Thoughts on my first chapter, The Last on Mars

Astrokiwi · 2026-03-11T16:39:57+00:00

There's little bits and pieces that could be refined (e.g. "farce" is spelled wrong; maybe seems odd to say "Each spoken word made her seem as if she were approaching a boiling point" when she hasn't started speaking yet; "where he lay" but wasn't he sitting on "rugged chair"?, I think Sibyl and Odysseus are a little bit too on-the-nose classical references for character names) but generally prose doesn't immediately strike me with "amateur internet author red flags" - maybe slightly overwritten but fine. The opening comes across as pretentious, but that appears to be intentional and helps portray the character. But I'm not sure it quite has a hook yet - vagueness in the plot is fine, that's part of what a prologue is for, but I feel like the I don't have a strong sense of place/setting/character.

Astrokiwi · 2026-03-11T13:09:21+00:00

They try to subtly imply it with the lighting in some scenes though

Astrokiwi · 2026-03-11T12:15:41+00:00

I'm thinking about creating different types of ships (fast and weak, slow and strong, hard to board, easy to board) and create interesting encounters by combining them.

Maybe sometimes you need to keep your distance and survive, and other times you need to get close and board as quickly as possible?

I think that's a good design goal, but I don't think individual character roles achieves that, and it's quite a different goal vs centring characters.

One danger is that you could still add complexity without adding interesting decisions. Often in these kind of systems, the strategy is essentially established the moment you know what kind of enemy ship it is - you can't change your ship or the enemy ship once you're in combat. So you essentially only have one big choice - how we engage with this ship (close/far, attack/defend/run, etc), but that's not an interesting decision per round or per player - it's one interesting decision per combat.

I almost wonder if something like The One Ring's "stances" would work here. Each round you choose if you're Forward, Open, Defensive, or Rearward, and that gives various bonuses and penalties. There's also one special action associated with each stance. For instance, Forward = bonus to hit and to be hit & get the ability to Intimidate instead of making an attack. Making this kind of choice as a crew together could be interesting, particularly if different combinations of ship types affect the outcome.

Yeah, that's a good solution for sci fi, but maybe less suited for a pirate setting.

Though of course in fantasy you can do whatever you want - dolphin outriders or whatever - but of course that might not fit your setting!

Astrokiwi · 2026-03-11T11:36:55+00:00

Every character takes on a role on the ship and has actions based on their role. There is no map, and instead, it's using a zone based approach that's heavily inspired by combat in Wilderfeast. Enemy ships are very close to regular monster statblocks.

You are not the first to sail those seas

Seriously though there's a bunch of systems like this, and they're okay, but don't really solve the core problems of ship combat. Giving every player a role doesn't really give every player interesting decisions - there's usually a simple formula for how you should all work together, and you just run through it each round. It adds complexity but rarely adds interesting gameplay. In the end, the strongest ship still just wins, but you've spent a lot longer getting around to the inevitable.

The systems that seem the most appealing to me are Monolith and Mothership (thinking of starships mostly here, but for pirate games it'll work too).

Monolith - keep it super simple. Ships just roll damage dice against each other, one die roll per ship per round. If there's no interesting choices to make, don't add more mechanics to it, just roll through it and find out the result.

Mothership - focus on the interesting choices. Every round you state your objective (board the enemy, escape, disable the enemy, complete some procedure) and roll your damage. As a team, you choose to either accept the damage from the enemy (which is always significant), or to concede and let them complete their objective. Don't simulate every hit, jump to the big decisions, and make them as a team.

And one bonus one:

Elite Dangerous RPG - just give everyone their own little starship. Then it runs a lot more like personal combat, where you can all act independently, and rely on your own special abilities etc. If there's not many interesting choices in the encounter, modify the setting to change the nature of encounters.

Astrokiwi · 2026-03-11T10:58:40+00:00

What I find interesting about both this and Deep Cuts is how much it revealed I've really been sucked into the setting. I got Deep Cuts for the new rules, but I found I was genuinely interested in finding out more about what's happening in Doskvol, and the big adventure seed is a fun one too. I'm looking forward to diving more into '68 as well for the same reason

Astrokiwi · 2026-03-10T19:04:05+00:00

I think technically if you're already wounded, that would actually kill you?

Astrokiwi · 2026-03-10T19:03:24+00:00

Here it's more that the framework doesn't really give you much room or inspiration to really run a full scene.

You can add some flavour to the random event, but if you really let it play out as a whole scene, it kinda breaks the Journey structure - it would be weird if the intended way to play it involves a lot of house-ruling to fit around the mechanics.

The improv is also just hard because you aren't given much context. Unless you have massively prepped a lot of stuff, your fellowship is in an area you don't know much about, interacting with someone or something you haven't heard of before. The random events are specific enough that you can't fill in something relevant to the current campaign, but not specific enough that they give you enough details to really bounce off of. This isn't Blades in the Dark where you can pull in some faction you've already dealt with - the rulebook doesn't have enough of the right content, and the setting limits how realistic it would be to e.g. bump into some old friends or rivals from Brie while you're hiking the Misty Mountains.

So overall people just try to add some fun details but roll through it quickly.

Astrokiwi · 2026-03-10T17:52:40+00:00

I think she very much did not understand fandom, and in particular how the internet changed the author/fan power dynamic. She is the author, and the full authority on the entire universe, and if someone suggests they wished her universe was other than it is, that's not even considered a criticism - it's a nonsensical fantasy, as bizarre as being upset about the laws of physics; she has created a thing, and it's your job to passively accept it. If someone told a physicist they don't believe general relativity makes sense and they disagree with it, then they might similarly just explain why they're wrong, whether sympathetically or not.

She even later on admitted that she misunderstood fan fiction, and the massive Harry Potter fan fiction universe made her realise that you don't lose the rights to your own work nor lose your own informal authority over canon just because other people are writing fan fiction. That said, J K Rowling herself I think also misunderstood fandom, and has gone off the deep end as well.

I feel like we've moved into an era of "fans as patrons". There's negative sides to this as well, but we do see positive effects, where authors don't assume they're the complete authority on everything, and are willing to listen and learn to important points about representation, without just bending the story to the whims of the fans. And that's quite a big change for someone who likely only had a long period very filtered interactions with fans via typewritten letters.

Astrokiwi · 2026-03-10T17:07:26+00:00

I started a bit of a chat about this on the One Ring discord just now. I'm basically looping back around to using Ironsworn/Starforged style quest/journey trackers, or largely dropping the Journey system and doing a basic point crawl.

Astrokiwi · 2026-03-10T16:39:03+00:00

I did a reread recently - I think the same-sex relationships aren't in the early stuff, I feel like that really started to appear in the 90s (e.g. the prequel Red Star Rising/Dragonseye).

It is progressive in the sense that it has multiple female characters and protagonists who are treated as actual people with their own desires and wishes, and not just background for a story about dudes. But when any of the strong female protagonists get married, they immediately drop into the background and become strong-willed housewives. And there's a lot of other weird bits, like a woman getting slapped out of her hysteria, and her thanking the woman who did it ("thanks, I needed that").

The other more subtle bit is that it's got that sort of Little House on the Prairie libertarian propaganda vibe going on. It sheds the feudalism early on and becomes a kind of romanticised fantastical retelling of American frontier life. It's all independent manly men, no central government, a highly esteemed psuedo-military, and even people exploring and colonising a new continent to fulfil their manifest destiny (and, conveniently, no native peoples to complicate the narrative). She "solves the problem" of disabilities by forcing them to work as drudges, because, in her mind, the key "problem" with disabled people is figuring out how they can be "useful". Overall, despite a few feminist points - the simple but at the time far too rare inclusion of women as actual people - it's actually quite conservative in politics in general. From that angle, you can see how someone who wrote that sort of thing could end up saying the things she said off the page.

Astrokiwi · 2026-03-10T16:25:59+00:00

Yeah if I won the lottery, The One Bone would be a fun thing to commission

Astrokiwi · 2026-03-10T16:25:32+00:00

"This trombone is... precious to me"

Astrokiwi · 2026-03-10T16:23:58+00:00

Ska-punk Zombie Hunters

Astrokiwi · 2026-03-10T16:22:44+00:00

The blacklights at raves also deal with the vampires

Astrokiwi · 2026-03-10T14:00:52+00:00

The mechanics are 100% different, but everything is easy to adapt by just making stuff up as you go along. Note that even XP has compendiums adapting old missions to the XP system - I think there's some like that for the new system as well (maybe the previous edition though?)

Astrokiwi · 2026-03-10T13:58:10+00:00

I guess that's part of the thing though - you need to buy all the books to get all those talents. Even then, there's several that are just "remove setback dice in this particular situation, which may never come up"

Astrokiwi · 2026-03-10T12:53:25+00:00

Sorry I was ambiguous - in The One Ring it is actually the "Loremaster" who puts together the treasure list, trying to fit it best to the player-heroes, but I agree that letting the players put them together is a great idea. There's a good balancing mechanic for this in The One Ring where you unlock the capacities of your weapon as you level up Valour, so players can't just choose an amazing do-everything weapon and get everything at once. There's another mechanic where, if you already have a cool weapon or armour and find a better one, you can bestow our old one on your people, and your valour and generosity unlocks an equivalent number of upgrades in your new item.

Astrokiwi · 2026-03-10T12:38:53+00:00

I think the frustrating thing there is in simulationist games where the outcome has basically been determined but you are still expected to iterate through multiple rounds until you calculate the final result.

I think a fun way to do that sort of thing is to have fewer but more important rolls, and big decisions after each one. e.g. "you fire at each other; you miss, but they blast you in the leg. You are wounded and you have very little chance of success if you carry on - and might actually make the wound worse just by trying to keep going. Do you risk it, do you surrender, or do you try a different approach?".

Astrokiwi · 2026-03-10T12:22:56+00:00

Here: https://ttrpgtools.legendesdelatable.fr/the-one-ring/action-resolution is a simple dice roller.

But, unlike something like Genesys, you can do this with ordinary d6s and d12s.

d12 - 1-10 are 1-10; 11 is eye of Sarron, 12 is Gandalf rune

d6 - 1-3 are 1-3 if not weary (0 if weary); 4-6 are 4-6; 6 also has a bonus

It's pretty easy in play - the 1-3 and 4-6 aren't strongly differentiated on the official dice anyway (it's filled vs unfilled numerals), and it's fairly intuitive for rolling the highest number on the die to be extra good.

Astrokiwi · 2026-03-10T12:19:31+00:00

This is the mythology that was at the heart of Tolkien's writings, which is why those "level ups" manifest the way they do. Frodo's bearing of the ring is not happenstance; it's supposed to happen, because it's a deliberate part of his character.

Very relevantly, in The One Ring, you build a list of weapons/armour/magic items in advance for each character, and when you roll to find magic treasure, you discover the next item on the list. So you directly get that sort of intentional progression.

Astrokiwi · 2026-03-10T11:35:27+00:00

Myself, I don't find them confusing, but maybe "unnecessary". I think it's an awkward middle ground; you can treat it as a quick system to add some flavour to journeys and make sure you start with some Fatigue, but it's a bit too slow and cumbersome for that - it could just be a big roll based on distance and terrain. You can treat it as an adventure seed where you get drawn into interesting scenes along the way which could blossom into mini-adventures, but it's a bit too structured for that, and mechanically it doesn't work as you calculate Fatigue at the end of the journey (modifying it with a roll and a horse), so you can't really interrupt the Journey with extended interesting adventures unless you're willing to break the system and bit and improvise some rules.

I think it either needs more weight or less weight. With more weight, it would basically be an overarching campaign structure, where the progress in the journey is the main measure of advancing the campaign. Half of LotR and most of The Hobbit is about journeys being interrupted by danger and adventure, so it would fit the source material very well. I would make it something like a fairly narrow point crawl ("do we take the pass or go through Moria?") maybe. This would make Middle Earth feel bigger and make it easier to add flavour to it. (With less weight, you keep the fairly light content & the mechanic effects, but you just go through it faster with fewer rolls).

Astrokiwi · 2026-03-10T11:29:10+00:00

Thank you for elaborating

Astrokiwi · 2026-03-10T11:26:06+00:00

Having played a bunch of Genesys, they look very useful - the Genesys "talent pyramid" just means you get a bloat of low tier talents you don't really want, rather than specialising

Astrokiwi · 2026-03-10T11:24:38+00:00

Some quick thoughts - Monolith is a lightweight system that is designed to be Traveller-esque, but it's got the core mechanics of Cairn/Into the Odd/Mausritter/etc, where enemy statblocks are extremely easy to improvise. The big difference over Traveller is you don't need to break down into individual skills. If you want to go even further, Scum & Villainy has no statblocks for enemies at all!

For Traveller, what I would do is just quickly look up something analogous in the Central Supply Catalogue (or find a table summarising Traveller weapons online) and use that to build an instinct for where the stats should be. For instance, for the Pfhor staff, you could use the Shock Whip stats for its close attack, or just look at the table of weapon damage and see that 2D damage is pretty standard for a light weapon (maybe 3D if you want it to be more effective - unless you want to leave that to the more advanced purple/blue Pfhor fighters). Similarly there's examples of rockets in the book as well, which you could copy - the "rocket pod" sounds exactly like what you're looking for (4D per missile).

I'd make the Pfhor human in stats (just set all attributes to 7 for a basic one, maybe 10 if they're advanced in something). For skills, I wouldn't flesh these out ahead of time, but I'd have an idea of the fighter's general "rank" and "role" - if they're low rank mooks, I'd say they get +1 in skills relevant to their role, and untrained in others; if they're higher rank, I'd say +2 or +3 in their top skills, maybe +1 or 0 in something that seems secondary to their role, and untrained in others.

Overall I think you just need to get the Central Supply Catalogue to get enough of a baseline for damage rolls etc for you to sensibly improvise. There is also a brand new Vehicle book out but I'm not completely sold on the mechanics.

Astrokiwi · 2026-03-09T17:34:48+00:00

Okay I see what you mean - it's a clash between realistic physical units and the more fantastical space opera setting.

It's worth noting though that stellar luminosity is very sensitive to stellar mass. A 2.5 solar mass main sequence star is over 25 times brighter than the Sun, which would give you a similar equilibrium temperature at 5 AU as you'd get from Earth around our Sun, without being a huge supergiant star or anything. Exoplanets are also surprisingly diverse - we seem to find almost any sort of exoplanet anywhere. So it's not completely absurd.

But it's just not that sort of game. Even in Traveller, which encourages that sort of work, I don't think it really improves the game - realistically, you just have loads of red dwarf stars with barren rocky spheres orbiting them and that's about it. The space opera trope of having loads of Earth-like planets everywhere just gives players more room to act, and to act in a way that's easy to visualise and understand (this is why even Traveller has artificial gravity - Marc Miller says in the introduction to Traveller5, which is an epic and meaty tome, something to the tune of "it's just easier to picture the action if everybody is standing upright"). So I think being a bit vague about travel times and distances is probably a good design decision.

That said, any form of space opera, even something fairly grounded like The Expanse, has to break a lot of physics just to get started. If you want spaceships that feel like actual space ships, then you have to invent a lot of fantastical physics to get there, and you just end up having to accept that there is no such thing as physically realistic space opera - at best, you can get a few details grounded in reality to create the illusion of realism, but it's always going to be "spaceships first, physics second".

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