Friday night, Margie and Randy and I sat down with Doyce to start building stuff for our playtest of Galactic, under development by the guy who wrote Primetime Adventures. The results, lovingly documented by Doyce,are over here.
For those as aren’t interested, you can skip over the cut …
In short, Galactic is a relatively simple-mechanic system to frame a space adventure RPG. Much of the activity ties into the game setting itself: The planet Caliban is only recently (and tenuously) united, as it’s realized that its humanity is all that remains of a huge galactic empire that fell before the “Scourge” a thousand years earlier. The Concordance of planetary territories is slowly colonizing worlds around it (all of which are much nicer, which makes you wonder why the saintly founder
of Caliban chose that particular overly-harsh planet), and encountering both alien races (all of which remember, mostly unfondly, the vanished “hoo-mans”) and the ruins of humanity’s past glories. (The setting reminds me a bit of David Weber’s “Mutineer’s Moon” trilogy, if a bit smaller in scale.)
Some fun parts of the system and setup to date:
- Each player is a captain of a ship. You decide what kind of ship, what it’s doing, etc., as well as RP your captain. Generally speaking, the idea is you’re going to be exploring, pushing the envelope of the Concordance space.
- Every player is also (as a different character) part of the crew of each other’s ships (which allows for separate stories that involve all players). Game mechanic-wise, the impact of these crew is fairly limited, but RPwise it should be fun. So, yes, in total each player gets to play (N=players) characters. This is reminiscent of our house rule playing the lackeys in Nobilis.
- The players get to design factions in the universe, which reminded me greatly of the Lexicon game, as each faction implies or ties into other factions, defined as yet or not. Given that Caliban’s unity amongst its territories is fragile at best, and you also get the whole homeworld/colonies thang — and not even getting into other alien races — factions let the players create complications and the flavor for the universe.
- As each game session moves to new planets, the building of the planet and the plots to deal with there are collaboratively built — mostly by the player involved, but with contributions from the GM and other players.
- The star map is defined through coin tosses onto a hex grid, which is kind of silly but does make for a random-looking map.
- The ultimate goal seems to be facing the Scourge, learning its mystery, and somehow defeating it. Which seems a very tall order for a single ship, but, then, that’s the way novels work. How much it could be divorced from that setting, and how different (fundamentally) each campaign would be, remains to be seen.
That’s the gist of it. The actual dice mechanics and the like aren’t too complex (to the extent that we’ve gotten into them). There are a fair number of rules and systems, but they’re mostly to provide guidance for fleshing out the characters, universe, and plots. Our entire first session was getting things set up, so actual gameplay has yet to commence.
Given that this is actually a playtest is kind of fun — it provides an opportunity to provide feedback that a normal game might not. Though, to be honest, we’re usually quick to identify flaws and gotchas and bitches about the rule book and the like. The system, thus far, seems pretty complete — I feel more “beta” in my testing than anything else, and there have been no glaring holes, just a couple of items for suggestion (e.g, a trader/merchant archetype).
Looking forward to the next game.
(And let me just note, parenthetically, that it was fun having Margie there to play with — er, alongside. I enjoy our time apart, but I usually enjoy our time together more.)