Time & Tide

This section contains spoilers. You can skip it for now — you’ll be directed back here at the midpoint of the story. If you want to skip ahead, head to Begin Your Adventure.

Representation vs Ableism

This adventure contains narrative elements intended to raise (but not resolve) questions around culture, disability, and identity. A non-player character is introduced who is part of a culture which has strongly resisted technology, and by contemporary standards might be considered “traditionalist” or even “fundamentalist”. This character has a mobility disability, and is presented with a cache of technology implements which run the gamut from simple assistive devices to one which effectively “cures” the disability.

Two goals of this module are slightly at odds here:

Making the intersection of disability and identity a source of narrative tension could be viewed as ableist, or inspiration porn. The intent, however, is to prompt conversation that should already be happening:

This module does not attempt to answer these questions, nor will later modules in the Skyline setting. The answers are up to you and your Narrator, if you have one.

Historical Context

This IASO module is a product of its time — late 2020. As it is being written, representation of disability in tabletop gaming is getting better, but is still a (needlessly) controversial topic.

While the author of this module firmly believes in the latter, the limited scope of this module allows both halves to be satisfied. This IASO module provides a wide variety of options for including disability into Skyline in ways that should be agreeable to even the strictest of interpretations. As there’s no way one module could account for the full diversity of human experience, the author hopes the module also provides a solid framework for improvising even more.

Outside of tabletop gaming, the disability community itself is also evolving. Tensions between “identity-first” and “person-first” language are still high, showing off the wide variety of disabilities and views of how those disabilities interact with identity both internal and external. This module tries to walk that line and avoid language that commits to one or the other. You should feel comfortable using whatever language makes sense for your table.

Authorial Context

A note from Rick Osborne, the author of Skyline:

The initial sketch of the IASO story came to me all at once: what would high-tech medicine look like to the Nora? As I started to layer on the tech we’d already seen in Horizon, I kept coming back to the story of Brom and Olara. Brom is portrayed as having dissociative events, which got me thinking about the neurochemistry of mental illness — would technology have progressed to the point that disorders such as schizophrenia could be diagnosed physiologically?

Which led me to my own autism — what would that look like to a Focus device, or to a device even more specialized in diagnosis? Would autism even register, even with 50 years of medical device advancement? This got me thinking about my nephew who is also autistic, but whose case is much closer to what most people would think of as “stereotypical autism”. Would some high-tech medical device be able to tell the difference between us, neurochemically?

Which got me thinking: could the AR overlay of a Focus act an assistive device for my nephew or my younger self? For example, could it help us through sensory overloads, or provide guidance on facial expression interpretation? How would I feel if a Focus had some magical ability to make me “neurotypical” for an hour? Permanently? For me, it wouldn’t even be tempting, but what about my nephew?

That, of course, led me to think about physical disability. The questions about assistive devices and “cures” would be the same, while physical disabilities are generally easier to show and address. I hope you can afford me a little space for representing disability in much clearer physical terms, instead of the cognitive and psychological terms which apply specifically to me.

-R

Horizon Characters

Finally, a quick note about characters from Horizon. Skyline modules will occasionally reference Horizon characters, such as Aloy or Sylens, to refer back to canon events from the game. The stories in those modules, however, do not and will not feature those characters, nor will the stories depict those characters’ actions in anything more than passing mentions.

As Skyline is a fan work without licensing from any of the owners of the Horizon IP, it would not be appropriate (or legal in most places) to use those characters without permission. Instead, Skyline modules try to keep even those references vague. Aloy, for example, is referred to as only “The Seeker”, and only in passing.

IP laws for creative works tend to focus on how the derivative works (mis)use characters, or deprive the rights-holder of markets and/or opportunities, or cause confusion about the status of the work in regard to the original. It is the author’s hope that playing in a sandbox which pays homage to Horizon, without in any way attempting to depict its characters, makes Skyline distinct and deferential enough to avoid any potential consternation.

Long story short: you won’t see Aloy or any other characters from the games in Skyline modules, but what you choose to do around your own table in your own game is up to you.