(no subject)

[the_rck]

Here's a crowd-sourceable thing-- For the game I'm running at UCon, I want all of the player characters to be playable as whatever gender the player prefers, but I also need to label the characters somehow. Names help with that.

The last couple of years, I've run games where I could just make up names, but this game is SF and set either in our solar system or in one colonized by folks from Earth. (Scott says I need to pull from The Expanse and/or Firefly.)

The characters are crew on a recently commissioned rescue ship, and I'm considering just labeling the characters by role and letting the players name them. I'm also considering just giving them family names, but then I have to decide ancestry/nationality and such, and I kind of feel like that should be up to the players, too, since it won't change anything I'm setting up (basically a space rescue with as many complications as it takes to fill the time. I'm making a list, and some of them will get more complicated the longer they're put off).

I could also use personal names that are gender neutral in the US or offer each person two somewhat similar personal name options, one US feminine and one US masculine. I used to do that when I wrote LARPs in the 90s, but I was also dealing with too many characters with complicated interrelationships for me to consider letting anyone go unnamed.

What do you all think?

Comments

[tinfoilvardan]

The Expanse was originally planned as a role-playing board game, before the idea was expanded (forgive the pun) into a novel series and now television series. The level of detail involved in the worldbuilding is fantastic.