This is RPG-ology #96: Stars, for November 2025.
Our thanks to Regis Pannier and the team at the Places to Go, People to Be French edition for locating a copy of this and a number of other lost Game Ideas Unlimited articles. This was originally Game Ideas Unlimited: Expanding, and is reposted here with minor editing [bracketed].
It’s life’s illusions I recall.
I really don’t know life at all.
–Both Sides Now
Joni Mitchell
I’ve been looking at the stars most of my life. When I was still young (well, in a sense I’ll always be young) my grandfather’s telescope came to me. In Scouts, I had to learn to find several constellations, and I can still find them. My wife and I often stare at the sky at night, trying to make heads and tails of stars and planets. I can recognize the phases of the moon, whether it’s waxing or waning, and have a rough idea of the time of night given the time of year and the visible stars. I surprised myself just the other day when I correctly identified an unknown object in the sky as Antares (confirmed by my wife’s star program). I’m no astronomer, but I have long watched the stars.
And yet there is a sense in which I have never seen them.
Our ancestors watched the stars. What else was there to do? They observed the changes, and realized that the stars could indeed tell them the future: the rise of different constellations signaled the end of summer, the coming of harvest, the approach of winter, the return of spring. To them, the comets which we rarely notice were major events, blazing lights across the dark sky. They imbued the celestial bodies with personality. Planet means wanderer, someone who can’t stay in one place. They imagined that the stars were not, as we know, distant suns, or as Pumba said, balls of flaming gas millions of miles away; nor something so insignificant as Timone’s fireflies caught on that big black thing up there. They were timeless spirits, immortal beings whose vision of the world below them combined with the wisdom of their age and experience enabled them to know, nearly with certainty, what was about to happen. The lights in the sky were angels, demons, fates, gods.
I have never seen those stars. I’ve seen the scribblings of modern fortunetellers who try to recapture the belief, but it’s clear that they don’t for a moment imagine celestial beings captured in a dance in the sky. I’ve made out the rough shapes of the giants for whom the points of light are mere skeletons, but never truly appreciated their motion above the earth. To me, they are and have always been fusion engines cranking out almost immeasurable quantities of photonic energy (not always in quite those words). I have never seen the stars that our ancestors saw.
But what is of more interest here is that none of my characters seem ever to have seen these stars, either. Oh, there’s a journal entry somewhere in which I vicariously mentioned the rise of a fictitious constellation in an alien world, but it has none of that awe, none of that expectation, none of that notion of a greater reality, a supernatural realm viewed dimly through the window of the atmosphere. Nor, as far as I am aware, have any of the other characters in my games encountered this realm.
Yet for our fantasy worlds, this would seem to be the norm. The Tower of Babel was built so that the stargazers could get closer to the stars, to better see what they were doing and so perhaps better know what they were telling us. The astrology which is for most of us a joke that lines the bottoms of birdcages was for them a very serious matter, a glimpse at what was to come. The stars themselves were worthy of a certain reverence.
We get no closer than this.
Oh, Star! (The fairest one in sight.)
We grant your loftiness the right
To some obscurity of cloud;
It will not do to say of night
Since dark is what brings out your light.
Some mystery becomes the proud,
But to be wholly taciturn
In your reserve is not allowed.
Say something to us we can learn
By heart, and when alone repeat.
Say something! And it says, “I burn.”
But say with what degree of heat!
Talk Farenheit. Talk centigrade.
Use language we can comprehend.
Tell us what elements you blend.
It gives us strangely little aid,
But does tell something in the end.
And, steadfast as Keat’s Eremite
Not even stooping from its sphere,
It asks a little of us here.
It asks of us a certain height.
So, when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on, and be staid.
–Choose Something Like a Star
Robert Frost
There is awe in that; yet it is not the same awe, not the awe our fathers felt. We feel the awe of something immense, something larger and more powerful than ourselves, and that is part of it. But they felt the awe of constantly being in the presence of the gods. In Perelandra, the woman on the cloud-enshrined planet wonders at the human, that his kind are permitted to gaze into heaven. It is that wonder that we lack.
Of course, not all of our games are about the past. Some are about the future. In many of those futures, there is less awe for the stars than even we have today. Yet I somehow think that in a post-apocalyptic world, some of the homage to the stars would return, as they became again rulers of the night [and foretellers of the future].
Not too many years ago a small earthquake knocked out power throughout a major metropolitan area in the western United States. In the days that followed, the observatory in the mountains was flooded with phone calls asking what was happening, what sort of strange celestial events had occurred during the crisis. The isolated scientists could not for some time determine what this was about, as they had observed nothing. But eventually they came to recognize that, with the power out, the ground lights had been dark, the reflection had faded, and the stars had shown down into the city for the first time in the lives of many of its residents. People who had never truly seen the stars were terrified at their appearance. The heavens are telling the glory of God; the wonder of His works the firmament displays. There is something there which should make our characters a bit fearful, a bit nervous, a bit in awe.
[Next week, something different.]
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