Star Dogs // Tangerine Blues - Sessions 1, 2, 3

I've been running space adventures using the intro blurb and random tables from Star Dogs, and loving it! The secret to running soft sci-fi is that it can basically be both fantasy with laser guns and any other gorram tropes I want to add to it. Rules-wise I'm just throwing a d6 after stating x-in-6 chances and that's it. Characters are also basically a name and background. Last weekend I ran Crow's End and tonight I ran the first part of what'll probably be a 2-session or 3-session game using Shadowrun's excellent adventure Silver Angel. Well, the main beats of it, I've come up with my own fantasy in space flavours for things instead of the original noir cyberpunk feel of the adventure.

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Hi, this one was left in draft form and in the mean time I ran another game with the first group! We do two hours long sesh now and it's actually way more enjoyable for everyone than three hours. It's surprising to me after having spent most of my life running 4h games, but it turns out the shorter time frame allows us to cram a lot of stuff or to really focus on a few scenes, depending on how much we get into the characters and play up the atmosphere. Which was also the case with four hour games but with more distractions and occasional drops and spikes in energy. I highly recommend trying this format, especially for online games.

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Lately I've found little joy in writing in-depth reports, so I'm thinking in the future I will have a quick series of bullet points summarizing the key events (for archival and prep purpose) and focus on talking about how I went about running the game, either specific aspects of a session or positives and negatives from overall sessions (ie: on one day I might focus on how I set atmosphere, on another I might talk about how we handled descriptions of combat, etc.) - this is the third time I come back to this article, so you're going to see the difference between session 1 and the others.

#1 // Crow's End
PCs: AB-1 the Diplomacy Bot & Munchkin Bill the Ex-Cop

What Happened
- The party woke up nake in individual cryo-pods, alongside many others, a few minutes before said pods were dropped down into a frozen tundra trashed by misty gales. So an instant of noticing where they were followed by a longer instant of screaming for their lives. Then a crash.

- Thankfully, the PCs' pods held out - they noticed a few did not, with their contents spread about the snow like raspberry sauce on cheesecake. Quickly, a procession of pointy-hat-wearing prison guards arrived to drag and guide survivors to a bunker in the distance.

- From the Bunker, down they went into a deep chasm filled with glowing crystals of Iridium, and prisoners working all day/night long, possibly until their death. On the first day, the warden gave a half-assed speech about their being property now, and to not try to escape thank you very much as it is pointless. So they spent the first few days socializing (they met Barth, a squid person who taught them the place was used as a political prison for the Empire's undesirables; as well as Lena, a no-nonsense tattooed burglar who would be in as soon as they got an actual plan to escape) and buttering up a local crime lord, Crocodile Gorkan (a saurian of impressive bulk), before the warden came back to seize them and brought them back up on the surface, looking even more tired and annoyed than before.

- Some guards brought them out into the tundra a few clicks away from the bunker, shot a flare, and left them in the middle of nowhere. With no better recourse in the freezing cold, they waited and soon enough a big bullet-shaped ship with a starry crown arrived and took them in. Inside they met Orlando Blake, a hairless giant who introduced himself as a representative of The Corporation(tm). He needed them to go retrieve a shipment of JOY (a designer drug that makes one feel nothing) from a crashed courrier that had barreled into the Garden, a domed, doomed terraforming project on the southern hemisphere of the world. It's called the Garden because of the mutated, overgrown flora and megafauna (think Jurrasic Park). In exchange, they would get passage to a "vacation world" of golden beaches called Elzablo, outside imperial jurisdiction. They enthusiastically agreed.

- They were given a flare gun and a few bits of junk as "expedition supplies" and told to follow the smoke. Reaching the broken ship, half buried in a swamp, they got inside and met some survivors. Apparently most of the crew had left to go find the shipment that had been stolen away by velociraptors. Then a giant T-Rex rammed into the ship. There was some running around, some screaming, and then AB1 shot a flare into the beast's mouth. I think Bill also shot it with some kind of projectile weaponry.

- Once the T-Rex was dealt with, the crew figured they'd rather stay with these new and dangerous people than stick to the ship, and everyone went into the jungle to try and track the captain and his officers. Bill tried to guide the group but turned out to be a terrible tracker, so the group ended up in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night, surrounded by sleeping brontosaurus. Then they woke them up. AB1 lost his lower half during the stampede. They killed one of the brontosaurus and used its corpse as bait for the raptors. Giant wasps came about to compete with the raptors, but thankfully the party managed to avoid getting detected by either group and tailed the velociraptors.

- The nest was under a waterfall, in a cave. So they shot a flare into it to scatter the raptors, ran to rescue the Captain and his crew, and ran off with the JOY shipment (and some more cargo) before the raptors came back. They salvaged a bit more stuff from the ship before leaving the dome and using the last flare to call on Orlando.

- Orlando Blake was pleased, and got the party to walk in cryosleep chambers. When they woke up, they were being dumped on Elzablo with no payment and the creeping realization that maybe it's not the vacation planet it was promised to them.

Thoughts
- So that was my first forray back into SF (arguably, on the softer end of SF) after a few years at the very least. See, I love Classic Traveller, I like Stars Without Number, I'm a big fan of Firefly, Cowboy Bebop, Babylon 5, and in general I like Sci-Fi a lot but somehow I never could successfully pull-off running a decent SF themed adventure game. Something about the scale of thing and an impossibly high standard of "I need to know how everything works and where everything is" made it a chore for me. Then recently I read Star Dogs and was like "wait so Star Wars is like Fantasy but in Space! I can do that!" and I decided to try a more gonzo, softer SF and it just clicked. That first adventure felt really linear which is something I regret - I wasn't too sure where it was going and my prep was a bit lacking. We could have done more with each locale, but in retrospect I felt like I should have condensed stuff a bit more for three hours. After this one I started going for two hours games instead.

#2 // Silver Angel, Part 1
PCs: Dorji the Scientist! & Nashwa - Kitling Noble and Captain of the Nyacatalyst

- Abord Station Cairos, in the Lorelei Star System, Dorji & Captain Nashwa got themselves a job.

- Codename: Silver Angel, a classified piece of software their patron (BDSM Kitling Crime Lady) wants.

- Two hooks: 1) Diane, dead hacker Bluetooth's girlfriend, has the coordinates to the research facility where Silver Angel should be, on floppy disks and data crystals. She's a dancer on The Beluga. 2) Pirate Captain William Blake is a former Imperial Navy officer and was security chief of said facility for years before being dishonorably discharged. He's operating somewhere around Dolmen.

- We had an hour left, so they went for Diane. The Beluga is a derelict ship converted into a casino town. Diane herself is a hipster artsy dancer using flying polyps' pheromones to charm her audience. She recites terrible Kitling War Poetry. 

- She tried running away from them as she believed them to be Imperial Secret Police. They caught her, quickly explained they were not, and then the Secret Police showed up. They ran away in airducts, through a bustling kitchen and down a trash compactor into a waste treatment facility.

- She gave them the coordinates and they took her onboard before escaping the Beluga.

Thoughts
- It was Nashwa's player's first tRPG session ever, and I think they had a lot of fun - because there's no character sheet to learn or no rules written down (I just ask for X-in-6 d6 throws here and there), they acted like a veteran player after about 30 seconds, essentially confirming to me that once you break it down to diegesis (fiction-first) stuff only, everyone is capable of doing a great job playing adventure games. Accessibility is a Win. Having them play the Captain, with the more experienced player being the Engineer (well, Scientist, but in my Star Dogs games, any group has a Captain and/or Pilot + an Engineer, as a sort of "secondary class" to the PCs rolled background, so that they can always use spaceships on their own.

#3 // Elzablo
PCs: ABI the Liaison Bot & Bill the Ex-Cop

What Happened
- We skipped a week ahead - ABI had found new legs and I handed the PCs a map of the local outpost of Tantaloone and told them about the major players - a union of Pfhor (local aliens) miners, Lady Vo Borun, the gun-nut noble at the head of the planet (with her Oasis/Rehab Center for Star Pop Stars/Private Villa, and more importantly her mercenary detachment).

- Going to the Waste Disposal Facility, they stumbled upon a mexican stand-off between Pfhor unionists and Mercenaries. They tried to defuse the situation then just shot the Mercs and got a job from the union leader: help them locate and rally a Kai Monk hiding in the desert to their cause. Kai Monks are basically Jedi, but instead of seeking "harmony", they see themselves as agents of change and chaos. Still better than the Empire though. For that scene I used a dice tower. Every time they waited for too long or said stuff that increased tension, I added more unstable dice like d10s or d20s. When they said stuff that defused tension I'd put big d6s for stability. When the tower fell, violence erupted (about a round before I'd have had everyone lower their weapons, too).

- Their first stop was the Lab, where Jr. Research Assistant Higgins (big minerals fan) and the Lab's AI software helped them secure a probe and scan the planet to triangulate a general location for the Monk - near ruins a few hours into the desert from the outpost. They went to get hoverboards from the Hovercraft store, playing off the shopkeep's fear of union debt-collectors to get them for free since they hadn't been paid by their patron on Crow's End.

- After a fun ride through the desert, they reached the ruins and started investigating. They got a call from Pr. Chad Cornwell, research project leader, who informed them he was on his way, as well as the noble Lady who was also looking for the Monk. She'd be here in 30 minutes since she took her ship. They desperately dug around and found a ship camouflaged under the sand, and woke the Monk up.

- She got them inside her ship and a dogfight happened. It was not great because I didn't know how to present interesting choices to the PCs from their various battle stations and they didn't know how to describe their actions in meaningful ways either. I'll need to think about how to do spaceship combat better. Anyways they won, and they freaking bombed the disabled ship of the noble lady. Then they sent a signal to the Union who promptly liberated the outpost. The surviving mercenaries got shot with the ship's auto-cannons and they took onboard all of the Star Pop Stars from the Rehab center, as well as a few Megacredits' worth of loot from the villa.

- In the Epilogue, we described how they partied hard for a few weeks, and finally delivered Ambassador Barth the Squid Guy, as well as the Burglar Lena, to the Squid Confederacy. Don't remember them? Yep, that's why we had these NPCs find a reason to leave. So far I've had way more fun playing the Kai Monk NPC as some kind of thrill-seeking Raoul Duke Crystal Mom. And now the PCs want to take down the Empire so they have a goal!

Thoughts
I'm kind of ambivalent about the X-in-6, 1d6 roll thing. It's a matter of physical sensation (it's not so interesting rolling a single d6, kinetically) as well as rythm. See, it takes me a few seconds to process an X-in-6 chance before asking for a roll. I much prefer the way I did it in Fast-Forward or how it's done in Any Planet Is Earth, with a 2d6 saving throw against a TN of 9+. 7+ with advantage (such as being skilled, etc). This way I can think for exactly 0 seconds about what to roll, but still get to think about when to roll and when to simply make a call.

Living House Rules - October 19th 2021

- No character sheets: players simply write down one to three words as their background, typically rolling them on a table (I use this one for my Star Dogs game, I would use this one for a low fantasy deal). Current PCs: Captain Nashwa the Kitling Noble, Dorji the Scientist, Bill the Ex-Cop, AB1 the Diplomacy Droid (that's literally everything we wrote down at character generation, I have no idea whether they even have character sheets, I suppose wherever their take notes is where their character sheet is). Keeps the focus on the world, as I want my players to focus on exploring and having interesting experiences and avoid the pitfall of building super elaborate characters as it can get detrimental to the unpredictability of a cohesive world (ie: if the PCs die, it sucks more if we're super invested in them as TV Show characters), I believe.

- Saving Throws on occasions that warrant it. I might make a Luck Roll (d6, high is good for the players) type roll here and there, but besides these I'm good. A Save has the advantage of feeling like a desperate, hail-mary type thing. You don't roll to check for mundane stuff, you roll to save yourself from something really bad. It also makes it feel fair if something really bad happens after you failed your save.

- Violence is rare so far but happens. I don't want to go back to Hit Points, so for now I'm sticking with a more descriptive take, keeping in mind that I want to focus on consequences. If they're taking a risk that involves bodily harm, I'll let them know if they risk Injury or Death. If they're injured, it makes everything riskier, and fighting when injured is almost a guaranteed risk of Death. I have my own little procedures for stuff like surprise and initiative but I like to keep them secret. The only aspect where I want full transparency is "what you risk if you pursue that course of action", which I made explicit above. Everything else is fair game in a combat situation. I want to remember to target their equipment, to have NPCs use strategy/tactics, and to make the environment more dynamic. By the way, I try never to stop describing stuff and rely on "attack rolls" or what not. Violence happens in the same time frame and freeform description mode as peaceful situations. There's just the added detail of warning for Injury or Death if I call for a Save.

- Experience is a diegetic thing only in my games at this point. I don't use any sort of XP or levelling system. PCs start out competent and they evolve through their experiences and memories, building allies, relationships and usually some amount of wealth. Speaking of wealth, I love to use 24XX's semi-abstracted money system, with what I call MEGA CREDITS in the Star Dogs setting. It'd work in a Cyberpunk one too, though might be slightly trickier if I wanted to represent the down to earth grittiness of something like Warhammer Fantasy.