24 thoughts on “Is anyone working on or have completed a space opera *World hack?”

  2. Star Wars would be a good start. I like fantasy in my sci-fi. 🙂

    I’m most interested in finding a hack that ditches AW’s stat naming conventions and goes with basic moves that are more… straightforward?… like DW’s.

  4. Cool stuff, I’ll check that out right away!

    I think the best I can do at this point is read a lot, try to work my own hack, release it to the public and hope that someone fixes everything that is wrong with it. 😛

    I wish you well with your own hack, sir! I would love a game that focuses on cool starships, especially if there was a lot of different cool ways to build your ship

  10. I would also check out the

    The Big List of Apocalypse World Hacks (last updated December 2013)

    https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nPfff5dSHsk__rFHGQfLaAmb3ns680s_Fc0CSNlhfFA/edit

    and

    Nerdwest’s: ALL of the Playbooks list – which has a very good list of hacks (last updated November 2013)

    http://nerdwerds.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/all-of-playbooks.html

    Likely sounding Hacks from those lists…

    – Apocalypse Galactica – Sean Nittner

    – Mass Effect – by Matthew Skau

    – Rogue Trader: Apocalypse – John P.D. Ryan

    – Star Ace – Declan Feeney and Neil Gow

    – Star Wars World, a Star Wars hack, by Andrew ‘Pheylorn’ Medeiros

    – Streets of Mos Eisley, another Star Wars hack, by Zack Wolf

    – Star World, a sci-fi space exploration hack, by Rob Wieland and Mark Diaz Truman

    – Traveller World – Rob Brennan (microTraveller still in development by Chris Bennett)

    – World of Algol, a weird-science-fantasy hack set on Planet Algol, by Johnstone Metzger

  11. I might have to look into some of those a little more, if only for inspiration.

    I tried looking at a few prior to this post but was off-put by some of the artifacts remaining from AW (like cool, sharp, etc.) especially the basic moves. It makes me feel really dumb admitting it but I couldn’t grok AW while DW was more intuitive for me overall.

    Then again, I read Monsterhearts and it was also very intuitive.

    Really, though, at the end of the day I just want to do adventure (DW) in space. I need a few small rules for advanced weaponry and spaceships and some playbooks to support futuristic concepts (cyborg, aliens, nano wizards, etc.).

  15. Cool. I think I have the basics of my hack ready, I just need to finish up the bottom line backgrounds and species before it will be something playable. (all of the blanks meant to be filled in by DW’s text)

  16. Just remembered . Mike Harnish told me at IndieCon this year that he was running a DW based SciFi game. It sounded more Firefly than Space Opera – but it might be what you want.

    (Paging MJ Harnish  )

  18. That’s me. I have two Sci Fi DW hacks that we’ve used here: One is a hack of the Clone Wars SW animated show. The second, which is a bit more refined, is more along the lines of Firefly meets Star Trek meets Traveler. We’ve been using that hack, with tweaks along the way, for the past 18 months to run a sci-fi game. I like it a lot but if I had to do it all over again I would have based the hack on AW rather than DW b/c the resolution system in AW is closer to what we ultimately wanted (I originally used DW b/c I thought that’s the task resolution focus in DW would appeal to my players more but it turns out I was wrong).

    If you’re interested in the “On the Verge” FF stuff, just send me your email address. I don’t distribute the SW stuff b/c I blatantly violated IP on it in terms of images and using quotes for moves b/c it was made specifically for a bunch of SW loving players.

  19. That’s interesting. I haven’t played AW so I’m a little bit fuzzy on the difference, something like DW is more traditionally oriented…? Is there any way you could nail down the difference in the resolution methods for me? I would appreciate it. 🙂

    That would be awesome, send it to mlevimiller at gmail.com

  20. It’s a phenomenal system …. get the book! Even just to support the main writer that has made this all possible. That is initially what I did.

    The moves are set up more based around fiction, and the health/xp system are unique to AW than copying DnD.

    I like DW, I love AW. I always tell my players when I MC that there is too much DnD in my AW when I talk about DW.

  21. For me the biggest mechanics differences are:

    AW tends towards resolving conflict using scene resolution whilst Dungeon World handles it as a series of individual blows. I say tends , because I don’t think this is  explicitly stated anywhere but seems to flow out of the way the playbook moves are written, the damage mechanics, and the examples of play.

    DW does away with AWs history mechanics and sex moves in favour of a number of bonds. 

    and finally the XP mechanics in DW are resolved at session end by the MC, whilst AW XP is very much in the hands of the players and uses highlighted stats.

  22. Declan summarizes it well. AW is about resolving the scene which means one roll tells you a lot about what will happen. DW tends to gravitate towards task resolution and be a bit more concrete in how the stats are used (i.e., STR is pretty much strength, while Hard can be interpreted in a lot of different ways).

    My group tends to like the more concrete stats and “skill” type of games best (many come from very trad backgrounds) but their playstyle and tastes have evolved over the years playing with me, so much so that they prefer AW’s more abstract and flexible attributes and moves in actual play and don’t want to roll and deal damage repeatedly. In reality it doesn’t much matter b/c I’ve adapted the DW moves and my campaign has very little combat in it (in much the same way the modern Star Trek versions (not the movies) doesn’t have a lot of actual combat in it either).

    It works really well and my players love the game. One of the things they like most is that I’ve created a ship playbook with moves and their ship is a character as well.

  23. Thanks for the enlightenment folks. This might explain why the AW text made a fool out of me. I like zooming out on a roll if the details aren’t interesting and all we are after is a result to speed along play to the fun parts, otherwise I don’t see myself doing that.

    I like my action detailed, intense and to work like a free form puzzle. The coolest part about DW, and why I want a sci-fi action/adventure game based on it, is that I get to have fun fights without half of the session being about just that thing. Gives us plenty of time to talk, investigate and adventure.

  24. DW works really well for that, especially if you start running hordes as a single monster. For example, DW can do the scene from the Hobbit with the running battle against the goblins effortlessly: the goblins simply are one big monster with a higher # of HPs and you narrate individual actions as cleaving them left and right – the rules function the same but you don’t attack (and kill) individual targets but instead you’re dealing with the entire mob in a narrative fashion. The whole thing is very cinematic and cool. In fact these days I only run “boss” sort of scenes using the standard DW rules and almost everything else is a horde type situation in which there are plenty of no-name adversaries dying left and right.

    The same thing works well in space opera type settings where you want to reasonably have the PCs face a dozen storm troopers. I’ve used this with the group fighting off a horde of nano-virus infected humans (essentially zombies) in the final episode of the first season of my ‘On the Verge’ SF game and the players LOVED it, especially when the bad ass combat character finally got to unload with her pulse rifle and started mowing down mind-wiped homicidal drug addicts by the dozen. 

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