It's been a while since we visited the Island of Lost Games, but there are still a few old and obscure titles on my shelf to explore. Today's game is 1996's Fading Suns, by Bill Bridges and Andrew Greenberg. It's probably the most well-known and successful of the Island's titles, but it never did manage to break out to popularity, even among hard-core gamers. Even at its peak in the late 1990s, I expect you could walk up to any random attendee at GenCon and ask if they knew anything about Fading Suns, with a pretty good chance that the answer would be "no."
The game was an attempt to build what we would now call a "media franchise" spanning computer games, tabletop roleplaying games, and tabletop wargames. I can find only one tie-in novel listed on Amazon, and I've never heard of any comics or graphic novels, which is a little surprising.
So: what is Fading Suns? A slightly snarky elevator pitch description might be "Nickelodeon's Warhammer 40,000." It had a lot of the same elements of 40K — a decadent quasi-theocratic interstellar empire, people using technology they don't really understand anymore, xenophobic humans alternately oppressing and being oppressed by aliens, and a generally apocalyptic feel — but it lacked the punk/metal tone, nihilism, and over-the-top weirdness of the British game.
In fact, Fading Suns was surprisingly optimistic. The empire is stagnant, the stars are going out — but the rulebook explicitly states that the player-characters can reverse this decline by being heroes. The universe is not doomed, the actions of individuals do matter, and humanity is worth saving.
The original designers started out working for White Wolf, and the influence of the World of Darkness games is strong. The world of Fading Suns has Nobles, Merchants, Priests, and Aliens. Each of those types can belong to one of several factions. The combination of class and faction provides certain advantages or powers, which are tied to the faction's role in the world.
So if you're a Noble, you can be one of the Atreides-like House Hawkwood, the Harkonnen-like House Decados, the heavily religious House Li Halan, and so on. Priests can be part of the Orthodox priesthood, the militant order Brother Battle, the mystical Eskatonic Order, or the flamethrower-wielding inquisitors of Temple Avesti. Merchants may be space-pilot Charioteers, cyborged-up Engineers, slave-dealing Musters, and others. Either you find this style of character creation which is innately tied to the setting fascinating and useful, or you find it constraining and frustrating.
The art and production values for Fading Suns were top-notch, the design was solid, it was well-promoted and had a decent string of support products. But somehow it never took off. There are two reasons for this, I think. The first was entirely outside the control of Holistic Design, the publishers: the release of Dungeons & Dragons Third Edition in 2000, which basically vacuumed up all the attention and money in the hobby for several years. With Peter Jackson's The Fellowship of the Ring ruling the multiplexes, everybody wanted to do heroic fantasy adventure instead of science fiction.
The second reason was built into the game itself, and was a problem shared by a lot of other games before and since: it wasn't clear what the characters were supposed to do in a game of Fading Suns. There were plenty of possibilities — intrigue among the nobles, trade, hunting heretics, etc. In fact, I think there were simply too many possibilities. In D&D you fight monsters and find treasure. In Traveller you're either a merchant-adventurer or a mercenary. In Call of Cthulhu you investigate Lovecraftian stuff. The default adventure is clear to all.
Fading Suns's greatest strength — its unique and well-developed setting, with tightly-connected game mechanics — was also its curse. Most people simply couldn't easily fit themselves into a quasi-medieval space empire setting. And the ones who could were probably already playing Rogue Trader. David Lynch's Dune film came out before most potential Fading Suns customers were out of kindergarten, so there wasn't a good fictional model in front of everyone.
This is a huge problem in roleplaying games. Everybody says they want innovative settings, but they're lying. What are the most popular game settings? The generic fantasy of D&D, the generic SF of Traveller, the generic horror of the World of Darkness, the media juggernauts Star Wars and Star Trek, and the nerd-culture favorite of the Cthulhu Mythos. Quirky, idiosyncratic worlds like Fading Suns don't draw in as many players.
I kind of like quirky, idiosyncratic worlds. I used my own "Billion Worlds" setting for a campaign, but the amount of background information I had to provide (and invent on the fly) was daunting — both to me and to my players. It's a lot easier to say "you're on Tatooine" than to say "you're in the space habitat Summanus in the shadow of Jupiter, run by a paranoid supermind with a giant laser."
The rise of online gaming should solve this problem. Players looking for weird and unique campaign settings should be able to find each other and play via Roll20 or whatever. That was always the promise of the wired world. Unfortunately, in practice the reverse seems to be true: online games seem to cater to the most well-known settings, simply because it's really hard to find those player-needles who might appreciate someting unconventional in the giant haystack of the Internet.
I only ever played Fading Suns once or twice, but I did borrow some of the setting elements for other games, as I always do. It was a good game with noble aspirations, which ran aground on the realities of the market. It deserved better.
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