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soypunk (he/him)

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A member registered Dec 01, 2018 · View creator page →

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Scott, your ability to create evocative settings from your extensive experience with folklore and then marry those ideas to mechanics is such a gift. Well done!

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Looking forward to this! I find myself nodding along with a lot of your observations and those in the comments.

I'll heartily second the ask for procedures for Trade - or perhaps more broadly what a lot of CRPGs cram into the "starport bulletin board" area: bounties, cargo delivery, passenger transport, escort missions, etc. These things tend to be rather template-y and fit nicely into the procedural framework ethos you have for hex-crawls or point-craws.

The other thing that might be handy would be "Patron" missions - where a randomly generated NPC offers a randomly generated mission ("mission target, mission activity, mission location, mission reward".) You could probably tie this into an expanded Faction procedures section - so the missions roll up to the Faction's goals, etc.

well in that case, I will just sit and wait patiently :-)

(but also, solo is a deeply personal thing which is why so many people are kitbashing the heck out of like five different solo tools and three rpg systems to make their ideal game.)

love the format and concept. what are the odds we could get a template version so we could reflavor the tables? for example, something more sci-fi friendly?

Thanks for the design notes! Looking forward to 2E!

For weapons that roll multiple die (high energy weapons, smart weapons) was the intention that you sum the dice together or just keep the highest? (I'm thinking about the notes in dual wield rules about multiple dice...)

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Thanks for sharing!!

This is quality work friend. There's def. a crowd of folks who say "there are too many rules in Starforged!" and I think there's a subset of that group who truly want to learn but aren't sure how to break it down like you have here. Well done!

Ahh I see now, that's the spreadsheet. Was that an option for those of us who pre-bought this item? I really don't remember seeing it. All good, thank you!

Is there any way to get the raw random table data in a form that might be more friendly to importing to digital tools such as discord bots, Obsidian, etc? Plain text file? JSON? 

Very exciting news about the solo supplement!

Great idea, looks solid on a first read. I did noticed a typo "When you complete a scene challenge, you'll earn a breather – either set your PO to d4 or return to three strikes." Guessing PO should be FO?

Wow, wow wow! Excited to see these resources. For whatever reasons, West End Games, Wizards, & Fantasy Flight/Edge choose not to include a lot of random tables in their materials. There are a handful of them scattered through maybe a dozen books and two books in particular - the WEG Planets Book and the  Galactic Campaign Guide from WoTC.  So for folks looking to run a sandbox or play gm-less (coop/solo) it is a bit of challenge to find the right random tables to get the ideas flowing. (Starforged's tables are good, but not a perfect fit. Stars Without Numbers' tables don't work at all for me. A handful of things in Traveller are helpful for Edge of The Empire or Age of Rebellion games but not much.)

that would be great! I have one Star Wars player who is versed in the lore but the rest of my players are not and find that intimidating. I always try to downplay lore knowledge in-game and keep things at the level of three original movies but it is a struggle to juggle both points of view. 

These are excellent, thanks for sharing.

Looking forward to it! Thanks for the follow-up.

Realizing now that SFA is based on a different "classic fantasy" game - a very cool one (I've done some homework!) Would still like to work out some rough conversion notes but I also found a bunch of material to work with.

Are there some general guidelines to converting B/X material to Simple Fantasy Adventure? I tried eyeballing a few monster conversions but my math did not line up with yours at all so I'm scratching my head a bit as to what the basic formulas are.

This is good feedback, thanks!

Lovely layout. Is there a method for randomly generating the Astro-Navigation charts?

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My apologies, it was definitely meant with the best of intentions. I'll restate: The atmosphere the work implies looks incredibly compelling, even to someone not well versed in the subject matter or genre. I love the idea of presenting the setting as in-world newspaper and it rekindles memories of playing some of my favorite childhood video games where the setting assumptions were revealed through in-world communication mediums (such as newspapers.) It is making rethink how I present setting information in my own games.

omg. (me jumping and down squeeing gif)

I like the whimsy in the additional Luck rules. This document has rekindled my love for Fighting Fantasy & Troika, thanks for sharing. (Also, yay, epub!)

Thanks Ray!

What are the odds we get a RPG for this setting? It is really amazing, one of my favorite SciFi reads from the last year.

Awesome, thank you! Makes it easy to reformat into A5 pages for my notebook. :)

Any chance we get the single pages variant of this rather along with the spreads?

Are there plans to expand the game to tackle other space adventure tropes that fit nicely into the “slice of category”? Space trading comes to mind as something that can have a nice rhythm but things can always can go wrong and the crew has to handle the bumps.

Just a note to say that the Google Sheet "VTT" has a typo on each of the character sheets. The Body attribute "Strength" is misspelled as "Strenght."

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This is a curious game. I like how it leans into the swing of the d20. I do think the game could use a couple of examples of play. I'm also curious if there is a way that Tags could have a more mechanical meaning in play for those of us who prefer a bit more "game" in our gaming.

Looks like the FJKRP for print.pdf file is missing the first page? (mine just has the solo materials.)

Well it is a late reply but I thought it worth sharing: having playtested a bit I think the following is workable as a general purpose outline of how one can extend mole.mole without adding too much complexity. 

Vehicles have an Agility rating (1-3) that grant the piloting character the equivalent number of rerolls for a check. In my games Agility was the most important factor in whether I felt a PC should get some kind of bonus to their actions based on the quality of the vehicle. Just setting position alone was not quite capturing the nuance of vehicle engagements.

Vehicles have a Role such as "fighter", "transport", etc. Mostly used for the fiction (setting position, thinking about obstacles, determining complications, etc.)

Vehicles have 4-6 Strain (4-Small, 5-Medium, 6-Large) which is used to track damage but can also be spent like Drive to access a Vehicle's Stunts via their Talent. (I think calling an attribute Drive for a Vehicle is confusing hence the rename.) 

Vehicle Talents are:

  1.  Mobile (fast, agile, all-terrain, etc.)
  2.  Armored (heavy armor, shielded, etc.)
  3.  Weaponized (bristling with multiple weapon systems)
  4.  Versatile (can be reconfigured or perform more than one type of job)
  5. Carrier (transports people, cargo, or other types of vehicles)
  6. Smart (magically enhanced, advanced sensors, AI companion, etc.)

Vehicles don't need to posses the Armored or Weaponized Talent to have these things but it just means they have the basic type of thing they would have for their Role. Having one of those Talents means they have a particularly amazing variant of them. Some basic Vehicles may not have a Talent, use your judgment.

Vehicles in play may be grouped together for bookkeeping and story reasons. If you are being attacked by a group of similarly built light starfighters just treat them like one entity that attacks and operates together and assign them a Strain equal to their numbers. A flight of 4 starfighters has 4 Strain.

Players should question whether particularly large Vehicles should even be created using this system. The galaxy's largest moon-sized battle station is not going to use this system. This is for games where ship-to-ship combat or frequent chases are occurring and you want to provide a little bit of structure for your play.

All of this is intended to keep the focus on the PC(s) controlling the vehicle rather than spotlight vehicles but some settings I think need the additional flavor. 

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There's obviously a lot of ways to tweak this to work to your preferences or genre assumptions... for example you could also do "Racing Clocks" if you want to stick to Forged in The Dark mechanics. Probably the "cleanest" way to do this would be to make the Extended Challenge check and add 4 to the result (anydice odds: https://anydice.com/program/27385) That gives you a spread of 5 to 10 which seems pretty reasonable for a "progress bar." Then you just track your progress vs. your opposition progress:

- PC Progress: [X] [X] [ ] [ ] [ ]
- Opposition Progress: [X] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ]
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It occurs me to I've overlooked that mole.mole's Extended Challenges can be "nested" - that is:

  1. Make an Extended Challenge check that represents how many "acts" you need to complete a Mission. Follow the steps on "playing" to get the Mission's Danger & theme (Oracles 3 & 4.)
  2. Within an Act, make an Extended Challenge check that represents how many Scenes you need to complete that Act. Remember to use the guidance for determining the where, what, why, who, and how of a scene.
  3. Of course if within a Scene you determine you need another Extended Challenge you make another a check.

I found I needed a little more structure than just a single level of "Scenes" though to really resolve a Mission - Missions have "investigative phases", "conflict phases" as the sides start to come into opposition, and then "action phases" as the various threads start to resolve themselves. (Sometimes one might even flashback to the investigative stage to pick up more clues or information...)

Anyway, this was helpful for me to put a little more story structure over my sessions, hope it sparks some ideas with others as well.

Congrats on getting this published, Cezar. Looks tight! Do you have a Discord for discussing the SRD (or really any and all of your games?)

thanks for the follow up. Perhaps a better question would have been, how would you like to be attributed? ;)

What's the license?

If you had a game where vehicles were important (equally as important as characters) thoughts on how'd you work them into the mechanics? Feels off to just shoe-horn them into Backpack/Equipment. It is tempting to elevate them up as a full "character" but then co-mingling their attributes feels wonky (e.g. piloting check - factoring in both the pilot occupation and a fast (talent) vehicle in a chase sequence.)

A nice distillation of the Freeform Universal rules. I do think that the "Harm" portion of the game should have some explanation or guidance. I assume the idea is to stat out NPCs with some variation of hitpoints, toughness, or challenge? Or use it as a measure of effect for boons & banes?