From Elves to the Kindred
By Nelson McKeeby
A Dead Character in Campaign 80
The Kindred entered Negentropy for a very ordinary role-playing reason. In December 1980, during Campaign 80, Wayne lost a character to a BEM. We were still in the Alpha India and Master Control sequence of adventures, and one of the questions we were actively working out was how replacement characters should enter a continuing campaign. Wayne suggested that his new character should be an elf.
The idea was popular with the players. Elves were already familiar from fantasy gaming, and nobody had to explain why someone might want to play one. I did not want to stop the campaign while I designed a completely new people from nothing, but I also did not want to drop a standard fantasy elf into Negentropy as though the setting were simply another version of a swords-and-sorcery world. Fortunately, I already had an answer sitting in another game.
My Oasis game had a people called the Oldari. They were long-lived, lived in Mournewood, worshipped the moon, and in that early version were slavers who could themselves be enslaved. They had already developed far enough that I could move them from one setting into another without having to invent their entire culture during a campaign session. The easiest solution was to say that Mournewood existed in the Negentropy world as well, somewhere beyond the Rockies in a region the characters were unlikely to reach soon. Wayne could have the kind of character he wanted, while I gained time to work out what the existence of that character meant for the rest of the setting.
Borrowing Without Copying Fantasy
At the beginning, the connection to elves was obvious. The players had asked for an elf, and I used the Oldari because they were the closest thing I already had. They were long-lived, physically different from ordinary humans, and associated with a distant homeland that the player characters knew almost nothing about. That was enough to satisfy the immediate request.
What mattered to me was that they did not remain elves with another name. Once the Oldari entered Negentropy, they had to answer to the same kind of questions as everything else in the game. Where did they come from? Why had ordinary history not accounted for them? How did their biology work? What did a very long life do to memory, politics, family, property, violence, and education? How did they relate to human societies? If they used magic, what did that magic actually do? If their homeland existed in North America, what kind of place could support it and keep it hidden or isolated?
I did not answer all of those questions in December 1980. Most of the detail came much later. The important change was that the Oldari stopped being a convenience imported from fantasy and became a problem inside the Negentropy world. Once they existed there, the setting had to account for them. That pressure gradually transformed them into something much less like a conventional fantasy race.
The Binder System
The way the Kindred entered the game also shows how Negentropy was physically organized at the time. We were using a series of ring binders that contained both handwritten temporary material and typed pages that had become more permanent. The binders were not finished books in the modern sense. They were working manuals that changed as the campaign changed.
The Standard Manual contained the Five Rules and the basic procedures that controlled play. The Character Forge described what a character consisted of, summarized Areas of Knowledge, and included citations to the books and manuals we used to control those subjects. Nomiconus contained BEMs and PEMs. Dwimmer held the expanding magic rules. Logi contained equipment. Another binder held material that did not yet have a permanent home.
Material moved through these books continuously. I could write a page by hand, use it in a game, revise it, and later type a cleaner version. When I added or changed material, I typed an update on the cover page so that people knew what had changed. Players photocopied the binders and then added new pages as they came out. In only four months of regular play, the manuals were constantly expanding. They were less like published rulebooks than a shared technical library under active revision.
The arrival of the Oldari was important because it was the first time I needed an entirely new book rather than another section in an existing binder. The easiest answer was to take Kindred, the book on races from Oasis, and transfer it into Negentropy. I did not have to invent the concept of the book at that moment. I already had a place where nonhuman peoples belonged. The work was in adapting what the book said so that it made sense in the new setting.
Moving Mournewood
The first adaptation was geographical. In Oasis, Mournewood was already the Oldari homeland. In Negentropy, I placed it in North America beyond the Rockies, far enough from the Iowa-centered campaign that the players would not be able to reach it immediately. That gave the setting room to breathe. The Oldari could exist without requiring me to define every road, settlement, border, and political relationship between Alpha India and Mournewood before the next Tuesday game.
This was a technique I used repeatedly in the early campaign. A distant place could be real before it was fully described. The world did not have to be empty merely because the players had not reached part of it yet. A name, a few facts, and the testimony of a character could establish that something existed beyond the current map. I could then research and develop it before the campaign actually arrived there.
Placing Mournewood beyond the Rockies also made the Oldari useful as evidence that the future was larger and stranger than the players first assumed. The Troubleshooters had begun by emerging from Cylinders into a world they did not understand. A long-lived nonhuman person from a distant western homeland reinforced that uncertainty. The players could no longer assume that the future consisted only of human successor societies and alien monsters. There were peoples in the world whose history did not fit the simple categories available to the characters.
The First Kindred Were Not the Modern Kindred
It is important not to read the modern Elder Kindred backward into that first binder. In 1980 the Oldari were still much closer to their Oasis origin. They were long-lived, associated with Mournewood and moon worship, and their society included slavery. They were not yet supported by the elaborate biological, historical, linguistic, political, and religious structures that accumulated over the following decades.
The term Kindred gave me room to move away from fantasy terminology. I did not need every nonhuman people to be a traditional race borrowed from folklore. Once the category existed, it could contain peoples with different histories and different relationships to humanity. The Oldari were the first important example, but they also created a place in the setting for later peoples who did not need to be explained as mutated humans or simple extraterrestrials.
That distinction became increasingly useful because Negentropy already had BEMs and Clickers. The game needed a way to distinguish an intelligent people from a monster classification. A BEM might be dangerous, animal-like, alien, or biologically inexplicable. A Clicker might be a machine imitating a person. A Kindred could be encountered as a member of a society, with language, law, memory, religion, trade, enemies, and arguments about its own history. The category helped the game move from asking what a creature was to asking who a person belonged to.
Slavery Complicated the Easy Elf
The early Oldari also carried material that prevented them from becoming idealized elves. In Oasis they were long-lived slavers, and when they entered the Negentropy development they could themselves be enslaved. That created a different social problem from the familiar image of an ancient, graceful, morally elevated fantasy people.
I did not introduce that contradiction because I had already worked out a mature theory of Oldari society. I had not. It came from the material I was transferring and from the way the campaign kept forcing consequences onto ideas. If the Oldari practiced slavery, then their long lives did not make them automatically wiser or better. If they could be enslaved, then longevity and unusual abilities did not make them invulnerable. Their history could contain domination in more than one direction.
That made the race more useful to Negentropy. The setting worked best when a new people created questions instead of answering them. A Troubleshooter encountering an Oldari could not safely assume that the character represented a familiar fantasy archetype. The individual might be victim, participant, outsider, noble, criminal, refugee, or something the players had not yet learned how to interpret. A request for an elf had produced a character who complicated the moral and historical world rather than simplifying it.
Players as a Source of Development
The episode also illustrates how much of the game was developed in response to players. Negentropy was never written completely and then handed to a group to test. The campaign and the manuals grew together. Players encountered gaps, asked questions, proposed solutions, and sometimes forced me to define parts of the world that I had not expected to need yet.
Wayne's request was not a demand that I redesign the setting. It was a simple character choice. But because I took the request seriously, the setting changed. A new category of people entered the game. A distant homeland became part of North America. A binder from another campaign became the starting point for a new Negentropy manual. Those changes later produced further questions about biology, history, magic, war, enslavement, and the relationship between humans and other intelligent peoples.
This was normal for the early game. A campaign problem could become a sourcebook problem very quickly. If the players needed a rule, an article, a creature, a piece of equipment, or a new kind of person, I wrote it. Once written, however, the new material had to live with everything that already existed. That is the point at which a quick improvisation began turning into canon.
The Advantage of a Distant Homeland
Keeping Mournewood distant was important because it allowed the player character to exist before the homeland was fully defined. The group could learn about the Oldari through the character instead of reading a complete cultural encyclopedia before play. That preserved some of the uncertainty that was central to Negentropy.
A Troubleshooter who emerged from a Cylinder was already displaced from ordinary time and separated from the world they had known. Meeting an Oldari added another layer of displacement. Here was someone whose assumptions came from a society the Troubleshooters had never seen and whose life might extend across periods that seemed enormous to ordinary humans. The character could explain some things while remaining ignorant of others. Personal testimony did not have to equal objective history.
This later became important to the way I handled the Kindred generally. Their own accounts of the past could be valuable without being automatically correct. Long life did not guarantee perfect memory, and ancient societies could preserve propaganda, religion, myth, family history, and political argument just as human societies did. The seeds of that approach were already present whenever a player character became the first source of information about a distant people.
From Race Book to People Book
The old Kindred binder had begun as a race book in the vocabulary of fantasy gaming. Moving it into Negentropy gradually changed what such a book needed to contain. A race description could not stop with lifespan, appearance, and a few special abilities. If the people were real within the setting, I needed to know how they reproduced, raised children, organized households, handled injury, governed themselves, remembered the past, treated outsiders, and obtained food.
That expansion did not happen all at once. It happened because every new adventure exposed another blank space. A player might ask what an Oldari ate. Another might ask whether one could be treated with human medicine. A conflict could raise a legal question. Travel could raise a question about their homeland. Magic could raise a question about whether their abilities were learned, biological, or something else. Every question pushed the material farther away from a conventional fantasy race entry.
This was one of the larger consequences of the Knowledges approach used elsewhere in Negentropy. If the game expected real questions about medicine, ecology, language, and technology to have meaningful answers, then intelligent nonhuman peoples had to withstand the same treatment. Their societies could not remain a collection of game bonuses and visual traits. They needed mechanisms.
Kindred and the Limits of Classification
The Oldari also made classification more difficult in a productive way. Project Negentropy could look at an unfamiliar organism and call it a BEM when ordinary terrestrial biology did not explain it. That category was useful in the field because a dangerous unknown creature did not need a complete evolutionary history before someone could report it. But an Oldari could not be handled adequately that way.
A person who spoke, remembered, worshipped, bargained, lied, loved, owned property, committed crimes, and made political claims demanded a different kind of description. Biology remained important, but biology did not exhaust the subject. The existence of the Kindred therefore pushed the Project toward treating nonhuman intelligence as a social and historical problem as well as a scientific one.
This became increasingly important as other Kindred were developed. Once one such people existed, the game no longer needed to explain every unusual humanoid as a single alien species wearing different costumes. Different peoples could possess different biological histories, languages, technologies, religions, and claims about the ancient world. The category became broader than the request that had created it.
What I Kept from Fantasy
I did not reject fantasy simply because Negentropy was science fiction. The players had asked for an elf because elves were enjoyable to play, and I understood the appeal. Long life, unusual senses, old cultures, hidden homelands, and magic all provide strong material for stories. I kept many of those possibilities.
What changed was the expectation that the label itself explained anything. Calling someone an elf did not tell me how the person metabolized food, survived disease, remembered two centuries, or related to human law. It did not tell me whether immortality was real, whether magic was biological or learned, or whether an ancient homeland could actually support its population. Negentropy kept the imaginative invitation and removed the exemption from questions.
That became a recurring pattern throughout the project. I was willing to use familiar material when it gave players something immediately understandable, but I wanted the setting to transform it by forcing it to operate under the same constraints as everything else. The result could still feel magical or legendary while behaving like something that belonged to a world rather than a rulebook.
The First New Book of Campaign 80
Looking back, the physical creation of the Kindred binder may be as important as the fictional decision. For the first four months of Campaign 80, the game had expanded by adding pages to books that already existed. The Standard Manual gained rules. Character Forge gained character material and Knowledge references. Nomiconus gained creatures. Dwimmer gained magic. Logi gained equipment. Miscellaneous material waited for a permanent home.
The Oldari changed that pattern. Their arrival required enough distinct material that simply adding another handful of pages to an existing binder no longer felt sufficient. Kindred became the first new book demanded by the campaign itself.
That was an early sign of what Negentropy would become. A small rules system did not grow mainly by adding more rules. It grew by adding bodies of information. A new problem generated a new article; enough connected articles generated a new manual. The sourcebook line was beginning to emerge from the way we actually played, years before the modern books took their present form.
What the Players Asked For and What They Got
Wayne asked for an elf. In the immediate sense, that is what I gave him. He received a long-lived nonhuman character from a distant forest homeland, and the campaign could continue without making him wait while I redesigned character creation.
What the game received was much larger. It gained the Kindred as a category, Mournewood as a place in the Negentropy world, and a reason to start asking what intelligent nonhuman peoples would actually mean in a setting built around research, history, and physical consequences. The imported Oldari brought problems with them, including slavery, long life, magic, and a history that could not simply be treated as another version of human history.
That is how a great deal of Negentropy developed. The initial decision could be quick because a game was waiting. The consequences could take decades to work out. I did not need to know everything about the Oldari in December 1980. I needed enough to let Wayne make a character and enough internal structure that the next question could be answered without discarding the first answer.
The modern Kindred are far removed from that first request for an elf, but I still recognize the beginning. A player wanted something familiar. I moved an existing idea into the setting, placed its homeland over the Rockies, and then allowed the logic of Negentropy to make it stranger.