A F**kload of Words

A lot of my concerns about the length and complexity of 60 Years in Space could simply be addressed by looking at the 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons Players Handbook and seeing how many rules players would be willing to put up with just for character generation. But there's two clear differences: there is an incentive to learn about what your character can do, which is cleverly partitioned by class so that - for instance - a barbarian never has to read about mage spells; and that a lot of the invented or borrowed Dungeons & Dragons lexicon has entered general language usage over the 49 years it has been played.

Science fiction has a similar challenge, except each science fiction world invents its own terms and adopts its own definitions for more general terms such as robot. In a fictional world, the author has control over the pacing and scope of the new language, using this to teach the reader at a pace they are comfortable with. By procedurally generating the world I could do something similar: have a massive list of all possible science fiction futures, but only have a limited number come up with each possible play through. I could even let the players win the game or have the world or the universe end - whereas most science fiction TTRPGs consist of a string of subgenre sand boxes which let players play in their favourite without spilling over into another.

This still doesn't solve the language problem. If I wrote the supplements using invisible ink and used a magic marker pen to reveal it as you play, I might be able to avoid you worrying about the names of every possible type of human-robot-animal-alien hybrid mix. But I have to be consistent in defining what a theriomorph, for instance, is so that when you see that word in the rules you know it means a human who has changed themselves to have an animal-inspired form. It helps, of course, if you are a classical scholar or speak Greek, but in the end I ended up using a lot of words that fall outside normal vocabulary. And as a result, much of the five books consists of the definitions of things.

I also coined some new words while doing this - apologies in advance if one of these is your band name or user handle. This is not an exhaustive list, but the most interesting.

• amorcracy - rule by a group of people who sleep with each other
• beginling - the first member of a species (from endling)
• bisentient - intelligent being consisting of one body and two minds
• fandemic - a behavioural modifying pathogen which makes infected both moderately addicted to a pleasurable activity and driven to  infect people around them to get them addicted to the same activity
• posterhuman - human who has completely replaced their body with a robotic body, but retains a humanoid form for aesthetic reasons
• skototropolis - a city that hangs underneath an aerostat
• simgularity - a singularity that has occurred in a simulated environment and is therefore not transferable to the real world

• storgearchy - rule by people who have children

• Theseuvian - either a robot who has replaced themselves with human parts or a human who has replaced themselves with robot parts

• tunafication - increasing proportion of fast twitch muscle fibers in meat
• xenonaut - someone who explores digital environments looking for naturally evolved life