24/12/2024
I've been playing around with the introduction to Orbital Cold War. My early thoughts are these:
HOUSTON, WE HAVE A PROBLEM…
Roleplaying is exciting, it’s fun, it’s liberating and it’s enjoyable. To turn the Space Race of the 60s and 70s into a viable playable roleplaying setting, some liberties have had to be taken. The author thinks that you should know just what they are, and why those liberties were taken.
The cool factor in Orbital Cold War comes from the players being able to interact with the well-known and loved technology of the Space Race: vehicles like the Gemini and Apollo capsules, the Lunar Rover and the Mir space station. You get to walk on the Moon when to do so was still novel and dangerous; but there has to be more. Every American astronaut (or Soviet cosmonaut) was under constant supervision and worked to a gruelling 24-hour schedule of scientific and technical tasks with little free time. How could that be fun?
Orbital Cold War has to have too many people in orbit and on the Moon, for Mission Control to keep track of them all: and far more stations, bases and assets in orbit and on the Moon so that travel between them becomes both possible and necessary. To achieve this, the game has to be set a couple of decades into the future. However, to retain the 1960s feel, the technology in the game is taken almost wholesale from either real world spacecraft, or actual design concepts that didn’t quite make it to orbit.
Realism and credibility, as far as how much space infrastructure has developed, is being pushed to its limit. Its fun to envisage so many people in orbit and on the Moon, but its costly and ... is it worth it? For the game, yes. As long as all of those people have things to do, then we can justify them in-game and get on with roleplaying. If the Space Race continuing up into the 80s is our first setting conceit, then having hundreds (or a couple of thousand )astronauts, cosmonauts and civilians in space, is our second.
