One of the most important issues when pulling together ideas for any science fiction (and I use the term in the widest possible way) game is to get your influences right and nail the premise, its trappings and colour. If you don't do this you end up with a bit of a confusing mess or so many different influences being thrown into the pot it starts to feel a bit confused, inconsistent, lacking vision and can even start to break down. This didn't happen with Pulsars and Privateers, but it certainly suffered from the clashing influences problem to a small degree.

As a result, it was inevitable I'd be driven to start picking my influences and narrowing down my melange of ideas to provide some consistency. As an example, though Mass Effect has been a major inspiration, the initial spark that drove things forward, I wanted significant elements of Fading Suns. The truth is, beyond the fact both have ancient races having left technology around the galaxy and use 'ancient gates' for interstellar travel, they aren't that similar. You have to nail this stuff as it influences important colour and trapping issues around society, politics, technology and whatever else.

So, as I've been writing and flagrantly copy editing stuff into the wiki, things have been getting more focused...I think. This is good, it was supposed to be an organic process that fed on itself to spur things along.

The main conclusion I've come to is: I need to establish how Fading Suns it is going to be. I think the issue I had was I wanted the religion, I wanted the sense of it being an age 'after humanities height' but I didn't want it to be so literally medieval. Fading Suns is very medieval. It is a medieval, feudal society transplanted into a space fantasy. It has serfs, lords with fiefs and manors, religion and the lack of scientific thought. The societies can have no electricity, use gas lamps and many people still use horses and manual labour. I was trying to have some of this, but not all of it, while keeping a lot more generic space opera principles of Mass Effect. I've come to the conclusion it needs re-balancing in that I need more Fading Suns (and to an extent Warhammer 40K but without the Grimdark) and less Mass Effect. If Fading Suns is on the left of the scale and Mass Effect is on the right, I've made a 'jump to the left'.

First, the technology and science question. Basically, for the colour and trapping to make sense and be consistent throughout I need to layer the religious element in more, which I wanted to keep anyway, not by doing anything more with the religious element directly, but by changing the technology and science element. The society in my space fantasy needs to not be a scientific society by and large. It's a milieu in which technology isn't so much understood as redeemed and re-created by wrote from ancient manuals, texts and archives that bare more of a similarity to religious texts than something born out of scientific scrutiny and endeavour. Technology exists, it's progress that has stopped. In essence, if the 'fantasy' of my space fantasy is to be religion, the darkness beyond the stars, the fading suns and all that entails I need the dark age to be a true one. This means losing the scientific method as a principle of society. If I tried to keep it, and throw in the rest, I'm sure it'd work in that glorious, go for the colour, don't look at the detail approach we have at the table, but I also think I'd be stopping the strands working together to create something better. I was playing to it, what I need to do is embrace it.

Second, the medieval conundrum. I still don't want the colour and trappings to be so literally medieval. It's not that I think it doesn't work, I just don't want the literal approach. In a way, I'm trying to keep it in a different way. This is a work in progress. Technology hasn't sunk so low, though progress isn't occurring and key technologies are proscribed and heretical, basically all the grand concept stuff of a realistic society projected into the future is now an existential and spiritual threat to human society (artificial intelligence, robots, genetics, nanotechnology, etc). This does mean a lot of space opera trapping aren't present (or are in that they are always exceptions and protagonists always encounter exceptions). In terms of imagery (if not the loss of scientific method) this is a bit like Battlestar Galactica, which has a surprisingly low-tech vibe, as does Firefly (and even Star Wars in many ways).

I'm also sticking with not having literal Lords and Nobles who have fiefs with lands and serfs, instead it's more that power has ridiculously centralised around the Dynastic Houses. It's largely the same, the Dynastic Houses, Guilds and Church hold power, most people never leave their home worlds and work and live a pretty banal existence and social mobility is pretty much dead (some may even have generational contracts with Dynastic Houses) – it's just the image of the average person toiling on fields with a spade doesn't do it for me. Instead they do a variety of tasks to keep society running in this world that no longer can rely on super-intelligence computers, robots and whatever else to do the work. In short, things are a lot more 'manual' than they should be. It's a conceit I can accept. They accept this because for generations now scientific thought has effectively ceased to be, the horrors of war is all several generations have known, the suns are fading and religion tells us it is the end of times. Hell, even historically events like The Machine Crusade have almost become religious allegory. All the elements are related.

This move does make things a bit more difficult to deliver, as I'm drifting away from my centralist concept with Fading Suns trappings and more towards a game in which the characters do belong to a milieu that is more alien to ours (though it will involve blaster fights, aliens, starships and whatever else).

The question is: how hard is it to deliver something at the table that isn't based on scientific endeavour and progress? Difficult? Or a none issue? A part of me thinks it'd not be that different to running Star Wars (technology was colour), another part of thinks it'd have a few wrinkles. In a way, isn't it just a matter of remembering the fantasy element of the space fantasy? I also have to watch out for creating something that sounds great, but doesn't act as a fertile environment for actual ideas for play. Pondering.