Far Horizon: an after-action review

Far Horizon is a near-future hard-SF scenario for Cepheus published by Zozer and written by Paul Elliot. It is set in Zozer’s Orbital 2100 universe, although it’s fully self-contained and you don’t need that book to run Far Horizon.

I recently played the scenario online over two sessions. I bought the scenario between sessions, and now that we have completed the adventure, I have read it.

(I’m unfamiliar with Cepheus, but I do know Traveller, which I gather it’s based on. So if my comments on the mechanics are slightly off, that may be why.)

I’ve tried to keep this review spoiler-free, but I expect a few minor spoilers have crept in. (Think of them as teasers!)

The scenario

Far Horizon concerns a deep space mission to the Kuiper Belt. The crew have surveyed Pluto (their planned mission) when mission control tells them that a rogue xenoplanet (given the name Tartarus) will pass through the Kuiper Belt, giving them a 96-hour window to explore it. So six months later, our heroes emerge from cryosleep with the ship in orbit around Tartarus and 96 hours to complete their mission.

The conflicts in the mission are primarily environmental – the PCs will be battling time pressures (balancing the mission with their need to take breaks) and the sheer peril of exploring an exoplanet at -180C.

Far Horizon shares many similarities with the Aurora Horizon freeform larp that I’ve been writing since January. They both involve sending a manned mission into the icy depths of space, with crewmembers coming out of cryosleep and the opportunity to explore a cold icy world. So I was keen to both complete the adventure and buy the book. (I wonder if Far Horizon influenced my ship title? It’s possible.)

The DRV Far Horizon

The first part of the book concerns the DRV Far Horizon itself. The ship is a TL9 1000 dton deep space exploration vehicle. Although the book has Traveller/Cepheus stats for the ship, it really feels like a genuine Earth ship. I could imagine it popping up in a future series of For All Mankind or Allen Steele’s Near Space series. (Or in an ALIEN scenario, come to think of it.)

13 pages are dedicated to the DRV Far Horizon, including ship stats, a tour by one of the engineers, four pages of deck plans and the two auxiliary craft. These details are worth the price of admission, even before you include the adventure.

The only downside to all this material is that we didn’t actually use much of it during the game. (At least as players, maybe the GM was referring to them more.) I don’t think I ever looked at the deck plans.

The crew

The DRV Far Horizon has a crew of 12, and stats for each are provided, making it easy to run as a one-shot with each player controlling two or three characters.

When I played, we were originally going to have six players, each controlling two PCs. When it came to the second session, only three players could make it, so while we controlled our two original PCs, we controlled the others as and when we needed to. (It might have been smarter to have divided them all up between us at the start of the second session, but we didn’t do that.)

As is usual in Traveller games, the characters are just stats. There’s nothing to help a player bring the character to life. If I were to run Far Horizon, I’d ask open questions to create bonds and backstory between the characters: Who do you admire? Who irritates you, and why? Who is your closest friend? What happened on Pluto? That sort of thing. (And had I published Far Horizon, I would have included that in the adventure material.)

The characters are a bit odd, though. Given that these are specialists who have trained for years for this mission and are presumably the cream of the crop, there are a few peculiarities.

For example, one of my characters was Mission Specialist Shireen Langstrom: 648AB8 Age 38 Terms 5 Survival 1, Geomorphology 1, Mechanics 2, Engineering 1, Vacc Suit 0, Comms 0 

Shireen has a dexterity of 4. That gives her -1 on Dex rolls. And if she’s in a vacc suit, that’s another -1 (because in this world, vacc suits are cumbersome). I don’t see how Shireen passed the medical! (And Shireen isn’t the only one with a low physical stat.)

I brought this up during play (when I needed to make a Dex roll and discovered my penalty to roll), and one of the other players suggested that maybe it was a glitch from the cryofreezers. Maybe Shireen had the shakes or nerve damage from spending so long in the state-of-the-art-but-ever-so-slightly-experimental cryofreezers. That would have been a great part of the scenario – starting the game with the post-cryosleep medical and discovering that some characters have suffered some sort of damage. (I have used this idea in my Aurora Horizon freeform larp, although with memories rather than physical characteristics, as discussed here.)

Skill redundancies

Another slight oddity is that some skills are in short supply. Notably, there is only one medic. I am pretty sure that flight training would have covered all sorts of skills that the team might conceivably need, and I would expect several people to have Medic-1 or Medic-0.

Similarly, there are only three characters with pilot skill. The scenario talks about the lander needing a pilot and a co-pilot, so three characters with the pilot skill aren’t enough. One lander catastrophe and you’re down to only one pilot!

So I would rebalance the skills a little.

Vacc Suits

Far Horizon goes into some detail on vacc suits, and customising your suit is part of character creation.

Fundamentally, wearing a vacc suit makes doing almost anything harder. They’re cumbersome and awkward, and wearing one means you get a penalty for many rolls.

There are also general rules for working in a vacuum suit, along with rules for donning and doffing a suit in a hurry, and rules for carrying out hard work in a suit. Failure isn’t necessarily fatal – Far Horizon includes a table of suit malfunctions that range from inconsequential (erratic suit instruments) to irritating (visor keeps fogging up) to more consequential (suit puncture).

I liked the way the vacc suit rules add to the hard-sf atmosphere of working in an unforgiving environment.

Tartarus and the mission

The xenoplanet, Tartarus, is then detailed. This comes with a minigame involving how much the players can get done in their 96 hours, with criteria for success.

Early scans result in areas of the surface being highlighted for further analysis and exploration. The crew won’t have time to visit them all, however, so they must pick and choose. And as they do so, Tartarus will slowly reveal its secrets.

Far Horizon is very much a resource management game. As well as fatigue, players must balance the skills of the away team, the lander’s fuel reserves, oxygen supplies and more.

Exploring Tartarus is hazardous, and rolls are needed during descent and for landing (and for taking off, once the players are finished with an area). And more hazards await on the surface: Tartarus does not give up its secrets easily.

Failing a roll doesn’t necessarily result in disaster – many complications may result in the away team needing to cut short their mission, or becoming stranded.

Finally, there’s another problem that those left behind aboard the DRV Far Horizon must deal with. I’m not going to talk about it because I don’t want to reveal too much.

Getting home

Far Horizon wraps up with an explanation of what’s really going on and rules for getting home, which get harder the longer the crew overstay their 96-hour deadline.

Playing Far Horizon

I played Far Horizon over two online sessions, taking about eight hours in total using Roll20. We had five players and the GM in the first session, and three plus the GM in the second. I much preferred the second session, but I found Roll20 was struggling with six of us. (I prefer smaller groups.)

So during the first session, we conducted the initial surveys and landed on Tartarus. Our commander put himself in charge of managing time and resources – I was struggling with dropping out, so it was good that he could do that. We visited two sites on Tartarus and had to deal with the lander icing up.

In our second session, Roll20 worked better for me, and I helped with the planning. I don’t normally enjoy tracking things like encumbrance, but doing it as a team was fun.

I had decided that one of my characters wanted to make a mark, so while on the ground, I was winched into an ice canyon in search of strangely-coloured ice and explored a strange cave. I paid for my troubles – I twisted my knee getting out of the canyon, but the doc put me on painkillers so I could carry on.

Our game finished with our pilots making tricky piloting rolls to deal with an unexpected situation, and we left Tartarus for Earth in good time to get home.

One thing I really liked was Traveller’s skill chains. One of the players suggested we use them for several of the tasks, and the GM readily agreed. So we used them a fair bit, whenever we were working as a team. (I’m surprised that sort of approach doesn’t appear in more games – I will certainly use it more in future.)

Anyway, I had a good time. There was perhaps a little less inter-character banter than I prefer, but Far Horizon really did feel like a hard-science SF game, and I’ve not played one of those in a long time.

Pedant’s corner

And because I’m me, I can’t help but be a little pedantic. Now that I’ve read the book, I spotted a few typos and other glitches, such as unfinished quotation marks and inconsistent paragraph breaks.

On page 37, Tartarus spends “millions of years of interstellar wandering”, but on page 56, it’s calculated that it’s been travelling for less than a million.

I found the layout slightly unpleasant to read. Text is formatted into a single justified column about 90 characters long, which is longer than typographers advise (this Wikipedia page suggests 66 as an ideal length). And being justified (and some of them are many lines long), I sometimes found it easy to lose my place.

The crew sheets starting on page 24 don’t include the characters’ zero-rated skills.

So it could do with another proofread – and ideally reformatting the pages to be easier to read.

Overall

Overall, I’m really pleased with Far Horizon. A great ship and an intriguing hard-SF adventure.

Am I going to run it? Probably not, but I’m pleased I bought it. I expect I’ll use the Far Horizon deck plans and stats at some point in the future.

Get Far Horizon here.

FTL in the Harvesters universe

In science fiction, each “universe” has its own FTL travel.

Star Trek has warp.

Star Wars and Larry Niven’s Known Space have hyperdrives.

Babylon 5 has hyperspace.

Alan Dean Foster’s Commonwealth books have the KK Drive.

Tim White's KK-Drive starship

Dune has space folding. 

Allen Steele’s Coyote series has star bridges.

The Mote in God’s Eye (Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle) has the Alderson Drive.

Traveller has jump drive.

John Scalzi’s Interdependency Series has the Flow. (And here’s a short story about its origin.)

The Expanse has the ring gate and its slow zone.

So each universe has its own way of breaking the rules of physics and travelling faster than light.

And many of them are the same kind of thing, just relabelled.

The Uplift Saga

Then there’s David Brin’s Uplift Saga. While the first book doesn’t really mention FTL travel, when it came to the second, Startide Rising, I was amazed to discover that the various alien races (and there is a multitude of them) use a wide range of FTL drives to suit their temperaments.

I can’t remember the different types of FTL drive (Startide Rising is on my to-reread list), and I can’t remember if I still have GURPS Uplift, or where it is if I do still have it.

So I did the same with my series of first contact freeform larps. Here’s the current list:

• Hyperdrives, which use hyperspace as a shortcut. Hyperdrives may still take many months to travel between stars, however.
• L-points are nexus points between stars. Travel is instantaneous, but the points are often close to (or sometimes within) stellar masses.
• Wormhole drives create wormholes between different parts of spacetime. Travel through the wormholes is instantaneous, but time is taken getting to and from where the wormholes can be created (deep space).
• Star bridges are stable wormholes constructed between two locations. Travel across the star bridge is instantaneous.
• The flow is an n-dimensional current that flow drives access. Travel using the flow is in one direction only.
• Teleporters convert a ship and its contents into information sent through spacetime (at the speed of light) or a wormhole.
• And some races even use slower-than-light travel.

Travel through conventional space is only possible at speeds below the speed of light. As a result, species that use STL often put their crews into cryosleep.

And we have a date for Aurora Horizon’s premiere

And we now have a date. After a bit of too-ing and fro-ing, I’m running it at the end of May.

The game files are mostly prepared, so between now and then I’m casting, sending out characters, redecorating the game space (a Discord server) and preparing the game instructions for when I run it again.

So I’ll have to think about something else to write about until then.

And after that: Consequences 2025

I’ve also submitted Aurora Horizon for Consequences 2025. That will be face-to-face in November, which means changing the format of handouts and contingencies, so I will do that over the next couple of weeks.

Aurora Horizon design notes

You can see other parts of my design notes here:

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 – Part 5 (this one)

Aurora Horizon design notes #4: The magic and the dip

I’m at that point in writing Aurora Horizon where I’ve written all the plots (in their own separate Word documents) and I’m now copying the text into the blank character template.

And it’s magical.

The process

Here’s what I do:

1. Make a copy of my blank character sheet template. (Or, just as likely, take the last character I did and just delete all the old stuff.)
2. Change the filename, title and footers to the new character.
3. Copy the opening paragraphs that introduce the character and set the scene for everything that follows. (Although I deviated from this point, as noted below.)
4. Go into each plot document and copy the relevant text (in this case, plot background, other people information and/or goals). As I do this, I colour the original text in the plot document purple, so I know I’ve copied it.
5. Rearrange the text so it’s in an order that makes sense to the character. So the “important” background is covered first, with incidental bits coming later. I put the list of other characters (Other People) in cast list order. Goals are ordered roughly in line with the background, so the goals that I think are most important to the character are first.
6. Read through the whole character and make sure it flows properly, editing and correcting as I do.

It’s amazing; each character is finished as soon as you’re done (and it only takes 15-20 minutes or so).

And because the work of writing the plots was done sometime in the past, it feels like the characters are popping out, fully formed, with barely any effort.

And suddenly, before you know it, you have a freeform larp virtually ready to run.

The dip

I haven’t found Aurora Horizon an easy freeform to write.

Many projects go through a challenging phase, a dip. Writing a freeform larp can be no different.

And I hit a dip with writing Aurora Horizon, which is probably the biggest dip I’ve had when writing any of these larps.

I think that maybe because Aurora Horizon has been a difficult freeform for me to write. I’ve not written an exploratory game before, so much of this is new to me. There are things I have ideas for, and some that I can’t figure out how to do. 

(As an example, I wanted to have some kind of memory overlay plot going on, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it justice. So I’ve canned it, which is a bit of a shame. And at one point I had a dead co-pilot, but I dropped that sub-plot as well.)

And there will be exposition dumps that I can’t see a way of avoiding.

Pushing through the dip

What I do know is that my process for writing freeforms works.

I knew I needed to “simply” push through the dip. Keep following the process. Write a plot. Then another one. Then another one.

But perhaps I shouldn’t have deviated from the process as much as I did. Before I start writing plots, I usually write the opening paragraph for each character so that I know something about them and how they fit into the game.

But I didn’t do that, mainly because I was struggling to figure out how to make the memory-loss-overlay plot work. So instead, to give me a boost, I wrote an easy plot first (stuff about exploring Callisto). And once I did that, things started to flow. And once things started flowing, I didn’t want to go back.

But as a result, I juggled character stuff with mission stuff, and invented the mechanics for exploring the alien ship as I went along. And I didn’t write those character introductions until after all the plots had been done, which wasn’t ideal.

Do the easy stuff first

Which brings me to a useful tip that helps me get through dips: do the easy stuff first. 

Doing the easy stuff first means I get in some early wins and start seeing progress. And with a little momentum, the trickier stuff won’t seem so daunting.

So I put the memory stuff on the back burner, and returned to it at the end. (It wasn’t quite what I was hoping for, but I’ll save that idea for another time.)

Online contingencies

I do have an idea for online contingencies, though.

I’ve struggled with online contingency envelopes because I haven’t worked out how to do them so players don’t read them before the game. 

But I’ve realised that I can give them a Word document with the text covered by black highlight, so it looks like it’s been censored. That way, they can only read it if they remove the black highlight, which they would have to do deliberately. 

And for those players who like to open their contingency envelopes before the game, it doesn’t stop them from reading them in advance.

It seems like such a simple solution that I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to think of it.

(The one catch is if a player doesn’t have MS Word, but I can do the same with a Google Doc if necessary.)

The light at the end of the tunnel

At this point, I can also sense that the game is almost finished. After the characters, I have a few handouts to compile and a timetable to flesh out – but that’s about it.

Then I will need to think about arranging its first run…

Aurora Horizon design notes

You can see other parts of my design notes here:

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 – Part 4 (this one) – Part 5

Aurora Horizon design notes #3: Inspiration

I wish I could remember where all the inspiration had come from for some of the other games in the series. So for Aurora Horizon, I’m writing it down.

The Aurora Horizon

The overall design of the Aurora Horizon (as in the overall ball-on-a-stick look) is taken from the Discovery in 2001: A Space Odyssey (Arthur C Clarke and Stanley Kubrick). 

(In researching this, I thought I read somewhere that Discovery used a nuclear pebble-bed reactor, but I can’t find the source now.)

CORA 9000

CORA 9000 is the name of the Aurora Horizon’s computer system (a player in the game). The name is inspired by HAL 9000 (2001: A Space Odyssey, again) with a hint of Blake 7’s Orac.

Does CORA 9000 have an agenda of its own? I couldn’t possibly comment.

Aerobraking

The aerobraking manoeuvre in Jupiter’s upper atmosphere was inspired by Leonov doing the same in 2010: The Year We Make Contact.

It’s only in the background (although it causes serious damage to the Aurora Horizon), but still. That’s where the idea came from.

Cryosleep

Cryosleep has been a feature of SF ever since I started reading it (probably most influentially, ALIEN).  2010 also has cryosleep, and if I remember the book (2010: Odyssey 2) correctly, actually reversed the ageing process for the characters, which I liked.

The idea that cryosleep might cause harm was taken from The Legacy of Heorot by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Steven Barnes. (Plus, of course, Traveller has its often-lethal low berths, which I’ve discussed before.)

Names of characters

The names of the human characters are either inspired by characters or their actors in 2001: A Space Odyssey and 2010: The Year We Make Contact or are taken directly from them.

For example, Commander Archer was inspired by Bowman.

The three Tau characters (Huey, Louie and Dewey) are named after the robots in Silent Running.

The ROV, VINCENT, is named after the robot in Disney’s The Black Hole. (Technically, VINCENT isn’t a character in the game, but anyway. That’s where I got the name from.)

Other influences

Some influences are a bit spoilery, so I will just list them here. You can read into them what you will.

• Stark by Ben Elton
• Europa Deep by Gary Gibson

Aurora Horizon design notes

You can see other parts of my design notes here:

Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 (this one) – Part 4 – Part 5