Stranger Stars #02: Classes, Trauma Responses, and Abilities

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Characters 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.

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Stranger Stars #01: Putting Canon Back into the Anti-Canon

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One 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:

99 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.

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