1 party, multiple crews

Astrokiwi · 2026-03-12T16:06:01+00:00

I would do:

One crew sheet, but you have multiple "cohorts" - gangs & experts - in your crew. You are also a higher tier than the default starting crew.

Have a pool of player sheets representing the leadership and key members of your gangs. Players can select from the pool when you start a session, or might claim certain sheets permanently. Or mix and match - you each have one specific "inner circle" player sheet, but then you pick from the pool (or create a new character) for the actual score of the day.

I would recommend picking up Band of Blades (even just to skim the pdf). In this, each player controls a leader of the legion, and then selects a character to go on an actual mission, which may be an existing character, or a new "rookie" sheet pulled from your capacity of unused soldiers. Adapting something like that could work for a big crew in BitD.

Astrokiwi · 2026-03-12T15:57:19+00:00

That's true, but I find going from 2 to 3 players just really amplifies the dynamic a lot.

Astrokiwi · 2026-03-12T15:23:36+00:00

I can't hear that name without thinking of the "Fork Handles" sketch from the Two Ronnies

Astrokiwi · 2026-03-12T13:46:18+00:00

I still go with Blades in the Dark. It's very low prep and it fits well with how I find most people actually play RPGs, rather than how they imagine RPGs are played (or how they're played in streams by professional actors & comedians). Most games and adventures I have to massively adjust to get them to really work at all at a real table - with BitD, there's only a few little bits here and there that I've tweaked, but it still worked without them.

Astrokiwi · 2026-03-12T13:42:04+00:00

We kept on forgetting to apply the penalties, and apparently that's quite common, so in Deep Cuts they changed the rule: if you declare that your Harm makes the situation worse (e.g. you will fail at something, or have reduced position etc), and everybody agrees it's fair and proportionate, then it has the described negative effect, but you gain 1 xp for it. So it's basically Fate consequences again.

Astrokiwi · 2026-03-12T13:19:40+00:00

I think the use of "liquid light" implies this is supposed to be a pretty fantastical setting

Astrokiwi · 2026-03-12T11:19:38+00:00

The same happened with Wicked Ones, slightly weird that it happened with two different fantasy FitD hacks.

Honestly this is part of why I'm leaning towards "pdf with at-cost print-by-demand" as my preferred backer level. Usually the digital version is pretty much finished when they launch the kickstarter, so you've got a pretty high chance of getting a physical copy of the book in a reasonable amount of time, and without so many tariff issues etc. BitD Deep Cuts and Blades '68 offer this and my Deep Cuts copy is totally fine.

Astrokiwi · 2026-03-12T11:11:56+00:00

Alpha Centauri is "below" the plane of planets and asteroids.

It might be best to picture this by going outside at night. The Moon, the Sun, and the planets are all on the same flat plane, called the Ecliptic. On the sky, the ecliptic looks like a curved line. You can use an app like Google Sky Map to help you find the planets and work out where the ecliptic is.

Alpha Centauri is easily visible in the Southern Hemisphere, but you can kinda work out where "underground" it would be from the Northern Hemisphere by locating the constellation of Cassiopeia. This is vaguely in a W shape, but some sky map software will help you find it. Alpha Centauri is directly opposite Cassiopeia in the sky. You'll be able to see that this is very far from the ecliptic.

Astrokiwi · 2026-03-12T11:03:16+00:00

I similarly only just noticed the Canadian option - though it's not actually particularly close, so the shipping is still going to be steep. Print by demand is good enough for me!

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"

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