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THE STARFORCE TAPES:A Three Way Discussionof the Design and Rationale of StarForce

The following is an abstract of portions of athree hour discussion of StarForce andrelated science fiction topics. The parti-cipants are: JOHN BOARDMAN, StarForceTechnical Advisor (and well-known Diplo-macy maven, SF fan, and science professor);NEIL SHAPIRO, professional science fictionwriter; and REDMOND SIMONSEN,designer of StarForce and holder of othertitles at SP!.

Redmond: One thing I just want to outline isthe objectives that I had in mind when I didStarForce (since it was the first game that Itotally designed. I assisted on a lot of games;this is the first one I was flying on my own). Iwas really trying to do science fiction in agame form, but first I had to decide whattype of mechanics I wanted to have operatingin the game. I superimposed upon that anelaborate rationale that I wrote as a littlescience fiction story. Both things modifiedeach other, of course. There were things thatwere injected into the rationale because ofthe game mechanics and there were thingsinjected into the game mechanics, after thefact, because of the rationale. After a while itbecame a synergistic system where one thingreinforced the other, but, in all honesty, Imust say - the basic mechanics came first.The biggest problem I had was making thegame meaningful in astronomical terms. Ijust didn't want to "pipe" the whole thing. Iwas thinking of something almost exactly inline with what John pulled out of the folderwhen I asked him for assistance. He justwhipped om these figures that he and GeorgeHeap had generated together and it wasalmost perfect, It almost required nomodification.. All I had to do was bend it andhammer i a Iitde bit to force it into ahexagonal -<I. There were a couple ofliberties . the positions of somestars, b d large. the map is pretty

zs;::;:U;](J;;:;Ui:2Ily. _ There are a fewsr years out of line.

working on this for about a year, I found thatGeorge Heap, who I knew through sciencefiction fandoin, was involved in the same sortof thing. The only difference was that hischart used Cartesian coordinates and mineused polar coordinates. We pooled ourefforts and, after George died, his widowturned over the material to me and I passedit on to Redmond, who found the Cartesiancoordinates system more convenient forthe purposes of map design.

Neil: I mentioned to John, Redmond, that Ithink that you and he have created not only areally fine game map, but a unique referencematerial which I actually found myself usinga few times for writing stories. You can pickup just about any Norton Star Atlas to findout how far one star is from the sun. But ifyou already have your hero on star B and youwant to get him to star C and then star F, youwant the time more or less in transit to berelative to each other and correct, and forsomebody with my poor background inmathematics, it has always been a hellishtask to figure out. But now I just pull out myStarForce map and use it as a model and thereit is. The entire universe on a piece of paper.Or at least the entire universe within acertain distance ...

John: Twenty light years.

Redmond: Well, speaking of that point, thereason that I chose that particular scale was,first of all, it was kind of obvious that onelight year to a hexagon is nice and neat andit's easy to explain what a light year is andrelate that to a hexagon. At first I thought Imight do it in parsecs, but the figures thatJohn was able to easily turn over to me justabout encompassed the area the mapencompasses now (a little more actually, acouple of light years more in eitherdirection). But I was pretty much going tostay within that local area of interstellarspace because, in my own estimation, giventhe time frame I have chosen, I don't think.that very much beyond that would beachieved. In fact, my time frame contravenesthe time frame of most science fictionwriters. Most science fiction writers, fivehundred years in the future, have us doingvirtually everything and going everywherewith the greatest of ease with no sweat andnobody bothers to explain just how all that'saccomplished. My premise was (I think I saidit someplace in the rules), that nobody couldpredict with any certainty what's going tohappen in the next twenty-five years. If Ipitched my game five hundred years in thefurore and I posited a war about a hundred

years from now, that had devastating and farreaching effects on human-kind, then I canhave almost anything happening in fivehundred years, within the capability ofpeople to suspend disbelief.

John: To make it a wargame requires somespeculation on the nature of war, which, inturn, depends upon the future socio-economic system, which, in turn, perhapsI'm showing a scientist's bias here, dependsupon the technology.

Redmond: To a large extent, yes.

John: Looking at the past, you can say thatthe watermill produced the feudal lord andthe steam engine produced the capitalist.

Redmond: I did pay some attention to thatinasmuch as from the very outset, if I scalethe thing so that the map is roughly fortylight years across and forty light years deepand there are about seventy-four star systemson the map ... you're going to have a societystrewn all over those star systems or a goodpart of them, and they're going to be able tointeract in a meaningful way and haveconflict. You've got to squeeze the time downto a point where it is no more than "contin-ental" as we experience it today, so that Iinteract with somebody in Europe on thesame scale that, five hundred years fromnow, I interact on Earth with somebody in ...

Neil: In other words, you can't havethousand-year Game-Turns.

Redmond: Right! You can't even have threeor four year Game-Turns as you go byEinsteinian physics from one star to the next.Just too long for human scale to operateeffectively in terms of conflict.

John: In order to have a game at all, you haveto suspend disbelief to the point where travelfaster than light is possible and presumablythe time scale is the same for everybody.

Redmond: Yes, and I got around the wholebusiness, of course, by not only positingfaster than light speed, but actually no timeat all lapsing between the literalfrom one place to another. The d·LsaJ:Iti::r.::itywindow effect. ow that can beupon as a grand cop-out, but I felt that ething that was desired dictated the terms ofthe scale. You had to have some devicewhereby people hopped about with as muchease as you fly to Australia today. So whynot? Or why not a psionic1y induced effectthat allows you to bridge space?

...Well, I envisioned a social trauma occuringafter the so-called White War that I just

briefly mentioned in the background.Something, a sort of exaggerated effectsimilar to what happened during the ThirtyYears War. Everybody was so sick and tiredof everything that it had a pacifying effectand I'm sort of 51% an optimist and soassumed that, given enough time and grossenough experiences, society as a whole couldactually learn something. The society I ampositing starts out as really stable, humanis-tic and fairly well organized. The same sortof problems we experience today, rapidchanges, people being under pressure, butthey have more tools to deal with them. Theyhave intelligent machines, for one thing, andthey have almost unlimited energy in ausable sense, because they have - well, Italk about an effect that I call gravity sleds.Gravity sleds are [an intimation of the]systems of energy handling that this societyhas. They can manipulate star systems. Thathas a straining effect on the fabric of thebasic society and that creates the occasions'for conflict, not anything inherent in thesociety as it started out. Basically the warsare, except for the final scenarios, theXenophobes, pretty pacific. Nobody reallygets badly hurt. The techniques used to fightare virtually bloodless. It's more by accidentthat anybody gets killed.

John: A great, destructive war, like theThirty Years War, would create a traumaand in the ...

Redmond: Well, the Earth that I started outwith is a unified governmental system thatdeveloped during the aftermath of the WhiteWar and so you had no national-statebusiness going on where you had separatepolitical entities biting on each other wheneconomic and social realities press uponthem. So you could stipulate that, givenhundreds of years of unified planetarygovernment and a great deal of energy todispose of as you wish, you could eliminate alot of the frictions that cause upheavals andrevolutions.

Neil: I have to be a little pessimistic aboutthat. The only problem for me to suspenddisbelief in StarForce is what we are talkingabout here. I think that this war would havesome lasting effects; perhaps it would lastright through 2451 A.D. with theL'Chal-Dah contact. I can see an entirehuman race thinking, we're all brothers andsisters under the skin and not fighting, buthaving these psychic arguments over certainpolitical points, which are what mostscenarios are. But I just have this feeling thatwhen they finally do make contact, unlesshuumanity changes completely, from thegenes out, this brother/sister relationshipwill not extend to something that doesn'tlook like a human. Especially in this scenariowhere the L'Chal-Dah attack first; thiswould definitely bring out some xenophobia.

Redmond: I think you have an argumentthere inasmuch as the first contact with analien race who acts aggressively would wakethe beast in human beings. The moderatingeffect is the Telesthetics themselves. Since

the Telesthetics are all linked together in aguild stronger than any guild you ever saw inyour life.

Neil: Do you stipulate that the Telestheticsoccupy the decision-making offices ofgovernment?

Redmond: Yes. They almost totally controlthe government because they are the lifeblood of intercourse between the stars ...without them the governments are isolatedon their own planetary bases and so, if theywant to have anything happening at all in aninterstellar fashion, they've go to play ballwith Telesthetics ... One of the things thatcontributes to the solidarity of theTelesthetics if the fact that they are telepath-ically linked. So they all can perceive eachother's emotions in a way no normal humanbeing can perceive. The Telesthetics areempathically linked and they also have totrain new Telesthetics - only a Telestheticcan train a Telesthetic. They are a sort ofnon-political entities, although they do havesome tie, of course, to their planets of originand have some loyalty economically toorganizations that employ them.

Neil: Did you consider a scenario where, atthe end, the Player is losing he can say,"Well, all right" (sort of like Adolf Hitlerand the bomb) and shoot down one of theTelesthetic vessels down from orbit?Redmond: The way I avoided the Arme-geddon syndrome is to make a planetsubduable from space (once you get by theStarGate that protects that planetary system)using the so-called Heissen effect that Ioutlined in the background. That's a meansby which you can use telesthetic power closeto a planet to put everybody to sleep. Youmake a landing and, as a matter of course,"defang" the planetary armaments and thearmy organizations and so forth.

Neil: But as long as the StarGate ...

Redmond: As long as the StarGate shieldsthe planetary system you can't do itbecause ... I make reference to the fact thatyou stand off the planet for a considerableamount of time and devote all your attentionto creating the field so if you had a StarGateat your back you'd get whomped if you triedto do that. I made the Starships or TeleShipsmerchantment because then everythingdepends on them. They are not only thebattlefleets, they are the merchantmen andyou cannot strip your entire merchantmarine to fight a war. That's why the forcelevels in the game are relatively low eventhough you are talking about billions andbillions of people. Dozens and dozens ofplanets funding and manning a war. Youwind up with thirty or forty StarShipsparticipating in a war. It's because they arethe merchant marine; you cannot take all ofthe merchant marine and throw it into thewar. Even if it's a very short war. I wanted todo that because I didn't want to have gamemechanics that required you to manipulate(in three dimensions) seventy-three ships.You would get a big headache trying to dosomething like that.

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John: We have an economic basis for thewars, control of trade in items which can onlybe produced in a few places.

Redmond: Also the primary resource ofinteraction - the TeleShips themselves andthe crew. As you control populationpolitically, then you control the base fromwhich you draw your Telesthetics.

Neil: I just wondered, though, if you stipulatethat perhaps one planet or another does havesome agricultural item or some hard goodsproduced by some means that can't beduplicated somewhere else. If you're notopening a possible scenario for actualterritorial expansion to take over that planet,instead of bothering with the merchantmarine and economics, just take what youwant and then I think you would get into abloodier conflict.

Redmond: Well, "take what you want" inwhat sense? The Solar government is beingtold by the government of Alpha Centaurithat we don't want to suffer under your aegisanymore; we want to be independent. Wewant to control our own economy. Let's saywe produce commodity Z that you need. Nowwhy doesn't Solar government turn aroundand say, "Well, if you do that, we are justgoing to come out and step on your neck.Totally devastate your planet." The reason itdoesn't happen is simply because thetechniques exist to subdue a planet in abloodless fashion... I had running throughmy mind when I worked out the scenarios, inthe general way things were going, that themodifier was the Telesthetics themselves.The Telesthetics never grew very far awayfrom each other simply because they are themain means of interstellar communications,both in terms of delivery of merchandise andalso in the delivery of symbols, that they arethe radio. Through them one planet talks toanother ... and tells each other to go to hell,for that matter. So if you want to do anythingyou've got to do it with the consent of thegroup of 'Telesthetics that you nominallycontrol. You don't totally control them.They're independent enough so that youcouldn't say to a band of Telesthetics basedon Alpha Centauri, "Well, go take thisconversion trigger and plant it in Sol andwipe out the home planet." They're notHitlers or anything like that. They'resophisticated people that have a very goodidea of their own worth and they're willing toplay ball with the planetary government... upto a point, but if it goes too far, they'll say"time."

Neil: So they are the limiting factor.Redmond: So they are the limiting factor tothe bloodiness of the wars. I didn't want tohave a game in which the technology existedto blow up planets, the race, every sign of lifeon the planet and turn it into a cinder and so,if that technology exists, you have to havesome mechanism in your scenario - theoverall society - that stops you from doingthat. Now, today we have the balance ofterror, but I didn't want to have just thebalance of terror.

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Neil: Perhaps you can describe it as the"balance of friendship," at least theTelesthetics.

Redmond: Yes, although it's partly thebalance of terror inasmuch as almost everyplanetary society has the means to explode asuper-H-bomb, conversion trigger on a starand fry everything on the planets orbitingthat star. More importantly it's theTelesthetics themselves that say, "Well,we're just not going to do that at all." Thatforced me to posit the Heissen effect, so thatyou could have planetary assaults withoutthat last-gasp-Hitler-in-the-redoubt syn-drome: "If I can't win, nobody can win."Because you can just zoom in on a planet andcreate a field and everybody ...

Neil: One question here. It occurs to me thatthey should be destroying ships rather thanrandomizing them.

Redmond: The reason that happens is thatthe only effective means of dealing withTeleShips at the distances in which youengage is the use of telesthetic ability. Thatrandomization - that is the displacement ofships rather than the destruction of them -it's not because they don't want to destroythem; it's because that's the only means thatthey have at their disposal to affect ships atthat distance. So, in other words, if they canget close enough they can use normalEinsteinian physics to whomp a ship, butthey can't get close enough. If you try tocome within range, within 100,000 miles, ofan enemy TeleShip without using anytelesthetic ability, and attempt to sink a highvelocity missile into it... there's not going tobe much of a chance of using anything that isanalgous to current-day technology toactually destroy a ship. You'll notice that inthe background I gave for the Xenophobescenarios that there was actually destructionof ships when we went on a punitiveexpedition into Xenophobe territory ... butthe techniques described and the time that ittook and the cost to the race were enormous.In relationship to the time scale, the societynormally operates in conflict. It took 1.7years to wind-up the punitive expedition.What they were doing, they were using adhoctechniques to destroy ships: low energyapproaches to StarGates (in other words,suicide teams), running in with bombsstrapped to their backs, practically, anddestroying it outright.

Neil: Like you say, the cost in PSL life of 3.7million battle deaths and twenty-oneTeleShips destroyed, which I guess would bequite a chunk.

Redmond: Yes. Since Telesthetics are rareand TeleShips expensive and the Gnostechsthemselves are expensive in many ways. Theyare expensive in hard terms and alsoinasmuch as the Gnostechs are complicatedintelligent machines, which, just like ahuman, gain experience and grow. That'swhy they have to be "initiated." They have tobe initiated with Telesthetics that would beoperating them.

John: Something like the Canine Corps.

Redmond: Something like that, except therelationship is more equal. The Gnostechsare, in effect, identities. They are "persons"and they have their own motivations andtheir own realities.

Neil: I suppose this could be a limiting factortoo, as far as the blood conflict goes. 1£ theGnostechs saw other Gnostechs beingbumped off, they might just decide not tohelp the aggressor ship.

Redmond: Also, you can assume that theyare imminently practical inasmuch as theydon't have an endocrine gland system to getthem all worked up over one thing oranother ... Well, there's any number of thingsthat I posited or imagined, plus you cansimply assume that there are other factorsoperating that prevent the sort ofrip 'em-up-tear 'em-out-tooth-and-nail bat-tles that humankind is used to.

John: Did you ever consider making theXenophone scenario a solitaire, with theXenophobe actions programmed much thesame way as the Japanese actions are inOperation Olympic.

Redmond: I did, and the only thing thatprevented me from doing it was time. I didput a simple solitaire system in there in orderto help people learn the game ... that businessof the rescue mission ... and I wanted to gofurther with the solitaire game, but I justdidn't have the time. When I first started outdoing the game, I was aware of the existenceof three or four other science fiction gamesdone by semi-amateur organizations. Ideliberately avoided looking at any of thosefor one reason: I didn't want to be any wayinfluenced, even subconsciously, by the worldthat somebody else created, nor did I want touse any of the mechanics of these games,because I felt that if I reinvent the wheel byusing the mechanics of somebody elseindependently, that's fine, it sits well withme.

Neil: I think the map is the high point of thegame. There have been other science fictiongames trying to bring a three-dimensionalconcept of space into the game. The one thatcomes to mind is 4,000 A.D. But they havenever gone beyond two levels above the boardand two levels beneath the board and usuallythe stars are in a single plane relationship ornot a single plane relationship - almost acrystal molecular arrangement - no basis inastronomical fact. The StarForce map is aflat board played as a sphere with ...

Redmond: Forty thousand different posi-tions you could be in.

John: 37,639.

Redmond: The thing that prevented me frommaking a really big mistake and letting thePlayer lose himself in 37,000 differentpositions was placing the counters on themap so that you could see them all the timeand yet be unaware of how "deep" they werein the map. That way you have limited intelli-gence effect without too much trouble.

John: You have to sacrifice something forplayability, but to say that you would knowthe X and Y coordinates, but not the Zcoordinates of any ship.Redmond: That was just a deliberatenonliteral way of writing limited intelligencewithout too much trouble. I don't mean tostate that in this "real" world (that I'minventing) that you literally knew the XY anddidn't know the Z. That's just the means ofrepresenting the lack of total accuracy inascertaining an enemy position. You cansimply assume that, in the real five-hundred-years-in-the-future, when they have tele-sthetic ships zooming around, that it will betrue three-dimensional inaccuracy in dis-covering positions of the enemy ship.Neil: I'd really like to see this game plotted sothat a computer a video screencomputer. ..

John: There are computer operated spacewargames.

Redmond: There is that classic, Space War.

Neil: Of course, that only takes place aroundone sun ...

Redmond: And two-dimensionally, at that.

Neil: .. .1 think this game could beprogrammed.

Redmond: In fact, if any game can be said tohave had any influence at all upon this game,it is that computer game. Inasmuch as inthat computer program there's a limitationon the disappearance of your ship off thescreen. That is to say, when you disappearoff the screen in one direction, you come backon an equivalent point on the other side ofthe screen. I like that concept that you couldgo totally off the map and I wanted to getaway from the wargame concept where if youwere forced off the map you were destroyed.After all, you are talking about three-dimensional space, for all intents andpurposes limitless, so I base the gamemechanics of when you randomize (and yourship is randomly displaced somplace in thesphere) upon sort of a "rebound" effect, thatthe Telesthetics who were in that ship wouldproduce. That, even though their ship wasrandomized and shot off to God knowswhere, their own sense of "actuality" in thespace they knew rebounds them into"known" space somewhere.

John: The same problem is faced in a lot ofgames that are played on just ordinary two-dimensional maps and the fighting gets alittle close to the edge ... what do you do? Doyou say that anything thrown off the edge iseliminated or escapes or that the movesimply isn't valid.

Neil: There is one science fiction game inparticular where I think that is the majordrawback; it's done through an inertiasystem of movement.

Redmond: Triplanetary ...

Neil: Only a two-dimensional plane in thefirst place and then it reaches the end of the

map and I don't know, God grabs it out ofthe universe or something.

John: There's a feature like that in 4,000A.D., too. If you run your ship too far up thewarp side of the board, it'll never come back.

Redmond: Incidentally, speaking of Tri-planetary, a moment, that takes place withina solar system ... in fact, within a limitedsegment of the solar system.

Neil: One thing that they do have, just to saya good thing about Triplanetary, movementaround the gravity wells. You can get aslingshot effect on spaceships.

Redmond: That's the best thing about thegame, that's to say, its use of vectors toinfluence movement. In fact it is basically amovement system game. You make theseadvance decisions and you're subject to themand they are subject to the positions of themasses that are on the map.

Neil: It occurs to me that once I would like totry transfering that to StarForce on theStarForce map.

Redmond: It would be, I hate to use theword, "unrealistic," given the backgroundfor the movement system and the scale thatyou're talking about.

John: If you do a strategic level game in thesolar system, a plane board does becomerealistic, because planets are very nearly onthe same plane. This was done in a game thatwas never brought into commercial produc-tion. Its inventor brought it to the ChicagoWorld Science Fiction Convention in '62; itwas called Interplanetary. The map boardwas the solar system and each planet moveda certain distance in each Game-Turn in itsorbit around the sun, representing thepassage of time. It was different, of course,with each planet. The ships themselvesmoved in various orbits and there was also adark planet, which is sort of a mobile blackhole, that might grab you if you weren'tcareful. The point of the game was for severalPlayers to try to get from Earth out to Pluto,pick up something valuable there, I think itwas a drug of some sort, and bring it back toEarth safely, without being hijacked by theother Players.

Redmond: There's a mission like that inTriplanetary. The thing I didn't like aboutTriplanetary I discovered after I hadStarForce down the ways and into thewater. .. The movement system was one of thenicest things about the game, yet it wasclumsy to handle; you were plotting with agrease pencil on acetate ... I just had a badsense about doing all that and doing it with agrease pencil and getting so involved in thatmovement system that you lost sight ofalmost everything else.

Neil: That's true. Once two ships are fairlyclose together, if there's a torpedo involved ora mine or one of these things that use thegrease pencil, courses start overlapping andyou wind up with a grease pencil line an inchwide and you can't tell were anything is.

Redmond: Plus the fact that the rules werenot written in such a way that you wouldimmediately grasp what was going on anddeal with this fairly complicated process withfacility. Relating it to StarForce, one of thethings I realized as I was midway into it, itwas a very different kind of game for awargamer, or for anybody. It was a game thathad a lot of inherent complexity in the systemand so I felt that it was a real pressure on meto make the rules as explicit - as allencompassing - as possible. That's one ofthe reasons why I went to the glossary, intro-ducing each of the two main sections of therules. Apparently, it's worked prettyeffectively, because we've gotten very fewquestions on StarForce. Usually a new game,particularly if it's complicated, you get apretty juicy wave of question letters in thefirst few months. StarForce has gotten lessthan half of the number we usually get... andthe rules are twenty-four pages long. Therules themselves are divided into two parts.The Standard Strategic Game and theTactical Advanced Game. The main body ofthe rules in the Standard Strategic Game areno more than eight pages in terms of realrules and, once you grasp the three-dimensionality of the map, you've got theStandard Game knocked. Once you get bythat main hump of unfamiliarity in dealingin true three dimensions ... one of the thingsyou mentioned before that you really liked ina game. Part of my insistence in havingliteral three dimensionality grew out of mydissatisfaction with the air games that weredone in which the three dimensionality wascompromised to a large degree, although Iowe something of a debt to the techniqueused in the air games inasmuch as in the airgames you have different levels, usingdifferent counters to represent differentlevels. Although I didn't use counters torepresent different levels, I did make use ofthat concept of a couple of dozen levels to beat.

John: 'In the game development did you everconsider putting a peg on each fleet to tellwhat itsZ coordinate was so that the Playerscould know a little more precisely thepositions and seeing what effect that wouldhave on the game.

Redmond: That relates to what I just saidabout the air games. In the air games, youhave different counters to represent a singleaircraft at a different altitude. At first, Ithought it might be possible to do that, tohave either Z coordinate markers or havethat system of replacing the ship each time.Because of the space I wanted to represent inthe way that I wanted to represent it, it wouldhave meant an enormously overblowncounter mix and a lot of unnecessarycomplications. Unlike the air games, it is asimultaneous game. You have the plot infront of you, the plot is pretty simple in thestellar map. Just the hex coordinate and theZ level that you're at, so I thought that it wassimple enough for a Player to reference toand plus the fact that you usually don't havemore than six or a dozen counters to

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manipulate. It's not that much of a strain ona guy's brain to get the feeling of where thosesix ships are. So I was relieved from that trapof having all those counters there.

Neil: One thing about the game, and that isto me I think that it is more realistic than anyof your other SPI games, much as I enjoyplaying them. I think this is because of theunfamiliarity of the game when I'm playingCivil War or Sinai I am moving littlecardboard counters on a cardboard map ...and I know it's entirely symbolical. There'sno way I can be fooled for an instant intothinking to myself that I am actually doingthis. But when you play StarForce it's a niceblack map with stars, so when you sit therevisualizing it in three dimensions, I canactually see that map as a sphere and it'salmost as if in your mind you have a holo-graphic projection of a battle being foughtoutside your starship.

Redmond: It's interesting that you shouldsay holographic projection, because that, ineffect, is what I was thinking of when Ivisualized the map to myself. I wanted to usethe gradiation of color and the blackbackground of the map and the Z coordinatebusiness to give you that sense.

Neil: I think that if there are ever star battlesfought, something like this is going to beused. Of course, it won't be a sheet, it wouldbe a holograph and it won't cover this vastvolume. But still, I think this is why it'srealistic.

Redmond: That device is used in a numberof science fiction stories that say anything atall about how they're fighting a space war.They do assume that there is some sort ofthree dimensional projection. I described inthe article we did on science fiction futures inS&T the way in which Telesthetics on boardthe ships sense enemy ships and dispositions.They go into a semi-trancelike state andproject their abilities, like human radar, theysee an abstract set of' symbols that is theirway of visualizing space and discontinuitywindows being created or collapsed by thealterations of colors and intensities ... nothingso literal as the map itself - I only hinted atit, because I knew if it were an actuality Icould never really understand it. .. The thingI felt very strongly about in creating thescenario for the game was that you could nothave interstellar political, social andeconomic interaction if you had to cope withall that baloney of years and years and theslipping of phase that you would get betweensocieties in which subjective travel was only afew months and yet years have passed. Youget into the whole problem of who's on whattime and why does it mean anything to mewhat you're doing over there since we'reseparated by this time barrier.

John: Yes, but then this assumes that youhave a common starting base. It's highlyunlikely that when we go into space we willencounter species with precisely our owntechnical development.

Redmond: Or anything near it.

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John: They may be so far away from us ineither technological direction that combat isunthinkable. The stronger side just moves inand declares what it wants and there's noargument.

Redmond: It may be something reallydifferent...

Neil: Let us postulate through some naturalselection (or perhaps unnatural selection)that the population, instead of producing.001% Telesthetics, which is probably toomuch anyway, is able to produce 20%Telesthetics.

John: There would be a basic change in thecharacter of the society.

Neil: Also it would be a basic change, but itappears to me that these Telesthetics with abit more trade could probably developindividual telekinetic powers - telekinesesand the ability to move.

John: Furthermore, 20% Telesthetics whichwould be regarded by the nonTelestheticsmajority not as a resource, but as a menace.

Redmond: Well, perhaps. Incidentally, themix of powers that the Telesthetics have -they're called Telesthetics because that'stheir predominant power: sensing things at adistance; another name for that is clair-voyance. They are telekinetic as well, not aspowerfully as they are telesthetic, and theyare telepathic, but again, not as powerfully asthey are telesthetic.

Neil: I think what I'm basically saying here isjust using the old StarForce system to comeup with something which should be nothingat all like you matted it. Suppose there was arace not only of Telesthetics, but also ofanalogs of the Gnostechs, only they're asub-species. This from the very first entryinto intelligent life of these two combinedraces would mean that they would not haveto develop nearly all the technology that wehave, in order to be starfaring and in order tofulfill all their needs and comforts ...

Redmond: I tend to think that there wouldbe an enormous diversity. However, I thinkthere are common points that all starfaringraces would achieve. They would havesomething in common. They would find thatthis is the best way to do a given thing. If I'mgoing to get into space and go between starsI'm going to do it this way. In fact, Ipostulated that the teieships themselves,being the optimum design, are the only typesof ships built. They don't have "destroyers"or big "battleships" simply because of theconstraints of the technology. It's convergenttechnology. A technological revolution whereyou have an optimum design and you betteruse that design because if you use anythingelse, you're going to be wasting resources.

Neil: You stipulate that a Telesthetic fromone race has the same magnitude of powersas a Telesthetic from another race.

John: That is a bit stickier. I could be quitewilling to extend Redmond's idea to thewhole level of technology from the invention

of fire on up and to base my belief on generaltechnological parallelism among differentintelligent species on that. But, of course,there might be basic differences in anythingfrom strength to stature to telesthetic abilitywhich might have something to ...

Redmond: Certainly it would modify theliteral design of the ship. The placement ofcontrols, the number of crew you might needto do a particular thing. One RameTelesthetic might not be equivalent to onehuman Telesthetic. In fact, I will be willingto state right now that Rame Telesthetics aremore powerful than human Telesthetics.Based upon the thing that I posit that almostall Rame are telepathic and since theytransfer their identities from one to the other,they have a richer mix of Telesthetics in theirrace. It's still logical within the game becauseI gave the Rame a smaller population base.We're not throwing dozens and dozens ofstarforces into space simply because theyhave a smaller population base. I look uponRame as the most level headed of all theraces that I depict. They're the mostcontemplative leaders of the mind because oftheir nature. They're just on the borderline ofbeing dolphins in effect. They have thatimpulse towards technological existence thatbrings them out into space, but they're not sodriven and so totally dependent upontechnology as humans are, for instance. OrL'Chal-Dah, which are, in effect, otherhumans. I had in the back of my mind whenI created the L'Chal-Dah that either theywere the original humans and we are sort of aforgotten remnant of them or vice versa. Orthat we both came from some other place.

John: Well, we're so closely linked biologi-cally with life on this planet that it would be alittle hard postulating an extraterrestrialorigin for humanity.

Redmond: Well, someone posited that thatvery close linking that we all use the sameR&A/D&A basis. It might be an argument infavor of the fact that we had a seed plantedon the planet. It all grew from the one root.I'm just saying that enough of adoubt existsbecause of the striking similarities betweenthe L'Chal-Dah and humans.

Neil: Can they interbreed?

Redmond: Yes, but they produce sterileoffspring.

John: Interbreeding among races evolved ondifferent planets is a very touchy. point. Therewas a lot of it in early SF with John Carter ofMars as the type and, biologically, this is justout of the question ...

Redmond: You can talk about simple,natural transfer of biological materialbetween planets. There's been stuff thatmaintains that simply by organic materialbeing naturally thrown off the planet.

Neil: The only thing that bothers me aboutthat in relation to the background of thegame looking over all the scenarios, theL'Chal-Dah seem to have less or no more

colony worlds than the humans do. Now itseems to me that if the L'Chal-Dah camefirst, it would probably hit more. They wouldbe the more expansive empire.

John: Well, this, I think, is the assumptionthat makes the game playable. Say, forexample, you have two species even as littleon the cosmic time scale as 100 years out ofdevelopment with each other. That meansthat one is going to explore space while theother is at a dreadnought level of technology.A hundred years is a hopeless head start atthis level, and yet it's a very small period oftime on a cosmic time scale.

Redmond: That is a difficulty in any worldsystem that you stipulate.

Neil: I think that, if you're going to stipulatethree races at the same level of technology, Idon't think you can have one the progenitorsof the others.

Redmond: Or, as you brought up yourself,it's possible that it is allowable within asystem to say that they were both planted bya third party.

John: As sort of a sociological experiment.

Redmond: See who develops faster underwhat conditions.

Neil: In that case, one wouldn't be theprogenitor of the other.

John: No. They both would have a commonprogenitor. I think that this business abouthaving them at the same technological level;it's one of the things, like faster than lighttravel and ESP, that you're going to have toassume if you want a game.

Redmond: If I stipulate a super race comingin with technology hundreds of years inadvance of the technology that exists on themap, the game becomes much lessinteresting ... There's one thing you couldspin-off from that and that is thedevelopment of a single aspect of technologyto point of its easy use, such as interstellartravel. That forces you "to have underpinnings of that technology that are at thesame level. It does not force you to have theexact same technological level throughoutthe society. You could simply say that they'reareas of technology in that the Rame andL'Chal-Dah are either superior or deficient tohuman technology and vice versa ... It's safeto assume that you can have disparitiesbetween the cultures even though they mighthave in common this one major aspect oftheir technology and might be operating atessentially the same technological level. Thatcan be reinforced by saying that there is oneoptimum design for a teleship given certainmissions that it is going to fulfill and plus thefact that the rarity of Telesthetics and you'regoing to be using them primarily forcommercial means would prevent theproliferation of different types of ships,different roles for different types of ships.That's one thing that I really want to avoid,whole transfer of naval technology intospace.

John: It might get a little far away from thegame to ask, but the fact that theTelesthetics are all women is likely tointroduce some kind of change in theconventional relationships between the sexes.

Redmond: The reason I did that was, I wasjust having fun, I wanted to stick a pin intothe typical wargamer. Most wargamers aremale, 990/0of them, and I though it would bea little bit of a twist having a wargamerhaving to deal with command elements thatwere commanded by women.John: In the movement features of StarForcethere's a point that makes it different fromany other wargame. The instantaneousmovement means that you can't blockstrategic routes, or place pieces in particularpositions that make up the enemy'smovement.

Redmond: Right. In effect, it is a synthesisbetween the mood of a naval game and an airgame and there's very little of the infantrygame in it. I had this done deliberately,because I feel that's the way things would be.That the distances involved, the volumes ofspace involved are such that you couldn'thave really that sort of Napoleonic or WWIbusiness where you have a line and you canarrange your forces in such a way thatnobody can penetrate them. The only timeyou come to something you can't go aroundis the StarGate itself. Because the StarGate ispowerful enough to shield the planetary

system on the outskirts of which it orbits. Soyou have to take that. You can't get by it inorder to secure the system.

Neil: What I particularly like is the mirrorshifting. The overshift which is equivalent toa forced march in a more conventional game,and the idea that you can take this chanceand you can wind up just completelyopposite, in planar distance and Zuluup-and-down distance.

Redmond: Originally I was going to usealmost exclusively mirror shifting ordisruption type effects. Then I decided, well,why not have randomization in which you gosomeplace and you don't know where the hellyou're going to wind up. Since there are somany possible places you could be, I thoughthat it would add a certain interest to thegame. Ultimately, it took over the combatresults in the game in that the TacticalAdvanced Game, that's what happens to you.You could be all the way across the map, adozen Turns away from where you want to beif you use a conventional method of shifting.But with GateLinks and so forth andStarGates in series, going from system tosystem you can get back reasonably easily ...The rationale behind placement of StarGatesis that, for the most part, they're crewed bymembers of that system and that the systemsupports the StarGate... I designed theStarGate values and the teleship values -the starforce values - so that you would

9

need at least two StarForces to take aStarGate. If the StarGate is supported by aStarForce, .you would probably need morethan two StarForces to take that StarGate ...In actuality, the game was designed as theAdvanced Game with the two map concept ofthe Stellar Display and the Tactical Display.After thinking about it for a long, long time(I spent months playing the game in my headwithout putting very much on paper at all), Isat down in a few days and tapped out a setof rules which are almost these [printed]rules. Very little modification took place inthe development. What happened in thedevelopment was the creation of scenariosand the honing down of some aspects of therules. People began playing it and found anenormous amount of complexity in getingused to it. So that the developer, John Young,suggested that we take the Stellar map andmake a "standard game" that revolvedaround simply moving on the Stellar mapand having combat in a more abstract way.Basically (to wrap it up) I'm pleased with theway the game came out, although there aresome parts of the system I would modify if Ihad another whack at it. It hangs together,though, and people that I've spoken withhave played it and who have really gotteninto it, really like it. They react to it well froma science fiction point of view, which pleasesme, because I really was half-way writing ascience fiction story as well as designing agame at the same time .••

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