or “Why Noblebright?”
Behind the Curtain 1 by polymer despair, lead writer
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Welcome to Behind the Curtain! This is the first in a series of articles and essays produced by various members of the team behind Ardent Spacers, elaborating on – well, LARP, live-action role-playing, and the process of creating and running LARP games. We hope you’ll find them illuminating, interesting and educational (not necessarily in that order).
Our first topic is appropriately fundamental to what Ardent Spacers strives to be – the mood of the game, which informs everything from planetary lore to event plotlines. In terms that are perhaps most recognisable to TTRPG players: noblebright over grimdark.
Settings that are both grim and dark need no introduction. You have played and probably enjoyed any number of books, films, games and shows where decay (biological or social) is inevitable, cynicism the correct response to any event, and hope has dwindled to protecting what little value remains amidst encroaching doom. So far, so good (or bad)!
What I want to zero in on as one reason for the popularity of grimdark narratives is the catharsis they offer through the expression and expulsion of negative emotions: despair, frustration, helplessness in the face of an unjust world. A rage against the dying of the light, as it goes. How do we, in Ardent Spacers, make a game that offers those same moments of catharsis – while emphasizing agency, cooperation, and idealism in a world half full rather than half empty?
In short: what are the elements of a noblebright setting? And: how do we use those elements?
A lighthouse and its keepers
In Ardent Spacers, players are specific members of a specific ship’s crew: the AES Ardent, and all who ride with her. It is an exploratory and scientific vessel – a light flung into the dark by a union of species and planets, who live and thrive by working together for the common good. They encounter mysteries, threats and villains, but, by applying their skills and knowledge together, they can overcome whatever confronts them.
This premise may be somewhat familiar to anyone who has ever encountered sci-fi in the past 60 years. Ardent owes a lot to Star Trek and its offspring within the genre; the lion’s share of that debt is a mutual sense of wonder and discovery. In Ardent, you are launching out from a position of relative safety and stability, created by the effort of those who went before, so as to nurture and share the light that you bring with you. You are noble: you represent an Alliance of different species, and your raison d’etre is working together to solve problems and explore new worlds. You are bright: the bonds and ideals you share with your crewmates keep the hopes of the Alliance alive, and you demonstrate the power and the potential of that Alliance when you give your all as a team.
This is not to say that the setting is mindlessly hopeful, but that it is aspirational – and that it supports you to live up to those aspirations, by giving you a shared purpose and immersing you in a spirit of co-operation.
Better things are possible
Consistency will establish a theme, but only conflict – and contrast – can drive a traditional narrative. In Ardent, consistency comes from the baseline structure and thematic core of the game. You are here to work together – when you do compete against other players, it is because you have differing opinions on how to achieve the best result, not because your overall goals are incompatible. Contrast is presented internally through the wide range of player options – six playable species, five planets to hail from, four divisions to join – and externally, in the form of the characters you meet.
Having that variety in culture and expression encourages a diversity of opinion. For example: a Skala gas miner from Marzion IX having a radically different perspective on workplace safety and its importance compared to, say, an Omdua experimental physicist from Geostation Kessler. When those differing perspectives come together, there is contrast, which leads to disagreement, which leads to discussion, which leads (ideally) to synthesis, and clarity of approach going forward.
That’s a fairly lofty way of looking at debate in the game, though. Primarily, contrast creates opportunities for interesting roleplay! The differing cultural briefs for the playable planets are designed to incite arguments and discussions, with players being encouraged to embrace those differences when deciding how their characters act and react – so that engaging conflict-based roleplay will organically arise. By making culture a primary lens of character roleplay, we also give players a layer through which to respond to the plots we lay out: “how would my character react in this situation?”. Challenging preconceptions through circumstance and debate allows for players to express their characters in greater depth by considering how they would feel and think when faced with big questions. Role-playing is half of the acronym “LARP”, after all; creating scenarios that push for more in-depth and expressive roleplay is just as important to the overall game experience as set dressing or combat
So: characters are encouraged to disagree, and to work together to resolve those disagreements. From those conflicts of interest and of opinion, they can create and act on shared plans. And, as game runners, we reward that investment in a narrative sense by responding to their actions: if they succeed, something changes. They rescue a hostage. They save a village. They make a new ally. And that’s important, because…
Choices matter
This is simplifying an entire genre into two broad tones, but bear with me: grimdark and noblebright both thrive on legible stakes. In works that tend towards the former, our protagonists – or players – are presented with a broken world and must find their own value, their own reason for moving onward, within it. In settings that lean towards the latter tone, the world may be flawed, but there is generally something worth fighting within it: something that people would reasonably both covet and want to defend.
For our storytelling to feel sincere while bending towards idealism, there must be a real and present risk to whatever the players value. What they value depends on their character and their background, their gameplay priorities, or even bonds that emerge in play – but the threat to it must be real. The mission can fail, or be failed. People can suffer and die, bearing the scars and trauma of conflict. Good things can be taken and corrupted. And – most importantly – these negative outcomes can be prevented with sincere and intelligent effort. Struggles are not in vain; they are rewarded with tangible results.
Inversely, making the stakes clear and sensible also involves not pulling the wool over our player’s eyes – or yanking the rug, narratively speaking, out from underneath them. Twists are cheap, and most impactful when carefully deployed; when people come to expect that nothing they do makes any difference, they mentally check out. So too if they always win, or are railroaded into victory.
For success to mean something, there must be a risk for you to fail. For failure to mean something, too, there must have been a chance – however remote – that you could have succeeded. That means keeping track of player choices, and being firm but fair when we write our stories and their potential outcomes: the resolution to an event must be consistent with what the players have actually done, and success on a mission will not be handed down. Players can handle negative outcomes, all the way up to outright failure, as long as the consequences are consistent, fair, and the natural result of the events leading up to them.
Talking it out
From civilians to villains, the galaxy is packed with wonders and dangers. Within the first event, we were introduced to the Lavra: pacifist castaways from the Alliance, adrift yet clinging together. Against them, and against the Ardent’s crew, we had our antagonists – the galaxy’s four major threats (CIRCUS, MOSIAC, SHADOW, and THRONE), each deliberately written to contrast the Alliance’s strengths, while also underlining its vulnerabilities.
All of these foes – pirate bands, terror artists, machine overminds, et al – have strong reasons, based on in-universe history and ideology, to challenge the Alliance. They aren’t just “writer-says-so” rival powers or bands of mercenaries, but thinking entities that can be understood and negotiated with. And when they can’t be reasoned with, and self-defense is the only option, there are reasons for closing off the lines of communication. Perhaps the local SHADOW bandits have been aggravated past the point of diplomacy, or MOSAIC mutants are mindlessly rampaging toward the camp – in any case, the players can clearly see why communications have broken down, and can respond appropriately.
We generally want to keep lines of communication open – even if it is just so that the players are tempted to keep their friends close and their enemies even closer. With Ardent, our goal is to strike a balance between “talky” diplomatic encounters and “shooty” combat engagements. The expectations we’ve set for the game don’t lend themselves to huge staged battles in the classic UK LARP tradition, but our players do relish tactical engagements, flashpoint skirmishes, and closed-room puzzles just as much as they enjoy engaging with NPCs.
The trick is that both combat and diplomacy (and engineering, and bio-med) all need to make sense within the story, and also work to develop the story. This is not a game of fighting for fighting’s sake, nor talking for talking’s sake: anything we ask players to do should serve a purpose beyond killing time. The purpose doesn’t need to be grand: an ostensibly simple supply run with an enemy ambush lurking behind its prize is a classic and completely valid type of encounter, which just so happens to deliver both items and excitement to combat-craving players – but it needs to make sense, and it needs to respect the player’s investment of both time and resources.
We know that our players want immersive encounters where they can work together, live up to their aspirations, and make real choices that they can see having a real effect on the game and the setting. Ultimately, Ardent Spacers is a game about acting together with purpose, and players should see their actions being rewarded – not just with credits, materials or crude gameplay benefits, but with changes in the narrative that reflect the effort they’ve put in.
Unconquerable soul(s)
The secret, captain, is that many of our writing priorities would be the same if we had wanted to run the game in a midnight-dark setting. We would still give our players something to strive for, and something to protect; we would still present them with meaningful choices, and respect whatever outcome they pursued; and they would still have the option to negotiate and persuade their way out of (most? some) problems.
So: why noblebright, indeed? It’s true that the sci-fi space is saturated with tales of pyrrhic struggle, and that even the largest and most classically hopeful of franchises are dabbling in darkness. In times of crisis and confusion, many people turn to fictional crises for catharsis. Holding the shadows on your screen, or at sword’s length, makes them feel smaller – less than real.
Perhaps that’s dramatic. Perhaps tone, in fiction, is a matter of taste rather than any subconscious desire to make sense of the world.
And – maybe, just maybe, in our own little corner of a big, bad, universe – we can make room for optimism. For a planet and a species that came to the brink, and pulled themselves back. For an alliance of species that stand together against the forces embodying authority, decay and thoughtless cruelty. For the stars, and the joy of racing towards them.
Maybe we can be masters of our fate, after all.
Thank you for reading Behind the Curtain! Stay tuned for more glimpses into the art and the craft of LARP – it’s live-action role-playing, Jim, but not as we know it…