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!

Busy Evenings Ahead...

This evening, before my son went to bed, but after he, my wife and I played 2 games of Settlers of Catan on our Kickstarter produced wooden board, we got around to discussing this upcoming three-day weekend.  The current plan is that I'll run another session of Exploring the Outside Inn on Friday night from 1800 to 2200.

On Sunday afternoon, starting at 1400, he'll spend about an hour "converting" the player characters from The Heroes' Gauntlet from DnD 4e back to AD&D 2nd edition.  After I started running the Outside Inn campaign, I think he realized his difficulties with his 4e campaign were NOT creativity problems on his part, but simply annoyance at the ruleset itself, which is far too ridiculous to be used as anything more than a source of ideas.  But I digress.  From about 1500 to 1900 we'll play in the revised version of his world with our revised characters.  I recreated Corrin Aledrinker in 2nd edition, keeping as close to the 4e version of him as I could, and dropped from 5 sheets of paper to 1 for a character sheet.  I showed my son and his friends, and even those who weren't sure they wanted to switch their characters immediately changed their minds.

Finally, from 1900 to 2300, we'll play in my Star Clans Traveller campaign.  My evenings will be spent prepping for Star Clans, with just a few hours devoted to Outside Inn, since I've got enough material for it to keep them busy for weeks.  I'll also spend some time going over the rules of AD&D 2nd edition with my son, after his homework is done each night, to help ensure he's ready as well.

Gonna be busy... having fun!

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.

Art to Inspire

If you're looking for inspiration for your game through the visual arts, check out Monster Brains.  Aeron Alfrey is both an artist and a docent of online art, and this blog is an amazing resource of art and artists I would probably never find on my own.  Today's entry highlights the work of Murray Tinkelman, and is Lovecraft-inspired.  Of course Aeron includes additional links so the interested viewer can see and learn more...

Give it a look... you won't be disappointed!

Art to Inspire

If you're looking for inspiration for your game through the visual arts, check out Monster Brains.  Aeron Alfrey is both an artist and a docent of online art, and this blog is an amazing resource of art and artists I would probably never find on my own.  Today's entry highlights the work of Murray Tinkelman, and is Lovecraft-inspired.  Of course Aeron includes additional links so the interested viewer can see and learn more...

Give it a look... you won't be disappointed!

Preparing the Sandbox

In getting ready for my OD&D "Exploring the Outside Inn" game, I jotted down lots of little notes, some of which became earlier entries here.  This past Friday, during our initial game, I used several of the ideas to give the world a certain feel.  The main door of Milburn Hall, which opened outward, was blocked by a huge wooden T leaning against the door and partially buried.  Kemper village had smaller T-bars blocking the doors of about half the houses the party explored, while the other half had their door broken and the door frame split.  The Kemper Village Mausoleum not only had a T-bar, but was chained and locked as well.

The party has encountered giant rats, kobolds and orcs, zombies, skeletons, rot grubs, and a roc, but not a single human that didn't come to Milburn Hall from Cittá...

They were very interested in the Mausoleum, so on Saturday I wrote a one sentence description of the main building, and each of the first six levels below ground, including the type of construction and the general feel of each level.  I also decided the orcs they had encountered on the way to Kemper Village would be a bit more civilized than your average orcs.  Finally, I decided the kobolds would become more aggressive, since the party had begun to cut down the brambles that provided cover for all their tunnel entrances.

On Sunday morning, getting ready for our afternoon game, I quickly mapped out the mausoleum's main level and described the contents.  I used the AD&D Random Dungeon Generator at Donjon to build the first six underground levels of the mausoleum, changing the Random Seed and comparing the results in each case to the descriptions I'd written the day before.  Those that didn't match what I had in mind were simply ignored and new levels generated until I liked what I had.  I also used it to generate the first level of the caverns the kobolds inhabit near Milburn Hall.

Finally, I used the AD&D Random Treasure Generator to determine the Kobolds' treasure.

A quick trip to Kinkos, and everything was printed and ready to go!

House Rules for Exploring the Outside Inn

House Rules for my Exploring the Outside Inn campaign:

• Players will start off with 5 zero level characters:

          -- Roll on the Occupation Table for occupation, weapon and extra item
          -- Roll 1d6 for gold, 3d6 for silver, and 5d6 for copper coins
          -- Pick a name, and choose alignment (law, neutrality, chaos)
          -- No stats are rolled until needed, then are rolled using 3d6
          -- Zero level hit points will be a d4, with 1s counting as 2s, and modified by constitution
          -- Zero level characters start at -500 experience

• To reach first level and choose a class, all six of a character's basic stats must be revealed, and he must have earned 500 experience

• Experience points come from monsters and treasure; additional experience can be earned for spending treasure on non-adventuring activities

• Hit dice will be rerolled at each new level, and the higher of the prior or new roll taken as the new hit points

Other rules will be added as I modify the LBB rules, or attempt to fill in gaps... but the goal is to maintain an old school feel for the campaign.

My house rules have been influenced by the gaming blogs I read... and when I come across the original posts that prompted me to try a rule, I'll come back here and update this post to give credit where due.  In the meantime, you can check out the "Blogs I Follow" and see for yourself!