#holistic design

[sarahcowgilldesign]

"The four-year, €60 million (about $65 million) project might seem outlandish to anyone outside of the Netherlands, but it’s business as usual for Dutch cities, which are slowly but methodically transforming personal automobiles into relics of a misguided past — a time when cities were built around the needs of cars, not people."

This bike storage facility project in Amsterdam is a great example of design leadership. Amsterdam is well-known for being a bike-friendly city, but investments in these types of facilities take design leadership. This project was focused on continuing to make the city human-centered not car centered. This means it is focused on improving transportation options including building the infrastructure to support more people biking and walking. It comes from a desire to make cities more livable, decreasing traffic, noise, and pollution. This specific project was about creating something that freed up the street-level space and made bicycle use and storage more efficient and convenient. It's not just about creating the space but making it user friendly with clear signage, easy to use two-level storage, and employees who are there to help users as well as keep the space clean.

Amsterdam’s underwater parking garage fits 7,000 bicycles and zero cars

Would your city spend $65 million for this?

[sydneykarlockvisualdiary]

Visual Diary #2 - Wicked Problems: Suburban Transportation

Lack of public transportation in suburban areas. To me, this is a wicked problem for a few reasons. The first reason is limited mobility for elderly individuals, disabled individuals, and people who don't own a car or cannot afford one. The second reason is the environmental impact our private vehicles have; our vehicles contribute to air pollution and climate change. Next, this problem is not only due to lack of public transportation but simply just living in the suburbs and that is social isolation. I have noticed this for myself in particular since moving back to the suburbs. While I was in the city I would socialize on public transportation, or talk to people in the city center, there is much less community engagement in the suburbs.

[vintagerpg]

As I said yesterday, Fading Suns (1996) is a hard science fiction RPG, set in a decadent and superstitious interstellar empire. It is a fairly simple D20 skill and attribute system with no classes or levels. There are broad similarities to White Wolf’s Storytelling System, which makes sense since the game was written by Andrew Greenberg and Bill Bridges, two former White Wolf staffers.  

Honestly, though, we’re not here for the system. We’re here for the setting, which is fantastic. The game takes place in the far future, after humankind has found alien technology that allows for interplanetary travel (this is accomplished with Jumpgates, which were constructed by the mysterious Anunnaki, and I would bet someone who worked on Mass Effect was a Fading Suns fan). A series of technological booms and busts followed, creating a vast interstellar empire that functions in many ways on a medieval level – many sophisticated technologies, like artificial intelligence, are forbidden by the Church, for instance. There are interesting aliens, deadly politics, some Cthulhu-inspired stuff, black magic, psychic powers and more. And, of course, as the name implies, the stars are going out and the end is likely near. Its weird and dark and expansive, maybe one of the deftest combinations of disparate inspirations of the period.

Speaking of inspiration, Dune is an obvious one, the novels for substance and structure, the David Lynch film for aesthetic. White Wolf’s goth/punk aesthetic is also here, filtered through a sci-fi lens. Warhammer is another obvious one, as is Gene Wolf’s New Sun, with maybe a hint of A Canticle for Leibowitz. The game also casts a pretty long shadow – I can see flavors from it in Starcraft (1998), for instance, and I already mentioned Mass Effect.

The creation of the setting, I think, is Fading Suns’s real accomplishment. It is full of potential, and even the weirder books in the line maintain a surprising consistency of tone. It seems to me that the game is rather unfairly overlooked. Check it out if you have a chance.

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[rpgcovers]

Fading Suns (d20 edition) ~ Holistic Design (2001)

[vintagerpg]

Please cue up “blackmagic,” by TSOL before reading this post. OK, I mentioned this the other day, but it bears repeating: Fading Suns has black magic and demons in it. This is some Event Horizon shit right here. Demons and black magic make everything better. This is a proven fact.

The Dark Between the Stars came out in 1997 (the same year as Event Horizon…hm…) and is the sixth book or so in the line, giving you a pretty good idea how important Holistic thought it was to inject diablery into their medieval space saga.

At first blush, it looks disappointing. Most of the “black magic” is just psionics that have been outlawed by the church. Sad trombone. They’re interesting but well, not demonologists. And when you do get to them, the so-called antinomists, they are introduced more as people and organizations with a set of beliefs rather than actual powers. You’ll read their section increasingly asking yourself, “But, are there actual demons?” The answer is yes, but the way the book takes its time in telling you actually serves to build the occult mystique.

It all feels sufficiently rooted in actual historical occult beliefs, but refracted through thousands of years of weird sci-fi history. It is sexy and dangerous, basically, and reminds me a lot of how Doctor Who would approach certain devilish ideas (“The Satan Pit” and Torchwood’s “End of Days,” both in 2006). Most of the diabolical stuff is left open ended, so you can push it more Lovecraftian, or pull it more Event Horizon, or do something entirely different.

Alas, most of the demon sultans the book details are a bit prosaic and vague, though I do like the one that whispers to the crews of ships traveling through jump gates in hopes of leading them astray.

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[vintagerpg]

For my money, Mike Kaluta’s cover art for Lords of the Known Worlds (1997) is everything good and appealing and mysterious about Fading Suns in one glorious illustration. The problem with a cover that good is that the interior art doesn’t have a hope of holding a candle to it. Its fine – mostly crisp and clean and properly evocative, but a bit of a let down after the cover. Kaluta is a tough act to follow.

Anywho, Lords is one of many splatbooks in the Fading Suns line (again, Holistic was following a model based on White Wolf’s Stortytelling games, even eventually releasing a live action rulebook), this one focused on the five major noble houses of the setting. You have House Hawkwood (cough Atreides cough), Decados (Harkonen, basically), Hazat (space Zorro), al-Malik (space Caliphate) and Li Halan (holy space samurai), all presented with painstaking attention to lore and politics spanning hundreds of years. You’re either going to love this or your eyes are going to fall out from boredom. I generally have less tolerance for lore dumps like this than I used to, but in flipping through the book, I find I still had a fondness for it. The political struggles of the houses form the major backdrop for the campaign, after all.

There are some brief rundowns of the minor noble houses, which serves to distill them to their primary function (Shelit are cyborgs! Van Gelder are assassins!). I’d have preferred a little bit more detail on them, to be honest. There are also some outlines of alien powers, but that section feels entirely like an afterthought.

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[vintagerpg]

The core rulebook has a lot of ground to cover and some sections seem a bit…scant on detail. Character creation options are presented nearly in abstract. The Players Companion (1997) provides narrative grounding and tons of player options, to the point that I would say you need this if you want to play.

The first section of the book is a blessing and I wish more faction-heavy TTRPGs would take cues from it. Every major character type – noble, merchant, alien, priest, etc. – gets a one page description of a generic day in their generic life. Reading through this section gives you way more insight into the world of Fading Suns than all the histories and genealogies of the core rules.

The book then details the many potential professions and allegiances, and their impact on player characters who embrace them. Again, all interesting, all contributing to the world building, all helpful to the players.

Then the book gets to aliens and blows it. In the core book, alien races are portrayed as generally remote, often hostile and, when it comes down to it, beside the point in a game that is essentially about humanity’s fumbling end among the stars. I guess folks thought the game needed more aliens, though, so we’ve got bird people and fish people and intelligent horses (yup, just horses that are smart), monkey people, weird bug people, weird lizard people and, well, you get the picture. None of them are particularly interesting. All of them seem…out of place.  

Nice Brom cover, though.

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