I recently replayed Pokemon Red for the first time in decades. Folks are talking about Pokemon whether it be in new video games, the cards, or even bringing them to the tabletop in new ways. It’s all got me thinking how I’d do Pokemon at my table. Here are some of rough ideas I cooked up while I was taking a shower.
Read MoreEarlier this week, Theo Sanderson released a map of 3.4 million Bluesky users, visualized by follower patterns. Because I have some sort of cursed brain, my first thought was “I wonder if I could use this as inspiration for an on-the-fly galactic sci-fi setting.” After thinking about it more, you definitely can, and I’ll show you how. Welcome to BLUESTAR!
Read MoreI’m planning to have unique Panic Tables for all six classes in Stranger Stars, my work-in-progress Mothership total conversion mod, which begs the question: What in the standard Mothership Panic Table is good? What’s bad? Can you write a whole blog post that is just a review of a single table?
That’s right. This is a review of all 20 entries on the Mothership Panic Table.
Read MoreCharacters are the window through which most players view the world of roleplaying games, and they are often where I start when designing a game or writing adventures.
For Stranger Stars, I’ve been building the character classes as a starting point to see what changes I’d like to make to Mothership’s core mechanics and how much of the setting I can hardcode into characters without limiting them in scope or diversity. Let’s dig into where I’m currently at with the 6 character classes and why I’m doing what I’m doing.
Read MoreOne of my background projects for the last few months has been picking away at what I’m calling a “total conversion mod” for Mothership - something akin to Cloud Empress in that it’s Mothership compatible but also so steeped in a particular setting and style as to be functionally its own game, like the total conversion mods of PC gaming yore.
My working title is Stranger Stars and the basic premise is:
Read More99 years after a wormhole gate leads humanity (and its largest corporations) to a new, resource-rich galaxy far across the observable universe, the gate collapses. In the Collapse, all ties with Earth and Milky Way are instantly and entirely severed. A century of chaos, corporate war, religious reawakening, and bitter survival followed.
Some cybernetically-enhanced humans are old enough to remember the original worlds of mankind, even Earth, but their numbers dwindle every day. Thousands more androids of that era, known now as Pregalactics, remain in operation either in their corporeal forms or as cores operating entirely within digital systems. They are the scholars of the Old Worlds.