The Long Rim is technically a science fantasy.
I wanted to walk the line between doing hard world building and soft world building, and part of that was emphasizing what parts mattered more. For hard world building, I wrote about the planetary mechanics of the Long Rim and how cardinal directions might change on a planet with different constructs around travel. For soft world building, I wrote probably my favorite article so far about the primary religious vectors of the Long Rim: the Radiant Goddess and the Obscured Goddess.
From a DM’s perspective, the differences between these two ways of approaching tabletop gaming are both completely valid. Understanding which elements of the game world appear diegetically from the world that the story is taking place in, and which elements are the subject to the ascetic and themes of the world, are both important to creating a world that seems real and meaningful. Each of these elements informs the other in some way, weither by offering the space where the meaning occurs or the context of the meaning itself. Tolkien can call it Mount Doom because from a story perspective it represents the ultimate evil, but that doesn’t mean the elves don’t call it Orodruin.
So, this should be a shorter blog article about some world building details about the Long Rim, ending with a problem I’ve been struggling with since the beginning, but as always, I need to signpost the entryways and exits in case of emergecy landing.
Inspirations and Iragons
In the book series Dragonriders of Pern, humanity comes to a far flung planet but eventually loses their connection to Earth through their fight with a malignant fungal force called the Red Thread. So, obviously, they do what anyone whould do in that situation: genetically modify the animals they brought with them so that they can breath fire to deal with it. After a couple thousand years where technology decays and the past is forgotten, bam, dragons in fantasy land. Fuhgeddaboudit.
In some ways this is similiar to what happens in the Long Rim. Humanity loses its connection with Earth as well, though it’s a bit more mysterious, partly because I don’t know why and partly because I want it that way. Rick Priestley, the game designer that wrote much of the early Warhammer 40k lore (alongside Andy Chambers and Jervis Johnson), said in an interview that he “left [the two forgotten legions] blank because I wanted to give the story some kind of deep background – unknowable ten thousand year old mysteries – stuff that begs questions for which there could be no answer,” which would have been great had not “some bright spark decided to use the Heresy setting – which rather spoiled the unknowable side of things.” Not everything in a setting has to be fleshed out, especially if it relates to theme and if even the most studied scholar in the setting might not know it.
There is a game-ism that the perfect first session is establishing the town/temple distcintion, that the game starts with three hexes and you roll as you need to explore. Part of this is to help the DM from spending too much time on prep that never sees the light of day, but it also creates a sense of mystery in the setting.
The planet the Long Rim exists on was colonized by an interplanetary spacing corporation a couple thousand years in the past. Think Harrison Armory from Lancer, take or leave the “anthro-chauvinism,” whatever the fuck that means. The Company built out an entire hab-complex running the radius of the planet in the dusk section of the planet. Because of the constant low light, the jungle that grew there had incredible dense foliage with dark green leaves, and both ambush predators and poisonous plants thrived in the shadowy jungle. The Company created the megastructure by using an internationally (or interplanetarily) outlawed technology: copious amounts of nanomachines.
This was a kind of hyper-green tech: usually, nanomachines are released onto the planet and alter the chemisty of everything they get into. For example, they’re able to direct the growth of trees so that some die in particular ways to make room for the gleaming white construction of the company. Nanites move through the soil to find material deposits to make resource reclamation easier. The nanomachines get in the blood of animals and alter brain chemistry and biology so that over generations they are bred to be smaller and more docile. The nanites even begin the process of transforming the elements in the air to better resemble the air on earth. When the process is completed, the biodegradable nanites shut themselves off and dissolve. Basically, nanites are magic, à la the Arthur C. Clarke quote, but this process takes decades.
However, the Company also knows the danger of nanites getting into the body and blood of humans. This is a no-go for a number of reasons, with some being that while biodegradable, these industrial nanites are still dangerous to human health, not to mention a bunch of Space Laws against using nanites as weapons of war or modifying soldier’s biochemistry. This is why the Space Company was always up to its eyeballs in regulation and oversight by the Space Government, but also why there’s such a focus on both analog and digital forms of warfare. It’s basically the sci-fi version of chemical and biological weapons: its use was outright banned in most situations, but powerful lobbying and corporate greed get in the way of it being fully enforced. And at the end of the day, kenetic warfare is still pretty neat.
When the Boar Spear happens and everybody dies, internal safety protocols embedded within MAIDEN flip the kill switch on most of the nanites on the planet, basically causing them to eviscerate themselves out of existence. Imagine the entirety of the Second World War: logistics, planning, battles, losses, rerouting forces to deal with losses, civilian deaths, decades and decades of information shoved within a single mind within milliseconds, a mind where every individual neuron is simultaneously dying in agony. And the Boar Spear lasted minutes. This is the reason that every time the Obscured Goddess reintegrates another part of her psyche it’s still screaming. It’s been screaming for more than a thosand years.
However, with the chaos of the Boar Spear, not all of the nanites were shut down. There was a rudimentary programmatic evolution built into their codebases that made most of them benign, an element of their fire and forget programming, but a lot of things went wrong that day and not every nanite was flipped off. Nowadays, most of the nanites have been modifying and changing algorithmically generated code for the last few centuries and that causes some weirdness. Some nanites are well optimized for particular “schools of magic,” and “sorcerers” often perform rituals to bring them more in line with their chosen magical school: letting certain nanite colonies live in their kidneys. There are some places where the “veil is thinner” for certain magics, namely a place where the nanites are more tuned for particular magic shenanigans.
Remember when I said that the nanites modified the brain chemistry and biology of the wildlife so that over generations they would be smaller and more docile? Yeah, that actually takes some fine tuning, and while some animals certain did succumb to the genetic editing, some animal’s bodies went into overdrive, causing them to grow larger and more aggressive. These are D&D dire animals. Not sure how I feel about this bit of fluff, namely how did the animals not all die when the Boar Spear it, but I’ll spend some time working on it, along with where all the horses came from.
A big part of the setting is that while there are sixguns and western tech stuff, the microscope won’t be invented until after players stop playing in the setting. That’s when everyone realizes that “oh the sorcerer isn’t just casting fireball they’re actually igniting all the nanites in the air” and “oh god there are nanites in everyone’s blood that can’t be good.”
Back in the mythic past, the sunside desert served as a perfect place for the Corporation to test weapons, blasting huge areas of the desert with explosives and testing superweapon tanks and mechs. There are hundreds of roofless cement compounds scattered throughout the desert, formerly used as training outposts and facilities for both giant mechs and infantry combat drills. It was expected that being “sunside” meant you were on duty until you were rotated back to the rim. Now the compounds are long abandoned. They rarely serve as a place to duck out of massive sandstorms on the other side of the Red Mountains, if you have the misfortune to travel sunside.
There are a handful of people who, after leaving the “vaults” once the nanites made the planet habitable, live on the opposite side of the Red Mountains, though it is a hard-scrabble life. The badlands where there is still a day and night have been scrapped clean of whatever tech there was long ago, and now it serves as a hideout for outlaws and fugitives. There are always people who want to enter the desert to look for treasures, and the place is legendary in the Rim. Some say there is a city of glass at the perfect center of the desert that holds unimaginable riches. There are also countless armories under the sands that contain priceless weapons. (But no energy weapons. There are no energy weapons in Long Rim.) There are sandstorms, because there is no real vegetation or soil to prevent them from becoming massive, that seem to shallow communities whole. Though, it is these storms that reveal or awaken ancient facilities. Actually, the winds are the most important part of a more traditional tidally locked world, since the two mountain ranges that frame the Long Rim, the Red and Blue Mountains, help protect the region. What minor planetary rotation does to the weather of a previously locked planet I don’t know.
There are also wild mechs and the remnants of artificial military intelligences driven to a sort of simplistic insanity that stalk the dunes. Think the surface of Mars after the Horus Heresy. Basically, a spider tank the size of a house uparmored with electrified metal plates your sixguns can’t penetrate that has been in kill mode for a thousand years sees your camels and gives itself a digital orgasm with every kill. There was a form of evolution occurring among the tank-mechs of the desert as well, with the most effective and efficient designs overcoming the others. If only the Company had thought of that before whatever happened happened.
As for the cold side, it was used to mass cool giant computer systems. Where sunside was used as a testing ground for traditional kenetic weapons, the dark side was for digital weaponry and blacker-than-night operations. A lot of the systems that ran MAIDEN were on the dark side, exposed to the void when the Boar Spear hit. There are probably still shards of her personality out there in the massive cold that the Obsucred Goddess really wants you to go get for Her. On the dark side, there are no house sized spider tanks patrolling the dark forests, no hyperaggressive dire creatures driven to overcorrect their biology in response to the nanites fucking with their brain chemistry, no outlaw kingdoms. The danger of the dark side is that it is cold and dark and the cold and dark hates you.
Beyond the Blue Mountains is nothing. There are massive pine trees fifty feet tall with trunks too hard to cut with an axe and needles as black as night to susist on starlight. There are snow drifts that cover harsh terrain, where a poorly place foot will snap your leg in two. There are complexes from the Long Ago that are onyx black, hellishly cold, and filled with enough treasure to make you rich a hundred times over. A few attempt to reclaim rewards from the dark side of the planet. All die trying. There is no wildlife, no sound of birdsong, just the wind and stars and the universe’s hatred of you.
The Word I Was Looking For Was “Precession”
I have read so much about astronomy to figure out if a world like the Long Rim was even possible. I fell in love with the idea of a UVG map that loops that I couldn’t let it go, but I wanted my world to be grounded in reaility in some way. I didn’t want to just rehash the gonzo style of UVG, not to mention it isn’t a style I’m very good at expressing at the table. The ideas surrounding the astronomy of the setting has been the stumbling block in this entire thing. Sure, I could’ve handwaved it and said “this is the way the world works, deal with it,” but this is where the tension between hard and soft worldbuilding lives.
A good setting has both. On the one hand, the important element is the story, the theme, why the world exists at all. And much of this determines why certain things exist. If you want to tell a story about honor, you have to include the elements of honor, where they stem from, why it matters to tell a story at all. The phases of the moon likely aren’t that important to that kind of story.
But at the same time, a story that doesn’t seek to show how it mirrors reality makes for a weak story. A game like Disco Elysium could have told the story of an alcoholic cop who solves a murder as the framework of coming to grips with the misery of his life in the modern world, but something is added when the creators take the time to build out six thousand years of alternative history. Death Stranding has a little of this, hidden in the interviews and emails of a world locked inside because of a disaster. I saw this video about “worlds not desperate to explain themselves” which was interesting and relates to this point in a roundabout way.
All this to say that both sides are important to the creative process, and whatever is the thing that’s pushing you forward, listen to, and switch when needed. The Long Rim isn’t about astronomy, but astronomy is needed to fuel the Long Rim.
And then I came across this article.
Pretty much every single question I had I found an answer or figured out enough terminology to make a Google search useful. It was masterful, and while I could feel my humanities legs flailing at the bottom of a hard science pool, I loved every minute of it. Whenever I have a hard science question, I just read this article until I remember that I don’t need much, just enough for the setting to make sense.
Conclusion
So yeah, this one took a while. Got a second article almost done and will get it over the finish line soon. This blog is a diary where I say fuck a lot and I’m arrogant enough to think you might want to read it.
I feel like a lot of the content falls under the fallacy of “argumentum ad nogaems,” argument from having No Games, but I promise I did have a lot of time to roll dice this summer. I have got to find a group in Texas.