MadJay Brown and Jeremiah Frye joined our regular Tuesday night game of Spacewurm vs Moonicorn. I pulled playbooks from Johnstone Metzger’s Dungeon Planet for single-session guest star purposes; they’re not nearly so specific as the remaining SWvM playbooks. They ended up playing the Technician (wizard) and the Engine of Destruction (fighter by way of giant robot).
I think our new players were shell shocked by the total freak show of a setting, which gets freakier every session. They also got first exposure to the novel new moves and economies of the custom books while the old players were pretty excited, I think, to see the weird moves adding all kinds of strange new inputs into the game.
Best development was finally, finally pulling our Space Void Madness danger into focus: they have actual plans on how to defeat the hunters and control the front. Rad, wish we’d had time to get all the way there tonight but six players is a lot of people to juggle.
It has been so great to have a week of non-stop lab grade gaming and now I’m ready to sleep for days.
As someone who hasn’t read SWvM, I assumed there were Technician/Engine analogs in there. Do these two playbooks overlap with something in there, or are there no classic DW-like playbooks at all?
I imagine SWvM is not a game of a traditional “party”. Do you have any special tricks to keep the spotlight moving with six players?
Aaron Griffin SWvM has, by default, no “traditional” sci-fi RPG roles — it’s space emperor, space jesus, love triangle, faction lord, alien, and spy. It is exclusively gonzo bananapants weird shit, with the closest to “traditional” classes being the Spy, I would say? But even that is stretching the definition of traditional, with its Master/Spymaster tension. The text calls out that you can use the traditional playbooks, and gives examples of Space Fantasy Bards, Rangers, and Wizards, but those are just reskins rather than whole new classes that are overlapping with other stuff.
My favorite part of playing The Technician was merging that with the style of the existing setting. So no real robots per se, but more creepy bio tech.
Made even more creepy since I took the move that made all my “robots” a part of me. And could also be removed.
Moonicorn, staggering through the howling Void toward his friend the Technician.
M: “Oh my god! What are you doing?”
T: “Gouging out my own eyeball! It’s the only way to stay sane!”
How is the r-map for this game less detailed than for your one-shot?
Johnstone Metzger because the front notes are spread across about thirty notebook pages, rather than on the butcher paper.
The one-shot version, everything we’re going to use needs to be on the paper.
Ah yeah, that makes sense.