RR#4, Sater’s Redemption, April 2024
Hello from the 5 Million Worlds!
Did you know how much of a bastard word “hello” is? The first written record isn’t even 200 years old! Origins range between a ferryman’s hail to “whoa there” (cousin of oh là là), an old Dutch exclamation of surprise, then dubious claims of Bell’s misheard “Ahoy!” and Bryson’s “Hale be thou”… Words are weird.
Anywho, a hail works well for spacefolk, don’t ya think? So, hello it is! Here’s what’s planned for this month’s Rokaner Report:
- Twisting Unseen
- Lost Bay Urban Legends: The Swine
- 5MW Avatar Fiche & Loopers
- Sabotage on Sater’s Redemption
Before all that, we’ve got a Rokaner report from Avatar Jace who visited the Graveyard of the Armored Hearts. Game designer
M. Allen Hall released a two-part solo play through of this adventure setting! Read part one and part two here.
Twisting Unseen
After a round of peer review, Sleeper Crew Adventure #2 Twisting Unseen is looking better than ever. The next step is sending draft four over to MeatCastle GameWare for more in-depth game development, and to Jean Verne for some layout mock-ups.
In Twisting Unseen, PCs wake up hundreds of years after a Jump-9 colony messes with Gate technology. The adventure is a map-building exploration module set against a 1d100 Untwisting Event table. With each “untwisted” map piece, events become more frequent and deadly. With each tile placed, the PCs become closer to losing the link to their own timeline. Can they solve the problem of the Gates, or will they hurtle into some other reality?
I’m really excited to talk about the mechanics of the map-building procedures and Untwisting table, once BioCryo is in people’s hands.
Lost Bay, The Swine
For a project on the freelance side (that I totally failed to mention last time), Iko and I are co-writing the introductory adventure for The Lost Bay RPG’s Urban Legends book: The Swine.
For this module, we’re taking inspiration from Josh Domanski’s blog “The Starting Adventure Primer”, Sersa Victory’s Cyclic Dungeon Generation, and pouring those lessons into a defunct 199X box store, the lair of The Swine.
The map has gone through five variations, starting with a pointcrawl. After seeing Strega Wolf van den Berg’s amazing work on Corpse Snatchers XMAS, I sketched out a sorta Bob’s Burger’s storefront+apartment with her in mind. Allen beat us to the punch with a butcher’s in The Lost Bay, haha (check out Moe’s House of Meat!), and I defaulted to Mothership design-brain and did a factory.
It was fine, but did not hit the Suburban Gothic vibe hard enough for an intro adventure, so we flipped to a buffet restaurant + Box Store + strip mall (see: inspiration tweet). In the end, the open buffet offered too much for an single session, so we peeled it back to Big Abandoned Box Store.
The Lost Bay RPG kickstarter campaign was a resounding success, and you can still pre-order the game over at thelostbayrpg.com. Keep yer eyes peeled for more news on the Lost Bay. I hear there’s a cursed cartridge going around…
5MW Avatar Fiche & Loopers
Between bouncing around projects over the last few weeks I managed to build a character sheet–the Avatar Fiche–for 5 Million Worlds. I took advice from Clayton Nostine’s recent “Turn the Character Sheet Sideways” post, and borrowed visual cues from the MoSh 1E and the new Cloud Empress charsheets.
I’ll pop these into this week’s World zip file too, and they’re also added on the 5MW Pocketzine page. Take a look!
The plan is to build this character sheet into landscape with generation procedure on the left. The Forms are proving the toughest nut to crack. For one, it’s the defining feature of 5MW character generation, so the flavor needs to go to 11. Also, I want Forms to be easy to template so folks can make their own Forms for the game. The hard part is the Active Function, the distinctive special abilities that each Form has, and finding how best to fit these into chargen.
But at least I can tell you about one of those for now! Last month I asked which Form you wanted to know more about. The votes came to a tie, so I took the vote to Twitter, and the winner was the Loopers.
Your day-to-day Loopers live almost solely in space. That means they’re in constant orbit, looping around one celestial body or another, as well as looping their dexterous bodies and finding loopholes in all sorts of agreements. Hence the name Loopers.
Pretty much anywhere you find space-faring societies, you find the Loopers. They’re tall (or rather long), lithe, hyper-flexible, and their legs/feet function like another pair of arms/hands. This ties directly into their Active Function (the sort of special power each Form has), Pandexterous, which allows Avatars to use their bodies in an extra-ordinary way to get the upper hand (ha, get it? bc they have four hands?). For Looper PCs, the most difficult step in an adventure is heading onto a world with terrestrial gravity. Walking on their hands restricts the freewheelin’ movement they’re accustomed to, and Loopers don’t always have gravity-training.
What’s fun in problems like this is the space players can use to describe how their Loopers overcome (or succumb to) these obstacles in game. I’ve certainly got ideas—especially from Looper source inspirations like The Expanse’s Belters and Elizabeth Bear’s Ancestral Night (2018). Each Form has a narrative kink to ‘em that makes certain settings a lil spicy. A more final solution would be to hop into a Chrysalis and change your Form, but such metamorphoses usually come with risks…
Sabotage on Sater’s Redemption
This Rokaner Report brings word from the space station Sater’s Redemption. Will you answer the crisis and save those who are left?
Enjoy the chaos, and catch you next time!
Signing off,
Chris Airiau
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Chris Airiau | Science Writing & Storytelling 