Recruiting: Free Starspiel Play-by-Post

Free Starspiel
Star Frontiers by way of Free Kriegsspiel

With the promise of a little extra free time, this summer, I'm dipping my toes back in Play-by-Post. Want to join in on some operatic, free-wheeling sci-fi shenanigans?

Welcome to Starspiel, the Frontier of Space
The price of galactic civilization’s peace, security, and abundance is a need for constant expansion. New worlds with valuable resources must be found and exploited.

This job falls to the explorers, itinerants, revolutionaries, fugitives, exiles, criminals, and a thousand other stripes of misfit that call the frontier space of Starspiel home.

Who are you?
What brought you to the Starspiel?
How did you lose everything?
What do you want to do about it?

Art by Arne Niklas Jansson, AndroidArts.com

Setting
Starting off with Star Frontiers as a base, but open to collaborative world-building as we play.
What’s Star Frontiers?

System
Free Starspeil, a Star Frontiers gloss on Free Kriegsspiel.
Link to a PDF of Free Starspiel (v 0.3)
What’s Free Kriegsspiel?

Adventure
Crash of Volturnus, from the Star Frontiers box set, but completely ignoring the railroad-y aspects of the adventure. If you’re familiar with the adventure, that shouldn’t be an impediment, as I expect we’ll take it in wildly different directions.

Where
This campaign will be Play-by-Post on the Unseen Servant forums.

If you're new to Play-by-Post in general, or to the Unseen Servant forums in particular, here's how to get started:
1. Register for the forum.
2. Create a new thread/topic in Introductions and Welcomes and tell us a smidge about yourself (This is how the forum checks for bots and spam)
3. Once you've posted there, you'll be able to reply in this thread. Let me know you'd like to join!

Here's a helpful menu of how-to's.

Posting rate
I'll post plot-moving updates two or three times a week, at scheduled times. I'll be available for clarification posts more or less daily.
Proposed start date: May 9
This game is expected to have an end-point. I hope to run it for about a year.

I hope you'll drop on by!

Comments

Reviewing Rules for Play-by-Post Optimization

I’ve played a lot of PbP games: all your favorite flavors of OD&D, AD&D, and their retroclones, Call of Cthulhu, Marvel Superheroes, Traveller, Dungeon World, etc. ad nauseam. In almost every instance, I forgot what ruleset we were using at some point. Which is a good thing. Once chargen is over, you spend a lot more time describing your characters actions and poring over the GM’s descriptions than you spend interacting with rules. When you do roll, it’s usually a combat to-hit roll, which you’ve probably programmed into the online dice-roller as a macro. Pretty much any game will work for PbP. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t points of possible optimization. Point 1: Resolution. Anything that can keep the action moving is a boon to PbP. A game that requires a back-and-forth exchange of information to resolve an action is going to progress very slowly. A good rule of thumb is that it’ll take 2 or 3 days to get a response from any given player. At that pace, an exch...

Knaves, fancypants

I've prepared a new layout document of Ben Milton's Knaves . Knaves is a great, light rules set that has an extremely elegant core mechanic while retaining total compatibility with OSR material. It's pretty much the rpg of my dreams. This document contains the complete rules, plus a bunch of useful hacks from the community, plus a few of my invention, plus some useful resources from Ben Milton's previous effort, Maze Rats . EDIT: I've updated the layout to fix errata and make a few tweaks. Further, I've made 3 variations: KNAVES TABLET LAYOUT The Tablet Layout is meant for scrolling on screens, and contains hyperlinks. KNAVES SPREAD LAYOUT The Spread Layout is set up to print on Letter-sized paper. KNAVES A4 LAYOUT The A4 Layout is set up to print on A4 paper, and is probably the most elegant of the three versions. This is presented with generous permission from Ben Milton, and should in no way be an excuse for not purchasing a copy of Knav...

Maze Rats by Post

In my previous post , I reviewed a bunch of my favorite rulesets for optimization for Play-by-Post. It occurred to me almost immediately that I hadn't really thought about Maze Rats enough. In fact, I'd mis-remembered and mischaracterized it. Upon reflection, one of the mechanics I took issue with is actually a big strength. Re-reading the rules, it seems like just a few very simple hacks could make it a highly-optimized PbP game. As follows: Danger Rolls are rolled by the GM. Danger rolls usually fail, so it is in the player’s interest to describe their actions plausibly and mitigate as many risks as they can, in the hopes that they don’t trigger a danger roll. 2d6 + ability bonus ≥ 10 If you have taken enough precautions to have a distinct advantage in an action, but not enough to have eliminated the distinct possibility of danger, the GM will give you a roll with advantage. 3d6 keep 2 + ability bonus ≥ 10 Because each character only has 3 ability scores (S...

An Abominable Fancy

Search This Blog