A Place to Start

There are a lot of things on my shelf, and it's not easy to pick a place to start. Not everything that I have is fresh in my memory, and I'm in the process of gathering up some important books that were important to me at one time or another, or were intriguing to me at some point in my torrid affair with the gaming subculture.

It shouldn't surprise anyone, especially others who have games or, really, collections in general, that I have a lot of games that I haven't played. Truthfully, I have a lot of games that I haven't even read. I have gaming books I've had for years and never cracked open beyond flipping through them to see the pretty pictures.

Now, there are some gamers out there that have a massive collection, and they know everything that it everything about their games, and can go on about all the minute details therein. I am not that person.

Sure, there are some games I have that I can dive into immediately, and give you a good rundown of the setting, system, what-have-you, and why I care enough to have it on my shelf. I want to use this as a way we can both find new and exciting things about these games that maybe some of us, myself included, didn't know. So, I'm thinking of tackling this in a slightly different way - I'm going to start talking about a game that I have never, not once, played, read, or even seen played in the 26 years since it was published (at least the edition I have).

I would love to tell you that this is a game that has intrigued me for so long and it's sat on my shelf since purchasing it at Gen Con 26 years ago, but that would be a partial lie. It is a game that I found intriguing, and it is a game I bought 26 years ago, but, as with anything over the course of a quarter-of-a-century, it's a game that I sold off or lost within that timeframe in one of those naturally-occurring cullings that occur for various reasons.

In fact, this is a game I ordered and received in the mail today, and this is the first time I've looked at the physical copy of the book in years - so long, I can't remember when I looked at this book.

The game is called Fading Suns.

I'm a science fiction fan. I grew up watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Babylon 5, Star Wars, X-Files, and so many others. I've never really gravitated to one IP in particular - Star Trek was fine, with Deep Space Nine being my favorite, but to tell the truth, I never finished watching the series. Probably the show that comes to mind that I am the biggest fan of would be Babylon 5, but I can get more into that another time.

Fading Suns is one of those games that's been around a while. It first came out in 1995/1996 from a company called Holistic Design. This is the edition I remember buying at Gen Con back then (incidentally my first Gen Con, so expect me to talk about several games that came out in this timeframe), and it's the edition I now have, crease in the cover and all.

What I didn't know was that Holistic Design started out as a video-game company in 1992, and they released four games before they ventured into the realm of pen-and-paper roleplaying. None of their video games ring a bell for me, so I can't really talk about those at all.

Fading Suns was to be developed at the same time as the video game, Emperor of the Fading Suns (available at GOG apparently). To be honest, I never played the video game, and really never knew it existed until it was far past its prime.

The inspirations for the game lie in Frank Herbert's Dune and Isaac Asimov's Foundation books, and looking it over it very much reminds me of The Expanse series of novels (and television show) by James S. A. Corey.

What intrigued me about the game was that it was a hard-science game (which was a thing at the time, remembering the other hard-science fiction game that came out at the same time, Blue Planet), where people were tired of the technobabble so often seen in things like Star Trek basically acting like magic in space. People wanted a foundation of realism in their science fiction - something that they could at least wrap their brain around, or attempt to.

The game was designed by Bill Bridges and Andrew Greenberg. Bridges was behind one of my personal favorites, Werewolf: The Apocalypse, but seems to have faded from the more public gaming scene in the last 15 years. He is heading up a new edition of Fading Suns that was Kickstarted in 2020 and is in the process of fulfilling now (gonna have to look into that ...). Greenberg did work with White Wolf as well, mostly with their Vampire: The Masquerade line, went on to teach at the Art Institute of Atlanta and is now the executive director of the Georgia Game Developers Association. He is listed as the Director for Holistic Design, Inc.

The only World of Darkness games that intrigued me were Werewolf and Mage, so Bill Bridges's name stood out to me, even back then when I didn't pay too much attention to things like that.

Fading Suns, while being a hard-science-fiction setting, was drenched in this ultra-gothic motif, which is prevalent all over the World of Darkness games, so the two of these guys fit right in.

From what I recall, the game was set in the far, far future, when the universe is old and the Sun is dying (hence the Fading Suns), and humanity has achieved interstellar space travel thanks to these huge gates they found in space left behind by some ancient alien species that's no longer around.

I'll try to summarize as best I can from the Wikipedia entry:

The feudalistic empire called the Known Worlds arose out of the remnants of the scientifically advanced Earth civilization that fell apart in the previous centuries. It was thanks to these ancient "jumpgates," relics left by an alien race called the Anunnaki - a kind of analog to the Vorlons in Babylon 5 who guided and genetically altered species for their own end, and who "waged a devastating war many millennia ago using them as tools and weapons."

Borrowing from the Cthulhu Mythos atmosphere, the Known Worlds are a "very superstitious and dangerous place."

There are five Noble Houses, five guilds within the Merchants League, and six sects of the Universal Church of the Celestial Sun.

Strict religious codes dictate daily life in the Known Worlds. The game picks up after centuries of war and most worlds have slipped backwards in technology (reminding me a bit of the Mutant Chronicles), to a "level not much more advanced than 21st century Earth." The alien Symbiots, the ancient Vau, and the barbarian empires of the Kurgan and Vuldrok all bide their time for a chance to toss humanity out on its ear.

You can play as a member of a Noble House, one the merchant guilds, or a member of one of the various religious sects. A few alien races are playable, like the "Ukar and Obun, and the six-limbed, bestial Vorox."

The game isn't without some form of magic, interestingly enough, You can possess psychic powers or what they call "Theurgy." Psionicists are seen as 'demon worshippers' and heretics and despised by and hunted by the Church, or forced to join the Church so they can presumably use their dark powers in the name of the Lord. Theurgy is a sort of "divine sorcery" where members of the Church call upon saints and angels to grant them magical powers.

I didn't know about that last part - I figured it was a science-fiction game through-and-through, so the psionics don't surprise me, but this Theurgy is interesting.

Looking through the book, the game is set in the year 4996 (so not really close to that whole Sun burning out thing I mentioned earlier). What really hits me from my fresh look at this game is the deeply-ingrained religious aspect that there is within it. I don't mean the book is preaching about God and religion, but religion has a heavy influence in the setting of the book, which is rather fascinating. It very much reads like a step into the dark ages, but with spaceships and aliens.

I didn't know that about this game back then. Like I said, I thought it was just a hard science game. I haven't seen the hard science in the book I was expecting, but the setting is very intriguing. I'm interested in finally reading it after all these years and want to look into this new edition that's coming out. 

Oh, yeah, a new edition was Kickstarted last year and is coming out soon. I can't tell if it's coming to retail, so I may have missed out. Both Bill Bridges and Andrew Greenberg are involved in the new edition, so that's promising.

I think I'll call it a night with that, and I may jump back into Fading Suns as I have more of a chance to read the book.