Stars Without Number Campaign 1: Session I

I’ve spent the last several weeks getting my Stars Without Number campaign going and yesterday was our first session after player vetting, interviews, a practice one-shot, and character creation/premise set up. This first part will be a bit long as there are character introductions and whatnot. I plan on mixing a bit of narrative play with my processes as a games master, and just writing the session summaries as I find the most fun to write, rather than to meet any kind of entertainment goal. The campaign is anticipated to last around 10-20 sessions at most, though we’ll see how well it lends itself to a natural end. Additionally, as a forewarning, I will be abandoning a fair bit of SWN’s default lore in favour of a more sci-fi kitchen sink space-opera tale, but some parts of it are kept to keep things coherent and to have a solid foundation to go off of. I also do not claim any of the following tales or designs are a reflection of how anything would actually function in the real world scientifically or physically, though I do try to keep it consistent and fair and how I would think things would work out logically. But I’m not here to do extensive science homework – I’m here to just tell people where to aim their sick laser pistols. My sincerest apologies in advance to the hardcore science fiction nerds, the physicists, and the chemists in the world.

With that out of the way, let’s get on with the show! Warnings for today: suffocation, drugs, alcohol, and human death & suffering ahead. The backstories are still pretty loose to start, but our cast consists of:

Blanche (23, she/her), the former “Cat’s Cradle” courier company driver. Pilot. Uplifted actual cat. Ran off with her company’s free merchant and cargo, and decided a life of smuggling drugs will get more money for her poor family back home. Also, kind of doesn’t want to go to jail after stealing the ship. Currently presumed dead by her former employer.

Hermes Hurtwell (18, he/him), our child prodigy software engineer (worked for Cat’s Cradle) turned space hacker. graduated young and entered the workforce too early – he quit his company in absolute rage and figures he can make better use of his skills on the black market. Not on good terms with his former employer.

Caitlin Wynter (23, she/her), a psychic goth theatre kid – took out a student loan through some sort of space mafia-type business and now they’re after her head. Not on good terms with said space mafia.

“Pillboi” (late 20s, he/him), resident ‘medical professional’. Sells drugs. Has a sick neon mohawk. Dips into his own supply, and would like to use the party’s free merchant courier ship to fund his new entrepreneurial operation of drug growing and smuggling. The rest of the crew seems to be on board. Has past connections with space mafia.

Let’s set the stage: it’s New Year’s Eve, December 31st 3199, and these four future entrepreneurs are having a party to ring in the new century. It’s Hermes’ 18th birthday, he quit his job that morning, and he’s getting shitfaced at the bar complaining up a storm about how piss poor the processes were. Caitlin, enthused by his goth depressing demeanour and having lost her theatre friends in the massive crowds of people, hits him up to share a few drinks, as a nearby courier, Blanche, attempts to find the owner of a package (unsuccessfully). Exhausted from her shift, she joins the two of them in complaining about their career situations. The three of them have a progressively more and more depressing conversation about the state of the economy, where an enterprising Pillboi steps in to offer them a little something to cheer them up. After a bit of back and forth, the four of them continue their bar crawl late into the night and eventually come to a brilliant heavily intoxicated decision: the three of them will take Blanche’s work ship and join Pillboi on his drug selling business and become the “highest” self-employed entrepreneurs in the galaxy. There are rumours of a plant on Blanche’s home planet, Terra Purr’ma, that has interesting properties when ingested by humans (as opposed to the native uplifted cat folk). Taking a few doses of a substance only brought out for ‘special occasions provided by Pillboi, the four of them black out.

…They wake up in a random part of space a few days later – clearly having gotten up to some sort of business, and only vaguely recalling their plans to become “self-employed”. but they’ve gone too far now – Blanche won’t be able to keep her job after running off with the ship, Hermes and Catilin have nowhere else to go, and Pillboi is excited at their future prospects. They spend almost two weeks getting the remaining cargo illegally sold off, and scrape the id from the courier ship, upgrading it to something a little more befitting of budding space adventurers with the money earned. They have a hefty 25 000 credits leftover to kickstart their pharmaceuticals business and decide to start getting a laboratory set up.

A lot of the above scenes were roleplayed out for fun, and to get folks’ feet wet in figuring out their characters, but had been decided ahead of time during character creation by the entire group as the premise-buy in (they said the concept of ‘The Hanover: In Space’ was hilarious) as to how their adventure started. I did not plan on running for a group of drug-smuggling bastards, but I appreciated the energy and I’m down for it. Please note that I, along with many of my players, haven’t done anything more than drink a few shots in my life, so a lot of the drug nonsense is truly nonsense. We plan on handling addiction fairly tastefully but a lot of it will be played for laughs as far as the party is concerned (not so much for my NPCs). It’s a group of ragtag idiots in a very harsh, very real and unforgiving world. So, from here, I set them down on a nearby planet, Kalmar, to acquire some materials to set up their lab, and gave them a bit of a primer for the locale:

Kalmar, is a planet in which breathable oxygen is at a premium. The dominant gas is sulfuric; if there was water on the surface, it’s evaporated due to the greenhouse effects reflective sulfur clouds would cause, and most of it is imported heavily from off-planet. Anyone venturing out into the sandy wastes needs a hefty oxygen supply. Settlements are either pod-like or underground where it’s cooler and water may still be available – however, they need to be fairly resistant to damage against the tunnelling, massive worms that occupy most of the surface of the planet. The largest settlement on the planet is also the oldest and has seen a long period of wear and repair, at this point looking as though it is barely held together with scraps.

The planet itself is rich in valuable minerals as well as a unique resource – calvinite, which is used to create speciality ship jump drives, among other things (such as purification for certain pharmaceuticals…), and day labourers are paid well for the dangerous conditions. Kalmar itself did not have a native sapient population but has been since colonised by a wide variety of intelligent life forms from across the galaxy. Most of the labourers on the planet are the ‘Futzes’, whose unique bodies can quickly adapt to extreme temperature changes and require very little water; and as such, do not require expensive habitation equipment to venture outside of settlements (though they still need a mobile oxygen source to breathe, and protection from the toxic gas). That said, as oxygen is rationed, a large number of the population has suffered severe health problems, which has put most of the settlers in extreme medical debt.

The mines, as the players arrive, are closed as of yesterday – the giant sandworms have unfortunately started their mating season much, much earlier than expected and the main major mine had to do an emergency shut down. Most of the valuable minerals have been pulled, and due to the perceived upcoming shortage, none of the calvinite that the players are after are for sale. However, a young Futz named Basil is ready to offer the players exclusive ‘back-alley’ access to the mines. It’ll be dangerous, with the worms about, and they’ll have to pay him for equipment and oxygen supplies (he’s trying to fund his brain surgery after an accident), but they can go in. A lot of the material is already mined, they just have to hope that they’re lucky enough to find cases of it left behind by the fleeing miners.

As a GM, I looked into a number of ways to handle this mission – I could put a fair amount of prep into it as thanks to our agreed-upon premise and time skip, I could start them in media res at Basil’s ‘shop’ preparing to go in, rather than risk them faffing about with other decisions, so we could kick things off with a bang before the sandbox opened up, and get them in a situation with clear goals. I decided to go with a miniature hexcrawl – it would allow them to learn the process of the hexcrawl, how I roll per hex at a smaller and faster pace, which will help them when we move to the larger hex-based space map when travelling to various planets (I’m going with the Planetville trope, here, for this campaign), and it gives a good look into the more nuanced approach to attrition and resource-management required in OSR systems. I think as new players (3/4 have only ever really played D&D5e) it’s a good way to showcase the style of play a fair bit. It’s also, technically, my first time using a crawl-styled structure and I wanted a space where I too could really grok the mechanics before moving to a larger space where things might have a different scale, and larger stakes.

I started with 60 hexes (later adjusted to I think 62 just to allow for some spacing issues on my VTT, Foundry) and then started decorating. Basil would send the players through one exit (bottom centre), and mention that while there are two other exits (on the left and right sides) that could be used in the case of emergencies, this was the only exit that he could guarantee would be unguarded, so no one would run the risk of being arrested for trespassing (and potentially theft). I wanted multiple exits because one of the main mechanics I decided on was for every hex moved, there would be a 10%+ increase of a sandworm tunnelling in and collapsing the tunnel behind them (so they wouldn’t be able to move back to the previous hex). Somewhat inspired by the ‘churn’ mechanics of The Expanse RPG, (and out of a back-and-forth discussion with other GMs), I basically tallied up the percentage change and rolled a d10, resetting the total chance to 0% after a worm was triggered. Each hex required 1 unit of oxygen per player to navigate (Basil sold each unit at 50 credits apiece), and they could expend an additional unit to dig through caved-in sections, do a more thorough exploration of the hex, etc. I scattered a number of hexes where 1d4 units of calvinite could be found, as well as three 1d4x2 caches of extra oxygen throughout. The players had two carts that each held 30 units of material (either oxygen or calvinite). I made it two carts as I wanted to give them the option to split up and cover more ground if they wanted (which they did opt to do). There were eight encounter hexes which I rolled on a table for, and minecarts that went one way, taking them through the caves faster, but the players wouldn’t know where they would end up and would need to ensure they had enough oxygen to get back from wherever the carts had taken them (somewhat inspired by Snakes & Ladders).

The players opted to purchase the full 3000 credits worth of 60 units of oxygen, confident they could make the money back with the acquisition of enough calvinite, and split into teams of two – giving them 15 hexes of movement each, barring any complications. The groups also had access to suits that, if the players ran out of oxygen, would inject a chemical into their bodies that would save their lives and allow them to subsist for a time without (but at the cost of severe lung and brain damage). I wanted to include these because, as helpfully pointed out by a fellow GM, “is it really fun if the players all suffocate to death alone in caves during the first session”? Probably not, so best to have some ’emergency contraceptive’ in the case of an accidental TPK. Back to the narrative:

Pillboi and Hermes trudged cautiously through the caverns – there wasn’t much to see in this area of the recently-abandoned mineshafts, but they had two nerve-wracking run-ins with tunnelling cave worms, and opted to adjust their route to proceed more carefully. Pillboi heard whispers in a room up ahead – and found two other rival ‘entrepreneurs’ scouring the caves in discount suits (presumably also sold by Basil) in search of calvinite. Knives out, and pistols drawn, the two pairs nervously faced off in a stalement, neither interested in risking their lives over some rocks. Hermes and Pillboi decided to imitate security guards, checking the caves for straggling miners, and convinced the two men to give up their stolen goods in exchange for additional oxygen to assist in their swift exit from the caves. With the agreement in place, and tensions lowering, the two groups split off in opposite directions – only for Hermes and Pillboi to find themselves stuck at a large crevasse, their only change of passage being to backtrack and dig through the previously collapsed tunnels in order to make their way back. Arriving at the entrance with just three units of calvinite, and barely two units of oxygen to spare, the two waited patiently for their other half of the party to arrive.

While this was happening, Blanche and Caitlin were heading in the opposite direction. Immediately upon splitting with Pillboi and Hermes, the two found themselves in a room filled with shallow puddles of water. Testing for acid, they safely trudged through the harmless brackish ponds, but not without causing a fair amount of noise to echo through the tunnels… Not wanting to risk the unwanted attention of the sandworms, or worse things, the two opted to ride the rail carts deeper into the mines. This proved fruitful, as they found several caches of supplies, including some mining equipment and spare oxygen tanks, and three units of calvinite. Making their way back towards the exit, the two heard the wheezing, rasping breath of a slowly suffocating unknown. The two looked at each other, and looked at their supply… they were too deep in the mines, and couldn’t afford to provide any oxygen or assistance to the dying one. Blanche and Caitlin hurriedly avoided the person in trouble, and snuck off into the dark, the desperate breathing ceasing quietly behind them. Not completely heartless, however, the two found another twitching, desperate soul that had used their emergency injection to stall their death, and loaded them onto the cart, sacrificing some of their cargo space. The two managed to meet up with Pillboi and Hermes at last, narrowly escaping one final collapsing cavern behind them, the worms tunnelling away, leaving the mine inaccessible from this entrance…

We called it there – a good 2.5-hour-long session. The person in need of medical aid was handed over to Basil to escort to a nearby medical facility, their goods brought to their ship and borrowed carts returned. XP was given out, and character advancements are to be processed over the upcoming week prior to the next session.

There are a few things I’d change: I would probably telegraph the ‘churn’ mechanics a bit more – no harm done, but I think it would have ramped up the suspense/stakes a fair bit. I think the number of encounters could have been increased on the board – there were a few too many empty hexes (but the length of the session overall was also quite well-paced, so I’m not sure about this one). I went back and forth between each group to give each of them equal screentime, though at one point a player had to grab a salad and it threw the balance a little off-kilter when continuing to play around it, I think it all worked out in the end. I would definitely do a 2 hexes-per group alternation in the future. One hex is a bit too short, especially if nothing is there, but more than two hexes mean things can drag on (especially if one side runs into a lot of encounters). I do want to keep timekeeping consistent between the groups as each one can affect the whole map with cave-ins. Overall, the numbers seemed fair, and other than potentially tweaking the value of everything depending on the campaign being run, I think it overall came out great! My players (one of whom is a GM himself) thought it was an excellent structure to run the session’s goals in. One other thing that was a bit unprecedented was the group wanted to keep the oxygen tanks and suits for ‘future missions’ – which I suppose I now ought to plan on including! I think I’ll probably run something similar underwater in a future session, and see if I can improve on the design a bit…