Threedom: ORBITAL BLUES

When the mysterious third (Chris) suggested we take a step into Orbital Blues’ world of depressed space cowboys (specifically the Tennessee Five setting from sourcebook Afterburn) we had one question: could we maintain a consistent broad Deadwood-esque cowboy accent for all our characters? The answer was: no.

Nonetheless it was a well timed dive into a game we hadn’t looked at before: Soulmuppet’s first big hit, during the Kickstarter for the (still ongoing, so do go nose!) Odyssey-’em-up, Atrapos. 

Orbital Blues was a surprise. It wasn’t quite what we expected while still being exactly what we expected, and led to a particularly loopy exchange between Jim and Kieron, which we’ve only barely tried to tame, like some manner of half-broken solar steer. Is that the correct metaphor?

Kieron: No, absolutely not the correct metaphor. This is space, not cosmic – but it is absolutely NSR-y – cowboy. There’s a lot I think which worked for our group in Orbital Blues… but the thing which I think most influenced it is how hard we bought into the Western aspect. The accents were constant, the language aspired to Deadwoodian flourishes. It did push it perhaps more comic to begin with, but we did course correct the further we went in and started playing the blues.

Which speaks to the problem of reviewing it, which we’ll come back to. We’ve both skimmed the manual, but don’t know the warp and weft of it. I think the biggest influence to the game was actually Afterburn – and we only get the ghost of that, with handouts, our experiences at the table and the bit at the end when Chris got out his Pepe Silvia-esque corkboard of the bit of the sandbox we played.

But I dug it a lot. What did you make of it all?

Jim: Howdy, pardner! I liked it a lot more than I figured I would! I’ll admit I was judging a book by its cover, which you have to do, or you end up buying the wrong book. And I’d probably claim that I don’t really get into sad as an escapist aesthetic, but of course that’s not true, so don’t listen to me. The idea that I should want to RP sad is anathema, I would tell you. I do not RP for sadness! We’re having fun! Except I just ran a campaign of The One Ring where sadness was the overarching theme, so again, that’s not fair or correct. So I am talking shit again.

I do absolutely and explicitly love cowboys these days though, which also surprises teenage me, who I have to say was a depressed, snobbish wanker who thought Westerns were American cultural imperialism. (Which they are.)

And away from TTRPGs, you love sad art, right? Want to unpack that a bit?

Yeah, I do. I like a sad film in which almost nothing happens best of all the cinema. Novels too! I love to weep. I spent the last few years watching sad movies with my son so that could just cry. It was great! I think my reticence to engage here is more specific somehow. Like, it’s the foregrounding of “sad”? Like, The One Ring campaign we are playing has some real sadness in it, but if it were topline “Sad Elf Fantasy” I would roll my eyes, even though that’s exactly what it is.

This feels like a British person of our generation response. We don’t mind being sad, but dislike being marketed sad! God knows I listened to enough depressing music which even turned that to a profound state of sadness – but we also mocked it. That’s an us problem.

Stiff upper lip, KG! I am not sure how I want to present this particular line of thought in terms of an article we actually publish, but I have a gut dislike the emo line of presentation, like, everyone is sad! We’re all broken and we’re going to die. I don’t like it!  We’re all a bit of the universe breaking its own heart, you don’t need to wear a badge with it on because you are literally the manifestation of that devastating reality with each breath you take. It’s as if you were to present The Power Fantasy “ah, look, the exciting thing is that these super heroes are sad”, because sure! Some of them are going to be sad, or like “Watchmen is about superheroes who are sad,” yep, that’s the human condition. Perhaps it should be called COMPLICATED COWBOYS and I’d be like “oh hey”.

(Perhaps I can come up with a slightly less confrontational way to express this.)

DEPENDS HOW MUCH OF A FIGHT YOU WANT!

Honestly, if it had been like “Deeply-Conflicted Space Cowboys”, I would probably have been into it without Chris’ prompting. 

It is interesting what specific kind of space cowboys it is. When playing it, I boiled it down to “Dieselpunk Cowboys, but specifically the 1970s cowboys movies cowboys”. It’s got that The New Hollywood approach to it – which doesn’t always mean sad, but certainly means deliberate. That sort of cowboy material is the most interesting stuff, for me  – especially when it’s pure New Hollywood. I mean, at its best, you can imagine it being less cowboy and more specifically New Hollywood – EASY RIDER IN SPACE. Not that our accents would ever allow us to pull that off.

My American accent is amazing!

Amazing is certainly a word which came to mind.

Anyway, that 1970s resonance is mashed into the whole faded-future tapes-and-decks element. Analogue! Tech with the crackle of a Star Wars Help-me-obi-wan transmission. I absolutely leaned into this with my character’s love of retro-videogames, juxtaposing someone who was an Asteroid-cabinets hustler dealing with navigating an actual asteroid belt. There was a thrill there for me. 

There’s also the other weird truth – I wouldn’t say “sad” is even the central aesthetic. The core, definitive mechanic in the game is the Troubles – whatever is the core driving flaw of your character. There’s a list of troubles you select from, but they’re not all (or even mostly) about the I Am Listening To Joy Division, Leave Me Alone stuff.

The Troubles escalate, gaining Blues point triggered by acting in certain, Trouble-specific ways. For me, it was things like “any time I boast about my achievements” or “put other people down.” After a while, you hit a threshold and everything explodes, before resetting to a new status quo. You go and punch a politician who is with your Ex. I blow off the mission to prove I can play Asteroids, no matter what the Ex I betrayed said. And then you get an advance. 

Punching the guy on stage was magic stuff. Exactly what we play RPGs for. Or I do, at least.

It’s not really sad cowboys. “Fuck Up Self-Destructive Hot Mess Cowboy” is kind of the throughline, if I were to choose one. Though there’s certainly enough depressive troubles for those who want to get their Country & Western lyrics on.

Yes! I really like the Troubles system and wanted to use it, and leaned into it. Heart break, drinking, I was totally into that character (and in the game!) (The non-confrontational version of my take here is just to admit that I read it wrong and actually the Troubles system is great and Sad is just shorthand for “fucking chaotic in a good way”? TROUBLED SPACE COWBOYS doesn’t quite work either, though…)

It’s weird that it was a fairly classical detective game? (How much was this (Chris)?) I was expecting it to be more directly cowboyish: villains on the frontier, people stealing space cows, shootouts in the strip. I suppose I did test muscle here and there, but I was surprised we didn’t have more barfights and ship chases, and I am disappointed that we didn’t rescue the space cows. What sort of cowboys are we, really?

I guess there’s a question there about the sandbox – what IS the sandbox. Though “Bounty Hunter” is a core cowboy verb too, I guess, and certainly in Afterburn. I really liked this aspect – I’d have played in this world for much longer than we did. It’s the first time we’ve done an actual detective game together. I was struck that “sci-fi detective” did seem a sweet spot for this group as a concept  – we haven’t written about the Ex Tenebris game I ran for you (as it was a playtest) but everyone really just liked that noodling around, wandering around space, doing detective stuff enlivened with genre tropes.

(I’d go back to Ex Tenebris! – Boxquote. But the same is true of Orbital Blues. I was sad we finished. I wanted to be a drunk and heartbroken.)

It was different here as it is that rather than a deconstructed adventure, it was the traditional form  – we genuinely were detectives, and I really did just love  going out and trying to figure it out. I really did try and puzzle this one out, and was pleased when all the pieces came together. It felt like real people, in an unusual setting, but driven by recognisable motives. Plus a lot of accents. That’s highly dig-able. I fear we really are reviewing Afterburn now, rather than Orbital Blues.

I do like to be a detective. This is a weird messy way to write this! I kind of like the stream of consciousness mode. We can maybe tidy it up afterwards. [We did, sort of! – Jim] I haven’t looked at the expansion so I have no idea what Chris was working with or what came from him. That’s something that makes this mode of review tricky when we are not GMs.

Yeah – it’s an eternal problem. Are we reviewing Orbital Blues? Or are we reviewing (Chris)? You can look at my 101 TTRPG list, and the number of games which I’ve run (or at least read in detail) are the highest ones, almost constantly. Me getting a game to a table definitely says something. 

Plus that this isn’t just Orbital Blues – this is the Afterburn expansion, specifically the Tennessee Five setting at the back. So I have read the rules of Orbital Blues – but the core of what Orbital Blues was for us was that. Which is the OSR/NSR problem, right? So much is play culture and rulings and the world-as-ruleset.

In this case, while things like the Troubles system absolutely slap, the core system really is soft to the point of eyebrow raising. The basics are there, but there’s some bits which aren’t exactly sharpshooting. It’s probably lucky I didn’t play this before Zach edited DIE, as every comment they made about the book would have prompted me to say “Hey, Zach  – should I delete the bit where I say how many actions you get a turn? As Orbital Blues seems to think you don’t need that.”

Yeah, it’s interesting how much we wrestle with that, now. Having played a lot of rulesy systems I actively feel like my position has been changed. Rules! Procedure! Tell me what I should be doing and how to do it. That’s not cowboyish at all.

Simultaneously, it’s not that I was playing this and wished I was playing a different system with the same material. The stuff that works really well works really well, and elements I feel are undercooked are where play experience will carry you through. Yes, there are three stats, and one is of much greater import when playing a bounty-hunting game? Sure! Does that matter? No, not really – or not enough to distract you working your way through this web of human betrayal, cheap whiskey and corporate maleficence.

I wonder if we’d have had just a couple of different encounters, like spaceship battle or a really big deal gunfight, whether these concerns would have changed. I certainly got to use my fighty abilities, but not like I’d anticipated when I rolled up a big sad desperado.

Where the mechanics and structures create story is where it sings its old, sad song truest – and, as an aside, its interspersing of music and having the players pick their theme tune gives a big thumbs up. It’s very good at the more narrative prompt, side of things. For example, the Troubles system: as well as giving a cycle to play of you imploding, it also gives you a series of short prompts you could use to add to the fiction. In my case, what are my achievements? Who did I betray to get them?  I get my rival/ex-lover and my specific obsession over the “Nebulae” videogame trophy, and all the chaos from that. It’s a great setting without us – but it’s made our setting by this kind of stuff. I’m sure most people wouldn’t have made up someone who was a 8-bit videogame hustler, right?

We’re reviewing ourselves. We’re reviewing (Chris). We’re reviewing sitting at a computer talking to our friends. TTRPGs can’t be reviewed! There is no authored experience! A conversation is not a broadcast! And so forth. I have a streaming head-cold and it makes me want to cry.

Jim is the Saddest Space Cowboy.

My genre is sad. Tropes: Sad. System: Sadness. But also: snotness.

Orbital Blues and Orbital Blues: Afterburn are available from Soulmuppet. Atrapos is presently Kickstarting!