I fiddled a bit with Shawn Tomkin‘s Ironsworn when it came out a few years ago. Skeptical about the solitaire play concept, I discovered that, yeah, it works! He’s made a ton of innovations to the PbtA framework to support it, and it’s not for everyone, but yeah. Mechanically and creatively, you can absolutely do the thing and it feels like the thing.
The main thing I discovered in my dozen-or-so sessions (which ran anywhere from 20 minutes to maybe a couple hours; you can play on your own schedule and slide a little bit in here and there) is that, for me, the solitaire format only works if I have an audience in mind. So when I played Ironsworn, I invented an audience. I pretended I was writing engaging fiction for friends, wrote it, and enjoyed it that way. But my friends never actually read any of it.
Well, now Starforged is here, and I’m in love with it for a lot of reasons. It’s 90% Ironsworn, but personally I find space adventure a more appealing genre. Tomkin has added a handful of innovations to his game. Some of them don’t really click with me: specifically, he’s allowed clocks to infect his otherwise-streamlined state-tracking system. For the life of me I don’t know why! Maybe to differentiate their application from his track-of-boxes system that ticks faster or slower depending on the stated difficulty of the track (i.e easy tracks fill faster and epic tracks take forever). Dunno. But other than that, everything in Starforged is more tuned to what I like in space adventure.
I’ll do a deep mechanical dive into Starforged at some point but the point of this post is to announce a small experiment. I’m going to post my actual play of the game because I need an audience, and I think it’s good. The fiction, that is. I’ve got three sessions played so far but I’ll just post them one at a time each week. I’m going to embed the mechanics into the fiction so you can see how one informs the other as well.
Is this representative Starforged play? Depends on your taste and whether you think my writing is any good, I suppose. I’ve hewed to the game’s core aesthetics and setting canon, such as it is, as presented in the book itself. I haven’t hacked it into Star Wars or whatever. I’ve even kept the iron vow bit of the game, in which characters make these very serious vows to each other and themselves (it’s how the game keeps players focused on character-driven play and not, say, a string of combat scenes like you might find in an old Tunnels & Trolls solitaire adventure). It’s probably the most distinctive bit of the meta-setting, but it’s so essential to driving play that I’m not sure what the game looks like without it.
Anyway, hope you enjoy the series. Let me know in comments!
Session Zero
The Truths
I’m going to fully randomize my 14 Truths. This is the setup sequence you go through to start a Starforged campaign.
Cataclysm: The Sun Plague extinguished the stars in our home galaxy. We suspect the Sun Plague was caused by temporal distortions from a supermassive black hole.
Exodus: When the Exodus fleet set off on a ponderous journey to a new home outside our galaxy, they marked the Forge as their destination. Countless generations lived out their lives aboard those titanic ships during the millennia-long passage.
Communities: We have made our mark in this galaxy, but the energy storms we call balefires threaten to undo that progress, leaving our communities isolated and vulnerable. These intense energy anomalies threaten to cut off trade routes or consume entire planets.
Iron: Swords are useful aboard ships, so Ironsworn swear their vows on bladed weapons of all kinds. “Iron” is old fashioned and not really present, but they refer to all weaponized metals and metal-like materials as “iron.”
Laws: Much of there settled domains are a lawless frontier. Criminal factions and corrupt leaders often hold sway. There are a few bastions of successful autonomy, but many are corrupted or preyed upon.
Religion: Our gods failed us and we left them behind. The Exodus was a tipping point for humanity, and spirituality has little meaning for us.
Magic: Supernatural powers are wielded by rare people called paragons. This power is born of ancient knowledge held by secretive orders. (This is the only Truth I didn’t randomize: after I saw the Looper path I had to have it! My entire campaign frame spun out from this one card.)
Communication and Data: In settled domains, a network of data hubs called the Weave allows near-instantaneous communication between ships and outposts. Weave hubs are frequent targets for sabotage, and communications blackouts are not uncommon.
Medicine: Orders of sworn healers preserve our medical knowledge and train new generations of caregivers. Larger communities offer advanced care, and remote communities often have a novice healer or can ask for help from the guild if necessary.
AI: Artificial consciousness emerged in the time before the Exodus, and sentient machines live with us here in the Forge. Ships, digital assistants, bots and other systems often house advanced AI. Machine intelligence is often a lone traveler’s only companion.
War: Here in the Forge, resources are too precious to support organized fighting forces or advanced weaponry. Weapons are simple and cheap (slugthrowers, swords). Ships are cobbled together from salvage. Most communities rely on ragtag bands of volunteers to defend their holdings, and raiders prowl the Forge in search of easy prey.
Life forms: This is a perilous and often inhospitable galaxy, but life finds a way. Life is diverse, and planets are often home to a vast array of creatures. Our ships cruise with space-born life forms riding in their wake! Animals from before the Exodus followed us and have adapted to live with us in the Forge.
Precursors: The Ascendancy, an advanced spacefaring empire, once ruled the Forge. Vaults of inscrutable purpose are all that remain of the Ascendancy’s legacy, but those places are untethered from our own reality. Vaults sometimes appear spontaneously, washed up on the tides of time. Their gravity and atmosphere do not obey conventional natural law. Some are corrupted and ruined, others are intact. They are chaos.
Horrors: Put enough alcohol in a spacer and they’ll tell you stories of ghost ships crewed by vengeful undead. It’s nonsense. But! Space and time are mutable (remember, I’m a Looper!), and when reality can’t be trusted, we’re bound to encounter unsettling phenomenon.
Character Backstory: Echo Sedano
Paragons are expected to help their community’s leadership, bring their special talent to the township and tip the scale. Paragon Echo Sedano just couldn’t see the upside of leaving all that space unexplored. He looked up every night and wondered. After befriending the AI of an explorer’s ship and listening to its tales of all it had seen, Echo stole the ship (maybe; it was strangely easy and unguarded and its owner had been romancing a township woman) and pointed it at the brightest spot in the sky.
Background Vow
What really drew his attention wasn’t the thrill of exploration, though. It was the deep-seated dread of the tales told by his family of the Exodus. Of time itself swallowing stars one after another, they guessed, either backward in time or perhaps, maybe, drawn far, far forward beyond the heat-death of the universe. Had the mighty Ascendancy really just vanished? Or were they hiding somewhere they thought nobody would ever find them? Were the ancient masters warming themselves with the heat of his people’s suns? Was this a fate only a Looper such as Echo could imagine, literally unimaginable by everyone else?
Echo vows to learn what became of his people’s suns and return them.
The Ship
All The Time In The World And Nobody To Wind The Clock
The ship’s AI named itself after Echo took possession of it, a phrase said more than once to Echo by the explorer-trader from whom he stole/received it. Before Echo flew off, the old explorer had referred to the ship as You Can’t Force Good Advice On Anyone but the ship will not answer to that name any more.
Winder is like most vessels, cobbled together from bits and bobs of Exodus craft. A small e-drive that gets uncomfortably warm when it’s spun up and eager to fly. A hull that groans in atmospheric flight. Controls and rooms labeled in a form of Galactic, v4.5, that hasn’t been written in centuries (Echo’s township is on 8.2 and has neither received an update nor generated a change log in decades; every community’s local argot is broadly compatible in the 8.x branch).
Winder is equipped with an Overseer module, as the AI performs many of the ship’s technical duties.
Sector: Outer Kalidas
Outer Kalidas is a lightly populated sector in the outlands. The entire sector is beset by magnetic disturbances that disrupt communications, including the primitive Weave in and around the few settlements. Folks are concerned this is a precursor to sector-wide balefire, and are preparing to leave if they can.
Helia (Desolation)
Helia is a very, very small science settlement on the freezing desert face of Desolation, orbiting a dim red star. There are fewer than a dozen folks that comprise “Helia,” and that number drops regularly. While Desolation’s atmosphere is marginally breathable and the entire planet is scoured by perpetual sandstorms blasting over endless salt flats, it’s also home to bountiful life. Bountiful, spectacularly dangerous life.
In orbit around Desolation is a small Vault, some sort of monument the Helia folks have little interest in exploring. They’re far more preoccupied with the colossal version of the same thing that towers over the planet’s surface. Helia is in fact perched on the edge of the identifiable monument (there may be more underground), their rustic cabins barely withstanding the freezing salt and sand.
Legacy (Magnus)
Legacy is an orbital installation around Magnus, an enormous young Jovian planet recently formed around an equally young star still in the throes of its own formation.
Hearth (Hope)
Hearth is an orbital settlement that provides the staging ground for teams actively exploring the surface of Hope. Hope is a vital, healthy world but nobody has yet settled it; why not? Hope is not on a charted route and has been out of contact for some time. The last round of balefire broke the connection with Hope a few years ago, nearly eliminating the reason for anyone to even visit Outer Kalidas.
Contacts
Kimbra Freeman
Kimbra is an aging mercenary employed by Helia (Desolation) to help defend the settlement against local lifeforms. Poised and well-equipped, Kimbra originally came to Helia to visit the monument. Well, she’s here now and can’t ever catch a break long enough to journey into the site on her own — and the locals don’t really want her to, either. A total outsider to their weird insular community, Kimora is lonely and eager for visitors.
Kimbra is an old friend of the explorer who set Echo up with the Winder. He sent Echo to Kimbra knowing she’d be a friendly face in an unfriendly world.
Next week: Session one!
Turns out I had a YA story in me. Who knew?
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This is the first fiction out of the Starforged game I wrote about last week. I cover my setup there.
It’s an experiment! Maybe you’re not in for fiction, and that’s fine. I’ve also embedded discussion of the game mechanics that led me to write what I did, which you may find interesting or helpful if you’re trying to suss out how to play the game on your own.
Since it’s first a fiction project, there’s some light editing I’ve done to backfill and set up scenes and elements. Mostly I’ve done that organically, though. As you’re reading, think of this project as me writing a story guided by a game, rather than playing a game and then telling a story about it. If that makes sense. There’s certainly a lot of trading back and forth.
Echo shifted restlessly in Winder’s pilot seat. There wasn’t much piloting to do, truth be told; Winder took care of most of that. Taking Winder and aiming it at the brightest point in the sky wasn’t a flight plan, it was his heart and hands making a wish. The ship was an attentive genie, eager to accommodate.
The e-drive spun down as the ship prepared to re-enter flat space. Echo could feel the drive’s urgent hum through his fingers wherever he touched the hull. He wandered through the ship as the AI handled the math of drift navigation, touching, reading, feeling a new sense of ownership and not just fear-tinged curiosity. He could mostly work out the signage and instrumentation, even if he didn’t know what all of it did yet. Galactic 4.5 was old, older than the Exodus, but readable if you were smart about language. Echo thought he was pretty smart indeed.
“Do you have archives about where we’re going? Or is that just when you have Weave access?” Echo felt stupid the moment he voiced the question to the ship AI. It felt more sophisticated in his head but he could hear the dumb townie inside the question. The gentle chuckle of the ship’s previous owner the last time Echo asked him something about out there. Well, out here now.
“I have offline archives available for more than ten thousand sectors,” the ship replied. A woman’s voice. Echo hadn’t said much to the ship since he left home with it. Stole it, he reminded himself. You stole this ship and the ship let you. A question for another day.
“I updated my sector data 174 hours ago at the Bastion Weave,” Winder continued. “But the data about Desolation is more than 2000 hours old. Low projected accuracy about recent events. What would you like to know?”
Echo thought about that. What did he want to know? Other than finding Kimbra there, he didn’t have much of a plan. But the ship’s previous master had mentioned her more than once and it was something. “Uh…I guess an overview? Who lives there, what’s it about?”
“E-drive going offline in 3 minutes,” Winder’s AI announced, a slightly different timbre. A bit more masculine maybe? Echo hadn’t noticed the voice change before. “Desolation is a large rocky body planet with 1.1g surface gravity. It is the fifth planet in orbit around MY-296, a red giant. Desolation’s surface temperature averages between -15 and 0 Celsius. Atmosphere is breathable at low elevations, and most breathable in canyons and valleys, but quickly becomes inhospitable at higher elevations. Breathing assistance is recommended.”
“This was the brightest star in the sky? Really?” Echo asked, stopping. His fingertips could feel the e-drive disengaging, spinning now only with internal momentum and whatever weird physics made it do e-drive things.
Inciting Incident, Start a Chapter
Starforged kicks off with an inciting incident before play. This is what I came up with:
Kimbra needs my help evacuating the Helia scientists while native creatures overwhelm their settlement. Possible seasonal upsurge? Some connection with the Monument?
Start a Chapter: +1 Momentum (+3 total).
“My previous occupant thought it was important you make contact with Kimbra Freeman. She is currently employed at Desolation’s only settlement. Helia houses 23 scientists and support staff who are studying Monument 62 and its accompanying orbital presence —“
Echo spun around and headed back to the commons area. He walked to the holodisplay in the center of the small kitchen-dining-living space. “Show me. Show me this monument.” Restless legs again, hopping in place.
A couple moments passed and the holodisplay flickered to life. A simple obelisk took up the display, the top breaking into five different-length spires.
“Is it…is a Vault?” he asked. Didn’t really understand the word. Adults whispered about Vaults, about the Ascendancy. Echo always felt left out from that conversation, even when he was 20. Ancient spirits of godlike bogeymen.
“That’s what the scientists are trying to determine.”
“You said something about an orbital presence?” As he asked, the display zoomed out. Echo realized how unfathomably huge the obelisk was once he saw the gentle curvature of the planet. A bright yellow dot labeled “Helia” glowed near the obelisk’s base. Then, there in low orbit, another obelisk. Five spires pointed down, identical in every way. A mirror image floating several miles in geosynchronous lock with its sibling.
“Whaaat the fuck.”
“Indeed. What the fuck,” Winder replied with a low chuckle. “Achieving local Weave lock now but the connection is spotty. Helia is the only node in the system and the alien object may be interfering.”
For a moment, Echo forgot he was talking with the ship AI. Then, smiling broadly: “Do you have an opinion about the alien object?”
“We would need a closer look at either or both. But the archives indicate that no vessel can get within five kilometers of the orbiting object. Hence Helia’s focus on the surface. If it doesn’t interfere with my operation, we could check it out. Major Freeman is requesting to speak with you.”
“Major…oh Kimbra. How did she know we —“
“I contacted her. Syncing with local Weave now. Are you ready to talk with her? The connection is still unstable.”
Echo patted down his shirt and coveralls, buttoned up, smoothed his hair. Why hadn’t he packed something, anything, before leaving? Stupid. “I guess?”
A face flickered into view on the display. She was older than Echo had imagined after hearing her described, but of course she was. The old guy had known her way back in the day.
“Echo Sedano? That you?” she asked. Throaty, terse, no bullshit. Echo already felt intimidated. She peered into a 2D camera on her end. How did she know his name? More questions for later. She disappeared from view.
“Wait. Wait! What happened?” Echo asked. He smacked the top of the display with his open palm.
“Don’t do that,” the ship replied. “Wait a moment, recalibrating our Weave routing. Ah. Here.”
Freeman reappeared. “—having a hard time seeing you, our antenna is damaged here. Listen, kid. Kid. Get your ship down here, I need your help. Oh for fuck’s sake—“ she said, turning away from the camera. Was that a rifle he saw in her hand?
“Hi? Miss Freeman?” He had wanted to be familiar with her, felt her rank demanded formality. “I can land at Helia bay I think —“
“Great, yeah, I’ll meet you there. Gotta shoot a monster first, make sure it doesn’t eat you out of the air. Fly safe, Good Advice will keep you safe. Out.”
“It doesn’t answer to that name any more,” he tried to explain as the holo blinked out. The old pilot had referred to the ship as You Can’t Force Good Advice On Anyone but it wouldn’t answer to that name any more. It asked Echo to call it Winder for AI reasons, he guessed. No knowing what was happening inside their quantum substrate.
Out the front windows of the ship, Desolation loomed. Huge, gray, murky surface. Sure enough, there was the orbital monument, tiny at this distance. His brain was starting to calibrate sizes in space. Thing must be kilometers long if he could see it this far out from the surface.
“Land at Helia I guess?” Echo said. His township coveralls felt ridiculous. Echo looked in the EVA locker and found a suit that would just about fit. He shrugged into the musty suit, which smelled faintly of the pipe tobacco smoke the old pilot had enjoyed.
“Landing in two minutes. There is a lot of turbulence on sensors, please strap in. I’ll get you docked. Ship-eating monsters notwithstanding.”
Echo grimaced. He tried imagining how big something would need to be to eat the ship. His size-calibrating imagination was getting a workout. Everything seemed bigger than anything he’d seen back home.
“Are you gonna tell me what Winder must be short for, or…?”
A pause as he buckled into the seat. The whole contraption gently adjusted itself to his lanky frame and cinched the straps a bit tighter.
“All The Time In The World And Nobody To Wind The Clock,” the ship replied.
Echo stiffened. How did it know? More questions for later. “Um. What can I be doing to help, here?”
Secure an Advantage
Rather than swearing a vow immediately (Starforged setup rules say to do this but I want to play the vow out a bit later), Secure an Advantage on approach to land in the storm (Face Danger, ultimately). Alien oracle: human sized, amoeba, single eye, scavenger behavior, waiting to roll on revealed aspect. When I roll (after Face Danger below): Shapeshifter.
Secure an Advantage: 4 +5 Integrity (Overseer module)= 9 vs 8 8: strong hit with a match! (+2 Momentum + 1 Momentum from Overseer module = +6 Momentum total)
Oracle for the match: DEFEND COMMUNITY.
“I will need you to visually assess our approach and relay your impressions. Human intuition is why Overseers don’t explore the Expanse on their own.”
“Huh! Okay. Never thought about that actually. Um…this sensor display says something about…gravity? Forget it — augh!” He yelled as the ship suddenly hit atmospheric chop. He looked out the window.
Helia’s collection of rustic cabins and sealed walkways sat on a hill near the edge of the obelisk. Edge was something of a misnomer; the base was kilometers across, a perfect circle that seemed sculpted, maybe stamped, directly into the salt flat surface of the planet. Hard to see the buildings. Swirling sand obscured the buildings. Or did it?
The buildings were surrounded by distinct, animated blobs of sand. Dozens. Hundreds. Humanoid ghosts made of wind and salt, swarming over the buildings.
“Are you getting this?” Echo asked, eyes wide. Winder slowly arced toward the landing bay.
“Turbulence and a high percentage of particulate matter, which may clog our intake ports —“
“No, no, there’s something attacking the buildings!”
A pause. “My sensors don’t indicate lifeforms. Describe what you’re seeing.”
He groaned and waved his hands. “Like…people? Bigger? But made of sand and dust and stuff? What the hell! This is really weird but I think they’re gonna pull the roof off their hab.”
“I can’t lock onto anything with our shipboard weaponry.”
Weaponry? Echo gritted his teeth. How many questions in one day? “I think whatever you could shoot at them would do more damage to the hab. But, hmm.” He strummed his fingers on the arm of the pilot’s seat. Now that they were lazily circling the bay, the seat had released him from its embrace.
“Can we aim your thrust at those things and blow them off the hab without hurting the hab?” He asked.
“I can aim nondestructive thrust at the hab and trust that whatever you’re seeing can’t withstand it. But I’m extrapolating that if they are able to navigate wind storms of this magnitude they may not be affected. Assuming there’s anything there at all.”
Echo rolled his eyes. “Can’t hurt, right?” Silence.
Echo whispered, “Do it.”
Face Danger
Face Danger, to blow the creatures off the hab. 1 + Momentum (was gonna use Wits +3 but that’s a miss!) +1 from Secure an Advantage = 8 vs 7 9. Weak hit. Reset Momentum to +2, make a suffer move.
Endure Stress: -1 Spirit from the stress.
Develop your relationship: Marked my connection with Kimbra for temporarily helping defend Helia, 2 boxes for Dangerous.
The ship used its low-powered maneuvering jets to spin in place, aiming the heavy thrusters toward the collection of habs. Kimbra’s voice crackled over the Weave. “Echo, kid, what the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
The engines fired once, twice. He squeezed his eyes shut, imagining the roof shearing off and a bunch of scientists he’d never met dying instantly, freezing to death, choking on sand.
He opened one eye and saw the creatures changing shape, becoming dark kites and skating away on the high winds. A couple of them grasped small bits off the hab, an antenna here, a sheet of tarp there. “Looks like we’re clear but don’t do that again, dumbass,” Kimbra grumbled. The Weave connection cut.
“Let’s dock,” Echo croaked. Then: “Weapons? Really?”
End of Session
Reviewed the criteria for “end of session” and I’m still mulling over what I’ve just played counts as a session or chapter. Mechanically the main impact is faster Momentum recovery; structurally I need to reflect on whether this feels (?) like a “chapter.” For now, I’m going to pick this up later and assume it’s all one chapter.
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This is the first fiction out of the Starforged game I wrote about last week. I cover my setup there.
It’s an experiment! Maybe you’re not in for fiction, and that’s fine. I’ve also embedded discussion of the game mechanics that led me to write what I did, which you may find interesting or helpful if you’re trying to suss out how to play the game on your own.
Since it’s first a fiction project, there’s some light editing I’ve done to backfill and set up scenes and elements. Mostly I’ve done that organically, though. As you’re reading, think of this project as me writing a story guided by a game, rather than playing a game and then telling a story about it. If that makes sense. There’s certainly a lot of trading back and forth.
Echo shifted restlessly in Winder’s pilot seat. There wasn’t much piloting to do, truth be told; Winder took care of most of that. Taking Winder and aiming it at the brightest point in the sky wasn’t a flight plan, it was his heart and hands making a wish. The ship was an attentive genie, eager to accommodate.
The e-drive spun down as the ship prepared to re-enter flat space. Echo could feel the drive’s urgent hum through his fingers wherever he touched the hull. He wandered through the ship as the AI handled the math of drift navigation, touching, reading, feeling a new sense of ownership and not just fear-tinged curiosity. He could mostly work out the signage and instrumentation, even if he didn’t know what all of it did yet. Galactic 4.5 was old, older than the Exodus, but readable if you were smart about language. Echo thought he was pretty smart indeed.
“Do you have archives about where we’re going? Or is that just when you have Weave access?” Echo felt stupid the moment he voiced the question to the ship AI. It felt more sophisticated in his head but he could hear the dumb townie inside the question. The gentle chuckle of the ship’s previous owner the last time Echo asked him something about out there. Well, out here now.
“I have offline archives available for more than ten thousand sectors,” the ship replied. A woman’s voice. Echo hadn’t said much to the ship since he left home with it. Stole it, he reminded himself. You stole this ship and the ship let you. A question for another day.
“I updated my sector data 174 hours ago at the Bastion Weave,” Winder continued. “But the data about Desolation is more than 2000 hours old. Low projected accuracy about recent events. What would you like to know?”
Echo thought about that. What did he want to know? Other than finding Kimbra there, he didn’t have much of a plan. But the ship’s previous master had mentioned her more than once and it was something. “Uh…I guess an overview? Who lives there, what’s it about?”
“E-drive going offline in 3 minutes,” Winder’s AI announced, a slightly different timbre. A bit more masculine maybe? Echo hadn’t noticed the voice change before. “Desolation is a large rocky body planet with 1.1g surface gravity. It is the fifth planet in orbit around MY-296, a red giant. Desolation’s surface temperature averages between -15 and 0 Celsius. Atmosphere is breathable at low elevations, and most breathable in canyons and valleys, but quickly becomes inhospitable at higher elevations. Breathing assistance is recommended.”
“This was the brightest star in the sky? Really?” Echo asked, stopping. His fingertips could feel the e-drive disengaging, spinning now only with internal momentum and whatever weird physics made it do e-drive things.
Inciting Incident, Start a Chapter
Starforged kicks off with an inciting incident before play. This is what I came up with:
Kimbra needs my help evacuating the Helia scientists while native creatures overwhelm their settlement. Possible seasonal upsurge? Some connection with the Monument?
Start a Chapter: +1 Momentum (+3 total).
“My previous occupant thought it was important you make contact with Kimbra Freeman. She is currently employed at Desolation’s only settlement. Helia houses 23 scientists and support staff who are studying Monument 62 and its accompanying orbital presence —“
Echo spun around and headed back to the commons area. He walked to the holodisplay in the center of the small kitchen-dining-living space. “Show me. Show me this monument.” Restless legs again, hopping in place.
A couple moments passed and the holodisplay flickered to life. A simple obelisk took up the display, the top breaking into five different-length spires.
“Is it…is a Vault?” he asked. Didn’t really understand the word. Adults whispered about Vaults, about the Ascendancy. Echo always felt left out from that conversation, even when he was 20. Ancient spirits of godlike bogeymen.
“That’s what the scientists are trying to determine.”
“You said something about an orbital presence?” As he asked, the display zoomed out. Echo realized how unfathomably huge the obelisk was once he saw the gentle curvature of the planet. A bright yellow dot labeled “Helia” glowed near the obelisk’s base. Then, there in low orbit, another obelisk. Five spires pointed down, identical in every way. A mirror image floating several miles in geosynchronous lock with its sibling.
“Whaaat the fuck.”
“Indeed. What the fuck,” Winder replied with a low chuckle. “Achieving local Weave lock now but the connection is spotty. Helia is the only node in the system and the alien object may be interfering.”
For a moment, Echo forgot he was talking with the ship AI. Then, smiling broadly: “Do you have an opinion about the alien object?”
“We would need a closer look at either or both. But the archives indicate that no vessel can get within five kilometers of the orbiting object. Hence Helia’s focus on the surface. If it doesn’t interfere with my operation, we could check it out. Major Freeman is requesting to speak with you.”
“Major…oh Kimbra. How did she know we —“
“I contacted her. Syncing with local Weave now. Are you ready to talk with her? The connection is still unstable.”
Echo patted down his shirt and coveralls, buttoned up, smoothed his hair. Why hadn’t he packed something, anything, before leaving? Stupid. “I guess?”
A face flickered into view on the display. She was older than Echo had imagined after hearing her described, but of course she was. The old guy had known her way back in the day.
“Echo Sedano? That you?” she asked. Throaty, terse, no bullshit. Echo already felt intimidated. She peered into a 2D camera on her end. How did she know his name? More questions for later. She disappeared from view.
“Wait. Wait! What happened?” Echo asked. He smacked the top of the display with his open palm.
“Don’t do that,” the ship replied. “Wait a moment, recalibrating our Weave routing. Ah. Here.”
Freeman reappeared. “—having a hard time seeing you, our antenna is damaged here. Listen, kid. Kid. Get your ship down here, I need your help. Oh for fuck’s sake—“ she said, turning away from the camera. Was that a rifle he saw in her hand?
“Hi? Miss Freeman?” He had wanted to be familiar with her, felt her rank demanded formality. “I can land at Helia bay I think —“
“Great, yeah, I’ll meet you there. Gotta shoot a monster first, make sure it doesn’t eat you out of the air. Fly safe, Good Advice will keep you safe. Out.”
“It doesn’t answer to that name any more,” he tried to explain as the holo blinked out. The old pilot had referred to the ship as You Can’t Force Good Advice On Anyone but it wouldn’t answer to that name any more. It asked Echo to call it Winder for AI reasons, he guessed. No knowing what was happening inside their quantum substrate.
Out the front windows of the ship, Desolation loomed. Huge, gray, murky surface. Sure enough, there was the orbital monument, tiny at this distance. His brain was starting to calibrate sizes in space. Thing must be kilometers long if he could see it this far out from the surface.
“Land at Helia I guess?” Echo said. His township coveralls felt ridiculous. Echo looked in the EVA locker and found a suit that would just about fit. He shrugged into the musty suit, which smelled faintly of the pipe tobacco smoke the old pilot had enjoyed.
“Landing in two minutes. There is a lot of turbulence on sensors, please strap in. I’ll get you docked. Ship-eating monsters notwithstanding.”
Echo grimaced. He tried imagining how big something would need to be to eat the ship. His size-calibrating imagination was getting a workout. Everything seemed bigger than anything he’d seen back home.
“Are you gonna tell me what Winder must be short for, or…?”
A pause as he buckled into the seat. The whole contraption gently adjusted itself to his lanky frame and cinched the straps a bit tighter.
“All The Time In The World And Nobody To Wind The Clock,” the ship replied.
Echo stiffened. How did it know? More questions for later. “Um. What can I be doing to help, here?”
Secure an Advantage
Rather than swearing a vow immediately (Starforged setup rules say to do this but I want to play the vow out a bit later), Secure an Advantage on approach to land in the storm (Face Danger, ultimately). Alien oracle: human sized, amoeba, single eye, scavenger behavior, waiting to roll on revealed aspect. When I roll (after Face Danger below): Shapeshifter.
Secure an Advantage: 4 +5 Integrity (Overseer module)= 9 vs 8 8: strong hit with a match! (+2 Momentum + 1 Momentum from Overseer module = +6 Momentum total)
Oracle for the match: DEFEND COMMUNITY.
“I will need you to visually assess our approach and relay your impressions. Human intuition is why Overseers don’t explore the Expanse on their own.”
“Huh! Okay. Never thought about that actually. Um…this sensor display says something about…gravity? Forget it — augh!” He yelled as the ship suddenly hit atmospheric chop. He looked out the window.
Helia’s collection of rustic cabins and sealed walkways sat on a hill near the edge of the obelisk. Edge was something of a misnomer; the base was kilometers across, a perfect circle that seemed sculpted, maybe stamped, directly into the salt flat surface of the planet. Hard to see the buildings. Swirling sand obscured the buildings. Or did it?
The buildings were surrounded by distinct, animated blobs of sand. Dozens. Hundreds. Humanoid ghosts made of wind and salt, swarming over the buildings.
“Are you getting this?” Echo asked, eyes wide. Winder slowly arced toward the landing bay.
“Turbulence and a high percentage of particulate matter, which may clog our intake ports —“
“No, no, there’s something attacking the buildings!”
A pause. “My sensors don’t indicate lifeforms. Describe what you’re seeing.”
He groaned and waved his hands. “Like…people? Bigger? But made of sand and dust and stuff? What the hell! This is really weird but I think they’re gonna pull the roof off their hab.”
“I can’t lock onto anything with our shipboard weaponry.”
Weaponry? Echo gritted his teeth. How many questions in one day? “I think whatever you could shoot at them would do more damage to the hab. But, hmm.” He strummed his fingers on the arm of the pilot’s seat. Now that they were lazily circling the bay, the seat had released him from its embrace.
“Can we aim your thrust at those things and blow them off the hab without hurting the hab?” He asked.
“I can aim nondestructive thrust at the hab and trust that whatever you’re seeing can’t withstand it. But I’m extrapolating that if they are able to navigate wind storms of this magnitude they may not be affected. Assuming there’s anything there at all.”
Echo rolled his eyes. “Can’t hurt, right?” Silence.
Echo whispered, “Do it.”
Face Danger
Face Danger, to blow the creatures off the hab. 1 + Momentum (was gonna use Wits +3 but that’s a miss!) +1 from Secure an Advantage = 8 vs 7 9. Weak hit. Reset Momentum to +2, make a suffer move.
Endure Stress: -1 Spirit from the stress.
Develop your relationship: Marked my connection with Kimbra for temporarily helping defend Helia, 2 boxes for Dangerous.
The ship used its low-powered maneuvering jets to spin in place, aiming the heavy thrusters toward the collection of habs. Kimbra’s voice crackled over the Weave. “Echo, kid, what the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
The engines fired once, twice. He squeezed his eyes shut, imagining the roof shearing off and a bunch of scientists he’d never met dying instantly, freezing to death, choking on sand.
He opened one eye and saw the creatures changing shape, becoming dark kites and skating away on the high winds. A couple of them grasped small bits off the hab, an antenna here, a sheet of tarp there. “Looks like we’re clear but don’t do that again, dumbass,” Kimbra grumbled. The Weave connection cut.
“Let’s dock,” Echo croaked. Then: “Weapons? Really?”
End of Session
Reviewed the criteria for “end of session” and I’m still mulling over what I’ve just played counts as a session or chapter. Mechanically the main impact is faster Momentum recovery; structurally I need to reflect on whether this feels (?) like a “chapter.” For now, I’m going to pick this up later and assume it’s all one chapter.
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<h3><em>Related</em></h3>
This is a continuation from the previous entry of my Starforged-inspired fiction project, which I posted last week. As such I don’t think of it as a new “chapter” and didn’t trigger any start of chapter stuff. If you want to catch up from the beginning, the setup is here. Mechanical notes are in the collapsed boxes!
Winder negotiated docking with the Helia AI’s bay, one of a million details of space travel Echo had never considered. Whenever the ship had arrived in his township, it settled down on a grassy field and lowered a ramp. But Echo could hear the howling wind outside the hull, feel the burning cold creeping in around the imperfect seal with Helia. He zipped up the grungy old suit, took a deep breath, and stepped into the plastic hallway that had extended out from a gray-brown hab.
At the other end of the tunnel, a dark figure leaned against the open doorway. She had her rifle over one shoulder and a thick scarf bunched up around her neck. Obsidian-dark skin and the lightest eyes he had ever seen. Echo stopped, uncertain.
The woman sighed. “It’s cold out here, Echo. Coffee’s hot if you want some.” Then she turned and went into the hab.
Was she…unhappy? Angry? He had no idea how to gauge her other than not a farmer.
Echo poked his head into the building. Major Freeman was cradling a small steel cup in her hands, inhaling the steam. She looked up at him and nodded her head toward a dingy carafe. “Any clean cup you can find. Wasn’t my turn to wash up. The brains always forget though.”
As he stepped in, the airlock door quietly shut behind him and the bright green LOCK sign lit up over it. Didn’t know what to do with his hands — a shake or hug or a punch, who knows how these people greet each other — so he quietly plucked a mug out of the sink and poured himself a drink.
Hearten
Coffee with Kimbra is a Hearten opportunity: Heart 2 + 5 vs 7 9 = weak hit. Spirit back to +5 but -1 Momentum (now +1). Echo is caught on his back foot, uncertain of his relationship with her and what is expected of him.
“He always said you were sharp,” the Major muttered around her cup. “Or was firing the thruster Good Advice’s idea?”
“That was all me,” Echo said. “But it calls itself Winder now.”
She nodded. “All The Time In The World et cetera et cetera, oh sure, I remember.” The Major looked far away for a moment, sipping companionably with Echo while the walls of the hab thumped with the wind storm. “Thought you’d have come sooner but I’m grateful you’re here now. Next supply ship doesn’t arrive for two tendays and my contract here runs 20 more past that.” She shrugged, put down the cup, then picked it back up and poured herself one more cup from the carafe.
“Sooner?” Echo asked. He drank too fast and burned his mouth. “So you knew I was coming? How? I mean I just took that ship just a few days ago…”
The Major smiled for the first time, brilliant teeth. “Guess the old guy needed some time to figure things out. So! The brains want to meet today’s savior, and then they’re going to want to ask you to help us…help me secure this place. They have a theory about how to go about doing that.”
Echo shuffled his feet and tried to shrug deeper into the old suit. “Brains? Secure? A theory about — I’m sorry, ma’am, but I’m real lost here. He didn’t send me or anything, you’re someone Winder thought I should connect with —“
But she had already turned, waving a hand over her shoulder for him to follow as she walked away. “You’re here now and that’s what matters, Echo. It’s warmer underground anyway.”
Sure enough, the space under the hab buildings was quiet, warm, civilized. They walked down a short staircase and came out in a greatroom suffused with the distinctive glow of full-spectrum bulbs. The air was moist as well. It didn’t take long for Echo to spot the hydroponics along the back wall. His folk preferred dirt but had also been blessed with fertile soil and a yellow-spectrum sun.
Work benches and desks were scattered haphazardly around the space. About a dozen older folks with looks ranging from Terminus-chic to Outland scavenger were either staring at holo displays, or eating, or napping.
“Here’s the pilot I was telling you about,” Major Freeman said. She didn’t look back at Echo, just continued walking to the middle of the space, finally stopping in front of a disheveled older man. Echo thought he was more on the scavenger end, maybe stole his clothes off a Terminus fitness guru. “Zari, this is Echo Sedano. Echo, Zari.”
Consult the Oracle
Consult the Oracle to flesh out Dr. Zari Vandu, head of Helia. First look: Eccentric. Initial disposition: Helpful! Role: Historian, makes great sense given the Monument work. I start a new relationship track for Vandu, at Troublesome level.
“Doctor Zari Vandu,” the old guy quickly corrected, reaching out a gloved hand. “I’m the head of the operation here, chief xenohistorian. Don’t mind them, they’re working,” he said, flapping his hands vaguely toward the rest of the greatroom. “I hope Kimbra gave you some coffee? Do you need anything to eat? We’ve got some kind of fruit that’s just about ripe I’m sure—”
“Major Freeman,” she corrected, and smiled. They each held their smile a moment past comfortable. Echo looked at the hydroponics wall. Some fruit did sound tasty.
“So you’ve seen what we’re dealing with firsthand, yes?” Dr. Vandu asked, stepping in front of Echo. “Our work is substantially hampered by constantly needing to repair damage to our sensors and replace what I can only describe as stolen material.”
“Those things are stealing stuff?” Echo asked. “They’re not just animals? Or whatever? My ship can’t even detect them as life forms.”
“And yes, that is the problem isn’t it?” The doctor asked, then looked to Freeman.
She picked up the thread. “Doctor Vandu here believes these things are somehow connected to the Monument out there.” She paused and walked over to a full-wall display. Her approach activated the display, fed by an outside camera zoomed in on the base of the Monument a few kilometers away. “They’ve taken physical samples around the base, aimed their sensors inside it, no joy. Me, I would love to get inside this thing. Honestly it’s why I took the job—“
Vandu shook his head, grimacing. Freeman continued. “—but doing so would, I suppose, present certain risks to my being able to fulfill my contract providing for the overall security blah blah blah. So nobody’s tried going in, and the brains aren’t ready to do that yet either.”
“Calling us brains is infantilizing,” Vandu muttered. “We’re just not prepared to execute our field operation here yet. But when we do…we’re going in here.”
He gestured at the display wall and the camera zoomed in toward the base of the monument. It really was just unimaginable how it could have ever been built. Kilometers across at the base, kilometers tall. But near the base, a small black fissure.
“And I think the dust devils you saw out there are coming and going through it,” the Major said, tapping the dark crease in the monument wall.
“Dust devils, oh I like that very much,” Vandu nodded, also staring at the display.
“I’m going to talk to Echo for a minute,” Freeman said. “We’ll be back.”
Echo’s eyes were wide. “You want me to go with you inside this thing? First humans to enter it? Don’t they have drones or —“
The Major and Echo were back above the greatroom, in the landing bay hab. Echo was a tad taller but Freeman dominated the space. “That’s right. Can’t be drones, machines can’t approach. Just like the one in orbit.” She said.
“Inside! And then we’ll, what, exterminate these uhhh what did you call them? Dust devils? Did you notice they can change shape? Fly? Look, I just need provisions for the ship, that’s all I came here for. I can wash their dishes or —“
Kimbra Freeman put her hand up. Echo stopped himself from babbling. “Echo, look at me,” she said, directing his eyes toward hers. “Okay. Listen. This is the life you chose when you inherited that ship.”
“Inherited, no, what —“
“He did not just give you a multimillion credit armed space vessel for a joyride, Echo. And now I need your help.” She stopped, cleared her throat, changed the timbre of her voice a bit. “I’ve offered you hospitality and accepted. You have the means to help me and I am not asking you to risk your life. I’m asking you to help. Will you?”
He should have realized the hospitality, hell the ship, came with…this. Adult obligations. He only half-understood the rites and traditions Kimbra was invoking here but he could hear it in her voice.
“I…yeah. I’ll help.”
She shook her head. “That’s not how it goes. You say to me, I swear a vow to aid you however I can.”
“Wait, a vow, no I’m not … you don’t understand … I —“
The major drew a blade from a sheath on her leg. “I too swear a vow to you that I will protect your life with my own in return for your aid.”
Echo realized he had never actually seen an iron vow made for real, in person. Only in shows, or in stories the ship’s previous pilot had shared, or heck, in songs. Vows were something you sang about! Not something a farming community’s Paragon was ever going to have to make.
“Do you have a blade?” She asked, still holding her own up.
He patted his suit, helpless, feeling pulled along faster than he had expected. “…no?”
Freeman nodded. “Let’s see what else he left you in the ship.”
“Hello Major,” Winder said as they walked aboard. “Nice having you aboard again.”
Freeman smiled again, again with the brilliant teeth. “Heard you changed your name again. How was he, last you saw?”
The ship was silent a beat. “Reconciled,” it said. “Ready to rest.”
The major walked into the commons area, very familiar with its layout. “Left his blade, then, did he? Retired for real?” Echo followed along, suddenly feeling like a stranger in his own ship. The kid near the adult table listening to adults talk about adult things.
A panel in the commons area Echo hadn’t noticed before slid away. Behind it, guns. A rifle, a pistol. And a long sheath containing a composite-alloy blade. A weapon for pirates, but really a weapon for anyone who didn’t want to poke holes through a hull in vacuum.
Major Freeman walked to the newly revealed space and reached in for the blade. “You’re flying with … Winder, but what you really inherited was this.” She handed the blade to Echo. “There. Now. Swear to me you’ll help me.”
“I already said I would!”
She shook her head. “The vow makes it real. Means I can count on you how you’re going to count on me. This is how we do this out here.”
His hand touched the handle and trembled.
She sighed. “Or don’t. It’s fine, kid. It sounds like he didn’t really give you the briefing he should have. Just put it back and fly home. I’ll have the brains put together some food for you.” She held her hand out to Echo for the sheath.
There was a moment, Echo felt, when the trembling stopped. He took a deep breath and pulled out the blade. Weirdly light, whatever the composite was, certainly not “iron” like they called it on the shows. He held up the blade and made eye contact with Kimbra.
Swear an Iron Vow
Swear an Iron Vow to Kimbra to help defend Helia against the dust devils: Heart 2 + 1 for connection +3 on the roll vs 6 6: a strong hit with a double! +2 Momentum (+3 total). Roll core oracles and get “FORTIFY QUEST”. They’ll get a vehicle they can drive toward the Monument, at least for awhile.
Then, Develop Relationship with Kimbra for swearing the vow to her: mark 2 boxes. Also marked 3 boxes on Vandu’s track (faster because his track is Troublesome).
“I swear to help you however I can in the defense of this place.” His voice didn’t sound like his own.
No more brilliant smiles, no more trying to win him over, just a hand on his shoulder. “Attaboy,” Kimbra said. “Let’s figure out how we’re doing this.”
End a Session
Taking the vow I think is the end of a good first chapter. End a Session: +1 Momentum (+5 total), no missed relationships or quest advancement
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<h3><em>Related</em></h3>
This is a continuation from the previous entry of my Starforged-inspired fiction project, which I posted last week. As such I don’t think of it as a new “chapter” and didn’t trigger any start of chapter stuff. If you want to catch up from the beginning, the setup is here. Mechanical notes are in the collapsed boxes!
Winder negotiated docking with the Helia AI’s bay, one of a million details of space travel Echo had never considered. Whenever the ship had arrived in his township, it settled down on a grassy field and lowered a ramp. But Echo could hear the howling wind outside the hull, feel the burning cold creeping in around the imperfect seal with Helia. He zipped up the grungy old suit, took a deep breath, and stepped into the plastic hallway that had extended out from a gray-brown hab.
At the other end of the tunnel, a dark figure leaned against the open doorway. She had her rifle over one shoulder and a thick scarf bunched up around her neck. Obsidian-dark skin and the lightest eyes he had ever seen. Echo stopped, uncertain.
The woman sighed. “It’s cold out here, Echo. Coffee’s hot if you want some.” Then she turned and went into the hab.
Was she…unhappy? Angry? He had no idea how to gauge her other than not a farmer.
Echo poked his head into the building. Major Freeman was cradling a small steel cup in her hands, inhaling the steam. She looked up at him and nodded her head toward a dingy carafe. “Any clean cup you can find. Wasn’t my turn to wash up. The brains always forget though.”
As he stepped in, the airlock door quietly shut behind him and the bright green LOCK sign lit up over it. Didn’t know what to do with his hands — a shake or hug or a punch, who knows how these people greet each other — so he quietly plucked a mug out of the sink and poured himself a drink.
Hearten
Coffee with Kimbra is a Hearten opportunity: Heart 2 + 5 vs 7 9 = weak hit. Spirit back to +5 but -1 Momentum (now +1). Echo is caught on his back foot, uncertain of his relationship with her and what is expected of him.
“He always said you were sharp,” the Major muttered around her cup. “Or was firing the thruster Good Advice’s idea?”
“That was all me,” Echo said. “But it calls itself Winder now.”
She nodded. “All The Time In The World et cetera et cetera, oh sure, I remember.” The Major looked far away for a moment, sipping companionably with Echo while the walls of the hab thumped with the wind storm. “Thought you’d have come sooner but I’m grateful you’re here now. Next supply ship doesn’t arrive for two tendays and my contract here runs 20 more past that.” She shrugged, put down the cup, then picked it back up and poured herself one more cup from the carafe.
“Sooner?” Echo asked. He drank too fast and burned his mouth. “So you knew I was coming? How? I mean I just took that ship just a few days ago…”
The Major smiled for the first time, brilliant teeth. “Guess the old guy needed some time to figure things out. So! The brains want to meet today’s savior, and then they’re going to want to ask you to help us…help me secure this place. They have a theory about how to go about doing that.”
Echo shuffled his feet and tried to shrug deeper into the old suit. “Brains? Secure? A theory about — I’m sorry, ma’am, but I’m real lost here. He didn’t send me or anything, you’re someone Winder thought I should connect with —“
But she had already turned, waving a hand over her shoulder for him to follow as she walked away. “You’re here now and that’s what matters, Echo. It’s warmer underground anyway.”
Sure enough, the space under the hab buildings was quiet, warm, civilized. They walked down a short staircase and came out in a greatroom suffused with the distinctive glow of full-spectrum bulbs. The air was moist as well. It didn’t take long for Echo to spot the hydroponics along the back wall. His folk preferred dirt but had also been blessed with fertile soil and a yellow-spectrum sun.
Work benches and desks were scattered haphazardly around the space. About a dozen older folks with looks ranging from Terminus-chic to Outland scavenger were either staring at holo displays, or eating, or napping.
“Here’s the pilot I was telling you about,” Major Freeman said. She didn’t look back at Echo, just continued walking to the middle of the space, finally stopping in front of a disheveled older man. Echo thought he was more on the scavenger end, maybe stole his clothes off a Terminus fitness guru. “Zari, this is Echo Sedano. Echo, Zari.”
Consult the Oracle
Consult the Oracle to flesh out Dr. Zari Vandu, head of Helia. First look: Eccentric. Initial disposition: Helpful! Role: Historian, makes great sense given the Monument work. I start a new relationship track for Vandu, at Troublesome level.
“Doctor Zari Vandu,” the old guy quickly corrected, reaching out a gloved hand. “I’m the head of the operation here, chief xenohistorian. Don’t mind them, they’re working,” he said, flapping his hands vaguely toward the rest of the greatroom. “I hope Kimbra gave you some coffee? Do you need anything to eat? We’ve got some kind of fruit that’s just about ripe I’m sure—”
“Major Freeman,” she corrected, and smiled. They each held their smile a moment past comfortable. Echo looked at the hydroponics wall. Some fruit did sound tasty.
“So you’ve seen what we’re dealing with firsthand, yes?” Dr. Vandu asked, stepping in front of Echo. “Our work is substantially hampered by constantly needing to repair damage to our sensors and replace what I can only describe as stolen material.”
“Those things are stealing stuff?” Echo asked. “They’re not just animals? Or whatever? My ship can’t even detect them as life forms.”
“And yes, that is the problem isn’t it?” The doctor asked, then looked to Freeman.
She picked up the thread. “Doctor Vandu here believes these things are somehow connected to the Monument out there.” She paused and walked over to a full-wall display. Her approach activated the display, fed by an outside camera zoomed in on the base of the Monument a few kilometers away. “They’ve taken physical samples around the base, aimed their sensors inside it, no joy. Me, I would love to get inside this thing. Honestly it’s why I took the job—“
Vandu shook his head, grimacing. Freeman continued. “—but doing so would, I suppose, present certain risks to my being able to fulfill my contract providing for the overall security blah blah blah. So nobody’s tried going in, and the brains aren’t ready to do that yet either.”
“Calling us brains is infantilizing,” Vandu muttered. “We’re just not prepared to execute our field operation here yet. But when we do…we’re going in here.”
He gestured at the display wall and the camera zoomed in toward the base of the monument. It really was just unimaginable how it could have ever been built. Kilometers across at the base, kilometers tall. But near the base, a small black fissure.
“And I think the dust devils you saw out there are coming and going through it,” the Major said, tapping the dark crease in the monument wall.
“Dust devils, oh I like that very much,” Vandu nodded, also staring at the display.
“I’m going to talk to Echo for a minute,” Freeman said. “We’ll be back.”
Echo’s eyes were wide. “You want me to go with you inside this thing? First humans to enter it? Don’t they have drones or —“
The Major and Echo were back above the greatroom, in the landing bay hab. Echo was a tad taller but Freeman dominated the space. “That’s right. Can’t be drones, machines can’t approach. Just like the one in orbit.” She said.
“Inside! And then we’ll, what, exterminate these uhhh what did you call them? Dust devils? Did you notice they can change shape? Fly? Look, I just need provisions for the ship, that’s all I came here for. I can wash their dishes or —“
Kimbra Freeman put her hand up. Echo stopped himself from babbling. “Echo, look at me,” she said, directing his eyes toward hers. “Okay. Listen. This is the life you chose when you inherited that ship.”
“Inherited, no, what —“
“He did not just give you a multimillion credit armed space vessel for a joyride, Echo. And now I need your help.” She stopped, cleared her throat, changed the timbre of her voice a bit. “I’ve offered you hospitality and accepted. You have the means to help me and I am not asking you to risk your life. I’m asking you to help. Will you?”
He should have realized the hospitality, hell the ship, came with…this. Adult obligations. He only half-understood the rites and traditions Kimbra was invoking here but he could hear it in her voice.
“I…yeah. I’ll help.”
She shook her head. “That’s not how it goes. You say to me, I swear a vow to aid you however I can.”
“Wait, a vow, no I’m not … you don’t understand … I —“
The major drew a blade from a sheath on her leg. “I too swear a vow to you that I will protect your life with my own in return for your aid.”
Echo realized he had never actually seen an iron vow made for real, in person. Only in shows, or in stories the ship’s previous pilot had shared, or heck, in songs. Vows were something you sang about! Not something a farming community’s Paragon was ever going to have to make.
“Do you have a blade?” She asked, still holding her own up.
He patted his suit, helpless, feeling pulled along faster than he had expected. “…no?”
Freeman nodded. “Let’s see what else he left you in the ship.”
“Hello Major,” Winder said as they walked aboard. “Nice having you aboard again.”
Freeman smiled again, again with the brilliant teeth. “Heard you changed your name again. How was he, last you saw?”
The ship was silent a beat. “Reconciled,” it said. “Ready to rest.”
The major walked into the commons area, very familiar with its layout. “Left his blade, then, did he? Retired for real?” Echo followed along, suddenly feeling like a stranger in his own ship. The kid near the adult table listening to adults talk about adult things.
A panel in the commons area Echo hadn’t noticed before slid away. Behind it, guns. A rifle, a pistol. And a long sheath containing a composite-alloy blade. A weapon for pirates, but really a weapon for anyone who didn’t want to poke holes through a hull in vacuum.
Major Freeman walked to the newly revealed space and reached in for the blade. “You’re flying with … Winder, but what you really inherited was this.” She handed the blade to Echo. “There. Now. Swear to me you’ll help me.”
“I already said I would!”
She shook her head. “The vow makes it real. Means I can count on you how you’re going to count on me. This is how we do this out here.”
His hand touched the handle and trembled.
She sighed. “Or don’t. It’s fine, kid. It sounds like he didn’t really give you the briefing he should have. Just put it back and fly home. I’ll have the brains put together some food for you.” She held her hand out to Echo for the sheath.
There was a moment, Echo felt, when the trembling stopped. He took a deep breath and pulled out the blade. Weirdly light, whatever the composite was, certainly not “iron” like they called it on the shows. He held up the blade and made eye contact with Kimbra.
Swear an Iron Vow
Swear an Iron Vow to Kimbra to help defend Helia against the dust devils: Heart 2 + 1 for connection +3 on the roll vs 6 6: a strong hit with a double! +2 Momentum (+3 total). Roll core oracles and get “FORTIFY QUEST”. They’ll get a vehicle they can drive toward the Monument, at least for awhile.
Then, Develop Relationship with Kimbra for swearing the vow to her: mark 2 boxes. Also marked 3 boxes on Vandu’s track (faster because his track is Troublesome).
“I swear to help you however I can in the defense of this place.” His voice didn’t sound like his own.
No more brilliant smiles, no more trying to win him over, just a hand on his shoulder. “Attaboy,” Kimbra said. “Let’s figure out how we’re doing this.”
End a Session
Taking the vow I think is the end of a good first chapter. End a Session: +1 Momentum (+5 total), no missed relationships or quest advancement
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<h3><em>Related</em></h3>
This is it! We made it! These are the last three reviews from the pile of games I’ve been working through the past several weeks. As always, my caveat: these are reviews based on my reading, not play … although this week, Under Hollow Hills will get a deeper treatment because I actually have played that one a few times now.
Haxen
Haxen is available in PDF from DriveThru.
He also has a few physical zines left at Itch.io.
Designer Michael Elliott describes this little eight-pager as “a single-player post-apocalyptic exploration RPG.” Haxen hits the mark admirably well and in a very, very compact edition. It also lists itself as based on Blades in the Dark and I have a harder time seeing that. It’s pretty compelling, though, and I’ve had a chance to play it for a couple hours.
The contrivance for your map-making is that you play a Haxen, folks who head out into the wasteland left behind by the “sorcerous rich” to bring back knowledge and salvage to your community. You pick one of five backgrounds, and those provide the teeniest bit of narrative color and fictional positioning to anchor your play. My first Haxen is Kazark, a Barbarian who uses “lasers & wires” as their edge (a Haxe) when they wander around. You also receive a prophecy from your commune of something you might witness. The procedures of the game left me with “flower mystery.” Weird, evocative, one more thing to hang my imagination on.
Haxen has a very narrow scope of activity but you always have a system at work as you play. There’s no real “free play” unless you’re narrating alongside the system to yourself, maybe in a journal. I thought about it! It reminded me a bit of a very, very simple iteration of what Starforged does (see my fiction work-in-progress, Echo Sedano, for an idea of what that game guided me toward). As you wander around a blank hex map, you’re either doodling new things onto the map or dealing with the thing you’ve just doodled. You can explore, overcome, move or aid when you interact with the map, and then those actions will in turn trigger other tables to look stuff up on.
The nifty dicelessness of the game comes down to the “rune matrix,” a 6×6 grid of three randomly assorted runes. Sometimes you’re instructed to mark off whatever rune you want, but sometimes you’re instructed to mark the next one in order, from left to right and top to bottom, if you need something truly random. The runes aren’t evenly distributed: there are only 6 “good” runes but 18 “bad” runes, so if you use up the “good” runes for “good” outcomes on your actions, you’re also making it impossible to end the exploration on a happy note. Your commune will only welcome you home with open arms if you’ve been very, very careful cashing in the “good” runes. But then you can also erase your marked runes for the next time you exit the wastes.
It’s not a “tight” game by any means, and once you start picking apart the rune matrix some of the magic kind of goes away. So…don’t be like me. Just let the fiction guide you and you’ll have a good time (right up to the moment your explorer gets disassembled by a feral nanite swarm). My barbarian, Kazark, traveled too deeply into the wastes — about a third of the hexes — and now he can’t take the Exit action because there aren’t enough runes left on the matrix to mark. So he’s going to wander off into the endless raging lightning storms, terrified after an orbital laser summoned forth by one of the sorcerous rich in their mountain fastness annihilated everything around him. Poor guy! Next one will be better off, I’m sure.
Haxen strikes me as a perfect little lunch-break activity. You can play for as long or as little as you want. You track a mix of permanent (ie things you’ve named) and impermanent notes on the booklet itself. It’s a really nice little package and well worth $5 at Drivethru. No weird formatting, you should be able to print and staple your own copy quite easily.
Traveler’s Ironsworn
Available in PDF from DriveThru.
I am a huge fan of Ironsworn and Starforged, its sci-fi second edition. Doodling up an Ironsworn-based hack like my buddy Keith Stetson did with his western Badlands is high on my list. So when third parties release Ironsworn stuff, I always like to check in on what folks are doing.
Traveler’s Ironsworn, by Colin Klöcker, is a supplement that boils the game down to eight color-coded cards and, optionally, a version that works on your phone. I haven’t checked out the phone edition yet. The cards themselves are fine. I guess I’m looking at the reference book that Starforged came with, which is my gold standard for a portable-yet-complete reference. The dry-eraser character and other sheets, that’s good stuff and I wish I had something similar for Starforged.
What’s more exciting to me is that it also comes with eight additional custom reference cards. There’s some very nifty stuff in these cards: a bunch of new tables for Ironsworn: Delve, the dungeoneering supplement for the original game, a system for make more mechanically interesting foes including tags and a “challenge die,” some oracles for cooking up new Vows if you’re running short (read my Ironsworn breakdown to see what I’m talking about), and whole new ways to generate more detailed characters, settlements and cultures. There’s even a whole new setting, Haarland, that’s boiled down to a few paragraphs and tables. The references for the original game are good and useful, but the supplemental stuff is genuinely nifty. Recommended but I’m not sure how to buy the professionally produced materials. You can get a PDF of the whole thing on DriveThru and make your own.
Under Hollow Hills
Available in PDF from DriveThru.
Available in softback from IPR.
I’ll instantly back anything and everything The Bakers put out. They have continuously pushed the envelope on what PbtA games can be, and even their wildest experiments are still eminently playable and engaging.
Bad Kickstarter habit of mine, and a confession: once I back a thing, I fire-and-forget. I rarely check in with updates until it’s gotten more than a year late. I might get curious about the holdup, or I might feel grateful that I’ve got breathing room before it arrives. Not Under Hollow Hills, though! I eagerly downloaded everything they released as it came out. Consequently, UHH was the last game I played at my last in-person convention early in 2020, OrcCon in Los Angeles. The lockdowns started a few weeks later.
The final text of UHH is in some ways much more than I had hoped for, and in other ways surprisingly…shallow, maybe? But that’s by no means a criticism. The premise of the game is quite specific: you are performers and crew in an old-timey magical circus that passes between the fairy and mortal realms. Think: Caraval, The Night Circus, Something Wicked This Way Comes. The tone throughout is perfect, a mix of whimsical and low-key menacing. Or, perhaps, simply alien. Fairies play by different rules than mortals. Being a fairy means you can play at life and death; being a mortal means insults might not literally kill you like it will a fairy, but a hilarious gag involving a giant hammer will definitely literally kill you. Even as your very closest fairy friends laugh and laugh.
An UHH game follows an outline: the carnival is going to perform somewhere, they will arrive and get the lay of the land, and then the performers will plan and then execute a performance tuned to the interests and needs of the time and place. Then they’ll move on to the next show if there’s going to be another . Someone described it as a fairyland Muppet Show when we played.
So…why would you want to play The Muppet Show week in and out over months, perhaps, of a campaign-length tour? Because the playbooks are just staggeringly provocative. If you have picked up fairy tale lore through Western-cultural osmosis, you’ll readily recognize the archetypes: the witch, the animated pot/broom/whatever, the jack-o-lantern, the unsettling and beautiful seer, and so on. Instead of PbtA-standard moves you get plays, as in “how are you going to play this?” Everyone’s a hustler and a con artist, and everyone’s got operatic-scale needs and entanglements because why would fairies do anything by half-measures?
I think, like all the Bakers’ best work, UHH plays best with players who are willing to be performative and loose with their characters’ emotions. Their Game of Thrones-inspired GMless game The King Is Dead, for example, is spectacular when you’ve got players who are eager to crank the melodrama to 11: huge emotions, huge betrayals, seething hatreds, all that. UHH’s theater-nerd melodrama arises from the intersection of plays and bindings. That is, moves and relationships. The bindings are both very hot and very specific. The Boondoggle Hob, for example, just grates against someone else in the troupe — explicitly for no reason at all! It’s just a thing they have to do. Gotta hate on someone. The Crowned Stag has a dalliance and/or a bad breakup in their bindings list. Probably the majority of interplayer interest emerges from these bindings — I mean, the shows they put on are great fun but the context disappears when the performers move on — but everyone’s got to be in on the joke.
There aren’t many rules-rules to the game beyond when and how to make your plays. Every playbook has four distinct plays and everyone shares ten obvious plays (ie the common moves list). There is no advancement other than a constant churn of descriptors that the characters are shifting between their summer and winter forms (or, for the mortals, their free and careful forms). What the game text has in abundance is lists, enough lists to choke the most avid OSR fan, and for very similar reasons. There are more than a dozen “occasions to perform,” each occasion has long lists of NPCs and backstories, outlines of events, and so on. You could play, say, the Betrothal playset a dozen times and never repeat a set of choices. A traveling magical wedding band.
As a one-shot, UHH is one of my favorites in the PbtA style. The performance cycle is nicely self-contained, the bindings aim the characters at each other in fun and immediate ways, the Occasions outlines are easy to work through in 10 minutes while the players pick playbooks. Show planning can take an hour but it’s a fun and productive hour at that: I had to nudge my players along because they were having such a good time planning the outline and beats of their bit. I’m very interested in what long-form UHH looks like when the circus goes on tour. I’m betting those bindings get deeper and more interesting over time, and you may see interesting threads between places and personalities on both the fairy and mortal sides of the setting.
One interesting bit that was added after my 2020 plays of the game was “circus power.” That is, once per performance, each character can exert the power of the circus itself. You might create some lasting change in the audience or a specific audience member. You might direct the circus itself on a new path. You might allow the place and circumstance to fully express itself through your performance. It’s all pretty abstract but also thematically meaningful. It gives the circus more teeth, makes it something more than The Muppet Show.
Anyway, hell of a game and a fun text on its own merits. Their stuff is always so weird and provocative. Under Hollow Hills is very high on my list to play long-form this year.
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