theories about Haleyy and the fork. And I think that's awesome. And some of those theories were 100% correct. So very good, those people that sent me a message and chatted with me about this stuff. But the point is that it created conversation, and the mystery is an important tactile piece of the story that, if it were removed, would make the story less interesting. So every session there's this version of the question for me, is the world ready for this thing yet? And more often than I expect, the answer is, no, it's not. Not yet, at least. Because every session there are opportunities to make strange things ordinary. A convenient NPC with the right information, a data file in the wrong place, a villain who's been sitting on the answer for three episodes and finally wants to give a speech about it and is so impassioned about this cool void technology, that's Rynn Kade. I'm always asking whether explaining something is worth what it costs, because when Rynn Kade opened her mouth, a lot of the mystery of the fork vanished. But eventually that mystery has to come home, and it has to be explained. A reveal at the right moment lands harder than a mystery that's held onto for far too long. We all know tons of properties out there that tried to keep the mystery or had too many things all tangled up and couldn't narratively bring them together. Lost. It's better to have your long, your medium, and your short-run mysteries each closing at different times to give people that catharsis of understanding more about the world, and you don't necessarily always want the mystery to then turn into three more questions. But having said that, there is something to be said for knowing how long to prolong a mystery before giving the explanation. And because this is an improv show where the characters are dealing with emergent storytelling, sometimes these mysteries can go on a long time because it isn't just about me telling them what's going on. It's more about them exploring the world and having those decisions about how they explore reveal the emergent information about the mysteries they are wrapped up in. So let's think about what's actually going on in episode 24. Robert is a clone with fabricated memories of a life he never had, and he thinks he's the original. Dr. Voss is the uploaded consciousness of a scientist stored in an alien orb that the crew's been carrying since episode 8. The fork, which appeared multiple times, multiple forks, both human-made and alien-made, that do a variety of different things. One is just merging three human minds into a single entity that nobody really knows what to do with now. And then we have the void cultists, serving alien masters they've never met, following instructions left behind by a civilization that vanished thousands of years ago. There's communication across light years happening instantly, which was never possible. And now Haleyy comes out of the woodwork after all of these episodes, all of these flashbacks, all of these memories, learning about who she is, and she heals a bullet wound with her hands. Boom, Biosionics. We keep growing the mysteries and the weirdness. And I promise you, season over season, when you go back to the first episode, you won't even recognize the show anymore. You'll be like, oh, we had these four people walking around trying to mess around with the Drift Rats. And they had some guns and some guile, and that's all they had. And now we're in season 10, and who knows what's going on. Things are going to keep getting weirder. And eventually, we're all going to look back at episode one, season one, and be like, how in the hell did we get here? Because the gap is enormous between episode one and episode 24, not even thinking ahead to what season 10 might give us. It's nothing that I've planned necessarily, it's just that the distance between any two adjacent episodes is pretty small. Episode 9 to 10, reasonable step. 17 to 18, it's a reasonable step. You wouldn't even think about it. But when you do episode 1 versus episode 24 and look at them side by side, you can see that there's a gap where a lot of light comes through. And it's sort of like when you put a frog in boiling water and it jumps out. But put the frog in cold water and raise the temperature one degree at a time, and it doesn't really notice how warm it's gotten until much later. Perhaps until it's too late. I'm not saying I'm going to boil my cast, but the principle holds. You can take someone somewhere if you lead them there one step at a time, even if they have no idea where you're going. So each of these things arrive in a sector that did not have them yet. One at a time, we became aware of them, the crew gets to explore them, and we get to go along with them on that journey. I try to introduce things slowly and let them sit. The weird things get weirder and weirder and weirder, and the sector that once made perfect sense at the beginning still makes sense, but only because we've gotten used to it. For example, in the original Star Wars trilogy, we had almost no Force users at all. Luke, Vader, the Emperor, Obi-Wan, that's it.
[00:11:14] Star Master Jeff: I mean, you're talking about just New Hope? We just had Obi-Wan and Vader. The Force feels cosmic and weird and strange and unfathomable. Nobody can touch it. Nobody truly understands it but these two paragons of the past.
[00:11:30] Star Master Jeff: Contact with it feels like contact with something genuinely outside the normal experience even when exposed through a sci-fi property like Star Wars, and you're expecting weird things. But every time we get a new film we get new Jedi. Before we have hundreds if not thousands of Jedi running across the galaxy. It's a skill set. It's a profession. It's a thing that someone could have a career in if they were born with the right particles, I guess. The rarity was load-bearing, and as we removed the rarity of Jedi, it eroded the stakes with it. We like the weirdness, but it has to be something that's rare and unique and introduced slowly. So Haleyy's Biosionics moment lands because of the 23 episodes before it. Because nobody had ever healed a bullet wound before with their bare hands. They didn't do it in episode 3, 9, 17. People have been shot before in this campaign. It's happened multiple times. And no one's ever been healed by someone else psionically or with space magic. The crew's run into a lot of strange things over a year, and none of it prepared them for this. Because none of them was this. There was no psionics. There was no way to describe something like this. No one would have ever expected that there was space magic about to come out of the woodwork. And it did. And I think this is a really good narrative trick that a lot of great authors do. I certainly didn't invent it. I look up to a lot of really awesome authors like Adrian Tchaikovsky and Brandon Sanderson, obviously the great JRR Tolkien, all do this trick of taking you into a normal space like Hobbiton, and then slowly expanding you out into the weird, the ring, the ringwraiths, until we're all of a sudden facing off against a great fiery eye in a distant land. And it all feels totally normal. But if we had jumped from Hobbiton straight to Mordor, you'd be going, what the hell? This is weird as hell. And so we want to slow roll it. We want it to go in dribs and drabs. Because in episode one, the crew stole a ship from the Drift Rats. And in episode 24, Haleyy healed a bullet wound with her bare hands. It's the same crew. It's the same campaign. We just walked here slowly, like Frodo in the Ring to Mordor. Slowly. Over the course of a year. And we're not done yet. So on that note, the next episode of the Dark Star Adventurecast, the crew is patching up the Scapegoat, and they're tracking down an old contact of Haleyy and Roberts in Spigot, the port city on the other side of Sibylen. She's a black market doctor who can run the scans Haleyy needs to get some answers, and a source of what the ship is missing, a new ownership module. None of them are exactly happy about the reunion, but they don't have a lot of options, and Spigot turns out to be less quiet than they were hoping. Well, that's it for my time today. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll catch you on the next one.