Holy damn that sounds really interesting! Please remind us when it hits PoD, but I am gonna try to check out the PDF ASAP. Not that i have a lot of free time, but a man can dream, right?
Hot damn, YOU are Mr. Ironsworn? Your game is great, have been following it on G+. Looking very much forward where it goes to and especially what else can be done with it . (Sci fi?) I sadly had no chance to play it yet. The design and layout is an inspiration as well, very unusual for an RPG.
Yeah, so many games, so little time. My wife and I played the first scenario of Gloomhaven like a month ago and it’s still sitting on the dining table waiting for us to come back to it.
I am, and I shall henceforth insist that my family members refer to me as such.
Thanks! And yeah, I’ll be taking the core rules and themes and adapting them to other settings and genres. Spaceship-centric Sci Fi is first. The vehicle mechanics and tweaked moves will give me the hooks I need for other genres. I hope to follow that with a pulpy, adrenaline-fueled mars setting. Think Road Warrior meets John Carter. Or maybe weird west. I haven’t quite decided yet.
Of course, that’s all cart before horse. I’ll see how things go in terms of interest level over the next couple of months.
My regular group is buzzing at least and wants to try it but so many others to try first. I will henceforth buzz it where I get the chance.
Cool! Buzz from others is all I got. I’m the only known human with a net-negative online social profile. Scientists are studying me. They didn’t think it was possible.
A master class in GM world building here as Adam does background work for his Stars Without Number campaign (similar to his Swan Song campaign). he is up to around 16 vids now I think? You can also watch the group play the game in the RollPlay channel on youtube under Verona.
Just fantastic stuff.
I’m a bundle of fucking nerves :-D
Tomorrow is the grand finale of my StS! Semi-Organized Play Campaign. We’re offering three tables to our player base to cap off the (mostly) episodic first season, with a big after-party for all the players and GMs planned for a local wing joint/bar later on. And then the post-season surveys will roll in. . . and then the planning for next year begins. . .
But all I really know now is that in 13 and a half hours, I’m running my last StS table for the year, and I really, really hope my players love it. And also that I finish it. The form of it’s been in my head since day 1, but a few of these last specifics are proving tough to nail down :)
Teaser text from the season finale sign-ups:
https://i.imgur.com/4hX1Qf7.png
The year: 2062. The place: space. The mission: save the galaxy from the weirdest, most confounding, most stupid threats imaginable! Join Expeditionary Team Delta of the Space Patrol on a high-action, high-comedy (but absolutely not high-brow) interstellar romp through the Orion Sector. Fight feisty space pirates! Escape from certain death! Outsmart dastardly AIs! Retrieve lost balls for space-dogs!
[Sinister Voiceover]
SPACE DATE 20620624: Alright, everyone. This is it. Our moment to shine. The bosses expect nothing but our best. We’ve gotta go out there and give it our all today! Wow the every-loving CRAP outta the whole galaxy, y’hear? And when we’re done, those Delta doofuses will be the LAST thing on anyone’s mind, muahahahaha!
[Sinister Voiceover OUT]Table 1 - “Steal This Planet: a Space Fable”
FM: Justin
Players (5 of 5): Allison, Rebecca, Spencer, Evan, Byerly - FULL TABLE
Description: "Ahem! Thank you all for coming! De-Us-Ma, the well-known Tinkeren tycoon, has passed away. Now, his successor, Gre-Di-Gi, has covered the company’s experimental and extremely dangerous e-space gate with a moon-sized party casino, and then boasted about how overwhelming his security is.“Shocking no one, we’ve received word that several infamous space pirate kingpins have, um, whelmed his security and infiltrated the facility, mingling with the extremely important guests. They’re trying to take control of the gate to use it to steal the planet below, Atul 4, a major source of e-fuel. These crime princes are the cream of the cream, leagues outside of your level of competence. We’ve got laughers, freezers, gunfighters, banemen, poisoners, two-faced schemers, etc.
“Team Alpha is busy with matters of galactic significance. That means we’re the only ones who can save the day, Patrollers! I have…an amount of faith in you. Dismissed!”
–XO Many-GemsSession Expectations: MODERATE Mental, HIGH Physical, and HIGH Social Challenges
Table 2 - “I Dream of Trees”
FM: Randy
Players (5 of 5): Tori, Sarah, Allie, Douglas, Patrick - FULL TABLE
Description: crackling static, broken voices"–ayday, mayday, can anyo–ear me? Please! Come in Expeditionary Team Alph–
"–ppeared 500 million klicks from the colony at the edg–ystem. Their Forestships are jus–overing there, it’s creepy as fu–ardon my Fren–
“–nd now they’re broadcasting some kinda psionic signal; peop–osing their minds! Like they’re brainwash–God, they’re at the door. Please, you’ve gotta sen–”
crash
“Everything is fine. I repeat, everything is fine. Do not send aid. We are fine. We are one. We shall grow.”
–Emergency Transmission from New Austin, Human colony near Quixish spaceSession Expectations: HIGH Mental, MODERATE Physical, and HIGH Social Challenges
Table 3 - “A Little R&R”
FM: Rob H
Players (3 of 5): Jacob, Craig, Kim
Description: "Ohboyohboyohboy, whew, sorry, I’m pantin’ here, lemme catch my breath! Awoo!"Pups, this is bad. This is real super duper bad. The rest of tha team is lookin’ into them spooky Quixes creepin up on a hunam colony n getting up to some kinda business with a planet getting’ stolen. It’s just us left here! An’ that big ol’ splosion you just heard? You know what that was?
"A Zuulgosian battleship crashin into the space station! Fulla Zuulgoes! More’n we seen here since tha war!
“Ohboyohboy! Deltas! Suit up! We gots to protect the station at all costs! Stop them Zuulgoes!”
–Commodore FetcherSession Expectations: MODERATE Mental, HIGH Physical, and HIGH Social Challenges
Whoa this looks great! What rules? Homebrew? Commercial? Edit. Found it!
I’m still running my lengthy homebrew-setting scifi comedy Fate game
Awesome!
A homebrewed adaptation of the Fate Core ruleset, re-done from the ground-up for comedy-scifi play :)
I’ve been working on this on-and-off for about 5 years now, and StS! Season 1 is sort of the culmination of all that. Come, gaze upon our Wiki and despair, ye mighty!
I love this!
I assume everyone wants to play a Chowr’ii like me? They are great!
Would you believe we’ve only got one?! Kim’s playing Galema, a Chowr’ii who was “orphaned” by a massive earthquake on her homeworld and rescued by the Space Patrol many years later, so she’s a little “cracked,” figuratively and literally :)
We’ve got a decent spread of races, but the favorites by far are Humans, Katameows, and Plodnars (who take absolutely no inspiration from the Droogs from Star Control 3, dammit ;-) ). Everything else is playing second fiddle to those, heh.
That’s so cool!
No, really?
Hah!
I’d throw 'em under the bus and say my co-GM Rob made the race up and he’s a little goofy, but honestly they’re pretty delightful and we all came together to workshop the race. I think he based their mythology off of the musical Cats which is just gloriously weird.
Okay, okay, the name is a little on the nose.
In the blatant plug category, earlier this week I published my first game in over a decade.
It’s a storygame that explores issues related to the death penalty.
Sales Link: http://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/239318/Witness-to-the-Execution
Web Site: http://narratio.press
That sounds heavy. Congrats on getting it out!
So as a part of the “Semi-Organized Play” program that the local RPG meetup I help organize runs (and that my StS campaign ran as a part of), we anonymously survey participants all the way through each “season” (after each individual session, taking ratings and thoughts on each table run that week) and after the seasons wrap about the campaign as a whole to keep ourselves on-track, learn about thoughts and opinions from folks who might not pipe up mid-session, and in general build a trove of quantitative data to use to drive our campaigns’ development going forward.
While we can do minor course-corrections mid-season (“Oh, hey, 3 players at my table mentioned they liked one-off NPC X–can we bring them back for the finale?”), it’s really the post-season survey that lets us think about and work on the big changes.
While it all sounds really intensive and business-like (to be fair, keeping Raleigh Tabletop RPGs’ large and enthusiastic membership engaged is a pretty intensive business!), I find the process extremely helpful. We’re all nerds at the end of the day, so it’s just about as uncomfortable for me to ask someone outright how they’re digging things as it would be for them to tell me to my face they thought NPC X sucked donkey nuts. Anonymous surveys let us gather that feedback in a way that keeps hurt feelings and stress to a minimum :)
I’m really proud of the feedback for StS! Season 1. We had a total player pool (at least one session played) of just under 20, and got feedback from 9 players total. The results were extremely positive. Tons of great constructive criticism, to be sure, but the main numbers–“Did you enjoy Season 1” and “Will you return for Season 2”–are high enough for me to finally release the last 7 months of stress and fear and self-doubt in a giant contended sigh of “Holy fuck, dude, you did it.” We can work with the critiques with the knowledge that the core of what we built and ran worked for people, and know that they’re excited to come back and see the new-and-improved version we’re gonna bring to the table(s) next year!
I don’t think anything personally identifiable is in the survey results, so I’mma link it here, because horn-tooting aside and pride notwithstanding, I think it’s a solid GMing technique that enables a new kind of communication between player and GM. Not something that’s right for every group, certainly, but we find a lot of value in it here in RTR.
And another ongoing RTR project is our GM mentorship program spearheaded by my pal Marisol. We’re offering a series of in-person workshops as well as pairing 7 expert GM mentors to do 1-on-1 teaching with a set of mentees, chosen based on compatibility of styles, game preferences, and schedules. As a part of that, I ran a Discord-based “webinar” on RPG session design principles, since our “Fundamentals of GMing / Meet and Greet” session last Friday ran long and we needed to fit this content elsewhere.
This is geared toward newbies for sure, the volume is super wonky because my mic sucks ass, and I take a good minute or three to stop spinning my mental wheels, stop just reading the slides, and actually start making sense, but I am honestly pretty proud of it :)