A Sci-Fi RPG Scenario About AI Accusations and Public Judgment
At the beginning of this year, I registered Lightspress Principia as my DBA and started stripping my government name off everything connected to my work. That shift came from a deliberate decision. I’m not getting into the reasons here, but they mattered enough to act on them. The result was predictable. A small corner of the internet decided the absence of a personal name meant something suspicious was going on, and that was enough for them to start taking blind swings.
One of them pitched the idea that the imprint was a Chinese content farm. So I adjusted. I created a pen name that sounds more real than my actual legal name, added it to the DBA, and that was enough to settle things down. Thoughts of Rain Man and the fishsticks come to mind, with an acknowledgement that the film is a deeply problematic portrayal of neurodivergent people.
I’ve been watching stories pile up about students and writers flagged for AI use, even when they didn't use it. That situation deserves a deeper look, and I’ll dig into it on The Narrative Core. I took that idea and turned it into a science fiction scenario inspired by Blade Runner, leaning into questions of identity and recognition. Underneath, it’s about how quickly public judgment locks in place and spreads, making accusations hard to challenge, even when they’re wrong. The process around it doesn’t care about resolution; the court of public opinion operates on a paradigm of guilty until proven innocent, with the bar for the burden of proof set egregiously high.
Don’t mistake this for an argument in favor of generative AI. This piece is about what happens when society can’t keep up with technology, and the unexpected harm that can be caused by both bad actors and the well-intentioned. When facts are unreliable, suspicion fills the gap. That creates pressure that reshapes how people move through the world, how they’re treated, and what they’re allowed to do.
I had some fun with it while keeping that small bit of social commentary in place. To get ahead of the usual bad-faith reactions, I wrote the whole thing out by hand first, photographed the pages, and included that alongside the final version. That doesn’t solve the problem; the people who won’t accept it, though, will only end up demonstrating my point.
The scenario is available for a dollar. If the premise connects with you, that's your invitation: check it out. If you see potential, I’ll expand it into a full story bible for Principia Canonica.
OH THE HUMANITY is a system-adaptable science fiction story scenario that includes a starting situation, profiles for factions and characters, and the essential locations needed for play. The player characters exist in a world where an android can pass for human, and no test is reliable. Androids have few civil rights, and humans accused of being an android face the loss of their jobs and dangerous public outrage. Will you fight for android emancipation with the Registry of Universal Rights? Get caught up in the movement with the Underground Record Club? Or work to end the existential threat of non-humans with the Civic Purity Front?
Written for Principia Canonica, usable with the system of your choice.
This scenario is two pages long; the other two pages are handwritten notes, included to prove the author's own humanity. If this scenario does well, we'll consider expanding it into a full sourcebook for narrative play.
