The Origins of Negentropy: 1979
By Nelson McKeeby
One Night in June
I began Negentropy in June 1979. I cannot reconstruct its beginning as a neat sequence spread across the summer because the central ideas arrived together during one night. I was eleven years old, living in Bay Point in St. Petersburg and attending Bay Vista Elementary. I was autistic, wrote very quickly, and was almost always writing something. Stories, scientific ideas, descriptions of people and places, game notes, technical sketches, and other projects accumulated constantly. Negentropy soon absorbed at least half of that output, and from the beginning it grew as a large body of interconnected material rather than as a small rulebook with occasional additions.
The work that followed that first night was largely research. I would write an idea and then try to find out whether it could work. Books, manuals, teachers, calculations, maps, interviews, and direct observation either supported the idea, forced me to change it, or convinced me to discard it. Some concepts survived only a few days because the practical problem behind them turned out to be impossible or unlikely. Others became permanent because the research gave them consequences I had not anticipated. That habit became one of the basic methods of Negentropy. An idea created a question, research supplied constraints, and the setting developed from the answer.
I had access to an unusually broad collection of books and games for a child because I moved around the St. Petersburg and Pinellas County area on buses and with my grandfather. I went to Phil's in Pinellas Park, House of Hobbies in Clearwater, Xanadu Comics and Collectables, Wilson's Book Store, Haslam's, and the Eckerd College bookstore game club. My first story workshop occurred in 1979 through that circle. I had written fiction before then, but this was the first time I remember bringing a story to other people specifically to have it discussed and criticized. The game and the fiction were already part of the same project, so the workshop process became another form of development alongside rules, research notes, and setting material.
Games, Stories, and the Problem I Wanted to Solve
By 1979 I had played Dungeons & Dragons, Traveller, Gamma World, and RuneQuest. Dungeons & Dragons was the first role-playing game I encountered. I remember going into a hobby shop intending to buy a model rocket and leaving with one of the little brown game books instead. Traveller followed almost immediately. What attracted me was cooperative storytelling. A group could share a situation, each player could make decisions for a character, and the resulting story could move in directions no one person had planned.
I was not trying to repair a defect in those games. I liked them, and I remember the rules of the period as comparatively simple. Negentropy developed differently because the story I wanted to tell kept producing practical questions. A person from one period would be sent into a future that could not be known in advance, carrying only what could be brought along. Once that premise existed, the game immediately raised questions about food, power, injury, communications, tools, transportation, weather, agriculture, and the ability of a small group to survive among unfamiliar societies. I wanted the answers to come from understanding those subjects well enough to make reasonable decisions during play.
My science-fiction reading supplied several parts of the initial framework. Laurence Manning's suspended-animation stories and the Buck Rogers use of Nirvano gas interested me, although I found the underlying idea unsatisfying. I had read C. J. Cherryh's Brothers of Earth in 1976 and was reading widely in science fiction that dealt with ruined societies, alien contact, hidden conflict, and human survival. Alas, Babylon, A Canticle for Leibowitz, and other post-catastrophe stories made me think seriously about social collapse, while Damnation Alley helped convince me that a standard nuclear wasteland had already been used often enough that I wanted a different route into the future. They Walked Like Men, All Flesh Is Grass, the Lensman series, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Heinlein's work, and contemporary UFO accounts helped form the hidden side of the setting, where extraordinary events might be visible only through fragments of evidence and contradictory explanations.
Entropy and the First Cylinder
The scientific idea that tied the project together came from my reading about entropy. I had been reading science behind science fiction for some time, and during a summer study program I encountered an English translation of Rudolf Clausius and then followed the subject through Ludwig Boltzmann, Leon Brillouin, Erwin Schrodinger, and information theory. My notes did not preserve enough bibliographic detail to identify every edition or article, but they preserve the idea that interested me. Clausius described entropy thermodynamically, Boltzmann connected it with the number of possible microscopic arrangements, and Shannon's information entropy gave me a way to think about uncertainty among possible states.
I turned those ideas into a fictional rule: if entropy could be reduced, the passage of time inside the affected system would slow with it. In the crude relationship I wrote for myself, ordinary entropy corresponded to ordinary time. Lower entropy meant less internal change during an interval measured outside the system. At zero, no event could occur inside the controlled region. I was not presenting this as real physics. It was a science-fiction mechanism that solved the problem I saw in suspended animation. If a mind depended on continuous physical activity, then freezing or chemically suppressing that activity seemed dangerous. A person inside a true zero-change interval would never need to be frozen, revived, or kept alive through a long sleep because the long interval would not exist for that person.
I called the subjective effect a butt splice. The Cylinder closed in one historical moment and opened in another, while those two moments were adjacent from the traveler's point of view. A century might pass outside, yet the occupant would experience no waiting, aging, hunger, dreaming, or deterioration between closure and opening. That idea became the permanent center of the Negentropic Cylinder. The actual engineering remained vague because the important part for the stories and game was the operating consequence: the traveler experienced an immediate transition into an unknown future.
The Shape of the Machine
The physical appearance of the Cylinder came from a much more ordinary source. My grandfather took me on trips to Ybor City, where I saw Romeo y Julieta Churchill cigars, Romeo No. 1 and No. 3 cigars, and Punch cigars sold in long gray or silver tubes. Older men later gave me empty, clean tubes to use for crafts when my grandfather took me walking at the Pier. I lined the tubes up, and that image became the first Cylinder room. My earliest drawings enlarged the cigar tubes until each one could hold a person and a limited amount of equipment.
That visual origin also helped establish the technology's scale. A Cylinder was an individual container. Each traveler used a separate unit, and anything sent with that person had to fit inside the available volume. I thought about the contents in the same way I thought about a Boy Scout survival kit. Clothing, tools, food, weapons, books, radios, medicine, and other equipment had to justify the space they occupied. The physical size of the container therefore became part of the game design long before players began arguing about vehicle size or power supply. The Cylinder was never an abstract portal through which unlimited cargo could pass; it was a finite object that imposed choices.
The cigar connection even entered the fiction. One early story had Project people trading cigars with people they met in the future. This was typical of how I worked. Objects I had handled, places I had visited, people I had interviewed, and books I had read could become part of the setting very quickly when they solved a practical or visual problem.
One-Way Travel into an Uncontrolled Future
I never thought of the Cylinder as a conventional time machine. Everyone already travels forward through time, and no one returns to an earlier moment. The Cylinder altered the relationship between external time and the traveler's experienced time, so I had no reason to create backward travel. Once the door opened in the future, the traveler was there permanently. Information could not be carried back to the people who had planned the mission, and mistakes could not be corrected by restarting the trip.
The opening date also remained outside the traveler's control. A person could enter with a plan, equipment, and expectations, but could not know exactly when the Cylinder would open. This became one of the most useful features of the game because it made discovery genuine. Characters could prepare for the future without knowing which governments had survived, which roads still existed, what languages people spoke, what technologies were available, or what dangers occupied the place where the Cylinder emerged. Their training remained useful, but their assumptions could be obsolete.
Separate Cylinders also introduced the possibility that people who entered together would not necessarily emerge together. Time itself could separate a team. Someone could be missing without being dead, and a Cylinder could open after the people who expected it had themselves disappeared. These possibilities arose naturally from the original rule, and they gave the setting mystery without requiring a complicated set of time-travel mechanics.
Ancient Technology and the First Project History
The Cylinders were never originally human inventions. In the first stories they had been made by an ancient culture. Alien peoples later acquired the technology and used it to cross interstellar distances without experiencing the duration of the journey. This gave the Cylinders a history older than Project Negentropy and allowed the human characters to use a machine they did not completely understand.
Breaker LaBatre became the first important human link to that hidden history. In a story written in 1979, LaBatre entered or was enclosed in a Cylinder in 1870, and scientists working for Dustin-Rhodes opened it in 1900. The exact emergence scene belongs to that early fiction, but the basic sequence was already established. Dustin-Rhodes did not build the first Cylinder; its scientists found evidence of a technology that had already crossed immense periods of history and possibly immense distances through space.
Dustin-Rhodes itself was only lightly defined in the first material. I knew it was a technical organization capable of investigating the discovery and that its scientists had found LaBatre's Cylinder. Some of the idea came from Robert Heinlein's Gulf and from the broader science-fiction idea of a concealed organization of unusually capable people. Large technical corporations were also familiar to me through my father, who had worked as a programmer at Florida Power before moving to Paradyne Corporation. I did not understand the internal structure of Florida Power in detail, but the idea that a large organization could bring many specialists together to solve technical problems felt natural.
Project Negentropy and the Fall
The word negentropy gave me two connected ideas during that first night. One was the physical Cylinder. The other concerned the failure of societies. Knowledge can be lost, institutions can cease functioning, infrastructure can decay, and communities can lose abilities that earlier generations possessed. I treated this as an analogy to entropy and imagined an organization whose purpose was to preserve human capability against that process. Project Negentropy therefore existed in the first working model, along with the term Troubleshooter.
The original Troubleshooters were highly educated scientific and technical specialists, usually volunteers, sent forward because their knowledge might allow them to solve problems no planner could predict. The first reference form for a Troubleshooter came from a standard school resume used for internships. That choice affected the game immediately. I thought in terms of education, Knowledges, training, languages, and useful experience because the form described a person's qualifications in those terms. Classes and levels never became necessary to define what a Troubleshooter could contribute.
The future already contained the Fall. In the 1979 version, the United States ceased to function as a democracy in 2034 as its leaders became subordinate to a fascist Russian dictatorship, and that political collapse helped trigger a larger breakdown of society. I had considered nuclear-war futures, but I increasingly wanted the failure to grow from human political and institutional weakness instead of depending on a single exchange of bombs. The characters would travel roughly 150 years beyond their own time into a world containing ruins, wilderness, and functioning successor societies. I had already created a Midwestern culture, an empire, and the Land of the Hummingbird, so the future was incomplete but never empty.
Hidden Adversaries, Kindred, and Possible Magic
The early hidden world drew on alien-invasion fiction and contemporary stories about unexplained events. The renewed Roswell discussion after Stanton Friedman interviewed Jesse Marcel interested me because it combined extraordinary claims with disputed evidence and an official explanation that many people believed had been manufactured. I did not believe a government could keep an alien presence perfectly secret, but the Watergate-like idea of attempted concealment fascinated me. The Frederick Valentich disappearance and the Pier Fortunato Zanfretta encounter added to that atmosphere of partial evidence, frightened witnesses, and explanations that did not settle the question.
The first BEMs and Clickers were alien adversaries, much simpler than the categories that developed later. The Kindred also existed in early form, although their modern histories and biology came much later. When players wanted elves in 1980, I developed the Kindred and especially the Oldari as a response. The early Oldari were long-lived slavers who could themselves be enslaved. The familiar fantasy request therefore became material for a culture with its own history and contradictions instead of a direct copy of a standard fantasy race.
Magical realism entered the first structure under the same general constraint I used for technology. Magic could manipulate energy or rearrange matter at the atomic level, but the resulting physical condition still had to be something that could exist in science. The mechanism could be extraordinary; the material result had to remain possible. This principle allowed strange effects without giving magic permission to erase every physical limit in the setting.
The Game Ladder
The formal rules remained extremely small. The first version that I typed and photocopied occupied about three pages. I called the central task system the game ladder, a compact method for deciding what happened when a character attempted something uncertain. There were no character classes or levels. Characters had Knowledges, and combat could be handled with a simple d20 roll. Injuries depended on where a hit landed and the seriousness of the weapon.
The Five Rules were already close to their present form. They gave the game master a general way to judge whether an attempted action was trivial, probable, possible, improbable, or impossible. Their purpose was task management. They established when uncertainty required a roll and when the physical circumstances already supplied the answer. This kept the mechanics small because the system did not need a separate rule for every possible human activity.
The distinction that later became known in our post-game discussions as cinematic reality and concrete reality was already implicit in this approach. A cinematic scene may allow an action because it creates a strong sequence of events. Concrete reality asks whether the equipment, body, terrain, power supply, distance, or material involved can actually support the action. Negentropy could accommodate dramatic play, but I kept returning to concrete constraints whenever the problem depended on engineering, logistics, injury, or another physical system. A successful die roll could resolve uncertainty inside a possible action; it could not make an impossible machine perform work it could not physically do.
Knowledges and Real Reference Books
The game ladder could remain small because the formal rules were only one part of the system. We used real reference books to understand real problems. Scout manuals were especially important, along with Army manuals, encyclopedias, maps, and whatever technical material I could obtain. If a team needed to grow food, the question began with soil, water, crop requirements, labor, tools, weather, and the characters' knowledge. The Five Rules then handled whatever uncertainty remained after the situation had been understood.
The Boy Scout merit badge pamphlets were ideal for this purpose because they compressed a practical field of knowledge into material a young reader could understand and use. Automotive Mechanics, Chemistry, Electricity, Electronics, Engineering, Environmental Science, Geology, Metalwork, Surveying, and Weather were among the ones I used most heavily. Their influence can be seen in the way Negentropy source material developed. I began writing articles that explained how a subject worked and what someone actually needed to do, because that information was more useful during play than a large collection of abstract modifiers.
Medicine, communications, engineering, survival, weapons, investigation, agriculture, and many other areas entered the game in this form almost immediately. The player and game master could establish a shared understanding of the real-world mechanism, then use the game ladder to resolve the part that remained uncertain. This was the beginning of the sourcebook method that later became one of the defining features of Negentropy.
Equipment and the First Logi
One of the clearest examples came from an encounter connected with Jacques Cousteau's research vessel Calypso. My grandfather took me to see Calypso during its 1975 visit to the St. Petersburg area, and I interviewed one of the men associated with the ship for a second-grade presentation. In 1979 I saw a newspaper notice that the same man was returning for a talk at Bayboro. I went to hear him, interviewed him again, and he remembered me.
He had served in the French Navy and showed me photographs while talking about equipment he had used. My notes identify a MAS 1936 rifle, another rifle I recorded as a MAS 1944, a Browning 1935 pistol, and an Uzi carried aboard the ship for protection in hostile waters. He also talked about Aqualungs, outboard motors, and the small Hughes helicopter. What stayed with me was his care with equipment. A few well-chosen tools and machines could support serious work only if they were maintained, understood, and trusted.
When I wrote the first version of Logi in 1979, I drew heavily from that example. The French weapons entered the game because I had spoken with someone who had actually used equipment of that type, and his approach reinforced the idea that Project gear should be selected for practical reasons. The same principle later applied to power systems, vehicles, tools, and scientific equipment. Their usefulness depended on weight, fuel, maintenance, replacement parts, and the knowledge required to operate them.
Fiction and Game as the Same Project
The fiction did not develop after the game as background material. Stories and game notes appeared together, and I treated them as two ways of working on the same world. Early titles included In the Shadow of a Crooked Spire, The Warped Edifice, Am Ever Present Fury, and The Wrath of the Hummingbird. Characters included Breaker LaBatre, Caleb Random, Cutter, Susan Faith Royal, and Aaron Hatchet. Players were expected to read some of the fiction, and facts established in a story could become part of play.
The relationship also ran in the other direction. Events from games could become stories, while questions raised in fiction could lead to research articles or game material. A technical problem encountered by a character might send me to a Scout pamphlet or science book. The resulting notes could then alter an adventure or create another story. Negentropy expanded through this continuous movement among fiction, research, and play, which is one reason the project grew so rapidly even before regular campaigns began.
Making the Project on Paper
The greatest practical limit in 1979 was the technology available for recording and preserving the work. Most working material was printed in pencil on lined paper. I referred to those pages constantly while writing new material, so they were handled, rearranged, carried, and sometimes separated from the notes around them. Pencil faded. Loose sheets disappeared. As the archive grew into thousands of pages, finding one particular name, calculation, or description could become difficult even when the page still existed.
The formal rules were typed because they had to be reproduced. I used a Smith-Corona Electric C/T and photocopied the finished pages. This produced a small body of durable, distributable rules while most of the much larger project remained handwritten. The imbalance still affects preservation today. Several copies of a three-page rules document could survive while a unique pencil page containing a story scene or technical design might fade, become misplaced, or require extensive work to identify.
My first major change in production technology came in 1985 when my family acquired a Macintosh 512 and I began using word processing. In 1988 I bought a LaserWriter II and connected it to that Macintosh, which made clean printed masters much easier to produce. I later bought a Macintosh Classic with a hard drive and used it almost as a portable writing machine. In 1990 a job purchased a CD-R system that I could use for archiving. Each step improved production, retrieval, or preservation, but none automatically converted the earlier paper archive. Saving those papers has remained a massive and continuing task.
The history of Negentropy is therefore partly a history of trying to make writing technology keep pace with the amount I was producing. I was constantly looking for faster ways to write, more reliable ways to duplicate pages, and better ways to retrieve material without retyping it. The project grew faster than the tools used to manage it, and that condition shaped both how I worked and what survives from the earliest years.
Before the First Campaign
Negentropy was not played as a regular campaign in 1979. That year established the design, fiction, research method, and working rules. Small tests began in 1980 at Seminole Middle School, and regular play began in September. The earliest session I remember precisely is Campaign 80, Game 1, played on September 21, 1980, at the house where my family lived at Indian Rocks Beach. Alpha India was the first adventure. Players had read some of the notes and understood the one-way time-travel premise, and their characters began by emerging from Cylinders.
From September 1980, Negentropy was played on Tuesdays while the related Oasis/Ocean game was played on Thursdays. We also played at the Play and Learn store in Seminole, and several dozen people participated during the first several years. The first convention play came at Suncoast Skirmishes at the University of South Florida in 1981. Those games produced a new kind of development because players tested the setting in ways private writing could not.
Post-game discussions became routine. We examined what had worked, where the game had become too cinematic, and where physical constraints had interfered with an idea. The Pipe Cars became one of the recurring examples. I had weighed components and motors and worked with a science teacher on estimates of mass, speed, and power. Even after applying an X-Tech assumption that improved performance, the vehicles remained limited and consumed electricity rapidly. Players repeatedly suggested larger Cylinders or exotic power sources that would remove the problem. I kept the limitations because they forced decisions about energy, cargo, distance, and risk. Hundreds of smaller changes entered the game through playtesting, while some foundational constraints remained because they were doing useful work.
What 1979 Established
The modern Negentropy setting contains far more detail than the version I wrote in 1979, but the core structure was already recognizable. The Cylinders, Dustin-Rhodes in early form, Troubleshooters, the Fall, an Iowa-centered adventure, the game ladder, Knowledges, magical realism, Kindred, BEMs, Clickers, French equipment, and near-possible technology were all present in the first working model. Their later histories, classifications, institutions, and technical explanations had not yet been developed. Many details changed repeatedly as new research and play exposed weaknesses or created better possibilities.
If I describe the 1979 game from memory, I do not begin with the three typed pages of rules. I remember a large and rapidly growing collection of articles about how things were done, Scout and Army manuals, USGS maps, stories, notes on people, equipment descriptions, scientific ideas, and a compact game ladder that turned all of that material into decisions at the table. The rules remained light because much of the game's intellectual content lived in the knowledge surrounding them.
That remains the strongest continuity between the first Negentropy and the work I am doing now. The project has accumulated decades of settings, characters, technologies, creatures, histories, and revisions, but the central problem is still the one that interested me in June 1979. People enter a situation they do not fully understand with limited information and limited equipment. They have to learn what is happening, decide what they can actually do, and live with the consequences of those choices. I did not know in 1979 how large that framework would become. I only knew that it allowed almost everything I was interested in to become part of the same world.