Casting Shadows

It is Saturday, August 29th, and, surprising no one hopefully, it is also Day 29 of #RPGaDAY2026. The weekly filter adding its special flair to the prompts from Day 24 to Day 30 is “emotion.” The daily filter for Saturday is “works hard for a living.” The prompt is “labor.” The game I am looking at this week to share thoughts on the notion of characters in RPGs is Space: 1999 published by @Modiphius and written by Andrew Peregrine. In the context of the 2D20 Space: 1999 RPG, influenced by the ideas of emotion and hard work, what character or characterization ideas are sparked by labor as a prompt? Anyone? Would you like me to take the first shift? No problem! I live in your future anyway, so let’s get to it~

So far this week we have looked at some specific characters in the Service, Technical, Security, and Main Mission departments, as well as looked at some fundamental ideas about characters in this incredible situation. This response will be general rather than creating a new character or pointing toward a specific person or type of person. Once Breakaway happened, you see, the role each person on Moonbase Alpha filled, changed. The fundamental principles under which they worked shifted with Luna’s separation from Earth and her long journey began.

Although a long-term, self-sufficient, permanent facility with a mixture of officers, civilian, and visiting inhabitants, Moonbase Alpha could rely on regular contact with and supplies from Earth. Shore leave and home visitations were possible. Regular contact could be kept and an assignment there was not much different than working in another country or on a different coast.

All of that changes with Breakaway, and in important ways.

Alpha could supply its own food, but now it has to – and it cannot make mistakes with its stewardship of gardens and livestock. There are no replacements. There is no means of replacing something lost, or adding something which had not been included. In time, new species from alien worlds will need to be included. What special care will that require?

Alpha is able to manufacture its own supplies and it has always been more cost-effective to do so, but perhaps not always labor or resource effective. Now, it has no choice. Lost items represent much more than they did, and the weight of replacement, recovery, and restoration is greater. What more does it mean now to shatter a window, cut through a lock, blow up a section of the complex, or crash an Eagle? What new twist does this apply to the labor of sustaining life on Luna and those who perform it?

Likewise, the people now have decisions to make about their own maintenance as a population be it controlled and balanced for stasis, growth, or reduction, or capped and put into a final decline. Do they open their community to any alien lifeforms with whom communication proves possible and beneficial or do their isolate? In what way will they now shift from working as a symbol of peaceful cooperation on Moonbase Alpha to being ambassadors from what may well be a planet no longer home to humanity as a species?

Such questions and more are what late shift Service workers labor through during menial tasks and those in command wrestle with behind closed doors. Security, Technical, Flight, Medical, and those who thought they were just visiting all have a new, permanent, and radical change of context to contend with as the realities of their new situation reveals itself to them.

Chief among these questions?

If this is all that is left of us, to what purpose will we turn our hearts, minds, and hands?

Tomorrow’s prompt for #RPGaDAY2026 is ‘Pride.’ Our weekly filter is Emotion. Tomorrow is Sunday and on that day we consider those whose entry into and passage through life has been blessed.

See you then!