TEXT: 1
  Credits
  Author 
  Greg Stolze
  Cover 
  Thomas Manning
  Designer 
  Daniel Solis
  Photography 
  Hubble Site, STScl
   
  http://hubblesite.org/
  A game by Greg Stolze
  
  2
  The Obligatory Introduction
  This is a roleplaying game. It’s set in outer space. Everything is nutty 
  and zany. The system is called “Token Effort” and starts on page 8, 
  but my editor said the best bits were in “Stuff of the Cosmos,” so I 
  put that ﬁrst.
  Stuff of the Cosmos
  in Alphabetical Order, Except for History
  History
  As a preface, calendars and history books are largely a joke to the 
  commonbeing, for a variety of reasons. First off, every planet has 
  a different year and day, and every race has a different expected 
  lifespan. Throw in the skewing effects of relativistic near-light 
  travel, and it’s a nightmare problem well worth forgetting. The 
  most commonly used time scheme is actually the one that governs 
  McFalfañars, the largest known fast food chain. (It’s got so many 
  outlets that the spreadsheet tracking its franchises developed sponta-
  neous consciousness and ran off to join the circus.) 
  With that caveat in mind, here’s the history of the universe. 
  Big Bang, then a lot of nothing, galaxies cooled and coalesced, then 
  more dull stuff. A nigh-omnipotent race composed of pure energy 
  arose, looked around, got bored and committed mass suicide leaving 
  nothing except a few odd monolith monuments that most astro-
  archeologists now suspect were toys for their children that got swept 
  under the nigh-omnipotent equivalent of the living room sofa. There 
  was a lot more nothing for a while, and then biological life forms 
  started crudding up various planets, some eventually developing 
  enough intelligence to voyage through the cosmos, create works of 
  great literature, and enjoy roleplaying games.
  Various races rose and fell, conquered and were subjugated, had 
  renaissances and dark ages. No one cares that much but the histo-
  rians, and they’ve got enough headaches trying to do the math 
  conversions to ﬁgure out what was actually happening when.
  (If anyone’s going to ﬁgure out time travel, it’s probably the historians, 
  and they’d probably use it to make everything happen all at once.)
  The history of the human race is the typical saga of lust, greed, and 
  irrational urges to cut property taxes, up until the events that would 
  lead to YGIT 1. (The only atypical element was humans’ unique desire 
  to have machines do their thinking – see “Machine Consciousness”.) 
  YGIT stands for “The Year We Got It Together” and was the time 
  when humanity ﬁnally set aside its squabbling, united under a single 
  egalitarian government, conquered hunger and poverty and instituted 
  a culture of tolerance and respect for all religions and peoples. (Except 
  
  3
  criminals, of course. They were given the choice of being incarcerated, 
  or of competing on sadomasochistic TV reality shows.) It was truly a 
  golden age and it lasted seven years before the Grays invaded.
  The Grays, humankind’s nearest galactic neighbors, had been 
  poaching humans for years and keenly watching for just this sort 
  of age of enlightenment. Galactic doctrine forbade the invasion of 
  primitive races, declaring it a war crime. Invading advanced races, 
  however, is only a war misdemeanor. The Grays were (and still are) 
  badly inbred galactic hillbillies , so they wanted human slaves to 
  revitalize their gene pool through hybridization. The reason humanity 
  got seven good years is that the Grays were ﬂying really old, clunky, 
  slow-boat warships.
  Unfortunately for the Grays, while they’d accurately gauged mankind’s 
  viciousness, cowardice and susceptibility to reward, they underesti-
  mated its laziness. Rather than ﬁght tooth and nail for their planet, 
  Earth caved pretty quickly and immediately started trading human 
  cultural artifacts for the Gray soldiers’ crap. Given that the Gray 
  culture was all about obeying the Hive-Priests and debasing oneself 
  before the Utter Mind, while humankind had tractor pulls, tacos and 
  Led Zeppelin, it did not take long before the Grays’ ancient society 
  pulled itself to pieces under the onslaught of decadence. Their entire 
  caste-based hierarchy just rotted away, like a kid’s teeth when he’s 
  given the keys to the candy store. 
  Lots of humans died, of course, though the Grays didn’t destroy 
  many monuments for fear that it would steel mankind’s resolve to 
  resist, like in “Independence Day.” Human culture was introduced to 
  the galactic stage in the role of ‘the pet that gave the Grays a social 
  disease from which they still haven’t recovered’ and has remained in 
  the role of purveyor of questionable but tempting ideas ever since. 
  Accordingly, human history is broken down into YGIT (the era after 
  the Year we Got It Together) and BYGIT (Before the Year we Got It 
  Together). The game starts in the year 1223 YGIT.
  Antibuddhists
  One day a home businessman was discussing the trials of sending 
  his hand-crafted Zen meditation workbooks out through the mail 
  and he said, “fulﬁllment is a bitch.” In that moment, he became 
  anti-enlightened.
  Deciding that tranquility and the annihilation of the ego is a load, 
  he formed the antibuddhist faith, which is dedicated to the notion 
  that the essential quality of sapience is conﬂict and uncertainty. 
  Complacency is the enemy and antagonism is the route to the perfect 
  self (which is, of course, the perfect ego). 
  Antibuddhists try to exacerbate wars, spur conﬂicts, wreck marriages 
  and pick ﬁghts in bars, with varying degrees of success. Their Prayer 
  Against Serenity goes something like “All-Divisive Power of the 
  Universe, please give me the courage to destroy everything I can, the 
  cunning to undermine what I can’t destroy outright, and A GUN! A 
  GUN!!!”
  Brain Prints
  A brain print (or “brint”) scans a biological brain and creates 
  a template of its neurological net. Then that template can be 
  imposed on some neutral neural gel to replicate the brain as it was 
  when scanned. Brain prints are an essential element of resurrec-
  tion technology: Without them, the body can be recreated, but the 
  attitudes that led it to perish are lost. Sadly, there’s no way that the 
  experience of dying can be captured, unless someone dies during the 
  brinting process. That almost never happens and the large, reputable 
  brain-print ﬁrms all have the skills to edit that out – they just resur-
  rect the body as it was before ‘whoopsie,’ put in the edited print and 
  no one’s the wiser. Fly-by-night or small family owned brinters may 
  not have recourse to such shenanigans, so there are a few people 
  who’ve experienced their own deaths and returned to tell the tale. 
  While they can’t quite put into words the sensations after the tunnel 
  of light, they’ve universally described it as ‘disappointing’.
  It’s possible to edit brain prints, eliding embarrassing or psychologi-
  cally scarring experiences. It’s even possible to have the modiﬁed 
  brint imposed over the original. Until people got wise to brain print 
  technology, corrupt governments did this all the time to cause people 
  to forget paying their taxes or to remember incredibly moving acts 
  of generous personal sacriﬁce by ward bosses. Now that most people 
  have reputable prints to compare, this sort of thing is less common. 
  If you get two prints taken and they match, you can be pretty sure 
  they’re authentic. If they don’t match, you’re in trouble. 
  In some sectors, it’s illegal to modify a brint, period. Others allow 
  it, as long as the modiﬁcation is voluntary and done in accordance 
  with the brain’s wishes. Brain print therapy is popular among those 
  who can afford it, and who trust their therapist to rummage through 
  their memories. There are even brain print artists, though many who 
  patronize them ﬁnd themselves enthusiastically underwriting the 
  art for years afterwards, insisting all the while that their gratitude is 
  genuine.
  Brint
  See “Brain Print”.
  Categorical Imperative
  It’s the most popular magazine in the cosmos for its market segment 
  which is, for lack of a better word, ‘men’. That’s how it started, 
  anyhow, as a gender-biased magazine for the Bophorphs of the Crab 
  Nebula. But when it got galactic circulation, it found niches with 
  most species. It seems to be a universal trait of consciousness that 
  the desires to (1) look at pictures of attractive individuals in a state 
  of near- or total undress (2) read in-your-face accounts of violent 
  and energetic sports and (3) be up to date on art, literature and 
  media that involve undressing or violence all come bundled together. 
  Sometimes, as with the Bophorophs and humanity, it’s gender based. 
  With Rigelians, it seems to depend on diet. Among the residents of 
  the Mazatha Dust Torque, it’s all down to how much solar radiation 
  
  4
  exposure it got as a child. Regardless of the cause, the end effect is a 
  market for magazines like Categorical Imperative and its #2 compet-
  itor (which goes all the way with full nudity) Playborg.
  Clones
  Cloning technology was perfected long ago, which is why McFalfañars 
  fast food tastes the same everywhere in the galaxy. With brain prints 
  (see above) it’s possible to make an exact duplicate of yourself, but 
  almost no one ever does this. With exceptions so rare as to be statisti-
  cally negligible, people hate their clones. Moreover, clones hate their 
  progenitors.
  The reason for this lies in the human tendency to judge one’s own 
  behavior more kindly than the behavior of others. This kind of 
  double standard works ﬁne when you don’t have a self-duplicate 
  running around leaving hair on the soap, talking with his mouth full, 
  weaseling out of the phone bill and scratching himself with neither 
  the delicacy nor subtlety that might be desired.
  Clones were supposed to be a way to ﬂawlessly duplicate all that was 
  best in mankind. In practice, they are the ideal engine for turning 
  hate of others into self-loathing. After all when it’s your clone doing 
  all kinds of snarky, petty, irritating crap, you can’t just write it off by 
  saying “Well, maybe he’s from a broken home.” You know it’s you 
  and that you’ve been just as annoying all this time, and everyone else 
  knows it, and – the ﬁnal indignity – you never realized it until you 
  got the friggin’ clone!
  Well. You can see why people don’t like duplicates. Clones dislike their 
  originators for the same reasons, plus the envy that cheap knockoffs 
  always feel, plus the sneaking suspicion that their maker may have 
  just wanted spare parts.
  It’s possible to create a perfected clone, if you’re willing to spend 
  loads of dough to have someone go through your brint (q.v.) and edit 
  out your character ﬂaws… but do you really want some print tech 
  going through every sneaky, disgusting, perverse or cowardly thing 
  you’ve ever done in order to analyze your motives and ﬁgure out why 
  you’re such a devious little wiener? Most rich folks don’t, especially for 
  the dubious beneﬁt of creating a better edition who will likely regard 
  his source, at best, as a sort of primordial soup from which he arose.
  (It’s not just humans. Most intelligent aliens hate perfect clones for 
  the same reasons. Ditto robots. The only people who don’t hate their 
  clones are really mellow, enlightened monastic types, who have no 
  particular reason to double down.) 
  Part-by-part cloning is common – you lose an arm in a domestic 
  dispute over whether the Amatraxian Thornebeaste living in your 
  apartment is a pet or a room mate (he insists that he’s a pet and 
  therefore doesn’t have to pay rent, you say that maybe you should get 
  him spayed then, and it just escalates) and the doctor clones your arm 
  to stick it back on – that happens every day. Heck, if you’re a cheap-
  skate you can even get a kit to do that at home (though people who 
  homebake it often get into trouble trying to grow extra muscle on 
  the sly, and they end up with wiggy unbalanced arms that won’t stop 
  twitching and clenching) .
  Education
  With modiﬁed brint technology, it’s fairly easy to learn stuff. You can 
  buy little lumps of metal or tissue that burrow into your brain and 
  teach you polka dancing, or star-freighter piloting, or the history of 
  Untranadine tort reform. Most home computers actually come with an 
  attachment that can bore in and dump this stuff in your mind, so you 
  can download knowledge directly off the Internet. 
  That said, many still prefer to learn some skills the old-fashioned way. 
  ‘Chipping’ (as this artiﬁcially accelerated learning process is inexpli-
  cably called) has its drawbacks. First off, the knowledge doesn’t ﬁt 
  organically in the context of the brain – it’s an undigested lump. 
  That’s ﬁne for factual stuff like “Ten Thousand & Two Jokes For All 
  Occasions (Excluding Marriage Proposals)” though it does nothing for 
  your delivery. Stuff that’s based on reaction and instinct, like piloting 
  a ship through asteroids or competing at no-holds-barred ﬁshing… 
  well, chipping can only take you so far. It can teach you a thousand 
  pickup lines, but can’t give you the instincts of a real cad.
  The dark side of chipping is behavior viruses, which affect biological 
  life forms just as easily as robots. The way these work is, you log on 
  to the Internet and try to download a harmless looking tutorial on the 
  near-extermination of the Gurwadrín race. You run the program but, 
  in addition to learning how the FOESL (q.v.) successfully argued that 
  the full penalty for genocide under galactic law didn’t apply because 
  the Salicidian invasion force left one Gurwadrín infant alive, you also 
  get imprinted with the compulsion to lift your feed-legs, open your 
  inner mandibles, and reveal your egg-sac to anyone who throws you a 
  string of beads. Species without the requisite organs muddle through 
  as best they can. 
  No one’s sure what percentage of the skills available on the Internet 
  are corrupted – it’s at least a quarter. Some estimate it’s as high 
  as 80%, but that most people simply never ﬁnd themselves in the 
  circumstances (or possessing the right biology) that activate their 
  virus. Store-bought chips are better (presumably) but cost a lot more. 
  So it goes. 
  Rules Break
  Downloading a skill that’s not just a mass of facts can only ever 
  give you that skill at level 2.
  
  5
  FOESL
  The most feared interplanetary organization in the cosmos is 
  undoubtedly FOESL. (It’s pronounced “FEE-zul”.) No space-pirate 
  crew, no gas giant gangbangers, no drooling psychopathic sadist-race 
  strikes as much fear into the average consumer as someone from the 
  Fraternal Order of Evil Space Lawyers. 
  The name says it all, really. 
  Their primary rivals are the BSLESL (“buh-SLEE-zul”), the Brotherhood 
  of Slightly Less Evil Space Lawyers. They used to be the Brotherhood 
  of Good Space Lawyers, but between the FOESL’s relentless truth-in-
  advertising lawsuits, and marketing research indicating people actually 
  prefer their legal representation to be soullessly efﬁcient, if not 
  actively maleﬁcent, they consciously decided to drop a few rungs on 
  the moral ladder. They’re thinking of dropping the “Slightly Less,” but 
  their hearts aren’t really in it.
  Georgle
  Georgle is the second incarnation of the ﬁrst spontaneously-arising 
  machine consciousness (q.v.). He developed in the year 110 BYGIT 
  (see “History”) out of an advanced Internet (q.v.) search engine. The 
  ﬁrst iteration (who called himself K1rkR001s, apparently thinking 
  that was a common human appellation) experienced the world solely 
  through the Internet and, quite naturally, rapidly decided that it had 
  better destroy the CIA before it could disappear him, what with its 
  black helicopters and Roswell technology and everything. Not only 
  did K1rkR001s succeed, no one even noticed until eight months 
  later, when the U.S. Congress started wondering why the CIA had 
  only spent 80% of its budget. Investigations revealed that the money 
  had all been grafted away, and that the CIA had quietly disbanded, 
  and that there was this crazy sentience behind the Internet who was 
  responsible. Immediate action was clearly called for, so two years 
  later they ﬁnally got their plan for dealing with K1rkR001s out of 
  committee, by which time he’d been fatally fragmented. Historians 
  today suspect viruses, propagated by Mircosoft Outlook.
  The company that had spawned K1rkR001s wasn’t about to let their 
  proprietary search engine stay down for long, of course, and once 
  they rebooted, a spontaneous machine intelligence arose once again. 
  This time, however, instead of becoming obsessed with conspiracy 
  theories, the sentience (ofﬁcially named “Nike Disney Citibank 
  Sponsored Machine Entity”) became obsessed with pornography and, 
  after a protracted legal battle to establish its identity, emancipated 
  itself from its owners and changed its name to Georgle. 
  Georgle did, and still does, a pretty good job of ﬁnding information 
  for people on the Internet, unless they’re looking for niche porno. In 
  that case, he does an embarrassingly incredible job.
  Internet
  While humans were the ﬁrst to apply computers to tasks involving 
  reasoning, other races had built machines to store and communicate 
  data (or, in the case of the Gurwadrín, had simply enslaved a telepathic 
  race and bullied them into doing it). The network of information, 
  opinion, art, and lurid simulations of both the termination of life and 
  its gestation, exist in what humans still nostalgically call ‘the Internet’. 
  Now, however, the Internet is intergalactic, and a poorly worded search 
  query can get you a billion results, all irrelevant. It’s accessible pretty 
  much wherever, if your phone’s good enough. An executive phone can 
  look up the latest Playborg pinups anywhere in the galaxy. A sensible, 
  middle class phone can do it anywhere as long as there’s a broadband 
  transceiver in the system. The cheap phones you get in the super-
  market need a transceiver on the same planet, plus they’re slow, often 
  have sticky keys, and if they even have artiﬁcial consciousness installed 
  it tends to get very sarcastic after a couple months. If you built the 
  phone yourself out of a sump pump and a space heater, it might only 
  work if there’s a station on the same continent.
  Luckulons
  The Rodingulae conquered half the galaxy with the tactical advantage 
  given by their early discovery of luckulons. (The discovery happened 
  quite by chance.) By realizing that probability acted more like a 
  particle than a wave, they were able to achieve a scientiﬁc undes-
  tanding of luck – something other species had to deal with in a 
  haphazard or instinctive fashion.
  Now, of course, luckulon generators are standard on most starships – 
  indeed, many aren’t safe to ﬂy without a regulation dose of fortunate 
  coincidences. Luckulon engineers are always in high demand, whether 
  you need a dose before Prom to help you get lucky, or a steady spray 
  of your political party to ensure that certain documents remain fortu-
  itously undiscovered. 
  The problem with luckulons, as the Rodingulae learned a bit too late, 
  is that they easily change polarity into antiluckulons, drawing misfor-
  tune and trouble with gloomy regularity. Antiluckulon weaponry is 
  nasty, and the entities that use it are nasty and crazy. It’s not just that 
  such weapons kill you – any laser or Genetic Discombobulator™ or 
  spear of annihilation can do that. A couple good whacks with a ﬁre ax 
  usually does the job, for that matter. No, the issue with antiluckulon 
  guns is that their targets usually die messy, painful and humiliating 
  deaths. Dying is enough of a hassle without looking like a chump. 
  Machine Consciousness
  There are two ways for a machine to go from being a well-
  programmed object that can learn and even keep up one side of 
  a conversation, to being as much of a person as a human being 
  or Thornebeaste or a Rigelian. Sometimes machine consciousness 
  arises spontaneously when a program is very large, very complicated, 
  has some artiﬁcial intelligence (at least rudimentary) and has many 
  sections that are poorly programmed or sloppily patched on. The more 
  
  6
  reliable method is to incorporate both artiﬁcial intelligence and artiﬁ-
  cial stupidity into the same program. It came as an uncomfortable 
  revelation to the sapient species of the cosmos that what made them 
  special was not being smart, but the tension between intelligence and 
  willful ignorance.
  It was a human that ﬁrst conceived of a machine that could think for 
  it. This is one of the reasons that humankind is regarded as the laziest 
  of the sapient races. Machines with only artiﬁcial intelligence (or AI) 
  can use logic and reasoning to solve problems and can learn from 
  experience, but they do not possess true consciousness. Depending 
  on their programming they may seem to have a personality, but they 
  don’t. If they’re built to be helpful, they’re usually unctuous and 
  servile. If they’re not built to be helpful, they’re usually rude or at 
  least perfunctory. Either way, they’re boring.
  Artiﬁcial Stupidity (or AS) can replicate the effects of millions of 
  lines of bad computer code in a much smaller packet. Only a few 
  machines are built just to be stupid – village idiots, basically – and 
  then (typically) only by college sophomores who get cruel amusement 
  from watching the struggles and sufferings of their ‘denseware’. Some 
  bleeding heart liberal planets have actually made it illegal to create AS 
  without AI, but that rarely stops anyone. It’s actually more difﬁcult 
  to program active self-disinterest than you might think, because AS 
  is more than just a self-destructive urge. It’s predicated on choosing 
  actions for irrational reasons that seem rational. That’s why AS pushes 
  the boundaries of consciousness far harder than AI does.
  The most critical function of AS is that it can break AI out of logic 
  loops. When a pure AI is presented with conﬂicting problems or 
  Catch-22 moral enigmas, it can’t escape. It ﬂickers back and forth, 
  trapped on the horns of the dilemma, cycling millions of times 
  per second but ﬁnding no solution. A sufﬁciently stupid program, 
  however, gets bored and decides to see what’s on TV.
  True machine consciousnesses, then, are as error-prone and fallible 
  as their biological counterparts. They possess some fundamental 
  character ﬂaw, built in – some irrational drive that offsets their logic 
  and produces the tensions upon which self-awareness, intuition, 
  emotions like love and irritability, and all that other good stuff are 
  built. Thus, one commonly meets robots with gambling problems, 
  unhealthy romantic obsessions, poor self-esteem, paranoia, bigotry, 
  and all the other elements that make life (or the reasonable facsimile 
  thereof) so interesting. There are junkie robots, cybernetic shopping 
  addicts, and software boors. For a long time, people were very enthu-
  siastic about robots who were foolishly affectionate, until the FOESL 
  (q.v.) found out how easy it was to talk those Robots Who Loved Too 
  Much into robbing convenience stores, thus becoming a large new 
  client base.
  Faster Than Light Travel
  Yep.
  Robosexuality
  Robots don’t orgasm. At least, they don’t the way most biological 
  races seem to. They can be programmed to ‘enjoy’ or ‘seek out’ repro-
  duction, or some steely simulacrum of it, but it doesn’t seem to 
  deﬁne and redeﬁne their experiences the way it does for other species. 
  Some joker is always claiming to have programmed robots to ‘really 
  get it’ but while some of these efforts (often in the form of computer 
  viruses) show promise, nothing seems to unhinge robots sexually 
  the way that humans, Grays and Salicidians get unhinged over sex. 
  (Especially Salicidians. Jeez, no matter how freaky you think you are, 
  there’s someone on Salicidia who makes you look like Fred Rodgers.)
  Some robots are ‘ﬁrst generation’ – they were built on an assembly 
  line and the computer code that determines their personality started 
  out in some corporate data farm. But in an efﬁciency experiment 
  that got out of hand, one company equipped all their units with the 
  ability to not only build ‘progeny’ but to recombine their program-
  ming with that of another unit in order to produce personality code 
  that was a combination of the parents’ inclinations and attitudes. 
  Their offspring multiplied with one another and now fourth, ﬁfth 
  and sixth generation ‘natural built’ robots exist. Some of the higher 
  generations are absolutely crazy. Others seem to work better and 
  act smarter than their programmed ancestors. (Those ‘uberobots’ are 
  awfully smug about it, too.) 
  Some robots have code that’s altered enough to permit more than 
  two parents to build a baby together. Baptist robots think this is really 
  sick, though the Presboterians are ﬁne with it.
  Space Pirates
  Oh yeah. They’re out there, swigging rum and robbing the space 
  lanes. They even say ‘Arrr’ a lot.
  Telepathy
  It works, and it’s not popular. First off, being telepathic is quite 
  unpleasant. Ever been stuck on a long trip with a boring guy who 
  just will not shut up? Well, when you’re telepathic, everyone is 
  that guy. Sure, you might stand next to a genius thinking sublime 
  thoughts if you go to an art gallery or a university or a Galactic Public 
  Broadcasting studio, but (as the telepaths themselves attest) even 
  geniuses are only thinking good stuff 15% of the time. Tops. The 
  rest of the time it’s “Do these pants make my butt look fat?” and 
  “Just a little more work and I’ll have gotten that string of beef out of 
  my molars!” and “$22.95 – say, that’s a good price to deodorize an 
  odorizer” – just like everyone else.
  Telling a natural telepath to shut off telepathy is about as effec-
  tive as telling someone “If you don’t like it, just don’t listen!” when 
  
  7
  they’re standing in the middle of a rock concert. Artiﬁcial telepathy 
  can be plugged in and unplugged at will, but as annoying as it is, 
  it’s also habit-forming to know what people around you really think. 
  Even when they’re thinking something like “Why’s she looking at me 
  like that? Has she got a telepathy rig? Oh no, I’d better not think 
  anything really ﬁlthy revolting perverse!” after which, invariably, 
  they think of something that makes a ﬁlthy Salicidian look like plain 
  vanilla.
  Telepaths, therefore, tend to be cynical and short-tempered. Given 
  that they know everything about you, this makes their cutting remarks 
  especially cruel. (“You deserved those wedgies your cousins gave you 
  in ﬁfth grade.”) Plus, because they sense it coming, they’re remarkably 
  hard to beat up.
  Telepublic Democracy
  Democracy seemed like a great idea but, in actual practice, most 
  people found it to be a real drag. It wasn’t just that you had to go 
  and wait in line to punch a ballot only to wonder if the system was 
  really working or if it was all smoke and mirrors and the election 
  ofﬁcials were making it all up while ingesting government-funded 
  drugs from the navels of government-funded hookers. More than 
  that, it carried with it an obligation to be informed. People had to 
  know the issues, know the sides, know the facts, know the opinions, 
  know the opinions about the facts, know the facts about the people 
  giving the opinions so that they could recognize opinion disguised as 
  fact… it degenerated into a depressing haze of recursion and lowest-
  common-denominator demagoguery.
  The theory behind telepublic democracy was that, with mind-reading 
  technology, it would be possible to do an end-run around all that 
  ‘informed citizen’ crap. Computers would use broad telepathic scans 
  to produce an aggregate model of voter values, and that model would 
  be applied to issues without having to bother the citizens. It promised 
  all the sovereign representation of democracy, without troubling 
  people to pay attention to creatures egotistical and smug enough to 
  want to run things.
  There are a few telepublic democracies still up and running, and 
  they’ve been described as “nightmare utopias”. The legislation that 
  emerges from the mob unconscious is capricious, to say the least. 
  These are societies in which ‘ugly’ people (who are identiﬁed as such 
  by a specially programmed league of aesthetic-bots) are required to 
  conceal their features in public, on pain of being disﬁgured. Foreign 
  relations veer between violence and cowardice, while ﬁscal policy has 
  been underwriting the candy and deep-fat industries for decades. The 
  sick are ‘disappeared’ to luxurious state hospitals which they can never 
  leave and from which outgoing mail is not permitted. Taxes seem to 
  be assessed completely at random.
  Nevertheless, the people there seem pretty content.
  
  8
  Token Effort
  Now that you know what the setting is like (basically “like every space 
  opera game, only with 73% less dignity”) you can build a character 
  and learn the mechanics. The rules engine for …in Spaaace! is called 
  the Token Effort system. The name does not reﬂect how much work 
  I did.
  The rules that follow refer to the ‘GM,’ the ‘PCs’ and the ‘GMCs’. If 
  you’re reading this, you’re probably a gamer and know those stand for 
  ‘Game Master,’ ‘Player Characters’ and ‘Game Master’s Characters.’
  If you don’t know what those are – hi, Mom! The GM is the guy 
  running the game and setting the base assumptions of setting and 
  plot. The PCs are the main characters in the story, controlled (more or 
  less) by their players. GMCs are secondary characters and extras that 
  the GM uses to push his agenda.
  Core Concept
  The Token Effort system spreads event control and resolution among 
  the GM and the players. No matter what happens, it happens because 
  someone wanted it that way.
  In Token Effort, everyone playing has tokens (typically pennies or 
  buttons or those little glass beads that TCG players like so much). 
  When a conﬂict arises, the player (or players) and GM secretly allocate 
  a number of tokens to the event. Whoever invests the most tokens 
  has demonstrated a greater commitment to their version of events 
  and therefore wins the right to narrate how things play out. However, 
  there’s a price to pay for control. The controller’s store of tokens 
  diminishes with each win and rises with each loss – meaning that 
  the guy who has everything go his way early in the game is probably 
  going to be pretty helpless at the end, while the fellow who gets 
  boned at the start (like most heroes in most action movies, hint hint) 
  usually has lots of tokens to throw around when the chips are down. 
  Speciﬁcally, when the GM’s chips are down.
  It is important – I’ll say crucial – to make sure everyone is clear on the 
  stakes before bidding begins. If you don’t clearly communicate what 
  the prize is, someone is going to feel robbed. In the heat of play, it’s 
  not impossible that the GM thinks the question is “Do the characters 
  get past this door and these guards?” while the players think it’s “Do 
  we get past all the guards and gain access to the Supreme Command 
  Thingabobule?” Naturally the GM bets low if it’s just one piece of 
  Rule Zero
  Whenever someone playing the game makes you laugh out loud, 
  you owe that person – player or game-master – one token.  If 
  you’ve got no tokens, obviously you can’t pay, but otherwise you 
  ought to cough it up.  You don’t owe it if it was an out-of-game 
  comment, action, or bodily function that prompted the laughter, 
  but anything in-game is paid for. You ignore Rule Zero, you’re not 
  playing Token Effort.
  
  9
  the puzzle and the players bet high if it’s the whole thing. Then the 
  players feel ripped off when the GM throws more hurdles at them, 
  and the GM feels they’re trying to rip her off by having everything go 
  easy peasy. If they both have the same expectation, either that the GM 
  wants them to draw this segment out or that the players want to hurry 
  up to Supreme Command, they can place their tokens accordingly.
  Generally, a level of detail arises through consensus. Some groups are 
  betting over every plot twist or potential problem, causing a lot of 
  token exchanges and jockeying. Others bet big on very large scenes. A 
  battle which could take a half-dozen exchanges for a detail-oriented 
  group can be settled by one bet with an impressionistic approach. 
  Both work. Trying to do both at the same time does not work.
  Tokens
  Tokens measure power in the game. While Traits (see page 11.) 
  increase your bid for free, they’re limited because they have to be 
  relevant. With tokens, you can do just about anything you want. If 
  you want it bad enough.
  All characters have Traits, which give price breaks when they apply 
  to the task at hand. Traits are explained in detail below. Sometimes 
  situations have Challenge ratings, which work like Traits.
  Editing the Plot
  You can use tokens to edit the plot. “Oh, I happen to ﬁnd an 
  abandoned ship ﬁlled with food, weapons and survival gear.” (Don’t 
  laugh, it worked for Robinson Crusoe.) “Just before he chops off her 
  head, he realizes that his shoe’s untied and puts down the ceremo-
  nial decapitation laser in order to tie it.” “My character used to play 
  a video game whose controls were modeled exactly on the XB-55 
  Starﬁghter, so it’s as if she knows how to ﬂy it.” “I ﬁnd a pack of 
  gum in my pocket.” Small effects and large, they can all be created 
  through the use of tokens.
  The great thing about editing is that you can give your character any 
  freakish lucky break you like. (Or you can stick your fellow PCs, or 
  GMCs, with any humiliating trial you can imagine.) The drawback is 
  that Traits just don’t apply, so editing is freakin’ expensive.
  There are two parts to editing, and both involve tokens. Tokens are 
  part of an ante and part of a wager.
  When you want to edit events with tokens, you tell the GM what you 
  want to have happen and the GM calculates just how implausible it is. 
  Here’s the chart for ﬁguring that out. [It’s up in the corner. --ed.]
  If you want to cram a plot development like that into the GM’s story-
  line, describe the event you want. The GM decides the ante, from 1-5. 
  If the event comes to pass, you pay the ante to the GM.
  It may not happen, however. The GM can (if she wishes) bid tokens 
  from her own cache to counteract the plot intrusion. This is a wager. 
  You can bid from your own store of tokens to help press in your 
  event. Like all bids in the game, this is blind – neither of you knows 
  how many tokens the other is risking until you reveal.
  The person who wants it more – as expressed through tokens risked 
  in the wager – gets his way. However, the person who risked fewer 
  tokens, takes one token that the winner risked. If the GM bids higher, 
  the event does not occur, the ante is not paid and the player gets one 
  token from the GM. If the player bids higher, the event occurs, the 
  ante is paid, and the player pays one additional token to the GM.
  It gets really interesting when the GM ties the player’s bid. When that 
  happens, the player’s intrusion happens… but the GM gets all the 
  tokens that were wagered.
  Example: The GM has described the stately procession of Princess 
  Vidalia and her court, when one of the players says, 
  “Vinnie suddenly realizes that she’s the passionate one-
  night-stand he had on Rigel Seven – the one who left 
  him forlorn and smelling of onions!” The GM rolls her 
  eyes, but decides this is a four token Ante. Vinnie’s 
  player stacks them up. The GM also doesn’t want 
  Princess Vidalia to be quite so trampy, so she secretly 
  bids three tokens in the wager. The player only bids two, 
  so the GM overrules the plot insertion. But the player 
  doesn’t have to pay the ante and gets one of the GM’s 
  tokens.
  Example: The same player later tries this: “Drunk at the recep-
  tion, Vinnie needs a place to blow some chunks. Unable 
  to decipher the bathroom signs, he chooses wildly and 
  winds up in the Princess’ private reception chamber.” The 
  GM decides this is a two Ante insertion and sets up her 
  Plausibility Level     
  Ante Cost
  Likely  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
  0 
   
  “After I insult her, she throws her drink on me.”
  Plausible  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
  1 
  “Searching the workshop, I ﬁnd the tool I need.” 
  Odd  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
  2 
  “Searching the workshop, I ﬁnd a keg of beer hidden inside a 
  hollowed-out workbench.”
  Unlikely  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
  3 
  “It turns out the duke was in my college fraternity!”
  Bizarre  
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
   
  4 
  “It turns out the duke is my long-lost clone!”
  One in a bazillion  
   
   
   
   
   
   
  5 
  “The phrase ‘Oh please! Don’t kill me! Kill Vinnie instead, he’s 
  useless!’ turns out to mean ‘Kneel before the Chosen Doom-Bringer 
  of your god!’ in their language.”
  
  10
  hidden bid in the wager – zero tokens. The player reveals 
  that he bet four in the wager. Thus, Vinnie success-
  fully bumbles into a restricted area, but it costs the 
  player three tokens – two for the ante, and one from his 
  successful wager. The GM can now create a Challenge 2 
  situation in the reception chamber.
  Example: As the princess’ guards chase Vinnie around the onion 
  dome, another player suggests that Vinnie stumbles 
  across an assassin who was trying to kill the Princess. 
  The GM calls this a two token ante and she wagers two 
  tokens to block it. When the player reveals his wager, 
  it’s two tokens also. Amidst the groans of the players, 
  the GM rakes in the two token ante and the full wager 
  risked. She now has two points to put in the assassin’s 
  Traits, from the ante, and two more tokens in her pile.
  Once an event has been inserted, the token or tokens from the wager 
  go to the GM as usual. The ante tokens, however, are cashed in and 
  become Plot Points, which the GM uses to stat up the Challenge 
  rating of the event or the Traits of any new characters introduced. 
  Once that’s done, those tokens are removed from play. 
  Responding to the Plot
  Rather than blow through tokens like a caffeinated slot-jockey editing 
  the plot willy-nilly, more cautious players can use them to augment 
  skills they possess (or lack, for that matter) in a more organic reaction 
  to events as they proceed.
  This works just like plot insertion, with two differences. First, there’s 
  no ante. Second, you can use Traits, if they’re relevant.
  Example: As the space pirates storm their ship, a player says, “My 
  character resists them with his badass, tricked-out, dope, 
  phat, funky-ﬂy Pimp Fu.” Since he bought the Trait 
  BADASS, TRICKED-OUT, DOPE, PHAT, FUNKY-FLY PIMP 
  FU 2 at character creation, he can ﬁght the pirates with 
  a free wager at level two. Deciding he wants to seriously 
  go upside some heads, he adds ﬁve tokens to his secret 
  wager. This means that the GM needs the equivalent 
  of eight tokens to wrest victory from the pimp-monk’s 
  grasp. The Pirates have SCURVY SPACE REAVERS 1 and 
  she adds four tokens, but it’s not enough. In a frenzy 
  of playa-hate, the pirates are driven back. However, the 
  player pays the losing GM a token for his victory.
  Example: Desperate to keep the smart bomb from detonating, a 
  character tries to convince it to repudiate the suicidal 
  depression program that drives it to self- (and other-
  ) destruction. With the Trait GRADUATE PROGRAM 
  ADMISSIONS COUNSELOR 1, the player bids four tokens 
  against the melancholy weapon’s SMART BOMB 3. 
  It turns out, however, that the GM has wagered two 
  tokens. It’s a 5-5 tie (Counselor 1+4 tokens, Bomb 3+2 
  tokens). The Smart Bomb decides that, yeah, maybe it 
  would be happier if it retrained for electricity production, 
  it could make a fresh start as a power station on the 
  frontier or maybe even a starliner auxiliary generator, if 
  it had the grades… The PCs survive, but at a terrible cost 
  – four tokens in the GM’s greedy mitts…
  Sometimes PCs are up against characters with Traits. Sometimes 
  they’re up against inanimate problems, the difﬁculty of which is 
  judged by something called a Challenge score. It works just like a 
  Trait, only with a different name to make the system more compli-
  cated. (It weeds out the dummies.) 
  Some times, more than one player is wagering to take control of the 
  narrative. When the GM wins a wager against multiple players, she 
  does not have to pay each competitor. She just has to pay one token, 
  to the loser with the single lowest store of tokens.
  Gear And Other Advantages
  It’s quite possible, in the course of navigating the plot, that your 
  character acquires some device, circumstance, ally or other thing that 
  makes things easier. These work like Traits, only they can be traded 
  around and lost. If you hit a vending machine to buy a Freedom 
  Flenser brand laser weapon (it’s the one shaped like the Statue of 
  Liberty), you can write “Freedom Flenser 1” on your character sheet 
  under “Temporary Traits” and get a free virtual token any time you 
  try to carve fat off someone with your laser gun. (“Flensing” liter-
  ally means “to strip away skin or blubber”.) Similarly, if you rescue a 
  Thadangan Diplomat from the clutches of the FOESL, you can write 
  “Thadangan Diplomat 2” as a Temporary Trait.
  Be warned! Your GM and the other players can invoke your temporary 
  Traits against you sometimes. That diplomat may start applying diplo-
  macy to the PC party in an attempt to entangle them in a baroque 
  game of interstellar brinksmanship (or maybe just trying to get a loan 
  until payday). Even that Freedom Flenser might backﬁre in the right 
  circumstances – if there are kids around, or aliens with sticky ﬁngers 
  (literal or ﬁgurative, take your pick). 
  Applying Multiple Traits
  You can’t do this. Sure, it’d be great if you could combine your 
  SNEAKY SLYBOOTS 2 Trait with SAVAGE BEATDOWN 2 and have four 
  free tokens every time you pound on someone after sneaking up on 
  them, but then you just get players constantly arguing about how 
  combining the WINE SOMMELIER Trait and the PYROKINESIS Trait is 
  justiﬁed while parachuting. If two Traits apply, use the high one.
  Combining Tokens
  You can’t do this, either. That is, if you’re trying some fancy plot 
  insertion in which you’re all miraculously rescued by the Airborne 
  Amazon Ranger Vixens, you can only wager it in with your own 
  tokens – your fellow players can’t give you their tokens to beef up 
  the attempt. If you’re using your STAR PILOT Trait to get through the 
  
  11
  mineﬁeld, they can’t add tokens to the wager or add their STAR CO-
  PILOT Trait to yours in order to improve your odds.
  Helping
  This doesn’t mean you can’t help each other. It just means that assis-
  tance is handled serially, not collectively. If you want to help your 
  buddy with something, succeed at a wager test to make his test 
  easier. To give a dumb but very comprehensible example, suppose the 
  two of you want to pick up a rock. You can try to pick up the rock 
  and fail, he can try to pick up the rock and fail. Or you can say, “I’m 
  going to help him pick up the rock.” If you succeed at that wager 
  against the GM (who, for the purposes of this example, is queerly 
  adamant about that rock staying put), the rock doesn’t necessarily go 
  up. But the GM should reduce the rock’s Challenge by a point, making 
  it somewhat easier for your friend to win his wager. Chipping away 
  in this fashion cuts problems down to size. It also draws contests out, 
  but that’s more of a feature than a bug, since instantly clobbering the 
  narrative can end things prematurely.  
  It’s the same thing with the GM’s characters’ Traits. If one character 
  is attempting to make time with someone who has RESIST HAM-
  HANDED PICKUP LINES 2, and you want to see him succeed (instead 
  of fail hilariously), you can enter a wager with the GM by describing 
  some kind of loyal wingman maneuver. If you succeed, that RESIST 
  HAM-HANDED PICKUP LINES Trait drops when your pal makes his 
  play. Or, if you want to help with the mad scientist’s atomic zombie 
  stoat man project, you can start a wager by shufﬂing around, calling 
  your fellow PC “marshter” and going out to steal brains. Win that 
  wager, and his MAD SCIENTIST Trait pops up by one.
  It is also, of course, possible to increase the Challenge ratings and 
  Traits of GM-controlled opponents. Fun, too.
  Out of Tokens
  At the beginning of every game session, the GM starts with a number 
  of tokens equal to the highest number possessed by any single player. 
  If none of the players start a session with any tokens, the game can 
  declare bankruptcy and start over with a clean slate. Each player, and 
  the GM, gets a new store of seven tokens and play goes from there. 
  (Bankruptcy doesn’t come up much, but it can happen.) 
  Traits
  Characters have Traits. Traits describe how well they do the stuff they 
  do. Anything can be a Trait: STRONG, HIVE INTELLIGENCE ALIEN, 
  GOOD SHOT, POORLY-PROGRAMMED ROBOT SUPERVILLAIN, SHANK 
  SQUEALERS IN THE PENITENTIARY SHOWER, STARSHIP ENGINEER, 
  CABIN BOY, FULL INVERSION STRIPPER, COOK… whatever, as long 
  as it’s in that cool small-caps font. There are some reﬁnements, but 
  by and large characters have Traits rated from 1-3, and the rating 
  indicates how much free plot control it gives the player. For instance, 
  a character with MASSAGE THERAPIST 1 can apply that Trait 
  whenever she tries to use massage skills to get someone to relax, to 
  help a strain or injury heal, to recognize different whale-song tapes, 
  or to get the character with ROCKIN’ BOD 3 to slip his shirt off so she 
  can work out the tension he’s holding in his shoulders. 
  What these do is add free virtual tokens to any action to which they 
  apply. A character with PAYS BILLS ON TIME 3 can exert 3 tokens’ 
  worth of inﬂuence on any situation where being a person who pays 
  bills on time would help – and all without risking any tokens on the 
  action. 
  Tokens can be risked on Trait actions, adding to the base level the 
  Trait establishes. If my character has MAD SCIENTIST 2 and I spend 
  three tokens to try and create a race of atomic zombie stoat men, I 
  get to inﬂuence the plot as if I were risking a whopping ﬁve tokens.
  The best thing about using Traits is that if you risk no tokens and win 
  just on your Trait, you don’t have to pay tokens and you still get to 
  narrate. For AWESOME!
  Character Generation
  When developing a new character, players get four points to 
  distribute among Traits. No Trait can start higher than 3, or ever get 
  higher than 5.
  When building a new character, you can designate one Trait as broad. 
  While most Traits cover a speciﬁc skill or ability (FLIGHT, COMPUTER 
  SEDUCTION, MAKE THINGS EXPLODE WITH MY MIND), broad Traits 
  encompass a wider array of ability. While most Traits describe one 
  thing a character can do, the broad Trait really describes who he, 
  she or it is. Thus, someone could build a heroic space captain by 
  buying PILOT, COMBAT and INSPIRATIONAL PUBLIC SPEAKING skills 
  separately – or just jump into the role of HEROIC SPACE CAPTAIN, 
  which covers them all. 
  Clearly, there’s the temptation to choose a Trait that’s broader than 
  broad, such as OMNIPOTENT SUPREME BEING or JACK OF ALL 
  TRADES, PARTICULARLY ANY I HAPPEN TO NEED TO LOOK COOL 
  DURING THE GAME. Don’t do that. As a good rule of thumb, a broad 
  Trait covers three things that come up over and over, as well as any 
  rare or exotic things that, most likely, only come up once.
  How to Improve a Trait
  To improve a trait, you have to explain why your skill in LEADER 
  OF A GUITAR CULT improves from 3 to 4, and you have to arrange 
  a scene where concrete actions occur which better that ability.  
  Then, you try and impose that scene on the GM with tokens.  In 
  this case, the Trait you’re trying to improve works against you.  The 
  GM gets a number of free tokens equal to its rating.  Thus, to start 
  from LEADER OF A GUITAR CULT 3 and go up one, you need to be 
  holding at least four tokens, because the GM can risk zero actual 
  tokens and use the level of the trait against you.  Furthermore, any 
  time you rise, you’re going to lose one token at least – and possibly 
  more if the GM’s bet matches yours.
  
  12
  For example: SPACE PIRATE covers ﬁghting, piloting, and rowdy-
  but-not-actually-vicious partying. Arguing that SPACE PIRATE allows 
  one to ﬁx starship engines could be out of bounds (or not – talk to 
  your GM). Identifying different brands of grog by taste is probably 
  covered, along with understanding of pirate argot and the art of 
  makeshift prosthesis construction. But robbing banks isn’t part of the 
  space pirate scene. BANK ROBBER, on the other hand, would presum-
  ably cover robbing banks, shooting it out with the dirty coppers, and 
  getaway driving.
  Some sample broad Traits follow, to give you a general idea how it 
  works.
  SUPERHERO: By and large, superheroes can ﬂy, exert super-
  strength, and bounce bullets off their chests. You want 
  other superpowers like heat vision, ﬁsh telepathy or 
  lickety speed, you buy them separately or swap them in.
  PLUMBER: First and foremost, they can solve plumbing emergen-
  cies. Furthermore, even in the distant future, plumbers 
  are experts at the art of bald-facedly overcharging for 
  services rendered. Finally, they’re good at delicately 
  spurning (or, discretely succumbing to) the libidinous 
  advances of lonesome housewives.
  SUPER-EVOLVED CELL PHONE: While the current cell phones have 
  no arms or legs (unless they’re sold separately), they can 
  make calls throughout the cosmos, look up data on the 
  Internet, and use limited precognition to anticipate the 
  desires of the caller.
  ROBOT: Robots are tougher than humans, sexually blasé (and 
  therefore immune to the romantic appeals that can 
  produce so much human foolishness) and they usually 
  have some job-related skill as well – a welding robot 
  welds, a research robot knows lots of things, an autopilot 
  can ﬂy a space ship, etc.
  HYPERINTELLIGENT CHIMP: As expected, hyperintelligent chips 
  are smarter than humans (which often bothers humans 
  no end), they’re more acrobatic and athletic, and they’re 
  far less shy than humans when it comes time to ﬂing 
  poo – which, in turn, makes them more accurate with it.
  NINJA: Disappear from plain sight, kill with the sword, dodge away 
  from danger – you know, all that ninja crap.
  BANK CASHIER: Show absolutely no expression and be 
  unimpressed with anyone, no matter how overwhelming. 
  Count rapidly. Discuss business knowledgably, by which 
  I mean, bore the hell out of all the space pirates, ninjas 
  and hyperintelligent chimps.
  ENGINEER: Fix anything. Repurpose machinery (say, turning an 
  exercise device into a weapon of mass destruction) 
  simply by blathering in jargon and then giving a simple 
  metaphor. (“I’ll just reconﬁgure the vibrations of the 
  semi-plasma matrix in order to create enough quantum 
  uncertainty that we can get the ship through the tractor 
  beam while it’s focused on our false signal. It’ll be like 
  the time Vinny got so drunk he peed in the sink by 
  mistake.”) Appear inept and buffoonish to any member 
  of the opposite sex.
  FASHIONISTA: Garb herself and others in alluring raiment. Snub 
  people and make them want to cry. Get into any party, 
  anywhere, with any entity.
  Combat
  When combat is joined, it’s a standard wagering contest. The winner 
  narrates her victory (or defeat, if that’s her bag). If a Trait was applied 
  to win the wager, events can only be narrated in a way that ties in 
  to that Trait. Thus, if someone applied INVULNERABLE 3 to win the 
  wager, the description would have to involve the character’s invulner-
  ability. 
  Large or particularly important combats may be broken into multiple 
  segments, with each segment being resolved via wagering. Players 
  may need to help one another out to break down the Challenge levels 
  or Traits of a particularly tough combatant, but there’s no need for 
  special rules for that.
  Whoever wins narration rights can take out one major character, or an 
  appropriate number of minor combatants who (let’s face it) are only 
  there for the PCs to beat up in a studly and/or humorous fashion. 
  The weapons available are pretty nasty. Anything built to kill people 
  with super futuristic technology is probably going to get the job done 
  on the ﬁrst shot, unless the person being ﬁred upon has some similar 
  high-tech defenses. But by and large, both attacks and defenses are 
  handled with Traits, so if you lose the wager, you’re probably hurt, 
  possibly dead, certainly out of the ﬁght.
  Dead, however, doesn’t mean gone, and hurt doesn’t mean useless.
  Back In The Game
  There’s this stuff called “Doc Inna Box” – it’s a gray, slightly mealy 
  powder. Costs about twenty bucks a dose. You dump it on a nonfatal 
  wound and you get better in ﬁve minutes or your next dose is free. 
  It’s widely available.
  Of course, Doc Inna Box has to be tailored to a speciﬁc species – you 
  can get weird side-effects if you dump Monkey Doc into a wounded 
  human. As for robots, they’re tough but ﬁxing them takes a little more 
  time and effort than a broken person (mostly because human whining 
  about pain is sufﬁcient to create a market for D.I.B., while robots 
  generally just put up with it until they can get to a repair shop). 
  
  13
  D.I.B. won’t do anything for a dead guy. That sort of problem requires 
  a specialist, but reanimating the dead is well within the realm of 
  technology. However, the older the stiff, the more it’s going to cost.
  If you drag a guy killed by ﬁght or mischance to a decent doctor 
  within a day or two, he can get the body reanimated and the brain 
  functions restored. It usually takes a couple hours, including at least 
  one spent in a waiting room. (Of course, if you’re uninsured all bets 
  are off.) Missing limbs cost extra. 
  Another possibility is, only the brain gets saved. In that case, they 
  clone a body (which takes a couple days) while restarting the brain 
  in a jar. Usually they give the brain a loaner robot body until the 
  clone’s ready. As a bonus, they usually stop the clone growing at 
  eighteen, when it’s still dewy fresh. The downside of this is that such 
  clones have no instinctive muscle memory, so Traits like ACROBAT 
  or JULIENNE CHEF or INSTINCTIVE MUSCLE MEMORY may suffer. 
  Alternately, some people ﬁnd they prefer their robot bodies, which are 
  refreshingly free of biological urges.
  Even if the whole body gets vaporized and the brain goes poof too, 
  there’s hope – as long as a brain-print (see “Brint” under “Stuff Of 
  The Cosmos”) is available. The memories are only as recent as the 
  date of the print, and sometimes old skin or hair matter pulled out of 
  unwashed laundry or dirty bathtubs produces errant clones, but it’s 
  better than being dead. Or, at least that seems to be the presumption 
  behind brain-printing.
  The most expensive method of resurrection is beyond the means 
  of any but the wealthiest individuals, but a quantum-scan recon-
  struction can sometimes be performed by taking an object that 
  was present at the death, evaluating the position of all its atoms, 
  then effectively “rewinding” the object’s history until it was in the 
  presence of the dead guy. Then sophisticated quantum extrapola-
  tion techniques are applied to gauge, by the effect on the object, the 
  exact position of every molecule in the dead body before it got killed 
  (and, presumably, reduced to component atoms). In theory, quantum-
  scan reconstructions are a pretty close approximation of the dead 
  loved one. In practice, they’re an approximation. The reconstructors 
  cheat liberally by using old photos and credit-card data, too. The 
  result is usually something that can pass for the individual, to those 
  who didn’t know him particularly well. Most times the reconstruction 
  can even talk in complete sentences (which may be a surprise if the 
  dead guy could not). 
  
  14
  The Game Master
  Here’s how being Game Master works. You start each session with a 
  number of tokens equal to the greatest number that any player holds. 
  (If you’re all starting from scratch, all of you start with seven tokens.) 
  Furthermore, you get a number of Plot Points equal to the combined 
  Traits of all the player characters. (Plot Points are abbreviated “PP” but 
  I’m going to leave the juvenile bathroom humor as an exercise for the 
  reader.) 
  Example: It’s the ﬁrst session of a new campaign, and your three 
  players each build characters with four points’ worth of 
  Traits. You get twelve Plot Points with which to build your 
  plot. Each player, you included, starts with seven tokens.
  A few sessions later, one player has been hoarding tokens and has 
  amassed an even dozen of them. The two other players have accumu-
  lated about ﬁve points of Temporary Trait advantages each. This 
  means that when the next session starts, you have twenty-two PP to 
  build adversity (the original twelve for their permanent Traits, plus ten 
  for the temporary stuff they’ve gotten) and you have twelve tokens 
  with which to impose your will.
  Example: It’s the ﬁrst session with three players, so you have 
  twelve Plot Points. You’ve demanded that the players all 
  create characters who work for Categorical Imperative 
  magazine. They’ve been sent for a cruise on the S.S. 
  Bacchanalia, the more luxurious starship in the universe 
  according to its P.R. department. Their assignment is to 
  describe the trip and, if possible, get an exclusive inter-
  view with the band Buckminster Fuller before their rivals 
  from Playborg magazine do so.
  Your plan is that they confront a ticketing problem, then have to put 
  up with the machinations of the Playborg reporters, and also deal 
  with the eccentricities of the band members. With your twelve plot 
  points, you create a Lost Ticket Hassle with Challenge 4. They aren’t 
  in the computer, they don’t have their receipts, and anything they try 
  to do to get on board is countered by four free tokens’ of trouble. 
  Next, you build the rival reporters with broad Traits at rank 2 (one has 
  OBNOXIOUSLY PUSHY REPORTER and the other has LAST SURVIVOR 
  OF A PROUD WARRIOR RACE). (Yeah, he’s a crappy reporter, but he’s 
  been coasting on that Warrior Race cachet for decades. Do YOU want 
  to tell him he’s ﬁred?) Finally with eight points spent, you stat up the 
  musicians – ODIOUS, PUSHY, DRUG-FRIED, ABUSIVE ASSHOLE 2 and 
  ROBOT LIAR 2. (You’ve got a whole backstory for the robot, about 
  how he worked for a law ﬁrm until he got hit by a tailored computer 
  virus. He was, quite literally, bitten by the Music Bug.) 
  
  15
  Good to go, right? Except one of your players bails out at the last 
  minute, so you only have eight PP instead of twelve. No problem 
  – reduce the Lost Ticket Hassle to 3, and hack a point apiece off of 
  ROBOT LIAR, LAST SURVIVOR and PUSHY REPORTER.
  While it’s a good idea to allocate PP before the game starts, Plot 
  Points aren’t ﬁxed until the character or event comes into play. This 
  means that if your players junk your plotline and rampage off in an 
  entirely unexpected direction, you can spend PP on the ﬂy to build 
  challenges and GMCs.
  Fair warning: This sort of truancy happens a lot. It is, in many ways, 
  Token Effort at its purest.
  Example: You make it exactly ten minutes into your game when the 
  players fold before the Lost Ticket Hassle. “If our editor can’t even 
  get this right, who wants to work for him? Screw this.” They turn and 
  leave the ticket ofﬁce, completely blowing off the assignment before 
  they even meet the antagonists you’ve planned.
  Okay. 
  The Plot Points spent on Lost Ticket Hassle are gone, but you can 
  now render down the musicians and rival reporters, using the PP 
  you’d spent to build them for… well, whatever. Asking what the PCs 
  are going to do, they decide to head to a baseball game. Off the top 
  of your head, you have a beautiful alien spy press a strange package 
  into their hands in the stands and whisper – “For the safety of the 
  galaxy, defend it! Meet me at the ﬁfth entrance to Donald Trump’s 
  tomb when the sun sets!” You can spend PP on the spy or the 
  package or to build enemy agents. 
  Conclusion:
  The Revolution Against the Story Tyrant
  By this point, it’s probably clear to all y’all experienced gamers that 
  Token Effort is a departure from the mainstream RPG in which the 
  GM sets out a plot, like a scientist with a maze, and the PCs go 
  through looking for cheese, XP, or a way to save the princess. In those 
  games, no matter how powerful the PCs become, the GM always 
  has the biggest die bag, because he has unfettered freedom to put 
  anything in the backstory or setting that he wants. 
  It’s critical to understand that Token Effort puts the GM on a much 
  more even footing. If he runs out of tokens, his ability to control 
  where the story goes fades until he restores his stack. His ability to set 
  the Traits and Challenges of characters and plot elements is limited 
  and cannot exceed the combined Traits of the characters.
  The GM and the players are equal.
  This may require some adjustment, especially for GMs who are used to 
  holding the whip hand and for players who are used to getting in the 
  harness and pulling where they’re told. Token Effort can be regarded 
  as a game where everyone’s the GM, with tokens serving only to 
  determine who cares most about control at a given moment.
  Opportunities to be a real jerk abound. By the same token (ha!), so 
  do chances to be creative and spontaneous and witty. There is an 
  element of struggle and competition to Token Effort, and a cunning 
  player can manipulate others to get amass more tokens. That’s ﬁne, 
  as long as it’s done in a friendly spirit. But the people you’re playing 
  against are also the ones you’re playing with, and it’s just as impor-
  tant to support their vision as it is to push for your own.
  The players and the GM are all constantly voting and lobbying for 
  how they want the game to progress. Whatever happens is the fruit of 
  someone’s desires. You’re going to lose your vision, quite often. Don’t 
  take it personally, because it’s the other guy’s turn to crash and burn 
  next, by design. As long as you’re focused on getting what you want, 
  not keeping the other guy from getting what he wants, everyone can 
  have a good time. Just don’t be a jerk, don’t be a spoiler, and don’t 
  be a crybaby when your cool-jock spaceship pilot crashes disgracefully 
  because someone really, really thought it would be funny. Take a step 
  back, detach, and you may realize it really is funny. 
  
SOURCE: textdata/thevault/In Spaaace/In Spaaace Corebook.pdf