One of the five defining art styles in Traveller is the plas-tech look. It's a world of clean, sterile surfaces, everything neatly covered up, and a modern aesthetic that's hard to miss. This is progress and civilization, or at least what the most significant players in the universe wish to project. It is cleanliness, power, advancement, profit, and an alignment to the greater purpose.
This is the projection of order and power, law and righteousness, method and tradition, and civilization's progression. If you add places like this in your game, you are sending a message about those inside.
This is contrasted and opposed by a post-tech industrial look, not the overly cluttered Alien "bolt a CRT without the case on the wall" sort of look. Still, the forms are uncluttered like plas-tech but dirty, hanging open, in disrepair, with instructions and warning signs spray-painted. This style can also encompass eight giant 10-meter-wide water pipes for a dirty dam with paint peeling off.
This isn't an "Alien" level of clutter; it is just massive, metal, and imposing, making you feel tiny and unclean in the universe. These places can be narrow, twisted, confusing, and metal, not purposefully cluttered unless necessary. They keep the universe running, dirty, loud, worked in, chipped and scratched, noisy, hot, cold, irradiated, and hard-working.
Post-tech is the machine behind the scenes that crushes imagination and independence. This is war, industrialization, resource mining, exploitation, and subjugation to the machine. If power is the clean, smiling face, this is the dirty boot that comes down after the deal.
Then there's cyber-fi, a style all about neon lights and the hustle and bustle of a commercial zone. It's loud, colorful, and superficial, a perfect cover-up for the decay and the machines that keep the universe running. It pushes buy-now, propaganda from the planet's leaders and factions, 24-7 news and entertainment, and lures you like a shiny, colorful bauble of dizzying colors and patterns.
This is more fake than it looks. Wires hang about, and the images can't be confused for reality. Wires hang down in places. The streets are still wet and dirty. The world isn't perfect, though it puts on a good show. Some genres blur the line between reality and the fake world; this can't cross the gap. Everybody knows how phony it is; the fake is visible, but they enjoy it for the moments of distraction it provides.
This represents the "bread and circuses" of the setting, the lies told to the population to keep them happy, and the constant stream of entertainment to opiate the masses. This is loud, screams in your face, colorful, sexy, appealing, and often happy fakery. Every side of a hot-button issue will have a channel that speaks to it and makes you hate the other side, controlled by the same company. You will be lied to, treated like children, talked down to, and you will be satisfied. Isn't that all you want?
Do you have enough problems in your life?
Let us take you away.
This is the newest part of Traveller in this group of influences. It is heavily influenced by the cyberpunk genre but mixed with today's post-truth information wasteland. There is no true or false; it is all the litmus test for your side. Where the cyberpunk genre is fascinated with flash over substance, this is a more insidious interpretation of the concept. This is the gunpowder on the fuse, hiding the growing unrest of people who feel smaller and smaller in a sea of crushing darkness between the stars.
Contrasting that is a dirty street-grunge look, almost like the red zone of any metro area. This is the most cluttered and layered style in the universe, evoking a chaotic, noisy, foul-smelling urban street area full of people and activity. This also encompasses the run-down and abandoned parts of the future, like ghost towns on forgotten worlds, where the money ran out for the mining colony, and there is no one left, no history, and no reason why people were ever there.
These are also the packed apartments of star-port and mine workers, the endless, shoddy, prefabricated, and dirty flats that 90% of the working class live in. The confusing streets, built on top of each other, with no real rhyme or reason to their layout, the cargo trains that bisect towns, the passenger rails, the roads filled with off-world cars of every make and model (with little hope of standard parts for any of them), and the factories, schools, cafeterias, hospitals, hopping plazas, sports arenas, drainage canals, parking lots, and office buildings that jumble the planets of the universe.
This is reality: the day after day of work, the appointments, permits, and licenses, the bills in the mail, the grit of the street, accidents, and arguments. Loud music shakes the wall. Police drive by with wary eyes. Lines wait to get into places of work and play. Gangs hang out on the corner, knowing the universe makes them insignificant, yet they try to pretend otherwise. Dust storms, rain, snow, heat, and cold. Scavengers. Miners. The rumble of starship engines overhead. The homeless and elderly look up at the stars and dream. Or denying they are there.
And this represents the places everybody forgot.
Broken roads, abandoned towns, crash sites, and closed facilities like the old days' auto plants and steel mills—or new ones going up in a flurry of activity and welder sparks—or being demolished for something new—or just being left to rot.
Just because a planet is TL 3 does not mean castles and knights are down there. It could mean the world is so poor and impoverished, and no one cares about them, that they have reverted to plowing the fields with animals and living in ramshackle houses. Bits and bobs of high tech can exist, just like the days of poor Appalachia, but mostly, there is little in terms of hope or a future coming anytime soon, or ever.
Remember the decay, abandonment, and poverty in this setting. They are just as much a part of Traveller as that sexy, clean, white plastic TL 12 laser pistol. And they will drive the story a lot better than playing sterile corporate troubleshooters.
This forgotten-grunge style is both the present and a past forgotten in a universe so big no one could ever remember it all.
The final type of art is this Moebius-ensue, strangely alien, ancient style—reserved for anomalies, alien civilizations, lost sites of forgotten races, fallen civilizations, and mysteries in the universe likely no one will ever solve. This is saved for only the required moments and serves as a counterpoint to all the art of "civilization" mentioned before.
Humanity in the stars will always be small.
There was always something before that was here, which we will never understand, and all our achievements and progress shall never hold a candle to.
Our minds will never be able to understand what this is.
Or why we are here.
No comments:
Post a Comment