Campaign Diary: SWN with All of the Fiddly Bits, ALL OF THEM!!

The Game: Stars Without Number

Players: 2 players that asked me to bring the crunch

There is a lot about the system I want to say, but I can't without spoiling the hidden parts of the sector for current or guest players that may eventually get involved with the game. So at least for now:

All the vague details you can handle

Stars Without Numbers is a game with a designer/writer that encourages people to hack their game apart to make it work for them. Much of the design of the game is series of system neutral world creation and faction tracking rules. It's a sandbox game; which means it tells emergent stories. That is stories that come from a result of the PCs actions exclusively. There is no wizened old spacer telling them they are the chosen ones to save the galaxy or they need to find the Grand McGuffin that will stop the evil invading the galaxy.

The PCs are given a sector backstory: 600 years since losing contact with Terran due to a cataclysmic event that caused psychics to go insane or mutate due to the energies flowing through them and the technologies that they created have lay dormant. I gave them a starship and a starchart for the sector. They get to explore and get involved as much or as little as they want.

It's a very different style of being a GM. I've created whole scenarios and situations I have tried to lure the players into bigger things, but they've ignored it and continued to do their own things. That's the nature of the game though. There is nothing wrong with the PCs being paid to take cargo to a planet, landing, seeing hundreds of alien bugs crawling over the surface of the planet, decide it's not worth it, lift off, dump or sell the cargo and get on with other things.  Running the game is forcing me to adapt my GM style; which I enjoy a lot. It's keeping me from getting stagnant in my methods.

There are also Faction rules; which function as a way for the GM to track the movers and shakers of the sector. I was a little wary of them at first, but once I got into actually doing GM turns it got easier and made a lot more sense. I then got to translate the results of the GM turn into events of the sector. I got to see how these things would unfold as they played out. The much stronger Faction trying to destroy the weaker faction didn't go as planned and the weaker faction managed to overcome the attacks so far. I can have a goal for a faction, but there is no guarantee that goal will be accomplished. I simply point the Factions in the direction I think they'd go and let the dice tell me what happens. I don't get to hand-wave my stories into place. I mean I could, but letting them play out makes it more interesting. It makes the sandbox feel alive. It's continuing on without the PCs involvement. No easy task to accomplish in a structured way.

Another thing that running this game has done is gotten me into tiddlywikis as a means to keep track of game stuff. Granted I've only used it for SWN because this sector generator gives you files in that format, but I still see promise in using it as a good RPG tracking format. I just need to figure out how to build them from scratch myself. A project for 2017.

House Rules

I normally like to try to play a game as is the first time I try to play it. I've been known to switch stuff up in the middle of a campaign (or even switch systems if it seems like a good idea for telling the story) after I've used the rules as written at least for a little while. This game encourages you to come up with your own house rules for XP. Rather than take the time to do that and lose valuable gaming time I took to the internet and found this Story Games thread from a few years back with a lot of helpful hints.

Here are some of the highlights from our game's house rules:

• Playing cards for initiative, instead of rolling a D8, everybody gets a certain # of playing cards from an action deck, cards tell you what turn you go in, face cards can have different effects on the game depending on the suit.
• Conflict/Dueling rules borrowed from Torchbearer and tweaked, as an option to give the players a chance to strategize a victory when they are outmatched.
• How a distillery would work on their ship, because space moosnhine was on the agenda right away
• This lead to me finding rules for law enforcement and illegal goods
• XP achievements: things like visit 10 planets, make 5 contacts, upgrade the ship, etc. These are outside of the character's stated person goals. I like it because it encourages the players to interact with things for the XP rewards.
• Retro-credit spending, sort of like adventuring gear from Dungeon World, if there is some small relatively mundane item that the players need for something they come across (50ft of rope, an instapanel, a weatherproof tent, binoculars, etc) if they have the credits they can spend them at any time to say they had the thing they needed, within reason. If they need a small part to fix a vehicle or something that wouldn't be available.
• I limited it so that only Warriors can retro-buy ammo, only Experts can retro-buy tools, and only Psychics can retro-buy medical supplies.

There are a lot more little fiddly bits for our game (freight contracting info, salvage value, mutations, etc), but most of them haven't been tested in our game yet, I'll cut out the ones that don't work or don't come up at all. It's been a while since I've been so excited about running a game.