Stars Without Number (of some sort)

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Fenris-77

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I've been thinking about running a PbP sci-fi game for awhile, and the recent Bundle of Holding for SwoN I am taking as a sign to stop faffing about trying to pick a system and go with that. I don't have any particular thoughts on theme or setting yet, but I wanted to see who might be interested in participating. I'm happy to have a roundtable discussion about exactly what kind of game this could look like. Exploring lost alien planets, sci-fi espionage or insurgency, mercantile, I'm good with pretty much anything.

Here's the bundle of holding, which is the set of books I'll have available, plus Darkness Visible (the espionage supplement).
 
I do have an initial pitch, or at least a decent sketch of one. Like I said above I'm pretty open on theme, but this is what I came up with...

Themes and Touchstones: Alien (for megacorps), X-Men (outlawed psionics), Sigmata (fascist government and a fractured resistance)/Star Wars

Scope: Probably a single sector as the core sandbox, with at least three systems. (Edit - I really mean groups of systems here, or power bases)

Deets: Sector X is a manufacturing powerhouse, with copious asteroid mining and technology corps fueling an extensive military industrial complex that produces and sells ships and weapons across the human diaspora. Sometime ago the a large military corporation joined with one of the largest criminal organizations to overthrow the sector assembly, previously controlled mostly by noble mercantile houses. The new government immediately outlawed psionics and implemented draconian surveillance and population management protocols (papers please), as well as moving against the other criminal organizations in the sector.

There is a resistance movement in the sector, but it is fragmented and limited by the competing interests of it's various factions. There are traditionalists that want the return of the sector assembly, a loose confederations of psions and sympathizers fighting for their very survival, smaller criminal organizations pushing back against the new law and order initiatives, various smaller corporate entities who resent the co-opting of their businesses and intellectual property, and some honest to goodness rebels who simply won't stand for fascist nonsense. These groups are in touch with one another, and sometimes even work together, but successes have been few and limited.
 
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I'm interested! I like psi's so I can bring that conflict if you want, if not, well, I can play something else. I could go for some pew-pew as well.
 
If we go with the above pitch there's room for just about any kind of group. The factions and backdrop are there to provide context and ideas, not to necessarily mitigate for, say, a rebellion game. If you played a Psi that element would be in play at least for your character, but that doesn't mean it needs to be a focus for the campaign (but it could be, of course).
 
A couple more thoughts for the pitch..

The Fascist Corporation Government has it's headquarters in a space station orbiting the main planet of the core system. The station houses the research function, the main shipyard, and living quarters for the upper management and workers associated with those two other functions. Security on the station is ridiculous. The main production facilities for weapons and smaller vehicles are dirtside.

Population control and propaganda are in part managed by an aggressive policy of 'chipping' criminals and dissidents, turning them into cybernetically enhanced soldiers. Those form a significant part of occupational security forces, as well as the rank and file of the for-hire military services offered to other systems and governments. Chipped operators are only useful in rank-and-file roles as the cognitive functions of the donor are usually severely reduced by significant psychological and pharmacological interventions as well as cybernetic buffers and limiters.
 
I'm interested! I like psi's so I can bring that conflict if you want, if not, well, I can play something else. I could go for some pew-pew as well.
One could do a whole party of spoon benders, but I think in SWN it's a character class that's pretty much useless at anything else. I suppose you could lift a page from Space Master's book and bodge a rule where you can make hybrid semi-psi characters by mix-and-matching from another character class.
 
One could do a whole party of spoon benders, but I think in SWN it's a character class that's pretty much useless at anything else. I suppose you could lift a page from Space Master's book and bodge a rule where you can make hybrid semi-psi characters by mix-and-matching from another character class.
I wouldn't really want to run a whole party of spoon benders really. So there's that.

Edit: Ideally, for the pitch above, the party would act as a nexus between at least two factions, perhaps more.
 
SWN does have hybrid classes, at least in revised.
Yeah, lots of room for some X-Men vibes without everyone playing the same class. Or whatever people want really. I'm getting some additional ideas and details spun up for the pitch above too, which I like enough to work on even if it doesn't end up getting used in this particular instance.
 
Are you down with the sketch of a pitch above? That idea is part of the sector of course, there will also be rival area headed by megacorps and a recently rediscovered swath of PreTech systems. So we have oppression, rebellion, a cold war, and a gold rush. :thumbsup:
 
Are you down with the sketch of a pitch above? That idea is part of the sector of course, there will also be rival area headed by megacorps and a recently rediscovered swath of PreTech systems. So we have oppression, rebellion, a cold war, and a gold rush. :thumbsup:
Yeah pitch works great for me. There's a wide range of characters to be played with diverse reasons to act.
 
I've got a couple of ideas for characters that might fit into this. Count me in.

I've got some older SWN stuff. Are there any significant changes to character generation in the new version?
 
I've got a couple of ideas for characters that might fit into this. Count me in.

I've got some older SWN stuff. Are there any significant changes to character generation in the new version?
I have no idea. I have the older edition but I only gave it a quick pass. We can figure it out though!

Anyone who doesn't have the new books can let me know and we'll work something out about char gen.
 
Isn't there a free (slightly stripped) version of the updated rules?
 
I have no idea. I have the older edition but I only gave it a quick pass. We can figure it out though!

Anyone who doesn't have the new books can let me know and we'll work something out about char gen.

Isn't there a free (slightly stripped) version of the updated rules?

I think mine is Revised Edition - it says that on the cover and DTRPG tells me I've bought it, so I think I've got the right version.
 
My suggestion here is characters - campaign direction - character revision. No one should feel the need to play a pilot because the group 'needs' one either, I have an idea for VI pilot-droid-thingummy that can fill that lacuna in the groups skill set at need.
 
I'm going to be doing a bunch (hah!) for the challenge too. I need to jump in with both feet anyway, so why not.
 
My initial thought on starting the campaign is to have the characters form the crew of some kind of small vessel, a la Firefly. Your just flew a disastrous first mission and barely managed to limp back to the nearest starport and your ship will need repairs before you can fly again (there's implied treachery and a good opening for an immediate adversary there). The world you landed on is on the frontier between The Praxis Mandate (fascists) and the remains of the Free Systems Assembly, currently and very recently annexed and occupied by the Mandate. To save this feeling too much like Star Wars and Mos Eisley I think it'll be a jungle planet, possibly with alien ruins.

Edit: The ship will be Free Merchant hull that was most likely purchased 'as-is' and will require a lot of love to become a paragon of its type.

We can flesh out details to suit the characters and backgrounds. Any and all suggestions are also welcome.
 
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Sounds like a plan to me. Wonder if I could make a precognative expert/pilot? (Really only reason I thought of that was the pilot thing above.)
 
Sounds like a plan to me. Wonder if I could make a precognative expert/pilot? (Really only reason I thought of that was the pilot thing above.)
I'd recommend that everyone make two even three characters. First to get a feel for the system, and second to give us some flex about putting a crew together. So by all means make that PC and see what the results look like. Combat is pretty deadly, so having a back-up PC or two on file isn't an awful idea either.
 
1) An'rurr Chalth, Pride Lord of the Hirahan, Second Son. Great Cat-like species with dense skin, and powerful teeth and claws (but biting people is distasteful and wrong.) They do however have a protein-heavy diet requirement, though most sapients are omnivores. Despite the Pride-Lord title, the Hirahan is a meritocracy. An'rurr is a second sone indicated by his two-letter first name though most other species don't pay much attention to that. (Lord is also considered any gender title for their species because the subtlety of the word 'feriwol' is lost on many species.)

Adventurer: Starfarer/Precog S13 D13 CN14 I9 W14 CH10 (I got immensely lucky with dice rolls) Skills: Pilot 1, Precog 0, Fix 0 Program 0 Punch (Species) 0 HP: 4

2) Reverend Mike (Michael Tonnes) Human on the run from old enemies (assassins he foiled when in the military while a Colonial Marine Chaplain)
Warrior: Clergy/Close Combatant S11 D9 CN16 I11 W9 CH 12 Skills: Talk 1, Notice 0 Lead 0 Notice 0, Punch 0 HP 8
 
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Straight 3d6 in order? Any house rules?

It will probably be this weekend before I would be able to get anything done in terms of char-gen.
 
I'm agnostic on exact char gen method, just jump in and make a character - 3d6, array, whatever. There's no hurry either, I've only had the books for a couple of days and it'll take me some time to get the initial planet and whatnot hashed out and get comfy with the rules and subsystems. Ideally we need at least one more player too.

A caveat though, I'm not precisely building the setting around the characters, so it's possible that some level of change or revision may be necessary in some cases. We'll see.
 
Something like this would work for smaller Free Merchant ship:

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You still looking for players? I'd love to get in on a Stars Without Number campaign, and I like the pitch.

(BTW the side view of that Free Trader looks suspiciously like the Millennium Falcon ...) :alien:
Yeah, I think we can accommodate one more. :thumbsup: The resemblance to the MF might be because it's a Star Wars deck plan, IDK. I'm very much a steal and adapt GM when it comes to sci-fi games.

As a general note, we'll keep using this thread for spit balling and faffing about, and I'll collate it into an OOC thread when we're ready to get rolling. Feel free, everyone, to chime in about touchstones, ideas and themes. I won't promise to use every item on every list, but I'll use what makes sense once we have a firmer idea what kind of campaign it is we're playing in in terms of focus. A basic tripartite division would be how Scum and Villainy does it, you have the rogue trader style Firefly crew who pull jobs and whatnot, you have a more militaristic bounty-hunter approach (not what I'd recommend in this system), and then you have the more rebellion focused game with espionage elements and a lot of sticking it to the man. I'll be blunt in saying that I'm not super interested in running a Far Trader commerce type campaign, although some commerce elements in the Firefly campaign would be fine and dandy.

Edit: In all the above cases I'm going to be striving for sandbox rather than linear, and you'll find that my adjudication of the SWN 2d6 mechanic owes rather a lot to PbtA principles.

Edit 2: I would like some opinions about the level of alien species in the game. My initial plan was all-human, but not really on purpose, that was just the picture in my head. Silverlion Silverlion has a xenos character, which I'd be fine with. Based on that my temptation is to make xenos far wanderers and rarities as opposed to a full multi-species cultural milieu.
 
I kinda like alien civilizations ... though I see no reason to assume every alien civilization is still, y'know ... around. :wink: I also see no reason for every sentient alien species to be playable as a character, and the assumption (mostly from Star Trek, I assume) that every sentient being is basically a human with some kind of weird facial features ... or even a bipedal hominid at all ... just annoys me. Let's see some intelligent, 20-foot-long, eight-foot-tall, telepathic cockroach people! :hehe:

Silverlion Silverlion you don't seem to have taken any Foci for your characters ... or at least you haven't listed them. They're an important part of every character, so you might want to take a look and choose some.

Fenris-77 Fenris-77 I rolled three sets of stats to create three characters, but rolled so well on my first one I'm embarrassed to bring it to the table (seriously: I rolled two 18s and then the rules for rolled stats allowed me to change my one absolutely average roll into a 14; the character is basically superhuman). You might want to consider requiring your players to use the stat array method.
Foci? Hrms I thought I had.
Michael Tonnes has Unarmed Combat as his foci. An'rurr has Starfarer
 

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Don't worry about stats yet. Nothing is finalized anyway, and I may just stipulate that people alter to use an array. My usual approach is to go with the array.
 
I'll take opinions on campaign direction any time. I don't want to get to far into prep before we decide what the deal is. Really that means the choice between Firefly-styles and Rebel Operatives (with whatever faction focus makes sense). Those don't need to be mutually exclusive of course over the long term, I'm really just talking about our starting context and the planning for that.
 
I might disrecommend unarmed combat as a focal point of char gen, especially for anyone who isn't playing a Warrior. It's ... not ideal.
 
Well, the party isn't going to have any heavy weapons to start. If they run into some then they should probably make the wise choice. :wink:
 
Fenris-77 Fenris-77 and all.

I dig the general ideas you've tossed out. I'll make a couple of guys, hopefully this weekend. I have no problem with there being aliens if folks want to go that route. I do like the idea of lost alien empires/civilizations if that fits with the general setting offered so far.
 
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