Talk Trio: The Aurora Setting

[Triogenix]

Hi all. Around the time I first became Loremaster, I can’t remember exactly when, there was an idea that for headstaff on the development side of things, we write out our general thoughts on our areas of responsibility, explain our reasoning, and give our general thoughts more openly to the community so they can understand the position we’re coming from, as like, an official thing. I don’t remember much else, all I remember clearly is Matt mentioning it in the discord at one point after being appointed head-dev. This is barely related to that, and more to start a discussion than let people know what I think - but I got the idea from it. Recently with the increase in discussion around the current setting as a result of the NBT2 player survey, my negative opinion on our current setting surprising some, and me writing for separate reasons what is basically an essay on the current issues of the setting, I decided to spend an hour editing down a few sections to throw them on the forums, so that people can see my thoughts clearly, fully, and without needing to essay post on discord. Instead I’m just doing it on the forums. You don’t need to take the time to read this, only if you’re curious, or if I linked this topic to you after you asked for my thoughts and reasoning in some discussion. That’s all - here’s Trio Essay posting.

Problems with the Current Setting

This section is going to be an overview of the problems with the current setting, and how to fix them, broken up into primarily three parts, and ending with my closing thoughts . The first part will be discussing what our narrative is currently missing, and the why/how it’s missing it. The second part will be discussing how we’re still chained to the past more in depth. The third part will be discussing issues, problems, and narratives within our current setting. Lastly, I’ll give my closing thoughts. All these sections will build on each other chronologically, so please read them in order, thank you. 

The Missing Medium

Since switching to a ship setting, Aurora’s narrative has been missing something. Due to how the setting of the Horizon was designed (being chained to the corporations and the SCC), alongside how we did not want to repeat what occurred in the past with the original station - that being everything in the spur revolving around one point - it has left us with narratives within the setting being either too large(general worldbuilding with things like politics, wars, and similar) or too small(character driven stories, something in the hands of individual players who may use lore the team writes, but are not written by the team). What we’re missing is something in the medium, on the level of the ship as a whole, that uniquely affects it/is involved in/is tailored to be around it - which sounds alot like event arcs which we haven’t been missing but isn’t what I mean. Basically what I mean is that right now, all the big general worldbuilding stuff(which the lore team focuses primarily on) is a vast majority of the time brought to the Horizon via character backstories, to play a role not in how the ship functions, or the day to day lives of the entire crew, but to be used in character driven stories - which may have those previous affects, but probably won’t. Why is this even important - why do we need stuff on the level of the ship? Because it’s what makes arcs feel relevant. As I will do later, using many Biesel Arcs as an example, it did not matter to the Horizon whether or not the Peacekeeper Mandate is still ongoing (then we added the Grupo) - it was just something going on in the background, maybe you’d get a TCAF patrol vessel mention it offhandedly, but it didn’t matter to the Horizon, even when it was in the CRZ - so it didn’t feel relevant to the ship. It’s not possible to run an event arc for everything and event arcs are really the only way we currently have to bring these big world building things down to the level of the ship. This is not something we can just “fix” ; it's inherent to the current design of the setting, so therefore we can’t just expand on this one aspect of medium level stuff to solve the problem. I will expand on this later, but for now, this does not mean that we should make everything revolve around our ship, but that the worldbuilding stuff has effects which are at the ship's level and impact how it goes about its daily routine.

 

Additionally - though the Horizon is mobile, we need to present most of the time due to a variety of constraints to feel the effects of a narrative on that medium level. Being present anywhere new takes developer time and energy, a lot of it, so also limits where we can go. This is more an OOC issue than a setting one, but I feel the need to mention it because I can see someone in the replies innocently suggesting we just visit newer places more frequently.

Chained to the Past

Secondly, I think it needs to be understood that the modern setting did not come to exist in a vacuum. It is the messy result of the last 7-8 years of IC and OOC lore developments, all stacking on top of each other in a sort of communal writing project style, to create it, and can’t really be separated from those previous developments. This is why writers bitch about old-lore so much. In its own right, for the time, on the whole old lore was not bad - despite the egregious examples that would never be allowed today being the most commonly brought up ones. However this early in the development of the Aurora setting ended up becoming it’s foundation, and by 2020 with the introduction of KOTW, the issues it caused were already beginning to show. I do not mean to beat a dead horse even more; while KOTW was my favorite arc as a player, 5 years later as loremaster, it has created more issues that I now have to deal with than any other arc run. That’s all I’ll say here on KOTW; however, those issues stemming from the early developments of Aurora lore continued to grow, and grow, and grow - until today.

 

As many problems as KOTW created, fundamentally, the setting will always be flawed and problematic due to these early developments. I do not blame those creating the lore at the time; nor do I blame those that came after, it is only sitting here now that we can fully understand the ramifications of what seemed like trivial decisions almost a decade ago when it comes to Aurora’s Narrative.

Issues, Problems, and Narrative

Okay, this section is going to be a little complicated, mainly because I had to cut like half of it. I’m going to be talking about the specifics of how these obstacles in the narrative of the setting occur, why I think they happen, and what we can do about them. For this, we’re putting aside any hope of getting impacts on the ship's level, This is to show how, no matter what we might be able to do, the setting has a fundamental flaw. Also, I will be using the word “obstacle” or “obstacles” to describe the fundamental block we cannot overcome with our current setting, aka, how we'll always stagnate over time.

To start, we’ll need some definitions going forward. For this section ONLY when I say issues, I mean something separate from problems; issues as I see it are defined as things or pieces of lore that make a narrative more dynamic, mostly from the perspective of the player characters and the ship - an example of an issue with the SCC is how its members squabble internally - it makes any narrative about the SCC more dynamic because it’s not fully unified (though we struggle to show this on the ship). Issues also do not necessarily have to be problems. An example is that Hephaestus having a monopoly in the Hegemony is an issue, but not necessarily a bad thing for the Hegemony (at least parts of it’s government) - however it still fills the criteria of being an issue because it introduces a narrative dynamic to any story within the Hegemony, and is relevant to Unathi player characters as a whole. 

 

Again for this section ONLY I define problems as just, something that is a struggle with/a bad thing, but doesn’t introduce a narrative dynamic in the setting or with the players. An example can be found with both Elyra and Tau Ceti, where both nations certainly have problems, but they don’t introduce a real dynamic to the narrative of the nation currently, or any player characters. This is complicated to put into words but I will try to be as clear and concise as possible; problems are not a bad thing in their own right, and can become issues if narratives are introduced that see those problems make that narrative more dynamic. When this doesn’t happen they become obstacles to a dynamic setting, and cause stagnation. The reasoning is very multifaceted, but the main reasons boil down to that the problems are at too large a scale, ignorable by characters from certain backgrounds, or disconnected from the wider narrative in some way. 

 

To give an example of how this can happen - I'll use the recent Biesel Election Arc. The biesel election arc saw the status quo of the republic shift due to issues (that barely fulfilled the criteria of being issues due to being rooted in the Peacekeeper Mandate) within the country that allowed the narrative to become more dynamic. What I didn’t do was replace those issues with more issues that fulfill the criteria of making a narrative more dynamic. Instead those issues were resolved (or some carried over) as the status quo changed, and what all of the newly introduced things were problems that were at a large political level, and while they have the potential to make the worldbuilding narrative more dynamic, as of now they don’t translate down to individual characters or the ship at all.This change was also ignorable by most characters for now, because it doesn’t really matter to the primary setting of the corporations - they’re still the ones with power behind the scenes, so it’s not something that affects the setting’s narrative. It has the potential to, but doesn’t yet. I believe that is something we need to improve upon, but is the result of the setting and narrative overall; as this trend has been going on for close to a decade now, not only in the past five years, let alone my tenure as loremaster.

Basically I'm saying I could have run an event every day of the election onboard the Horizon for the biesel election, and that wouldn't matter - it still wouldn't work - it doesn't matter to the Horizon who the president of Biesel is, unless a player chooses to consciously make it matter to their character, for whatever reason. That's not a setting you're playing a character in, that's a setting you're watching the TV of. That doesn't account for actually getting events set up. To be fair - sometimes that's what people want, but there are so many narratives like this, where no matter how fire the writing is, the uncomfortable truth is it's become a vast majority of the teams arcs, including my own. The only arc outside of events I'd say I've written that was important to the Horizon in some way(and even then, not very) was The Titan Rises - everything else fell into this category.

So, we need to both know how this obstacle can arise - which was just covered in that example - but also why it happens, which is a much trickier question. This “why” ties back into what I mention in the second section, about how the setting did not come to exist in a vacuum, but is the result of the last 7-8 years of lore developments, something that also applies to the narrative. Aurora has one of the most unique narratives of any SS13 server, as it’s a continuation of the same narrative that was started in 2017 with only minor tweaks/retcons made to past articles over time. It is our biggest strength, but also our biggest weakness as this is the fundamental reason why these obstacles around issues and problems exist. The way the setting was established back then, even with all the changes, set the paths the narrative could take, but due to how the setting was established, there was only one path that was logical and reasonably justifiable to take, where as time passes the narrative moves towards issues being resolved and replaced with problems, resulting in the setting becoming more stagnate. How and Why?

 

Narratives and Storytelling are fundamentally, structured conflicts, but our setting is one where any conflict requires huge amounts of justification to logically and reasonably happen. This is caused by a ton of factors, such as the fact that our entities are split primarily into two groups, large hegemonic powers for whom conflict is almost always unnecessary/unprofitable, and smaller regional powers who are prevented from starting meaningful conflicts directly or indirectly by the larger hegemonic powers; other things include the complete and total power dominance of megacorporations, something that has previously seen attempted fixes that didn’t do much, the Solarian Alliance pre-collapse, completely surrounding the system of Tau Ceti, and much, much more. It can be argued that theoretically we could shift our approach as a team, but practically, this is the logical and justifiable narrative trend, so it will be the one consistently returned to as a narrative trend overall as the team is not one consistent group of people, but changes members overtime, sometimes very rapidly. Therefore, our narratives and storytelling overall are going to drift towards stagnation, even if we have bright spurts of a growing dynamic setting here and there, because they are structured conflicts, and our setting is not conducive towards conflicts happening. To be clear, as of now this is only a theory, I do not have hard evidence other than the general return to stagnation overtime continually despite arcs like the first invasion of Biesel, Frost’s rise to power, and then KOTW, all of which threatened to shatter the status-quo, ended up fizzling out or were resolved eventually for one reason or another, in one way or another.

 

Closing Thoughts

Trio note: Back to normal usage of the word issue and problem.

 

Articulating this issue at the heart of our setting is something I always struggle with, especially how it’s basically not something we can fix, now, or again in the future. The problem does not stem from old lore being “bad” on the whole, it stems from oldlore not being prepared, designed, considered, whatever other word you want to use, to be the foundation of an almost decades long narrative, and it’s unreasonable to think that back in 2016 they could have known what they were writing. Seemingly trivial details, like just what type of state the alliance is, something I can’t imagine anyone thought would cause the largest event arc this server has ever hosted, ended up required it to be shattered in KOTW just for a breath of fresh air in the setting, which is now beginning to stagnate again. Every little detail that didn’t matter then, now defines what the setting is and will continue to be so long as it’s our groundwork; and that will always be the case, no matter what we do, even coming up with an entire new setting from scratch in a completely different galaxy would see those tiny details grow in importance again, and again, and again. So then how do we fix it? To be honest….. We don’t. Atleast, not entirely. This is one of those issues that is inherent to any communal writing project - especially a volunteer one like Aurora’s is. While the days of the Lore Team’s Wild West are over, it will always be the case that something someone thought was minor gets added, and ends up being something definitive, especially in the early days of any setting. The lore team has tried a lot over the history of Aurora to fix this problem, massive OOC retcons, IC arcs; Kermit just redid the entire way we process inhouse planet applications so it’s less arbitrarily up to the loremasters with guidelines now, and I’ve been bashing my head against the wall of figuring out a way of doing documentation and longterm planning that isn’t guaranteed to die like the lore diary did since I got this position, but nothing I or anyone else has tried has worked over the past almost decade. So - where does that leave us? Fundamentally, no matter what we do today, as long as we are working with the same flawed foundations, we will have a flawed setting. This isn’t anyone’s “fault” or similar, we just can’t go back in time and tell the 2016 team that this narrative would run continually for what seems an assured decade and that they need to plan for that. What can we do then? Basically, figure out a way to make the foundation of the setting irrelevant to the current lore - fully this time. I really don’t see any other way to fix this problem. Thank you for your time reading this.

 

Trio Note: Hi everyone who made it to the end. I decided on a whim to make this due to the amount of questions I’ve gotten about what my problem with the setting currently is. I won’t be announcing it, and spent an hour quickly cutting down my original writing to be under three thousand words. As a result, this isn’t perfect. I did a poor job at connecting the Missing Medium to the Issues, Problems, and Narrative section, cutting what I had trying to explain the link, because I felt it would come off wrong. Figuring out what words to say to communicate what you want, especially over text, is difficult for me, and I didn’t want to risk miscommunication. So then why not wait until I finished everything? Mainly just what I’ve seen around discussions involving the setting currently. Things don’t just happen randomly, they happen for a reason; sometimes that reason makes sense, sometimes it doesn’t, but I think it’s important that we explore more of the “why” the setting ended up the way it did, and right now when discussions about the setting come up, it’s mostly about it in the present, not how we got to this point. I think the latter is far more important - so I decided to say fuck it and open a discussion specifically on that. I'd rather do something and have it be imperfect but atleast get a discussion started sooner on what, IMO, is important to recognize and learn from.

Oh also, last thing - the just changing x argument, where x is some piece of lore in the past, probably an IC thing. Whatever piece of lore it is, given the time, X has probably become foundational and removing it/changing it would fundamentally alter at least one or more factions/species. Trust me, I tried to retcon the antag contests, and found out just how important they were to modern lore and wanted to die. Also there's gonna be like a trillion spelling mistakes, what part of an hour was lost.

 

ALSO I FOROGT; Credit to the lore team as a whole for helping me figure out how to articulate this in any sense of coherency, but specifically NM for pointing out the missing medium way of looking at it, and schwann for pointing out the Hegemonic/Regional power divide and it's effects.

Edited March 31 by Triogenix

[Sniblet]

I think you’re coming across clear enough. I completely tuned out the Biesel election. I think Torvald is president? All I know about him is from vaurca-general memes. He’s like racist or something, maybe.

We’re in Tau Ceti, though - a mobile Biesel territory. The current president can affect us via his influence over our laws. Changes that the corporations won’t sit down for aren’t exactly likely to come about without a major conflict (which can affect us in its own way. if whoever-the-president-is goes dramatically off the rails), but they’re capable of small concessions that appreciably affect us. Getting away with what used to be sedition, or especially eating a fine for what used to be narrowly acceptable behavior, remind us that we put a new guy in the big seat, and also that yes, we are in Biesel.

Edited March 31 by Sniblet