Same Old Space

And visiting the worst place ever from the comfort of your desk

This Week’s post ruminates on the familiar and the novel.

Circuits & Rallies

I’m back from holiday! I guess coming back to familiarity after a few weeks of novelty got me thinking.

Sometimes you repeat the same stuff over and over. Sometimes you breeze past stuff, never looking back. We’ll use an imperfect racing analogy of Circuits and Rallies.

Circuits are great because you get to revisit things, building a familiarity with them. In Intergalactic Bastionland this is the ship, where you regularly return to the same place with the same people.

Rallies are great because you’re experiencing a flurry of new material. In Intergalactic this is visiting worlds, where you get to experience a strange place and meet new people.

This isn’t a case of good vs bad. Both types of element have their advantages, but benefit from the other in order to shine.

And of course this usually isn’t a perfect fit. You can encounter new people and places within the ship, and you might revisit a contact when you go back to a world. The purpose of this idea is to consider whether your game would benefit from more of either type of content.

In my last Traveller campaign I think the crew visited eleven worlds, with no return visits. There were a few recurring NPCs, but they only encountered them on new worlds, usually requiring a little hijinks behind the curtain to get everyone in the right place on time. As such, it felt very rally-like, a road trip through space where the happenings on each planet felt quite disconnected from each other. It felt like a bit of a missed opportunity to go back to a known location.

This is part of my impetus for having Intergalactic take place on a much larger ship, with that acting as the circuit. This is the Star Trek model, right? Planet of the week, with the ship acting as a consistent element.

So why do I worry that the players won’t care about these worlds if they don’t return to them?

At the moment the ship’s movement is unpredictable, largely outside of the players’ hands at the start of the game, but my gut feeling is that new worlds will be slightly more common than recurring worlds.

So it’s easy to imagine the players not caring about these worlds, beyond a place to pick up a one-off job before blasting off into the void. Maybe they won’t even care if they revisit a world like Labyrinth and find that the planet’s core has finally annihilated itself from within.

I guess this is the nature of space, or at least a game that encourages such wide-spanning space exploration. It’s okay to have the novelty of the rally alongside the familiarity of the circuit.

Intergalactic Bastionland also has a new version of its playtest doc. Go check it out!

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Elsewhere

• Smiling Fox releases yet another fantastic episode, this time looking at spark tables in Mythic Bastionland

• Traipse talks about writing little sketches of fiction to help develop your hexmap

• The Tomb of Horrors is an in-browser game based on the infamous dungeon, finally a safe way to explore this legendary hellhole on your lunch break

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Coming Soon

Over on Patreon I talk about a significant change to Intergalactic Bastionland.

Being part of a thousand-strong crew on a huge starship has become a key part of Intergalactic, something I was eager to explore as a point of difference to the familar sci-fi RPG setup of a small independent crew with their own ship.

From my initial playtests I wonder if I went a too far with this, having a bit too much time cooped up in the ship, sometimes making it easy to forget you’re in space at all.

Expect the full post here and on the blog next week.

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