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Showing posts from August, 2020

Sci-fi dungeon crawls

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  Despite there being a lot of dungeons out there, very few of them are meant to be played with a sci-fi ruleset like Traveller or Stars Without Number. There are a number of assumptions that go out the window with the tech levels in question. In this post, I will discuss some thoughts that appeared in the #workshop channel on the OSR Discord. If you want in on this discussion, join us over at the #sci-fi-scrapyard and talk shop. Link: https://discord.gg/PRg3RWJ

The most important NPC in your sci-fi sandbox

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I’ll be upfront - it’s about the spaceship your PCs call home. If you run a sci-fi OSR game with a spaceship like the Millennium Falcon , the Serenity, or the Rocinante , then chances are your PCs consider it a mobile home.  Having floor plans for the spaceship is great. It gives your players a sense of the vessel. Add to that, letting them “move in” by assigning crew quarters is also great for immersion and roleplaying. But as a referee, you can also go ahead and give the spaceship a sense of character .  The Raker was real fast, but its coffee machine kept breaking apart.

Interstellar Travel

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 How to get from A to B - interstellar edition. This post is meant to be a small write up about various sci-fi technologies that enable interstellar travel and how they influence a sci-fi campaign. 

Save or die?

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I have been running Castle Amber these days. It has a weird mix of rooms, ranging from some odd things to the more bizarre stuff. During the latest session, I came across a design I wasn’t quite happy about, and it involves save or die .   Castle Amber has a few rooms which involve save or die. There is a throne room featuring a deadly throne, a bedroom with a dangerous safe, and an alchemy lab. Two of these rooms offer a choice. One of them can just straight up kill the character, regardless of what they do.  The Rooms The throne room features a couple of thrones, one of which contains the soul of a magic-user. Upon entering the room, the magic-user’s soul will attempt to take possession of a randomly determined individual. The chances of the possession ramps up over time, but the PCs can presumably escape the hazard by leaving the room.  The bedroom with the safe is quite different. The safe is hidden and trapped. If the PCs somehow manage to open it, they risk exposing themselves t