Ekumeno

A New Name for an Old Idea

The Great Seal of the Ekumeno

In the earlier versions of Thousand Suns, I made an effort to keep setting elements as “generic” as possible. My belief was that, by doing so, I’d make the game easier to adapt to each Game Master’s own ideas. I still don’t think that’s a bad approach, but I’ve since learned that many RPG players, including GMs, actually prefer a game that provides more concrete setting detail — a solid foundation on which to build, along with stronger concepts to inspire them.

That’s why I’ve decided the second edition will include a more explicit and well-defined setting. I haven’t completely abandoned the idea that the setting should remain open-ended and flexible. I still think that’s important in a roleplaying game. What’s changed is my understanding of what openness and flexibility actually mean. Where once I worried that too much specificity might step on the toes of individual Game Masters, I’ve come to see that evocative detail can just as easily serve as a springboard for creativity.

A good example of this shift is “the Terran State.” In earlier drafts, I used that term to describe the dominant human interstellar government of the setting. I chose it precisely because it was vague. “State” could imply almost anything, whether a democratic federation, a bureaucratic technocracy, a decaying empire, or something in between. It was broad enough to accommodate many interpretations.

It was also dull — not just to players, but increasingly to me as well.

Once I recognized that, it became much easier to move forward, which brings me to the Ekumeno. The Ekumeno is the name I eventually chose to replace the Terran State. It derives from the Lingvo Tera rendering of the ancient Greek word οἰκουμένη, meaning “the inhabited world.” It struck me as both distinctive and appropriate for the largest interstellar polity in the setting. I also appreciated its echo of the Ekumen in the stories of Ursula K. Le Guin, since Thousand Suns has never hidden the literary influences that helped shape it.

More importantly, though, the term carried useful ambiguities. Like its ancient Greek antecedent, Ekumeno can refer not only to the interstellar government itself, but also to the wider human civilization surrounding it. That ambiguity appealed to me because it reflects the realities of the setting. The Ekumeno is not merely a state in the modern political sense. It is also a cultural and economic sphere. It’s a vast network of worlds linked by trade, history, language, and other shared assumptions about humanity’s place among the stars.

Using a Lingvo Tera term instead of the rather prosaic “Terran State” also helped ground the setting more firmly in its own imagined history. It made the setting feel less like a generic science fiction backdrop and more like a real civilization with its own traditions and worldview. That may seem like a small change, but, for me, it represented an important realization, namely, that specificity is not the enemy of imagination. Often, it is what sparks imagination in the first place.

That realization has recently guided much of my thinking about the second edition of Thousand Suns. Rather than presenting a deliberately featureless framework, I want the setting to possess a stronger identity and a clearer point of view. My hope is that this will not constrain Game Masters, but empower them by giving them richer material to adapt, reinterpret, and build upon in their own campaigns. In the weeks to come, I’ll be sharing concrete examples of just how I intend to do that and how doing may affect not only the content of Thousand Suns but perhaps even its physical presentation as well.