Fred Hicks asked if I’d talk a little about the role of the micro-fiction in Diaspora and so I will.

First let’s be totally above-the-table here. I’m going to talk as though what we got is what we intended and as though what it does is what we wanted it to do. This is a habit of speech with me. The reality is that we were working through the creation of the text from a starting point of no idea to an end point of refining stuff that happened in the middle. There wasn’t a template for what we built until very late in the game. But I will analyze what I think the micro-fiction does because I think it was our target, it just wasn’t our clearly stated and totally deliberate target. In future it will be more deliberate because I think it works.

Zoom out and step back. I have heard it said that a picture is worth a thousand words. I’ve read a lot of great books, though, that don’t need illustrations and so I’m tempted to believe that a well chosen thousand words is better than any picture in some contexts. I am motivated to deliver, at work and at play, as much as possible in text before resorting to illustrations because I think that illustrations should, well, illustrate the point. That is, they are ancillary to it. Augmentation. A nudge because sometimes the words are complex when delivering a complex idea. A picture is worth a thousand words, but it’s not clear to me that pictures replace a thousand words.

Zooming in now. When we started building Diaspora artwork was not in the plan. Illustration is, however, essential for delivering context to a game and it’s also essential for delivering enthusiasm. So I think early on we felt instinctively the need to inject context with little blurbs of fiction. These are our proto-illustrations of what happens to characters inside a Diaspora game. It partly works because people are used to receiving science-fiction in text anyway — my favourite authors never needed any, to my recollection, and yet I have great pictures in my head of ringworlds and monoliths and starfaring museums. So I can send you pictures without drawing any, which is a boon with four writers and no artists on the project.

So the micro-fiction in Diaspora followed an illustrative pattern: small images that don’t eat a ton of space and attention, but draw out what’s cool about the immediate text. Where possible they came from actual play because, frankly, if contextual imagery wasn’t coming from play then there wasn’t enough playtesting. Later we would make some up from whole cloth, but by that time we had a pretty good idea that what we imagined about play would be true — we had a couple of years of experience by then.

Eventually we realised what we were doing and established some rules for the micro-fiction: there would be some for every chapter and most sections. It would be short — less than a page except in two special cases. It would come from actual play if possible but would always come plausibly from actual play. It would deliver some emotional impact — it would be cool as well as instructional. It would introduce jargon in context so that players knew how to talk cool in the game, or at least would know how to imagine talking cool. And it would introduce a little wonder. A little awe. Because those things are part of what the game needs to deliver in this genre, and so it’s nice to get a little sent your way while reading it too.

We also knew what we didn’t want. We didn’t want to deliver a whole setting, so some of the fiction is inconsistent because you (we for sure) might play several separate campaigns and things might be inconsistent and that’s just fine. It’s awesome, even. So embedded in that fiction is some permission.

We didn’t want a lot of fiction and we didn’t want whole stories. Stories are not illustration. They are more demonstration. We wanted to augment the text and not interrupt it. But we did want the voice of each author, and so we solicited material from everyone for the fiction and we got enough that we could cull some out and only take the best or at least best-suited. Being short, it was something each author had time and skills to produce effectively because it drew mostly on their experience of the game itself.

There are two long pieces in Diaspora, though, and they frame the whole text. The first is the story of Lawrence, a person who lives somewhere wondrous and lethal and certainly not a place where humans evolved. It actually started as a short story for a different purpose but I suck at writing short stories, so instead it lies with no story but as a study of character and place intended to deliver the wonder I talked about before and the alien and, maybe most importantly, the commonplace: Lawrence lives somewhere incredible and does incredible things but he’s still just this guy, with his little place in a huge universe. He could be you. He is the extreme of the “blue collar space” concept — the guy who’s just a farmer but who farms alien life at night because during the day the sun will kill you. An ordinary man in an extraordinary place, which I think is clearly what we want players to be too. Maybe not always characters, but always players.

The second long piece is a real story, the one about Dave and the slipknot discovery. Again, it’s an ordinary guy in an extraordinary place, though this one (written by Toph and not me) shows an ordinary place becoming extraordinary. Without making Dave a superman. Or anyone else. Not even the high tech aliens that change everything are supermen. Everywhere you look in Diaspora, it’s just folks. Sure, they often wield extraordinary things at extraordinary scales, but you could still share a beer with them and they still go to the bathroom and worry about their kids.

So that’s the story of the micro-fiction in our game. We wanted to illustrate without drawing and as our source material was text, we felt text could do the job on several axes: show the system, show the “setting”, and deliver a little wonder in a small package. I think if anyone wanted to know in future what Diaspora was “about”, they could do worse than to borrow someone’s copy and read, at random, the stuff in italics.

–BMurray

P.S. Thanks Fred — in writing this I was forced to go back to my copy and read some of the fiction there. It does deliver, as you say, and that’s something I didn’t really get a chance to appreciate while it was going through the chores of being written.