Don't Roll a One

I wrote a post about an expansive, serial-numbers-filing-off take on sci-fi a while back, and after way too much No Man’s Sky, it’s started to come together a little bit.

I’ve been working on Outlaw Country. This will be Nomad Galaxy. It’ll be a big, open, permissive universe because let’s face it, there are a lot of flavors of space adventure and I don’t want to gatekeep myself right off the bat.

Minigames

I’m pretty minigame-pilled after working on Outlaw Country for so long. I think they’re fun at the table, they keep things fresh, and they create a clear separation of concerns.

• Jumpspace as a “downtime” game
• Derelicts as dungeons?
• As per usual, there’ll definitely be a shootout game
• When it comes to spaceships, I think I could support a few different flavors. Maybe some of these would be mutually exclusive, because they assume different things about how spaceships work:
  • Intercept Course: For groups who don’t want to deal with spaceship fights. The battle is decided in one roll and the losers end up dead or lifepodded.
  • Swooshy! Probably an adaptation of my Super Bandit dogfighting rules, focusing on small craft zipping around like airplanes in space.
  • Battlestations: For the group who wants to crew a single spaceship, probably most analogous to starship combat in other games.

Tech Levels Vibes

As reductive as calling something “vibes” sounds, I honestly feel that categorizing a wide-ranging universe by vibes is the right move.

Coretech

You need a place to start. Think cassette futurism, Star Wars, MCU-in-space. I call it “Core”tech because it’s the baseline but if we assume there are “Core Worlds” in the setting we can make it diagetic.

Slicktech

This is the sufficiently advanced shit. Star Trek, Eldar, Protoss. Glowing bits, smooth lines, technobabble.

Bugtech

Organic technology. Living ships (Farscape), Zerg rushes, body horror, and alien weirdness. Cenobites and carapaces.

Hardtech

“Plausible” sci-fi tech. Spin gravity, firearms, possibly even wired/analog systems.

Wiztech

This works because of Actual Space Magic. Or possibly psionics. Look, if you have to explain it, it’s slicktech. If it just works, it’s wiztech.

Scraptech

For your apocalypse worlds or regressed barbarian planets. Think Borderlands, Mad Max, 40K Orks.

Raytech

From “raypunk”. It’s retro slicktech. Fins on everything, sleek tail-sitter rockets, and jetpacks for everyone.

Worldbuilding

We’ve somewhat handled the “nomad” part – what about the “galaxy” part?

Last year I got two very inspiring books. One’s for generating spaceships, while the other is for that plus everything else. That’s right, I’m going to use An Infinity of Ships alongside The Perilous Void for generating a place to play.