FINALLY! We’ll start our first game any minute now after moving the time like half a dozen times. Any last minute advices for players?
(I’ll blog about this session this week if someone is interested about our mission to secure Spilia.)
FINALLY!
FINALLY!
Ask questions, use answers. Draw maps, leave blanks. Your players will fill those in. Don’t worry if it feels like you’re overusing Face Adversity, you’re probably not. Refresh yourself every so often by looking at a cheat sheet of the GM moves. Have fun ,let us know how it goes!
Advice for the players: Read the player principles! 😛
But seriously, the advice I can give for UW players is “see where it takes you”. Explore, and answer prompts with your gut, not your head. Leverage your knowledge of sci-fi tropes, subvert them or embrace them as appropriate. Don’t play to win, play to experience.
Help your GM, work with them.
.
.
Cramped quarters is your friend. It’s my favorite GM move. It’s not just for long journeys. Any time you PC has downtime in a cramped space with another (shuttle rides, ship maintenance, hunkered down in a bunker, stuck in med bay.)
Go with the flow. Your players will teach you. Instead of mapping out an adventure with little boxed descriptions and chapters where everything goes right, think of outcomes based on external factors where things go WRONG, and think about those branches. Have a FEW random occurrences and situations ready, poised for their first failed roll…
Indeed! All your factions should have some agenda and a checklist that goes from annoying to bad to ‘we need to get out of here… now.”
For GMs, a very easy go-to for missions/situations is to take two factions and put them in conflict along one of their axis. Then have them ask/demand that the characters get involved in the situation.
After faction creation, before starting the game, take a moment to look for obvious conflict between factions, places where their Power, Reach or Ideology clash (Structure is an internal matter).
Obvious examples are stuff like Space Pirates vs Star Navy, but there can be subtler ones:
– Merchant League trying to reposes lab equipment because Scientific Cabal refuses to pay their debts.
– Venerable diplomat of Stellar Empire is arrested by Galactic Police on trumped up charges.
The Factions are movers and shakers, and the starting Debt allows the factions to move and shake the players.
Although it may not matter at first, you can plan major story-arcs. Star-systems have a life all their own. There may be news outlets or blogs specializing in filling in spacers who have been away from a system for years about sector news. It is much better to learn about a devastating civil-war one system over than jumping into it unawares!
For another game I was planning an empire based on the current socialist Chinese politburo. Everyone must be a loyal party-member in the politburo and so political outcomes are fixed, with political meetings like set-pieces rather than any struggle among vastly different political parties. There is a politburo for each planet that sends representatives to the federation politburo. But there are still factions, and the people are intensely interested in what little politics they can practice. The cadres strictly follow socialist thought to get elected. The merchant guild wants to liberalize trade with outside and create free zones around the starports to ease it, though anything crossing out of the starport will be subject to heavy bureaucracy and taxes. The unions proclaim their loyalty but are out to improve worker conditions and are sometimes allied with the merchants, sometimes against. The Sophont League represents aboriginal aliens, who by statute are granted rights and representation, but as each alien species has nothing in common, they are all over the map. Into this mix come outside trader ships in a newly liberalized trading environment. The old hands who eked out a living with border trade in the old process sternly warn the flood of traders not to get mixed up with politics and factions, but the factions find outsiders with space and military experience too useful as freelancers and so they inevitably do.
In my setting, there are SectorNet relays at every known jump point. Ships can log in and get the latest news, market prices, and begin uploading and downloading mail.