Space, the final frontier.
It was pretty much inevitable as soon as I created Winterweir that I would immediately start work on a Space Opera RPG. I'm a big fan of Aliens, The Chronicles of Riddick, and of course Star Wars. I have always been a big fan of the various Star Wars role-playing games but I felt that something better could be done with Savage Worlds. Thus, I decided to create Black Hole as a way to give myself the rules for Savage role-playing in space.
The big question, of course, when I set out to create my setting for Black Hole was what do I do that hasn't been done before? My answer was "Everything has been done before. What should I do that has been done that I can do BETTER?" I decided to look back at Winterweir and then decide to create a companion piece to that series. I had done Dark Fantasy for Savage Worlds, now was a time to do Dark Space Opera.What's Dark Space Opera? Well, my idea was that I would do grand and sweeping epics in a massive universe that would allow the player characters to be able to effect the course of the entire galaxy's history. Likewise, I envisioned that the player characters would exist in a universe with no real easy answers. Star Wars is great in its moral absolutes. The Galactic Empire is evil, the Rebellion is good, and never the two shall meet. However, what if there was a threat large enough to justify the Galactic Empire's existence? What if the Rebellion didn't care if they had to plunge the galaxy into anarchy to stop the Galactic Empire. These were the kind of questions that I was interested in asking.
The Stellar Cloak Galaxy was something that I wanted player characters to be able to make a serious difference in but be unimaginably vast. There would be always room to tell more stories in the setting. Even if there was a Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country moment where the heroes finally make peace between two major feuding factions of the galaxy, then that just means our champions can go onto the next great challenge. I drew from a lot of sources like the action set up of Starship Troopers (both the movies and the Books) and the politics of favorite television shows like Babylon Five and Firefly. I wanted player characters to get an immediate sense that, while the Stellar Cloak galaxy was filled with all sorts of rotten people doing rotten things to one another, they were still just regular human beings. Even if occasionally, some of them weren't human beings at all.
There were some big questions to handle during the design process. Bluntly, Star Wars has hundreds of books to design millions of different locals and starships for its materials. In the setting book, I often found myself torn asking whether or not to include stats for one thing or write-ups for another. Instead, I mostly came with the conclusion that I should provide enough examples that Narrators can run their games entirely on the material presented in the book but leave it clear there's a lot more out in creation for them to work with.
In Black Hole; you can be a smuggler, a psychic monk, a cold blooded fascist, an escaped pleasure bot, a cigar chomping lizardman, an insane corporate executive, or a huge genetically engineered super soldier with equal storytelling possibilities. Even more amusingly, you can be all of these in the same party and have it justified.