High Speed Hover Tank --Creating a Backstory
So again, Tom Russell graces us with his thoughts on High Speed Hover Tank. I've had a chance to play the game and, like many of Tom's designs, I like it quite a bit. I will, however, briefly share my thoughts on gritty vs not-so-much. I am definitely and irrevocably in the gritty camp. Unlike Tom, I don't feel that too many gritty universes exist. Certainly many authors and game designers have tried, but most fail. Bloody doesn't make gritty, cursing doesn't make gritty, lengthy hardware explanations doesn't make gritty, nor do soul-searching heroes/ines. What does? I'm not sure, but as Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once said, "I know it when I see it." Be that as it may be, there's obviously room in the game design world for those who love grit and those that don't. So, let's hear from a talented designer who doesn't and his thoughts on High Speed Hover Tank.
High Speed Hover Tank is set in the future, after a devastating nuclear war that has transformed the Earth into an “irradiated hellscape”. This posed a challenge for me: how do I make this different, if only subtly, than the hundreds of other fictional irradiated hellscapes out there—both in terms of the “facts” of the world, and in terms of how that world feels?
The answer to the first came pretty readily, if only because I had, for a time, already been working on a fictional irradiated hellscape. This was a design for a Mad Max-style car
combat game. The twist on that was that instead of a dry, arid wasteland oppressed by the heat of the sun, there would be mountains of snow, slippery road conditions, and ultra-sub-zero temperatures. (Mad Max on ice!) This was abandoned—or at the very least, set aside—as there were some mechanical problems I just couldn’t seem to fix. But the gloss on the whole thing was that “This isn’t hell. This is Michigan!”
And while I didn’t port the snow idea to High Speed Hover Tank, I did latch onto the idea of it (sorta) taking place in Metro Detroit. (I say “(sorta)” because Mega-Detroit, HSHT’s central location and macguffin, explicitly isn’t anywhere near the real place, nor is it anywhere near big enough to be a passable facsimile.) I made the game’s world excessively local. No one outside of Wayne County might know what a paczki is, or how it’s pronounced, and you might not understand why Hamtramck-6 is in the middle of Mega-Detroit, and “Eastpointe” might not have any resonance. That’s okay. I think these weird little details give the world the barest simulacrum of a pulse: just enough to have something there without getting in the way of the action.
But more than the particulars, there’s of course the tone and the feel of the thing. Once I decided on Mega-Detroit, it immediately called two of my favorite hell-futures to mind: Robocop’s, and Judge Dredd’s (specifically, the comics). The thing both of these science-fiction cornerstones have in common—at least, the thing that I find interesting—is the wicked satirical bent. Both worlds are ridiculously horrifically awful and over-the-top, as befits pop-art sci-fi action comedy masterpieces. I didn’t aspire to such lofty greatness, but I did want to have some sly, tongue-in-cheek, apocalyptic fun, and I wanted to borrow some of the comic-book craziness at the heart of both of those franchises. I ran it by Mary, who was still running Tiny Battle at that time, and she gave me the thumbs up, and so I started designing scenarios about radioactively-insane rock ‘n’ roll warlords, double-dealing mercenaries, and of course there’s Ethel, the Deranged, Homicidal, Also Terribly Lonely, Sentient Nuclear Tank.
Flash-forward several months. Mary’s stepped down from Tiny Battle, leaving Mark in charge, and I’m working with Ron Shirtz and Dave Mack, the two great artists that Mark found for the project. I described the playful tone of the game to the artists, and to Mark. “Whoa,” says Mark. “I don’t want anything goofy. We need this to feel gritty and real. It needs to be grounded in the real world.” That would have been a pretty significant change, and would have required some serious retooling, or at least re-theming, of the game’s ten scenarios. Mark and I discussed it privately over the course of the next few days. He was worried, and not without reason, that an overtly humorous sci-fi wargame would have trouble selling. I emphasized that I wasn’t talking about goofy or cartoony stuff, just about having a sense of humor and wit, and letting the crazy action do its thing. I brought up my two touchstones, particularly Judge Dredd. It turns out we both have passion for the guy who keeps the peace in Mega City One, and that our visions for the game were much closer than we had originally thought; we just had two very different ways of describing the same thing, with his preference pulling slightly in one direction and mine in another. I agreed to tone down some of the humor, and I removed some, though not all, of the flippancy in the ruleset, bringing it closer to the center as it were, and Mark gave it his blessing.
There’s still some sly humor there, and things that are simultaneously awesome and dumb—kinda like the title itself. I think it feels a bit different and new, and playful, while still being something you can take seriously as a gameplay experience with a capacity for emergent narrative.
High Speed Hover Tank is on sale at Tiny Battle Publishing. Click here for more info.
High Speed Hover Tank is set in the future, after a devastating nuclear war that has transformed the Earth into an “irradiated hellscape”. This posed a challenge for me: how do I make this different, if only subtly, than the hundreds of other fictional irradiated hellscapes out there—both in terms of the “facts” of the world, and in terms of how that world feels?
The answer to the first came pretty readily, if only because I had, for a time, already been working on a fictional irradiated hellscape. This was a design for a Mad Max-style car
And while I didn’t port the snow idea to High Speed Hover Tank, I did latch onto the idea of it (sorta) taking place in Metro Detroit. (I say “(sorta)” because Mega-Detroit, HSHT’s central location and macguffin, explicitly isn’t anywhere near the real place, nor is it anywhere near big enough to be a passable facsimile.) I made the game’s world excessively local. No one outside of Wayne County might know what a paczki is, or how it’s pronounced, and you might not understand why Hamtramck-6 is in the middle of Mega-Detroit, and “Eastpointe” might not have any resonance. That’s okay. I think these weird little details give the world the barest simulacrum of a pulse: just enough to have something there without getting in the way of the action.
But more than the particulars, there’s of course the tone and the feel of the thing. Once I decided on Mega-Detroit, it immediately called two of my favorite hell-futures to mind: Robocop’s, and Judge Dredd’s (specifically, the comics). The thing both of these science-fiction cornerstones have in common—at least, the thing that I find interesting—is the wicked satirical bent. Both worlds are ridiculously horrifically awful and over-the-top, as befits pop-art sci-fi action comedy masterpieces. I didn’t aspire to such lofty greatness, but I did want to have some sly, tongue-in-cheek, apocalyptic fun, and I wanted to borrow some of the comic-book craziness at the heart of both of those franchises. I ran it by Mary, who was still running Tiny Battle at that time, and she gave me the thumbs up, and so I started designing scenarios about radioactively-insane rock ‘n’ roll warlords, double-dealing mercenaries, and of course there’s Ethel, the Deranged, Homicidal, Also Terribly Lonely, Sentient Nuclear Tank.
Flash-forward several months. Mary’s stepped down from Tiny Battle, leaving Mark in charge, and I’m working with Ron Shirtz and Dave Mack, the two great artists that Mark found for the project. I described the playful tone of the game to the artists, and to Mark. “Whoa,” says Mark. “I don’t want anything goofy. We need this to feel gritty and real. It needs to be grounded in the real world.” That would have been a pretty significant change, and would have required some serious retooling, or at least re-theming, of the game’s ten scenarios. Mark and I discussed it privately over the course of the next few days. He was worried, and not without reason, that an overtly humorous sci-fi wargame would have trouble selling. I emphasized that I wasn’t talking about goofy or cartoony stuff, just about having a sense of humor and wit, and letting the crazy action do its thing. I brought up my two touchstones, particularly Judge Dredd. It turns out we both have passion for the guy who keeps the peace in Mega City One, and that our visions for the game were much closer than we had originally thought; we just had two very different ways of describing the same thing, with his preference pulling slightly in one direction and mine in another. I agreed to tone down some of the humor, and I removed some, though not all, of the flippancy in the ruleset, bringing it closer to the center as it were, and Mark gave it his blessing.
There’s still some sly humor there, and things that are simultaneously awesome and dumb—kinda like the title itself. I think it feels a bit different and new, and playful, while still being something you can take seriously as a gameplay experience with a capacity for emergent narrative.
High Speed Hover Tank is on sale at Tiny Battle Publishing. Click here for more info.
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