Sci-Fi: Space 1977 - An Analysis of Failure

 
I decided to revist my Space: 1977 setting idea. You should probably read that post first, but in brief, the idea was to combine every Star Wars knock-off film produced between 1977 and 1980 into one gloriously terrible space opera setting.

The Systems That Slip Through Your Fingers

I usually use Fate Core for Star Wars games. It's trivial to hack and emulates the genre fairly well. Money, weapons, etc. are sufficiently abstract in Star Wars.

But for Space: 1977, I also wanted to try writing a Troika! hack. Daniel Sell claims that Troika! is the greatest game of all time and will cure acne, wash your dishes, and teach your cat to play fetch. I've always found Troika! a little light for the kinds of D&D-type campaigns I enjoy, but for Space: 1977, where I anticipated more background-driven one-shots than long campaigns, it seemed like an idea fit.

(Also, don't tell anyone, but Troika and Fate Core are very cross-compatible. If you use a harmonized Skill list, Troika! backgrounds become a list of Aspects plus some suggested skill point assignments.)

I managed to put together a fairly tidy 7-page rules set. You can read it here. I had started to write the backgrounds when creeping doubt set in. Something was wrong. I'd missed a step.

The Vital Question

"The world is a cube with eight suns and twelve moons, and the names of the months are determined by..."
    "Ok, but..."
"And the Elves, except they're not called Elves they're called Drothgr't'zel, they have a secret plan to..."
    "Ok, but..."
"The head of the Colledge Arcanum is named Baxalwurda, and..."
    "Ok, but what do the PCs do?"
"What do you mean?"
    "I mean, what do the players characters do in this setting? How do they interact with any of this stuff?"
"Oh, I guess they explore dungeons and fight goblins."
 
"What do the PCs do?" is the core question of any setting. When you're doing worldbuilding, unless it's for a novel or pure fantasizing, you should always focus on how the material you're creating will interact with the players at the table. There's no need to map continents they will never visit, list the history of long-lost kingdoms, or invent names the PCs will never learn.

You can still do those things, of course, but there's no need to, and in a world with finite time and energy you may want to devote your time to other projects.

Space: 1977 is an interesting concept, but what do the PCs do?

A typical Star Wars game has the PCs acting as explorers, traders, scrappy smugglers, morally ambiguous participants in a larger conflict, unlikely and accidental heroes, etc. They are involved in a real world. It's fictional, but it follows certain rules, and there's plenty of room for new stories.

Space: 1977, because of the incoherent and often farcical source material, doesn't leave a lot of room for more than one type of story. You can tell the story of some unlikely heroes who gather and defeat the bad guys... but that's about it. No other modes of play feel sufficiently supported by the setting material.

The constrained setting introduces new challenges for a GM. If a GM wants to introduce a city in the clouds as an adventure location, is that a forbidden idea from Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, or just a plausible in-genre development?

Finally, the level of care put into the films are just too different. Disbelief can only be suspended so far. Any attempt to harmonize the background material from the films of Space: 1977 runs into insurmountable problems. There are areas of overlap and areas of stark contrast, areas where a director clearly thought about an idea and areas where they clearly didn't.

Telling interesting space opera stories using Space: 1977 was actually harder than not using it, and produced less interesting results. A good setting should feel full to bursting with interesting hooks. Every post Arnold makes about Centerra, for example, feels like it has hooks for the PCs. Every line I wrote about the Space: 1977 setting felt like I was blunting a hook or closing off an interesting avenue.

Lies, Damned Lies, and Sales Figures

Continuing to write rules and setting material for Space: 1977 feels counterproductive.

I could continue to write the Troika! hack. Writing backgrounds isn't particularly difficult. I could finish it, get some art, and publish it... but then I'd need to tell people it's good, that it works, and that it's the best I could make it. That would be a lie. Not because of the core system or the work I put in, but because the entire basis of the setting is flawed.

I can make a Space: 1977 book appealing to a reader, but I can't make it appealing to a GM. Sound fiscal practice be damned, I'm not publishing anything I'm not 100% happy with.

So, what's left?

Interesting Things

Space Feudalism

The various Empires in the films seem to dominated by one central charismatic figure, with a small cluster of loyal retainers, and a large (but not insurmountable) number of uniformed troops. They demand tribute, accept pledges of loyalty, and conquer by treaty and light occupation, not by extermination.

The Galactic Empire from Star Wars: A New Hope has a substantial fleet, a giant battle station, and a regimented and fully organized military command structure. They seem to be doing fairly well, as far as Space: 1977 empires go. It's important to note that the Death Star's purpose is to keep the outer systems in line through fear. Very feudal; direct control is impossible, and, with the senate abolished, voluntary participation is curtailed.

The Empire of the First Circle of the Universe from Starcrash. Presumably there are other circles of the universe and other empires, or the title is just grandiose puffery. The villain is a rebellious Count. They have machine operated justice system, prison planets, and some form of Imperial bureaucracy and state police. When the Emperor fakes his death, he says [the Count] "thinks our armies have dispersed without a leader." Imperial power is, effectively, personal power.

The Gavanas Empire from Message from Space just wants a beautiful planet on which to build a palace. Emperor Rockseia XXII is a bizarrely honourable and poetic character, a sort of Marcus Aurelius in space. Sure, he'll massacre a planet's population and blow up the moon as a show of force, but he won't massacre all of them, and he'll ask politely for a negotiated surrender. Even in a dream sequence, he isn't threatening, just factual, and even scolding. "You do love her. She will die, and you are to blame." He keeps demanding the protagonists surrender and promises no harm will come to them, and he might actually mean it. He's got them at gunpoint. Why ask, if it's not important?

The Cylon Empire from Battlestar Galactica is rarely seen, but also controls tribute-planets, produces substantial space fleets, and manages civilian life.

The Malmori Empire from Battle Beyond the Stars is limited to one tribute-extorting ship. The rest of the setting seems fairly lawless. The Draconians from Buck Rogers in the 25th Century seem to be another roving band of tribute-seekers, or at least a delegation from a larger empire.

We don't see a specific named empire in The Humanoid, but the power struggle is between two brothers, and there are queens and nobles aplenty. Similarly, Escape from Galaxy 3 features many warring kings.

Space, it seems is awash with petty kings and collapsing empires. A charismatic figure rises, produces some uniforms, pays troops, and carves out a transitory empire that collapses within a few years. Any old soldier in Space: 1977 probably served under half a dozen different empires, warlords, or adventurers. Planets explode on a regular basis.

The Table of Distinguished Actors

One potential Troika background was called "Distinguished Actor". You were the venerated actor brought in to lend the production some credibility: Alec Guiness or Christopher Plummer.

It was fairly easy to do a data pull of award-winning actors who were between 45 and 75 in the years 1977 to 1980 (and therefore accessible to the directors of Space: 1977). But how many of those actors were recognizable to people in 2020? Not many. And would a sleazy B-movie director in 1977 realistically cast a woman in a "distinguished actor" role instead of spending the money to hire Corinne Cléry or Barbara Bach?

Casting wider net, including actors who might be called in to a film made in 2020, helped a bit, but there's another issue. I don't like placing embodiment restrictions in RPGs unless it's interesting, and the resulting tables, no matter how I sourced my data, looked remarkably monochrome.

Final Notes

If anyone wants to adapt or finish off the Space:1977 Troika! hack, feel free to. There are a few interesting ideas in there that I might revisit one day, but probably not in this context.

Always keep the vital question in mind. What do the PCs do?

40k: HamWarmer 24.5 - Tyranids (With Photos)

The swarm grows!

I've also finished the Faction: Tyranids (v0.1) book for HamWarmer 24.5. That's 2 factions and the core rules done (and indexed here). Check that post for updated versions.

Tyranids are a curious faction in 40k, rules-wise. Every Codex author seems to take a different approach. Points costs, abilities, and stats swing wildly. A Lascannon is a Lascannon, but nobody seems entirely sure what any given Tyranid thing is, or even how certain units should function.

I've tried to write an interesting Synapse ability. Tyranid units need to stick fairly close to a Synapse creature to be carefully controlled; outside Synapse range, they more-or-less need to be steered. Dismantling an army by targeting the Synapse creatures, then driving off the survivors.

As usual, points costs will be adjusted as testing progresses. With the Faction: Space Marines book, I'm fairly confident on basic infantry and wargear costs, but less certain on the powerful vehicles. With Tyranids, it's the opposite.

Painting Recipe:
Started with a black basecoat, did a zenithal highlight in white. Didn't end up showing much, so you can probably skip it. The chitin is Vallejo 71.023 (Hemp), the carapace is Vallejo 71.075 (Sand Ivory). Both were highlighted up with the same colour and a few drops of white. Didn't mask anything while airbrushing, so there's a bit of overspray in a few places, but I can fix it while doing final brush highlights.

Then, models were inked with Vallejo 73.300 (Sepia wash). It's not my favourite, but it's cheap, it covers well, and it can dry in interesting shades (from yellows to reds) depending on thickness, so it's good for adding some variation.

After a final drybrush (still testing colours) and some fleshy details, and a bit of light basing, they should be done. Will adjust this post to include final paints.
 

Bonus: Patreon  Project

I'm thinking of running a "Select-Thy-Own Disaster" story (or series of stories) on Patreon, where the Patrons control (by voting) the actions of a small group of probably-doomed characters. In-person gaming has been difficult due to Covid, so this feels like a decent substitute. Plus, I get to show off my appalling painting skills! Yaaay...

And here's a sneak peak at the "set", or at least, part of it.

The terrain (like most of my terrain) is painted with just 5 colours: Black, Ivory, Ochre, Burnt Umber, and Burnt Sienna. All cheap artist acrylics. Oh, and a bit of metallic silver, but that's just for accents and doesn't really count.

After priming black, I highlighted the centre of each square (and various panels) with ivory, using the airbrush. I then applied a random mix of burnt umber and bunt sienna using a large brush (dipping one side in one paint, the other in the other, and smearing them to create an uneven pattern), and carefully thinned it across the whole board. Doors and central chevron areas were taped off and painted with ochre, then stenciled with ivory.

Once that was dry, I applied a wash made from burnt sienna, tap water, and a drop of dishwasher anti-spotting liquid to decrease the surface tension. While that was drying, I applied smaller washes with black and burnt umber.

The whole process is very quick. With highly detailed and textured terrain like this, you can let the structure tell the story. I feel that terrain shouldn't dominate a scene, so picking these relatively muted colours, and applying them consistently across several projects, lets my miniatures stand out... for better or for worse.

Anyway, stay tuned for more news and something resembling a release schedule.

40k: Towards Better Rules: HamWarmer 24.5

White Dwarf 187

Warhammer 40,000 exists in a weird gap in the wargame spectrum. There are excellent skirmish games, and excellent large-scale battle rules, but very few rules for large battles at the 28mm scale. There's probably a reason for that.

A skirmish game can take an RPG-like approach to each model. Rules can be complex and detailed because they don't need to be used very often. When you're tracking a grand total of 12 models, all sorts of rules become viable. There are some great skirmish games out there, including:

• Grimdark Future
• Grimlite
• Inquisimunda/Inq28
• Tor Megiddo (PDF)
  
• Dolorous Stroke
• Kill Team

Large-scale battle rules can group units (or platoons, or divisions, or entire armies) int convenient bundles. Tracking individual models is less critical.

But at the odd scale of Warhammer 40k, every model has to count. Any rules for 40k have to go from the platoon level (e.g. a character, two squads, and a tank) to the army level (massed infantry, monstrous units, giant walkers, etc.), and deal with normal humans and walking demigods. Every model needs to stand on its own. You can't treat one squad of 10 with a single profile.

There's an OSR-type movement in the Warhammer community too. Some people are perfectly happy with Rogue Trader (for good reason; it's fun!), and some more are working on hacks of 2nd Edition. There's a dubiously legal "Warhammer 40k 2nd Edition Battle Bible" floating around out there. Project Anvil is another 2nd Ed hack. It's all very exciting.

In fine DIY tradition, I've made my own hack. Introducing:

HamWarmer 24.5

HamWarmer 24.5 (PDF) is vaguely based on Warhammer 40k: 9th Edition (free PDF), with some rules borrowed from older editions or entirely invented. It is non-commercial, unprofessionally distributed, hastily made, entirely unofficial in every way, and completely free. The current PDF is 9 pages long.

Currently, only the core rules are complete, but I'll be adding faction rules and scenarios in short order. Expect this blog post to change rapidly over the next few months.

HamWarmer 24.5 is intended to be a hobbyist-friendly rules set. If you've built it and painted it, chances are there will be rules for it... eventually. I'm going to work on the factions played locally first, then work on the others.

Making the Sausage

Rules burnout is real. Games Workshop produces new rules on a regular basis, and once you've read enough rulebooks you stop caring and lose interest. Patterns emerge. Every time a new edition is released, some units - usually something newly released - become absolutely vital. In the next edition, they get "fixed', and the cycle repeats. Lovingly painted units are supplanted or deleted. Rules grow as every unit, faction, and subfaction gets mechanical differentiation.

Great games come from consistent choices in the same direction. Inconsistent choices result in terrible games. Games Workshop has a number of competing priorities when it comes to writing rules.

• New units have to be at least as good, or better, than existing units, or no one will buy them.
• Old units need to be supported. With 30 years of rules out there, there are a lot of legacy units.
• The rules must be compact and simple. Otherwise, no one will run the game.
• The rules must be formal, incontrovertible, and cover all cases. People will find loopholes and use them. Here's a compilation, written in a peculiarly unappealing style.
  
• Patching or fixing rules was (and to a certain extent, still is) a difficult process.
  
• The rules must support past assumptions about Warhammer 40k. Certain weapons and units have values that feel right; change them too much and the game might stop feeling like Warhammer 40k.
• Only six-sided dice can be used.
• The game's scale is 28mm heroic. One dimension of the battlefield cannot be larger than 4' (see below).
  
• Rules cannot be written simultaneously. Some factions will get rules before other factions, leading to balance issues.

Luckily, I can avoid a few of these problems. I can't avoid all of them (or the game wouldn't be Warhammer 40k), but I can write rules and patch them daily (if needed). I don't need to make them perfect, just good enough for casual play. I can write them all at once, fixing units from one faction as I write rules for another faction. I don't need to sell models, take photographs, write lore, grapple with the implications of the setting, or pay anyone.

I can also playtest continuously and adjust rules based on feedback, without needing to write from a position of supreme and unquestioned authority.

Oh look, express written permission. ;)

Major Changes

These changes will only make sense if you're somewhat familiar with Warhammer 40k's published rules. Feel free to skip them.

• Alternating Activation. Instead of one player moving, shooting, and charging with all their units before the other player gets to act, players take turns in every phase.
• A revised to-Wound chart. In 9th Ed., all units can damage all other units, leading to an arms race of more shots, higher damage, and wound negation.
  
• Movement-based Morale rules.
• Templates! They're inconvenient but fun.
  
• Vehicle facing returns. In 9th Ed, vehicles can fire all their weapons in all directions, leading to some very odd situations. In this hack, flanking a vehicle is important.
  
• No Flyers (as in fast aircraft). The models are great, but the rules just don't work on a small battlefield and they always tip over.
• No Command Points, Stratagems, Formation Bonuses, Power Cards, or other cruft. I'm going to try to avoid extra rules systems.
• Points values will be based on 3rd-4th edition. I'm working on tabulating and tracking them in the background. Far too boring for a blog post.
  

PDF Links

Links will be added as PDFs are completed.

• HamWarmer 24.5 Core Rules V 0.4
  
• Scenario Book
• Faction: Space Marines v0.3
  
• Faction: Tyranids v0.3
  
• Faction: Tau v0.2
  
• Faction: Imperial Guard v0.1
•  etc.
  

White Dwarf 318

Side Note: 40k Scale Battlefields

I've run some tests. Asking people to bend over their kitchen table and take photographs is surprisingly easy; apparently everyone's bored during lockdown. A 5-6' tall human bending over a waist-high table can safely reach about 2'. They can look directly down at anything closer than 1', maybe 1.5" if they've got a long neck.

Therefore, no matter how long the board is, it can only be 4' wide.

GW's 28mm scale is a bit wonky (and wargaming in general compresses distances and scales for the sake of convenience), but let's say a 6' character gets a 1.25" tall model. 6' real scale / 1.25" game scale = 4.8' per 1". A 4'x8' (48" x 96") battlefield, the largest most people ever use, is therefore approximately 230' x 460'.

The outer red square is a 4'x8' board. The inner red square is GW's new 44"x90" minimum-maximum size. The smallest red square is a 2'x2' skirmish board. Boards are compared to Warhammer World in Nottingham, a Walmart in Gary, Indiana (selected because it's exactly north-south aligned), and Hill 937.

You can argue about the model-scale to real-world-scale conversion factor, but even if I'm off by 50% or more, you can see that the battlefield doesn't scale up to anything like a realistic size.

Some Titanwalk events (where people bring their superheavy war engines like toddlers to a playdate) use the floor of a convention centre boardroom as the battlefield, but that doesn't really work for tiny plastic models. It works fine if you're using prepainted lead soldiers, but delicate plastic figures are likely to become expensive caltrops.

So no matter how epic your battles may be, remember that they're effectively a pub brawl on a Saturday night.

OSR: Response to some Scurrilous Invective concerning Magical Industrial Revolution

I'm very sorry, but the title of this post is pure clickbait.

Ray C / Libertad did a very thorough and flattering "Lets Read" style review of Magical Industrial Revolution, summarizing each chapter and making notes. It's an extremely useful look at the text for two reasons: it summarizes the book in a convenient yet detailed form, and it provides line-by-line first impressions.

I aim for accessible design. If a reader gets an impression on a first readthrough, I'd like that impression to be both accurate and useful. If all the cool stuff requires hours of reading and cross-referencing, nobody will ever find it, let alone use it at the table. First impressions are crucial.

The review was posted to a variety of forums:
Enworld
RPG.net
Giant in the Playground
Minmax Forum
The Gaming Den - NSFW
Something Awful - NSFW

(What "W" stands for is up to you, but those boards definitely are Not Safe For it. Especially the SA thread; MIR was being reviewed alongside another book of very dubious taste.)

I've decided to combine all my responses into one post. Nothing in the review or the comments required a response (in the sense of being misleading or wrong), but I thought I could use it as an excuse to discuss some behind-the-scenes information on MIR.

Main Review Comments

It is built for that pseudo-B/X ruleset that predominates the OSR, although it has some mentions here and there of more modern iterations of D&D. A lot of its charts and tables are more or less system-neutral, which helps in this regard.

Bits of MIR were tested with B/X, AD&D, OSE (I think), D&D 5th Edition, the GLOG, Fate Core, and I think someone ran an informal MIR-adjacent Fiasco game. People who were familiar with / wrote other systems also read it and offered feedback. When I aim to make a system-neutral book, I really try to ensure nothing in the book requires unstated assumptions.

But in spite of the toolbox nature, MIR does come with some pseudo-setting preconditions. One, Endon’s magic is mostly arcane in nature; most inhabitants are secular and the gods if they exist seem to have a hands-off approach towards the city’s events.

Making Endon mostly secular was a choice I made fairly early on. I wanted GMs to feel comfortable dropping Endon into an existing setting. Adding a new god or pantheon made that difficult. It also adds information the GM has to memorize that might not have any immediate in-game utility. I think the finest bits of design in MIR's are the bits the book doesn't include. 

The implications of a divine apocalypse, as punishment for Endon's sins, was something I wanted to avoid. The apocalypses listed in the book are self-inflicted, not delivered from on high. There's no outside agency, just people wreaking awful havoc with the best intentions.

Additionally, gold piece values correspond on a 1-1 basis of what 1 British Pound was worth in 1800. Which according to the Bank of England is equivalent to 844 pounds in 2019 via adjusting for inflation, or $1,100 US Dollars in modern times. The book claims that it’s $100 USD modern, but my much larger findings are based on Bank of England website and MorningStar Investment. The latter I found via Googling “British Pound to US Dollars” and using the calculator provided. But at the end of the day I’m not an economist so I may be off in some regard and just using the more immediate results. For gaming groups using AD&D or 5th Edition rulesets, they’re advised to increase gold piece prices tenfold.

Historical currency conversion is a minefield. If you use a standard calculator, yes, 1gbp in 1800 will come out closer to $1,000 modern USD. But if you calibrate on purchasing power and intuitive pricing, it's closer to $100. E.g. an income of £500 a year was pretty dire for a family in a Jane Austen novel. $500,000 doesn't feel too dire; $50,000 easily could be. 

I calibrated values in MIR using historical price lists, advertisements, reports, etc. London Labour and the London Poor and The Rise and Fall of a Regency Dandy were two very useful sources for wages and prices at the top and bottom of the social scale.

I'm not an expert on why currency conversion calculators always seem to go awry, but it seems to have to do with the price of land, factoring in the relative standard of living, and the rising world population. For D&D purposes, find out actual prices in the era of interest and calibrate around them.

Weather in Endon conforms closely to real-world London, being a temperate-to-cold climate and very foggy.

I feel compelled to point out that London fogs have stopped occurring, at least in way you're probably imagining them. They were an anthropogenic phenomenon. Also, if anything, I made the weather in Endon less deadly than historical fogs. Magic can't compete with sulphuric acid.

Each Innovation’s means of Averting differ, but tend to have a few similarities: PCs can turn public opinion on to the dangers of it, they could sabotage the industry or turn the public on to an alternative service or resource, and/or predicting the upcoming dangers and devising safeguards to prevent them. Not all of the solutions are Luddite in getting rid of said industry, although a few suggest that legislating and taxing the market as an end in and of itself to make said industry grow less.

It's important to remember that the GM has access to the suggested solutions in the Averting the Apocalypse section, but the players don't. They inevitably come up with new ones, based on personal preferences, available information, or moments of true inspiration.

I do feel that some of the Terminal Events feel a bit slap-dash or out of nowhere.

I wanted to strike a balance between predictable catastrophes and sudden and unexpected disasters. I didn't want to make them completely obvious. In tests, the players were occasionally blindsided by a danger they hadn't anticipated, but that usually lead to superb schemes and excellent play. A GM can foreshadow them as much or as little as they'd like (or invent new apocalypses).

Endon’s criminal justice system is not concerned with determining whether or not someone’s guilty, but to show the power of the State to the public in the belief this will enforce good behavior. Trials rarely last longer than a day, and typically are never held unless the prosecution is 100% certain they can score a conviction.

This is, amazingly, historically accurate. Our modern conception of criminal justice is extremely modern.

Our chapter ends with some sample poetic songs of Endon, and another clipping from Boff Magazine:

I am sad the songs only earned a brief mention. I really like the songs! Writing a children's song was fun; put a lot of "a"s in a song and it automatically sounds like it should be chanted by enthusiastic but tone-deaf children.

My chief concern is that the relative cheapness of spells and items as the Tempo increases may make spellcasting PCs and those with charged magical items even more powerful.

It is definitely a concern, but in tests, problems scaled with availability of tools. By Tempo 3, some solutions the players came up with involved bulk orders of magic items, emergency loans, or other convoluted schemes. In short, you can't magic yourself out of a problem that you magicked yourself into.

Prices for magical prosthetics can be anywhere from 30 to 250 gold and stay the same regardless of Tempo.

This was forced by layout, not game design. I couldn't figure out a way to a terrible sprawl of numbers if prosthetic prices increased with Tempo. Since they are situational and relatively cheap (compared to industrial equipment), I decided it wasn't critical.

Those who cook and eat said eels reduce all damage of a magical origin by 1 point for 1 hour.

If I had a nickle for every time farming Thaumovoric Eels has come up in playtests, I'd have ten cents, which isn't much, but it's weird that it happened twice.

Pamphlets: These are not part of the book itself, but separate 1-2 page PDFs that come with the eBook purchase of MIR. As I do not own the physical copy I don’t know if they’re physical handouts or just bonus pages.

They were originally printed and shipped with the Kickstarter, then sold afterwards. I decided not to print them during the second print run; it seemed like necessary risk and effort considering the times we live in. They're fairly easy to print at home. One group printed them on fancy paper, dabbed them in artificial smoke flavouring and tea, and used them as centerpiece props.

Selected Replies and Comments

Whizbang Dustyboots
I'm not crazy about "multiply all prices by 100" in lieu of "reduce the amount of treasure you give out," but it seems to be popular with designers.

In a gold for XP systems, I've found it's easier to adjust the currency than to adjust XP curves. It helps with compatibility.

Kettlehelm
I found just with experimenting, that one phenomenon would increase at a constant rate while the other 7 stalled. Just a quirk of the math. 

But when a party averts a crisis, how does the party prevent it's reoccurrence?

Testing various systems for advancing Innovations took a fair bit of time. I wanted to create a method that didn't lead to all Innovations advancing at the same rate, while still ensuring that they advanced at all. The method had to be simple and quick to use. I did some back-of-the-napkin math to make sure the final method worked, then, out of an abundance of paranoia, rolled around 200 tests (8 innovations, until at least 4 of them had reached stage 6), the tabulated the results.

The probability of a "runaway" Innovation (i.e. one that advances every season while the others advance more slowly) is reasonably high, but the probability of multiple runaways is low. This is intentional. By the time the PCs have dealt with their first apocalyptic crisis, they'll be in a much better position to deal with any subsequent disasters. With 8 Innovations (starting at Stage 1), it takes around 6 Seasons for any one of the eight to reach Stage 6, but subsequent Innovations will start to reach Stage 6 soon after. Anyway, it's a fairly neat bit of design, and I'm proud of how well it works.

Preventing the recurrence of an apocalypse will depend on the apocalypse and the methods used to prevent it. I don't think any specific advice in the book would help. Apocalyptic events can be prevented forever, delayed, transformed, or swept under the rug

vitruvian
That was one of the things I didn't actually like as much, the tendency for solutions to the apocalyptic effects of these magical inventions to involve society giving up their use altogether, as opposed to decades of wrangling over restrictions on them. I mean, we've known about the greenhouse effect for how long IRL, and even Dune's Butlerian Jihad presumably took a good long while to do away with all AI and lesser automation. The rapid doing away with a whole new industry worked well enough in Pratchett's Soul Music, but that's about the only example I can think of off hand which made a lot of narrative sense to me.

PurpleXVI
Yeah, it seems a shame that none of them have like, a "fix" condition where, say, implementing a social safety net and regulations make the invisible servants net positive and create a magical space communism society. Or where you can help the Moon Rocket succeed and maybe become the first astronaut wizards on the moon. For the extradimensional space and transport ones, it feels implied that the main reason they fail is cost-cutting and over-use, not the basic concept, and that if Endon wasn't terminally poisoned by capitalist thought, then it could have improved everyone's lives.

Also maybe if the golems had some proper crash/exception handling and Laws of Golemancy at a core level...

Again, the suggested preventative measures are suggestions aimed at the GM; sort of last-ditch "if the PCs are stuck and ask for help" measures. In tests, the PCs tended towards integration and alteration instead of abolition, but with variations based on the state of the state of the setting and the tools available. The variation was so wide I didn't think any specific advice would help. "If the PCs have invented antimagic eel oil and a thermo-dispersion gun, and have access to an airship, then they can..."

Oddly enough, none of the test groups managed any great degree of societal reform. It didn't seem to interest them. I'm not sure if it was the players, the general tendency of RPGs to bring out the innerer schweinehund, or deliberate irony.

Anon_issue
Since when the hell is a season five months?

Not a season, The Season.

MGuy
I am very glad this came up as it is very relevant to my interests. I had been scribbling some notes for the setting I'm working on and I very much want to make an industrial revolution kind of era. The fact that this resource covers it and seems to read as very cynical about the social system that develops during this kind of period has me eager to read more into it. Are there any similar books/settings that are similar to this but for a different system? Are there any similar books/settings that are similar to this but for a different system?

The closest in tone are probably GURPS Goblins or The Kerberos Club (both cited in Inspiration Media, pg. 148.)

Hogarth
Extracting sunbeams from cucumbers is a reference to Gulliver's Travels, of course.

Gatto Grigio
This is a pretty great reference to turn-of-the-century French filmmaker Georges Méliès

There are a lot of references packed into MIR. Some of them are, I'll freely admit, only for me, or are so obscure I've forgotten the original intent.

Ithle01
Which brings us to the issue where you can't really have the Victorian Age without imperialism, but that's a separate argument. With the exception of Conjured Servants which could either be a commentary of racism or just be very racist accidentally.

Nothing in Magical Industrial Revolution is accidental, even the typos. If Conjured Servants were intended as a commentary on anything, it's on how it's often very profitable to classify people as not-people. For some tangentially related notes, see this post.

Loxbourne
I think the key to remember is that you as the GM do not have to use the catastrophes unless they're fun. OSR is a bit bad about that and it seeps through a little.

A magical moon rocket made by strapping hundreds of broomsticks together is fun. The PCs having to avert disaster by stopping it falling over is fun. The GM making it fall over to destroy the city should not be a given, unless destroying the city would be fun.

If you're buying and using a book called "Magical Industrial Revolution: A Pre-Apocalyptic Setting Guide", I think it's safe to assume you think averting magical apocalypses (or not) can be fun. Otherwise, you want a different book.

PurpleXVI
Considering the capitalist hellscape thematics of the setting, I would absolutely expect bought magic items/spells without flaws to come at a premium and actually buying the cheap, mass-produced stuff to risk turning your hands into weasels every time.

I did consider it, but I couldn't find a way to make that fun, interesting, and gameable. Adding drawbacks to everything lead to weird combinations of unintuitive effects and an endless buy-test-reroll-buy cycle where PCs tried to get usable items. I decided to make all items weird but reliable instead.

On the other hand (hah!), hands turning into weasels is probably better than some of the Magical Diseases.
 

Final Notes

It was fascinating to see what items, spells, or concepts a reader picked out for special consideration. Stuff I'd assumed would blend into the background was selected as emblematic; stuff I'd assumed would stand out was glossed over. All very useful information, and presented in a very professional way. Even if you've read the book, the review is still useful.

Magical Industrial Revolution is available on DriveThruRPG, and in print (in the US/NA region) via Indie Press Revolution and (in the UK/EU) via Soul Muppet.

If you'd prefer a video review from a biased soruce, IPR recently uploaded a short commentary. Other reviews are available in the Megapost.