More on Negentropy in 1979
By Nelson McKeeby
I began developing the ideas that eventually became Negentropy in 1979, when I was eleven years old. At the time I was trying to solve a problem that seemed much simpler than it does now. I wanted a world that could contain both fantasy and science fiction, and I wanted the two to belong to the same history. I did not want one setting for swords and magic and another unrelated setting for spaceships and advanced technology. My solution was to put the fantasy world in the distant past and allow its destruction to become part of the foundation from which later human civilization arose.
I chose about 5000 BCE as the date of the great catastrophe that ended this older world. The choice had no archaeological theory behind it. Five thousand BCE simply sounded unimaginably remote to an eleven-year-old in 1979, and I assumed that anything placed that far in the past could disappear from serious history. I imagined a Great War that destroyed the old political order, killed perhaps ninety percent of the human population, and left only scattered survivors who gradually became the ancestors of later historical cultures. The older civilizations would vanish, while distorted memories of their peoples, creatures, technology, and wars would survive as myth and legend.
The weakness in this idea is obvious to me now. A catastrophe that killed most of the world's population and destroyed an advanced civilization around 5000 BCE would leave an enormous archaeological, demographic, and environmental record. At eleven, however, I knew almost nothing about how archaeology reconstructed the past. The date 5000 BCE had no deeper meaning. It was simply far enough away to act as a personal McGuffin, a place where I could hide an entire lost age because I had no idea how difficult hiding such an age would actually be.
That ignorance turned out to be productive. It gave me an enormous space in which to invent, and many of the ideas created for that ancient world survived even after I learned enough to recognize the problems with the original premise. The history became more complicated, the civilizations became more detailed, and the explanations changed, yet the ancient world remained part of the structure of Negentropy. The mistake itself became a source of questions, and those questions became part of the setting.
A Fantasy World Inside Human History
The role-playing game itself originally belonged to this ancient period. It had creatures and peoples that filled some of the familiar roles of fantasy literature, although I was already trying to invent my own versions of them. There were peoples analogous to elves and dwarves, large and small goblin-like creatures, reptilian peoples, and the Grithi, whom I imagined as tall, thin, large-eyed, almost cadaverous beings. These were fairly simple ideas when they first appeared, because an eleven-year-old did not need hundreds of pages of anthropology to decide that an unusual people belonged in his world.
Over time these ideas grew into the Elder Kindred and acquired distinct histories, biology, cultures, technologies, political systems, and competing accounts of the ancient past. The old fantasy analogues slowly became peoples in their own right. The Dwarrow retained the relationship with stone, underground life, craft, and metal that had made the original dwarf-like conception attractive to me, while the Grithi developed into something considerably stranger, with their own biological engineering and peculiar relationship with technology. Other peoples followed similar paths. What began as the familiar vocabulary of fantasy became material that could support a much larger and less derivative world.
The most important decision was that these peoples belonged to Earth history. Their existence was not separated from humanity by another dimension or an unrelated fantasy continent. If they had existed, they had influenced the same world in which later human cultures developed. Their wars, migrations, technologies, stories, and ruins could therefore leave traces. A legend might preserve a badly distorted memory of a real event, while an archaeological discovery might reveal a piece of history that neither modern scholars nor surviving Elder Kindred understood correctly.
That also meant that disagreements about the ancient world could become part of the setting. I did not eventually need a single perfect chronology known to everyone. Different peoples could preserve different traditions, and those traditions could disagree because memory, religion, politics, loss, and interpretation had changed them. The naive decision to hide a lost civilization in 5000 BCE eventually produced a world in which the past itself became something that characters could investigate.
Making Magic Technical
Magic presented another problem. I wanted it in the world, because the ancient setting was still a fantasy setting, yet I also wanted the universe to have some underlying logic. My answer was to treat magic as technical even when the people using it did not understand the mechanism. The phenomenon that eventually became known as Dwimmer could be practiced, observed, studied, and incorporated into technology, although no single culture necessarily possessed a complete explanation of what it was doing.
This led to the Life Engineers and to the Five Lanterns, which became part of the ancient history surrounding the arrival or development of Dwimmer. These ideas were very primitive at first. I did not have the elaborate biological, physical, or historical explanations that would be developed decades later. The important idea was simply that something had happened in the ancient world that changed what was possible. Magic therefore had a history, and that history could eventually be investigated in much the same way as any other lost technology.
That choice affected the tone of Negentropy long after the original fantasy campaign. I became increasingly interested in mechanisms. If a creature had an unusual ability, I wanted to know what part of its biology permitted that ability. If a culture maintained some remarkable technology, I wanted to know where it obtained energy, materials, knowledge, and replacement parts. Dwimmer remained the great exception because its ultimate mechanism could remain uncertain, yet even there I wanted practitioners to observe regularities and develop techniques that could be taught.
The result was a setting in which the distinction between magic and technology often depended upon who was describing the event. A ritual might be religious to one person, practical craft to another, and an unexplained physical phenomenon to a Project investigator. That approach came much later in its detailed form, although its origin lay in the same childish desire to have fantasy and science fiction share one world.
Oasis, Ocean, and the Future
At roughly the same time I was creating this ancient world, I was also developing the future settings that became Oasis and Ocean. These belonged mainly to the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth centuries and were part of the same larger history. I therefore had two ends of the story developing at once. The ancient period contained the lost civilizations, magic, strange peoples, and the Great War, while the future contained humanity moving outward into space and encountering the consequences of a history much older than conventional human accounts recognized.
This approach allowed things invented for one period to affect another. An artifact created for the ancient game could have consequences thousands of years later. A future discovery could provide a new interpretation of something that had survived only as a myth. The same people or technologies could appear in radically different circumstances. Once I had decided that the fantasy past and science-fiction future were parts of a continuous timeline, history itself became one of the tools I could use to connect stories.
I still faced a serious problem with the science-fiction side of the setting. If humanity was going to travel among the stars, I needed some way to move people across distances that could require decades or centuries. Faster-than-light travel did not satisfy me because I could not imagine how it could work. Backward time travel seemed even worse because it immediately raised questions about causality. Conventional suspended animation also began to bother me once I thought about what the machinery would actually have to accomplish.
The solution to that problem became the Negentropic Cylinder.
The Montego and the Problem with Frozen Sleep
One of the stranger influences on Negentropy was our family Montego breaking down. I had already encountered science-fiction stories in which people could be frozen or placed into some form of suspended animation while a ship crossed an enormous distance. The idea initially seemed reasonable enough. Then I began thinking about the machinery.
Cars broke. Pumps failed. Electrical systems stopped working. Belts, hoses, switches, seals, and other ordinary components wore out. A machine that operated for a few years could require continual maintenance, so a device expected to keep a frozen human safely preserved for hundreds of years seemed absurdly complicated to me. If our family car could break down during ordinary use, I could not understand why anyone would trust a vastly more complicated machine to preserve a human being for centuries.
This was the engineering reasoning of an eleven-year-old, and it had several obvious weaknesses of its own. Curiously, I could imagine a comparatively simple rocket or propulsion system operating for an extraordinary length of time because I imagined the problem as one of keeping a machine moving. Maintaining a living human body in an artificial state seemed much more delicate. The reliability problem bothered me enough that I discarded frozen sleep as the main answer for long-distance travel.
I needed something that eliminated the maintenance problem entirely. The traveler could not merely sleep through the journey. The traveler had to experience no journey at all.
The Negentropic Cylinder emerged from that requirement. A person or object placed inside the Cylinder would cease to experience ordinary elapsed time. The Cylinder could then be moved across space during a voyage that lasted centuries. When it was opened, the person inside would experience the interval between closing and opening as effectively instantaneous.
This preserved the part of interstellar travel that I could imagine. The spacecraft itself could move slowly, perhaps using propulsion that remained within ordinary physical limits. Centuries could pass outside the Cylinder. The passengers would neither age nor require food, oxygen, refrigeration, or life support during that interval because they would experience no passing time.
I had therefore rejected faster-than-light travel, rejected conventional hibernation, and rejected travel into the past, only to solve the problem by inventing a machine that removed its contents from ordinary time. The inconsistency did not trouble me in 1979. I had invented a mechanism that obeyed the particular rules I wanted, and those rules were more important to me than whether the mechanism itself was any less impossible than the technologies I had rejected.
One-Way Time Travel
The Cylinder created another possibility that eventually became more important than interstellar travel. It allowed time travel into the future while preserving the prohibition against traveling into the past. A person could enter a Cylinder in one century and emerge in another because the outside world continued to age while the person inside did not. Once the Cylinder opened, however, there was no return to the earlier time.
This gave time travel consequences. A traveler who went forward a hundred years lost those hundred years permanently. Friends could be dead, governments could have vanished, languages could have changed, and the familiar geography of cities and roads could have been transformed. The character brought knowledge from the past into the future, although that knowledge might be incomplete, obsolete, or dangerously misleading.
This eventually became central to Project Negentropy and to the Troubleshooter campaigns. Characters can emerge with training, equipment, documents, assumptions, and memories from an earlier world, then discover that the people living around them have built societies of their own. The Troubleshooters may possess extraordinary technical equipment, while a farmer, boatman, merchant, priest, soldier, or village official understands the present environment far better than they do.
The Cylinder therefore changed from a transportation device into a narrative device. It created strangers who could enter a world carrying genuine expertise and genuine ignorance at the same time. It also made history irreversible. Characters could change the future they entered, but they could never go home and correct the past.
That idea has survived almost unchanged since childhood. Many of the names, technologies, cultures, and historical explanations surrounding it have changed repeatedly. The basic experience of entering a Cylinder, having no awareness of the passing interval, and opening it in another time remains one of the oldest continuous ideas in Negentropy.
Developing a Role-Playing Game in 1979
The timing also matters. In 1979 commercial role-playing games were still very young. Dungeons & Dragons had appeared in 1974, and during the next several years designers were exploring possibilities that had not yet settled into rigid genres. Empire of the Petal Throne had demonstrated the possibilities of a deeply developed invented world. Metamorphosis Alpha placed characters inside a damaged generation ship where technology, mutations, lost knowledge, and strange societies could coexist. Traveller developed interstellar adventure, while Gamma World combined post-apocalyptic ruins, technology, mutations, and material that easily crossed the boundary between science fiction and fantasy.
I do not want to reconstruct an artificial history in which every idea I had must have been borrowed from a particular game. I was eleven, and my memory of exactly what I knew at every moment cannot support that kind of claim. The important historical point is that I began Negentropy during a period when the boundaries of role-playing games were still unusually open. Designers were discovering that a role-playing campaign could contain a dungeon, a ruined spaceship, a distant planet, a post-apocalyptic settlement, a political argument, or an invented civilization.
My own solution was to make those possibilities part of one timeline. I did not yet have the vocabulary to call the result science fantasy, speculative history, post-apocalypse, or any other useful category. I was simply trying to make everything fit.
That process continued as I grew older. The world accumulated new material because every answer generated another question. Once a people had been invented, I wanted to know where they lived. Once they lived somewhere, I wanted to know what they ate and how they obtained it. Once they had a technology, I wanted to know who maintained it and what happened when it failed. Once they had a government, I wanted to know how authority actually worked when two people disagreed.
The game gradually moved toward the idea that understanding the world could replace large amounts of game machinery.
Rules Light and the World as a Sourcebook
From the beginning I preferred relatively light rules. I wanted players to describe what they intended to do and the game master to determine what happened from the circumstances. Detailed rules could help when uncertainty mattered, although I did not want every human activity reduced to a separate table or specialized subsystem.
This eventually shaped the sourcebooks in an unusual way. A book about healing could explain enough about wounds, infection, shock, medical treatment, and recovery for the game master and players to reason about what their characters were attempting. A book about firearms could explain ammunition, range, cover, weapon handling, manufacturing, and the consequences of wounds. A book about boats could discuss hulls, engines, fuel, mortgages, crew requirements, maintenance, navigation, and cargo because all of those things could influence what happened during play.
The sourcebook therefore became part rulebook, part setting book, and part discussion of how something worked. Players and game masters could establish a shared model of the situation and then use relatively simple game mechanics to resolve the uncertain part. The more clearly everyone understood the physical or social circumstances, the less need there was for a special rule describing every possible action.
I eventually came to think of this approach as role playing without a net. The players are expected to think about the situation itself. Equipment is finite. A plan can fail because somebody forgot an ordinary problem. A river can be too shallow for a particular boat. A wounded person can need treatment that the group cannot provide. A successful political intervention can produce consequences that no rule table could anticipate.
The method has its origins in the same instinct that made the broken Montego important. I kept asking how things worked, where they came from, what could go wrong, and what people would do when they went wrong.
The Advantage of Being Eleven
Looking back, the most interesting part of the 1979 design is the unevenness of my skepticism. I could reject faster-than-light travel because I could not imagine its physical mechanism. I could reject frozen sleep because I had seen ordinary machinery fail. I could worry about the logical problems of traveling into the past. At exactly the same time, I could invent a global war around 5000 BCE, kill most of humanity, destroy advanced civilizations, and assume that modern archaeology would somehow overlook the evidence.
The standards were inconsistent because they belonged to an eleven-year-old learning how the world worked. Some problems happened to fall within things I understood well enough to question. Other problems remained invisible because I did not yet know enough to recognize them.
I would not want to erase that history by pretending the original setting was more sophisticated than it was. The value of looking back at the development of Negentropy comes partly from seeing what was actually there at each stage. The eleven-year-old did not secretly possess a mature archaeological explanation for the Great War. He had chosen a number that sounded ancient. He did not possess a theory of temporal physics. He had invented a Cylinder because it solved a practical storytelling problem.
Later development could make those ideas more complicated without changing where they came from. The Great War became part of disputed ancient history. The fantasy peoples became the Elder Kindred. The old technical magic became Dwimmer. The Life Engineers and Five Lanterns accumulated history. The future worlds of Oasis and Ocean expanded the timeline. The Cylinder became the defining technology of Project Negentropy.
The original ignorance remained underneath all of it.
That may be the most important lesson I can draw from the history of the game. Knowing more helps a designer make a world richer, more coherent, and more convincing, yet ignorance can sometimes create possibilities that knowledge would have dismissed too early. In 1979 I did not know enough to understand why much of my world could not work, so I built it anyway. I then spent decades asking how it might work after all.