I Was Pleasantly Surprised!

I thought last night's game got off to a rocky start... once again, side conversations, people wanting to peruse the rule books rather than play, a bunch of "Hey, Mr. Kristof, can I...?" in the middle of other action, etc.

As I mentioned before, I run my games from the kitchen island, looking across it to the dining room table where all my players sit.  (We have an open floorplan with kitchen, dining room and living room just one long room.)  When I'd had enough of trying to track all the different threads, I straightened up, looked at the group, and said something like, "OK... I'm going to leave the room for a few minutes.  While I'm gone, you guys need to figure out what you're going to do as a group.  I can't keep running multiple threads for you because none of you can agree on a way forward.  We can do whatever you want, but you all have to be involved."  Well, it was something like that, anyway.  Then I left.  Went into the front room, then upstairs, then back through the kitchen to the garage for a beer.

When I came back into the kitchen, beer in hand, they started to tell me what was up, but I ignored them and poured my beer into a frosty glass from the freezer.  Only then did I turn to them, and say, "OK, I'm back.  What's the plan?"

They surprised me.  They really did!  They kept each other quiet and on task... they asked each other (in character) for advice and kept each other engaged.  The side-conversations shrunk to almost nothing.  And I was then able to run the game as I enjoy... actually pulling ALL the players into the action at appropriate times.  For instance, while negotiating with the Council of Seven on Tralnor, the Kearnayan pirate Chidi simply acted as bodyguard for Tiernan, the group's prime negotiator at one point. One of the Councilmen, Milos, was short and fat, thought rather highly of himself, and wasn't too sure of what benefits Tralnor would receive if they signed a pact with the Ardeni Kingdoms.  Then he saw that Chidi was armed, asked about the weapon, and for a demonstration.  Afterwards, they were able to convince Milos of the value of the negotiations by reminding him he'd be able to purchase weapons like the hand cannon he'd been so intrigued by!

We'd scheduled to play from 1900 to 2200, and although I told them we couldn't, everyone wanted to continue playing... everyone seemed to have a good time, and I definitely had a good time!

Now I've got more work to do... finally got around to looking over the Stars Without Numbers rules for Factions, and they'll be perfect for the work I still need to do on the clans (hence Star Clans).  Also have to detail a few more nearby worlds, since it looks like they've got plans already written on what they want to do next time we play!  Oh, and of course, I've got to write up the Play Report for the Star Clans blog!

Working on Traveller

We ended the most recent game in my Star Clans Traveller campaign with the party split.  The characters of the players who couldn't attend had remained in Star City, on their homeworld, Arden.  One character was in prison, awaiting transport to the mines of Tralnor for fifteen years of hard labor.  The rest of the party was in their starship, newly christened the "Arianwyn," in the middle of a jump from Tralnor to Arden.  I make the player who is piloting roll to see what happens, and this time it indicated a misjump.  As they entered hyperspace, I told them the engines didn't sound right, and at the end of the week, when they should have dropped out of hyperspace into the Ardeni system, nothing happened... they remained in hyperspace.  That was the last thing I told them as we ended the session.

During our next game, they'll have to determine where they are, and plot a course home.  Well, that's what they'll do if they want to regroup with the other player characters.

I rolled the dice for the misjump, and they got lucky, when they drop out of hyperspace, they'll actually be in a star system rather than an empty hex!  I have some work to do now, since the misjump takes them beyond the few worlds they've explored, and in fact out of their subsector altogether!  Luckily for me, I had started jotting down the history of the sector (the entire campaign, actually) over a year ago, before we started playing.  Between these initial thoughts, and the random world tags I can generate using the Stars Without Numbers rules for all the worlds between their new location and home, I can be ready to ad lib a game in just three or four hours.  Of course, that work will just add to the Rasu Sector Encyclopedia I'm compiling, and make future games even easier to plan for.

I had originally used a small database to record sector data, including system locations, universal planetary profile data, and my notes.  More recently, I just used a text file and the Star Clans blog itself.  It occurred to me that I could use the database again, keeping my own notes in one data field, and Ardeni Information Services (AIS) library data in another.  This would let me show both data fields on one form so I could cross reference them, and it would allow me to generate reports based on either the AIS library data, or my own notes.  I'll let you know how it goes.

Back to Star Clans

Pulled up my copy of the free .pdf version of Stars Without Number this evening, because I'll be running my Star Clans game Sunday evening, and I wanted to give World Tags a try.  For those not familiar, world tags are simple descriptives of one or two words that can either be chosen or randomly determined and that are used to generate ideas for adventures.  In Kevin Crawford's more eloquent words, "Tags are brief conceptual tropes that set the world off from planets of otherwise similar population and characteristics."  Yeah, what HE said.

Kapu Subsector contains 44 worlds... and I already had notes on 7 of them.  I ended up generating tags for 37 worlds, and will read them over a couple of times before I go to sleep tonight.  Tomorrow, I'll have a pretty good idea how those tags intersect the background story of the sector that I decided on last year, and I'll jot down notes on the 10 or 15 closest to Arden, the player characters' home world.

The recommendation is to note enemies, friends, complications, things and places, and the booklet gives a short paragraph description of each tag, as well as examples of each of the five points for each tag.  Further, it's recommended you choose 2 tags per world; one is two flat, three or more just lead to confusion.  In my case, I stuck with two per world, and I got such gems as, "Restrictive Laws, Freak Weather," "Major Spaceyard, Warlords," "Forbidden Tech, Unbraked AI," "Area 51, Theocracy," and the one my players may like best, "Zombies, Bubble Cities."

Can't wait to see what percolates overnight!

Stars Without Number

Back in September, I picked up a copy of the Stars Without Number free edition pdf.  I glanced through it quickly, and found a lot to like.  Then I got busy and didn't open it again until today.  I run a Traveller game, but Kevin Crawford's work here is simply amazing!  With Traveller, I can use random numbers to generate a sector full of defined planets, but I still have a lot of work to do before I can run my game.  Even winging it takes a lot of effort.  SWN not only lets me generate a sector full of defined planets, but I can add tags, adventure hooks, and factions as well, all from wonderful tables that simply require me to roll some dice.  I prefer winging it when running my games:  I pre-define the general themes going on in my settings, then I keep them in mind while reacting to my players... which helps pull them into the setting all the more.

SWN makes my winging it even easier, all the additional tags and snippets of data I can generate at random beforehand simply add fodder to my general themes and really get my creative juices flowing!

It's been months since we played in my Star Clans setting, and my players recently asked about it.  I'll be using SWN tables to fill in some detail on the worlds surrounding the Ardeni Kingdoms, and, I suspect I'll use them in my OD&D Exploring the Outside Inn setting as well!  As I do, I'll discuss here what I'm up to.