Campaign Toybox
The Story: In real life, the transportation to Australia by English prisoners was the largest displacement of people bar the Holocaust. And more than one historian has made the point that the place they ended up was so alien it might as well have been another planet. So let’s make it another planet. Stephenson’s Rocket really is a rocket, launching 18th century Britain into space. Giant steam-powered guns launch ships into the etherspace, and the first stop is the red planet of Mars: a land of drab brown mountain ranges and ochre dust. But to be a useful military outpost and refit port, it needs to be settled. With Britain’s prisons stretched to their limit and the American colonies no longer available to take the overflow, there seem to be two problems ready to solve themselves.
Except it’s not that easy. The journey to New Albion takes almost two years aboard disease-ravaged hulks. For those for whom the journey wasn’t a death sentence, the arrival might as well be. The new land is full of hostile natives and deadly plants and animals of a like no-one back home could imagine. All the seeds brought to plant die in the first summer, and so does the livestock. The masters are brutal, escape is impossible and returning home invites instant death upon discovery. There is only one choice: to work up from being convict scum to being granted a pardon and maybe your own bit of dirt to call your own. The first step on that long path is getting a “half-pardon”, a piece of paper that gives you the right to take the chains off your legs and trade the cat o’ nine tails for a real job. A document they call the Ticket of Leave.
Style and Structure: Of course, you don’t just have to focus on convict characters. This is a wide-open setting with opportunities for many different types of stories: freelance explorers pushing back the boundaries, soldiers keeping the outpost safe, scientists documenting the strange new land, or space privateers keeping the new colony alive and making a fast buck where they can. The simple fact that New Albion is a penal colony will ensure that these stories never hew too close to American colonialism, and provide a whole new type of story. Meanwhile, the macguffin of Mars means you aren’t tied to real history.
A convict story will only increase the unique feel, and comes with its own built-in arc and plot hooks. The harsh legal system of 18th century Britain could capture almost anyone, and then make them all equal: alone, isolated, and very much low-level. Trying to raise themselves back up into society fits many experience systems, even if such social establishment flies somewhat in the face of the counterculture tendencies of most wandering adventurers. For those kind of adventurers, there’s always escape to a career as a bushranger (what Americans might call a road agent) or a pirate, or even fighting the man for the freedom of all. Those who don’t want to buck the system can go dig for gold and explore the lost ruins underneath Mars, perhaps bringing back relics and treasure in exchange for their freedom. The possibilities are like the red desert: endless.
PCs and NPCs: As mentioned, a convict could be almost anyone. That said, it took a fairly serious crime to be sentenced to Transportation – it was considered one molecule short of execution. Alternatively, you could be poor, Irish or female – the former two could work their way up to Transportation after a series of petty crimes, like stealing bread or being drunk. The middle and upper classes might end up too poor to stave off transportation, once they ran out of money to pay for renting their cell (no kidding). Meanwhile women were considered too fair to execute and were in fact in desperate need in the colonies, because every non-convict (and his wife) was used to several housemaids keeping his household. And this was a world where tending house might mean shooting monsters for dinner and curing diseases unknown to man. Which is a nice way of saying female gamers don’t necessarily have to play prostitutes, wives or arm-candy. Although a bunch of Jane Austen stay-at-home ladies trying to maintain propriety in an alien hell-hole has a great deal of dramatic appeal.
Back in England, guarding prisoners was a job for commoners but in the colonies, most guards were soldiers or marines – the famous redcoats that Paul Revere and friends shot at a few years earlier. These ranks were filled with a huge variety of people, from lords to guttersnipes. Money and prestige often bought rank and the reverse was certainly true – a lieutenant could demote himself in return for cash, allowing for a great deal of social mobility. In the colonies this was doubly so. The rigid class system of England was replaced by a world where you were either a convict, a soldier or a settler. And with a ticket of leave, even that became blurred. As if the alien world wasn’t shocking enough.
Speaking of the alien world, the only people who wanted to go to Australia were scientists. With space travel still in its infancy, such fellows would be even more likely on New Albion. And in the 18th century, a member of the Royal Geographic Society was required to be more than just an egghead: nature had to be tamed with gun and compass before its samples could be put in jars. Many such crusading scientists realised the benefit of local help, opening the door for players to take up the roles of sentient aliens – whatever they might look like.
Plots and Villains: Although prisoners with money had decent food and space, the emancipation of prisoners was a Victorian value, due some 100 years later. In the 18th century, many considered being criminal a sign of not just moral but spiritual weakness, marked by God as being a lesser human being. Cruelty was the standard, and the soldiers who kept order learnt their discipline systems in the British navy, a world where rum, sodomy and the lash was altogether too much rum and sodomy. In such environments, truly bad men flourish and good ones shine out: exposing the former and protecting the latter can provide any number of stories for convicts and guards alike. Camp commanders make particularly good villains, as proved by the real-life example of Captain Logan, a savage bastard whose legend of cruelty far outlived him, after he was stabbed through the heart by one of his prisoners seeking revenge.
Prisoners are also hardly a moral bunch, and escaped ones may visit their moral failings on countless others. Leaving aside the legal system, a new planet could be filled with enemies and threats, both sentient and otherwise. Making the natives terrifying savages who need to be destroyed is of course not something everyone is going to consider acceptable, even if it does reflect perceptions of the time. Making them fluffy bunnies that assimilate perfectly is equally insulting. A middle ground is a good idea, and a good way to do that is with multiple races. After all, why should Mars be filled with just one kind of Martian?
Sources: Australian history isn’t the easiest thing to come by outside of the Antipodes, especially anything before WW1. You could try some classic novels like David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon and Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs or the pure history of Robert Hughes’ The Fatal Shore. There’s also For the Term of His Natural Life, by Marcus Clarke, which has the added pedigree of being written only a few decades after the fact. Britannia of the period is much easier to find: start with Sharpe, Hornblower and Master and Commander, either the books or the superb films, and then move onto any number of tales of the American Revolution to see the redcoats getting the crap blown out of them in the name of liberty. Early colonial America can also provide plenty of story ideas to steal – most everything from Fennimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans to Bruce Beresford’s Black Robe could take place on a different but equally brutal shore. For story ideas about prisoners and their arcs, there’s a treasure trove in the HBO series Oz, not to mention the great old Aussie television show Prisoner (aka Cell Block H). And if you can find Aussie TV, the show Rush is a little later in history (on the Gold Fields) but is a great source for the look of the whole thing.
RPGs: Once again, supplies are limited. Australian RPGs have not rushed to fill the gap either. Napoleonic soldiers from Britain are done in striking detail in In Harm’s Way: Dragons! and GURPS: Napoleonics. A surprisingly close model of Australian colonial history (and the wet and wild alien environment) appears in Blue Planet. For the wild world of alien colonisation there’s also Pinnacle’s old Lost Colony game. In that vein, Deadlands’ mix of dudes and greenhorns with a savage frontier would also be useful. And while we’re borrowing from the Old West, Serenity would suffice.
