USS Crowfield

An idea occurred to me the other day. I can’t even say it was a new idea. It was the marriage of several old ideas:

• In my second post about Crowfield I talked about the challenges involved in “a campaign … about exploration into unknown lands.”
• About 5 months ago I posted an idea about a campaign where “…the player characters will have no technology. No stone tools.”
• Almost 2 years ago I talked about how a D&D world’s alignment might might have originated with members of the Federation and Klingon empire visiting a fantasy world.
• Just a couple of months ago I said “I think it would be great to set a campaign [with] … A group of star travelers arriving at a strange new world, with no way to leave and nothing but what they brought with them trying to establish a new home.”

Putting it Together

Here’s my idea. The player characters were crew members aboard the U.S.S. Crowfield, a (Star Trek) Federation vessel. The Crowfield is a Columbus class¹ that has been refitted as a hospital ship. It was launched maybe 10 years before Captain Kirk’s Enterprise.

A Backstory to Address Issues

Back in my second Crowfield post, I spoke about my concerns for a background. Let's look at those concerns and how they work here.

If the lands are unknown, how did the characters happen to be there?

The Crowfield was on its way back to Deep Space Station K-7 to resupply after treating an outbreak of Tellarite blood plague on Mashime IV. A random sensor malfunction lead the ship off course and they stumbled upon an uncharted planet. Star Trek is full of unchartered planets.

Taking advantage of the opportunity for an impromptu exploration mission, the Captain led an away party to the surface while the chief engineer recalibrated the navigational sensors. While on the surface, the away team encountered issues with their technology. Everything from tricorders to communicators began to fail. Fortunately, Star Fleet has protocols for such things, and the away team was beamed up after they failed to report in.

The team was safely aboard for a few hours when shipboard systems began failing throughout the vessel. The engineering team was convinced that the failures were related to whatever caused the original sensor malfunction on the journey from Mashime IV.

They were wrong. Not only were they wrong, but they spent too much time chasing a red herring. By the time they learned the truth, it was too late.

The truth was that this uncharted planet was home to a tiny microbe. By some happenstance of destiny this otherwise harmless microbe found highly refined carbon nanofilaments to be particularly tasty. It would devour them and reproduce, creating more of the microbe. Unfortunately for the crew of the USS Crowfield, Federation fabricators and synthesizers used highly refined carbon nanofilaments in everything that they produced. Even more unfortunate, fabricators and synthesizers were used to make all the components of the ship and all the equipment therein.

The Crowfield was being eaten from within. Critical systems were failing. There was no calling for help; coms was down. Even the shuttlecraft were infected. Having no other choice, the captain called for the crew to abandon ship. 

Regular escape pods were useless, so the crew had to rely on survival cocoons. Each person was secured in their own little rescue bubble and ejected into space. Fortunately the cocoons were built to survive atmospheric re-entry, and the crew of 400 was scattered across the planet's surface like seeds. 

Once I get the characters into the strange land, what do I do about replacement characters? Especially if I want to run the campaign as an open table, I need a way to explain why all these people are here but they don't know where they are.

This is easy! The party just finds an "unopened" cocoon with a fresh character inside!

How can players have a meaningful backstory if everything and everyone they knew are unreachable?

This remains a challenge. Of course people can have relationships (good or bad) with other crew members who may or may not be "out there" waiting to show up.

What stops the players from walking into the first village they find and asking the locals for a map?

Technology! In this scenario I turn the clock way back for the planet. Instead of being a medieval fantasy I would place this in a stone age world. No metal, no writing, no maps. The natives are just transitioning from hunter-gathers to domesticating animals and planting crops.

Plus there's the Prime Directive. If the players follow it, they'll have to avoid almost all contact with the natives. Of course, the players might argue that without their technology there's little chance that they can corrupt the native societies. Following that line of thought they would be free to interact. Even in that case, the players don't have any Universal Translators, so speaking will be difficult.

That's It

That's the idea. I spoke about it to some guys at work. Sam said it was an awesome idea. Dustin said that he'll be angry if I let the players "invent" electricity.

What about you? What do you think? Does it sound like a fun setting for a game?

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1. My original thought was a Next Generation era Nebula-class ship. I changed it because I don’t want Andorians and Vulcans running around my fantasy world. Human-only crews were common in Kirk’s time.↩

History of the Astral Web, Part 7

This is the seventh in a series of articles covering the in-world history of the Astral Web. I originally wrote the history as 15 or so eras of history. Rather than make one long post, each era is getting its own post.

This week’s era covers 130 years, but is super short text-wise.

The Story so Far

The First Step: Mankind had terraformed Mars, and established settlements there.

The Departure: Mankind decided to send a million settlers to establish life around distant suns.

Left at Albuquerque: The fleet leaves Earth and is scattered far and wide by some unknown event.

The Awakening (Years 1 - 167): 20,000 humans settle on the planet Dearborn.

Expansion & Empire (Years 168 - 431): Scientists on Dearborn developed the first working Nexus drive. Dearborn makes contact with the other settlers spread out over 74 other planets. The Empire is formed, the pirates rise, and the Interstellar Sentinels are formed.

The Great Revolution (Years 432-478) The Duke of Schellenberg leads an accidental but successful rebellion against the Dearborn Empire. The Empire is split and the Schellenberg Republic is formed.

The Two Nations (478-608)

This is a historically quiet period of history, where technologies, and cultural identities develop. Although a kind of peace is maintained, The Dearborn Empire and the Schellenberg Republic continue to build their interstellar war fleets. The phantom of all-out war looms overhead, but never materializes.

Retrospective

This is so short that I considered joining it with the next era.

Clearly this is one of the “joining” eras, though it could be playable. Players could be on one side or the other of cold war, undertaking espionage missions and preventing war.

Lucky 7: U13's Smaller Twin

 I was walking across a field thinking about ways to simplify Unlucky 13. What I came up with was Lucky 7. My original intent was to maybe make it an optional rule in the U13 book. After giving it some thought, I might actually reverse those roles: L7 will be the main rule, and U13 will be an optional alternate.

My thought for a Lucky 7 logo

The First Thought

My thought as I was walking was to replace U13's 2d12 with 1d12. Rolling 1d12, we can't expect a success to be 14+, so we drop that to 8. The failure result becomes 6 or less, with a "7" being the "Lucky 7" result: it defaults to a failure but can be converted to a success if the player is willing to accept a consequence.  In other words:

Outcome	U13 2d12	L7 1d12
Success	14 - 24	8 - 12
“Consequence”	13	7
Failure	2 - 12	1 - 6

So I ran the L7 numbers. I was very pleased to see that they were pretty much within 3% of the U13 probabilities.  One thing that made me less happy, though, was that the 1-3% difference was always to the player's disadvantage.

James Suggests a Fix

I mentioned my concern to James and he immediately said "Just shift everything by one, though the name won't be as cool." That means that 7 would now be a full success, and 6 would now be the "yes, but" result (if the player so chooses): 

Outcome	U13 2d12	L7 1d12
Success	14 - 24	7 - 12
“Consequence”	13	6
Failure	2 - 12	1 - 5

The numbers ended up looking like this:

Chance of success. Click for a bigger version.

I really like these chances, even more than the distribution in U13. For a task of "average difficulty" the player has a full 50% chance of success normal, which rises to 58% if he's willing to take the "Bad Thing" when he rolls a 6. This is a ~4% benefit for the player over U13.

The Name

I think I can still keep the "Lucky 7" name, because 7 is the number you need in order to succeed without any negative consequences. Maybe "6" will be called an "unlucky 6."

Benefits of L7 over U13

As I said, this might become the "main rule," and relegate U13 as an alternate rule. There are two main reasons for this:

1. As I mentioned above, I really like the probability distribution better.
2. Dealing with 1 die is easier that 2 dice; there's no math involved. This advantage is magnified with using penalty or bonus dice, because it's easier to scan the dice for the lowest or highest die than it is to look for the two lowest dice in a group.

Amiright?

What do you think? Do you like L7 more than U13, or should I go back?

The Year Ahead & Chance of Success in Unlucky 13

Happy 2022, everyone!

I took the last month off from blogging for the holidays, but now it’s time to get back to it. Two short topics this week, because blog posts about the blog itself are too meta for my tastes.

The Year Ahead

In 2022, I foresee the following posts:

• The long-promised Traveller-style character creation rules for OD&D. James helped me playtest this during the past month, and I’m happy with the results. It still needs some fleshing out, but is almost done. That will be a LONG post.
• Finishing up the the history of the Astral Web.
• A post about using alchemy instead of magic in the U13 version of the Crowfield setting.
• Hopefully some play reports!
• A new U13 damage system.
• A post of using emergent character creation in U13.
• An update to the look of the blog. Probably something more minimalistic.

Where the blog goes after that? I’m not too sure. I don’t have any plans to give up on it, but there’s no destination in mind. But that makes sense for a Vagabond.

Chance of Success in Unlucky 13

I like charts. I thought it would be nice to be able to show how bonus and penalty dice affect a character’s chance for success in U13. (Click the chart to to see in full size).

Looking at the chart, it confirms my belief that 1 bonus (or penalty) die is all that’s needed most of the time. While adding more dice moves the probabilities way I want them to, I think the system loses some simplicity if you’re rolling 5 dice and have to pick out the two highest (or lowest).

The chart also reminds me of the success distribution chart that TSR used in its Conan Role-Playing Game from the mid-1980s. That pleases me to no end, because I very much wanted Crowfield to have a Conan-like feel (vs the Tolkien-esque feel of most fantasy games). And this die mechanic is much simpler than TSR's!