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msmcnevertweet · 1 year

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Into the Blind, and Wot I Like about Space Stuff

I've been working on this for a while in between breaks updating As the Sun Forever Sets. Why is my idea of a break from writing games just writing a different game? I have dumb bitch disease. I wanted to talk about some of the inspirations for it.

Welcome to The Rim

Into the Blind is a sci fi game about a group of gig economy workers living contract to contract on the roiling, wild edge of space. It's about CRT screens, mechanical keyboards, junction boxes, pipes and wires. It's about the unknown, the stresses of capital, and horror - visceral and ephemeral. It's about working hard jobs in dangerous conditions for little pay, and the chance of a better life.

You are a Freelancer - Salvager, Shipbreaker, Courier, Bodyguard, Assassin, First Responder, Negotiator, Investigator, Debt Collector. A Freelancer is any and all of these, depending on the contract. You'll take whatever you can get to make ends meet.

Every job you do balances your need to pay the rent on your ship against your desire to remain alive. Grab what you can, get paid, and stay alive.

If this sounds cool to you, you can grab a free preview (with the old name) below.

Let me show you my favourite space things

Ok, time for the self indulgent ramblings.

(Potential) Spoilers for: Gravity, Interstellar, Contact, Arrival, The Expanse, the Alien series, the Thing, Annihilation, Homeworld: Cataclysm and Magnetic Rose.

Physics and Feelings at 10km/s

There are a lot of sci-fi horror TTRPGS out there. Like a lot a lot. Mothership, Death in Space, the Alien RPG, You're in Space and Everything's Fucked, the list goes on and on. Not that that matters - people should make the games they wanna make and I wanted to make a scary sci-fi game with spaceships, so eh fuck it.

Something I realised while writing stuff for Into the Blind and working on the system is that the themes and feeling of a lot of the sci-fi stuff I'm into didn't revolve around a towering monster skulking around dark spaceship. Like, sure, Into the Blind will have a nasty alien somewhere, I don't need to say that I like Alien or talk about why it's good (I do, it is, and I'm going to), but there's more to write about than monsters. Space is already intrinsically stressful and horrifying:

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Neil Degrasse Tyson and Chris Hadfield can shut the fuck up, Gravity has some of the scariest, tensest scenes in a movie I've ever seen in my fucking life. After watching this you could never pay me enough to go to space. The only enemy here is inertia, the only monster are the principles of physics that cause a cloud of debris to whip through orbit at 22,000 miles an hour.

Aside from the spectacle, Gravity is a film about finding the will to go on when you have nothing to live for and everything's against you. It's heavily implied that Dr Stone went to space because she's tired of existing on earth (or at least that's my read). She wants mercy and relief from the pain of her life, and watching it you want to gift it to her so badly, but the debris field crashes into her life over and over. It's a relentless, uncaring solar tide that returns like clockwork when to fuck her up any time she gets a break.

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These extreme forces also generate incredible tragedy and loss. Interstellar is kind of a dumb movie but despite the memes about this scene it always gets me. You don't know what you have until it's gone, and sometimes the distance between you knowing you've lost something and it becoming lost can (thanks to black holes and weird gravity stuff) slip by you in an age that feels like an instant.

Both Gravity and Interstellar have soft, beating hearts encased behind the layers of radiation shielding, technobabble and worn metal, and when the colossal forces that make the universe turn rip it open, they're laid bare.

That's a fucking cool thing to make a game about!

Indistinguishable from Magic

I'm not a big brain science person, when it comes to wormholes, relativity, folding space time and all that, I don't really get it. I just know that it's cool as hell and opens the door to powerful character stories about finding meaning and confronting your feelings at the edge of our understanding of reality.

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Contact and Arrival are two sides of the same movie to me. Both are heavily grounded in big Theory and big Science Words, both are about powerful sciencey girlbosses who've lost something dear to them (one in the future, one in the past.) Contact leans more towards the hard science approach, but both are at their best when they're balanced on the edge of the plausible and the implausible. They're both about the incredible, incomprehensible nature of the universe. They're both about people who change the world, in ways both vast impercievable to everyone else.

They're both stories of hope and benevolence, but Contact frames this through 90's optimism and the power of nations working together towards a common goal (it's so optimistic, even the villain-coded megacorporation decides to help out, which uhhhh), Arrival frames these themes through personal tragedy - Dr Banks pays a high price to save humanity from itself.

Behind the calculations and clipboards and theories, these are stories about personal discovery, love and heartache.

These are also fucking cool things to make games about!

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Magnetic Rose is probably the single biggest influence on Into the Blind - there's a full adventure heavily inspired by it in the preview. It's just so good. The visual design and animation are simultaneously grounded and real yet brilliantly beautiful and surreal. It's tragic gothic horror at the dark, gritty edge of space, and it's so good at being sad. The penultimate scenes in heart of the tomb-like space station, surrounded by rank brown water and decaying metal are heartwrenching. Heintz is tormented by visions of his past and you feel it so hard. The film doesn't care to tell you how this is all happening - are his memories ghosts? holograms? hallucinations? It only cares about the why, and it's incredible.

Breathable Air Prepayment Meters

It's been ages since I watched The Expanse, so I'm not gonna dwell on it too much, but what I remember focused heavily on how capital and government care little about those they govern and sell to.

The level that our existence is monetised and used as a cudgel against us currently can surely only expand along with our expansion into the stars. You can go there right now if you have enough money to do so, and when life beyond earth becomes feasible, the companies that financed it will need someone to clean the ducts and polish the solar arrays. The amount of things that can be sold to you can only increase out in space. You think rents are high now? Wait till you see the price of a 1 bedroom apartment in orbit around Mars. Add nice breathable mix of nitrogen and oxygen to your list of monthly outgoings. You think you'll be able to repair your C02 scrubbers without voiding the warranty? Fuck no.

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The Alien movies are obviously (despite what some grognards on twitter dot com will tell you) deeply about extreme capitalism. The galaxy is ruled by companies that could not care less about you, and the bottom line is all that matters. This kinda matters less and less as the films wear on, but the first 3 are all about working class people sacrificed on the altar of the interstellar dollar.

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Alien 3 in particular has a lot of problems, but the edgy teen in me is still really fond of this scene. It's doing a Big Foreshadow (Do you get it? The alien is like.. the flower he's talking about right? But the flower is bad?) But it feels like an appropriate lament for prisoners on the ass end of space. Despite what the company wants you to believe, the inmates of Fury 161 don't deserve to die, aren't expendable.

We all have flowers within us waiting to grow, out from the shadow of capital.

You might've noticed mentions of a nasty guy in those last clips.

Ok fine, also Monsters

We all love a little nasty guy, I cannot resist the pull of the weird monster that does Big Themes. Like I said, there's so much TTRPG stuff focused on them for good reason And space is ripe for the nastiest of guys.

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There's really nothing more to be said about The Thing, it just fucking rules. It's a movie that cares as much about what a monster can do to peoples bodies as what it can do to their minds and relationships.

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What a horrible fate for Sheppard. The idea of Annihilations mutant bear is just so sinister it makes my gut drop whenever I re-watch it. Again, not much else to be said about this movie. It rips.

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Homeworld: Cataclysm is a weird game. It's a survival horror.. strategy game? Set in space? Where you never see a single person?? And somehow it's voice acting and plot is incredible???

The Beast is the nickname for the microorganism that emerges from the millenia old wreckage the mining vessel Kuun-Lan happens upon whilst scouring deep space for valuable minerals. The threat it presents is so real and visceral, it's one of those "if this hits our planet, it's so over" monsters, and it's obscenely scary and gruesome. Even the Bentusi, a race of nigh-on ageless benevolent machine beings are absolutely terrified, and try to abandon the galaxy in the face of it (they fear their biological minds will be trapped in their machine bodies if they're taken over by The Beast, locked in and forced to watch what it does to the galaxy. Damn.)

The scene where you and your fleet fight the Bentusi as they try to evacuate known space to force them to help you is intense and incredible. You're fighting gods, and all you can do is crash against their incredible technology again and again like a stiff breeze, pleading for help and humanity. You shame them into taking responsibility for helping the mortals in the galaxy against this ancient threat. That's the fear inspired by The Beast.

Thank you for coming to my Space Ted Talk

I told you it was self indulgent huh. Hopefully this goes some way to explaining what I'm going for with this game. Not only monsters, but the experiences of people trapped by incredible forces of nature, corporations and circumstance. Not only horror, but exploitation, sadness, love, longing and loss. Thanks for reading.

Again, if you want to check out Into the Blind, you can get the free preview below, and follow me on Itch to get notified for when game releases (soon? idk)

#ttrpg #indie ttrpg #ttrpg design #horror #science fiction #y'all ever go on a spaceship and cry #incredible self indulgence #am I accidently doing a Substack on tumblr dot com?

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