Stranger Stars #03: Building Factions & Creating Planets

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A key part of any setting-focused roleplaying game is… well… actually building that setting. For Stranger Stars, I’m hoping to strike my preferred balance of in-text worldbuilding which is enough to understand and envision a majority of the universe while leaving plenty of voids to be filled in at each table during play (or by the GM during their prep, if desired). Ideally, that will be something a bit more expansive than MÖRK BORG’s world information (12 or so pages in the BAREBONES EDITION) but far more streamlined/focused than a trad game’s setting section (which can easily be hundreds of pages long, if not being entire books unto themselves).

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Table Talk: Mothership's Panic Table

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I’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.

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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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