Star Frontiers Campaign 2024

This year, I would like to run a Star Frontiers Campaign. I have a couple of ideas of what I'd like to do. I'd like to have a mystery to investigate. 

Let's start with the characters. They are not newbies. They have survived the events of Volturnus modules. To that end, they are in advanced officer training and learning to crew a spaceship. 

In my campaigns, spaceship skills are selectable from the get-go. These characters have 20 experience points for anything they like from the Alpha Dawn set and 10 experience points to spend on one spaceship skills. The players have one special option at character generation - they can trade 1 exp point for 1,000 credits. This pairs nicely with the 20 exp for any AD skill. The characters will be nicely equipped with the expectation everyone has one or more guns. 

I don't believe in yanking the character's equipment at the start of the adventure. 

Next, the characters have a home base, a planet named Typhon. It's a water world with underwater living quarters. The population is small, but growing after the war. The planet features a chain of islands around the equator. There are many aquatic animals in the planetary ocean and more than a few amphibians inhabiting the island. Even the bird and rat-like creatures are amphibians. It is an interesting world without too much excitement. Typhon is one of those "best-kept secrets" planets, beautiful and safe, not well known yet and not completely explored.  

Also in the Typhon system is the planet Dust. This planet is barely habitable, but the low-oxygen atmosphere is great for storing and repairing spaceships. It is a base for training future astronauts. It isn't as dangerous as training in a vacuum. All species hate the environment, it requires suits for comfort but you can survive on the surface. Just barely. Typical stints on Dust last between a month and 3 months. The planet has one main base and dozens of smaller bases scattered here and there. 

If you weren't learning how to be an astronaut, you'd have no reason to visit and even less to stay. Everyone, including the general staff, tries to speed run any necessary tasks to get back to the comfort of Typhon. Failing that, a tiny ship and a hard vacuum would do. 

Now we are to the meat of the setting. There has been a rash of incidents where the visitors to Dust go missing. They vanish after leaving Dust for other destinations. This is bizarre because they spend some time at the destination getting settled, checking in with friends and family, and getting spotted on plenty of security cameras. Then they are gone. The one commonality is they disappear at night. No bodies have been found, no ransom remains, there is no pattern to the destinations, and no foul play is evidenced but is obviously suspected. 

Since the Sathar and their agents have been sent packing, it is an interplanetary locked room mystery for the players to solve.  

Star Frontiers: Alpha Dawn
At DriveThruRPG

I picked up the print copy of AD from DriveThruRPG. The printing is excellent, the binding looks sharp and clean.  

Ode-No! to the 10 Page Character Background

A picture shares 1000 words. 

Everyone has had that 10-page character background story show up at the table. I don’t mind, but there are limits. When I go into a campaign, I have less than a 10-page setting outline and there is an excellent chance that I can tag off of a player’s writings and interject some of those things into the game. 

So, I am looking at this whole process of ideation for a completely different reason. At the moment, I have limited access to rule sets and want to make sure I have everything I need to play a campaign. This is a solo venture, I have no players because I don’t know if I have items I need. 

Funny that I don’t know what items I need. 

One of my anonymous readers, whom I shall call “Blackrazor” because his mom did not name him that, gave me a boatload of stuff to get started. The Basic and Expert rule set and dice. Technically, that’s all I need. The links will take you to DriveThruRPG.

Last year, I backed Todd Leback’s Into the Wild. I really want to use that book, too. 

Just before this adventure began, I ordered a hard copy of Rules Cyclopedia, which strongly mirrors what I was trying to do with e1 back in 1980. Between the stuff from Blackrazor, my luck, and ordering habits, I think I have all I need. But I will test that by engaging in some solo play. 

I want 6 adventurers. That gives me an Elf, a Dwarf, a Magic User, a Fighter, and two Clerics. I feel pretty good with this creeping capitalization. Today is a new start, and I am not sure how I was blogging class titles before. So, caps for classes. 

Now, who is the “hero” of this story? The party, all 6 of them. So they need a reason to be together or character background. How many pages does that take? I don't know. Let us see. 

When I rolled these characters, I threw an additional 1d6 for level:

1-3 is first level, 

4-5 is second, and

6 is 3rd level. 

So I have a first-level Elf, Magic-User and Cleric. I have a 2nd level elf and fighter and a 3rd level cleric. I’ve decided that no one has magical equipment at this point, but they do have transportation, which is sometimes better than magical items. 

Why are they together and where?

Let’s start with the young Magic-User. He is really smart and very young, say 16 years old. He is the 9th child of a well-to-do stationer. 

What’s a stationer? It used to be that people came to town on market day and threw their wares out and had people buy off a blanket, wagon, cart, etc. A stationer was a person who sold goods that were not easily transportable or too fragile to handle the weather, therefore they needed an actual shop. Back in the day, the first of these were scribes, they provided goods and were “stationary” by definition. Think of them as the mall’s anchor stores. That definition solidified into the definition of their trade goods, “stationary”. 

As the 9th child of this stationer, I need to tell you a bit about this family. The Magic-User is named Charles, whom everyone calls “Chuckie”. Charles Sr. hates this and wants his son to leave home and name “Chuckie” behind to get a proper education. 

So, we have a bit of the story. Young Chuck is going places. Let’s circle back to Charles Sr. for a moment. He didn’t start out as a bookseller, he was conscripted into the army. After a single campaign, he lucked out and was granted a small but rich plot of land. He got married and had 2 boys with his first wife. His first wife died of the plague. 

When he remarried, he granted his oldest boys the farm while Dad started milling. One of the boys enjoyed farming, while the other was interested in seed stock and seedlings. They tagged off of each other’s skills to become successful. Dad was still doing good work of the land as a miller, which allows his boys to capitalize off of super cheap milling prices. 

Charles Senior’s second wife produced a trio of girls, plus one more son. The son got into cattle ranching, while 2 of the two of the girls married well and the third daughter became a priestess. 

Unfortunately, the second wife died giving birth and poor Charles senior had to remarry again. This time it worked out fine. Chuckie is the youngest of the children, he has two older sisters plus the brood of much older siblings.  

Charles Sr.'s current wife is an illuminator, an artist specializing in books. This was Charles Sr.'s final career change, to stationer. He buys skins and papyrus from his children’s farms or ranches and provides these materials to his daughter’s convent. It's a good deal for all.

Chuckie has a best friend in similar shoes. His name is Avfin, and he aspires to be a Bishop. His dad works for Charles Sr. The two young men will be traveling to a larger town for schooling. 

I am nowhere near 10 pages at this point, so let’s throw Alice into the mix. Alice is an elf who lives at the edge of town. She is friends with Avfin and Chuckie despite being wildly older than them. As if being an elf in a human town isn’t odd enough, she is a free spirit who runs wild all over the surrounding countryside, much to the consternation of her family. Think hippy-chick. 

Her parents have done backflips to make sure she gets in with Avfin and/or Chuckie in the hopes that she will learn to read and wear shoes. When they heard that Avfin and Chuckie were leaving, they encouraged Alice to tag along, as the boys will need someone with animal and wilderness knowledge with them. Hopefully, she’ll grow up on this adventure. Surprisingly, she threw herself into the adventure with gusto despite her parent’s blessing. Alice also stole her mother’s boots and sword, plus her dad’s chainmail suit. 

This is just one page, and I still have 3 more characters to describe: 

Nicholas, a 3rd level cleric,
his second-level fighter bodyguard, Gaelin, 

and a second-level dwarf named Wralin. 

Nicholas is one of Charles Sr.’s war buddies. Army life wasn’t for either of them, but Nick has made his way as a chaplain and researcher for the army. He is currently transporting religious relics and magical writings to a large monastery. Since he was passing through anyway, he agreed to keep an eye on Chuck and his friends on their journey. 

Gaelin, Nick’s bodyguard, doesn't like his job. It takes him away from the glorious, but also a non-existent battlefield. He is thankful to have Chuck, Alice, and Avfin along as the kiddos are happy to gather firewood, start fires and take care of the animals. 

Wralin the Dwarf is unusual. Like all dwarves, he has an eye for construction and mining. But he has a greater passion, horses. He can assess an equine just as well as other dwarves can spot a good diamond. Oddly, he rides a mule named Sneer instead of a horse. Sneer thinks she is a warhorse. She is very comfortable on the battlefield and when dealing with monsters.  

At this point, I have roughly covered more than a dozen different characters. Their backgrounds are pretty cool, and if I went 1 by 1, each character could have one handwritten index card of biographical information. 

So in getting these 6 characters ready, I have a lot of campaign information at my fingertips. 

The kingdom is at peace, but there was a war in the recent past. There are many villages and cities to see, some of which have schools and monasteries. A network of roads and probably caravans exists. The army is forced to do non-combat tasks because the Lord or Lady of the land is doing some sort of recon and resource exploitation. In peacetime, the leadership is getting ready to engage in warfare or negotiate a peace. Humans and demi-humans work together. We’ve mentioned that monsters roam and some characters have encountered them. 

Rather than a 10-page character background, I have a 2-page campaign primer, which includes much of the character backgrounds that I would need as a DM. The players could refine these starting points to make the characters their own. 

So much for the 10-page background. Two is more than sufficient. 

Peninsula of Plenty Campaign - Background Information

My Peninsula of Plenty campaign kicked off the other night. Things are still being worked out with the players, but I would like to give a brief game report in my next post. This post, I would like to focus on background.

First, The Peninsula of Plenty is based on Roman history and mythology. My game map is still in pro-type mode and has a scale of six miles per hex. It is roughly the same size as Italy.

The capital is located on the west coast of the Peninsula. It extends eastward for approximately 2/3 of the landmass and southwards a good ways. The Empire started off as a small town, expanded to a Republic and then to an Empire just like them Roman. This culture has existed in some form or another for 1,200 years. It has fallen into stagnation.

What is different about this culture? Well, there are elves, dwarves, gnomes, halflings plus a whole cast of monsters. In this setting, the dwarves occupy a couple of hundred miles around an ancient volcano on the eastern lobe of the Peninsula. They represent the various hill tribes that engaged the Romans. Halflings are invaders/refugees from over the northern mountains, gnomes are friendly towards all and the half-elves are trusted by none. On the far east coast is the Capital of the Elves and their clients the half-orcs. The elves arrived from over the sea, and represent Hannibal and the Carthaginians. For a long time, it looked as if Roman would never be free of Hannibal. Just imagine if Hannibal had magic.

Half-elves are the most prevalent race on the Peninsula, They are viewed as monsters or misbegotten children by humans and deformed but still loved creatures by the elves. The elven Kingdom believes that they have magically devolved from true elves, while the humans believe they they are the offspring of evil, horrible elves and the innocent human victims they prey upon. While neither humans or elves will treat with them as a political power, they are free to move throughout the Peninsula. Other races like them just fine.

The human Empire clashed with the elves and dwarves over slavery. The Elves forced the Empire to give up non-human slaves. This was devastating to the human economy. In just one generation, the Emperor realized he couldn't defeat the elves and in an effort to save face, presented the idea that the legendary culture which the empire was founded upon never really endorsed slavery. He was a manumissions, as opposed to an out and out abolitionist. In this way, he prevented the general public from lashing out at non-humans in a way that would create an unwinnable war. For the Emperor, it was not merely lip service, but for general public, the reception of freedom for all was not established. Debates and outright war over slavery has racked the human Empire for centuries, keeping them from dominating the Peninsula.

The human Empire, (which I have not named yet) needs to secure it's southern flank from sea raiders. They would very much like to believe that it is the elves, but it isn't the elves. To this end, they will be deploying the 55th Legion to the area. The Fighting Five-Five, will take the role of sailors, based out of the city of Tabletop*.

Since the loyalist town of Tabletop is outside of the controlled border of the Empire, the Emperor's Council has employed the PC to blaze a trail of exploration to the town. The characters are also charged with checking on the Compass Rose Inn, a former Keep on the southern border. This was done in the spirit of the module X-1 Isle of Dread.

In the very next post, I will detail the PC's adventures so far.

*Why did I name a major city Tabletop? As a child I used to fish and swim off of some submerged, tabletop like slabs of concrete on the shores of Lake Ontario. It became a part of most of my campaigns and neither I, nor my players every made the connection between "Tabletop Games" and "The Town of Tabletop" since all of us have been to this real life location which appears in most of my campaigns.

River's Rest - Ships and Dust Background Information

I was wondering why there was so much dust in River’s Rest. It turns out that River’s Rest is modeled on Andalusia in Spain.

Andalusia is a mediterranean climate and experiences both torrential rains and cool dry spells. This was revealed by Scribes on the forum.

Perhaps the image on the left is the hills where the Kakore was harvested for my runestaff.

I think it is wonderful.

The current descriptions go back to Bradach and Jineer. They gave the town a dry and dusty flavor, with vague hints of Middle Eastern Culture. I would describe it as Moorish, but Middle Eastern fits, too.

Another possible easter egg in the town is the inexplicable model ship available at Bertha’s. It might have been modeled on the ship in MYST, however no clear evidence of this exists. There is a couple of ships in the River’s Rest environ’s, so this could be completely independent of the MYST ship.