Notes for a Playlist-based World Building Tool and Play System

I've been creating playlists on Spotify that function as tables for far-future sci-fi games / world-building.

I'll link to individual playlists below, or you can view all of them on my Spotify profile.

(Note that these are emphatically NOT "sci-fi soundtracks", they run a wide and crazy gamut of genres, so if you are trying to create a musical "space mood", this ain't your tool!)

First, how the playlists work (super simple):

• Hit "shuffle", get an entry, just like rolling on a table
• Like the entry? Use it! (Adapt and build on it as needed)
• Don't like the entry? Hit "next"

Here's a recipe for quickly building out an interesting space ship:

1. Use the Ships playlist to find a name for the ship
2. Fire up the Spaces playlist to populate the ship with some unexpected areas; many of these are intentionally vague / strange / "impossible". Stick with them and find ways to bend the laws of reality in your world to make them possible.
1. Within those spaces, check out the Atmos playlist to get a sense of what it looks and feels like
3. Here's a Stuff playlist (aka loot table) for the ship; why are these things here? why are they valuable?
4. Want some people/aliens/androids/cults/etc on the ship. Use the Souls playlist! 
1. If you want to flesh out the Souls, give them some things from the Stuff playlist
2. Use the Skills playlist to give those folks some stuff they're good at
3. Use the Quirks playlist to make them a little more (un)real

Boom(?) ... now you have a very interesting space ship; start exploring!

Now, a few musings on why I find this sample-based table-building practice and resource particularly valuable:

• The future is already here, seeded throughout the present; song titles are a great way to find those seeds and gather them into seed banks for future planting
• Music activates different activity centers in my mind, opening different pathways, making new connections; pairing that mode of discovery with text and world-creation is exciting
• The playlist is potentially infinite, nothing needs to be excluded because it doesn't fit in a neat d20 table or d100 or whatever
• Shuffle = discovery; shuffle = creation
• The variety of titles, genres, moods etc is a necessary counterpoint to sci-fi's tendency towards a kind of mono-culture / mono-atmosphere. I love me some Blade Runner (and Blade Runner 2049), but the overwhelming atmosphere seems to leave little room for the vast variety of experience and perspective. 
• As with all things sample-based or remix-ready, the focus and power shifts from THE ARTIST as a singular near-mythic entity, to THE USER as a collector and activator of the elements; what will YOU discover while surfing through the playlists? What worlds will YOU create from the seeds and sparks (either in your mind, or at the table, or ???)
• It encourages me to navigate music-space in a different way, leading to unexpected discoveries and new (to me, at least) territories of sound and thought

And a quick note on play systems (to be explored in a follow-up post).

I'm leaning more and more towards extremely rules light, narrative forward playstyles.

I imagine a system where someone uses the Souls playlist to find their character, the Skills playlist to give them 3(ish) skills, and the Stuff playlist to give them a couple things. Throw in some quirks and you are almost good to go.

As for stats? Blah blah blah, use 2d6 against static 8 challenge rating, give them +1 when using a relevant skill or stuff.

GO!

Here are those playlist links again:

Ships

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5dg7wvczSnKJ35BqSGs7Bz?si=c600b6cd61524cab

Spaces

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0ech27efdmw3BalrWfKuaS?si=3e3c7a250fde4cc3

Atmos

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/26WVHCfkPDgWqiiX7IseQR?si=180096b1e6dc43e7

Stuff

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0VTAv9ZG7SkCpzTDFt1Hnl?si=31a237a2cff34251

Skills

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/06NCCIhZmCMp5UXZv1OJWX?si=a3b0eeab9e33433c

Quirks

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/4blygdZRCuup8tyY7UamYm?si=78e4e8c4177c4423

Forms Beyond Form

For Solomon Stations, I want to push the boundaries of what exactly it is you are playing as ....
In all senses, "jobs", "species," "skills", "identities" etc.
Want the characters to emerge from the fuzzy potential in the spaces between systems and categories.

So while I started with four "races/species": Human, Android, Drone and Ancillary/Avatar, I'm now experimenting into much broader, more open "forms", more suggestions than anything. Each Form might have a couple bullets or a sentence of description, but likely I'll leave it up to the player to interpret what it actually is (especially in (re)combination with the skills they roll).

Here are d20 "Forms" for Solomon Stations and other far-future / post-human / high-wonder sci-fi...

d20 "Forms"

1. Android
2. Archive
3. Avatar
4. Biome
5. Circuit
6. Colony
7. Complex
8. Drone
9. Fox
10. Glimmer
11. Human
12. Network
13. Projection
14. Recorder
15. Ship
16. Sparrow
17. Spectrum
18. Swarm
19. Vessel
20. Weather

Here are a few characters incorporating the new Forms:
(from the v3 character generator)


...


...




What do you think of these Forms?

Are there others you would add to this list?

Some Moons - Random Moon Generator

"Full moon"
"Mega moon"
"Super blood harvest moon"
"Frost moon"
Etc....

WE DEMAND MORE MOONS!!!!

So I created this generator to provide EVEN MORE MOONS (fantastic, outlandish, suggestive, what have you).

Use this to create some interesting moons for your setting.
How does the moon influence the characters?

How does the world change during this moon?

I started with the moon phases (new, crescent, full, meta, micro, etc), and added in attributes and professions (many of which come from Troika and Electric Bastionland)

For extra fun, I threw in an "amount of moons" to occasionally throw out some bonus (double, triple, infinity) moons.

Here's what's going on behind the scenes:

Now... forget the annotations!

I love the slipperiness and openness of the language here.
"Drowning" can refer to the moon or to the "Chaos Champion"
Is "New" describing the moon itself, or is it a newly drowning Chaos Champion?

I left the structure deliberately open to this kind of fluid interpretation.

Here are some others I am digging:






Have fun with the generator, and share your favorites in comments below!
(Also, you can copy and "edit" the generator to create your own versions)

Ok, one more:

Faction Inspiration: Expression

Let's look at one of the many factions interested in the Solomon Stations: Expression.

(Images below can be found on my pinterest board for the Expression faction)

This faction basically answers the question: what would artists do if they discovered ancient powerful tech that would allow them to bend reality in service of their artistic vision? How could they express themselves if freed from the constraints of the oh-so-tired "laws" of physics?

• Massive environmental art (solar system as installation art?)
• Body augmentation
• Merging with the environment
• Inscribing hyper-dimensional geometries on lower-order surfaces
• Collecting and connecting objects, sacred and mundane
• Translating via the body
• Expanding and bending light (red shift, blue shift, black (w)hole)

Like the other factions exploring the Solomon Stations, Expression will have unique tech and code they've developed on the Stations.

What weird tech do you think that artists would create if they were empowered by an ancient alien intelligence?

Which artists do you think would benefit from a trip to a Station to help them expand their work?

Glitch Corps! (a Spotify Playlist-based Sandbox (SPbS))

Character and setting generation ideas sampled and remixed from Genre Glitch playlist on Spotify:

All language used is from song titles, artist names, album names, etc.

Organized for use in Troika, but can be used in any system.

No descriptions or stats, just language open to interpretation.

Go crazy with it.

You are a member of the elite Glitch Corps…

Create a character and decide what the Glitch Corps actually does, and then … do that?

Possessions

You get a sampler, headphones, a portable broadcast unit, and 2-4 of the following:

1. Viewfinder

2. Persuasion system

3. Nervelevers

4. Ecstasy of St Teresa

5. Cherry soda

6. Fruit salad

7. Nexus

8. Skee mask

9. RX -101

10. Warm electronics box

11. Object blue

12. Rosé 

13. Escape pod

14. Stereo cube 

15. Dopamine

16. Datasset

17. Downlink

18. SFV Acid 

19. Autumn keys

20. Drip of: (d6)

1. Infinity

2. Conflict

3. Ancestors

4. Bias

5. Sequences 

6. Time

Names

1. Green

2. HYENA

3. sparrow 

4. Stone

5. Tycho

6. Hiro

7. Sinjin

8. Rockledge 3A

Backgrounds

1. Watermelon woman

2. Full Panther

3. Brainwaltzera

4. Meteologist

5. Multirex

6. Player Dave

7. Icarus 

8. Natureboy

Skills

1. Escapism

2. Debiasing

3. Street talk

4. Color palettes

5. Dreamlike

6. Veil

7. Stories

8. Superstructure

9. Anomalie

10. Juggling of numbers

11. Special request

12. Salutations

13. THIRST

14. Harvest

15. Sequences

16. We

17. Gone

18. Remix

19. Serenity

20. Wolf

(General Skills)

Not pulled from song titles, but skills generally expected from Glitch Corps members…

• Glitch 

• Beat 

• Static 

• Dance 

• Drop

Spells

1. THINK BIG

2. Promise you'll haunt me

3. Fracture remix

4. The soft pink truth 

5. Move in silence

6. Laika's revenge

7. Broadcast profanity delay

8. Understanding the possibility

9. Floating points

10. Darkstar

11. Dayzero 

12. Booth thrust

13. Dorian concept

14. Ghostly swim

15. Weather the storm

16. Transactional relationship

17. Drumno

18. XYZ (examine your zed)

19. Canone Infinito

20. Feed My Ancestors

Locations

1. Shadow of like and likeness

2. Concrete spire

3. Central airport

4. Arse end of the moon

5. Maple Mountain 

6. Emerald Lake

7. Junkyard

8. Holodec

9. Club Winston

10. (two locations mashed-up)

Encounters

1. Elephant kiosk

2. Misfits

3. Bones

4. Grippers

5. Deadheads

6. Gold Panda

Stat and season to taste...

Some code fragments

Working on an expansive generator to create far-future sci-fi / high weirdness code fragments.

Some favorites at the moment:

• anti-reversible coordinate interceptor
• inter-Euclidean wave commander
• peta-minor fact jumper
• uni-mantic probability enveloper
• paleo-cool excession crusher

More to come.