r/SWN

Greetings humans, humanoids, and those of us just pretending to be one of the other two!

As some of you already know, I am from a SWN Actual Play podcast called 7th Star to the Right. If you do know that, you are probably aware of the other two active SWN podcasts: Astronomica and Dark Star Adventurecast.

The three of us have been bumping into each other across the internet for a bit now and have finally decided to make this flirty thing we've got going on official. As you well know, when two or more podcasts love each other very much, they get together, trade cast members, and see what comes of that. Sometimes, it's crabs. (Keep reading to find out why that's funny.)

Each of our three podcasts will be recording an episode with at least one guest from each of the other two shows and will be releasing them all on the same day, June 17th, in a grand event that we are calling the SWN Triple Podcast Round Up.

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Astronomica will be premiering Space Patrol 3: Invasion of the Crab People with Colin and Geoff from Astronomica, Jeff from Dark Star Adventurecast, me (Kirsten) from 7th Star to the Right, and Josh from High Tech Low Life (a pretty excellent Cyberpunk media review podcast).

GMed by Chris from Astronomica, this story follows the continuing adventures of Brutus Novus, stalwart captain in Nü Rome's prestigious Space Patrol. With his ship still in dry dock, Brutus decides to fuck off to a vacation planet along with his second in command, Bonus Maximus, and his firm-appointed lawyer. Along the way, they meet a plucky transport first-mate and a daring grav racer driver with a need for speed. With the big race still a day away, there are still deliveries to be made, legal briefs to be filed, and, of course, tiki drinks to drink. But what dangers lurk beneath the crystal clear waters of this supposedly serene paradise planet? Find out in Space Patrol 3: Invasion of the Crab People!

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Dark Star Adventurecast will be debuting a new Lasers and Feelings One Shot starring the usual DSA suspects along with guest stars Stan from Astronomica and Geoff from 7th Star to the Right.

GMed by Jeff from Dark Star Adventurecast, Lasers and Feelings is a delightfully chaotic RPG in which the story is created by random dice rolls mere minutes before play begins. Last time, DSA played Lasers and Feelings, the story featured an invasion of brain worms, a drive by shooting (in space!), a rogue science fair project, a sexy doctor, and a girl just trying to earn her last merit badge. What will this story feature? Tune into Dark Star Adventurecast to find out!

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7th Star to the Right will present The Silverlight Sabotage starring the 7th Star cast, Astronomica Stan and Geoff, and Dark Star Adventurecast Jeff.

GMed by Kirsten (me!), The Silverlight Sabotage is the story of a band of incredibly expendable mercenaries who are brought together by a singular purpose: earning a bunch of money from a nerdy scientist. All they have to do is disable a malfunctioning satellite being piloted by a rogue VI and retrieve some data from the core. How hard could that be?

Featuring a bear alien space pirate, crystalline goblin twins, a teleporting assassin, a psychic thief, and a madman with a bunch of space drugs, this one shot is both a loving homage and teasing mockery of 7th Star's usual combat-heavy style. Billed as "the SWN one shot with the most Geoff/Jeffs," the Silverlight Sabotage is guaranteed (note: not an actual guarantee) to be filled with wacky hijinks as well as our usual 7th Star brand of magic bullshit and accidental DnD references. Will this motley crew master Satellite Six and return victorious, or will my space puzzle dungeon prove too much for them? (I honestly don't know because we don't record until this weekend.) Find out in the Silverlight Sabotage!

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tl;dr: All three active SWN podcasts (that we know of) will be premiering one shot episodes featuring guests from the other podcasts on June 17th. Look for them on your favorite podcast hosting sites.

Hi everyone!

I'm a long-time player of SWN but new to this subreddit. I wanted to approach this group about a VTT I've created just for SWN - primarily for my own gaming group to begin with.

I'm building VTTs that are directly aimed at specific systems, rather than the "one size fits all" mentality of most VTTs; ours will be aimed at each specific system.

The features of this VTT are too numerous to list, but here are a few:

• Notes on every object
• Ability to hide/show on every object
• Sector creation - including hidden trade routes
• NPCs and the ability to link them to locations in sectors.
• Character creation, editing, and leveling up.
• Quest management.
• Lore
• Starships - buying, selling, financing, fitting.
• Starship combat
• Interactive Initiative system
• Enemies that you can add to your initiative instantly.
• Battle Map - Fog of war, building random bases.
• Journals
• And much more...

I'd love it if people would "beta test" it and let me know what you think. Right now, to access it, you just need to sign up for a free account on my Patreon and then go to https://swn.shawnsvtts.com to log in. Or, you can go to that link without signing up just to see if it's real.

FYI - I'm fairly new to posting on Reddit. I've mostly been a lurker. So, I hope I followed the rules ok. Thanks.

https://preview.redd.it/tiotibjihy0h1.jpg?width=1378&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=a2acc32f074227668a5c043528513319dfc6a289

https://preview.redd.it/q5o30nojhy0h1.jpg?width=1378&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=94da1e468187334c04ad90865ccf0418eadf732a

https://preview.redd.it/gotev1jkhy0h1.jpg?width=1378&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=37820d72e4b20e778510771270f555656730aa25

https://preview.redd.it/oxgj726lhy0h1.jpg?width=1378&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=7ab33da4fe5d2d034d1faceffe919a1d77e7dde5

The frequencies are open! Whether you're a veteran pilot or just starting your journey into the stars, this is your weekly space to break radio silence.

The Weekly Log

>What's happening in your sector? New sessions, prep wins, rulings you're proud of, cursed dice, cool moments, dumb plans that somehow worked. Drop a quick ping and let us know!

No need for a long write-up; just a quick transmission from your table to ours.

Mod Note: If you're new to the sub, welcome! This is a low-pressure thread for everyone to share their Stars Without Number stories.

Player rolls Sneak, gets a 4, groans. Before I've even described what happens they're already thinking, "I failed, this scene is cooked." Now the roleplay is built around the die result instead of responding to the fiction. The knowledge they failed is out there in the ether and can't be ignored.

So, I've been thinking about rolling all non-combat checks myself instead behind the screen, so the player doesn't see the number. Sneak, Notice, Fix, Know, Connect, whatever. If it's not a combat roll, I roll it.

The player narrates what their character does, I roll secretly, I narrate the world back. Sometimes that's a clean success. Sometimes it's "you make it past the guard post. The far checkpoint's empty, which is weird, because it wasn't an hour ago." They don't know the reality of the result until it matters. You roll Know for a player to figure out what the machine does, and they roll very low. You tell them they have seen something like it before, and give them the wrong answer. The player doesn't know if they really know or not, but it doesn't matter, because the character thinks they know.

Combat would stay player-rolled. When you're in a firefight you know if you missed the shot. That feels different from whether the corporate exec bought your cover story.

Anyway, curious if anyone's actually run it this way. Does it change how players engage, or does it just create friction when they want to understand why something went wrong?

Edit: I'm not saying I am going to do this, but I do find it an interesting an appealing approach, but I also understand it comes with complications.

He wants to miniaturize a spinal cannon to put on a fighter... In theory... maybe?
What do you all think?

Basically, I have been working on a tool that allows you to import sector maps generated from Sectors Without Number to view on cell phones.

I also plan to expand it's functionality to allow you to store character sheets on it, make custom house rules, and do rolls (sort of like Roll20's SWN setup). Entirely for my own game. Wondering if other people would be interested enough for me to put it up?

For my first session as GM, this could have gone WAY better, but it could have gone worse...
The bad:
-Deviated from the script too many times.
-Forgot small details.

The good:
-One PC decided the 'space barnacles' we scraped off the bottom of the ship at the docking bay looked tasty, ate some... and decided they are delicious, and is begging for more.
-The same PC wasn't paying attention and took a header every time the ship came out of Drill.
-When we first got to the ship, another PC decided it would be good to utilize the low gravity of the moon to jump up onto the top of the ship, but rolled poorly, and smashed headlong into the side of the ship.
-The pilot rolled horribly the whole session.
-The Navigator rolled mid.
-Before we could set off, we had to clear out an infestation of critters in the ship. I called them 'Nibblers', due to their tendency to chew through everything. They are the size of house-cats, they resemble rabbits, they have six legs and so dense, you'd think they were made of tungsten. One PC (the barnacle-eater) decided he wanted to keep one as a pet, but we got attacked by them first. (They all have 1HP and no armor.) shot at them... they explode when hit. We finally killed them all, save for 2 babies. he tried to keep both, but the captain came in and put an end to it. (Also, turns out, these creatures work very well as fuel for the ship when tossed into the reactor.)
-One character ended up taking lots of damage from the little creatures (mostly due to being hit by these creatures when they were thrown through the air by someone who failed their 'Throw' check. she grabbed a stimpack without reading the label, and ended up injecting herself with a powerful medicine that put her right to sleep for the rest of the session.

All in all... hilarious.

Hola guys, I have a question about osr compatibility. So I plan on making a campaign sometime later this year and I have yet to really dive in into the rules outside of the big selling points of the game.

My question is that I have a bunch of classic traveller, d6 star wars, mork Borg and mother ship adventures. I would like to use them as events on the sector map like a hexcrawl, how much work will that be, converting it all? I know I'll already have to rewrite stuff like settings and lore to make it all fit, but I intimidated by the rules and mechanics of osr games and if this would even work. Any advice would be appreciated

I like the SWN hacking mechanics for what they do. And I like the CWN mechanics for "real" hacking.

What's been lacking, to me, is something like what Murderbot does.

They anthropomorphize subsystems and other non-sentient modules. As most of us do with our computers or cars or anything that seems to have some sort of interactive capacity. They don't take full control of these subsystems, because then you would have to literally do their entire job. Often MB tells these systems they are friends and makes "requests" while also telling them the request is permitted.

There's been a few posts on some of the generic rpg subs lately about social minigames. Negotiations in Drawsteel and Battle of Wits in Burningwheel. These are simplistic mini games that treat social encounters like combat, as opposed to 1 roll.

This all has put in mind of hacking subsystems as more of a social encounter. The above systems are not perfect mirrors for this kind of "hey, we're friends" hacking. But they, or some other social mini game would suffice for wining and dining non-sentient computer systems and making temporary allies out of them.

You may wish to picture it backwards. First, what it would take to have hacking work as a way to charm a VI, or a braked AI. And then just picture a much more simplistic and limited version of that to apply to a non-sentient system that controls, for example, all the elevators.

The above systems utilize scores to track what an NPC wants, will tolerate, and how patient they are. And while imperfect for the task should work fairly well.

The frequencies are open! Whether you're a veteran pilot or just starting your journey into the stars, this is your weekly space to break radio silence.

The Weekly Log

>What's happening in your sector? New sessions, prep wins, rulings you're proud of, cursed dice, cool moments, dumb plans that somehow worked. Drop a quick ping and let us know!

No need for a long write-up; just a quick transmission from your table to ours.

Mod Note: If you're new to the sub, welcome! This is a low-pressure thread for everyone to share their Stars Without Number stories.

I have a player who likes to tinker. And break things. But he also wrote up a 4 page ship contract and is currently tracking every expense the crew has on multiple spreadsheets. So good and bad. Anywho, he decided to take Unique Gift as his latest foci. This is what he sent me as his proposal. I sense the usage of something unbraked here and wanted some other eyes on it. I italicized some things that I question. Thoughts? Opinions?

The Sister's Trail is a Unique Gift representing Mr. Book's preternatural ability to surface meaningful connections across disparate public and semi-public records systems. It is not hacking, not psychic ability, and not a particularly high Intelligence score at work. It is pattern recognition honed by two decades of obsessive, grief-driven research.

Trigger condition: Mr. Book must have access to any public-facing or semi-public records infrastructure. This includes: Port authority arrival/departure logs, Corporate registration and filing databases, Cargo manifests and customs records, Passenger lists, Spuber fare records, or transit authority archives, Exchange or holding depot inventories, Legal arbitration queues and contract records

Mechanical effect: Once per session, when Mr. Book has access to such a system and at least a few minutes to work it, he may make a single INT/Administer check at +2 to surface a meaningful connection (or that a player simply couldn't reasonably find without the GM explicitly handing it to them) that would otherwise require weeks of manual cross-referencing. A "meaningful connection" means something that advances a thread: a lead on his sister, a link between two seemingly unrelated parties, an alias that connects an NPC to a prior event, a pattern of transactions that reveals who's actually pulling the strings of a job.

The GM decides what's surfaced, but the player always gets something real. Not a dead end, not a vague hint, but an actual piece of the puzzle. This cannot be duplicated by gear. A standard data-broker service can search for a name. A hacker can pull specific records. What Mr. Book does is different — he notices the shape of things, the way a series of unrelated transactions forms a silhouette when you look at them from the right angle. No software does that. Only someone who has been hunting a ghost through paperwork for twenty years does that.

What It Looks Like In Play Mr. Book sits down at a port terminal, a customs kiosk, or a filing system. He starts pulling records while not looking for anything specific, but letting the data move through his head the way water moves through a filter. Then something catches. A ship name that appeared in two different systems in the same week. A corporate entity that shows up as a funder on three unrelated cargo holds. A passenger who traveled under two different names but always booked SpuberX... because even people running from something like their comforts.

I'm working on putting things together to GM my first-ever TTRPG game. I've plated DnD, Pathfinder, D20 modern and a couple others, and decided I wanted to try my hand. And, I wanted to do Sci-Fi. SWN seemed to fit the bill. But, I am taking creative liberties and bringing in tech from other media. Mostly Sci-Fi book series I've read and enjoyed.

For example, I'm bringing in concepts from the 'Undying Mercenaries' series by B.V. Larson.
Specifically, the revival machines, and a character very similar to the Antagonist, known as 'Claver'. though, in my game, he's not an antagonist, so much as he is the shady captain and leader of the whole adventure.

Anyone else done this?
Any suggestions as a new GM? Any suggestions on how to make it an enjoyable experience for two kids in their early teens , as it'll be their first EVER TTRPG experience.

I've also been watching the SWN series that the Roll4it YT channel did about 8 years ago.