Spectre Vector
A Gravity RIP Solo RPG Gameplay
Content Warning:
Language, Violence, Vehicular Violence, Genetic Biases, Body Horror
To start at the end, in his Acknowledgements, Westaway thanks the reader for playing this “dumb game.” It’s a throwaway bit of self-deprecation and it almost certainly is not as deep as I’m about to make it but it struck me. I know this self-deprecation ‘cause I do it all the time. This dude is part of a multimillion subscriber online enterprise, he makes a game book and gets it to print, and still chucks a line like that in the acknowledgements. Almost assuredly, it really is just a throwaway line tossed out by a humble soul to soften the hard edged expression of glee and gratitude he must be feeling at his success here. Me, I’m still working on not hating everything I do but that’s neither here nor there. But listen, it struck me less because of how I relate to it and more because I don’t think this is a dumb game at all.
Okay, to be fair, I haven’t played it yet. I’m just about to, you understand. But I’ve played, reviewed, and studied so many games that I like to think I have at least a small inkling of what sounds fun and what will transfer from theory to practice well. This game isn’t robust and its setting is minimal, loose, and (probably) intentionally silly. Watching the actual play on the channel he’s on, outsidexbox it’s called, those feelings are reinforced for sure. But it’s just such an evocative idea (and sometimes, hell maybe most times, silly is what’s called for). I’ve been kicking around a death race style game as far back as when I owned a word processor as a kid. My parents and their friends joked about scoring points for pedestrians and I wanted to find out what that meant, so I went to a Blockbuster and rented the 1975 Death Race 2000. And have been hooked on Car-nage ever since (with the first Death Race movie remake and the wargame Gaslands being favorites). I’ll finish my own game eventually but I doubt I’ll be able to capture the same essential quality and simple elegance I’m finding in this game. When I do complete my game, though, if I don’t credit this game as an inspiration, it’s because I’ve received brain damage in the interim and I hope whoever has read this will remind me of it. Not that anyone is reading this…I write as though I have an audience because it’s the only way I know how to be. I talk to myself too, if you’re wondering.
Aaaand I’ve just realized how everything I’ve just shared makes me sound like a sociopath, so…let’s move on.
For this game, I’ll be using the Gravity RIP rpg book for core play and Mythic 2nd Edition to fill in the gaps.
Worldbuilding in the Post-Myriad
First off, I’m on the fence about calling the galactic collection of worlds The Myriad still. Setting makes clear that capitalism ruined everything (as it is wont to do) and caused the worlds to fracture, linked mostly by their shared love of the RIP Drive and how it make cool hover car go fast. I scoured the Thesaurus for some ideas as to what to call the Post-Myriad (though that right there is also a perfectly acceptable name, really) and came up with “disparate.” I guess The Disparate works pretty well, especially because it’s one of the words the author uses to express the idea in the first place. So I suppose I’ll bounce between those three terms.
Next, I don’t really have any concrete ideas for this one…I just kinda really wanted to get into it. Also, I’ve had a helluva week and I’ve found little time to give it much thought. I’d just take more time…cause it’s not like I’m on a schedule or anything…but I can’t guarantee I’ll have the energy regardless. Ever again. So. You get what you get. But there are some idea sketches floating around in there.
I want to do something with clones. I’ll get to that in character creation but I think I’ll go with the idea that Clones aren’t well liked by society at large. I think the very rich are probably all clones at this point, several generations removed from the original, with loads of genetic modifications. I’m thinking of the old immortals in Altered Carbon. I want to call them antediluvians but I think I’m thinking of Vampire (in terms of contemporary fiction, not pre-flood bible figures). I imagine those people are just seen as the people they are and suffer no real discrimination (except from extremist religious nutjobs and the like…Shadowrun has something like this too). But I think a noticeable portion of the populace (human or not) are the Clones of a few hundred thousand originals. At some point in the past, probably after the Wars, Cloning was legally restricted. The common trope is outlawed but I think I’ll stick to merely restricted. Maybe it’s one of those few things the worlds in the Disparate have agreed on as part of a tenuous peace accord. A citizen of any world can have one body up and about at a time. Can’t do anything about the hundred grand (let’s capitalize that, actually, and call them the Hundred Grand), though. No real way to prove a clone of one of them is or isn’t new. Even proof by aging is out, with genetic modifications on the table. Used and abused for mass labor and dangerous jobs. There are probably folks who join them in campaigning for more equal treatment but social change is slow…or so we keep telling ourselves.
Playing on those themes of modification and immortality, I was thinking about the cyberpunkish skeletons Westaway and crew included in their actual play (and which are featured prominently in illustration on the cover of the book). And I’m watching Pantheon now, so that’s probably on my mind. But I kinda dig the notion of people, translated into Uploaded Intelligence versions of themselves, walking around in their own bones. There were 500 years and three grav-nuclear wars, so I imagine we have a lot of space to work with. I can imagine these unrestrained intelligences running wild on some kind of galactic net. They would still have been people, though, no matter how evolved they had become by virtue of transcending their meat bodies. So they still would have made mistakes and given in to biases, unable to leave well enough alone when faced with the diametrically opposed ideologies of other uploaded people. One ugly cycle into the next. Same shit, different battlefield. I can imagine the Skeletons being another dystopian solution to that problem. Just like with the clones. You get one body. In this case, yours. They flense your bones, wire them up, dump your brainbox into your old skull, and spray everything down with a protective coating. Bam, reverse robot kinda.
Teleportation. Ok, so the RIP Drive is tech that makes you go superduper fast. Though, it seems like fuel efficiency is also an important consideration. But if TP, then why go fast with spaceships? I guess the easy answer to that would be that Teleport tech came after all those hundreds of years and now RIP Drives are basically solely used for racing/entertainment purposes. Cause it’s still fun to go fast/watch other people go fast. But I think what I’m going to go with instead is that Teleportation takes a massive amount of energy for even the smallest item, let alone a whole racing machine, let alone twenty racing machines. The setting material notes that RIP racing courses take a metric fuckton of space and money to build. It makes mention of planetary empresses and god-mayors (that last one made me laugh). So I’m imagining that the starting grid teleportation circuits cost the wealth of entire large nations and it’s one of those expenditures that the hyper-wealthy galactic capitalist elite use to justify future gains or whatever. Build a stadium and they will come type shit.
That said, I want to diverge from the Deep Lore here for a minute. I think there are maybe a limited number of “official” tracks that host RIP racing. Basically like how there are 24 races in Formula 1 this year and there were 25 last year. For us, I think there will be an increasing (over a long period of time) but steady amount of circuits in the RIP Racing League. I’m good with 24, arbitrarily. Let’s just say there are 24 major circuits that are basically always in a season. I like the idea that there are a bunch of minor tracks, hundreds perhaps, which are used for training and lower league placement. Maybe one or two of the more robust tracks make it into a season alongside the Major Circuits and receive fame and funding as a result. So we can have everything from pristine stretches to the equivalent of shitty dirt backroads as racing tracks. To that end as well, The Side will probably only be implemented on the tracks that have had more money poured into them which definitely makes lower league racing a lot more rustic. Finally, I think this also means that even top tier racers will sometimes need to transport their vehicles from race to race, which allows us another avenue for shenaniganry (I’m thinking of opportunities for sabotage but I mean, cue Lightning McQueen falling out of the back of his trailer, you know?).
One way in which I might maybe diverge is if I decide to do some kind of championship thing where races are tracked from one to the next in an overall bracket type thing. Like, understand, I’m not a sports guy and I unequivocally don’t understand these things so I’ll end up doing some google-fu to get a base overview of how to set it up and then just focus on the dramatic parts that are interesting to me. It does change the tone of the game, though, because in Gravity RIP, each race is its own self contained thing. You’re only as good and as famous as your last race. This is a narrative device forced into place by the necessities of the game mechanisms, which have you starting in a random place by lottery each race. A lot of the excitement of the game seems to be pushing your way through the ranks and if you’re already starting in first place each race by way of cumulative point totals and earned pole positions, there are probably a few less interesting decisions to make during a race. I don’t think I mind, though, so we’ll see. Maybe. If I get far enough to want to give it a try. Putting the cart before the horse, though. I want to stick with the basics for the start of this thing and see if I can build a story from it.
Character Creation: The Spectre
For the Driver, I’m stealing directly from Frankenstein. The Spectre is a broad shouldered badass in a leather jacket and a simple, black mask. He’s stoic and speaks only with clipped mostly one word responses. Basically every creepy WWE wrestler you’ve ever seen doing their best to mimic the Undertaker. He’s brutal and ruthless and he strikes fear into the hearts of his opponents. Contrary to other teams, Team Spectre is really just The Spectre. Other racers cycle in and out of the team. Sometimes because they’re guest racers (usually lower leaguers who don’t mind helping to spotlight Spectre in exchange for a hefty payout or the exposure racing in the big leagues brings them but also sometimes big leaguers whose managers think the legendary team up will create a big draw) and sometimes because they’re a clone whose only purpose is to sacrifice themselves for the Spectre’s glory. Team Spectre hypes their frontman up as a pure, unmodified human being. Just one with ice in his veins. Problematically, a large portion of the fanbase goes nuts for that purity crap. They call it “refreshing” and are so impressed with how a “normal” human can withstand the races. So despite being one of the top dogs, he always somehow maintains an underdog vibe that even infects the less problematic audience members.
Here’s the kicker, though. The Spectre isn’t an unmodified human. He’s one of the Hundred Grand originally but part of a strand of genetic generations specifically engineered for RIP Racing by Team Spectre and their shadowy corporate sponsors. There have actually been 41 different Spectres. The current one is lucky number 42. No one knows that, of course, outside of the higher ups running the team. The scandal would be catastrophic. We’ll call 42 Spender Shine. He’s a flamboyant sort who is in it for all the behind the scenes benefits. Sex, drugs, money. Living the high life. His real personality couldn’t be further from who he becomes with the mask on. Bubbly, excitable, dramatic. He poses as himself, a flashy racer who is subcontracted to the Spectre’s team currently. Obviously, when the races start, a clone takes his place while he dons the mask. It doesn’t even matter if the clone dies as far as he or anyone on the team is concerned. As a recognized clone, the audience expectation is that Team Spectre and Spender Shine are following the accords (limiting Shine to one active clone at a time). No one bats an eye when he reappears later. Our guy is…not a good guy then. Listen, I’m coming up with this literally as I write it. We’ll see if it goes anywhere. I think the bias against the 100G is marginally toned down in the backrooms. Shine has more money than god, for one, and no one wants to piss off Team Spectre, for two. Well, almost no one.
Let’s figure his Chaos/Theory. Now, I imagine the Spender persona (who can say who he really is anymore, the lines are so blurry) has a very chaotic persona. It’s all charm and smarm. He’s all over the place and his racer persona is fast and flighty. I think the Spectre is somewhat more controlled. He’s certainly a man of fewer words and much more focus. That would seem to lean him in the direction of Theory. But, the thing is, Spectre is violent and scary. He’s not a scalpel, he’s a machete. So if he leans theory at all, he does so from an initial positioning of chaos. Which makes sense if his actual personality is Shine. Also, I think I’d want to give more narrative “air time” (as City of Mist might call it) to Spender Shine in Gravity RIP’s Story Mode (I kinda love this framework, by the way). Let’s set it at 4.
Now for his Machine. I’m going to go ahead and create both persona’s machines here, even though the actual Shine will only ever be driving as the Spectre.
The fake Spender Shine racer will occupy a bright bubblegum pink speed-demon machine that is little more than a sleek bike with engines strapped on. It’s an attractive speeder, with a long forward nose and a half-body cockpit that encases the rider in a pointed pill-like shell. The rider’s legs aren’t visible, slotting back into the anterior of the vessel and positioning the rider into a nearly horizontal, head first, superheroic flight pose. A vertical half-halo of long, powerful engines runs the length of the back of the machine, following the rounded curvature of the massive central cylindrical engine that forms the center mass of the back of the machine. The rider is basically horizontally straddling a fuck huge rocket engine, guiding it along the track with an aerodynamic needle nose, and is protected by a scant few inches of sturdy plasteel. It will spend all 4 points in Acceleration, taking it to a 3 and giving it a Weight of -1. As a result, it has a lesser Integrity of 7. The speeder bike RIP Racer is called “Lancer.”
Every so often, Team Spectre will roll out a new vehicle model for The Spectre to drive as part of an ongoing attempt to maintain fan engagement. So the current model has no upgrades or mods yet. While the various models vary in shape and style, their specifications remain almost exactly the same. The current RIP Racer has a wide, stable base with a low overall height profile. It has a large, boxy hood which is both sturdy and which houses a souped-up power multiplier engine which is hooked via interior cable lines running the length of the vehicle to the straight row of accelerators positioned at the rear. The machine is specced for high speed gains on straight-line racing but its overall stability and balance leave it able to handle the consequences of such reckless speed come the inevitable curves. The body is a single piece chassis with no doors, hinges, or movable parts outside of the reinforced grating covering the window (which folds down to admit the driver through a low opening). The whole machine is, of course, jet black. Even its windows are somewhat obscured by the reinforced grating motif that continues across the front and back. Spectre is a balanced racer, ultimately, if a bit violent so I’ll spend 2 points each on Acceleration and Weight, bringing them both up to 1s. That puts its Integrity at 9. This muscle car RIP Racer is called “The Wraith.”
With that extremely simple creation out of the way, we’re ready to head to our first race.
Works Used
Next: Episode One, A Job to Do, Part 1
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